So Linc posts about his VMware woes, and I too have experienced some mysterious issues these past couple of weeks, primarily with my Asterisk image. The asterisk server would mysteriously shut down with no warnings and nothing coherent I can see in the log files. To top it off, I had my main server image go haywire requiring a reboot on Monday and then it was just down the other morning. Again, no indication as to the problem has yet been discovered.

Imagine my surprise when my Meso battery would not charge. Recall that Linc had mentioned his Acer batter not charging for some reason a few episodes back on TLLTS. I had it plugged in at work yesterday and then all night last night. When I fired it up the battery was still dead. I have it on now and plugged in and it seems to be charging though, so I hope my issues are not the same as Linc. It’s at 15% now and climbing; maybe I am out of the woods.

Never-the-less, if you are having problems of late it’s probably Linc’s fault. Remember to remind him.

Won’t you join Klaatu in his multimedia quest? I noticed that the other day I failed to post some pertinent information regarding the multimedia sprint. Once again I failed Klaatu. I hope he can forgive me:

When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time

Where: irc.binrev.net #media

What: Linux Multimedia “extra content” Sprint

Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there’s no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let’s band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.

Hopefully that will vindicate me once more in his eyes. Klaatu is a harsh task master, that he is.

I come home from work Friday night to find the MythTV box running a browser looking up Thomas Jefferson on Wikipedia. My daughter was reading up on the President and decided to use the MythTV box instead of her eeePC. Back in the day we would have to pull the right encyclopaedia volume off the book shelf or get Mom or Dad to drive us to the Library for research. Kids these days have it so easy….

Well it is good to see that she is using the technology for purposes other than watching tv or catching up on anime episodes off Animefreak.tv. I must saying, watching full screen anime from Animefreak.tv is a wonderful experience on the mythbox. Why can it not be the same way for Hulu?

Back on January 8, 2010 Klaatu sent me a great email about a project he is kicking off on January 26, 2010 and I was remiss in playing the announcement on the show. Well, I am trying to get the word out now. So without further wordiness from me and in his own words:

Running the server without the fans is probably not a good idea since I could cook an egg on the box. Well. that has prompted me to only run the workstation when needed and rely more on the other systems I have. The biggest detriment was to my email filtering as I was relying on Thunderbird to shuffle my emails into their proper folders. It was finally time to get off my lazy butt and learn procmail. This was pretty darn easy to do and now my email gets filtered properly without the need of a client.

What am I going to do with my workstation now?

Say goodbye to my faithful workstation that has served me for a good 5 or so years. About a year ago it started giving me boot issues, would lock up with some regularity and was just ornary. Well, today was the final straw. I ripped it out of my rack and removed the hard drive. Slapped that in my the spare rack server I had over here for backup purposes and went at it.

Arch did not want to boot because it could not find the hard drive. Luckily there was a failsafe image on there. I suspect the regular arch image was tailored to the old hardware so the initrd system did not have the proper modules. Couple this with some knowledge of grub and I was golden.

This system has an ATI Rage XL and getting that configured and using something other than 800×600 was a chore. It made me realize I have no desire to use ati cards in the near future. While people may complain about nvidia, and I used the open nv driver, they work a hell of a lot better than any ATI card I have ever tried.

The biggest problem, though, were the four fans in this thing. The old Compaq server I had sounded like a jet taking off. This damn box sounds like a whole squadron. Did they have to make the fans so loud?

The horror, the horror.

Well Arch is running and I am back into my fluxbox. Hooray!

So I noticed that for some reason if the screen blanks on the System76 running Karmic and I slide across the trackpad or hit a key when it comes back for some reason it borks audacity and the recording stops. When this happened I was able to recover and save the file then open a new instance and continue recording. I went back to the original file after the show and it said something about deleting some blank blocks so I said ok. At the time I had the other files open and things were getting a bit slow so I figured I would save and close the new file then process the other files, export to wav and open the orginal project and piece it all together. Easy peasy!

Well, when I opened the original project Audacity just sat there as if it were processing, the file open, but I could do nothing. Try as I might, it was not going to happen. So I went to manually recovering the files which were saved and not in the temp directory.

I knew I could concat all the .au files together using sox only little did I know they just using sox *.au pt1.au would not piece them together in the right order. It was a mess. So I created a script to copy all the files using the modifcation date and the file name to another location (never mess with the originals). I used sox to piece all these files together and something was still not right. Then it hit me! I was piecing them together backwards, I had to reverse the list sorted on modifcation date. After doing that in the various data sub directories (luckily there were only 5) I had the original part 1 of the show back together. I pulled this into audacity with the second part and the show was good to go (I hope). Or it seems to be good from what I listened to so far….

I pretty much use fluxbox everywhere. On my workstation at work, my main desktop at home, my System76 and my Meso. Three different distrobutions one similar configuration for fluxbox.

Unlike some other window managers/desktops fluxbox does not have a quick way to shutdown the system. No menu command or button in the slit like KDE or Gnome. That was never a big deal for me as I could just fire up a terminal and type in sudo halt.

Now mind you I rarely shutdown my desktop at home but I do my portables and my workstation at work. So opening a terminal and issuing these commands 3 times a day is not very efficient. Not when you can harness the power of various Linux tools.

Now the least secure way to do this is to setguid on /sbin/halt, /sbin/restart, and /sbin/shutdown but we are not going go go that route. Nope, we are going to use sudo. Therefore we must edit the /etc/sudoers file as root using visudo and add this line:

%[usergroup] ALL=NOPASSWD:/sbin/shutdown, /sbin/halt, /sbin/restart

Now replace [usergroup] with the group name for the users you want to be able to use these shutdown commands without having to enter their password. On some systems that might be the admin group, on others, like Ubuntu, you can put your username in there as the user group. Instead of a group you can specify a user by omitting the % and putting in their name.

Now you are good to go. You can add a line like this to your .fluxbox/menu file:

[exec] (Shutdown) {sudo halt}

but even better you can put this in .fluxbox/keys:

Control Mod1 q: Exec sudo halt

That will set Ctrl-Alt-q to issue the command. Becareful to chose a hot key pattern you will not accidently fat finger.

Now you can easily shutdown your system when you want with the flick of three fingers. It will not ask you whether you want to logout, reboot, suspent or shutdow, it will do exactly what you tell it to do as it should.

It has not been a good month in the Washko home for technology. First I slammed my new Sansa Clip in the car door. I bought a Fuze and lo while it works great, the hard case is on back order. Needless to say the screen is getting all scratched up. I purchased some Novus polish to get rid of as many scratches as possbile. That is some real arm busting work to buff out the nicks. I figure I will do this over time, especially when the case comes. For now I am very careful with it.

Over the weekend the server hard drive started crapping out. Monday morning I woke up and the server was down, but not the centos server hosting the virtual machines. Weird, I thought and started everything up and went to work. Prior to coming home the server went down again. I noticed smartd was throwing errors on the drive. This was not good. Over the next 24 hours it went down 3 more times and that was it. I had to order a new drive and throw in the spare that I had and hope for the best. Only the spare would not fit. The interface was about an 1/8 inch off and there was no wiggle room. Damn!

On the bright side I did notice that the server was full of dirt and dust bunnies. I did a thorough cleaning, put it all back together and crossed my fingers. Thus far it has not given me any more problems. Perhaps it was just over heating. Regardless, the new drive came today and I am going to put that in over the weekend.

Last night getting the audio setup off the ground for the show was hellish. I don’t know why things seemed to changed. While I managed to pull it off, we were 10 minutes late.

Today I came home to find the myth box down. There was no display on the screen. I had to drag out a monitor and hook everything up. Well, long story short, the s-video out on the card no longer works. Luckily the card in my workstation had an s-video out so I swapped them and ordered a newer video card.

I just hope this is the last of the dying equipment.

Lesson learned: Make sure you take care of cleaning your equipment to avoid heat and other related damages.

Previously I had complained about the problem with flash clicks not registering in the browsers of current Linux distros. I had settled upon the fix to hold down the middle mouse button and left click where I wanted. While that worked all the time, it was a pain to do on my meso where I only have two buttons. I have to hold the right button down and left click but this invariably brings up the flash menu which I have to then work around.

There is a fix for nspluginwrapper which seems successful for me under my Ubuntu workstation at work and that is to add the line:

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

before the last line in /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer and restart my browser. But, I don’t have nsplugwrapper on my meso which is running Debian. So I found this:

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=TRUE firefox

And while that works I don’t want to have to type that in every time I want to run a the browser of my choice. So I created a simple script to do it for me. Nothing special here! I created a file called browser in my ~/bin directory:

#!/bin/bash
GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 %1

And that is that! So now when I want to run midori all I have to do is type:

browser midori

And I am good to go. Oh, yeah, I type this in fbrun which is why I don’t have a special icon or I am not using bash history in the terminal.

Works for me for now and I did not have to modify a file that is owned by a package which may result in complaints when said package gets updated. Hooha!