Midnight Oil

For a while I’ve had this weird bug on my Ubuntu laptop where, while using an external keyboard, if I hit any key on the numeric keypad the current X server would reset. Incredibly annoying. What’s worse, is that I never really got around to “fixing” the problem, I just trained my right hand to not stray too far to the right. But of course, accidents happen, and this last time of losing work was the final “home loan that brought down the US economy”.

The problem originates somewhere between XGL and using your numeric keypad to control the pointer (known as Mouse Keys).

If you’re sure you don’t need XGL (check your xorg.conf first!), then simply remove it:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xgl

And disable your Mouse Keys:

1. System -> Preferences -> Keyboard
2. Mouse Keys (tab)
3. Uncheck “Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard”

Now restart your machine, and Voilà

Problem: While in Eclipse, my finger and thumb lost coordination and I accidentally dragged a folder up the file tree to a another folder. Since I have Subclipse installed, it automatically maked my changes for “addition” and “deletion” from the repo. A simple svn revert on the parent directory was not enough.

Solution:  For some reason I’m used to Subversion commands being recursive by default (guess I’m used to doing a lot of updating?). This is apparently not the case with revert. You need to explicitly indicate the -R [ --recursive ]  option

To revert an entire directory:
svn revert --recursive <directory>

I was eager to try out the new release of OpenSolaris (release Indiana I think). Popped in the LiveCD, got a nice boot menu, was greeted by a HUGE license agreement dialog, and the next think I knew I was up and running in a nice Gnome 2.2 Desktop (laptop?) environment.

There was even a convenient and deceivingly helpful little WiFi network prompt that showed me all of my local networks. I found mine, and clicked connect. The screen went away, I assumed I was connected, but alas to not avail, I was not.

For some reason, the little WiFi tool (that shall remain nameless) could identify that my network used WPA security, but couldn’t connect to it. Helpful, but only in a deceiving way. At first I didn’t think much of it. Even Ubuntu has its WPA woes a few releases ago.

So then I embarked on the “chicken-egg-chicken-egg” scenario of downloading drivers from the internet that enable my computer to connect to the internet. One Ethernet cable and a Google search later, I found the OpenSolaris laptop support page with a mini tutorial on how to install the wpa_supplicant (again, very reminiscent of the Ubuntu olden days).

Got everything downloaded and installed, but when I tried to start the wpa_supplicant daemon, I got this nasty, brutish error:

ld.so.1: wpa_supplicant: fatal : libssl.so.0.9.7: open failed: No such file or directory


“Okay” me thought to myself, “I need libssl”. But when I went to check, I sure enough had OpenSSL already and its version was 0.9.8a

At this point I was crying and screaming on the floor. My new toy wasn’t going to work. Why does this always happen to “me”?!? The last thing I wanted to do was start symlinking “shit” around in an OS I wasn’t familiar with.

What happened next is what highlights a fundamental difference b/w men and women (note: I am man). A woman by the name of Karen Tung simply asked how to fix this problem on an OpenSolaris forum. I guess its like the proverbial “let’s stop and ask for directions”…”go to hell, I’m not lost” scenario.

Here is the solution, reposted in its infinite glory:

# from the terminal...
# change to the root account.
# the root pw on the livecd is 'opensolaris'
su root
dladm create-secobj -c wpa mykey
# enter your psk twice
dladm connect-wifi -e "<essid>" -k mykey <interface>


If you don’t get any “shitty” feedback like a segmentation fault, you should get that overly persistent, initially deceiving WiFi dialog popup (within a few minutes, hang tight). Find your ESSID you entered above, enter your psk ONE MORE TIME and you should be cool. You should receive a dialog confirmation saying something like

Brought interface interface up, got address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Now you can post on your blog from the liveCD…like someone I know…

Long story short:

1. Sun says: “OpenSolaris is desktop ready”
2. Out-of-the-box: no decent (WPA, etc) WiFi support
3. Manageable until: you realize OpenSolaris needs an internet connection to “function properly”.

Just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04. Leave “desktop readiness” to the experts.