How I spent my day (Old Blog)

This article is one I wrote nearly ten years ago for my old blog. It was originally written in three parts and explains the origin of may adage "I'd rather work on a ten minute job than a five minute one. A ten minute jobs only takes ten minutes to complete. A five minute job takes a least two hours."

It's interesting to note how terminology and technology have changed in ten years. Flash drives were commonly referred to as "pen drives" and dial-up modems are almost unheard of now. Most of the issues discussed with installing Linux are now non existent - back then you really had to know what you were doing to work with Linux, now Linux is so easy even an MCSE can work with it.

How I spent my day - Part 1 (written March 2004)

I'm afraid I got sucked into it one more time. Despite owning a T-shirt that proudly says "No! I will not fix your computer" I said "yes" in a moment of weakness when my wife asked me to "take a look" at her friends computer.

Fortunately it was relatively new (not like some of the dinosaurs I get): an Athlon 1800 with 256MB ram, Canon i250 printer, an internal modem with an Intel chipset that didn't sound like a winmodem, nVidia chipset, GeForce video adapter and a decent monitor. System was running XP with Norton AV but noticeably WITHOUT any service packs.

"Uh huh" I thought as pictures of dozens of Trojans, spyware and who knows what else passed through my mind. A quick check revealed 60 odd trojans including the Bloodhound trojan. Connecting to the net was almost a waste of time, there was that much outgoing activity it was almost impossible to download anything. Having encountered Bloodhound in a previous life, I knew the best course of action was to admit defeat.

Armed with the futility of going any further I announced I could possibly solve all her problems by installing Linux. What was best was that I go the go-ahead. By this time I was sure I would be out of there in an hour or so.

A quick perusal of the distros at hand led me to the conclusion that SuSE 9.1 personal edition was the way to go. I resized the NTFS partition and installed away! All the devices recognised, however the modem required the intel-536ep package installed. Of course, this meant that I couldn't get on the net to download it. Not a problem. Simply reboot, select "Windows" from GRUB, and boot XP.

Nothing.... Not a sausage.

Houston, we have a problem.

Hmmm. Maybe the problem is with NTFS3? Boot to WinXP in system recovery mode, do a fixboot and fixmbr. Reboot to see if that works.

Nope. Now Linux won't boot either.

Okay, recovery install of XP. Nope. Still doesn't boot. Install XP in a separate directory. Still doesn't boot. Okay, blow away the NTFS partition and install into a FAT32 partition.

Still no dice.

Okay, now I need to save the files on the Linux Reiser partition, but I can't boot Linux. Take out my SuSE liveboot edition and startup. Mount the linux partition - no problem, try to burn the files to CD-R. No dice. CD-R not recognised by Live Boot for some reason. I'm tempted to try knoppix. Instead I break out my pen drive and struggle to mount it. Finally I copy just the critical files over to the pen drive. Takes about 20 mins to delete all the unnecessary garbage so that it will fit.

Now I'm safe. I pull out my killer boot CD and blow away all the partitions. Next I kick off the install of Win2K on a smallish FAT32 partition. At this point I leave with instructions to answer the questions it asks. Frustrated, I make the trip back to my place of work-when-I-feel-like-it to put in an appearance. By now it is nearly 11AM and I look irritated enough for anyone to think twice before asking "where have you been".

During this period of unfettered Internet access, I check out the intel-536ep only to find out to my horror that it is a winmodem, but yes, there are linmodem drivers. I quickly snatch the SuSE RPM and the official intel source and whack it on my Pen drive. After work I pick up the kids and its back for round 2 (complete with the kids for moral support and inane questions).

I arrive to find the owner was stuck on the "Enter your Name" question and the installation of Lose2K had stopped at this point. I continue with the fun only to find that 2K doesn't want a bar of this modem either. No problem, I've got the LinModem drivers. Pull out SuSE 9.1 PE, install. Reboot. Mount Pen drive. Copy user files and the drivers. Uncompress the drivers. RPM the driver.

Nothing again. Check the archive. Requires compilation. Gaaah. SuSE personal edition has no C compiler. I can't connect to the Internet because I have no driver for the modem. I can't install the driver because I need to download the compiler. Maybe I can fool it! Time for some lateral thinking!

Fortunately I have a complete copy of SuSE Server. I copy the server files from 3 of the 4 CD's (never worked out what the 4th CD was for) onto the Linux partition and configured YaST to look for installation files there. Bingo, the C compiler comes up but it is OLDER that the already installed cpp - this means I need to backrev cpp. There are a couple of hundred warnings that I ignore to get the compiler installed.

Unfortunately, now nothing else works. Next plan, boot to Windows, get the modem working, manually download gcc and all dependent files and go from there. Reboot. Select Windows.

Nothing.... Not a sausage. I have this feeling of DejaVu.

In desperation I pull out Fedora Core 2. It never lets me down. Sure it's harder for the end user, but I'm more familiar with it, and right now I couldn't care less how hard it was for the end user. Boot to FC2 install and I get the message "Drive geometry is incorrectly reported on the partition table. This may prevent correct booting for some boot loaders."

No S*** Sherlock.

I kick off a vanilla installation of FC2 and by this time the kids are asking which leg they should eat first. I take my leave with instructions to change the CD's when asked (I'm not hopeful about this). I hurry out before the installation finishes, fill the kids up with Pizza and hurry home.

Back for round 3 tomorrow...

 Round 3...

I decided I couldn't face the machine yesterday, but today being Friday and with nothing more important to do than catch a movie, I decided to spin the Karmic wheel once more and have another crack at the computer. It was an off the cuff decision, so I didn't have my bag of tricks with me. Always a fatal action.

I arrived just as the family was going out to dinner. "Not to worry" they said "we don't mind you staying behind."

A dinner invite was what I really had in mind.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Fedora fully installed and operational - apart from the drivers of course. I quickly concluded that the 13YO son must have stepped in to save his mum.

I plug the pen drive in. Copy the RPMs. Gah. These are precomplied for SuSE. Copy the source over, no problem. Then I remember I kicked off the basic install last time, no development tools.

Okay, I kick off the installation of the development tools. This is when I remember I only left two of the CDs behind. Hopefully it won't ask for CD3. It does. Mongrel!

I drag my 11YO away from the games console and its back home for my bag-of-tricks. I reminisce of the time when I could carry all my precious programs around on 10 x 5.25in double density floppy disks instead of 250 odd CDs.

Back with the offending CD, the installation of the development tools finishes and I compile the intel-536ep LinModem driver. It surprises me by working first time and within 5 minutes I'm on the net. The only problem is that because it is proprietary it spoils the kernel.

Next step the Canon i250 printer. Now I have Internet access it is a breeze to find an official Canon driver for Linux. Things are looking up. I download the driver files (RPMs - great!) try to install and bomb out again. Looking through the Canon documentation - which is quite good once you ignore all their 'we don't support this' clauses - I find dependencies in both the x-development (libpng) tools and Gnome development tools (can't remember which one).

Okay. Now I install the tools which results in swapping between CDs 1,2 & 3 about a hundred times. You think they would have worked this out a little better.

With the development tools installed, both the RPMs install without a hitch. Canon have a quirky method for installing and registering the printer, but hey, they provided the instructions, I may as well follow them. For some reason they insist on restarting the computer. I do that. Restarts fine. Then I'm presented with the login screen.

Hmm. What username did they use? What password? Nobody's here except me, my 11YO fixated by some game he's playing, two pet rats and a cat that thinks my kicking it when it comes near me is a display of affection. I go for the predictable and after a few guesses I get it right. I'm gonna havta talk to them about security; right now I'm happy it's lax.

I do few test printouts. Everything is peachy. I create a launcher icon on the desktop for the Canon Printer tool and for Internet access. It looks good now and is starting to look professional. A couple of more tweaks and my USB pen drive appears on the desktop just by plugging it in. It's actually starting to look better than my own system.

Next I work on getting sound up and running. After agonising over why the left speaker is not playing any sound I realise that the speaker is faulty. A few minutes later and I have Don McLeans "American Pie" blasting out in glorious mono.

Only thing left is the webcam now. Hmmm. Logitech Webcam. A search of the net reveals a driver for it. I download it and try to install. I'm relieved when it doesn't work first go. What's good is the driver is well written and actually tells me why it didn't install. I need to get xawtv. Off to sourceforge and surprise surprise, its level 5 - production/stable. This is a far cry from most of the alpha software I find myself installing.

Of course, it has a dependency too: libjpeg-devel. Now I know I have that one installed, so it's just a linkage problem that is quickly fixed. Running ./configure causes /lib/cpp to fail its sanity check. Why? I don't have a clue. I fiddle some more with it before giving up, after all it's only a webcam. By now it's 9:30PM and I've been there since 5PM (including the trip home and back). So, I leave with everything up and running. I'm hoping they will be grateful.

That web-cam is still bugging me though. By now I've spent about 12 hours on this 5 minute job and I figure maybe just another couple of hours will have it running smoothly. A bit of research here and there. Shouldn't be a problem.

I'll save it for Round 4.....

Round 4: The Final Showdown!
After a few weeks of avoidance, I finally bumped into my wife's friend today who complained she could no longer print for some reason. Since my plans for today had fallen through I agreed to pop around after 2PM.

I rolled up to find the PC sitting there happily logged in. Checked the printer was plugged in. Yep. Tried a test print: spooler error.

Since Fedora Core 3 had recently been released, I decided this just might be my shortcut. I installed FC3 at home and lots of things that had never worked started working (except my Sony Clie hotsink ).

Reboot. Put in the CD, began updating, bombed out on disk 3. Fatal error on zlib, corrupt archive. Reboot, restarted installation, jumps straight to disk 3 (great improvement that) and this time there is no problem. FC3 up and running like a charm. However, in the process the WinModem driver didn't take. I'll have to deal with that later.

Printing still doesn't work, so I uninstall the canon packages and re-install them. The method is a little quirky but very well documented and within 10 minutes I'm prinitng again. The problem comes when I try to print from OpenOfficeOrg. For some reason it starts printing halfway down the page. Hmm. Quick check shows the printer is set to A5 from within OOO. Every time I change it, it shifts back to A5.

I work on this for about 45 minutes before I give up. I tell the user I'll install Abiword. However, when I try it fails on a dependency for libroco. Huh? I know this is installed. After some mucking around I realise it must have something to do with the upgrade to FC3. Originally I installed from the K12LTSP-4.1.0-FC2 CDs which are a modification of the FC2 distro to include LTSP and the K12 packages. Never mind, I 'll brush up on my RPM skills and install abiword manually. Nine dependencies straight up, with the first dependency having three of its own. This is going to take forever.

Instead I pull out an older copy of OOO and install it in a separate directory. Works fine. I place an icon on the desktop with instructions to the user to use THAT one when printing.

Now to the LinModem drivers. One annoying thing about Fedora is that paths to /sbin and /usr/sbin are not standard, which stops many install scripts from working. I export the new path before unpacking the intel-i536 tar file and run the following:

make clear
make 536
make install

Instantly the modem is working again.

Now that webcam is till bothering me from last time. I pick up from there and install xawtv. The install script for this is a thing of beauty. Run './configure' and then 'make'. With xawtv installed, the way is paved for the driver installation. Again the install script './quickcam.sh' is another beautifully written script. Despite a few warnings it was very soon up and running.

Hmmm. I just remembered I forgot to add 'modprobe quickcam' to the init script. Oh well. I guess another visit might be necessary.

Today's efforts took about 4 hours, of which about 1 hour was waiting to swap CDs. Not a bad effort and all of her peripherals are working (which is more than I can say for my PC). So, I came home today quite chuffed and ate my now cold dinner while I contemplated the experience.

Over the last two weeks I have been evaluating linux distributions for two 2nd hand hardware platforms for end users (I intend to distribute 60 of each). I have come to the conclusion that SuSe 9.1 is THE way to go. SuSe 9.2 is way too heavy. Really nice, but you need 256MB RAM minimum. SuSe 9.1 requires 128MB minimum to operate effectively, and while 9.0 will run in 64MB, it is a dog with anything less that 128MB.

FC3 is still lacking in peripheral support, and with Gnome as the default (and only really effective) desktop, it falls short for workstation use. As much as a like Gnome, KDE is beating it left, right and centre. udev is only now supported on FC3.

I tried Xandros and ended up with machines that would boot when they felt like it and freeze the mouse quite often. Occasionally, Xandros reboots for no apparent reason.

Mandrake is, well... Mandrake. The problem with SuSe is that I only have the PE which hamstrings you from doing ANY development work or compilation at all. I would like to try the full version.

I'm starting to wonder if there is a distro out there for me. One that can serve as a great desktop, allows development and can run the services I want.