Blog van Foppe Hemminga

An Ubuntu user goes Fedora

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on Jul.13, 2011, under Computers, Linux

On my desktop -which basically acts as a server- I did upgrade from Ubuntu 10.11 to 11.04. But as we all know there's Unity and that's not what I want. As an alternative I considered several alternatives. Of course there's Kubuntu or another KDE derivate. I did try that in the past but fucked the install with an undisclosed experiment. Drawbacks -apart from my failed experiment- were the resources it used and the immaturity of several core applications.
You must be curoius about the experiment. IIRC I tried the latest version of KDevelop from some external repo (Debian sid?) With it came newer versions of core libraries which were incompatible with the rest of the install. I decided to abandon ship.
On my laptop I never upgraded Ubuntu to 11.04. I did have a serious look at several other distro's. I managed to install Arch but failed in a similar way to Kubuntu when trying the then just stable Gnome3. Arch in itself is very boring. It's simply that I don't want to spend all that time and effort to only keep the install up-to-date, let alone compile whatever I need only to write a note or do something I just want to do at that very moment. It made me love all those volunteers creating distro's with all the art work and precompiled standard applications.
So I tried the Fedora 15 live CD in it' s beta stage. Gnome3 looked promising. More so than the tablet interface Unity is. I decided I'd go for it. It required several attempts to install and configure the way I want. So, for the record, and as note to self some remarks.
- I always use GParted to partition my disks (ext4 usually). Fedora live CD doesn't come with it, so use Ubuntu or an Ubuntu CD to re-partition your harddrive before installing Fedora. I created a 20Gb partition for / and more for /home. I don' t intend to use /home for larger collections of images, music, video or whatever. I will auto-mount either a seperate /data partition or -on the laptop- an nfs mount to the 1Tb harddrive on the server.
- Near the end of the Fedora install it asks to isntall grub. Don't if you want to keep the Ubuntu alongside it. Fedora will install Grub legacy (Grub 1). Instead install Fedora, boot into Ubuntu and run

sudo update-grub

It will find and add Fedora to the existing Grub2 menu.
- After reboot into Fedora it will ask for your name. Don't forget to add yourself to the administrator group. That's a checkbox choice in that panel
- Now updater all packages. The package update manager failed but it should run nicely in Terminal with

su -c 'yum clean all'
su -c 'yum update'

Spoiler: yum sucks, dpkg / apt rocks.
- Install the free and non-free repositories from RPM Fusion on http://rpmfusion.org They contain the applications and drivers you really care about.
- I managed to install Chrome by hand from the Chrome download page. Can't tell just now if that's a wise decision. Will it upgrade itself when a new version of chrome arrives?
- I downloaded the 64 bit Flash .so file from Adobe. Put it in ~/.mozilla/plugins the (re-) start Firefox and it should just work. Also Chrome did pick it up nicely.
- I struggled with the nfs connection to the server. The documentation of nfs on Fedora is outdated (for Fedora 14). The documentation on Ubunut is how I did set it up in 10.11 on the server and on the Ubuntu partition on the laptop. I managed to get it to work with:

sudo -c 'yum install nfs-utils'
sudo mount -t nfs4 -o proto=tcp,port=2049 
    192.168.1.65:/data /mnt

In Ubuntu you'd install nfs-common. Also there's something weird with the mount command.
On the server the folder is /export/data and this command shows all files in /mnt whre I expected a /data folder. nfs-server:/data, as advertised in the Ubuntu guide didn't do the trick. I'll try a couple more times after I reboot the install. Since it works I don't expect serious issues here.
- The printer was found easily. Cups rocks. The printer is attached to the server, not directly to the laptop but that's all taken care of as easy as it was in Ubuntu.
- I tried to install the ATI Radeon driver on earlier occasions. All failures. I think I need to reconfigure /etc/X11/xorg.conf before the reboot but since the non-proprietary driver works just fine I'll not engage in another disappointment. Dual head works out of the box. That's my main concern.

So far I'm happy. Just not really that confident as I'm with my Ubuntu install.

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Pythonic PHP

I shot some photographs for a friend and put them in an open dir for himto grab them. NO big deal, but he mailed me that he'd rather see the images in the folder.
I did that before at least twice. This time I decided to grab an exiting script. I found http://www.phpace.com/image-resizing-with-php/ by Sam Yapp. The script scans the folder fot images, creates thumbs with the GD library and displays them.

I liked two lines of code because they feel so Pythonic. This is the first:

preg_match('#^(.+?)(_t)?\.(jpg|gif|png)#i', 
    $entry->getFilename(), $matches) );
list( ,$name, $is_a_thumb, $extension) = $matches;

If you look beyond the regular expression, at least if you're intimidated by them, the array $matches collects matches from the regex. $matches[0] is the complete match consisting of the filename of an image. $matches[1] contains the first part (before the dot) of the filename, $matches[2] contains '_t' if it's there (thumbnails are created with an added _t in the filename) and $matches[3] contains the part after the dot.
Interesting is the list constructor in the second line of the example code. That's the Pythonic part. It creates all the variables in one line. Or am I mistaken and is it Perl magic in origin?

That's not all there is. You see the $entry->getFileName(). That comes from this code:

$dir = new DirectoryIterator($path);
foreach( $dir as $entry ){

Wow. An iterator in PHP. I hadn't seen this in PHP before. I have in Python though. hte DirectoryIterator seems pretty complete. PHP is growing up.

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Browser

"Google announced Friday that it will be phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6, more than two weeks after the attacks on Google's servers that targeted a vulnerability in IE6. In a blog post, Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, said that support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites will end March 1. At that point, IE6 users who try to access Docs or Sites may find that 'key functionality' won't work properly. Sheth suggested that customers upgrade their browsers to pretty much anything else."
Source: Slashdot

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My new phone: T-Mobile Pulse

Note: This is about the Dutch T-Mobile.

I ordered the brand new T-Mobile pulse a week ago and I am expecting it to arrive next week. Let me describe what made me choose this particular cellphone and make some remarks about my expectations. That will be fun to reread in a couple of month time.

History
I've never had a lot of fun with phones. Most likely that's because I'm no longer sixteen years old. But I've had 'm for some time but I seldom use the phone. Take this literally. With seldom I mean less than 20 minutes per month.
My first phone was a Siemens M55. I bought it because of the then emerging data (Internet) possibilities. The performance was horrible. It could only show real WAP sites and there were only a few of them around. Starting up the GPRS and loading the first site would take the best part of five minutes. I didn't use it a lot. I payed per kB so what the heck.
I had high hopes of the possibilities with the embedded java. I did manage to find a few games that I could download and install from within the phone. Apart from the fact that it was dead slow I was demoted by the small screen (color!). So I didn't play a lot.
This was technique in it's infancies.

Today
I have a basic Nokia, simlock free. No Internet. Phone only.

Next week
If all goes according to the promises by T-Mobile they will start shipping the Pulse from Monday October 12. Have a look at a picture:

T-Mobile Pulse

These are the specs from the website. You find this phone at http://tinyurl.com/ydnc32q

Specificaties:

Afmetingen: 112 x 56.2 x 14.4 mm
Gewicht: 135 gram
Spreektijd: tot 480 minuten
Standby tijd: tot 750 uur
Netwerken: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 UMTS/HSDPA tot 7.2mbps/GSM/GPRS

Functies

Besturingssysteem: Google Android
Scherm: TFT Touch Screen met 65.000 kleuren
Camera: 5.0 megapixel
Processor: Qualcomm MSM 7200A 528 MHz
E-mail
Intern geheugen: 288 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM
Games
Handenvrije luidspreker
HTML-browser
MP3 beltonen
MP3-speler
Polyfone beltonen
Ge?ntegreerde GPS ontvanger
Video/Audio speler
Uitgebreide agenda
Trilfunctie
USB aansluiting

It has everything a modern smartphone would want. But these specs are vague. Like what is the screen resolution (480 x 320). The other page on their site claims it runs the latest Android but I can't imagine it to be 1.6. The camera resolution is 3.15MP, not 5 as claimed here.
The phone really is a Huawei U8220. For those among you interested in more detailed specs, have a look at this site: http://tinyurl.com/y8r6f5z.

Money
This phone will cost me close to € 30,- a month in a one year contract. It includes darn slow but unlimited Internet (345kB/64kB) and 150 min for E.T. to phone home.

Choices
What made me decide for this one? Mainly it was money. This phone sells at € 257,- or thereabout and that's about the upper limit for both my wallet and my notion of what a phone should cost. The latest iPhone would cost me around € 1100,- for two years of fun. I would probably go for it anyway if it was only fun I could expect. But I don't like the software being closed source, the App store being controlled without an alternative store available. Even the case is closed so I can't add memory or a spare battery if need be.
If I would want to develop apps for the iPhone I'd need to pay a decent sum of money to start and next get in touch with Objective C. I am not an Apple fanboy. I simply don't want to be locked up into the fantasies of other people.
An alternative would be another phone with Android. Notably the HTC Hero. It's just more expensive. I tend to believe the specs are in the same range.

Expectations
I'll be phoning a lot more. But more important, I;ll have my mail around. And my Twitter. Being a profound bicyclist I have high expectations of the GPS possibilities of the phone. I hope it's got some tracking possibilities. I'll be making pictures and listen to music. I think it's all those basic tasks that keep me busy at least some time in a regular day. It has the potential to be used something like two hours a day when I'm not at home. I can live without it, so it's a pure gadget.
Will I be developing for the Android? Yes and no. I do think I'll be doing a 'Hello World' of some sort. I don't think I'll be doing a real app. I regularly lack inspiration. And things I do come up with are so specific I'll be my only customer. That's the outcome of many of my efforts. I really do know what I'm talking about!
I don't like Java. There Python bindings available but they need to be expanded. It is not expected to be any Python GUI bindings, so the Python part will be text based I presume.
Part of me believes this phone will be a disappointment. But that happened before. It's a glance into the future. The phones of today will turn out to be immature in a few years time. But that's the fun part of progress.

I'll take some time to write a review. I think before the end of the year.

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The Virus

This is what we're all afraid of: the H1N1 virus aka 'Mexican flu' or 'swine flu'.

Unfortunately it doesn't say how often it's magnified.
Source: CDC - Center for Disease Control and Prevention

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New Site
Thank you for visiting my blog. However I decided to move to something new. You find the Joomla based CMS at it's new location.

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