New Life for Old Computers? - Xubuntu

Wired has an article this morning about Google's Chrome OS, a downloadable operating system that runs especially well on netbooks, and takes advantage of an always-on internet connection. (You can still work offline using Google Gears, the browser extension that caches things like GMail, and allows you to sync back up when you connect again). And, oh yes, under the covers, Chrome OS is (yet) another version of Linux.

For something a little more conventional, and that is available now, how about Xubuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux that uses a "low-footprint" windows manager, to create a graphical user interface that works acceptably on older, slower computers?

Xubuntu retains many of the virtues of its parent, Ubuntu, while providing snappy performance on an older machine.

Xubuntu provides the usual tool kit. If you use a browser-based eMail system (gMail, Horde, RoundCube,) you can access it easily from within FireFox. For word-processing Xubuntu includes AbiWord, a Word clone which will save in a host of different file formats including the typical Word .doc and .docx formats. For a spreadsheet they include Gnumeric, which is a pretty good Excel clone. Both AbiWord and Gnumeric have virtually all of the functionality of pre-2007 versions of the Microsoft Office applications. Both of these seem to work well within tight memory constraints.



I'm trying to convince my education clients that Xubuntu is a viable way to get some additional life out of some of their older machines. The scenario has happened a couple times now... something has gone wrong with the original Windows installation, i.e. the boot record, or the registry has gotten messed up, or the hard drive has failed completely. In any case, a reformat of the hard disk is required. The problem is the cost; by reformatting the hard disk, installing the base version of the original Windows that was on the machine (which is definitely obsolete....Windows 2000, Windows ME or Windows NT,), then installing all the hardware drivers for the network card, sound card, and video that are peculiar to the machine, and then tracking down all of the applications....well, this all will take 3 or more hours. Say, $300 or so. Even then, having gotten it back up and running we've spent that amount on a 5-8 year old machine that is essentially obsolete. So, the Xubuntu solution is attractive... if the hard drive still works, you can go back to a working machine in about 15 minutes of a mostly automated installation.

I dunno....look at the screen shot.... it looks close enough for me.

Email Transition: Verizon to Fairpoint

All of a sudden I've lost eMail contact with lots of friends who had verizon.net eMail accounts as Verizon abandons their landlines in three New England States, and Fairpoint takes over.

There is an official site provided by Fairpoint which will help people transition... but it is for Windows only. The site checks to see what your browser and operating system are, and if you have Windows XP or Vista, and are using Outlook 2000 or later, you can download a little program (ActiveX control) which will change your settings.

If you don't use Internet Explorer, the automatic setting won't work. The manual instructions are on the next page of the web site. I had a friend go through this with a technician, and this is what he came up with.

User or Account Name:
Your new myfairpoint.net email address
Example: ([myusername]@myfairpoint.net)

POP Server: mail.myfairpoint.net (i.e. incoming mail)
SMTP Server: mail.myfairpoint.net (outgoing mail)

Account name - on incoming mail server
[myusename].myfairpoint.net

Check My Server Requires Authentication
Settings next to it. �Use Same Settings as Incoming Server�

The technician also suggested that you change the outgoing mail port change from 25 to 1025 (WTF?)

I do have Fairpoint phone mail, and this no longer picks up when I'm on the line. Sigh.

If you have anything non-windows, and non-IE (Linux, Macintosh, Safari, FireFox) , you have to use the manual instructions.

Tech Friday: Small Business Network

In a recent column �Jerry Pournelle talks about problems with the Microsoft Active Directory. �

Back in 1999 I set up the Chaosmanor domain with Active Directory on two machines running Windows 2000 Server. I knew at the time that I didn't need that complex a network, but a number of my readers did. In those days networking was hard, Active Directory was new, and many of my associates were curious about how well it would work. At worst this was another of those silly things I do so you won't have to.

Actually, it worked pretty well. Windows Server 2000 with Active Directory had some infuriating requirements, and it really wanted everything done precisely its way, but from 1999 until this year it served me well. When Windows Server 2003 came out I was tempted to upgrade to that, but there was never any powerful reason to do so, and as time passed it seemed less attractive. I had novels to write and other work to do. I was able to try several Linux-based on-line backup systems - Mirra was one of them - and those worked just fine. Of course machines were getting better, and my old servers were getting more obsolete each year.

Now he thinks that everything he knew about networking is wrong. In particular, like many of us, his experience carried over from older versions of Windows networking, which makes things a lot more complicated than they need to be these days. You can reads more about workgroups, domains and routers and alternatives to Windows networking in the column.

At Microdesign we are reevaluating our own network, that has a core server running Windows 2003 Small Business Server; i.e. relatively unchanged for the past five years. Nothing has really changed as far as our core requirements are concerned, except there are several of us working from different offices, and on occasion when traveling. We increasingly collaborate on projects with partners who are outside our company. Our requirements parallel many small businesses and non-profits with 2-50 computer users. Here are our "legacy" requirements:

1. Common file sharing area where multiple users/machines can access the same document
   
2. Absolute trustworthy security of those files
   
3. eMail and calender - available from anywhere on multiple devices
   
4. Shared printing, from multiple machines to single printers.
   
5. Reliable backup�

Those modest requirements suggest a file and print server based in the office, connected permanently to the internet, with printers shared off of the file server, and some kind of backup scheme (tape or additional hard drive). The network diagram which fulfills these requirements is essentially unchanged from the 1990's.

Even with a server-centric network our advice to clients has always been to use the facilities of an internet service provider for two applications; eMail and the outward-facing (public) web server for the organization. �We (still) recommend having eMail outside the organization to provide greater reliability, ubiquitous access via the web, and industrial-strength spam control. We recommend the organization's public web site be hosted outside the organization to provide 99.99% uptime, and to take advantage of higher bandwidth typically provided by an hosted provider.�

So, what has changed? Two things; disk storage and broadband. Broadband, or rather cheap broadband, has made it possible to reconfigure things so that the cloud �can now substitute or supplement a file server. With individual personal computers routinely having disk drives of 250 gigabytes or larger, the original�justification�for "server as giant hard disk" is falling away.�

Along with hardware improvements, there are now a host of inexpensive applications available on the internet that can supplement or replace software that used to require a file server. Basecamp is one example that can be used for project management and shared file storage.�

A more modern interpretation of the legacy network diagram puts the cloud at the center of the network.

So, I'm wondering whether to replace my file server. The server is no longer the be-all end-all of my network. Like Jerry, I don't need a domain login mechanism. I barely use my printers, and those are attached directly to the local network. The small business server's eMail, and web hosting have always been done off-site. The server does offer SharePoint, which is a capable platform for Basecamp-like project management, but Basecamp is about $12.00 per month, and it took about five minutes to set up. And, now that we have been invaded by the Macintosh monster...there are more reasons to find, (or at least evaluate) a cross-platform solution for our application needs.

Windows vs. Linux - Open Source vs. Commercial

I got sucked in to a bit of back and forth on our local Linux/Unix list a couple days ago and wrote:

Ten years ago I was consulting for a multi-national education non-profit, and I discussed with the systems manager the notion of using open source...in particular I was talking about replacing their Windows 2000/NT servers, with Linux. This would have been a logistical wrench, not least because they had several client/server applications that used SQL-Server as the back end. His point was that as an educational institution, they got such good discounts on any proprietary software that the amount spent on the software was a miniscule percentage of their IT budget. So, there was no economic benefit, and certainly no performance benefit that justified such a change.

Later that year I was doing an inventory of their machines at one of the european sites and couldn't find the terminal server box. Turns out this was a Linux box running VMC or something and it had been bricked up in a wall during a recent renovation, and been merrily running, unseen, for several months.

So, the moral for me was, use what works. At the time I actually got them to go from running four O/S's in the organization to two, Windows, and the aforementioned Linux. We dumped Macs in one site, and Novell in another, and my advice to subsequent clients was to run one and only one OS in the organization.

I'm happy to say that they didn't all run Windows.

Logging in as Root in Ubuntu with Live CD

We just had a little contretemps as we attempted to replace system files on our Windows XP embedded machine with a new image. The easiest way we've found to copy the files is to run an Ubuntu Linux Live CD, which boots up a Linux desktop. Since the default user in the Linux desktop is guest, the user does not have privileges to replace the files a second time. To get around this, you have to log in using the root account. Steps:

1. in the original desktop, under the security tab for logins, be sure to check the box "allow local administrator to log in" under system->administration->login window.



2. Open a terminal session

3. type sudo passwd root

4. enter a password for the root user

5. re-enter a password for the root

6. shutdown - change user, and log in as root with your new password.

Background: There are three sort of funny things about this process for users who are not familiar with Ubuntu.

1. Ubuntu does not install a root user account by default. Or, maybe it installs the account, but it doesn't allow its use. Thus, the act of assigning a password to the root user account is necessary to activate the account.

2. Even if you have a valid root account set up, by default Ubuntu does not allow you to log into a standard Gnome desktop. That's why you have the change the setting in the security preferences.

2. In this example, since we are using the Live CD, you have do step 1 first. If you restart the computer from scratch all configuration settings are lost, because the Live CD does not allow you to permanently write anything to the disk.

Woof.

In any case, this solved our problem; we were able to blow away the system files on our target hard drive C:, so that we were able to copy a fresh version of our XPe image to the drive.

Ubuntu Linux rescues Windows XP Embedded

This being summer, we're back on the Windows XP Embedded kick. After generating an image, the question was..how do we get this on to our target machine?

We wasted a lot of time on this one. As recommended in the docs, we installed "regular" Windows XP on the target machine to make sure that it would run Embedded. No problem there, it installed without problems from CD. We ran the Target Analyzer, to get our device.pmq. Copied device.pmq back to the development machine and generated the image.

At this point, we started fiddling with a second partition on the target machine. We created and formatted this using Acronis Disk Doctor, which comes on a bootable CD. Our plan was to install our target image on this partition, change the ARC listing in boot.ini to point to the second partition as the boot partition. We spent a day fooling with this, including changing the drive letters, hiding the partition, moving stuff around. Didn't work.

Finally, we reformatted the hard drive on the target machine. Now you'd think that Microsoft would have something like a "LiveCD" for this purpose, which would boot a version of Windows enough to allow copying to an existing hard drive. It doesn't, but Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora Linux all have this, and Ubuntu had drivers that would read the USB drive where we stored the image, as well as the NTFS formatted hard drive.

A quick drag and drop, and we're done!

Have they no shame? (Microsoft that is...) There is a Community Technology Preview out for a new version of Embedded...let's hope this issue might be addressed with a couple of extra tools.

Tech Friday: Installing Ubuntu on the Mac and the PC

I've been drinking a lot of coffee today, and I think it affects my ability to concentrate. So, one thing has been leading to another and another, and I've ended up installing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux on both my PC and my MacBook using virtual machine software.

Why Virtual Machines?

A virtual machine allows you to host multiple operating systems on a single physical computer. The classic reason for doing this is to run some form of Windows on the Macintosh OS because you just can't live without some crucial Windows program. (Think Quickbooks, or OutLook, or in my case OneNote). The Virtual machine program is a thin layer of software which sites between the original OS (on the Mac this is OSX), and one or more "guest" operating systems, (in my case Windows Vista). There are a couple to choose from. The people at our university recommended Parallels. Installing Vista and Parallels went pretty smoothly. So, as I hadn't seen a Linux desktop for while, I thought I'd try installing the latest and greatest Ubuntu.

Why Ubuntu?

Ubuntu appears to the current favorite for a "desktop" Linux. It is available on some Dell machines. It comes with a large number of applications, and an attractive desktop. There are several versions available for specific purposes. It is well supported.

I started with this step-by-step tutorial, which is available for a couple different combinations of Parallels and Ubuntu.

While waiting for this to install, I fiddled with Microsoft Virtual PC on my Windows box and found that I was using an older version 2004. I downloaded and installed version 2007. Looks just like 2004, but includes support for Vista as reported at Linux.com. After a couple of false starts dealing with the mouse, I was able to get Ubuntu installed.

Once installed there are several additional tweaks that need to happen which required editing the boot loader parameters and some config files to get the mouse working. Then a similar process is required for sound drivers, and network drivers.

Rather than go through all that, I downloaded VirtualBox and installed it on my workstation. Then I reinstalled Ubuntu. Mouse worked immediately. Networking came right up. The sound card worked as soon as I changed the default VirtualBox configuration to include the sound card. So far, Ubuntu works fine, and is surprisingly fast, and VirtualBox appears to be superior to Microsoft Virtual PC, at least when installing non-Microsoft operating systems.

Meanwhile, back on the Mac, its been more of a struggle. Here a couple issues and solutions:

1. When choosing which version to install, choose the "alternate" form of the Ubuntu installer. (There is a checkbox for this on the download screen.) This is a text-based installer. Otherwise, it will just hang as you start to do the install, and you'll get a funny message saying somthing like "Tried 6 times to start the X-Server and something is seriously messed up".
2. When you download the .iso file from the mirror, it will appear on the desktop as a disk. However, this is actually, just a pointer to the file ubuntu-7.10-alternate-i386.iso which is located in your download directory. This caused a lot of confusion, because when you attempt to assign an "image" for the installation process through Parallels, you have to point to the actual file with the .iso extension. (If in doubt...just burn it to a physical CD for heaven's sake; I should have done this and saved myself an hour of futzing. To be honest, my problems with the disk and the .iso are due to unfamiliarity with OSX on the Mac, not the fault of Parallels or Ubuntu.)
3. When installing, you'll be given the opportunity to select the screen resolutions that you want to install. The excellently named Muffin Research discussion page suggests selecting two resolutions: 1440x900 for using full screen, and 1280x800 for use when you have Ubuntu running in a window. Once you have installed, if there is still a problem, you can run the following command to start the selection process again:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
   
   
4. Parallels gives you the opportunity to set up networking to use the existing Mac network addressing, (shared), or the not-so-well-named (bridge). The bridge will treat the Ubuntu VM as a separate machine, so it will get an IP address separate from the Mac. There is an icon in the "system tray", located in the upper right hand of the Ubuntu desktop window, that shows if you are connected. If not, just click once on the icon and select "Wired Nework", if that is how you're connected.
   

More from LifeHacker on running Parallels on the Mac.

Trixbox Appliance: New Baby

Just unwrapped the new baby here... a Trixbox appliance (the so-called "base" model for about $999) that comes without landline interface cards. In its base configuration it is suitable for those who want to implement a fully IP-based VoIP system. I'll be adding hardware to this; an existing Sangoma A200 card which provides two landline connections. I'll only be using one of the two connections to start. I couldn't resist starting it up, and sorry, but contrary to all the assurances; the thing is noisy. Too noisy to have setting next to my desk. Damn.

The dual power-supply version that was demonstrated back in June sounded like a jet engine. Definitely that one is a unit for the server room, not deskside.

We had our first real snow that stuck today, about three inches. The Trixbox will be a great project on those cold winter days.

Ekiga, formerly known as Gnomemeeting, is a Linux based softphone/videophone. (A newer version is also available for Windows). They've thought of everything... STUN, H.323, SIP, a directory, NAT traversal, you name it.


I'm using version 2.03 that was in the stock installation of Ubuntu Feisty. After a couple hours of fiddling, (at least 30 minutes of which was finding out that my microphone was switched off...) I've been able to make test voice calls to what sounds like their Asterisk server. Looking around, it says they are up to about 2.09, and if you want it work full-screen, you have to compile from the source code.