Rudkin On Linux

For several years now I have been using GMail to store my email and Google Reader to manage my RSS news feeds.  Although I was content with this, in the back of my mind I was always concerned about Google having access to all my data and the unhealthy relationship they appear to have with the US government.

I don’t actually have anything to hide, however the recent privacy screw up by Google when they released Buzz really rammed home to me that all my data is with Google and I am trusting them to keep it safe!  I do not believe the Buzz fiasco was an error by Google.  Most Google products go through several years of beta testing (remember GMail just recently came out of beta) and all of a sudden a new product called Buzz was thrust upon us.  I think this was all very intentional, and Google were just testing the water to see what they could get away with.

So with this in mind I set out to see how I could live life without GMail and Google Reader, and I found it extremely easy especially as I have a couple of VPSs which I have full root access to.

Email

Moving all my email to a Dovecot email server was a breeze.  I used isync to connect to GMail via IMAP and create the equivalent MailDir format.  Job done.

I predominantly use Thunderbird 3 as my email client, though occasionally when I am on the road it is handy to access the mail via a webmail client, and this where RoundCube comes to the rescue.   Don’t be fooled by it’s low version number, it is feature rich and a more than suitable replacement.

News Reader

This was bit harder to find, but I found a fantastic project called Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, it’s a breeze to install and use and even has a mobile interface for accessing from you phone.   It was easy as pie to export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them to Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, and after using it for a week or so in many ways  I prefer the interface to that of Google Reader, lets face it Google are not renowned for their UI design.

So my online life is no longer tied to Google, and best of all I have achieved the same functionality using free, libre and open source software.  I would like to thank the developers and community of both RoundCube and Tiny Tiny RSS for making this all possible.  From the 1st March 2010, I will terminate my GMail account and presumably all the data associated with it will be sent to the big bit bucket in the sky….or will it?  I guess I will never know.

paul General, Linux, Software, Ubuntu GMail, google, Google Reader, Linux, RoundCube, RSS, Tiny Tiny RSS, tt-rss

Taken from http://gpodder.org/news:

The second gPodder release in this month brings updated translations, lots of bug fixes and some UI clean-ups to your open source podcast aggregator. Here are some highlights of this release:

• “All episodes” in “View” menu and enabled by default
• Episodes are passed to the media player in chronological order
• Try to use mimetype-based file icons (using GIO) for episodes
• Make sure the podcast list is correctly updated all the time
• Disable feed_update_skipping by default (+expose in UI on Maemo)
• Default cover art for podcasts with no cover art
• Re-designed preferences dialog for Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• gPodder rotates to landscape on Maemo 5 when the keyboard is open
• Better button captions in shownotes window (“Cancel download”)
• Remove podcast.de search option (this was broken for some weeks)
• Hide “Download folder” preferences option (see User Manual)
• Flush gPodder database after MP3 player sync has finished
• Updated translations (Galician, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Polish and German)
• New translations: Romanian (by Gherhardt Mathisz)

The source package is now available from the downloads page and packages for Ubuntu, Maemo and Windows should be available soon.

paul Linux, Podcasts, Ubuntu gPodder, Linux, Podcast, Podcasts, Podcatcher, Ubuntu

I first must apologise for not blogging for ages, I have no excuse other than laziness!

I recently created a new server at home and install Ubuntu 9.10 Server on it.   As a consequence all the SSH keys I used to access my old server were lost and I needed to add them back again….one at a time from each machine I use to access it.

Although this does not seem a big deal, the method I was using previously was as follows:-

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<host>
'dd of=.ssh/authorized_keys oflag=append conv=notrunc'

Although this worked fine, I was catching up on my Linux reading and in Linux Journal #184 (August 2009) another reader Mark K. Zanfardino wrote in withe following more simplified command which works great on Ubuntu:-

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<host>

This is not only easier to remember, it also checks that the key being added doesn’t already exist on the server! Brilliant!

paul Linux, Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic, Linux, Server Elements, SSH, SSH Keys, Ubuntu

Taken from gPodder.org:-

After a productive weekend in Copenhagen with improvements in the UI for portable devices we are ready to surprise you with another fine release of the most enjoyable podcast client so far. Some highlights:

• Download pausing, resuming and better error reporting
• “Paste from clipboard” button in add subscription dialog
• Auto-detect run path (makes –local obsolete)
• Better screen space usage for the Maemo UI (no more tabs)
• Newly supported target: Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• Newly supported target: Mer (Maemo Reconstructed)
• Newly supported target: Windows (Tested with XP/Vista)
• A HUGE set of bug fixes and performance improvements
• Transition to GtkBuilder means removal of Glade dependency

See the detailed changelog for more information.

paul General, Podcasts, Software gPodder, Linux, Podcast, Podcasts, Podcatcher

For the last couple of weeks I have been running the 64bit beta version of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope which will be released on 23rd April.

The computer I am using is a Dell 1525n which has an Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller. After my initial install of Jaunty Jackalope beta all was well, the graphics card was detected and Compiz enabled. This however was short lived as some days later I applied some updates and Compiz could no longer be enabled.

On investigation I discovered that Compiz had ‘blacklisted’ my video card. I have yet to find out why because Compiz has worked without complaint on every version of Ubuntu since Gutsy Gibbon.

I was initially gutted and planned to downgrade to Intrepid, but not to be defeated I did some searching and found out that you can force Compiz to skip the black list checks. To do this you need to create the following file:-

~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

and add the following line:-

SKIP_CHECKS=yes

After this I was then able to enable Compiz and continue working as I have done for the last year or so. So far I have not seen any issues, so it is still a mystery as to why the GM965/GL960 was blacklisted.

I hope this helps somebody!

paul Hardware, Operating Systems, Software, Ubuntu 1525n, 9.04, Compiz, Dell, GL960, GM965, Graphics Controller, Intel, Jackalope, Jaunty, Ubuntu

Recently I saw some posts on twitter from @mled that contained short URLs linked to his own domain mled.me. After a few tweets I was introduced to the Phurl, the PHP URL Shortening Script which is the result of the hard work of Hidayet Dogan.

This script is very easy to get installed and running on a Linux box with a LAMP setup. I then started to use it. However when posting some Launchpad URLs that contained ‘+’ characters, I discovered that Phurl did not store the URL correctly therefore causing the shortened URL not to wok.

I emailed Hidayet with this question, and overnight I got a response that included the fix:-

in create.php

change:

$url = trim(urldecode(@$_REQUEST['url']));


to:

$url = trim(@$_REQUEST['url']);


This will ensure that URLs are correctly stored in the database, including those containing the ‘+’ character.

I am sure this fix will be included in the next release of Phurl, but to make sure your installation is free from this issue then make the changes above.

paul Software LAMP, Linux, Patch, PHP, Phurl, URL Shortening

Taken from gPodder.org:-

We promised a new release every month, and this month we start out with a fresh bugfix release from the 0.15.x series. 0.15.2 brings lots of bugfixes that have been discovered during the last four weeks and some translation updates for the best (and probably most stable) podcast experience available at the moment

Thanks to all who were involved in this release:

* Anders Kvist (1)
* Bastian Kleineidam (1)
* Fabio Fiorentini (1)
* Gonçalo Cordeiro (1)
* Jim Nygård (1)
* Marco Antonio Villegas Vega (2)
* Paul Rudkin (1)
* Silvio Sisto (1)
* Steven Oxley (1)
* Thomas Perl (15)
* Torbjörn Wassberg (1)

The release contains a ChangeLog that contains detailed info on the changes since the last release. As always, you can also extract that information from the Git repository.

In the meantime, we have been hard at work implementing new features and cleaning up the code for the 0.16.x release series. You can check out the (unstable) code from our Git repository and report any bugs that you encounter, so that we can present you a fine new release in a few weeks.

Grab the new release from the download section or wait until the new package becomes available in your distro. As always, we provide .deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu users.

paul Podcasts, Software gPodder, Podcasts, Podcatcher

I wanted to upgrade OpenOffice on my Ubuntu 8.10 installation. Surfing the web I found numerous PPA that could be used, but the easiest method seemed to be below.

1. Download the debs from the OpenOffice.org site
2. Tar -xvzf them
3. cd to the directory containing the debs
4. sudo dpkg -i o*.deb
5. sudo dpkg -i desktop_integration/o*.deb

A big thanks to this article at The Open Sourcerer blog

paul Uncategorized 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, OpenOffice, Ubuntu

Having recently acquired a DroboShare I have been experimenting with the various applications that are currently available and install. What I felt was missing from the collection was Gerd Knorr’s webfsd. This is a simple and very lightweight http server for serving static content. This would provide me with web access to the contents of my Drobo from any web browser, including Safari on my iPhone.

The question I had was how on earth do I go about doing this? Although Drobo provide an SDK with the information on how to do this, what I needed was a step by step guide to give me a push in the right direction. Fortunately I came across this blog post which takes you through the steps of compiling MediaTomb. This was exactly what I needed. I am familiar with compiling applications for my Ubuntu system, what I wasn’t familiar with was cross compiling – I didn’t know where to start!

I was a little nervous about doing all of this on my main system, so I created a virtual machine of Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 using VirtualBox. I followed the instructions to the letter up until the compilation of the libraries, I then substituted the webfsd compilation, and the result is now available for download at the DroboSpace Developer Community

paul General, Hardware, Operating Systems, Software drobo, droboapp, droboshare, intrepid, Ubuntu, virtualbox, webfs, webfsd

For the last year I have been using Synergy at work to enable me to use my Ubuntu laptop using the keyboard and mouse connected to my Windows desktop.   All worked well until I tried to type the ‘@’ symbol on my laptop, instead I would get a ‘Ω’.  Considering the ‘@’ symbol is important in our modern life, this was a real pain.

Searching the web I could find other people with the same problem, but sadly no solution.  Until today!

I stumbled across this blog entry on Synergy Problems and Workarounds and I now have the ‘@’ symbol back on my laptop when using Synergy!

The solution is very simple, in a terminal window type the following:-

echo keycode 24 = q Q at at at at | xmodmap -

Brilliant, thanks to Delta Nova!

paul Software Linux, synergy, Ubuntu, windows xp, workaround