Comments (0) Found the problem! Your log says ‘/usr/lib/indicators3/6/libsession.so does not exist.’ That file is part of the ‘indicator-session’ package, which provides the shutdown buttons for Unity and Lightdm.
Note to self: Always install ubuntu-restricted-extras first. Without it, XBMC will crash when playing MP3s since libmad is missing.
So Ubuntu is getting into the TV business. If they can pull it off, and get into Cable/Satellite/IPTV STBs, the would would be a much better place. This looks way better than Microsoft Mediaroom or any proprietary cable box software I’ve seen.
Now, is it just me or does that video sound a lot like this one?
I have to say, I gotta feeling that Canonical might have got it right. Unfortunately, past experience says Big Telecom isn’t very interested in what’s good for the customer.
more at
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697982/interview-ubuntu-tv-pete-goodall
OK, rant time.
Way back in the day (I mean 2001 or so), I used to use rpm-based distros. Red Hat, Mandriva – or rather Mandrake- and they worked fine. As long as you didn’t have to install any packages. To be fair, this was in the early days of package managers and the like, and I was a novice Linux user at the time. Mandrake had put in a good effort with urpmi, but I still had to visit sites like http://rpm.pbone.net/ and http://rpmfind.net/ very often to find this or that package.
Then, in 2004/2005, I discovered Ubuntu. (The OS, not the philosophy. Ha ha.) It was a world of difference. Need a program? apt-get install program would automagically fetch and install it for you. Don’t know the name of the package, or exactly what you’re looking for? apt-cache search can help. If that package you want installed has dependencies, and those have dependencies? No problem, everything gets pulled in and the proposed changes are listed for you. The other advantage was that seemingly any program I could possibly want was available in a Debian/Ubuntu repo.
Fast forward to today. I’ve pretty much been using Debian based distros since then, although I have tried Arch and Slax, and possibly many others that I can’t remember right now. All my servers run either Debian or Ubuntu Server, and my Linux PCs are Ubuntu or Arch. Package management has become so easy that I rarely ever have to worry about it, unless I’m trying to make some major changes outside of repo packages.
Recently, however, I’ve started using some RPM distros again, to see how things have been on that side of the fence. It’s been mostly CentOS and a few CentOS/PBX distros (Elastix, Trixbox, pbxinaflash…). I have to say though, I can’t believe the state of the package management system. CentOS has got yum, which seems to be good in principle, but somehow I’ve seen it massively fail in ways that Apt never has for me. The first issue is not really to do with the package manager, but more the repositories.
For example, we had a service on a server at work that absolutely required “Arial”. In Ubuntu or Debian, all you have to do is enable the non-free repo, or an Arch, use one of the excellent AUR frontends such as yaourt. Then install msttcorefonts (Debian) or ttf-ms-fonts (Arch). The package manager will fetch the MS fonts package and its dependency, cabextract. It then downloads each of the fonts’ self-extracting EXEs from sourceforge, cabextracts them, then installs them to the appropriate fonts directory. Now, on the CentOS 5 server, no such luck.
$ yum install msttcorefonts Loaded plugins: downloadonly, fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * base: centos.mirror.nexicom.net * extras: centos.mirror.nexicom.net * updates: centos.mirror.nexicom.net Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Addons Finished Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Base Finished Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Extras Finished Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Updates Finished Setting up Install Process No package msttcorefonts available. Nothing to do $
Awesome. Time to break out the manual package manager, AKA Google. Which brings me to the corefonts sourceforge project homepage, fortunately with clear instructions on how to install on an rpm-based system.
- Make sure you have the following rpm-packages installed from from your favourite distribution. Any version should do.
- rpm-build
- wget
- A package that provides the ttmkfdir utility. For example
- For Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, ttmkfdir
- For old redhat releases, XFree86-font-utils
- For mandrake-8.2, freetype-tools
- Install the cabextract utility. For users of Fedora Core it is available from extras. Others may want to compile it themselves from source, or download the source rpm from fedora extras and rebuild.
- Download the latest msttcorefonts spec file from here
- If you haven’t done so already, set up an rpm build environment in your home directory. You can to this by adding the line %_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild to your $HOME/.rpmmacros and create the directories $HOME/rpmbuild/BUILD and $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch
- Build the binary rpm with this command:
$ rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.specThis will download the fonts from a Sourcforge mirror (about 8 megs) and repackage them so that they can be easily installed.
- Install the newly built rpm using the following command (you will need to be root):
# rpm -ivh $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
Sounds like fun. Let’s try and see if we’re lucky.
yum install wget rpm-build cabextract
Cool! rpm-build was installed! but wait, how about wget and cabextract? It didn’t mention those!
wget is probably installed, but let’s try anyway:
$ wget wget: missing URL Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]... Try `wget --help' for more options.
OK, how about cabextract?
$ cabextract sh: cabextract: command not found
Well then, that’s wonderful. Thanks for mentioning that you didn’t install cabextract, yum.
Fortunately the good people at corefonts provided a link to the download for cabextract, and fortunately, my server is i386 (I know it doesn’t seem like it from the screenshot), so I can use the pre-built RPM. (For those who need it, the x86_64 package) Now to the final step.
$ wget -O - http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec | rpm -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.77304 + umask 022+ cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD
[... a hundred or so lines...]
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm Executing(%clean): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.22861 + umask 022 + cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD + '[' /var/tmp/msttcorefonts-root '!=' / ']' + rm -rf /var/tmp/msttcorefonts-root + exit 0
Phew, that’s a lot of output. Well exit 0, that’s good. Aaand “Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm”. cool!
And finally:
$ rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:msttcorefonts ########################################### [100%]
$
(Another thing that bugs me – no success message! After all that, not even a Yay! Package installed!? I’m disappointed, rpm.)
For illustrative purposes, Debian:
# apt-get install msttcorefonts Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: cabextract ttf-liberation ttf-mscorefonts-installer The following NEW packages will be installed: cabextract msttcorefonts ttf-liberation ttf-mscorefonts-installer 0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. Need to get 1103kB of archives. After this operation, 2109kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
[...]
All fonts downloaded and installed. Updating fontconfig cache for /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts Setting up msttcorefonts (2.7) ... Setting up ttf-liberation (1.04.93-1) ... Updating fontconfig cache for /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-liberation
Wasn’t that easier? Also, a nice plain English message saying what was done: “All fonts downloaded and installed.” Take notes, rpm.
For completeness’ sake, Arch:
$ yaourt -S ttf-ms-fonts ==> Downloading ttf-ms-fonts PKGBUILD from AUR... x PKGBUILD x ttf-ms-fonts.install x LICENSE
[...]
==> ttf-ms-fonts dependencies: - fontconfig (already installed) - xorg-fonts-encodings (already installed) - xorg-font-utils (already installed) - cabextract (package found)
[...]
Targets (1): ttf-ms-fonts-2.0-8 Total Download Size: 0.00 MB Total Installed Size: 5.49 MB Proceed with installation? [Y/n] (1/1) checking package integrity [########################################] 100% (1/1) checking for file conflicts [########################################] 100% (1/1) installing ttf-ms-fonts [########################################] 100% Updating font cache... done. $
A bit more user interaction, but that’s the point of Arch.
So, to summarize:
Arch/Debian package management > rpm package management (CentOS).
And that’s the end of my rant for today.
It’s a bit of a pain having to run upgrades on all servers. I could of course, set up unattended upgrades, but I always liked initiating the upgrade process myself. So I wrote a little bash script that will initiate apt-get update and apt-get upgrade on all running OpenVZ containers.
Note that this only works for Debian-based distros. So Debian, *buntu, Linux Mint and the like.
It’s very rough, no error-handling or safeguards, so use at your own risk. Works for me, but YMMV.
#!/bin/bash #Delete temp file rm /tmp/tmp-script.sh #Get running VZ CTIDS=$(vzlist | awk '{print $1}' | sed -e '/CTID/d' -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' ) # Echo list of running IDs echo "$CTIDS" CTIDarray=($CTIDS) for x in ${CTIDarray[@]} do echo "#/bin/bash" > /tmp/tmp-script.sh chmod +x /tmp/tmp-script.sh echo vzctl exec $x "apt-get update &&; apt-get -y upgrade" >> /tmp/tmp-script.sh screen -d -m /tmp/tmp-script.sh done #Delete temp file rm /tmp/tmp-script.sh #Show running screens screen -x
First, we rm the /tmp/tmp-script.sh. Starting off with very bad form, I know, feeling lazy right now. Then I use awk and sed to get the IDs of running containers from the output of the vzlist command, and place them on a single line, separated by spaces. Those IDs are than put in an array, so that the update command can be called using a for loop.
For some reason, I couldn’t get screen to launch the
vzctl exec $x "apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade"
command directly, hence the hideous use of a temp file. If anyone can fix/improve this, I would be glad to hear from you!
This script will read the container ID from the file name, and use it to restore the tgz dump to the same ID on the new OpenVZ/Proxmox server.
Note that this only works if the default name for the vzdumps is kept, and it only works for the next 89 years, because I’m lazy.
Thanks to
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-loop-over-file/ and http://bashcurescancer.com/10-steps-to-beautiful-shell-scripts.html
#!/bin/bash VZDUMPS=/path/to/backups/*.tgz for f in $VZDUMPS do f2=${f#*openvz-} VEID=${f2%-20*} echo "Restoring $f to $VEID" vzrestore $f $VEID done
cd to the folder, run :
$ find . -name '*attach*' | xargs rm
where attach is the keyword present in all filenames to delete.
I’m currently running Ubuntu Natty as my primary OS at work.
My setup is a Precision T3500 workstation that came with two NVIDIA Quadro cards which were a nightmare for Linux support. I heard that ATI cards supported 3 monitors on one card, as long as one of them was DisplayPort. I saw a cheap Radeon HD 5450 on sale for about $40, so I picked it up only to notice that it had an HDMI port instead of DisplayPort. I figured I’d try it anyway and was surprised to find that with the open-source radeon driver, 3 monitors work! One is connected by VGA, one HDMI and one DVI.
I had, however been experiencing random X crashes, and I suspect the problem was with the radeon driver.
Currently testing out some updated xorg drivers found at:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?50038-Updated-and-Optimized-Ubuntu-Free-Graphics-Drivers
My system specs:
$ sudo lshw -short H/W path Device Class Description ==================================================== system Precision WorkStation T3500 () /0 bus 09KPNV /0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS /0/400 processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3530 @ 2.80GHz /0/400/700 memory 256KiB L1 cache /0/400/701 memory 1MiB L2 cache /0/400/704 memory 8MiB L3 cache /0/1000 memory 14GiB System Memory /0/1000/0 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) /0/1000/1 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) /0/1000/2 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) /0/1000/3 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) /0/1000/4 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) /0/1000/5 memory DIMM DDR3 Synchronous [empty] /0/100 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port /0/100/1 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 1 /0/100/1/0 eth0 network 82574L Gigabit Network Connection /0/100/3 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 3 /0/100/3/0 display Cedar PRO [Radeon HD 5450] /0/100/3/0.1 multimedia Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series] /0/100/7 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 7 /0/100/14 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub System Management Registers /0/100/14.1 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub GPIO and Scratch Pad Registers /0/100/14.2 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Control Status and RAS Registers /0/100/1a bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 /0/100/1a.1 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 /0/100/1a.2 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 /0/100/1a.7 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 /0/100/1b multimedia 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller /0/100/1c bridge 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1 /0/100/1c.5 bridge 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 6 /0/100/1c.5/0 eth1 network NetXtreme BCM5761 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe /0/100/1d bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 /0/100/1d.1 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 /0/100/1d.2 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 /0/100/1d.7 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 /0/100/1e bridge 82801 PCI Bridge /0/100/1f bridge 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller /0/100/1f.2 scsi0 storage 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller /0/100/1f.2/0 /dev/sda disk 250GB ST3250318AS /0/100/1f.2/0/1 /dev/sda1 volume 101MiB Linux filesystem partition /0/100/1f.2/0/2 /dev/sda2 volume 4102MiB Linux swap volume /0/100/1f.2/0/3 /dev/sda3 volume 20GiB EXT4 volume /0/100/1f.2/0/4 /dev/sda4 volume 208GiB EXT4 volume /0/100/1f.2/1 /dev/sdb disk 1500GB WDC WD15EARS-00M /0/100/1f.2/1/1 /dev/sdb1 volume 499GiB Data partition /0/100/1f.2/1/2 /dev/sdb2 volume 897GiB Data partition /0/100/1f.2/2 /dev/cdrom disk DVD-ROM TS-H353C /0/100/1f.2/3 /dev/cdrw disk DVD+-RW TS-H653F /0/100/1f.2/3/0 /dev/cdrw disk /0/100/1f.3 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller
PulseAudio, as usual, has been annoying me.
This time, it’s because it’s blocking the S/PDIF passthrough via HDMI from XBMC.
I found a great tutorial on how to disable it at http://www.jeffsplace.net/node/12.
However for some reason I had no sound from the TV. That’s because the default device for ALSA is the analog audio output rather than the HDMI port. To fix this, run aplay -l in terminal to determine the card ID for the HDMI out.
$ aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC662 rev1 Analog [ALC662 rev1 Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Then, create a ~/.asoundrc file with the following:
pcm.!default "plughw:0,3"
Where 0 is your card ID and 3 is the device ID found from the aplay -l.
Now all apps should be able to play audio through ALSA/HDMI.
yer -ao alsa -ac hwdts -vo vdpau qgh_dts.dts
Being a long-time Ubuntu/Debian user, I’m used to editing the good ol’ /etc/network/interfaces file to configure network interfaces.
Recently, trying Arch Linux, I discovered that networking isn’t always that simple.
Most basic system parameters in Arch are configured in the /etc/rc.conf file. However, that file is limited to configuring one static wired ethernet connection.
In order to configure multiple interfaces, you need to install the netcfg package and create profiles for each NIC in /etc/network.d :
There are some examples provided, however none of them mention how to set a custom netmask or multiple DNS servers. So here are my two network profiles:
interface 1
CONNECTION='ethernet'
DESCRIPTION='Static IP WAN'
INTERFACE='eth0'
IP='static'
ADDR='172.32.24.108'
GATEWAY='172.32.24.1'
DNS=('172.16.24.1' '172.16.24.3')
interface 2
CONNECTION='ethernet' DESCRIPTION='Static IP LAN' INTERFACE='eth1' IP='static' ADDR='192.168.2.80' NETMASK='255.255.254.0'
Once the profiles are created, go back to the /etc/rc.conf and make them activated at boot. The values for the NETWORKS array are the two files previously created in /etc/network.d:
# Enable these netcfg profiles at boot-up. These are useful if you happen to # need more advanced network features than the simple network service # supports, such as multiple network configurations (ie, laptop users) # - set to 'menu' to present a menu during boot-up (dialog package required) # - prefix an entry with a ! to disable it # # Network profiles are found in /etc/network.d # # This requires the netcfg package # NETWORKS=(interface1-static interface2-static) # ----------------------------------------------------------------------- # DAEMONS # ----------------------------------------------------------------------- # # Daemons to start at boot-up (in this order) # - prefix a daemon with a ! to disable it # - prefix a daemon with a @ to start it up in the background # # If something other takes care of your hardware clock (ntpd, dual-boot...) # you should disable 'hwclock' here. # DAEMONS=(hwclock syslog-ng net-profiles sshd netfs crond dbus @cups kdm)
Custom theme by me. Based on Panorama by 
Themocracy
You will be awarded a medal for disregarding safety in saving someone.