Clean Install of Ubuntu 9.10

Erika’s laptop on the other hand is not taking the update well at all. Video is very slow and the touchpad decided to stop working. After messing around with it a little I have decided to just backup her home dir and do a clean install. If it still has issues once I test out the live cd for 9.10 I will just go back to 9.04 on her laptop for now. I am just glad she only has a 3gig home dir. :)

arrakis_screenshot-10092009

You can get the wallpaper below.

kurt_cobain-1440x900

Arrakis Screenshot Sept 22, 2009

Part of the reason I stopped playing around with my Stamp II after school was the lack of Linux support for it at the time. I have since pulled it out of a dust box this evening and am happy to say it still works. Below are the steps I took to actually getting a working environment for it on my Thinkpad T61 running Ubuntu 9.04.

First as with most modern computers of today I don’t seem to have a serial port on my laptop. I picked up a cheap $14 usb to serial cable at the local computer shop. And went to work getting it working in linux.

Plug in your new usb to serial cable and open up a terminal window.

Type lsusb

You should see something along the lines of what is below. I have highlighted the important part. Please note that your brand of usb to serial cable will prob say something completely different, but it should be labeled well enough to let you know what it is.

Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0483:2016 SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2110 Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth Controller
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 046d:c50e Logitech, Inc. MX-1000 Cordless Mouse Receiver
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05af:0802 Jing-Mold Enterprise Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04b3:4485 IBM Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Next we need to find out where the device is located on the sysem. To do this type the below command in the terminal:

dmesg

Some where near the bottom of the mass amounts of output should be something like this. Again I have highlighted the important section. The info we actually want is the ttyUSB0

[ 64.937214] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[ 69.252073] usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 69.411191] usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 69.454660] USB Serial support registered for pl2303
[ 69.454690] pl2303 4-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
[ 69.466202] usb 4-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 69.466215] usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
[ 69.466217] pl2303: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver

We now have a working usb to serial interface and need to find some software to write some sample code in and test transferring the code over to the Stamp II.

You can get the packages we will need at Parallaxs website under the downloads section here.

The Two files we are looking for are PBASIC Editor for Linux part 1 and part 2. Part 1 is pbcompiler.tgz and Part 2 has the library files we will need to communicate. Download and extract both these files in your home directory.

tar -zxvf pbcompiler.tgz

tar -zxvf lib.tgz

Next we need to move a file over to another location of the system.

cd lib

sudo cp * /usr/lib

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libborqt-6.9.0-qt2.3.so /usr/lib/libborqt-6.9-qt2.3.so

Lastly we need to tell the software about the location of the serial port. In the directory PBcompiler/bin/ is a file called config.dat. Open this file in your favorite text editor and change the line.

/dev/ttyS0

to

/dev/The_device_found_above

In my case I would replace the /dev/ttyS0 with /dev/ttyUSB0 which I found when running the dmesg command earlier. Save the file and we are now ready to run the program.

For some reason one of the Bugs in the release notes of the program is that it will not run from console and you need to run it from in gnome or kde. So fire up Nautilus and goto PBcompiler/bin/ Double click on the PBasic Application and start coding.

arrakis-screenshot-06212009

Arrakis Screen Shot May 31st 2009

I used a install of Ubuntu 9.04 to actually do this process, but most any install
should be fine provided the needed packages are available in your repository.

First you are going to need to install a few programs.

apt-get install convlit txt2pdbdoc w3m

convlit will install clit (A lit decoder with a interesting name).
txt2pdbdoc will actually allow us to encode the txt file to pdb format.
w3m will be used to strip the html content from the file output by clit.

For this example lets say the book we want to convert is called book1.lit

First we are going to have to decode the lit file to html

clit book1.lit book1/

This will convert the file book1.lit to html inside a directory called book1 in the
current working directory.

Next we have to strip out the html of that file.

cd book1/
w3m book1.htm > book1.txt

Now we have a completely stripped txt version of the book. The last step to get this
into a pdb format is to run it through txt2pdbdoc.

txt2pdbdoc Book1 book1.txt book1.pdb

You now have a nice pdb file you can copy on your palm.

If you are willing to spend some extra time you may want to markup the txt file
before you convert it to a pdb. You can check out some of the markup lang via this link

Alltray is a handy little application that will allow you to take any application and put it in the system tray area of your gnome panel. By default it is added to the menu under Accessories -> Alltray.

Starting the program will just pop up a little dialog area like below:

Clicking on any open application will move it to the system tray. You can see what I mean here with firefox.

I tend to use this for pan most of the time, but did not want to have to do this every time I started pan.

A min or two of poking in the command line switches of the alltray application let me create a startup session in gnome to start pan in the tray on boot up.

alltray –skip-taskbar pan

Replace the command pan with an application you chose and put it in your gnome startup session.