the fixing field trip

On turning up at office on Tuesday, after a 3 day holiday, heard about the problem blowing out here and there in our kiosks due to a broken package in our repository. Thankfully it was happening only with our ongoing new rollout image which was installed in around 80 kiosks in Karnataka. We decided to make a field trip and asses the situation, find a fix that can be executed in the affected kiosks with the help of the field engineers and operators itself. Our earlier plan of making the trip on Tuesday evening itself was dropped as it would have been too late when we could reach even the nearest affected kiosk.

We started the field trip around 8 a.m. on Wednesday, getting a cab to take us around. This will help us in visiting as many kiosk as possible in a day. We started with a 2 hour travel to Yadiyur near Kunigal falling under the Tumkur district. The cab driver suggested us a nice hotel in Kunigal, where we had plate-idlis, vada and tea before continuing our journey.

The Yadiyur kiosk is located right in front of the cattle market of the village. We started hunting for the bug which caused all the mess and soon found it to be an extra netmask line in the network interfaces file. Removing this line and rebooting the machine brought the network up and the machine started to operate normally. But when we tried the second machine, it was more than this. The firewall seemed to have messed up during the upgrade, so we needed to clean it, then clean the interface file and bring up the system back. We also started calling up the field engineers, asking them to go to the nearest problematic kiosk and guide them to perform the same fix we found.

Having found the fix, we wanted to test it again. So we next moved to our kiosk in Maisandra, which is some 20 Kms from Yadiyur. We had a bit of trouble in finding the kiosk as it is located in a building interior to the main road. The kiosk was small but neatly maintained. We fixed the first machine following the same procedure, but the second machine did not face the updates because of lack of network switch to connect both the machines and hence it was still unaffected. We finished our job and left to the next location, but it was already afternoon.

Our next location was Huliyurdurga, which is on the other side to Yadiyur and it took us almost an hour to reach. We again had problems locating the kiosk as the name board is not put on the building it is located at and people could not get a clue of what we were searching for. Thankfully the operator was standing out in front of the building, could spot our car and I could spot her waving. We quickly fixed the first machine, made it operational as customers were waiting and moved to the second machine. With some extra effort, we managed to fix it too.

We were hungry and decided to feed us with some snacks from the bakery. We decided not to visit the next kiosk Tiptur as it was very far and it was already 5 p.m. We started our way back to Bangalore and after crawling through the traffic around Nelamangla and Yeshwantpur, we reached office by 7.40 p.m.

We have learnt our lesson that we need more stricter Q.A. process and more rigorous testing before we update our stable repository next time. When we were in the kiosk, probably a hour or two at each location, there were indeed customers turning up at least once every hour On the whole, it was a nice day of traveling through rural Karnataka and visiting few more of our kiosks.

Maryo is in Universe

While reading the latest issue of Full Circle Magazine today, I came across the Game section and was surprised to know Maryo was available in the Ubuntu Universe repository. The package is named smc, short form of Secret Maryo Chronicles. I downloaded it (some 41MB totally) and went running it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get added in the menu. So I had to manually add it and also set its icon.

Always I have the habit of running a newly installed software from the terminal to check whether it spews some error or not. So did smc, there was some dependency error confirming to this launchpad bug. Luckily some one had prescribed a fix that makes it work. Had some fun playing Maryo after a long time. Hope they fix the bugs and we get a really super Maryo game in Hardy.

Making Flash Player Plugin work with Firefox in Ubuntu 7.10

Erased previous installation and installed Ubuntu 7.10 afresh. When I tried to check the blog stats in wordpress.com, which uses Flash for the chart, it gave me a missing plugin error. It also showed me a little pop up to install the plugin, but unfortunately it did not work. So I decided to try the alternative Gnash plugin, but it too didn’t seem to work.

A bit of googling took me to some Ubuntu Help Forum post where it was advised to get the Flash Player from the Adobe site and install it. This involves downloading the tar.gz file, extracting it out and running the flashplayer-installation script which installs the player. But this is to be done in the command line, followed by answering some simple questions. It asks to specify where the mozilla plugin directory is, which is /usr/lib/mozilla (and the plugin directory within), but this step kept failing.

This is where the hacker jumped out of me and made me to look into the source code of flashplayer-installation script to find out where it was going wrong and what I rather need to do to install. This script is accompanied by the actual plugin file `libflashplayer.so`. The scripts just performs some checks and copies this file to the mozilla plugin folder with a permission 755 for root:root. Then it checks for the existence of an environment variable `MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH pointing to the plugin directory for Firefox to detect the plugin.

This is the manual step to install the Flash Player plugin for Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 7.10

1. tar xvzf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
2. cd install_flash_player_9_linux
3. sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
4. sudo chmod 755 libflashplayer.so
5. vi ~/.bashrc and add `export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins` (i.e. the command within the “)
6. Run Firefox (all opened Firefox windows should be closed before doing this installation)Adobe site

Thus, we have added the export command to .bashrc of the user so whenever he logs in, the environmental variable gets set and thus his Firefox can detect the Flash player plugin.

When things like installation script fails do not give up. A true geek looks into the script and does what the installer does. This is what that is awesome about GNU/Linux and FOSS, even when one door is locked there is surely another door which can be opened. What needs is an effort to search for the door and try opening it

Update: Trying to file a bug lead me to the solution. The md5sum mismatch has been fixed in the package, but uploaded into Hardy repository rather than Gutsy. But we can get the .debs from here and install with dpkg.

Not an easy ride

I still have the memories of doing beta testing for Edgy and fighting daily with broken packages. It was an awesome experience, which helped me learn a lot of packages, upgradation, pre and post installation processes and how to face problems out of a broken package. Feisty has started become something of the past, similar to Dapper and Edgy. Now what every one speaks about, writes about, discusses about is Gutsy Gibbon.

This time I missed all the fun of upgrading during the beta days and doing testing, reporting bugs, helping out others fix issues and many more things. The reason is I do not have the luxury of Internet connection at home in Bangalore, as well as we have bandwidth issues in office such that I don’t want to trouble my admins by adding extra load.

Thus I made my trip to Chennai for Dusshera holidays mainly to upgrade my Helios from Feisty to Gutsy. I landed here on the day when the world was busy upgrading to Gutsy. Hence the load was more on the apt mirrors that when I started the download last evening, it took almost 18 hours to finish the whooping 1.65 GB download. I had to wait for additional couple of hours for it to finish the install. But nothing goes without troubles, this time exim4 package’s configuration process was giving me errors and it was messing up the whole upgrade.

I had to resolve to running `dpkg-reconfigure -a` which started configure every piece in my Ubuntu installation. It took 50 minutes to finish up the reconfiguration and finally I cleaned up unwanted stuffs with `apt-get autoremove`. Then I went for a reboot to boot with the new 2.6.22 kernel and my new Gutsy desktop.

I boot in, welcomed by my usual login screen. Nothing new or unusual. I login to KDE to find most things same other than a few icons and menus. I was told it will remove beryl but I still find it there. Then I went to check the GNOME desktop as I had no clue of where the compiz was in KDE. As I knew where to enable the compiz effects in GNOME (Preferences –> Appearance ), I turned them on to find the new desktops effects appear. GNOME is fine but what I need is KDE, so I relogged into KDE to see how it works there.

There is no menu option in KDE, and hence one good way is to add “/usr/bin/compiz” to .kde/AutoStart/ as a symbolic link. This makes compiz to be started when we log into KDE. But I still face the issue I had in Beryl with the multiple workspaces showing a distorted look when changed to and back between compiz and None. Also, if I select 4 multiple desktops in `Desktop preferences`, it produces 8 workspaces but only two of them works with compiz. *sigh* Tried to make things work, but having lost interest any further turned off the compiz thing and removed it from AutoStart.

The other cool things with Gutsy are newer version of OpenOffice (which I don’t care about), Gimp and the Gaim instant messenger now known as Pidgin. One more thing to feel good is the pop ups we get when Thunderbird gets a new mail. This is really useful when you are working in some other workspace and don’t have a audible ping turned on. Yet to try with the new Strigi desktop search (is it new? may be for me). The kernel is now 2.6.22.14 which is another good thing.

Am yet to check other things like bluetooth which people have reported to have improved a lot,as well as things on the KDE side. Will report them once I find them, as well as more bugs here and there as I encounter. For those who are still waiting to upgrade to Gutsy, just do it buddy without any second thoughts. Good luck and Congratz to the Ubuntu developers team and MOTUs for another awesome work

No Warranty if you move to Linux!

I happened to read an article about the experience with HP where the customer got rejected for the warranty because she changed the OS in her laptop to Linux from the pre-installed Windows. This surprised the customer as her issue was with the key-board keys sticking out and not working properly, which doesn’t have any relation with whatever OS is on the laptop.

Read the story at the source Linux.com