Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

The other day I realized that Linux Mint wasn’t receiving the official security updates from Ubuntu. My Ubuntu Studio desktop had update after update while my Linux Mint desktop had nothing. Strange - so I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 - LTS edition because my laptop’s ATI card wasn’t supported in the newer version of Ubuntu 9.04. I at least wanted the support that was available until April 2011 from Canonical. I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 will all codecs and additonal software and then decided to install even more with the Ubuntu Studio upgrade. That installed the real-time kernel which I was dying to try out. Unfortunately, an error I had experienced in the past came back up dealing with the wifi drivers and the new kernel location. I blogged about it before but it’s not even worth mentioning now. As a reminder to everyone, I use a Toshiba Satellite A215 that has an ATI chipset and Atheros chipset. I couldn’t upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 because the FGLRX driver is completely corrupted in the newest version of Ubuntu. I still tote the Ubuntu decal on my laptop but I have definitely ventured out to other distros. Besides the 9.04 issue and my keeping 8.04 as the LTS edition, I have been experiencing a few other issues such as Blender never working correctly on any version of my Ubuntu installed on my laptop (worked great on nVidia desktop) and the inability to go into suspend without breaking the system on resume.

I’ve spent the last 3 hours trying to get VirtualBox setup and running on my Fedora 10 system. I’ve scowered the web in search of assistance for a “can’t create COM object” error - whatever that might be. I’ve had no luck. No support on any forums from anyone. I’ve even found where other Fedora users have complained of this issue, but so far I haven’t found where anyone has followed up or solved the error. First Adobe Flash Player had issues, now VirtualBox. Currently, Sun is only providing a Fedora 9 compatible package. It’s lacking full compatibility with version 10 and that causes a few problems.

You wouldn’t think that doing this would be so complicated but apparently it is. I tried multiple methods of simply downloading the RPM install file from adobe.com but to no avail. The real problem is getting Firefox to recognize the new add-on. Either way, just to cover all the bases, I’m going to list the steps and explain what I did to the best of my knowledge. This works for the 32 and 64-bit architecture. SKIP the 5th step if you are only using the 32-bit architecture of Fedora.

In my last post, I mentioned an audio problem I was having with Ubuntu. The mic was not capturing audio so I went through a tutorial on how to fix my audio with a few modifications. Those modifications set me my audio askew and I realized what the problem was. If you bring up the volume control panel and click on File > Change Device, you might see 5 or more choices for audio devices. You must be sure to choose the correct device for audio to function properly. For some reason, the Alsa mixer works almost universally from what I’ve read and experience personally. It is my default, or 1st option, on the device list. There was another option for “analog input: front” which turned out to be my front volume switch however the Alsa stilled managed to function better (as in more volume). I’m still trying to figure out why my mic isn’t working when I’m able to get feedback and echos when I bring up the Alsa Mixer app by typing “alsamixer” in the terminal window, but we’re making progress.

Much learned in this past week. I’m blogging from my laptop while I watch the Fedora install and update on my HP xw9300 Workstation. Yes, I went ahead and decided to install trhe 64-bit Fedora 10. My xw9300 was running a 64-bit Ubuntu 8.1 and Windows XP Pro. I’ve been doing a lot of software testing recently and XP absorbed quite an infection. You know the type - incessant IE pop-ups that just will not go away. After trying every spyware, malware and virus scanning program I had, I dropped XP and pushed Fedora into the xw9300. The HP xw9300 hardware was originally developed in cooperation with Red Hat, Microsoft and Nvidia. I’m tired of XP so I decided to give the machine a try with Red Hat’s Fedora. I installed Windows Server 2003 first just for dedicated Adobe CS3 support and then installed Fedora. Fedora was quick and easy to install and also provided a Boot Loader section for dual-booting. Wifi worked immediately along with other hardware. Two minors bugs related to additional package installation and updates but mostly a walk in the park.

Over the past week, I have been exploring some of the other Linux distro options available to me. Initially I branched out when I had to do some data recovery on a corrupted Windows XP hard drive. A friend in the business recommended Puppy Linux for fast load times and non-destructive viewing of the hard drive’s contents. Puppy Linux has the very useful ability to load itself directly into RAM as opposed to loading itself on the local disk drive. The Live CD is only around 90 MB but is amazingly a fully featured OS with an office suite, CD/DVD burners, graphic programs, audio editors and more. I quickly loaded Puppy Linux onto a bootable CD and a few minutes later I was extracting the data I needed from the corrupted hard drive. Nicely done. I might also mention that Puppy Linux is among quite a few different Linux distros that can be completely loaded to RAM.