Tag: free software

FLOSS – software which is, by definition, free, libre and open source

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INTRODUCTION

Enough was enough. I rocked and rolled along with one mainstream distribution after another, since I started using GNU/Linux in 2000. It was time for something else. Something that wasn’t trying to be everything.

Even I was slightly surprised then that, knowing so little about it, I chose Slackware Linux as my next distribution.

Here are some rough-and-ready notes from my installation, in case they’re of help to anyone else.

INSTALLATION

To install on an encrypted drive, I followed Juan Valencia’s blog:

http://www.jveweb.net/en/archives/2010/10/installing-slackware-in-an-encrypted-lvm.html

Apart from the natural modifications expected, i.e. kernel versions, the instructions were completely sound and the installation proceeded without issue.

INITRD KEYMAP

One LILO was installed, and the system rebooted, I had two issues:

  1. The USB devices attached to my ThinkPad’s docking station weren’t activating at boot time
  2. The keymap of the initial ram disk was set to US, so to decrypt my drive I had to observe the alternative placement of certain characters… 😉

To resolve these issues, I found the “IT Debris” blog (amusingly sub-titled: “Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect”):

http://blog.beulink.org/slackware-initrd-luks-usb-keyboard/

To the command line (mkinitrd -c -k 3.2.7 -f ext4 -r /dev/vgl01/lvroot -m usb-storage:ehci-hcd:usbhid:jbd2:mbcache:ext4 -C /dev/sda2 -L -u -o /boot/initrd.gz) I added the flag “-l uk”, which loaded the UK keymap by default into the initial ramdisk.

Not forgetting to run lilo afterwards!

LILO’S KEYMAP

LILO’s keymap was also set to US. I decided to take a look at this. While the documentation is pretty comprehensive, the instructions for this particular issue were met with a slight problem – the file locations and names had changed in the 13 years since the documentation was written.

keytab-lilo is the recommended tool for updating LILO’s keyboard mapping.

keytab-lilo expects a US map and the other map (in your language, that you want to use) in order to create a mapping between them.

According to the docs, as referenced in /usr/share/doc/LILO…/doc/README’s web link, keytab-lilo expected keyboard mappigns in /usr/lib/kbd. This directoty doesn’t exist, so I did this:

mkdir usr/lib/kbd mkdir /usr/lib/kbd/keytables

loadkeys uk

cd usr/lib/kbd/keytables

cp /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/uk.map.gz . cp /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.map.gz . gunzip uk.map.gz gunzip us.map.gz

mv us.map us.kmap mv uk.map uk.kmap

keytab-lilo uk > /boot/uk.ktl

.. FINALLY, edit /etc/lilo.conf in your favourite editor:

emacs -nw /etc/lilo.conf

boot = /dev/sda keytable = /boot/uk.ktl

NOTE: the remapping doesn’t seem perfect. The hash (“pound” in en_US) symbol (#) is mapped to two keys and the UK pound (£) symbol is not mapped to number 3 at all, but in the main this is a usable UK mapping for me.

AND.. THE SYSTEM KEYMAP!

Edit /etc/profile.d/lang.sh, adjusting from en_US to en_GB

POST-INSTALL STUFF

After this, there were a couple of issues which I wanted to resolve. When using Ubuntu, I recall there was an issue with using a ThinkPad T420 (my machine) and possibly other ThinkPads with audio output via the docking station‘s analogue port. The issue was also addressed in a Ubuntu forum post.

I created /etc/modprobe.d/t420.conf and added the following:

options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad

options iwlcore led_mode=1

.. then rebooted. Perfect – audio came up as expected. The flashing LED still appears to be flashing, though, so this requires further investigation.

INSTALL GOOGLE CHROME

http://web.archive.org/web/20150815075708/http://infinityperl.org/post/2009/12/09/How-to-install-Google-Chrome-on-Slackware-13.html

(+ hangouts plugin): http://slackblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/videovoice-chat-works-in-slackware.html

TERMINAL – modifying the prompt

A long trip arouind the documentation and understanding how bash is invoked made me realise that the easiest thing to do is go into XFCE’s Terminal preferences, and tick the box that says “Run Command as login shell”. Then I get my nice prompt with my login, hostname and path instead of just “sh-4.20$”.

PSEUDO SUMMARY

These are my first steps at installing and configuring Slackware Linux. So far, so good. And not a single crash, which is what I expect from a sensible GNU/Linux distribution.

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I recently came across the dreaded owncloud login loop. This surprised
me a little, as I hadn’t performed a software upgrade or otherwise
changed any configuration parameters for a while.

So why the change?

One lesson I have learned long and hard through developing web sites and
testing, is that there are two components which are equally
important: program code and data. Never assume there is
something wrong with your code; your live data (or test data) could be
equally at fault, causing your application to slip up.

In the case of ownCloud, I found that my hosting environment had reached
its quota. Although ownCloud could create session files in /tmp, it
couldn’t write data to them. Perhaps the code should have handled this
more gracefully, but it’s safe to assume that a cloud environment
has hard disk space in order to save its files. That’s what it’s
there for, after all.

So here’s a quick, work-in-progress checklist to ensure your ownCloud installation has the
best chance of working correctly:

  • PHP Sessions should be enabled
  • session.save_path in php.ini should point to a valid (writable)
    filesystem location
  • Storage space on hosting environment should be ample

More to follow when I have further issues..!

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This wasn’t the droid I was looking for

Motorola Razr HD smartphone rear cover
Good finish… bad start!

I was so happy recently to unpack my brand new Motorola RAZR HD.  It’s a lovely device. Wonderfully built, with a 4.7 inch 720p screen, replete with Gorilla Glass, and backed by a rubberized kevlar weave.  The aluminium strip separating the two, running around the edge of the phone, provides a premium feel.

Or, at least, this is what I was led to believe from various reviews.

In reality, what you have is a beautiful brick – with good battery life. Android 4.1.2, the operating system shipped with the phone and modified by Google/Motorola Mobility, to ensure the phone is quite unusable, provides an amazing experience – if you connect up your Google account.

The Empire Strikes Back

What happens if you don’t have a Google account, or if you’re unprepared to create one?

What happens is that the software on the phone may refuse to play nicely with other software you choose to install. Here are some examples of this obnoxiusness:

  • Phone set-up
    • Before even seeing the home-screen, you are prompted to log into your Google account – or create a new one. You decline.
    • You are reassured that it’s a really good idea to create a Google account, otherwise you’ll “miss out”.
    • Resolutely, you continue. You get to the home screen. Then you want to install something from the Android Market (sorry, “Google Play”). You now cannot avoid creating or using a Google account.
  • Contacts
    • The phone is still behaving as though you are not fully connected to Google. Therefore, your data storage is predominatly on the phone only.
    • However, you might want to check this in ‘Accounts and Sync’ (which we’ll get on to in a sec)
    • You have the option of synchronising your data off elsewhere, away from Google’s servers. The CardDAV Sync software on Google Play provides the vehicle for doing this*. You download and install it, set up the sync with your CardDAV server, and sync away.
    • You might find that some of the software from Google updates on your phone during this time, now that it has access to the market.
    • All good… but, you soon come to realise that you cannot add new contacts to your chosen sync location. Take the scenario where you receive an SMS from an unknown number. You try to add the contact from the SMS, and can only do so to local storage.
    • Worse still, your only option to alleviate this – the only sync location you can add contacts to is – that’s right, a/your Google account.
    • If you delete your Google account on the phone, you then find that you cannot sync your contacts anywhere, because you cannot specify a default Contacts Store in the Contacts app.
  • Calendar
    • The same is broadly true of the Calendar. If you are not sync’ed with a Google account, the only calendar you can use on the phone is the built-in phone calendar. You cannot use another, third-party calendar as the default store or synchronisation copy.
    • If you create calendar events on your phone without a Google account, even though you have other accounts which provide full calendar syncing capability, you will still be creating an event on the local calendar that has no synchronisation counterpart
    • During the course of writing this article, strangely the option appeared in my calendar to utilise alternative calendars when creating an event. We shall see if this persists..
  • Accounts & Sync
      • This section has become a total mess in Jelly Bean – especially in Motorola’s implementation.
      • You start at the home screen: swipe down (or across from left-to-right) to get to Settings (the cog symbol)
      • In Settings, you scroll down the list to the Accounts section. Hit CalDAV or CardDAV.
      • You are then taken to the respective app’s account information with a link to Edit account settings. Let’s hit that.
      • The screen scrolls again to another black screen showing the same account, the settings of which you want to change. Yet another tap on this…
      • .. and hey presto, you’re finally in! Here you make changes and then hit the back key.
      • … and then hit the back key…
      • … and then hit the back key…
      • and then you’re at Settings again, so..
      • … you then hit the back key…
      • …and you’re out!  (seriously, was this actually DESIGNED?!)
    • Going the other way into the apps settings (sorry if this is too painful for you) you first hit the Apps shortcut:
    • Hit the CalDAV or CardDAV icon
    • You then have the option: “Add account”, or “Go to accounts & sync”. Let’s say I want to edit an account, I’d choose “go to accounts and sync”..right? I tap it.
    • Oh, then there’s a pop-up style interface with ALL of your sync accounts. So I have to find my CalDAV app in the sync accounts list and tap on it…
    • Then I can see the calendar account I want to sync.  But how do I edit it? When i tap on it, it synchronises! Ahh, wait, there’s a menu/settings button (the one with three squares). I tap on that…
    • … and get the options “Sync now” or “Remove account”.
    • So, let’s get this right: to EDIT my app’s data, I go to Settings > Accounts & Sync (not to the app). And when I want to SYNC the account or DELETE it, I go to the app! That’s logical!

    In summary…

    Android is an open source ecosystem that encourages vendors to produce lock-in experiences which are frustrating, dysfunctional and unintuitive.

    And to think I was pro-android this time last week.  I suppose I still have the t-shirt.  The retailer will soon have the phone back, though.

    bootnote

    *CalDAV sync and CardDAV sync are both great pieces of software that fully get my support (and have done, in the financial sense).  I use them here as examples of good apps which are potentially made almost impossible to use by the restrictions imposed by Android OEMs.

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    Quite simply, I am very happy to be back in Emacs-land.

    There I was, thinking that the web-based task managers, to-do lists, etc
    were “all that”. Well, ok, I do feel that some are pretty good, as you can tell from
    my tag cloud on this blog. But nothing ever felt like it was native to
    me, this keyboard and this computer.

    I wanted to put tasks on a computer to Screenshot - 100413 - 10:55:20make them easier to manage.  Putting them on a web site didn’t do that, and I don’t think it ever
    really will for me. So I’m back in the saddle with orgmode and boy, am I loving this again. It’s amazing how the keystrokes just come back to
    you.

    Here’s my list of software in Emacs (at  present):

    • mu4e, for E-mail
    • orgmode, for task/calendar management
      — mobileorg, for portability
    • weblogger, for blogging (duh)

    For coding, I’m also using:

    .. plus some other fontification and syntax colouring plugins.

    Truly forgot what a joy it is to use this environment, although it does
    take a little work setting up.

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    A simple one, this. Firstly, get to where rhythmbox stores its data:

    # cd ~/.local/share/rhythmbox

    Then, do this:

    # grep podcast-feed rhythmdb.xml -A 5 | grep location | sed -e 's/<location>//' | sed -e 's/<\/location>//'

    You should end up with a list of URLs which your podcast feeds are served from.

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    This is a blog post for personal interest and probably not of much amusement to others.

    My work machine has a fresh install of the (soon-to-be released) Debian version 7 (codename “Wheezy”). There are a couple of modifications I’ve had to make to the installed software to get things working as desired.

    Firstly, I’ve read really good things about mu4e – the “maildir-utils for emacs” email client.  (Just for clarity, the author of maildir-utils has abbreviated its name to mu.)  mu4e provides an interface to your email in emacs which is fast and efficient.  I like things that are fast and efficient.

    I installed debian’s standard mu and mu4e packages, but found that mu (the wheezy-based package) was not indexing all of my email. Firing up mu4e within emacs then trying to browse the ~/Maildir/INBOX – and being told there were no messages – raised some suspicions!  So I removed that package and installed from source instead and, now, indexing works much better.

    how to do this

    Basically, it’s pretty simple.  Just:

    # apt-get remove mu4e

    This will replace maildir-utils (0.9.8) and mu4e.  Then download the mu-0.9.9.5 source (list of mu releases) and follow compilation and installation instructions from its install page.

    On Debian, this will result in you installing mu and mu4e to /usr/local/share instead of the default installation point, /usr/share.  To enable the use of /usr/local/share/emacs/site-packages/mu4e/ from within your standard emacs23 install, just create a symlink pointing to it from /usr/share/emacs/site-packages/ :

    # ln -s /usr/local/share/emacs/site-packages/mu4e/ .

    The software replacements are:

    •  with mu (0.9.9.5) from the  package

    other modifications

    (Edit) I also installed gnu tramp for Emacs from source, but the reasons why I originally did this now escape me, as tramp has been part of Emacs for a while.

    unrelated issues

    I have found a worrisome issue in wheezy.  When I attach an eSATA drive to my ThinkPad (T420) and copy lots of data – e.g. GBs of photos – to my ~/Pictures, I get some kind of kernel panic/X error.  I’m still investigating this at present.

    I will attempt to keep this list updated as I continue getting this set-up just as I want it 🙂

    [ EDIT 10 April 2012 10:00 ]

    Grabbing the currently stable, newest kernel source (ver 3.8.6) and compiling it in the debian way has seemingly fixed this crashing/locking issue.

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    I was recently asked to explain the difference between setting permissions on a directory to either 755 or 751.
    In 751 mode, a user who isn’t the owner and isn’t in the group assigned to that directory can still execute anything within that directory, provided they know the name of the executable file.  They are unable to browse the contents of that directory to find the name.  Therefore, 751 is inherently more secure than 755.

    The funky, geeky bit

    For reference, each number of 7 5 1 is an octal representation of the number of permission bits set on the file/folder.  There are 3 bits per field.  
    Taking the 7, from 751, this means all bits are set to 1.  This is how it works (think of it like a lookup table):
    meaning:     r   w   x    (read, write, execute)
    bit value:   4   2   1    (< - this is  the octal lookup bit)
    bit set to:  1   1   1    == 4 + 2 + 1 == 7.
    If you take the value 5, then this is how that’s set in the bit fields:
    bit set to:  1   0   1      == 4 + 0 + 1 == 5.
    Remember, there are three fields!  So each field – the “owner”, “group” and “others” fields – contains the sum of permission bits set for that field.  The “751” is actually a nice, easy way to see permissions.  The actual permissions set in a 751 situation are, in binary “nibbles”, 0111, 0101 and 0001. 

    Demo – try it yourself!

    As root, set up a test dir in /tmp/ called test, with 751 perms.  Then create a file within that called hello.sh which simply outputs “hello” on the command line when executed.  To achieve that, simply do this (as root, remember):

    # mkdir /tmp/test

    # touch /tmp/test/hello.sh

    # chmod +x /tmp/test/hello.sh

    Then edit /tmp/test/hello.sh and put these two lines in:
    #!/bin/sh

    echo Hello
    /tmp/test is owned by root (rwx / 7) , has the root group (r-x / 5) and the "world" just has execute (--x / 1).  When using your own user account, trying to do a # ls /tmp/test - should tell you that permission was denied.  

    However, you should be able to do # /tmp/test/hello.sh which outputs "Hello" as expected.  

    If you bump that world permission to r-x / 5, you would be able to see that file because ls has the necessary permission to read the directory contents.

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    As a Debian user, you may choose to adopt the distro-managed rebuild of the world’s greatest web browser.  But, by doing so, you may not be able to use G+.  Don’t worry, the answer is at hand.

    Visit the Firefox add-on page for User Agent Switcher:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user–agent–switcher/

    Install the add-on and restart your browser.

    Now, go to Tools > User Agent Switcher > User Agent Switcher > Options…

    Add a new User Agent, call it Firefox 11.

    Add the following text in the fields:

    • Description: Firefox 11
    • User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
    • App Code Name: Mozilla
    • App Name: Netscape
    • App Version: 5.0 (X11
    • Platform: Linux i686

    If you’re running an amd64 build, plonk that in the Platform field instead (it’ll probably already be populated).

    Make sure there is no reference to Iceweasel in the User Agent field.

    Make sure this user agent is active, and then browse to Google+.

    Have fun! 🙂

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    Minimalism & Debian

    Less is more, as the saying goes.

    While I love using Fedora in my daily work, sometimes when I want to relax I find using an alternative distribution is good therapy.  Fedora is fabulous with its GNOME Shell finery, but occasionally I hanker for something simpler and more lightweight.  It’s also good to see how the other half lives 🙂

    So, I decided to put Debian on my netbook.  With no GUI.  Everything I do on it must be by the command line, including web research.  Compared to Fedora, Debian‘s system requirements are practically non-existent, which is especially good if you want your system to still run nice and quick.

    First steps…

    1. Firstly, I had of course to grab the distribution.  I’m not over-fussed about running cutting edge stuff on this machine.  For me, the most important thing is a low-maintenance base where I don’ t need to think much about the distribution changing every 6 months.

      I visited the Debian Mirror List and grabbed a NetInst CD image.

    2. Next off, I plugged in the USB CD/DVD drive and installed the software, making sure I didn’t overwrite my XP partition.  Well, you need a reminder every so often how awful life used to be.. 😉
    3. I won’t go into the installation process here – there’s plenty of documentation elsewhere which covers that.  So, once installed, I really wanted to keep the installed software as trim as possible.  That is, with one or two exceptions…
       
    1. Firstly, I have tried and tried it again but I just can’t/don’t/won’t do vi, vim or anything similar.  It’s just not my bag.  It’s emacs for me.  I also want to keep my mail inside emacs, so it’s goodbye to mutt – even if it does suck less, apparently 😉
    2. Also, Exim4.  The servers I manage don’t use it (generally it’s Postfix or QMail) and I already have a tiny smattering of Sendmail knowledge – so I have no desire to pick up on this.  I’m sure it’s a fine MTA and undoubtedly there are many technical reasons why I should keep it on my netbook… but even so, no thanks.

      Therefore, my software changes are:

      $ sudo aptitude remove exim4 exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light vi mutt

      $ sudo aptitude install emacs w3m-el sendmail

  • So far so good.  However, I was still stuck with a chunky 80×25 character screen when booting up, which is real ugly.  Through much searching and grub configuration editing, I found that my answer was actually to install the intel video package.

    $ sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-intel

    You’re on to a winner here, because Debian Squeeze is already set up for Kernel Mode Setting.  In other words, as soon as your system starts booting up, the video drivers get loaded and the optimal video mode is enabled (or, at least, that’s the intention).

    Whether or not it’s worth specifying screenmode in grub is open for debate.  FWIW, I put this in /etc/default/grub:

    GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x600
    GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD=1024x600x16

    … And in /etc/grub.d/40_custom:

    set gfxpayload=1024x600x16

    Then, I simply updated grub with the new config:

    $ sudo update-grub

    Please note that this step relates to my Intel-based netbook.  Yours may vary.

  • The only significant piece of the puzzle remaining was to get wireless sorted out and connect to my server:

    $ sudo aptitude install wireless-tools iw wpasupplicant autofs nfs-common

    ** PLEASE NOTE: this step assumes your wireless network device doesn’t require firmware or that you already have the firmware installed in /lib/firmware. **

    Once done, you need to uncomment the /net line in /etc/auto.master and restart autofs:

    $ service restart autofs

    If you want to refer to server by hostname and are not running a DNS server, add the hostname to /etc/hosts (somewhere below the localhost lines):

    111.222.333.444      myserver.mydomain.com  myserver

    At this point, assuming all went well, you can cd to /net/ in either the shell or a file manager such as nautilus (if running a GUI).

    So, this takes care of a basic local network configuration, but we still need to actually get connected to it on wifi.  So, there is, in my /etc/network/interfaces:

    # The loopback network interface
    auto lo
    iface lo inet loopback

    # The primary network interface
    allow-hotplug eth0
    iface eth0 inet dhcp

    # Wireless
    auto wlan0
    iface wlan_mynet inet dhcp
    wpa_ssid my-network-ssid
    wpa-psk  my-network-key

    Once done, save this file and change the permissions for extra security:

    $ sudo chmod 0600 /etc/network/interfaces

    – and connect up, like this:

    $ sudo ifup wlan0=wlan_mynet

    • Voila!  With luck, maybe a little patience, and possibly an extra step or two (which you can hopefully figure out, if needed) these are the key set up steps which will make your netbook/laptop nice and lean, and perhaps more fun to play with.

    Next time, I’ll go through a few tools I use for ‘net stuff.