DJS Consulting Tech Blog
Technical Information You Can Use (or not – but hey, at least it's free!)

Mozilla Sunbird is a calendar project that’s being designed as a sister program to Thunderbird and Firefox. It’s now at the 0.5 version, and there is a plug-in that integrates Sunbird with Thunderbird, called Lightning. It allows you to not only have a calendar, but send and receive meeting requests as well.

I’m running Thunderbird 2 under Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on the AMD64 architecture, and could not find a pre-compiled version of this that worked. So, I decided to give it a shot. It was pretty easy, and the result is a plug-in that works with the AMD64 version of Thunderbird! Since I had trouble finding it, I thought I would share it.

Since I have just started using it, I haven’t wrung it out, or tested all the options. Use at your own risk, etc.

You can download the plug-in here. Happy storming!

I was finally able to resolve my problems with Apache and MySQL. When I decided to mount my FAT32 drive under /home/summersd, I inadvertently caused myself some problems. From talking to a Linux guy at work, I found that no processes that weren’t running under my user ID could access those files. The reason is that Linux looks up the entire diretory tree, back to /, to determine if you can access the file. So, although I had “-rwxrwxrwx summersd summersd” on every file, /home/summersd was “drwx—— summersd summersd”, and /home was “drwxr-xr-x”. The permissions on /home/summersd was keeping Apache from seeing /home/summersd/drive_d/wwwroot, and MySQL from seeing or writing to /home/summersd/drive_d/mysql/data. I moved the drive to /mnt/drive_d, with the mount point being owned by “root”, still mounting the drive with my user name, and everything worked.

In the process of reconfiguring Thunderbird, I believe I may have found out how to share the address book across operating systems. The file ~/.thunderbird/default.[something]/prefs.js has a listing of all the preferences and settings. I modified this file to change the location of my mail files, and there is a setting there for an address book (which isn’t shown in the configuration dialog – after all, it is 0.7.3…) I’ll play with that later – right now I’m just elated to have Apache and MySQL working again.

Today, I reinstalled WBEL 3.0.  I was able to compile ndiswrapper (as I kept that on my FAT32 drive), and get the network card working smoothly very quickly.  (In fact, it seems to be more reliable under Linux than WXP!)  With the network up, it was easy to download Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and installing them was a breeze.  (I decided to put them under /opt this time, trying to stick with the FHS.)  I decided to mount my FAT32 drive under my home directory, as /home/summersd/drive_d.  E-mail works fine, but Apache gives me a 403 (Permission Denied) error.  MySQL doesn’t seem to be working either – I’ll have to play with that later.

Well, the last month has been interesting. I was able to get my Windows and Linux installations synchronized by creating a mount point for my second drive under /mnt/drive_d . Under that, I created a directory called /thunderbird for my e-mail, and moved my e-mail and newsgroup folders over there. (The first time, I missed the “newsrc” file, which is important – it tells what newsgroups you’ve subscribed to and which messages you’ve read.) Under Windows, I pointed it to “D:\thunderbird\pop3.knology.net”, and under Linux, it was configured to “/mnt/drive_d/thunderbird/pop3.knology.net”. I then moved the “wwwroot” directory from “C:\Inetpub” to drive D:, and pointed IIS to the new location. Under Linux, I did something a little different. As “root”, I deleted the directory /var/www/html, and instead created /var/www/html as a symbolic link to /mnt/drive_d/wwwroot (the actual command is “ln -s /mnt/drive_d/wwwroot /var/www/html”). That worked great as well.

MySQL was more complicated, but I was eventually able to get it working as well. I created the directory “D:\mysql\data” for the data, then configured /etc/my.cnf under Linux to look at “/mnt/drive_d/mysql/data”. I kept getting “Could not connect to server using socket /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock”. After some digging, it appeared to be a permissions problem. All the documentation said that the default socket was /tmp/mysql.sock, so I changed my.cnf to point there instead, restarted mysqld, and it worked! So, I have no idea what a Unix socket it, but I know that now I have one!

I was also able to get DVDs playing using xine, compiling it myself, and using libdvdcss, I can even watch commercial DVDs. I’m really impressed with xine – it handles all kinds of media out of the box, including DivX and up to version 8 of WMV files. You can add codecs to it as well, to support almost anything you want to do from an audio or video perspective. Compiling the player took around 20 minutes, and compiling the front end took another 5. And, it was simple – download the .tar.gz file, do “tar xvfz [name].tar.gz”, “cd [name]“, “./configure”, “make install”. The “./configure” script is the key in the whole process – it looks at what you have installed, and creates make files that will work with your compiler.

Everything started going south, though, when I started having freezes. Eventually, I got to where I could not boot without a kernel panic, and then boot errors (which I detailed in this e-mail to the WBEL user’s list. Encouraged by my success over the past month, I decided to return to WBEL – it’s supposed to be more stable than FC2, and I bet that I can get ndiswrapper, the dual-booting web server, the common e-mail, and maybe even some other stuff working again.

Today I installed Fedora Core 2. This thing is slick! WBEL looked a lot like RH8, which I had seen before my renewed Linux learning began. FC2 has a graphical loader that hides a lot of the background stuff (unless an error occurs) – that’s cool. During the install, I skipped OpenOffice.org and MySQL, although I installed PHP with MySQL support. The reason for that is that I wanted to get the latest and greatest versions of those two products. We’ll see if this proves to be a good decision or not.

The wireless network card still wasn’t recognized (phooey). I did some more searching, armed with the knowledge that I have an adm8211 chipset. One of the first hits under Google’s Linux search for “adm8211″ pointed me to a project called NDISwrapper. This is a “wrapper” that uses the vendor’s Windows DLL file, and converts the hooks from Windows to Linux. Doing this, this driver can (in theory) support most any network card, especially those that aren’t in the Linux Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). I downloaded it, compiled it, and followed the directions to install my driver under it. I still wasn’t able to create a connection, but on a hunch, I restarted the computer. NDISwrapper is also a kernel module, and I know that often those are only read at startup. Once the computer was restarted, I was able to create a connection, and now my network card works! YEA!!! (And it was only one night’s worth of work – much better.)

Now that I have networking working under both operating systems, I plan to try to get four things working the same, whether I’m booted to WXP or Linux – E-mail (using Mozilla Thunderbird), PHP (using Apache on Linux, IIS on WXP), MySQL (using the exact same version on both), and a web server that uses the same html root directory (again, Apache on Linux, IIS on WXP). If I didn’t already have IIS up, running, and configured under WXP, I’d probably just do Apache on both, but this will be interesting – it should work, as I don’t have many creative permission rules.

In setting up my “I’m gonna use this for a while” environment on WXP, I’ve stumbled across what I feel are two gems. These are the FireFox browser (which I’ve been using for a while now) and the Thunderbird mail program. Thunderbird is not as fully featured as Ximian Evolution, but I prefer it’s interface to that of Mozilla Mail. I also think that once I get back on Linux on a regular basis, I’ll install the same version there, and see if I can get my mail to use the same data files whether I’m using Linux or WXP.

Today I didn’t do a whole lot – I deleted the dupes out of my inbox subfolders, and I downloaded wine. I’ll install it tomorrow.

When I left for chior practice this evening, I had 2 messages in my inbox. When I returned, I had over 600! Remember way back when I said that I removed that setting that left a copy of the e-mail on the server? Turns out in Ximian Evolution, “Close” is the equivalent of “Cancel” in most apps, and my change did not take. It looks like my ISP’s mail server, in an effort to alert me that I was over my limit, started clearing whatever status was on these messages, which caused them to be downloaded multiple times, every 10 minutes. I made sure the setting was set, then went into my ISP’s web mail service and deleted every message in my inbox. I deleted all the dupes out of my main inbox tonight, and I’ll delete the dupes from the other folders tomorrow.

Printing is proving to be a challenge. Using samba (the Linux SMB libraries) and cups, I was able to configure my networked printer. However, I don’t have a driver on my computer for it. I tried using some drivers that were close, but they didn’t work – they just caused the printer to eject a blank page. I was creating the documents using OpenOffice.org’s Writer, which has a “one-click PDF conversion” feature. When I went to use that feature, I found that I was on version 1.0, which didn’t have the PDF stuff.

I downloaded the Linux install for version 1.1.2, and remembering that you need to use the “root” user to do most installs, did an su, and ran the install. I then launched the new writer and exported the PDF. Using samba, I copied the file over to the other computer, and was able to print it. However, since I installed it as root, it installed under /root, which meant that my normal user couldn’t access it. At some point, I’ll uninstall it and reinstall it in a public directory.

On another note, I posted a message about my inability to import mail from Netscape into Evolution to the WBEL user’s list, and the response I got worked! Netscape actually stores the e-mail in the same format as many other Linux e-mail programs (a format called mbox format). Using samba, I copied the files from “C:\Documents and Settings\Daniel\ApplicationData\Mozilla\Profiles\default\{somthing}.slt\Mail\Local Folders” – under this folder, there was a separate folder for each POP3 account, and within that folder, the file called “inbox” was my inbox. On some systems, the file is named “mbox”, and it’s in a folder with the name of the folder it represents (i.e., “Inbox/mbox”). Once these files were copied, I used Evolution’s import utility – it prompted me for a file to import (whose type it determined automatically), and a location for the messages to go. I now have all my e-mail from my old setup!

One part of Unix/Linux of which I’m quickly becoming a fan is its adherance to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). The FHS defines where files should be found, and it represents all available files under a single directory, known as “/”. No matter how many drives or network shares that are mounted, they’re all under this directory. What this gives you is a system-wide view of your files, instead of the normal DOS-imposed separate drive specifications. The FHS also says what files are supposed to be in what directories, so no matter what Unix/Linux system you’re using, once you know the FHS, you know exactly where to look for things.

When I moved the mouse to try to get the screen to unblank this morning, nothing happened. It was locked up once again. I decided to only run one process, to see if I could isolate which one was causing me problems. I started with the F@H client. I started it before we left for breakfast, and when we got back, the computer was still running okay. I started using the computer actively, and found another problem – my profile for Firefox now thinks it’s still in use, because I was using it when the machine crashed.

Now, anyone who has ever used Linux will know that one browser is much less severe than, for example, IE becoming unusable in a Windows evironment. I switched to using Mozilla, and was doing some research on Linux crashes when the machine locked up again. This time, when I restarted, both Firefox and Mozilla thought they were still in use. I fired up the only other currently-installed browser, Konqueror, and surfed out to LinuxQuestions.org and posted a message asking how to tell these browsers that they’re not in use.

A few hours later, an answer appeared. For Firefox, the file is ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.lz7/lock, and for Mozilla, the file is ~/.mozilla/default/{something}.slt/lock. Both these are symbolic links to a process PID – deleting them freed up the default profiles so these browsers could be used again.

In the mean time, I have not restarted F@H, but I’ve had Evolution running in the background without incident. It seems that it may be the F@H client. That bugs me, because I was really looking forward to using this machine to help with the project. I may try to run the Windows version under wine, a Windows emulator for Linux.

Some folks have also expressed interest in the Tournament and Membership Tracking System (TMTS), which is a web application I coded to track membership and golf tournaments for a local golfing organization. They’re interested in the PHP version, for which I no longer have the source code (it was on a laptop that was stolen). So, much of my computing effort over the next few days will be trying to get this recreated. Today, I was able to get the database rebuilt, and the first few pages converted.