In the meantime, please do enjoy the new look for the blog, in particular the header image which changes depending on the time of day, and time of year, so check back at different times during the day to see different images.  I’m also quite pleased with the comments post-it notes too, which work quite well.  The only caveat with that is that I have had to put a cap on the length of comments, otherwise it all started to look silly.

Once comments are up and running again, please feel free to let me know what you think.  In the meantime, twiddle your fingers, or if you really do want to tell me something send me a postcard, or a homing pigeon, or smoke signals, or something.

It all stemmed from a problem I was having, and searching the net hadn’t provided an answer, so I felt asking some actual people might prove more effective.  And so I found myself wandering around the Web Designer Forum, a UK-based community (well, the web site is based in the UK, the members could be from anywhere I suppose) specifically for web designers like me.  I was able to introduce myself, ask my first question, get some responses, and answer some questions other people had, all within a couple of days of discovering the site.  They seem like a genuinely nice bunch of people, so I’m expecting to hang around this site for some time!

A knock-on effect of this is that it also counts as advertising for my business web site, the URL for which is slipped into my signature.  Incidentally, my site recently had a major upgrade, so if you haven’t had a look recently then I encourage you to take a peek.  It’s got a revised look and feel, a proper company logo (at last), and some set packages for web sites rather than doing it all on an hourly rate.  Obviously each project will need to be taken on individually, and even if people request a package I may advise them differently if what they want and what that package offers differs wildly, but it should help people see just how much – or indeed, how little – web sites can cost.

Sorry, shameless plug over!

Anyway, the main point I was trying to share is that I’m enjoying being part of a community again.  Now that I’m selling my Mini, my involvement with the Colchester Mini Club has diminished, much to my disappointment, and I’m missing contact with the outside world.  Okay, so an internet forum isn’t quite the same as meeting with real people, but it’s better than nothing!  And it is something else I’m genuinely interested in.  I’ve also been able to answer several people’s questions so far too, which is encouraging because it suggests I may be better at this whole web design thing than I often give myself credit for.  Humility and business rarely walk hand-in-hand when you’re trying to sell your services!

Anyway, a byproduct of that temporary glitch was that I started looking into getting Linux working again.  I say again, it wasn’t actually broken before.  I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy on the PC over a year ago and never really used it because I couldn’t get it to recognise the wireless dongle I had.  However, having got Windows back online with a CAT5 cable I decided to see if I could persuade Ubuntu to go online too.  And that’s proved to be a mammoth operation, and I’ve got little work done today so far.

The first hurdle was to get Ubuntu to use the ethernet connection to access the internet.  Now, I wouldn’t call myself a hard-core geek.  Maybe a soft-core geek.  Whichever, I have never really played with Linux much before, and it’s all still rather foreign to me.  Last time I tried to get it online I spent ages looking through forums randomly typing commands into the terminal to try to get it to do things, and had no idea what any of the commands were.  I have a feeling that probably contributed to the difficulty I had today trying to reverse whatever it was I did last time, which I’ve completely forgotten.

In the end I think I managed to completely remove the wireless driver and all reference to there being a way onto the net via a wireless network.  I think.  A little more tweaking and gentle prodding finally yielded some positive results – Firefox jumped into life and started showing web pages!  Hoorah!!

Of course, that wasn’t quite enough.  6.10 Edgy is actually quite old now, and I needed to upgrade to the latest distribution.  Now, on most other operating systems this means buying the install CDs and either wiping your hard disk and starting afresh or upgrading your old system to the new one.  But because Linux is open-source it’s all free to download.  It’s like upgrading from Windows XP to Vista over the internet, or even Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard.  It’s a pretty hefty operation.  And it wasn’t working.

Ubuntu has a clever little system for installing software.  Rather than going to the provider’s web site and downloading an install program, all the available software is available from a central list, and you just click it to install it.  Ubuntu takes care of giving you the most up to date list of programs, downloading all the files needed for the software and installing it for you.  Nice.  Except that for that to work it needs to know where to look to find all these programs, and that’s what wasn’t working for me.  Neither could it upgrade the main Ubuntu installation, because none of the upgrade files appeared to exist online for it to refer to.  I would type in ‘sudo apt-get upgrade’ and it would complain that all the files it was looking for were not there – all of them gave a 404 error.  A quick check in Firefox showed that it wasn’t lying – the files really weren’t in the place it was looking.

After a lot of searching on various forums I found that the Edgy files had been taken off the servers because it was old and not supported any more.  That makes sense I suppose.  And after all, I didn’t want to upgrade to Edgy, because that’s what I already had.  I wanted to upgrade to Feisty, which is the latest release at the moment.  Finally I found someone telling me that to upgrade to Feisty I needed to change the locations in /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Feisty instead of Edgy.  Sounds simple?  Yeah, I thought that too.  I did manage to find someone’s blog post that went through it step by step though, giving the process of updating the sources.list file, so I did that.

Thankfully at that point it all started to work.  Or at the very least appear to work.  The apt-get update command found all the files it was looking for, and going back into the System Updates screen showed a whole list of updates that weren’t being shown before.  To begin with it tried to persuade me that I needed to upgrade to 6.10 Edgy, which was actually what I already had, so I cancelled that and went back and told it to upgrade to 7.04 Feisty.  Right now it’s downloading all the files, which is all very positive.  It hasn’t complained so far, it’s found all the source files it needs, and it’s connected to the internet.  Good stuff.  Whether it finishes the installation without any problem is another matter, but since the whole process could take a couple of hours I’ve got time to spare.

This all begs the question – “why do I need Linux?”  Am I turning into a geek?  Well, not really, because I was already almost a geek.  Almost.  I still wouldn’t call myself a geek really, not in the truly geeky sense.  I still have no idea what most of the commands are that I’ve been typing in, nor what their effect has been.  And it’s not like Ubuntu is going to become my primary operating system either, because it’s on the wrong computer.  If I installed it on my Mac it might be a different matter, but then I wouldn’t be using my Mac.  I like my Mac.  It’s fun.  In all honesty Ubuntu (if it works) will probably only get used for testing purposes so I can check that web sites look all right on Linux machines.  The plan will be to set up a VNC server on it so I can remote desktop into it from my Mac.

There is one quirky little thing about Linux I just find hilarious though, and that’s the command ‘sudo’.  I’ve no idea what it’s meant to mean, but as far as I can tell its main function is to override various security measures.  For instance, if I wanted to edit a system file it wouldn’t let me, unless I sudo it.  It’s like the following conversation between me and Ubuntu:

“Do something.”

“Hah, no chance.”

“Sudo do something.”

“Oh, all right then.”