Man, that’s a long title. I need to avoid the use of KPPP. It is a KDE application that I have to run as root in order to use. It allows me to use GPRS connectivity via PPP. It is very handy, because it required minimal configuration after a few pointers from my esteemed colleague and fellow AJUG member Angus Berry. Methods to use it without running it as root (as shown in the KDE docs) have not worked for me. This is a problem, since it screws up a tempfile for the ICE window manager when launching it in Gnome, which prevents me from successfully launching a KDE session without first repairing the file whose permissions have been unfavorably altered.

I have created a set of PPP chat scripts for GPRS over Bluetooth with T-Mobile working. The scripts are based on excerpts from Linux Unwired (thanks guys!) and the O’Reilly article Linux Untethered by Brian Jepson. They are currently a bit suboptimal, though. When I hang up, the Bluetooth connection between the phone and the adapter is sometimes locked in some way and redialing does not work well. To get it to work again, I have to power down the phone and turn it on again. I also periodically get some sort of serial loopback error when trying to initialize the pppd daemon, whose trail of unpleasant spew ends as follows:
…
Serial line is looped back.
sent [LCP TermReq id=0xb “Loopback detected”]
rcvd [LCP TermReq id=0xb “Loopback detected”]
sent [LCP TermAck id=0xb]
rcvd [LCP TermAck id=0xb]
Connection terminated.
Serial link disconnected.
(more…)

Guess what? I found out what was wrong with WSAD when trying to execute the Ant javac task. The Ant runtime doesn’t have access to the tools.jar file in WSAD’s own folder structure! How nuts is that? I also went ahead and placed a reference to WSAD’s own copy of the junit.jar library so that Ant could execute a junit task as well. Bear in mind; this is not an issue with Eclipse 3.01. Sad, sad.

So I can’t wait any longer. Even though 1 package showed up as broken, I went ahead and installed Gnome 2.6 on my Debian sid installation. Oddly enough, the one broken package did not show up as broken afterward; go figure. Gnome is really pretty compared to KDE; much more intuitive and form-follows-function in my opinion. More Mac-like than Windows-like, which is a good thing with me. I now have to wean off of KPPP for GPRS and learn to write my own chat scripts, but hey, it has to happen sometime. I am just glad to be in position where it’s a matter of learning an alternative means for GPRS connectivity versus hoping and praying that I can even get it to work.

I have discovered that my installation of WebSphere Studio Application Developer is not able to find a Java compiler to execute the javac task in Ant. What a ridiculous thing! I tested the same codebase in Eclipse 3.01 and with an external Ant install, and it works without issue. How frustrating. That is eating up plenty of energy these past few days.

Think about it; the free product works, the $5,000 product does not. Pathetic.