Chris' Blog » Linux

Folding again

Chris — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:36:34 +0000

So after a break of a few years I’ve got back into Folding, this time I’ve started from scratch discarding my old account. As of writing my new account has a score of 37304 more than doubling my previous score in 10 days rather than the 2 years it took me to accumulate my previous score! I’m using my Intel Core i7 for most of the work, one SMP core using 6 threads and another single process core. I’m supplementing my i7 with an AMD Athlon II Neo which is left running 24/7, it’s nowhere near as powerful the i7 but it’s CPU cycles are otherwise wasted.

Right now my i7 has a nVidia GTX260 sitting mostly idle just shifting dust, which I’d like to employ as well. However I’ve not had much luck getting the FAH core, CUDA and Wine to cooperate in the name of science, any pointers greatly appreciated.

One Down

Chris — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:20:15 +0000

Well one of my gripes with Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ has been cured at least, Firebug 1.5 now works after upgrades to Firefox 3.5.8.

Shame that I’ve found out my bash completion is broken.

N900 Sharing

Chris — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:21:23 +0000

Since my earlier post about sharing photos from the N900 I have discovered Pixelpipe, which includes support for Gallery2 uploads as part of a huge array of supported services. You can read more about Pixelpipe and the N900 here and here.

Sharing photos from N900 to Gallery2

Chris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:49:51 +0000

I recently treated myself to a new mobile ~~phone~~computer, so I bought a Nokia N900 which eXpansys eventually shipped to me. Now to the point, you can easily share content to Facebook, Ovi, and Flickr but I maintain my own Gallery2 installation and I wanted to upload my photos there as well. Luckily the sharing infrastructure is pluggable, so all I needed was a plugin which I found. Configuring it was a bit of a headache so here is how I did it.

I assume you are familiar with installing packages and whatnot on the N900/Maemo OS.

First off I grabbed the plugin from the download page.
I installed it from the terminal using dpkg --install.
Next I entered my Gallery2 Administration interface and added a new user, I called it mobile. I configured it with a random password, which I jotted down to enter into the N900.
After that I enabled the Remote plugin in the administration interface.
I created a new album, with the title Mobile (note case is important here)
I adjusted the permissions on the album to permit the mobile user full access, I could probably lock this down a bit to only allow addition of new items but I’m not too worried.
Next I grabbed my N900 and went to configure the Gallery2 sharing service, this is where the fun began for me. I ended up using tcpdump over ssh to diagnose the problems!
I filled out the form with the following variables:

User name

mobile

Passsword

Pa$Sw0rd

URL

gallery.cs278.org (leave off the scheme, https is not supported.)

Album

Mobile (Case is important here, use the same as the album title you set.)

If you get a network error, basically the plugin couldn’t authenticate to Gallery2 or you didn’t have the Remote interface enabled. Hopefully this helps somebody and saves you heading for tcpdump and some head scratching.

Why do I bother?

Chris — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:52:23 +0000

Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.

The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.

My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.

Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.

Good grumbling done for the morning!

Vacuum Firefox on Ubuntu

Chris — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:14:04 +0000

It was suggested to me to use vacuum places to improve my Firefox awesome bar performance, as I’m still using Firefox 3.0 which is packaged with Jaunty; I do have 3.5 installed I just use it for testing sites at the moment. However realising that I didn’t need an addon a single line of bash will probably do what I want I headed to Google and found an explaining it all and a suitable one-liner to optimise all my Firefox SQLite DBs.

You will need the sqlite3 package installed and you should close Firefox prior to running the command.

for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done

Can anybody explain?

Chris — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:53:25 +0000

chris@sandman:/mnt$ sudo df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1             459G -1.9G  461G   0% /mnt
chris@sandman:/mnt$ sudo du -hs .
4.0G	.

I sure as hell cannot!

New Home

Chris — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:16:12 +0000

My blog has a new home on a VPS hosted by Host Europe shared between me and a friend. It has a nice lean installation of Debian Lenny, running a variety of low profile or tuned applications to provide various services. We also have another 50MiB of free memory to play with.

X2X

Chris — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:48:45 +0000

X2X is this awesome little utility I found which allows you to control an X session on a remote computer with the keyboard and mouse on your local computer, by remote computer I for example mean the laptop sat beside you as it relies on you being able to see the output of the remote computers monitor. The Ubuntu Community Documentation has a quick how to on using this handy tool.

Punching holes in Firewalls

Chris — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:37:09 +0000

It is a lot easier than you think.

OpenSSH, which can only be described as the best utility of all time, is quite a versatile tool one feature people use frequently is port forwarding. This allows you to open a port on your computer that forwards the data over the SSH connection to the destination you specify, very useful when needing access to the an intranet web server when you don’t have a proper VPN set up for example. However, SSH can also do this in reverse! It opens a listening port up on the remote machine which then relays data to the destination you specify. For example you can SSH into a remote host and get SSH to open a port on that host which relays data back to the SSH port on the machine you are connection from, thereby allowing SSH access to a machine where it would normally be impossible.

A practical example:

chris@ktulu:~$ ssh sandman.cs278.org -R 2222:localhost:22

This connects to the server sandman.cs278.org and opens port 2222 which forwards traffic to localhost:22 (localhost is the machine I am connecting from). Once logged into the server I can do this:

chris@sandman:~$ ssh localhost -p 2222

Which opens a connection back to the remote machine.