DJS Consulting Tech Blog » Linux

Lightning Calendar Plug-In for Thunderbird AMD64

Daniel — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 15:01:42 +0000

Mozilla Sunbird is a calendar project that’s being designed as a sister program to Thunderbird and Firefox. It’s now at the 0.5 version, and there is a plug-in that integrates Sunbird with Thunderbird, called Lightning. It allows you to not only have a calendar, but send and receive meeting requests as well.

I’m running Thunderbird 2 under Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on the AMD64 architecture, and could not find a pre-compiled version of this that worked. So, I decided to give it a shot. It was pretty easy, and the result is a plug-in that works with the AMD64 version of Thunderbird! Since I had trouble finding it, I thought I would share it.

Since I have just started using it, I haven’t wrung it out, or tested all the options. Use at your own risk, etc.

You can download the plug-in here. Happy storming!

Webshots – Wine Strikes Again!

Daniel — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 06:00:29 +0000

When I ran Windows as my desktop, I had a program called WebShots that I used to set my desktop wallpaper, and cycle it. They have Windows and Mac versions, but no Linux version yet. They still send me e-mails each week, showing the daily picture selections for each day in the past week. I decided to download the Windows version, and install in under wine to see if it would work. I moved “websamp.exe” to /home/summersd/.wine/fake_windows, then ran “wine C:\\websamp.exe” to install the program. “wine “C:\\Program Files\\Webshots\\Launcher.exe” ” then started the desktop control. I used that to disable the tray icon (wine has one, but you can’t see it), and I disabled almost every other “auto update” feature.

I had downloaded a “.wbz” file (which is what is imported into WebShots), and I finally figured out how to import it. Running the launcher program, and following it with the name of the .wbz file, imports it. I may figure out a way to automate that, but for now, I know how to do it.

(Note: This is the end of the “My Linux Adventure” series of posts. After this, I ended up going back to Windows XP, just because it worked and I didn’t have hobbyist time. As of May 2007, I’m running Ubuntu 7.04 on one computer, and Windows Vista on my laptop, which is currently out of commission.)

Apache and MySQL Are Back

Daniel — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 06:01:50 +0000

I was finally able to resolve my problems with Apache and MySQL. When I decided to mount my FAT32 drive under /home/summersd, I inadvertently caused myself some problems. From talking to a Linux guy at work, I found that no processes that weren’t running under my user ID could access those files. The reason is that Linux looks up the entire diretory tree, back to /, to determine if you can access the file. So, although I had “-rwxrwxrwx summersd summersd” on every file, /home/summersd was “drwx—— summersd summersd”, and /home was “drwxr-xr-x”. The permissions on /home/summersd was keeping Apache from seeing /home/summersd/drive_d/wwwroot, and MySQL from seeing or writing to /home/summersd/drive_d/mysql/data. I moved the drive to /mnt/drive_d, with the mount point being owned by “root”, still mounting the drive with my user name, and everything worked.

In the process of reconfiguring Thunderbird, I believe I may have found out how to share the address book across operating systems. The file ~/.thunderbird/default.[something]/prefs.js has a listing of all the preferences and settings. I modified this file to change the location of my mail files, and there is a setting there for an address book (which isn’t shown in the configuration dialog – after all, it is 0.7.3…) I’ll play with that later – right now I’m just elated to have Apache and MySQL working again.

foobar2000 with Wine

Daniel — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 06:00:47 +0000

foobar2000 is about the best, most organized audio player I’ve found. However, it is a Windows application, and according to what I’ve read, very reliant on Microsoft C++ extensions. I decided to give it a shot under wine, and it works great! There is a repaint problem – sometimes the playlist doesn’t refresh as it should. But, it’s pretty much a start-and-minimize sort of application, so that’s acceptable.

ndiswrapper May Have Issues

Daniel — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 06:00:49 +0000

We’re speedily working towards a Friday deadline at work, so tonight I had some analysis work to do on some COBOL code. Great, I thought, I can use my VSlick setup under wine. I moved my computer from the living room back to our now-empty bedroom (soon to be nursery), and booted it up. Kernel panics galore – never got past the network stuff. When I booted to Windows, I found that the wireless network didn’t reach that far, and I’m guessing that the ndiswrapper folks haven’t tried their driver a lot with a wireless card, but no wireless network. Once I get past that, I may grab the dumps from these kernel panics and see if the developers need them to see what went wrong. So, for tonight, I had to use WXP (in which I actually had to disable the wireless connection – seems Windows doesn’t handle a barely-there wireless connection much better than Linux).

The diagnostics I ran last night never found anything – they ran for about 10 hours. I suppose I’ll just have to wait until I have problems again, then run it right then. Another person from the WBEL users list suggested I check the way I have my hard drives set up; he thinks that a 2GB drive slaved to a 20GB drive may be causing conflicts, which would cause freezes or panics.

Success with Wine & Diagnostics

Daniel — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 06:01:51 +0000

At work, we use an editor called Visual SlickEdit (VSlick). It’s got a lot of features, and supports color-coding for many different languages. I decided that I’d give wine another shot, as we only have the Windows version of this program. I installed wine and winesetuptk, used winesetuptk to configure the installation, then ran the installation program. Everything installed, and the program ran up to a point, when it started complaining about a missing DLL. I booted to WXP, found the DLL, copied it to the FAT32 drive, rebooted to Linux, and copied the DLL into the “fake windows” system directory. Soon, it was working great! I can’t believe it – success with wine!

I also have made little headway towards getting Apache and MySQL to working. I changed the process that Apache uses to run as “summersd”, and I was able to see pages (although any pages that relied on a database didn’t work). I still haven’t figured this one out yet…

I’m still getting kernel panics from time to time, and it seems to be whenever I access networking. A suggestion from one of the folks on the WBEL users list was to download the Ultimate Boot CD, filled with diagnostic programs. I downloaded it, burned it, and ran some memory checks. Those checked out, so I’m going to run a “CPU Burn-In” program to see if it can detect errors from the CPU. It runs for up to 7 days, but I think I’ll just run it overnight – folding@home didn’t take nearly that long to crash it before.

DVDs Are Back & Conflicting Wireless Networks

Daniel — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 06:00:15 +0000

I downloaded xine and xine-ui again, just to get the freshest stuff. Compiled first time, worked first time. I must be learning how to do this stuff! I also did a “yum update” to get the most recent version of everything, and I upgraded ndiswrapper from .8 to .10.

I moved the computer into another room, and found that I was now getting conflicts on my wireless card. After some research, it appears that I’m picking up my next-door-neighbor’s wireless signal as well. I renamed our wireless network, and configured the cards to use only that network, and those conflicts went away.