Tuesday, 16 April 2002

I have spent a bit of time playing with Linux. I downloaded and installed Ximian Red Carpet, subscribed to the Red Hat 7.2 channel, and told it to download all the updates available. There are more than 200 of them totaling 358 MB. I'm sucking those down now, at 120 KB/s. I have no idea what most of them are for, but I suppose I need them. The next thing I need to do is get Samba set up so that my Linux system can see my Windows systems and vice versa.

I'm going to keep my main Windows 2000 desktop as a crutch until I'm comfortable with Linux. That'll come as I get comfortable with Linux on my secondary desktop system. As that happens, my secondary system will gradually become my primary system. At some point, I'll also take down the Windows system in the den and replace it with a Linux box.


14:45 - I've said all along that my transition from Windows to Linux would be a gradual process. At first, I'd use my main Windows system 90% of the time and my main Linux system only 10% of the time. Gradually, that proportion would be reversed, and I'd be using my main Linux system almost exclusively. I started working with my Linux desktop system yesterday afternoon. It's been a long struggle, but I think I'm almost ready to make my Windows desktop my secondary system and start using my Linux desktop as my primary system. There are a few things I need to do before I can complete the transition, to wit:

1. The big one first. I still haven't been successful in accessing my Windows Networking systems from the Linux system, or vice versa. I need to be able to view Windows shares on my Linux box and vice versa . In the KDE Control Center, there's an option called Network -> LAN Browsing, and another called Windows Shares. Can it really be as simple as configuring those dialogs correctly?
2. I have a DDS-3 tape drive in the Linux box. It would be nice to be able to backup my local system (and, ideally, shares on the Windows network) to that tape drive. Is there a graphical backup application somewhere on my Linux system that I'm missing? I do vaguely remember from the distant past using tar to archive stuff to tape, but I'm hoping there's a tree-structured graphical backup app I can use to archive data to my tape drive.
3. I know there are front-ends for burning CDs. This system has a 12X Plextor writer in it, but I'm not sure how to burn CDs. Any tips greatly appreciated.

There are probably other things I'm overlooking, but these are the main ones for now. I've loaded Ximian Evolution and am able to send and receive mail. I have my real mail store on a Windows box (using Mozilla Mail) right now, so I've told Evolution to leave a copy on the server. Once I get #1 above resolved, I'll move my real mail store over to the Linux box and import it (if necessary) into Evolution. I haven't downloaded OpenOffice for Linux yet, but I've run it on Windows and I'm sure it'll be adequate for what I need to do. Worst case, I'll always have a Windows system running with Office 2000 on it, so weirdly formatted documents shouldn't be a problem.

It seems that I'm on my way to running a Microsoft-free computing environment. And it seems that it's not as painful as I feared it would be. There are pitfalls, certainly, and things I haven't figured out how to do yet. But I'm confident that I'll work my way past those, with a little help from my friends. And I'll be cheating now and then, when there's something I absolutely need to do and haven't figured out how to do in Linux yet, or when I need to run an application like Cartes du Ciel that is available only for Windows. But those Windows systems are now largely just crutches. I know they're there if I need them, but I probably won't need them much.

Now, where do I get those penguin stickers to put on the front of my computer cases?

Wednesday, 17 April 2002

I'm in the process of converting over to Linux entirely. Thanks to Greg Lincoln, who solved my major problem, at least in part. I wasn't able to access Windows shares from my Linux system. Here's what Greg told me to do:


Which indeed works, but only on Windows NT 4 shares. When I attempt to do that for Windows 2000 shares, I get the following error message, both at boot time and when I try to access the share:


I tried the same thing on other Windows 2000 shares and got the same results. Apparently, Microsoft changed something in Windows 2000 that breaks SAMBA. But that will do, at least for now. I can access my server volumes on theodore, and that's all that really matters.

Right now, I'm running my mail on three different clients with three different mail clients. Until a few minutes ago, I had Mozilla Mail running on messier (my main Windows desktop) set to POP from my server at pair and delete the messages after it retrieved them. I have Evolution running on galileo, also set to POP from pair Networks, but to leave messages on the server. I have Outlook 2000 running on ursa (my Windows 2000 system in the den), also set to POP from pair Networks and leave messages on the server. My main mail store is therefore on messier. I can't figure out how to point Mozilla Mail to a different directory, so I just let it store the mail locally on messier and periodically manually copy and paste the whole mail directory hierarchy over to theodore (the Windows NT 4 Server file server), from which it gets backed up.

I intended to make Evolution my primary mail client last night, and so attempted to import the Mozilla Mail data into Evolution. That didn't work as expected. I ran the import utility and was given the choice of importing all data from an older mail system or doing a file-by-file import. When I chose the first option, I was presented with a blank screen. No joy there. Just to experiment, I told Evolution to do a file-by-file import and pointed it to the Inbox file. That worked fine, so I shouldn't have any problem importing my data, except that I'll have to do it folder by folder (and I have many, many folders). Also, I'm not sure how I'll get my non-mail folders (such as my contacts) into Evolution.

What I considered doing was setting up Mozilla Mail under Linux and then copying all my Mozilla Mail data over from messier to galileo . Presumably that would allow Mozilla running under Linux to see all that data and then subsequently allow Evolution to import it as a batch. The only problem is that I can't make it work. Oh, well. At least I can get my messages over to Evolution, and I should be able to import my addressbooks somehow.


Holden Aust sends me very detailed instructions for burning CDs under Linux. Although it's a long message, there's so much valuable information here that I decided to post his message in full so that I and others can refer to it later.

Thursday, 18 April 2002

9:20 - I'd intended for today's entry to be the first one done completely under Linux, but that turned out not to be possible.

I've made a fair amount of progress. My primary mail client is now Evolution running on my Linux box. It's by no means as full-featured as Outlook 2000, but it seems to have all the essentials. I'm really looking forward to Evolution 1.1 or 2.0 or whatever they call it. There are a lot of convenience features that need to be added, and my guess is that the programmers are working on them for the next major release. But Evolution is Good Enough for now.

Among the features they really need to add is a usable Outlook import facility. Mozilla mail imports Outlook messages and address books, so there's no reason why Evolution can't do the same. It is, after all, aimed at the corporate Outlook market, so it's pretty much mandatory that it be able to import data from the application that it's intended to replace. Instead, the current release of Evolution says that it can't read Outlook files, and actually recommends using Mozilla Mail as an intermediary to get Outlook messages into Evolution.

The Outlook-to-Mozilla part works great. Mozilla's import grabs Outlook messages wholesale and puts them (and the folders that contain them) in a separate set of "Imported Mail" folders in Mozilla. It goes downhill from there, though. As far as I can see, there's no way to bulk import the mail from Mozilla to Evolution. Instead, you have to import it folder by folder. That at least does work properly, but it's quite time-consuming to replicate the Outlook/Mozilla folder structure in Evolution and then import folder by folder into Evolution.

What's worse is that there is apparently no way to import address books into Evolution. The best Evolution can come up with is to suggest mailing your contacts to yourself. I couldn't come up with any convenient way to do that in Mozilla, so I fired up Outlook, selected every contact in my Contacts folder, and sent them all as one huge mail message. That arrived in Evolution fine, but there was no way I could find to extract that data from the message and put it into Evolution.

So I decided to try sending my contacts one-by-one as v-card file attachments. Actually, I had too many contacts, so I decided to use my Subscribers list instead. I tried mailing one subscriber record as a vcard, and that worked fine. I opened the message in Evolution, and there was a button at the bottom of the message that said "Add to Addressbook" or something similar. Fine. So I spent the better part of an hour emailing each Subscriber record as an individual v-card attachment. Only after I'd sent them all and retrieved them in Evolution did I learn that the process didn't go as smoothly with most records as it did with that first test record. Evolution did in fact import the v-card data, but the resulting records were incredibly ugly. Each of them took up a full column in Evolution's Contacts display, with lots of little boxes and strange characters in the Notes fields.

After that, I tried everything I could think of, including exporting my Contacts records as comma-separated-value ASCII files. Nothing I tried worked. In each case, Evolution told me that it didn't have an importer for the format I'd chosen.

At that point, I decided to pend getting my contact data over to Evolution and move on to something else. Apparently, I lost my mind, because I decided to upgrade my system to KDE 3. (I should mention here that any bad things I say in this or future journal entries about stuff that happens is not criticism of the people who are helping me. It's pointing out that I do these silly things because I'm silly.) Greg Lincoln had sent me a link to the site where I could download the rpm's for KDE 3 stable for Red Hat 7.2. I went to that site and downloaded, as Greg suggested, every file I found there except the language support files. I don't need support for Croatian or Norwegian or any of the other languages, but I did grab everything else.

I stuck the downloaded files in the /home/thompson/kde3 directory. Once I had them all, I brought up a command prompt window, executed su to make myself super user, changed to the /home/thompson/kde3 directory, and used the command rpm -Uvh *.rpm to install KDE3. Being an optimist, I was at that point expecting the process to complete normally and give me KDE 3.0. Instead, I got a whole bunch of error messages about failed dependencies. Oh, well. Everything seemed to continue working normally, so I assumed that the rpm installer was smart enough to check for dependencies before doing anything to the existing installation. That seemed to be the case, and everything continued working normally.

So I continued playing around with various Linux stuff, planning to ask Greg later what if anything I should do about KDE 3. It was then that I decided I was going to use Linux to do this page for tomorrow (today). Planning to use Mozilla Composer, I fired up Mozilla. Big mistake. It appeared to start normally, although with the ugly old Netscape skin. I clicked on Task - Composer and Composer came up apparently normally. I called up this page, which is located on the Windows server, and it came up, apparently normally.

Then I got to thinking about version numbers. I'm running 0.9.9 on Windows and wasn't sure what I was running on Linux. So I made the big mistake of clicking Help -- About. That brought up a new Navigator window and locked Mozilla up tight. All of the Mozilla windows were still visible, but none of them responded to any commands, including my attempts to close them. I searched in vain for an equivalent to Windows' Task Manager -- End Task command. Mozilla was covering my desktop and wouldn't go away. I couldn't move, minimize, or close the Mozilla windows. What was worse was that if I started another program like Evolution or Solitaire, the resulting program window was underneath the frozen Mozilla windows. I could of course get a fresh desktop by clicking 2, 3, or 4 down on the task bar, but nothing I did would fix the frozen windows in my primary desktop.

Eventually, I rebooted the system. The Mozilla windows were still there, but I was able to close them. So I took the Gone With the Wind approach, and decided to think about that problem tomorrow. As I was using Evolution, I made the mistake of clicking on a link embedded in an email. Instead of firing up Konqueror, Mozilla came up. I'm not sure how or why Mozilla ended up associated with html files and I really wish I knew how to change the association back to Konqueror. Because each time I click on an embedded link, Mozilla comes up and freezes.

So I decided to upgrade Mozilla to the current version. I used Konqueror to go over to the Mozilla web site. I found the rpm for Mozilla 0.9.9, downloaded it and double clicked on it to bring up the GUI rpm installer. I told it to install the 0.9.9 version, but again I got a failed installation due to a bunch of dependencies. Obviously, I needed more than just the one rpm. There were a half dozen or more, but I foolishly assume that just the one 10 MB one would be sufficient. Obviously it wasn't.

There was also a tarball version that was a bit larger, but I didn't get it because I don't remember the procedure for extracting and installing from a tarball. I seem to remember from the hazy distant past that I'd need to download the tarball, run tar -xvf to unzip the files, do a chmod, and then execute an installer executable. Or something like that. But vague recollections from years ago aren't good enough. Come to think of it, it may even have been a .gz file rather than a tarball.

So I went back to download the rest of the Mozilla rpm's. I got all of them downloaded, fired up a command prompt, became superuser, changed into the download directory, and typed rpm -Uhv *.rpm. This time I got only one failed dependency: "mozilla = 0.9.2.1 is needed by galeon-0.11.3-2". So again there's no joy. I can see that failed dependencies are going to be very aggravating.

When I went to bed last night, my primary desktop was still cluttered with Mozilla windows-that-will-not-die. This morning, they're all gone. Very strange. At any rate, that's why I'm typing this in Mozilla 0.9.9 Composer on my Windows 2000 system.

13:00 - more in, including several helpful emails, which I reproduce here.


Thanks. As it turned out, I didn't need to kill the steenking processes. Instead, I killed the whole application (along with Evolution, which I didn't want to kill. I got it back, though. More later on my page.

And more from Roland, this time about RPMs:


Which indeed turns out to be a useful summary page for learning how to use the Red Hat Package Manager. Too good, in fact. I remember years ago when I was trying to help a friend on the phone. He was having problems with, as I recall, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. At one point during the conversation, he said "I wasn't sure what the file was for, so I deleted it." Duh. But then I did the same thing today. One of the segments in that page tells you how to delete packages without consideration for dependencies. The author warns the reader that doing so can have very bad results.

I was getting a bit frustrated with my inability to upgrade Mozilla. The first thing I did was try to delete Mozilla. That refused to work because Galeon required one of the Mozilla 0.9.2 files. So I deleted Galeon. So far, so good. Then I tried running an upgrade of Mozilla to 0.9.9. No joy. So I decided to delete Mozilla, which worked fine. I then tried to install Mozilla 0.9.9. That failed, because one of the RPMs in my mozilla-0.9.9 directory was mozilla-nss-0.9.9-0. RPM informed me that mozilla-nss-0.9.9-1 was already installed, and aborted the installation of Mozilla. Okay. Time to delete mozilla-nss-0.9.9-1. When I tried that, RPM told me that it was required by Evolution. Gulp.

Well, my mail was already backed up to a different system, so I went ahead and told RPM to remove mozilla-nss-0.9.9-1 without considering dependencies. That worked, of course, but it killed Evolution. Oh, my. So I installed Mozilla 0.9.9, which worked fine. Evolution was still dead, of course. So I fired up Red Carpet, intending to tell it to go get Evolution and reinstall it. That option wasn't offered. Okay, I fired up a terminal window again, su'd to root, and uninstalled my broken copy of Evolution. I then fired up Red Carpet again, and found that Evolution was now available to be downloaded. I told it to go ahead and do that. It did, and Evolution is now back up and running with no loss of data. And Mozilla 0.9.9 works.

I'm impressed at how robust Linux is. Doing something like this with Windows would probably have trashed everything beyond hope of recovery. But Linux just keeps on ticking.

So now I have Evolution and Mozilla 0.9.9 both working fine. I'm writing this on my Linux box. What is truly strange is that Mozilla Composer got everything off my Windows box without being told. That is, when I fired up Mozilla Composer for the first time, it already had the same most-recently-used list of files and so on. The only place it could have gotten them is from the Windows box. I have no idea how it did this, but it's very nice.

One thing that's not so nice is the ugly fonts. I know that there's some sort of issue with TrueType, although I'm not aware of the details. In fact, the Mozilla download page specifically says that there's no TrueType support. I believe this is a licensing issue, but I don't understand why it's a problem. After all nearly everyone has a full set of licensed TrueType fonts around on a Windows CD somewhere. If I'm not using that Windows copy, should I not be able to just stick the CD in my Linux box and have it use those already-licensed fonts?

I'm also not sure why some applications seem to be using pretty fonts and others ugly ones. At first, I thought it was KDE versus Gnome, because Evolution looks very pretty. But then I noticed that some KDE stuff doesn't seem to have the ugly fonts problem. This would be a good thing to figure out. The fonts are usable as-is, but they are indeed ugly. I don't think I'd want to be forced to look at them all day long while I work.

Friday, 19 April 2002

I haven't done much with Linux since my last post (other than use it to get work done), but there is some good mail I wanted to get posted:


Then Phil Hough and Mike Strock weigh in on using SAMBA with Windows 2000 shares:


And


And Dave Markowitz tells me how to kill hung programs:


Roland Dobbins and Greg Lincoln tell me how to use TrueType fonts in Linux:


and


And Mark Huth weighs in on Linux versus Windows:


Linux certainly isn't for everyone yet, but it's getting there. Sure, the Linux world has its share of bigots, radicals, and true believers, but my experience with Linux people is that they're almost invariably friendly and eager to help. For every LinuxPunk out there who's eager to show us newbies what morons we are and how smart he is, there are 100 or 1,000 normal folks who are willing to extend a helping hand.

My impression is that that situation is getting better, not worse. In the early days, Linux was more of a cult, so it was much more common to encounter the type of behavior you mention. But Linux has now broken out into the mainstream, and the True Believers are now a much tinier percentage of Linux users (and experts).

As you say, I do have access to many true experts in Linux. That's one of the reasons that I'm keeping this journal. As a Linux newbie, I figure that many of the showstoppers I encounter will also be showstoppers for others trying to get started with Linux. As I document the problems I encounter and the solutions to them, I'm also creating what I hope will be a useful series of documents for others who decide to take the plunge.

Saturday, 20 April 2002

12:15 - Trying to install TrueType fonts for Red Hat 7.2 brought to mind a classic episode of M.A.S.H. The one where Hawkeye ends up having to defuze an unexploded bomb sitting right in the middle of the hospital compound. There he is, standing next to a huge bomb with his tool kit, with everyone else hiding in bunkers. Hawkeye has no idea how to defuze a bomb, but fortunately they have the field manual, which gives detailed instructions. Someone else--Trapper John, I think--has that manual in a bunker and is shouting out the instructions to him, and the exchange goes something like this:

Hawkeye: "Okay, I have the cover off. What do I do next?"
Trapper:  (reading from the manual) "Cut the red wire..."
Hawkeye: (snips wire)
Trapper: (turning page of manual) "after first removing..."

Which is kind of how I felt when I tried to use the Red Hat instructions for installing TrueType fonts.

This page seems to tell you everything you need to know to install TrueType fonts under Red Hat 7.2. If only that were true. Unfortunately, the instructions they give are wrong, missing required information, and out of order. Or at least it looks that way to me. The instructions begin:


So I logged on as root, got to a command prompt, and did that. (They didn't bother to mention that many of the TrueType fonts I copied from my Windows directory won't work because they use capital letters in the filenames. But I learned about that later.)

There are some real problems with the instructions they give here. First, there shouldn't be a period at the end of the line. I figured that one out myself. Second, the syntax is wrong. When I typed chkfontpath -add /usr/share/truetype I got an error message. "-add" isn't a valid option. It should have been "-a". Okay, so I ran the command again, this time using "-a". Didn't work. Why? Because the information they give first you have to do second, and the information they give second you have to do first. Duh. Here's what followed in the instructions:


So I ran those two commands, each of which apparently completed successfully. (At any rate, there was no feedback. The system simply returned me to a prompt). Then I ran chkfontpath -a /usr/share/truetype again, and this time it completed successfully (or appeared to). The instructions go on to say:


Well, I couldn't do the first part, because the pipe character on my keyboard doesn't work. Apparently I have the wrong keyboard defined or something. But I did use the xset -q command, and it returned a bunch of text which included "unix/:7100". That was close enough to their "unix:/port_number" (note the transposed colon and slash) to make me think everything was set up correctly. I rebooted the system (I know, I shouldn't have to reboot as often as I do, but I'm still using the "when in doubt, reboot" method)". The system booted normally, and I used xset -q again to make sure that the "unix/:7100" was still present. It was, so I expected my fonts to work properly.

I fired up Mozilla and the fonts were as ugly as ever. I figured I might need to reset Mozilla to use another font, so I went to Preferences and found that several (but not all) Microsoft fonts were now showing up. So I selected one for a sans-serif font. I was kind of expecting Mozilla to start using that immediately, but it didn't. Just in case, I exited and restarted Mozilla. Same old ugly fonts.

Obviously, something wasn't right. So I went off in search of more information. I found this page, which makes it clear that I have more work to do to get TrueType fonts working on my Linux box. Alas, I'm out of time for now. I have some stuff to do before I get ready to leave for the wedding. I don't doubt that I'll get this working, but the instructions could be a lot better.

9:45 - At this point, I'm just using my Linux box rather than trying to improve it. I'll get back to doing that sometime soon, but right now I have a lot of work to get done, so I'm willing to put up with minor aggravations--the lack of TrueType, no ad-blocker, etc. I continue to be impressed with Linux, but there's no doubt that it's harder to install and upgrade software under Linux than under Windows. For all that people complain about DLL Hell under Windows, it seems to me that Dependency Hell under Linux is at least as bad. Probably worse.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Linux isn't an operating system. It's a kernel, around which many similar operating systems have been built. The similarities are much greater than the differences, but those differences can still bite you.

I've been accumulating Linux-related mail since the end of last week, so it's time to post some of it. The first is a continuation of my exchange with Mark Huth.


Sorry to hear that. My own experience has been a lot different. The standardization issue has some validity, but of course one can standardize on one distribution and not worry about the others.

Well, apparently I'm not going to post any more mail. I had a hell of a time getting that previous message copied and pasted from Evolution into Mozilla Composer, and now I'm unable to copy/paste at all. The last batch I did worked easily. I highlighted the message and header in the Evolution preview window, copied it from there, and pasted it here. That no longer works. Nor does opening the message and attempting to copy/paste from there. Perhaps it'll work if I reply to the message and try copy/paste from that screen.

Nope. Same thing. I copy the text, come over to Mozilla Composer, and try to paste it. There's a pause of a couple seconds, and nothing shows up here. This is very frustrating. I need to get some real work done, so that's all for now.