Bob's Own Blog

Netbooks and KDE network manager

bob — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:05:48 +0000

I’m currently running an ASUS eeePC 1201n netbook/laptop. It has a 12″ screen and a full sized keyboard; sort of on the border between a netbook and a laptop. It’s small enough to carry around comfortably and large enough to see and type. I tried running openSUSE with KDE on it, but KDE has a major problem with the network manager. It cannot connect to a wireless station with a hidden SSID. Bug 209464 has been open on KDE since October 2009 and still marked NEW with priority HI and severity NORMAL.

My wireless station is not broadcasting the SSID and is using WPA/WPA2 personal with a pre-shared key. I’m not about to change that. There is no point in broadcasting the SSID and letting the neighborhood know that wireless access is available to anyone with a good key cracker.

There are some workarounds which I’ve tried with limited success. The Gnome network manager works fine. I’ve also tried LXDE and Enlightenment successfully. Come on KDE, that bug has been open over a year and a half. If Gnome and the others can do it, look at their code and fix it.

I started out with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on the netbook. Once I got the screen set up with a short panel on the bottom containing links to my most used programs and everything else in the top panel, it was very usable. Both panels auto-hide to give me more room on the screen.

I made the mistake of allowing it to upgrade to 10.10 and then 11.04. The Unity layout is OK, but not as good as my original layout. However, after a few updates, I started having problems with the system. I don’t know whether that was a result of the multiple distribution upgrades or just a problem with 11.04. So I wiped the system and went back to 10.04 LTS. I’ll probably stay there for the remainder of the netbook’s lifetime.

I have a test system with a wireless PCI adapter that I’ve been trying other distributions. I tried LXDE and liked it, but couldn’t get the desktop background to cycle through a number of my pictures. That’s something I have on all my other systems, both openSUSE 11.3–KDE and Ubuntu 10.04–Gnome. Then I tried Bhodi Linux with the Enlightenment desktop. It’s very impressive. I think that my next netbook/laptop will run Bhodi Linux.

Back to KDE on openSUSE 11.3

admin — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:56:02 +0000

I did finally get openSUSE 11.3 to run on my dual screens, by installing Linux Mint 9 and copying the xorg.conf file back to openSUSE. That solved one display problem, but there were more to come. Skype, which I use a lot to talk to family and friends, installed. It needed a bunch of 32-bit libraries to run. Once I got it running, it kept dropping sound or locking up the system to the point of needing to power off. The sound hardware finally stopped working.

I replaced the motherboard with a Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 board with a Intel Core i5 650 CPU running at 3.2 GHz. That’s the same board/CPU in my server. There were still some problems with the processor maxing out when I ran Gkrellm (a system monitor) or Lbreakout2 (a game like pong). That turned out to be caused by the interaction of xorg, nVidia driver and the nVidia GeForce 8400 graphics adapter. The server was running Gkrellm without any problems. It uses an nVidia GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS graphics adapter. Once I replaced the graphics adapter, everything worked without problems.

Gkrellm is a system monitor which shows everything you might want to know about the system including: CPU usage, temperatures, fan speeds, disk activity, network activity and emails on a remote server. It also allows me to monitor Gkrellm on a remote system. That way I can check on my server from my workstation. The built-in plasma system monitor does not show emails and takes up a lot more screen space. It has a global share option, but I couldn’t find out how to access it on another machine. Maybe in 4.5 or 4.6.

I have my local applications recompiled and running. Skype, XTrackCAD and TeamViewer have been installed and are running. XTrackCAD is a track layout program for model railroaders. TeamViewer is a desktop sharing program that runs on Windows, Linux and the Mac. I have it installed here and on all the systems of my family and friends. It’s free for personal or non-commercial use.

My Telly is a program that displays the current broadcast/cable programs with descriptions. It requires a subscription to Schedules Direct, which cost $20/year. Schedules Direct is also used by MythTV to display its schedules. It didn’t want to run at first, complaining about a missing Jave parent. Once I installed a Java development kit and any Java package that looked even slightly like it would help, it ran as intended.

Going from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.3 has been difficult for a number of reasons:

KDE 4.4 is a massive change from 3.5. I see that 4.5 will be called KDE SC. It should have had a name change when 4.0 came out. It will take a while to learn all the quirks of the new KDE. I think that the KDE developers got so intrigued with creating new toys that they lost sight of the users. I know that I’m not alone in thinking that.
Hardware failures. It happens.
Graphics support. The 8000 series from nVidia is pretty common. They should have noticed the periodic lockups caused by maxing the cpu.

All in all, I happy with the system as it is now. I just wish the upgrade hadn’t taken so much time.

Conversion from DBTextworks to Koha

Steph — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:48:48 +0000

Some (possibly) helpful hints in converting DBTextworks to Marc records.

We have cracked the problem I had with converting the DBTextwork file I had created (which looked fine until the Marcedit was run over it and all the fields just ran into each other)) by doing the following in Marcedit

In Marc Delimited Text Translator

Choose “Delimited” – comma

Text qualifier - “

And tick UTF-8 encoded box

Then when file is converted and you reach the Marc Tools for edit :

Input file C:\ (file name).csv

Output file C:\(same file name).mrc

And tick Translate to UTF

Then execute

And it should work (well, it did for me!).

Also when doing the first part of the conversion I found that these Export options worked for me

Record separator {CR} {LF}

Field separator ,

Entry separator |

Quote character “

Store field names in first row tick box

Steph Lambert

familyplanning.org.nz

I Switched to the Gnome Desktop

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:16:02 +0000

I’ve been using SuSE or openSUSE since Caldera Open Linux shut down about 10 years ago. I liked the KDE desktop and YAST (Yet Another System Tool.) YAST concentrates all the system tools into a common graphic interface, which makes configuring the system easy.

I’ve since upgraded my hardware many times and now have a dual monitor display. I have a slide show of photographs I’ve taken as the background image spanning both monitors. KDE3 was a very comfortable desktop. It was much more flexible than Gnome. I had a number of icons scattered around the periphery of the desktop so that I could get to frequently used applications with one click. My panel spanned both screens at the bottom.

OpenSUSE 11.1 and 11.2 had early versions of KDE4 which were not ready for prime time. So I stuck with 11.0 and KDE3. I did have Qt4 installed and have converted my programs to run on it. Now openSUSE 11.0 has reached the end of support.

With some trepidation, I installed 11.3 with KDE4. I quickly discovered that configuring it was a real PITA. It does not handle multiple screens well, if at all. It will not allow a background image to span the two monitors. It will not let you move icons from one display to the other. Just getting them on the desktop is frustrating. Panels cannot span both displays. Wobbly windows do not improve productivity.

Over the years, Gnome has improved a lot. I reinstalled openSUSE 11.3 with the Gnome desktop. I still needed some KDE4 libraries to run KMyMoney, the best open source replacement for Quicken.

I do have my pictures in a slide show spanning the two displays and icons scattered around edge of the desktop. It won’t let a panel span the two displays. So, I put a panel at the bottom of each display. Most of the fixed stuff goes on the second screen.

My Roses

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 19:20:54 +0000

It all started a number of years ago when I went to get a bush to hide the second air conditioner from the street. I had a black thumb. There was a potted umbrella tree in my house that was dropping leaves–and it’s plastic. When I explained this, they showed me a cocoplum bush. On the way to pay for it, I passed some rose bushes. They suggested a Duchess du Brabant rose bush. The Duchess has been flattened by three or four hurricanes and was under the tent along with the cocoplum when I had the house tented for termites. They both are doing fine. The Duchess is blooming its head off most of the year.

Duchess du Brabant rose bush

You can just see the cocoplum bush peeking out from behind the rose bush.

I have one other big rose bush. I got it at Lowes. I’m not sure what the name is.

What is this rose?

If you recognize it, please let me know.

When I started to plan the garden railroad, I thougt that micro-miniature rose bushes would look great around the houses. I got a variety of them. Unfortunately the garden railroad is on the north side of the house and doesn’t get much sun, especially in the winter. The ones that did are near the front edge (away from the house) or on the west side where they get afternoon sun. The gallery below shows the sizes of the blossoms.

Rose Blossom Sizes


Elfinglo


Ice Crystal


Peter Pan


Baby Cheryl


Yellow Rose of Texas


Duchess du Brabant

Going Live–Part 1

bob — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:52:08 +0000

We did the patron and loans conversions and went live about a month ago. The staff have all been enthusiastic about Koha. So far, we’ve done two custom modifications: Membership cards and labels and full Gaylord book labels.

Patron (borrower) conversion followed pretty much the same type of code used to convert catalog entries. We did need to enable patron attributes and put some of the flags such as “OK to mail” and “OK to publish” as well as the select codes into Koha. There is an import patrons tool that will bring in the patron records in a comma delimited file.

Our loans file had some corruption. We dropped all records that were returned before January 2008. Then we looked at the patron number and catalog id. If either was not in Koha, the record was also dropped. Koha item records had to be updated with the number of issues and return date if the loan was still open. Returned records went into the old_issues table and open records into the issues table. We didn’t update the statistics tables. This gave us a reading history for each patron for a year and a half and allowed us to handle returned books in the normal way. We probably didn’t get all the open loans into Koha, so some of the returns gave a message that the item was not checked out. The staff was used to this on the old system.

We use a book label that has three parts. We modified the ‘BIB’ printing type to print the call number and copy number (if > 1) on the spine label. The second part is the inside label which contains the call number, author and title. The third part is the barcode label containting the call number, title and barcode. We tried to get it to use the Koha barcode routine, but couldn’t get it to work. So we used a barcode font and just printed it.

We modified the tools template to point to a separate patron card generator. We are on our second version of that generator. When the page first comes up, it lists all the patrons whose cards expire in 11-13 months as a checkbox group, all unchecked. The user can then check the boxes of the patrons whose cards need to be printed. There is also a field to enter card numbers of other patrons. When all the patron cards have been selected there is a button to download a patron card pdf and a second one to download a label sheet pdf. The patron card has the library logo in color, the patron name, expiration date, barcoded card number (rotated 90 degrees) and library boilerplate. The cards are laminated and mailed to the patron.

Part 2 of the conversion will complete the conversion with serials and archives.

Koha Training

Chuck Shuttle — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:54:25 +0000

I will post the Koha training manual here in draft until I have time to review it next week with key folks to insure we get the right information posted. Unfortunately, the only Koha documentation available is web based, so I am converting their web documentation to .pdf files, so that they can be customized and printed for our use. Please feel free to post your comments here regarding the training documentation.
Koha Training Draft v1.4.
Chuck Shuttle

The manual is a direct crib from the Koha 3.0 manual put into a PDF form with our Library’s logo on the cover. We really need to revise it soon for 3.2.
Bob

Imager by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

bob — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:52:28 +0000

Rhennythyl is the son of a wool merchant and is a journeyman portrait painter when he causes his master’s house to blow up. He discovers that he is an imager, one who can create things by imaging them. He goes off to the Collegium Imago on Imagisle and is trained as a covert imager (read spy).

There are three threads in the story:

His training
5 attempts to assassinate him
His family and his new girl friend ( a Pharsi although she is a 3rd generation local)

Most of the story is about his training. The questions that his teacher makes him think about are fascinating.

Is our government good?
Is it better than the others?
What are the best characteristics of a covert imager?
What is the real purpose of a quorum call?
Why is government necessary?
…

I couldn’t put it down and will have to go back and re-read it to think more about his training.

The assassination attempts provide a bit of action and mystery which will have to be solved in a later book in the series.

His interplay with his family and his girl friend’s family is very well written.

Book Catalog Conversion

bob — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:54:43 +0000

The catalog records for books are selected and exported. DBTextCatalog will convert them into MARC records, which can then be bulk imported into Koha. The MARC record will have a 952 field for each physical volume.

Field mapping

This is a list of fields in the DBText Catalog database and how they map to MARC 21 fields.

Field	Present	Length	Crlf	Description	MARC Field
0	100.0%	5	0	ID	001
1	99.5%	68	79	Class	050$a 952$o
2	0.4%	10	0	Label Information
3	65.8%	62	2	Copy Management
4	99.9%	111	12	Title	245$a
5	48.8%	315	6	Subtitle	245$b
6	98.3%	211	52	Author	100$a
7	0.5%	92	4	Corporate Author	110$a
8	84.6%	300	16	Responsibility	245$c
9	32.1%	243	5	Edition	250$a
10	55.3%	79	0	Source	040$a
11	97.1%	117	9	Place	260$a
12	99.6%	158	14	Publisher	260$b
13	99.5%	27	16	Pub Date	260$c
14	97.6%	268	22	Physical Description	300$a,b,c
15	100.0%	5	2	Record Type	Book
16	5.4%	69	0	Series	440$a
17	73.1%	757	117	Descriptors	650$a
18	1.9%	1052	2	Abstract	520$a
19	51.3%	2467	139	Notes	500$a
20	87.4%	90	23	ISBN	020$a
21	0.2%	9	0	ISSN	022$a
22	66.3%	20	2	When Cataloged
23	18.1%	19	0	When Approved
24	3.1%	9	0	Order Number
25	0.0%	0	0	Supplier Title No
26	0.0%	0	0	Internal Acct No
27	0.0%	0	0	Purchase Order
28	0.0%	0	0	Copies on Order
29	0.0%	0	0	Requestor
30	0.0%	0	0	Request Date
31	0.0%	0	0	Requestor Due Date
32	0.0%	0	0	Order Date
33	0.0%	0	0	Order Received
34	0.0%	0	0	Sent to Requestor
35	0.0%	0	0	Order Type
36	0.0%	0	0	Supplier
37	0.0%	0	0	Invoice Number
38	0.0%	0	0	List Price
39	0.0%	0	0	Actual Cost	952$g
40	0.0%	0	0	Order Notes
41	0.0%	9	0	Frequency
42	0.0%	0	0	Start Date
43	0.0%	0	0	Expiration Date
44	0.0%	0	0	Renewal Date
45	0.1%	56	2	Holdings
46	0.0%	0	0	Special Issues
47	0.0%	0	0	Indexed In
48	0.0%	0	0	Retention Policy
49	0.1%	15	0	Loan Policy
50	0.0%	0	0	Q1 Cost
51	0.0%	0	0	Q2 Cost
52	0.0%	0	0	Q3 Cost
53	0.0%	0	0	Q4 Cost
54	98.0%	48	1822	Bar Code	952$p
55	66.9%	20	12	LC Card
56	97.4%	10	0	Record Created	952$d
57	2.7%	23	0	Items Out
58	0.0%	0	0	URL
59	0.0%	14	0	Waiting List
60	2.3%	67	0	Provenance	952$e
61	0.7%	17	0	Dewey	082$a
				Fiction or Nonfiction	952$a
				copy number	952$t
				flflsla	003

Converting the DBText Borrower Database

bob — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:54:03 +0000

The DBText borrower database needs to be converted into a comma delimited file in the proper format to be loaded into Koha via Import Patrons in the Tools menu. Most of the fields can be mapped into the corresponding Koha fields. The branch code and an initial password need to be added. We have added a number of fields to DBText that will be needed by Koha.

DBTextMembers is patterned after DBTextCheck. It can be downloaded here. It does some formatting checks on phone numbers and dates.

Conversion Steps

Modify the code. In addition to the @check_blank array of fields, you will need to go through the code to select and format the output fields. See the program details below.
Run DBTextMember on the exported borrower file. The output defaults to patron.csv.
Take a look at paterr.csv. It will have some additional errors found in formatting the output. You may want to go back to DBText, fix them, and re-run step 2.
Go to the Tools menu in Koha and click on Import Patrons. It will ask you for the file to be imported.
This may also find some errors which you will want to fix.

Field Mapping

DBText	Koha	Processing
Borrower Number	borrowernumber cardnumber userid	set_field
Last Name	surname	use Company if blank, comma or period
First Name	firstname	set_field
Address	address	set_field
Company	address2	set_field
City State Country	city	include country if not USA or blank
Zip	zipcode	set_field use 33300 as default
EMail	email	set_field
Phone	phone	set_phone
Cell Phone	mobile	set_phone
	branchcode	SLA
Record Created	dateenrolled	set_date
ExpirationDate	dateexpiry	set_date
Notes	borrowernotes	set_field
Zipcode	password	first 5 characters

Patron Attributes

If MailingList is set, MAIL is set to True or False as appropriate. PUBLISH is set similarly.

The SELECT attributes will be set with BOD, BUS, FAM, IND, CULT and PR. All other Select Codes will be dropped.

Patron Category

The patron category is set with FAM, IND, BUS or PR in that order, if one of those codes is present in Select Codes. If none of those are present and there is an expiration date, the category is set to IND. If all else fails, the category is OTHER.

Program Description

DBTextMembers is written in Perl. Time::Local, Getopt::Long and Date::Manip are required Perl modules.

The first part of the program reads in the first record to set up the field names and number, very much as DBTextCheck did. It opens two output files which default to patron.csv and paterr.csv. The name of the input file is the required parameter. The error file contains the borrower number, name and a list of errors for each record with errors.

The main loop reads in each record and cleans up the fields. The record is checked to see if it is blank. Then the fields are mapped as shown in the table above and the patron attributes are set. The patron category is set last because it depends on some of the previous fields. The record is formatted as comma delimited values and writen out.

At the end of the program, various statistics are written out to the console.

Subroutines

set_phone: This routine looks for 3 digits, 3 digits, 4 digits followed by anything. The digits may be separated by any non-digits. So 954-123-4567 ext 123 or 9541234567 would be valid phone numbers. If it can’t find that pattern, it looks for 3 digits and 4 digits followed by anything. In that case, it has to guess at the area code. If the zip code starts with 334, it is in Palm Beach County and should have 561 as the area code. A zip of 334.. is Miami-Dade county with area code 305. Anything else is 954. We hope that any member outside the three county area has an area code.
Two parameters are required: the input field name and the output field name.
set_date: This routine tries to format the date to mm/dd/yyyy with leading zeros. One of the errors that occurs is having the day of the month set to 31 in a month that has less than 31 days. In that case, the day of the month is set to 28. If the date is still invalid or missing, it is set to the default date, $dfltDate = ’02/05/2002′. The default is the date that we started using DBText. It is necessary to specify dates rather than let Koha assign one.
Two parameters are required: the input field name and the output field name.
set_field: This routine gets the input field. Single quotes (‘) are doubled (” that’s 2 characters) to conform with comma-separated-values standards. If the field contains commas or double quotes (” that’s one character), it is enclosed with double quotes.
Two parameters are required: the input field name and the output field name. A third parameter may be used to set a default value when the input field is missing. In that case and error will be noted.
put_error: This routine collects errors and writes them to paterr.csv. The first output field contains the borrower number. If it is different from the current borrower number, the record is written out. The second output field contains the borrower or company name. The third output field contains a list of errors.
One parameter is required: the error description, usually the name of the input field.