Mikael Henrikson

My own hosting in progress

Mikko — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:45:43 +0000

I’m continuing to write on:

www.simondra.se/internet/

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy on HP nw8240

Mikko — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:49:19 +0000

I finally managed to get Ubuntu Gutsy onto my HP nw8240. With the LiveCD booting with a totally disabled screen it wasn’t a walk in the park. It seems to work fine now except the direct rendering for cool 3D effects is still not enabled -this is however not a Gutsy problem but ATI driver problem. It seems some people got it to work on the Internet but i didn’t so far.

Gutsy is stable and fast and gives a fairly robust impression at first. Diving more into details there are a number of glitches still. Some examples:
- OpenOffice stops working is you change Gnome theme
- mPlayer is not rendering video in the Firefox plugin until I installed VLC

The process of installation was roughly the following
- boot the nw8240 with a Edgy LiveCD (the screen rendering is broken as well -but it’s still usable for 10 minutes or so)
- switch into terminal and run ‘dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg’ and manually change the video driver to VESA
- restart X-server through a logout
- install the fglrx driver
- install Edgy
- upgrade to Gutsy

It works; but I can’t really recommend it unless you like problem solving and some terminal stuff. Ubuntu still has some hardware compatibility to work on..

Interesting links:

Bug report for the nw8240 discussion

Composite rendering works?

Ubuntu laptop testing team

Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy

Mikko — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:42:01 +0000

I really wanted Ubuntu Gutsy to be good. But it’s not mature..
After all I did wait a month or so after the official releas, but still. I tried to start digging in a couple of different ends but they all lead to the same conclusion -not good enough.

My HP nw8240 laptop doesn’t start at all with the Live CD -and I’ve tried many different ways of getting it going.
My old desktop is starting but;
The legay NVIDIA card is not working
My USB wireless is not working

I don’t dare trying Gutsy on my music box.

My advice for now; stay on old Ubuntu versions until this has had some more months to grow stable. Or maybe buy a Dell that is Gutsy-proof..

Google AdWords

Mikko — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:50:18 +0000

Google have made their idea of sponsored links in search results a success. Trying it out is really easy and you get the feeling that it’s powerful. You select the search phrases you want to be associated with and put in your credit card number. Of course there is a payment model with prices according to the value of the phrases.

It seems a bit addictive if you like having traffic on your site..

Google Analytics

Mikko — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:30:48 +0000

Interesting service. Free up until 5 million visits per month. Fairly comprehensive reporting and really easy to implement. With WordPress there are widgets that even does it for you. Google is smart in creating value that drives people to use their services. There is also a seamless integration to the AdWords concept in Google, which probably is financing the free analytics service.

iPod sync on Amarok (Ubuntu)

Mikko — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:55:09 +0000

I decided to try to synchronize my iPod with my Ubuntu laptop hoping that I could easily add a few nice features to my home set-up.

Synchronize new music to my iPod from my laptop and avoiding the hassle to synchronize i-tunes with my network harddrive
Synchronize play statistics and ratings

After formatting the iPod and pluging it in, everything is (almost) plug-and-play. The experience is as good as with i-tunes. There is one exception; no good error handling of the iPod becoming full. So manually controlling the lists synced over is necessary. Album artwork is also included in the sync. The connection is a old USB standard which shows when the laptop has high CPU load from other processes -resulting in timeout of the sync (which is not really error handled either).

All in all; better then I hoped for and I’ve left i-tunes. Even though I do miss the album cover navigation in i-tunes..

Brief update: after using this for a while now it works really well. The only glitch is some cover art not syncing over correctly when getting into timeout or iPod full-situations. I can live with that though. Waiting for the cover art navigation to reach Amarok..

Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbons

Mikko — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:42:31 +0000

A new release of Ubuntu is out today. I’ve been checking out the betas and I think the big difference is 3d desktop and some nice usability improvements. I’m still thrown back a little bit by my graphics card not being fully supported. However; it’s really exciting that Ubuntu is gaining focus and credit in the technical space. Freeware and open standards is about to rock the software world.

I’ve been evaluating if I can totally move to Ubuntu. My current conclusion is that I would miss a few things.
- The very nice record view, stable audio cd burning and seamless i-pod integration in i-tunes -even though Amarok is doing a good job replacing i-tunes
- My tv card is not supported on Linux
- Video calling is not supported in MSN or Skype -even though I unfortunately don’t really use it anyways.

So; for now I’m running Ubuntu and Vista..

Still no (good) video calling on Ubuntu

Mikko — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:22:59 +0000

A new version of Skype is released for Linux (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn). I was really hoping for video calling to be enabled since this is the one feature I’m missing in general on Ubuntu. But no. The new version is cleaned up and more stable -but no video. I tried Ekiga, a SIP calling client, that seems to work with a lot of hassle -but it’s not easy enough.

So, unfortunately, no video calling is still a big drawback on the Linux box.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Mikko — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 23:13:16 +0000

You would think that Google finds your site and makes it accessible in the search. Reconsider. There are a number of factors to take into account. The main parts are Meta-tags in your header page and a “robots.txt” file in your web root. Of course these follow certain standards that you need to (somewhat) understand (or copy paste at least).
Read more..

WordPress translation

Mikko — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:07:30 +0000

The devil is in the details
Just finished a battle with WordPress and FTP. Some of the stylesheets and the local translation file (.mo) did not load properly. After some trouble I found out that since my FTP transfer was happening from a Linux box (Unix base) and the server is also Unix based the transfer needed to be Binary and not ASCII. Unbelievable that these things are still not in sync in the standards and you need to get into protocol stuff on a simple ftp transfer.