Linux :: Brave Cobra's Hideout :: If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem.

Logitech QuickCam Messenger with Skype on Linux

I finally got my webcam to work on skype (sort of). I have a Logitech QuickCam Messenger (046d:08da), which is a v4l2 (video4linux v2) device. Skype only (still) works with v4l version 1. Thus “Houston, we’ve got a problem”!

I almost solved the puzzle.

Best music player for Windows: aTunes

We all love to listen to music, right? I've been searching for a good music player for windows for a while now. I already found it in Amarok, but that one only runs natively on Linux.

Joining movie parts is easy with mencoder

How often does it happen that, when downloading a movie, it's all separated into chunks? You don't want to open file by file when watching that movie. You want to combine all those chunks into a single avi, wmv or mpeg. Mencoder is your solution.

NX Server on Ubuntu Hardy

For those in need of NX Server installation guide on the latest Ubuntu (Hardy), here it is:http://www.drtek.ca/freenx-server-ubuntu-hardy#en. It worked fine on my laptop.

andLinux brings almost any linux application to windows

Linux is better than window$, there, I've said it. On some rare occassions, you still need to run windows and I've tried several options in the past: vmware, qemu, virtualbox... All of them had their backdraws. Most of them just being slow. The latest I've tested is andLinux, and I must say, this one has impressed me the most. You're able to run almost any linux application, directly in windows. You're still running a linux distro (ubuntu) in the background as a windows service and although you need to share your files between the host and the guest, you're actually running the linux application within the windows desktop. All the others I've tested ran those application on the guest desktop. Here is a screenshot, illustrating my point:

Ubuntu shutdown problem

I had a little shutdown problem with my laptop which has ubuntu as OS. If your ubuntu installation hangs on shutdown and you had NFS mounts, you'll probably solve it by following this guide:http://blog.avirtualhome.com/2008/03/10/ubuntu-shutdown-problem-cifs-related/

Some other linux blogs

Here is a list of some interesting blogs on Linux
http://blog.linuxoss.com/
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/
http://vertito.blogspot.com/

ZendStudio fails to start

My ZendStudio installation just failed to start with following error:

Codejava: xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock' failed.

Seems an error with the java installation and apparently a well known one. So I issued the following lines from a shell

Code# cd /usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.0/jre/lib/i386/xawt
# cp libmawt.so libmawt.so.bak
# sed -i &quot;s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/&quot; libmawt.so

Play dvd iso image with xine

Havin' an iso image of the latest movie on dvd is all pretty well, but you still would like to see it. You could mount the image and let xine play the vob files or take advantage of the dvd:// capability of xine like this:

Codexine &qout;dvd://path/to/your/file.iso&qout;

Even handier would be to have that command in your context popup (by right-click'ing the file). To have that in KDE, open up the directory "~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/" and make a xine_iso.desktop file with the following content.

Code

[Desktop Entry] ServiceTypes=application/x-iso
Actions=Xine ISO
[Desktop Action Xine ISO]
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=xine &amp;qout;dvd://%U&amp;qout; Icon=exec MimeType=application/x-iso
Name=Play DVD ISO with xine

Now right-click an iso image file and look under "Actions"

Enjoy the movie!

More help on editing context menu's can be found at : http://legroom.net/2007/04/20/adding-custom-actions-kde-context-menus

Mediawiki shows Method not Implemented

It took me a while to figure out what happed but the MediaWiki installation I have running on my intranet suddenly started spitting out errors pages like : Method Not Implemented POST to /mediawiki/index.php not supported. I had recently upgraded mediawiki, so I thought that was the problem, just another bug. However that was not the case. Later on I stumbled upon the next message:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki/22001, which provided me with the knowledge that mod_security was blocking the POST request. Disabling it, made mediawiki work correctly again.

Kuroo failed to start

After updating my desktop (Gentoo), I was unable to startup kuroo. As usual, a post on the Gentoo Forumsprovided me with the needed answer:

Code

rm ~/.kde/share/config/session/kuroo*
rm ~/.kde/share/config/kuroorc
su -c 'cp /var/cache/kuroo/backup ~/KurooBackup -rf'
su -c 'rm -rf /var/cache/kuroo'

ISPConfig on Gentoo

Although I haven't tried it yet, it should be possible to get ISPConfig to run on a Gentoo server. Try the next guide to set it up: <del>ISPConfig setup wiki</del>

Archive mail with imapsync on Courier-IMAP

I've been looking for a way to archive my mail and keep it readable from my email client. I work with evolution on a local Courier-IMAP server, running on my server.

Finally found it through imapsync. This one program is able to login your IMAP account, parse through your IMAP folder and move mail to another IMAP account if it matches certain criteria. I wanted to move mail that's older than 1 year. So I made an extra IMAP account 'archive' and had imapsync move my old mail items there.

The command looks as follows:

[cgeshi_bash] imapsync --host1 mail.olympus.home --user1 james@mail.olympus.home --passfile1 /etc/courier/mailarchive/james --authmech1 LOGIN --host2 mail.olympus.home --user2 archive@mail.olympus.home --passfile2 /etc/courier/mailarchive/archive --authmech2 LOGIN --minage 365 --syncinternaldates --syncacls -nofoldersizes --delete --expunge --expunge1[/cgeshi_bash]

Only when running this the second time, it expunges the moved mail from the source account. Further it got stuck on one mail message (with a 108 Mb attachment) ending the process with "Out of memory". I moved that message manually, before running imapsync again.

And adding this command to my crontab makes mail archiving easy. I still have to watch out for concurrent IMAP access, but setting the cron entry on moment when I'm not working, solves that problem for me as well.

Imapsync can be found at http://www.linux-france.org/prj/.

Fetching your gmail messages through POP3 SSL with fetchmail

Gmail allows you to fetch your messages through pop3 ssl. If you collect your incoming messages with fetchmail, you'll find this articles quite interesting : http://download.gna.org/hpr/fetchmail/FAQ/gmail-pop-howto.html.

eix and layman

eix is a indexing tool for Gentoo's portage or as they call it a "Small utility for searching ebuilds with indexing for fast results"

layman is a portage overlay manager, adding extra (custom or user) ebuilds to the ones of Gentoo.

Now wouldn't it be nice if those two can work together, making it possible to search and index the added overlays.Well, by default it doesn't. It looks like eix can't understand layman's entry :

[cgeshi_bash] source /usr/portage/local/layman/make.conf[/cgeshi_bash]

To fix this, have layman add the overlay entries directly into /etc/make.conf by changing the make_conf entry in /etc/layman/layman.cfg like this

make_conf : /etc/make.conf

Now your update-eix will find the newly added overlays and start indexing them. Happy searching!

PyTelemeter Ebuild

Any Belgian ISP works with limited bandwidth for its customers. Quite annoying, I know, but there is no alternative in Belgium. So it's a matter of choosing the best one out of all the bad ones. My choice was Telenet. Telenet works with a little webapp called Telemeter. Now on SourceForge you can find a little python program called PyTelemeter which provides a desktop interface to this Telemeter. Being on Gentoo, I've written an ebuild to install the PyTelemeter the Gentoo way. You can find it at the patches part of the SF project :http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1463011&group_id=99970&atid=625908References: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-427589.html http://pytelemeter.sourceforge.net/

restart service with mtimes differ

When restarting Apache on Gentoo I was getting messages like these :

[cgeshi_bash]/etc/init.d/apache2 restart * Re-caching dependency info (mtimes differ)... * Stopping apache2 ... [ ok ] * Re-caching dependency info (mtimes differ)... * Re-caching dependency info (mtimes differ)... * Re-caching dependency info (mtimes differ)... * Re-caching dependency info (mtimes differ)... * Starting apache2 ...[/cgeshi_bash]

It took only a little while to find out that a simple command like

[cgeshi_bash] /etc/init.d/depscan.sh --update[/cgeshi_bash]

solved the problem for me.

Speeding up portage with cdb

For those wondering about how to speed up portage on Gentoo, try this: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=261580

Installing Fedora Core 4 further

While installing Fedora Core 4, it was time to investigate how to make the system fully operational. yum is still the defacto updater for RedHat's OS, it seems Some useful tips can be found here: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc4.html
http://www.fedorafaq.org/
http://home.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc4-tips.php
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installation_notes.html

VirtualHosts on Apache

I have a little apache server running on my desktop to test out stuff. Every web developer does have one.

I have configured mine to use virtual hosts. In my local DNS (another machine), I pointed all subdomains of my desktop to my desktop as well. An example: subdomain.desktop.mydomain.home is pointing at my desktop (desktop.mydomain.home).

Now I can have my apache on my desktop treat subdomains of itself as seperate websites, with the use of VirtualHosts. This has always worked very well, untill today. Something must have changed in the parsing of the config. This is no longer valid, it seems:

[cgeshi_apache]<virtualhost> DocumentRoot /var/www/subdomain/htdocs ServerName subdomain.desktop.mydomain.home<directory var="" www="" subdomain="" htdocs="">AllowOverride All Options FollowSymLinks Order allow,deny Allow from All </directory>RewriteEngine On RewriteOptions inherit </virtualhost>[/cgeshi_apache]

I had to put the values of DocumentRoot and ServerName between quotes before I got them to work again, like this:

[cgeshi_apache]<virtualhost> DocumentRoot "/var/www/subdomain/htdocs" ServerName "subdomain.desktop.mydomain.home" <directory var="" www="" subdomain="" htdocs="">AllowOverride All Options FollowSymLinks Order allow,deny Allow from All </directory>RewriteEngine On RewriteOptions inherit </virtualhost>[/cgeshi_apache]

Hope this helps...

File recovery of USBStick with Sleuth on Linux

Accidentily remove some files from your USB stick and you want to recover them? Here is your answer :http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-365703.html

Bad memory excluded from use on Linux

You have a bad memory (module)? Then this little blog entry might save the day:http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B1237.html. I used it on my laptop successfully. The patch of BadRam does run perfectly on the latest gentoo-dev-sources. I even think this patch should be added permanently. So how does it work? You use memtest86 to detect what parts of the module is broken. Then you add those entries to grub (memtest86 spits out the correct syntax for badram.). With the badram patch, your kernel then reserves these memory locations so they can't be used by other processes. Pretty neat thinking, right?

Using sound on Linux

I've been playing with sound for some time now and I never really got it the way I liked it. Sometimes gaim would cache its sounds until I stopped xmms because /dev/dsp was in use. In other words there was no hardware nor any software mixing. At first sounddaemons tried to solve that issue, but nowadays there is more elegant solution to solve all this. Have a look at how you can have all of theat fixed on Gentoo : http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix

Write your own little browser in Glade#

Building a webbrowser seems like a heavy task. Not in Glade#. Have a look at this page:http://primates.ximian.com/~edasque/projects/Tutorial/glade2.html. Looks like building a browser has never been easier. Of course the result is rather basic, but still you'll get the idea how easy it is to extend this little program icon_smile

/usr/portage on a LAN

I was using a NFS mount for sharing my /usr/portage tree across my local network. However experience showed me that wasn't the best solution. Then I came across a couple of posts in the Gentoo Wiki: The idea is as follows. Build a local rsync daemon that will offer your /usr/portage tree to your network, but exclude the distfiles folder. This offers the possibility to sync each box separately without overloading Gentoo's servers. I can even have each box have its own overlay without interfering with another. Next you can cache every source tarball, avoiding unneeded bandwidth. The NFS share of the /usr/portage/distfiles was doing fine there, but it posed a problem on my laptop. When I wasn't home Ididn't have access to my sources anymore. With a caching proxy on the server, from which I download my sources now, my laptop has all the sources it needs and still I don't download them twice. Personally, I think this is the best way of setting up portage for a LAN with multiple Gentoo boxes. More information and guides can be found here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Download_Cache_for_LAN-Http-Replicator and http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Local_Rsync_Mirror

Brave Cobra's Hideout

If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem.

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