More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • Ubuntu – Installing MS Office 2007 with WINE

    Unfortunately I have to run Microsoft Office 2007 for work purposes. No criticisms please! I have tried OpenOffice 3.x and it is just a little too disruptive to the documents in question (although part of the fault may be sub-optimal document templates). Personally I would much rather use LyX which is little feature light, but absolutely brilliant for pure writing.

    Anyway, when I first tried running Microsoft Office with WINE, I couldn’t get past the installer and I had to come up with the following recipe for getting it installed.

    First of all, remove all traces of wine from your system (I’ll be assuming Ubuntu 8.10 which is what I’m running) :-

    sudo apt-get --purge remove wine wine-dev
rm -rf ~/.wine

    Note that I am removing the old ~/.wine directory which you may choose to keep if you wish (you may have installed something else after all!). However this document assumes that you are only installing Office and may not work if other software is also installed.

    The next step is to download the right version of wine from WineHQ. Unfortunately the latest version of wine isn’t compatible with the installer. The version I tried (after reading numerous problem reports) was 1.1.16. The archive page can be found here.

    After downloading, install manually with :-

    sudo dpkg -i wine_1.1.16\~winehq0\~ubuntu\~8.10-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

    After this has been installed, you can mount the Office 2007 CD and start the installer. Incidentally it is well worth creating an image file from the real CD if you are going to be spending any time tinkering with this – which is why I’m using a CD image!

    sudo mount -oloop,unhide /cdimages/office2007.iso /mnt
wine /mnt/setup.exe

    The installation process should be fairly straight forward although you will need to ignore a few warnings about being unable to obtain some updates.

    Once this has finished you can run Word with :-

    wine ~/.wine/drive_c//Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office/Office12/WINWORD.EXE

    Enjoy!?!

    No guarantees that everything works properly of course, but it is a start.

    At this point it may well be worth taking a backup copy of the wine directory with the installation of Office 2007. This can be done quite easily with :-

    cd
tar cvf ~/wine-drive-c-with-office.tar .wine
bzip2 ~/wine-drive-c-with-office.tar

    If you no longer need to run the installer, it may well be worth removing wine again to install a later version of Wine. This can be done by repeating the first step (but not removing the .wine directory) and downloading a different version of wine from the archive page as given.

  • Police Actions At The G20 Protests

    Now that there has been time for things to surface and time to reflect, we can see that whilst the majority of the police were well behaved and went about their business responsibly, but as might be expected a lunatic fringe tried to spoil things by going too far …

    1. Battering a passer by to the ground because a man walking away from you with his hands in his pockets is just so threatening. Ian Tomlinson was merely on his way home from work when this happened and died from a heart attack a few minutes later around the corner. See the video:
    2. Giving a woman a back-hander and then using a truncheon against the back of her legs, just because she’s a little in your face. Normally someone who behaves like this towards a woman is condemned for their actions, but it’s perfectly ok if you are the Police and she’s a protestor :
    3. If you look closely at the video above you will notice that the policeman battering that protester has no identifying numbers on his shoulder. British police are supposed to have identification to stop the anonymous brutality that occurs in police states, but perhaps we are living in one ?

    If you look around YouTube, you may well find other examples that make it appear that the police were heavy handed against the protesters. For example :

    I’ve seen quite a few video clips of violent protesters over the years – frequently at G20 (or similar) events, and the protesters in this clip don’t look particularly violent to me. I am not saying there wasn’t stuff going on that isn’t coming across too well in the video, but the police response to me looks excessive.

    The death of Ian Tomlinson shows why everybody should be concerned with the possibility of police brutality at such protests – it is easy for people to be caught up in these events who have nothing whatsoever to do with the protest. And the police need to be constantly reminded that the protesters have the right to be there, and the right to protest.

    And as to how that policeman was allowed to go out without identification, well that should be regarded as the equivalent of a burgular going out “tooled up” for a job … he was prepared to go out and indulge in levels of violence extreme enough that he felt he needed to protect his identity. Who allowed him to go out on the streets in the first place ?

    Today it was announced that there will be a review of the police tactics used for dealing with demonstrations. That may well be a good idea, but what would be more helpful is a review of every policeman’s attitude to demonstrators.

  • New Server – Possible Disruption

    I doubt anyone will really care, but I am migrating to a new server today so you might notice some disruption as it gets migrated to the server room under the stairs.

    Strange as it may seem, I think I am going to miss the old server – a Sun Ultra 60 with 10 disks. It may have been a little on the noisy side, but it was a real server (old Sun workstations are built more like servers than desktop PCs) with a non-Intel architecture. I will even miss the muted growl under the stairs; the new server is so quiet I might not even notice a power failure.

    Still the new server should be a little quicker and should eat a little less electricity.

    Update: The new server is in and running in the final position. All well so far – excluding the fact that it needs my Eizo monitor rather than my ancient Sony (I really want to use the Eizo where it will be used). And of course I now discover that OpenSolaris has a really useless boot screen that doesn’t show any details. Must find out how to get it to display proper geeky text messages.

  • Ubuntu on Intel iMac Review

    Yes I know everyone and their dog has already written a review of the Intel iMac, but I have not done so yet. This is a review of the 24″ iMac (and I’m already hating that incorrect capitalisation) with the specific intent of putting Ubuntu on. This is not some kind of weird anti-OSX statement; I already have a laptop with OSX installed on it and it does seem like a fun operating system.

    But this is a replacement for my main desktop, and I really want a “proper” Unix on it, and Linux will do in the meantime.

    First Thoughts

    First of all, the screen stand should allow adjustment in the vertical direction; already I can see myself getting out an extremely old and manky tape drive to sit underneath to raise the screen to an appropriate height. Apple ? Your lack of foresight in not including height adjustment is ruining the look of the system!

    Nice keyboard! If you do not type much. I am aware that some people really like the skinny Apple keyboards, but it is not for me even though they got off to a good start by not including Windows keys. Back to the Das Keyboard for me I think. The mouse is similar – there’s this nice funky ball on top which is an improvement over the usual scroll wheel (although I am not too sure how well it would work at speed), but just not enough buttons.  Or at least it does not feel like enough buttons. The “one button” with two effects method as appears to be the case here is a little odd and off-putting.

    Perhaps Apple needs a special country kit – “Special Clicky Keyboard And Mouse With Too Many Buttons For The Unix Geeks”. How many people end up using a non-Apple keyboard and mouse ? Perhaps not many, but why not cater to them with alternative keyboards and mice ? My Apple keyboard and mouse will be mostly unused.

    Where are the memory card slots though ?  It would make things a bit more complete (and the iMac is about one box doing everything) if there were a sensible selection of memory card slots.

    In terms of software (and not OSX itself), one thing becomes immediately apparent when booting (and on previous occasions when trying to boot from CD, diagnosing booting problems, etc.). The Apple firmware breaks the first rule of user interface design! Not something you expect Apple to do.

    The firmware needs to be just a little bit more expressive about what is going on. You may well be thinking that as a hardcore Unix geek I want to see inscrutable messages from the firmware about initialising that chipset, addresses of where adapter cards are, cpu values, etc. And of course you are right.

    But basic messages about starting the hardware would still be helpful.

    More importantly however, the Apple firmware should be letting you know what keystrokes are needed to do “unusual” things like boot from a CD, an external hard disk, start the hardware diagnostics, etc. One of the most irritating things about Apple hardware is the need to provide secret incantations to boot from CD  – you hold the “C” key down for “a while” (how long anyway?).

    The Install

    At this point the “unusual” choices of Apple bite you when it comes to installing a version of Linux intended for use on mainstream PCs. First you have to install rEFIt, then you install Linux off CD (and mess around with the MBR partition table), then have to remember to “resync” the partition tables.

    Seems there’s an EFI partition table and an MBR partition table that need keeping in sync. Having two partition tables immediately strikes me as a dumb idea. When Windows is involved, there is probably no fix for this problem, but why is Linux still not doing things properly ? Or at least not doing the sensible thing by default.

    It also means there is effectively a two step boot process – first rEFIt starts, then then starts grub which finally starts Linux; this is not a quick system to boot.

    Fixing The Niggles

    In any install, there are always little niggles that need fixing. The most obvious is a way to control the brightness of the screen which by default is far too bright. There may well be better solutions out there, but a bit of C coming from http://www.felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2006/09/11/basic-backlight-support-for-macbook-pro

    A quick compile and install in /opt/bin/bl and root can set the backlight brightness with :-

    bl (1-15)

    Adding this in an appropriate way to /etc/rc.local ensures that the backlight is set on every boot.

    It also appears that we need to do a bit of hacking to support the sound properly. Adding an option to /etc/modprobe.d/options specifies the “model” of soundcard we are using to get sound working :-

    options snd-hda-intel model=imac24

    A quick reboot and sound is working (microphone not tested!).

    For some reason the module that is used to gain access to the iMac temperature probes is not loaded automatically. Adding applesmc to the end of /etc/modules gets this loaded (after a reboot or manually with modprobe applesmc). Unfortunately there does not appear to be an immediately obvious way of using this except from the command line.

    The wireless network controller apparently works after the addition of the proprietary driver that shows up after doing an update. Admittedly I cannot say for sure because I use a wired setup.

    Lastly the IR receiver. I will admit this has currently defeated me although that is partially because I am not that interested. I will of course update this if I get it to work.

    Later: Screen Calibration

    I later took a look at setting up the screen properly. Proper controls for the screen would have been nice, but configuring from the system turns out to be relatively easy.

    First of all I used the OSX screen calibration tool in “expert” mode to generate in ICC file containing the screen profile. Doing this may well be possible inside Ubuntu; I just happened to know where the tool was in OSX.

    I then installed xcalib :-

    apt-get install xcalib

    This could be used to set the monitor profile from the earlier generated ICC file.

    Conclusion

    It works. After a week or so using it, I am no longer thinking of the iMac as a system being installed and tested but as my standard desktop.

  • Solaris – Always Mount All ZFS Filesystems In Single User Mode

    Traditionally I have always mounted just the filesystems I needed in single user mode whilst tinkering in Solaris. Turns out this is a dumb method for ZFS filesystems.

    What happens is that the zfs mount command will create any directories necessary to mount the filesystem. Later this can stop other ZFS filesystems from mounting when the tinkering is finished. This could be an argument for not creating hierarchies of filesystems, but that’s rather extreme.

    The better solution is to mount all the ZFS filesystems in one go with :-

    zfs mount -a