http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?blogId=1 Quick note: This is a pretty long post. If you'd like to skip dinner and go straight to dessert, jump to the summary of my FOSScon 2010 wrapup . On June 19th, a warm Saturday morning, I found myself getting up very early. There are very few things, aside from fire, that will get me up very early; apparently a local FOSS convention is one of them. Four-ish in the morning, and I was off — to FOSScon! After I arrived at RIT , where the conference was being held, I was astounded to find a Scottish couple that I had met at OggCamp headed for sign-in. After checking to make sure I wasn't slipping into madness, I greeted them and politely asked them what the hell they were doing in upstate New York. Turns out that FOSScon Part Deux will likely be a European affair, and as part of the folks organizing it, they thought they'd take a look at the original. After the opening keynote from the folks at basekamp , I headed to the "FOSS at Home" track. Luckily I stumbled into Klaatu on the way there, who was the first speaker, and he helped me find the right building and auditorium. There were multiple talks and workshops being given all around the campus (things were spread out), which kept the presentations cozy. FOSS at Home had around 10-30 attendees for each talk, and I ended up sticking with that the whole way through. The presentations on that track were varied, from hardcore technicality with Richard Weait's talk on OpenWRT hacking and Klaatu's multimedia presentation that advocated compiling your own kernel, to Jorge O Castro's talk on how to "RTFM" (i.e: Finding the answers to your burning tech support questions). Onno Kluyt's presentation on managing an open source project was particularly good, and included some insight about the way different regions' communities go about things. For instance, my region of New York seems to be very subdued and private, whereas the West Coast is much more in the public eye, thanks to the silicon valley culture. The final presentation on the FOSS at Home track was, in my opinion, one of the most enjoyable. OpenStreetMaps is my favorite FOSS projects to hear about, Richard Weait stepped up again to present about it. Even after suffering a problem with the projector that washed out half his map detail, his presentation was fantastic - I'm always amazed to see how far OSM has come, and Richard had example after example of why OSM deserves all the credit we can muster. All in all, FOSScon was well worth the trip. I would have loved to catch some of the other tracks, but that's just the way it goes at conferences. The venue could have been less spread out, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying myself. If they're planning a FOSScon 2011, I'd say it's well worth your while to stop by and check it out - I know I'll be there. http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=109&blogId=1 Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:58:06 -0400 As someone who doesn't run a full desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, I'm learning a lot of new tricks about the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps Linux ticking. For instance, my heybuddy links kept opening in Arora somehow - and I didn't really know where to change that. Arora kept closing/crashing immediately after loading a link, so I thought I should probably research that a bit. It turns out that opening URLs is done by a bash script called ' xdg-open ' located at /usr/bin/xdg-open (or at least it is in Ubuntu systems). Since link opening is handled by this script, setting your default browser also requires a little bash stuff. The way to set a different browser (in my case, Chromium) to be the default for opening links, is to add the following to your '.bashrc' file in your home folder: export BROWSER=/usr/bin/chromium-browser A quick note: this only applies to things that use xdg-open to open links. Gnome software uses a Gnome setting, with the same being true for KDE (I think). If you want your default browser changed for them, you'll have to hunt down whatever setting they use. http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=108&blogId=1 Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:49:41 -0400 Okay, it seems like I should be all moved over. I apologize if some sort of Planet-Spam happens due to this, but as far as I could tell everything should be kosher, and nothing should have changed to cause that sort of nonsense. Fingers crossed! http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=107&blogId=1 Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:42:09 -0400 In a previous post, I mentioned that I was receiving a bizarre error message: " Unable to create temporary work files ". It turns out that it may not have been as bizarre as I had once thought. After making the previously discussed change, things went downhill fast . Errors started coming in, dozens a day, from the same page. We had a brand new problem; every once and a while, queries on the same FoxPro data source would start failing. This was mostly during periods of high volume, and would also randomly start working again after a couple minutes. My solution was to migrate all the data to a normal SQL database, and that worked – but while I was working on that, I was able to track down the problem. It appears that the Microsoft Visual FoxPro ODBC driver was indeed having trouble creating temporary files. I found that, upon every new connection, the server created a randomly named temporary file in one of Windows' temp folders. It would then create another for the next connection, and another, and so on. It would keep on creating a temp file for each new connection requested by that process; in this case, the IIS worker process. File #14, no problem. 15 & 16 were cake. But upon creating the 17th file, it crashed and burned. This would make the database unreachable by each subsequent PHP page that loaded and tried to connect until the IIS worker process was recycled, or those files were deleted. As I said, we solved it by moving all the data to SQL, but I thought I should post this just in case anyone else runs into this problem. http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=105&blogId=1 Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:18:40 -0400 Update: The plot thickens! Since I work for a County municipality, we have a lot of bizarre stuff going on behind the scenes. For instance, we have an ODBC connection set up so that I can display a bunch of FoxPro data on our web site using PHP. Weird situation, right? Well, it gets weirder... A little while back, I started seeing an error pop up every once and a while: "Unable to create temporary work files". I scoured the net, but wasn't able to find anything that would explain the behavior we were encountering. Luckily, I added in some logging functionality and was able to reproduce the problem. Since the FoxPro data came from a production system, I copied the database (just a collection of files) on to the web server, to prevent hammering the application server with web traffic, and to prevent any security holes from affecting production data. A quick script copies all of the relevant files to the web server at night, so it has something to work with... or so I thought! It turns out that I forgot to copy one of the files, and therefore one of the tables, over to the web server. Whenever we tried to display a property that referenced that table, everything blew up quite spectacularly and threw that vague error message. After amending the copy script and running it to get the missing files, everything went off without a hitch. I know this doesn't make for exciting news, but I wanted to throw it out there just in case someone else ran into this problem, and received an equally vague error message. It also serves as a warning to any would-be developers: make intelligent error messages! http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=104&blogId=1 Thu, 06 May 2010 12:06:57 -0400 In my quest for a cool Openbox desktop that fits me (you know, other than CrunchBang , which has elevated itself beyond sliced bread some time ago :) ), I ended up tearing up a lot of other perfectly nice distros and building some up from a base install. In each, I ended up tearing out GDM. It's little bit hefty for accepting two strings, and it doesn't exactly work with Likewise, which I use at work. Once I did that, I was back to good 'ol Getty, which is as basic as you can get. That also means that it dropped me at a Bash prompt, where I would have to run startx manually to get all the GUI goodness going. That's where this new trick comes in handy: the " .bash_profile " file. It should be located in your home directory - just create it if it doesn't. Once there, toss the following line into the end: startx ...and "whamo!" You've got yourself an X session whenever you log in. Original tip, and more info, courtesy of Debian Admin's article about starting X without a display manger . http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=103&blogId=1 Wed, 05 May 2010 05:54:33 -0400 Just a quick post to highlight a great package I found in the Ubuntu Repositories: gcolor2! gcolor2 launches one of those color-pickers with the hue/saturation triangle embedded in the color rainbow ring. It has a bunch of boxes for RGB values, hex name, etc. and so on. Where this really shines is the eye dropper; if you click the eye dropper tool, and then go to another window, you can grab a color right out of another program. Window borders, web pages inside your web browser – even your desktop background. Pick whatever you'd like to use as your source, and it will give you the hex value and all of the other information for it. This is perfect for use in combination with a program like Agave, which generates color palettes. If you use Ubuntu (and possibly Debian) and have the right stuff installed, you can install gcolor2 using the link. Enjoy! http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=102&blogId=1 Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:30:24 -0400 Recently I had to print at work, which required installing a printer on Ubuntu, so I thought I'd share how it went. Long story short: It went awesome . First of all, I checked with OpenPrinting (now run by the Linux Foundation) to make sure if our office MFP was supported; and indeed, it was. In fact, it looked like it was supported by a whole bunch of different Linux printing methods. I'm most familiar with CUPS , so I did it that way. Before I tried to install it, I made sure I had the HP drivers installed through the Ubuntu repositories. The packages are called hplip and hplip-cups ; if you're using a Ubuntu-based system, you might even be able to click right on those links and have them installed. Otherwise, a quick search with Synaptic or Add/Remove Software should do the trick. To install the printer, just visit the CUPS admin page , and follow the prompts. That was it - printing in just a couple minutes. The only snag I ran into was the printer selection page of the process; it searched my whole network for ANY available printers, so I had a gigantic list of generic-sounding HP models. Luckily, we have the only HP 4345 in the building, so I was able to pick it out. While I'm mostly posting this so that I can remember myself, who knows; maybe somebody will find this useful. http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=101&blogId=1 Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:40:28 -0400 Okay, quick note for myself later on - and anyone who may find it useful - about how to mount a Windows or Samba share in a Ubuntu Karmic/9.10 Minimal Install: You'll need to install the " smbfs " and " smbclient " packages beforehand Here's the mount syntax: mount -t cifs -o nounix,noserverino,username=DOMAIN\\user,password=*****,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 \\\\server\\share /mount/point In mount, don't forget to replace "DOMAIN" and "user" with your domain and username, "*****" with your actual password, "\\server\share" with the appropriate UNC path for the share, and "/mount/point" with the location on your local file system where you'd like everything to be mounted. Those backslashes are doubled-up for a reason, too: they have to be escaped or else bad stuff happens (I assume). If at first this doesn't succeed, and you get the [INSERT ERROR HERE LATER, JAKE - nothing to see here yet, folks... ;)], you probably need to install more Samba packages. Try randomly installing stuff with the word "samba" or "smb" in it from the repos - the two listed in the first step were just the last two I tried, and might not do it on their own. http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=100&blogId=1 Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:03:40 -0500 As of today, I'll be booting into Ubuntu at work instead of the usual Windows XP. I am psyched . For the past month or so, I've been spending an hour or so after work building up a second drive on my machine. I think I started off with Crunchbang, moved to Xubuntu with a lot of pieces stripped out, and eventually settled on a Ubuntu minimal install with Openbox for a window manager. Tonight, I was able to get the last bits sorted out that make it a sensible alternative in an all-Windows environment. Here are a couple tips I learned along the way: The Likewise Open packages in the Ubuntu repos will allow you to join your computer to an Active Directory domain, provided you have the user permissions to do so. But beware; in Ubuntu 9.10, this completely destroyed my ability to log into my machine with a local user through GDM , so I had to tear it out and use Getty & run " startx " to get to a GUI. There are alternatives, like qingy, but I didn't get very far with them. Lots of things are simplified if you set the default domain in your Likewise configuration. Since AD users are represented as DOMAIN\user, and a backslash is an escape character in unix-like systems, this makes commands and configurations awfully tricky. Simply logging in with your user name, and having Likewise assume you mean to log into your domain, makes things much smoother. Auto-mounting samba shares is a pain in the ass. I couldn't get it working without putting my user name and password in a plain text file, so I went for the manu-matic approach. I created a quick shell script that prompts me for my password twice (once for sudo, once for pasting into the mount options) and created a bash alias for it. The first thing I do when I log into my machine is open a terminal and type "connect", and that kicks things off nicely. I have a Windows XP VM around for annoying programs that don't have a FLOSS alternative or a native Linux port. There are so many crappy pieces of software that we use internally, some of which need IE to function, etc. Keeping a VM around with Windows allows me to run Linux for mostly everything while still being able to work on the help desk. So far, things are going well; Ubuntu with Openbox is proving to be lightning fast and far out-performs my XP installation on the same machine. Hell, the XP VM runs faster than the native install. I'll keep posting tips and tricks I run into along the way, and who knows: maybe I'll save someone time in the process. Here's hoping! http://blog.fragdev.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=99&blogId=1 Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:00:26 -0500