Ubuntu

I've been experimenting with Jupiter (currently version 0.0.51) on my Ubuntu 10.04 notebook to see if I could improve the battery life on this old System76 Serval (version 5). Though there is the applet built in Mono to that is accessible to the user to quickly adjust a few options, the real meat are the scripts it places under /usr/lib/jupiter that are run a notebook is placed on AC power or not.

Unfortunately, it looked like the scripts were not detecting whether the notebook was running on AC or battery power properly. While looking around those scripts, I think I found the problem in /usr/lib/jupiter/scripts/state. In the script on line 10, it looks for an AC device in /sys/class/power_supply that contains either a ADP or AC in the name, and on the next line it points to the online file in that device.

Unfortunately, on my Ubuntu 10.04 setup, there was no device with that name, only the battery was shown with the name BAT0. In this device, there is the file status available that seems to contain either "Discharging", "Charging", or "Full" (and possibly other states) depending on the current status of the battery.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Just a short little update on a few things. First of all, I've changed employers; I'm currently developing in Flex, which has been an interesting and fun learning experience. I use Flex Builder 3 as my development Environment, but since the Linux Beta of it is somewhat limited at the moment, I've end up running the Windows version on Windows XP Pro in a virtualbox on my work laptop.

As someone who just upgraded his laptop to Ubuntu 7.10, primarily used Ubuntu linux as my primary desktop O.S. since Dapper was in beta, and utilized Linux O.S. since 1998 as a server, the following quote from Rupert Goodwins blog really says it for meGranted, I have limited experiences with Windows Vista, mainly playing with it on a friend's computer. But the quote still highlights what is an important different between close source and open source software are to me in general.:

Then how come I'm so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn't succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.

Yeah, I'm a few days late on this. Heck, Dell had launched the systems on Thursday. Actually, this hasn't been too new, as Dell have been selling Red Hat equipped servers for some time (And they even have their own customized Yum repositories for hardware-specific drivers). But this is a very good sign for Linux (and other open source systems) when Dell is willing to sell systems with Ubuntu 7.04 preinstalled!

I had installed PostgreSQL, Apache, and PHP on my laptop (running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy) to aid in development. But when I was attempting to load a copy of the production database into PostgreSQL, it kept giving me errors on setting up the functions. Turns out that PostgreSQL (which I installed with the Ubuntu GUI package system, Synaptic) was expecting a file at /usr/lib/pgsql/plpgsql.so, but the real file was at /usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib/plpgsql.so. In fact, checking the file system, there was no directory called pgsql in /usr/lib.

The next version of Ubuntu is finally out! Now to download it and check it out on a virtual machine. Later on, I'll attempt to do the upgrade process on the install that's on my main desktop then my laptop.

It also seems the Ubuntu website is getting hit by some pretty serious traffic, so it seems to be switching between a holding page that lists the mirrors that you can download the ISOs from and the original site.

I just decided to use an image that I had found in relation to one of my favorite animes:

[img_assist|nid=56|title=|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=640|height=400]

I couldn't resist playing with the Beryl water effects here:

[img_assist|nid=57|title=|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=640|height=400]

Earlier, I had mentioned that I was getting the ZyXEL ZyAIR G-102v2 wireless Cardbus adapter from Newegg.com to see if it will work properly in Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. I have to now report that it does indeed work right out of the box in Ubuntu, complete with WPA2 wireless security.