I'm not lying, I promise. Adobe has announced an x86_64 version of their adobe flash player. I unistalled that latest 10.0 32bit version along with nspluginwrapper, and downloaded the v10 alpha. The install was a simple copying it into ~/.mozilla/pugins, and it works.

Two initial findings I have, are dropdown menus are now popping up in front of the flash banner, instead of behind. Which is amazingly great. And the second is cpu usage. So far, listening to pandora is quite a bit lower, probalby b/c it was going through nspluginwrapper, but I notice about 4 - 5% difference in CPU. Can't wait to check out more flash streams that I've noticed cause some high cpu load.

For links to download and a chance to read up a bit about the release, check out the SWF Penguin's blog (one of the developers for linux flash)

I know, I missed these release by about 2 months, but better late then never, right? Anyways. Zabbix 1.6 was released. I've been watching this product since the 1.1 release, and they keep making it better. For those that don't know, Zabbix is a monitoring solution. It uses agents and SNMP to collect information and provide a nice interface to view it all. It is actually pretty robust as it is a distrbuted monitoring solution, which can make for some nice scalability through larger enterprise networks.

The last version I used was 1.4 and it was at my old job. I've been watching the development of 1.6, they have added a lot of improvements and features. I can't wait to get my hands on this release to see what it can do. If are looking for a monitoring solution, I highly recommend Zabbix.

Yep, you read the title right, and no this blog isn't becoming an advertising site, just so happens this post and the last are right after one another.

Codeweavers has created a challenge and that challenge has been met. Gas in the Twin Cities as returned to where it was a year ago, at $2.79 per gallon, after being up to $3.79. I guess I will tell them that the avg gas here in Ft. Worth, TX is $2.25 right now, with some suburbs having gas wars between Exxon and QT and seeing the price below $1.95 per gallon. But that is another story I guess.

So for today only, you can go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and get your free serial number for their software. You have to register it before it is any good, and because of the increase of traffic today, their servers have died. Not literally, but they are done, and all their sites are now just plain text. You can get your serial number today only, but they are allow you to register it tomorrow also because of the down time.

For those that don't know CodeWeavers Crossover Office is a product based on the open source application Wine. You aren't paying for Wine itself, but yet the support and tweaks CodeWeaver's has done to the package to help it run your favorite Windows applications. It can run Quicken, Powerpoint, Excel, even some version of Access. With CrossOver Games, you can run your favorite games also. This product isn't just for Linux, but for the Mac also.

So go get, try it out, and hell, if you like it this publicity stunt might of paid of big time as you will likely want upgrades after your subscription is out.

Just got down spending about 3 hours trying to get a simple gallery page to render the same across multiple browsers. It is crazy trying to get all browsers to work. I think we are dropping IE6 and FF2 from strict compatibility tests. As long as the data is rendered, we are calling that good. But that still leaves, FF3, IE7, Opera, Safari and Chrome. And we have IE8 around the corner, which will initialy just be a render data in a readable format.

The issue we are having is inside Webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, Midori, and many others). The have our CMS applying a wrapper to a basic php gallery page. This page uses jquery and galleria to handle the image transitions and such using ajax. Works great on the browsers by itself, and after a bit of CSS work for IE7 works great on that and FF3. But once done, Safari and Chrom wouldn't display the ajax content when the page is loaded directly. Hitting refresh though, the ajax / javascript engine inside these browsers decides to work, and everything works great. It is the craziest shit I've ever seen. Nothing changing besides hitting refresh.

Which brings on to my biggest compliant, UI design sucks. It isn't even for Web Design, but designing applications to work on a variety of interfaces is going to cause problems. Windows has done a decent job of not changing things too much between major backends, so apps developed for 2000 should look find in XP and Vista ... should, but not always. But look at java apps, that share the same code for Mac OS X, Vista, XP, Linux (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc, etc) and it has some small issues that araise, you got font issues, DPI, resolution, window decorations (or the lack there of). It is a huge issue. And people (end users) don't look toward the person resonable for their platform (firefox, IE, Apple, Gnome) but instead to the individual developer to create special cases for all these different idiosyncrocies. And we, as the small developers, bend over, take it, and try to get all the wrinkles ironed out.

While choice is good for the consumer, it sucks for those trying to create things to work for the most amount of people. Next to writing a custom interface for every single option out there, there are going to be some that run in a degraded mode, ignored, and in the extremem cases not even work.

Okay Rant Over - back to work.

Browsing the web today, I found two nice tools for managing AD in Linux. First up is adtool. The home page is at http://gp2x.org/adtool/. This is a tool that lets you manage the objects in active directory without having to know too much knowledge of LDAP. You will have to know a bit about the layout in Active Directory, but you don't have to worry about having to write your LDAP queries. This small little app lets you list out directories, modify attributes, reset passwords and more.

Next up is a package released by the ZenOSS group, they use it with their monitoring suite, and it is a WMI client. Again CLI only, but works great. I found it over at http://felimwhiteley.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/wmi-calls-from-linux/ and the package can be downloaded from http://dev.zenoss.org/svn/trunk/inst/externallibs/. It seems to be a python script with very little documentation. Based on the blog post, the syntax isn't much different then that of the wmi client for windows.

Between these two tools, you could decently manage basic task from linux, and even write some nice scripts to do more. While these two tools won't Network and System Administrators of Windows Domains out of a window enviroment all day, it will help those who still prefer Linux as the day-to-day machine.

I had a strange issue last night. After updating a few X11 packages from git, I rebooted and everything seemed to work fine. I then shutdown and went over to a buddies, booted up only to see X was locking up my session. I would get a blank screen, and then the system would become unresponsive. I tried re-emerging a few of the applications but the problem still existed.

I instead removed all the keywording for the r500 drivers and the X11 beta applications, and then added back in just the things needed for xorg-x11-7.3. I downgraded everything else, and then my X came back. I then re-added the unmasking and kewording for the r500 drivers, updated everything is now my enviroment comes up. Crazy .. except one small issue. My AIGLX isn't working. 3D seems to work, but I am getting strange errors.

First of glxinfo reports Direct Rendering: Yes. But when I run glxgears, I get an RGB error about double buffering. This seems to prevent any type of compositing manager from running. I tried running Frozen Bubbles, and it works fine. All my 2d acceleration is now working fine, just compositing/3d seems to be borked.

I guess this is the pain fun of working with live git packages

Finally I got my synaptics drivers to work properly. With the new HAL, you are able to have it hotplug your input devices into X, this means they don't need to be listed in X. I tested this out on my laptop a few months ago, and it worked. Only problem is I couldn't pass along the variables for my synaptics touchpad. Well, after months of waiting and research, I finally got it figured out.

I created the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptic-options.fdi, which, in Gentoo, are the user added hal policies, system installed are in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/. I then added the following into that file


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" contains="synaptics">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>


This turns on SHMConfig which allows synclient and gsynaptics to change synaptic settings on the fly. Sadly, in between noticing this taking effect I had moved to a few pre-release applications to get the 3d r500 accelleration with ati drivers. Below are a few application and versions I am running


[ebuild R ] sys-apps/hal-0.5.11-r1
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.4.99.906
[ebuild R ] x11-drivers/synaptics-0.14.6-r4


Also note, i just notice xf86-input-synaptic-0.15* has been added to the portage tree for the 1.5 prerelease, need to check this out.

I've been using WICD for the past week, and I think I like it better then Network Manager. It focuses on connecting your network interfaces to networks and does it right. IT doesn't have the ability for VPN's or anything else, it is merely I frontend to wpa-supplicant and iwconfig. I have had zero issues with connecting to wireless networks. It is actually connecting to them better then Network Manager was. My connections are stable, and I can switch between my wired network and my wireless without problems. (I had problems with NM b/c when I plug into a wired network, the BIOS throws the kill switch to the wireless radio, NM had problems finding it again after this).

The connection times are very quick, most of the time I am connected to my wireless before my gnome interface loads. It has a service that has to run, so it might even be connecting to it earlier then that ... which would be very cool.

There is one issue though. When I first boot up my and if I have an ethernet cable plugged in, the WICD tray panel fails to load. And I am not sure why, I'd imagine though it might be loosely related to the same reason it won't "auto connect" to the wired network when the cable is plugged in.

Besides that small issue, it WICD runs in a smaller footprint, has a better interface, and provides a stable Internet connection using the proven standards and tools already out there.

I finally left the fglrx closed sourced drivers and loaded up the ati drivers from the git repo. These code in git includes the ability for 3d acceleration for the r500 chips. I have an x1300 in my laptop, which I believe is a r515. So naturally I my curiosity won and I had to give them a go.

I found Phoronix post detailing how to install ati on gentoo, Ended up only unmasking the git ebuilds for the packages listed in the 2nd or 3rd post. I didn't install the x11-drm packages b/c I am now running 2.6.26 kernel which includes these. Install was quick, and after the reboot I found my first problem, Compiz wouldn't run .. shit. I disabled compiz from running at startup and just used plain metacity, and everything seems to work, 2d works just find and was pretty snappy. So this was a good port. I checked dmesg, and found drm was loaded just fine. I then checked glxinfo and found that I didn't have direct rendering.

After playing around some more I found a out something very weird. 3D rendering did work, but only once, after it ran the first time, it will fail to work again. I can run glxinfo once and see Directing Rendering: Yes, or I can run glxgears just once. But after that I can't an error about not being about to find rgb glx visual's. Exact errors from glxinfo and glxgears are as follow

% glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual

visual x bf lv rg d st colorbuffer ax dp st accumbuffer ms cav
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro r g b a bf th cl r g b a ns b eat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x23 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x24 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x25 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x26 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x27 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x28 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x29 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2a 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2b 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2c 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2d 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2e 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2f 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x30 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x31 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x32 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x64 32 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None

% glxgears
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual

So it seems I got a bit more work to do, I might be needing a few more packages that are considered "stable" in gentoo yet

It seems Gentoo has finally released the 2008.0, the first release since 2007.0 which was released early in 2007. This is huge, there have been many changes in packages and such in the portage tree that an initial install took a lot longer then needed to have an up-to-date system. Along with just the updated stage's, we are also seeing a lot of bug fixes and enhancements. The profile management has changed to help reduce headaches, and the livecd will be switching from gnome to XFCE to further reduce space and headaches with the livecd.

Now I get to go around and migrate my profiles over to the new release, and then I am working on a new box to test this install out on, should be good times

You can Discuss the release or just go ahead and Get Gentoo!