Big Fat Ostrich

So I finally installed the ever popular Linux Mint 12 aka Lisa. The last time I tried Linux Mint was version 3.0 (Cassandra), which was back in 2007 (eons ago in Internet time). Back then, Linux Mint was a little shaky and one horribly broken  upgrade had me reverting back to Ubuntu.

Well, alot has changed since then and Linux Mint 12 appears very solid!

Instead of wiping my recent installation of Ubuntu 11.10 (even though I kind of want to), I installed Linux Mint as a virtual machine in VirtualBox. There’s not much to say about it except that the installation was hassle free. Typical installation, where you hit next a bunch of times. You can choose the advanced options of course, but we’re really trying out Mint for its simplicity.

Linux Mint is a Debian based distro, so like Ubuntu, apt-get is your package manager, and best friend. After using Arch Linux on my other machine for awhile, I have to say that apt-get is still the best. Pacman is fine, just a little too manual.

New features in Linux Mint 12 include Gnome 3 and MGSE aka Mint Shell Gnome Extensions which gives the desktop a super slick look. We used to make fun of Mint and call it Lounge Linux because of it’s pseudo-stylish look, but it really does look good. And the whole feel is just fast and snappy. There’s also MATE, which is a fork of Gnome 2. However, the dudes at Linux Mint central say that it’s not 100% stable yet so I’m not going to get into that now.

Overall the whole thing feels fast, and I’m running it on a mere 512M of RAM. I should say that I initially tried to install Mint using a bare minimum of 256M and that caused the installation to crash. I know. What was I thinking?

There are also tons of visual improvements, slick wallpapers, and MGSE doesn’t have the convoluted look of Unity. Unity feels like it’s there to confuse you. MGSE and Mint just feel better. Like you can just start using the OS without having to play scavenger hunt for all your apps. And it’s all running on the new 3.0 kernel.

Last new thing: I was surprised to see that Linux Mint is using Duck Duck Go as its default search engine. Yep. Where every other OS just assumes that you’re going to want to use Google, in Mint it’s Duck Duck Go. But don’t worry: you can use Google too if you want.

Aside from the weird name, Duck Duck Go is a really great search engine. I think many of us have gotten to a point where we use Google out of habit. Back in the old prospector days of the internet, we used to use multiple search engine all the time because no single search engine had all the results we wanted. Then Google changed all that by becoming so great. However, Duck Duck Go is very good and much cleaner than Google at this point. One of its best features is that its results act like a dynamic feed, so all you have to do is keep scrolling down the page for more results, kind of like Twitter does. With Google, you still have to click next page, next page, next page, etc. Which is so 3 years ago.

Duck Duck Go also has a strict privacy policy where they state that they do not collect any personal information.

All that to say, give Duck Duck Go a try. I’m challenging myself to use it for a week even if I’m having trouble getting used to looking at that bow tie wearing duck. And the name. Again: What is with people using animals in names for software and websites? Yeah, I’m looking at you, IPchicken.

One last thing! If you want a clue about how amazing Linux Mint 12 is, do a Google search for something like Linux Mint 12 Issues or Problems with Linux Mint 12. The results of my searches were mainly Linux Mint reviews, and for the most part, positive ones. The issues that people have been having have been minor so far, which is a good sign.

Ok, I need to go so let’s end this thing: Linux Mint 12 looks and feels great. Try it and adopt it.

I was going to list a whole bunch of reasons why I’ll be switching from Ubuntu 11.10 to Arch Linux, but my decision really just comes down to 1 thing:

Ubuntu has gotten fat and lazy.

Actually, Ubuntu always was fat. It’s just that each subsequent install/upgrade seems to add more and more weight to the overall operating system. I may have said it before, but Ubuntu is starting to feel like the Windows of Linux distributions: bloated.

So, we’ll be test driving Arch Linux and its minimalist approach. Since I’ve never installed it before, I’m kind of expecting the process to be somewhere between Gentoo and Debian, but hopefully more Debian. Gentoo was a great learning experience, but god was it painful to install back in the day. Anyway, I’ll write about the experience next week or something.

One other reason why I think moving to Arch Linux will be a good thing: more focus on scripting and command line functions. See, as fat and lazy as Ubuntu is, it’s made me fat and lazy too. I need some more sweet command line action to sharpen my skills.

Later

Yes, today was the day of the upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10, so let’s talk about that.

Ubuntu 11.10′s friendly alliterated animal name is Oneiric Ocelot. Oneiric is defined as dreamy, which brings me to the riddle I just made up:

Q. Why is Ubuntu 11.10 called ‘Oneiric Ocelot’?
A. Because they were asleep when they made it!

Stop laughing. I’m not joking.

The Upgrade
First of all, the upgrade took over 2 hours! Why? Because we all know that Ubuntu is not known for it’s slim girlish figure anymore. A few nicknames came to mind while watching some of the many packages get installed: Bloatbuntu, Ubun Too Goddamn Fat, and Moo-buntu. Yes, this is one fat OS.

The upgrade itself was smooth. After all, you can’t do anything but make dinner or watch T.V. while the packages are installed and downloaded. Why? Because networking is disabled throughout the whole process. Well done.

Ubuntu 11.10 boasts a hideous new login screen
I noticed two things once the upgrade was complete and I logged in for the first time: Oneiric Ocelot is incredibly sluggish when launching apps. 4 gigs of RAM should be more than enough on a linux system, but not here. Ubuntu has become the Windows of linux distros. Fat, bloated and with way too many processes eating up your cpu.

2nd thing: NO WIRELESS.

Well done Canonical/Ubuntu. Maybe I’m being harsh, but can you have everything work out of the box for once? Least of all the wireless. I’m pretty sure that in 2011, wireless technology is kinda a requirement. Jesus. I kind of expected to have to re-configure the desktop environment after upgrading, but the network settings? You’re kidding, right?

As I write this, I can connect to my wireless network so the driver seems to be fine, but I can’t ping anything. Yep. I get an ip address from DHCP, but no ping and no internet. Yes, it’s back to wired for now. Slow clap.

3.0 Kernel
Oneiric Ocelot uses kernel 3.0. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux. It was Linus Torvalds‘ idea or something like that. It’s kind of cool to see 3.0 after seeing 2.6 for so long, but it’s not making much of a difference, yet. We’ll get a better idea after some testing.

Desktop environments and Unity
Unity is “cute” but not something I’ll be adopting anytime soon. It’s clean but not necessarily optimal. It’s just sluggish. Gnome 3 is not much better, so I switched to Gnome with no effects. Decent, but not great. It should be faster once I tweak the performance. Again. Like after every upgrade. Probably should have forced it to leave my previous settings.

The Verdict: Oneiric Ocelot is a lazy cow. Arch Linux is starting to look more attractive. Or maybe a clean Debian install.

P.S. After using Ubuntu 11.10 for awhile I’ve come to really hate the Ubuntu Software Center. It’s ok and does the job eventually, but I feel that Synaptic Package Manager was cleaner, faster and more robust overall. It feels like aesthetics were the main reason that they replaced  the old Synaptic Package Manager with the Ubuntu Software Center.

Awhile back, I raved about MediaTomb and how great it was but there was one little issue that made me try Serviio: streaming subtitles support.

Being able to actually see the subtitles is sort of a big deal when you’re watching someone scream craziness in a Takashi Miike film, so I killed an evening learning how to install Serviio on my Debian LAMP server.

Here are a few preliminaries:

Download and install Serviio:

wget http://download.serviio.org/releases/serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

Unpack it. I did this from my home directory for the hell of it (but you can unpack it anywhere):

tar xvf serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

Install java and ffmpeg if you haven’t already

apt-get install default-jre
apt-get install ffmpeg

Now for the fun part and the major fail of Serviio. Serviio’s one major flaw is that it doesn’t have a web interface. This means that you have to configure it FROM the place that you installed it. Basically, if you’re serving movies or music with Serviio on your network, you have to configure it ON the machine where it’s installed. What is this, 1994? You can workaround this by using VNC or connecting a monitor to your server or whatever your setup is. Up to you.

First run Serviio from the bin directory (you should create an init script for this later)

/serviio-0.5.2/bin/serviio.sh

Now launch the serviio console:

/serviio-0.5.2/bin/serviio-console.sh

When the console launches, you can configure the paths to your media folders, i.e., video, music and photos. Pretty straightforward.

And that’s it! You don’t even need to configure Serviio’s profiles.xml, where you need to tweak mediaTomb’s config.xml to get it to work properly.

Now someone please tell me: How is it that mediaTomb hasn’t figured out how to stream subtitles AND have a kick ass web interface, yet, Serviio DOES support streaming subtitles but DOESN’T have a web interface? How is this possible? Please, someone introduce the mediaTomb people with the Serviio gang so that they can have sex and give birth to a fully functioning piece of software.

I picked up a 40″ Samsung 550 Series LCD the other day. Initially, my plan was to stream digital video from USB storage through a media streamer like Apple TV, Boxee, or the Seagate Free agent GoFlex. Turns out this TV is pretty well equipped to just play video streamed from my Debian server, so it pretty much cuts out the middle man.

Samsung has an application called Allshare which you can install on Windows. Mediatomb is an alternative to Allshare if you’re running Linux.

It depends what you want, so if you want a real media center like Boxee or XBMC, use your PS3 or Xbox or something like that. I didn’t feel like buying yet another box/appliance so I installed Mediatomb on my Debian machine and was watching my shows in about an hour. It’s programmed in C++ and has a simple xml control file. It’s really easy to install, so here’s how.

Step1: Install Mediatomb:

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

Step 2: Configure Mediatomb:

Add the following to the server section of config.xml. The following DLNA code is the key:

<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming” />
<add header=”contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=01700000000000000000000000000000″ />
</custom-http-headers>

You’ll probably also want to configure your mime types like this in import/mappings/extension-mimetype

<map from=”avi” to=”video/x-msvideo”/>
<map from=”ts” to=”video/mpeg”/>
<map from=”divx” to=”video/mpeg”/>
<map from=”mp4″ to=”video/MP4V-ES”/>
<map from=”mkv” to=”video/x-msvideo”/>

Lastly, under section <server> change the following to ‘yes’:

<protocolInfo extend="yes"/>

Source

And that’s pretty much it. You’ll probably want to turn on the GUI initially and you can do that in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml under section <server>:
<ui enabled=”yes”

Now you can configure which folders you’ll want to share to your Samsung 550 series LCD TV by going to the following address. If you have usernames set to ‘on’, the default username/password is mediatomb/mediatomb.

http://localhost:49152/

Enjoy. I’ll be back with some cool mediatomb hacks.

Speaking of being on the bleeding edge of technology, a recent update/upgrade of my Debian server revealed a bug with man-db. Yes. man-db. Out of all places it could have happened, it happened here. It’s shameful!

After upgrading, you might see mandb taking up 100% of your cpu. And not only that, the upgrade is likely to hang on it.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

2653 811 man 20 0 21500 1256 488 R 100 0.1 154:39.62 mandb

This was found in man-db version 2.5.6-4 but it’s already been fixed. You’ll just have to do an apt-get update followed by an apt-get upgrade. After that you should have man-db version 2.5.6-5

You can also look at the bug report here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=562503

Exciting times.

Because sometimes you’re just too lazy to even look in the fridge!

But not too lazy to play with Debian linux.

The Project:
Add a wireless webcam to my Debian server and then stick the camera in my fridge. Then I would only have to browse to a webpage to see if have to do groceries today!

Difficulty Level:
Not that hard to do.

Stupidity Level:
Possibly THE dumbest idea I’ve had in the last 4 years.

Hardware: Linksys has these WVC54GCA wireless webcams that have their own ip address as well as an embedded webserver which you can use instead of configuring apache.

So yeah, providing that your Debian server is already set up with wireless, you can skip the next step. Otherwise:

$ lspci (use lspci to figure out which card you have. That way you’ll know which driver to install)

# m-a a-i madwifi
# modprobe ath_pci

for Broadcom: b43-fwcutter

# apt-get install b43-fwcutter
# modprobe b43

for Intel : firmware-iwlwifi

# apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi
# modprobe iwl4965

Once you have the right drivers installed, you can use something like wicd to get your wireless setup.

Add this repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://apt.wicd.net/ debian extras

# apt-get install wicd

Cool. Now that your wireless web cam is set up, just browse to the ip address that it uses. Mine is at http://192.168.1.105 for example. What’s also cool about the  WVC54GCA having an embedded webserver, is that I can now actually ssh to my fridge. How awesome is that?!

Finally, I can now find out what in the world is in my fridge!

Except I might want to deal with the fact that there is actually no light in the fridge…