Big Fat Ostrich

OMFG and Double You Tee Eff, the people at Songbird announced that they’ll no longer be developing my favorite music playin’ application for Linux anymore. That’s right.

No mo.

Which kind of sucks since it’s so lightweight and basically does just what I need it to: play music. Yeah, go ahead and read about why I liked it so much over here in an earlier post.

But why? WHY INDEED. Let’s just say that the people over at Pioneers of the Inevitable have decided to focus on Songbird for Windows and Mac OS only. At least that’s what’s stated over in the Songbird Wikipedia entry. Songbird will actually still be available for Linux, just no longer supported.

But there’s a silver lining because some Songbird community members are going trying to continue developing an open source music player under the guise of Nightingale, which will basically be a branch of Songbird 1.8.

That’s all I really have to say about it. I mean, what else is there to say? I’ll still use Songbird on Ubuntu 10.04, and when Nightingale becomes available, I”ll test it out. I’m not desperate enough to go back to Amarok 2. I’m definitely never going there again. Never!

Yeah, I did it. I finally did it! I bought a laptop. A Dell Inspiron Core i3 64 bit 15 inch thing to be exact. It came preloaded with Windows 7 and the usual Dell crap and McAfee, which has a generous 10 day free trial. Wow guys. That was awesomely generous indeed!

So after about a week of clicking this thing, checking out that thing, and generally yawning over the whole Windows 7 experience, I took the next plunge: INSTALL UBUNTU 10.04 LTS!

It worked out stellarly.

I’m glad I waited the week. I was going to install Karmic on it, but then I read that Karmic doesn’t support i3 processors. Lucid Lynx does, and the install was smooooth. In fact, this release is all about change. No longer can we refer to Ubuntu as “Brownbuntu”. That’s right. They’ve removed that hideous brown theme and went with a purpley splash screen. It’s a little sleeker than the last release, and maybe even edging a little closer to Mac OS in style. Still, it feels like Linux and performs great.

Everything works. Video, audio, and the integrated wireless card. It’s kind of ridiculous for me to call it an integrated wireless card in this day and age, isn’t it? It’s a laptop! Everything is integrated!

So, after the install, I installed VirtualBox OSE and installed Windows 7 as a VM. That’s where Windows 7 will live. Forever. And with the VM running, you can really feel that you’re getting your value out of those 4 gigs of RAM. You don’t even feel it, even with Compiz running which is on by default. I may tweak Lynx to use less memory, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that there is no lag whatsoever, no matter what I do!

Now. About the D-Link 615 piece of shit router that I bought from  Dell with my order. I’m about to break the thing in half and go back to my wired router. Wireless is fine. Wired is fine. Browsing anywhere on the ‘ternets? Fine! How about ssh from my laptop back to my wired server? It doesn’t fucking work. I can reach my wired network from my wired machine. But the router seems to be blocking ssh and port 443 just from the wireless network.

And yeah, I forwarded ports 443 and 22. Don’t think I didn’t, cause I did.

I’ll let you know how it all works out!

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.

Well it’s time to upgrade and say goodbye to Jaunty Jackalope. With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic Koala, it had to be done.

Karmic Koala was released on 29 October 2009, and while I am a little late on my review, I will say that I wanted to wait it out. After the initial release, I was hearing a lot of grumbling about slowness and issues with upgrading as opposed to a fresh install.

The last time I wrote a review of the Ubuntu upgrade process was way back in April of 2009.There were some issues with that tracker bug, but that was finally resolved. This time however, the upgrade went really smooth. Actually, let me back up a bit: The first time I tried to upgrade (2 months ago) to Karmic Koala, I used my old PIII 500Mhz laptop as a guinea pig. The exercise went horribly wrong, and to no fault of Ubuntu. Yes, my old Dell Latitude PIII finally bought the farm. That 20Gig hard drive has done it’s final spin.

So I had no choice but to bite the bullet and try the upgrade on my main machine.

I’m happy to say that the upgrade went perfectly smooth. I was a little worried that some packages might break considering the history of package installation that my machine has, but that didn’t happen.

The only issue I had was upgrading Virtual Box once Karmic was installed. If you use Virtual Box 2.0, you’ll need to first remove it (as root) with apt-get remove virtualbox-2.2.6.31-160, then download Virtual Box 3.12 from here and install it like so: dpkg -i virtualbox-3.0_3.0.12-54655_Ubuntu_jaunty_i386.deb

There was some initial slowness during the first boot, which is normal. Thunderbird and Firefox took forever to load. After the second boot, everything seems fine using the 2.6.31-16 kernel. Other than that, I have nothing bad to say about the Karmic Koala upgrade, so far. Time will tell.

I will say that the new splash screen is pretty slick. Click to enlarge:

Addendum I: After using Karmic Koala for about three hours, a nasty little bug was revealed. It turns out that a ton of useless messages will get logged to /var/log/messages, kern.log, and syslog. The logs fill up to the point where / or /var/log fills up. I’m really surprised that this made it out into the field, and it’s extremely annoying. The messages in question look like this:

Dec 1 08:02:42 compname kernel: [35031.545468] CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 13710)
Dec 1 08:02:42 compname kernel: [35031.545470] CPU0: Temperature/speed normal

Good thing though, is that there’s a simple temporary fix that you can use from the Ubuntu forums. Check out post #57 here. Once you apply the fix, backup or delete the huge log files and restart rsyslog.

Aside from that (I know, it’s a pretty major bug), Karmic Koala is running very fast and snappy. I’m inclined to say that the slowness I experienced with Jaunty was the fault of Firefox. Now, with Firefox 3.5.6 on Karmic, browsing is extremely fast. I’ve been testing browsing in Karmic using Chrome 4 as well, and page loading is very fast there too.

Addendum II: After a good 4 days of using Karmic, I’m really satisfied with performance.  Chrome 4 is good, but not there 100% yet. All apps seem to be loading fast, and my Windows XP Virtual Machine is smoother than before. Plus, Firefox is still surprising me with page loading,  especially when clicking through Adgitize blogs and ads.

m.

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 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…

top - 11:27:57 up 2 days,  2:51,  2 users,  load average: 227.75, 225.36, 224.84
Tasks: 958 total,  72 running, 877 sleeping,   0 stopped,   9 zombie
Cpu(s): 33.1% us, 66.9% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   4086484k total,  4009724k used,    76760k free,   130860k buffers
Swap:  8388496k total,      136k used,  8388360k free,  3163560k cached

What else can I say, except that it’s a bad scene all around. And for privacy sake and non-disclosure, I can’t really talk about it. In fact, I cannot even kill -9 any of those zombie processes. Plus, I’ve never seen that many of them all at once before. Yes, this server is in one sorry state. So I’ll have to resort to a rare Linux event: a reboot.

How embarassing.

Two Words: Quake Live

I only recently discovered it since I haven’t been in a gaming mood at all for months. Truth be told, I’m not much of a gamer, but I get an itchy trigger finger every so often. Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe it’s because I played paintball for the first time in my life 2 weeks ago.

Quake Live is based on Quake III Arena and essentially grew out of the Quake family of First Person Shooters. The thing about Quake Live is that it runs entirely within a web browser. No small feat, but the guys at Id are practically immortal in that thing that they do. After all, this is the company that brought us Commander Keen and Doom (which scared the crap out of me when I first played the demo off of a diskette on my old i386). Coming from someone who doesn’t know a lot about the gaming industry (Me), I think they’re pretty well respected all around.

Quake Live is also entirely free and would be so much fun to play if my computer could actually support it. It’s my video card which is really the problem. I just can’t render anything fast enough so I have to live vicariously through my friends who can actually play it. And the recommended system requirements are not all that far fetched either:

Intel CPU- Pentium 4 1.4GHz
AMD CPU- Athlon XP 1800+
Nvidia Graphics Card- Geforce 6500
ATI & Intel Graphics Card- Radeon X1270
RAM- 256M
Hard Disk Space- 1G
Direct X- 9

Needless to say, I meet all the requirements except the graphics card and I’m not even going to divulge what I have since it’s just too embarrassing and painful to talk about.

But trust me when I say that Quake Live looks awesome. My friends were having such a great time playing while I watched and longed for the day when I too could get in on that sweet, sweet frag action on the 25 or so maps that Quake Live offers. On a Core 2 Duo with a respectable graphics card, the game play is snappy. Stats for your character are also maintained online, which is pretty cool. Sadly, I don’t have any stats yet but when I do, they’ll be attached to ‘pwnz0rze’. The ‘o’ is actually a zero!

Oh yeah, one last thing. Quake Live can be played on Linux, Windows and yes, on a Mac. That’s the beauty of in-browser game play. I have yet to see it played on a Mac (if you have, let me know how it went), but Windows and Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora 11) were flawless.

Lata

M.

I found that this is the easiest way to go about installing VMware on Ubuntu 8.10  (and no, I still haven’t upgraded to Jaunty)

Go to the VMware download page, and grab the bundle. You have the choice to download the rpm, but trust me on this one; the bundle is what you want.

Once the download is complete, make the file executable:

sudo chmod 655 VMware-Player-2.5.2-156735.i386.bundle (or whichever version you downloaded)

Then run it as root:

sudo sh VMware-Player-2.5.2-156735.i386.bundle

Surprise! We’re treated to a nice graphical installer. Follow the prompts (there are few), and let the installer complete. Once it’s done, you should find VMware Player under Applications > System Tools > VMware Player. Go ahead and launch it and accept the EULA.  Then browse to your VM images and you’re done.

m.