Category: Linux (page 3 of 4)

April 24, 2007

dd-wrt rocks

If you have a supported wireless AP or gateway and want to have fun extending it without getting too deep into building software, give dd-wrt a try.

I have a collection of Linksys wireless junk, enough that I should consider becoming a stock holder. When we moved into this house I was thinking of running cables from the basement up to the 2nd floor. But this house does not have a simple means to run cable from the basement to the attic and I really don’t want to punch holes in the walls.

So I setup a Linksys WAP54G in the basement, another WAP54G in the guest room, and a WET54GS5 on my second floor where Lily and my computers are. Eventually I purchased a WRT54G v5 and replaced the WAP54G in the basement. I think I wanted to play with the idea of using the WRT54G as a replacement for my Linux gateway. The old WAP55G got put away on the shelf.

The second floor WET54GS5 was a 5 port switch bridge; it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is simple to setup but it spontaneously reboots often and support for it is really non-existent. It’s a dead end product.

The shelved WAP54G only has 8MB of RAM and 2MB FLASH which in the past excluded it from hacking. Now the website www.dd-wrt.com has a replacement firmware v2.3 SP2 micro image which fits and is a stripped down. Using these instructions, I installed the image on the WRT54G v5. It works really well and I’ve replaced the 5 port switch bridge with the WRT54G.

On the WRT54G the WAN connection is now configured as just another LAN port. I configured the device as a “Client Bridge” and connect it to the AP in the basement. At the WRT Wiki is a pretty good description of how to set it up. It’s been running without a hiccup for over two weeks now. My game consoles, the laptops, etc. all work fine.

April 17, 2007

Ubuntu working fine

I’m running the beta of Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) with no problem at all. Everything is working fine and I’m keeping it on the T40.

April 7, 2007

Ubuntu and Steam

So far so good. I have tried the following with my Ubuntu installation:

Tried to get Compiz running on my laptop
Updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
Get Steam working on my laptop running Ubuntu

Compiz works badly. I think it’s the xserver I am using. I’ve un-installed it already; my laptop probably just lacks the horse power to drive the effects.

Ubuntu 7.04 will likely be better. But I fat fingered something and ended up putting back on 6.10 Edgy.

Steam works so far. In the past I purchased Transgaming’s Cedega cause I really like what they’re doing. But this time I’ve installed wine using

sudo apt-get install wine

Steam now installs via a .msi file. So to get it installed I downloaded SteamInstall.msi from http://www.steampowered.com/ and Googled to locate tahoma.ttf font file.

I moved the tahoma.ttf file to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ and ran

msiexec /a SteamInstall.msi

The mouse worked but I could not get the keyboard focused on the installer. Everything I typed ended up in the terminal I used to run wine. I ended up running winecfg and unchecking the “Allow window manager to control the windows” which was enough to get it installed.

Later on I put that option back and ran wine again with this on the command line:

WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine "C:Program FilesSteamsteam.exe"

This was lifted from a Ubuntuforums.org page. BTW I just pasted the snippet from the web page into the WordPress TinyMCE window. All formatting was taken care of, very cool. All I did was use the Code tab to adjust the width of the box.

The installation of a Steam game created a link on my desktop complete with icon. Later on I just double-clicked that link and the Steam app is installing my copy of Condition Zero.

The only problem I have is that the Steam window stays on top all the time. I will see if I can get that fixed.

April 1, 2007

Ubuntu 6.10 on a IBM T40 laptop

Update: Well the keyconfig extension no longer works despite hacking the install.rdf in the file. I had to follow the instructions located at this website.

On my Ubuntu laptop I did the following at a bash shell prompt:

cd /usr/share/firefox/chrome/browser/content/browser
sudo vi browser.xul

Did a search for “mainKeyset” and right after the line

<keyset id=”mainKeyset”>

I added the following two lines:

I then saved the file and the two IBM keys worked fine. This requires the lines in ~/.Xmodmap below. I’m not pleased with this solution because I have to update the main firefox package files. I will have to figure out how to do this in my home directory.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

That was way too easy.

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 from the Live/Install CD I had and ran the updater to get all the patches. I played with it for an hour or two and then ran

sudo “update-manager -c -d”

in a terminal window. This permitted me to upgrade the laptop to Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. I added some more software using Synaptic and was good to go.

Everything worked except in Firefox the keyboard navigation keys for previous/next page did not get recognized. So I added ~/.Xmodmap and put in the following two lines

keycode 234 = F19
keycode 233 = F20

I was all set to do the keyboard macro dance of death when I located and downloaded the keyconfig firefox extension. This extension lets you remap or assign functions to keys in Firefox. That’s very cool since I only was interested in making the keys work in Firefox.

I ran “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap” and used the extension to map Back as F19 and Forward as F20.

If you download animation or watch video clips, get and install Automatix2. All my vids work due to getting the correct codecs. I’m finding Totem to be a good player.

The real test of if this will work is Lily. She has used the laptop once or twice for browsing and I have even used this laptop to connect to my work’s remote desktop in a browser solution. It’s all working fine.

If she has no issues I’m leaving Ubuntu on this laptop.

March 31, 2007

Laptop committed XP suicide

Cool Ubuntu logo from www.linuxextremist.com For about a week my IBM T40 laptop has been acting bizarre.

It boots, complains about different problems, and none of the network connections work at all. Using the few tools I have for XP, I can’t get the thing to work.

It’s gotten to the point where I have to dig out the IBM CD’s and re-install XP and the utilities from the CD. I don’t think it’s a virus but the laptop has ticked me off to the point where I’m “Let’s just buy a new one!”

Without slip-streaming an updated copy of XP, that means I have to do the factory re-install and download a few hundred megabytes of patches. It’ll take hours to do.

X-<

As a rule I don’t keep anything important on my laptop. I have a USB key fob and keep copies of the important docs on my servers. Since all I plan to do is use the laptop for browsing and ssh’ing to my boxes, I am installing Ubuntu.

As I am typing this on another virtual desktop, I’m currently installing Ubuntu 6.06 from a live CD. That’s just not an option when installing XP.

This should be good, I will see how long I keep it.

Cool logo found on www.linuxextremist.com.

March 11, 2007

eAccelerator for Opensuse 10.0

Updated: I bumped the version from 0.9.5 to 0.9.5.1.

The source RPM for 0.9.5.1 can be found here.

The 32 bit compiled version can be found here.

I no longer have access to a x86_64 opensuse installation but running this command:

rpmbuild -bb php5-eaccelerator-0.9.5.1-1.src.rpm

should create them on your system.

——————————-

I wanted to add APC or even XCache but found that my PHP version 5.0.4 was not supported. Changing to 5.2.1 did not really seem to work well for me and some plugins did not work. So I went back to the default updated opensuse 10.0 packages.

The PHP cache software eaccelerator 0.9.5 does work with php 5.0.4. In fact sometimes it speeds up php by almost half.

The opensuse 10.0 source rpm I put together can be found here. I built the .x86_64.rpm and put a copy here. The src.rpm will figure out where to put the extension so if you do a rpmbuild on the src.rpm on another opensuse which has php5 installed it should work.

The spec file has some build requirements, most of which can be commented out I am sure. I built it with

configure –enable-eaccelerator=shared –with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config

I put the eaccelerator.cache_dir in /var/spool/eaccelerator and made that directory part of the package.

Inside the footer of my theme I put

<!– <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds. –>

The timer shows that pages were taking 1.3 seconds or more to generate, sometimes longer.

With eaccelerator I get 0.628 seconds or so.

I also keep

define( ‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true );

in my wp-config.php right below the line that reads define (‘WPLANG’, ”);.

This caches database information such as categories etc. I turned it off and the frequent hitting of my mysql tables introduced a big delay in response time.

Next up will be to tune my mysql settings.

January 24, 2007

Very Bad Upgrade

Sunday I went to Stefan’s to upgrade my main server. It was running Fedora Core 1 and was well past an upgrade.

I wanted to get away from Fedora because it was not supported in a way that I liked. But I did not want to waste too much time so I took with me the latest Fedora and tried to upgrade.

The new Fedora did not like my hard disk setup and refused to see the existing system. So I figured I’d put on Opensuse 10.1, move files on the file system and do an install over the old Fedora Core 1.

Everything that could go wrong did. Massively. Non-stop. The DVD drives did not work. The boot sector was not installing. It installed but refused to boot.

I finally moved the mail and web pages over to another server (more that 3 GB of data) and did a clean install of Opensuse. I’m still recovering. Last night I finally got postfix with TLS and SMTP AUTH working. The web pages are working (sorta).

December 4, 2006

XPS 700 BIOS update

Version 1.1.6 of the Flash BIOS is out and can be downloaded here. This version supports 64 bit operating systems.

The prior 1.1.3 release would not boot up an x64 Ubuntu live disk. Nice to have a 64 bit Core 2 Duo (what a lousy marketing name) and not be able to play with a 64 bit operating system. After I applied the update I loaded up my Ubuntu 6.06 x64 CD and booted into the live desktop. Cool, previously it would hang on just after unpacking the kernel.

This is probably done to support 64 bit Vista, but now I have the possibility of running a 64 bit Linux on my box just for fun.

October 4, 2006

OpenSuSE 10.1 quirks and postgrey RPM

Update November 13, 2006:

Fixed the rpm’s. I was putting the –daemonize in with the other options. That does not work, putting it in first works.

So now I read the /etc/sysconfig/postgrey with

test -s /etc/sysconfig/postgrey && . /etc/sysconfig/postgrey

And execute

$POSTGREY_BIN –daemonize $OPTIONS

And all is right in the world.

Here are the links for the rpm and source rpm that I use on my SuSE 10.1 server.

Original October 4th post starts here.

————

I run OpenSuSE 10.1 on my server. For a few weeks yast’s online update was acting up. It would list things for update and not seem to fully get that the update was already.

Saturday I checked and got a boat load of new updates. One reboot later and yast online update is working perfectly each time.

I like packaging the software I use. It’s one way to keep my technical skills fresh and make my server more manageable. I use Postgrey with my postfix installation and have had problems wrapping the software. The software and RPM build fine, and I can run it by hand but when I try to read the /etc/sysconfig/postgrey in the init script, junk gets added to the command line.

I hacked the postfix init script and created a new script for postgrey.

I run postgrey like so:

/usr/sbin/postgrey
–unix=/var/spool/postfix/postgrey/socket
–daemonize –user=postgrey –pidfile=/var/run/postgrey.pid

In /etc/sysconfig/postgrey I have

OPTIONS=”–unix=/var/spool/postfix/postgrey/socket –daemonize –user=postgrey –pidfile=/var/run/postgrey.pid”

So in my init script I should be able to just do

. /etc/sysconfig/postgrey

And set OPTIONS that way. Once that’s done I should be able to just run

POSTGREY_BIN=/usr/sbin/postgrey
$POSTGREY_BIN $OPTIONS

The options piece seems to be adding on junk. The OPTIONS variable is set correctly but when I execute the perl script junk gets added and the postgrey script exits.

I’ve replaced $OPTIONS with explicit command line arguments for now but it’ll bug me till I figure it out.

August 9, 2006

VPS Servers

My domain is managed by me on my own name servers. When I moved to Long Island I lost my static IP addresses from my DSL line. So I moved both my DNS servers to Stefan’s house via his DSL line.

Not a good idea for availability. Since both DNS servers were there, any connectivity issues meant my domain disappeared. I had setup my basement server to queue up mail, but if the name servers became unreachable then no one could figure out to send mail to the other box.

Yesterday I went to http://www.tektonic.net/ and ordered a virtual private server from them. I picked the UM1 which is 10GB of disk space, 256MB RAM, on a Dual AMD Opteron 246. I selected SUSE 10.0 paid online and I’m good to go.

It’s a little different. I selected SUSE because that is what I use. Once I setup the yast repository I added bind, apache, php5, etc. and ran the online update. It’s very easy to forget that this is all virtual and on a shared box. The responsiveness is very good. I contacted my domain registrar, updated the record and poof all done.

Just for kicks I moved this blog onto this new server. I’ll see how it goes, but so far there have been no surprises.