DJS Consulting Tech Blog
Technical Information You Can Use (or not - but hey, at least it’s free!)

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!

Today, I reinstalled WBEL 3.0.  I was able to compile ndiswrapper (as I kept that on my FAT32 drive), and get the network card working smoothly very quickly.  (In fact, it seems to be more reliable under Linux than WXP!)  With the network up, it was easy to download Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and installing them was a breeze.  (I decided to put them under /opt this time, trying to stick with the FHS.)  I decided to mount my FAT32 drive under my home directory, as /home/summersd/drive_d.  E-mail works fine, but Apache gives me a 403 (Permission Denied) error.  MySQL doesn’t seem to be working either - I’ll have to play with that later.

Wine is not getting me drunk. I installed it, downloaded and installed WineSetupTK to assist with configuration. I then ran the setup program (through wine) for Thomas the Tank Engine: The Great Festival Adventure. Once that completed, I tried to run the program (by entering [wine "C:\Program Files\Hasbro Interactive\The Great Festival Adventure\thomas.exe"]) and got a message box saying “CD check path not found.” I searched the web for this message, and didn’t find anything - it may be a message from the game, and not wine. I’ll do some digging later.

You may remember the problems I had with the Folding@Home client. So, I decided to try to run the Windows version through wine. I downloaded it, and ran it through wine. It took about 2 minutes to lock my machine up. I’m not being too hard on wine for this stuff - an emulator isn’t going to be 100%. I am concerned that I don’t seem to be able to run any sort of Folding@Home client, and since it’s not open-source, I can’t try compiling on this computer.

I uninstalled the OpenOffice.org suite from the /root directory, and installed it in /usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.1.2 (which was where it suggested). Now, it works for normal users. I still haven’t been able to resolve my printing problems, but I sent a question today to the WBEL users list - they came through quickly for helping me resolve my mail importing issues.

Printing is proving to be a challenge. Using samba (the Linux SMB libraries) and cups, I was able to configure my networked printer. However, I don’t have a driver on my computer for it. I tried using some drivers that were close, but they didn’t work - they just caused the printer to eject a blank page. I was creating the documents using OpenOffice.org’s Writer, which has a “one-click PDF conversion” feature. When I went to use that feature, I found that I was on version 1.0, which didn’t have the PDF stuff.

I downloaded the Linux install for version 1.1.2, and remembering that you need to use the “root” user to do most installs, did an su, and ran the install. I then launched the new writer and exported the PDF. Using samba, I copied the file over to the other computer, and was able to print it. However, since I installed it as root, it installed under /root, which meant that my normal user couldn’t access it. At some point, I’ll uninstall it and reinstall it in a public directory.

On another note, I posted a message about my inability to import mail from Netscape into Evolution to the WBEL user’s list, and the response I got worked! Netscape actually stores the e-mail in the same format as many other Linux e-mail programs (a format called mbox format). Using samba, I copied the files from “C:\Documents and Settings\Daniel\ApplicationData\Mozilla\Profiles\default\{somthing}.slt\Mail\Local Folders” - under this folder, there was a separate folder for each POP3 account, and within that folder, the file called “inbox” was my inbox. On some systems, the file is named “mbox”, and it’s in a folder with the name of the folder it represents (i.e., “Inbox/mbox”). Once these files were copied, I used Evolution’s import utility - it prompted me for a file to import (whose type it determined automatically), and a location for the messages to go. I now have all my e-mail from my old setup!

One part of Unix/Linux of which I’m quickly becoming a fan is its adherance to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). The FHS defines where files should be found, and it represents all available files under a single directory, known as “/”. No matter how many drives or network shares that are mounted, they’re all under this directory. What this gives you is a system-wide view of your files, instead of the normal DOS-imposed separate drive specifications. The FHS also says what files are supposed to be in what directories, so no matter what Unix/Linux system you’re using, once you know the FHS, you know exactly where to look for things.