Moving Day

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

I just moved to blogger (obviously) because it has comments and many more features than Tumblr. (This move was recommended by Josh Stroud)

2wire+iwl3945=Crash

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

It turns out that my wireless problem is in my router not my computer. My 2wire router crashes when I try to connect to it using the iwl3945 driver. Ubuntu Gutsy used the ipw3945 driver (now deprecated). That driver worked. Otherwise, Hardy is cool.

Installing Ubuntu beta

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

The wireless card continues to not work but I am installing anyway (nothing to loose). I am hoping that the fix on launchpad will work.

Edit: The battery monitor applet does work in GNOME.

Xubuntu 8.04 Beta 1

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

I just tried out Xubuntu hardy beta with full disk encryption.

Verdict: Broken.

  1. Xubuntu would not properly display my battery percentage (the panel applet would display 28%, 100%, or 0%).
  2. The wireless worked fine and then suddenly stopped working (I had not updated or otherwise messed with my system). When I conncted to a wireless network said network would go down (tested with 2wire only).

I am now trying ubuntu 8.04 beta x86_64 (the 64 bit version) on my dual core, 64bit Intel laptop. I will post the results.

Turn on keyboard led when receiving mail

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

After a lot of fruitless searching I finally figured out the command to turn the scroll lock led on and off in X. I first tried setleds +scroll and setleds -scroll but that only works in a Virtual Terminal. I then tried xset led on and xset led off. That one messes up the num pad. I finally came up with the following:

On:

xset led 3

Off:

xset -led 3

I use mail-notification and set the scroll lock led to go on when I have new mail and set it to go off when I have read the mail.

My Desktop

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

After a lot of tweaking, my desktop is beginning to look how I would like it to look.

Xname.org

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

I just signed up with 1and1.com and found that they do not offer marginally advanced DNS settings and allow only five subdomains. To work around these limitations I signed up with Xname.org. They allow unfettered customization of the DNS record and are free. I very much recommend them (and thank them).

10 Hour Fix

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

Today I spent 10 hrs fixing my hostname.

I had just bought the domain stebalien.com and was fiddling around with my network settings with network-admin and found the domain box. I typed in my new domain to see what the setting did. Nothing happened for a while so I erased the setting and changed the hosts file back to its original state (without the domain name). Later, while I was using Firefox, my session crashed. I logged back in and received this error:

(process:6725): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

(process:6729): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

I was consequently logged out. This error had nothing to do with the hostname so I assumed that one of my files had been corrupted. After reinstalling half of my system (sudo aptitude reinstall packages) and looking through all of my configuration files I finally logged in using startx. I was immediately logged back out with a hostname internal error. I spent another hour going over my host configuration files (/etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, …) and all of my DNS configuration files. I finally logged back in using the Failsafe Terminal, typed in sudo network-admin and re-added my domain name, logged back out and in, and my session did not crash. I then proceeded to launch firefox. The page did not load. I could ping, tracerout, and use elinks (a text based web browser for the console) but I Firefox would not load any website. I tinkered with my network-admin settings for 15 minuets before I finally realized that I had a backup of my network-admin settings. I restored my settings and proceeded to write this blog post. I am still clueless as to what my problem was but am happy that it was at least fixed.