Software: The Tail of the Gutsy Gibbon

Please forgive me for the pun in the title, I really couldn't resist. Don't hate me for it.

Anyway, after writing out a pretty long review about my experience with Ubuntu yesterday an then going to post it to find that it'd magically disappeared into the realms of Spodes hungry server, I thought I'd better write another one, I did promise to Spode I'd write about my experience after all. It is 11:54pm and I can't help but feel the servers got one up on me now so I'm going to make sure I get it right this time.

I'm like most 'normal' people, wary of anything free and especially wary of anything that's apparently 'great' and free. I'm also even more put off if you have to be a programming enthusiast to use it, lucky for me you don't need to be for Ubuntu. After a recommendation from Spode an some sweet talk (not that sort you dirty buggers) I thought there can't be any harm in having a Dual Boot with Ubuntu and XP. I was right for once, I haven't used XP for a whole week now and to my amazement I've had to do minimal fiddling about to get everything to work in the Gibbon. Drivers automagically installed themself and I'm doing all the things I did in XP in a secure environment with more eye candy! Happy days! Anyone undecided about jumping onto the Linux bandwagon, Ubuntu is a perfect start, I've been using it for a week now an I feel perfectly at home. So basically what I'm trying to say is, 'what are you waiting for?!'

If you are a Linux user, I'd be more than interested to hear of any recommended nifty programs that I could go and get.

So far I've managed to install Limewire and Amarok, the latter gave a fair bit of abuse saying '.mp3 format not found, installing .mp3 codec now' an would only play music as root. Fixed it by putting the codec folder into the home folder, didn't have to open it as root again. Other than those two, I can't think of anything else that I need really, Pidgin works fine as a IM client any recommendations?

ooo, a font pack. I could use that. I really enjoy Ubuntu. I only have one issue with it. I still can't get my Clie to sync with gnome-pilot. It worked on 6.10 but 7.10 is just a no go. I just backup to memory stick for now.

Posted By: Spode

That's annoying Ivan. What happens? Get any error messages?

Nothing happens. When I use the Wizard to connect gnome-pilot to the Clie I get to the point where it is going to establish the connection and nothing happens. The connection just times out. If I sync with my WinXP laptop it works fine. So, I have rulled out a hardware issue on the side of the cradle and Clie. I also tested that particular USB port and I am able to transfer data from my camera to the PC without issues. It is just a GNDN. (Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing).

Posted By: Spode

Open a terminal, and then launch the wizard manually from there. Any error messages should pop up in the terminal window and will give you a clue as to what is going on.

I'll try that tonight.

Okay, never mind. It looks like the visor module has been blacklisted for some reason. I am trying to comment out the blacklisting but it says I don't have permission to write to the file. Bah, I need a terminal/editor refresher.

I was using the editor installed in the applications folder (Can't remember what it is), but I did not sudo. Duh! That's probably why I could not edit the file.

Okay, it is fully functional! The file you need to edit in 7.10 is:

/etc/modprobe.d/libpisock9

You just need to comment out the "blacklist visor" by putting a "#" in front of it.

Just to be clear, and in case I need to reference this in the future, you open a terminal window and type:

then comment out "blacklist visor". It should look like this:

then write your edit by pressing ^ o (control + O)

Exit your terminal, reboot, (Can you restart services within the OS so you don't have to reboot?) and you should be done. This looks like it affects a lot of Palm based PDA's. I have no idea why they did this.