Month: December 2017

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Linux for Christmas

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab. This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over how I set up a tower for my father as a Christmas gift. Let’s get started.

Seeing as I am scheduling this post for Christmas day, I can safely wright without spoilers. Remember that old PC I turned into a MineCraft server? Well I got another one and gave it the RAM from the now parted computer. To keep up appearances, I have the parted computer sitting where it has been for a while now, beside my main tower. The new machine is hiding behind a pile of clutter.

I installed the RAM before I even booted the new tower up, using my secondary monitor and a VGA cable. It detected the new RAM, and offered to do a hardware check. I figured, “Why not?” and went for it. The thing came back with a complaint of too much RAM. I tried booting to Windows, and it worked, so that’s a problem I figure I can address later.

I decided to try the Cinnamon desktop environment. I went to the stack of blank CD’s and grabbed one. The top had some stuff on it, but I didn’t think much of it; I was just testing a burn program. I burned the latest version of Linux Mint to it and washed the disk to get rid of the dirt on top… and on the bottom. The bottom of a burned CD is a little discolored when you look at it. The dirt on the bottom masked bubbles of unwritten portions of the disk, rendering it useless to me.

OK, so I try to use another disk… Linux Mint is 300 MB too big to fit on a normal CD: I had just ruined a burnable DVD… the only such DVD I had at my disposal, and it’s the first one I reached for. The LightScribe disks I have had sitting here are regular CD’s. I ended up redoing my Mint USB stick.

I charged in with enough confidence when installing the OS. I must have taken a detour when starting to install, because I ended up at a partition option screen. I backed out of there, and soon enough, I had a new Linux Mint machine. Sure, a bunch of the specific software looked different from Ubuntu MATE, but I used my skills to install Chrome, WINE (ironically named WINE Is Not an Emulator), and a few other goodies my father is likely to want, including a Glass Eye program that doesn’t natively support Linux. I had to get a .DLL file and stick it directly into the program file folder, since WINE was asking for it. Strange thing was that it was unwilling to just work when placed among other .DLL files for WINE.

On a whim, I tried installing SimCoaster, a game I enjoyed when I was younger, but only got 99% completion before my save corrupted (twice). It installed, but put up a front of ambivalence when I tried running it. The program made as if to start, but something didn’t work and it stopped without any error message or other explanation. I let it go for now before searching into the problem led to my plans being discovered. While I was setting the machine up, I grabbed my usual desktop and hid the icons and “start” bar. When I was done messing around with it, I assembled a custom wallpaper similar to the one I made for the Ubuntu machine.

This week, I decided I like to write my posts as I work. It might be a little more dramatic at times, but I should remember what is going on better. Final Question: Have you ever wrestled with WINE and won?

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Goal Checklist

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am reviewing my goals leading up to development on a robot. Let’s get started.

So far, I have a Linux machine running. That’s about it. OK, I setup a pair of  MineCraft server programs on it, and all those activities built up my skills, but now, the path forward seems a bit less linear. I’ll try to explain each skill I think I’ll need and a possible project to accompany it.

The next project I want to do is set up another Linux MineCraft server, but this time, I want to remote in and use another computer to control it.

At some point, I think at some point, I will need to look into 3D Modeling. The skill to program a shape into a virtual environment is a valuable skill with many downstream applications, like animation, renders, and 3D Printing, among others. I have a minimal amount of experience with Blender, and I hear it’s fairly well supported across many platforms and for about any job. Plus, it’s free and open-source nature fit the secondary themes I’m trying to work with. The only thing I can think of to do in terms of learning it is to find a tutorial and follow it, pure and simple.

Gazebo and ROS are programs I will need. But before I can go there, I will want to get my main tower properly dual booted. Before I can feel comfortable doing that, I want to set up Linux a few more times AND a get a regular backup going for my computer. Once those are in place, I can start toying around with a virtual robot in Gazebo with ROS before moving up to physical robots.

Manufacturing the bot is something I’m looking forward to, but it’s going to feel like grunt work to me. I want to get on to programming it, but not so fast as to be completely oblivious as to how to do it when I get there. That said, I realized I will need to develop skills in following schematics when I spotted a post on the site for my intended model last week (LINK).

Even after I get a little proficiency in those skills, I can see myself having to go through a prototype or two before I work up to a social robot I’ll be satisfied with. I feel like I should practice setting up a dual boot system before converting my main system. Final Question: What kind of things would you want to see in a finished, open-source social robot?

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Operation Intuos

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab, this is Shadow_8472, and today, I am trying to get my sister’s drawing pad to work in Gimp on Linux. Let’s get started.

I went into this project by looking for official support. None given, they only officially support Windows and Mac. But, I learned that Wacom, the company that made the Intuos is cooperative in facilitating community support.

Now, I have used the drawing tablet in Windows before using a somewhat older version of Photoshop. The basic operation, as I learned it is as follows: Draw with the tip and erase with the other end. The harder you draw, the darker the line. A variety of buttons on the side stand in for normal Shift, Alt, and Ctrl keys, as well as other functions. A touch scroll can control the brush size, zoom settings, or anything you would normally use the mouse wheel for. And it’s complete with a control panel with enough settings to discourage anyone who doesn’t want to set aside a day or two setting the thing up exactly how they want it. The term is called, “decision fatigue:” you get to a place where you have so many options that anything feels better than continuing to look.

Armed with the hypothesis I was likely to find a solution fairly quickly, I simply plugged the device in and opened Gimp. That first, glorious success when it actually drew when I put pen to pad was beautiful… until I put the eraser to the pad and that drew too. The buttons on the side of the pen seemed to register as inputs as well, but the pressure feature was a no-show. I just tested the scroll wheel and other buttons, and they don’t seem do do anything useful. The scroll pad just seems to center the picture vertically and the function change button seems to just blink the mouse pointer.

Looking into the correct drivers is proving a challenge. I still don’t fully understand the situation, and I have found old support forums seem to go stale after more than a few years as software is maintained. One old forum directed me to a particular package to download, but apt-get stopped me as there were dependencies that couldn’t be resolved.

I did a little more research, and it looks like support for my version of Linux isn’t as easy as I would have hoped. A two year old Ubuntu MATE forum post broke the discouraging news. I will need to look into finding what distribution is going to be the easiest to work with this… less than standard input device if I want to avoid a year or two of learning how to write my own driver for it.

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A new hope spot: My entire situation has more than just the OS in between user and brushstrokes.  Maybe the tablet is already fully supported but not properly configured. If so, Gimp just needs to be told what to do.

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I found a command to run in the terminal to list the “devices” associated with the tablet, but it could be the “devices” supported by a particular driver for it. Either way, my current thoughts are that the tablet is supported, just incorrectly configured.

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http://lifeofageekadmin.com/configuring-wacom-tablet-for-use-on-gimp-2-8/

I found this tutorial on how to get Gimp and the Intuos to play nice, and it happens to be on a distro of Linux, Fedora in this case. I won’t say the tablet is 100% functional, but I’d say it’s well on its way. I was able to draw in Gimp using the varying pressure, erase with the eraser, and I think the scroll wheel switched tools. I’ve heard of additional software to make it work fully, but I’m happy with it for now.

This week, I got a lesson in looking for problems in the right places. If I had considered that Gimp wasn’t Photoshop and focused on the easier solutions first, I wouldn’t have gone around trying to install redundant/already held drivers. Final Question: When was a time you tried to fix a problem with the wrong approach?

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