Ubuntu and other geekery
Posts tagged Linux
TestDrive – Test Latest Ubuntu Build in a VM
Feb 25th
Just linking to a page where is explained how you can test the latest Ubuntu builds in a virtualmachine like VirtualBox. This means you won’t have to screw up any of your systems and won’t be left with a buggy OS..
Keep an eye on this site btw, they have some nice articles!
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/02/testdrive-automatically-downloads-and.html
Ubuntu Lucid Software Center Thoughts
Feb 25th
As some of you might have noticed there’s been a lot of hype around the new Software Center that will come with Ubuntu Lucid. People seem very enthusiastic about it and for GUI jockeys it is a major step forward (I guess). Personally, however, I never use a GUI to install my software and only rely on command-line aptitude commands to install and update.
The biggest step forward has to be the inclusion of PPA’s in the list. Being able to see exactly what packages a PPA has available is quite a nice feature imho. Something that I haven’t figured out how to do on the command-line (although I haven’t really searched very well).
Somehow I get the feeling they took some of the functionality from UbuntuTweak and added that to Ubuntu itself. UbuntuTweak already had the option to add PPA’s to your list of apt sources, but it lacks the option to see the packages made available by these PPA’s.
In case you are not up-to-date on this whole PPA thing here’s an explanation from Launchpad.net (the place where the PPA’s are all hosted):
Using a Personal Package Archive (PPA), you can distribute software and updates directly to Ubuntu users. Create your source package, upload it and Launchpad will build binaries and then host them in your own apt repository. That means Ubuntu users can install your packages in just the same way they install standard Ubuntu packages and they'll automatically receive updates as and when you make them.Every individual and team in Launchpad can have one or more PPAs, each with its own URL.Packages you publish in your PPA will remain there until you remove them, they're superseded by another package that you upload or the version of Ubuntu against which they're built becomes obsolete.
What does this mean for you?
Basically you can add a PPA to your apt sources list to install software made by Ubuntu users. A lot of times it is possible to get updated versions of Ubuntu packages through the PPA’s, think of handy apps like VLC, Wine, Firefox, etc.
Chuck Norris invades your router!
Feb 22nd
There are many things Chuck Norris can do, but I didn’t expect him to be 1337 h@x0r as well! Turns out Chuck Norris can gain entry to your router if you haven’t changed the password to something else than the default (let me guess: admin?). I would have expected him to try and threaten your router first, then end up punching or kicking it to bits when it doesn’t squirm and give up it’s personal details.
How things change!
But no seriously, there’s a new botnet out in the wild and it’s called the Chuck Norris botnet. One of the programmers mentioned him in the code somewhere and ever since it was dubbed the Chuck Norris botnet. Quite funny, but somehow it also scares me..
Must be all those facts about Chuck that I take so seriously 
Yes I know they’re old, but you can’t kill teh internet meme!
Just, for the love of all that is mighty (and Chuck), please CHANGE YOUR DEFAULT USERNAME & PASSWORD ON YOUR MODEM AND/OR ROUTER! NO MORE ADMIN/ADMIN!
Sidux: Not as reliable as I’d hoped
Feb 10th
So I’ve been running Sidux for a few days now. It started off wonderfully: my homeserver felt snappier than ever before running bog standard Ubuntu. However, after having installed my usualy Apache and MySQL for testing some development things at home the machine has been crashing at random times. Usually when I’m not home. This is the biggest problem, since I can’t get into the machine at all anymore, so a reset is out of the question. Also my WoW guild didn’t have teamspeak last night because it had crashed and I wasn’t home but at a work dinner.
So, I’ve decided to try and get the best of both worlds by starting with a simple command-line install of Ubuntu and then installing only the packages I need. I will also not be using Gnome but XFCE, maybe combining it with OpenBox. You might be wondering why I’m not going for Xubuntu, and I’ll tell you: it’s almost just as bloated as normal Gnome.
The speed difference running Sidux was unbelievable, I was even able to play 720p on my server. Something I never thought would be possible with this kind of hardware.
So my experiment is not quite over yet and because I do require a little bit of stability I am going to stick with Ubuntu (although not a normal desktop install).
nVidia 195.x TV-Out broken in Linux
Feb 8th
I recently messed around with Karmic trying to get the newest nVidia drivers installed. However, this broke TV-Out on my system and I decided to then take the step and move to Sidux considering they had the latest drivers in the repo’s instead of having to do the binary install from downloaded drivers. My situation did not change however, whenever I added TVStandard to the screen options the machine would freeze with a black screen.
Today I’m a bit bored at work so I decided to take some time to Google this problem. At first I was almost ready to reinstall Ubuntu again since things just worked there with the 185 drivers but I didn’t want to give up so easy. I then stumbled upon this thread at nvnews.net. This describes my problem exactly considering I am running an nVidia Geforce 7600GS in the machine. I can’t verify that this works, but I thought I’d share it with everyone already.
Linux MD5 hash of a string
Feb 4th
It took me a while to find the right command for this so I decided to add it to the blog to save it for a later date
echo -n ‘the_password’ | md5sum -
Very simple yet does exactly what I want. I’m still surprised this isn’t a standard function in Linux since md5sum exists why not md5string?
Itching to change distro again
Feb 3rd
A few years back I started messing around with another OS than Windows. I looked for one with lots of documentation and a strong passion for open-source software. After having looked at many Linux distro’s I actually decided on using FreeBSD 4. Their handbook was by far the easiest method of finding good documentation about the installation process and there were many, many applications I could install without too much trouble. However, I soon noticed that running a full graphical interface was not FreeBSD’s forte: things felt slow and it took a lot of time and effort to get things to work the way I wanted. I learned a lot but felt that things should be easier and faster, so I moved to Linux as most benchmarks showed me it would be faster for the Desktop.
At that time Debian was on version 4 (Debian Etch) and I was very impressed with the ease of installation and the overall speed of the desktop. Things just felt right and the apt package manager was very easy to use and also didn’t once cause problems for me. I ran Debian for quite some time, and in the mean time I started trying out other distro’s on a spare laptop I had laying around. Being a 500Mhz oldie it was the perfect test platform for performance: something which ran ok on that machine must fly on my main computer I figured.
Having tried many distros in a year’s time I became a bit envious of all the eye-candy a lot of other distros were showing. Most notably distros like Sabayon which came with instant support for Compiz, very impressive for a LiveCD. Another distro which then caught my eye was OpenSUSE, which looked very slick with it’s green theme and was also one of the first with Compiz support. The 3D square desktop was very impressive at that time and I just had to have it. I tried both distros for a few weeks yet I quickly figured out that I am not a fan of RPM based distros or source-based ones like Gentoo. OpenSUSE was also quite slow at the time and was extremely bloated. Sabayon was a LiveCD with an installer, yet because of it being source based I didn’t feel comfortable having to recompile packages with every update.
At that time I started to look for a Debian based distribution which had some extra features and then stumbled upon Ubuntu which was at 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) at that time (2006). Even though all the eye-candy software wasn’t installed/enabled by default it was very easy to do this manually. Since then I’ve been running Ubuntu, except for a small relapse to Debian when Lenny was still in beta. I quickly went back to Ubuntu though as it just had better support for a few apps I used regularly.
However, now comes the time again where I am looking to change and dip into unknown waters. This time my eye has landed on quite a unique distribution, namely: Sidux. After reading some things about Debian Sid (the name Debian gives to it’s testing version) and some problems I have encountered with Ubuntu Karmic I wanted to try it out. Sid was quite unstable at the time though and it wasn’t very reliable. I then stumbled upon Sidux, a rolling distro which always uses the latest Debian Sid packages but tries to ensure stability. A rolling distro means that you never have big version releases as seen in most distributions and OS’s.. Think of Windows: 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7.. Ubuntu: Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic, Lucid.. And the list goes on.. Instead of these major releases a rolling distro always has the latest software in the repositories which means all you have to do is run the upgrade script once in a while and you’ll have the latest & greatest software. No more need to do a fresh install when a new version is released..
So far my experiments with Sidux in a VirtualBox VM have been quite succesful. Most of the packages are VERY recent and even doing a pretty massive dist-upgrade with apt didn’t give me any problems. It’s sporting a very recent kernel and feels very snappy indeed. I’m very close to reinstalling my homeserver with it, yet I have to wait till no one is using the TeamSpeak server I have running on it.
Teamspeak 3 is out!
Dec 23rd
I just noticed on one of my favorite techy news sites (www.tweakers.net – hulde!) that TeamSpeak 3 has FINALLY been released. Considering this baby has been in development for 5 years I’m quite excited about it’s release. From a front-end point of view not too much has changed, but underneath the hood the changes should be quite impressive. For one the whole application was re-written from scratch in C++ which should make it a lot speedier. Not to mention the fact that there’s clients and servers for Windows, Linux and OSX.
I tried installing it on the work machine I currently run my Ventrilo server on but am having problems connecting to it from home, but I plan on testing it thoroughly from home and maybe even install it on my VPS (which this site is running on) although that might increase some latency since the VPS is in the US and I and most of my friends are in NL and the UK.
Anyways, you can grab the downloads from http://www.teamspeak.com/ and if you require a lot of users (lets say for your massive WoW guild) you can get a 512 user NON-PROFIT license key from http://npl.tritoncia.com/ts3npl.php
Ubuntu Karmic on iMac 20″
Dec 23rd
I had previously been running Ubuntu Jaunty and decided to do a fresh install of Karmic on my work machine (a 20″ iMac). I waited this long to make the jump because I still saw a lot of updates coming in every day on my machines at home, so I figured it would be better to wait a bit. Lately the amount of updates had decreased and were mostly for packages which weren’t too important.
I must say, everything went without a hitch, except for that the screen had lines moving over it on the open source ATi driver. So I installed the restricted driver from the Hardware Drivers tool and everything works beautifully.
I also had to change something to get my sound working but all-in-all I’m quite happy with how it went. Got everything up and running within an hour or two, something I can’t say if I had been running Windows (or even Mac OSX for that matter if you take into account it’s a clean install).
Google Public DNS and OpenDNS
Dec 4th
Today Google anounced a new free service: their Public Dns. This is part of Google’s quest to speed up the internet which they have released quite a few tools for (which used to only be used internally at Google HQ) an optimised browser and now we get this free service as another extra. My first experiences are quite positive, currently it seems faster for me than using OpenDNS, my preferred DNS host.
I first started using OpenDNS because I was unhappy with the resolving speed of my ISP’s DNS servers and I was quite happy with OpenDNS. They have some great features to manage which requests you want to allow or block. I currently also use it at the office to block malware and phishing sites, amongst other things, to keep my colleagues a bit more safe when they’re browsing.
OpenDNS made an interresting blog post responding to the Google Public DNS
Some quick benchmarks:
Resolving facebook.com with the Google DNS:
dig @8.8.8.8 facebook.com
; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P2 <<>> @8.8.8.8 facebook.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 47346
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;facebook.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
facebook.com. 415 IN A 69.63.184.142
facebook.com. 415 IN A 69.63.187.19
facebook.com. 415 IN A 69.63.181.12
facebook.com. 415 IN A 69.63.187.17
facebook.com. 415 IN A 69.63.181.11
;; Query time: 23 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec 4 11:32:37 2009
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 110
Resolving facebook.com with OpenDNS:
dig @208.67.222.222 facebook.com
; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P2 <<>> @208.67.222.222 facebook.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 37693
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;facebook.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
facebook.com. 1917 IN A 69.63.187.17
facebook.com. 1917 IN A 69.63.187.19
facebook.com. 1917 IN A 69.63.181.11
facebook.com. 1917 IN A 69.63.181.12
facebook.com. 1917 IN A 69.63.184.142
;; Query time: 110 msec
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec 4 11:33:55 2009
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 110
As you can see the Google DNS is performing quite well for me!
Mind you, I am situated in the Netherlands, your results might vary if you are in a different location.