Processes started at boot and sysv-rc-conf
The package “sysv-rc-conf” is useful to check which programs are started at boot time on linux (and ubuntu in particular).
Find and chmod
It often happens that I have to change the owner/permissions of directories and files under linux. One could use the recursive chown and chmod but they do not distinguish between files and directories, and so I don’t like them. One slick way is to use the find command, like so:
find . -type d -exec chmod 777 {} ;
find . -type f -exec chmod 666 {} ;Urrah for rsync!
Yeah yeah … long time no post … Anyway, today I downloaded the DVD iso of the latest Mandriva Linux (2006.0 I think) using the Free Download Manager (a freeware download manager, duh!). I like it very much, but the iso I downloaded didn’t have the correct md5 sum, so what do I do? Redownload a 2GB file? Alas, rsync to the rescue. Just type in (on the same line)
rsync carroll.cac.psu.edu::MandrivaLinux/official/iso/2006.0/i586/Mandriva-Linux-Free-2006-DVD.i586.iso ./Mandriva-Linux-Free-2006-DVD.i586.iso
and rsync automatically retransfers only the bad parts of the iso image. So in 5 mins I now have the correct image! Praise Murphy!
FeedBurner
I was hearing the Interview with a FeedBurner of Chris Pirillo, and it got me thinking. One cool thing that Feedburner does, is that it can splice and merge different feeds. And so I did an thus created CarloRSS: a complete digest of my blog posts, my del.icio.us links, and my flickr photos. Maybe, I’m starting to grok RSS…
Google Earth Screencast
Hi! I just did my first screencast! A presentation of Google Earth. Look at it, it’s cool!
Frilling Webdav and Microsoft WinXP SP2 IE6
I set up a WebDAV on my server, but it’s hard to figure out if it works, if your client doesn’t work properly. I ended up on a page detailing the troubled “Microsoft Way” to discover that IE6 does not really support WebDAV that well. But it was very helpuf to suggest to use a trailing # to circumvent a problem with username and password (which seems to take care of these problems with login procedure too, thankfully). So, now the damn webdav works and so does the client on WinXP, but I’m not sure how I did it. I also installed this patch from Microsoft.
Transparency/translucency on KDE
So, since it was Sunday I decided to waste several hours of my life to do something useless: activate real traslucency on my laptop under Linux. The result are here:
I’m impressed: if you look carefully you can see that both the konsole and the mplayer window (OT: Looks probable we’ll get a Futurama movie: yoohoo!) are both transparent. You can see one blended with the other and you can see the firefox browset below those two. Also notice the gorgeous drop shadows.
How did I manage? Not too hard, after you know what to do 
You first need a recent version of the xorg xwindow server, with the Composite extension. Then activate it by writing
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You also want the programs xcompmgr and transset, but you probably want to grab xcompmgr from here because it has more options than the regular one (under Mandriva, you can get it by urpmi xcompmgr_hack). Then you can kinda follow the instruction for gentoo and you’re good to go.
It’s really too bad that my laptop doesn’t support DRI (it’s a centrino 855GM) and so it becomes dog slow….
Cooperative Linux and X
I decided to fool around CoLinux since it looked like the most promising. I wanted to use it to boot the Linux I have on a different partition. Since it uses a custom kernel I had to copy the modules into the Linux partition and disable all auto-discovery features, so in the end the crucial configuration line is:
<bootparams>2 nopci nopnp noapic nousb acpi=off fastboot root=/dev/cobd0</bootparams>
So my Linux boots, but how about X? There are different solutions, detailed in XCoLinux – Cooperative Linux Wiki and the easiest I found was to set up a tightvnc server and connect via tightvnc. If I wanted to use cygwin as an X server (or client, I think X has the terminologies backward) I would have to install a different X server on Linux and that would cause all kinds of pains. Anyhow, now it works really nice and it’s very very fast (not as fast as native, say 80% using X).
I also tried to start X using the sarge prebuild image and I had use amount of troubles with the fonts. In the end I installed xfs and used that, as detailed in the Q4 of CoLinux Infrequently Asked Questions.
How Chris and Ponzi Fell in Love (Weekly Broadcast)
Well, I listen to podcasts usually while I work out in the gym, but by a stroke of luck I listened to this one during breakfast. Handling free weights and laughing at the same time would not be smart:How Chris and Ponzi Fell in Love (Weekly Broadcast).
Linux under Windows
Well, this stuff is cool! There are a few ways to run Linux under Windows (withouth rebooting, that is).
- VMWare (expensive) or Cooperative Linux (free): I think they work pretty much alike. They are very fast (90% of native speed I would say) and they install an extra network driver win WinXP. The problem is that they run a custom kernel and so one has to install specific kernel modules to make them work, but the preinstalled images work really great!
- QEMU: this is more like an emulator. It is very much slower (say 30% of native speed) but it is a lot less intrusive on the host system and it can run not just linux, but windows and other os. Go to FreeOsZoo for binaries for windows and preformatted images.
- Cygwin: well, this is not really Linux, but just a bunch of applications compiled with a port of GCC to windows. This works really really well if it has the packages you need (LaTeX, Emacs, etc) but compiling new programs by yourself can vary from easy to nearly impossible (PHP for example).
AWStats
Well, I needed more that Webalizer and lo and behold AWStats comes to the rescue! It does also have integration with GeoIP (which is free for countries but paid service for cities, isp, etc). The coolest thing is that it works without access to the log using pslogger so I can track also the other web pages I have on free hosts (which do not give access to the log).
WebSVN bug
I was using WebSVN to browse my subversion repositories, but there is a bug in the latest version. Maybe I should downgrade? Maybe I will just wait for the upgrade. The good thing is that it recognizes TeX files easily and so does enscript. In the meantime, I also installed ViewCVS (the CVS version which supports svn repositories) and it works like a charm. Excellent!
Webminstats
Oh my, this is one sweet package:Webminstats. It works pretty much automatically and give a huge amount of information on the server. WAY easier to install and use than MRTG !
More lighttpd
Ok, installing from source is fun, but I needed a script for init.d (a better way to stop and start the server that killall lighttpd). I just extracted the init.d file from the rpm (which didn’t work on my system for some reason) using rpm2cpio lighttpd-1.3.13-1.i586.rpm | cpio -ivmud
and copied the appropriate file. It works! Praise Murphy!
Lighttpd
Well, that wasn’t too easy… Since I only have 64mb of ram, running apache and mysql uses too much memeory (about 95% of ram and 30mb of swap space), so I tried lighttpd. After fighting a while to get fastcgi working, I decided to install php5 which comes with a php5-fcgi package, which does the trick. The last problem was strange…
Using Firefox trying to open a php file caused the dialog (do you want to download this file?) to pop up. It didn’t take too long to figure out it was a mime problem (altough IE didn’t have any problem at all) so I added .php as a text/html in the lighttpd config, but the problem persisted! Ah! I need to clean the cache! Yes, that did it….
Imported from Blogger!
Well, following the instructions from Catsutorials I was able to import the few posts I had from Blogger. It would support comments, but nobody ever commented anything!
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress!
WordPress
Oh well, I got some space on unixshell so now I should move everything up there.
I started installing WebSVN (nothing too hard, just urpmi WebSVN and modify the config file. Rememer to deactivate cache).
Then WordPress caused a little bit of a problem, since it wouldn’t let me use a different user, and I had to go with root and ‘localhost’ as domain. Maybe it’s a mysql4.1 problem, and I should use
SET PASSWORD FOR 'wordpressusername'@'hostname' = OLD_PASSWORD('password');Compiling subversion
So, I’ve been trying to compile subversion. After many tries I think I got the gist of it. Just have to remember that not installing in standard places I might have to deal with libraries issues:
Libraries have been installed in: /home/mazzac//lib If you ever happen to want to link against installed librariesin a given directory, LIBDIR, you must either use libtool, andspecify the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR'flag during linking and do at least one of the following: - add LIBDIR to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH' environment variable during execution - add LIBDIR to the `LD_RUN_PATH' environment variable during linking - use the `-Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR' linker flag See any operating system documentation about shared libraries formore information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages.
Subversion ond Cygwin
WTF! I have been trying for the past few days to compile subversion under cygwin to no success. First it was complaining about not being able to build dynamic libraries (ok, just add –enable-all-static) and the it could not find -lresolv (ok install minires and minires-devel) and now it does compile but the perl bidings do not. WTF!
So the latest command I have been using is
./configure –with-apr=/usr/bin/ –with-apr-util=/usr/bin/ –prefix=/home/Owner –without-berkeley-db –enable-all-static
And the make does compile, but the make swig-pl gives
cd /home/Owner/subversion-1.1.4/subversion/bindings/swig/perl/native; /usr/bin/perl Makefile.PL
../../../../..//subversion/libsvn_fs_base/.libs: No such file or directory at Makefile.PL line 42
make: *** [/home/Owner/subversion-1.1.4/subversion/bindings/swig/perl/native/Makefile] Error 255
What can I say? WTF!
Ah, I got into all of this because I wanted to install svk and that needs the subversion perl bindings.