Good news: OLPC extends “Give One, Get One” program to December 31. If you haven’t given yet, please consider it. If you have no use for an OLPC, they accept contributions, too.
Archive | Linux
A UNIX-like operating system.
Recommendations for FOSS podcatcher?
I listen to audiocasts (I don’t have a *pod, and don’t agree with the brand implications. Since I listen on my ThinkPad, they’re PadCasts for me. Let’s say “audiocast” or we could be really retro about it and refer to them as “audio recordings” since they’re neither cast nor podded.) while working out and go through quite a few. The Conversations Network has been a great source for these: IT Conversations in particular. Phil Windley’s Technometria is one I try to catch each weekly episode. Other features, like David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote at the 2007 RailsConf or Tim’ O’Reilly’s keynote as OSCON are other favorites. There’s lots of other good stuff on Coversations Network, so much so that I’ve contributed to the network, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.
But there are other, far smaller operations. I met Peter Nikolaidis through the Dartmouth Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, and he does an audiocast called “Fresh Ubuntu” with a fellow from the west coast named Harlem, a man with a voice for radio. An interesting show with contributions from many others, too, focused on Ubuntu, but ranging over many of the topics involving Open Source.
I like to keep up with all of these audiocasts (and would welcome more recommendations from others!), but it involves manually visiting the web site, checking to figure out if I’ve heard the audiocast already, and downloading it. I’m looking for an automated way of doing this.
I was (and still am!) a regular subscriber to Dave Winer’s Scripting News, and listened to his first audio enclosure (imagine that!) in his RSS feed, accessible directly through the Radio Userland built in feed reader. Since then, I’ve changed hardware a few times, operating systems at least twice, and feed reader software more times than I can recall. I’m looking for an application I can run from my Linux desktop that will regularly check the RSS feeds put out by the audicasting sites and download the new audiocasts of interests. Bonus points if the software is under a FOSS license, +1 for efficient and frugal resource use, cool interfaces, etc.
One recommendation off the Conversations Network is labeled iPodder, but points to JuiceReceiver, which doesn’t “yet” have a Linux port, despite being written in Python. It seems like there are close relatives to this code in CastPodder and IcePodder, but it’s not clear to me which of any of these projects is alive, well and legitimate. It appears to me that IcePodder has roots in the others, with directories still named iPodder (likely renamed due to near trademark infringement of a well-known player?) and a CastPodder manual buried in the download, dated 2005. (Here’s a clue: IcePodder’s About page says “IcePodder is a podcatcher (RSS client) for Linux conceived as a replacement for CastPodder. ” So my guess is that iPodder begat JuiceReceiver begat CastPodder begat IcePodder. Whether or not I’m on the “right” branch is something that a little more research ought to bring to light. (Update: a little Googling confirms the theory, and it appears to be pretty amicable.)
IcePodder was an easy install: download, unpackage, review the README and INSTALL, review and run the install.sh script. Written in Python, using wxWidgets for UI, GPL. A little shaky in operation – I’ve crashed it once or twice, but I’m running the old “stable” release rather than the current code, so I should upgrade before passing judgement. The code needs some serious search-and-replace s/CastPodder/IcePodder/g but it looks pretty promising. Anyone else have recommendations?
UPDATE: gPodder also looks promising. Don’t let the version 0.10 fool you – apparantly, that’s the version after 0.9, according to the developers…
Retro-tagging a WordPress blog
I’ve got a WordPress blog with a couple thousand posts, upgraded several times, from a TWiki blog to a Radio Userland blog to WordPress and a couple of upgrades. And I’d like to add the new taggin features available in WordPress 2.3. Here’s what I’ve figured out from poking around: what used to be wp_category is now wp_terms and terms contains both categories and tags. The categories are hierarchical from a self-join using the group column to link back into the term’s term_id primary key. wp_terms in turn links into wp_term_taxonomy: that’s got a column named taxonomy that contains groups like ‘category’ and ‘link_tag’ and a parent column that self links into term_id, which I think is a duplication of what wp_terms is doing. There’s also a count field, meaning that we’re denormalizing the count of categories and tags, meaning if we hack at them, we’ll need to manually update this (see below). Finally, the posts are related to categories and tags using the table wp_term_relationships that’s a many-to-many link from the post’s primary key, object_id, to the term_taxonomy_id primary key of the wp_term_taxonomy table.
So, here’s the recipe to retrofit tags into some posts. I used phpMyAdmin as the web interface into the MySQL table that holds WordPress’ data. You can do the same via the mysql terminal interface or using other remote connectivity like ODBC or your choice of tools.
1. Create or update a tag in the wp_terms table. Note the term_id PK.
2. Insert the term_id and category of ‘post_tag’ into the wp_term_taxonomy table.
3. Create the linking records in wp_term_relationships with the following SQL. In this case, I’m tagging with “Ruby” any post that has “Ruby” in the title or post.
INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships
SELECT wpp.id object_id, `term_taxonomy_id`
FROM wp_posts wpp, `wp_term_taxonomy` wptt
JOIN wp_terms wpt ON wptt.term_id=wpt.term_id
WHERE wpt.name='Ruby'
AND wptt.taxonomy='post_tag'
AND (wpp.post_content LIKE '%Ruby%'
OR wpp.post_title LIKE '%Ruby%' )
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id=
wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
(The ON DUPLICATE code is just a quick hack to tell MySQL to ignore it if you’ve already tagged some posts Ruby by hand.)
4. Hack away. When you’re all done, you’ll want to fix the count in the table with the code below:
UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy wptt
SET wptt.count=
(SELECT count(*)
FROM wp_term_relationships wptr
WHERE wptr.term_taxonomy_id = wptt.term_taxonomy_id
GROUP BY term_taxonomy_id)
Fedora 8 Everything Spin Released! — Fedora Unity Project
The Fedora Unity Project announces Fedora 8 Everything Spin Released!: “The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new spin, the Everything Spin. Included in this spin are all the packages available at the time Fedora 8 was released.”
A neat feature of recent ( 7 & 8 ) Fedora releases is the ability to create your own derivative distributions based on the tools supplied with the package. This allows the LiveCD and LiveUSB features I mentioned earlier, and allows independent groups to create specialized disk images (“spins” in their inside chatter) to meet specific needs, in this case, a set of CDs for those who don’t have a DVD handy. I ran into this situation recently with a customer who had chosen to economize on his server specifications by cutting out a DVD that was likely to be used only a few times over the lifetime of the hardware. It’s cool that the Fedora build process has been made public and the tools to do this added to the distro itself.
Red Hat Magazine | I am Fedora, and so can you!
Max Spevack, the benevolent dictator in charge of herding cats for the Fedora project, doesn’t announce the official release of Fedora 8 today in his posting, I am Fedora, and so can you! in Red Hat Magazine, but it’s out there. (His post is actually a great HOWTO on running Fedora off a USB memory stick, neat trick that that is!) Find the bittorrents and conventional downloads at http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora and hop aboard. I run Fedora, and so can you!
Max Spevack: FC6 end of life is December 7
Max Spevack blogs fedora core 6 end of life is december 7:
Those of you who dont read the fedora-devel-announce list but who do read Fedora Planet will probably be interested in this reminder: Fedora 8 will be released on Thursday November 8th, 2007. According to our policy of “supporting release X until one month after release X 2”, Fedora Core 6s end of life date will be Friday December 7th, 2007. Fedora Core 6 Zod was released on October 24th, 2006. Its total supported lifespan will end up being 13.5 months. Fedora 7 will be supported until about 1 month after Fedora 9 is released.
This is the Paradox of Change: we want our software to evolve, keep moving forward, improving, but we hate the costs of upkeep. Backup, reinstall, reconfigure, restore, tweak, update, etc. is a long process, though worthwhile. Bear in mind that this is fedora’s legacy: it’s for folks who like to surf the cutting edge, at the cost of flatten-and-restore. If you want more stable choices, there are many, at the cost of not getting to play with (and risk getting cut on the sharp edges of) the latest stuff.
Someone at last Thursday’s LUG meeting asked about the feasibility of upgrading an Ubuntu install done “middle of last year” with the latest 7.10 release, and the folks were skeptical, at best. I recently tried an in-place upgrade of 7.04 to 7.10, but that was a pretty clean and fresh install and it went well. Others have not been so fortunate. The best practices of Freemanizing™ a machine (backup, format, install from scratch, clean installs of new versions, copy over data, preferences, scripts and settings) still has some merit, I think.
MonadLUG notes, 11-October-2007: Ben Scott and DNS
Late post: a great meeting Thursday night the 11th of October: thirteen people made it to the October meeting of the Monadnock Area Linux User Group, held as usual at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough on the second Thursday at 7 PM. Thanks to Ken for sponsoring us at the offices, and dealing diplomatically with the double-booking of the space.
Ben had a little trouble finding the place, after a long, long drive from Dover. We forgot to mention in the driving directions which of the dozens of “Use other door” doors the meeting was held behind, so Ben had to find the Boy Scout meeting and the girls volleyball practices before finding us. Charlie promised to update the directions.
Nonplussed by all of this, Ben gave a great presentation on DNS, reprising his previous presentations. He’d replaced the MagicPoint presentation with S5, and had a few technical issues with getting it to behave, but persevered. I expect we’ll see an update to the slides on:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PresentDNS
But the other files there (bind configuration files, sample inside and external zone files, etc.) should be relevant.
Ben gave a great overview of the Domain Name System and how it works from several client OSes, how the trail of DNS queries is processed, the structure of zone files, the structure of the BIND configuration files, and many of the common misconfigurations that lead to errors or just quiet failures.
It was a meeting well worth attending. Thanks to Ben for efforts above and beyond, to Charlie for hosting and managing the meeting, and to Ken and the SAU#1 offices for providing the facilities.
November 1: Real-Time Linux, Ed Haynes of Wind River, at DLSLUG
The Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group will be hosting Ed Haynes of Wind River, presenting some of Wind River’s innovations on the Linux kernel to produce real-time Linux. Here’s the announcement from coordinator Bill McGonigle. Should be a fun meeting! Note the the meeting is held in Haldeman building, next door to our past location, in the lower level of the building.
CentraLUG notes, 1-October-2007: Michael Kazin on Nagios
Ten attendees made it to the October meeting of the Central NH Linux Group, coming from as far away as Nashua, Laconia, Peterborough and Hanover. CentraLUG is a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, and our meeting was held as usual on the first Monday of the month at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, Room 146, from 7 PM to 9 PM.
Michael Kazin presented Nagios, the host and service monitoring system. Michael told us a bit of his colorful personal history, and his exposure to Nagios as a student administrator of the Rutgers University computer center. He had found a neat diagram of the relationships between the configuration files in Nagios (we covered the current 2.x and not the 3.x, currently in beta) and went to explain how it could be used for businesses and home users, keeping an eye on working systems, alerting the operating to problematic conditions of low disk space, high CPU usage or unavailability of resources or services. Nagios has a huge number of pre-built modules, a 240-page manual, and documentation on how to extend the system for your own use.
Michael ended up with a presentation of a working Nagios installation on his home network, and showed how shutting down a service would set off an alarm, how the operator could flag the alarm as acknowledged, fix the problem, and verify that the alarm cleared. While the audience watched, participated and pestered Michael with questions, we identified and fixed a couple of permissions issues with his install and got the system to do things he’d never tried before. A good time was had by all. Wish you were there.
Michael’s slides are available on the GNHLUG site.
Bill Sconce was present to point out that modules could be written in Python. Ben Scott was heckled. I made the usual announcements: GNHLUG meetings can be found on http://www.gnhlug.org; several related meetings are taking place this month: SwANH’s annual infoeXchange, the NEARfest ham radio gathering. See the web site for links.
Thanks to Michael for a fine presentation, to Bill Sconce for providing the projector, to NHTI for providing the space and to all for attending and participating.
Red Hat Magazine | A guide to GNU Screen
A handy reference, A guide to GNU Screen, appears in Red Hat Magazine:
The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.”
The killer feature of screen, in my mind, is the ability to launch a long-running task, disconnect and reconnect to it later. For a consultant on the go, or when your wireless isn’t reliable (or the dog pulls the ethernet out of the wall), screen lets you reconnect and pick up where you left off. It’s handy for setting up a set of screens on a client site and then using only one secure tunnel to connect to them and examine the state of various applications. This is a tool everyone should learn and keep in their toolkit.