Wifi-radar and WPA

Under my Debian installation I'm using Wifi-radar, a nice utility for managing wireless networks (although it is a GNOME application, I'm using it under KDE without problems). I've always used for WEP networks, but now I needed to start using also for WPA networks, and in order to deal with such networks, wifi-radar relies on wpa-supplicant, which is also available for Debian.

Thus, you need to setup the configuration file of wpa-supplicant so that wifi-radar can use it (thus, you cannot set WPA parameters from within wifi-radar), but this is not hard to do; for instance, in wpa_supplicant.conf you can put such a stanza:

network={
    ssid="network ssid"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    proto=WPA
    psk="network password"
}

and then you can specify the driver for your card in the "WPA" section of the wifi-radar's configuration dialog (for instance, for my ipw2200 wireless card, I chose wext).

Unfortunately, if you try this way, you'll get an error from wifi-radar due to an undefined variable:

NameError: global name 'WPA_SUPPLICANT_ARGS' is not defined

to solve this problem, I actually modified the wifi-radar script (it's a python script) by changing the line:

wpa_args = WPA_SUPPLICANT_ARGS % ( INTERFACE, profile['wpa_driver'] )

with

wpa_args = "-B -i " + INTERFACE + " -c " + WPA_SUPPLICANT_CONF + " -D " + profile['wpa_driver'] + " -P " + WPA_SUPPLICANT_PIDFILE

and now it seems to work correctly.

Italian Hyphenation in OpenOffice (Debian)

I'm using LaTeX for most of the time for my writings, but for simple and small documents (e.g., letters) I prefer to rely on OpenOffice. I'm actually Italian, but I write most of my documents in English... sometimes, though, I have to go back to my mother tongue ;-) Thus, I wanted to use hyphenation in OpenOffice, under Debian, and so I installed the related packages, in particular, openoffice.org-hyphenation-it.

Unfortunately, hyphenation still did not work... Then, Kent West, in the debian-user mailing list, told me to install hyphenation packages directly from OpenOffice, and it worked! (Thank you Kent!)

I had never used such functionalities in OpenOffice, and they work great! I used the menu File->Wizards->Install Dictionaries and it does most of the work automatically, you just need to retrieve the list of available dictionaries and choose the one you want. Then, you'll find the corresponding dictionary in Options->Language Settings->Writing Aids.

Problems after upgrade xserver-xorg in Debian

Today I've upgrade my Debian installation (a mix of testing and unstable) and after a reboot the X server did not start complaining about the missing nvidia module (I'm using the drivers from NVidia site). I've also reinstalled the nvidia drivers but the problem still persisted...

I then tried to install the new version of the nvidia drivers (mine was version 1.0-9755 but now there's the new version 100.14.11). After having installed these new drivers, the X server did not complain about the missing nvidia driver, but it was complaining about the missing keyboard driver.

Actually, it looks like the name of the driver for the keyboard has changed from keyboard to kbd, so all I had to do is to change this string in the xorg.conf file... now I'm on X again :-)

My experience with Kubuntu

I've been experienced for some weeks a crash problems with Eclipse on my Debian installation on my Desktop... I use Debian (and Gentoo) on all my computers (3 desktops and 1 laptop), and this was the only computer showing this problem... unfortunately I haven't been able to solve the problem and so I resorted to reinstall the distribution.

I had tried kubuntu a year ago, and I didn't like it... but I thought I could give it another try, and so, instead of re-installing Debian (I'm using Debian on the other computers after all so I won't miss it), and installed a kubuntu edgy 6.10. Since I definitely don't like Gnome (I never did, and probably never will ;-) while I've always loved the pleasant environment provided by KDE, kubuntu was the only choice, instead of ubuntu.

My first impressions were definitely good: the installation consists of only few steps (although grub by default wants to install itself on the mbr, while I didn't want to touch the mbr, since I'm using Gentoo's installation grub, and it wasn't clear in the beginning how to avoid this) and it's quite smooth.

After the installation I was surprised by the desktop and menus that are quite clean, with only the essential programs; actually I was a little bit disappointed by the lacking of programs I'm used to, such as, e.g., the program for resizing the screen (although there's a similar program in System Settings). Concerning the System Settings program, this seems to replace the standard KDE Control Center, but it lacks some voices such as "themes". You can still call the good ol' KDE Control Center by the terminal, though.

I soon installed the good ol' Synaptic package manager, since I wasn't comfortable with Adept package manager, since it provides too few functionalities and packages (but probably it's more usable for the first time users, so praise for it!). Adept is however very good for update checking and installation. It checks for updates in background and then notifies you if some updates are ready. Installing the updates is also very easy.



What I never liked about (k)ubuntu, and I don't think I ever will, is the fact that you're forced to use sudo, since root shell is disabled... I don't think this enhances security and it's less error prone, but that's just my opinion... In fact, I always use sudo -s that opens a root shell ;-)

Another really great surprise is that, few weeks ago, the adept manager not only notified me about available updates, but also about the update of the whole kubuntu distribution itself!


It offered me to install the update (the new Kubuntu 7.04, codenamed Feisty Fawn), and I didn't refuse :-)


This update takes some time but goes on smoothly


and after the downloading, the installation of the update starts and when it's finished you can simply reboot into your new system!


I then enjoyed my new kubuntu system! I think I'll keep on using kubuntu (of course, together with debian and gentoo :-) since it really looks like a very good distribution (standing on the shoulders of the giants... but it stands very well!)

Restoring GRUB

Today I had to reinstall windows on a computer (sigh). On the same hard disk there were a Debian and a Gentoo installation too. Of course, reinstalling windows wiped away the grub boot loader (the root of grub is in the Debian installation).

So, in order to restore grub, I started with a Netinst Debian disk and typed rescue at the boot prompt.

This led me to a shell in the root directory of my Debian installation. I then cd to the directory /boot/grub, and entered grub with the command

grub --batch

without the --batch option I got an error complaining about a non supported terminal (bterm).

at the grub prompt I checked that the root directory was actually in /dev/hdb8:

find /boot/grub/stage1

and got the expected answer (hd0,7) (remember that disks and partitions in grub start from 0 and not from 1).

So I set the root for grub

root (hd0,7)

and installed grub on hd0

setup (hd0)

quit grub and reboot... argh... bad surprise: after the message saying that grub was loading, the screen went blank and couldn't load any operating system :-(

I then booted again with the Debian netinst floppy disk. This time I tried to create a grub disk: I cd into /boot/grub and:

dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

then booted with this disk. I then got a grub prompt, and tried to reinstall grub from there (using the same steps above).

It worked!!! :-)

This time my grub menu was back and can boot all the operating systems I have.

Copy / Cut is very flakey in Eclipse 3.2 on Linux (interferences with Klipper)

I was experiencing this problem since I upgraded eclipse to 3.2 under Linux (both Debian and Gentoo): when I select test and copy it or cut it, most of the time not all the selected test is not copied (or cut). With cut you can see that since some part of the selected text is not cut, but with copy you realize it only when you paste and you don't see all the text. See also this bug report.

Similar problems happen when you select a file in the file view and copy it or cut it (in order to move it to a different location): often you get a message box saying that there were problems accessing the clipboard; alternatively, you can get a null pointer exception during pasting the file.

The message saying that there were problems accessing the clipboard made me think that the problem could have been in the KDE panel applet Klipper, the cut and paste history applet. So I tried to remove it from the panel and everything in eclipse worked fine again!

Debian Iceweasel (upgrade to 2.0.0.1+dfsg-3)

The update of Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox), version 2.0.0.1+dfsg-3 seems to be very unfortunate.

First of all, after the update, when running the new version, the import profile wizard came out and after this, a brand new profile of iceweasel came out, just like I'd lost my previous profile.


Fortunately, my previous firefox (or iceweasel) profile was not lost... simply, a new directory (called, indeed, iceweasel) was created under the .mozilla directory.

So, I only had to remove the new iceweasel directory and make a symbolic link, with the same name, to my previous firefox directory.


Some problems, however, still existed: when clicking on an URL from within Thunderbird (well... yes, OK, Icedove in Debian), if a running instance of iceweasel was present, the present error came out:

Iceweasel is already running, but it is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Iceweasel process, or restart your system.

Fortunately, the solution is illustrated in this bug report, and simply consists of changing this line in the file /usr/lib/iceweasel/iceweasel:

APPLICATION_ID=iceweasel

instead of

APPLICATION_ID=firefox

And then, everything worked as it used to do before...

Got rid of FAM (inotify)

I finally got rid of FAM (File Alteration Monitor).

Quoting from http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fam:

FAM provides an API applications can use to be notified when specific files or directories are changed. It is intended to be a more efficient and more useful replacement for alternatives such as the poll and select system calls.
FAM is most useful for tools such as graphical file managers, which should always show the current state of the system, even if another tool is used to modify a file.

The problem with this software was that it sometimes hanged and took all the CPU time.

Luckily, now this mechanism is handled by inotify in the linux kernel itself, so I could uninstall fam. :-)

Debian, Cups & Xerox Phaser (stopped with status 22)

I had previously posted on this blog about this Xerox printer, a Phaser 4500 DT (by using the drivers found on their website). I had solved a problem under Gentoo, but now I've experienced other problems under Debian, after I upgraded these drivers downloaded from Xerox website.

By taking a look at the log /var/log/cups/error_log, I found this line again:

PID xxxx stopped with status 22

This time the problem was with the wrong filter used in the ppd of the printer, in particular this line of XRX_Phaser_4500dx.ppd:

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 pstoxeroxps"

which needs to be changed into

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"

Now everything seems to work :-)