Ben Kevan’s Blog

Lotus Notes 8 on openSUSE 10.2

So Lotus Notes 8 Final version came out for Linux, so I decided to upgrade my Lotus Notes 8 Beta 3 to Lotus Notes 8 Final. First bummer was there is no upgrade path, you have to uninstall Beta 3 and re-install the Final version, which really isn’t a big deal..

Much like with Beta 3 the Final version did NOT look for Mozilla (which 7.0.1 used to do, along with the first versions of Sametime).  So I decided to log in as root to do the chores (I am sure I could have just sudo’ed and done it, but the old instrucitons requested you log in as root since I believe there was a call to xserver. If you try to run the install with su - or sudo and you get a blank screen, this is probably the cause. Try logging on as root, or do a text install.

Ok.. so back on track. I uninstall Beta 3.  by running:

/opt/IBM/lotus/notes/_unist/./uninstaller.bin
NOTE: the default install location is /opt/ibm/lotus/notes, but I decided to go with /opt/IBM/lotus/notes since the IBM folder was originally created by sametime when I installed the RPM.

So that finished.. I go to install Lotus Notes, (at this point I have already untar’ed my package) just go to the location where you extracted your install files and do a ./setup.sh (note, you can probably double click the setup.sh icon in Konqurer and have it start the installation) .. The Installer program comes up, and I follow the on screen instructions and .. I am done.. seriously.. it was that easy.. Thank you ECLIPSE ..

My first impressions: WOW!, Lotus Notes Native cilent released with the Windows Client that isn’t goddly slow. The new icon is pretty cool, other then that it just seems more responsive then the previous Beta 3 and I’ve had quite a few less crashes (with Beta 3, it went down a few times). Now my sametime settings actaully stick, with Beta 3, I had checked my windows not to steal focus, and yet they would always pop up, in the middle of a conversation or email that had some deragatory words, and was sent to the wrong person, great reason to clean up your vocab. They also fixed the Day at a Glance portion of the sidebar, previously it would take focus after you deleted an email.. and it was irritating.. I deleted a few meetings that way on accident.. But now.. it is all good.

Some things I don’t like still:

When you have a property window you cannot type into a integrated sametime chat window..
A little slow when switching between opened tabs like Calander / To-Do .. A big faster on a Windows VM I have on my machine..

How to speed up your openSUSE 10.2 box.. And get rid of 100% CPU Usage with update-status

Well, we’ve all been there.. Booted up our openSUSE 10.2 box, and shortly thereafter the CPU is pegged due to parse-metadata or update-status.. So what is up with that? You want to know what’s up with that? ZMD. That is the Zenworks Management Daemon. Which they used for getting updates to your openSUSE box.

So how do you fix it? Just remove ZMD:

su-

rczmd stop

rpm -e zmd libzypp-zmd-backend sqlite-zmd rug zen-updater

Don’t worry though, you will still have an updater.. the name of this puppy is openSUSE updater, and was recently patched by some updates pushed out by Novell.

Hopefully 10.3 will bring us a much better updating / package management experience.

Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 Release | Installed on openSUSE 10.2

So decided yesterday after Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 was released that I would give it a whirl. It seems like a few things have been fixed since the last non released dev version was released. Remember 0.5.2 is a DEV release, and not a stable release, which will be 0.6.0.

Here are a few things that I liked:

Options: Workaround: Make “on all desktops” windows “sticky”. Which fixed the issues with SuperKaramba being only on Desktop 1

Expo, Expo and Expo.. It seems like some updates have been integrated into Expo on this release.

I believe that the freeze on logoff / shutdown w/ KDE may have been fixed (I will verify later)

Animations works better

Here are a few things I disliked:

The caps are still behind what they were in Beryl.  Under Utility there is a Cube Caps Plugin, but it should actually be integrated into the Desktop Cube. Right now the Desktop Cube only has 1 option for a “Cap” and it only works on the top cap. The Cube Caps plugin allows you to put stuff on both the bottm and the top, but it doesn’t scale the whole cube, and is not transparent.

Zoom and what is called Enhanced Zoom are still a few steps back behind what they were in beryl. Enhanced Zoom should be depreciated, and the functions should be built into zoom, and hopefully they will work as seamless as they did in Beryl, still very jumpy in Compiz Fusion

Installation  was SIMPLE. I already have Compiz Fusion running from the CyberOrg repository, and decided I was going to switch back over to the X11:XGL Repo, to install. This repo is located:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XGL/openSUSE_10.2/

rpm -qa | grep compiz
compiz-kde-0.5.2-17.1
compiz-bcop-0.5.2-2.1
python-compizconfig-0.5.2-4.2
compiz-emerald-themes-0.5.2-2.1
libcompizconfig-0.5.2-5.2
compizconfig-settings-manager-0.5.2-6.3
compiz-emerald-0.5.2-6.2
compiz-fusion-plugins-main-0.5.2-7.1
compiz-fusion-plugins-extra-0.5.2-6.4
compiz-0.5.2-17.1

Is what I have installed. Worked like a charm.

Also on that repo you can also see that Novell is working towards the single click install.. Can’t wait to really start seeing that.

Compiz Fusion on openSuSE 10.2

So the last time I tried Compiz Fusion, I got fed up with it and went back to Beryl on XGL (Yes, I actaully ran Beryl on XGL on my NVIDIA Quadro 110M because running with the Native NVIDIA driver still gave me some issues). You may be wondering why I want to go back to Compiz Fusion, well it’s because of a feature called ”Expo”. Expo basicly lets you span out, and you see all of your desktops, and you can move windows between them, and switch your active window.

Above is a picture of what Expo looks like while you are spanned out. Or course Compiz Fusion adds some other great features like awesome appliaction switchers, atlantis cube (which basicly makes a fish tank in your cube) and things like writing on the screen with fire. Alot of those are eye candy and are not functional plugins. But Expo is far from just a little bit of eye candy.

Ok, so now that I got why out of the way, let me show you how:

open YaST
open Software Installation Sources

add:
nvidia repository: server - download.nvidia.com - folder - opensuse/10.2/
cyberorg repository: server - software.opensuse.org - folder - download/home%3a/cyberorg/openSUSE_10.2/

open Software Management:

install the following nvidia drivers:
nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default (or bigsmp) depending on your kernel
x11-video-nvidiaG01

install the following from the cyberorg repository:
bcop
ccs-lib
ccs-python
ccs-settings
compiz-fusion-plugins-git
compiz-git
compiz-git-kde (or gnome)
emerald-compiz-git
emerald-themes
libwnck (may be installed from another repo)
licenses (may be installed from another repo)

open a terminal and run the following command:
sudo nvidia-xconfig –composite –allow-glx-with-composite –render-accel –add-argb-glx-visuals

reboot

Logon, try running compiz with:
compiz –replace ccp &
emerald –replace ccp &
This will start Compiz and Emerald

Emerald Configuration is under Applications
CompizConfig Setting Configuration is under Utilities –> Desktop
Note this is for KDE, I am not sure how it is in GNOME.

To make it auto start do the following:
open a terminal
touch ~/.kde/Autostart/startcompiz.sh
kate ~/.kde/Autostart/startcompiz.sh

Paste the following in your text editor:
#! /bin/sh
compiz –replace ccp &
emerald –replace ccp &

Save it.. and close it

back at termial type:

chmod +x ~/.kde/Autostart/startcompiz.sh

log off, and log back on, you should be good to go.

Now back to my experience. After re-installing this time, it seems to be much more stable, however there are still quite a few flaws that need fixing, here are some that come to mind:

Rebooting / Logging out sometimes freezes and needs a Hard Shutdown
SuperKaramba is only on Screen 1 and not all of them like Beryl
Locking computer sometimes doesn’t work correctly with screensaver

A few other things I know I am missing, those just jumped out at me right away.

Hope this helps someone…

Oregon Wildlife Safari

So this weekend Sarah, Baby and I went to the Oregon drive through Wildlife Sarafi.

I have to say this was a great great experience. We all really enjoyed it, and I don’t believe that little guy being only 6 months old was a limitation. He really enjoyed it, he even tried to talk to the animals.

It was great being in the animals habitat, you really felt like you were in their home instead of walking around seeing them in a fake habitat. Seeing the Giraffes, Rhino’s and other exotic animals roam free, without a care about you or your car felt like I was back years ago, watching Jurassic Park wishing I was on the tour. Seeing the brute force of the bears, and being able to see the massive size of most animals really made me appreciate nature and the animals much more. I would write up more, but there is nothing I can say or show you that will give you the experience you are looking for, especially since each trip can and will be different, they are wild animals, and are very unpredictable.

Gallery Pictures

Aplus.net / Wordpress and Coppermine and Internal 500 Server Errors

Well, after alot of time dealing with Aplus.net and the Internal Server Errors (500) i’ve finally just put it to rest. They have the following limits in place:

2 PHP Scripts per Customer at a time
10 Concurrent MySQL Queries

So that shouldn’t be too bad, should it? No, it shouldn’t. But then you have to take into mind you have Wordpress. Spammers love wordpress, and how do they spam wordpress? With SQL of course, taking up a bunch of your Concurrent SQL queries. I’ve turned off comments on my blog, and since then (this morning) I have not received 1 Internal 500 error. I’ll give it a shot for a few days and see how it pans out.