Connecting the dots

I'm supposed to be on vacation this week. But I have a new laptop with Fedora 9 so I'm playing with it to see if I can make it really do all I need it to do to make my life easier. So far so good.

Previously I was using ScheduleWorld with syncEvolution on my Fedora 7 laptop in hopes that I could eventually get it to sync with my treo and publish to a google calendar so others could see what I was up to. Well I never got the treo syncing and then about 3 months ago my syncEvolution script started reporting errors so I just disabled it.

Tonight however I revived all of that intrest while trying to figure out a way to sync my old laptop (now my desktop) and my new laptop. And if I could sync with the Treo even better! Well I did it.

First I had to upgrade syncEvolution on the Fedora 7 box. It was on version 0.5 hence the errors. I hunted down the source as there weren't any rpms available for F7 in my current repos. A simple ./configure followed by a sudo make install and I was updated. Then I ran my sync script and everything work. Step 1 complete.

Next I had to install syncEvolution on the F9 laptop. Easy, I just typed yum install syncevolution and it was done. A quit copy of the .sync4j directory from my F7 laptop and I was almost ready to try it. But first I wanted to force my laptop to download everything from the ScheduleWorld server. That meant I needed to change the sync method in the config files and wipe out my local copy in Evolution. I discovered in doing so I have to kill the evolution data-server processes as well. Once done I started Evolution and then ran my syncEvolution script. Presto! I have the info as it appears on ScheduleWorld.

Then it was time to try the Treo again. I installed the Synthesis SyncML Palm client as recommend at ScheduleWorld and tried to sync. First I got the addressbook but nothing else. With a little digging I was able to get the notes and tasks. Then after clearing the name field of the events and retyping "cal" I was able to get the calendar. Woohoo!

Now I can add something on my F9 laptop and when I sync my phone it'll be there. I might just go ahead and spring for the $60 pro version of the Treo software so I can get automated updates versus the $30 standard version where you have to manually sync.

To make things even slicker I found a great little python gnome applet called Genesis that sits in my notification tray and allows me to run ScheduleWorld via a GUI. Now when I log it, it automatically syncs and will sync every 60 minutes after that while I'm logged in. There's a little problem when connected via wireless as the connection does come up in time but I think I can probaly adjust the genesis python code to delay that initial sync by 2 minutes or so in order for me to get online. I might also be able to adjust the code to detect whether the NetworkManager reports that I'm online. That would be even cooler. For now, the premature sync when I first log in is only mildly annoying and can easily be disabled with a click of a checkbox.

At this point I have my Evolution data syncing everywhere and the other day I installed Foxmarks to sync my Firefox bookmarks between computers. The only thing left is to try and install Unison to keep my Documents folder in sync. That's another project while on vacation I guess.

Living with my HP dv2810us and Fedora 9

This little laptop is starting to become a favorite of mine. I'm very impressed with Fedora 9 too, almost to the point of trying to upgrade my HP dv8000 from Fedora 7. The only hold up is with the VTBook video card that allows me to have a total of 3 monitors on my desktop. Plus I need to keep a Firefox 2.0 version around while I'm developing a customer's web site. But once the project is complete, I'll definitely be upgrading to Fedora 9.

So today I took the laptop out for a little show and tell with a client. Before leaving the house I simply closed the screen and packed it up. When I got to Panera Bread (coffee shop) I opened it and let it resume operations. I went to the NetworkManager and found the Panera network. A few clicks later and I was surfing the web. Wow! what an improvement.

I had a little problem with Adobe's Flash. They haven't release an x86_64 version yet so you have to run nspluginwrapper and install the 32 bit version. Then flash works like a champ. Once again Google to the rescue. I found the solution to the problem in the Fedora release notes.

While googling today I stumbled on a post about Wine and Mapsource. So I decided to install Wine 1.0 via Yum and see what happens. Mapsource installed fine and I was able to easily install the update and unlock my maps. Now all I have to do is get it to "find" my Zumo and I'll be set. Push comes to shove I can simply save the route as a gpx file on the SD card of the Zumo. I mapped a Windows drive to the /media directory so I can see the Garmin when it's plugged in, the software just can't "find" it. That's certainly not the end of the world. Not having to boot into Windows almost feels like nirvana.

Since that worked so well I thought I'd try my luck and install the BMW RepRom DVD that I use when working on my beemer. It was worth a shot. Well things seem to work until you try to view the documentation pages. But while clicking on buttons I stumbled on a Wine warning window saying I needed to install a gecko browser which it promptly did. Interestingly some content can be viewed while other information can't. I suspect a path problem. But at least I'm close to making it work.

I can now use the built in memory card reader on the laptop. This is a very handy feature and means that's one less thing I have to carry with my laptop. At less than 6 pounds this laptop is a serious little power house with a screen I can live with.

The other night I was able to get uvcvideo installed and the webcam working with very little effort. So now I have a web cam that works. I guess I'll be exploring the world of video chatting in the coming months. It would be nice to see the misses while on longer trips.


On a slightly different note, since the bbq I've been using ScribeFire to write all my posts. I'm really starting to like it too. I find it a little easier to use than the blogger interface and I can save posts and come back to them later without ever having to post them. Sure I can do the same with the draft feature in blogger but it's just nice to have it local in my browser. On trips were I can't always get net connectivity this should allow me to record posts and then upload them when I get to a place with connectivity.


Well I think I'll go tinker with Wine and see if I can get my RepRom issues solved. First thing to try is to install Internet Explore 6. It'd be nice to carry the DVD info when I'm on long trips.

Fedora 9 on my HP dv2810us

Last night was spent making the recovery discs just in case I lose my mind and want to switch back to Windows Vista or maybe if I want to put it back when I sell it. In the time it took me to burn the 3 DVDs I was able to download Fedora 9 x86_64 and burn it to a DVD.

I spent a little time this morning uninstalling all the junk that was included with Windows as I had decided to keep the Windows partition but to downsize it to 35G. I also plan to try an install of Mac OS X on here as well so there's another 35G partition for that. Once things were ready I inserted the Fedora 9 disc and began the install.

The ntfs resizing went pretty well. It was actually faster than I expected. Then the installation of software began. As I had pretty much taken the default Office and Productivity packages there were over 900 packages to install. It took longer than I was used to but then again I don't normally install that much stuff when I'm doing server installs.

Out of the gate, I had sound. The ethernet worked but the wireless did not. The monitor was useable at 800x600 but definitely not the 1280x800 that I wanted and expected. That would have to be fixed. But first I needed to update Fedora to get all the latest packages since the ISO had been spun. That took a while as there were over 250M of updates.

While waiting for the updates I restored my Firefox settings from my desktop/laptop:

from my home directory: scp -r desktop:.mozzilla .

When I started Firefox up it complained about a few plugins that weren't compatible with FF3.0 so I removed them. Firebug is the one plugin I'll want to reinstall as soon as it's available.

Then I restored my evolution settings:

scp -r desktop:.evolution .
scp -r desktop:.gconf/apps/evolution .gconf/apps
scp -r desktop:.gnome2_private/Evolution .gnome2_private


Evolution started up with a problem. All my settings, addressbook, calendar, it was all there. Now I need to start figuring out how to sync it with my desktop instead of just copying it over everytime.

And I added myself to the /etc/sudoers files so I wouldn't have to go to root everytime.

$ su -
# echo "brian ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

the NOPASSWD keeps me from having to enter my password each time


Once the updates were done, it was time for a reboot. Then it was time to try and install the NVidia driver from nvidia.com. There were a few problems along the way in the form of missing packages.

$ sudo yum install gcc

took care of the 'cc' missing error.

$ sudo yum install kernel-devel

took care of the missing kernel source error.

Finally the installation worked:

$ sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.14.09-pkg2.run

After the installation completed I tried startx but it failed complaining about a kernel module. So I rebooted again. This time the laptop came up with the NVidia splash screen and my desktop was at 1280 x 800. Such an improvement.

Next step was to get the wireless card working. A quick look at lspci revealed that I had a Broadcom BCM 4310 card onboard. And some googling showed that Fedora 9 already had the B43 driver for Broadcom wireless it just needed the right firmware. So I tried the instructions found at this link:

http://forums.linksys.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=Wireless_Adapters&thread.id=15114

Well that didn't work. When I found the bcm pages at linuxwireless.org I discovered that the bcm4310 is unsupported. So back to Google and it looks like it's the ndiswrapper route for me. So I did a "yum list | grep ndis" to see what packages were available to me. Luckily the ndiswrapper was available in the Livna channel (check this link for how to add the Livna repository). So I installed it:

# yum install ndiswrapper kmod-ndiswrapper

next I made sure the bcm module wouldn't load:

$ echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Then I went to the HP site to get the broadcom driver for my laptop

wget ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp37501-38000/sp37745.exe

Unfortunately unzip wouldn't extract it so I installed cabextract

# yum install cabextract

Then I extracted the files

# cabextract sp37745.exe

Finally I could install the inf file...

# ndiswrapper -i bcmwl6.inf

then I was making progress!

# ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl6 : driver installed
device (14E4:4315) present

When I tried "modprobe ndiswrapper" I got a lot of errors in /var/log/messages about not being able to load the driver. So then I removed the driver with "ndiswrapper -r bcmwl6". With a little more googling I discovered you can't use Vista drivers with ndiswrapper. Then there was the problem of HP not having Windows XP drivers for my laptop. So I tried a dell driver:


# wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe
# unzip R174291.exe
# cd DRIVER_US/bcmwl5.inf
# ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
# ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4315) present
# modprobe ndiswrapper
# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:32 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Oh glory days! I had success. To make sure things would work after I a reboot:

# ndiswrapper -ma
module configuration information is stored in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper

Then it was time to try the reboot. When the reboot was complete I was successfully connected to my wifi network. It just worked.

So now it was time for the more outside the box type things like my Sprint USB U727 card. I found a post on blogspot that made it sound easy. The only problem was that I was never seeing the cdrom icon on my desktop. It turns out for some reason I'm getting error from the /dev/sr1 device thus preventing it from ever loading. My solution was to make a shortcut that ejects the device and then things work as explained in Bryan's blog. My eject command:

$ sudo eject /dev/sr1


I also needed to copy my pidgin settings over so I wouldn't have set up the accounts again:

$ scp -r desktop:.purple .


Next I installed OpenVPN and the NetworkManager plugin:

# yum install openvpn NetworkManager-openvpn

I copied my /etc/openvpn files over from my desktop but trying to set up a connection via the NetworkManager will have to wait for another day I guess.

At this point I have a working laptop that I could take on my trip. I'll probably add the shockwave and flash players. And a few other things but this little Linux laptop is good to go.