Posts

I upgraded one of my ThinkPads from Linux Mint 7 to Linux Mint 9 today, and discovered that I was no longer able to use my HP P1006 printer. The HP printer tool (hp-toolbox) detected the printer correctly, downloaded the appropriate plugin, but then couldn’t install the plugin. Running the tool from the command line didn’t give any extra information. This is a known bug in Ubuntu 10.04. The solution is to download and build the HP printer package (known as hplip) from source. The complete instructions are here. I had to install the following extra packages before the configure and make steps would succeed: libjpeg-dev, libsnmp-dev, libcups2-dev, libusb-dev, python-dev, libsane-dev, and libcupsimage2-dev.

May 29, 2010

Moving from Keyring on Palm to KeePass on Linux and Android

#Android #Centro #Linux #Nexus One

Keyring is a fine little open source application for Palm OS that stores and generates passwords. There is no Android version of this program, so I decided to move to KeePass 1.x, both the Linux version and the Android version. Then I hunted for way to import my Keyring data into KeePass 1.x. I couldn’t find a tool to do this, so I had to invent my own method, which included writing a conversion script in Ruby.

March 26, 2010

The impoverished state of Android Apps

#Android #Centro #Nexus One #Ruby #Software #Treo

One of the reasons why I decided to buy an Android device was to investigate the possibility of writing applications for that platform. After spending a couple of days with Android, it’s pretty clear there are huge voids in the app space waiting to be filled. The transition from Palm OS is going to be painful because the following apps have no equivalent on Android: Adarian Money. This is lovely little financial app that I’ve used for several years to track every penny I spend. The Android checkbook apps do not come close; the best-selling one doesn’t even track expense accounts, let alone support double-entry accounting. Clearly, a lightweight version of GnuCash is needed here. DateBk. I’ve used this program for nearly ten years in its various incarnations, from DateBk+ on a Handspring Visor, to DateBk5 on a Centro. It’s the king of calendar apps and nothing on the iPhone or Android comes close. The Google Calendar app does sync with the web version, but is otherwise very minimal. It also has a serious bug: its ringtone reminders do not work when the screen is turned off, so you’ll miss appointments and meetings constantly. Pimlico has hinted that they might be porting DateBk to other platforms, but who knows when or if Android will ever be supported. ListPro. This is a checklist app on steroids, almost a mini-database. I use this for packing lists, lists of items lent out to other people, notes on things to look up when I get home, to-do lists, etc. The Android apps are the usual mix: either seriously broken or only supporting a tiny subset of ListPro’s features. If I didn’t have a full-time job, I’d start working on filling these gaps myself. I may do that anyway as a rainy-day weekend hobby. The prospect of writing in Java is not pleasant, so I may start working on the algorithms and data structures (or Models and Controllers, in newspeak) in Ruby, and hope that Duby is usable on Android by the time I need to start thinking about the UI (or View in newspeak).

March 25, 2010

Moving contacts from Palm OS to Android

#Android #Centro #Nexus One #Treo

After nearly ten years of using Palm OS PDAs and cell phones, I’m moving to an Android phone. I didn’t want to enter over 100 contacts manually on the new device. Some Google searching turned up ways to migrate the contact list, but most of them involved running Palm Desktop software on Windows. It turns out there is a non-obvious, Windows-free method, described here. In case that forum posting goes away, here’s a repeat of this method (slightly modified):

March 23, 2010

Solving pilot-xfer sync problem on Ubuntu Jaunty / Linux Mint 7

#Centro #Linux #Linux Mint #Software #Treo #Ubuntu

I use pilot-xfer (part of the pilot-link package) to back up the data on my Palm Centro, and occasionally to install files on the Centro. It’s always worked fine on Linux Mint 6. The only thing I needed to do before running pilot-xfer was load the visor kernel module using this command: sudo modprobe visor But when I switched to a different laptop running Linux Mint 7, pilot-xfer never seemed to be able to connect with the Centro for the second and subsequent attempts after a reboot. Some poking around revealed that the problem is apparently due to the visor module setting up an incorrect symbolic link for the device /dev/pilot. Normally, after you connect the Centro to the computer with a USB cable and press the hotsync button, /dev/pilot should become a symlink that points to ttyUSB1. But I was seeing it point to ttyUSB0, which is the wrong device file for the Centro.

March 19, 2010

Replacing postfix and procmail with maildrop

#Linux #Linux Mint #Software #Ubuntu

In the previous post, I wrote about how I solved a problem with fetchmail connecting to the postfix mail server. I also have postfix configured to transfer mail to procmail, which does some filtering for me using some rules I’ve written in ~/.procmailrc. But postfix+procmail is really overkill for a laptop or any other machine that is not going to be used as a mail server. Both of these programs can be replaced by maildrop, which delivers mail to your local mailbox or maildir, and which has a much more readable filtering language than procmail.

March 16, 2010

Fixing "connection refused" error in fetchmail on Ubuntu Jaunty / Linux Mint 7

#Linux #Linux Mint #Software #Ubuntu

Today I installed fetchmail on Linux Mint 7, which also brought in postfix as the mail transfer agent. I’d used this combination on Linux Mint 6 with no problems, but on Mint 7 (which is based on Ubuntu Jaunty), fetchmail printed this error message: fetchmail: connection to localhost:smtp [::1/25] failed: Connection refused. The error was caused by fetchmail attempting to make an IPV6 connection to postfix on the local machine. Postfix refused the connection, so fetchmail then attempted an IPV4 connection, which was successful. The mail was delivered, but the error message was annoying.

March 15, 2010

The iPad is not a Kindle killer

#Hardware #Kindle #Rants

The blogosphere is now full of ecstatic praise for the still-unavailable Apple iPad. Much of the commentary follows this pattern: a recitation of the known facts about the iPad (fast, multipurpose, “cool”), followed by the unwarranted conclusion that these facts make it a “Kindle killer”. This argument is similar to debates about religion, in which it is assumed that belief systems are a zero-sum game where there can be only one winner. But what is most noticeable about this argument is that it ignores some crucial facts. This isn’t too surprising, given the rich-geek myopia and herd mentality that pervades Silicon Valley culture. Here are the issues the geeks are ignoring:

February 4, 2010

Fixing the default shell in Ubuntu / Linux Mint

#Linux #Linux Mint #Ubuntu

Several years ago, the Ubuntu developers made a horrible decision to make dash the default shell instead of bash. This breaks numerous shell scripts, and I recently discovered it also broke one of my own Ruby scripts that depended on bash’s signal handling. The problem here was that when a TERM signal is sent to dash, it doesn’t kill off its child processes. The problem isn’t fixed by making bash the login shell for a particular user, because some programs (such as Ruby) invoke /bin/sh, which is a symlink to /bin/dash. The fix for this problem is to make bash the default shell on a system-wide basis. The following command does that:

February 3, 2010

Improving fonts in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

#Linux #Linux Mint #Software #Ubuntu

By default, Linux Mint 6 and 7 (and presumably, Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04) come with a minimal set of somewhat ugly fonts. There are two things that can be done to improve the situation. First, install the Microsoft TrueType fonts: sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts Then, if you are using an LCD monitor (e.g., a laptop), enable anti-aliasing (smoothing). On Linux Mint, start the Control Center from the main menu, then select Appearance. (On Ubuntu, I believe this is done using System > Preferences > Appearance.) Click the Font tab, and under Rendering, select Subpixel Smoothing.

December 30, 2009