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.

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.

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

Recently I purchased a Pinnacle Soundbridge (Roku Soundbridge outside of the UK) and wanting to be bleeding edge I check out the Firefly Media Server website and discovered that the latest nightly build is version 0.9-svn-1696. According to the descriptions of the various releases this had several bugs fixed, including a major memory leak. The author kindly produced deb packages for most versions of Ubuntu except for Gutsy, so I decided to see if I could compile from source and get the latest up and running. Not being a Linux expert I did some research and did not find a single guide that was 100% correct, so I have hopefully captured all the commands that I used to get this up and running. I hope this is sufficient information for those like me who are unfamiliar with compiling from source.

First of all open a terminal window. We are going to install all the project dependencies. This can be achieved with the following command:-

$ sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev gawk gcc g++ make libid3tag0-dev libgdbm-dev libavahi-client-dev libnss-mdns avahi-daemon avahi-discover

Some of these may already be installed on your system, but just select yes when prompted to install those that are missing.

Now we are going to create a directory to install the source into and move into it:

$ cd /opt
$ sudo mkdir src
$ cd /src

Now we must download the tarball from the Firefly Media Server website.

$ sudo wget http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org/dl.php?FILE=mt-daapd-svn-1696.tar.gz

Before we can compile the code we need to extract the contents of the tarball and move into the directory it creates:

$ sudo tar -zxvf mt-daapd-svn-1696.tar.gz
$ cd mt-daapd-svn-1696

Now we are going to configure the environment and make sure we have all our dependencies installed correctly:

$ sudo ./configure -prefix=/usr --enable-sqlite3 --enable-avahi

If this runs without an issue enter the following:

$ sudo make

Followed by:

$ sudo make install

Before we can start the server we must create the configuration file, we can start with the one provided with the source package, copy this one to the correct location as follows:

$ sudo cp /opt/src/mt-daapd-svn-1696/contrib/mt-daapd.conf /etc/mt-daapd.conf

You can then edit this file using your favourite text editor, but if you want to say within the terminal enter:-

$ sudo nano /etc/mt-daapd.conf

Ensure that you modify the following:-

dbtype = sqlite3
runas = root
mp3dir = /path/to/your/mp3/files


This should be all you need to do at first, read the documentation for details of the other configuration commands. You should be able start your Firefly Media Server with the following command:-

$ sudo mt-daapd


You can see the web interface by pointing your browser to http://localhost:3689, entering a username of admin and password of mt-daapd. You can change localhost to the ip of the machine if you are accessing from a different machine to that which the server is installed.

• ASUS A8N5x Socket 939 Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200
• 2.5GB DDR RAM
• ASUS Nvidia GeFource 6200 256MB PCI-E video card
• LSI Megatrends 150-4 SATA RAID Card
• 3 x 320GB SATA configured in a RAID 5 Array
• Epson Perfection 3590 Photo Scanner
• Canon Pixma IP5000 printer

The only piece of hardware that has specifically been chosen to work with Linux is the LSI Megatrends 150-4 SATA RAID card. I discovered that most of the RAID provided on motherboards is referred to as Fake Raid which requires software drivers in conjunction with the hardware. Unfortunately there are not many (or maybe any) that are supported under Linux so I decided to find a cheap hardware RAID card that was supported.

All in all Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10 worked out of the box with the above hardware, with one exception. The Epson Perfection 3590 Photo Scanner. Doing research it appears that there are not many of the modern day scanners supported under Linux, which is a real shame. I however will keep searching to see if I can find a solution and get this scanner working.

In general I am impressed with the hardware detection. I have installed Ubuntu 7.10 on a cheap Chinese laptop that is about 4 years old and it works perfectly, including the wireless card! So I would certainly not hesitate anybody giving it a go!

Earlier on this year I was toying with the idea of upgrading to Windows Vista, it was for no reason other than the fact that I wanted to have the so called latest and greatest. I was soon put off by the negative press and most of all the unattractive price tag! On discussing this with a friend, he suggested that I tried Linux, and in particular Ubuntu. That was back in March and now I rarely run Windows, and if I do it’s usually under a virtual machine in Linux.

The journey has not been smooth all the way, and in fact I am still having issues with certain pieces of hardware and finding the best software for each task, but I what I intend to do with this blog is share my experience and hopefully encourage those who are skeptical about a move to Linux to simply give it a try. Where possible I will give step by step guides on how I achieved different things so that hopefully other people can benefit from the late nights I have spent trying to get something to work!