Archive for category Linux
The Defragmentation Brigade
These people epitomise all that is bad about computer-care.
- They read a book once, it had ‘Technical’ in the title.
- They read a website once, it had ‘Tweaks’ in the title.
- They fix their mom’s computer, installing realms of free anti-spyware software when doing so.
- They enable the windows firewall on a trusted lan, and install another firewall for good measure.
- They use the words ‘Anti-Virus’, ‘Anti-Spyware’ and ‘Firewall’ interchangeably.
- They say things like ‘fix it in the bios’.
- Their favourite piece of software is called ‘Super Extra Registry Clean Optimizer’ (order of adjectives varies).
- They know all about ‘l-eye-nux’: It’s fast, efficient, wonderful. Some day they know they’ll try it too.
- And they honestly believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that defragmenting a computer hard disk fixes issues.
So, if you ever have a computer problem, and someone gives you some advice containing the word ‘defragment’, consider running away, very fast. God has a special level of hell reserved for these people, and you don’t want to be near them when he sends them there.
Popularity: 13% [?]
WebKit on Linux
It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that the mac or windows versions have, but it’s damn handy for testing safari compatibility without booting another OS.
To install/build it on ubuntu (hardy with the usual bells & whistles), proceed as follows:
First you’ll need some dev packages to build it with:
sudo aptitude install libqt4-dev libxslt-dev gperf bison libsqlite3-dev flex build-essential
Then get the latest source from nightly.webkit.org. Right now that’s r36309, so we have:
wget http://builds.nightly.webkit.org/files/trunk/src/WebKit-r36309.tar.bz2
The builds change almost daily, so check first, don’t just copy the line above.
tar -jxf WebKit-r*.tar.bz2 cd WebKit-r*/ export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt4/ WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit
This will take 30mins+ on a reasonable machine, so go make tea.
When it’s finished, you can launch it as follows:
WebKitTools/Scripts/run-launcher
And that’s it, we’re done. Simple eh?
Note: it will need QTDIR set for it to run. We exported it when we were building above, but it probably won’t be set when you try to run it next time. The simplest way to work around this is probably to just put the export in your .profile as follows:
echo "export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt4/" >> .profile
Popularity: 24% [?]
What the f&*k’s up with IM Video on Linux
I mean how difficult can it be?
- Skype: It’s the best I’ve found so far, but it still sucks dried donkey turds. Aside from minor annoyances like having to run the static build coz the buttons keep disappearing otherwise, random crashes for no apparent reason, dropped calls every time it tries to switch to TCP (helloooooo? TCP for realtime video is a terrible idea!) and generally bombing out for an indefinite period after about 10 minutes of conversation … where was I? … oh yes: Well skype is evil, isn’t it? Proprietary, closed-source, linux-is-an-afterthought and all that. Bah.
- Pidgin: Well the great god ubuntu gives it his stamp of approval. But, well, did they forget to put in audio/video? Oh wait, a little googling tells me that they don’t actually care about audio/video conferencing. They may implement it, some day. But that day isn’t now.
- Kopete: Aside from being ugly, and coming with a shedload of kde stuff I don’t want; video is limited to MSN and Yahoo. Hmm … well that’s useful eh? Don’t know (or more correctly, wish to speak to) anyone who uses either.
- Ekiga: An hour or so tweaking around with an asterisk server to set up video, and twenty minutes convincing the other end of the call (a windows user) that they wish to install Ekiga, led to a 2 minute call with terrible video and no audio, and downed internet connections on both ends for about 20 minutes afterwards (I’m guessing that ekiga was trying to send video info so fast that it just stacked up at both routers, and killed everything else). This one nearly cost me a divorce.
- Wengo: Signup on their site is broken – no problem I says, I’ll use asterisk again. Turns out their implementation of H263 is non-standard and doesn’t work with asterisk. Great.
Is that it? Are my options exhausted? I think so.
So for now it’s suffer skype, or run windows in a vm.
Popularity: 20% [?]
PC, Mac… meet Linux – advertisements from Novell
A series of advertisements from Novell, promoting SUSE.
In all my years working with it, I never knew Linux was a woman – stunned I was.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Email to SMS gateway
This is something I’ve implemented several times over the last few years. The principle is simple:
- You send an email to mobile_number@sms.yourdomain.com with TXT in the subject, and the actual text body in the email body,
- This goes to your mail server mail.yourdomain.com, and gets forwarded to the user smsuser
- A procmail recipe in smsuser’s home dir strips out the mobile number and the body of the message, and, using o2sms, sends a regular sms to mobile_number
- The output from o2sms is sent back to you via email, so you know it all worked out ok.
It’s all free, and reliable.
This is how I went about setting it up on ubuntu: Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 100% [?]
SIP TCP support in Asterisk
Edit: This post is now quite out of date. There’s a more recent discussion of this at the trixbox forums.
Original Post:
Despite digium’s screwed up licensing restrictions, and its diabolical coding standards (something which Callweaver will hopefully make a thing of the past, but that’s for another day), SIP over TCP support is now finally available in asterisk (at least for the 1.2 branch).
Brief instructions how to upgrade your 1.2.x installation are given below: Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 98% [?]
rsync over ssh on a non-default port
Posted by Bricky in Linux, Networking on October 16th, 2007
This has long been plaguing me. I finally worked it out today though. 
The syntax is quite simple, for port 12345 you would use …
rsync -avPe 'ssh -p 12345' username@remoteserver:/filepath /localfilepath
Very simple when you see how it’s done eh? 
Popularity: 44% [?]
RIP Authentication between Cisco IOS & Quagga
Posted by Bricky in Linux, Networking on October 12th, 2007
For some reason, this wrecks my head every time I have to set it up. It should be simple yes? It looks simple when you see the config below yes?
… well each time I have to set it up, it costs me several hours. I guess it’s some kind of mental block or something.
Anyway, the instructions …
Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 32% [?]
Installing ices (Icecast streamer) on Ubuntu
Ices is the mp3 version of the command line streamer from Icecast.org. It’s like sc_trans for shoutcast, but alot better. Because of the mp3 stuff, it’s not distributed as a .deb anywhere (if anyone does find a .deb, please let me know), so it has to be built from source.
It’s all relatively straightforward though:
- First install the Mediabuntu repository.
wget -q http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/medibuntu-key.gpg -O - | sudo apt-key add - sudo wget http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/sources.list.d/feisty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y upgrade
- Next install some headers (we need these to be able to build it) …
sudo aptitude install libshout3-dev liblame-dev libxml-dev
- (Optional) Perl support in ices is useful, for this we’ll need libperl-dev
sudo aptitude install libperl-dev
- Download and build the source …
wget http://downloads.us.xiph.org/releases/ices/ices-0.4.tar.gz tar -zxf ices-0.4.tar.gz cd ices-0.4 ./configure --with-lame make sudo make install
Popularity: 42% [?]