The previous article here was about upgrading Mandriva Linux on a Compaq Armada M700 laptop used for business. Since that laptop has a minimal amount of software installed, mainly just business related applications, I thought I would document upgrading from Mandriva 2007.1 to Mandriva 2008.1 on my tower PC. This PC is for business and personal use. As a result it has much more software on it than the laptop. Further, with this upgrade I intend to attempt to keep using the system while it is upgrading. I wanted to test this to see if one could actually do an upgrade in the background while continuing to be productive on the PC. I suspect I may have to restart applications, like Firefox, as they are upgraded. Since I am using Firefox to write this article I am saving after every sentence.

I have started this article on the PC while it is upgrading. I have X running and am using the applications I normally use every day in my business on this PC. Those are: xterm (eight instances for various CLI uses including one that runs ‘mc’), Kontact (includes Kmail, Kaddressbook, Korganizer, etc.), Firefox web browser, Kopete (Jabber, AIM and MSNIM instant messenger), XChat for IRC.

For the beginning of this upgrade I start by choosing some Mandriva 2008.0 repositories at easyurpmi.zarb.org. There are 1700+ packages that will have to download and install over our SOHO shared internet connection. We have a FTTH connection that is 4Mb/512Mb so I started the upgrade at the console ([Ctrl] [Alt] [F1]) after changing out my package sources. I used this command: ‘urpmi –auto-update –limit-rate 300k -v‘ to keep the downloads from taking all the available bandwidth. One thing I noticed, I just attempted to read the manual page for urpmi while the upgrade is going and man returned “garbage”:

$man urpmi
±R¸©k ąéºo©ýK..f…….åØ4ª]’”(AR [ïAR#¨æ¶ä©”‘êÚö/¤Sk&iæu¦ü÷Né©zøùÁj/ì¿=IB³5ĐqÛÉccþu0§2¥

So, apparently that will not work for a while as this upgrade proceeds. One of the first things upgraded is urpmi and its’ support programs and libraries. I am a little surprised that I cannot yet read its’ man page as I thought man pages should be standard across releases. Obviously my thinking is flawed about that. I expect that man page problem to clear up as the upgrade proceeds.

At this point the upgrade has been going for about an hour. The only thing upgraded so far is urpmi and its’ support applications. The packages for the upgrade are still downloading at the console. This PC has a 1.8G /var partition and I suspect that urpmi is downloading as many packages as it can before installing them. The reason I think this is that the laptop upgrade using this method would download a few files, install, remove the downloaded files, etc. This was likely due to the smaller size of the available disk space on the laptop. Currently the /var/cache/urpmi directory shows it has 849M in it with the /var partition showing 86% full using ‘df -k‘.

Wow, /var is 100% full and urpmi is still downloading, to where I am not sure. I am wondering if this is going to work at this point. After waiting a few more minutes I see many “retrieving failed” messages, then urpmi begins trying to install the packages it did download. Unfortunately there is no space left in which it can work. Looks like it is time for some creative symbolic linking to give urpmi more space. I had to ‘kill -9‘ urpmi (yeah I know, bad bad bad) to get it to stop. I then mv the /var/cache/urpmi directory to /mnt/data/urpmi then symbolically link /mnt/data/urpmi back into /var/cache. The /mnt/data mount is a ~70GB SCSI disk for business and personal data that has about 10GB free. It includes old data that has been backed up that I can purge if more than 10GB is needed. I doubt much more space is actually needed though. I then restart ‘urpmi –auto-update –limit-rate 300k -v‘ and watch to see if this works. The urpmi program starts downloading from the point of failure. So, this problem is solved with a workaround.

At 1.5G of data in the /mnt/data/urpmi directory the packages finish downloading and urpmi begins processing files for installing the upgrade. The installation fails due to two RPM packages I have installed from oddball sources with unresolvable dependencies, one a game the other a gutenprint update, neither were from Mandriva. I remove them and restart the install. This results in the 1700+ packages actually beginning to be installed. After this install finishes I will reboot and see how the system has fared.

Old packages are being removed, so I decide to shutdown X at this point to avoid a possible X crash.

… time passes …

About 19 hours have passed since that last sentence was typed. I’m reinstalling the applications I use on a fresh install of Mandriva 2008.1 at this point. The upgrade from repositories path on this PC did not complete correctly for the 2007.1 to 2008.0 upgrade. After all the 1700+ files finished downloading when I tried to ‘shutdown -r now‘ the init program just returned to me a message about nothing to do for the runlevel (I forgot to write the exact message down.). After staring at that for a moment with an unusable system I decided to press reset.

The system came back up and asked me for the runlevel after going through the grub boot loader. I thought this was not looking good but typed in ‘5′ for runlevel 5. Again init returned to me a message about nothing to do for the runlevel (Again I forgot to write this down.). Time for some forensics. I have an ISO for a Mandriva One Live CD, boot and run from CD disc. Unfortunately I had not burned the CD yet and the ISO was languishing on my now hosed PC. Luckily I had just recently gotten and burned a Knoppix 5.3 Live DVD image. I booted the Knoppix 5.3 DVD, mounted the root partition on my PC and began looking around. My first place to look was in /etc/rc.d since that is where init finds its’ “stuff”. As soon as I saw the subdirectories I thought to myself “Well, there’s your problem.”. For some reason there were no scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d/ and thus no symbolic links to those scripts in /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc1.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc2.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc4.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc6.d/. At this point I just wanted to get on with my 4th of July, Independece Day (USA) holiday. I did have the Mandriva 2008.1 install DVD burned just in case something like this happened. I rebooted with that and started a fresh install. About an hour later I had a basic install of Mandriva 2008.1 running on my SOHO tower PC.

The results of my experiment with upgrading Mandriva releases using repositories now has a 50% success rate. The upgrade of my business laptop could not have been smoother using this method. The upgrade of my business / personal use tower PC could have definitely been smoother. Although I did prove I was able to continue to keep using the PC while the upgrade was running. Everything kept working up to the point where I shutdown X. The bottom line here is Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV) using this method so be certain to have a fall-back CD or DVD from which to do a fresh install.

Hmmm, my wife’s PC running Mandriva 2007.1 needs upgrading … I wonder if …

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Mandriva Linux is a Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) distribution. One uses RPM to install, remove and manage software packages on such a distribution. In the past RPM got a reputation for causing “dependency hell” and many folks still think this about RPM based distributions today. However, Mandriva has tools called ‘urpm*‘ created by very smart developers that along with the information stored in ‘hdlist.cz‘ files keeps all the dependencies straight. So, arguments against RPM are now moot if one uses Mandriva and the ‘urpm*‘ tools for package management. Here is a list of these from a Mandriva 2007.1 Linux system:

• /usr/bin/urpmf
• /usr/bin/urpmi.update
• /usr/bin/urpmi_rpm-find-leaves
• /usr/bin/urpmq
• /usr/sbin/urpme
• /usr/sbin/urpmi
• /usr/sbin/urpmi.addmedia
• /usr/sbin/urpmi.removemedia
• /usr/sbin/urpmi.update

My rather old Compaq Armada M700 business laptop was still running Mandriva 2007.1 and I wanted to upgrade it to 2008.1 to keep getting desktop and security updates. I had heard that one could just change the distribution media repositories and use ‘urpmi –auto-update‘ to get this done. After asking a few questions in #mandriva on irc.freenode.net I decided I would try this and document my experience here.

This takes some time to complete so make certain there is time available before starting this process. Obviously one wants to have a “high speed” internet connection or an on-site repository mirror for this. If using an on-site repository mirror then the easyurpmi.zarb.org step is not needed.

The first order of business was to change my package repositories on the internet from 2007.1 to 2008.0 and remove the old 2007.1 repositories. I went to easyurpmi.zarb.org to get the list of new 2008.0 repositores. I ran ‘urpmi.removemedia -a‘ to get rid of the 2007.1 repositories and then copied and pasted the list created at easyurpmi.zarb.org from my selections there. This created the new repository data and got the dependency files from the repositories I had chosen. Once this was done I logged out of X, switched to a console command line shell, logged in as root and shutdown X using ‘init 3‘. This may not be necessary but I wanted to make sure things went smoothly. Then I issued the command ‘urpmi –auto-update‘ and sat by the system for a while as it got the 1000+ packages needed to upgrade from 2007.1 to 2008.0. Since I started this at night I went to bed and left it running at about 700 packages completed or so. It was at the command prompt waiting for me when I got back in my home office the next morning.

I rebooted the laptop to make sure it still worked with these updates installed using this method. It did. I then went back to easyurpmi.zarb.org and got a new list of repository URLs for the Mandriva 2008.1 packages. I repeated the steps above to remove the previous mirrors and add these new ones. Once again running in runlevel 3 (init 3 as root at the console CLI.) and starting the upgrade with ‘urpmi –auto-update‘. This time there were over 1100 packages to download and install. I accepted the list of packages and left the laptop downloading and processing them as I went about my business day. I checked periodically to make sure the upgrade was running smoothly. After installing packages for several hours, the root prompt returned and I checked to see if the latest kernel was installed. It was.

I rebooted the laptop once more and watched while it went through the startup routine. I noticed a message “ACPI: Transitioning device [C1B2] to D0″ followed by “ACPI: Unable to turn cooling device [cb0c9a50] ‘on’”. A little web searching shows these are common messages with some Linux 2.6.* kernels and there are several suggestions on how to “fix” it. The first reboot loading the upgraded system took quite a bit longer than previous bootups. So long in fact that I walked away from the laptop and did some other work while it booted (The next bootup did not take any longer than previous bootups.). Once the bootup completed I logged into my fluxbox window manager and looked at the menus. Once again Mandriva has changed the menu structure. Come on Mandriva, leave it alone across releases for once. While this is a minor, personal irritation of mine it is not a show stopper for me. In any case everything I tried was working and was upgraded to the latest version available with Mandriva 2008.1 Linux.

Frankly, I think this is an excellent way to upgrade a system rather than doing a fresh install every time. Plus, if it fails one can always go ahead and do that fresh install by wiping out all the partitions except /home and installing from CD or DVD media or by doing a network install. Here is pseudo-code for the logic of doing these ‘urpmi‘ upgrades:

Release Upgrade Steps Using urpmi on Mandriva

     Do NOT skip over a release, do them in sequence.

     Example: 2007.0 > 2007.1 > 2008.0 ...

----------------------------------------------------------------

Remove old repositories with 'urpmi.removemedia -a'

Add new repositories (use easyurpmi.zarb.org to get these)

Upgrade with 'urpmi --auto-update'

     While another version is needed

          Reboot

          Remove and add new repositories

          Upgrade with 'urpmi --auto-update'

If new kernel is not installed

     Upgrade kernel with 'urpmi kernel-latest'

If new kernel source is not installed and is needed

     Upgrade kernel source with 'urpmi kernel-source-latest'

Final reboot

Here are things that were a bit wonky following the upgrade.

When I first started OpenOffice.org Writer it gave me an error message:

Error loading BASIC of document file:///usr/lib/openoffice/share/basic/WebWizard/script.xlib/:
General Error.
General input/output error.

This error is caused by having older OpenOffice.org configuration directories in one’s home directory (~/.ooo-2.0 and/or ~/.openoffice). Deleting these directories loses previous settings but eliminates that error.

I have a 10GB hard drive on this laptop with a 5G /, 49M /boot, 3.6G /home and 269M /tmp. Under 2007.1 the root partition was roughly 50% full. After running this urpmi upgrade process it was 76% full. It seems there is some cruft left over from the previous versions that would be cleaned up with a fresh install. Removing old kernels and kernel sources with ‘urpme‘ frees up a bit of space (now / is only 62% full.). It is possible there is a lot of junk in /var that I could clean up but after removing old kernels and kernel sources I have about 1.8G free on the root partition so /var is not a critical problem yet.

The default login manager theme for X shows a Microsoft-ish list of users. For a laptop I prefer no user list to show. So, I went into the configuration menu for the login manager and changed to a theme that does not show a user list. I personally believe it is better to not show a user list by default and let the end-user choose to change that.

That is all I noticed for now. If there are other bits of wonkiness due to this upgrade process I will add them as updates to this article.

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We have a client that needs a new server for their primary Point of Sale site (SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 + Advantage accounting. I know “SCO! hiss! boo!” but this is what they have used “forever”, meaning about 20 years. We tried to move them to LedgerSMB on Mandriva Linux but it does not fill their needs at this time. While migration from older Unix Point of Sale might be problematic we still recommend Linux + LedgerSMB for sites needing a startup Point of Sale solution.). The old server hardware is getting flaky after running every day since the year 2000. I think the new server is rather “sexy” (I would like one myself):

• THERMALTAKE Wing RS 100 VG1000BNS Mid Tower Case (x1)
• Enermax EG565P-VE FMA 535W Power Supply (x1)
• MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD 790FX Phenom Socket AM2+ ATX Motherboard (x1)
• AMD Phenom X4 9750 Quad Core Socket AM2 2.4GHZ 4MB Cache 125W Processor (x1)
• KINGSTON KVR800D2N5K2/4G 4GB PC2-6400 (DDR2-800) SDRAM Memory (x1)
• ADAPTEC RAID 3405 SGL/128 w/o Cables 2251900-R SAS/RAID Controller Card (x1)
• WD1500ADFD 150GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer (x3)
• SAMSUNG SH-S203B/BEBN 20X DVD±RW Black (x1)
• 1.44MB 3.5in Floppy Disk Drive (x1)
• ACER AL1716FB 17in 800:1 5ms LCD Monitor Black (x1)
• Keyboard and Mouse Combo (x1)
• ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB PCI Express x16 Video Card (x1)

This is going to be running as a three drive SATA RAID system using the Adaptec controller. There will be an 8-port multi-port serial board moved from the old system to this one to run the WYSE 60 Point of Sale terminals and one serial printer. We are waiting for the “special” cable to come in for the RAID controller (I forgot to order the darn thing) and for the new SCO OpenServer 6 license and media to arrive.

While waiting I decided to install Mandriva 2008.1 Linux on the system this weekend as my “test suite” software to test the hardware. I hooked the WD Raptor drives up to the on-board SATA connectors for this. The Mandriva install was uneventful except for a problem with the graphics display not installing properly for the ATI based card. I eventually got it working with a VESA mode and then installed the dkms-fglrx module from Mandriva after the first reboot (this module gives 3D video capability using the ATI based video controllers). After doing this I decided I would install and play with Compiz Fusion (a 3D desktop enhancement for Linux) to give the video hardware a workout. The Compiz Fusion install went well but when I logged out to reset the GUI subsystem I lost all video output on all console screens (F1 through F7)! This was disconcerting but I was able to reboot the system with the three fingered salute (Ctrl + Alt + Del). When the system came back up Compiz Fusion was running and I logged into a KDE desktop session to play with it. Logging out still loses the video output if running in runlevel 5 so at this point I boot to runlevel 3, login to my user account from a console prompt and run startx. This seems to work better than using the ‘*dm’ program in runlevel 5. Regardless of these minor annoyances (which may just be related to the specific graphics adapter used here) Compiz Fusion is quite fun, I recommend trying it.

I have seen several demo videos of Linux 3D desktops and have always considered doing one myself. After playing with Compiz Fusion for a while I decided to do one myself. I tried several different packages and none of them gave me a smooth video. I ended up using Istanbul to create the video in OGG Theora format then used ffmpeg to convert it to MPEG4. I wanted to show people the 3D desktop but I also wanted folks to see how easy one can do things from the GUI on a Mandriva 2008.1 system now. Mainly installing software and updates is as simple as it gets. See the demo to see what I mean: Mandriva 2008.1 Session Demo (MPEG4) 34,656,275 bytes

Here is the same demo compressed into a .zip file for those of you who would prefer to download it and view it offline: Mandriva 2008.1 Session Demo (zipped MPEG4) 25,080,970 bytes

This demo runs at 1024×768 and is a bit “jerky” even though I was recording on a Quad-core system with 4GB of RAM and a decent graphics adapter. If anyone has a clue for me on getting a smooth X desktop video demo I would love to see it. Please post a comment or contact me using our contact form.

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Spring Football is American style football¹ played in stream beds fed by underground springs. This was a favorite activity of “native Americans” prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims initiated the playing of football in the Fall on flat fields as it is a much cooler season for the sport and the fields are better for running. Thus the Pilgrims converted the “native Americans” to Fall Football which is now just called Football. Spring Football, at this point, is just a side note in the history of football.

1 The real football where the ball is thrown through the air with the hands and carried in the arms, not that soccer thing played only by kicking a ball with the foot.

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While getting a new PC ready to ship today I ran into a popup message at www.fedex.com when trying to use our Ship Manager account to make and print labels:

Looks to me like yet another large corporate site checking for the operating system under the browser. As if that matters at all if they would only develop to accepted, non-proprietary standards.

I also ran into some problems trying to create and print two shipping labels for drop-off shipment at our local FedEx International Shipping Center. I tried for a very long time to get around the problem using Firefox, Opera and even IE 6 running under WINE. I just could not get my shipment to be accepted to print labels. Finally I gave in and called the help number for FedEx Ship Manager customers and got a nice young fellow that told me what to do to get around the problem. (The problem is that today is a holiday for FedEx Ground and our account is set for pickup. Even though I changed the shipment to drop-off the browser cache was defeating the change. Closing the browser, starting over then changing the date FIRST to tomorrow “solved” the problem. I could have saved a few hours of frustration if the site developers would handle that better.)

In the course of our conversation I mentioned the pop-up message to the fellow and told him I was running Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Linux and that the popup should not appear for that. He agreed with me and stated that they should recognize Linux. I said I should write a web log article about it and tell folks to contact FedEx asking for Linux to be recognized. So, I ask you folks to contact FedEx and ask that they fix their site to ignore the operating system or to recognize Linux.

In the USA one can e-mail FedEx using the e-mail forms on their USA Customer Support page. Or one may call them using 1.800.463.3339 in the USA. Outside the USA go to the FedEx International Home Page, choose your country then click the Customer Service URL for your country to find the contact information.

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Here is another great system for an eComStation user that is similar to the previous system I wrote about. There have been requests from several people for me to document these builds to help promote eComStation (demo CD URL) and I have agreed that is a good idea. Here are the specifications of this system as agreed upon by the end-user:

• Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Full Tower Case w/Side Panel Window (Black)
• ENERMAX EG465P-VE-FMA 460W Power Supply
• Asus M2N-E nForce 570 Ultra Sempron/Athlon 64(FX)(X2) SktAM2 DDR2 ATX Motherboard w/Audio, Gigabit LAN, RAID/Serial ATA (includes added internal parallel cable)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4000+ Socket AM2 (65W)
• Kingston KVR800D2E5K2/2G 2GB Kit DDR2-800 PC2-6400 ECC Memory
• Adaptec SCSI Card 29160N
• HIS H165PRF512N-R Radeon X1650 PRO 512MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card
• NEC 1.44MB 3.5in Internal Floppy Disk Drive (Black)
• LITEON DH-20A4P-08 20X IDE DVD Burner Black Drive
• FUJITSU MBA3147NP 147GB SCSI-320 (68 pin) 15,000 RPM 8MB Buffer Hard Drive
• Logitech Media Keyboard (PS/2)
• Logitech Marble Mouse (PS/2 + USB)
• ViewSonic Q241wb 24in 16:10 6ms LCD Monitor 1000:1 300 cd/m2 (Black)
• eComStation 1.2MR upgrade from eCS 1.1 (ESD)
• Labor to install eCS on new PC
• eComStation Subscription Services with eCS (ESD)
• Novell openSuSE 10.3 (ordered from Novell for the end-user)
• Installed FreeDOS on first primary partition

We at ERACC installed FreeDOS and eComStation for the end-user. We offered to install the Linux as well but the end-user wanted to install the openSuSE 10.3 Linux himself. There is space set aside on the 147GB SCSI hard drive for him to install a /boot near the start of the drive and the rest of openSuSE 10.3 after the eComStation partitions.

The Radeon X1650 PRO based PCIe graphics adapter was ordered with the other parts and arrived with them but before this system was built we at ERACC discovered there is a flaw in the graphics handling for many ATI video cards under eComStation. I contacted the end-user and offered to replace the Radeon X1650 PRO with a nVidia based PCIe card at our expense. He agreed so we ordered a GeForce 7300 LE based PCIe card to replace the ATI based card. This worked out quite well with the included SNAP Graphics driver that is included in eComStation 2.0rc4. I imagine it will also work with the Panorama VESA driver but we did not try that since SNAP worked “out of the box”.

The 24 inch Q241wb ViewSonic monitor is a very good choice here. It works perfectly with the eComStation graphics system and is run at its’ native resolution of 1920×1200 dpi. I personally want one of these monitors now.

I have also never used a trackball “mouse” myself. I found myself liking the Logitech Marble Mouse while working on the setup of this system. That is another item that may find its’ way onto my desktop in the future.

The original dual IDE DVD±RW drives were a matched set. When building the system it was discovered that one of the drives would not spin up. So it was replaced with a “PIONEER DVR-212DBK 18X SATA DVD” burner which works quite well with the updated eComStation mass storage chipset drivers from Daniela Engert.

The audio was problematic as we downloaded the latest UNIAUD drivers and installed those. This caused a very nasty hard hang on the desktop whenever the second system sound tried to play. The only out was to push the reset button. After several hours of trial and error research I discovered that installing UNIAUD from uniaud114RC5.zip and then replacing the uniaud32.sys file with the one from uniaud32-1.9.2.zip “solved” the hang problem. These are both older versions of UNIAUD files but they work here. NOTICE: This is a specific fix for the audio on these ASUS M2N-E motherboards and may or may not work on other motherboards with eComStation.

Several folks have asked me for pictures of this build so here they are:

I also took a video with my digital camera of the system booting into eComStation 2.0rc4 and then rebooting to FreeDOS. The video is rather large (319,581,796 bytes) and is 640×480 resolution in AVI format. I attempted to convert it to MPEG-2 but the results were even worse than the original AVI so I deleted that. It is only of the PC booting with roughly the first half of the ~6 minutes showing the system counting the 2GB of RAM and waiting through the IBM Boot Manager 30 second count down to boot eComStation. In my opinion it is not all that exciting but I went ahead and included the video here to be complete.

(This was still uploading as of the time of this post. ETA to finish uploading is 4.5 hours from the time on this post. I want ISP people to just give us the same uplink speed as downlink speed without the unnecessary huge extra fee for that.)

Multiboot PC Video - AVI format - 640×480 - 319,581,796 bytes

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Update Thu May 22 01:31:26 UTC 2008: (NOTICE! I’m not sure what I got but it apparently was not the printer on my LAN with embedded Mandriva. Any incorrect URL typed with 10.10.10.25 on my lan still returns that error shown below. Now to track down what system is returning that … Please see the comments at the bottom.)

Recently our networked Lexmark T520 printer ran out of toner in the original cartridge after light use for three years. We do not print much here as the printer is for those times that a PDF document in e-mail or a faxed document from OpenOffice.org Writer is not enough to satisfy whoever is receiving the document. So I was in the market for a new toner cartridge. I got a bit of sticker shock when I saw the best price I could get for the replacement toner was about $100.00/US. If I was going to have to spend $100.00/US I decided to get a new network laser printer that would have less expensive replacement toner cartridges.

I had looked for an inexpensive network laser printer last Fall (2007) for one of our local Linux server clients (they are running Mandriva Linux for their business desktop and to serve as a VM host for XP Professional to run Quickbooks Professional). During my printer research I ran across the Samsung ML-2571N printer for around $170.00/US including shipping. Which meant for the ~$100.00/US I would pay for Lexmark toner and an additional $70.00/US I could have a new printer. For that price I could pretty much buy a new laser printer every time it ran out of toner and sell the old one on eBay. This printer also has a ~3000 page toner and drum replacement cartridge I can get from inkgrabber.com for around $48.95/US plus shipping.

I ordered a ML-2571N from our distributor and it came in last week. I unpacked it today, put the pieces together, attached it to our LAN and went to my Linux box to set up the ML-2571N using its’ built-in web interface. I changed the IP address settings from DHCP to static and then changed the hostname. After changing the hostname I lost access to the web interface. I saw this result when I typed in anything other than the base IP address of 10.10.10.25 (caveat, obviously this part is incorrect but I am leaving it in as an object lesson for myself):

Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 404
10.10.10.25
Apache/2.2.4 (Mandriva Linux/PREFORK-6.4mdv2007.1)

Notice, it is running embedded Mandriva Linux and Apache! I began reading the troubleshooting and FAQ pages at www.samsung.com but could not find out how to fix what I figured was user error (mine). After about an hour of fruitless searching I called the Samsung USA service center. The first level technician tried his best to help me but my problem did not show up on any of his “standard answer” screens. He ended up sending me to level 2 technical support where I got a nice young lady named Sarah. After explaining what I had done (changing the hostname) Sarah informed me “you should not do that”. I am happy to say she did not laugh at me and damage my frail ego. Sarah also did not know the answer but she had more freedom to research it than the poor level one technical guy I had stymied. After waiting on hold for about five minutes Sarah came back and said I could fix it by running their “Set IP” tool. I asked if they had tools for Linux and was told essentially “we do not support Linux as there are too many versions to support”. Ok, fine. I know and you know that is a non-issue but apparently Samsung still does not know that. Maybe we should write them and call them about it … http://www.samsung.com/us/info/contactus.html. (Yes, I have already written them an e-mail using one of the web forms on that page)

The Problem with Sarah’s answer is we do not use Microsoft operating systems here. All I have is an old Windows 98 CD and license that had never been installed. I asked Sarah if the tool would work on Windows 98 and was told “it should”. VMware to the rescue. I have had VMware installed here for a while to play with other operating systems. This time I broke open that Windows 98 set and installed it on VMware. After installing the Samsung “Set IP” tool I was able to access the printer, reset the IP address and get into the web interface again:

After I had access I finished checking out the printer and setting it up for our SOHO business LAN. Samsung has “drivers” for these printers that can be downloaded and installed from the CLI. However, I know that all I really need is CUPS running and a .ppd file for CUPS. I downloaded the Linux *.tar.gz “driver” for the printer and accessed the file with mc to get at the .ppd files. I found the ML-2570ps.ppd file, extracted it to our file server NFS shared directory and told CUPS to use it when I set up the printer (BTW, CUPS “saw” the printer as soon as I fired up the CUPS web interface, pretty cool). I printed a test page, saw it was good and was done.

So, if you are a Linux user with a parallel port, USB port or LAN and need an inexpensive laser printer these Samsung laser printers work with Linux and work well with Linux. The only thing I could ask of Samsung is that they create their tools for Linux.

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I was recently involved in a conversation on the IRC network chat.freenode.net in the #ubuntu channel about notebook computers for Linux. The young lady that was seeking the information is a college student who wants to get a notebook computer to run Linux. However, she did not know where to find a notebook computer for running Linux and asked for recommendations. She received some suggestions from others but I directed her to Dell’s open-source n Series laptops page. Dell offers these notebooks with bare hard drives and ship them with FreeDOS (likely to satisfy the letter of their contract with Microsoft that probably says, and I paraphrase, “Thou shalt not ship thine personal computers without an operating system”). As of the time of this article it appears that Dell does not offer notebooks with Linux installed (corrections welcome, please use the comments).

Edit Thu May 15 21:57:27 UTC 2008: I received a private correction about Dell and pre-installed Linux. See this Dell PCs Featuring Ubuntu page. Oddly enough, now that I see the page I recall seeing it before.

After my involvement in this IRC chat I wondered if there were any companies that sell “white book” or “barebones” notebook computers to end-users. I also wondered if any of these companies offer configuration of the notebooks. Finally I wondered if they offered Linux preloaded. All this wondering led me to do some web searching for well known barebones laptop brands, mainly ASUS and MSI. I found two companies that seem to get the latest models from ASUS and MSI, RK Computers and AVADirect, Inc. I contacted both by phone and asked for a person I could e-mail that could answer some questions about their barebones notebooks and Linux. I was given that information and sent a set of questions to both contacts.

Here are the questions and the answers (RK Computers responded first and is listed first here, this is not an endorsement. AVADirect, Inc.’s contact said he had to send the questions off for review before he could respond. I presume he has to clear it with some internal legal department. After no response for three days I had to go ahead with this article and put in public information anyone could find from AVADirect, Inc.’s web site. While this is a disappointment to me it is not a reflection on AVADirect, Inc.’s responses to actual customers. They appear to get good reviews at resellerratings.com.):

• What is your company name and sales contact information?
  • RK Computers, 866-760-4998, 845-942-8568, sales@rkcomputer.net, support@rkcomputer.net
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. See their Contact page.

• What brand(s) of barebones notebook computers does your company carry?
  • (RK Computers) ASUS, MSI, Sager-Clevo
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. Check their Notebooks pages.

• Can these notebook computers be purchased from your company unconfigured (no CPU, etc.)?
  • (RK Computers) Yes, they can be purchased as just the “barebone” or any combination of components up to a completely configured model. By default complete or partial systems are assembled & tested. If the customer does not wish the notebook assembled they should put “ship as parts” in the order notes.
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. It does appear that they do offer the notebooks unconfigured, however one should Contact them to be sure.

• Does your company provide configuration of the barebones notebooks?
  • (RK Computers) Yes, all models can be configured online with many of the most popular components available. Orders/configuration can also be done by phone, if there is a request for a component(s) not listed we can get just about any compatible component the customer desires.
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. It does appear that they do offer the notebooks pre-configured, however one should Contact them to be sure.

• Does configuration cost extra? If yes, what is the average cost?
  • (RK Computers) No, all notebooks are assembled and tested prior to shipment at no extra cost. All notebooks purchased with a cpu installed are bios updated prior to shipment. Barebone models or models purchased without a cpu may require a bios update. All driver and bios links are available on our site (URL).
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. I could not determine this information with a search of their web pages. Contact them to find out.

• Can a configured barebones notebook be purchased from your company without an operating system installed?
  • (RK Computers) Yes, all our barebone and partially configured models are available without an O/S.
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. It does appear that they do offer the notebooks sans operating system, however one should Contact them to be sure.

• Does your company offer any barebones notebook models with distributions of Linux preloaded? If yes, how long has Linux been offered and which Linux distributions?
  • (RK Computers) Currently no, we do not offer linux pre-installed.
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. It does appear that they do offer some notebooks with Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu pre-installed, however one should Contact them to be sure and to find out which notebook models have this offer.

• Do you recommend any specific barebones notebook models for use with Linux? If yes, please provide at least one example (more would be better).
  • (RK Computers) These models have been purchased by our customers and successfully installed different distro’s of linux: MS-1221, MS-1222, MS-1634, MS-1719(a), MS-1719(b), MS-171A, S96Sp(a), S96Sp(b)
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact.

• Do you have any end-user success stories with your notebook models running Linux? If yes, please share one or point to a URL where this is documented.
  • (RK Computers) We have spoken with customers, and received emails in the past but no url I can point to.
  • (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact.

Additional information supplied outside of the questions asked:

• (RK Computers) We also have a section “notebook photos” which helps when ordering online as most manufacturer’s photos do not show all angles and high resolution photos.
• (AVADirect, Inc.) No response within three days of contact. However, looking at their configuration menus it appears they offer custom paint jobs for notebook computers purchased from them. Contact them to find out about this option.

Granted there are more questions I could ask. I simply wanted a short list that I could post here to get people started when looking for a Linux capable notebook personal computer. If one is currently in the market for a notebook computer to run Linux then any of the companies mentioned in this article will be able to supply one’s notebook needs. Contact these companies for any information not covered here.

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The Linux community spoke and foxnews.com listened. I received a polite message late today from Mr. Dave Denis the Director, Product Development at Fox News. Mr. Denis stated that Fox News is now aware of the problem with their Video page and is working with Maven Networks to get it fixed. Mr. Denis also stated that most of the Fox News developers use Ubuntu. I only wish they had bought the systems preloaded from my company (one can dream, can one not?). I have asked for permission to include the body of his message in this article but have not yet heard back from Mr. Denis. It is after working hours in New York at this time so I expect I will hear from him tomorrow. Should I get permission to include the body of his message I will update this article and add that.

Of course almost as soon as I posted this I received a reply from Mr. Denis:

Hi Gene - not a problem. … If you want to talk a bit further
tomorrow I’m free in the morning. In the meantime, I believe
foxbusiness.com DOES work in Linux

Dave

David Denis
Director, Product Development
FOX News Digital
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

So, here is Mr. Denis original message:

This message is for Gene - hi Gene, I read your blog entry re:
foxnews.com and Linux. I just wanted to reach out and let you
know we’re trying to fix the issue at this very moment. We’re
working with our video vendor, Maven Networks to diagnose the
problem. Most of our developers actually run Ubuntu so we’re
definitely focused on correcting it. Thanks,
Dave

What I get reading this message from Mr. Denis is that Fox News employees do care about Fox News Online users and are responsive to problems on their web site when they are made aware of them. Although I have not yet spoken with Mr. Denis directly I imagine there will be a rewrite or replacement of the code that does the various tests.

Further the fact that he states “Most of our developers actually run Ubuntu …” shows me that Linux is more main-stream than many would claim. I am quite pleased to read that a major news organization like Fox News is a Linux user. While it is not likely that the Fox News reporters and news desks are using Ubuntu or any other distribution of Linux we all know that the adoption of Linux in server closets and development labs is a foot in the door to corporate desktops. Once on the corporate desktop it is only a matter of time before more people take the penguin home.

I suspect right now Linux is much more prevalent on corporate and home desktops world wide than can ever be shown with “market share” numbers. Since most market share numbers come from product sales and the great majority of Linux distributions are “free” these market share studies will never be accurate in regard to Linux. Any web based market share study using web logs would also be skewed since many Linux users keep their Firefox browsers running with User Agent Switcher on reporting to be a browser from a Microsoft based system. Konqueror and Opera both have the same type of function. Just witness the many comments on Digg.com and elsewhere that suggest using a fake user agent to fix problems like the one shown recently when viewing the Fox News Video page.

I will follow up in this article with further information regarding Fox News Video and their fix to the Video page so be sure to get the RSS feed for our web log comments if you want to keep up.

Update Tue Apr 29 13:52:21 UTC 2008 I just received this e-mail from Mr. Denis:

Turns out this line was causing the problem:
mp.setParameter(’checkSystemId’, ’systemRequirementsHTML’);

in this code block:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
           function doLoad() {
                     var mp = new MavenPlayer('videolandingpage');
                     mp.setParameter('checkSystemId',
'systemRequirementsHTML');
                     mp.setParameter('backgroundColor', '#ffffff');
                     mp.setQueryParamsAsVariables(false);
                     mp.write('flashParentHTML');
           }
           function doContextMenu() {
                      return maven.PlayerObjectUtil.doContextMenu();
           }
// --></script>

Developers are working to push the change live shortly.

Dave

So, we should be able to see the Fox News Video page without faking the user agent later today. Do not forget to clear your browser cache or force a page reload if you are checking this page.

Update Wed Apr 30 16:07:45 UTC 2008:

I am happy to report that as of this morning Fox News Video and Fox Business Video in Linux are working natively. No User Agent Switcher needed. Thank you Mr. Dave Denis and the Fox News development team. Anyone who does web development can appreciate the effort you took to get this working. To those of you following these articles who wrote to ask for this please take a moment to write a thank you note to the Fox News development team. Write yourcomments@foxnews.com and put Attention: Web Development Team - Thank You in the subject line.

(See this follow up article: Guess What? Fox News is Responsive to the Linux Community.)

This will be a short web log post. Try to view the Video page at foxnews.com from a Linux system using any browser and see what happens. http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html

I see these results. The first is Firefox on Linux the second is Opera on Linux.

Up until recently there was no problem viewing video content on Fox News Video web pages. Apparently some Microsoft and Apple Only types have taken over the video content pages for Fox News. I for one would appreciate it if these large organizations would stop trying to pretend that Microsoft and Apple are the only games in town.

Please alert each person you know in the Linux community to take action and send foxnews.com polite messages or make polite phone calls about this. We are likely to get more results being polite than trying to rip off their heads and puke down their bleeding necks. Here is how to contact them:

• Phone calls in the USA: 1-888-369-4762
• E-mail from anywhere: foxnewsonline@foxnews.com

I have already sent my e-mail:

To: foxnewsonline@foxnews.com
Date: 04/25/08 11:52 pm

Dear Fox News Online,

I am seriously disappointed that you choose to deny me access to your video
content because I only use Linux operating systems. Please change to a video
format that will work across all operating systems and most web browsers.
There are proper ways to do this and you were doing it well in the past. But
you choose to do otherwise. I appreciate your working to make it where all in
the Linux community will once again be able to view your video content. Thank
you for fixing it as I am sure you will.

Oh yes, I have a web log article about it. I have included this message there:

http://blog.eracc.com/2008/04/25/does-foxnewscom-hate-linux-users/

Gene
--
Micro$oft - Convicted Monopolist, restrictive licenses, limited choice
GNU/Linux - No monopoly possible, Open Source, FREE, lots of choices
Use GNU/Linux - http://www.distrowatch.com/ (I like Mandriva)
http://www.eracc.com/ - Linux preloaded computers

Edit Sat Apr 26 06:21:12 UTC 2008: It appears I am not the only one to notice this and I am a bit late to the game: Fox News Videos at MozillaZine Forums