Here's a Strange Thing

My new laptop has been causing me some trouble!

Like most people (I presume), I like the idea that my laptop is portable (I can use it in bed) and I don't want it plugged in all the time, only when the battery needs to be recharged. Over the last few days I've been getting a weird error whenever the gnome power manager tells me that the battery level is critical. If I plug in the charge cable in while the laptop is running, the system shuts down and refuses to restart properly. Rebooting the machine results in an error message telling me that I have a corrupted file system and opening a recovery terminal (rather than booting to the GUI).

Googling the problem didn't meet with much success. It seems that various problems with the Ubuntu gnome power manager have been reported but I couldn't find either a specific or generic solution to my problem and I started to think that my Christmas present was likely to end up at the recycling centre after all! Then it occurred to me that the problems started shortly after I swapped the cheap crappy battery in the machine at the time of acquisition for a genuine DELL product from my other laptop.

Swapping the batteries back seems to have resolved the problem, but I'm not sure why. What I do know is that I'm glad that I didn't pay nearly £80 for a replacement battery a few months ago!

My Word

If you're a Brit using Open Office, you might be forgiven for wondering why your dictionary and thesaurus defaults to English US.

Open Office installs with the US dictionary as the default language, if you want the UK version, you'll have to download and install it for yourself. I didn't find this as intuitive as I would have liked: mostly because Open Office uses ambiguous titles for its extensions making it difficult to locate them online. However, I recently did some digging and I have managed to find the correct download and now I have a working (and workable) UK dictionary and thesaurus.

The file that you want is the English spelling and hyphenation dictionaries and thesaurus: don't bother searching, it's a nightmare to find! You can download it from here (the file is actually called dict-en.oxt, but, for some obscure reason, the title on the Open Office website is English dictionaries with fixed dash handling and new ligature and phonetic suggestion support).

If you're using Open Office 3:

1. Download the file from the link above and save it to your hard drive
2. Open the Extension Manager (from the Tools Menu) and click Add...
3. Navigate to your download from the dialog box and click Open to install your dictionary

Now you can change your default language to English UK:

1. From the Tools Menu, click Options...
2. Under Language Settings, select Languages and set the Default languages for documents option to English UK in the Western dropdown menu
3. Under Writing Aids, make sure that the Spellchecker, Hyphenator, and New Thesaurus check boxes are all ticked
4. Restart Open Office

Now you should be able to spell check documents in the Queen's English and use the thesaurus by highlighting a word and hitting ctr+F7 on your keyboard.

Thanks Mum

The Definitive Guide to Samba 3 [Paperback]
Roderick W. Smith
ISBN: 978-1590592779

Sometimes a bargain comes along that's just too good to pass up. This book popped up in my Amazon recommendations the other day (probably after I searched for "Using Samba") and I couldn't believe the price!

Amazon has this available from one of its resellers for £5.47 + p&p so I snapped it up! I have no idea whether it's any good, I suppose that time will tell: but my Mother taught me that you can always afford a book and, at this price, I guess she's right. I ordered it after business hours on 14th January and it arrived in the post this morning - excellent.

Thanks Mum!

Bling

I've been enjoying my new laptop: not only is it more convenient to use in bed than my Dimension 8400, but it has also been useful for keeping my newly acquired Ubuntu skills sharp!

Of course, the Ubuntu operating system makes this a fabulous addition to my network and it runs like a champ under Linux. It's a shame then, that the Windows stickers are a constant reminder of the machine's unfortunate legacy - until now, that is!

I've just pimped my ride with some bling to give the laptop a more "open source" feel:



This "powered by Ubuntu" sticker comes from system 76 and can be yours for the cost of a self-addressed (and stamped) envelope! Honestly, it won't cost you a penny (other than the cost of the stamp and the envelope) and it looks so much better than that old Vista sticker. Follow the link for your local office address.


You can, for a small price, buy some case stickers from the Canonical Store.



These do cost £1.75 plus VAT, so it's not as cheap as the system 76 offering and Canonical insist on sending them by registered post, so the cost escalates rapidly! However, you get three sheets and the cost is still under a tenner per order (delivered to me in the UK, anyway)!

If I lived in the USA, I'd also get a sticker to cover the Windows logo on the Windows key but unfortunately, they're not available in the UK. I guess that the legacy will never truly die!

Finally!

As always, my intellect has proved to be inadequate for the needs of my ambition!

After weeks (perhaps months) of failing to get my computers to talk to each other using host names (NetBios) and blaming samba, I've finally managed to resolve the problem.

It turns out that samba was working properly all the time and so too was Ubuntu. More importantly, so was my firewall! I could get samba working on my laptop (an old DELL Inspiron 1501 running Karmic) and access everything on the network except my Ubuntu desktop: the reason that samba worked unhindered on the this device and not the desktop is that I hadn't enabled the firewall on the laptop so there was nothing to block the NetBios broadcasts! I use Ubuntu's Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) on my desktop and enabled it this afternoon, presuming that opening up the necessary ports (137, 138, 139, & 445) would be all that was need to allow host/client communications between nodes.

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw status

However, enabling ufw on the laptop immediately broke samba leading to the inevitable conclusion that it was a firewall issue and not a samba issue that was causing my difficulties.

It turns out that the "kernel has network connection tracking modules. The module for netbios-ns (UDP port 137) is not loaded by default. You must turn it on for Samba to penetrate the ufw firewall". A simple change to the /etc/default/ufw configuration file (on both laptop and desktop), adding the firewall rules, and restarting samba was all that was required to finally deliver server/client services using host names!

Now for some extra reading to really understand how samba works.

Almost But Not Quite!

Sams Teach Yourself Networking in 24 Hours
Fourth Edition by Uyless Black
ISBN: 978-0-7686-8576-3

Aimed at the entry-level networking professional, Sams Teach Yourself Networking is unlikely to satisfy the needs of readers interested in an introduction to managing home networks. Much of the discussion centres on network operating systems, dedicated servers and keeping system users happy: hardly high priority topics for non-professionals who tend to be more interested in getting (and keeping) a disparate collection of hardware devices working in harmony! However, this observation should not be construed as criticism and Black's treatise is an excellent aid to developing expertise beyond the typical hybrid desktop routers supplied by most ISPs.

Black uses the OSI network model to introduce the concept of layered protocols and it is a theme used throughout the book to describe how data moves through networks. Not only is this model an excellent vehicle for explaining the fundamentals of networking, but it is also useful for understanding how PCs prepare data for transmission and interpret data on receipt: suddenly, those cryptic error messages will start to make sense and troubleshooting errant PCs becomes a little easier.

However, despite imparting some excellent guidance this book does have some flaws. For instance, Black squanders a couple of his “hours” discussing the role and responsibilities of a network administrator: whilst this might be interesting per se, its inclusion suggests that learning about networks requires less than twenty-four hours! Similarly, Black spends the last chapter speculating on the future of computer networks. It is almost as if he has run out of technical advice and resorts to conjecture to fill some space (and the requisite number of hours).

Overall, this book provides a useful insight into professional network management and offers an excellent description of layered protocols. However, the shortcomings diminish the desired effect and, given the relatively high cover price, the result is an offering of questionable value that fails to deliver the promise of the title.

Christmas: a time for surprises

Christmas has come and gone and I was treated to a second-hand DELL Inspiron 1501 laptop for the knockdown price of a new Macbook!

My daughter has abandoned Windows for the forbidden fruit and I got her cast-off. Her five-year-old laptop really was on its last legs and, despite a new battery a month or so ago, it seemed certain that the old workhorse was destined for the scrap heap (I mean, recycling centre, of course).

However, once the new Mac was up and running with all the data and files (including the awful iTunes software) transferred from the DELL, I decided to see how Ubuntu would perform on this ageing hardware before consigning it to the junk yard. I opted to run Karmic 9.10 (knowing that the graphics would never cope with a newer version) and eschewed to cut-down netbook version for the desktop software already running on my DELL Dimension. Of course, this meant that I didn't need to worry about downloading and validating a new OS and I used the same disk as my desktop install.

I kept things simple with a clean installation that replaced Windows Vista (Basic) with Ubuntu Karmic. I didn't even bother partitioning the drive: this experiment really was just to satisfy my curiosity and, if things worked out ok, to give me a disposable device that I could test stuff on.

The only hiccup that I encountered with the install was that the wireless network card refused to work. Running

lspci -nn | grep WLAN

in a terminal, gave me the following information about my WLAN card:

05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)


This information told me that I needed the b43 drivers and firmware for my card. This is achieved by installing the fwcutter package (using an ethernet connection!) and extracting the firmware for the card.

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

You can follow the instructions via the Ubuntu Wiki (here) if you need precise instructions on getting a Broadcom NIC working. A reboot was necessary once the correct driver was installed.

Once the wireless card was up and running, the little DELL exceeded all expectations! It's lightning quick to boot (and to shut down) and it seems to enjoy running Ubuntu far more than it ever did Windows: all-in-all, a lovely surprise for Christmas and a great "toy" to play with (and blog about) over the coming weeks and months.

Happy New Year.