Teh Blarg » linux

Rhythmbox and iPod

Raybdbomb — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:28:04 +0000

At work, I listen to my iPod with Rhythmbox on Xubuntu latest stable. Rhythmbox isn’t perfect, but from my experience it was the best at dealing with my iPod, works great for reading from and writing to it. Every once in awhile it will do something that makes me very angry at it.

For example, sometimes when I click on a music share with a password, there is no way to escape the resulting screen. No matter how hard I try, I end up having to go to a virtual terminal and killing the rhythmbox process. I have no need for music shares, or this might be an issue.

Another example, about 90% of the time that I eject my iPod, I have to click OK to a dialog that says “Cannot unmount the volume ‘IPOD’”, with details “Cannot remove directory”. /media/IPOD is owned by my user with perms 0755, so that doesn’t really make any sense. After clicking OK, the media is actually ejected. *shrug* not a big deal.

The most annoying example — and something that makes me not want to use this player again — was yesterday. Rhythmbox was playing The Mighty Mighty Bosstones – The Impression That I Get from my iPod when the player froze. It locked up. I switched to a terminal and killed it, which led to a defunct process, but the window was still open and still very much locked up. Because I hadn’t written anything to the iPod recently, I decided to ignore the flashing red circle and disconnect it anyway. I eventually had to close the window manager and reboot because Rhythmbox was giving me such a hard time. I left work yesterday and thought nothing of it.

This morning I came in, connected my iPod as usual, and came to find there wass no music on there. All of the photos were in tact, so it wasn’t a complete wipe, but every single song (of my ~15GB collection) was gone; and of course not backed up. I knew this day would come someday… just didn’t really want it to be today =\

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 ifconfig adding an alias

Raybdbomb — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:27:35 +0000

I’ve setup multiple IPs on FreeBSD before, so I expected the process to be about the same for RHEL 4. It took me about a half hour to figure out that I didn’t want to create an alias (at least not by using that terminology). I finally found this site which helped me through it.

Manual:

ifconfig eth0:0 up 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig eth0:1 up 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0

Automatic:
In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:0 put

DEVICE=eth0:0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.1.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.0

In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:1 put

DEVICE=eth0:1
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.1.3
NETMASK=255.255.255.0

That’s it!

Xubuntu Optiplex 320 fix

Raybdbomb — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:31:53 +0000

After installing Xubuntu 7.10 on my work Dell Optiplex 320, after the reboot, the system would go to a blinking prompt, without allowing text input. After some research, I found that there is an issue with grub and the motherboard of THIS box. After a few hours of research I was able to find a fix: installing and using lilo instead of grub.
This is the thread I eventually used to guide me through it. I write about it because the first time I needed it, I spent 4 hours looking for it. The second time I needed it, I spent a half hour looking for it. The third+ times I need it (or maybe not), I’ll spend 1 minute looking for it.

Argument list too long

Raybdbomb — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 04:59:43 +0000

By now I’ve figured out that if I need to google something more than once, it’s important enough to write down.

Trying to rm a (large) list of files on my *nux box led to this
[root@sam /dir/ectory]# rm 1.* -su: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

A google search led to doing this as a solution, which works.
[root@sam /dir/ectory]# find . -name '1\.*' | xargs rm

Why Ubuntu is not for me.

Raybdbomb — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 08:42:21 +0000

I installed Ubuntu Linux about a 3 days ago on my new system. It has not performed up to my expectations. I have compiled a short and concise list why I feel Ubuntu is not for me.

First, the OS is workstation oriented, in contrast to server oriented. There is very little support anywhere for a non-GUI based Ubuntu install, and everything is setup according to an ‘ease of use’ principle. There is talk on their forums about how the distro is slightly slow compared to some other Linux distros which compile their application packages, whereas Ubuntu simply installs the binaries. Moreover, something that really annoying me was the fact that you can’t by default su to root in an Ubuntu install, you have to instead sudo every command you want to execute as root. While I’m sure there are workarounds, such a ridiculous default option is nothing short of pestering.

Next, and further suggesting the above, the fact that the OS by default comes so bloated with software is somewhat annoying. It would probably be good for a typical workstation user, but for someone wishing to use the system as a server, the fact that OpenOffice, Gimp, etc. are installed is simply a waste of space. Personally, I think that Windows makes a great workstation, and I doubt I would anytime soon find a replacement. If the server were bloated with option server software, well that might be a different story…

Next, I was having some issues installing Oracle 10g. It turns out that Ubuntu isn’t a “Certified Linux Distribution” for Oracle 10g. Currently the only distros that are certified are

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3)
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9)

I’m pretty sure each of those distros cost money. While I’m sure that the issues are probably easy to fix, I really don’t want to have to deal with it. I want an install that will work “out of the box.”

Next, the default “remote desktop” for Gnome acts as a vnc server, but it has enormous lag problems (compared to a system with 1/3rd the CPU speed and 1/4th the RAM). Not exactly sure why…

Lastly, their documentation is heavily lacking. But, I might have spoiled early in my *nux career.

Next step for getting an Oracle server? I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I’ve considered a Windows 2003 (win2k3) server, or maybe a VPS like Virtuozzo with win2k3 and some *nux (probably back to FreeBSD).

Ubuntu installed

Raybdbomb — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 23:42:53 +0000

I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on a shiny new system I just received… which barely fits under my desk.
Relevant stats:

2x Intel Pentium III 1.05GHz
2GB RAM
2x 250GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive
1x 80GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive
4x 40GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive
ATI Rage 128 (it is a server…)

With an onboard RAID device, and plenty of power, this system has support for 8 HDDs (room to grow!). It really is a thing of beauty. It also has room for 4 hard drive caddies, which each have built-in fans for cooling the HDDs.

I immediately installed Ubuntu server onto the system. After having it installed, I noticed that all of the documentation and guides out there were for the GUI version of Ubuntu. Apparently nobody uses Ubuntu for a server? So I scrapped that and reinstalled with the GUI version.

I found some great documentation for learning Ubuntu:

Speaking of… since one of the main reasons to switching to Ubuntu is to install Oracle, I decided to try installing Oracle 10g on Ubuntu.

Checking operating system version: must be redhat-3, SuSE-9, redhat-4, UnitedLinux-1.0, asianux-1 or asianux-2
Failed <<<<

ccole says you have to trick the system:

Add the following to new file /etc/redhat-release:
Red Hat Linux release 2.1 (drupal)

I’ve yet to try this, but I will as soon as possible.

So far, it looks to be working great. There are a couple of things I need to solve before I consider this a good replacement. Those things are, namely:

Where do I get the gcc compiler?
Java 1.5?
UFS r/w compatibility?
Vncviewer only has “takeover” mode, meaning the target machine still has all things viewable, potentially causing excess lag. How to get around this?

Nano Syntax Highlighting

Raybdbomb — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:06:30 +0000

I’m an avid nano user (the editor, not the ipod), and perusing the manfile today introduced me to a lot more of its features than those to which I am accustomed.

I’ve gotta say, the Syntax Highlighting is a pretty cool enhancement for what I thought to be a very basic text editor.

Apache with dynamic IP

Raybdbomb — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:24:55 +0000

I was setting up a FreeBSD system to use Apache, and I was running into some problems getting it to start normally. I had the following in my /etc/rc.conf file:
hostname="grtest.domain.name.com" ifconfig_em0="DHCP" ...
and in my /etc/hosts file:
::1 localhost 127.0.0.1 localhost

I was getting assigned a good IP, but when I would attempt to start Apache, I would get an error message similar to

[Thu Aug 18 11:05:11] [alert] httpd: Could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

What I had to do to fix the issue was to add a private IP for my NIC. I did this via the FreeBSD Diary’s instructions, which involved:

Adding the following line to /etc/hosts:
192.168.0.1 grtest grtest.domain.name.com
Adding line to /etc/rc.conf to add IP automatically to NIC on boot:
ifconfig_em0_alias="inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffffff"
Add IP to NIC via the command:
ifconfig em0 alias 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffffff
Restart apache, noting no longer an error:
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2.sh restart

Now it will still give me a public IP from the DHCP, but now works so that Apache will start correctly.

I was having a similar problem on a Gentoo Linux system before I scrapped it, so a similar solution would probably have fixed that issue as well.

Gentoo’s /bin/ash

Raybdbomb — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 09:51:50 +0000

I was getting this message with Gentoo‘s (Linux) 2004.3 livecd:

Started device management daemon v1.3.25 for newroot/dev
>> Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/cdroms/cdrom0

BusyBox v1.00-pre7 (2004.07.21-17:47+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands

/bin/ash: can’t access tty; job control turned off
/ #

I figured out the fix was on bootup to specify ide=nodma on boot, so the full command is
gentoo ide=nodma

This allows it to boot (took me about a half hour to figure out).

Samba setup on Gentoo Linux

Raybdbomb — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 00:25:29 +0000

I had tried to setup Samba a couple of times before because I thought it would be cool, but never really got it going. I finally invested some effort and followed the steps from this tutorial and got it working. That tutorial provides instructions on how to setup samba for network printing as well as being a windows file server, but I’m only using the folder sharing.

It now works perfectly. Here are the exact steps that I did:

#1. emerge net-fs/samba //emerge the script
#2. nano /etc/samba/smb.conf //setup the config, includes the following information
#——-
[global]
workgroup = IWGroup
server string = Samba Server %v
log file = /var/log/samba3/log.%m
max log size = 50
interfaces = lo eth0
bind interfaces only = yes

hosts allow = 144. 127.
hosts deny = 0.0.0.0/0
security = share
guest account = guest
guest ok = yes

[VideoCardDrivers]
comment = drivers
path = /home/VideoCardDrivers
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
public = yes
create mode = 0766
guest ok = yes
#—-
#3. mkdir /home/VideoCardDrivers //make the shared directory
#4. smbpasswd -a root //created the user ‘root’, but i don’t think i’ll use it
#5. nano -w /etc/nsswitch.conf //edited the line hosts to be {hosts: files dns wins}
#6. chmod 755 /home/VideoCardDrivers //make the directory properly permission’d up
#7. /usr/bin/testparm //make sure the settings worked fine
#8. rc-update add samba default //adds samba to run at startup
#9. /etc/init.d/samba start //starts samba

Works like a charm.