I grabbed a (free) copy of VMWare Server tonight to try it out, and so very I’m very impressed. My first test was to try to get an Ubuntu VM loaded on my Windows box…
Nice! More on this later.
Bitlbee is an IRC gateway application that allows you to use an IRC client to chat with people on any of the major IM networks. Basically, you run Bitlbee as a daemon, and then connect to it as if it were a standard IRC server (6667/tcp). From there, you have Bitlbee log in to the various networks, and each of the people on your contact lists shows up in the #bitlbee channel.
It’s a really cool idea. It’s particularly useful if you predominantly use IRC for chatting, but you have a few friends who only use, for example, AIM.
From the earliest versions of Bitlbee it has been easy to connect to AIM, MSN, and ICQ. Now that Google has launched their own IM service (based on the Jabber protocol), many people would like to connect to that network as well.
So here’s how to use Bitlbee to connect to Google Talk (aka GTalk)…
Back in August I upgraded my IPCop hardware, and tonight I finally installed the latest Zerina OpenVPN addon. The next/last thing I wanted to do was to hook up the parallel LCD and permanently mount it in the front of the case.
I had the LCD working on IPCop before using Mario Minati’s LCDProc addon. But when I checked tonight, his site hasn’t been updated since the 1.3.x series of IPCop releases (the current version is 1.4.11).
And this ipcop-users post doesn’t sound too good:
Does anyone know if there is an LCDProc addon for IPCop v1.4.x. I used to use the addon on v1.3 but unfortunatley it did not work on v1.4.x series so it would be nice if anyone managed to get it going on a current release. If not, then I’ll probably try to recompile it and get it going, but don’t want to reinvent the wheel if there is something out there already.
…and there were no responses.
Hopefully someone will compile a version and release it. I can use the LCD on a different box, but I was hoping to put it in the IPCop box.
Just today I was discussing the latest version of Gnome with Matt, saying that it has come a long way from the 1.x days. And that, most importantly, it is no longer horribly ugly out of the box. As of 2.16, I actually really like the default look. With a little help from gnome-look, it can be a rather attractive desktop indeed.
But then tonight I come across this post (Why is Gnome So Ugly?):
Ok, so Gnome 2.16 came out a while ago. There are lots of new features. Yay for the foot.
Now I bet Apple fanboys are screaming right now. I don’t blame them. For the rest of you who don’t know why people would be screaming, its fairly simple. Default Gnome is ass-ugly. Thank God the Ubuntu folks made their own theme, otherwise no one would be using Gnome at all. I’ll swear by that.
Heh. Oh well… de gustibus non est disputandum.
Tonight’s CPLUG meeting was a little different that the usual format. A few reps from Acronis came down from Massachusetts to give a talk on their backup and data recovery solutions.
The presentation was good, and I was glad I attended. Their software seems to be well polished and looks like it would be easy to use, especially in an enterprise environment with a mix Windows workstations and Linux servers. It also appeared to handle virtual machine (e.g. VMWare) backups without a problem. All in all, looked pretty decent. And, all things considered, the price was very reasonable.
That said, being a LUG meeting and not just a sales meeting, I had hoped for something a little different…
The theme of tonight’s CPLUG meeting was IRC and chat. There were five different topics covered:
The slides from my presentation are in the gallery if you want to check them out. Please note that after getting some grief last month about my love of black on white slides, I switched it up quite a bit. This time it was white on black! Crazy times my friends, crazy times!
Eric talked about Bitlbee (one of my favorite chatting apps), and was entertaining as usual.
Seth’s Jabber presentation was definitely the most interesting for me. I had no idea that Sun had latched onto XMPP as much as they have, even including Java System Instant Messaging as a standard part of Solaris 10.
In the past Matt and I have played around with setting up a Jabber server or two, but we ended up going with a plain old IRC server that he hosts on his box. It was just easier. So now there’s really no need for me to even try Jabber again, but it does seem like a cool technology.
Some more pictures after the jump…
(more…)After a very long time, I finally decided it would be a good idea to upgrade MythTV. In the course of the upgrade, I ended up switching from XFree86 to Xorg. Thankfully I was able to just copy over my old XF86Config file to /etc/x11/xorg.conf and it pretty much just worked. I did get the following keyboard errors (just like Matt said I would):
(EE) Failed to load module "Keyboard" (module does not exist)
(EE) No Input driver matching `Keyboard'
No core keyboard
The fix is to just change the keyboard driver in the config from Keyboard to kbd:
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "kbd"
Next, Mythfrontend was failing to update the database schema, claiming there were duplicate columns. To make a long story short, I used the advice given on the mythtv-dev list from 2004 and manually dropped some columns using phpMyAdmin:
ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN lastmodified;
ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN filesize;
For what it’s worth, I didn’t have to drop the ‘oldprogram’ column mentioned in the post.
After that, everything seemed to work fine…
I didn’t even lose my old recordings or programming schedules in the upgrade. I’m shocked!
Got Gentoo loaded on the new Dell PowerEdge SC430 tonight. Apparently the handbook only supports Stage 3 installs these days. Just one of the many things that have apparently changed since the last time I did a full install.
Everything went smoothly except for the inability to grab the time from the system’s hardware clock (via hwclock). It would fail to read /dev/rtc and then give the following error:
select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out
Apparently I’m not the only one who has run up against this issue, as there are quite a few references to it on the net. It could be related to ACPI, but a post about Debian Bug #277298 gave me a decent workaround. Fire up your favorite editor and add/modify the following lines in /etc/conf.d/clock:
CLOCK="local"
CLOCK_OPTS="--directisa"
Restart the clock service:
europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart
* WARNING: you are stopping a boot service.
* Stopping syslog-ng ...
* Setting system clock using the hardware clock [local] ...
* Starting syslog-ng ...
After that, everything works fine. Good enough for me.
Rather than the usual two (pre-pizza and post-pizza) presentations at the CPLUG meeting tonight, we had four smaller talks:
The slides from my talk are in the gallery if you want to check them out. Unfortunately (depending how you look at it) tonight’s audience was actually a little more experienced than most nights. So although I think the presentation went well, not a lot of people got much out of it. Luckily there were a few people who were very new to Linux who may have appreciated it.
I particularly enjoyed Todd’s talk about Subversion. I currently use it to check out the latest Django source, but I have yet to really put it to work for managing my own Python scripts and configuration files. Now I have no excuse not to make the leap and implement it. His slides are online in ODP format.
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