NixNote

I'm a big fan of Evernote and use it pretty consistently to take notes so that I can remember what it is that I'm doing.

One thing that is lacking is a native Linux client. However, there is a solution: NixNote (nee Nevernote). The 64-bit RPM installed easily on openSUSE 11.4 and seems to work reasonably well in some limited testing. I'll give it a more through test run over the next few days and see how it goes.

Installing Google Talk Plugin on openSUSE 11.4

I ran into a strange problem today when trying to install the Google Talk Plugin. I opened up Gmail and tried to call a phone from the page. This showed the usual call dialog and prompted me to download and install the plug-in.

From the plug-in page, I selected the RPM for openSUSE 64-bit and let it run. After entering my password, it said the installation was completed successfully. Selecting call a phone from the Gmail page prompted me to download the plugin again. Hmmm...

I quit Firefox and restarted it with the same result. I restarted the system and it was not in about:plugins. I got it to finally work by going to YaST Software Management and removing the plugin. I then stopped Firefox and reinstalled it from YaST. That did the trick and it is working now.

Android development with Eclipse

After installing Eclipse 3.7 Indigo, I wanted to do some Android development. The instructions on how to do so on the Android developer site are quite good and if you just follow along, you should be all set. 

During installation of the ADT Plugin, I ran into an error about requiring org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui. To fix, I extrapolated from some information I found in a FAQ about the Google Plugin:

Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo)

1. Select Help > Install New Software...
2. Click the link for Available Software Sites.
3. Ensure there is an update site named Indigo. If this is not present, click Add... and enter http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo for the Location.
4. Now go through the installation steps; Eclipse should download and install the plugin's dependencies.

Be sure to change the .bashrc file to make sure that that the platform-tools are in your PATH and then you are all set to develop for Android on openSUSE 11.4.

 

 

VirtualBox bridged network to wlan0

I needed to connect a Windows XP VM in VirtualBox 4.0.12 to a PPTP network. To do that, you have to use bridged networking (NAT won't work). The problem was, when I switched to bridged mode while on my wireless network, the network in the VM stopped working. The virtual network card said it was connected, but it couldn't get a DHCP address or anything.

Since it worked fine when I was connected to eth0 on the host, I figured it had to have something to do with the configuration of the wlan0 connection.After a bunch of searching, I found some references to enabling promiscuous mode on the wireless card (sounds naughty, but actually has  to do with accepting packets not specifically addressed to it).

The fix seemed simple. At the command prompt:

sudo /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 promisc

To make sure it took, I checked the log with:

tail /var/log/messages 

and found

device wlan0 entered promiscuous mode

After that, I was able to use bridged mode in the VM for a minute or two but it switched back off. Looking into it a bit further, I noticed the following in the logs:

vboxnet0: no IPv6 routers present

I remembered something from the VirtualBox documentation about IPv6 not being supported on Linux (yes, I read the docs). So, I went into YaST and disabled IPv6 in
Network Settings. Although YaST claimed the system needed a restart, everything seemed OK after the network restarted. In any event, I can now connect to the PPTP network from my VM.

s3fs

I'm very intrigued by the possibility of doing backups on Amazon S3 since they have made it free to upload data. You still have to pay for storage and download, but that should be minimal in my backup situation.

I searched for a little bit to find a suitable library to mount S3 buckets to the filesystem and came across s3fs.  To see how it works, I downloaded s3fs, compiled and configure it on my openSuSE 11.4 system.

After installing the base development pattern in YaST, I only needed to install a couple of development libraries (fuse >= 2.8.4 libcurl >= 7.0 libxml-2.0 >= 2.6) to get the configure script to run successfully. After getting the proper libraries in place,
make ran without a problem and the s3fs binary file was compiled in the src directory. Installing it to /usr/local/bin using make install as root also worked fine. 

Next, I created a bucket in AWS Management Console called rericsson-s3fs. To have something to look for in there, I uploaded a picture from the AWS console.

Following the instructions in the s3fs wiki, I created a  .passwd-s3fs file with my access credentials (be sure to have no additional whitespace in this file). After that, I ran chmod 600 ~/.passwd-s3fs to restrict permissions to the file.

To test it out, I did the following from the command line and could see the file I had uploaded:

rob@linux-oqvn:~> mkdir s3
rob@linux-oqvn:~> /usr/local/bin/s3fs rericsson-s3fs /home/rob/s3
rob@linux-oqvn:~> cd s3
rob@linux-oqvn:~/s3> ls
DSC00078.jpg

I tried a couple of more copies into the mounted directory and everything worked very well. All of this took about 30 minutes and is a promising start for backing up my system to S3.

Installing Eclipse 3.7 on openSuSE 11.4

Installing Eclipse has been covered fairly well in a number of other places, but I wanted to outline all of the steps completely. First, install the Sun JRE YaST Software Management. It is part of the non-OSS repository, so you might have to add that into your repository configuration first.

After you have installed the JRE, set the version of Java to use by running:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-alternatives --config java

and selecting the number corresponding to the Sun JRE. If you run java -version, you should see the version you just set.

Now, download Eclipse from www.eclipse.org using the closest mirror. From what I've read, this seems to be better than trying to get it from the openSUSE repositories. When the file is downloaded, extract it to the /usr/local/bin directory (or anywhere else  seems convenient for you). The easiest way to do that is run Dolphin as root by hitting Alt+F2 and then typing kdesu dolphin in the command prompt. After extracting, test by running the program from the command line: /usr/local/bin/eclipse/eclipse.

You should see Eclipse launch. To make things easier, create a menu entry by right-clicking on the Kickoff Application Launcher in the bottom left corner of the screen (the lizard) and select Edit Applications... to show the KDE Menu Editor.

Create a new entry under development for Eclipse and select Save. You should now be able to launch Eclipse from the menu.

YaST Patterns

I'm continuing to learn about OpenSuSE and discovered a feature in YaST that is really handy: YaST patterns.

If you want to install a particular set of software that makes up a common use case, you can open Software Management from the YaST Control Center and select Pattern from the View filter. This presents a screen listing all of the different patterns that have been defined. You just select one, click the Accept button and that use case and all of the dependencies are installed at once. EZ. 

Dr. Suse

I've recently installed openSUSE 11.4 on my Lenovo ideapad z560. I've actually done it twice in the past month because my hard drive died and needed to be replaced (more on that later).

First impressions on install are great. The openSUSE installer has a good reputation and lives up to it. The options are straightforward and it goes in very smoothly from the downloaded DVD. All of hardware in my z560 is supported with out a hitch and overall the installation is a breeze. Answer a few questions, and you are good to go. The wireless network just works and I haven't found anything that doesn't function as expected.

The KDE Plasma desktop looks and works great. I'd historically been a Ubuntu/GNOME user, but I decided to go with KDE to give it a try and I haven't been disappointed. I'm still getting used to some of the differences, but so far it's been very easy to adapt to.

The included software is solid. LibreOffice 3.3.1 is nice and works well, Okular is an excellent PDF viewer and the rest of the basic programs just work. I haven't installed very many applications to date except VirtualBox 4. The YaST software manager is nice and works well (you do need to add some repositories in that are not added by default to get user contributed software in the install list). One strange thing is that the installer includes a beta version of Firefox 4 which I immediately upgraded to Firefox 5. I guess they didn't have the released version of 4 ready yet when openSUSE 11.4 shipped.

I was able to connect to my ancient HP 1012 printer easily. The only thing that was at all complex was that I had to update the firewall to allow SMB connections which was easy to figure out but not clear from the printer setup wizard.  Interestingly after I ran the upgrade to the latest patches in YaST, I could no longer browse my SMB systems on the network. Not sure what that is all about right now. 

An interesting little problem cropped up with the Flash Player in Firefox. Basically, when rolling over an interactive section of a Flash interface weird blank boxes would appear over the interface and it was pretty unusable. I was pleasantly impressed with the quality of support in the openSUSE forums and was able to find a fix very quickly. 


Overall, I'm pretty happy with it so far. It is taking a bit of time to get used to the differences from Ubuntu 10.04, but I think openSUSE is going to be a keeper.

VNC

I needed a way to get to the desktop of my Ubuntu 10.04 system from my openSuse 11.4 laptop via VNC. To get a jumpstart on this, I searched the web and found a nice outline of what to do at http://theseekersquill.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/vnc-server-ubuntu-windows/.

I already had vnc4server installed, so I started with step 3 which is to run vncpasswd to establish a password for the VNC connect. The first time I did this, I ran it as sudo and it didn't work so I had to go and delete the generated password file and do it again as my user account.

Next, I edited ~/.vnc/xstartup in vim. By default, 10.04 has the following lines commented out:

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
sh /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

So I uncommented them and left the rest of the file alone. That didn't work. Connecting via KRDC gave me a blank blue screen. So, I edited the file so that it contained just the lines above and I tried to connect and got through, but got a gray screen with nothing on it except a cursor with an X. Progress!

Digging into the log, I noticed that there was a permissions problem calling xintitrc. So, I ran
chmod +x /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, killed the server and tried again. This time it worked and all is well in linuxland.