Big Fat Ostrich

Hey remember when VirtualBox came out and everyone thought that the VBoxGina module (for automated logons) name was so hilarious? Well me neither.

Still, it got me thinking about some of the weirdest linux packages out there. You know the ones. The ones that, if you’re Googling them while at work, you make damn sure to include the word Linux or Ubuntu in your search. Because surprising results can happen when you Google for ‘man beef’. Ok, it wasn’t surprising at all.

Anyway, here’s a short list of some of the weirdest linux/Ubuntu packages out there in repository land:

scrot – Which is a command line screen capture utility, i.e., SCReen shOT. That means if you have to look at the man page, you’ll be forced to type “man scrot”. Fine. You don’t think that’s so bad? How about:

scrotwm – This is a dynamic tiling window manager. And yes, this means that you’ll eventually be typing “man scrotwm”. I doesn’t get more obvious than that. Oh wait it does:

liboobs-1-4 – Which I was surprised was installed on my machine. No, there’s no man page for liboobs-1-4, but it does provide a GObject based interface for system-tools-backends. Yay.

beef – That’s right.Open up a shell and type ‘man beef’ and you’ll get the man page for ‘beef’ aka the flexible Brainfuck interpreter. Brainfuck has its own Wikipedia entry cause it has such an awesome name. Brainfuck is basically a programming language written in C that’s so minimalist that it’s basically unreadable. If your colleague is using it, you probably need to pie them in the face with a textbook. Still, beef is pretty damn efficient. Bastards.

And that’s all I got. I could go on about ‘tar‘ and the hilariousness of typing ‘man tar‘ 20 times a day, but that one’s been over done to death.Either way, let us know if you’ve come across some crazily named packages yourself. Do it.

* This isn’t related to that old Man Beef Hoax. Or maybe it is. I don’t care either way.

I’ve been wanting to write about my last upgrade for weeks and weeks, but we got all freaky with a bunch of Bobbipins posts instead!

So finally, after weeks of anticipation, here it is: My extensive review about upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat.

It went real smooth.

Seriously. That’s all I got. Each subsequent upgrade with Ubuntu becomes easier and easier, which really translates into boringer and boringer! I don’t know…it’s like the whole OS is so stable at this point, it just makes me want to yawn. Maybe I need to install Beryl or Compiz or something.

Anyway. Don’t you feel like punting that meerkat up there?

You know how it is with music. Sometimes the more you hear about a band, the more you want to hear less about them. After Arcade Fire‘s Funeral, I had reached my saturation point. But after staying away from them for a bit, I came back and gave them an unbiased ear, and yeah, still like them. Neon Bible did less for me, but The Suburbs is working out just fine.

Ok, so the whole point of this post is to tie in some Linuxing with Arcade Fire. Can I do it? Hell yeah.

Thing is, they put out an interactive video for We Used To Wait. You need to go to thewildernessdowntown.com, type in the address where you grew up, and BANG, personalized video. I think this works really well as streets from your upbringing are integrated into the video. Not like I got sentimental and cried or anything, but it just worked nicely.

Ok, fine! I cried, ok? I got all weepy and pathetic and I fucking cried my ass off.

Anyway.

The interactive video at thewildernessdowntown.com is an html5 + Google Chrome experiment. Maybe the first of its kind. So for the full effect, you need to install Chrome. And if you’re using Ubuntu, here’s how to do it.

Sidenote: Don’t do like I did and try to run it on Chromium. Chrome and Chromium are two different forks. Chromium is the development package, where Chrome is your friendly Google browser. If you’re not sure, just check the help/about menu. Don’t be like me and spend 20 minutes waiting for the bar to go past 91%!

So yeah, of course you can download and install directly from the Chrome website, but who does that? This is how I did it for my amd64:

sudo wget -q -O – https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

And that’s it. You’re done.

Now launch Chrome, go to thewildernessdowntown.com, and plug in the address where you grew up. Enjoy.

But if you REALLY can’t be bothered to do it (you lazy bastard), you can have the non-personalized experience by watching someone else’s memories:

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 tweaking 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 crap 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. I’m 100% sure that this has nothing to do with my Dell Inspiron I3.

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 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…