09 Oct 2008 Lately I found myself wishing for more in the world of Linux and Open Source. Yesterday I installed the free VMware Server 2.0 which in my opinion is an upgrade worth while. I didn’t need to patch anything to get the modules running on my Ubuntu Intrepid system, and on my laptop where I’m still running Ubuntu Hardy matching binary modules was actually included in the installation… no need to compile them … I like that. Bridging the Atheros wireless on my laptop still doesn’t work, but I guess thats not VMwares fault.
Anyways after installing VMware Server I installed a virtual Ubuntu 8.04 server (Jeos - Just enought operation system) and wanted to install the VMware Tools on the machine. But honestly would like to just install a deb package. I searched the web for a bit to see if someone had created some debs ready to use…. nothing. At some point Ubuntu hard Debian packages for both the VMware server itself and the VMware Tools. I want that! Well a package with Open Virtual Machine Tools would do as well. I think my choice on Ubuntu (or Debian for that matter) mainly is because the gigantic repository of quality packages. But this is one of the few times when it comes short. As far as I can tell open-vm-tools will be packaged for Intrepid… looking forward to it :)
I’m still ripping all my music to FLAC and today I found some old pieces of music which had been tagged wrong. I was browsing my music library with Rhythmbox and right clicked to change the tag but I couldn’t edit it :( I found a few bugs which seems to describe my problem… and it seems to be fixed in gstreamer-plugins-good version 0.10.11… to bad Intrepid only have 0.10.10 atm :(
Last but not least I wish the nvidia driver would support Xrandr… though I’m not holding my breath :D
I’ve bumped into several other wishes but these was the ones I could remember on top of my head. It seems that for every time the overall quality Linux raises I just raise my expectations by the same degree.
24 Aug 2008 This weekend I decided to try and get my Apple remote to work on my Mac mini which I just upgraded to Hardy the other day.
Configuring the package lirc you are able to select the apple remote from a list but I couldn’t get it to work that way. So I found a way to create my own configuration file for the Apple remote:
sudo irrecord -H macmini -d /dev/usb/hiddev0 macmini.conf
-H tels irrecord which driver to use -d is the device irrecord listens for input on macmini.conf is the file where irrecord saves the configuration when done
First you need to hold a button. I had to wait almost 25 sec before it was satisfied and went on with the configuration. Now just follow the on screen instructions and in the end you should have you own configuration file. I recommend to compare the following file with the one you just created to check out the differences:
/usr/share/lirc/remotes/apple/lircd.conf.macmini
I made sure to call my buttons the same as in lircd.conf.macmini.
After that I altered these two files to point to my newly created configuration file and removed pointers to lircd.conf.macmini:
I then restarted lircd with:
sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart
now you should be able to check that it is working with the command irw:
Just Ctrl+c when you are satisfied with the result.
At some point I would like to use my remote with Elisa which just released a 0.5.6 which have DVD playback support, but for now I’ll just stick to Totem just to try getting it to work.
To use the remote in Totem you first have to enable the IR plugin (Edit -> Plugins…). Then you have to configure what to buttons are supposed to do which is done in a configuration file in you home folder:
Content could look something like this (read more about syntax on LIRC’s website):
begin
prog = Totem
remote = Apple_A1156
button = vol+
config = volume_up
end
Since the Apple remote have a combined Play/Pause button I wanted to find out if that was possible. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what was going in the config = line and looked through all documentation I could find on LIRC’s website. Suddenly it hit me that the values in config a specific for the application. Not much about this on the Totem website so I downloaded the source code for Totem. Don’t worry this isn’t going to be hardcore. I unpacked the source code and searched for files with the name lirc:
$ cd totem-2.22.1
$ find . -name \*lirc\*
./data/lirc_example
./src/plugins/lirc
./src/plugins/lirc/totem-lirc.c
./src/plugins/lirc/lirc.totem-plugin.in
I opened the file totem-lirc.c and found about 25 definitions for IR commands something like the following:
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_PLAY "play"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_PAUSE "pause"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_NEXT "next"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_PREVIOUS "previous"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_SEEK_FORWARD "seek_forward"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_SEEK_BACKWARD "seek_backward"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_VOLUME_UP "volume_up"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_VOLUME_DOWN "volume_down"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_FULLSCREEN "fullscreen"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_QUIT "quit"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_UP "up"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_DOWN "down"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_LEFT "left"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_RIGHT "right"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_SELECT "select"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_MENU "menu"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_PLAYPAUSE "play_pause"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_ZOOM_UP "zoom_up"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_ZOOM_DOWN "zoom_down"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_SHOW_PLAYING "show_playing"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_SHOW_VOLUME "show_volume"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_EJECT "eject"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_PLAY_DVD "play_dvd"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_MUTE "mute"
#define TOTEM_IR_COMMAND_TOGGLE_ASPECT "toggle_aspect"
Other multimedia software might be better docuemented when it comes to IR but I guess you would be able to use something similar to figure out what possible config-options you have in the lircrc for the software.
Anyways Totem have a Play/Pause toggle and I ended up with:
begin
prog = Totem
remote = Apple_A1156
button = play
config = play_pause
end
22 Jul 2008 After my server was restarted twice by my hosting center I decided to make sure Teamspeak would start automatically. I read a few posts on how other people did it but in the end I decided that I created my own minimal script.
My two goals with this init script was:
- Run the Teamspeak server as an unprivileged user.
- Make sure the Teamspeak server starts up after reboot even though it wasn’t shut down properly
- A little bonus was that it reuses much of the init script that is bundled with the installation
Init script (/etc/init.d/teamspeak):
#!/bin/sh
TEAMSPEAK_DIR=/usr/local/teamspeak
TEAMSPEAK_USER=teamspeak
# Make sure that Teamspeak starts even though it wasn't closed nicely last time (ie. by a power cut)
if [ $(su - $TEAMSPEAK_USER -c "ps ux" |grep tsserver2.pid|grep -v grep|wc -l) -eq 0 ] && [ -f ${TEAMSPEAK_DIR}/tsserver2.pid ]
then
rm ${TEAMSPEAK_DIR}/tsserver2.pid
fi
cd ${TEAMSPEAK_DIR}
su - $TEAMSPEAK_USER -c "./teamspeak2-server_startscript $1"
cd -
05 Jun 2008 A lot has happened since the last time I blogged… I must admit the main reason for not blogging has been World of Warcraft :)
Anyways back in December my girlfriend and I bought ourselves a new LCD TV capable of displaying HD 1920x1200. To start out with we used our aged Playstation 2 as a DVD player but the low DVD playback quality really shows on the new TV. A few months later I went out and bought a Mac Mini on which I installed Ubuntu.
So far we’ve mainly used it for the slimserver backed for the Squeezebox and occasionally DVD playback in the VLC media player. I’m looking a the different media centers for Linux but haven’t really decided yet. Being a Gnome guy I’m gonna give the next release of Elisa (0.5) a spin when it comes out in july. The earlier releases of Elisa was beautiful and clean but lacking a lot of functionality. So far VLC and a mouse has worked just fine. What I’m really hoping for is some BlueRay playback support in Linux.
Anyways I’m really happy with the Mac Mini as a “Media Center”. I wont be needing any TV Tuners. Its small, good looking, use fairly little power (I think) xD I’m hoping to replace the DVD drive with a BlueRay drive when Linux support picks up at some point.
30 Oct 2007 I’ve installed Zimbra on SLES9 for a costumer because they wanted Zimbra on Suse. The costumer wanted the community maintained version and I felt it was too risky to install Zimbra 5 release candidate.
First a little Suse bashing (sorry but I just get irritated about this over and over again). Zimbra recommends using imapsync to migrate emails to Zimbra and it seems to be a fine piece of software.
- I started out by using yast to search for this tool but as I expected nothing.
- After downloading it from the website and trying to run it I got a message that I was missing
Mail::IMAPClient lib. - I tried to find SLES9 rpm packages (or just RPM packages) with the
Mail::IMAPClient lib. -
I tried to install this with cpan:
cpan
cpan> install Mail::IMAPClient
....
Writing Makefile for Mail::IMAPClient::MessageSet
Warning: prerequisite Parse::RecDescent 1.94 not found. We have 1.80.
I’m no cpan / perl expert so I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get Parse::RecDescent installed.
- Anyway what is the benefit of having a supported enterprise version of Suse if you trash it with all sorts of unsupported software.
You could argue that Zimbra should provide imapsync as some part of migration tools.
Anyway the solution was that I installed imapsync on my Ubuntu Gutsy laptop:
sudo apt-get install imapsync
I just gets so disappointed that things are so “hard” in a professional Linux compared to Debian or Ubuntu.
When I’m done I’ll just uninstall it and all its dependencies again:
imapsync libdigest-hmac-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libmail-imapclient-perl libnet-ssleay-perl libparse-recdescent-perl
Important note: I had imapsync on Ubuntu Gutsy hang when it connected to the Zimbra server. I found that passing --noauthmd5 with the example in User Migration in Zimbras wiki made imapsync not hang. An earlier version of Ubuntu (Edgy with an earlier version of imapsync) didn’t need this.
