December 21, 2008 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Linux

Now that I’m back from University for Christmas I don’t need to leave my Linux workstation on permanently. I’d like to be able to suspend and resume it, except I’m having one problem. On resume, the network card does not switch to gigabit, instead staying at 100mbit. I have Googled around but have been unable to find a solution. For now, if I need gigabit speeds the solution seems to be to remove the r8169 module and insert it again:

sudo rmmod r8169
sudo modprobe r8169

Bear in mind doing this will obviously cut out your network connection, so don’t do it over SSH!

Does anyone know of a proper solution? Or a more elegant hack.

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November 17, 2008 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Linux

Here’s my set up:

• Firefox 3 is installed using the default Ubuntu packages
• I’ve installed Firefox Minefield (Firefox 3.1) to /opt/firefox
• I set up a shell script to run as root daily via cron (dangerous I know, but it’s only readable+writable by root) which downloads the latest 64-bit nightly from Mozilla and extracts it, and recreates the symbolic link to it in case Ubuntu has updated and overriden it at some point (optional).

The script is as follows, be careful of any line breaks my blog puts in, watch for the semi-colons to indicate true line breaks:

#!/bin/sh
cd /opt/;
rm firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
wget "http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2";
rm -rf firefox/;
tar -jxvf firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
chmod -R a+r firefox;
rm /usr/bin/firefox;
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox;


It’s crude, but it works. If you are running x86 you’ll need to adjust the wget and tar lines to the correct source. Hope someone finds this useful.

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October 3, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Linux, gaming

Today I got an Atmosphir beta invite, and I decided to try installing it on Linux first, before Mac or Windows. There were a couple of things I needed to do in order to get it to work correctly on my 64-bit Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex box.

1. Firstly, I installed Atmosphir to /opt/Atmosphir. I don’t know if this had an effect on the problems I had, but anyway.
2. After installing, I tried to run it, and got the following error:

   game: error while loading shared libraries: libpq.so.5:
   cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   This can be fixed by downloading the 32-bit package of libpq5 (much the same way as I did for Flash Player 10) and extracting it and copying the file libpq.so.5 into the Atmosphir directory. At the bottom of this post I have provided a copy of this file (and the file in the next step) for those that don’t want to go through the faff of downloading the .deb and extracting it themselves.

3. I then got another error:

   game: error while loading shared libraries: libgnutls.so.26:
   cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   The same method applies, download the 32-bit package of libgnutls26 and extract the libgnutls.so.26 file, again I’ve provided it in the archive at the bottom of this post.

4. Success! The game now starts. However I was getting some sound related errors, and there was no sound:

   ALSA lib ../../src/conf.c:2700:(snd_config_hooks_call) Cannot open shared library
   /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_conf_pulse.so
   ALSA lib ../../../src/pcm/pcm.c:2196:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default
   Couldn't open audio: No available audio device
   

   After a quick bit of googling, I discovered people get the same error when trying to use Skype with PulseAudio, and there is a quick fix solution available which also does the trick for Atmosphir. Great!

Hope this helps anyone that has any problems with the new Atmosphir Beta. I’ve already played it a bit, and I think it’s a great idea and seems great fun to play, and works brilliantly on Linux which is awesome to see. If you don’t have a beta invite yet, head on over to the Atmosphir site and fill in the registration form, they are giving out beta invites over the next couple of weeks, so you might get lucky!

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October 3, 2008 at 2:30 am · Filed under Linux

Today, Ubuntu announced the first Intrepid Ibex beta. I gave my Linux workstation an upgrade immediately to give it a try. A few days ago, I had manually installed Flash Player 10 using nspluginwrapper, and wrote a guide about it. I received a suggestion that you can also use an Intrepid Ibex package to install Flash Player 10 on Hardy Heron, which is a great suggestion and a lot easier than my method.

Now I have Intrepid Ibex, and that package is available, installing Flash Player 10 on 64-bit Ubuntu is a snap:

apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Yup, that’s it. Reload Firefox and you’re done! I must say though, it seems a little less stable than it was in Hardy Heron, but then Intrepid Ibex is still in beta.

Edit: A quick test suggests that Minefield is a bit speedier using Flash Player 10

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October 1, 2008 at 2:00 pm · Filed under Linux, Networking

Edit: I’ve written a followup article tackling Flash Player 10 on Intrepid Ibex.

Edit: I’ve been informed by burty89 that you can visit this page and choose the latest package of Flash Player 10 for Intrepid Ibex 64-bit and install that on your Hardy installation. Thanks Burty!

I was experiencing some screen tearing on video with Flash Player 9, and thought perhaps giving Flash Player 10 a try would help. It didn’t help much, but here’s how you can install Flash Player 10 yourself using nspluginwrapper on 64-bit Ubuntu. I did this on Hardy Heron, but similar steps will probably apply to previous or new distributions. Read the rest of this entry »

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August 25, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Linux

The perfectionist inside me has been furious at how fetchmail keeps flooding my mail server’s logs with messages about invalid SSL certificates (one of my hosts uses ‘localhost’ as the name in the certificate…), making it almost impossible to check what’s going on with my mail server and so forth. Fetchmail itself has no way of removing these messages (the response seems to be ‘tell your host to fix their SSL certificate or put up with it’), so I was trying to find a sysklogd replacement that supported filtering so I could filter out these annoying messages, but they all seemed to take far too much effort.

Then I had a brainwave: do it myself. And so this is my lesson learnt – if in doubt, write a Perl script.

Read the rest of this entry »

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August 6, 2008 at 10:27 pm · Filed under Linux

Today I downloaded podget, a simple podcast aggregator for *NIX. What is a podcast aggregator? It’s a program that downloads a list of podcast feeds (be it RSS or iTunes PCAST files) automatically so you don’t have to go and visit each site in turn – instead they are automatically downloaded ready to be viewed at your leisure.
Read the rest of this entry »

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July 26, 2008 at 10:33 pm · Filed under Linux

Phoronix Test Suite makes it just too easy to run benchmarks. I decided to run some benchmarks on Tombraider (my Linux server) and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) setup I have.

Tombraider is an AMD Athlon 4200+ with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Lots of things are running in the background all the time, which were not cancelled for these tests, so don’t treat them as hugely accurate. The KVM was created using ubuntu-vm-builder and uses the special JeOS kernek. It was freshly created for the benchmarks so was not running anything else.

I ran the entire suite of command line benchmarks, unfortunately some failed to run for whatever reasons (missing packages on the KVM, and some also failed to run on Tombraider – no idea why), however it still provides a wide range of results. because there are so many graphs, I have decided to upload the XML file containing the results where you can view all of the graphs and figures, and get more details about the software setup. As I say, they are not highly accurate so don’t take them too seriously.

The results are impressive. All of the encoding tests were very close indeed, which is nice to know because I use a Windows 2000 KVM for encoding my TV shows. However the KVM was let down in the compiling tests and compression tests. Composite tests and RAM tests were also very good. Its important to remember that the KVM had only 512MB of RAM available to it, whereas Tombraider had whatever was spare (probably around 1GB), which I expect would have an effect on the compression tests at least.

I’m hoping to add some VMware Server benchmarks alongside these results sometime in the near future. I recently migrated from VMware Server to a KVM setup, so I hope to see KVM outperforming VMware Server (though there were other reasons for migrating too e.g. clock drift).

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July 25, 2008 at 7:22 pm · Filed under Linux

I use VMWare Fusion on my Mac for running Ubuntu when I need something from Linux that doesn’t run so well in Mac OSX (NX client for example). It’s great to run it full screen in a Space and be able to flit between Linux and Mac so effortlessly, especially as everything seems to just work (keyboard, two finger scrolling, automatic resolution changing) and performance is great.

However I’d been using a 32-bit guest all the time, even though my MacBook is 64-bit. I was guessing that VMWare Fusion would be more optimised to run 32-bit guests, and I remembered reading somewhere that VMWare wasn’t too hot on doing 64-bit guests. But I thought I’d take some time, and try out the Phoronix Test Suite and benchmark Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit and 64-bit and see what the result is.

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