A few days ago a customer dropped off a desktop computer that would not boot. It was a Compaq model about three years old and, according to the stickers, it had Windows XP Home Edition installed. I booted the machine and was met by a message saying that a .dll was missing. I rebooted the machine using a Linux livecd. Examination of the Windows partition showed it to be completely empty. Also gone were all installed programs and all personal data. Apparently this person was the victim of some serious Windows malware.

The machine had a recoverery partition so I booted into that. Recovery failed after about 90% complete. The partition was damaged. My final option was to download an XP Home .iso from a bittorrent site. This installed nicely. This is not necessarily illegal as the Windows install now requires activation. Of course. my customer had no knowledge of product keys or activation. I told her that the computer would only work for 30 days without activation and wished her good luck. I also gave her a copy of Linux Mint to install when Windows stopped working.

There are a few Windows utilities that will reveal the OEM install product key. Here is a link to one. If you are still using a legal copy of Windows, I strongly reccomend that you retrieve your product key. It may save you some grief in the future.

Sadly, Apple has chosen to keep the iPhone/Touch devices ‘closed’ which hinders file transfer to and from the device. In fact, they have ordered the removal of USB file transfer abiliity in several apps including Stanza and Air Sharing. Fortunately, users can still sync files via several popular protocols including WebDAV, FTP, email, and syncing to a third party server such as Google Docs. In this post I will discuss two apps that I use and like, however I have tried about five and I’m sure there are a few that I missed.

Air Sharing was an early (September 2008) entry into this arena. Currently the basic version that supports WebDAV is priced at $2.99 and a $6.99 upgrade adds print (to a wireless network printer) and email capabilities. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in Ubuntu that is preventing the setup of wireless printing. Once installed, Air Sharing will play or display all file types synced to it and supported by the iPhone platform. I have successfully synced a 350MB movie file and played it.

WebDAV is a file transfer protocol natively supported in both the GNOME and KDE desktops. The iPhone/Touch app will report its assigned IP address on the local network. Typically this will look something like http://192.168.1.101:8080. A GNOME user will go to Places>Connect to Server… and enter the IP and Port into the indicated fields. Depending on the app either a window will open or a folder will appear on the desktop. Files can now be synced to the device via drag and drop. Similarly, KDE users can use Konquerer to open “webdav://192.168.1.101:8080. With documents available locally, printing locally is possible despite the Ubuntu bug.

GoodReader is priced at 99 cents. The basic version supports WebDAV and email and like Air Sharing it will display/play all or most file types. A 99 cent upgrade adds the ability to sync with Google Docs. Again, the printing problem is solved. GoodReader has a free Lite version that will let you try all features before purchase. It is limited to five files. Another upgrade will add FTP ability if you prefer that protocol.

In combination, all the above apps provide you with an office suite for your iPhone/Touch. They will also work on the soon to come iPad. Apple has promised an office suite for the iPad. I can only wonder about what abilities that app will add.

A few days ago Apple confirmed the rumor that had been circulating for some time by officially announcing the iPad, a tablet computer. I have owned an iPod Touch since July of 2008, and while I like it very much, it has some features that I dislike and lacks others. Some of these features will carry over to the iPad so the question I must answer is “Does the good outway the bad?” In this article I will be specific about what I dislike and like about the Touch and why I might consider buying an iPad despite it’s shortcomings.

First my dislikes. Without “jailbreaking” the iPhone or iPod Touch, only software purchased through the Apple store can be installed into the device. Furthermore, iTunes is required to update the device firmware. The problem is that there are versions of iTunes only for Windows and Mac users. As a Linux user I must maintain a dual booting computer. The only purpose of the Windows partition is to run iTunes. It’s mostly a waste of hard disk space.

My other dislike is that it is a “wireless only” device. For home use a router is required for an internet connection. Away from home one must find a WiFi “hotspot.” Fortunately, these hotspots are becoming increasingly easier to find as popular restaurants install open access routers hoping to attract customers. Even so, it would be convenient if there were an adapter for a wired internet connection.

On the positive side there are now about 140,000 apps available in the Apple store. Many are free and the price for those that are not is usually only a few dollars. As the device firmware has evolved (now at version 3.1.2) the apps capababilities have evolved with it. Some productivity type apps can now use “copy and paste.” A game that I play a lot is called Words with Friends. This is a word game similar to Scrabble. It is able to find a random opponent for me anywhere the internet reaches. The game has a chat feature so I can talk to my opponent while playing. This is very nice indeed. I have other apps for listening to internet radio and others to read ebooks. Surely, there is something for everyone.

The portability of the device is superb. I spend quite a bit of time in wating rooms at doctor’s offices. I am never bored as long as my Touch is with me.

For the most part the iPad will be a jumbo sized Touch. It will no longer fit in a shirt pocket, but being about the size of a book it will still be easy to tote around. The larger virtual keyboard will be much easier to use. For people, like myself, who type with one or two fingers, the keys will be larger targets. Ebooks will have pages approximately the size of physical books and will require less page turning. Videos will be more enjoyable on the 10 inch screen.

At the product announcement Apple also said that a version of iWorks would be available for the iPad. It will come in three pieces, i.e., a spreadsheet, a word processor, and a presentation program, each priced at $10. With this functionality the iPad is a viable notebook computer. I can see my laptop going up for sale except I still need that damned iTunes!

There are some hardware improvements. Battery life will be up to 10 hours between charges. Wireless will connect with the b, g and n standards.

Finally, I will mention two criticisms I have read in other blogs. First, the device does not multi-task and second Adobe Flash is not supported in the Safari browser. I will address both of these issues with two comments. First comment. In the computing world what is true today may not be true in six months and will certainly be different in a year. Second comment. Different operating systems will always offer different features. Microsoft Windows is different from Mac OS X and both are different from GNU/Linux. It is unreasonable to expect all to work the same and all to support all possible features.

I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the iPad will available about the same time as my birthday!

Ubuntu-tweak has been upgraded to version .5x. A deb installer can be found here. Similarily, a deb installer for ailurus can be found here. These two applications are similar in nature, and duplicate a few functions. Both can be used to customize your Ubuntu/GNOME installation quite a bit. Both purport to make the learning of Linux easier. I like both of these apps, but I don’t think either should target Ubuntu ‘newbies’.

Back in the days when I was a student, I always wondered if classmates who took copious amounts of notes ever really learned anything. It’s much the same with learning Linux. You can copy and paste a lot of commands but that is just blindly making changes. It is not learning.

Apply a tweak in the same way that you would use the command line. You should never issue a command until you understand exactly what it is doing. Neither should a tweak be applied unless the user completely understands its effects. I have pointed out before that the GNOME configuration editor is purposely not enabled in the menus to avoid newbies from messing up their desktop. And if you do tweak, I would strongly advise keeping a record of it in case strange events start occuring at a later date. I practice what I preach, and believe me, good notes have saved my day numerous times.

Tweak only with caution!

In the good old days of Jaunty, Ubuntu had an asound.conf file that could be patched to increase the range of audio volume. This is no longer supported in Karmic. Instead, the PulseAudio volume control allows up to a 50% increase over the norm. Unfortunately, depending on how the .avi file was created, this may not be enough. One solution (there may be others) is to transcode the file into another, boosting the audio volume in the process. This article will provide instructions on how to do it with the transcode utility. It may also be possible to do it with mencoder or avidemux. I am uncertain of the syntax for those and if one of my readers does, please comment on it.

Transcode is available in the standard repositories. Install it from the command line (sudo apt-get install transcode) or use Synaptic. Here is the syntax of the command:

transcode -i input.avi – P 1 -s <desired gain> -N 0×55 -o output.avi

Let’s clarify this a little. Input.avi and output.avi are the names of your input and output files. If your input name contains spaces you should rename it to something without spaces. Otherwise you will have to use the “escape” character “\” for the command to parse correctly. For example “My Rip.avi” would be entered as “My\ Rip.avi”. This gets messy, so just rename the file.

0×55 is telling transcode that you want the output sound to be mp3 encoded. You can have other encodings if you so desire. Read the manual by entering man transcode on a command line for further information.

<desired gain> requires a little knowledge about decibels. Decibels follow a logarithmic scale. To double your volume you would enter a value of 3. A value of 6 would quadruple the volume. A value of 2 would result in an increase of about 60% Stay with low values, A value to high could damage your speakers, and sound distortion is likely. Replace <desired gain> with a value of your choosing.

That’s it for now. Let’s hope Ubuntu finally gets sound right in Lucid.

Your first effort will be to locate a radio station that streams its broadcasts to the Internet. Radio stations are small to meduium sized businesses. Your local stations may or may not have sufficient IT support to implement the technology. If they do, the streaming format they choose may or may not be useable in Linux. Radio stations in larger cities (with larger budgets) are likely to have more streaming options some of which may be Linux compatible. Go to this site for a large selection of classical muic sites. Go to this one to find local FM stations, many of which will stream. The problem with Internet radio is that there are too many streaming formats. Many require Windows Media Player. Therefore your next task will be to enable Firefox to play these streams (hopefully).

This post at UbuntuGeek instructs on how to install w32codescs and the mplayer plugin. Read the comments as they make some minor corrections to the post. Your success rate will immediately improve but will not be perfect. You might find, as I did, that using a stand alone media player like Banshee, xmms or VLC might be a better way to play the station than with a browser. Let’s use WRTI (Philadelphia) as an example. I like their music selection and I simply ignore the weather and traffic reports that are irrelevalent to me in Florida.

At the WRTI website you will see a LISTEN LIVE button. Clicking on the button will not work. However, if you right click on the button you can Copy Link Location to your desktop. It is a file with a .m3u file extension(classical-247-mp3.m3u). Open the file with gedit or any text editor. This reveals the url of a generic mp3 stream (http://wrti-ice.streamguys.net:80/classical-247-mp3). Opening this location in Banshee or in xmms will play the station. For some reason on my machine Exaile did not like it.

Your success with using Firefox will also be improved by installing the Novell Moonlight (aka Silverlight) plugin. Go to this wesite for installation. Please, no complaints from mono haters. I’m just telling you how to do it, it’s your choice whether to do it.

Finally, you can try RealPlayerGOLD11. It’s open source and promises to play Winows streaming media. I have not tried this but I want you to be aware of it.

Good Luck and Happy Listening!

Recently an app crashed on me. Worse, it left me staring at an empty desktop without icons. Only my wallpaper was visible. Restarting X had no effect. I tried dragging the icons out of the Desktop folder onto the visible desktop. They politely returned to the folder. The solution was to be found in the GNOME Configuration Editor.

The GNOME Configuration Editor is installed but not enabled by default. It is a powerful tool and should be used with caution only when needed. This was one of those times. To enable it, go to Applications>Preferences>Main Menu. In the left panel select System Tools. In the right panel check the box next to Configuration Editor. It is now enabled and obviously will appear under System Tools.

Start the Configuration Editor. Navigate the editor by clicking on the arrows next to the subsections. Click on the arrow next to apps. Then nautilus followed by preferences. Scroll down the options until you find the one called “show_desktop”. The box next to the option must be checked. To be sure, double click on the option and it should show a value of “True”. If it does not, recheck the box until it does.

The desktop icons on my machine reappeared. If you follow this procedure and you are not the sole user of the machine, you might want to go back and disable the editor for security.

In an earlier post, Konstipated Koala, I documented a screen resolution bug and provided links that would enable affected users to find a work-around. Armed with that knowledge I attempted to increase my resolution to 1280×800. Strangely, I could not achieve a resolution greater than 1280×768. I knew that my 19 inch monitor could handle it. There is a sticker on the monitor claiming a capability of up to 1440×900!

Doh! Finally I realized that my graphis card might be the limiting factor. So how can you determine your card’s possible resolutions? First install the hwinfo package from the repositories. Bring up a terminal and issue..

sudo apt-get install hwinfo

Or, if you prefer, use the Synaptic Package Manager.

Then from a terminal issue..

sudo hwinfo –framebuffer

Your graphics card will be identified and you’ll see a listing of all possible resolutions. In my case, there was no vertical resolution greater than 768. Oh well!

When GNOME 3 is officially released next year it will no longer have a bottom panel. The default bottom panel in GNOME 2 can be problematic at times. Some applications compete for the space at the bottom of the screen making buttons difficult to access. In this post I will suggest some solutions, and in fact, demonstrate how you might eliminate the panel all together!

Begin by right clicking on some empty space in the panel. Among the options you will see “Properties“. Clicking on that will reveal several visibility options. Check the boxes next to “Show hide buttons” and also “Arrows on hide buttons“. Return to your desktop. Notice the arrows on each end of the panel. Click on one. Watch the panel slide off to the side.

Once again right click on empty space. This time notice the option “Add to Panel“. You are now offered a long list of Panel Applets. By default the Workspace Switcher and the Trash applets are activated. The remainder of the panel is used as the taskbar. Yes, these applets are certainly useful but they really don’t need to be fixed to a panel, or at least not to the bottom panel.

A dock also serves as a taskbar. Furthermore, you can add docklets to replace panel applets. My next comments will refer to Docky, the dock that I use, but other docks such as the Cairo Dock or the AWN dock may be equally configurable. Instructions for the installation of Docky appear here.

Docky installs with a few default docklets and you can configure it for others. When running as a taskbar, right clicking on an icon will give you the option to pin that app to the dock. Once you have Docky configured to your liking you can return to your GNOME desktop. Right clicking on a panel icon will give you the option to remove it. On my desktop I removed icons for Firefox, email, trash and clock, all of which were now on the dock.

The only remaining bottom panel applet was the Workplace Switcher. I removed this too but not before adding it to the top panel that had gained some free space. With the email, browser, terminal, clock and trash icons now pinned to the dock you probably only need two workspaces. Why two? Sometimes an app will crash freezing your display and leaving your mouse useless. You can go to another workspace with your keyboard.. CTRL+ALT+RIGHT (LEFT) Arrow. Then you can open a terminal and kill the crashed process. Right click on the workspaces applet and reduce their number to two.

This completes our panel customization. All that remains of the bottom panel is a little arrow in the corner. Mine has not been pressed for several days.

Now that Fedora 12 has been released you may want to take it for a test drive. Traditionally, this is the role of a livecd. However, even though it is 2009, CD burning remains somewhat of an art. I proved this to myself after making five attempts to burn a Fedora image using two different burning programs and two different burners. None of the CD’s could pass a checksum test. Oh well, CD’s are cheap. So let’s burn a live USB stick instead.

I will assume that you know how to boot into your BIOS setup and cause your machine to boot from live media. Your first step is to visit the Fedora site and download a livecd iso image. Fedora provides several ways of doing this but the preferred way is to use a bittorrent client. The bittorrent protocol has built-in error control that will ensure your downloaded image is good.

Next insert a USB stick into an available port. The Fedora image is 654 MB in size, so your stick must be at least as large. At this point Windows users can use the popular unetbootin utility to burn the iso image to the stick but GNU/Linux can do it easier from the command line.

Bring up a terminal and issue the “mount” command. This will give you a listing of mounted file systems. Look and see what device is assigned to the USB stick. On my machine it shows ‘/dev/sdc1′, on yours it may be different. The numeric ‘1′ is a partition number and is not required in the next and final command.

Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the image. Issue the command “sudo dd if=Fedora-12-i686-Live of=/dev/sdX bs=4M“, substituting your device letter for X. This will copy the image to the stick and will delete any data previously on it.

You are done. Reboot and have fun!