GNUski bacon

KDE 4.8 is released!

2012-01-26T15:31:00.000-06:00

Congrats to the KDE team on the 4.8.0 release this week! I'm looking forward to it being packaged by my distro and it sounds very nice. I am especially excited that the bulk-rename function in Dolphin now keeps the default extension, which will help my to rename images and video taken with my camera.

Congrats to KDE and to the community!

Ethernet Bonding in Debian: 2 NICs acting as one

2012-01-22T10:00:00.000-06:00

Ethernet Bonding allows two (or more) ethernet cards to act as one, dramatically increasing throughput or allowing for redundancy.  More info about the various modes are available here.

1.  Install ifenslave:
root#  aptitude install ifenslave

2.  Set the 'bonding' module to load at boot:
root# echo bonding >> /etc/modules

3.  Set up your bonding configuration:
root#  vim /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf

and put in these lines and save the file:

alias bond0 bonding
options bonding mode=5 miimon=100 downdelay=200 updelay=200

4.  Edit your networking interfaces file
root#  vim /etc/networking/interfaces

comment out the eth0 and eth1 settings, and set up bond0 (and bond1 if you have enough cards to do this), editing this info to match your needs:

iface bond0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.100
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.1.0
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
        down /sbin/ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1

5.  If you have more than one bond (say, bond1 with eth2 and eth3) you'll need to set that up in your bootup scripts; edit /etc/init.d/networking and add* these lines (the bold ones) just before the Options are loaded:


#!/bin/sh -e
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          networking
# Required-Start:    mountkernfs $local_fs
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs
# Should-Start:      ifupdown
# Should-Stop:       ifupdown
# Default-Start:     S
# Default-Stop:      0 6
# Short-Description: Raise network interfaces.
### END INIT INFO

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin"

[ -x /sbin/ifup ] || exit 0

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

echo +bond1 >> /sys/class/net/bonding_masters
ifup bond1

process_options() {
    [ -e /etc/network/options ] || return 0
    log_warning_msg "/etc/network/options still exists and it will be IGNORED! Read README.Debian of netbase."
}

...

...

...

*  I'm sure that this isn't the best place to add these lines for the bond1 but doing this in rc.local means your network comes up later than you maybe want.  However, if you don't somehow add bond1 to that file, you'll get errors such as:

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
bond1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device

Cygwin SSH server: adding Windows accounts

2012-01-21T09:00:00.000-06:00

If your Windows server needs SSH, the Cygwin set of tools does a great job of combining the GNU tools on a Windows platform. Download and install Cygwin and install the SSH Server; once you have that installed you're going to want your local users to have SSH access.

This pulls Windows accounts and adds the account info to Cygwin:

$ mkpasswd -cl |grep $USERNAME >> /etc/passwd

This sets up Windows groups on Cygwin (they may already be there):

$ mkgroup --local |grep $GROUPNAME >> /etc/group

Note that you may need to edit your /etc/passwd file for a new home directory, default group membership, or other such info that would be contained in the /etc/passwd file.

Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum. (Solved)

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-06:00

If you get the error:
Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.

it's probably because you've been running RPM commands directly. Yum doesn't like this any more; fix it by running:

shell# yum clean all

Installing PHP extension Memcached on RHEL6

2012-01-19T10:09:00.000-06:00

I couldn't find the memcached extension for PHP in the base installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, so here are instructions for installing memcached on RHEL6:

This assumes your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 server has its license working:

shell# rhn_register --nox

First install the EPEL repository for RHEL6 (all one line):

shell# yum install http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

Install PHP into your Red Hat EL6:

shell# yum install php

Visit the Red Hat website and get the php-devel packages and these various libmemcached files:

php-devel (both i686 and x86_64)
libmemcached (both i686 and x86_64)
libmemcached-devel (both i686 and x86_64)

Download each of the above files and install them:

shell# yum install ./*.rpm

Then install the PHP packages that we need:

shell# yum install php-pecl-memcached php-pear

Restart your httpd (Apache2) service:

shell# service httpd restart

You can check this in a web browser by creating a file info.php containing the following code, and browsing to that to see what PHP extensions and the like are running:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

It should look like this (and much more) when you visit that info.php page:

Click to embiggen

Did this work out for you? Any suggestions? Please comment if this helps you and thanks for visiting!

Individual Package Downloads from Red Hat's Website

2012-01-18T06:36:00.001-06:00

I'm unsure how, but one way or another I got into a dependency mess on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 server and ended up removing some core packages, such as those that allow me to rhn_register my system for updates etc.

At the same time, I needed the development packages for PHP 5.3 on Red Hat, but the package php-devel isn't easily found in the Red Hat repositories. In my RHN site I tried turning on the various channels but my server just couldn't seem to find the package.

In both situations, I was able to turn to Red Hat's Customer Portal and download the individual packages that my system needed. To get there, log into your RHN.RedHat.com page, go to the Customer Portal, hover over the Downloads tab and select Packages.

Searching for php-devel gave me exactly what I needed and I made sure to download the package designed for RHEL6 (the most recent being named php-devel-5.3.3-3.el6_2.5.x86_64 from the RHEL Server Optional repository). Thank you Red Hat for making this possible!

Phosphor: a terminal for the Hipster generation

2012-01-17T08:15:00.001-06:00

Hipters are into old things and making them cool again. Velco shoes? Tapered pants? Cassette tapes? Yep, they're back in style, although computer nerds maybe never knew they were gone!

With all things old now becoming cool again, why not get back to the Terminal with your computer use?

But not any old terminal; the X Screensaver named 'Phosphor' can also be used as a terminal emulator, complete with slow screen updates and a fading green phosphorus look. It's much like the terminals you maybe grew up with, or the terminals that you see in hollywood movies:

You can adjust the -delay flag to a lower number to get a more responsive terminal, and adjust the -scale to a larger number for a larger font, but the fading green text and the slow-to-appear letters are the draw of this old-school terminal emulator.

Install the 'xscreensaver-gl' or similar package to make sure you have this; run as root 'updatedb && locate phosphor' if it doesn't install to '/usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor'

On a Debian system, run this to launch your Phosphor terminal (all one line):

shell$ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -program /bin/bash -scale 1 -delay 200

More options available with:

shell$ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor --help

Do you dig it, hip cat?

Running a File System Check

2012-01-12T15:37:00.001-06:00

If your Linux box suddenly loses power, or your laptop battery dies, or your external drive dock gets disconnected, it's possible that your harddrive needs to have it's filesystem checked. Here is how to do this for ext3-formatted and ext4-formatted drives.

Plug in the hard drive to the computer and open a terminal.

Become root:

shell$ su -

Password:

root#

See which drive was recently attached, in case you're unsure

root# dmesg

...

[1144639.292844] sd 24:0:0:0: [sde] No Caching mode page present

[1144639.292855] sd 24:0:0:0: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through

[1144639.356633] sde: sde1

shell#

Unless you know what you're doing with filesystem fragments and the like (I do not), you probably just want this up and working rather than trying to recover tiny parts of files. We see the above 'dmesg' output telling us the newest attached partition is 'sde1' so we'll run a filesystem check against that partition.

First, make sure the drive isn't mounted or you can cause issues:

WARNING!!! The filesystem is mounted. If you continue you ***WILL*** cause ***SEVERE*** filesystem damage.

If you're sure the drive isn't mounted (run as root 'umount /dev/sde1'), let's proceed:

Run the auto repair (-p) first, then we'll force (-f) a second run and auto-answer Yes (-y) to any questions:

root# fsck -p /dev/sde1

...

root# fsck -f -y /dev/sde1

fsck from util-linux 2.20.1e2

fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)

Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes

Pass 2: Checking directory structure

Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity

Pass 4: Checking reference counts

Pass 5: Checking group summary information

Free blocks count wrong (721019450, counted=301927649).Fix? yes

Free inodes count wrong (183148533, counted=183148043).Fix? yes

DriveName: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

DriveName: 501/183148544 files (3.4% non-contiguous), 430638623/732566272 blocks

root#

If you have 'bad blocks' errors you may want to run a 'bad block check' and we'll answer 'yes' to these questions as well:

root# fsck -c -y /dev/sde1

Did this work out for you? Let us know in the comments!

Listing Files in a RPM package

2012-01-11T16:44:00.001-06:00

To list the files in an RPM file, we first need to get that file; this will also get the dependencies for us:

shell# yumdownloader --resolve pam_ldap

Once we have the file, list the contents:

shell# rpm -qlp pam_ldap-185-11.el6.x86_64.rpm/etc/pam_ldap.conf
/etc/pam_ldap.secret
/lib64/security/pam_ldap.so
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/AUTHORS
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/COPYING.LIB
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/ChangeLog
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/NEWS
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/README
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/README.TLS
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/ldapns.schema
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/ns-pwd-policy.schema
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/chfn/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/chsh/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/ftp/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/gdm
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/halt
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/imap
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/kde
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/linuxconf
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/linuxconf-pair
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/login/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/mcserv
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/other
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/passwd/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/pop
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/poweroff
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/ppp
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/reboot
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/rexec
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/rlogin
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/rsh/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/samba
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/shutdown
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/ssh/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/su/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/vlock
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/xdm
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/xlock
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/xscreensaver
/usr/share/doc/pam_ldap-185/pam.d/xserver
/usr/share/man/man5/pam_ldap.5.gz

Video: Wiring an RJ-45 Network Jack

2012-01-10T08:11:00.003-06:00

This is a brief HowTo video about wiring a Leviton network jack for computer networking.

Leviton jacks on Amazon.com
Punchdown tools on Amazon.com

Leviton jacks on Amazon.com
Punchdown tools on Amazon.com

HowTo: Upload files to FTPS with cURL, Dolphin, and FileZilla

2011-12-29T09:59:00.001-06:00

We've discussed setting up secured FTP with FTPS on VSFTP here. This uses FTPS over port 21 and works well as Passive FTP. We can connect using KDE's Dolphin and the KIO-Slave ftps://ftpuser:PaSsWoRd@1.2.3.4:21/ where 1.2.3.4 is the IP of the remote machine, ftpuser is the user account, and PaSsWoRd is the password, as we see here:

We can also connect with FileZilla as a setting the Server Type to 'FTPES' (or "Protocol: FTP" and "Encryption: Require explicit FTP over TLS") and Login Type to 'Normal' and using the needed credentials:

If you get an error which reads, "Error: GnuTLS error -12: A TLS fatal alert has been received.
Error: Could not connect to server", you need to either get an older version of FileZilla, or change your VSFTP settings to include "ssl_ciphers=HIGH".

Finally, we can upload files non-interactively with cURL using these settings (note this is all one line):

shell# /usr/bin/curl --ssl-reqd --ftp-ssl-ccc -u ftpuser:PaSsWoRd ftp://1.2.3.4:21/ -v -k -T /home/lefty/testfile.txt

where 1.2.3.4 is the IP of the remote machine, ftpuser is the user account, and PaSsWoRd is the password.

Listing installed packages with Aptitude (to install on another computer)

2011-12-27T15:37:00.001-06:00

Debian and Ubuntu machines, and others that use Aptitude, can list their installed packages many ways. This is my favorite since it only lists the manually-installed packages. Dependencies, which may change in the future, aren't included on this list which means that Aptitude can do the dependency handling.

First we list the packages and redirect that to a text file named packages.txt (note this is all one line):

root-shell-machine1# aptitude search '~i' |grep -v "i.A " |awk '{print $2}' > packages.txt

Then we want to copy that packages.txt file to the other machine (I'll let you figure that out). Once on the other machine, we want to update our Aptitude catalog and then install the listed packages:

root-shell-machine2# aptitude update
root-shell-machine2# aptitude install `cat packages.txt`

Debian has KDE 4.7.4 in Experimental repositories; install instructions

2011-12-20T10:36:00.000-06:00

Not in the Debian-KDE repos that had 4.7.2, but in the official Debian Experimental repositories, KDE 4.7.4 has been released! You need to be running Debian Sid to take advantage of this and be aware that these packages aren't fully vetted and may break your world.

First make sure that you're running Sid. Add these three lines (or similar for your local repos) to the file at /etc/apt/sources.list making sure to adjust if you don't want the non-free packages, etc:

## EXPERIMENTAL aptitude -t experimental install digikam

deb http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

deb-src http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

Run aptitude update to update the catalog, and then we need to update the system and specify that we want the Experimental packages (for system stability reasons):

shell~$ sudo aptitude -t experimental dist-upgrade
[sudo] password for lefty:
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gcc-4.7-base{a} kamera{a} kmenuedit{a} libapt-inst1.4{a} libapt-pkg4.12{a} libboost-filesystem1.48.0{a} libboost-regex1.48.0{a} libboost-system1.48.0{a} libdbusmenu-glib4{a} libexiv2-11{a} libexttextcat-data{a}
libmagickcore5{a} libmagickcore5-extra{a} libmagickwand5{a} libopenal-data{a} libopenal1{a} libservlet2.4-java{a} libspandsp2{a} libtiff5{a} libvdeplug3{ab} libwine-alsa-unstable{a} libwine-bin-unstable{a}
libwine-cms-unstable{a} libwine-gecko-unstable{a} libwine-gl-unstable{a} libwine-gphoto2-unstable{a} libwine-ldap-unstable{a} libwine-openal-unstable{a} libwine-print-unstable{a} libwine-sane-unstable{a}
libwine-unstable{ab} python-pycurl{a} wine-bin-unstable{ab} wine-unstable{ab}
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libdbusmenu-glib3{u} libwine-alsa{u} libwine-cms{u} libwine-gl{u} libwine-gphoto2{u} libwine-ldap{u} libwine-print{u} libwine-sane{u} wine-utils{u}
The following packages will be upgraded:
apt apt-utils ark bash-completion colord dbus dbus-x11 debian-archive-keyring dolphin dragonplayer exiv2 filelight findutils foobnix freespacenotifier gawk gdb gdbserver git git-man gnokii-common gstreamer0.10-gconf
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-x gwenview icedove icedove-dbg iftop ifupdown imagemagick imagemagick-common
initscripts{b} jovie juk kate kate-data kate-dbg katepart kcalc kcharselect kde-baseapps kde-baseapps-bin kde-baseapps-data kde-baseapps-dbg kde-config-cddb kde-config-cron kde-plasma-desktop kde-runtime kde-runtime-data
kde-runtime-dbg kde-standard kde-style-oxygen kde-wallpapers kde-wallpapers-default kde-window-manager kde-workspace kde-workspace-bin kde-workspace-data kde-workspace-dbg kde-workspace-kgreet-plugins kde-zeroconf kdeadmin
kdeadmin-dbg kdeartwork-emoticons kdeartwork-style kdebase-bin kdebase-dbg kdebase-runtime kdebase-runtime-dbg kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-dbg kdegraphics-libs-data kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-dbg
kdelibs5-dev kdelibs5-plugins kdemultimedia kdemultimedia-dbg kdemultimedia-kio-plugins kdenetwork-dbg kdepasswd kdepimlibs-kio-plugins kdepimlibs5-dev kdeplasma-addons kdeutils kdeutils-dbg kdf kdm kdoctools kfind kget
kgpg khelpcenter4 kinfocenter klibc-utils klipper kmix kmouth kompare konqueror konqueror-nsplugins konsole konsole-dbg kopete krdc kremotecontrol kscd kscreensaver kscreensaver-xsavers kscreensaver-xsavers-webcollage
ksnapshot ksysguard ksysguardd ksystemlog ktimer kttsd kuser kwalletmanager kwrite libakonadi-calendar4 libakonadi-contact4 libakonadi-kabc4 libakonadi-kcal4 libakonadi-kde4 libakonadi-kmime4 libapache2-mod-php5 libcolord1
libdbus-1-3 libdbus-1-dev libgadu3 libgcc1 libgfortran3 libgomp1 libgpgme++2 libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-0 libhsqldb-java libindicate-qt1 libindicate5 libio-compress-perl libkabc4 libkastencontrollers4
libkastencore4 libkastengui4 libkateinterfaces4 libkatepartinterfaces4 libkblog4 libkcal4 libkcalcore4 libkcalutils4 libkcddb4 libkcmutils4 libkdcraw-data libkde3support4 libkdeclarative5 libkdecorations4 libkdecore5
libkdesu5 libkdeui5 libkdewebkit5 libkdnssd4 libkemoticons4 libkephal4abi1 libkexiv2-10 libkexiv2-data libkfile4 libkholidays4 libkhtml5 libkidletime4 libkimap4 libkimproxy4 libkio5 libkipi-data libkipi8 libkjsapi4
libkjsembed4 libkldap4 libklibc libkmbox4 libkmediaplayer4 libkmime4 libknewstuff2-4 libknewstuff3-4 libknotifyconfig4 libkntlm4 libkonq-common libkonq5-templates libkonq5abi1 libkonqsidebarplugin4a libkontactinterface4
libkopete4 libkparts4 libkpimidentities4 libkpimtextedit4 libkpimutils4 libkprintutils4 libkpty4 libkresources4 libkrosscore4 libkrossui4 libksane-data libkscreensaver5 libksgrd4 libksignalplotter4 libktexteditor4 libktnef4
libkunitconversion4 libkutils4 libkwineffects1abi2 libkworkspace4 libkxmlrpcclient4 libmailtransport4 libmarblewidget12 libmicroblog4 libmpeg2-4 libmudflap0 libnepomuk4 libnepomukquery4a libnepomukutils4 libnewt0.52
liboktetacore4 liboktetagui4 liboktetakastencontrollers4abi1 liboktetakastencore4 liboktetakastengui4 libokularcore1 libortp8 libp11-kit-dev libp11-kit0 libplasma-geolocation-interface4 libplasma3 libplasmaclock4abi2
libplasmagenericshell4 libpopt-dev libpopt0 libprocesscore4abi1 libprocessui4a libqgpgme1 libquadmath0 libshout3 libsigsegv2 libslp1 libsolid4 libsolidcontrol4abi2 libsolidcontrolifaces4abi2 libstdc++6 libsvga1
libsyndication4 libtaskmanager4abi2 libtextcat0 libthreadweaver4 libvde0 libweather-ion6 libwine libxi-dev libxi6 libxine2 libxine2-bin libxine2-doc libxine2-ffmpeg libxine2-misc-plugins libxine2-plugins linux-libc-dev
locate make marble marble-data marble-plugins mkvtoolnix mplayerthumbs mysql-common okteta okular okular-extra-backends openvpn oxygen-icon-theme patch perlmagick php5-cli php5-common php5-ldap plasma-containments-addons
plasma-dataengines-addons plasma-dataengines-workspace plasma-desktop plasma-desktopthemes-artwork plasma-runners-addons plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets plasma-scriptengine-javascript plasma-scriptengine-python
plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba plasma-scriptengine-webkit plasma-wallpapers-addons plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-lancelot plasma-widgets-addons plasma-widgets-workspace pmount python-cupshelpers python-kde4
python-newt python-numpy python-software-properties{b} qemu qemu-keymaps qemu-system qemu-user qemu-utils screen software-properties-gtk{b} sweeper system-config-printer system-config-printer-kde system-config-printer-udev
systemsettings tcpdump vde2 whiptail wine wine-bin x11proto-input-dev x11proto-randr-dev xkb-data xserver-common xserver-xephyr xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-evdev{b} xserver-xorg-video-dummy{b}
xserver-xorg-video-r128{b} zlib1g zlib1g-dev
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
konq-plugins plasma-scriptengines plasma-widget-networkmanagement
336 packages upgraded, 34 newly installed, 9 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 948 MB/953 MB of archives. After unpacking 260 MB will be used.

Watch YouTube videos on Wii in Fullscreen

2011-12-19T07:21:00.002-06:00

This holiday I wanted to play a fireplace video on my Wii but the Internet channel and its Opera browser no longer allow fullscreen YouTube videos. What good is a fireplace if it isn't the full screen?

I've solved this, sorta, but it's not convenient. First we visit the video we want, using a computer browser, and click on the [Share] button, and then the [Embed] button:

Copy that Embed code and paste it into a text editor so we can just pull out the URL. From this code:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LIJAsKCLTqc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

we want just this part (the src= part):

http://www.youtube.com/embed/LIJAsKCLTqc

Now we can either enter that URL/link directly into the Wii's Opera browser, or we can shorten that URL at a place like tinyurl.com

TinyURL was created!
The following URL:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/LIJAsKCLTqc
has a length of 40 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 26 characters:
http://tinyurl.com/bth5wqg

That TinyURL is far easier to type. Once you've loaded this into your Wii, press the Star button on the screen to bring up your favorites/bookmarks, and then add this as a favorite to not have to type it again!

Did this work for you? Any suggestions or feedback? Anyone know how we can force this to be a higher quality than the Wii default?

Sending email from a Debian Web Server

2011-12-17T14:00:00.000-06:00

On a Debian server it uses Exim4 for the mailing server; if this is only outgoing mail that is the easiest and we'll just cover that here. Ubuntu will work similar if it uses Exim4. Redhat uses Sendmail and will have different setups.

On Debian:

shell# dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

Select these options:

Internet server, sending mail directly with SMTP

System Name: set this as whatever you want user@____.com to come from; this will also accept emails for users at that name

Listen to the needed IPs and/or machines

Don't relay, generally

DND Minimal set to No

Maildir format to prevent a single-point-of-failure

Split Config is generally set to No

Test at a command line with:

shell# mail -s "Subject" yourname@realemail.com [enter]

something something

[ctrl][d]

[enter]

shell#

See current mail queue with:

shell# mailq

Run current queue with:

shell# runq

With a bit more manual setup, we can also accept user+tag@domain.com type emails.

FTPS with VSFTP

2011-12-16T18:30:00.000-06:00

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is an older networking protocol to, you guessed it, transfer files. Due to the way FTP works, there is a 'data channel' and a 'command channel'. The Command Channel runs on Port 21 and is used to pass information about the session, while the Data Channel is where the file transfer actually happens.

Due to this two-channel setup, the inherent insecurities of a non-encrypted data stream, and the complexities of a Firewall and the NAT system and whatnot, FTP is slowly being replaced by SFTP which uses a single port (22) and the SSH protocol to transfer files. But since SFTP isn't everywhere (especially on Windows machines), FTP is still needed.

Let's add some more complexities: Active vs Passive FTP. In Active FTP, the Data Channel is on Port 20 and it is initiated by the FTP Server. This is nice because the Server's firewall has a known port (port 20) that needs to be opened. Unfortunately, this requires the client's firewall be wide open to listen for that incoming connection, which may be blocked. Some firewalls will expect these connections, however, and permit the access.

Passive FTP, on the other hand, has the client initiate the data connection. This works to not open wide the firewall on the client network, but requires that the FTP Server's firewall has holes. Since the server will only be set up once for multiple clients, this can be a better method than expecting everyone to open their firewall.

An issue with Passive FTP behind a firewall, however, is that the server is initiating the connection using its own, private IP. With normal FTP, apparently the firewall may rewrite these packets. But with FTPS, which is secured using an SSL certificate, this data is encrypted and the firewall cannot make those packet changes.

VSFTP on Debian GNU/Linux allows us to set up Passive FTP on a NAT system with FTPS (or FTPES, meaning "explicit SSL" which is Port 21 still. There is also FTPS on port 990, which uses implicit SSL, and this HowTo doesn't cover that.)

First install VSFTP:

# aptitude update# aptitude install vsftpd

Now we'll make a self-signed SSL Certificate:

# mkdir /etc/vsftpd# cd /etc/vsftpd# openssl req -new -x509 -days 9999 -nodes -out vsftpd.pem -keyout vsftpd.pem

Answer the questions and when you're done you'll have a file named /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem

Edit the /etc/vsftpd.conf file to have these options, which of course you can adjust:

listen=YES

anonymous_enable=NO

local_enable=YES

write_enable=YES

local_umask=022

dirmessage_enable=YES

xferlog_enable=YES

pasv_enable=YES

pasv_address=66.44.55.66

pasv_min_port=24000

pasv_max_port=24100

syslog_enable=NO

log_ftp_protocol=YES

chroot_local_user=YES

secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd

pam_service_name=vsftpd

ssl_enable=YES

rsa_cert_file=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem

force_local_data_ssl=YES

allow_anon_ssl=NO

force_local_data_ssl=YES

force_local_logins_ssl=YES

ssl_tlsv1=YES

ssl_sslv2=YES

ssl_sslv3=YES

ssl_ciphers=HIGH

Note this line (below); this will allow VSFTP to rewrite its own passive packets to allow for that data channel to function. Set this as the firewall's external IP, not the 66.44.55.66 example I have here:

pasv_address=66.44.55.66

In your firewall, allow these ports through and port-forward them to this same internal server:

pasv_min_port=24000pasv_max_port=24100

Now you need to add a user to your system:

adduser ftpusername

If you want to prevent this user from logging in with SSH or at a console, you'll need to set this user to not have a shell (aka, set to /bin/false ) in /etc/passwd:

ftpusername:1001:1001::/home/ftpusername:/bin/false

and make sure that is a valid (even though fake) shell option in /etc/shells:

....../bin/false...

Finally, we'll turn off VSFTP's checking of the shell access in the file /etc/pam.d/vsftpd by commenting out (putting a #) the line:
#auth required pam_shells.so

We'll restart VSFTP

# /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

and we should now be able to use FTPS from another computer, assuming you have your Firewall and Port Forwarding set up correctly for port 21 and ports 24000-24100 (or whatever you set in vsftpd.conf). Instructions for connecting with various options (Dolphin, FileZilla, and cURL) can be found here.

More about FTP here

More about FTPS in VSFTP here

More about VSFTP logging here and conf options here

More about disabling PAM authentication to allow VSFTP to use /bin/false here

Thanks everyone who has written about this elsewhere and thanks to the developers of VSFTP.

HowTo: Batch-Converting m4a files to mp3 (command line)

2011-12-13T08:00:00.000-06:00

If you buy songs in *.m4a (or ma4) format but, like me, your car stereo plays *.mp3 audio files only, here is a commandline script to convert all the m4a/ma4 files in the local directory to mp3 at 320 audio bitrate (the highest offered by mp3)

for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320 "${f%.m4a}.mp3"; done

HowTo Get Mac OS X’s “Natural Scrolling” In KDE

2011-12-12T07:20:00.000-06:00

MakeUseOf.com has an article on setting up Natural Scrolling on Ubuntu, which requires a lot of setup for such a simple idea! Natural Scrolling basically takes the scrollbar out of the equation and relies on your mousewheel/touchpad/touchscreen to be pushing a page up or down, rather than it's scrollbar. In other words, you reverse the direction (and the behaviour) that we've learned about scrolling. Without a mouse, this makes some sense.

This is easy to do in KDE: Open System Settings, click on "Input Devices" or "Keyboard and Mouse", click on the "Mouse" section, checkmark the 'Reverse Scroll Direction' box and click [Apply]:

I can see this making sense on a touch device but not as much on a computer with a mouse. Do you prefer the Natural Scrolling or is it too much of a change?

Setting up Exim4 to allow Tagging: user+tag@domain.com

2011-12-08T20:00:00.000-06:00

Email Tagging is a super-handy feature in GMail and other services, but if you run your own mail server on Exim4 this should be possible for you also. Let me show you how!

Briefly, email address tagging (or "sub-addressing") means that if user@domain.com is a valid email address, then we can tag it with +anything (well, almost anything) and still have it be delivered to the user@domain.com address which allows for easy sorting and searches or to see who is selling your information:
user+amazon@domain.com
user+petition@domain.com
user-senator@domain.com

To do this we need to first have your Exim4 server working properly and ports forwarded in the firewall or whatever you need to make Email flow; this is beyond this HowTo. Then you need to know if you use Exim4's config split into smaller files or if the config is done in one large file (or make the changes in both, I suppose). On Debian we can find this out by configuring Exim4 (or not changing the working settings if they work already) :

root-shell# dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

internet site; mail is sent and received directly using SMTP <Ok>

System mail name: domain.com <Ok>

IP-addresses to listen on for incoming SMTP connections: _________ <Ok>

Other destinations for which mail is accepted: <Ok>

Domains to relay mail for: <Ok>

Machines to relay mail for: <Ok>

Keep number of DNS-queries minimal (Dial-on-Demand)? <No>

Delivery method for local mail: (You decide but an mbox file is a single point of failure) <Ok>

Split configuration into small files? <No>

Exim4 will restart with your config changes. Now we're going to add a few lines to the config.

If you DO have this split into smaller configs, open the files listed below (Debian 6; your files may be different) and add the lines in bold:

root-shell# vim /etc/exim4/conf.d/router/600_exim4-config_userforward

userforward:
debug_print = "R: userforward for $local_part@$domain"
driver = redirect
local_part_suffix = -* : +*

local_part_suffix_optional

domains = +local_domains
check_local_user
file = $home/.forward
require_files = $local_part:$home/.forward
no_verify
no_expn
check_ancestor
allow_filter
forbid_smtp_code = true
directory_transport = address_directory
file_transport = address_file
pipe_transport = address_pipe
reply_transport = address_reply
skip_syntax_errors
syntax_errors_to = real-$local_part@$domain
syntax_errors_text = \
This is an automatically generated message. An error has\n\
been found in your .forward file. Details of the error are\n\
reported below. While this error persists, you will receive\n\
a copy of this message for every message that is addressed\n\
to you. If your .forward file is a filter file, or if it is\n\
a non-filter file containing no valid forwarding addresses,\n\
a copy of each incoming message will be put in your normal\n\
mailbox. If a non-filter file contains at least one valid\n\
forwarding address, forwarding to the valid addresses will\n\
happen, and those will be the only deliveries that occur.

And this one:

root-shell# vim /etc/exim4/conf.d/router/900_exim4-config_local_user

local_user:
debug_print = "R: local_user for $local_part@$domain"
driver = accept
local_part_suffix = -* : +*

local_part_suffix_optional

domains = +local_domains
check_local_user
local_parts = ! root
transport = LOCAL_DELIVERY
cannot_route_message = Unknown user

If you're NOT using split-file, edit this single file and find these two sections and edit them to add the parts in bold:


userforward:  


debug_print = "R: userforward for $local_part@$domain"  


driver = redirect  


local_part_suffix = -* : +*  


local_part_suffix_optional  


domains = +local_domains
....


....


....



local_user:  


debug_print = "R: local_user for $local_part@$domain"  


driver = accept  


local_part_suffix = -* : +*  


local_part_suffix_optional  


domains = +local_domains  


check_local_user 


... 


...


...

Rebuild your config:

root-shell# update-exim4.conf

Find your config file and look in there to see if these changes made it:

root-shell# exim -bV

Exim version 4.69 #1 built 30-Jan-2011 20:48:20Copyright (c) University of Cambridge 2006Berkeley DB: Berkeley DB 4.6.21: (September 27, 2007)Support for: crypteq iconv() IPv6 GnuTLS move_frozen_messagesLookups: lsearch wildlsearch nwildlsearch iplsearch cdb dbm dbmnz dnsdb dsearch nis nis0 passwdAuthenticators: cram_md5 plaintextRouters: accept dnslookup ipliteral manualroute queryprogram redirectTransports: appendfile/maildir/mailstore autoreply lmtp pipe smtpFixed never_users: 0Size of off_t: 8

Configuration file is /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated

Assuming the config file looks right, restart Exim4 and try your emailing now with a +sometag

root-shell# /etc/init.d/exim4 restart

Note that in our two lines that we added:

local_part_suffix = -* : +*
local_part_suffix_optional

the first line has a minus and a star, colon, plus and a star. The colon separates the options and we're saying that a minus-anything or plus-anything on an address is an acceptable tag. We could specify this more with this instead:

local_part_suffix = -beta

local_part_suffix_optional

to accept only user-beta@domain.com if that is what we wanted.

Forwarding X11 through multiple SSH connections

2011-12-07T07:42:00.001-06:00

Graphical Applications on a GNU/Linux machine can be launched from the remote machine to appear on your local machine by using 'X11 Forwarding', with X11 (or Xorg) being the name of the software that makes graphics possible on a GNU/Linux machine. Your desktop such as KDE or GNOME or whatever is the client which connects to the X11 server. There is now Wayland in the works, to replace Xorg/X11, but this won't cover that.

Because this is a client/server relationship, the two don't need to be running on the same machine. We can start a remote graphical app from a command line and run the processing power on that remote machine (the server), while seeing and working on that app at the local machine (the client).

Let's first get an SSH connection with X11 forwarding started using the -X flag:

local-shell$ ssh user@remote.server.com -X
password: **********
remote-shell$
remote-shell$ dolphin
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)
kbuildsycoca4 running...

Here is a partial screenshot of this; the front Dolphin is the remote Dolphin (@bigboi) and running KDE 4.7.2 and with its specific layout, while the Dolphin in the back is the locally-running Dolphin (KDE 4.4.5 on Squeeze).

Click to Enlarge

Note the Dolphin in the foreground has its window management handled by the local machine (we can see the colour mismatch), but other aspects such as icons and contents belong to the remote machine.

To run X11 graphics across two connections, however, requires a bit of TTY-forwarding (using the -t flag, multiple times). This tip allows us to connect to one machine, say a network gateway, and from that machine run a command to connect to our office desktop. From here we can launch a graphical application and have it appear on our local machine.

local-desktop$ ssh -X -t -t -t lefty@gatewaymachine.com "ssh employee@192.168.1.00 -X"
lefty@gateway's password:
employee@192.168.1.100's password
employee-desktop$

This can come in very handy and it allows X applications to be run through a complex firewall scheme. That command is a single line:

ssh -X -t -t -t lefty@gatewaymachine.com "ssh employee@192.168.1.00 -X"

FLOSS: Making Crazy Remote Connections Possible

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000-06:00

This is certainly not the only way to do this connection, and very likely not the most efficient, but I found it cool so I had to write it up. Do you have a similar story?

I have a client with a VPN connection that requires Windows to make that VPN connection, from my office IP address. Because of this VPN requirement and other clients with similar setups, I keep a Windows virtual machine at the ready, as a VirtualBox Virtual Machine (VM) image. This VM has its graphical bling set as minimally as possible to help speed connections wherever possible.

Tonight I wanted to do some remote work for this client. I first connected into my office over VPN using KVpnc, and then over SSH to my office desktop with -X for X11 (graphical) forwarding:

home-shell$ ssh lefty@10.10.10.10 -X

work-shell$

From my office desktop, I was then able to list my VMs

work-shell$ vboxmanage list vms

XPsp3

TinyKore-kde

and boot that VirtualBox version of XP from the command line:

work-shell$ vboxheadless -startvm XPsp3 --vnc --vncpass SomePass &

[1] 6079

Oracle VM VirtualBox Headless Interface 4.1.6_Debian(C) 2008-2011 Oracle CorporationAll rights reserved.

work-shell$

Using the VirtualBox built-in VNC server on default port 5900 (which I started with --vnc in the above command) and the SomePass password that I set above, I was then able to use VNC to remote into my Windows XP machine (note this is all one line):

work-shell$ xtightvncviewer localhost::5900 -quality 0 -bgr233 -compresslevel 9 -encodings CoRRE

When prompted for the Password, I entered the SomePass as I set when initially starting the VirtualBox VM. I tried using different -encodings flags for that xtightvncviewer connection, such as -encodings zlib and -encodings CoRRE and -encodings CopyRect; the default encoding (tight) seemed to well but for rapid screen updates (such as scrolling yum messages), -encodings CoRRE really worked best.

Once on the Windows XP virtual machine, I was then able to start my magical VPN connection and fire up PuTTY, and connect to the remote server for maintenance.

To recap:

I connected to work with a VPN
then to my office desktop with SSH
then I booted the XP virtual machine in headless mode with VNC
I then connected from that SSH session to the VNC server on the XP VM
From XP I started a VPN connection to a remote client's office
I then started PuTTY and connected to the client's Linux server

Are there any crazy connections that you go through that wouldn't be possible without Free Software?

Debian Testing or Sid: KDE can't mount USB drives (Fix)

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-06:00

I've had my system stop allowing KDE to mount files. Why? UDisk and PolicyKit stuff, dunno. Here is the fix though. To fix this, become root:

shell$ su -

edit the file at:

shell# vim /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.udisks.policy

and change the stanze which reads similar to this (note I had to remove all of the < due to blogger.com thinking I was entering code) :

action id="org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount">
    description>Mount a device /description>
    description xml:lang="da">Montér en enhed /description>
    description xml:lang="de">Gerät einhängen /description>
    message>Authentication is required to mount the device /message>
    message xml:lang="da">Autorisering er påkrævet for at montere et fil system /message>
    message xml:lang="de">Zugriffsrechte werden benötigt um das Gerät einzuhängen /message>
    defaults>
      allow_any>no /allow_any>
      allow_inactive>no /allow_inactive>
      allow_active>no /allow_active>
    /defaults>
  /action>

to now read (note the bold parts, which are the changes):

action id="org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount">
    description>Mount a device /description>
    description xml:lang="da">Montér en enhed /description>
    description xml:lang="de">Gerät einhängen /description>
    message>Authentication is required to mount the device /message>
    message xml:lang="da">Autorisering er påkrævet for at montere et fil system /message>
    message xml:lang="de">Zugriffsrechte werden benötigt um das Gerät einzuhängen /message>
    defaults>
      allow_any>yes /allow_any>
      allow_inactive>no /allow_inactive>
      allow_active>yes /allow_active>
    /defaults>
  /action>

If this helps you at al please let me know! Note, the next installation of the udisks package will overwrite these changes.

Debian Sid+ gets KDE 4.7.2: install instructions

2011-11-28T09:28:00.001-06:00

Note: KDE 4.7.4 is now (2011 12 20) available in Debian Experimental

After months of idling at KDE 4.6.5, the Debian-KDE team has made 4.7.2 available in the Experimental repositories. Unfortunately, KDEPIM apps such as KMail are still not ready for Debian:

From: José Manuel Santamaría Lema

Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:35:55 +0200

While developing the 4.7 packages our fellow developer Eshat Cakar experienced some important problems with kmail.

On the other hand, kdepim 4.4.x wasn't tested against 4.7 by upstream KDE developers (unlike what happened with the 4.6.x releases). Therefore, this may raise some new bugs. In hope that we are choosing the lesser of two evils, we are skipping kdepim 4.7 for now.

Last but not least, note that kdepim developers work on one of the most "dangerous" module (this module can chew users' data if there are important bugs) so be patient with them, they deserve our respect.

The package maintainers absolutely deserve our respect; packaging software isn't an easy task.

You need to be running a fully-updated Debian Sid ~~on AMD64 (aka x86-64 aka x64)~~ to successfully install these packages, and be willing to experience possibly more breakage than Debian Sid itself provides. Sure, Sid treats us well, but if you're not willing to take the chance, I suggest you wait. If you're OK with running Experimental packages and not having the newest KDEPIM yet, let's install KDE 4.7.2 on Debian ~~x64~~! UPDATE: i386 packages are now available.

First, upgrade your system to the newest Sid has to offer:

# aptitude update

# aptitude dist-upgrade

Second, add these repositories to your file at /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main

deb-src http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main

Third, update your catalog to include the new repository:

# aptitude update

Fourth, install the key to trust these packages:

# aptitude install pkg-kde-archive-keyring

Finally, install your packages by defining the release with the -t flag:

# aptitude -t experimental-snapshots upgrade

Log out of KDE and from the KDM menu (where you log into KDE), restart the X11 Server and then log into your KDE 4.7.2! Or, you can reboot the full computer, but that is overkill.

How well did this work? How do you like KDE 4.7.2? Please leave us some results! UPDATE: i386 packages are now available.

Linux Hardware: External SATA Drive Dock (USB3)

2011-11-21T07:30:00.000-06:00

I recently purchased an External Drive Dock for work; this allows me to plug 2 SATA drives into my USB3 card, power on the dock, and mount (up to) two internal hard drives as if they were normal USB drives.

This Cavalry "Retriever" Series is the second Cavalry dock I've owned, the other being a perfectly-functioning USB2 dock. But while buying new hardware, we wanted to get the newest and fastest, so USB3 it was, in conjunction with this great USB3 card.

The USB3 Cavalry dock works perfectly in a USB2 port as well, and isn't any slower than it should be, meaning that there aren't any USB3/USB2 compatibility issues.

Another cool aspect of the Cavalry Retriever series, although we've not yet used it, is that it allows one to plug two dries in and duplicate one drive to the other. Very cool to be able to do drive duplication without even needing a full-blown OS.

The Cavalry wasn't our only attempt at this; we tried with a Sabrent DSH-USB30 dock but it couldn't maintain the USB3 connection, and I don't recommend it. I was getting many kernel errors (Linux 3.0.x) in dmesg while I was using the Sabrent on my Debian Sid system, such as:

xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: WARN: Stalled endpoint

USB3 is a relatively new technology. Linux has drivers for USB3 before the other OSes, but that doesn't mean the manufacturers are making great hardware yet. Stick with what works.

HowTo: Use Amarok as an Alarm

2011-11-19T09:33:00.001-06:00

This was a requested HowTo and I hope that it helps you also! Thanks much for the IRC people in #Debian-KDE on irc.debian.org to assist with the X11 display stuff when I was first fighting this.

In today's HowTo, we're going to write a script to start Amarok playback on a schedule. You can play a streaming URL, as I do for a Friday afternoon Science Friday program which I like on NPR, or you can play a local file, or you can just have Amarok start to play whatever is at the top of its playlist.

This is a two-part task; first we need to write the script that will call Amarok, and second we need to create the Cron entry to have something start at a specific time. This probably could be written as one line in Cron but this is how I have it working.

First, create your script. I have it stopping Amarok with the -s flag, and then starting the URL that I want Amarok to play. (See other Amarok options at the command line with amarok --help ). I append the URL so that my playlist isn't wiped out. Create this file and save it somewhere, such as in your ~/scripts/ folder (note that the second amarok call has a URL listed, in case it gets a line break — this is only 5 lines long, see the screenshot)

#!/bin/bash
# Script to start Amarok, info at gnuski.blogspot.com
# http://gnuski.blogspot.com/2011/11/howto-use-amarok-as-alarm.html
DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/amarok -s
DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/amarok http://minnesota.publicradio.org/tools/play/streams/news.pls
exit

Here it is as a screenshot for formatting purposes, slightly different as it doesn't have the above comments:

Save that file (we'll call it ~/scripts/amarok_alarm.sh for this example) and make it executable, and let's tighten it by removing other people permissions as well (we don't need them changing our file to execute something evil!). You can run these commands, or right-click on the file and adjust its permissions:

linux-prompt$ chmod u+rwx ~/scripts/amarok_alarm.sh
linux-prompt$ chmod go-rwx ~/scripts/amarok_alarm.sh

You should be able to test this at the command line if you wish; running this should start Amarok's playback:

linux-prompt$ ~/scripts/amarok_alarm.sh

OK, we got that working. Now we set up the Cron entry; again you can use crontab -e to edit your Cron Table, or you can use the KDE Task Scheduler (package named kde-config-cron) or something like that.

With KDE's Task Scheduler it looks like this:

In the crontab itself, it looks like this (crontab -l to see the cron table):

# m h dom mon dow command
#Start playing Science Friday
0 13 * * 5 /home/lefty/scripts/amarok_alarm.sh

Notice in the Cron Table, you have the Minutes column listed first (0), then the Hours column (13, aka 1pm). then the Date of Month (and number works for me), then the Month (all months), then the Day of Week (Fridays is when this program airs, and Friday is set with a 5). If you're not familiar with Crontab, I suggest you check out this article.

I hope that you found this article useful and please let me know if I can improve it or let us all know how you've put it to use! It's important to note that the computer must be powered on and not asleep, it must have internet access if you want to stream, it must have speakers...

HowTo: Using Aptitude to Minimize Software Bloat in Debian, Ubuntu

2011-11-18T08:17:00.001-06:00

In my recent writeup of Specific Debian Package Installation, I came across an article by Jeff Hoogland about minimizing bloat when installing software with apt-get. Here is the same thing, but with our friend aptitude:

root-shell# apt-get install --no-install-recommends packagename
root-shell# aptitude install --without-recommends packagename

Using the above --without-recommends flag to install the metacity window manager (usually used on GNOME and so my KDE systems don't have it), aptitude wants to install 98 packages when it pulls in the recommended apps and libraries, and their recommended apps and libraries, and so forth:

root-shell# aptitude install metacity
The following NEW packages will be installed:
alacarte{a} app-install-data{a} brasero{a} brasero-common{a} capplets-data{a} deskbar-applet{a} desktop-base{a} desktop-file-utils{a}
evolution-data-server{a} evolution-data-server-common{a} gnome-about{a} gnome-applets{a} gnome-applets-data{a} gnome-control-center{a}
gnome-desktop-data{a} gnome-dictionary{a} gnome-doc-utils{a} gnome-icon-theme{a} gnome-media{a} gnome-media-common{a} gnome-menus{a}
gnome-netstatus-applet{a} gnome-panel{a} gnome-panel-data{a} gnome-power-manager{a} gnome-session{a} gnome-session-bin{a} gnome-session-common{a}
gnome-settings-daemon{a} gnome-system-monitor{a} gnome-user-guide{a} gnome-utils-common{a} gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly{a} gvfs-backends{a} hwdata{a}
libbrasero-media0{a} libburn4{a} libcamel1.2-14{a} libcdio-cdda0{a} libcdio-paranoia0{a} libebackend1.2-0{a} libebook1.2-9{a} libecal1.2-7{a}
libedata-book1.2-2{a} libedata-cal1.2-7{a} libedataserver1.2-13{a} libedataserverui1.2-8{a} libegroupwise1.2-13{a} libexempi3{a} libgdata-google1.2-1{a}
libgdata1.2-1{a} libgdict-1.0-6{a} libgmime-2.4-2{a} libgnome-desktop-2-17{a} libgnome-media0{a} libgnome-menu2{a} libgnome-window-settings1{a}
libgnomekbd-common{a} libgnomekbd4{a} libgucharmap7{a} libgweather-common{a} libgweather1{a} libisofs6{a} libmetacity-private0{a}
libnautilus-extension1{a} libnet-dbus-perl{a} liboil0.3{a} liboobs-1-4{a} libpanel-applet2-0{a} librsvg2-common{a} libsidplay1{a} libslab0a{a}
libtie-ixhash-perl{a} libtotem-plparser17{a} libtracker-client-0.8-0{a} libunique-1.0-0{a} libupower-glib1{a} libxml-parser-perl{a} libxml-twig-perl{a}
libxml-xpathengine-perl{a} metacity metacity-common{a} nautilus{a} nautilus-data{a} python-gconf{a} python-gmenu{a} python-gnome2{a} python-gnomeapplet{a}
python-gnomedesktop{a} python-gnomekeyring{a} python-libxml2{a} python-pyorbit{a} python-wnck{a} system-tools-backends{a} upower{a} xsltproc{a} yelp{a}
zenity{a}
0 packages upgraded, 98 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded.
Need to get 126 MB of archives. After unpacking 330 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.

Using --without-recommends, aptitude only pulls in 3 packages to install metacity, and the chain of dependencies has shrunk considerably. Much better:

root-shell# aptitude install --without-recommends metacity
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libmetacity-private0{a} metacity metacity-common{a} zenity{a}
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
gnome-session lxsession openbox xfce4-session
0 packages upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded.
Need to get 6,107 kB of archives. After unpacking 17.9 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.
root-shell#

Thank you Jeff Hoogland for the insight into apt-get and the inspiration for this HowTo!

HowTo: Use APT or Aptitude to install specific packages (Debian, Ubuntu)

2011-11-18T07:03:00.001-06:00

Debian's APT, the Advanced Package Toolkit, is a fantastic command-line frontend for the dpkg package handler. Together with 'aptitude' and 'the 'apt-get' families of tools, Debian's package installation and dependency handling is a very powerful set of tools to keep your OS and software updated. There are graphical frontends to APT and dpkg, such as Synaptic, but today we're working with the CLI.

As I mentioned, dependency handling on Debian and its derivatives (such as Ubuntu) is a breeze. What happens when you need a specific version of a program, however? What if an update breaks an application because, say, your website requires a specific version of PHP or your SingleClick UltraVNC client will only connect to a specific version of XTightVNCViewer? The APT family of tools can help you to find specific versions of software, install those versions, and hold (or pin) that software version.

First, of course, let's update our catalog of available software. I use 'aptitude' for this and as many installation options as I can, since aptitude has better dependency handling than apt-get. (aptitude is also a bit more finicky, so if it doesn't like my upgrade path, sometimes I'll bypass it with apt-get. Anyways...) So first, we update our catalog:

root-shell# aptitude update
Hit http://debian.uchicago.edu squeeze Release.gpg
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/contrib Translation-en
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/contrib Translation-en_US
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/main Translation-en
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/main Translation-en_US
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/non-free Translation-en
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/non-free Translation-en_US
Hit http://debian.uchicago.edu squeeze-updates Release.gpg
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze-updates/contrib Translation-en
Ign http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze-updates/contrib Translation-en_US
Hit http://security.debian.org squeeze/updates Release.gpg
...
...
...
root-shell#

We'll use 'apt-cache policy' to see which versions of a package we have; for an example with ffmpeg, we have:

root-shell# apt-cache policy ffmpeg
ffmpeg:
Installed: 5:0.7.7-0.0
Candidate: 5:0.7.7-0.1
Version table:
     5:0.7.7-0.1 0
        500 http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ squeeze/main i386 Packages
*** 5:0.7.7-0.0 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     4:0.5.5-1 0
        500 http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates/main i386 Packages
     4:0.5.4-1 0
        500 http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ squeeze/main i386 Packages

This output gives some very specific information. There are four versions available, three of which aren't installed with their 'apt preference' set to 500 (more on that in the upcoming HowTo: Pinning Debian and Ubuntu Packages), and the installed version (marked with ***) with its apt preference set to 100.

We also get to see the repository for each package, in case we want to use a specific maintainer's package (such as the Debian Multimedia repository).

If we needed to install a specific version from the above list, we can specify that with:

root-shell# aptitude install ffmpeg=4:0.5.5-1

This works with 'apt-get install ffmpeg=4:0.5.5-1' as well, which will have different dependency handling; I try to only fall back to apt-get if aptitude is really looking for trouble and wants to remove things that I think it shouldn't. I'm not necessarily right, of course!

I'll write up an article on Aptitude Pinning soon, so stay tuned, readers. (I have some less focused info here about it).

Save Tabs when Quitting Firefox 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10...

2011-11-17T10:06:00.001-06:00

When quitting Firefox, back in the day it offered to save your tabs:

Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for the next time it starts?

Firefox no longer offers to "Save and Quit" by default, but its an easy fix to get Firefox to ask this question again.

Open a new tab and, rather than visiting a website, go to "about:config" (without the quotes). In the filter bar that shows up, type in "showQuitWarning" (again, no quotes). Double-click to change the value to "True" and, because this is a modified setting, it should turn bold. Now, when quitting Firefox (only the last open window tho, not every Firefox window!), you should be offered to save your tabs for the next session. If you checkmark the "Do not ask next time" box, it will reset your "showQuitWarning" setting.

Click to embiggen

UPDATE: If this change alone doesn't work you may need to also toggle (with a double-click) these settings in that about:config page:

browser.tabs.warnOnClose
browser.warnOnQuit
browser.warnOnRestart

This works great on my Firefox 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, and it should also work on Debian's Iceweasel and other Firefox clones. If anyone has tips about improving this let us know!

iPod Filesystem Structure

2011-11-11T11:50:00.001-06:00

If anyone is wondering why iPods are a headache, it's partly due to not having a filesystem structure that makes any sense. Look at this image, below: rather than sorting the files as folders like Artist/Album/Songs.mp3, iTunes (and programs that work with the iPod, such as Amarok) needs to work with some crazy database to get the files on the device and labeled in a way that the iPod can read the files. This is why I recommend the Sansa Clip, or really anything other than Apple: Apple tries its hardest to lock you in to what it produces and lock out all other competition.

Click to embiggen

Full-fledged Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux on your phone!?

2011-11-11T07:48:00.001-06:00

This past week I was introduced to a great Android app: Linux Installer. This sets up a chroot environment with a loop file on your phone which will boot into a full-fledged Debian or Ubuntu OS; between these two distros you can pick among various releases.

I installed the Debian Testing distro and the Linux Installer app walks you through a number of steps to get the loop file created and formatted, mounted, and the OS installed. On my Motorola Cliq, which is somewhat slow in comparison to newer phones, this base install took a few hours and I was happy to have the phone plugged into a power source.

My first installation attempt failed and the step-by-step installer has a button to email the console logs to the developers as feedback. Within a day, I received a response and an updated Linux Installer was released to patch the error that I experienced. That, my friends, is FLOSS dedication! The new version worked perfectly.

Unlike one of the poor Terminal Emulators out there, this is a full-fledged Debian Testing OS. My coworker installed X11 and tightvncviewer on his phone and was able to remote-access his desktop and interact fully, with a touch screen interface. Wow!

This changes so much. Finally I can run a webserver to share files, I can run 'host gnuski.blogspot.com' without permission failures, I can view remote machines and work on them, I can run KTorrent (well, maybe). Finally, my phone can run the GNU/Linux that I know and love, not the Linux/Android stack that works well but isn't quite what I want it to be.

If you want to install Ubuntu on your phone or Debian on your tablet or something along these lines, I suggest you start with the CyanogenMod ROM to get your device working tip-top and to get the rooted permissions that you'll end up needing anyways. Then, check out the Linux Installer in the App Market and enjoy!

Mozilla releases Lightning 1.0 calendar, Thunderbid 8 email client, Firefox 8 browser

2011-11-08T13:53:00.001-06:00

Mozilla Lightning, the Calendar plug-in for the Thunderbird email client, has finally reached the 1.0 release today, after years in development. The Thunderbird email client also had a release today, to version 8, as well as Firefox 8.

With Lightning's official 1.0 release, users can finally send and receive appointments tied to emails, like with other PIM solutions such as KDE's Kontact and MS Outlook. Lightning events/appointments are compatible with Google Apps calendar and with other existing calendar platforms, including MS Outlook 2000 SP3 and newer. The Lightning plugin can be installed on older Thunderbird releases, but the Thunderbird 8 release today should be a useful, suggested upgrade to anyone running Thunderbird.

Firefox 8 was also released today, as a part of Mozilla's increased-frequency release schedule. Improvements include better memory management, faster rendering, faster tab loading, and increased search options such as Twitter.

Congratulations to the Mozilla team on their new releases! Readers, any feedback on this software? Do you use Lightning and Thunderbird?

Reworked KDEnlive has 0.8.4 release coming

2011-11-07T18:03:00.004-06:00

KDEnlive, the video editing software for Linux and other *nix desktops, is looking to release version
0.8.4, an update to the recent 0.8.2 push that has unknown bugs which only appeared after the release. The KDEnlive team is taking two weeks or so to ready this newest version with various bugfixes, and are hoping to make a public release during the week of Monday the 14th November.

After some discussion, the release may be named 0.8.2.1, to reflect that it is just a maintenance release rather than containing new features. Update: release has been planned as 0.8.2.1, more info here

KDEnlive is one of the more advanced FLOSS video editing programs for the GNU/Linux desktop and other *nix workstations. We've discussed KDEnlive here in the past and the software has improved in its functionality and stability in the last three+ years. Speedier parts help the experience as well, of course :)

KDEnlive 0.8.2 Released

2011-10-31T20:23:00.002-05:00

After three months of additional work, KDEnlive, the non-linear video editing software for Linux and other *nix desktops, has its long-awaited 0.8.2 release today, coinciding with the MLT framework 0.7.6 release.

image from kdenlive.org

These releases includes video stabilization filters, off-line editing with proxy clips, masking with the rotoscope filters, improved software stability, and better volume controls for the video, among the many improvements between the two projects.

Congratulations to the KDEnlive and MLT teams on a solid-looking release with many new features and bug fixes. I hope to use it soon on my Debian systems.

Firefox Crashes when Opening Downloads, or Inkscape Cannot Open its own Files (pick one)

2011-10-28T12:53:00.001-05:00

On my Debian Sid machine (2011 Oct), I am running Firefox 6 and I'm unable to open my Downloads window. There is a work-around per this bug report:

As root, edit the file at /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf and comment-out (put a # sign in front of) the file: file line, so that it looks like this:

#file: file

Save that file, restart Firefox, and you're good to go!

This does seem to prevent Inkscape from being able to open its own files, however.

HowTo: Amarok: Deleting Saved Lyrics (Amarok 2.4)

2011-10-26T12:54:00.001-05:00

LyricWiki.org has a great collection of song lyrics and Amarok's built-in script draws from this site to display lyrics to the songs that it is playing. However, these lyrics aren't always correct and (in my experience) Amarok doesn't check for updated lyrics. I've updated a few songs there myself and Amarok still displays the old, incorrect lyrics.

I don't know how to erase a single entry, but since I rarely read the lyrics on a computer that isn't internet-connected, I erased all of my lyrics and Amarok can re-fetch them as needed and rebuild its lyric database.

From a command line:

locate -i lyrics.frm |grep -i amarok

My lyrics are located in my home directory, along with a few other database files. Delete them all:

$ locate -i lyrics.frm |grep -i amarok

/home/lefty/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle/amarok/lyrics.frm

I just deleted these files and restarted Amarok:

$ rm -rf /home/lefty/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle/amarok/lyrics.*

Debian Sid idles at KDE 4.6.5

2011-10-25T07:46:00.003-05:00

Update: 4.7.2 is available in Experimental, 2011 11 28

I have to admit it's a great desktop, KDE 4.6.5, but now KDE 4.7.2 is out and Debian's KDE packaging team hasn't moved us up. The last version upgrade to KDE was in July to 4.6.5, right on schedule, and Debian even release KDE 4.4.3 ahead of schedule when that was released.

KDE released 4.7.2 in the beginning of October 2011 but due to busy packagers and the end of summer and other things, we've not had a new

update since July. With KDE's 15th anniversary recently passing (congratulations to the KDE project!), about the same time when the limited Unity and GNOME3 desktops are being pushed out, there has been renewed interest in the KDE desktop.

I run a few Debian Stable desktops and a Debian Testing desktop and a Debian Sid desktop, and I really like the KDE in all of them. The only thing I miss in the Debian Stable, KDE 4.4.5, is renaming multiple files with a leading zero (fixed in 4.6.0), and perhaps some bugfixes but I don't really see errors nor crashes on that machine.

I am most itching to get my hands on the new Kontact email suite, and I've heard good things from Kubuntu users. The expansion of the Multiple Desktop / Multiple Activity in the 4.7.x series seems interesting but I'm not sure I'll ever learn to use it.

Readers, is your distro at KDE 4.7.2? How are you liking it? Do you use the new Kontact? Do you use the multiple activities in KDE?

Are Updates the Dirty Linux Secret?

2011-10-24T07:53:00.001-05:00

A recent post by tech writer David Gewirtz goes on a rant about a remote-hosted server which failed to function or reboot after a CentOS Linux software update. Others have responded, both in the comments and in articles of their own, supporting both sides of this argument.

So, are updates the dirty little secret of running Linux?

Just like installing any software, updates are new software code running on your computer. Because this is new code, it does have the possibility to run or act differently. I had my own example of this just recently, with a CPAN module not working correctly on one Red Hat server — after updating over two dozen servers, this was the one error which I encountered.

I've had my share of more spectacular stable-update failures as well. Our home livingroom-laptop runs Debian 6 (Squeeze) and recently had an issue with its bootloader not knowing where to find the kernel. I had to boot from the Debian LiveCD and reinstall the GRUB bootloader and everything worked after that. Was it easy? Sure. Was it obvious? Not at all, to a non-techy. Is this type of problem limited to Linux? Not at all. I've had my share of MBR issues on Windows machines.

Windows has certainly had its share of failed updates. I've seen plenty of mup.sys hangs at bootup, plenty of BSODs, plenty of disk not found errors. I'm far more concerned with a failed update to a remote Windows server not coming back online after updates and a (far-too-common) reboot, than I am with a reboot of a GNU/Linux server. Short of a harddrive issue or the boot issue mentioned earlier, a failing Linux server is almost always recoverable by command-line tools and can often be done remotely. A Windows server, on the other hand, has extremely limited command line tools (until the relatively recent release of Microsoft PowerShell, which took administration and functionality hints from GNU/Linux systems) and remote core-system administration of a Windows server requires that the core is up and running.

What about version upgrades, from say Debian 5 to Debian 6, or Windows 2000 to Windows XP? I've faired rather well with those over the years. At a client's office we upgraded over 200 desktops from Windows 2000 (sp2?) to Windows XPsp1, and we only had one problem machine there. Recent Windows 7 doesn't allow upgrades from XP; I have very little experience with Vista.

On my various servers and desktops running Debian, the Debian Stable upgrades have always worked well for me; trying to maintain a "rolling release" Debian Testing hasn't always been smooth but I'm willing to gamble on those setups. Red Hat doesn't support version upgrades as far as I know. The only failed version upgrades I've ever experienced have been from Kubuntu in the 6.x-8.x days, and that experience (and the KDE setup at the time) has kept me away from that distro.

The biggest point here is that computers are complex. They do a lot of things, they make the hard things easy and make the impossible become possible, but to do this they have a million little parts that may or may not decide to behave. A GNU/Linux system does require that its software is packaged just so to run on a specific distribution release, and this is a headache to many. Mozilla Firefox seems to have gotten around this and their software, save a few dependencies, runs out of the box on most modern distributions. But we often forget that these aren't mix-and-match platforms; GNU/Linux distributions are each their own Operating System.

Just as you can't run the Microsoft webserver (IIS) on a Red Hat computer, likewise you cannot run the Debian webserver (apache2) on a Red Hat computer. Red Hat is its own OS, and so are the others. If you don't know how to manage your software at all, you're certainly going to have problems.

Readers, how have your upgrades gone? Either version upgrades or stable release upgrades, have you had more issues with Windows or Linux or equal problems over the years?

Controlling the 99%

2011-10-19T13:38:00.001-05:00

We're protesting one master while we give away our future to another. Free Software is Software For The People, By The People. We say that we want Democracy but we're using closed tools to say it.

The recent protests against Wall Street's Corporate Greed, against the Endless Wars, against our Failing Economy, and in support of a new approach to our Economic Structure are all well-intentioned and the #OccupyWallStreet and other #Occuly movements generally have my support.


Wall Street, stop controlling my future! It's Apple's turn!

But people, realize that we put ourselves here. As a people, we've given up our purchasing power by trading away our personal information in exchange for some 'socializing' on Farcebook. Free Software is where innovation is happening and Free Software has the users in mind, not a corporate bottom line, yet the protestors use Apple OSX and Microsoft Windows, Twitter and Farcebook. 'Social Networks' are seen as the enablers of this movement, but they're just the newest masters and we happily give up our data to them so that we can play Farmville.

Creating a new financial system and new economic structure requires that we learn new ways to do what we do now. We need to support small businesses, not Big Box. We need to change the way our banks run. The long-term success of this movement requires that we build our society with tools that aren't designed to lock out members of this society.

We can choose to structure our society around openness and mutual contribution by everyone involved, or we can choose to use tools that are closed in their workings, tools which lock us into their use, tools made by companies that take our code and ideas and sell them back to us without any community-focused contributions.

New Android; Where's the 4.x Source?

2011-10-18T23:53:00.001-05:00

Google and Samsung released the Samsung Galaxy Nexus Prime Android phone (that's a mouthful!) earlier today; this is the first public device running Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich."

The 2.x series had its source opened from the get-go, which allowed the CyanogenMod team to create optimized builds of the Android software. But with the Android 3.0 software, the code was closed by Google until the 3.0 branch was merged back into the main code. Basically, there were very few Android 3.0 devices because Google locked us out. Other releases were delayed as well.

Now Android 4.0 is out and the Tech News seems pretty excited about the specs. But I gotta ask, where is the source for Android 4.0, or even Android 3.0 now that it should be merged into the mainline? Is there anything of value in that older 3.x code? Perhaps Google never released it because it's poor quality, but isn't that the idea of Open Source, to be developed in the open, to air out the code so the community can squash the bugs? It helps make everything better.

The Android 4.0 GPL parts are available here, it seems, but not yet the full source.

Has anyone had a chance to fly to Hong Kong yet to check out the new Samsung device? :)

GNOME Desktop Survey

2011-10-18T12:39:00.001-05:00

Phoronix.com is hosting a survey about the GNOME desktop; you can take it here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=gnome_survey
My Three Suggestions, near the bottom, are:

1. Support and interact with KDE KIO-slaves

sftp://

smb://

ftp://

2. Create/support a common backend for File Open/Save type dialogs with OpenDesktop and KDE, so that apps from either DE feel native

3. File picker dialogs (File Open/Save) should obey single-click browsing and opening if other parts of a Gnome app are configured that way. Double-clicking in the picker is confusing and difficult if the rest of the desktop is single click.

This last one has been a bug for almost a decade now...

What are you're requests for GNOME? Are you a GNOME user?

Update: Bruce Byfield gives the history of this survey and some preliminary results here

Linux Hardware: External Hard Drive: WD My Book

2011-10-18T07:21:00.003-05:00

A customer recently picked up three of these Western Digital hard drives, two for their office backup and one for our office, to use as remote backup.


Western Digital MyBook 3TB has the space you need!

We hooked 'em up to the USB3 card that I recently purchased and wow do they fly! The spacious 3TB of space means that the rsnapshot backups that we run with this client should give us a lot of room for growth in the future, and the SuperSpeed USB (aka USB3) allows for quick restores of even the largest files. Very cool that Linux has USB3 support before any other operating system, is it not?

These are the third set of Western Digital My Book external drives that we've purchased for this client. The previous drives had less capacity and although they worked perfectly for years, its not a bad idea to replace older drives with newer ones before the Big Restore is needed and the drive picks that day to fail. You know, it's bound to happen. Newer drives, after their burn in, should reset the clock on the lifespan of these backup devices. (Of course, no one knows for sure how long a drive will last, which is why the customer bought three of them!)

This is USB3 and Wireless-N combined!

At home, we also have a My Book external drive which we use with unison to keep the Photos/ folder and the Music/ folder in sync between the ~~basement~~ office computer and the living room laptop. Unison works great, transfer speeds over Wireless-N means that our files stay in sync, and the reliable Western Digital My Book has our files, always available.

RHEL5 and Perl CPAN: PDF::API2 error 'Can't call method "infilt" on an undefined value'

2011-10-17T10:58:00.001-05:00

We updated a client's RHEL5 server this weekend and they started getting issues with the Perl CPAN module 'PDF::API2', specifically:

Can't call method "infilt" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/PDF/API2/Util.pm line 667

Some results said to remove and reinstall Perl and all modules, but that seemed extreme. Since CPAN modules are outside of the general GNU/Linux package management, they don't have the normal bugfixes and compatibility checks that an official distro package would have. But, it also means that we probably don't need to look at the Package Manager for a fix.

I started with a downgrade to that Perl package, but I am not sure this was needed or not:

root@server:# yum downgrade perl-5.8.8

Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security

Setting up Downgrade Process

Resolving Dependencies

--> Running transaction check

---> Package perl.x86_64 4:5.8.8-32.el5_5.1 set to be updated

---> Package perl.x86_64 4:5.8.8-32.el5_5.2 set to be erased

That still gave the error Can't call method "infilt"... so I looked into rebuilding the PDF::API2 module:

root@server:# cpan -fi PDF::API2

That had issues with the ExtUtils::MakeMaker CPAN extension which had its own issues... this seemed like a dependency issue in Perl/CPAN. I looked into the CPAN man page and saw that -r will recompile a module. I tried that against the PDF::API2 and that seems to have worked!

root@server:# cpan -r PDF::API2

The MakePDF command no longer gives errors and the customer reports that things are again working:

root@server:# MakePDF -t /var/pdftemp/template.pdf -s /var/pdfinvoice/12340.pdf -i /var/emailtext/12340.txt -l 25 -m 30

root@server:#

CyanogenMod 7.1 is pretty sweet

2011-10-17T08:01:00.000-05:00

Last week, the CyanogenMod Project released their version 7.1 of the Android phone OS; 7.1 is based on Android 2.3 and my Motorola Cliq (Motorola Dext in the rest of the world) was only supported by the company for Android v2.1.

I put CyanogenMod 7.1 on my phone on Friday following the info on the project's Wiki. I was getting errors "No Such Device" but it turned out I needed to restart the service:

./adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp/

Error: no such device

./adb kill-server

./adb start-server

./adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp/

They also don't mention in that Wiki, that you need to run the commands from the folder where you installed them. That is, "adb start-server" won't function because 'adb' is likely not 'in your path', i.e., not in your list of locations to find programs. Putting the ./ in front alerts the shell that this directory . has the command.

It's only been a few days but so far I am enjoying the newfound responsiveness on my phone. I can't yet report much on battery life, but I can say that I've spent a lot of time getting my contacts organized. I seem to have 2 or 3 or 4 of many of my contacts, and I've been combining them.

Linux Hardware: a Great Little MP3 player, the Sansa Clip+

2011-10-16T09:34:00.000-05:00

Are you looking for a compact, drag-and-drop*, dead-simple MP3 player? A good MP3 player that works with the GNU/Linux desktop? I present to you the SanDisk Sansa Clip+

We just got my wife a second Sansa Clip+ after the first died from overwork after four years of use. (I kept this Clip to install Rockbox but the internal storage doesn't seem to want to hold onto any data. The Clip also has SanDisk-supplied firmware updates.) We both liked the way the Clip+ worked, enough to buy a new one of the same.

The Clip+ is a nice piece of hardware. It has a decent amount of internal

storage (up to 8GB as of this writing), works with Amarok to transfer files in either its MTP or MSC mode*, it obeys ReplayGain tags, the SanDisk Sansa Clip+ has a built-in FM radio, it charges and transfers over a standard mini-usb cable, and the Clip has hours of playback time. Oh, and it has a built-in clip on the back, to attach this MP3 player to your shirt or pants during a workout, and it weighs almost nothing which is important during exercise.

*I suggest using the device in MSC mode, Mass Storage Class, which allows the storage to be interacted with in the same way any USB-connected storage device should work: attach the device, open the file browser, and drag-and-drop the files that you want onto the device. (Apple devices such as the iPod don't work this way and this locked-down behaviour is one reason I dislike Apple products. Have you ever opened an iPod in a file browser? It's a mess.)

MTP mode works as well to get music onto the device but it requires an MTP-compatible player, such as Amarok, to interact with the device in this mode. Bad news is that files added in one mode aren't accessible in the other mode; good news is that files added either way are totally accessible from the device itself.

The Top-Rated Low-Power Linux Learning Tools

2011-10-14T07:12:00.001-05:00

Paper Books, as I've discussed before, are a great way to continue to learn about a topic, especially a computer topic, without being in front of a computer all day.

Real, Paper Books are the ultimate in technology:

Small and portable
Require no power
Instant-on
Solid-state with fast search and paging ;)
Low-cost
Simple bookmarking system
Their internal electronics are exceptionally well sealed, hidden even, just in case you spill that coffee ;)

Another benefit with paper books is that you're able to loan them out without fear of reprisal, something that eBooks do not yet do. You own the paper books and you're able to browse, reference, dog-ear, and learn from the book as much as you like. Loan it out, throw it out, sell it — its your book.

But all knowledge advances, and Free Software is no exception, especially since Free Software is usually developed under an Open Source development model. Old books and web pages may both be useful, but newer versions cover newer topics and books are almost always written to cover a broad topic better than a web page.

With that in mind, here is a list of some of the current Top Rated Linux Administration books on Amazon.com:

UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition) by Trent R. Hein

Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide, Fifth Edition by Steve Shah

Pro Linux System Administration (Expert's Voice in Open Source) by James Turnbull

The Accidental Administrator: Linux Server Step-by-Step Configuration Guide by Don R Crawley

Linux Administration Handbook (2nd Edition) by Trent R. Hein

Readers, how do you feel about Computer books? Good tool, or too quickly obsolete?

A New Linux Administration PAPER BOOK

2011-10-13T07:13:00.000-05:00

Open Source Developers Pull Together

Computer software, and the GNU/Linux operating system in particular, tends to change at high speeds with the rapid pace of Open Source development (especially when combined with a Free Software license) — why let a problem remain unchallenged? Let someone fix it for the community to benefit.

The more things change (in the details), however, the more they stay the same (in the big picture). Online references and help, while often very fast and interactive, can be outdated with references to one implementation of software which may have changed somewhat in more recent versions of software.

Next week marks the release of a new Linux Administration paperback book (I have not read it), Essential Linux Administration: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners by
Chuck Easttom. I really like working out of a book when I can; the details aren't updated like a Wiki may be, but the coverage is generally more in-depth and includes information beyond a list of commands. It's also easier on the eyes; as an administrator myself, ten hours of daily monitor use can start to strain my eyes and I welcome the opportunity to learn about computers without having to be on a computer at all times. (Speaking of strained eyes, has anyone tried these?)

If you're looking for current information on GNU/Linux administration in the form of a real book, without a focus on only Ubuntu or Red Hat or another distro, a book which takes into account modern developments in the Linux kernel, in the FUSE tools, and in networking technology like Avahi (aka ZeroConf aka mDNS), this 600 pager may be the one.

CyanogenMod 7.1 released - Free the Android

2011-10-11T15:22:00.000-05:00

The admirable CyanogenMod project has released their 7.1 ROM, an Android release to upgrade (or replace) your smartphone's Operating System to Android 2.3.

I have a Motorola Cliq and I've been waiting for the stable CyanogenMod 7.1 release so that I can get additional features, speed, and battery life out of my phone.

Thanks to the CyanogenMod team and congrats on the new release!

Linux Hardware: Harddrives for Video Editing on Linux

2011-10-10T21:00:00.005-05:00


Making of Tron II

I like to shoot and edit video (on Debian GNU/Linux, of course on KDE, using the wonderful KDEnlive Video Editor), but in video editing, there is always a bottleneck. My wife and I recently purchased a Nikon D5100 camera which shoots fantastic video in hi-def! I was worried that my video editing computer hardware wouldn't be able to keep up with these large HD video files.*

With my last hardware refresh, I purchased a new Western Digital Caviar Green harddrive; the Green drives spin at a lower rate (5400 RPM) which I worried would impact my video editing performance: this drive was planned for long-term data storage only, not for live video editing.

What a cache!

I was pleasantly surprised to lean that this drive can keep up with my video editing needs just fine. Maybe its because the Caviar drives have such a large cache at 64MB? Is it the SATA2 and SATA3 speeds? And at the current prices for moving drive storage, its hard not to like what these drives offer: good performance, fantastic 64MB cache, low-power use, huge size, SATA3 interfaces, and at a great price. Two terabytes for under one hundred dollars! Amazing times.

Check out our other recent Linux Hardware reviews for a USB Wireless-N Dongle and for a SuperSpeed USB3 PCIe card.

* For anyone interested in what video format the Nikon D5100 shoots, here is output from the 'ffmpeg -i FILE.MOV' command:

ffmpeg -i FILE.MOV
Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h264, yuvj420p, 1280x720 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 5696 kb/s, 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 24k tbn, 47.95 tbc

This is shooting at 1280x720 (720P) 24fps. The drive can also handle 1920x1080 at 24fps and 30fps, but I don't need that high of image quality and I prefer the film-like 24fps.

Best Use for an Old Laptop (version 1): TinyCore Linux

2011-10-09T01:30:00.004-05:00

Like many computer geeks, I have more unused computers than I know what to do with. Old hardware is often considered to be obsolete when often the preinstalled MSWindows operating system went pear shaped. I know that Linux can breath new life into almost any hardware, so I have a hard time letting older machines go. Unfortunately, they often don't have the needed components to be fully usable — what good is a computer these days without networking?

TinyCore Linux is an ultra-small Linux desktop; the 4.0 release is just under 12MB. TinyCore is stripped down, so don't expect the bells and whistles of a more active desktop, such as KDE or OSX or Windows has. Instead, its claim is that it runs in RAM and it runs fast, which is great for older hardware.

Recently I wrote a brief review about a fantastic little USB Wireless-N card from Edimax. This hardware is supported in Linux 3.0 and in the later 2.6.39 kernels, and the recent release of TinyCore Linux 4.0 includes the Linux 3.0.3 kernel. This sounds like a winning combination!

Let me tell you, it is a winner. I downloaded and installed* TinyCore to an old NEC Versa FXi laptop (P3) which has 192MB of RAM. I installed Firefox 7 (well, Minefield 7, an unbranded Firefox) and I disabled as many of the startup programs as I thought I should, leaving behind only wifi, firmware, pci-utils, and minefield7 to start at boot. My Edimax USB network works perfectly and Firefox 7 is great, and the whole Pentium 3 boots up in about 40 seconds. Not a speed demon, but it works.

(* Firstly, its come to my attention that the TinyCore4 ISO mightn't have the installer; you must download that from the package manager. MultiCore, on the other hand, is what I tested and it does have the installer and its available in the same place. Just make sure to boot into MultiCore, and install TinyCore, not install MicroCore (which is included in the MultiCore ISO). Get it? Whew.

Second, and I'm not sure why, but after the OS installation I was unable to install software; I had open user permissions in the system directory with this at a command prompt:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX /mnt/sda1/tce/
and after that, everything worked fine. I tried a few 'sudo' fixes and the like, but only this worked.)

Unfortunately, nearly all of my RAM and my swap is filled when running Minefield7, so browsing isn't as smooth as I'd like; adding swap space (192000) to /mnt/sda1 helped a bit. I also installed Dillo which is a much smaller web browser and works well for most of my needs, so Minefield may be moved to an on-demand app instead of on-boot. There is also a Firefox v2 browser available, which is rather small also. Either way, the laptop is usable for web reading, document work, emailing, and the like. Video is out of the equation, including Flash like YouTube. Good enough for many of my needs and its rather zippy if I respect its limitations.

I've only tried it on my NEC Versa FXi Pentium 3 laptop, which doesn't have any of its own networking hardware (not even ethernet), but TinyCore works great. My laptop doesn't even have a scroll option on its touchpad, so within Firefox I've installed the Firefox extension "Grab and Drag," and I set its Preferences to Reverse so that its more like a touchpad scroll. Next up will be my Pentium II laptops... how old is too old?

If you have any older computers I suggest repurposing them with TinyCore and this Edimax USB network dongle. I plan to keep this laptop in the kitchen, perhaps wall-mounted, to help display recipes. Thanks to the TinyCore team for their excellent work on the TinyCore distribution!

If you have any experience or tips with TinyCore or another lightweight OS that I should try, such as Puppy or SliTaz, please let me know in a comment!

Free Software: the reason Amazon Fire is Android 2.1

2011-09-29T07:36:00.000-05:00

The Amazon Kindle Fire is out and looks to be the competitor to the Apple iPad that no one else could yet produce: it has a low pricetag and good hardware, and like Apple products, this one is tied into a store and is designed to keep you there. Yep, the ebooks have DRM and 'lending' these books out is nearly impossible:

only certain "lendable" books ("lendability" being determined by the publisher) can be lent at most one time, only within the United States, for a period of exactly 14 days.

So, they've got that going for it. I thought Big Media was learning its lesson about DRM, that it only hurts customers not copyright infringers (who get around the DRM); I thought this was the normal 2011 but I must be wrong. In this alternate 2011 in which we're now living, DRM is back and higher prices for artificial scarcity is back. Between this new Amazon Fire Tablet and the expensive, restrictive, limited-option Netflix plans, I'd bet BitTorrent gets a boost over the next few years. MAFIAA Big Media has been set back by its own lack of vision and inability to maneuver in this new marketplace, where Free is the new Cheap, and Cheap is the new Everything. They're blinded by previous profits in an unsustainable business model, and their only hope on this current path is to convince the US Government of their value and to have that government push other governments around until the whole world is ruled by US Copyright Laws, and then they can sue everyone at once.

OK, so anyways, the Kindle Fire: Amazon took the Android 2.1 software, which is what my phone runs, took out most of the Google stuff (including the Market), stuffed it with Amazon apps designed to get you buying, and has released it on the RIM PlayBook hardware. This is great!

Ok, let me clear this up: I am not a proponent of BigCorp controlling us or collecting our data. I just recently got a PayPal account, a good 15 years late; I don't have FaceBook; Apple iDont.

But the idea that the Free Software produced by many of us, that you and I tested and reported bugs and put through the paces in our daily lives, and that software is out there for anyone to use — that is a powerful idea. Amazon saw this, took the Android 2.1 software and made it their own, and now we can decide if we want to use it. Personally, I am waiting for CyanogenMod version of Android to be released for my phone, so that I can upgrade MY software on MY device. I would imagine this will be released for the Amazon Kindle Fire as well, eventually.

So we have Free Software, capable of being customized and deployed anywhere: Fantastic. The two drawbacks to the Free Software movement are due to greedy vendors and we must vote with out wallets; I am guessing no one will get the message. The drawbacks are that vendors release their software, that you and I helped to build, but they don't release the code allowing us to build that software. Google has been doing this with their more recent Android releases: only their changes to the Linux Kernel will be released, per that license. The rest, we're screwed. The other drawback is that, in trying to keep their secrets about our software, hardware has now changed so that we cannot install our own software onto our own hardware. TiVo started this trend and caused the Free Software Foundation to release the GPLv3, but it hasn't been enough because customers aren't exercising their rights and we're getting more and more locked out of our hardware.

The Amazon Kindle Fire did what they could: took a 10-release-behind (!) version of Android and made it their own. I wonder if that version, Android 2.1, already had the needed drivers for this hardware. Or maybe they're that far behind in the product development. Or maybe, its all Google would let them have of the software that you and I built.

Linux Hardware: Western Digital USB3 PCIe card

2011-09-26T15:24:00.001-05:00

We got this Western Digital USB3 card for my work computer; it plugs into the PCIe 1x slot and it worked at first boot on my Linux 3.0.0 kernel in Debian Sid. Works like a charm, so if you've got any USB3 devices you should check out this card for a nice speed boot over USB2.

http://amzn.to/r7bUok

They say that USB3 is 10x faster than USB2 but I've heard that disputed; its a change in the calculations to measure the speed increase that significantly. However, USB3 is certainly faster and due to the easy installation of this card in Linux, I'd give this device a 5/5.

Western Digital WDBFNJ0000NNC-WASN USB 3 card

Linux Hardware: Wireless-N on Linux (USB Device)

2011-09-14T11:45:00.004-05:00

This little guy is smaller than a US 25¢ and is Wireless-N

I wanted to plug this great little device, a USB 2.0 adapter that gives good wireless performance:

Edimax EW-7811Un 802.11b/g/n USB 2.0 Wireless Nano USB Adapter with 150Mbps Data Rates

This USB Wireless device gives me good speeds (limited by USB 2.0, not the device itself) and works out of the box with my Debian Linux (and Ubuntu should work) setups that are running the Linux Kernel 2.6.39 or higher. This uses the Realtek RTL8188CUS chipset and the Linux driver rtl8192cu and this Wireless USB adapter has made my older laptops usable again. I was tired of having poor wireless performance on my Linux laptops with older cards, or no wireless networking on some machines, and this USB adapter has changed all of that for the better.

Small extension wire
keeps it cool!

The speed is limited by the USB 2.0 interface and the radio power isn't awesome due to the incredibly small size, but overall I am quite pleased with the device. It is inexpensive but not cheap and it works well. EDIT: One thing I've noticed, on one of my older small laptops, is that this device can get very hot due to the location of the USB port, and the heat causes the connection to drop. I've fixed this with a small extension wire, which keeps my Wifi USB device cool and also helps to boost the reception ever so slightly by raising the antenna. Extension wire: 6 inch, 12 inch, 18 inch.

So, Linux users, if you need a good Wireless USB 21Adapter for your Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora or probably most any Linux distro, and you're current enough to run 2.6.39 or Linux 3.0 or newer kernels, I suggest giving this device a try.

What did I do with this perfect USB wireless card? Check it out!

More Cluster headaches: RHEL5, Pacemaker, and other stuff

2011-05-05T15:25:00.005-05:00

Apparently, Heartbeat is the name of an old project that, while still around, has been depreciated in favor of OpenAIS. Also, CoroSync means something, as does Pacemaker. See, no one seems to have any clear explanation as to what these all are, and the instructions that tell us to install Pacemaker and use CoroSync in favor of Heartbeat, still install Heartbeat as well in their setup commands.
What's worse, these are external-to-Redhat repos, meaning they're guaranteed to fail because that's just how these things seem to work. And guess what? Fail they do.
This being a 64bit machine (x86_64), we needed to add the external repos:

# rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

# wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/pacemaker.repo http://clusterlabs.org/rpm/epel-5/clusterlabs.repo

And attempting the install fails:

# yum install -y pacemaker corosync heartbeat

Error: Missing Dependency: libperl.so is needed by package pacemaker-1.0.11-1.2.el5.i386 (clusterlabs)

Error: Missing Dependency: libesmtp.so.5()(64bit) is needed by package pacemaker-1.0.11-1.2.el5.x86_64 (clusterlabs)

Error: Missing Dependency: libesmtp.so.5 is needed by package pacemaker-1.0.11-1.2.el5.i386 (clusterlabs)

We can resolve a part of this:

# yum provides */libperl.so

(bunch of output)

# yum install perl

But the libesmtp isn't so lucky:

# yum provides */libesmtp.so.5

Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security

No Matches found

EDIT: package found that fulfills this dependency, at
http://pkgs.org/download/centos-5-rhel-5/epel-x86_64/libesmtp-1.0.4-5.el5.x86_64.rpm.html
The remainder of this post WAS how I got this installed but it didn't really work out until I installed the package, above

The work around is to install yum-utils, then download the packages that we need, then install what we can and skip what we cannot install, and then force the install of what we have left and skip its missing dependencies. Really.

# yum install yum-utils

# yum install pacemaker.x86_64 corosync.x86_64 heartbeat.x86_64 --skip-broken

# yumdownloader pacemaker.x86_64 pacemaker-libs.x86_64 lm_sensors.x86_64

# rpm -ihv pacemaker-1.0.11-1.2.el5.x86_64.rpm pacemaker-libs-1.0.11-1.2.el5.x86_64.rpm lm_sensors-2.10.7-9.el5.x86_64.rpm --nodeps

I don't yet know what it will require to maintain this system; the High-Availability aspect of this may be provided by other systems more than this RHEL5 system.

I cannot believe that Redhat, which is THE enterprise GNU/Linux distro, doesn't provide the needed tools for clustering, or that the needed tools that are provided by a 3rd party, are broken. For what its worth, Debian 5 Lenny installed just fine from the lenny-backport repos.

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Firefox 4.0.1: Firefox is out (of memory) !

2011-05-02T12:55:00.000-05:00

I've been running various builds of Firefox 4 on Linux since the betas were beginning, months ago. They were very stable. And then 4.0.0 was released, and recently 4.0.1, and with both I've had a lot of crashes. What's worse is that I cannot submit crash reports and no one on irc.freenode.net #firefox seems to know why (or they just won't answer).

When I run these from the command line, I see 'Out of memory' but I have 4 GB of RAM and 2GB of Swap space. I am not out of memory, Mister Fox.

Promethean Board ActivInspire installation on KDE and Debian Squeeze

2011-04-30T11:01:00.004-05:00

The Promethean-branded whiteboards provide GNU/Linux software which is great, but like most closed software it has issues with never seeming to get the packaging quite right. Today's headache was with the audio drivers on a Debian 6 KDE system; MoDaX in the #debian-kde IRC channel was again a great help.

First we need to add the repository line for Debian, as their instructions read:

deb http://activsoftware.co.uk/linux/repos/debian squeeze oss non-oss

and from a command line we need to install their key so that we can trust their software:

Terminal method
Type
wget http://www.activsoftware.co.uk/linux/repos/Promethean.asc
sudo apt-key add Promethean.asc
If all goes well, the last line you see will be OK

Great! I opened up Synaptic to install these packages; searched for Promethean and installed the various packages that came up, avoiding those that looked like languages (-es and -pt and -it and the like). Installation was fast other than the download of the massive packages, but once installed we couldn't get the program 'ActivInspire' to launch!

From a command-line I typed 'activ[tab][tab]' to see what would auto-complete, but there were no programs by the name 'activinspire'. I right-clicked on the KDE menu, selected Edit, found the Educational section of the menu and dug down to ActivInspire; turns out the program is run as 'inspire'. Obviously.

Ok, so I run 'inspire' from the command line, which allows us to get output that launching from a Graphical Menu generally hides. The output errors were about the Phonon sound system:

user@vostro1500:~$ inspire
Loaded libfam.so.0
Promethean: Open lock
Promethean: Initialise board state
Promethean: File Monitor Starting.
Promethean: File Alteration Monitor (FAM) Not Open : Polling instead.
Promethean: Pollfile: /tmp
Promethean: Unlocked count 0
Promethean: Activ devices 0
ActivInspire(2881)/phonon (KDE plugin): Can not create backend object from factory for "Xine" , "phonon_xine" :
"Could not find plugin 'Xine' for application 'ActivInspire'"
./Inspire: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/kde4/plugins/phonon_backend/phonon_vlc.so: undefined symbol: _ZN6Phonon12PulseSupport11getInstanceEv
user@vostro1500:~$

At first I thought this may be an Xine issue and that the program wanted GStreamer as the backend, but installing phonon-backend-gstreamer and changing the KDE Multimedia Backend didn't fix this.

Off to the IRC (irc.debian.org), where the ever helpful MoDaX walked me through seeing what the app was trying to launch; apparently the Prometean repo installed additional Phonon audio backend files which didn't properly function:

user@vostro1500:~$ sudo updatedb
user@vostro1500:~$ locate libphonon.so.4
/usr/lib/libphonon.so.4
/usr/lib/libphonon.so.4.4.0
/usr/local/bin/activsoftware/libphonon.so.4
/usr/local/bin/activsoftware/libphonon.so.4.3.1

I moved those last two (with sudo, giving me root user permissions) to a new location (just in case!) and now I was able to launch the app without issue!

hbomb@hbomb1500:~$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin/activsoftware/badlibs
hbomb@hbomb1500:~$ sudo mv /usr/local/bin/activsoftware/libphonon.so.4* /usr/local/bin/activsoftware/badlibs

Thanks MoDax, thanks KDE, thanks community! Thank you also to Promethean for providing the software; you should consider Freeing ('open sourcing' and giving it a good license) that code so that we can get this working properly. Also, Promethean, your Linux forums seem locked :( with no posts there since May of 2010. Not inspiring.

I really hope this helps someone out there. All I can think of, however, is that nearly everyone that I know wouldn't go through this trouble. Nearly everyone I know would have given up and found a computer that didn't have these problems, which probably meant it wasn't running a FLOSS operating system. Nearly everyone I know wouldn't even know to try an IRC room to look for support, wouldn't know how to run the Terminal commands needed to get this done, wouldn't even have the time to do it. This is doubly-true for teachers, one of Promethean's target audiences, who are already overworked.

Yes these bad libraries were provided by Promethean, but who gets the blame in this situation? Yep, the umbrella known as 'Linux', and every distro and program under that umbrella gets a black mark. I hear all the time about how Linux cannot do the job because MSOffice doesn't open OpenOffice-created documents properly; what a crock.

It is really too bad, because GNU/Linux and FLOSS in general is sooo good. As this example shows, however, Audio still seems to be an issue.

BZ2 Libraries Not Found, UUID errors....

2011-04-27T13:14:00.003-05:00

I am trying to compile and install Cluster-Glue and Heartbeat onto a CentOS system, as a test for High-Availability Linux clustering to eventually run on Redhat RHEL5 or RHEL6.
An error when compiling Cluster-Glue is that:

configure: error: BZ2 libraries not found

The fix is to install the 'bzip2-devel' package. See what they did there, one is BZ2 and one is bzip2 (different capitalization, and a different name). I hope to follow up with additional info once I have this working, or maybe not.

Another error that I've hit is:

./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_parse'
./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_generate'
./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_copy'
./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_is_null'
./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_unparse'
./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_clear'
./.libs/libplumb.so: undefined reference to `uuid_compare'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
gmake[2]: *** [ipctest] Error 1
gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/root/halinux/Reusable-Cluster-Components-glue--glue-1.0.7/lib/clplumbing'
gmake[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/root/halinux/Reusable-Cluster-Components-glue--glue-1.0.7/lib'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

The fix here (on CentOS5) is to install these packages since I cannot find 'libuuid-devel' on CentOS:

e2fsprogs-devel

e2fsprogs-libs

For those interested, this is what I've needed to install on a CentOS server in order to build the Cluster-Glue software:

yum install flex python net-snmp OpenIPMI autoconf automake libtool glib2-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel bzip2 bzip2-devel uuidd e2fsprogs-devel e2fsprogs-libs

Looking at the HALinux page, they only mention these requirements:

3.1.1. Cluster Glue build prerequisites
Building Cluster Glue requires the presence of the following tools and libraries on the build system:
A C compiler (typically gcc) and associated C development libraries;
the flex scanner generator and the bison parser compiler;
net-snmp development headers, to enable SNMP related functionality;
OpenIPMI development headers, to enable IPMI related functionality;
Python (just the language interpreter, not library headers).

I don't mind that the requirements are semi-extensive and I am excited about the HALinux project, but when people complain about Linux software installs being difficult, this is what they mean. Installing software from a repo is easy, even at a command line if you know the command:

yum install flex

But getting the software installed when there AREN'T readily available packages isn't easy, and not listing dependencies or HowTos makes things all the worse. For example, this exciting Video Stabilization project has zero information about the installation of the software: http://vstab.sourceforge.net/

Next up, actually getting Heartbeat built and installed...

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HowTo: Display IP Address at console login screen (Debian, *buntu)

2010-12-06T10:44:00.001-06:00

This setup allows you to display the IP Address at the text login screen. The utility of this is somewhat limited but it works great for Virtual Machines (VirtualBox, VMware, etc) which may require people to log in from your network, but which don't really need a static IP Address.
The console login screen reads something like this:

Debian GNU/Linux <releasename> <hostname.domain.com> tty1

Note that the above <releasename> and <hostname.domain.com> will depend on your own setup. This information is generated in the file at /etc/issue so we just want to append the IP Address to this file.
Start with creating a script; I put myne at /etc/init.d/boot_prompt.sh since it gets run at bootup. Edit the file to include this info, which will get the IP Address and put it to the end of /etc/issue :

#!/bin/bash
IPADD=`/sbin/ifconfig | sed '/Bcast/!d' | awk '{print $2}'| awk '{print $2}' FS=":"`
echo " $IPADD" >> /etc/issue

We then want that scrip to run at boot up, so we run it from /etc/rc.local by putting the above script's path into /etc/rc.local above the line reading exit 0 :

/etc/init.d/boot_prompt.sh

We also need to make sure these scripts CAN run, so we make them both executable:

shell# chmod +x /etc/init.d/boot_prompt.sh
shell# chmod +x /etc/rc.local

Now, you no longer need to log in and run the 'ifconfig' command to get the dynamic IP Address of your virtual machine — the information is right there at the login prompt! Enjoy.

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HowTo: ClamAV in Debian Lenny and Setting up Backports

2010-11-30T12:19:00.001-06:00

Debian GNU/Linux is known for its stability and infrequent releases. Unlike in Windows, software on Linux is usually compiled (i.e., changed from source code into a program) specifically for a distribution and a release. A program compiled for Red Hat Linux generally won't run on a Debian GNU/Linux OS.

Debian's release stability comes from well-tested packages that don't really change throughout the life of that stable release, meaning some programs can be 2 or 3 years out of date. While this generally doesn't affect a server much, some programs (like antivirus) need information that is newer than 3 years old.

As a quick aside, Debian Testing and Debian Sid are usually used for desktop use, where users can get newer programs quickly.

Anyway, to get ClamAV antivirus on Debian Lenny (5.0.x), we need to get the 'backports' set up to allow newer software into Debian's package manager.

First, open as root the file /etc/apt/sources.list:

shell$ su -

[password]

shell# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

and enter these new repositories for Debian to get its software:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

deb-src http://www.backports.org/debian/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

Save that file and exit. Now edit the file /etc/apt/preferences:

shell# vim /etc/apt/preferences

and add this information, which will tell aptitude not to upgrade to Backports nor Volatile unless the packages are already from there:

Package: *

Pin: release a=stable

Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *

Pin: release a=lenny-backports

Pin-Priority: 200

Save that file and exit. Now update your catalog of software:

shell# aptitude update

And install the newer packages that we need, specifically instructing aptitude to use the backports:

shell# aptitude install -t lenny-backports clamav clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam clamav-unofficial-sigs clamav-base

That should be all that we need to do, and now you're Debian server can use the newer release of ClamAV. For more information on the packages in Backports, see here.

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Apple OSX 'invents' Apt

2010-10-20T14:08:00.001-05:00

At today's Apple conference, one of the big roll-outs is Apple's new Mac Store.

Basically, its a way to use aptitude on OSX, for paid apps.

Debian has had apt and aptitude for a long time, with or without graphical frontends, allowing users to search for, install, and update software to their Debian OS. Other GNU/Linux Operating Systems have had their own package managers for a number of years now as well.

But it took mobile phones for people to understand the concept of installing software without a cardboard box — the Application Markets on the iPhone and Android phones showed us this. Now, everyone understands how to add a program to their smartphone.

Apple has taken this 'easy installation' to their desktop OS, finally, 17 years after Debian's first release. Way to innovate, Steve. Windows 8 will probably have something like this as well, done horribly wrong of course.

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Android lockdown: Thanks Linus

2010-09-14T13:56:00.001-05:00

The current lockdown of Linux based devices (including Android phones, TiVo, and many many consumer devices) is due, simply, to the Linux developers' unwillingness to update their code to the GPLv3 license. We* contribute to Linux, Linux is taken for use in Android (and remains Open and Free), and then the phone manufacturers take our work and lock it up and sell it to us with reduced functionality. Big thanks, manufacturers.

The GPLv2 license, released a very long time ago (in Technology terms), didn't foresee device manufacturers using the Free, Open code in their devices, but locking down those hardware devices to prevent that hardware from running anything but the manufacturer's signed code. These manufacturers are taking the hard work of thousands and going against the spirit of the license by not allowing these developers to share in the changes and code that these developers helped to create, with the exact intention of sharing their code and its uses and benefits.

Not too long ago, the GPLv3 came out. This new license extended the rights of users that the GPLv2 guaranteed, but also required that code released under this license would still be allowed to run if modified. The intent here was to prevent the 'TiVo-ization' of code; that is, to prevent the code being held hostage by corporations that used GPL code but wouldn't let any modifications run on their hardware. Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel, said that he had no problems with the way his kernel was being used, and wouldn't be moving to the GPLv3. This was a huge discussion a few years ago, with the possibility that whole parts of the kernel would have to be rewritten if they couldn't get the contributors to move to GPLv3 or if those contributors couldn't be contacted.

In the end, the Linux kernel stayed at GPLv2. And now we're stuck with device manufacturers using our* own code against us, which the GPLv3 license would have prevented, although possibly with a huge, initial negative impact had parts of the kernel needed to be dropped or rewritten. Which is better, the initial pain, or the long-term lock-in?

*the FLOSS community, not my own personal code!

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Debian Sid gets KDE 4.5.1! (External repo)

2010-09-13T10:03:00.001-05:00

Debian GNU/Linux now has KDE 4.5.1 available from an unofficial repository. This is meant for Sid- and Experimental-branch users. It is pretty great (in my 30m of testing thus far) and there are instructions available at http://qt-kde.debian.net

I've had two small issues since the upgrade: my [End] and [DwonArrow] keys were being reported as [F13] and [F14] when look at them from xev (run 'xev' from the command line and then do stuff in the box that pops up, and the command line will give feedback about what is pressed/done/typed); this was fixed with 'setxkbmap -keycodes evdev' run from the command line (and added to a script in .kde/Autostart/fixkeybd.sh for now). Also, my dual-monitor setup somehow got swapped, which was an easy fix in System Settings.

Way to rock, KDE and Debian!

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BackupPC not graphing? Pool size won't shrink? Try this fix for BackupPC v3.1

2010-06-17T11:10:00.001-05:00

What a mess this was! We have two nearly-identical BackupPC setups and one wasn't graphing but the other was. Research on the interweeb, and chats on IRC, didn't seem to give any results so hopefully this can help someone. Note that the /pool/ partition on the failing-to-graph system is ReiserFS 3, which may have been a contributing factor. Also the Pool size wasn't ever decreasing meaning something wasn't being cleaned up.

Got the info from this list

http://www.backupcentral.com/phpBB2/two-way-mirrors-of-external-mailing-lists-3/backuppc-21/backuppc-doesnt-clean-cpool-94508/

In 3.1 an optimization was added to use IO::Dirent for reading

the inodes in a directory, which on certain filesystems doesn't

work correctly. If you are running 3.1.0 I would recommend

trying to disable IO::Dirent by changing this line:

$IODirentOk = 1;

at line 83 of lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm to:

$IODirentOk = 0;
"

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HowTo: Moving from Bilbo Blogging to Blogilo

2010-05-04T09:31:00.001-05:00

This is a short one. Bilbo Blogger was an outside-of-KDE blogging app which was recently incorporated into KDE Proper, and with that came a new name to avoid naming issues: Blogilo. 'Blogilo' is Esperanto, and Esperanto is English for 'Make up words and call it a language' or something ;)

To set up your Blogilo app with the same settings as the Bilbo app had, copy the bilbo.db file that stores your username, blog name, and password and put it at the blogilo.db location:

First, of course, a backup of blogilo.db:

cp .kde/share/apps/blogilo/blogilo.db .kde/share/apps/blogilo/blogilo.db.BAK

And then we copy the Bilbo file to where Blogilo can access it:

cp .kde/share/apps/bilbo/bilbo.db .kde/share/apps/blogilo/blogilo.db

Start your Blogilo and all should be well! It was for me, anyway.

KDE 4.4.3 reached Debian Sid, and its awesome

2010-05-03T09:54:00.001-05:00

Today, the 3rd of May 2010, KDE SC 4.4.3 has been uploaded to Debian Sid (Unstable). This is the first of the 4.4.x series that Debian has had (outside of the Experimental repository and an unofficial repository), and so far the whole of it is awesome.

There is a new KDM login window which looks great. Upon logging in, Strigi and Nepomunk start up and begin the indexing of the local system (and, likely my FUSE-mounted drives, since it probably doesn't know better and I didn't stop it). Nearly everything has a new release, including a newer Kontact suite (4.4.3) for email and calendaring. I had to re-add my local file for my local address book, but the Akonadi (network-accessed) resources such as my home Kontact calendar and my Google address books all worked fine after the upgrade to KDE SC 4.4.3.

System Settings is cleaned up a bit, but I've not yet figured out how to change system-wide settings without launching it with 'kdesudo systemsettings'. I thought PolicyKit integration was supposed to help here, but I've not had the time to investigate it.

The only drawback at this time has been the slow response of the KRunner dialog, accessed with [Alt][F2], which I use constantly to launch apps, perform mathematical operations, and more. This could be related to the Strigi indexing of my files, which will slow the machine down until this is finished (and I am running a virtual machine in Virtual Box, slowing my system down further), so I hope performance of the KRunner increases after some time.

Overall, I am very impressed with KDE in general (I've always been a huge fan), and the 4.4.3 release seems to be running great. I've not yet had any time to investigate the improvements to the window manager, KWin, or to the other changes that have been made, but the overall refinement seems like a great amount of effort was put into KDE 4.4.3, and it really shines.

Anyway, this may be my last post with Bilbo Blogger, as it had been renamed to Blogilo and it is now an official KDE app, and so that app is available in the repos and I'll be installing it shortly.

Thanks for KDE everyone, it truly is Software for People.

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MagicFolder in KDE4: Plasmoid Now, but what is the future?

2010-03-17T07:35:00.000-05:00

True story: last night I was thinking about how great a Magical ~/Downloads/ folder would be, so that downloaded PDFs, videos, documents, whatever would automatically get moved into my ~/Documents/ and my ~/Music/ and my other folders. I thought, hmm maybe I'll make a wish on http://bugs.kde.org/ for something like that. Granted, not everyone wants it as their Downloads/ folder (and not everyone even has that; Iceweasel and Firefox set it up in 3.5 and beyond and I don't know if Konqueror, ReKonq, or Aurora even use it). But it was an interesting idea.

Today, I went to look for a Twitter-following plasmoid, and came across Magic Folder: write some rules, drop some files, and they get automatically sorted, just as I was hoping for! Is this Magic or what?

Now, it isn't a real folder in that there is no path to get there in a file browser, and therefor it cannot be set in Iceweasel as the location for my downloads. But, with time perhaps it can be a real folder, or maybe it can monitor a real folder.

The Downloads/ Magic Folder is even the first suggestion on the Plasmoid page.

Free Software and the community, always one step ahead and fillingin the blanks. Thank you to bizzl who wrote the plasmoid.

Dell sells great XBMC system, requires you to buy Windows

2010-03-12T07:47:00.002-06:00

I read a review today about Dell's ZenoHD system, and it got me interested. I would love a small, quiet, networked, powerful computer to hook up to my tele. Watching Funny or Die on the television would be great!

So I browsed over to Dell.com (not linking that) to check out this hardware and see what it may cost me. The moment I saw that I was forced to buy Windows7, I dropped the whole idea.

Dell, where is the "No OS" option? Where is the Ubuntu option? Or the FreeDOS option? I want to GIVE YOU MONEY for a FLOSS operating system, not something that MS can use to show how many copies it has sold (since the install would be wiped anyways). Even the Operating System icon at the bottom is Windows, giving us an indication as to how committed Dell is to selling some FLOSS operating systems.

I know that I'm not the only one disappointed by Dell's lack of FLOSS systems, and I do appreciate that they're, ahem, trying to sell some FLOSS-powered machines. I just wish it would be a bit more possible to actually buy them.

HowTo: KDE4: KVpnc connections to PPTP Server (KVpnc 0.9.3 to MikroTik)

2010-03-01T14:01:00.001-06:00

At work we use MikroTik as our PPTP VPN server, to allow employees into our internal network. Recently we've changed IP Addresses and we cannot get to a few remaining clients who have our older IP hard-coded into their firewalls, so I had to use a VPN to get to our old address for one particular client.

KDE's KVpnc application, while a great app that can connect to a whole lot of VPN endpoints, does have a whole lot of configuration options. This is both a benefit and a drawback, because sometimes a user (or an administrator) has no idea what needs to be set!

PPTP VPN is what I need to use, also known as Point-to-Point-Protocol, and also known as Microsoft VPN. But because the MikroTik is a GNU/Linux-based device, its settings aren't exactly the same as they would be for a MSWindows-based device (do those exist?).

After a bit of errors on my side, and getting the errors from the MikroTik side, I found settings for KVpnc that work for my connection. Please read along! This is for KVpnc 0.9.3 running on KDE 4.3.4, on Debian GNU/Linux Sid, but similar settings should work elsewhere.

First, you'll have to run KVpnc as the root user or with your 'sudo' user, to give the program enough control to edit the networking configuration:

To do this, you can launch from a command line (sudo kvpnc) or from the KDE KRunner dialog box (with [Alt][F2] if you're unfamiliar); from here you can run 'kdesudo kvpnc' if you have KDESudo installed (or kdesu):

or you can click on the Wrench icon to change the settings for that app:

Once KVpnc starts with root privileges, go through the New Connection Wizard to set things up, and then Edit that new profile to use the Authentication type of CHAP, not one of the two MSCHAP options:

Click the above image to enlarge it

NOTE: In future attempts (after an upgrade to the MicroTik software), I've had to use MSCHAP to authenticate.

Good luck and enjoy your PPTP Connection!

Roku SDK Available; Someone make my local content streamable!

2010-02-10T09:33:00.002-06:00

The Roku player, that nifty little Linux-based device which streams Netflix, Amazon movies, Revision3 shows, and more, now has an SDK available for programmers to create their own channels:

With the Roku Software Developer’s Kit, you too can build a channel that streams your content to the TV.

The Roku needed this. Staying competitive in the marketplace, which will soon have the BoxeeBox and other devices, needs to remain a priority for this company if they want to stay on top. One benefit of the BoxeeBox and other devices (including home-built solutions) is that they're designed with user control in mind, allowing the user to stream their own local (or networked) content, not just consuming what companies decide should be on your television.

If Roku wants to build its customer base, it needs to allow customers to access their own files. Perhaps Roku won't do this themselves; with the SDK, I would imagine its possible to build a 'Channel' which connects to your network shares (Samba, SFTP, FTP, or others) and allows you to browse and stream your media from your network.

Someone, please make this a reality. Roku, thanks for making this a possibility.

ABC TV now allows Linux users to watch streaming media!

2010-02-08T13:01:00.002-06:00

Linux users for a long time have been kept out of ABC Television's streaming media. Today I checked, and this artificial limitation is no more! Thank you ABC for listening to your viewers; Netflix are you paying attention?

Yes, you still are required to use Adobe Flash (GNU Gnash may work, can anyone provide feedback?), but at last we can watch our shows like users of other desktops. Linux is now listed in the System Requirements:
"What are the system requirements?
# Adobe Flash Player 10.0.0 or later
# Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, Firefox 2.0 or later, Safari 3 (Mac only) or later, Chrome 3.0 or later (Adobe Flash playback only)
# Microsoft Windows XP or later, Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Linux (Adobe Flash playback only)
"

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HowTo: Clear out Amarok's corrupted music database and start over

2009-12-07T12:41:00.001-06:00

UPDATE: Apparently this is fixed in Trunk and the next release (2.2.2) will no longer require a reset of the database.
When I upgrade my Debian Sid machines' Amarok, often I will get issues with my music not being categorized properly. Artists and albums get mis-filed and some of my music seems to disappear.
While this isn't a good fix because it removes data about your tags and ratings, the fastest fix is to start over and rebuild your database.
Make sure Amarok is completely closed when you do this.
In a file manager or on the command line, change to your home directory's (~) Amarok database folder:
shell$ cd ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/mysqle/amarok
and delete all of the files in there:
shell$ rm *
Then restart Amarok and check your settings; they should be the same and your database should rebuild itself. If it doesn't, pick the Tools menu > Update Collection to rescan your music.
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Windows 7 sure looks a lot like KDE 4...

2009-11-13T14:32:00.001-06:00

At work we have a new machine with Windows 7 on it. While setting it up for a new employee, it was my first chance to play with Windows 7. My impression is that its pretty much the same Windows as always, with a shiney new graphical interface. If you liked Windows before, its not all that different. In some places (Control Panel), options are gone for setting up new users and the like; but in many other places just below the surface, its all the same as before, such as adding a new printer.

But the desktop REALLY looks like KDE4. From the slanty lines on the taskbar, to the system tray's size and icons, to the way the Windows (Start) button lights up when it gets moused over — people may think that Microsoft took some cues from Apple, but I would have to say they took more from KDE 4.

currently Bilbo doesn't work to upload images to BlogSpot postings, so maybe I'll come back and add some screenshots later. But there are plenty out there, why pollute the web further?)

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OpenSuse's KDE/Firefox Integration

2009-10-28T16:48:00.001-05:00

Just a quick nod to the OpenSuse team, which looks to have a great looking KDE desktop for their new 11.2 Release. Congratulations!

Now, about those changes to make Firefox integrate better with KDE — you'll be releasing those upstream to KDE for the inclusion to all distros, right? :D

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KDE 4, please integrate 10 Administrative tools!

2009-10-27T10:04:00.001-05:00

I am a big fan of the KDE desktop but their current KDE 4.3.2 release is still missing tools that are required for a 'complete desktop experience', specifically for system administration tasks with a Graphical User Interface.

Reading around the web, there are many requests and suggestions about ways to improve the KDE Desktop. It is very important to note that KDE 3.5.x was years in development to get to the functionality and stability that the 3.5.x release had; KDE 4.3.2 has only been in development for a bit over two years and its capabilities are already very impressive.

KDE 4.3.2 may have an impressive list of capabilities, but the desktop isn't yet complete for those Point-and-Click types. Here is my wish list for the near future of KDE development, to allow full system administration within the GUI of KDE.

1. KDESudo access to saving files

I would love to be prompted for a sudo password when trying to edit a file which I have no write access to, such as if a desktop computer is going to be used for an application like Motion and the user doesn't know various command-line editors. Browsing to /etc/ and opening a file with Kate (or KWrite, or any app) should allow for read-only access, and prompt for a password if the user wants to edit and save that file.

2. Administrative Mode in System Settings

Various parts of System Settings require that the root user makes changes, such as for user auto-logins and for adding printers. I am not sure the status of this. Launching 'kdesudo systemsettings' allows a user to get around this, for now.

3. Printer setup tools

In Debian at least, printers can be added in KDE by launching 'kdesudo systemsettings' and then using the Printer Configuration module, assuming the user has installed the package 'system-config-printer-kde'. Access to this should be tied in with point number two, above. Also, any machine with CUPS (which is likely any Linux machine that prints) can set up printers in http://localhost:631 — but we all knew that one by heart, right?

4. User Account Tools

Adding users to a multi-user system like Linux is important, yet it is missing in KDE's System Settings. The application 'kuser' can be installed and launched with 'kdesudo kuser' but it isn't integrated into the System Settings as far as I can tell.

5. Services and Daemons

There should be an application to start/stop/setup system daemons that happen at boot; there is an addon located here which looks to do the job on Kubuntu, but this should be a standard module within System Settings, to allow a user to stop MySQL or to change when SSH is launched, etc.

6. FUSE File System Setups

The FUSE system is great; it allows users to mount a remote file system on their current setup, without needing root access that a regular filesystem mount needs.

For example, at home my Laptop gets its wireless signal and connects to my big computer's music collection, providing transparent streaming of my music to the laptop without having all of those files on the laptop itself. For someone familiar with the command line and mounting filesystems this is pretty easy; for a computer (or even Linux) newbie it isn't so clear what needs to be done.

I would really like a System Settings module which allows for certain file systems to be mounted at login depending on various conditions. For example, if my wireless access point is 'lefty@home' then my sshfs:/ and fusesmb:/ file systems should mount; if my access point is "corporation-WEP" when I am at work, then FUSE file systems which I have defined for my work needs should mount, etc.

7. Package installation integration

Using some software requires that additional packages are installed to make that first app work properly in certain situations. If I want to open a .doc file, for example, I would need OpenOffice or KOffice or some other application which can read the closed, binary Microsoft document format. If I try to open a .doc file and I have no applicable software available, KDE should offer a list of options and install the needed software (and not limit my options to KDE applications in the process).

8. Graphics setup configuration

Adding a second monitor to my home computer required setting up an XOrg config file (because Xorg doesn't use those by default any longer) and then defining a Virtual Desktop size that would be equal to, or larger than, the total resolution of my two monitors added together. I had to add this to my Screen section of my /etc/X11/xorg./conf file (completely outside of KDE), and the whole process isn't very intuitive:

SubSection "Display"

Viewport 0 0

Depth 24

Virtual 3048 2048

EndSubSection

KDE would do well to extend the capabilities of KRandR to allow these setups to work with minimal hassle to the end user, as well as to insert various modules into that xorg.conf file to allow for 3D rendering etc, regardless of the driver used (assuming the driver is capable of this with some module modifications). KRandR sits in the Tray of your plasma task bar, but it should be accessible within System Settings. There is a Disp[lay section with information about Multiple Monitors but it doesn't do anything to assist in the setup.

9. Hardware information

In KDE3 I could see my hardware, capabilities, and even the serial number of some of the hardware peripherals installed onto my computer. KDE4 could do this and so much more, but currently the Hardware module in System Settings only discusses software backends for HAL Power Management, for Networking, and for Bluetooth devices. Where is the information about my RAM? About my processor speed? This information is all inside KInfoCenter but there isn't a way to access that from System Settings. Granted, this is information and not something with settings, but it should still be within System Settings.

10. KDE4 Technologies need clarification

Akonadi? Nepomuk? If you're not a KDE user or developer these names mean nothing to you; as a KDE user I am still unsure what these do. They need more descriptive naming in the System Settings to describe what it is I am looking at. Don't call it Anokadi in system Settings; call it Anokadi Data Storage or whatever it does. Even Aaron Seigo, the KDE hacker, puts it this way in a recent post

Jargon Is Bad:

There's a lot more jargon in KDE, though: nepomuk (search service!), krandr (screen settings!), kwin compositing (desktop effects!), akonadi ... If we can keep the jargon out of what we see when using the software, it will help people immensely.

Notice even Aaron didn't tell us what Akonadi is? :D

All and all, I love KDE, its capabilities, its sensible defaults, its configurablity, its beauty, its speed... I just hope to see KDE 4 allow users to control their whole desktop better from an administrative perspective. Give it time, it will happen. The best part about KDE is that it keeps improving, by leaps and bounds.

Any Graphical Administration suggestions that readers can provide? Please, leave a comment, and enjoy your Free Software.

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HowTo: VirtualBox on Debian Squeeze (Testing / Sid)

2009-10-21T14:37:00.000-05:00

VirtualBox is the great, Free Software virtual machine software which compares to VMware and others. Unlike the closed-source competitors, VirtualBox has the needed source code 'kernel headers' which allow it to hook into your Linux kernel and do its networking setup, etc.

With a rolling-release distribution (which makes new software available as it gets released) such as Debian Testing or Debian Sid ('Unstable'), new kernels mean that the older apps and drivers which hook into the kernel no longer work. For example, if you have run a working VirtualBox virtual machine in the past but get errors like the following image, there is a good chance that the kernel has changed and you need to recompile the modules (drivers):

Debian has a great tool called "Module Assistant" which easily compiles needed modules (drivers) for various applications, including VirtualBox and some wireless network drivers.

To run VirutalBox successfully, make sure that you have 'module-assistant' and 'virtualbox-ose' installed, and optionally 'virtualbox-ose-qt' if you prefer a more KDE-like graphical interface.

Once those are installed you'll need to work at a command line. As root (or as a regular user with 'sudo' capabilities) run at the command prompt:

shell$ sudo m-a prepare

to get Module Assistant prepared with whatever it needs; likely it will download some kernel headers if you've not used Module Assistant before. Then we're going to 'auto install' (a-i) VirtualBox with Module Assistant:

shell$ sudo m-a a-i virtualbox-ose-source

You'll see some screens like this as Module Assistant is doing its work:

Once that is done, we'll need to load (modprobe) the kernel modules (drivers) that VirtualBox uses; you may want to add these modules to the file at /etc/modules so that they auto load at boot time. Note that because I had the older kernel modules loaded, I am going to remove (-r) them first, and then load in the newly built modules:

shell$ sudo modprobe -r vboxdrv
shell$ sudo modprobe -r vboxnetflt
shell$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv
shell$ sudo modprobe vboxnetflt

In this screenshot, we're getting warnings about an unrelated config file so we're going to ignore it as you may not have these issues on your own setup.

Now, VirtualBox is using the needed kernel modules for its current kernel and VirtualBox, and I am able to load my virtual machines again.

Happy VM'ing!

An open request to rename Ubuntu package formats

2009-10-15T09:31:00.001-05:00

I have a .deb file, where can I install it?

If the software package was compiled for Debian, I can install it on nearly any recent Debian release. Currently I have XTightVNCViewer installed with the Debian package release 1.2.9-21 (from the Stable branch) even though I run a Sid desktop, because this older package has functionality which isn't available in the Sid package at version 1.3.9-5. Other than some dependency resolutions, mixing Debian software branches (Stable, Testing, and Unstable) isn't recommended but it isn't difficult to do, and my experiences with it have been a rather stable setup when it needs to be done. (Let me repeat, this is not recommended nor supported). Debian releases infrequently enough that this mixing probably isn't needed much; if a package is still relevant there will be a new release for it.

Ubuntu came onto the scene a few years ago with the goal to release Debian Sid (Unstable) as a stabilized set of packages. Not to start a flame war, but Ubuntu's success in this has been questionable, depending on who you ask or your own experiences.

The repackaging of Debian was at first welcomed by many in the Debian community, but early into the project the Ubuntu developers forked and changed the way Debian works for their own distribution. This is Free Software and there is nothing wrong with that approach, although there has been much said about Ubuntu's contributions upstream.

With that split from Debian, however, came no split with the package manager or its tools. Ubuntu now requires separate package releases for each OS release; a quick stop at GetDeb.net shows that you have to search for your specific version of Ubuntu to find a package which will work for your setup. These aren't repositories to keep your software up-to-date like Debian is designed for; these are downloadable packages to be installed much like a Windows .exe file would be installed: download and double-click.

When SuSE Linux took the Red Hat package format, RPM, it led to the increase of Dependency Hell for RPM-based distributions. Red Hat, Suse, and Fedora all use RPM files but they're incompatible; without knowing which release and distribution a package was created for, that package is nearly useless and attempting to install it will lead to a failure or massive headaches when trying to resolve its dependencies. O perhaps it will just luckily work, all depending on the software and its complexity.

Ubuntu is doing the same to the .deb package format. Their frequent OS releases means that every package needs to be recompiled for that release. Applications downloaded from GetDeb.net or one of the many other Ubuntu-focused software sites may no longer work when the OS is upgraded; without a repository there is no way to upgrade the 3rd party packages. (Note: These sites provide a valuable service to the Ubuntu community, but seem to disregard Debian completely; the purpose of this Open Request is not to stop or deride these sites at all.)

Debian, on the other hand, has always used .deb files and has encouraged using software repositories for accessing new software and for keeping it up-to-date. While mixing Debian released packages from one OS release to the next isn't recommended or supported, it does work. Downloading individual .deb files for installation works but it isn't the recommended method. Perhaps mixing Ubuntu packages (from one release to the next) would work also, I am not sure.

But the real problem here is that Ubuntu is using the .deb package format and giving it both a bad name (due to dependency breakages), and its packages are named .deb but don't work on Debian, the very system that the packages were designed for.

With Ubuntu's frequent release cycle and with the nature of Free Software, the package management tools that Ubuntu uses (dpkg, apt, aptitude) should be modified to accept packages in a Ubuntu-specific package extension: .ubu files. This could happen at any release; perhaps after this next release it could be worked on, to be ready in time for the next LTR or even the next 'short term' release in order to give time for testing.

While the packages themselves may be internally identical to a .deb file, these .ubu files would specify that the packages are for Ubuntu and not for Debian. SuSE should have done that and didn't; Ubuntu doesn't have to make this same mistake. Debian users wouldn't have to be confused trying to know if a .deb file will work on their system or not. Ubuntu would get the great package management that Debian has but with better branding of their packages and software. Debian would have its branding as well, and perhaps both Debian and Ubuntu could still install one another's packages with unknown results, just as it is now.

The new .ubu files wouldn't impart any release info in their file names as they are; either the name itself could be 'packagename.904.ubu' or maybe the extension should specify the release, for example 'packagename.u904'. I don't have the answers to this, but naming separate distribution packages the same isn't helpful at all.

Ubuntu may be here to stay, but please, keep Debian's package extension .deb for Debian.

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Debian Sid: HowTo: Firewire Access

2009-10-06T09:03:00.001-05:00

I had a hell of a time last night trying to capture video in KDEnlive, the great video editor.

It's not KDEnlive's fault that the Firewire stack is such a mess on Linux. My Debian Sid system seems to be using a new Firewire (ieee1394) stack that isn't complete or something. With some work I was able to get the Firewire control and capture working for our Panasonic video camera.

First I plugged in the camera and at a command prompt, ran 'dmesg' to give the recent list of kernel activity:

lefty@bigboi:~$ dmesg

Oct 5 23:48:11 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: rediscovered device fw0

Oct 5 23:48:11 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: phy config: card 0, new root=ffc2, gap_count=7

Oct 5 23:48:11 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: giving up on config rom for node id ffc0

Oct 5 23:48:11 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: skipped bus generations, destroying all nodes

Oct 5 23:48:12 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: rediscovered device fw0

Oct 5 23:48:12 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: phy config: card 0, new root=ffc2, gap_count=7

Oct 5 23:48:12 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: giving up on config rom for node id ffc0

Oct 5 23:48:12 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: skipped bus generations, destroying all nodes

Oct 5 23:48:12 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: giving up on config rom for node id ffc2

Oct 5 23:48:12 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: giving up on config rom for node id ffc0

While my computer recognized the camera, it didn't seem to like it much and I am not sure why exactly. To get Firewire working, first I unloaded the modules (drivers) and then reloaded them:

lefty@bigboi:~$ sudo lsmod |grep fire

firewire_sbp2 14920 0

firewire_net 13728 0

firewire_ohci 23232 0

firewire_core 47360 3 firewire_sbp2,firewire_net,firewire_ohci

crc_itu_t 1884 1 firewire_core

scsi_mod 148496 5 firewire_sbp2,sg,sr_mod,sd_mod,libata

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe -r firewire_net

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe -r firewire_sbp2

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe -r firewire_ohci

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe -r firewire-core

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe firewire-ohci

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe firewire-net

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe firewire-sbp2

lefty@bigboi:~$ modprobe firewire-core

Now 'dmesg' has better information:

lefty@bigboi:~$ dmesg

Oct 5 23:49:42 bigboi kernel: firewire_ohci 0000:02:03.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16

Oct 5 23:49:42 bigboi kernel: firewire_ohci: Added fw-ohci device 0000:02:03.0, OHCI version 1.0

Oct 5 23:49:43 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: created device fw0: GUID 0011060000200a4a, S400

Oct 5 23:49:43 bigboi kernel: firewire_core: created device fw1: GUID 008045803173ad59, S100

I knew from the past that video capture in Kino and KDEnlive both use /dev/raw1394 rather than the device created above (/dev/fw0), and I also knew that I needed read access to that file /dev/whatever, so I addedmyself to the video group:

lefty@bigboi:~$ sudo adduser lefty video

The user `lefty' is already a member of `video'.

Had this been a new addition to that group, I would have had to log out and log back in for that change to take effect. Then, I changed the group for that file and gave group-read (and write, why not) permissions:

lefty@bigboi:~$ sudo chown :video /dev/fw0

lefty@bigboi:~$ sudo chmod g+rw /dev/fw0

Finally, I linked the new Firewire device to a location that I knew KDEnlive (which uses the dvgrab program, actually) would look for the video capture, /dev/raw1394 as I had stated:

lefty@bigboi:~$ sudo ln /dev/fw0 /dev/raw1394

Note that the above is *not* a symbolic link (not 'ln -s' ). This is a hard link which points to the exact device that I needed to access.

Now KDEnlive was able to capture fine, finally! Then I noticed that my battery was getting low from all of this work, so I had to unplug the camera to put in a new battery, causing all of the above work to fail. I had to redo it all but now that I knew what to do, it was much easier.

I hope this works for others and enjoy your video editing with KDEnlive!

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Ubuntu Server: "Setting locale failed" and a fix

2009-09-29T09:07:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, working remotely to set up a cleanly-installed Ubuntu Jaunty server, every command that I ran would give me errors with Perl and an unset language. For example:

root@dev:/vweb# adduser htomol tracusers

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.

perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:

LANGUAGE = (unset),

LC_ALL = (unset),

LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"

are supported and installed on your system.

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

Adding user `htomol' to group `tracusers' ...

Adding user htomol to group tracusers

Done.

root@dev:/vweb#

I tried reconfiguring the locales package and a few others but no fix. The solution was to install the language pack that I wanted to use; I am not sure why this didn't happen at install time (I didn't do the installation). For English, the pack to install was 'language-pack-en' so I needed to run:

root@dev:/vweb# aptitude update

...

root@dev:/vweb# aptitude install language-pack-en

...

root@dev:/vweb#

That seemed to have fixed it; thanks goes out to the irc.Freenode.net people on #ubuntu-server, specifically the user named sub. Another example, in my eyes, of why Ubuntu is not the slick setup that everyone seems to believe that it is; I've never had this issue with Debian.

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CMake: How to define where to build a package

2009-09-16T11:53:00.001-05:00

I just build Bilbo Blogger, a KDE blogging client that I have recently read about.

KDE apps now use 'cmake' instead of 'configure' when building a package from source; it seems to work about the same but it does have a different syntax. So for my own reference, and others who search for it, if you want to require a directory prefix with cmake here is the proper syntax:

shell:/home/username/package/$ mkdir build

shell:/home/username/package/$ cd build

shell:/home/username/package/build/$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local

shell:/home/username/package/build/$ make

shell:/home/username/package/build/$ sudo checkinstall

That last part allows you to create a fake, bad Debian package.deb. Its not the best package and it cannot really be shared with others (due to dependency checking mostly, I think), but it does allow it to install and run and be removed from your computer using aptitude or dpkg.

This is my first post with Bilbo, we'll see how it turns out!

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Access More Samba shares in KDE

2009-09-14T11:37:00.004-05:00

In KDE's file browser Dolphin, you can view available Windows network share workgroups and computers (and anything else that uses Samba, like your own Linux computer for example) with the KIO-Slave 'smb:/'. Just as websites are data that are accessed with http:/ and file servers can be accessed with ftp:/ , so too can Samba shares be accessed with smb:/ . (Note that usually we see http://www.xyz.com/ — in true Unix fashion the protocol part is the http:/ and the path of the remote server is /www.xyz.com/ )

For example, opening Dolphin we see our own files in /home/username/ as this image show:

Entering smb:/ into our address bar we get:

But what if you know there are other workgroups out there, such as MSHOME or OFFICE? We have two options. You can either enter the protocol and path such as smb://mshome/ (the name of a specific workgroup), or you can edit the file /etc/samba/smb.conf to not put yourself into any workgroup.

If we go with this second route and edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and change our workgroup from whatever we have now, to a * , we can suddenly see many more workgroups!

First, edit our file and replace "workgroup = workgroup" and make it read "workgroup = *" as we see here:

Then, restart Samba networking (note, we cannot share files with the Samba protocol without being in a workgroup!); on Debian we restart it like this (or a reboot, or I am sure there is a graphical way to do this also)

Notice that smbd failed to restart, because we're not in a workgroup.

Now, with Dolphin's address bar of smb:/ we can see all of the workgroups in our local network!

Enjoy your newfound access to network shares!

GPL'ed JkDefrag closes source, becomes MyDefrag

2009-08-16T14:46:00.004-05:00

The great JkDefrag MSWindows application, which I had written about here, was released as GPL'ed Free Software up until the 3.36 release. The application allowed a user to defrag a Windows hard drive much better than the built-in Windows defragmenter, using the same underlying technology as the Windows version but with much better options and results.

Unfortunately, the 4.0 release of the software has been renamed MyDefrag, and it has been released under a closed-source, non-Free license.

The newest release, MyDefrag, has built-in scripting capabilities and claims to have improved the speed and memory usage of JkDefrag, while still relying on the underlying API of the built-in Windows drive defragmenter.

The name change is summarized on the JkDefrag page, reading:

It is no longer the "JK" (Jeroen Kessels) defragger, but "my" (your) defragger!

How can a closed-source piece of shareware ever be "my" software? Software written and released under a Free Software license, like JkDefrag was, is truly "my software" because users have access and rights over the code in that software.

Shareware has no such promises as are given under the GPL or other Free Software licenses; in fact the license for this software now reads that "J.C. Kessels or another party may require the user to ... pay service charges related to providing MyDefrag to the user". Meaning, where once JkDefrag was Free software (in both senses of the term), now MyDefrag may end up costing you money if the company decides to charge, perhaps even retroactively. Not for the license mind you, but for just Providing the software to you.

The last release of JkDefrag is still available, along with the GPL source code. Although I cannot code, it would be great if this project were kept alive to help MSWindows machines survive. Not that their demise would be a bad thing, and in fact something that security professionals and FLOSS supporters everywhere would relish.

Installing PHP extensions with pecl on Debian

2009-08-14T11:48:00.002-05:00

'pecl' downloads packages from a repository for PHP apps or libraries, and installs them somehow as PHP packages. Or something. I don't really know what this does or means but as a sysadmin, our developers need this done occasionally.

So, in today's example, we need the GPG extension for PHP so that we can encrypt files using PHP.

shell# php -m
## big list of php extensions, and it seems we do not have GnuPG installed.

shell# pecl install gnupg
WARNING: channel "pecl.php.net" has updated its protocols, use "channel-update pecl.php.net" to update
downloading gnupg-1.3.1.tgz ...
Starting to download gnupg-1.3.1.tgz (19,331 bytes)
......done: 19,331 bytes
5 source files, building
running: phpize
sh: phpize: command not found
ERROR: `phpize' failed

shell# pecl install phpize
No releases available for package "pecl.php.net/phpize"
Cannot initialize 'channel://pecl.php.net/phpize', invalid or missing package file
Package "channel://pecl.php.net/phpize" is not valid
install failed

Lets first get the channel info correct:

shell# pecl channel-update pecl.php.net

Updating channel "pecl.php.net"

Update of Channel "pecl.php.net" succeeded

So now we need 'phpize' installed:

shell# aptitude install php5-dev
...
The following NEW packages will be installed:

autoconf automake automake1.4 autotools-dev libtool php5-dev shtool
...

shell# pecl install gnupg
WARNING: channel "pecl.php.net" has updated its protocols, use "channel-update pecl.php.net" to update
downloading gnupg-1.3.1.tgz ...
...
...
checking if nawk is broken... no
checking for gnupg support... yes, shared
checking for gnupg files in default path... not found
configure: error: Please reinstall the gpgme distribution
ERROR: `/tmp/pear/temp/gnupg/configure' failed

Now we need the development packages for gpgme according to that last error message:

shell# aptitude search gpgme
p libgpgme-ruby - GPGME bindings for the Ruby language
p libgpgme-ruby1.8 - GPGME bindings for the Ruby language
p libgpgme-ruby1.9 - GPGME bindings for the Ruby language
p libgpgme11 - GPGME - GnuPG Made Easy
p libgpgme11-dev - GPGME - GnuPG Made Easy

shell# aptitude install libgpgme11 libgpgme11-dev
...
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
libgpg-error-dev libpth-dev libpth20
...

shell#

Now, one last time:

shell# pecl install gnupg
downloading gnupg-1.3.1.tgz ...
Starting to download gnupg-1.3.1.tgz (19,331 bytes)
......done: 19,331 bytes
5 source files, building
running: phpize
...
...
Build process completed successfully
Installing '/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/gnupg.so'
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/gnupg-1.3.1
configuration option "php_ini" is not set to php.ini location
You should add "extension=gnupg.so" to php.ini

shell#

As the instructions state again, make sure to edit your php.ini file to add
extension=gnupg.so
into that file's extensions area.

Easy huh? Well, if you know what you're looking for it can be.

Nagstamon: Nagios Status Monitor on Debian Sid

2009-08-14T08:59:00.002-05:00

I went looking for a Nagios System Monitor of sorts, hoping for a KDE Plasmoid for my desktop, so that I could have an eye on our work Nagios which would alert me if one of our servers or part of the network went down.

I came across Nagstamon which seems to do the job, and it lives in the System Tray of my KDE 4.3 desktop. Although written for GNOME, it works fine in KDE with a few required packages:

shell$ sudo aptitude update

shell$ sudo aptitude install python-setuptools python2.5 python-gnome2-extras python-lxml librsvg2-common

shell$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/nagstamon/nagstamon/nagstamon%200.8.2/nagstamon_0.8.2_all.deb

shell$ sudo dpkg -i ./nagstamon_0.8.2_all.deb

If you're getting an error, "glib.GError: Couldn’t recognize the image file format for file ‘/usr/lib/nagstamon/resources/nagstamon.svg’ " you're missing the package named 'librsvg2-common'.

Many thanks go to the developer of this package, Henri Wahl, and the package for other Linux package formats and whatnot can be found on the Sourceforge page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagstamon/files/

Kontact: Check for New Email: Setting up a Global Shortcut in KDE4

2009-07-16T15:57:00.004-05:00

I've set up a shortcut key to check for new email in Kontact, because in my current version of Kontact I cannot seem to change the Global Shortcuts column.

Now, I just press [F9] from anywhere and my Kontact will check all accounts for new emails.

In KDE 4.2.4, this is pretty easy to set up, although figuring out the D-Bus call was a bit confusing for me. On the Debian IRC channel #debian-kde I got a bit of assistance from gkiagia, so thanks go to him (or her?)

Open your System Settings > Input Actions, right-click and add a New Global Shortcut > D-Bus Command, name it what you'd like, and add the information that you see in my screenshot (click it to enlarge it and make it readable). Enjoy!

Postfix on Debian: Fixing the bounced email issue "553 5.5.4 ... Domain name required for sender address root (in reply to RCPT TO command))"

2009-07-16T14:10:00.003-05:00

After many google searches, Pickcoder on the Freenode IRC channel #postfix helped me out with this one.

After setting up Postfix as the MTA on a Debian box using these instructions, I was able to send email through the SMTP server. However, when sending from the command line, I was getting bounce messages in my /var/log/mail.info file:

shell$ mail -s "Test email" someone@somewhere.com
this is a test [ctrl][d]

shell$ tail /var/log/mail.info
Jul 16 13:17:44 server postfix/smtp[873]: E676D180278: to=, relay=email.somewhere.com[12.12.123.123]:25, delay=0.63, delays=0.05/0.02/0.44/0.11, dsn=5.5.4, status=bounced (host email.somewhere.com[12.12.123.123] said: 553 5.5.4 ... Domain name required for sender address root (in reply to RCPT TO command))

The trick to fixing this was that the account (root in this example) didn't get its hostname nor FQDN attached to the end of the address, so my email looked like it was coming from 'root' rather than 'root@someserver.com'.

The actual fix is to edit the /etc/postfix/main.cf file and chage the line that reads "append_at_myorigin = no" to "append_at_myorigin = yes"

Edit the file with vim or your preferred editor:

shell$ vim /etc/postfix/main.cf

and change the line from

append_at_myorigin = no

append_at_myorigin = yes

Make sure to restart Postfix:

shell$ /etc/init.d/postfix restart

And then try your mail command (up above) again. If you check the mail.info logfile, the status should now read, "status=sent"

Gripes with Ubuntu

2009-06-22T15:17:00.004-05:00

I don't use Ubuntu, I use Debian. I tried Kubuntu for a while but I was never really happy with it.

I don't want to be negative, but Ubuntu just doesn't cut the souce with me. When people ask why I don't use Ubuntu, I can come up with many reasons. I've decided to list them here and then perhaps the Ubuntu community can address them within the Ubuntu and related distributions, and win me over. But, I don't expect hat will happen since I am so happy with Debian Sid as it is.

Over all, I want to express that this saddens me. I'd love to see more Linux on the desktop, but I really don't want to suggest to people that Ubuntu is the way to go. I feel that KDE has more going for it and that Ubuntu has too many problems. Of course, I am just one person, but here are my main grips with Ubuntu.

(1) Ubuntu packages aren't compatible with Debian yet are called '.deb packages' — makes it very painful to find a Debian package some times, and it's not useful for new users to have two distro packages that are named the same but incompatible. Yes, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, and OpenSuse (and others, I am sure) all use the .rpm format, but they have this same issue and that doesn't make it OK. Please, rename your packages .ubu or keep them compatible.

(2) I really dislike Gnome desktop and feel its extremely limiting in what you can do with it and how the defaults are usually poor decisions, IMHO. As long as Gnome is the main focus of Ubuntu, I am not interested.

(3) Ubuntu it's incredibly unstable and has issues that no other Linux distro that I've tried has. Others may disagree, but in my experience the Ubuntu packages have many issues that don't affect other distros. Check this bug that has been open for over a year https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/119730

(4) as a KDE user, the Kubuntu is horrible; lots of KDE people feel this way. If you want to try KDE, don't expect to really get a feel for it with Kubuntu.

(5) KDE doesn't get much attention even though its claimed to be an equal desktop. Kubuntu also gets the short end when any new system tools are created by the Ubuntu devs or community. Free Software shouldn't focus on excluding a major DE from innovations.

(6) I've never once had a successful upgrade from one release to the next. This may be because I've installed 3rd party repos, but if needed apps aren't provided by the distro, what is a user to do? Once even without these 3rd party repos it still failed. I've never had this issue with Debian.

(7) Cananocal releases LTS versions with new software like PulseAudio, which has caused a lot of issues for people; a LTS should NOT have untested software.

(8) Bug reports go for a long time with out being addressed, and then the response becomes, "The next version of Ubuntu is out; upgrade to that and tell us if it is fixed". Bugs should be fixed in this release, not pushed off to the next. What if a user's environment demands that they stay at release 8.04LTS or whatever? Here is one example of many like this that have been responded to bug reports https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/118842/comments/15

(9) Bug reports then get closed due to lack of attention, when its the developer's lack of attention that defines this, in my opinion and experience.

(10) I'll file a wish for newer versions of software, and the release team would respond with, "Too late for the next release, we'll get the one after that" — when (1) each release should have been synced with newer software already, but it's not happening, and (2) they'll then miss the software upgrade for the next release also. Here is a good example of this, with each comment promising it'll be available for the next release https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kmediafactory/+bug/194438

These are only 10 of the issues that I've had with Ubuntu, but they're enough to keep me away. I am sure others have disagreements with me over some of these issues, and I would like to see Free Software and Linux succeed but it seems to me that Cananocal needs some major improvements.

Two wishes for Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

2009-06-16T07:47:00.002-05:00

The KDE Desktop people and the GNOME Desktop people are joining forces this year for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I have two requests which I am sure won't get addressed, but here we go anyways :)

1. Let the file picker dialog (Open, Save, and Save as) for any application bring up the DE file picker, not the file picker based on that toolkit. For example, if I use Handbrake (a GTK app), I want the file picker to use my KDE file picker on my KDE system. GNOME users should get their native file picker also when using the great KDE apps available to them.

2. Let 'single-click to open' or 'double-click to open' work (and be set) across desktops. In my KDE 4.2.4 (Debian Sid) I very much like my single-click policy, but when I use a Gnome app I have to double-click every file and folder to navigate anywhere (usually in relation to Wish 1, above). I am guessing there is a way to set GNOME to single-click but likely I would need to fully install GNOME in order to find the one-of-a-million config apps which does this.

What are your wishes for the joint desktop summit, my readers?

2.6.30 Kernel and Sidux

2009-06-11T07:18:00.002-05:00

Sidux Linux, based on Debian Sid (the 'unstable' branch) and touted as being 'Debian Hot & Spicy!', has released their 2.6.30 kernel with a huge surprise.

If you read around the web about the release of this new kernel, nearly every article discusses increased performance and a large number of new drivers for the 2.6.30 kernel release. But within Sidux, the kernel developer slh has decided to remove all non-Free (Libre) firmware from the Sidux kernels. The result is poor hardware performance within Sidux 2.6.30 kernels, at least thus far according to rants on the OFTC irc network on the #sidux and #smxi channels.

On my own system, my ATi Radeon card has much worse performance (under the Sidux 2.6.30 kernel) with the XOrg radeon driver or the XOrg radeonhd driver, both of which were suppose to be improved with the 2.6.30 kernel. Perhaps my drivers need to be at a newer version for the improvement to be seen, but there shouldn't be a regression. IRC forums suggested that I download the firmware from the internet (providing a link for me, even) but performance didn't improve. Graphics are still choppy when scrolling, and my fan was running higher than ever -- until I rebooted back into 2.6.29 for now.

Removing the non-Free bits from a kernel does increase the "Free Software" aspect of a kernel, which I do appreciate and support. But at the cost of hardware functionality, for many users, without warning? Had I wanted to be that in tune with Free/Libre software I could be running gNewSense Linux. Debian has long been a promoter of Software Libre and had struck a balance with FLOSS and closed firmware within the kernel; Sidux was supposed to be as close to Debian as possible, and thereforseemed to followed the same 'binary bits' philosophy, but no more.

Debian itself isn't yet at the 2.6.30 kernel and I don't know what they will do. Sidux may fix this, perhaps by a seperate firmware package to install, or perhaps the pressure will force slh to put the firmware back in, or perhaps another kernel will be available in the repositories. If something doesn't happen, however, I see Sidux alianating many of its user base.

Frustrations with help for a newbie

2009-05-04T16:00:00.002-05:00

I recently set some friends up with Debian Sid using the KDE4 desktop (4.1.0 i think; I am waiting to do their update to 4.2.2 and it may well be 4.2.3 or higher at that point!) and I got a call for help with the Gimp.

This user had used the Gimp on his Windows XP setup before but was never impressed with its strange* functionality. On desktop Linux, however, Gimp is king for photo editing, although Krita is coming along (and has some strange functionality of its own, IMHO).

His question: "How do I make a layer, or parts of a layer, transparent to 20%?"

Seemed simple enough to me, but a few moment of poking around andI had to confess that I didn't know. I walked him through firing up Konversation and got him on the #gimp IRC channel for some help. I joined the channel also to make sure things would work and to help him if needed.

He asked his question, "How do I make a layer, or parts of a layer, transparent to 20%?" and the response was, "Use a mask." Not, "Use a mask and go to the Layer menu and set transparency at ...." or "Here is a tutorial," just "Use a mask."

I followed along and added a mask to my own setup... and then I was completely lost. White? Black? Grey? What do these mean? Where are the tooltips? A google search of YouTube brought up a video showing how to somewhat blend one layer into another, but at no point was it clear on how to fade a top layer to let the bottom show through.

My friend said after a few minutes with little help, "I think i got it, thanks" and logged off. Maybe he did, but I sure didn't. I am not sure why he didn't stick around to wait for more assistance, but he left in a hurry. And the initial 'helper' never offered more help than, "I said, use a mask."

I am not saying that the Gimp is broken, but I would like to see it better. I am not saying that the help wasn't there, because an answer was provided quickly, if without depth. I am not saying my friend wasn't guilty of not RTFM, because he certainly didn't (nor have I).

But if we want people to use the software, we have to have the patience to walk someone through their issue until it is resolved, if we have this ability. If we don't have the knowledge or patience, then we shouldn't be offering help at all.

Am I wrong? Does someone have another take on this? Does someone have a concise answer to my friends' question?

*that is just how Photoshop users see it, no bones about it. I don't even use Photoshop now, and only used it a very little bit about 6 years ago, and I still find the Gimp painful and confusing. Its not holdover use patterns from another app, its just not how my brain works. Nor others' brains, by the common reactions that are out there.

GRUB Stage 1.5: Error 2 — HowTo fix

2009-04-29T12:21:00.003-05:00

After moving my Debian Sid install from an older AMD Athlon XP+ to a newer computer with Intel Pentium D, dual-core setup, I also had a whole new kit to deal with. New motherboard, new video card (from NVidia to onboard ATi, and then to a purchased ATi card), and also some older parts made the move with me...

Anyways, after I did all of this and struggled with the ATi drivers (eventually giving up and just using the instantly-implemented XOrg drivers), my whole computer seemed kinda sluggish. Video playback was choppy especially...

So I decided to try Sidux, which is based on Debian Sid but has some 'enhancements'. Last night I installed it onto my ATA drive /dev/hda1 (so Debian used to call it), with my storage drives still being two SATA drives. When I booted the Sidux LiveCD it called my ATA drive /dev/sdc so I installed it there (yes I mounted the drive to be sure!) but when I rebooted, I got this:

Loading GRUB
Grub Stage 1.5

Error 2

Eventually I found that the drives were being called different things by the BIOS when booting from a CD than what they're named when booting from the hard drive (ODD!?) and so I just had to unplug my two SATA drives, boot and install to the only remaining drive partition (now labeled as /dev/sda1), and power down. Then I reattached my SATA drives and when I booted, everything worked perfectly.

The Sidux system is very snappy, and I have loaded KDE 4.2.2-2 from Debian Sid and all seems to be great so far! Still, I wonder about some of their changes, like why they chose to use Runlevel 5 rather than Debian's default Runlevel 2 for graphics and networking, and likely some others that I've not come across yet...

Happy to have a system that can be fully reinstalled in a few hours time with everything up-to-date and all of my devices working, but not happy how my BIOS handles its hard drives but whatever, its fixed!

Free 3D Video Drivers needed to spread the Linux Desktop

2009-03-06T07:35:00.004-06:00

Desktop use of GNU/Linux is on the rise, and one of the factors leading people towards its use is videos such as these, showing off the newest KDE4 effects, the new Elive distribution with E17, or Compiz effects in Gnome.

However, to get these effects on a KDE or Gnome desktop, you must* use a 3D-accelerating hardware driver for your video card. Most video cards are produced by NVidia, ATi, and Intel, but of these three, currently only Intel has advanced Free/Libre/OpenSource drivers, used by Xorg in your system the moment X is installed.

If you have a computer with a built-in Intel video 'card', your 3D graphics and the effects that you see in those videos should work out of the box after installing a modern Linux distribution. Debian Sid with KDE 4.2 works great on my EeePC 701, for example, without any extra work on my part.

If you have an NVidia or ATi card, however, life isn't so easy. The *buntu people have Envy which assists with installing a closed, proprietary driver, but it's not perfect. As I am not interested in running *buntu, and it has failed for me in the past for Debian installations, I have to pass on this one.

The point is, installing these closed GPU drivers on one distribution or another is filled with occasional successes and (more often) failures. I have to say, NVidia seems to work a lot more often than ATi driver installations, and I maybe should have bought another NVidia card when I recently upgraded. I went with an ATi RadeonHD 3450, however, because of the lure of Free Software drivers....

Free Software drivers are in the works for both ATi and NVidia cards. ATi has released documentation since their purchase by AMD, leading to the FLOSS drivers 'radeon' and 'radeonhd'. My card, an ATi 3450 that I purchased with the express intent to use the radeonhd drivers, isn't yet supported for 3D but support for this functionality is in the works. See its progress here:
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Unfortunately for all Free Software users, and especially for the developer himself, Novell has layed off Luc Verhaegen, so that is one fewer developer working on getting 3D Acceleration in the RadeonHD drivers. The RadeonHD page once said to expect 3D Acceleration in the RadeonHD driver in 2009 Q1, which is now; this has since been changed with the loss of a developer and the 3D support is in development.

Likewise, for NVidia cards there is a FLOSS driver being written, named 'nouveau'. This driver is expected to be the default NVidia-hardware driver in the next Fedora release, warts and all, while its developers try to iron out its issues. Red Hat recently hired another developer to work on this driver, which is excellent news.

This driver also has Feature Matrix of its progress, available here:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix

As Desktop Linux and Free Software both grow in use, open and unfettered hardware access for driver writers is essential. For years, FLOSS supporters have written and campaigned both NVidia and ATi hardware manufacturers to open their drivers, and for years we've been shot down. Now the Linux community, including Novell and Red Hat, are taking matters into their own hands by writing the Free drivers instead of getting the drivers Freed from the corporations.

Unfortunately, this lets NVidia off the hook somewhat. ATi released the documentation to assist with writing this driver, but NVidia will get great graphical performance on their cards without helping the FLOSS community in any way.

This is the reason that I bought the ATi card, even though I knew my closed drivers installation would be difficult (I've given up), I also knew the Free drivers were coming and I wanted to support the company that supports the community.

* Enlightenment DR16 and Enlightenment DR17 both do not need 3D-enabled Graphics drivers to do some of their amazing desktop work. However, using these window managers is less common than KWin, Metacity, or Compiz.

HowTo: Reset the XOrg configuration file in Debian

2009-02-12T07:52:00.003-06:00

Here is a walk-through to resetting your XOrg configuration file (located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf if you want to see what you have now) to some very basic settings. This won't take into account, as far as I know, proprietary drivers nor touch-screen drivers and geometry, all of which can be added into this file in some way or another.

What is X you might ask? Back in the day there was a graphical 'windowing' interface named W for Unix systems. This allows graphics to be on the screen, the mouse pointer to do stuff, etc...The successor to W is... X, which does the same job of allowing graphics on your computer. Maybe some day there will be a Y and a Z?

Anyways, resetting that file:

In a terminal (I use Konsole on KDE), run as root:

shell# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

or as your normal user, if you have sudo access:

shell$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

From here you will have a few pages to go through; for the most part you can accept the defaults, but here is a brief overview of each page and the settings that I've chose. This is NOT a graphical application, so your mouse won't work here — use the [Tab] key to move around to various fields and [Enter] to 'click' a button ([Space Bar] may work also).

Run the above command, and on Page X you'll see...

Page 1. Use kernel framebuffer device interface?
No

Page 2. Autodetect keyboard layout?
Your call, but US keybd select No; if you don't know if you have a US keybd or if it has a lot of odd buttons, select Yes. Note that selecting Yes will give MORE PAGES than what I have listed here.

3. Keybd layout:
us
Well, I've got a US keybd; if you have something else or selected Yes to the first question, this may be something else.

4. XKB rule set to use:
xorg

5. Page 5 is some info; hit [tab] to highlight and then [enter] to pick

6. Keybd model:
accept default (pc104 on my computer)

7. Users of U.S. English keyboards should generally leave this entry blank
Click OK

8. Keyboard variant:
I kept myne blank, as recommended in Page 7

9. Experienced users can use any options compatible with the selected XKB model, layout and variant.
[Tab] to get to and [Enter] to move forward

10. Keyboard options:
I prefer my [Caps Lock] key to function as another [Control] Key (although I've really modified it to be a compose key in KDE, and likely this can be done at this screen — anyone know how?) and my 'Windows' key the function as a Meta key. If you want these enter this info on this tenth screen:
ctrl:nocaps altwin:meta_win

That should be it to recreate your XOrg file, now located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the Terminal should also report where your previous XOrg configuration file is located (backed up), if there was one before.

To test your new XOrg configuration file, restart X from your KDE or GNOME login screen, or reboot the whole computer if you're a Windows user.

Package Management Basics on Debian GNU/Linux

2009-02-03T07:45:00.004-06:00

One of the 'hardest' parts of Linux for new users is often the installation of new software, or the understanding of how this all works. Generally a modern distribution has software 'repositories' and overall they function something like this:

You have a text file with a list of internet addresses (URLs) and some additional information about that URL; these are the Repositories and act somewhat like a 'catalog of software'. You can shop from the distribution's usual 'catalogs', or you can add new 'catalogs' from which to obtain new software.
Your system's Package Manager uses this information to contact the Repository to get the most up-to-date list of that available software
A user can search for software by name, function, or other criteria; if the software looks interesting, the user selects that software to install and the Package Manager may alert the user that some additional software will be needed. This is like ordering a kitchen knife for example, and the catalog also makes sure that you get the sharpener and the cutting board. Or something like that, basically its additional software that the first piece relies upon to work.

Seems simple enough to me. I run Debian, so my list of software repositories is located in a single file at /etc/apt/sources.list and there can be additional repositories (well, text files with repositories written in them) in the folder at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ The file's format is simple enough once you understand it:

type / location / branch / sections
deb http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

In the above two repositories, the Types are 'deb' for programs and 'deb-src' for source code

The location for each is the URL ' http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/'

The Branch part, for Debian systems at least, is 'stable' or 'testing' or 'unstable' or 'experimental'. Note that these can also be referred to by their release names, which do not change — currently 'stable' is Etch but in a few weeks it is expected to be 'Lenny'. Software starts in Experimental and works its way to Unstable and then as more bugs are cleaned up, it works its way to Testing, and then every couple of years the software in Testing is released as a new version of Stable.

The Sections for a repository depend on what that repo has available; the general Debian repositories usually have three: main, contrib, and non-free. Depending on the licensing and distribution terms, an official package will go into one of these three Sections. Other repositories may only have one section.