Forgive Me, Gnu

Forgive me, Gnu, for the sins I am about to commit.

I have a plain old text file, whose contents are valid xml. It is my task to convert it into some sort of PowerPoint monstrosity.

Forgive me for embarking on this path. Forgive also those who have asked for said monstrosity, as they may know no better. Give me the strength to show them the light you have given the world. Indeed, thank you for showing me the way, that I decided initially to put my data into plain text, knowing that it could later be converted to anything.

I do not know if it is a larger sin, or some sort of compensation, that my current plan of attack is to first convert my file into an odp file. Or that I will be doing as much of the conversion as I can on a Linux system.

In the name of Stallman, Raymond, and Torvalds (and the many eyes I know not), amen.

Slackware!

I've been using Ubuntu for a while. It's got some great features, notably it's package management and update setup (which my friend has complained about, but I've always appreciated). But I've recently been frustrated with things responding slowly on my computer. I've tried turning off services and such, but it never seemed to improve. In the past, I've used gentoo and slackware, and I remembered them being a bit snappier for me. With a new version of slackware out, I thought it was about time to try something new(ish).

So I downloaded the iso images and burned them to cd. I backed up some data (been meaning to look at Amazon's S3 online storage... apparently that'll be another day though), and took the plunge. The setup seemed to be going well, until a failure when it got to installing mysql. Retry, and still fail. Took the disc out, tried cleaning it off, and still fail. So I came back to my ubuntu install, and found these directions about installing slackware without cds. I only skimmed through them, but got a good enough idea how things should go. Since the cds I had would properly boot and let me run setup, I think most of those directions weren't too necessary anyway. I downloaded new iso images, and rebooted with my install cd in the drive. When setup came around to asking for my source, I pointed it at the mount point (which I had made, and mounted things to before running setup) for my iso image, and was good to go.

One thing that confused me was that there are multiple install cds, but the directions at the link above didn't seem to care about that. They only indicated one disk. I mounted discs one and two in different locations, but I think you could save a step and mount both in the same place before running setup. I would have also mounted disc three, but it gave me an error about being able to find loop devices (perhaps I'm only allowed 2?). Anyway, after disc one was done, I was still in setup, and told it to install more packages from the second mount point. Seemed to go fine.

After a reboot, there was lilo, waiting for me. My ubuntu image wasn't there, but I've edited /etc/lilo.conf before, so I wasn't too concerned. First step: make a non-superuser - useradd. Next up, start the windowing environment (as pretty as the command line is) - startx. FAIL. "could not open default font 'fixed'", then "waiting for X server to begin accepting connections" and "giving up". That's not what I wanted to see.

Lynx, to google, and asked about it. This turned up, and using alt-F2 and alt-F1 to bounce between terminals, I got the commands entered. Fingers crossed, 'startx'... Hurray! Xfce.

Now I get to configure things again. Always a good time. I've got firefox 3 installed, and twitterfox, and the flash plugin, and my old bookmarks. I've got my desktop set back up basically the way I had it. That's probably enough for one day. Besides XEmacs and a terminal, that's pretty much all I use anyway. On that note, the default terminal isn't behaving at all for me. I type, and it doesn't even show the characters I type. I've been temporarily using xterm, but it's something I'll have to look at some more.

GPS in Ubuntu

When I started running more often, I decided to keep a log of my runs. I've found it to be helpful and mostly encouraging. To map the runs I do and get some idea of distance and such, I use mapmyrun (but only until I roll my own...). However, when running on trails, you're pretty much just guessing where points are. So I consider myself lucky enough to have a friend with a little portable GPS unit that I was able to borrow (thanks Sean). I took this on my favorite parts of the Rivanna Trail, here in Charlottesville. I had been worried that it'd be difficult to get the information off the unit, but it was really easy.

The unit is a Garmin etrex Venture Cx, and I am using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. So here goes

1. Install the gpsbabel package, with "sudo apt-get install gpsbabel".
2. Plug the unit in via usb cable, and turn it on. I'm inside so it couldn't get a strong satellite reading, and complained about that after a few minutes, but I told it to just work without gps, so that it'd remain on.
3. I first tried "gpsbabel -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F file.gpx", but it complained at me. Somewhere online I saw some indication that you had to be root, so 'sudo' that command, and you get the waypoints off of the unit. That was easy.
4. What I was most interested in was the 'Tracks' it had stored. While probably overkill, the command "sudo gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F file.gpx" pulled the tracks (and waypoints, and probably more, I haven't looked too closely yet) off the unit.

So there you have it. I now have a nice looking xml file with some geodata in it. Now I just gotta get my mapping software to a point where I can use this information...

Upgrading to Hardy Heron (pt 2)

Well, here I am. Since I did the upgrade, instead of a fresh install, nothing looks particularly new. That's ok (but I still have the urge to start from scratch, and see what it's like). There seemed to be some issues toward the end of my upgrade, the chillispot thing came up again, and I killed another process there, and it even said 'update-manager' failed to update. So we'll see how that goes. I also still want to play and see if I can get my wireless working this time, as I never did in Gutsy Gibbon. I guess the big new thing is using the firefox beta 3 (which I could have done without a full system install), which I'll need to play with some more to see what all new awesomeness it has. At the very least, it doesn't crash when I close flash videos that are still playing, as opposed to what happened before this upgrade. So that's nice. I certainly want to think that the beta is snappier too, which I've read in other places. Hopefully I still feel the same as time goes by.

In the mean time, I'm off.

Upgrading to Hardy Heron (pt 1?)

I decided to use the built in update manager in ubuntu to upgrade to hardy heron today. It's been chugging along for about 6 hours now, so I'm thinking it might have been quicker to burn a cd and start from scratch. Plus then I get to mess about with doing lots of customization. But anyway, it got to a point where it said about 20 minutes remained, so I left it alone and went and did dishes. When I came back, it was stopped at 17 minutes remaining. In the terminal it has up to show progress, it said it was copying a conf file for chillispot. Not the sort of thing I'd expect to cause problems. I could minimize the window, but the arrow to hide the terminal didn't do anything on a mouse click. I opened up a separate terminal, and a 'ps -aux' showed a couple of processes that mentioned chillispot. I took a stab with 'kill' to end one of the processes (I should have looked more into the process codes, I guess). A window popped up to let me know configuration of chillispot had encountered an error, but that my upgrade would continue. So hopefully chillispot isn't something I use much. Guess I'll go read about it while I wait these last 10 (hopefully) minutes for the upgrade to finish. Plus it gives me time here on my XO.