Feelin’ Gutsy

27 September 2007

After completing my bassoon AMusA on the weekend, I went and bludged by going and installing Gutsy on my computer.

Since I have an Athlon64 processor, I’ve been wanting to install the AMD64 version of Ubuntu for a while, so I took this opportunity to do that also. I started out by downloading the AMD64 netboot ISO, which took about 60 seconds to download, and 15 to burn. Installation went smoothly, but the initial login process was slightly problematic, because just before I’d reinstalled, I’d moved my /home directory to a new partition, and the GTK+ themes weren’t showing up properly. So, I just went and deleted some directories from ~/.gconf, like apps/panel, desktop/interface, etc. After that, everything was quite smooth.

The first thing that struck me was the inclusion of the Fast-User-Switch-Applet and Deskbar panel applets by default. I haven’t really liked Deskbar in the past, but I’ve been trying to give it a fair go. Also cool is that Tracker, a search tool, is on by default. The next thing that caught my eye is that the new Clearlooks theme has been pukeified. (Yes, I just made that word up.) It looks like Motif-cross-Aero. Luckily, the classic version of Clearlooks which was in Ubuntu Feisty is still included.

My favourite part of Gutsy is torn in my mind between the inclusion of the Turner patches (droolworthy subpixel font rendering that I have grown to like more than ClearType over the last couple of years) or the new Compiz Fusion which is the result of the Compiz and Beryl projects merging.

As for the AMD64, it’s working wonders. I don’t notice any performance increase, but all the software I have tried except for World of Padman works beautifully. WoP depends on /usr/lib/libvorbisfile.so.3, but because WoP’s executable is 32-bit, and libvorbisfile.so.3 is 64-bit, it bombs out when trying to load the game. I found an x86_64 version on the WoP forums that fixed the problem. Other games, like Urban Terror work fine, except I can’t play online with the x86_64 version, as the library for BattlEye, the anti-cheat software used, is 32-bit, and so fails to load on the x86_64 version. So, I have to play with the i386 executable, but that’s fine.

I’m still trying to decide whether it was worth installing the AMD64 version. It took a lot longer than usual, as our APT cache didn’t have the AMD64 version cached, but apart from that, there were no problems. Hardware support is beautiful, software support is great. To put it politely, Windows XP’s x64 support sucks by comparison — and I haven’t even tried Vista x64.

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Create a bootable FreeDOS USB flash drive in Linux

24 September 2007

The network chipset in my motherboard (NVIDIA nForce; uses the forcedeth driver in Linux) suffers from the problem where the motherboard returns the MAC address backwards. Naturally, the forcedeth driver spat the dummy each time I booted up, and assigned me a random MAC address, which was annoying, especially seeing as though I couldn’t set up a static DHCP anymore, and got a new IP address on each bootup. On a post on the Mandriva Forums, I got the idea that a BIOS upgrade would fix the problem. So, I went to ASUS, looked at the downloads page for the M2NPV-VM motherboard, and found that there was indeed an update for my BIOS.

However, one snag: the BIOS update was a DOS executable. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that I don’t have a floppy drive, or any FAT partitions on the hard drive that I could store the update on while booting DOS from the Windows 98 CD. So, I decided the best route would be to create a bootable USB flash drive running DOS to run the update from. After a bit of pondering, I also decided I wanted it to run FreeDOS.

So, where to start? The first thing I looked at would have been this guide at the FreeDOS wiki. However, it was less than helpful, as it was very ambiguous as to what method I should use for actually creating the stick. It vaguely suggested using HP’s flash drive formatting tool (not possible for me — it was Windows-only), or maybe some other tools, or maybe SYSLINUX. This guy apparently had success with the HP+Windows route, but I really didn’t want to do it that way. Well, because I had no idea what to do, I decided I’d try the SYSLINUX route. Attempting to follow this guide, I managed to get SYSLINUX running on my flash drive. I copied a ‘boot sector image’ from the FreeDOS kernel source package onto the flash drive, but couldn’t figure out how to get SYSLINUX to actually read it — the BSS option didn’t seem to be working.

Well, after getting fairly annoyed at the fact that it was so difficult to get working, I stumbled across a guide on the Gentoo Wiki. This guide involved mounting your flash drive in dosemu, and running the sys command from there, which installs a DOS boot sector. (I’d already put an MBR on from this guide.) After that, the flash drive was instantly bootable!

I put on a few utilities, like edit, himem, emm386 — you know the drill. I also put on my BIOS flash-o-matic, which worked fine. After that, I put on a few DOS games, all of which also worked perfectly. (Some wouldn’t run without himem, but that’s to be expected.) So, now I have a working bootable DOS USB flash drive. I think I’ll keep it around for a while — it’ll come in handy one day, I’m sure.

Moral of the story: always trust the Gentoo Wiki. ;)

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IPv6 update

16 September 2007

In July, I wrote about how I managed to get onto the IPv6 internet by tunneling through Teredo. However, I’m now trying something different.

We have a WRT-54G at home which runs DD-WRT. Today, I remembered that it has IPv6 support in the form of 6to4, an IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling system that is more transparent than Teredo. By following DD-WRT’s IPv6 tutorial, I’ve managed to get our home network transparently connected to the IPv6 internet now.

All our Ubuntu machines are magically connected to the IPv6 internet, and to get our Windows XP ones working, all I had to do is add the IPv6 protocol in the network properties dialog and it works. One website that I use for testing to see if I’m properly on the IPv6 internet is remlab.net. Rémi has a little message on his sidebar that tells you if you’re using IPv6 or not.

When configuring the router, I was told by the tutorial to use the anycast IP address 192.88.99.1 for doing the IPv6 tunneling. However, judging by the pingtime and slowness of the connection, the machine that 192.88.99.1 is pointing to seems to be located somewhere like Germany, which made things quite slow. Luckily, thanks to a list of public IPv6 relays, I have found that AARNET have a relay I can use at 6to4.ipv6.aarnet.net.au (open only to Australians), which resolves to 192.231.212.5 at the time of writing.

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Proud to be a part of it

13 September 2007

Ozh made a heat map of the most frequently attributed bug reporters in WordPress. I’m proud (and quite surprised!) to say that I am on the map — if you look closely enough, I’m there. My font size isn’t quite as big as some of the other more long-standing and weathered contributors, but I am honoured to be a part of it nonetheless.

Hat tip: Lorelle and Matt.

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Django

11 September 2007

As a followup of my dabbling with CakePHP, I had a bit of a play with Django.

Django is not all that dissimilar to CakePHP, in that it is based on MVC concepts. One of my reasons for trying Django is because I have always wanted to learn Python, yet haven’t been able to stomach the thought of having to go through a million and one “Hello, world!” coding examples before I get a grip on the language (I’ve already done that for QBASIC, Tcl/Tk, Delphi, JavaScript, HTML, Java, PHP; I couldn’t bear the thought of one more torture session.)

So, I thought I’d dive right in by copy-and-pasting from the Django tutorial and pick it up along the way. It’s gone pretty well, with me creating a simple fetch-and-display-data frontend, with a super-sleek admin backend.

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