Brandan's Thoughts » Linux

Booting Ubuntu from USB

Brandan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:02:46 +0000

I recently set up a usb drive with a bootable version of Ubuntu using the following tutorial http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-usb-bar

It is geared to Ubuntu Gutsy but I was able to install the Ubuntu Hardy Alpha 4 with the same instructions.

Upgrade to Hardy Alpha 5, and Beta was really smooth, all I had to do was copy the new files into the bootable partition.

Tomato

Brandan — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:36:02 +0000

New Router Firmware

I saw a post on Lifehacker about setting up a different firmware on my home router. I’ve tried this before with DD-WRT, HyperWRT and Open-WRT. The only version that I was able to get set up easily was HyperWRT. HyperWRT was alright (read functional) but it certainly wasn’t fantastic. In setting up the other two firmware I managed to brick two routers so I eventually gave in and left the stock firmware on my main gateway router.

Tomato

Last night I set up Tomato and I am very pleased with the results. I really like the eye candy that shows how you are using your bandwidth and I feel that this feature may prove to be useful in the future. I am also very interested to see how much bandwidth my house uses considering we have a few servers, two laptops, and a bunch of small devices that all connect to the internet. I will post some results at one month, three months, and hopefully a year.

Troubleshooting

The install went really smoothly. I uploaded the new firmware right over my old firmware (with fingers crossed) and I was running again in under a minute with no further configuration needed. The only issue I had was with configuring the bandwidth logs to save over the network to another box. I had to learn to configure Samba, which is the Linux version of Microsoft Windows shared folders. Normally, from within Linux, I connect via ssh to all my computers since it is secure (as opposed to Microsoft Windows shared folders). This is much easier to configure for me and I gave up bothering with Samba years ago. But to get this feature of Tomato working I needed a Samba share to push the logs to. I was able to configure everything and I was able to connect from my laptop to the share via smb://192.168.1.4/logs but I was unable to get the router to successfully connect. First, I was receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6".
While tracing the connection attempt with wireshark I saw that the only difference was that my laptop was connecting successfully to smb://192.168.1.4/LOGS while the router was failing to connect to smb://192.168.1.4/logs. I changed the case so that the share name was uppercase and then I started receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -1".
I was able to resolve this by changing my samba configuration (/etc/samba/smb.conf) from “security = share” to “security = user”. After making this change and restarting samba everything worked fine.

Listening to Podcasts on Linux

Brandan — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 01:56:47 +0000

Last week one of my coworkers told me about Synergy (which lets you use a single mouse and keyboard with multiple computers across a network, and is cross-platform so I can use it on my laptop and my work computer) so I have been able to use my laptop more at work and I would rather have all my podcasts in a single location anyhow. Since my laptop is running Ubuntu I needed a Linux alternative to iTunes. I have been trying to find an alternative to Apple’s iTunes for managing my podcasts for quite awhile and ever since their, recent, upgrade to iTunes 7 my search has taken on a new life. I have heard that quite a few people that listen to Podcasts with iTunes have been having problems since the upgrade.

So I started, last week, using Amarok. One of the things that I didn’t like about it is that I can’t figure out how to list all the Podcasts that I have, yet, to listen to in one place. I know that they have some interface that lists them in an HTML page under the content tab but I can’t find a way to send them to my media device from there. So I found where the program stores it’s smart playlist information (~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/smartplaylistbrowser_save.xml) and I found a discussion online with how to interface with the SQL in the program and I wrote a query to pull up Podcasts that I haven’t listened to yet. The query is listed below. I am having problems with the filename portion though. It seems that Amarok saves the podcasts to directories based on the “Album name” and these have spaces in them that are encoded in the file location as %20′s. This wouldn’t be a problem except that SQLite does not have a Replace function so I can’t figure out how to replace the ‘%20′ with a space manually. Here is the code that lists them in case anyone is interested. And here is the SQL:
SELECT substr(podcastepisodes.localurl, 8, length(podcastepisodes.localurl)-7) as url, 0 as deviceid, podcastchannels.title as name, podcastepisodes.composer as name, podcastepisodes.composer as name, 'Podcast' as name, podcastepisodes.title as title, '2006' as name, podcastepisodes.comment as comment, 0 as track, 0 as bitrate, 0 as discnumber, podcastepisodes.length as length, 0 as samplerate, podcastepisodes.size as filesize, 0 as sampler, podcastepisodes.filetype as filetype, 0 as bpm FROM podcastchannels, podcastepisodes WHERE podcastepisodes.parent = podcastchannels.url AND podcastepisodes.localurl LIKE 'file%' AND isNew ORDER BY createdate DESC;

SuSE Linux and My Synaptics Touchpad

Brandan — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:21:33 +0000

I just installed SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.1 RC and, by default, on my laptop the synaptics touchpad has the botton section or horizontal scroll mapped to the forward and back browser buttons in Firefox. Fortunately I found a reference for how to fix it on the internet.

The basic idea is that you need to go to about:config in Firefox and change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to ’0′ and mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines to ‘true’