A Conservative Techie

I have a Dell Latitude D830 that I really enjoy using, however it started freezing when I was in the middle of somehting.  At first I thought it had to do w/ KDE4 (recently installed through the packages available on the Kubuntu website).  So I posted on bug, on bugs.kde.org and got great and almost feedback from some of the developers.

Anyways after looking further into this and posting to the Kubuntu Users list was told to check these bugs out:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=587905
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=585714
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/145112
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/157777

So anyways upgrading my NVidia driver to the newer closed source driver has solved my problem.

 Thanks to everyone for helping me out… Also this is closer to a note to myself in case I have further problems.

Please vote for the Official Ubuntu Book as Linux Book of the Year as part of the Linux Journal Awards.

Link

Interesting article on building a Home Server, using Kubuntu as the operating system posted on Linux Journal.  Nice to see some more articles on Kubuntu.

I have updated my Kubuntu 7.10 to final KDE4.0.0 from that my good friends in the Kubuntu team created.  It is beatiful, but frustrating.  And I need some help trying to figure out where to start to track my problems down.

• Freezes whenever I do something disk intensive:  I use VMWare aware and whenever I turn on my VMWare session, KWin? or something else freezes.  And its not just vmware that is causing the problems.  Tried to burn a cd, the new Kubuntu Gutsy Live CD and got a screen freeze, tried to open up a large OpenOffice document complete with screenshots, etc and the screen froze.  I’m using the turn screen because I don’t know exactly what to do to try and troubleshoot these freezes.  I don’t have access to another computer to try and ssh into the box and troubleshoot, I have only my computer which is either in at a client where I don’t have access to another computer, or I’m in my hotel room and I don’t have access to another computer.  I see activitiy on my Wi-Fi indicator, but besides that I don’t get any other indicator.  I can’t Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and kill the session, I can’t change to any other session through the function keys, no hard disk activity indication.  If I’m playing a cd or soemthing the music will start to skip as it is frozen.
• Sound at startup:  Where do I control the loud new startup sound that I am hearing when I sartup?  I really enjoy this new sound, but if I mute my speaker, turn the sound down or whatever it is still loud enough to bother my co-workers in thier office.  Some help would be greatly appreciated.  BTW the sound control buttons, up and down both work but the “mute” button doesn’t have any affect

Some specs about my laptop:

• Dell Latitude D830 with 4 Gigs of RAM
• NVidia Graphics card, with the NVidia driver in use
• Intel sound card

Let me know what else I need to troubleshoot this.

Thanks

So here’s another problem I’m wrestling with. As mentioned before, I dual boot both Windows and Kubuntu, also mentioned before one of the programs I can’t live without in Windows is OneNote. Because of the dual boot I have a separte partition formated in FAT32 that I save all my docs on, including my OneNote notebooks.
So what I would like to do is share my /media/sda4/onenote folder and access it through a Windows XP VM that I run to access Exchange, Office, etc…So I have enabled the folder shared through Samba via Dolphin and the sharing wizard. However I am prompted for a Username and Password. I would have thought I could use the uesrname and password I sign in as? However I am still prompted for the username and password.

Any help would be greatly appreciated… Thanks

I dual boot my laptop with Vista and Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). Anyways I can connect without a problem to the wireless network. However when I boot into LInux I have time-out problems and other connection issues. So I called the “Helpdesk” number to troubleshoot. The last hotel I had problems with dealt with a tcp windowing issue which I have since resolved.
Anyways, as soon as I mentioned Linux they couldn’t do anything for me really. Except they asked for my MAC address. I wonder if that is loaded into the router somehow in Windows that the router is sending MAC information to the system?
So I gave them the MAC address and it is loaded into there system for the week, which is the rest of my stay here. Anyone else deal with problems like this before?

Since my last post I’ve been trying to figure out what tools I miss the most when I’m booted into Windows and it is actually a shorter list then tools I miss when I’m in Linux.

• Kio-Slaves: The differnet slaves in KDE are great and make my day a lot easier.  Need to open a document on a remote server via ssh and edit it?  It’s really simple, open it up through Kate via SFTP and then save it back again: sftp://jjesse@home:/home/jjesse/test.txt
• Konverstation:  I haven’t found a suitable IRC program to replace Konverstation.  In fact, I can’t find a GNOME equivalent  I like, but that is besides the point.  I’ve tried mIRC, and about 5 different programs and still can’t find one that I like as well. It is easy to use, I really like the On Screen Display, setting up different identies, etc.
• Konqueror: I find myself trying to do some of the same things that I use Konqi for on a daily basis.  Need to connect to a remote computer?  Is it through Windows File Sharing?  No problem…. Is it via SSH?  No problem…  I can do this all through Konqueror.  Try to connect to a remote server via SSH in Windows?  Need to download a different program and then I still can’t map a network drive
• Kate: For simple text editing there is nothing better at least in my opinion.  I work on the Ubuntu Doc Team and I love the way it handles Docbook XML with indentation, syntax highlighting, etc.

So here is my list of utilities I can’t live without when I’m booted into Windows.  Do you have a list?

My friend Rudy has started a web development company.  He does a great job of designing web sites, been doing it for a long time.  Anyways the name of his company is Intrepid Web Design, and can be found here.

Some of the sites he has done include the Grand Rapids Marathon, and Concentrek. 

I’ve been doing some thinking as to what tools I use every day that I miss when I boot into Linux.  In other words the following reasons are why I can’t totally get rid of Windows in my life.

• OneNote:  One of the more misunderstood parts of the Microsoft Office suite.  I use OneNote for taking notes, for organizing meetings for everything I do.  I go into a meeting and open up OneNote.  I study for a new certification test, I use OneNote to help me understand things.  I’ve tried basKet and other tools from the FOSS world and can’t find anything that matches.  I cannot get basKet to organize things correctly (plus I think development has stopped), I’ve tried Tomboy, but still can’t get it organized the way I want.  OneNote is simple to use and quite powerful.
• SQL Management Studio 2005:  Actually any tool that connects to SQL Server from MS is a requirement.  My day to day is working with MS SQL Server and I haven’t found a FOSS tool to work correctly with this.  Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated
• Outlook:  Work uses MS Exchange for email, enough said.
• Groove:  Not quite sure I’m sold on Groove for MS yet, but just started using it and its pretty sweet.  Don’t know if its a keeper yet
• SlingPlayer:  This is personal but I haven’t gotten it to work correctly in Linux with Wine yet.  I know there is a how-to on it, but I’ve fallen in love with my SlingBox

That’s it for now that I can think of.  Would love to find tools to replace these if possible in Linux.  Maybe I can get a list of possible replacements?

Gizmodo has the video from Bill Gates last CES Keynote and can be found here.

Best line is Bill “rappin” in the studio.  An amazing list of celebs appear on this video, including Matthew Mcconaughey, Bono, John  Stewart and others.  Great job on this video.