Category Archives: Linux

Installing Kindle on debian testing under wine

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finally man­aged to get this work­ing. I think things are com­pli­cated when tar­get machine is 64 bit. I really was keen to get this run­ning on my net­book, and Acer Aspire One.

The steps are a bit scrappy and gleaned from var­i­ous blogs, but, basi­cally what I did was:

Fol­low the steps in this blog to get wine installed on Debian Test­ing. i.e. (as root):

ARCH=`uname -m | sed -e s/x86_64/amd64/ -e s/i.86/i386/`
wget -r -A "*_$ARCH.deb" http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/
sudo dpkg -i dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/*.deb

then hop over to this blog, and fol­low most of the steps in that. Don’t need to install wine as we’ve already got that now, in the­ory, but cabextract def­i­nitely handy.

actu­ally, think­ing about it, the only steps I ended up using were these:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks corefonts

I was get­ting closer all the time but still it crashed. Until I found this tip on the wineHQ website:

To work around the msvcp90 bugs, delete or rename ­this file:

~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/x86_microsoft.vc90.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_9.0.30729.4148_none_deadbeef.manifest

Note that Wine will recre­ate that file every time you upgrade. To avoid this, make the direc­tory read-only.

and now it works.

garbled software selection

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pretty much moved now from LMDE to just Debian.

The last cou­ple of instal­la­tions had a bit of weird­ness dur­ing the soft­ware selec­tion dialogue:

debian software selection screenWhat the deuce?

Any­way I just con­tin­ued and hoped for the best. And it was all fine. First time I’ve come across this though. Won­der what causes it.

 

it’s the little things …

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like the dia­logue win­dow that unfurls itself from the cur­tain rail like some sort of dainty bal­le­rina. Pre­sum­ably some peo­ple like it — fair enough. I don’t, and would like to switch the effect off. Can I? Pos­si­bly. Is it pos­si­ble? Dunno. Where are the set­tings? Can’t find it. How much do I care? Not much. I’ve tried Gnome-3, and it’s not for me. xfce on the other hand …

Gnome 3

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Ok, so you’re typ­ing, and want to use <tab> to help you on your jour­ney. You want to do an ‘ls’ on cer­tain files. You’re not sure what they are. You do ‘ls –l da’ then you hit TAB, because you want to see what’s there. It’s 2 TAB hits to get the auto­com­plete, but what’s this, on the FIRST tab hit, there’s a DING! Well thanks Gnome3. What the hell is that for. In what way, is you giv­ing me an ALERT on hit­ting tab, in any way, use­ful to me?

Installing Debian on an Acer Aspire One 753

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This is pretty straight­for­ward with a cou­ple of quirks. Installing sta­ble (squeeze) using the wifi was pos­si­ble but I had to tem­porar­ily con­fig­ure my router to use WEP (instead of WPA2/PSK) before I could get a connection.

Network cards recognised during install

Net­work options dur­ing install

Then after instal­la­tion, the wifi had dis­ap­peared. I could’ve inves­ti­gated, and this post cer­tainly sug­gests that it is fix­able, but installing sta­ble had been an acci­dent. Since I had a clean install, there wasn’t any­thing to lose. I went back to Old Kent Road, and threw the dice again. The cur­rent test­ing release is wheezy, so I decided to give that a blast.

The wifi options were slightly dif­fer­ent this time. I was offered WPA2 and even though I had to man­u­ally enter the SSID of the router, net­work con­nec­tiv­ity was a breeze.

Installing Debian Wheezy - WPA2 wifi ok

Debian Wheezy Install

I’d read that it was pos­si­ble to con­fig­ure the IP address man­u­ally by select­ing expert install so I chose that route and got a ver­bose and inter­est­ing jour­ney through the install, which was, on the whole, a piece of cake.

Eject CD, reboot, and hello Gnome 3. Well we can deal with you later. But first, the net­work. Where’s my wifi gone? I’d used it to install, and now it was gone.

I might have given up around now. I toyed with the set­tings sug­gested here with­out much enthu­si­asm, and thought that LMDE had been work­ing fine, I could just go back. Why make life hard for myself?

And it was a close thing. I knew it was almost cer­tainly pos­si­ble to get the wifi work­ing again — it was just how much tin­ker­ing under the hood was required. It turned out just to be a loose wire, and the fix was really easy. The only dif­fer­ence I found between my sys­tem and the instruc­tions in raghu’s blog, is that the con­fig file is actually:

/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

and not /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf.

So what worked for me was to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf, change:

[ifupdown]
managed=false

to

[ifupdown]
managed=true

then restart the net­work man­ager. i.e.

/etc/init.d/network-manager restart

(or reboot).

And Bob’s your father’s brother.

so thanks for your blog raghu … if I hadn’t stum­bled upon it I’d be back on LMDE.

As it hap­pens, the IP address was allo­cated using DHCP and I had to con­fig­ure it man­u­ally again, so there was no advan­tage to using the ‘expert install’ option.

Full Circle

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It feels like I’ve gone full cir­cle. I started, some time ago, with slack­ware, installed from a cou­ple of flop­pies. Then Red­hat, Suse, Man­drake and Ubuntu. I’m sure there were oth­ers. But in and out of the dis­tros there was always debian. I like Ubuntu but then after one par­tic­u­lar upgrade I dis­cov­ered that, overnight, the desk­top had mor­phed into some­thing grue­some. I could’ve tin­kered and regressed. Instead I moved to Linux Mint. Then to Linux Mint Debian. And the LMDE chair was very comfy.

But recently I wanted to install Linux on a cou­ple of clapped out old head­less servers. They don’t have USB ports, at least, not bootable ones. They have floppy dri­ves, and space-age CDROM dri­ves. But LMDE is only avail­able on DVDs. I’m sure there are ways of get­ting LMDE on a CDROM and doing a net­work install but I really can’t be arsed find­ing out. Why bother when I can just install debian?

So I installed Debian, and saw that it was good. Really easy. Then I installed it on another Clapped out PC, and that was easy too. Then I installed it on a lap­top, and that wasn’t quite so easy. But still easy enough to be worth the effort. It is sug­gest­ing I use some abom­i­na­tion that calls itself Gnome 3 but I found it just as happy to use Xfce4 instead. It’s now being installed on an Acer Aspire One 753, and that is not with­out its prob­lems. But not big prob­lems. And I’ll have debian. It’s like putting on a big comfy pair of slippers.

Nokia E71

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I’ve had my E71 for nearly two years now and that’s given me ample time to dis­cover what an unmit­i­gated pile of crap it truly is. When things work, it’s fine. The GPS is kinda cute, and seri­ously handy, and I really like the BBC iplayer. In fact it’s prob­a­bly the main app I use.

The iplayer has caused me grief in the past, time­outs and freez­ing, solved only by the highly tech­ni­cal process of throw­ing away the router and get­ting another one. But that was a while ago now and it’s been great of ever such a long time. Until two days ago. Lis­ten­ing to iplayer then after about 10 min­utes, it stopped. Prob­a­bly just a fluke, I thought.

Over the last cou­ple of days I’ve tested it a few times and sure enough, I’m get­ting the old favourite:

BBC Iplayer - No gateway replyNot an uncom­mon error mes­sage for the E71. Var­i­ous sug­ges­tions are offered, includ­ing man­u­ally set­ting IP address, DNS set­tings and tweak­ing router set­tings. All tried, all failed. I installed a nifty util­ity called IfInfo that told me my phone’s net­work set­tings, and the router was pretty sure it was there too. I tried a util­ity called Nokia Device Sta­tus, from the Beta Labs, but all I got was “Licence Expired”, so that was a waste of time.

More exper­i­ments showed that iplayer would run for a few min­utes, then time­out with the Gate­way error. Every­thing else on the LAN still hap­pily con­nected to the inter­net. Inter­est­ingly, the E71 would then refuse to con­nect to the inter­net at all using any browser (tried opera plus the default), via the wire­less router (Zyxel) or Wire­less access points (Netgear).

One of the more promis­ing avenues was installing a util­ity called HandyWi. This imme­di­ately got me con­nected and I thought my prob­lems were solved. But then, after about 5 or 10 min­utes the famil­iar Time­out and Gate­way error mes­sages. But I could still ini­ti­ate new ses­sions, they just didn’t last very long. Which kinda sug­gests this might be some­thing about the way the E71 default con­nec­tiv­ity soft­ware doesn’t work. Dur­ing all this I also rein­stalled the firmware and restored from backup.

Curi­ously no-one has sug­gested climb­ing to the top of a very tall build­ing and chuck­ing the E71 out of a win­dow, or plac­ing it on a set of rail­way tracks, or hit­ting it many many many times with a very very very big ham­mer. My con­tract expires in a few months and I shall count the days until I can get rid of this wretched machine.

In the mean­time, it’s Big Red Switch time. A fac­tory reset, rein­stall, then start again from a very early backup, and we shall see what we shall see.

Update: 10 Jan 2012

Hmmmm, inter­est­ing. I wiped and restarted from an old backup and the prob­lem per­sisted. I tried using man­ual address­ing instead of DHCP and the prob­lem per­sisted. I gave up. And now, well, it’s work­ing again. Some­one, some­where, is, as they say, hav­ing a laugh. I did won­der whether ‘some­thing had changed’ at the BBC end given the prob­lems watch­ing video on some smart­phones. It seems a bit unlikely, and wouldn’t explain the con­nec­tiv­ity issues with my E71 and browsers. But it’s work­ing for now, until it stops again. Ho hum.