Posts
Enabling fingerprint reader in Linux Mint 9 / Ubuntu 10.04
It looks like the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu is going to keep me busy solving problems for a while. Today’s second problem has to do with the fingerprint reader in the ThinkPad X41. There’s a good source of information here , but there wasn’t a definitive set of instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 that actually worked. Most of the uproar about the fingerprint reader in Ubuntu 10.04 has to do with a bug where the Enter key has to be pressed after swiping your finger. I couldn’t even get to that point; the trouble was getting logins to prompt for a finger swipe.
June 8, 2010
Fixing Logitech (pwc) webcam hang in Linux Mint 9 / Ubuntu 10.04
I have an old Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks that uses the pwc (Philips Web Cam) driver on Linux. This camera has always worked flawlessly on Linux Mint 6 (Ubuntu 8.10). But on Linux Mint 9, the camera only worked the first time it was plugged in; on subsequent plug-ins, no programs could read images from the camera. The fswebcam utility reported a timeout trying to read the frame buffer; other programs like Cheese or Skype simply displayed blank images.
June 7, 2010
Sharing a VPN connection on Linux
My employer’s VPN system doesn’t allow more than one login at a time. But there are occasions when I’d like to be able to use the VPN from two different laptops simultaneously. The solution, most of which I found here , is to use iptables on the machine running the VPN to forward packets from the machine not running the VPN.
June 2, 2010
Booting Linux Mint 9 from a USB key
I just spent many hours getting a 4GB USB key into a state where it can be used to boot Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04). Here are some notes on the problems I had to solve. In the past, I’ve used unetbootin to create bootable USB keys. When I did this with the Linux Mint 9 ISO image, the resulting USB key booted up just fine, but the installer application hung when trying to run the partition editor. I narrowed this down to an assertion failure in libparted. Apparently it doesn’t like the geometry on some USB keys. This is a known bug .
May 30, 2010
Fixing HP printer plugin problem in Linux Mint 9 / Ubuntu 10.04
I upgraded one of my ThinkPads from Linux Mint 7 to Linux Mint 9 today, and discovered that I was no longer able to use my HP P1006 printer. The HP printer tool (hp-toolbox) detected the printer correctly, downloaded the appropriate plugin, but then couldn’t install the plugin. Running the tool from the command line didn’t give any extra information. This is a known bug in Ubuntu 10.04.
May 29, 2010
Moving from Keyring on Palm to KeePass on Linux and Android
Keyring is a fine little open source application for Palm OS that stores and generates passwords. There is no Android version of this program, so I decided to move to KeePass 1.x, both the Linux version and the Android version .
March 26, 2010
The impoverished state of Android Apps
One of the reasons why I decided to buy an Android device was to investigate the possibility of writing applications for that platform. After spending a couple of days with Android, it’s pretty clear there are huge voids in the app space waiting to be filled. The transition from Palm OS is going to be painful because the following apps have no equivalent on Android: Adarian Money . This is lovely little financial app that I’ve used for several years to track every penny I spend. The Android checkbook apps do not come close; the best-selling one doesn’t even track expense accounts, let alone support double-entry accounting. Clearly, a lightweight version of GnuCash is needed here. DateBk . I’ve used this program for nearly ten years in its various incarnations, from DateBk+ on a Handspring Visor, to DateBk5 on a Centro. It’s the king of calendar apps and nothing on the iPhone or Android comes close. The Google Calendar app does sync with the web version, but is otherwise very minimal. It also has a serious bug: its ringtone reminders do not work when the screen is turned off, so you’ll miss appointments and meetings constantly. Pimlico has hinted that they might be porting DateBk to other platforms, but who knows when or if Android will ever be supported. ListPro . This is a checklist app on steroids, almost a mini-database. I use this for packing lists, lists of items lent out to other people, notes on things to look up when I get home, to-do lists, etc. The Android apps are the usual mix: either seriously broken or only supporting a tiny subset of ListPro’s features. If I didn’t have a full-time job, I’d start working on filling these gaps myself. I may do that anyway as a rainy-day weekend hobby. The prospect of writing in Java is not pleasant, so I may start working on the algorithms and data structures (or Models and Controllers, in newspeak) in Ruby, and hope that Duby is usable on Android by the time I need to start thinking about the UI (or View in newspeak).
March 25, 2010
Moving contacts from Palm OS to Android
After nearly ten years of using Palm OS PDAs and cell phones, I’m moving to an Android phone. I didn’t want to enter over 100 contacts manually on the new device. Some Google searching turned up ways to migrate the contact list, but most of them involved running Palm Desktop software on Windows. It turns out there is a non-obvious, Windows-free method, described here . In case that forum posting goes away, here’s a repeat of this method (slightly modified):
March 23, 2010
Solving pilot-xfer sync problem on Ubuntu Jaunty / Linux Mint 7
I use pilot-xfer (part of the pilot-link package) to back up the data on my Palm Centro, and occasionally to install files on the Centro. It’s always worked fine on Linux Mint 6. The only thing I needed to do before running pilot-xfer was load the visor kernel module using this command: sudo modprobe visor But when I switched to a different laptop running Linux Mint 7, pilot-xfer never seemed to be able to connect with the Centro for the second and subsequent attempts after a reboot. Some poking around revealed that the problem is apparently due to the visor module setting up an incorrect symbolic link for the device /dev/pilot. Normally, after you connect the Centro to the computer with a USB cable and press the hotsync button, /dev/pilot should become a symlink that points to ttyUSB1. But I was seeing it point to ttyUSB0, which is the wrong device file for the Centro.
March 19, 2010
Replacing postfix and procmail with maildrop
In the previous post, I wrote about how I solved a problem with fetchmail connecting to the postfix mail server. I also have postfix configured to transfer mail to procmail, which does some filtering for me using some rules I’ve written in ~/.procmailrc. But postfix+procmail is really overkill for a laptop or any other machine that is not going to be used as a mail server. Both of these programs can be replaced by maildrop, which delivers mail to your local mailbox or maildir, and which has a much more readable filtering language than procmail.
March 16, 2010