Computer Log

My son Alex bought iMac and he connects to network wirelessly. I wanted to allow him to print to my old (but still prints good) HP DeskJet printer. It is not a network attached printer, but is a local attached to Linux, parallel printer. So I had to tell Cups to share it. iMac saw the printer but would not print to it. Solutions on the internet did not work. I decided that it was the Firewall…so I turned it off and could print. Didn’t want to leave firewall off so I added a rule that would allow the Cups service, and this worked. Next time I’ll buy a printer that can connect directly to the network.

Download/Install LinuxMint 14.1 Cinnamon 64bit. Other than Ubuntu server running in a VM, had never ran a 64 bit OS so I decided to try one. Things fixed over my LinuxMint 13 Cinnamon 32 bit…1) Software Manager progress meter no longer appears to hang. 2) Can now restart from logout screen 3) Of course it now recognizes all my memory. Software manager reports 20,000 more apps.

Bought a native Linux game [The Book of Unwritten Tales $4.99 @ 75% off] from Steam. This is big news. For years one of Linux’s weaknesses has been the lack of quality games. It’s one of the two reasons I still keep MS-Windows around…the other being MS-Access. Anyway Steam just released a Linux client which I downloaded/installed. Installation required updating my video driver. Was a little worried about updating video driver so I ghosted [G4L] Mint partition to another drive.

I felt I needed to support Steam as they seem very pro Linux and as a promotion many games discounted 75% or more. In addition it seems like they are working with the video chip designers to fix problems they discover. So far my biggest complaint is that they don’t specify file size for games in advance. The game I chose was 4GB…much larger than anything I’ve previously downloaded. I might have chosen another …smaller game, had I knew the DL size in advance. However they do have pause/resume so you don’t have to DL it all at once. Once installed, the game seems very professional and polished…nice graphics/audio/storyline…so far.

Want to install LAMP stack. Had problems previously installing each piece. So I installed my current distro in a VM…then cloned it (incase I needed to get back to beginning quickly). Install LAMP piece by piece, but had problems with phpMyAdmin. So restored clone. and reinstalled using XAMPP, much easier but still a problem with phpMyAdmin which was fixed with a config change.

Updated VM virtualbox to latest version which seemed to fix my 64 bit Linux install problem. Next install a REAL standalone server (Ubuntu server 64bit) with no GUI on a VM. Makes it easy just select LAMP, SSH and email. After server install…install phpMyAdmin. Again a problem with phpMyAdmin…couldn’t log in. Turns out, at least in this case, to logon, it wanted the MySQL password. Silly me sinse, at install, it asked me for a phpMyAdmin password, I assumed it wanted the phpMyAdmin password to sign-in, but nooooooo. Also install Webmin afterwords. Then install PROFTPd within Webmin (Un-used modeles) for FTP access. Sinse it’s console based…I can’t paste commands into it…however by SSHing into it I can. So I have a real web server I can access from my non-VM linux by using the servers IP address (ifconfig fom the VM gives you the IP address).

Ordered/installed 1 GB of memory on sisters PC. Replace motherboard battery which was causing BIOS to lose settings and time. Much faster/better.

Playing with alot of distros lately. Installed Bodhi 2.1.0 Linux on my sisters old PC with 256MB memory…runs slow. Installed Bodhi, Vector Linux 7.0, Linux Mint 14 on VM. Install Kubuntu on HD…pretty nice uses the KDE desktop, but not enough to make me give up my current everyday distro…Linux Mint 13 LTS. One interesting bit of information about this version of Kubuntu is that it requires a PAE processor. I immediatly noticed it recognized all 4 GB of my memory…the non PAE versions only recognized 3GB of memory. Trying to boot Fedora 17 64 bit on a VM caused my physical PC to reboot… so I installed it on the HD. Seemed pretty decent however after updating the software, Firefox randomly getting “Server Not Found” while clicking on Google links. Same links worked on Linux Mint 13. Saw (in Google) other people had the same problem. Was using Firefox to find solutions to getting MP3’s, Video, Flash working. Was fun at one time (when Linux was young)…but now I don’t want to work that hard…especially when other distros work so well.

Backup Local church website on my site and restore on their server. Even though the test site on my server was in a subdirectory, the execellent Akeeba backup software, allowed me to restore on their root directory, and get them up fairly quickly. Site has rotating images on the home page, menus with drop down catagories, a Google map that displays their location, an event calendar, audio sermons, a welcome page video, PDF bulletins, bible verse popups, and most importantly, can be maintained by them, through the Joomla WYSIWYG editor.

Install Linux Mint Cinnamon 13 (based on Gnome 3) on home PC even though I just installed Linux Mint Mate 13 (based on Gnome 2). Linux Mint 13 is a LTS version that is supported for 5 years. Among other things I like Cinnamons Virtual desktop. Mint 13 uses Linux Kernal 3.2. Finally installed Nvidea drivers successfully, didn’t even try on Linux Mint 12. Although there appears to be some video driver issues, occasional screen lockups, screen flickers.

Install Linux Mint 12 on home PC because Ubuntu 10.10 no longer supported. A distribution based on ubuntu. 3D now finally working “out-of-the-box”, can run Google earth, Supertuxkart etc. Mint 12 uses Linux Kernal 3.0.

Update my genealogy software WebTrees from version 1.0.6 to 1.2.7