I got home for the holidays last Friday (Dec 15th). I decided to force myself to use Kubuntu 7.10 on my laptop, since I have time now to overcome any problems it throws at me. So far I’ve been pretty successful, the only thing I haven’t been able to get working is compiz/emerald, but that wouldn’t work on my desktop either so I’ve just given up now.

Samba threw me into a loop for a while, I was trying to setup shares similar to windows, read-only and no password required. I thought I had it setup great, but it kept giving me “path cannot be found” when accessing the share from another machine. I eventually found the samba logs, saw that it said access was denied. I played around with permissions for a while, never getting the user “nobody” to be able to read from that folder. Finally I realized the external hard drive the folder was on was mounted with umask=007, meaning that other users and groups could never have permission to read from it. I removed the umask, set the permissions on the folder, and now it works great. This might be one of those things that I want to punch myself in the face for later down the road when I learn more about this type of stuff, but for now I’m the only user on this laptop so changing that can’t be too terrible.

The new website is coming along. I have a general design idea and I’m playing around with the CSS right now. I’m going with a dark theme, lighter text on a darker background. Not sure what I’ll do with the blog on there… guess I’ll find out when it’s done!