Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
Following a recent family death, I have ended up with the laptop belonging to the deceased and, since it has been offline most of its life, I set to getting it updated. The McAfee security suite was straightforward enough but trying Windows Update produced errors suggesting that it was not working that a system restart was needed. Doing that did nothing so a little further investigation was needed.
The solution turned out to be stopping the Windows Update service and clearing a certain folder before starting it again. To stop the service, I typed in services.msc into the search box on the Start Menu and clicked on the Services entry that appeared. Then I sought out the Windows Update entry, selected it and clicked on the Stop link on the left hand side. After that, I used Windows Explorer to navigate C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and deleted everything in there. The, I went back to the Services window and started Windows Update again. That sorted the problem and the system began to be updated as needed.
All of this was on Windows 7, hence the mention of the Start Menu, and the machine is Toshiba Satellite C660 from 2011 with an AMD E-300 APU, 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive. Those specs may not be the most impressive but it feels spritely enough and is far better than the lethargic Toshiba Equium A200-1VO that I acquired in 2008 though the HP Pavilion dm4 that I bought in November 2011 probably will travel more often than either of these, if truth be told. After all, it now has 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB Samsung SSHD along with its Core i3 CPU so it should last a while yet.
Being ever curious on the technology front, the release of the first build of a Technical Preview of Windows 10 was enough to get me having a look at what was on offer. The furore regarding Windows 8.x added to the interest so I went to the download page to get a 64-bit installation ISO image.
That got installed into a fresh VirtualBox virtual machine and the process worked smoothly to give something not so far removed from Windows 8.1. However, it took until release 4.3.18 of VirtualBox before the Guest additions had caught up with the Windows prototype so I signed up for the Windows Insider program and got a 64-bit ISO image to install the Enterprise preview of Windows 10 into a VMware virtual machine since and that supported full screen display of the preview while VirtualBox caught up with it.
Of course, the most obvious development was the return of the Start Menu and it works exactly as expected too. Initially, the apparent lack of an easy way to disable App panels had me going to Classic Shell for an acceptable Start Menu. It was only later that it dawned on me that unpinning these panels would deliver to me the undistracting result that I wanted.
Another feature that attracted my interest is the new virtual desktop functionality. Here I was expecting something like what I have used on Linux and UNIX. There, each workspace is a distinct desktop with only the applications open in a given workspace showing on a panel in there. Windows does not work that way with all applications visible on the taskbar regardless of what workspace they occupy, which causes clutter. Another deficiency is not having a desktop indicator on the taskbar instead of the Task View button. On Windows 7 and 8.x, I have been a user of VirtuaWin and this still works largely in the way that I expect of it too, except for any application windows that have some persistence associated with them; the Task Manager is an example and I include some security software in the same category too.
Even so, here are some keyboard shortcuts for anyone who wants to take advantage of the Windows 10 virtual desktop feature:
Otherwise, stability is excellent for a preview of a version of Windows that is early on its road to final release. An upgrade to a whole new build went smoothly when initiated following a prompt from the operating system itself. All installed applications were retained and a new taskbar button for notifications made its appearance alongside the existing Action Centre icon. So far, I am unsure what this does and whether the Action Centre button will be replaced in the fullness of time but I am happy to await where things go with this.
All is polished up to now and there is nothing to suggest that Windows 10 will not be to 8.x what 7 was to Vista. The Start Screen has been dispatched after what has proved to be a misadventure on the part of Microsoft. The PC still is with us and touchscreen devices like tablets are augmenting it instead of replacing it for any tasks involving some sort of creation. If anything, we have seen the PC evolve with laptops perhaps becoming more like the Surface Pro, at least when it comes to hybrid devices. However, we are not as happy smudge our PC screens quite like those on phones and tablets so a return to a more keyboard and mouse centred approach for some devices is a welcome one.
What I have here are just a few observations and there is more elsewhere, including a useful article by Ed Bott on ZDNet. All in all, we are early in the process for Windows 10 and, though it looks favourable so far, I will continue to keep an eye on how it progresses. It needs to be less experimental than Windows 8.x and it certainly is less schizophrenic and should not be a major jump for users of Windows 7.
It appears that PROC SGPLOT and other statistical graphics procedures create image files even if you are creating RTF or PDF files. By default, these are PNG files but there are other possibilities. When working with PC SAS , I have seen them written to the current working directory and that could clutter up your folder structure, especially if they are unwanted.
Being unable to track down a setting that controls this behaviour, I resolved to find a way around it by sending the files to the SAS work directory so they are removed when a SAS session is ended. One option is to set the session’s working directory to be the SAS work one and that can be done in SAS code without needing to use the user interface. As a result, you get some automation.
The method is implicit though in that you need to use an X statement to tell the operating system to change folder for you. Here is the line of code that I have used:
x "cd %sysfunc(pathname(work))";
The X statement passes commands to an operating system’s command line and they are enclosed in quotes. %sysfunc then is a macro command that allows certain data step functions or call routines as well as some SCL functions to be executed. An example of the latter is pathname and this resolves library or file references and it is interrogating the location of the SAS work library here so it can be passed to the operating systems cd (change directory) command for processing. This method works on Windows and UNIX so Linux should be covered too, offering a certain amount of automation since you don’t have to specify the location of the SAS work library in every session due to the folder name changing all the while.
Of course, if someone were to tell me of another way to declare the location of the generated PNG files that works with RTF and PDF ODS destinations, then I would be all ears. Even direct output without image file creation would be even better. Until then though, the above will do nicely.
Though I use only the command line to do system updates, I still got system restart messages every time a new kernel version was installed. While they can be helpful, I actually prefer to be left to my own devices when it comes to restarting a system and I may have a something running at the time that I do not wish to interrupt.
In Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 and before, there was no sign of these messages so I decided to see if I could go nag free again. The responsible application is called Update Notifier and I tried seeing if I could remove it but that act has a major impact of the system so it was not a useful way to go.
As it happens, it is an application that starts up automatically at computer boot time but there was no sign of an entry for it in the Startup Applications Preferences screen (started using from the command line using gnome-session-properties). The for this is that there is flag called NoDisplay in the relevant autostart shortcut in /etc/xdg/autostart/ that stops it appearing in the aforementioned settings screen when set to true. The trick then is to set it to false and the following command (broken over two lines for sake of display and quotes could need replacing when you issue the command too) does the trick for all such hidden start-up applications:
sudo sed -i ‘s/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g’
/etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop
What the above does is that sed goes into every file and changes NoDisplay=true to NoDisplay=false in each file with the desktop extension. When that has completed, there are more entries in Startup Applications Preferences and Update Notifier can be deselected in order to stop it starting. Removing the relevant .desktop file would be a more permanent change but this one will do me, especially since no more of those pesky restart messages appear anymore. My regularity when it came to system updates meant that the update messages never appeared anyway and I tend to shut down my system at the end of every day so the updates will be picked up too so all should be well.
There are times when you might need to drop back to a full screen terminal session from a graphical desktop environment when running Linux. One example that I have encountered is the installation of Nvidia’s own graphics drivers on either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Another happened to me on Arch Linux when a Cinnamon desktop environment update left me without the ability to open up a terminal window. Then, the full screen command allowed me to add in an alternative terminal emulator and Tech Drive-in’s list came in handy for this. there might have been something to sort on a FreeBSD installation that needed the same treatment. This latter pair happened to me on sessions running within VirtualBox and that has its own needs when it comes to dropping into a full screen command line session and I will come to that later.
When running Linux on a physical PC, the keyboard shortcuts that you are CTRL + ALT + F1 for entering a full screen terminal session and CTRL + ALT + F7 for returning to the graphical desktop again. When you are running a Linux guest in VirtualBox and the host operating system also is Linux, then the aforementioned shortcuts do not work within the virtual machine but instead affect the host. To get the guest operating system to drop into a full screen terminal session, the keyboard shortcut you need is [Host Key] + F1 and the default host key is the right hand CTRL key on your keyboard unless you have assigned to something else as I have. The exit the full screen terminal session and return to the graphical desktop again, the keyboard shortcut is [Host Key] + F7.
All of this works with GNOME and Cinnamon desktop environments running in X sessions and I cannot vouch for anything else unless alternatives like Wayland come my way. Hopefully, this useful functionality applies to those other set-ups too because there are times when a terminal session is needed to recover from a mishap, rare though those thankfully are and they need to be very rare if not non-existent for most users.
On upgrading from Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 to Ubuntu GNOME 14.04, a few rough edges were to be noticed. One was the display of my chosen background image: it was garbled. Later, I discovered that there is a maximum width of 2560 px for background images in GNOME Shell these days and that things get messy beyond that.
In my case, the image width was around 6000 px and I was used to its getting resized in GNOME Shell 3.8 and its predecessors. It seems that the functionality got removed after that though so the workaround of manual image resizing in the GIMP needed to be employed. Though having big images open in memory creates an additional overhead, not handling them very well at all looks like a bug caused by setting 2560 px as a maximum screen width for the GNOME Shell panel and the complete removal of Nautilus from desktop rendering duties. Let’s hope that sense is seen with ever larger screen sizes and resolutions coming our way.
It’s the sort of thing that did get me looking at adding on Cinnamon 2.2 for a while before setting background image scaling using the indispensable GNOME Tweak Tool was discovered. LinuxG.net has a useful tutorial on this for anyone with such an adventurous streak in them. For now though, I am OK with my set up but the GNOME project’s focus on minimalism could affect us in other ways so I can see why Clem Lefebvre started the Cinnamon one primarily for Linux Mint and the desktop environment is appearing elsewhere too. After all, Gedit lost its menu bar in GNOME 3.12 so it’s just as well that we have alternative choices.
Update 2014-05-06: It seems that the desktop image bug that afflicts GNOME Shell 3.10 got sorted for GNOME Shell 3.12. At least, that is the impression that an Antergos instance in a VirtualBox virtual machine gives me.
When I recently did my usual system update for the stable version Ubuntu GNOME, there were some updates pertaining to apt and the process failed when I executed the following command:
sudo apt-get upgrade
Usefully, some messages were issued and here’s a flavour:
Setting up apt (0.9.9.1~ubuntu3.1) …
ERROR: Can’t find the archive-keyring
Is the ubuntu-keyring package installed?
dpkg: error processing apt (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
apt
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Some searching on the web revealed that the problem was that there were no files in /usr/share/keyring when there should have been and I had not removed them myself so I have no idea how they disappeared. Various remedies were tried and any that needed software installed were non-starters because apt was disabled by the lack of keyring files. The workaround that restored things for me was to take a copy of the files in /usr/share/keyring from an Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 installation in a VirtualBox VM and copy them in to the same location in its Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 host. For those without such resources, I have packaged them in a zip file below. Other remedies like Y PPA also were suggested where I was reading but that software package needed installing beforehand so it was little use to me when the likes of Synaptic were disabled. If there are other remedies that do not involve an operating system re-installation, I would like to know about them too as well as possible causes for the file loss in the first place and how to avoid these.
With my tendency to apply Linux updates using the command, I was happy to see that something similar was possible in FreeBSD too. The first step is to fire up a terminal session and drop into root using the su command. That needs the root superuser password in order to continue and the next step is to update the local repositories using the following command:
pkg update
After that, it is time download updated packages and install these by issuing this command:
pkg upgrade
Most of the time, that is sufficient but I discovered that there are times when the above fails and additional interventions are needed. What I had uncovered were dependency error messages and I set to looking around the web for remedies to this. One forum question that was similar to what I had met with the suggestion of consulting the file called UPDATING in /usr/ports/. An answer like that looks unhelpful but for the inclusion of advice where extra actions were needed. Also, there is a useful article on updating FreeBSD ports that gives more in the way of background knowledge so you understand the more about what needs doing.
Following both that and the UPDATING file resulted in my taking the following sequence of steps. The first act was to download and initialise the Ports Collection, a set of build instructions.
portsnap fetch extract
The above is a one time only action so future updates are done as follows:
portsnap fetch update
With an up to date Ports Collection in place, it was time to install portman:
pkg install portman
A look through /usr/ports/UPDTAING revealed the commands I needed for updating Python and Perl to address the dependency problem that I was having:
portmaster -o devel/py-setuptools27 devel/py-setuptools
portmaster -r py\*setuptools
With those completed, I re-ran pkg update again and all was well. The extra actions needed to get that result will not get forgotten and I am sharing them on here so I know where they are. If anyone else has use for them, that would be even better.
During the latter part of last year, the magazine Linux Format suffered a staff clear-out and I was left wondering why. It was as if a load of folk left at once and, even if I have seen that sort of thing happening at my current place of work, I was asking if something went wrong at Future Publishing.
What had passed me by was that the then staff of Linux Format were working on starting up their own magazine. They then went about crowdfunding the thing on Indiegogo and it only was the appearance of Linux Voice on a shelf in the Macclesfield branch of WHSmith’s that alerted me to what was happening in previous months.
It does sound risky to have an entire bunch of folk from one publisher’s magazine go off on their own and do their own variant of it, especially in these digital days when magazine publishing is not as secure as it once was. The mention of someone being held by no-compete covenant that reminded me of the mindset of where I work for a living. Quite what their old employers must make of it would make interesting reading because mine might be tempted to see me in court if I did something similar, assuming that was a possibility; I too would be bound by a covenant for six months after leaving.
As for the magazine itself, the content is good like it needs to be. There may be the occasional misspelling but articles on OwnCloud and Arch Linux installation would draw my attention along with reviews of Mageia 4 and FreeBSD 10. A lot of the old names from Linux Format appear too so there’s an air of continuity there. The design of the new upstart is less flashy than its longer standing predecessor and it will be interesting to see how they coexist.
It will take time for any new ideas to come to fruition and I wish the new magazine well. Its intentions are good in that half if profits are to go to open source software projects and articles are to be made available to all under a Creative Commons licence. First though, it needs to stay financially viable and the coming months could be interesting. The collective experience of who is behind the magazine should help though and that might stop it becoming like Walking World Ireland and Cycling World, other magazines whose appearance in newsagents is occasional. Having support from an enthusiastic community is a bonus too and there may come a time when I have to decide between Linux Voice and Linux Format as is the case with Linux Magazine and Linux User & Developer. For what is supposed to be a niche operating system, users of Linux are not badly served when it comes to magazines.
When I upgraded to Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 and went for the 64-bit variant, I tried a previously tried and tested approach for installing Nightingale that used a PPA only for it not to work. At that point, the repository had not caught up with the latest Ubuntu release (it has by the time of writing) and other pre-compiled packages would not work either. However, there was one further possibility left and that was downloading a copy of the source code and compiling that. My previous experiences of doing that kind of thing have not been universally positive so it was not my first choice but I gave it a go anyway.
In order to get the source code, I first needed to install Git so I could take a copy from the version controlled repository and the following command added the tool and all its dependencies:
sudo apt-get install git autoconf g++ libgtk2.0-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libtag1-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev zip unzip
With that lot installed, it was time to checkout a copy of the latest source code and I went with the following:
git clone https://github.com/nightingale-media-player/nightingale-hacking.git
The next step was to go into the nightingale-hacking sub-folder and issue the following command:
./build.sh
That should produce a sub-directory named nightingale that contains the compiled executable files. If this exists, it can be copied into /opt. If not, then create a folder named nightingale under /opt using copy the files from ~/nightingale-hacking/compiled/dist into that location. Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 comes with GNOME Shell 3.8, the next step took a little fiddling before it was sorted: adding an icon to application menu or dashboard. This involved adding a file called nightingale.desktop in /usr/share/applications/ with the following contents:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Nightingale
Comment=Play music
TryExec=/opt/nightingale/nightingale
Exec=/opt/nightingale/nightingale
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/nightingale.xpm
Type=Application
X-GNOME-DocPath=nightingale/index.html
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla=Nightingale
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=nightingale
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Component=BugBuddyBugs
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Version=1.1.2
Categories=GNOME;Audio;Music;Player;AudioVideo;
StartupNotify=true
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;
Keywords=Run;
Actions=New
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=nightingale
[Desktop Action New]
Name=Nightingale
Exec=/opt/nightingale/nightingale
OnlyShowIn=Unity
It was created from a copy of another *.desktop file and the categories in there together with the link to the icon were as important as the title and took a little tinkering before all was in place. Also, you may find that /opt/nightingale/chrome/icons/default/default.xpm needs to be become /usr/share/pixmaps/nightingale.xpm using the cp command before your new menu entry gains an icon to go with it. While the steps that I describe here worked for me, there is more information on the Nightingale wiki if you need it.