X11 Forwarding, Exceed, Putty and SSH Tunneling

Wow. Why haven’t I done this sooner??

For at least a year, I have had a license for Exceed at work. I have never thought about using it too much except for the lone Oracle install since Oracle wants/needs java to install (which pisses me off, but that’s for another post). Anyway, our new DBS who’s kind of new to the AIX environment asked how to run the oracle installer and thankfully he had a consultant with him that knew how, but then I got to thinking, why haven’t I done this with my laptop?

Started messing around and ran a couple apps and now I find it REALLY useful. For example, I run Banshee as a podcast catcher on my laptop. I now run it on my Windows machine via Exceed and I can use the BIG monitor and be able to navigate things so much easier.

The best part is it looks like Banshee is running directly on my desktop even though only the display is running on my desktop with the client running on my laptop.

Even better….when you start something playing on the desktop, it comes out on my laptop’s speakers! Now all I have to do is figure out how to get bluetooth headphones working on Linux and I can use it to listen to podcasts instead of a iPod.

ISG and Ardour GTK

I have started a new podcast called The Incredible Shrinking Geek  on podshow.  This show will kind of chronicle my weight loss program of sorts as well as provide people with hints on how I got around things like eating out and more.  It’s located at:

http://incredibleshrinkinggeek.podshow.com

Anyway, as I want to always have the ability to record this show, I decided to use Ardour as the editor.  Ardour runs on Linux and is a full Digital Audio Workstation.  It can also record multi tracks as well.  It’s a bit complicated but it does work.  It uses another program called JackD which is a audio server on steroids.  It can handle working in realtime if your kernel supports it.  Anyway, take a listen to the show and try Ardour if you want something better then Audacity.

Feisty Fawn is released into the woods and the Lord said, it was GOOD!

Ok, the Lord did not say that but I sure did.  Network Manager installed by default.  Getting ATI drivers working on it was PAINLESS!  Just a couple tweaks to a few things related to suspend and it works pretty well too!  My only complaint, is every once in a while, the ethernet adapter flys the coop.  I just need to edit the same script I did for the wireless card to have it remove the ethernet module prior to suspend and load it on resume and I think that will fix that too.

Couple minor things…Desktop effects won’t work without XGL on this machine.  I’ll get around to it (once someone ELSE does).  The main issue with this is the ATI driver yet again.  Why in the world in this day and age ATI doesn’t release a driver capable of compositing is beyond me.  This same care would likely work perfectly on Windows Vista in the super cool idiot mode.  Anyway, I can live without this for a while and I have to say that Ubuntu is a premier distro now and is now THE distro I use and recommend.  I even would recommend it to total geeks as it’s EASY to setup.  Geeks don’t ALWAYS like the hard road….I have a life too and if it takes me a long time to get things like LAMP working, well screw that distro.  I also don’t have the time to go through many different ACPI scripts to figure our why my laptop won’t suspend/resume properly (even Microsoft screws this up).  So I use a distro that is easy to install and to get working.  Anyway, have fun and give it a try!

Fiesty Fawn Install Awaits This Weekend

Fiesty Fawn is released finally and I am looking forward to using it.  I will likely install it sometime tomorrow after I have some time to backup some info.  One thing that I will do is try the upgrader first.  After that, I will reinstall automatix if it goes ok.  I do have the iso, so if all goes bad, I will have a backup so I can do a fresh install, if I must.

Next comes Gutsy Gibbon(Oct)!

Made it to Phoenix

I made it to Phoenix.  It was a long trek but I am here and the EVDO is fantastic on a Rev A network under Ubuntu.

Current Speeds: 302 Kbps Down/ 128 Kbps up.  Very good and pretty darn speedy.

Coming to you via EVDO….and LINUX!

Hello all.  I am currently sitting in the airport waiting for my boarding time and I am using EVDO to post this!  On Linux, after applying a Kernel hack, I was able to jump right on with a sudo ifup ppp0.  It’s intresting how far Linux has come.  I bet in the next Ubuntu, I won’t even have to do that hack to make it work (it should be in the 2.6.18 Kernel….using a back port).  When I get a faster connection, I’ll post details….Columbus, OH is still a Rev 0 country and Phoenix is already Rev A.

Current speeds are: 379 Kbps down and 74 Kbps up.  Not bad, but not great.  Got to be a overloaded cell or the airplanes messing with the signal.

Beryl and XGL…..ok XGL ain’t so bad…ATI drivers still sucks

I’ll reserve final judgement for tonight, but it seems I discovered a bug in Beryl and I figured out why it seemed like I was getting thrown back to the gdm prompt. It appears that if you hit Shift-BackSpace, it will log you out of Beryl. They need to fix that….for the mean time, I did what they proposed on the ThinkWiki and created a script called annoymenot.sh and with it I changed my keymappings. We’ll cross the fingers and see how long I remain in Beryl tonight! WOOHOO! For the full instructions, check out the T60 Ubuntu Edgy Eft page on ThinkWiki at http://tinyurl.com/ypnl5d and also make sure to visit the main wiki at http://thinkwiki.org .

Beryl works….XGL sucks….

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with a ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics card in it that was purchased for me by work. For months on Edgy, I was not able to run Beryl at all. Now it seems the latest Beryl updates WORK on my T60. This is a good thing. The bad thing is XGL is frickin UNSTABLE AS HELL.

Has anyone gotten AIGLX to work on this card?? Any suggestion? Can I meake some tweaks to the X setup to make it better?

I really want to use Beryl as it’s the first Window Manager that has actually gotten me to USE the multiple Desktops just so I can hit Ctrl-alt and SPIN the windows in a cube and find the one I want. I especially like hte new 3d effect of popping the windows up like papers hovering over each side of the cube. Fantastic. Plus once people see how cool Beryl is I can then say this ONLY works on Linux! Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions, just leave me a comment.

Hildon in Higher Then 800×480

Internet Tablet Talk has a story about the Hildon API running on a laptop!  This means hildon will scale to resolutions larger then the Nokia 770 and N800 Internet Tablets.  This also COULD man a OLPC type device.

What’s Hildon?  It’s the UI that the Nokia internet tablets use with thier Maemo install.  It’s a nice UI and it seems to be easy to understand to me anyway.

Ferrari Laptops for Bloggers….

Where can I get my free laptop Microsoft?? If you have not heard, bloggers are getting laptops that they can keep from Microsoft wiht a preinstall of Vista on it. I would boot Vista long enough to see if it’s lame or not (trust me….it probably is) and then put Ubuntu Edgy on it. I wonder…..Microsoft here’s your chance….convince me that Vista is better then Mac OS X and Linux! Send me one! E-mail me at: gorkon at gmail.com