I've been having the absolute worst Firefox experience in Kubuntu recently. I can't pinpoint the exact time that it started but it got a lot worse when I upgraded to Flash 10 (what a hog! Adobe seriously? Flash 10 runs about as well as a Microsoft OS does!).

Once Flash 10 was there scrolling in Firefox became impossible. It was as if my whole computer was locked for about 5 seconds. Then it would scroll... slowly. Painfully even.

After poking around in Google for a while and not finding much in the way of solutions, I decided to try some new video drivers. I uninstalled all of the Ubuntu Nvidia drivers and downloaded and installed the 177.80 drivers. 

Wow! What a huge difference. Not only that, but almost all of my issues with hibernation (it was intermittent, but sometimes it didn't work) are gone now too. 

One thing I did run into was that I didn't uninstall the Ubuntu Nvidia packages and just ran the Nvidia installer. After a reboot, the Nvidia drivers didn't load properly. the i2c_core module was not loading, unless I unloaded and reloaded the Nvidia driver. Once I uninstalled all the Nvidia related stuff from the Ubuntu repository and reinstalled the latest Nvidia driver all those problems were resolved.

Wow was getting ssh logins using RSA key pairs a real pain in the butt. I suppose if everything had been standard Ubuntu things might have worked out of the box... maybe.

In order for me to use the Bazaar Eclipse plugin I needed to setup ssh to my server to not require a password. This is because for some reason, the plugin can't handle any user interface type stuff with ssh. Sigh.

So I did the basics first. 

I ran the following to setup my key pair (I typed in a passphrase when it asked, to make it as secure as possible)

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048

Then to copy it to my home directory on my server.

ssh-copy-id suttonca@myservernamehere

But I still was having issues. It was asking me for a password even after I'd unlocked my RSA key. So I checked /var/log/auth.log on the remote server and found some errors like the following:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /home/suttonca/.ssh

I had to run the following commands to setup the permissions properly before the solution worked.

chmod go-w ~/
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

All that remained was to ensure that everytime I logged in that I was asked to unlock my key. In KDE all I had to do was run the following:

Go to http://stephandchadsutton.com for some neat links to follow the election with online!

Well. Circuit City is definately on its way out. My guess is that they are just trying to survive through the Christmas season. They are barely going to do that. If you have to close down 155 stores before Christmas, you know its going to be really bad. I also would guess that this is just the beginning of this type of closing. Its kind of like how all of a sudden Baker's Square went bankrupt and then a bit later we saw stores like Bennigann's go as well.

Aside from the simpathy that I feel for the employees, I don't think that Circuit City will be missed much. In much the same way that I don't miss CompUSA. Their stores sucked. Especially once they ditched all their knowledgable employees for high school and college kids. I've noticed a significant decline in how the stores are cared for over the last 2 years or so. It just wasn't clean anymore. Their selection of technology generally sucked horribly, which is where CompUSA went really really wrong as well. When Costco has a better selection of TV's that Circuit City you know that they are in trouble. 

The other thing that really bothered me about Circuit City was that there was litterally no one at the registers most of the time. Why would I want to shop at a place that makes me wait to check out... even when there are no friggin' lines? I hate... revile Best Buy, but at least they have people staffing their counters.

So I've been fighting with Eclipse for the last 2 days now. Let me just say that installing Eclipse from the Ubuntu repositories equals a really crappy Eclipse experience. I wasn't able to add or update anything successfully from any of the Eclipse repositories. It was beyond horrible. I'm guessing that it was mostly because it was an older version. But shouldn't Eclipse be able to update even itself to the latest version? I'm not happy with Eclipse's package management much either. Somewhere along the line something has got to be able to update itself to the latest version and both products didn't work very well.

So now I'm installing it all manually. Never again to trust that Ubuntu can install correct versions from its repository and never again to believe that when an old version is installed that Eclipse can actually update itself properly either. Sometimes you just gotta get it done yourself!

A few weeks ago, my wife's laptop (an HP Pavillion dv2000 with an AMD Turion and Nvidia graphics) started acting strange. It would periodically not boot properly. All the lights would light up and the fans would turn on. I could see the hard drive light and the DVD light go on and I knew they were both spinning up. However, the screen remained blank. It wouldn't even flash with the backlights... nothing. There was no bios screen that would show, and no useful diagnostic beeps either. Usually popping the battery out and unplugging the power supply would fix the problem. However, this weekend, even that didn't seem to work very well.

I managed to get it booted back up and made sure it had the latest BIOS (which it did). I also checked the memory and the hard drive. No issues. Strange stuff. I managed to finally get it booted up again last night and I immediately turned off all the powermanagement, so it wouldn't turn itself off, and backed up my Wife's data from her home directory to my Ubuntu server.

For you linux geeks out there I used tar over ssh to backup her home drive. Its a quick and easy way to securely backup files to your server. 

Having a Presidential candidate that understands and uses open source is incredible. A friend dropped me an IM with this blog entry regarding the Obama campaign's use of Ubuntu. I guess this is just one more nail in Obama's coffin for people that can't hack having an intelligent person running the Whitehouse. But I, for one, will really enjoy having Barrack as President because his campaign used Linux in such a practical and vital way. Perhaps he will press the executive branch to run open source stuff more often to save the tax payers some money? Am I hoping for too much there? I think not. There are already some pretty large agencies that are using more and more Linux and open source apps. I wonder if Microsoft's lobbyists will react if open source becomes even more entrenched in goverment. Its happening in so many governments across the world at here at home. With the smart kind of leadership in Washington, I think it will spread like wildfire and really cut tax payer budgets all over this great land of ours.

Drupal! Its my favorite CMS and the only one that I use on the sites I setup. Chadarius.com is a Drupal site. In fact I'm so lazy with themes that I still haven't really changed the default drupal theme here since I upgraded to 5.3 over a year ago. One of these days I'll get around to it!

Chicago has its own great Drupal user group at http://cdmug.org. Those guys are putting on http://drupalcampchicago.org.

I recently needed to bring up a java app that I hadn't used in quite some time. At least as long as before I had Kubntu 8.04 installed. Back then I was using Java 6 (1.6.x) as the default JRE on my latptop. Now however, the app was failing with all kinds of errors.

As with any OS that can use Java, just because you have a java version installed, doesn't mean that version is the one that is launched by default. I have Java-gcj, Java 5 and Java 6 all installed on my Kubuntu 8.04 laptop. Java-gcj was currently the default java version.

In Linux, the way the java default is setup is both elagent and confusing all at the same time (Linux in a nutshell if you ask me, and I love it!). In Linux the /usr/bin/java file is really just a link to the java version that you want to be the default. But /usr/bin/java links to another link to /etc/alternatives/java which in turn links to the actual java binary at /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java. 

I've been fighting with Asterisk the last few days. I think now I have almost tamed the beast though. At first I was running into problems with the web interface. However, at the time I was running the packages that come with Ubuntu 8.04 server. I decided that it would just be better to just compile the latest stable version on my own.

This is fine except that the latest stable version's config files don't actually work. When I started Asterisk I would get an error about how it could not create /var/run/assterisk.pid. This, inspite of the fact that after looking at /etc/init.d/asterisk, it was telling asterisk to create the file in /var/run/asterisk where the asterisk user and group had full rights. Bizaar.

After leaving it for the weekend (My family went to go visit Grandma at her new house) I took a fresh crack at it this morning. It sfunny how when you leave something for a few days you get a whole fresh new look at things.

I decided that even with hacking the /etc/init.d/asterisk file to hard code the startup command to ensure it was passing the right parameters and getting no where, that the /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf file must be the culprit. 

In the asterisk.conf file that the make command creates, it just housed one section called [global] with a number of directives for where Asterisk should find and create files. 

Well it turns out that this is horribly wrong, and people know about it. Lovely.

I changed the file to look like this instead: