Archive for December, 2005

I’ve been a happy user of wordpress for quite some time now, but until recently that I feel like having some photos in my blog, I got my mind mixed. WordPress is a nice blogging tool, but the default editor is not wysiwig and for almost the same reason, picture/photo files need to be uploaded separately and later hyperlinked through the HTML editor within wordpress.

Since I’ve been living with HTML for almost 10 years now, wysiwig editor is not really an issue. It is however that I felt inconvenient with the upload and hyperlink stuff, that I started to think for an alternative. It’s not to switch to other blog engine but to have an editor that I can use it to upload my graphics/ photos, and wysiwig as an added bonus. Maybe I’m just too used to joomla way of doing this, and so I think it would be nice to have the same feature in wordpress too.

Joomla uses TinyMCE editor as it’s default editor. I, however, personally prefer fckeditor, and by that I started searching for fckeditor for wordpress. fckeditor is an online wysiwig editor that is much similar to Microsoft Word, except that it runs in my favorite browser, firefox, and other browsers as well. I can’t wait to see it to have a save buton that I can save my work in .doc (or actually .odt) format. If previously there were rumours that google will be developing web based word processsor, then fckeditor might be in google’s next-to-buy list.

My quick search lead me to, which later bring me to. Installation was a snap, and everything works well for me, though many people raises issues in the forums. I just followed the installation manual directly as in readme.txt provided along with the zip file.

1. Unzip the chenpress.zip file, and you will have a "chenpress" folder containing all the ChenPress files.
2. Upload the "chenpress" folder and its contents to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Move the folder "UserFiles" to your website’s root (http://www.example.com/UserFiles), and set the properties of the folder and its subfolder to 777.
4. Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for ChenPress.

For more information however you can refer to this page. Here’s a snapshot of fckeditor in action:

Update: 20051229
I am now using wordpress 2, which already has a simple wysiwig editor by default. It is simple indeed and I just don’t like the upload option at the bottom of the page, and so I’ll just stick to my fckeditor..

I’ve recently got myself a Dell Inspiron 6000, after my Compaq Presario 1580 refused to boot. A quick post mortem to the Compaq reveals that the cause of death of the laptop was the broken motherboard, making it not really practical to have it repaired (that is to replace the motherboard) in the economics point of view.

The new Dell Inspiron 6000 is a Centrino system with 1.86 GHz Pentium M and comes comes with some decent hardware. The first thing to do when I get the laptop was to format and repartition it to make space for my Linux installation. Windows was left with 5 GB, and the remaining space, out of the 80 GB drive goes to Linux.

I’ve been using few Linux distributions so far, and now I mainly use Gentoo Linux. By the time I was to install Gentoo Linux on the Inspiron, Stage 1 was no longer supported and so I just proceed with Stage 3. After almost a day, I managed to get my KDE + Firefox running, installing it using my favorite live cd, SLAX. Running lspci produced the following output:

herugrim ~ # lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
0000:00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Radeon Mobility M300]
0000:03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
0000:03:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b3)
0000:03:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 08)
0000:03:01.2 Class 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
0000:03:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG MiniPCI Adapter (rev 05)

Everything seems to be working fine, but I later realized that there were few things missing:

1. The provided radeon graphics driver doesn’t support DRI for the card
2. Intel wireless card is not natively supported by the kernel
3. Ethernet doesn’t start automaticly
4. Couldn’t turn on DMA for the dvdrw drive
5. Software suspend doesn’t just work using the default method prescribed in gentoo wiki

With the workload at the office, it took me quite sometime to find the solutions. In my next posts I’ll show how did I actually addressed all the issues.

Few days ago our company delivered few Sun machines to a national research institute around here. There’s nothing much to disclose, but just to share some things that I consider as “funny”.

1 – Security server running Windows Server2003
While our company deliver the Sun servers and workstations for the client’s HPC need, other companies deliver their solution to the institute as well. While we were there, the institute (or actually a vendor, to be precise) was in the process of setting up the security server in the same room as we were installing our servers.

While seeing the MCSE guys setting up their servers, I just cant stop laughing (silently of course). They launch few programs, clicks here and there, and wait a considerably long time for the progress bar to advance.

As they left, I still keeep my eyes on the server, and the next thing I know, the mouse pointer suddently move. Ah, they’re doing remote login. When logged on, the first thing the mouse ponter went to was to the Start menu, and the Start menu just hangs and 10 minutes later the guys are back scratching their head

I’m not totally against Microsoft Windows. They might be good for my nephew to play games on it, but for a security server, I would argue that..

2 – Sun machines with Sun’s OS
All the Sun machines (Sun Fire V40z Server and Sun Ultra 20 Workstation) already comes with Solaris 10 03/10 pre-installed. I haven’t had much experience with Solaris myself, and I was thinking that it would be a good opportunity for me to learn something there. It was not a good expression however that the pre-installed Solaris couldn’t boot into Sun’s Java Desktop Environment, though I have no ptoblem booting into CDE. It was libbonoboui problem, the same problem I faced when I was a gnome user (dropline Gnome on Slackware). I wonder how do the engineers test the machines before being delivered..

3 – Triple booting
When delivering the Sun Ultra 40 Workstations, we have a request from the client to multi boot the machines. One might argue if a workstation is dual-booted (it’s ok if it’s a personal/development machine to dual-boot), but the client wants it to triple-boot. I have no choice but to scratch my head and proceed with the request.

The OS to be installed were Windows XP Pro, SuSe 9.3 and Solaris 10 03/10. We started with Solaris, and do a full install so that the client wouldn’t bother us with incomplete packages or whatever later. The installer took a long time to load and initialize, and that’s really a minus. As we come to the installation GUI, things are straightforward and we didnt face any problems with that. Our complain goes to the very slow installation process, that took us over 2 hours. Don’t compare it with gentoo though, but it deserve the name Slowaris instead of Solaris. After swapping CD’s and DVD’s for the installation, we manage to get the JDE to work this time. Another minus for Solaris for be Sun’s OS is that it didn’t automaticly detect and configure the built in network card. We need to get a third party drive n get it to work,, though actually later we found out that the driver was provided in a separate CD.

The next OS installed was Windows XP Pro. We were trying to install it on the second hard drive as we later come to a problem where Windows was so hard headed that it only wants to reside on the first harddrive. Our guess was Windows programmer doesn’t want to add some code to make it able to be installed in the second hard drive that it would later add another vulnerability to the system. More codes = m0re bugs.. The rest of the installation went ok, but as usual, the self pro-claimed best OS when it comes to hardware support couldn’t get the graphic card, network card and sound card, among others to work.

Last but not least, we installed SuSe 9.3 on the machine. Everything just works fine, except that it couldn’t get 3d accelaration to work. What we did just to run YOU, and tick on the NVidia driver for installation, and we get the 3d acceleration to work within minutes.

I would say, SuSe wins the round, and Solaris is just a bit under Windows..