Have you ever tried to build a complex NixOS ️❄️ configuration in GitHub Actions only to be greeted by the dreaded “no space left on device” error? I certainly have, and it’s been driving me bonkers for quite some time! 😖 Standard GitHub Actions runners come with a paltry ~20GB of free disk space, or so it would seem. Which sounds decent until you try to build sophisticated NixOS or Home Manager configurations. A comprehensive workstation or home lab server setup can consume 10...| Posts on Wimpy's World
We’ve all been there - you’re knee-deep in customizing your desktop, tweaking configs, perfecting that theme, and suddenly you need to grab a specific colour from somewhere on screen. If you’re like me and recently made the jump to Hyprland (or other contemporary Wayland compositor), you might have found yourself missing some of those handy X11 utilities that “just worked” ️™️ The Wayland Colour Picker Problem When I switched my daily driver to Hyprland back in August 2024, I ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
It took 9 episodes of Linux Matters for my friends and co-hosts Alan and Mark to wear down 😅 my resolve to buy a Steam Deck, even after I passed on my original Steam Deck pre-order. I’m glad they did, it’s a great little device and a dream come true for Linux 🐧 nerds; excellent hardware and completely hackable 🧑💻 I ordered the 64GB model via the recently announced Steam Deck™ Certified Refurbished program. I’m going to resist retrofitting a larger NVMe SSD, and have ins...| Posts on Wimpy's World
When I received my Steam Deck Purchase Information email I wasn’t playing games all that often; mostly online racing games with friends once a week. I didn’t think I’d get much use out of a handheld console. I also had an inventory of PC parts available that could be used to build a dedicated Steam Box. So on July 18th 2022, I declined spending £569 on a Steam Deck and set about building a Steam Box instead. Here’s how I got on and what I learned. As featured on Linux Matters! 🎙...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I was a Google Stadia “founder” and when it was shut down on January 18, 2023 I was left with 3 perfectly usable Stadia Controllers; provided I could connect them using a USB-C cable. I quite like the Stadia Controller, the form factor is similar to the PlayStation DualShock but with an Xbox style button layout. Stadia Controller While using it via USB-C is great for PC, wireless connectivity would provide more options. Thankfully Google released Bluetooth firmware for the Stadia Controll...| Posts on Wimpy's World
During the second half of 2022, I dusted off my laptop and travelled to three events for the first time in over two years. During these trips, it became apparent that my laptop is not the right tool for the job. At KubeCon EU 2022 my colleague Lindsay brought her Apple Macbook Pro M1. It was lightweight, compact, looked fabulous and had epic battery life. Meanwhile, my ThinkPad P1 Gen 1 looked fabulous but it is a bit of a chonker and a massive power pig 🔌🐖 Battery anxiety was constant ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Creating production-ready containers for use in commercial-grade apps can be a far cry from the “get started with Node.js and Docker”-type of tutorials that are common around the Internet. Those guides are great for introducing all the advantages of Docker containers in modern cloud-native development, but creating a container that passes muster in a large-scale application in production is a different story. For production-ready containers, there are three key things you want to optimise...| Posts on Wimpy's World
So you’ve coded an awesome app and you are ready to deploy it to the cloud. You’ve heard a lot about Docker and completed a few online tutorials to containerise your app. All set, right? But what do you need to know if you’re going to move that app to a production environment on the public Internet? What if you’re using it for your job and need to pass security scans and DevOps checks? In this series, I introduce some basic concepts for making production-ready containers. I also intro...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Inspired by the recent NES Classic I made a DIY SNES Classic just in time for the Christmas holidays and it’s very portable! Raspberry Pi 3 in a 3D printed SNES case with 8Bitdo SNES30 controllers To make one yourself you’ll need: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Retropie 4.1 or newer. Two 8Bitdo SNES30 wireless controllers. A SNES 3D Printed case. CRT scanline shaders to complete the retro look on the big screen. Both controllers use Bluetooth, so two player wire-free gaming is possible. The USB ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I recently bought the Nextcloud Box. When it came to setting it up I ran into a problem, I only had Raspberry Pi 3 computers available and at the time of writing the microSDHC card provided with the Nextcloud Box only supports the Raspberry Pi 2. Bummer! Overview This guide outlines how to use Ubuntu Core on the Raspberry Pi 3 to run Nextcloud provided as a snap from the Ubuntu store. If you’re not familiar with Ubuntu Core, here’s a quote: Ubuntu Core is a tiny, transactional version of ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve installed Open Media Vault on a HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L and use it as media server for the house. OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian. I want to minimise power consumption but maximise performance. Here are some tweaks reduce power consumption and improve network performance. Power Saving Install the following. apt-get install amd64-microcode firmware-linux firmware-linux-free \ firmware-linux-nonfree pciutils powertop radeontool An...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve just bought my first brand new computer since 2008. Thanks to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on Amazon.co.uk and Scan.co.uk this year I was able to put together a pretty sweet Intel NUC which is now running Ubuntu MATE 15.10. I spoke about this new system on LINUX Unplugged Episode 122 and have been contacted by people wanting more details. Hopefully this blog post will answer any outstanding questions. Press play below to hear to what I said on the podcast. The NUC I purchase...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Nikola is a static site and blog generator written in Python that I’ve been using for a good while now. This blog post describes how to install Nikola on Ubuntu 14.04 or newer. Now, this may look like a long winded way to install Nikola, given that .deb package exists, but in my opinion it is the correct way to install Nikola on Ubuntu. Installing Python First you’ll need Python. sudo apt-get install cython3 libpython3.4 python3.4 python3.4-dev python3.4-minimal Now install the Python “...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Willie is an IRC bot written in Python that I’ve recently started using. This blog post describes how to install Willie on Debian and as usual I will be using virtualenv to isolate this Python application from the rest of the system. Installing Python First you’ll need Python. sudo apt-get install libpython2.7 python2.7 python2.7-dev python2.7-minimal The following will also be required to enable all the features Willie supports. sudo apt-get install enchant python2.7-dev libxslt1-dev lib...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have been using the BIP IRC proxy that maintains a persistent connection to a list of IRC channels. However, I’ve heard good things about ZNC and decided to give it a try. The purpose of an IRC proxy, or bouncer, is that you can then point your IRC clients to them to maintain a transparent connection from multiple clients and playback the conversations that took place while you were away. Installing ZNC The ZNC package for Debian Wheezy are very old, so I decide to install from source. In...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have a few Debian servers that run at home and on VPSs. I wanted to add some basic systems monitoring to them, but didn’t want anything too complicated to look after. I found Monitorix. Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor as many services and system resources as possible. It has been created to be used under production Linux/UNIX servers, but due to its simplicity and small size can be used on embedded devices as well. Install Monitorix...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Last year I removed all my music from Google Play Music and created my own subSonic server. I really like subSonic but don’t use it a huge amount, mostly for syncing some music to my phone prior to going on holiday or business. Therefore, I’ve made a single one time donation to the project rather than the ongoing monthly usage fee. Installing subSonic on Debian This is how I install subSonic on Debian Wheezy. Install Tomcat. sudo apt-get install tomcat7 Install subSonic. apt-get install f...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have a Brother MFC-7360N printer at home and there is also one at work. I wanted to to get Cloudprint working with Android devices rather than use the Android app Brother provide, which is great when it works but deeply frustrating (for my wife) when it doesn’t. What I describe below is how to Cloudprint enable “Classic printers” using Debian Wheezy. Install CUPS Install CUPS and the Cloudprint requirements. sudo apt-get install cups python-cups python-daemon python-pkg-resources Inst...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve had these notes kicking around for absolutely ages. I haven’t checked to see if this stuff is still accurate because during the last 12 months or so our viewing habits have changed and we almost exclusively watch streamed content now. That said, my father-in-law gave us a Humax Foxsat HDR Freesat digital recorder as a thank you for some work I did for him. It turns out the Humax Foxsat HDR is quite hackable. Hard Disk Upgrade I contributed to the topic below. The Humax firmware only ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
This how-to was updated for Open Media Vault 2.x and 3.x on 22nd August 2016. I’ve installed Open Media Vault on a HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L and use it as media server for the house. OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. I use a free Dropbox account to sync photos from mine and my wife’s Android phones and wanted to automate to import of these photo upload into Plex, which is also running on Open Media Vault. Installing Dropbox on O...| Posts on Wimpy's World
At the time of writing OpenMediaVault 0.6 is pre-release. But it is possible to install OpenMediaVault on Debian Wheezy in order to get some testing done. Install Debian Wheezy on your target VM or test server. Go with the defaults until the ‘Software selection’ dialogue. Make sure everything is unselected, like this: [ ] Debian desktop environment [ ] Web server [ ] Print server [ ] SQL database [ ] DNS Server [ ] File server [ ] Mail server [ ] SSH server [ ] Laptop [ ] Standard system ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve replaced Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync. In order to do this I’ve have btsync running on a VPS (2CPU, 2GB, 400GB), my home server and assorted Arch Linux workstations. I had a couple of reasons for migrating away from Dropbox. Dropbox was costing $100 per year. Dropbox encryption model is weak and I have data security/privacy. The VPS I am running BitTorrent Sync on costs $50 per year and provides four times the storage. I run btsync on a VPS so that there is always a server “in the ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’m a member of the MATE Desktop team and until recently the majority of my involvement has been focused around Arch Linux. However, I’m working on a MATE project that is based on a Debian derivative. MATE has recently been accepted into the Debian Backports repository for Wheezy, so I decided to do a “MATE from scratch” on Debian using an old netbook to get familiar with the MATE package naming differences between Arch Linux and Debian. Install Debian I installed Debian Wheezy from t...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I switched from BIP to ZNC, and recommend you use ZNC instead! BIP is an IRC proxy that maintains a persistent connection(s) to a list of IRC channels. You can then point your IRC client to BIP each time you log in and playback the conversations that took place while you were away. I’ve found bBIP to be so useful that I now maintain BIP for Arch Linux, although I now run my BIP proxy on Debian because my new VPS provider doesn’t offer Arch Linux as an option. Installing BIP Installing BIP...| Posts on Wimpy's World
At some point last year I was experimenting with Linux Containers (LXC) on Arch Linux. I never finished the blog post but somehow it was briefly published and then unplublished. I have no idea how accurate this blog post is but someone did see it and bookmarked it. They recently emailed me to ask where the blog has disappeared to, so here it is in all its unfinished glory. Install LXC sudo pacman -Syy --needed --noconfirm arch-install-scripts bridge-utils lxc netctl netctl Bridge The guest co...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Nikola is a static site and blog generator written in Python that I’ve been using for a good while now. This blog post describes how to install Nikola on Debian. Now, this may look like a long winded way to install Nikola, given that Debian .deb package exist, but in my opinion it is the correct way to install Nikola on Debian. Installing Python First you’ll need Python and virtualenvwrapper sudo apt-get install libpython2.7 python2.7 python2.7-dev python2.7-minimal Remove any apt install...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Note Updated on June 3rd 2014 and now includes LXQt and Unity. For the last 9 months or so I’ve spent my spare time working with the MATE Desktop Team. Every so often, via the various on-line MATE communities, the topic of how “light weight” MATE is when compared to other desktop environments crops up and quite often Xfce is suggested as a lighter alternative. After all MATE and Xfce both provide a traditional desktop environment based on GTK+ so this suggestion is sensible. But is Xfce...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have an old Thinkpad T43p that I am trying to extend the life of. So I recently fitted a cheap 60GB IDE Solid State Drive (SSD) and put a 320GB SATA Hard Disk Drive (HDD) in the Ultrabay. This is not a true hybrid disk, but the principles are similar. The root partition will go on the SDD (for performance) and the home partition will be located on the HDD (for capacity). I’ve been running Arch Linux on the T43p and the SDD improves system responsiveness and boot time considerably, especia...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve recently started using Plex Media Server to handle most media streaming duties around the house. I run in on Open Media Vault 0.5.x. At the time of writing Open Media Vault is based on Debian (Squeeze) 6.0. Plex Media Server Anyway, it turns out that installing Plex Media Server on Open Media Vault is super simple thanks to the hard work of Christian Svedin who has packaged everything and made it available via an apt repository. sudo apt-get install curl echo "deb http://shell.ninthgat...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have Open Media Vault running on a HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L. OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. At the time of writing OMV 0.5.x is based on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze). In recent months Plex has taken over just about all media streaming duties in our house, with the expectation of streaming music because Plex music playback and streaming is seriously lacking (no playlists!). So, MiniDLNA is still required for serving up music around the...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I use SketchUp at work to manipulate models for use in Google Earth. Here is how I got SketchUp Make 2013 installed and working on Arch Linux under Wine 1.7. Wine for Arch Linux Install Wine on Arch Linux as follows. sudo pacman -S --needed icoutils libwbclient libxslt lib32-mpg123 p11-kit lib32-p11-kit samba wine winetricks wine-mono wine_gecko sudo packer -S --noedit --noconfirm ttf-ms-fonts For 64-bit also install the following. sudo packer -S --noedit --noconfirm lib32-libwbclient lib32-l...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve installed Open Media Vault (OMV) on my new HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L to replace my aging, and lackluster, ReadyNAS NV. OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. At the time of writing OMV 0.5.x is based on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze). This blog post is not going to cover the extremely simple OMV installation procedure, it assumes OMV 0.5.x is already installed. This post explains how to upgrade the kernel, install some addtional plugins and...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Recently I’ve been deploying Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) and 7.0 (Wheezy) servers for some personal projects. These servers are provisioned in different ways: Open Media Vault using a Squeeze pre-seed VPS powered by LXC deployed via debootstrap VPS powered by KVM using the hosting providers Wheezy pre-seed Consequently the basic install differs on each instance and requires a little bit of post install tweaking to get them all consistent. This blog post is a quick reference for the post install st...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have an NFS server at home and at work we have Windows (not Samba) servers. When I first switched to systemd I noticed that boot and shutdown were seriously delayed while NFS and CIFS were mounted/unmounted. systemd was designed to eliminate those kinds of delays, so I did some research to find out how to correctly mount NFS and CIFS using systemd. systemd friendly fstab Below are some example /etc/fstab entries for NFS and CIFS mounts that are systemd friendly, the pertinent mount options ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
At work I maintain the Jenkins test and build servers. I’m just about to update our Windows build servers and thought I’d better check the available “Python Distributions” to see if our current choice (the brilliant Python(x,y) is still the most suitable for our needs. Our Flight Data Analyzer makes extensive use of Numpy, Scipy, h5py and other analysis tools. So, pre-built Python distributions on Windows save me a lot of pain time. On Linux we roll our own of course. What follows is ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
About a year ago I migrated all my workstations, laptops and netbooks to Arch Linux. Since then, I’ve setup Arch Linux on a Raspberry Pi and this server was also recently migrated to Arch Linux. I’ve had no major issues issues during the last year and have upgraded through five major Linux kernels, transitioned to systemd and upgraded from GNOME 3.2 to 3.8. Although I have been disciplined about merging .pacnew files frequently, during the upgrades and experimentation’s I have packages ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I use get-iplayer to download TV programs so I can watch them on the devices that suit me, when it suits me. What follows is how I install get-iplayer on a headless Debian 6.0 server I have a home. The server in question is really low powered so building from source was not an option. In order to install the latest version of get-iplayer (currently 2.82) on Debian Squeeze a couple of additional package repositories need enabling. Debain Multimedia Debian Backports Enable the Debain Backports ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I bought a budget Android tablet a little while back that turned out to be really rather good. However, there were issues with the initial firmware. Connecting to, or maintaining connection with, some wireless networks was unreliable. When the internal NAND was under moderate load the tablet would become unresponsive. Ployer released a firmware update in November 2012 and again in April 2013 which addressed these issues. Here’s the translated change log. Increase the volume buttons on the v...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I recently switched ISPs at home and now have unlimited high speed broadband. Finally I can participate in torrenting Linux .ISO images. I always download the latest distros using BitTorrent and can now contribute to the community by seeding the distros I’ve downloaded. I have a small (in size and resources) Debian 6.0 headless server at home that I wanted to turn into a torrent box. I’m a big fan of Transmission since it can be managed from the shell, web and Android phone/tablet. Sadly,...| Posts on Wimpy's World
My webserver of choice is nginx, it’s resource friendly, fast, reliable and versatile. I have a resource constrained Debian 6.0 “server” and wanted to deploy nginx on it for testing. Sadly, the nginx package in the Squeeze repositories is very old. Fortunately, the nginx team maintain a Debian package repository. Add the nginx repository. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx.list Squeeze deb http://nginx.org/packages/debian/ squeeze nginx deb-src http://nginx.org/packages/debian/ squ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve been a fan of nullmailer for some years now, so much so that I took ownership of the nullmailer package for Arch Linux. nullmailer is a sendmail/qmail/etc replacement MTA for hosts which relay to a fixed set of smart relays. It is designed to be simple to configure, secure, and easily extendable. The other advantage nullmailer has compared to similar tools is that is queues email until it is able to deliver it upstream. Install nullmailer as follows. packer -S --noedit --noconfirm null...| Posts on Wimpy's World
While migrating one of my VPS servers to Arch Linux I deployed Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) to handle basic firewall duties. I like ufw as it provides simple host-based firewall management and, in my opinion, one of the better projects to come out of the Ubuntu camp. Install ufw as follows. sudo pacman -Syy -noconfirm --needed ufw Configuring ufw is simple but make sure you have console access to the host you are configuring just in case you lock yourself out. NOTE! When enabling ufw the chai...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve decided to migrate one of my servers to Arch Linux. I’m not sure that a rolling release distro really suits servers but I’ve enjoyed using Arch Linux over the last year on my workstations and the only way to assess it’s suitability on a server is to try it. So, I’ve decided to migrate my blog to an Arch Linux server. This blog post describes how to install Nikola on Arch Linux. Nikola is a static site and blog generator written in Python that I’ve been using for a few months....| Posts on Wimpy's World
When I migrated my site to Nikola I wanted to ensure I could manage my blog from the shell, the web, Android smartphone or Android tablet. I took some inspiration from Joe Hewitt’s article Dropbox is my publish button and created a free Dropbox account which links to a shared folder on my Dropbox Pro account. I created a simple shell script (invoked via cron every minute) that looks for a trigger file, if the trigger file exists Nikola publishes and deploys the site. I am able to edit conte...| Posts on Wimpy's World
We have a mix of Linux and Windows users at work. My department use Linux and the rest of the business use Windows. We been running a mixture of LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, which works pretty well until you start trying to collaborate, then it gets messy pretty quickly. So, it was decided at the end of 2012 to migrate everyone, including the Linux users, to Microsoft Office 2010. What follows is an installation guide for Wine and the 60 day trial version of Office Home and Business 2010...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I use the nano text editor in preference to vim and have done for years. This is because we used Pine for email at university and my first job, the Pico text editor was used to compose mail messages. Due to the binary only distribution of pico, nano was created as an free software alternative. And that is why I use nano. Since I migrated my blog to Nikola I’m using nano more frequently as I typically write my blog posts on a remote shell, so I thought I’d spend some time to tweak nano a l...| Posts on Wimpy's World
We use Python for pretty much all our software development at work. We also use virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper extensively, both for development and deployment. Why is virtualenv so great? It just is. Read the virtualenv documentation. If you’re a Python developer you need virtualenv in your life. You also need virtualenvwrapper too. virtualenvwrapper is a set of extensions to Ian Bicking’s virtualenv tool for creating isolated Python development environments. Installing Python and virt...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have several VPS hosts with different providers using different virtualisation platforms. Naturally I have OpenSSH running on these VPS hosts and deploy either DenyHosts or Fail2Ban to add an extra security layer to thwart SSH brute force attacks and other abuse. DenyHosts blocks brute force attacks by adding offending IP addresses to /etc/hosts.deny. It therefore requires the SSH server is configured with tcp_wrappers. Arch Linux dropped support for tcp_wrappers so DenyHosts is not suitabl...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Something wonderful has happened! Jesus Alvarez has created pre-compiled packages for netflix-desktop for Arch Linux. There is no need for me to repeat the installation instructions as they are clearly documented on the page below. Arch Netflix - Netflix on the desktop through WINE The source code for both of the packages can be found at archnetflix-github. For reporting problems, please see the AUR page at netflix-desktop-aur or the announcement forum posting.| Posts on Wimpy's World
We use two server monitoring services at work, one that does external availability checks of critical services and another agent based monitor that reports various system metrics. Neither of these monitoring tools offer sensible free plans. I recently setup monitor.us to do external monitoring of my VPS hosts. It’s very good and offers many tests (internal and external), smartphone apps and reports. All are available on the free plan. However, the user interface is cumbersome, the reports a...| Posts on Wimpy's World
As I mentioned in a previous post we are prepairing to migrate our Bazaar repositories to Git, or more precisely to GitHub. This migration also heralds the Open Source releases of many of the core technologies we’ve been developing at Flight Data Services for the last few years. I want to track visits for our GitHub projects. A bit of Googling turned up githalytics which enables you to track visits and page views for your GitHub projects using [http://www.google.com/analytics/](Google Analy...| Posts on Wimpy's World
We have been using Bazaar for source control at work for nearly five years. We are about to Open Source most of our core technologies and decided that GitHub is the best way to encourage community participation. We have signed up for a Silver plan at GitHub and will migrate all our Bazaar repositories to Git. I have a few personal projects in Bazaar repositories hosted on Launchpad. I decided to migrate my projects to GitHub in order to learn the migration process. What follows is an overview...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I recently migrated three sites from a self hosted Wordpress installation to Nikola. Nikola is a static site and blog generator written in Python. Although I use both reStructuredText and Markdown, I decided to migrate my Wordpress content to Markdown. This is by no means an exhaustive Wordpress to Nikola migration guide but it should provide enough clues for anyone else wanting to do the same. The following was done on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Export the Wordpress content. Tools -> Export -> All Co...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Yesterday I needed to create a data flow diagram for one of our technology partners at work. They are presenting to the FAA and need to explain how we (Flight Data Services) can replay the data from tens of thousands of flights in extremely short order. Anyway, I went looking for a good tool to draw the diagram. I’ve tried several in the past and never really been satisfied. I found draw.io and it is really good. This is how they describe it. draw.io is an online diagramming application and...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve recently taken delivery of my first Android tablet, the Ployer Momo8 IPS. I purchased mine from GTR Electronics as they have a track record for excellent customer service, provide 12 month warranty and their devices are free from Chinese apps and bloatware. I wrote up a review on Amazon.co.uk, see below. A quality Android tablet with a budget price As I mention in the review above, I’ve rooted the Momo8 IPS. The following were useful references for the rooting. http://forum.xda-devel...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I recently migrated several domains I manage for family and friends to the “free” version of Google Apps. I setup the Gmail app on their Android phones for them and email arrives promptly and spam is pretty much eradicated. Happy days. However, the Gmail app for Android only supports a conversation view of emails. My wife and I hate that and have actually missed emails because new emails get burried in an earlier email conversation way down your inbox. Frustratingly changing the preferenc...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve been working a shell script for Arch Linux that automatically configures my preferred GNOME 3 setup on my netbook, laptops and workstations. The main features are: Quickly deploys Arch Linux to my specifications Supports i686 and x64_64. Detects ATI/AMD, Intel and Nvidia chipsets and configures the Open Source video drivers and enables early KMS. Hardware and location aware. Installation and configuration can be different for Home vs Work or Desktop vs Netbook. Detects and correctly co...| Posts on Wimpy's World
In a recent Ubuntu community feedback session run on IRC Mark Shuttleworth said: if you are a super-technologist then there is value in learning all about linux from every angle try arch. try gentoo. try fedora. try debian. try suse. they are all good So, I did. I tried Arch Linux and it is is not just good, it’s truly brilliant! The truth is, I didn’t take Mark Shuttleworth’s advice. I took the advice of a quietly spoken work colleague. Whenever he saw me getting frustrated with Ubuntu...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Canonical disabled my Java PPA at the end of last week. So I’ve developed another solution for installing Java on Ubuntu which doesn’t infringe any copyrights, licenses, terms of use or CoC’s. However, by running this script to download Java you acknowledge that you have read and accepted the terms of the Oracle end user license agreement. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/ My script is an automated wrapper for Janusz Dziemidowicz Debian packaging scripts for J...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Update Friday 13th January 2012 My Java PPA has been disabled by Canonical, possibly because they violate the Ubuntu CoC and PPA terms of use, as Jef Spaleta noted in the comments below, although I’ve had no communication from Canonical at this time. I’m preparing an alternative solution, for those of you who need Sun Java 6, that doesn’t violate and copyrights, CoCs or terms of use. A new blog post will be made when that alternate solution is available. Update Monday 16th January 2012 ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I tried Unity in Ubuntu Natty 11.04 and Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10. We’ve agreed to hate each other. A few weeks ago I started using GNOME 3 and it only took me a couple of hours to adapt to it’s workflow. GNOME 3 is now my desktop environment at home and and work. I love it! If you’d like to give GNOME 3 a whirl then you could try installing Jan Hoffman’s Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix from either the 32-bit or 64-bit ISOs he has prepared. This will give a “pure” GNOME 3 experience. http://u...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Like many others I wanted Shotwell 0.11 for Lucid and Maverick so I’ve created a PPA for it. https://launchpad.net/~flexiondotorg/+archive/shotwell My PPA contains Shotwell 0.11 built for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS and Ubuntu Maverick 10.10. I created this PPA because I run Lucid at home and wanted the new version of Shotwell. Sadly, Yorba aren’t going to provide new Shotwell packages for Lucid due to the reasons discussed in the following ticket: - http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/3015 As mentio...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Like many others I wanted Shotwell for Lucid so I’ve created a PPA for it. <https://launchpad.net/~flexiondotorg/+archive/shotwell. My PPA contains Shotwell 0.8.1 built for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS. I created the PPA because I run Lucid at home and wanted the new version of Shotwell. Sadly, Yorba aren’t going to provide a Lucid build of Shotwell 0.8.1 due to the reasons discussed in the following ticket: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/3015 As mentioned in the ticket above, there are versions ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’m working a script to automatically backport Debian packages to Ubuntu. I needed a way to get a list of currently supported/active Ubuntu releases by codename or version. Here is how I do it. Get a list of Ubuntu codenames wget -q http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ -O - | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | grep '^[[:space:]][a-z]' | sed 's/\///g' Get a list of Ubuntu versions wget -q http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ -O - | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | grep '^[[:space:]...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve finally found a photo organiser for Linux I can live with, Shotwell. Shotwell is a photo organiser for GNOME that I’ve been testing for a few months now but the recent 0.5 release which added tagging and printing, it means Shotwell is finally ready replace F-Spot on my workstation. Shotwell is intuitive, well documented, extremely easy to use and reliable. It’s easy to dismiss Shotwell as an over simplified photo manager. But once you start using it, you’ll quickly appreciate its...| Posts on Wimpy's World
After tinkering with Ext4 I did some research and tested other file systems on my new disk arrays. I’ve concluded that XFS, once tuned, is the best file system for my needs and it could well be the best file system for your needs too. The remainder of this page explains how I arrived at that decision and how I tune XFS to get optimal, yet safe, performance that can rival Ext4 and JFS. Benchmarks Here are some benchmarks. http://izanbardprince.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/comparing-boot-performa...| Posts on Wimpy's World
The Ext4 file system, like Ext3, reserves 5% of the blocks on the file system for the root user. The reserved blocks are there for root’s use as a safe guard if the filesystem gets full, it provides some wiggle room to enable the really important programs to still function. But in some cases there’s not much point in having space reserved for root. I’ve recently upgrade my workstation with a 6TB internal RAID 0 array for data storage (music, videos, photos, etc) and an external 6TB RAID...| Posts on Wimpy's World
*** UPDATE: The StarTech S354UER completely died after less than one year. Not recommended! *** I’ve ripped my entire CD collection to MP3 and I’m in the process of ripping my entire DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD collection to MPEG-2 TS files so that I can stream everything to my PS3 using MiniDLNA. I currently have this data stored on an internal 2TB volume and backed up to an external 2TB volume. I currently have just 360GB remaining capacity and I’ve only imported half my DVD collection an...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve been using Mediatomb for nearly two years now but decided to give MiniDLNA a whirl since it is a fully fledged DLNA server whereas Mediatomb is UPnP only. I’m currently running both Mediatomb SVN and MiniDLNA CVS. So, how does MiniDLNA compare to Mediatomb? MiniDLNA is easier to compile, configure, uses less RAM and has less software dependencies than Mediatomb. MiniDLNA doesn’t currently support music play lists or Last.fm scrobbling. Mediatomb supports .m3u and .pls playlists but...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve no idea when Amazon.co.uk launched their MP3 store and I’ve no idea when they released their Linux client for downloading the MP3s you purchased. I don’t care, I just want to say I’m really impressed Amazon have considered us Linux users. Well done Amazon! Not only that but the MP3s are DRM free, encoded using variable bit rates aiming at an average of 256 kilobits per second (kbps), album cover art is included with each song and the tracks are typically cheaper than iTunes. Well...| Posts on Wimpy's World
A while back I released a script that rips a DVD to MPEG-2 PS allowing the user to select one audio stream and one subtitle stream. Optionally the video can be requantised, using M2VRequantiser and an ISO image created. If creating an ISO image the chapters are also preserved from the original DVD. You can see the original post below. DVD to MPEG-2 PS Ripper for Linux I’ve just released an update to that original script which fixes subtitles in the original MPEG-2 PS mode but now adds the c...| Posts on Wimpy's World
We use hex editors daily at work, we are regularly cutting up data from flight data recorders for analysis or recovery. So when I find a new hex editor for Linux I usually give it a try. I happened across a blog listing five GUI hex editors for Ubuntu today. Find out more below. Five gui hex editors for ubuntu| Posts on Wimpy's World
I created JetDirect compatible server on my NSLU2 running Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 using p910nd, which is a small printer daemon that does not spool to disk but passes the job directly to the printer. It is particularly useful for disk less Linux workstations and embedded devices that have a printer hanging off them.| Posts on Wimpy's World
PlayStation 3 firmware 3.00 added a new feature I was very excited about, multi-av output. Today I finally got round to re-wiring the home cinema system to make use of this new feature. I now have the PS3 streaming music from MediaTomb with my A/V receiver sending audio to Zone 1 via digital inter connects and also sending audio to Zone 2 via analog stereo interconnects. Zone 1 is a 5.1 speaker setup and Zone 2 is a 2.0 all weather wireless speaker system which are often in the kitchen but al...| Posts on Wimpy's World
UPDATE! I no longer use or maintain the script below. I suggest the vastly superior Sheet Maker for Linux. Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place. IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG-2 video Today I’ve released v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thank...| Posts on Wimpy's World
The PlayStation 3 can’t play MKV files. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 compatible MPEG-4 from Matroska providing the video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS. Xbox 360 compatibility requires that audio is forcibly downmixed to stereo with --stereo. AAC 5.1 audio will have the correct channel assignments when transcoding from AC3 5.1 and DTS 5.1. If neroAacEnc is installed then it is used in preference to faac for encoding the AAC audio, as it produc...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Work has been crazy. We’re moving house. Hence, not much time for geeky stuff recently. I’ve been putting this off for ages, I need to “normalise” the volume of my MP3 music music library. Not all CDs sound equally loud. Whilst different musical moods require that some tracks should sound louder than others, the loudness of a given CD has more to do with the year of issue or the whim of the producer than the intended emotional effect. This difference carries over when you rip the CD t...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Some of my mobile phones have been able to record video clips in MPEG-4 format. Sadly some of these clips don’t play on the PlayStation 3 and those that do stutter terribly. I use iplayer-dl to download content from BBC iPlayer. Sadly the files are in a Quicktime container and are not playable on the PlayStation 3. In order to address both these issues I created a script which extracts the audio and video from an existing MPEG-4 or ISO Media Apple QuickTime container and repacks them in a n...| Posts on Wimpy's World
The PlayStation 3 can’t play MKV files. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 compatible M2TS from a MKV, assuming video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS with as little re-encoding as possible. Any subtitles in the MKV are preserved in the M2TS although the PlayStation 3 can’t display subtitles in M2TS containers. Optionally splits the M2TS, if it is greater than 4GB, to maintain FAT32 compatibility. Unlike other MKV to M2TS solutions, this script doesn’t create...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Every so often I find myself in looking through the ex-rental DVD “bargain bin”. Quite often I find something I consider a bargain. However, the experience of watching an ex-rental DVD is typically ruined by the various trailers and marketing guff at the start which you can’t skip. My wife hates that stuff, and I love my wife, so I routinely rip the main feature of newly acquired ex-rental DVD movies so we can avoid that crap. I run a Mediatomb DLNA server and I want to load it with all...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I recently discovered that tcrequant (part of the transcode suite of tools) has been deprecated. Worst still I found that when I ran tcrequant on my 64-bit Linux workstation is was corrupting the video. See the links below for details. transcode 1.1.0 Final Release [transcode-users] tcrequant status Therefore I decided to get the M2VRequantiser code from Metakine working on both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux as a replacement for tcrequant. M2VRequantiser accepts the raw MPEG2 video data (not VOB) f...| Posts on Wimpy's World
UPDATE! I no longer use or maintain the script below. I suggest the vastly superior Sheet Maker for Linux. If you’ve read my blog before you’ll know I run Mediatomb DLNA server with my PlayStation 3 as the client, You’ll also know I am working towards importing my entire DVD collection into my Mediatomb server. However, my wife wants to know something about each film in the library without having to dig out the DVD case from storage. My solution is to include a MPEG-2 video displaying t...| Posts on Wimpy's World
It has been a while since I last posted, mainly due to not having Internet access at home for a month. Anyway, I’m online again and I have been tinkering with various projects the most recent of which is Matroska conversion (again). Matroska to MP4 For sometime I have been converting Martoska files to MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1 audio so I can stream them via Mediatomb to my PlayStation 3. The conversion process works well although there is some overhead in transcoding the audio and the AAC 5.1 aud...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Mediatomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices, such as the PlayStation in my case. Mediatomb 0.12 is not yet released as final yet but it is certainly stable enough for general use, so I spent the last week migrating from Mediatomb 0.11 to Mediatomb 0.12. I’ve recently finished ripping my entire CD collection (344 CDs) to MP...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Last November we switched to Python as the principal language for all new software development projects at work, ditching Microsoft Visual C++ and PHP in the process. Last Friday we released our first Python application to our customers for both Windows and Linux users. Although we make good use of Open Source software development tools and methodologies the application we have just written is propritary and the source can not be released publicly. We needed to compile, or freeze, the Python ...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I manage several websites at work and have therefore learned something about search engine optimisation (SEO). Our main site at work uses Wordpress as the content manager, which has good SEO features by default. Last week we launched a new website and I also refreshed the other sites, in so doing I found a great article discussing how to fully SEO your Wordpress site. It is a good read even if you don’t use Wordpress, but for those of you that do, it recommends a suite of plugins that do al...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have quickly forked WordTwit into WordDent. WordDent is a Wordpress plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Identi.ca account as a dent. It allows all your Identi.ca contacts to keep up to date with your blog postings. I’m still just testing that WordDent works correctly. I’ll find out if the nice people over at Brave New Code will agree to me releasing WordDent since I can’t fine any license details for WordTwit.| Posts on Wimpy's World
I am just about to clean up and convert another batch of programmes I have recorded from Freeview (DVB-T in the UK) so that I can add them to my DLNA Server. I thought I’d share the method I use on Ubuntu. By clean up, I mean edit out any adverts and trim crap from the start and the end of the recordings. It just so happens that the result of this process is a DVD compliant MPEG-2 which is suitable for DVD authoring, or in my case, streaming around the house. This method of conversion shoul...| Posts on Wimpy's World
We use Zimbra at work for email, contacts, calendaring, etc. I have Zimbra syncing with Thunderbird and my phone, I love it. At the weekend I was updating the music library on my iPod Nano (2nd Gen) and noticed I had hidden the Contact and Calendar menu entries. I decided to see if I could get my iPod Contacts and Calendar synced with Zimbra, it turned out to be very simple. In the examples below replace username and password with your Zimbra user credentials. Obviously use the URL to your Zi...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Last week I switched from VMware to VirtualBox at home. Why? Well, hack value mostly and I also wanted to learn more about VirtualBox having never used it before. Bottom line, for home use it suits me very nicely and is far easier to get installed and running when compared to VMware Server which almost always required patching. The VirtualBox and Guest Additions (think VMWare Tools) installers both worked without a hitch. I even migrated my existing VMware Linux guests to VirtualBox, again ev...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I finally got around to verifying my websites with the Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live search engines. I’ve also setup sitemaps for my websites too. I’ve done this for the websites at work but couldn’t be arsed to do it for my own sites until today. To find out why you want sitemap enable your sites read the Sitemap page at Wikipedia. In order to register your sitemaps with the major search engines you’ll need to setup accounts for Google Webmaster Tools, MSN Live Webmaster Tools and Yaho...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I’ve just installed WordTwit on my blog. WordTwit keeps track of when you publish new posts, and automatically informs all of your followers by pushing out a Twitter tweet. All links are automatically converted to tiny URLs.| Posts on Wimpy's World
We have a reasonable number of Debian servers at work and as a result I ssh into servers about as many times as I visit Google. I have been using Profiles in gnome-terminal to manage my ssh connections, which is fine but requires I already have a terminal open to initiate a new server connection. Enter SSHMenu, a GNOME panel applet that keeps all your regular SSH connections within a single mouse click. I couldn’t be arsed adding up a new repo for one application, so here are my quick and d...| Posts on Wimpy's World
AIR (Automated Image and Restore) is a GUI front-end to dd and dcfldd designed for easily creating forensic bit images. Or, a nice way to let the guys at work who like GUIs make Debian boot install floppies (don’t ask) easily. Ubuntu 7.10 doesn’t have a package for AIR, but AIR does have an installer. sudo aptitude install perl-tk sharutils dcfldd netcat cryptcat wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/air-imager/air-1.2.8.tar.gz?download tar zxvf air-1.2.8.tar.gz cd air-1.2.8/ sudo ./ins...| Posts on Wimpy's World
gLabels, as packaged in the Ubuntu repositories, has not worked properly for some time. The accuracy of printing was way out making gLabels a non-starter unless you went to the hassle of manually re-aligning every label on a page to account for the inaccuracies. However, I have been patiently waiting for a new version of gLables to be released. The new development branch completely replaces libgnomeprint with the new GtkPrintOperation and Cairo. The upshot of that is that the printing accurac...| Posts on Wimpy's World
I have been meaning to setup a weblog client for a while now. I have tested a couple of blog clients and have settled on BloGTK. It has a simple user interface but comprehensive features, although I did need to define a few Custom Tags before the editor supported all the formatting options I wanted. Setting up BloGTK is very simple for Ubuntu and Debain users requiring an aptitude install blogtk to get it installed and the following settings will connect to a Wordpress blog. Server URL: http:...| Posts on Wimpy's World
When I setup the mail server at work I picked Zimbra. It’s great. Today Zimbra just got a bit better when I found Zindus. Zindus is open source software and runs on all Thunderbird platforms including Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Zindus can sync your contacts between Zimbra and Thunderbird. It syncs everything from Address Books to your GAL (Global Address List). It currently supports ZCS 3.x to 5.x. Adding the Lightning and Zindus add-ons to Thunderbird create a very complete desktop client...| Posts on Wimpy's World
For the longest time I have been meaning to setup a shared calendar for my wife I and to use. You see, like most men I have no idea when and where I am supposed to be. This is because my wife keeps all this information in her filofax and that lives in her handbag, somewhere I never venture. So I have spent this evening setting up PHP iCalendar on Lighttpd, and I am very happy with the results. I have opted to use the publish.php add-on provided with PHP iCalendar, rather than add the WebDAV m...| Posts on Wimpy's World
Another bloody AI commit generator, born from pure spite but stays local| wimpysworld.com