Compiling Mono 2.0.1 on Ubuntu Gutsy Server 8.04

I didn't want to use the aging Mono version present in Ubuntu Server 8.04, so I set out to compile Mono 2.0 (and subsequently 2.0.1, via the same process). This turned out not to be too bad.

First, install the requisite packages:

aptitude install build-essential swig autoconf gawk mono-common binfmt-support bison pkg-config libglib2.0-dev

Yes, that's not a typo--you do want one of Ubuntu's Mono packages, mono-common. This will enable shell execution of Mono executables via ./ notation rather than having to execute "mono /path/to/executable."

Once you are done, download and unpack the source for Mono. This will get you 2.0.1:

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.0.1.tar.bz2
tar xf mono-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Now you are ready to build and install Mono (the make step will take a while):

cd mono-2.0.1
./configure --with-libgdiplus=no
make
make install

Lastly, you need one symlink so the binfmt-support package can execute Mono executables directly via the shell:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/mono /usr/bin/cli

That's it. Typing the command "mono -V" should yield the about information for Mono 2.0.1. Follow the instructions under "Testing the Mono installation" and confirm you can not only build and execute the example.exe application, but that you can execute it with ./ notation (e.g. ./example.exe).

Cheers!

D-Link DWL-G122 wireless USB adapter on Vista

I have a D-Link DWL-G122 wireless adapter (B/G) that I wanted to get working on Vista. I found a few posts, including this forum thread, but nothing worked for me. It turns out I have an older revision B adapter... and I ended up getting this to work by installing the Windows XP drivers for the revision B from D-Link:

ftp://files.dlink.com.au/products/DWL-G122/REV_B/Drivers/

I installed this by right-clicking the adapter in Device Manager, choosing:

1. Update Driver Software...
2. Browse my computer for driver software
3. Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer
4. Network Adapters category
5. "Have Disk" button... then finally browsing to the extracted contents of the above driver.

Enjoy.

Vista power saving never activates... thoughts?

I was hoping for some help with getting Vista's power saving to function. I have a Windows Vista Business Service Pack 1 (x64) installation. I have power options set up as follows:

Turn off the display:
[on battery] 5 minutes
[plugged in] 20 minutes

Put the computer to sleep:
[on battery] 15 minutes
[plugged in] 1 hour

Initially, power saving was working as expected. However, now it never enters power saving mode or even turns off the monitor. I have tried changing the plan settings around (including changing from one plan to another and creating a custom plan with the desired settings) with no success.

Does anyone have any ideas?

** UPDATE 28 Oct ** This was caused by the Vista Photos screensaver! Other screensavers allowed power saving to function, but the Photos screensaver did not.

MOSS doesn't like having the indexer role moved

We needed to expand our MOSS farm from one server to two so that we could have the search and indexing performed by a second machine, as we were putting the one poor server under significant periodic load. So, we stood up the second instance and joined it to the farm, and attempted to assign the search and indexing roles to this new instance. After doing so, when we would go to the search settings link in the SSP, we got the following message:

“The search service is currently offline. Visit the Services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.”

I searched and found wildly different solutions for fixing this. I ended up doing the following things to correct it:

1. On the new index server, I had to stop and restart the Office Search role after the initial move. I did this with stsadm via the following commands: 1) stsadm -o osearch -action stop 2) stsadm -o osearch -action start -role IndexQuery -farmserviceaccount DOMAIN\accountname -farmservicepassword PASSWORD
   
2. Access the SSP administration page (http://url-of-central-admin/_admin/managessp.aspx), and on the drop-down menu for the SSP in question, choose Edit Properties.
3. In the section titled Process Accounts with access to this SSP, add the search service account to the dialog box.
   
4. In the section titled Index Server, select the new index server for the farm.
5. Click OK to apply your changes.
6. Reboot the index server and restart full crawls of the content sources.