I started writing about the computers under my care really for just one reason: so that I would have some record of what I’d done, so I could stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that, exactly, but at least it’s been entertaining watching me try.

Since many of you are new around here, and this is an admittedly quirky personal site, let me point you towards some other computer logs that may interest you:

Commissioned

The following computers are currently in service.

• Eöl, my new Black MacBook running OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard).

  Eöl replaced Vinyamar.

• Tsiolkovsky, my wife’s Toughbook W2, continues to crunch numbers and hang in there, despite losing the “B” key to a toddler-related accident a few weeks ago. The lower left hand side keyboard is also starting to have some problems, but there are no new issues to report with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

  Tsiolkovsky is slated for replacement in the next few weeks.

• Hithlum, my 17” PowerBook G4, is as lovely and elegant as ever, even if her PPC chip is getting a little long in the tooth. She still does great work, however, and is running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger).
• An unnamed Thinkpad T43, my work computer, runs Windows XP and is completely uninteresting to me as a computer. My company gave it to me to work with, I work with it. End of story.
• Tigana, a Sony Vaio 505-TR running Red Hat 7.2, has a busted power supply and no battery power. I will need to wipe the hard drive before I can consider her decommissioned.

Speaking of which…

Decommissioned

These computers have left the building:

• Vinyamar, my Macbook Air, went through two revisions before being sent back to Apple.
• Al-Rassan / Ithilien, a Thinkpad 1400 running SuSE 9.x.
• Arbonne (I) / Sarantium / Atlantis / Lórien, a beige 750MHz Pentium III tower I picked up from CompUSA which ran Windows 98, Windows 2000, and more Linux distributions than I really care to remember.
• Arbonne (II) and Gorhaut, two identical Linux towers who ran Red Hat 9.

You will no doubt notice certain themes in the names.

Each computer has its own category, some with more information than others. Hopefully you’ll find something you like.

Thanks again for visiting!

Cheers,
Brett

I may decide to resurrect Al-Rassan (currently loaded with FC 2) so that at least I can keep up to speed with Fedora. Not sure that I want to, but there you have it.

What the hell am I thinking?

IBM Recalls 553,000 Laptop Power Units Worldwide

Al-Rassan now doesn't want to boot and her battery is competely dead. I assume that the screen still doesn't work, either. I haven't done anything since the last time other than turn her off and charge her battery. Then the battery drained over the course of a few hours.

Argh!

Looks like I'll have to install Linux on my work laptop after all. Now I just need a name...

I brought home another Thinkpad power supply from work to test on Al-Rassan, and sure enough it worked fine. Only problem was that when I turned her on, the screen didn't light up. I thought it was completely busted, but then I peered closely and saw that the images were still on the screen, just without any light.

In case you're wondering, this makes it very hard to see what the hell you're doing.

The worst part about it is that the screen worked before I opened up the case. It survived the multiple falls without a problem, but not my meddling. I did this, and that makes me kick myself. Hard. Often.

Things were going so swimmingly, too - things were really starting to come together on that machine. Then I dropped it and caused the AC adapter to stop working. Everything else was fine, but the battery stopped charging and I couldn't get it to come back on. I cracked open the case to make sure there wasn't anything loose, but didn't find any problems. So finally I sealed her up and figured I'd wait to see what I could do.

This morning, on a whim, I took the power pack from my work Thinkpad and tried it. Voila! Worked fine - thankfully. So now I've just got to find a replacement on eBay to get Al-Rassan back up and running.

In the meantime, I tried once again to upgrade Tigana to a more recent distro than Redhat 7.2: this time, Fedora 2. No such luck. Still can't get the CD-ROM to be recognized (even though I boot off of it.) What the heck is up with that? My next trick will be to try to install 7.3 on it and see if that gives me network/USB support.

In the meanwhile, I'm getting reacquainted with Arbonne. She's still a good machine, after all these years.

Another issue is that I couldn't find the desktop switcher tool to set KDE as the default session. Fixed that by going to /etc/sysconfig/desktop

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

That seems to have done the trick.

I've been installing some of the multimedia packages described in Greg Gulick's Fedora Core 2 Tips and Tricks. Setting up multiple repositories for up2date was easier than I thought, and reenabling mp3 support was quite easy.

APM support appears to be disabled in the 2.6 kernel. What's up with that?

1. Added to arbonne:/etc/rc.d/rc.local to get the netgear MA311 PCI card to work on bootup:

/sbin/modprobe orinoco_pci

2. Got BitTorrent working to download Fedora Core 2 following these instructions:

• Download bittorrent:
  local rpms for rhl 7.3, 8.0, 9 and fc1
  from the homesite
• install bittorrent
• Open up ports 6881-6999/tcp so other clients can contact you for bits
  First forward those ports on the router
  Then open up the ports in your /etc/sysconfig/iptables file
• To download run: btdownloadcurses.py --max_upload_rate 350 --url $torrent-URL-here
• Once your download is complete please leave your downloader running so it can help upload to the other clients. This is what makes bittorrent efficient.

3. Having completed the download in record time (no comparison to HTTP or FTP, they both stalled out last night - BitTorrent took less than three hours) and having left the upload running all day, I shall now attempt to upgrade al-rassan to Fedora Core 2.

Next up: installing SELinux on Al-Rassan.

Huzzah!

Tigana / Lower Corte's battery has been going more and more quickly. I originally wrote that there wasn't much life left in it, but then Merrystar looked over and corrected me - she said she'd been working for an hour and a half and running the usb optical mouse and wireless card. So I sit corrected.

However, my laptop's a different story.

Al-Rassan's battery's been all but dead since I got her. In and of itself, that's not a problem; I don't take my laptop outside the house, so I just use the power cord. But now the cord's getting flaky, so I have to balance Al-Rassan and hope that I don't let the orange power light go out.

So.

Why can't things just work and keep working?

So it turns out that Lower Corte's problems weren't due to some worm, but rather a conflict between Norton Personal Firewall and one of the recent Microsoft updates. I only have a hunch that it's Norton Personal Firewall -- I have no proof to support it, nor do I care enough to actually acquire such evidence.

Last night I went ahead and took a look at it again while Merrystar was cleaning up; it took about 30 minutes to boot into Windows from the CD and attempt the repair steps outlined in the aforementioned links. (Actually, this step took about 2 hours, because of some wonkiness with Tigana's boot process that wouldn't let it go from CD boot to CD boot, but instead required a boot into Linux). That didn't work, so I tried it again (old stupid Windows habits die hard). Then, I deleted six *.dll files to force Windows 2000 to replace them all, which it did, and I could finally boot into Windows after another hour or so. An installer kept popping up asking for Norton's Firewall disk, so I tried uninstalling it; unfortunately, something happened with the Windows Installer software and the program wouldn't uninstall.

So, had I been really smart, I would have just reinstalled the firewall without even attempting to update anything. But no, I'm an idiot, so I decided to run Windows Update to fix the problem with Windows Installer.

Idiot.

So, there I am last night having spent 4 hours to get right back to square one. (Although, at least I knew how to get off square one: "Turn on the light.") So I put away Tigana/Lower Corte and spent the rest of the evening with Merrystar.

Right. Today, Merrystar leaves on a trip, so I figure I'll put on Stargate SG-1 Season 4 and see if I can get this piece of *($)#)*#$!!! working. (Note: I do not blame the machine; I blame the operating system. This is probably unfair. I don't care. I want the time I spent back.) I go through the hoops and finally get Lower Corte booting again. I install NPF right on top of the old one and the error messages stop. I check connectivity and firewall and shut it down.

Now, a smart man would have cut his losses here and gone and painted a fence or clean the gutters or something.

I am not a smart man. (See idiot note, above.)

Instead, I thought I'd upgrade Tigana to redhat 9 (thus finally getting the USB optical mouse and wireless card to work) and Arbonne and Al-Rassan to Fedora Core 1. Let's take them one at a time.

Al-Rassan was actually the easiest of the three, as she was already running Red Hat 9 and I could (and did) easily back up my home directory to Arbonne. The biggest problem was how long it took - I started it around noon and it finished around 4. The next biggest problem was that the background changed from the bluecurve to the fedora blue flower picture.

If that's the second biggest problem in an upgrade, I'll count it going pretty darn well. (Of course, I'm trying to run up2date and it's taking hours to complete - that could be server problems, or something more serious.)

Once I'd established that Al-Rassan was okay, I took on Arbonne. Last weekend I yanked Windows off Arbonne, and the only real data on her was the home directory from Al-Rassan, so if everything went really wrong I could just reformat the drive and start over. The Fedora update also took some time, and everything seemed to be going well until I tried rebooting; at that point the boot seemed to hang on searching for new hardware. Arbonne is still trying to boot - I'll give her some more time, but it's been 42 minutes.

Tigana - ach, Tigana remains stubborn. She doesn't have a built-in CD-ROM, so she needs a driver to boot from CD - a driver that's mysteriously absent on the RH9 disk, but present on the RH7.2 one. Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

So. I think I'll leave that one for another day.

Current count: Computers 3, Me 1. Ah, the drama of system administration.

Time to call it quits.]]> 2174@http://brettpeters.org/log/ Brett Peters Computer Log 2004-02-14T23:34:40-05:00 http://brettpeters.org/log/2003/09/30/finally-got-web.html#1928 Finally got WebCollage working - from Bug 76244 - XScreensaver WebCollage doesn't work, I went:

[brett@al-rassan ~]$ su
Password:
[root@al-rassan brett]# mv /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/webcollage-helper /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/X-webcollage-helper

And there you have it.

I have to admit, the vidwhacked version really does look cool.

Spent tonight setting up cable modem and wireless network. I've been grouchy about the whole project for some time - I didn't want to spend additional money on something that only I'd really use - so finally I cut my cell phone bills by $20/month and will cancel the dialup account (also $20/month), which gave my conscience the permission it somehow needed to get a high-speed wireless connection.

I have strange hangups. I admit it.

My biggest concern was with the cable company - I don't trust them, even though they've been less apt to price gouge than, say, my cell phone company. I really hate dealing with my cell phone company, and can't wait until LWNP (local wireless number portability) goes into effect this November. But, overall, it was much more pleasant dealing with the cable company.

Did I just say that? Someone please hit me.

Right. So. I drag my tower (Sarantium) downstairs to where the live cable outlet is early this evening and hook up the cable modem. I do this because I'm not letting the cable company's software anywhere near Merrystar's laptop, Tigana. You will in fact have to shoot me before I let them mess with her internet settings litke that. But, and this is wonderful, there's software that you need to run once to register, and it only runs on Windows - actuallly, I could have said I have a game box or something like that, or pressed the point about a non-Windows solution, but I didn't - well, I thought it only ran on Windows, so I drag the tower and monitor downstairs to watch Merrystar play Atari whilst I get the cable modem working. Soon it is, and then it's the wireless router's turn.

Nothing worked. Absolutely nothing! Argh! Then I had a flash, put the install CD back in the drive, and reinstalled the router software. I had to reset the router twice and get rid of all the stupid changes I'd made before, but eventually everything was conifgured. I got Sarantium's firewall set up to handle the new configuration, and then - as I'd just reinstalled the operating system(s) last night in a sucessful attempt to get the computer to recognize itself on the network - proceeded to do the Windows Update dance. So much faster now! I can almost remember what it was like to just have a list of software sites and download whatever the latest versions were. (Almost.)

While Sarantium was patching, I got Al-Rassan out and ran up2date on her. Then I browsed the web until Sarantium finished and I rebooted her into Linux, where she got the up2date treatment, too. I then disconnected everybody from the network and dragged them upstairs again, reassuring a somewhat concerned Merrystar that Sarantium wasn't going to live permanently in our kitchen.

So.

I'm in bed, a floor away from the router, typing away. I'm not so grouchy anymore about high-speed access.

Just don't ask me about my cell service provider.

But all these things aren't quite it - which is why I'm enchanted.

I'll think about this some more today and see if I can explain it any better.