Whether or not to upgrade to a beta

The next release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) is scheduled for release April 24th, but if you are really daring, you can upgrade from either 6.06 LTS or 7.10 straight to the beta version now out. Now here is the dilemma… I scanned the new features, and yes they look good, but here is the issue, I’ve got an older-ish system with a new-ish NVidia card (not a top notch state of the art card but much newer that the system as a whole) powering my widescreen LCD monitor. Every time there is any kind of change to the kernel, I run into issues. I know that I’ve got to recompile the kernel with the NVidia drivers and all, but it doesn’t always work… quite often I just try not to reboot in fear that the update will krap out. anyways… but I also like living and playing on the edge with tech… so my instinct is to say screw it and go for it with the upgrade… but today is my birthday and it would really suck if I killed my system today… so maybe tomorrow….

HardyUpgrades – Community Ubuntu Documentation

If you are curious enough to try out the latest beta and via the upgrade, let me know how it all goes….

Alternative to Cygwin for Unix on Windows

I used Cygwin up until the point I made the full move to linux, but I always recommend Cygwin to those who need Unix in their windows. Here is an alternative that looks to be shall we say ‘lighter’. UnixUtils seems to be a set of window binaries for most/many Unix commands with out the Unix Cygwin layer. They work straight in your regular Cmd. Basically Unix without BASH. So if you need this kind of solution… I guess give it a try… I’ll stick with my Linux System (Ubuntu is what I’m currently running).

read more | digg story

Nokia acquires Trolltech, goes cross-platform

I wonder what this will mean for the mobile market and for Symbian. I also wonder what are the real plans for the TrollTech product line. TrollTech is the maker of Qtopia but also QT the cross platform windowing package, which until recently KDE was based on. I can see where this move works with the linux tablets, but Qtopia is also linux-based and meant for phones…. do you think Nokia has plans on merging the two? or shifting away from Sybian, or do you think they may just do what they’ve done with every other mobile app company they bought… maintain for a year or two and then shutdown…. They did it with IntelliSync and a few others?

read more | digg story

Songbird update

Previously I posted on the subject of installing Songbird on Ubuntu. Today, Songbird 0.2.5 was announced. I figured I’d need to go and once again run the script to install everything, probably some un-install and then some re-install process. To my surprise when I downloaded and ran the latest version of the install script, it actually stopped in its tracks and said that since I had already installed Songbird, I could use the built-in update feature. How nice of the script to check for me.

Also a note about the new version, it looks to have better iPod support and it included a new add-on for the Hype Machine, I don’t know how it will work but I’ve been going to the Hype Machine for sometime now for new music.

SSH and Permissions

I just spent the better part of the last 2 days working on setting up SSH with private/public shared keys. I’ve done this many a times so I launched my nifty file containing the documentation I’ve used in the past and went to work. I first made my key pairs on both machines, and then I transfered the file to there respective sides. The connection for hostA to hostB worked flawlessly from the first instance, now hostB to hostA was another story. Of course the first thing I did was check the permissions:

hostA:> chmod 700 ~user1/.ssh
hostA:> chmod 600 ~user1/.ssh/*

and tried again… still did not work. Next I checked the /etc/ssh/sshd_config , everything looked fine and actually when diff’d with the one on the other server, they were identical. I should mention that hostB is a Redhat ES 4.4 server and hostA is Centos 4.4 server (basically identical). Well I scratched my head and went to google. Of course every forum and mailing list result I found said: “check the permissions”. Well I did it again….. and again… and again…. still no luck. This is when I decided to try a different user.
hostA:> chmod 700 ~user2/.ssh
hostA:> chmod 600 ~user2/.ssh/*
And guess what…. it worked. this is when it hit me. the actuall directory structure. The typical hierarchy looks like this:
owner path
root /home
user1 /home/user1
user2 /home/user2

but this was my hierarchy:
owner path
root /home
user2 /home/user2
user1 /home/user2/user1

All I can figure is that since the parent to the users home was not owned by root, SSH didn’t work. Solution:

owner path
root /home
user2 /home/user2
user1 /home/user1

ln -s /home/user1 home/user2/user1

Argh…. 2 days wasted and while I swore it was not permissions, it was just under the name “ownership”. All because for layout reasons I want the home directory of one user with in the other.

Songbird on Ubuntu

Well for a while now I’ve wanted to try Songbird on my linux box. I gave it a quick try when it first came out on my mac at work, but being a mac, nothing competes with iTunes. By far I’ve yet to see a music player that I like better than iTunes, but being a linux user at home, well no iTunes for me. Yes I know may people have managed to install iTunes for Windows via Wine, but the point of using linux, is that I don’t want to use windows. Now I will admit, I do have wine installed and I’ve actually resorted to a few windows apps in the past, but I try very hard not to.

Well anyways… like any good gnome distribution, Ubuntu includes Rhythmbox as it’s default music player coupled with GStreamer. I have nothing against Rhythmbox, it just doesn’t do it all for me. Recently I’ve been enjoying the interface of Listen (link). It has a very clean interface, similar to that Rhythmbox, and it too includes a nice dock/tray functionality allowing me to preserve every inch of real estate on my screen. It is a little buggy and and 0.5 was just released last week (I have not tried the release version just yet), and overall in my opinion a better player when it comes to look and feel than Rhythmbox.

However back to the start of this entry, I’ve always wanted to give Songbird a try. I am a very happy user of all Mozilla creations. I’m an Firefox only browser, and if it isn’t web mail, it has to be Thunderbird in my book. Mozilla has provided an excellent based for working off of. I’ve given Flock a swing, and enjoyed using Nvu when playing with web design, both excellent spin-offs of the Mozilla code base. And again back to Songbird… I guess I became a distant fan the minute I heard was was coming into existence. I wasn’t to happy when I saw that is was only initially going to be available for Windows, but I was patient. Knowing that basically all of the Mozilla apps and spin-offs have always progressed this way, I felt it was worth waiting and keeping an I on it. Anyways, I did just that I watched and waited, as soon as I saw there was a Mac developer on the team, I waited for that version, and as soon as I saw they finally had Linux on the list… Well anyways, I quickly downloaded the first linux release as soon as it pop on the site. Unfortunately for me, I like all my apps to be nicely integrated with the Desktop, and while yes I know, I can easily add all the various gnome anchors and confs, I’m lazy. I’ve really enjoyed my last few years as a USER not a tinker. Anyways, being that it is presidents day, I’m at home! no access to iTunes, so I decided to give Songbird another quick whack. Being that this is the first attempt I’ve made at Songbird since moving to Ubuntu (was a long time Redhat/clone user), I first checked for a debian package, no luck. Than I decided to do a quick google search for write-ups and howto’s for installing Songbird with Gnome and Ubuntu. To my enjoyment, I stumbled upon the following link:
Installing Songbird on Ubuntu
Here you will find 2 simple scripts, one for installing and one for un-installing. Well, like any good IT person who spends much time dealing with security issues, the first thing I did was read through the script looking for anything suspicious, finding none, I ran it. It works great, it asked a few quick questions to decide which version to download, and then for my password for sudo, and upon completion, in my Application menu I found a nice little Egg. Well part one complete, it is installed, now for usage.

So far so good. Upon the first load, it asked where all my music is located, and read in my entire library. The primary thing I use audio players for is streaming music. With all the other players I’ve tried, you have to search the web, find the playlist or stream uri, and then go through the process of adding a radio station, the nice part about Songbird is that it is a partial web browser. I just type the search query or surf the web and find links to playlist. I personally am a fan of Shoutcast and it is an included extension with Songbird, and I also like DI.fm, SKY.fm and Somafm.com , all have a nice selection of stations, most can actually be found in the Shoutcast directory. Anyways… I just browsed over to the various sites I wanted to add, right-clicked, and was provided with a “Add as Playlist” option and poof, there is a new playlist of that stream.

So far, I am happy, later this week, I’ll start working with Podcasts!

Ubuntu + Box.net = Happy Nick

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Well one of the things that I could never seem to get working with Centos was the mounting of a webdav filesystem via davfs. Well today with the help of Ubuntu and the web, I’ve gotten it figure

# apt-get install davfs2# mkdir /media/box.net# mount -t davfs http://www.box.net/dav /media/box.net

I was also able to get the mount to work as me by adding a .davfs directory for me with the username and password, plus with an fstab entry. Of course you also have to setuid the mount.davfs for root.

// setuidchmod 4555   executable_file// setgidchmod 2555   executable_file

But now that that is all working, I can actively use my box.net account as part of my filesystem.
I’m happy.

references:
[howto] Mount your Box.Net account using WebDAV via ubuntuforums
How to set the setuid and setgid bit for files in Unix

Ubuntu continued

Well… like I said in my previous post, I moved to Ubuntu. I then promptly screwed my system up, and then I started over and got things working. Well the next step was to load all the standard apps that I use (basically Java stuff). I was easily able to load java, but I was never able to get Eclipse running…. well after many a tries and many a googling, I said screw it…. I remembered having a similar problem with the 64bit version of Eclipse and java on my Centos setup and that I had ended up installing the 32bit version. Of course I first spent many an hours trying to do this same thing, but in the long run, I gave up… now I’m running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu on my AMD 64bit processor… I know it is kind of a waste, but for now I will have to settle. Hopefully now that both the Intel Core 2 Duo and the AMD chips are all now 64bit the OSs will shortly follow… at that point, I’ll give the 64bit version of Ubuntu another try. But for now I’m happy, my system works and the move to Ubuntu seems to be worth it overall.

Moved to Ubuntu

Well after playing with the downloadable live cd from Ubuntu last night, I decided that I would make the move permanent. I’ve been a long time user of Redhat starting back with version 2.0 which I installed on a 386 back in 1996. I gave linux up for many years sticking only with MacOSX via my office computer, but when it came time to buy a home PC I knew that there was no way I was going to load windows. Being that while I love Macs, I refuse to pay the price tag. So I once again looked back to Linux. I first gave BSD a try since it is the back bone of MacOSX, but while I was able to quickly get it running, getting app was a pain especially when it came to java… From there I went to Mandrake but when they merged with Connectiva and ditched the Redhat kernel, I decided to go back to Redhat. Of course this was along the same time that Redhat formed Fedora and I did not wish to go that route or pay for RHEL. Well some at the NWS pointed me at the RHEL clone: ScientificLinux. That worked out well for several months until I got tired of waiting for updates. From there I went to the more popular Centos. Centos was nice and had an extremely similar look and feel to that of the actual RHEL (which I have on several work related machines. This to served me very well, until I finally purchased a LCD monitor (Viewsonic VX2035wm). Being a widescreen monitor, I unfortunately discovered that I was going to be a lot of work to get the resolution right. In steps Ubuntu. I was searching for a solution to my widescreen problem when I ran across several forum entries where people mentioned that they had no problems with widescreens and Ubuntu linux. So I clicked over to Ubuntu.com and started to dig around. Nicely enough, they had a downloadable Live/Install CD. Well naturally I quickly downloaded it for the AMD64 bit processor (then the x386 and then the PPC). I also started to remember a number of article about Google and Ubuntu…. so I went home and boot up the CD. To my great surprise everything worked great. My monitor looked great and all my accessories looked fine. So I started the installer. I must say that installing from a Live Linux CD has its advantages…. instant access to the internet while things load… if you have questions you can google them from the same machine that you are installing Ubuntu on. Anyways… to make this long story short, I’ve got my machine back up and running with Ubuntu and it looks great… of course I promptly killed it by not carefully restoring my files and consequently I over rose something… oh well time to start the process over again.