David R. Heffelfinger

Being a child of the 80's, I love listening to music I grew up with. Unfortunately, it seems most of the 80's compilation CDs out there made a conscious effort to find the suckiest songs of the 80's and put them together in a CD. It seemed like the really good music from that era had just but disappeared.

Today while browsing Amazon I ran into some MP3 downloads for some songs I hadn't heard in about 20 years, the good stuff that I thought had dissappeared, I, of course, became very eager to add these songs to my collection.

When downloading individual songs in Amazon, no special software is needed, however, the Amazon MP3 downloader is needed to download complete albums.

They have a few Linux versions for Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. The only version of Ubuntu they support is Gutsy Gibbon, which is two versions behind the latest, Intrepid Ibex.

Feeling brave, I tried to install the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Amazon MP3 Downloader under Intrepid Ibex, unfortunately the installer failed, telling me that the architecture was wrong. The deb package available on Amazon is for i386, and I run the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Linux.

I googled around to see if there was a way to install 32 bit packages under 64 bit Ubuntu, I ran into getlibs.

getlibs is a script that downloads any missing libraries for any installed package.

In summary, what I had to do to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader under 64 bit Ubuntu was to get getlibs from http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb. Simply clicking on the link results in the package opening in GDebi, it should install without issues.

Once getlibs is installed, the Amazon MP3 Downloader needs to be installed, passing a parameter to ignore the architecture difference:

This will install the package, it will be placed under /usr/bin/amazonmp3, however at this time it won't run properly because of missing libraries. In order to get the libraries, we need to run the getlibs script:

At this point the application should be "good to go" and able to download MP3 albums from Amazon MP3 Downloads.

I just upgraded my old Blackberry to a Blackberry Bold. I of course wanted to transfer all my old contacts to my new device. I transferred all my contacts to the sim card and installed the sim card in the new phone, however that is a less than ideal solution since the sim card splits the contacts, that is, if a contact has home, phone and work numbers, that one contact appears as three different contacts in the sim card. Also, email addresses are lost when using this technique.

It is no secret that I am a Linux user, however I do keep a spare Windows partition around for the rare cases that I need to use Windows. Today was one of those days.

Blackberries come bundled with Windows software to install applications, synchronize with outlook, perform backups, so on and so forth. I wanted to run the Blackberry software to transfer the address book from my old device to my new Bold.

I booted to Windows vista and ran the installer, while it was running a million security updates and popups were showing up, and windows kept asking me to reboot my laptop. I refused to reboot as I simply wanted to transfer my addressbook to my new bold. Once the Blackberry desktop installer completed, lo and behold, it asked me to reboot. I gave in and rebooted, only to have Windows Vista prevent me from logging in again once it came back up.

When I tried to log in, a Windows Activation dialog window showed up, complaining about the license store containing inconsistent data or something like that. The dialog box had a link to contact HP, my laptop's manufacturer. I clicked on it and I was able to chat with HP customer support. After a lot of back and forth what HP told me is that I would have to do a full system restore, which I refuse to do since it would wipe out my Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex installation.

I googled around for a solution to Windows vista preventing me from logging in to no avail. I tried to transfer the addressbook via bluetooth, but for some reason I don't get the option when I select the Bold from my old Blackberry (I do get the option when I select my bluetooth headset, go figure).

At this point I turned my attention to trying to transfer the addressbook using Linux. I had heard of a utility called Barry that may help me with my issue.

I found Ubuntu deb packages here, unfortunately the most recent version they support at this time is Hardy, I saw no packages for intrepid. I felt brave and installed the packages for Hardy under Intrepid, they installed with no obvious issues.

From the list of packages, barrybackup-gui looked promising. I installed it by simply clicking on the link from Firefox and opening the downloaded file directly in GDebi. There were some unresolved dependencies, which at the moment I can't remember exactly, but all the dependencies are listed in the same page. I simply installed the dependencies and tried again, until all dependencies were satisfied (I only had to install two or three dependencies).

At this point I plugged my old Blackberry to one of the USB ports in my laptop, and executed barrybackup, it detected the blackberry, asked me to identify it. At this point I configured barrybackup to backup only the address book by going to Edit | Config, then clicking the configure button.

I only wanted the addressbook, therefore I clicked "Deselect All", followed by activating the "Address Book" database. I OK'ed my way out of there and clicked on "Backup". After a couple of seconds, I had an addressbook backup in my Linux box.

At this point I unplugged my old blackberry from the USB port, plugged my new one and re-ran barrybackup, it recognized the new device and asked me to identify it. After doing so I clicked restore and it started copying my backups to the bold (word to the wise, it deletes all entries in the existing addressbook before restoring). Unfortunately there was a problem and it only restored a partial number of the entries in my addressbook.

It left out about 20 or so entries, luckily a lot of those I don't need anymore, therefore I ended up having to enter only a few by hand.

Although the Ubuntu/Barry combination wasn't perfect, it sure was a better solution to my problem than Windows vista with the official Blackberry desktop software

I recently got involved in a project that uses MySQL as its RDBMS. I am not a DBA, nor I pretend to be, but I wanted to set up a local MySQL database on my Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex laptop.

I ran into some issues that were primarily because of my lack of experience installing or administering MySQL, I assume others trying to do the same will run into the same issues, therefore I decided to write this entry recording what I had to do to get MySQL going for the benefits of others (and possibly some time in the future I might forget the solutions my issues, therefore I can refer to this entry myself if I ever need to setup MySQL again).

The first problem I ran into was that MySQL does not show up in the "Add/Remove Applications" GUI tool, sure there are MySQL clients, but the RDBMS itself is nowhere to be found.

I tried "sudo apt-get mysql" and it turned out there was no package mysql to be installed, at this point I started to suspect that the Desktop version of Ubuntu I have does not include MySQL, not even in the repositories.

Luckily I turned out to be wrong, after some research I found out that the correct package to install is mysql-server, a "sudo apt-get mysql-server" took care of installing MySQL.

Creating a new database worked without issue. I issued the following query to create the database:

It worked without issues.

The next thing I wanted to do was to create a regular, non administrator user to use MySQL. Following the instructions at the MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual created a user allright.

The following query:

did the trick "someuser" is the new mysql login name for the new user "password" is the user's mysql password. Originally I forgot to enclose the password in single quotes, rookie mistake, I corrected the mistake and the query worked without a problem.

Next I wanted to grant the newly created user all privileges on my newly created database, in order to do so, I issued the following query:

At this point I thought I was "good to go", I attempted to log in to mysql by issuing the following command in the command line:

At which point I was prompted for a password, I entered the correct password and was denied access.

After a lot of googling and hair pulling, I found out that my grant statement did not work for "localhost", I had to issue a different grant statement to be able to log in using my newly created user.

The following query did the trick:

It turns out I had to specify use the username@hostname syntax to be able to log in from the same server where mysql is running.

After doing this I was finally able to log in as my newly created user and create the tables I needed for the application I am working on.

I just finished installing Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on my HP Pavilion dv6810us, which is part of the HP dv6000 series

Installation was fairly straightforward, the only hiccup I found was that wireless networking was not working out of the box, I had to install ndiswrapper, but thankfully this was pretty painless. All I had to do was install ndisgtk

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

And the Windows XP drivers for its wireless card (identified as 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01) by lspci According to this post in the Ubuntu forums, the correct drivers can be found here.

Once I installed ndisgtk and downloaded the windows drivers, all I had to do was point ndisgtk to the .inf file included with the driver, and wireless "just worked", no mucking around with blacklisting drivers or anything like I had to do with previous versions of Ubuntu

I also ran into an issue in which the system would stop booting unless a key (any key) was pressed repeatedly. This issue seems to be affecting several Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq laptops.

This issue was reported on launchpad, and I found a workaround there.

The file /boot/grub/menu.lst needs to be edited as root, I use vi as my editor, substitute the following command with your favorite editor:

vi /boot/grub/menu.list

Find the following line:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=c877e76e-7e7f-4b47-aec7-6ae28d1ab767 ro quiet splash

and append "acpi=noirq" to it. After doing this the line should look like this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=c877e76e-7e7f-4b47-aec7-6ae28d1ab767 ro quiet splash acpi=noirq

After making the above modifications I was able to boot to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex normally.