Just Uber

Hi all,
I had to install SQL Server Express 2005 edition on my works laptop so I could develop a small database driven application.
I have Visual Studio 2005 already installed and thought installing SQL express would be a simple process, oh no..,…

First attempt – it installed the following without a hitch:

• SQL Setup Support Files
• SQL Native Client
• SQL VSS Writer

but then failed miserably on the SQL Server Database Services, checking through the log files showed nothing out of the ordinary. The summary file stated that the install had been a success, though the installer then wanted to report a fail back to Microsoft headquarters.

So time to start digging, fire up Google and find out who else has had a similar problem, quite a few by the looks of it.

My first attempt at a remedy was to use add/remove programs to remove all traces of the botched install. Then use regedit to remove the following keys (if present) /HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Microsoft SQL (xxxx) where (xxx) is anything after SQL..

After a reboot I tried another install – same error message.

After many variations of the above I then looked slightly further afield, at the MSXML6 parser, this is a pre-requisite of SQL Server Express 2005, and I had downloaded it from the Microsoft download page MSXML6.exe Parser and attempted to install it.

It failed stating that the version installed was newer than the version I was attempting to install, but after more headaches etc I looked at the dlls msxml6.dll and msxml6r.dll and noted that they were not newer.
I tried to remove MSXML6 parser using the add/remove programs – it replied that it couldn’t as it wasn’t installed!
But the .dlls could be seen – and they were registered?! So I unregistered them both using regsvr32 /u and tried again to remove the app using add/remove programs. No luck.

I then downloaded Windows Installer Clean Up tool and scrolled down to find the rouge MSXML6.
Highlighted the app – clicked ‘Remove’, then attempted an install of msxml6.exe, it didn’t complain about any previous version (onto a winner?) and installed correctly.
I then, tentatively, tried to install the MS SQL Express 2005 – and after an age it installed fully…

Wahoo… we have a winner.

All I have to do now is write the application… and I am more of a MySQL man myself.

;o)

Adam

So, you’ve got a touchscreen monitor and you’re wondering why it doesn’t work properly? Lets see if we can get it up and running!

After connecting the touchscreen monitor’s USB cable to your PC and restarting, check out the USB devices on your system by running the command ‘lsusb’. If you see a line with the words:

D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd eGalax TouchScreen

then we’re in business. I know how to set that one up!

Give the screen a sneaky tap with your finger. Marvel at how the computer seems to recognise a mouse click event (you may notice it highlights some text, or scares a small child from your PC case), but doesn’t yet doesn’t recognise mouse movement events.

Go on over to http://210.64.17.162/web20/TouchKitDriver/linuxDriver.htm and select the file called ‘Kernel 2.6.x with xorg 1.4.0 only’. At the time of writing the direct link to this file is here. It may have moved by the time you read this.

Anyway. Extract the TouchKit-2.03.tar.gz file. It contains a folder with 2 files and a tar archive in it. Good times.

At the command line move to the TouchKit folder you just extracted and run the following command:

sudo sh setup.sh

Wait a sec and be rewarded with the following menu. I’ve left in the choices I made.

(*) Linux driver installer for TouchKit controller

(I) Begin to setup TouchKit Linux driver.
(I) Checking user permission: root, you are the supervisor.
(I) Extract TouchKit driver package to /usr/local/TouchKit_x14.
(I) Create TouchKit utility shortcut in /usr/bin.
(I) Copy X module egalax_drv.so to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input.

(Q) Which interface controller do you use?
(I) [1] RS232 [2] PS/2 [3] USB : (I) Please choose [1], [2] or [3]
(A) 3
(I) Using interface: USB
(I) Found a HID compliant touch controller.
(I) Found kernel module usbtouchscreen.
(I) It is highly recommended that add it into blacklist.
(Q) Do you want to add it into blacklist? (y/n) y
(I) Add kernel module usbtouchscreen into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

(I) Found X configuration file xorg.conf in /etc/X11.
(I) Add touch configuration into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

(I) Please reboot the system for some changes to take effect.

Reboot your system

When the system comes back up you can calibrate and adjust your touchscreen by running sudo /usr/bin/TouchKit

Jobs a gud’un.

— Update

You may find that clicking on the desktop leaves irritating little selection box artifacts that wont go away. You can sort this out by changing the xorg.conf configuration that the TouchKit application generates.

Change SendCoreEvents to CorePointer (I edited out the default config at the top there). Problem solved.

Section “ServerLayout”
### InputDevice “EETI” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “EETI” “CorePointer”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”

Unfortunately though you may find that your mouse no longer works. Swings and roundabouts!

I’ve let this blog go a little quiet lately because I’m lazy…

I noticed a fun little meme over at planet.ubuntu-uk.org so thought I’d join in to see if the old blog still works!

Snapper? Well, the conversation went on and on about him.

- Seven Troop, Andy McNab

To join in just follow the instructions below:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

It happened again!

Karoo – the demon spawn ISP of Hull’s much bemoaned monopolistic telephone overlords KCOM – has managed to yet again destroy the city’s ability to connect to the t’interweb.

From piecing together odds and sods from various sources (and from being one of the poor buggers having to use KC) it looks like the outage downed all internet services delivered by KCOM.

The fault which lasted over 8 hours, is alledged to have downed essential services, residential broadband, and businesses utilising credit card equipment connecting back through an ADSL connection.

As usual users from the unofficial karoo forums have jumped onto the problem and are debating it, so if you’re interested, jump in and have your say!

Karoo last dropped Hull off the internet in January this year, and August last year. Bad times.

The Register are covering the story here.

Do you ever have one of those days when no matter what you try, you just can’t get a web application to work? I suffered the angst of this recently when trying to install SugarCRM 5 on a Plesk based shared hosting server.

No matter what I tried, in step 2 of the installation process I got an error about the writable session save path not being valid. I checked the path in the /etc/php.ini file, created a php test page using phpinfo() and checked that the php session location was writable. Still, the installer brought up the same error message.

Finally I resorted to hacking the install script. I thought I’d share the hack with you here just in case you suffer the same error as I! Open up the install/installSystemCheck.php file. Check out the example below, and notice that seventh line from the bottom, I have changed the variable $error_found = true; to $error_found = false;

That should move you onto install step 2.

// session save dir
$session_save_path = session_save_path();
if (strpos ($session_save_path, “;”) !== FALSE)
$session_save_path = substr ($session_save_path, strpos ($session_save_path, “;”)+1);
if(is_dir($session_save_path)){
if(is_writable($session_save_path)){
installLog(”Session Save Path is “.$session_save_path);
}else{
$save_pathStatus = “<b><span class=’stop’>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}</font></b>”;
installLog(”ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}”);
$error_found = true;
$error_txt .= ‘
<tr>
<td><strong>’.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].’</strong></td>
<td class=”error”>’.$save_pathStatus.’</td>
</tr>’;
}
}else{
$save_pathStatus = “<b><span class=’stop’>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}</font></b>”;
installLog(”ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}”);
$error_found = false;
$error_txt .= ‘
<tr>
<td><strong>’.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].’</strong></td>
<td class=”error”>’.$save_pathStatus.’</td>
</tr>’;
}

Take a deep breath, unwind and relax. Setting up your Ubuntu Linux powered PC for mobile internet access isn’t half as hard as you thought it’d be.

My brother just got a £7.50 a month deal with Three, for 3 GB per month of internet access over 3G (HSDPA). I installed Ubuntu onto a PC for him and had a bash at getting the 3G dongle up and running.

Here is the easiest way to get this up and running.

1.) Plug the dongle into a spare USB slot and restart the computer.

2.) Download the Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux. The version I’m using is 1.99.17 (Beta) and comes as a .deb package.

3.) After installing, run the Vodafone application that you’ll now find in Applications > Internet.

4.) If the application doesn’t detect your dongle restart your PC and try again (although it should).

5.) Insert these settings if you’re using the Three (UK) network.

Username: three
Password: three

Preferred connection: 3G preferred
Authentication mode: Default
APN host: 3internet

DNS Servers: 4.2.2.4 and 4.2.2.3 (Figured out by Alec Cawley in the 2nd comment of this post, thanks Alec!)

6.) That’s about it. You should be able to see a signal strength bar at the bottom of the app screen, and connecting to the internet is a simple as pressing the big green connect button.

The vodafone application itself is pretty good. Particularly useful is the usage indicator. It allows you to restrict the amount of data transferred to help ensure that you don’t breach your monthly limit. Check out the screenshot below. Cool eh?

Enjoy mobile internet on Linux!

Fortunately Ubuntu has packages for Asterisk and Destar located in the Universe repository, so running the following command will grab and install them for you.

sudo apt-get install asterisk destar python2.4

Hardy ships with Python 2.5 but DeStar throws errors unless it’s running on Python 2.4. Therefore you need to tell destar to use Python 2.4 instead.

edit /usr/share/destar/python/destar.py

so that the top line reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

Asterisk needs to be configured to allow DeStar to manage it. To do this, create a file called destar.conf in /etc/asterisk/manager.d/ Change the secret to a password of your choosing.

[destarman]
secret=123342342
deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
permit=127.0.0.1/255.255.255.0
read=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user
write=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user

Try DeStar now by going to http://servername:8080 The default username is admin and the password ad26. (don’t forget the dot at the end). You should change it.

In the DeStar web GUI go to Configuration > Options > Management API Access and ensure that the secret there is the same as the secret in your destarman.conf file.

You should now have Asterisk installed and DeStar configured to manage it!

This is just a quick post to say well done to Hull City AFC for achieving promotion to the premier league!

The city of Hull is currently undergoing a period of regeneration unprecedented in it’s long history. Previously a prosperous fishing town, Hull is fighting back against economic decline and trying to etch a place out for itself in a new millenium.

Having a team in the premier league is the icing on the cake and I for one am excited to see what the future holds for both our football team and our city at large.

Hull. Things are looking up!

I just read this on Slashdot and wondered what people thought of this seemingly bizarre move from MS?

After campaigning for OOXML so vigorously, MS have now announced that they will be issuing an update to Office 2007 to add support for OASIS ODF 1.1.

This won’t be available as the default format for saving, but even so – making support available for ODF and not supporting OOXML (that won’t come until a future version) must fatally damage OOXML as a standard.

Hopefully the delay in OOXML support and the emergance of ODF support as standard in an MS Office suite will herald new support by the public sector for the ODF format.

Who knows, the next time you visit your favorite government website you might be able to grab a copy of taxreturn.odt

Some exciting news coming from the Phoronix website suggests that Valve may be porting the Source engine to Linux.

The Source engine powers many of Valve’s top titles including Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

Linux support for Source is likely to increase the take up of Linux based operating systems amongst Joe Public. Lack of support for modern games is often cited as a reason for not moving from Windows.

Lets hope that the rumours are true, and that Valve are the first of many games developers to go down this route.