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Some things are my fault:

• Buying a laptop with an NVIDIA card (I’m never going to buy another NVIDIA product)

Some things are out of my control:

• Needing to test applications using IE
• The Australian Tax Office only supports Windows
• Being unable to sync the contacts/calendars between my phone and Evolution

Some things aren’t important but still frustrate:

• The built-in webcam and microphone don’t work
• The external microphone worked with Kubuntu (which killed the audio after a kernel upgrade) but not Ubuntu (which I use)
• I’ve never been able to use the digital TV tuner that came with the computer

While I can do 100% of my day-to-day tasks that only covers 95% of what I do each the month. Being unable able to do the other 5% has become very frustrating and is almost enough to make me switch back to Windows. I just keep feeling that if I hold off long enough that I’ll be able to do the last 5% with Linux (or Reactos will become a viable option).

Update: I’ve made some progress on syncing contacts between my phone and Horde Groupware Webmail Edition using SyncML which I then hope to sync with Evolution.

[17179652.184000] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[17179652.356000] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[17179652.460000] usbcore: registered new driver usbserial
[17179652.464000] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
[17179652.464000] usbcore: registered new driver usbserial_generic
[17179652.464000] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
[17179652.472000] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for PocketPC PDA
[17179652.472000] drivers/usb/serial/ipaq.c: USB PocketPC PDA driver v0.5
[17179652.472000] ipaq 2-2:1.0: PocketPC PDA converter detected
[17179652.472000] usb 2-2: PocketPC PDA converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[17179652.472000] usbcore: registered new driver ipaq

followed about 5 seconds later by:

[17179667.064000] usb 2-2: USB disconnect, address 2
[17179667.064000] ipaq ttyUSB0: PocketPC PDA converter now disconnected from ttyUSB0
[17179667.068000] ipaq 2-2:1.0: device disconnected

The solution turns out to be really simple – TURN YOUR PHONE ON!!

With the phone turned off Linux will detect the phone and set everything up then report the phone as disconnected about 5 seconds later. The solution is to turn your phone on. It doesn’t seem to matter if you turn it on before or after you connect it, just as long as you do it before running synce-serial-start.

"Can't get message, Lost connection to Evolution Exchange backend process"

After half a day of the Exchange web mail interface driving me crazy I finally fixed the problem. The solution turned out to be simple. After removing the Exchange account from Evolution and quitting it I ran the following commands to remove all evidence of Exchange:

% evolution --force-shutdown
% cd ~/.evolution
% rm -rf `find . -name *exch* -print`

I then restarted Evolution and added the Exchange account again.

Warning: Before removing any files or directories you should back up your entire ~/.evolution directory just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore it.

% sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev
% sudo pecl install pdo
% sudo pecl install pdo_mysql

You then need add the following to the end of your php.ini file(s). Depending on which version of PHP you installed they’ll be /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and /etc/php/cli/php.ini.

extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so

Update: Before you can install any PECL extensions you need to install the php5-dev package. For information see my post about Using PECL with Ubuntu.

Installing MySQL

Once more apt-get makes installing services trivial

sudo apt-get install mysql-client-5.0 mysql-server-5.0 mysql-common

That’s it!! You don’t need to do anything else in this post. I’ll cover creating a schema for users and adding a few in my next post.

Reverse DNS

We’re using the 192.168.x.x network so I’ll use the file /etc/bind/db.192.168. Change the name of the file as appropriate for your network. Copy the following into your file

;
; BIND reverse data file for local network
;
$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     localhost. root.localhost. (
                              1         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                         604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      localhost.

You now need to add entries for each IP address in the form

xxx.yyy      IN   PTR    sbs.example.com.

This turns the IP number 192.168.yyy.xxx into the name sbs.example.com.

Once you have created the zone file you need to add it to /etc/bind/bind.conf.local

    zone "168.192.in-addr.arpa" in{
      type master;
      file "/etc/bind/db.192.168";
      allow-update{none;};
    };

To hide this from people outside of the network I included it in the “external” view created in the previous post. Restart bind and you should now be able to resolve IP numbers into names.

Start of Authority – SOA

The SOA record is the first thing that appears in the zone file. The format is

<domain.name.>   IN  SOA  <hostname.domain.name.>  <mailbox.domain.name>
        <serial-number>
        <refresh>
        <retry>
        <expire>
        <minimum-ttl>

Serial-number is the serial number for this version of the file. You need to increment this each time you make a change to the zone file. A good idea is to use the current date and a number in the format YYYYMMDDnn where nn is a unique number for that day. So the first zone file for today would have 2007021801.

Refresh is how many seconds to wait before polling the primary name server to see if the serial number has changed.

Retry is how many seconds to wait if a refresh fails before trying again.

Expire is the number of seconds after both a refresh and retry fail before the domain name server stops serving the domain.

Minimum-TTL is the minimum time for an entry to live.

Next time I’ll cover setting up MySQL.