Sun, 04 Jul 2010

OpenSuse 11.2

Although Ubuntu is a breeze to use, I was becoming quite frustrated with it in that I wanted to do things that it didn't support without heavy amounts of additional work (for someone who's wedged OpenFire, SparkWeb, Asterisk, PmWiki, Alfresco, KnowledgeTree, IRC, MythTV, Moodle, Namazu, Munin, and StatusNet into the same box, it's saying a lot). The extremely hard part was getting Xen to run. Ubuntu specifically supports KVM while avoiding Xen support. While a few, very talented individuals have gotten Xen to run with an Ubuntu DOM0, I'm not one of them. I'm a Xen n00b. So I went looking. While at the South East Linux Fest, someone passed me disks for Suse Linux Enterprise 11 and OpenSuse 11.2. SLE 11 does exactly what I currently want/need. The probelm is that I can't justify buying the Enterprise license for home use. Fortunately, OpenSuse 11.2 supports most of my requirements with a marginal amount of trouble. If you're following the wiki, you'll notice updates to various articles as I update them to reflect changes required for OpenSuse. Example: Setting up LIRC for MythTV with a MCE USB remote on OpenSuse 11.2. For those with access to my system, I'll be working to get the background services back online. For now, OpenFire, SparkWeb, and PmWiki are back up. The rest will show up as I get the time to work on them. joat: 12:25:15 4 Jul 2010

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Fri, 11 Jun 2010

SELF Day 1

Yesterday was a long day. Put a full day in at work and got on the road around 4:00. Got mugged by a gang of squirrels at a rest stop, just over the border in North Carolina. We rolled into Spartanburg at 11:00 last night. Unloaded the car and finally got to sleep a little after midnight. We were up and around again by 6. Spent a good portion of the day troubleshooting equipment that I hadn't touched since last year. Sat in on the unofficial Fedora Activity Day, where Ian, Eric, and Paul hashed out some of the CMS and editing issues. Thanks to Nathanial from ZenOS for buying us lunch. Looking forward to your talk. Right now hanging out in one of the downstairs hallways, taking advantage of what little free wi-fi there is. Looking forward to the talks tomorrow. joat: 20:13:43 11 Jun 2010

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Sat, 05 Jun 2010

Bitlbee and Everything

As promised, I've pushed my notes for Bitlbee to the wiki. So far, I have notes for: installation, Bitlbee account creation, connecting to Twitter, connecting to Facebook, sending encrypted messages (incomplete), and changing a password for a specfic account. Enjoy! joat: 10:55:28 5 Jun 2010

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Fri, 28 May 2010

SELF 2010

Two weeks to go, until South East Linux Fest (SELF) 2010 kicks off. This year is going to be (excuse the language) F'in awesome. Check out the speakers list, especially the last two: Wendy Seltzer and Wietse Venema. Various LUGS will also be well represented this year. Sparks and I are headed out early to take advantage of the Friday and Sunday events. We should be rolling in late Thursday night (it's a 7-hour drive). This year, maybe I can stick around and convince Ian to redo his "buiding a package" tutorial. (That was Ian, wasn't it?) joat: 22:27:41 28 May 2010

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Sun, 02 May 2010

Upgrade frustration

I never learn. I always want the cutting edge versions and always suffer for it. This time, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.4, instead of performing a clean install. Two things fell out which shouldn't have: the ability to use a second video card Alfresco . I can only guess that nVidia needs to redo their drivers to support 10.4. This loss is painful in that the second card is the one with TV out, for MythTV. I'm looking at two work-arounds. Switch to using the second card as the primary display or use the MVP box again. I'll probably try the former first as the MVP option is quite limited. The loss of Alfresco could have been considered catastropic if I hadn't backed up my data first. I was using the Alfresco as the data store for PmWiki. This allowed me to attach objects (PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, etc.) to the wiki and also have full-text search for each. The trick for doing so was using davfs2 to mount Alfresco's WEBDAV service as a file system under PmWiki. It worked nicely, though it was a bit of a kluge and required manual mounting. Upon completion, Alfreso would start and then kill itself a few minutes later. As I'm horrible at troubleshooting Java, I only tried to fix it for a couple hours. After that, a short search revealed Namazu, which I'm currently putting through its paces. For me, it has two plusses: it's written in Perl (something I understand) and it doesn't affect the source object that you point it at. If I can find some time (not this year!), I'll probably play with the underlying code. Wish me luck! joat: 21:36:03 2 May 2010

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Tue, 20 Apr 2010

Connecting Bitlbee to ????

Have been messing with Bitlbee for the last few weeks, every since I ran across the note that the test version of Bitlbee had Twitter capability and that Facebook had a Jabber interface. A couple things that I've learned: I follow too many people on Twitter one side effect of the Jabber interface is that you can tell when your friends are checking in on Facebook So far, I've used Bitlbee and JIRC to connect various services together: Facebook, Twitter, OpenFire, Sparkweb, and a handful of IRC servers and channels. I'm currently looking at how to add OTR to jabber. In any case, I'll push my notes to the external wiki shortly. joat: 21:21:18 20 Apr 2010

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Mon, 19 Apr 2010

Update to OpenFire and JIRC

In the wiki, I've added an update and some additional notes to the OpenFire and JIRC page. In short: the xmpp.client.idle fix seems to work better in the most recent version of Openfire and I've added a description of what JIRC's output looks like when authentication to OpenFire is incorrect. joat: 06:30:33 19 Apr 2010

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Sun, 18 Apr 2010

CDR notes update

Added/updated notes in the wiki for configuration and troubleshooting for Asterisk-STAT. joat: 10:45:02 18 Apr 2010

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