The World of a Penguin

I have now had my laptop for a month. The laptop is great in size, weight, and speed. Most hardware components I have tried works. So I am happy. Okey, but what is not working? I have noted three things. First, the earphone connector does not work. According to some info on the net there are a patch for Alsa that should make it work. Maybe it will work in Feisty. I have not been digging deeper into this, my need have not yet been that big. The second thing is when you want to have dual head. I have had dual head running for years on Matrix and Nvidia cards on my desktop. But I do not get the ATI card to handle two screens with different resolution. It works fine if I have the same resolution, I can switch back and forth between only laptop and dual head. There are newer releases of the ATI-drivers on ATI's web site, but I have not tested these. I have until now only tested the drivers in Edgys multivers. I am using the closed source drivers since I want to use the hardware acceler...

I just read at digg about Microsoft supplies Vista Ultimate distribution signed by Mr Gates. Will Ubuntu response with signed CD:s by sabdfl, that is of course much cooler! *smile*

Last few days it has been a lot talking about the MS Windows based installer for Ubuntu. I totally love the idea. Most Windows users get confused about burning an ISO. With this we get rid of the burning step, instead we install our Ubuntu as any other MS Windows software. I hope we can trick even more people to use Ubuntu when it is ready.

I have a Express Card slot in my laptop. Until today, I have thought it is just another name for PCMCIA/PC Card. Which it isn't. Express Card has a smaller connector an exists in two sizes 34 and 54 mm. What I am looking for is a Compact Flash (CF) reader, since my Nikon D70 uses these. Unfortunately, a express card CF reader costs about $60 and a PC-Card CF-reader costs about $12. That's not funny. I can buy a USB connected CF-reader for about $12, but I want to avoid carry around a lot of loose pieces. I will wait a while too see if the prices goes down and coninu to use my desktop for the purpose a bit longer. On the good side I found that Belkin has a docking station that you connect to the express card slot. The MSI S271 does not have support for traditional docking station, which was a drawback I did know when I bought it. Now is the question if Linux supports Belkins docking station.

A few days ago I gave some support to people running a desktop pilot project. They are testing three different desktops; Novell/Suse Desktop 10, Fedora, Red Hat Workstation. The task was to integrate Suse Desktop with an existing AD. Okay, lets start with using the configuration GUI that they are famous for. There is a selection for running AD. Nice! Click for SSL, the current AD is no configured for TLS. Fill in Group and User OU. This seems promising. But here are we entering the halt. MS recommends that you configure your AD to use a proxy-users before authentication. But the Suse GUI does not have support for a proxy-user, so we change direction and start editing the /etc/ldap.conf-file. Add the proxy-user. But things is not working. A normal ldapsearch works but not doing id username . Looking in the logs it shows that it tries to use ldap and not ldaps. Some searching using google gives that on Suse the parameter ssl on in the config file is not working, you instead have to poin...

I have tried to get the Network-manager working, but it does not want to. I have no problem at all to get the wireless net to work with the normal network configuration tool, it worked out of the box. But then when I install the Network-manager I do not get any wireless connection. It sometimes finds the network but can't connect. My laptop is a MSI S271 running Ubuntu Edgy and have a MSI wireless network card with a RaLink RT2500 chip. According to the hardware listing it should work with WEP and unencrypted. I also have a feeling that I only have 802.11b working, but not g. My router is a Linksys WRT54GS. Update: I have 54mbit/s according to: $ sudo iwlist ra0 rate ra0 12 available bit-rates : 1 Mb/s 2 Mb/s 5.5 Mb/s 11 Mb/s 18 Mb/s 24 Mb/s 36 Mb/s 54 Mb/s 6 Mb/s 9 Mb/s 12 Mb/s 48 Mb/s Current Bit Rate=54 Mb/s

I have wanted to install Beagle for a long time. Due to my use of a home directory over NFS, it had not been possible in a smooth way. But now when I have a laptop and therefore it's not feasible to run NFS any more I will run Beagle. So today I read Christer Edwards blog about installing Beagel and thought it was time to activate it. I must say; just a few hours later and I am addicted to it.

It is often hard to get a big picture of how Linux is growing. I notice at my work that the number of Linux clients and servers are increasing. But what had happened in the big world? Here is a nice summary of positive achievements in the enterprise during 2006.

One of the requirements when i bought my new laptop was that it should have a CPU with support for virtualization in the CPU. I have since last summer been running Xen on my server using para-virtualization. It works nice and give me the possibility to separate external web and mail server from internal infrastruktur services like DNS, DHCP, and NFS. The lack of para-virtualization is that you need a special kernel and preferably a special glibc. When using virtualization support in hardware, you get rid of this drawback. Recently another player entered the main kernel stage, KVM . KVM is built on qemu and Bosch that have been around for years. A nice thing with KVM is that normal users can get the rights to run their own virtual machines as their own user, not sudo to root. A quick search on Google gave me a nice howto . One thing has changed since Alan wrote his howto. The latest version at the time of writing is 0.8. Instead of just insert one kernel module (kvm.ko) you had to i...