Find the error on this wonder wheel entry card

Horrible support of Eee PC 1005 HA in Xubuntu 11.10 Beta 2

I just tested Xubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 and experienced a horrible support for my Eee PC 1005 HA. While it worked almost perfectly in Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix (NBR), I already learned to live with the fact, that Fn+F1 (go standby) doesn't work in Xubuntu 11.04 and Fn+F2 (WLAN on/off) behaves strangely. So far so bad - Xubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 is even worse! The only things that work is adjusting screen brightness with Fn+F5/F6 and volume with Fn+F10/F11/F12. All other combinations are dead. Also the special key for deactivating the touchpad, which is quite useful while typing longer texts, doesn't work. The touchpad is just a normal touchpad in Ubuntu, while it is multitouch capable in Windows XP. It is really sad that nobody could develop a driver for the Eee PC 1005 HA and compatible touchpads in all those years. It's clear, that Linux can't be a winner over Windows, if you have to cope with so many disadvantages and you're brought back 10 years by just using Linux.

Test pictures with my new camera

Quite interesting: There's is definitely no green light in the ground floor, but the sensors record such.

If you look in the windows of that train, you see yourself distorted. But for the camera the window is actually merely a mirror.

My new camera: Nikon Coolpix S3000

Because my old camera (Fujifilm Finepix, bought in January 2002) already had some technical problems, I wanted to buy a new camera. I planned this already for some months, because my cell phone's built-in cam isn't even good enough to take quick snap shots (pictures look ugly, even under camera-friendly circumstances). So, yesterday I went to a shop in Graz and asked for used cameras, because I wouldn't need a brand new one. The guy at the shop showed me some cameras, where two of them were more recent models. In the evening I searched the web for addtional information about these cameras and finally I decided to buy the Nikon Coolpix S3000, which I did today in the morning. Here it is:


Picture taken with my cell phone's cam - you see the worse quality.

Another advantage of an extra camera is, that nobody can call me there while taking photos. ;-)

Sugar vs. Salt

Sometimes I think reality fools me. The name of Facebook's boss is - as you may be know - Mark Zuckerberg. One of the competitors of Facebook is Diaspora and its boss's name is Maxwell Salzberg. The funny part is not just that their names both end in "...berg", but the meanings of their names: "Zucker" is a German word that means "sugar", "Salz" is also German and means "salt", "berg" (well, it's German too) means "mountain". So, their names mean "sugar mountain" and "salt mountain". Crazy!

Funny bug in Google Toolbar

On 19th of June 2010, a funny bug happend in the Google Toolbar translator:"Eierbecher" means "egg cup" in English. The random characters seen on the screen indeed don't means anything similar to "Eierbecher" - at least not in German. May be in Icelandic (watch at the word that I looked up in Wikipedia some time before I took the screenshot)?

I just got this dialog when I downloaded Google Chrome and Internet Explorer crashed. When I read it, I thought: "Yes, there is a solution available. I just installed it." :-)

Fight against Tomcat 6 under Ubuntu

This blog post is for all people who fight against Apache Tomcat 6 under Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. The goal is to install a servlet application.

Tomcat has an built-in manager. To make it running, you first have to create an entry like this in your /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml:




No - /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps is not the directory where your servlet files go to, even if that looks logical or intuitive. Instead, you have to use /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps

Have a look at you application's WEB-INF directory, where you could find a web.xml file, it could contain paths that you would like to adjust.

Ubuntu's ubiquity still fails to generate initrd sometimes

Under some circumstances (whatever these are - I have no clue), ubiquity - Ubuntu's installer - fails to generate the initial ramdisk file (initrd). This bug is already known for a long time. One solution is to enter the just installed system from another (working) system and let it generate the initrd. Another solution is to get the initial ramdisk file from somewhere else. Either from another computer where ubiquity did it's job correctly, like I did, or from some other resource. The best way is to check if everything worked accordingly after installation and in case the initrd file (located in /boot) is missing, you can for example download it from here:

http://temp.mkcs.at/linux/ubuntu-1104-natty/initrd.img-2.6.38-7-generic.bin

Windows Server 2008 R2: NTLDR is missing

Just use the search engine of your trust and let it search for "Windows Server 2008 NTLDR is missing" and you will find many occurences of this problem. It happens every time I do Windows Update or if I connect my other hard disk and try to boot Windows Server 2008 by GRUB (which normally is possible easily). Then I have to search for my Windows Server 2008 DVD - yes, Microsoft still uses technology from the 1990s to distribute their OS, while booting Ubuntu means just entering 4 lines in my grub.cfg and it boots off the desired ISO file from my (much faster) hard disk - and boot it while having my second hard disk disconnected, doing some quirky repair, rebooting and boot again from DVD, repairing again, and rebooting and hoping. Hm, is that the way I expect my computer to work? No. So, I won't install Windows any more on real hardware, I only will install it inside virtual PCs where it is "alone" and can't do anything bad (although I still like Windows Server 2008 R2, it's basically a great product, just the boot loader sucks).

Taktverdichtung 58er/63er: Es geschehen noch Wunder!

Manchmal geschehen offenbar doch noch Wunder: Habe ich im Juni 2010 noch darüber schimpfen müssen, dass die Linien 58 und 63 in Graz an Werktagen im Sonntagsintervall verkehren, obwohl die Busse hier seit Jahrzehnten überfüllt sind, hat sich hier durchaus etwas positiv geändert: Die Linien 58 und 63 fahren seit September 2010 werktags den ganzen Tag im 10-Minuten-Intervall (und sind trotzdem relativ gut ausgelastet) und zwischen 8 und 10 Uhr fährt außerdem die Linie 58E zwischen Hauptbahnhof und Uni. Ich finde jedoch, der 58E könnte ruhig schon ab 7 Uhr 30 fahren. Toll wäre auch, wenn die Studenten sich nicht alle in den 63er quetschen und dessen Abfertigungszeit unnötig hinauszögern und den 58E fast leer abfahren lassen. Wenn in den nächsten Monaten und Jahren noch die zu liefernden Variobahn-Straßenbahnen in Graz auf den Schienen rollen, werden die Graz AG Linien vielleicht auch in der Lage sein, die Linien 1, 5 und 7 öfters fahren zu lassen oder auf bestimmten Ästen zu verstärken, da diese momentan ja auch notorisch überlastet sind. Dann sind wir in Graz ein Stück näher Richtung akzeptablen ÖPNV, was diesen als Alternative zur ungeheuren Umweltverschmutzung durch Autos, die fossile Treibstoffe verwenden, machen könnte. Meine Lunge (ich leider mitunter stark unter der schlechten Luft in Graz) wird's danken!