Fornax is a 6-year old PC running Ubuntu. It wasn’t working properly due to the cooling fan in its power supply unit. Until about two weeks ago, I replaced the old fan. I am not very confident about the replacement because it is a third party part and the replacement isn’t as good as expected, but it works. I have to shut it down every night before going to bed.

So, the last thing before I go to bed is to backup the svn directory and then shutdown the server. I am quite fed up with this extra manual works. Last night, before going to bed, I decided to automate this process. And I did it this morning.

I wrote a simple bash shell script to do the backup. I cron it so that the process will start automatically at 2300 hours and then shutdown.

#!/bin/bash

BACKUPFILE=/tmp/backups/svn-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz

rm /tmp/backups/svn-*.gz
tar -cj /svn > $BACKUPFILE
for COMPUTER in host1 host2
do
   scp $BACKUPFILE user@$COMPUTER:Desktop/
done
/sbin/shutdown -h +5

UPDATE (05/10/2009): I setup a password-less ssh login so that no password is required for scp (secured copy). Now, after the backup, the backup file will be copied automatically to two other computers for safe keeping.

Will Sun set and never rise again? Here is my encounter of the hot Sunny affair.

In October 2006, I installed Solaris 10 on an Intel box code-named, Pyxis1 (I love to name my computers after the name of a planet, a star or a constellation). The installation was successful but I could not get it to configured to work correctly. Some of the configuration would disappear every time I restarted the server. I could not find the reasons and I was on tight schedule to get the server up and running. I replaced Solaris 10 with Debian and eventually with Ubuntu. Read the story here.

Solaris 10, in my opinion, is by far a better and more robust operating system than Linux. The fallback was the lack of installation information on older machines. That’s the bottom line of the configuration problem I had three years ago.

Last May, I began the virtualization of my MacBook and I had Ubuntu installed and ran parallel with Mac OS X. I tried to install Solaris 10 on VMware Fusion. Installation was successful but I never got it to boot after the installation. Again, I gave up and went on with Ubuntu.

On Sunday, I upgraded VMware Fusion 1.1.3 to 2.0.2 and read about successful installation of OpenSolaris on Mac. I decided to give it another try.

OpenSolaris is a community-driven open source version of Solaris. Solaris is a proprietary UNIX operating system by Sun Microsystems. Sun plays an active role in open source software such as OpenOffice, MySQL and OpenSolaris.

VMware Fusion 2.x has many major improvements. One obvious change is the Virtual Machine Library window. It shows you the snapshots of your virtual machines.

The Virtual Machine Library window showing the snapshots of OpenSolaris and Windows XP

Ok, ok. I have a Windows XP installed. For those who know I have ditched all Windows since 1998, I have some inevitable reasons. First, I need it to support my clients on some hardware and software configurations. Second, I needed it to support my Garmin GPS device. And thirdly, I need it for some non-appealing reasons. I have it installed to avoid having the need to hunt for a Windows desktop for some petty simple jobs. I used the Windows virtual machine under 10 times since last May. Simple put it, I just need it to get some simple jobs done, otherwise it is just a piece of shit occupying 5GB of disk space on my MacBook.

Installation of OpenSolaris was quite pleasant and simple (although it took about half hour). During the installation, I was surprised to learn that OpenSolaris has something called Time Slider which is an automated backup software similar to Apple’s Time Machine.

My hardware configuration:

1. MacBook White, 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2. 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
3. 160GB hard disk
4. Mac OS X 10.5.6

My virtual machine configuration:

1. VMware Fusion 2.0.2
2. 2 virtual CPU, 720MB RAM
3. 15GB hard disk space

Installation screen showing Time Slider

I will never need Time Slider on my Mac Book but I may need it after I switch from Ubuntu to OpenSolaris on Pyxis1. Until then, I am unable to tell if Time Slider is as good as Time Machine.

There are a few patches and manual installation after the first boot to solve some problems:

1. The sound is not working.
2. No networking (you may not experience this).
3. The Apple’s menu bar is not appearing when virtual machine is running in full screen mode.
4. Need some packages from OpenSolaris repository in order to get the Ada compiler working (for Ada programmers only).

OpenSolaris running at full screen on MacBook White.

First thing after restarting from installation is to install VMware Tools. At window mode, click on the Virtual Machine menu bar and select Install VMware Tools. A CD icon will appear on the OpenSolaris desktop. Open it and copy the zipped file to the desktop then extract and follow the steps below:

# cd Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl

OpenSolaris virtual machine running in window mode

After installing VMware Tools, you will be able to access to Mac OS X menu bar when virtual machine is running full screen mode. Move the mouse pointer to top of the screen and the menu bar will drop down.

If the two networking icons on the top right do not show green badge as in the screenshot below, then make sure your Virtual Machine Network Settings is connected and set to NAT (share the Mac’s network connection). The network should also work in Bridged mode. Also make sure the OpenSolaris network interface is connected to e1000g0 and is active.

Two networking status icons with green badge

Otherwise, click on System > Administration > Network to set it to auto configure. Your network should be up and running. 

Next is to activate the sound. Download OSS (Open Sound System) driver at http://4front-tech.com/download.cgi and install it as follow:

# pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.0-123-i386.pkg
# osstest

After the installation, run osstest to test the sound system. You will hear a tune playing on your speakers. You may need to reboot your system to allow the driver to properly load.

There are a few more packages to be downloaded and installed from OpenSolaris.org repository. To install gcc4ada from BlastWave, you will need SUNWgnu-libiconv and SUNWarc. Start Package Manager to download and install them from OpenSolaris repository. If you need source code management, you will need SUNWsvn as well.

The OpenSolaris repository does not have Ada compiler (gccada) and only supports gcc 3.4.3. You will have to install Ada compiler from another repository at Blastwave.

To download and install software packages from Blastwave, you need pkgutil. Download and install pkgutil and other necessary packages by following the instruction at Blastwave site. You can obtain a list of software packages that you need from Blastwave. After installing pkgutil, you may want to include /opt/csw/bin to your path.

If you need an Ada 2005 compiler, then download and install gcc4ada:

# pkgutil --install gcc4ada

Include /opt/csw/gcc/bin to your path and the Ada compiler is ready. I checked out a project from my svn repository and compiled. Viola! I am happy with the performance which I find is better than Ubuntu and any other Linux distros. One drawback of OpenSolaris or Solaris is the limited software packages. There are more than a thousand ready-built software packages to download in every Linux distros. That means you will have to build some of the software you need on Solaris (and OpenSolaris).

I removed and re-installed OpenSolaris yesterday after I found some broken links due to not following the instructions correctly. Always read installation instructions from various sources carefully before installing. I find the trouble is worthy otherwise I will not have a clear summarized steps to write about here.

With the recent IBM’s announcement to acquire Sun Microsystems, I hope Sun will not be cannibalized after the acquisition. And I hope that Sun is not setting but if it must, it will rise again. OpenSolaris and UltraSPARC processors are one of the leading technologies available.

I hope to find time on a weekend to install OpenSolaris on the Sun Blade 100. It is still running Solaris 9 since 2003.

I searched all the Subversion and Ubuntu forums but could not find any solution to my problem. In the past months, I tried to identify the source of the problem and even tried many solutions suggested by people on these forums but the problem persisted. I had been committing to svn server with post commit email notification turned off and lost quite a number of post commit message. I used to keep track of changes by these email notification.

Yesterdat, I was trying my luck again and I accidentally noticed sendmail and sendmail-mta were called after commit. A look into syslog confirmed that sendmail process was put into sleep by some unknown reason. Failing to identify the cause, I removed sendmail and related packages from my Ubuntu server and installed Exim4. It is claimed to be easier to installed and configured than sendmail. The problem diminished after I got exim4 up and running. Now I am able to receive post commit email notification after every svn commit. Every commit takes a few seconds to complete after this. Problem resolved.

I have been working on some documentation, new and converting existing from Lyx to DocBook. With DocBook, I am able to publish the contents easily to many formats, namely TEX, text, pdf or HTML. I had been trying to output some of my DocBook documentation to HTML.

This afternoon, I have finally succeeded to publish to HTML. I installed some DocBook packages on Ubuntu. Here are the packages you need to get DocBook going:

1. docbook
2. docbook-xsl
3. docbook-xsl-doc
4. docbook-xsl-doc-html
5. docbook-xsl-doc-pdf
6. docbook-xsl-doc-text
7. xsltproc
8. and optional xalan and fop

To output your DocBook document to HTML, simply this:

$ xsltproc --output paper.html \
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl\
paper.xml

You can turn on chapter and section numbering by setting chapter.autolabel to 1 and section.autolabel to 1. To include the chapter number in every sections, set section.label.includes.component.label to 1.

$ xsltproc --output paper.html \
--stringparam section.autolabel 1 \
--stringparam section.label.includes.component.label 1 \
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl \
paper.xml

I am working on a web-enabled application developed with AWS (Ada Web Server). This application is developed on Mac OS X. Building and testing on mac OS X has no problem at all. To compile the source on Ubuntu, I need AWS. So, I tried to install AWS packages from Ubuntu but found only broken dependencies. Then I decided to build one myself. The build has failed because the gnat (Ada compiler) from Ubuntu is 4.2. It lacks two Ada packages, a-calfor.ad[sb] (Ada.Calendar.Formatting) and a-catizo.ad[sb] (Ada.Calendar.Time_Zones). AWS depends on these to build.

I posted to comp.lang.ada and AWS list. It looks like I have no choice but to bootstrap gnat-4.3 myself or install from Ubuntu Intrepid or wait for the next Ubuntu release of gnat-4.3.

My Mac Book sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz with 2GB RAM and 160GB hard drive. I am too skeptical to have 2 physical partitions on my hard drive. Thanks to VMWare Fusion, I can create virtual partition with it. After I have installed VMware Fusion 1.1.1, I created a Ubuntu-64-bit virtual partition and installed Ubuntu from the ISO disk image. With VMware Fusion, I can install directly from the disk image without having to burn a CD or DVD.

Since my Mac Book is codenamed Uranus, I called my Ubuntu on Mac Book, Uranus-Zeta. The idea is from the ζ-ring of Uranus

Like Linux, Mac OS X is a UNIX like operating system. Why do I need Linux? Well, there are a number of reasons. One being you can and another to learn new things. But these are not the reasons to motivate me. Being a software developer developing cross-platform software, I do tests on multiple platforms. Having Linux to run on my MacBook means I can develop and test my software on both Mac OS X and Linux environment without switching to my Linux/Solaris boxes. Another important reason is that I see the needs to support my clients on Linux arise and soon Solaris. Having the ability to run three different operating systems on one machine can be productive and versatile for me.

The other obvious reason is that I have a Core 2 Duo. Meaning I am having two 64-bit CPUs in one processor. It will be a waste of resources if I don’t utilize the computing power I already have. Assigning each CPU to run different operating systems and tasks is called virtualization.

With VMware Fusion, I can run Linux and Solaris side-by-side with Mac OS X without the need to boot into anyone of them at one time. This is a great feature when supporting clients in Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris.

Here are some screen shots (click to enlarge) of Uranus-Zeta:

The system was developed using Ada, AWS (Ada Web Server) with a little of PHP and Perl. The system deploys a MySQL database running on Linux. The system is hooked up to air-borne SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) for real-time acquisition of landscaping information in snow hazard affected area to help assessing the damage of rail ways, roads, housing and forest. The Chinese army engineering company was dispatched by the system to areas in need of assistance.

I have yet to receive further details of how the system works and probably will not. Anyway, that shows the Chinese ability and responsiveness in dealing with natural disaster. Hail China!

The problem lies within Apple’s new X11 in Leopard. The keyboard is not properly mapped after establishing the X tunnel. After searching the web and Ubuntu forum, I found a solution:

% ssh -X username@gutsy
% xmodmap -pke > ~/.keymap
% gnome-panel 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null & xmodmap ~/.keymap

Just do xmodmap map once will do. After that, ssh into Ubuntu and invoke gnome-panel.

Lets look forward to this April for the release.

This morning, I hacked some codes to provide a rather informative post commit email notification. All are done except the check in will stall. It takes a long time (and possibly hang!). I have yet to fully test before I begin my development project again.

The upgrade was smooth and without any problems except it broke my scim. I have exhausted the search on Internet for a fix but was disappointed. So, I tried to experiment with a few methods based on the information I had on the Internet and came up a work around for this problem.

Referring to my Chinese Input HOWTO here, I assume you have installed scim in Feisty Fawn (7.04) and later upgraded to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10).

1. Goto System -> Preference -> Sessions. Delete the “Input Method” as created in my previous HOWTO.
2. Uninstall and install again scim and all suggested packages.
3. Click on menu: System -> Preferences ->Sessions
   • Click Startup Program Tab then [New] button.
   • Name: Input Methods
   • Command: scim -d
   • Click [OK] button
4. Logout and login again.
5. Go to System -> Administration -> Language Support
   • Select your language(s) support. In my case, Chinese and Japanese.
   • Check the box at the bottom, Input Method, to activate complex characters input. Apply, uncheck it, apply and check again and apply then quit.
   • Restart Language Support to make sure the box is checked.
6. Logout and restart your system.
7. Login and launch any application, e.g. gedit or Terminal. Right click and select “Input Method” and check “SCIM Input Method”.
8. Now click on the “Input Method” tray icon on the top left of your screen to choose your desired language support and input method.

Now, you should be able to switch input method in some applications such as Terminal or gedit. It still does not work on every applications such as Open Office. To activate scim for every applications, use the command line (or Terminal):

1. Check your locale:

   
   $ locale | grep LANG=
   
   

   The answer would be something like below, which is in my case:

   
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   

2. Now, with the following command, insall scim-qtimm and tell your system you want to use scim for your input method in your locale:

   
   $ sudo apt-get install scim-qtimm
   $ im-switch -z en_US -s scim
   
   

3. Logout and login again and start Open Office. You should now able to select your input method in every applications.

This should also work (with instructions from my previous post here) if you have a fresh installation of Gutsy Gibbon. Please let me know if this works for you.

1. Install the following packages:
   • scim
   • scim-chinese
   • scim-config-socket
   • scim-frontend-socket
   • scim-gtk2-immodule
   • scim-server-socket
   • scim-tables-zh (option)
   • xfonts-intl-chinese
   • xfonts-intl-chinese-big
   • ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp
   • ttf-arphic-gkai00mp
   • ttf-arphic-bkai00mp
   • ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp
2. Click on menu: System -> Preferences ->Sessions
   • Click Startup Program Tab then [New] button.
   • Name: Input Methods
   • Command: scim -d
   • Click [OK] button
3. Logout and login again.
4. You will see a new icon on the top right menu bar.
5. Right click and select ¨SCIM¨ setup and activate languag/input support you need.
6. Left click to choose desired input method.

Unlike many other Linux favor such as Caldera (now SCO), SuSE, RedHat; it has come out of competition neatly. Based on Debian, it has a better packaging of software packages which makes installation and upgrading software components very easily and almost without hassle. The only hassle I see is when downloading some large files during a slow connection or heavy Internet traffic.

The auto-upgrade is the feature I like most in Ubuntu. It works seamlessly and the new software components are well tested before the release. I had had my system corrupted when I was using SuSE and not so long ago on FC5 (Fedora Core). Causing a lot of valuable data and time. What can I say? So far, so good!

The software update is also very frequent. This always keep my system up to date with the latest release of Ubuntu’s software components. Well done!

The other neat feature is the easy activation of SCIM, a Smart Common Input Method for all Unix-like OS for inputing complex character sets like Chinese and Japanese. This gives me another platform of choice when updating my blog and other websites (blogs) with Chinese and Japanese characters. I will write about how to activating SCIM later.

I hope Ubuntu will be the Linux for my secondary working platform.

Today, after some months, reinstalled fornax again with Ubuntu 7.04, code named Feisty Fawn. The UI is even more superb than Debian. Everything has been nicely done and packaged. To my surprised, I can run KDE applications from Gnome’s menu. This could not be done in Debian and some other Linux. How nice!

As the matter of fact, I did not like Gnome very much because KDE applications would not appear in Gome’s menu. Ubuntu has changed my perceptual experience about Gnome and once again Linux!

I find Ubuntu has more human touch than any other Linux distros. I also find that Ubuntu is very closely competitive with Mac OS X!

Really, I have download Ubuntu’s alternate install CD in June but I had never had a good reason to install Ubuntu over Debian. This morning, I had to install and configure many software, for instance, Subversion, apache and many other software development tools; it gave me a good reason to install Ubuntu. Not because Debian did not have all these software packages (Ubuntu is based on Debian), it was because I had to do most of the tasks which were almost like installing a fresh system.

Ubuntu’s installation is easier than Debian and faster. I had it up and running in less than 20 minutes!

Now, fornax has once again become my Linux development platform as well as SCM (Source Code Management) server. Oh! I run ktorrent for downloading movies as well. It really flies and sucking all the bandwidth. I have to stopped ktorrent whenever I want to work on Internet.

Sed is the ultimate stream editor. If that sounds strange, picture a stream flowing through a pipe. Okay, you can’t see a stream if it’s inside a pipe. That’s what I get for attempting a flowing analogy. You want literature, read James Joyce.

Anyhow, sed is a marvelous utility. Unfortunately, most people never learn its real power. The language is very simple, but the documentation is terrible. The Solaris on-line manual pages for sed are five pages long, and two of those pages describe the 34 different errors you can get. A program that spends as much space documenting the errors than it does documenting the language has a serious learning curve.

You can read more about Sed here.

My project uses a thick binding of PostgreSQL/MySQL called APQ. APQ is a project by Warren and I helped to host it at my server. See my post here. The configure and make process are not really stable which I think is due to various version of MySQL and the Linux tools such as sed.

To build APQ, first, two MySQL include files, errmsg.h and mysqld_error.h need to be parsed. These files contain MySQL error codes and they need to be parsed and translated into Ada syntax. This translated Ada code will be inserted into apq_mysql.ads.

However, this parsing and translation process are not working correctly as they supposed to be. When I look into this problem, I found a peculiar abnormality. The parser uses sed. When I built APQ on Mac OS X, FC5 and Solaris (Intel), the result in apq_mysql.ads is not consistent on these different OS.

After I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.9, the parser refused to work with some error messages which I think caused by sed. I was mingling with the configure script until this hour. Suddenly, something struck my mind. Why do I need to mingle with configure? The problem is the parsing and it deserves the highest priority. The build configuration does not perform a thorough check of the environment but it still works fine at this point. So, I moved my priority to write a parser in Ada to solve the parsing problem. This light shed on me at this whee hour in the morning and I was really too tire to continue working on the parser.

I had been SUSE’s fan but I started to deviate after it was bought over by Novell. Since then, I found their products lagging. Many packages in SUSE distro were outdated, the online update would break the stability and etc. I moved to Fedora and it was not better than SUSE in the online update. Again, FC5 broke the stability and usability of my system. I had even downloaded FC6 but never installed on my system. Why? Because I am quite happy with Sun’s Solaris 10.

The reasons I moved away from Linux are:

1. the maintenance of software packages is tedious and sometimes mind-bogging, fearing the new software packages would break some dependencies or functionalities of the system or some application software.
2. the update of kernel is troublesome, so getting some devices to work on a distro is very much dependent to the kernel installed. Updating to a new kernel may break system integrity, sometimes.
3. The UI of the graphical desktop is never as good as Mac OS X! and it is also very difficult to keep abreast with the latest releases.
4. Software configuration on many distros are different. For example, some distro uses /var/www as the root directory of Apache, some uses /svr/www.

I love the way Mac OS X handles things. They are standardized among many of its own releases. Mac OS X has a clean cut in system administration.

Now I am having the urge to download OpenSUSE for a try. I hope OpenSUSE will resurrect my faith for Linux.

With today’s availability of powerful microprocessor such as AMD and Intel 64-bit processor, SGI’s hardware has become too expensive too invest and maintain. Another reason is the difficulty to find tools such as gnat Ada compiler. The download site usually provides out of date version that makes maintaining the consistency of compiler versions across other platforms difficult.

This decision should have been made long time ago. A lot of time and resources had been wasted in maintaining existing software and development of new applications. Our clients’ decisions to migrate to Opteron and Mac OS X based platforms have also contributed to this decision. We expect zero or next to zero porting problem because we are using portable technologies such as Ada, GTK+, GtkAda and OpenGL. This decision enables our development to focus on both Opteron (Solaris and Linux) and Mac OS X platforms.

Firefox 2 has made web browsing easier and delivered best online experience. On Mac, I use both Safari and Firefox for my browsing. Unfortunately, Safari is not really working together with WordPress. For example, I lose all the editing functions when I write my post. The editing functions panel is not displayed in Safari. In the contrary, Firefox 2 displays the editing functions panel and I am able to access these functions by clicking on the icons. Firefox 2 allows me to easily write my posts.

I have not been using any Microsoft products since I completely ditched Microsoft in 1998. The only product that I had on my Mac was IE, Microsoft’s web browser. In terms of performance, speed and security, IE really sucks. I have deleted IE on my Macs and replaced with Firefox.

Mozilla makes improvements to the user interface, security tools and options for customization, combine to deliver rich, engaging, safer and more productive web browsing experience for all.

One feature I like most in Firefox is its ability to view background image and page info. These are valuable tools for web development. Another feature I use most is displaying my browsing history in the sidebar which allows me to browse my history side-by-side with web pages.

Tabbed browsing has become a de facto standard feature in most modern web browser. Mozilla has changed the user interface of tab and allowed moving tab to any position you like so that you can arrange the pages you are browsing according to your priority. Another plus for Firefox 2 which makes web browsing more productive. Apple’s Safari does not allow moving the tab.

Another good selling point of Firefox 2 over Apple’s Safari is the built-in spell checker in input fields. Firefox 2 will underline misspelling inline and is very useful for blogging. With Firefox’s built-in spell checker, there is absolutely no necessity to install additional plugins for blogging tools such as WordPress.

Although Apple’s Safari is also a nice web browser, it still needs some patch up to be on par with Firefox 2. The only best feature in Safari is its excellent support of international character encoding. Apple has done a great job not only in Safari but in Mac OS X and applications as the whole.

So much on the features that I like most and often use. I will let you to discover Firefox 2 yourselves.

My laziness and desire to start up applications and finish the job quickly makes me look further into the world of remote access. This leads me to X tunneling over SSH.

With X tunneling over SSH, I am able to run X applications (Linux FC5) on my preferred Mac OS X desktop, Pluto. The screenshot shows that I am running KDE Control Center (Linux FC5 on triton1) on Pluto (Mac OS X).

This is how I do it:

1. ForwardX11 needs to be enable. Edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config. Make sure you have ForwardX11Trusted yes is enabled in ssh_config.
2. On Mac OS X, start X11. At terminal, type

   $ ssh -X username@ip_address
   

3. Start any X applications you like.

Remote Desktop Login has been out there for some time ago. I did not try it. Remote Desktop Control has been useful for me occasionally. I had a bad experience with RDC when my Linux server crashed in early September. I was RDC from my SPARC/Solaris workstation. I stopped using RDC since then.

One drawback about RDC is that I have to login before I can access the desktop remotely.

Because of my eye condition, I feel lazy to switch between keyboards and mice and running from one room to another. I decided to check out Remote Desktop Login. It took me a while to understand. But after I tried it out, it was pretty easy though.

Here’s how I do it to login to SPARC/Solaris. Launch X11 from Mac OS X then

$ xhost +ip_address
$ Xnest :1 -query ip_address -geometry 1280x1024

According to some documentation, it is required to configure gdm on Linux boxes. I used the following to configure FC 5 (Fedora Core 5) box:

1. Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf
2. Add RemoteGreeter=/usr/libexec/gdmlogin to [daemon] segment
3. Under [xdmcp] segment, change the line Enable=false to Enable=true
4. Restart gdm

With Remote Desktop Login, I don’t have to login before I remotely access the PC. It has also save me some money for investing in a KVM switch. I was thinking about hooking up some of my computers with a KVM switch. It will still be a mess with all the cables despite of its pricy tag. Remote Desktop Login is the best method for me at this moment. It allow me to become lazier because I no longer need to login at computers which I want access. I can login remotely, simple!

I ran Ark to open a tar.gz file for preview via RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) from Pyxis2. Suddenly, Pyxis1 hung. I could not regain control at Pyxis1 and I forced a power down and reboot. The grub prompt showed up. I knew great problem just knocked on my door.

After trying to boot with grub commands:

grub> kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 1
grub> initrd (hd0,0)/initrd
grub> boot

An error said that it could be hard disk failure. I ran badblocks to check the hard disk and it spat out block numbers that were affected. Here go my data in the server.

I have the data backup to my iBook. They are in the iBook hard disk. I will have to protect the hard disk like a precious gemstone now. Otherwise, HUGE trouble will be.

Last night while I was surfing at Apple’s website, I found GIMPShop. I was very excited and quickly downloaded and installed it.

GIMPShop is a free Open Source image editor that is similar to the popular Adobe Photoshop. Specifically GIMPShop is a version of the GIMP that has been edited to be more user-friendly for Photoshop users.

GIMPShop was created by Attack of the Show’s Scott Moschella. The menu structure and terminology are adapted to to look and feel more like Photoshop, and other adjustments were made to make the GIMP more usable. In the Windows version, the Deweirdifyer Plugin has been used to place all of the various windows into one nesting window, so it will act more like a single program that multiple little programs.. Also the menu structure and terminology are adapted to to look and feel more like Photoshop.

GIMPShop was orginally developed for Mac OS X, but has been ported to Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

It is like meeting an old friend after a long time. I feel more at home with graphics now (I am not very good at graphics, but I will do some very basics graphics at times). I think it’s time for me to ditch PhotoStudio!

It was one of the fastest PC 2 years ago. Now, it is ancient. It is hard to find a replacement motherboard that supports Athlon XP 3000+.

Perhaps, I should get a dual G5 PowerMac. But it is very expensive.

Over the years of using Linux and Mac OS X, I have fallen in love with Mac OS X for its ease of use and configuration. I am using it for my email, web browsing, photos, music, software development and almost everything on my Mac. But I am still running Linux boxes at home for servers and software development. Linux is my second preferred OS.

The problem with Linux is the many different distro. Every distro has their own way to implement things although they work the same. There are no standard defined methods of doing things among these distro company.

In 2002, United Linux was announced. It was an attempt to create a common base distro but it ended in 2004.

One significant advantage of Apple is that it works straight out of the box.