Ubuntu and other geekery
Posts tagged Ubuntu
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or more PPAs, each with its own URL.Packages you publish in your PPA will remain there until you remove them, they're superseded by another package that you upload or the version of Ubuntu against which they're built becomes obsolete.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.
ffmpeg-php on Zend Server CE
Feb 17th
I’ve been working on a little project to view photos and videos from a mobile browser using Zend Framework. I’ve gotten so far as to generate a little gallery with real-time thumbnailing and pagination which shows the image at (once again real-time resized) a resolution commonly used by mobiles. Now the next step is being able to show a gallery of video’s and having them stream transcode and stream real-time to my mobile.
Now, my problems started when I wanted to thumbnail the video’s..
I needed the ffmpeg-php extension but I am running Zend Server CE with PHP5.3 on that machine and this confused me a bit since I was only used to compiling extensions using bog standard php5-cli. After a day of messing about and searching online I finally stumbled upon this guide which solved my problem:
http://www.philbayfield.com/2009/10/25/compile-ffmpeg-php-for-php-5-3-yes-it-does-work/
Turns out I missed a few required packages (I think) and Phil also added something to the PATH.
Either way I’m happy to have it working so I can continue ramming the keyboard like the code-monkey I am! 
iMac sound fix under Ubuntu
Feb 17th
I’ve been living with this problem for quite some time now and today I had some time left over at work so I figured I’d have a look into it again. I’ve tried a few different settings from the Ubuntu wiki but they always resulted in the same tinny sound.
My colleague who sits in the same room runs OSX on his iMac and has pretty decent sound, but under Ubuntu the sound is horrible. Today he isn’t here so I have to live with horrible sound and was getting quite annoyed so I decided to have a look at it.. The sound is very tinny, like someone hung an ear-bud into a coke can and cranked up the volume. Thanks to this fix I am now able to enjoy the same quality sound as I had under OSX:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8793845#post8793845
In a nutshell it comes down to this:
Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf :
options snd-hda-intel model=mb31 power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
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.
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).
Canonical to remove Gimp from default Ubuntu installation
Nov 27th
To be honest I am quite happy about this decision, GIMP is a great package but I think a lot of people don’t use it. I, for one, don’t use my Ubuntu machine for any kind of graphical work and have no need for this. Another package I wouldn’t mind seeing removed is OpenOffice.
Maybe there should be an option in the installer which asks you what application you wish to install for regular tasks like office work or photo management/editing, with the almighty option: NONE.
We already have options like this in the alternative installer, but I would like to see a user-friendly menu to select these types of packages in the LiveCD as well. My main problem with Linux is that a lot of distro’s seem bloated. Sure, they don’t take too much diskspace, but I know that it could be even less. Sure, we have harddrive space to spare these days but it can be a bit frustrating to have some of these huge packages installed by default and not being able to remove them either (Gnome seems to rely on parts of OpenOffice and Gimp, from what I remember..)
Another bunch of packages we could do without are the default Gnome games..
A lot of distro’s seem to want to show off how complete Linux is, but it takes more time to properly uninstall all this software as it does to install it. Another reason to give the option is that it would save a lot of time to install the distro, considering Gimp and OpenOffice are pretty big packages.