Brian's Blog

This is sort of old news but I thought I'd share a little project I've done at home.

The CD player on the living room stereo finally died, well mostly. It plays sometimes, other times it doesn't. So, rather than replacing it I decided it would be time to be able to play the tunes from my computer downstairs on the stereo upstairs. I was previously using gnump3d to stream music at work, but due to a sever security flaw I decided it was time to drop it and try something new. After asking around it was suggested I take a look at Slimserver. It's commercially developed, GPL'd, and has a slew of features. It runs fairly well but seems not as stable as gnump3d. I've had to restart the daemon a couple times a week. It is designed to work with hardware that they sell (price range from $300 to about $1000) but will work with most any player. I've tried winamp, xmms, and amarok.

Setting up the server software isn't that hard as there are packages for most popular distributions at the download site. It also run on Windows and Mac which is cool. If you run Slackware there is a slackbuild available at slackbuilds.org. Once that's installed you just connect whatever player you choose to run to the stream at http://<serverip>:9000/stream.mp3.

As far as getting the music up to the stereo I went as frugal as I could. Rather than buying a Slimdevice of some sort I just used a spare small form factor PC I had around that has integrated wireless. It's small enough to fit behind a speaker of the stereo. It's running Slackware 12.0 (any distro will do) and connected automatically on boot to the stream with mplayer. I'm not sure how to do such thing with Windows but the way I did it was to write a small script and call it in my rc.local. The goal was to have it connect on boot and automatically retry connecting if it lost connection to the stream. I put the script below somewhere in my path and called it start_mplayer. I'm sure it could be improved by someone who actually know scripting well but it seems to work. Of course, the username, password, and IP address aren't real.

killall mplayer
mplayer -user USERNAME -passwd PASSWORD http://123.45.67.89:9000/stream.mp3
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
        start_mplayer
fi

The idea is that it kills all instances of mplayer just to make sure no extra mplayer processes are running taking up resources. It runs mplayer and connects to the stream. If mplayer exits with an error it restarts itself.

Finally, in my rc.local I put:

/usr/bin/start_mplayer 2> /dev/null 1> /dev/null &

There is a 1/8" audio to RCA cable I had laying around that I think I bought at RadioShack ages ago that connects the PC's sound card to the CD in line of the stereo. Now I just choose what I want to play from my laptop and it come out of the stereo.

This works pretty well for the most part. Like I said, I have to restart the slimserver daemon a couple of times a week. The client computer also looses it's wireless connection about once a day. The client issue is probably because the wireless chipset it has is not supported well under Linux.

It's no super secret that I love Slackware Linux. There are many great things about it that I don't really feel like going into at the moment. There is one thing though that is a bit of a pain, and that's software installation. I mean, it's a breeze when there is already a package available. Just a simple installpkg packagefile.tgz and it's all done. The trouble is finding a Slackware tarball can sometimes be a challenge.

Now, there is Linuxpackages.net which is nice and all but the packages don't come with source usually and the usually don't include the slackbuild script used to generate the package. The trouble with that is you can't easily roll your own or check what options were used at compile time. Then there is slackbuilds.org which is a collection of slackbuild scripts. You just download the script and the source. Then run the script to generate a custom made Slackware package for your system. Then install that. The trouble with that is that the repo isn't huge. I've submitted a handful of slackbuilds to help but unless slackbuilds.org becomes hugely popular I doubt the repo will get huge.

Now, having been playing with Kubuntu on my laptop here I have to say it's darn hard to beat software installations on it. The rebos are just gargantuan and the Adept Manager is easy to use. Just search, select what you want to install, and click apply. Done in a snap. It would be nice if Slackware could get to that point one day.

It's not like I'm going to stop loving Slackware over one slight shortcoming though.

For some strange reason the comment system I use just decided to spontaneously quit. I'm not sure why but I get the following fun entries in may Apache error log:

[Sun Nov 18 19:25:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Illegal character in prototype for main::linkformat : $formatstring at /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/reblogger/reblogger.pl line 632., referer: http://rignesnet.tzo.com/
[Sun Nov 18 19:25:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Odd number of elements in hash assignment at /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/reblogger/reblogger.pl line 177, line 301., referer: http://rignesnet.tzo.com/
[Sun Nov 18 19:25:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/reblogger/reblogger.pl line 182., referer: http://rignesnet.tzo.com/

To be honest, I haven't really put to much time into troubleshooting this but, as comments are mostly a luxury I've just removed them for now in the hopes that I can take the time to fix this in the near future or change over to another blogging system.

It's not like I've been all that faithful in posting as I should anyway.

OK, so I'm a bit of a late bloomer on this one but I've finally given an Ubuntu derivative a go and I have to say it's really kind of nice. I've pretty much been in love with Slackware since I started using Linux as my primary OS and never really gave another disto a chance. That is until I recently acquired a 2nd hand laptop. When I worked at Inova Technologies I was given an IBM Thinkpad T30 to use. It was a nice and fairly Linux friendly laptop on which I had installed Slackware 10.2 at the time. Much of it worked but I had to jump though some serious hoops to get laptopish things, such as suspend to disk, working. I recorded my efforts and if you take a look at that article you will see it was far from easy. The results were nice and it was one heck of a learning experience, but I just don't have that kind of time right now to do it all again.

I'm not going to go into a review or Kubuntu, that's been done elsewhere and a quick web search will probably bring up a slew of reviews. But I was happy to see that everything, and I mean everything, worked right out of the box when I installed Kubuntu. Suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, xorg, and wireless Just Worked© with no intervention at all.

Don't get me wrong, I still love my Slackware and will keep it on my workstation and whatever servers I choose to run but Kubuntu made for a nice quick workstation with minimal fuss. Pretty cool stuff. Linux sure has come a long way it seems, even in the short time that I've actually been using it.

Well, I should probably say at least one doesn't like Live Search. I was on a tech support call with Microsoft and part of our conversation went like this:

Microsoft Guy: I need you to install a small utility call Filemon. Can you Google for that and download and install it?

Me: You don't want me to use Live Search?

Microsoft Guy: Well, if you don't want to find it...

So, he wouldn't use his own companies search engine. I know he's just one guy and search engines aren't all that there is but it was still somewhat amusing.

I used to swear by Linuxpackages.net for nearly all of my Slackware packages. Apparently it didn't make really big news but I just learned that a couple of months ago Linuxpackages.net has intentionally released a malicious ISO on P2P networks that included a package that would nuke your HD if you used it. I guess they wanted to make sure you bought it from them rather than downloaded it somewhere.

According the the article linked above the following text was included in the WARNING file:

Standard information here. We take no responsibility for what any of these packages may do. They are checked but for only minor things. As with any software you download you should check it very well before installing it.

Also if you have downloaded an ISO of this archive from a P2P network or purchased it from a source other than Linuxpackages be warned there is a package included in the archive that will remove all the files from your HD and yes we put it there to prevent unauthorized mirrors and leeches that try and make money off of the hard work of many without giving them credit. These ISO.s that are out there are not authorized by us and should not be trusted. The archive is available for purchase from us or you can download the packages from authorized mirrors. To see the list go to http://www.linuxpackages.net/mirrors.php

LinuxPackages.net

This sort of thing by anyone is absolutely not cool in anyway whatsoever. Not to mention terribly illegal (IANAL). Of all the people who should know that this is wrong you would think it would be an organization that is centered around Open Source Software like Linuxpackages.net. This sort of thing is usually in indication of a deeper issue within an organization and shows us where it's true priorities lie. In this case, that priority is money. Either that, or there is some colossal stupidity in the ranks and they didn't really think their actions through.

So, this is just one more thing to urge me to stick with SlackBuilds or even CheckInstall if it is ever updated to work on Slackware 12.0.

I was just lurking about on ##slackware at freenode and learned that Slackware is 14 years old today. Supposedly Slackware 1.0 was released on July 16, 1993.

As I've said, I've been messing with Slackbuild scripts since checkinstall is unhappy with the latest Slackware. I have to say one thing so far about them and that is, "Why didn't I mess with these things earlier?" There are a few apps I feel I need and don't really want to wait and rely on someone else to make a package on Linuxpackages.net. One of them is digiKam. Of course, it and it's dependencies aren't available yet on Linuxpackages.net and the slackbuild at slackbuilds.org is only validated for Slackware 11.0 in addition to be a slightly older version. Lucky for me all but 2 of the dependencies already existed on Slackbuilds.org so I only needed to make scripts for the 2 missing dependencies and digiKam itself. That wasn't all to hard as I just grabbed an existing script and modified it accordingly. The resulting packages seem to work OK so I submitted them to Slackbuilds.org if they want them. Maybe it'll save someone else a bit of time.

Making a Slackbuild from scratch would take much more work but then you'd only have to do the work once as the script will create a .tgz for you. And once the initial one is made it seems fairly easy to updated it to newer versions of the thing it's meant to build. I see the benefits of of Slackbuilds over existing packages. Those being:

• The resulting package is compiled specifically for you system.
• You can read the script and see what options are compiled in which could be useful if the program isn't working as expected.
• It makes a tgz which can be installed via the installpkg command which is nice for if you want to ever remove it from your system. Not every makefile seems to have the uninstall option making it sometimes difficult to get a manually compiled program removed.
• You don't have to rely on someone else to make the package and, since you compiled at and can review the script, you will know exactly how the package was made and can easily make changes.
• The resulting package will be true to "The Slackware Way" if the script is written correctly.

If that isn't nice enough I ran into a really nice script on Chess Griffin's Blog. Yup, that's the Chess of the Linux Reality Podcast. Anyway, the script is called buildsbo. What it does is rsyncs the Slackbuilds.org repo to your system and will automatically get the source for you, validate it's checksum, and run the slackbuild for you in one command. For example, to install digiKam it would simply be:

# ./buildsbo digikam

And when it's all done you'll have the .tgz in /tmp. Pretty cool eh?

It seems rather odd having two such polar opposite things in the same post but it is what it is.

So, I put Slackware 12.0 on my system which had Slack 11.0 on it. It's gone pretty smooth so far. Normally I would have just upgraded but this time, after something like 4 or 5 years I decided to do a fresh install to clean cruft. The cruft that I had was caused by inexperience and now I'm hoping to hold of cruft for longer now that I know a bit more. I think I mentioned all of this in a previous post somewhere. Things are all 100% rosy though. 12.0 is so new that Linuxpackages.net doesn't have much which means I have to compile my own stuff. Now, I wouldn't mind that but checkinstall is also not compatible with 12.0 so I won't even be able to easily include what I compile in the package manager. I've used a few Slackbuilds for some stuff. I'm going to either have to wait, or write my own slackbuild scripts. I'm considering trying to update a few slackbuilds that are for 11.0 and contributing it back. At least it would be educational.

On an unrelated note I've been having much of my life consumed by Metroid Prime. Man, this is a good game. It's not much for story line but the action is more than enough. I'm at the point where I have to fight the Omega Pirate who is repeatedly kicking my little butt all over the place. I know the pattern on what has to be done to kill the bugger though, so it's a matter of practice. Eventually he'll go down.

Now for the MCSE part. I've finally gone and schedules my last MCSE exam (70-296) for July 27th. I guess I need to pull myself away from the GameCube and do a final review. Wish me luck.

I've been using qmail as my MTA for some time. It was just something that I installed in order to get mutt to send mail. I never actually used it to receive mail making it overkill for my purposes. Also, as I've proven in the past, my knowledge of E-mail servers in general is pretty poor. So, for the sake of simplicity I've gotten rid of qmail and gone with msmtp as a simple "relay only" MTA. All I was doing with qmail anyway was using the pobox SMTP server as a smart host anyway. I did some searching and asking about and sort of randomly chose msmtp. It compiled and was setup super easy. There are also some useful scripts that let use have mails go into a simple queue if you are offline to be sent later. There's not much more to say about it simply because it was so easy to setup. Part of the motivation for moving away from qmail was because I just don't want to go though setting it up again. You see, Slackware 12.0 just went RC1 today and I am likely to upgrade via a fresh install when it is released due to the cruftieness of my current system. qmail seems to be a great program and I've heard high praise of it but it's way to much work for what I'd use it for. Basically I'm just trying to simplify my system down to make the impending upgrade easier.

On a totally unrelated note, I'm finally getting acceptable results in the practice exams for the MCSE Cert for work. I figure I'll do a bit of reviewing and take another practice test or two. If all goes well I'll be scheduling my exam sooner than later.

Out of the blue I thought of that ancient computer adventure game from the Commodore 64 days called Telengard. Oh the hours I wasted away in the 80's with this little gem. I thought the fun was over forever though. I assumed since the game was so old no one would ever remember it, yet alone port it to anything modern. It turns out there is a Win32 version of Telengard to be had. I haven't checked on a Linux version but I imagine it would run rather well in either Wine or Crossover Office. Oh the nostalgia!

According to the BBC Windows XP is to be retired in 2008. In other words, you won't be able to buy it on a new PC anymore. Of course, it's no surprise at all that they intend to do this. The opening of the article says:

Microsoft is keeping to a plan to stop selling the operating system even though surveys show a lukewarm response to Windows Vista among consumers.

Well, that's one way to boost sales! Just stop selling the old one so people have to buy the new one! I will venture to guess that XP is more than sufficient for the vast majority of peoples computing needs thus the low urge to upgrade.

Of course, that attitude may change a bit as I use Vista. At work I'll have to support Vista systems so it only makes sense that I run it in order to be familiar with it. Besides, it's a work laptop so I kind of have to. I'm only on my second day using Vista so I haven't really formed an opinion yet but if/when I actually do have an opinion I may post it here. In all fairness though I'll have to make a conscious effort to compare it only to it's predecessors. If I start comparing it to Linux then it will obviously lose.

I don't personally use Speakeasy and wasn't going to initially blog about this. However, after reading my friend Ricardo's post entitled We're Totally Screwed I have to say I also have some trepidation about the acquisition. Like I've said, I don't use Speakeasy, but I have wanted to for years and couldn't due to service not being available. Anyone who hasn't been sleeping under a rock knows that Speakeasy is well known for it's outstanding customer service and for employing technicians who have a clue. At most other ISP's clueful technical help is somewhere between rare and non-existent which I'm sure has been a reason for Speakeasy's success.

We use Speakeasy at work so we were sent the announcement E-mail about this. One particular paragraph kind of made me chuckle a bit.

Best Buy, like Speakeasy, is known for its high level of customer service. Our reputation as a trusted provider of voice and data services with stellar customer service will not change. Our values are similar too -- Best Buy shares our customer passion, respect for individuals, and drive to do the right thing while achieving results.

Best Buy is far from being known for it's customer service. I'm not just repeating what I've read on this subject as I've had several horrible experiences there myself. If I only had one issue I'd call it a fluke, but having had several I can't believe it's just bad luck. Usually I make a point of avoiding Best Buy if I at all possibly can. I think the only store I avoid more is Walmart.

Even so, the letter does claim that, "All aspects of your service will continue to be managed by Speakeasy and the excellent service and support you expect will continue uninterrupted." Well, that sounds good. Hopefully Best Buy will learn a bit of something from Speakeasy rather than the other way around. It'll be interesting to see if anything noticeable changes. As long as Speakeasy stays Speakeasy I'd still be open to switching if they ever come to my area. And if Best Buy becomes more like Speakeasy I'd be open to frequenting their stores again.

Whatever you do, do not install Dropline Gnome on your system if you think you might every want to remove it. I installed it to see what it was about and to try and get updated libraries and other thingies that some Gnomish programs rely on. In my case it was to try out Cedega for playing games in Linux. Other than that one app, I really don't need Gnome. So, I decided to uninstall Cedega and Dropline along with it as it wasn't needed anymore. Afterwords my system started acting very strange. Programs sort of half worked. Some started crashing with Segfaults and other good fun. I had read somewhere that Dropline will kill your system if you ever remove it and now I believe them.

Previously I had Freerock Gnome installed which worked fine but was beginning to age. The build that was installed was actually built for Slackware 10.2 (I'm using 11.0) and the project seems to have stagnated pretty badly. Freerock is much more preferred as it is intentionally designed to be an noninclusive as possible.

To get my system working again I had to restore the root partition from a 2 week old backup. All my data sits on a separate partition so the age of the back wasn't that big of a deal. If I didn't have a backup the only practical solution would have been to reinstall. As it stands now the time spent on just trying to get it working is almost equal to doing a base install. About 10 minute after starting the restore my system was back up and running stable again.

I just saw a few days ago that there was an update to the Slackware-current Changelog. I was beginning to wonder when the next update was going to be. To be fair though it really hasn't been all that long since 11.0 was released. I'm not sure if it's official but it looks like Slackware is finally switching to the 2.6.x.x series of kernels. I really like Slackware but the one thing that was taking way to long was switching to 2.6. I'm no expert an I'm sure Patrick Volkerding has his reasons but it would have been nice to have an easy option in the setup routine to choose between 2.4 and 2.6. You could sort of do it but then it required manually finding the modules and headers package and using installpkg to install those too. It's not really a big deal for a seasoned Slackware user to do that but the convenience would have been nice. In either case, from a look at the changelog it looks like 2.6 is required which will be a welcome change.

The upgrade process explained in CHANGED_AND_HINTS.TXT looks a bit onerous though. Perhaps it will get better but I don't think it will matter so much for me as I'm thinking of a fresh install anyway. My current install has been upgraded since 9.0 (or maybe 9.1) if I recall correctly and is beginning to develop some cruft. It'll be somewhat painful until I get things just right again but it'll be nice to start with a clean slate. Slackware 9.0 was released in March of 2003 so this install has been around for about 4 years or so without any major problems. Not a bad run I think. Wow, 4 years, has it been that long? Normally I keep my system updated to current but am thinking of holding off until it's farther along in development. Maybe I'll even wait till it's released before taking plunge. I get the impression that things are changing a lot for this next release.

On a somewhat related note I've decided to finally give Ubuntu a shot on a spare system. I had to install the kubuntu-desktop package as I can't stand Gnome. It looks pretty nice so far though. I need to get more familiar with it's package management system though. So far I've figure out it has apt-get, aptitude, and synaptic as ways to manage your packages. Each one has it's advantages and disadvantages but I'm not sure just what those are yet. I did get Beryl working on it briefly and it looked really nice but never got it to work again. I'm not sure what changed as it was working before I went to bed and the next day it wouldn't run. Unless the gremlins stopped by and messed with things nothing was changed by me overnight. Beryl looks like it is still very experimental though so I can't complain about instability.

It may not seem like it having said all of the above, but prepping for the 70-296 exam continues. I've just about finished getting more familiar with the Windows Certificate Authority stuff which is something we actually use at work. As always, prepping seems to take longer than anticipated. I tend to over prepare for these exams and can't seem to break away from that. I'd rather study to know the material than study to just pass the test. At $125 a try, pass or fail, I hate to take chances.

OK, I think I'm done rambling now.