Today I visited a friend at her house for a day, bringing my Eee Pc along to show it to her. Once I introduced her (a longtime Windows user) to the games I had on it, Super Tux 2 and Frozen Bubble, she was hooked (really!) and had a great time on my netbook playing Linux games.
And that’s basically what I did this weekend…
~LH

Scale 10x is this weekend @ Los Angeles!
~lh

For that other little something I usually put here — typing in “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl” at the terminal will get you the Star Wars movie (all in keyboard characters!) playing in your terminal.

 Happy New Year!!!

~LH

If you type “about:about” into Firefox’s address bar, you’ll get some info (both technical and non-tech) on Firefox. There are also a few fun pages thrown in there, such as “about:robots” (references galore; check out the button) and surprisingly “about:mozilla”.

While looking for cool easter eggs in Ubuntu (specifically the terminal) I tried out one of the older ones but it appears it no longer works in 11.10. On typing in “aptitude moo” I get “The program ‘aptitude’ can be found in the following packages etc. etc.” instead of the usual easter egg.

Edit: Nevermind… I tried “apt-get moo” instead and it worked this time Although “aptitude -v moo” and “apt-get -v moo” both seem to have disappeared as easter eggs…

(If you are the admin of your computer) And for some sudo with attitude!, open the terminal and put in “sudo visudo”, which edits the /etc/sudoers.tmp file. Type “,insults” directly after the line with “env_reset” and then save the edit, pressing ctrl-x and answering “Yes”. After it saves, close the window and open a new terminal. Type in “sudo (random text)” so that it doesn’t start a task, and when it asks for a password put some random letters or phrase instead of your password. Sudo will respond with less-than-polite retorts, mostly concerning you. (ex. Do you think like you type?) After 3 incorrect passwords, another “sudo (random)” is needed to generate more.

~LH

Have you mooed today?

This movie’s animation is the first to be done with a new “motion-capture” technique that captures a real actor’s movements with tiny dots. These dots are then picked up by the computer, which captures the actor as he/she is moving about. Then a basic skeleton, skin, clothes, hair etc. is added to give the characters a life-like appearance. When I first saw it in 2005, I was very impressed by its animation of the characters, especially with the hair and clothes; I felt like I could almost touch them, they felt very realistic. Now, some people see it differently, either they like it or find it absolutely creepy, but I am one of the people who like its animation.

The songs are good and fit the mood and season very well. (it’s a holiday/winter movie after all) Some music sequences get repetitive, as the main “action” music is played for almost every action-packed scene (the “skiing on the train top” scene music is very identical to the “train on ice” scene music) but other than that the music is pretty good. I like the feeling that a certain track brings (the music played when the boy researches Santa from the magazines in his room), it gives a mood of doubt and mystery to the scene, as in “Is this Santa guy real or a fake?”. It’s also played in a different tone when the boy realizes he has lost his special Christmas gift (nope, no spoilers!) as the train starts back home.

For the plot of the movie, it’s based on Van Allsburg’s book “The Polar Express” but with, I think, some movie additions. (I haven’t read the book ) It’s basically about a boy who, while losing belief in the existence of Santa, chooses to ride the Polar Express, a magical old-fashioned steam train that travels to the North Pole every Christmas Eve. Along the way he makes new friends, gets in and out of adventures, and near the end accepts the spirit of Christmas, which in this movie is Santa Claus.

The hero boy’s adventures are usually started due to his not knowing how to ride on or control trains/train cars, which I guess is understandable because you don’t automatically gain info on trains unless you’ve been around them for some time. But his knowledge improves somewhat, as he discovers that the emergency brake handle previously used to stop the train isn’t found on a lone runaway train car. With a hint from the local helpful hobo, the boy discovers that the last train car instead uses a wheel as the “hardcore” brake.

The movie went pretty smoothly, except I think that the “puppet car” scene was not needed, although it acts as one of the “triggers” that leads the boy to further doubtfulness. I feel like it was just put in for viewers who wanted some “scare factor” in their movies. The credits’ song is nice and continues the atmosphere of the movie after it has ended, I also like the song the two children sing while watching the view at the back of the train.

I give this movie 4.5 out of 5 stars (+1 for a movie I liked, +1.5 for animation, +1 for soundtrack, +1 for overall mood, -.5 for that puppet car)

And, even on my second viewing, my favorite character is still Billy. Besides being a minor character (and getting his own theme music), he got the best gift for Christmas.

That’s all for my little review of The Polar Express, I recommend it as a nice holiday train-y wintery film, keep in mind it is not religious and contains no mention of the biblical Christmas story, for that purpose there are other Christmas films…

~LH

A Google search containing the word “christmas” comes along with a nice decoration of ornaments at the top.

In Google colors, too

~LH

One of my parents suggested that I install the Ubuntu server edition of 11.10 and then get the packages for the gnome desktop interface. I said “Hey why not” because my netbook is about to go through another install, this time to get the username right.

So I installed Ubuntu server on my netbook, which contains some extra steps not done in the desktop version.

1. I plugged in my internet cable (which I’m guessing is needed for server edition to work properly [a server is practically made for the internet])

2. Then I put in the server version disk and started the installation (Purple & orange color theme here too)

3. First is the keyboard layout. Ok, as usual.

(I think “[!]” in the title denotes the level of priority, more !’s inside the brackets means more importance)

4. Next is a message for configuring the network (essential step for the server edition, I gather.) I selected autoconfiguration and let it find my network through the cable, whatever it does to do that.

5.Then comes the hostname for the system (name of the computer).

6.Partition editing – I chose manually, as before… my hard drive has 3 partitions – redefined the journaling & mount point to match originals and formatted the partition with the filesystem on it) Server edition has more technical details for partition editing, and not knowing what they are for I just left them the same, except for checking that the boot flag is on for the / partition (otherwise it won’t even boot itself :O ). Then I set the bootable flag off for the /home partition and on for swap.

7. Then comes the name for the user account and password. I made sure to enter molly this time. Very sure.

8. Next comes another unique step, additional software to install on the server. I chose OpenSSH because I connect with other computers to share files a lot.

9. Installation is finished and I rebooted my Eee.

Instead of the usual login screen, Server edition has a very bare-bones plain terminal-styled login, just “Computername login”. I entered my username and password and was logged in.

Now for the other part, getting a desktop installed on it. This is all commands here, so we need to know exactly what to type in. (I used a book called “Beginning Ubuntu LTS Server Administration” for the commands, it is very helpful, otherwise I wouldn’t know which packages to install!)

First I checked if the netbook had an internet connection, “ifconfig” gave me some ISP numbers, so it has an internet connection to get packages on.

I typed in “sudo apt-get update” which updates the list of packages for installation, and after that completed I followed it with a “sudo apt-get upgrade” to apply all the upgrades Ubuntu might need before installing Gnome. (commands found on page 61 of the aforementioned book.)

After my poky-slow internet connection finally downloaded + installed all those updates, I am able to install some gnome. (@ page 65) The command “sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg xfonts* gnome gdm” installs all the packages needed for a Gnome interface.

After that I rebooted the computer (“sudo reboot now”) and got a graphical interface. yay! The login menu is not the nice fancy one usually tagging along with unity in 11.10, as unity is not installed it instead looks like the old login from previous versions of Ubuntu. I selected Gnome classic (no effects) in the drop-down list and had a usual interface (well, with windows & colors that look like they came from Windows 98…). The panel is the same color as my old install, pink… and /home is associated with molly. (I’m glad that /home is configured properly now)

Hmm, I think that’s about all I have to say about it… now looking into changing the colors on the dialogues.

Have a merry Christmas holiday everyone!

~moi

So, today I decided to add a new user to Ubuntu…. During my original install on my netbook, it had created a new Home directory “lola” while leaving my original home folder moly off the side (with all my stuff in it). So I created a new user called “moly” using the User Accounts program so ubuntu could see moly as the home folder instead. Once I did, the new user moly  showed my old icon I had used before I upgraded.

Looks okay so far… it recognizes something…

I changed moly’s account to admin, enabled the account, set its password. Then I set my old account lola to standard (i wanted to get admin with only moly – big mistake later on) and changed the password to prevent conflicts with moly. Switched users, and at the login screen, chose moly, and entered its password.

And….. it kicked me right back to the login screen. Not good.

I switched back into “lola” and went to user accounts. Now the dialog asked for moly’s password, as lola was no longer admin. I changed lola’s account type to standard (stupid me – well I thought that by changing lola to standard, the computer would see moly as the sole user and log in to that account.)

I switched users to lola, logged in, and couldn’t start ubuntu, as it went backto the login screen. About 5 tries later, it was still in a loop.

Ohmygod. I remember that I had set the other account lola to be disabled. Entered in its password for the heck of it, got an invalid password error.

….

You know that sinking feeling inside when you know that something fatal is going to happen to you? Well I got that…

Tried logging in to lola, got a loop again.

Great. Awesome Saturday, right? effectively locking myself out of my own system. >:( I’m supposed to be using my netbook for the entire day too. wow.

Logged in to guest [yay! i logged in to something finally, even though it be Unity], tried to edit User Accounts from there — system policy prevented editing. Well of course… it is a guest account after all.

Erm… lesson learned for today is….

Search on the internet for actions and results of actions before doing them. It may sound like a hassle but it is really really helpful when things don’t go as planned. Looked up online about switching user accounts, found that 11.10 can’t even do that properly and is a bug.

I’ve been definitely thinking about just starting over from scratch on my netbook (external cd drive) using the custom partition tweaking i talked about in my previous post, this time really checking (bold. italicized.) the users created – if i make a user called moly, it should boot with a user called moly.

My other tower computer, when installed with a user that had the same name as my old user, even kept the old pink color scheme I had while using Lynx.

*cue rant about past*

I loved Lynx, the editing of specific colors in the window, highlights etc. was great. It also read .deb which i liked because i could install programs if they didn’t appear in synaptic. Hence why I had been using it from its release ’til September [it's an LTS!] until certain family members were concerned about its security and the big motivation (translated: install it now) came when my ol’ Lynx could not ssh to the others’ brand new Ocelots [5 ocelots and 1 lynx in the house. I'm stubborn...]. These files needing an ssh were really important and certain family members were going to pull their hair out because my 3-year old OS couldn’t “recognize the new software” of 11.10. And… I thought 11.10 was great (as long as I was able to get Gnome panels on it, i was happy) until i find that it still needs bugs ironed out, which leads to my current predicament that I have.

So here I am stuck in annoying Guest account with no privileges and everything saved in tmp where I know it will be deleted when I shutdown.

And I left my usb sticks at home and will be going to a convention with password protected wifi that I do not know the password of.

No wifi = no downloading games = no saving anyway because everything is in tmp.

At home later today I’ll get to re-installing & de-unitying ubuntu (is that a word? lol) again. I already backed up my data so that’s not an issue when re-installing.

For right now I’ll just leave my poor stuck-in-jail netbook in the case and enjoy some reality this time (previously I dragged my netbook and set up my own little place at some empty table – people gave me looks. weird looks.)

If they have free open wi-fi I will look at some videos on youtube or something.

In other news: Just checked out the “Remi Gaillard” videos on youtube – I wonder if bystanding people are genuinely surprised or if some are told to ignore the ridiculously costumed guy dancing in the store…

And that’s my uber long post/rant for today!

~LH

Changed blog theme for winter.

Today is 70 years to the day (1941-2011) of the attack on Pearl Harbor, please pray for those who died and their families.

After googling for an hour, finally found a sort of workaround for kdenlive.
First I uninstalled Kdenlive completely using the Ubuntu Software Center, then I followed the first set of instructions at the kdenlive forum in post #1 (http://kdenlive.org/forum/ubuntu-1110-wont-run-kdenlive-mlts-sdl-module-not-found). After adding the ppa and updating the sources (Help for adding a ppa) I reinstalled Kdenlive in the software center, which now shows the downgraded version of kdenlive (8.3).

Kdenlive’s configure wizard popped up without the error, and I set up Kdenlive and ran it without any further problems.

In other related news…
Now upgrading my netbook to ubuntu 11.10 to keep up with the times – it was running Ubuntu 10.04 previously, similar to my main tower computer.
Will be editing the previous post about getting the classic desktop in Ubuntu 11.10 as my Eee finishes upgrading.

~LH