I’m building a new web site for KEI, using Drupal 6. We created a dummy site on a subdirectory of another domain, and then tested the site to see would happen when we assigned a new domain to the new site built on drupal. Well, the new domain broke everything. The fix involved a single file: sites/default/setting.php.

Find the text starting with: $base_url = ‘http://

and edit it so the new domain is used.

At home I have a Verizon DLS service, using a Westel DLS modem. At work once had Internet service from Comcast, and a Linksys WRT55AG wireless router. After we switched to Verizon, the Linksys WRT55AG router stopped working. I tried reseting the WRT55AG to the default setting and upgrading the firmware, but that did not help. What did fix the problem was to go into the router setup (going to 192.168.1.1), and from Setup/Basic Setup/Network Setup, change the Router IP to 192.168.2.1.

I use Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop, and on several other computers. Half our office now uses Ubuntu, the other half uses MaxOSX as the primary operating system. For many things, I think Ubuntu is now as good or better than anything available in Windows or MacOSX. In other areas, Linux is good enough. One area where Linux seemed to lag is for video. Netflix, rapidly becoming a must have service, does not stream to Linux at all. This is a significant issue for Linux users living in the US, where Netflix streaming is available.

When I first tried Hulu, it worked on Linux, but not as well as it does on Windows. But there was a reason, and I could fix it.

My main computer is a Dell m1530. I have an Intel Core2 Duo T8100 processor, and 4 gigs of Ram. The video card is very fast, and the screen has a high resolution. My monitor is a 15 inch monitor with 1920×1200 (16×10) resolution. My video card is the nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600M GT (rev a1) with 256 megs of video memory.

In Windows, I can stream video from Netflix and Hulu in full screen mode, with surprisingly good resolution. In Ubuntu, I can’t use Netfix at all, and Hulu did not stream the video in full screen mode. (This was true even with Moonlight-Mono installed as a plug-in for Firefox).

The problem, it seems, was that Ubuntu did not originally install or use the non-free drivers for my NVIDIA video card. I found this out when I tried to add some screen effects. After telling Ubuntu to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, the video improved considerably for the Dell m1530.

Meanwhile, in order to view Netflix, which does not work at all with Linux, yet, I have now installed Windows XP on my Dell m1530, which originally came only with Ubuntu. This turned out to be more of a challenge than one would have thought, as it was hard to find the Windows XP drivers for the Dell m1530. Dell told me my computer was shipped with Vista, which was not true. I could only find the Vista drivers on the Dell web page, and while some worked also on XP, many did not. I was able to solve some problems by taking some notes about my hardware, including by using, from a Linux boot, the Unix command lspci, which lists many of the devices attached to the computer. I used this information to hunt for XP drivers on the Dell web page, or elsewhere. The whole exercise took quite a bit of time, but now I can boot into Windows have use Netflix or Hulu in full screen.

……….
Updates, for my m1530 with 1920×1200 screen.

Using the NVIDIA drivers in Ubuntu:

NBC.com: now works fine.
ABC: Some videos work fine. Others don’t seem to work at all.
Comedy Central: Works fine.
Youtube: Works fine.

The change in drivers made a big difference.

I have an older Dell 600m that came with 512k memory, Windows XP Home edition, no power supply and a few broken keys. From ebay I increased the memory to 1.2 gig ($34), replaced the keyboard ($17), and bought a new power supply ($11), for a parts cost of $62.

For a friend, I had tried to clean up the Windows installation twice, and tired of tying to make XP Home work right, I decided to install Ubuntu 9.04. It was a very easy install, except that the onboard broadcom wireless card was not recognised by the operating system.

I used this command from a shell to learn some details about the wireless card:

lspci -vnn | grep 14e4

Which gave this result:

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX [14e4:170c] (rev 02)
02:03.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4318] (rev 02)

After looking at some forums, I decided to install a program from the Synaptic Pakcage manger called b43-fwcutter, which is described as:

a utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmware, fwcutter is a tool which can extract firmware from various source files. It’s written for BCM43xx driver files.

For whatever reason, and I certainly did not understand it, this completely fixed the problem. I rebooted the computer and the wireless worked just fine.

Our office has a 7 year old Toshiba Satellite 1405-S151. Windows XP is unbearably slow on the laptop, so I wanted to see if it was usable with a current version (9.04) of Ubuntu. The installation went pretty smoothly, and the computer worked much better than with Windows, except for the screen, which was stuck on 800×600 resolution.

After spending a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to fix things, I was able to come up with this solution, borrowing from several forum posts.

The solution requires an edit of the xorg.conf file, which is found here: /etc/x11/xorg.conf

But first, it is alway a good idea to back up the existing file. My backup was xorg.conf.backup

Before the change, the relevant text in xorg.conf read like this:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
EndSection

Based upon some things that worked on different computers using the same video card, I finally tried the following, which seems to work.

Section “Device”
Identifier “Trident Microsystems CyberBlade XPAi1″
Driver “trident”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Generic Monitor”
Option “DPMS”
HorizSync 28-51
VertRefresh 43-60
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Generic Monitor”
Device “Trident Microsystems CyberBlade XPAi1″
SubSection “Display”
Depth 8
Modes “1024×768″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 16
Modes “1024×768″
EndSubSection
EndSection

I now have the laptop using the whole screen in a 1024×768 mode. It is much faster and more reliable than anything I could make work in Windows.

This week I purchased an Acer laptop from Micro Center for $299. The model was: Aspire 5516-5474. It came with an ATI video chip set (ATI Radeon Xpress 1200), a 160 gig hard drive, an 8x DVD, an SD reader, 2 gigs of RAM, a 15.6 inch LDC Monitor (16:9 1366×768), and an AMD Athion 64 processor (the TF-20). The installed software was Microsoft Vista, home basic. I installed Ubuntu 9.04* to dual boot. It worked without any problems.

The computer case is made out of plastic, and feels light for its size. At $299, it seems like a pretty good value. Amazon sells the Aspire 5516-5063, which looks like the same thing except with a slightly larger hard drive, for $448, so it pays to shop around.

One issue that I did not care much about concerns the Windows Media player. I had trouble getting the sound to work. But I had no problem using the sound for Netflix and other streamed video in Vista. In Linux, the sound worked fine, but Netflix does not work for Linux, yet.

Ubuntu 9.04 recognized everything, including the screen, the wireless, the DVD player, the SD card reader, etc.

* I have only tried the 32 bit version.

Although it is described as an unstable release, I have found Google’s test version of the Linux version of the Chrome Brower to work pretty well, subject to limitations described below. I use Ubuntu 9.04, and installed the .deb files from Google’s web page for the early access release.

It took me a while to find the bookmarks (toggle using control-b), but I like the cleaner look with more screen that this approach provides. One issue for me will be that Zotero does not install on anything but Firefox.

On the down side, flash does not yet work, the plug-ins are not yet implemented, and a lot of forms on web pages don’t seem to work yet. So, it’s not finished.

Some time ago, I bought a Dell m1530, with Linux Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. I have since moved on and installed a few upgrades of Ubuntu. I am currently using Ubuntu 9.04, which I like very much. But I wanted to make the machine a dual boot with Windows, so I could also do a few things that Linux can’t do yet.

Yesterday and today I spent a huge amount of time trying to understand why Windows would not see my hard drive. I assumed this was a result of the Linux boot loader changing the Master Book Record (MBR), and I spend hours trying different ways of addressing this. But that was not in fact the issue. Instead, the problem was due to the hardware settings, and specially the fact that my SATA hard drive was set to use something called AHCI mode. As described in this blog post on the topic, older versions of Windows don’t have drivers that support AHCI.

I was finally able to fix this problem by entering the Dell Bio setup, and changing my SATA setting to an ATA emulation. After making this change, Windows XP had no problem finding my Sata drive.

I recently created a facebook quiz: How well do you know James Packard Love? When a co-worker filled out the survey, I looked to check her answers. At the bottom of the questionnaire answers was the following advertisement.

The message, Hey James, Hot singles are waiting for you!! had a picture a single woman. She’s single alright, since my father passed away.

Dear Facebook.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I really don’t think of her this way.

I have recently installed Joomla! 1.5 on server hosted by inmotionhosting.com. I use an 1.0 version of Joomla for another web page on a different server, and I would like to migrate to the new version of Joomla, and possibly change my web hosting company. I created the Joomla installation in a new empty directory (joomla.workingagenda.com), to play around. I did not install the sample data, but created a few dummy entries to experiment. My first problem was that I had trouble getting the search engine friendly URLs to work.

From the Joomla Global Configuration menu, I found the SEO Settings, on the right hand column. In the default installation, they are turned off.

The default SEO Settings

I tried simply changing the “Search Engine Friendly URL’s” setting from no to yes.

With search engine friendly URL's option turned to yes.

Unfortunately, this did not work with inmotionhosting.com. I received an error message, that the file was not found:

The 404 - Component not found error message

Next, I tried turning on the Use Apache mod_rewrite option.

Turning on the SEO setting for Apache mod_rewrite

This also did not work. At this point, after trying a few other things that did not work, I searched on forums, and found that I needed to look in the directory where Joomla was installed, and find the file htaccess.txt. I made a copy of this file, and renamed it .htaccess. At this point the SEF URL’s worked find, but they are a bit longer than I like.