When double clicking on apps don’t seem to open the correct program anymore on almost every file, there is most likely an issue with the MIME database. The MIME database tells the desktop environment which program should open a file. Try this to re-associate things.
update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime
This tip was found after searching the net and landing on this page.
Check em out here. Unfortunitely, it looks like Linux users have to wait until the 5.1 release of MySQL Workbench to get a good free ERD tool.
This month, there were a good set of new Linux distribution releases. The ones I was most excited about was Fedora 9 and OpenSuse 11. This excitement was driven by a few things:
My initial project was to install Fedora Core 9 on the arcade system. The installation was unique in that I decided to install to a flash drive instead of a hard drive. This was inspired by the Fedora Live USB tools http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo.
Fedora is in a very interesting point in its life. It is getting over being trounced in popularity by Ubuntu and learning to implement some of the features that make Ubuntu so appealing to so many.
I used the Windows version of the Live/USB creater tool first and it seemd to complete successfully. However, the system would not boot fully to the device. It seemed that the USB stick was assigned /dev/sdb which caused some errors. I did get it to boot after typing some commands to mount the stick properly.
It was near sighted on my part, but I didn’t reallize that the Live USB stick would want to do hardware configuration on every bootup. Perhaps a save hardware profile option would be a nice addition. After realizing this, I decided that a full install to a the the USB Flash drive would be the best route.
The installer that is included with Fedora 9 is lacking when it comes to installing to flash. There is no option to use jff2 as the file system. This would’ve helped increase the life of the flash disk. It took about 10 tries to get the installation going. There were various problems with the disk partition tool that kept cropping up. It, of course, didn’t like that I didn’t want to use swap space. Also, any attempt to use the fat filesystem for the drive resaulted in a failure.
I ended up buying a 4GB drive to be the primary drive. The Fedora installer fails if the drive does not have enough space (I think it was around 2.3GB) to copy the initial image. The failure for this happens after the disk partitioning is done, so you have to go all the way back through the installer to correct this.
The Fedora desktop is really good looking and has been for most of there recent releases. The hardware detection worked well and detected the atheros wireless card and loaded the driver correctly. It surprised me since that was only recently committed to the Linux kernel.
Fedora package management has been its Achilles heel, in my opinion. This release is, unfortunately, no exception. Pup and Pruit have been ditched (yea!!). The have been replaced with an installer that can only install one package at a time (boo!!). This is a flaw that may just turn people against the distribution as a whole. Installing yumex is a good interim solution for this issue.
There are a few ways that Linux distributions separate themselves from other distributions. Here’s where comparisons should be made.
Type: Desktop
Release Cycle: 6 months, supported for 1 1/2 years
Package Management: Still slower than most, the default graphical fronend is missing the feature to install multiple packages. This is the area where the distribution does the worst.
Feel: Good overall feel. Theme is pretty and desktop is snappy.
Security: SELinux is great. It stayed out of the way while still prividing security.
License: It’s harder to find a “freeer” distribution than Fedora. They and Red Hat are members in good standing with the open source community
Virualization: I didn’t test this on the arcade, but Fedora 9 does include the new paravirt_ops.
I will still use Fedora and check out the releases as they occur. They are simply great at moving Linux forward with projects like PackageKit, AIGLX, pulseaudio, and paravirt_opts. It’s hard not to want to support them. Just please fix the installer and the package manager.
As you probably do not know, I am the proud owner of a Tech Romancer cabinet. The cabinet’s life as a one trick pony ended shortly after the purchase, and it is now a very capable mame box.
There is one large issue with having a computer inside of a large, wooden box. Where’s the power button supposed to go? The easy solution is to run cables off of the current power switch to some other button that is placed in a more convenient location. This approach was considered, but I didn’t like it. I thought that remote control was the way to go with this.
Looking back, this may have been a just for fun decision. Although, running wires and modding the computer would have been more work. The main driver was that the computer could not easily be removed once the button was in place. Also, the location to put button wasn’t obvious.
It is a little known fact that there are some always on power coming from the computer’s power supply. IMon takes advantage of this and created products such as the Imon Inside. This gives the ability to receive remote signals even when the computer is in a powered down state. Once the motherboard’s power button is rerouted to the Imon Inside, the computer can power itself on remotely. How cool is that?
Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. The Imon device operates via infra red signals. These don’t travel through 1/2″ of wood well. My initial tests worked great when the computer was out in the open, but not when placed inside of the cabinet.
There is a solution to this problem too. I honestly didn’t think I’d find a cooler product than the Imon, but I was happily mistaken thanks to the Next Generation Remote Control Extender. It turns out that they make an RF transmitter that poses as a AAA battery. By replacing one of the batteries with an RF transmitter and putting the RF receiver in the cabinet by the infrared receiver, the signal was remote was now able to push commands through the cabinet.
Success was finally mine.
Materials
Imon Inside ~ $60 Purchased at Newegg
Next Generation Remote Control Extender ~ $33 Purchased at Amazon
Its been a while already, but it’s official. I’m up and running with a WRT-350N router now. The new mega version of the firmware includes openvpn and usb storage modules.
I did run into a configuration incompatibility upon loading it. The wireless was sitting in Ad-Hoc mode even though I had specified otherwise. The fix was just a backup of the config, a reset of the device, and then a load of the config. Yes, I know that is the lazy way out 
, but it works.
My router is now capable of thing that aren’t possible with routers that cost 4 times as much. Yee ha.
Rocks:
My computer has never run beter than it has today. My gentoo system just got a full update to the latest unstable AMD64 release and the difference is quite noticeable. The new kernel, 2.6.25 actually gave me a decent performance boost as did the move to the new gnome 2.22 desktop. I was previously thinking about investing in a quad core proc to get some speed improvement, now those thoughts are history.
Linux core2 2.6.25-gentoo #2 SMP PREEMPT Thu Apr 17 19:46:30 CDT 2008 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
Sucks:
There are a few line items on why Linux sucks. These are the things that people keep sighting and then saying “Linux isn’t ready for the desktop”. If your needs are one of these things, then you may be right.
1. The new IPod Classic crashes Banshee and Rhythmbox — This one hurt. I was trying to show my mother how cool Linux was by syncing her new IPod. It didn’t work and I had to resort to using a mac to get the sync to work.
2. Skype video chat doesn’t work for me — I recently purchased a creative live cam video im pro webcam device. It works great with most Linux apps, but not with Skype. This is important to me as nothing else does what Skype does right now. I have several familiy members on the Windows version of it that I can’t video chat with.
3. Epiphany bookmark related crashes — I’ll post on this later in more depth. On my box, epiphany cannot even import its own exported bookmarks. There is a bug out there for this.
4. ATI video isn’t 3d accelerated — This is a work in progress right now. There is a lot of effort to get the specs that ATI released into a xorg driver. The two main efforts for this are the ati and radeonhd drivers. This will get there, it will just take time. xcompmgr still works fine so my desktop looks snazzy; its just slow.
Please don’t take these critisms harshly. I am in no way trying to dismiss or invalidate the great work these projects represent.
This is a current screenshot of my desktop. Buuf icons, silver cursor, murrine rounded metacity, and murrina eternal gtk theme.
And then it dawned on me, blogs are public! I don’t write here much not because my mind isn’t coming up with interesting things, it is more that there are a whole lot of people who don’t read words the way they are written. Anything that is written or spoken can be taken out of context by people who are blinded by their beliefs or simply ignorant. There are horror stories about companies who have done research on candidates and discovered things they didn’t like about them by reading their blogs or social network pages. I don’t want to fall into that catagory. Only things that are non-debatable will show up in the public portions of this site. If you would like to talk about debatable matters in an intelligent setting, feel contact me.
You may already know this, but everything you do or say over a public channel is being recorded. Cnet has a good article that helps point this out and talks about how to get around some of it.
6. The games now run longer thanks to more commercials than ever before
5. The commentating of Troy Aikman
4. The commentating of Phil Simms
3. You only have one choice of game to watch in the second slot on Sunday
2. The number of times you watch the players on the field swearing during a game
1. This year’s coach of the year was convicted of cheating and yet still gets the award
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