The version of solr that is provided by Ubuntu 9.10 is solr 1.2, which is over 2 years old.  Installing directly from the solr .jar is likely better.

Tomcat was kind of pain in the ass anyway.

$ apt-cache search syntax | grep python

with

$ apt-cache search python | grep syntax

I guess I need to get into the habit of typing “$ apt-cache search python syntax” but I’m not even sure that’s what I want.

All I wanted to do was throttle a stdout pipe that’s being sent to the music player.  I found reference to a utility called throttle, but also found that it isn’t included in the Ubuntu 9.04 distribution.

There’s a maliing list post that says that the program cstream will do the same thing.

man cstream says:

-t num    Limit the throughput of the data stream to num bytes/second. Limiting is done at the input side, you can rely on cstream not accepting more than this rate. If the number you give is positive, cstream accumulates errors and tries to keep the overall rate at the specified value, for the whole session. If you give a negative number, it is an upper limit for each read/write system call pair. In other words: the negative number will never exceed that limit, the positive number will exceed it to make good for previous underutilization.

So, I changed my audio transcoding script to say:

lame –quiet -V6 $FILE – | cstream -t 25000

The number “25000″ comes from the fact that I don’t want to use more than 192kbps of my outbound stream, and cstream’s argument is in bytes per second.  192kbps = 24000 bytes/second, and I added a little extra.  It would probably be safer if I also passed “-B 192″ to lame, but that would actually limit my overall quality, so I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope that “-V6″ doesn’t produce >192kbps for very long.

There are several descriptions on the net on how to hack around missing library dependencies and download them (via getlibs) or to tweak out the pkgconfig file to shoe horn the amazonmp3.deb file into an amd64 system.

I like to keep my installs really pristine, and avoid workarounds like getlibs and modified packages, so I’ve decided to go with a 32-bit chroot for running amazonmp3.  Generally, the process involves downloading another version of Ubuntu (in our case, 8.04, which is what the amazonmp3 package was built against), and then chroot-ing into this install area to run the 32-bit program.  Several existing tools make this easier than it sounds.

Get Ready

There are several dependent packages that you should install first.  In your base system, please run:

$ sudo apt-get install debootstrap schroot

Install 32-bit Intrepid into a subdirectory

Using the new debootstrap package that you just installed, you can now run:

$ mkdir ~/chroots

$ sudo debootstrap –arch=i386 intrepid ~/chroots/intrepid-32

The second command will take a while to run, and will download several hundred MB of intrepid packages, and install them under the newly created directory ~/chroots/intrepid-32

Edit /etc/schroot/schroot.conf

You should add a section to /etc/schroot/schroot.conf that looks like this:

[intrepid-32]
type=directory
description=Intrepid 32-bit
location=/home/YOUR_USERNAME/chroots/intrepid-32
priority=3
users=YOUR_USERNAME,root
groups=YOUR_USERNAME,root
root-groups=root,adm
run-setup-scripts=true
run-exec-scripts=true
personality=linux32

Do a little bit of post-install cleanup.

I’ve found that by default, I don’t have sudo permissions inside the chroot, so I do this one small step:

$ sudo cp /etc/sudoers ~/chroots/intrepid-32/etc/sudoers

That way, when I enter the chroot, I have sudo permissions available as well.

Get inside the chroot and make sure it works

You can now go inside the chroot via the following command:

$ schroot -c intrepid-32

You should see that while inside the chroot, your prompt should start with “(intrepid-32)” indicating that you’re chrooted.  Great.  Give a simple sudo command a try to make sure it works, like this:

$ sudo ls ~

Type your password, and confirm that you can run things as root.

At this point, you can do anything else you want in the chroot, like installing other packages, or cleaning things up.  You may want to run “sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” just for fun.

Install amazonmp3.deb in the chroot

The chroot shares your home directory, /tmp, and several other directories with your main system (so be careful!).  But, this also makes life easier.  While you’re outside of the chroot, download amazonmp3.deb and put it in /tmp or your home directory. Then, get inside the chroot, and run:

(intrepid-32)$ sudo dpkg -i amazonmp3.deb

It will complain about some missing dependencies.  Install those libraries via apt-get, and then run the dpkg -i again, and you should be in business.  To run amazonmp3, you may need to double-check your DISPLAY environment variable and make sure that it’s properly set inside the chroot.  Once you’ve done that, you should be able to easily run amazonmp3 inside the chroot, and download music to your home directory.

Good luck!

I started out with netjuke, which died and got absorbed into the horrible jinzora project.   So then I switched to Ampache, which worked fairly well, but needs some serious UI upgrades/changes to make it reasonably useful.

Now that I’m fully ubuntu-ized, I’m using mt-daapd through an SSH tunnel to listen via a native client app.  This solution has lots of interesting benefits:

1. Running mt-daapd locally means other people in my house can see my music, including my TiVo and any other desktops with an iTunes/daap compatible frontened.
2. I don’t have to worry about security issues with having all my music accessible via a web portal that could be hacked.
3. mt-daapd is available as a package in Ubuntu, so that means upgrades are easy.  Doing upgrades (by hand) of php-based web apps was really becoming a drag.
4. This means less junk on my slacy.com web server, which I’m trying to significantly trim down and make more secure by having less applications.

Several others are talking about compiling it from source, but this seems very wrong and unnecessary to me.

If you have any other information about how to easily via apt-get make RRDTool functions work in php in Ubuntu 9.04, please leave a comment here.

I’m not sure why this has to be so complicated.

I’ve recently switched my primary desktop machine from Fedora Core 8 (very old, I know) x86_64 to Ubuntu 9.04 (latest and greatest) x86_64.  In general, things went well, but there were a couple gotchas that I had to work through, so I thought I’d list them here:

• The default Ubuntu 9.04 desktop installer won’t let you set up RAID by default.  So, you have to boot and run the “alternate” installer.
• If you use unetbootin to “burn” the Ubuntu alternate install disk to a USB stick and boot from that, then it will have errors during the install asking you to “insert your CD-ROM”.  Ugh.  The solution here is to select “Install” from the unetbootin boot menu instead of “default”.  This will run a network-based install instead of trying to install from the USB image that you just burned.  I know it’s silly, but at least it worked.
• Ubuntu, unlike Fedora, only allows x86_64 for it’s libraries in /lib, unlike Fedora which puts 32-bit libraries in /lib and 64-bit ones in /lib64.  Ubuntu has an option (ia32-apt-get and ia32-libs-tools) to put some 32-bit libraries in /lib32, but I found that this led to some serious apt-get dependency issues, and I quickly gave up and uninstalled these packages (and removed the damage they caused).
• There are a couple of critical things that are 32-bit only:
  • The amazon mp3 downloader application.  There are some tutorials around about how to use a program called “getlibs” to make it work right, and there are some pkgbuild and wacky .deb creation scripts to make this seem to work.  It’s my understanding that both methods pollute /lib with 32-bit libraries, so I haven’t tried it yet.  I have an e-mail out to the amazonmp3 downloader maintainer, and we’ll see if that pans out.
  • Adobe Flash.  Thankfully, Ubuntu seems to have worked this one out, and if you “sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer” it just works, although it uses ndispluginwrapper, which is sort of a giant hack, but at least it works until Adobe gives full support for 64-bit flash on Ubuntu.
• Although the Ubuntu 9.04 fonts looked pretty good out of the box, I found that my installing some alternate font packages, that I could really improve the look of many web pages.  The packages that I installed were: msttcorefonts, ttf-bitstream-vera, ttf-dejavu-core, ttf-droid, ttf-liberation, ttf-xfree86-nonfree.  I think that’s a fairly good list, and was surprised that they weren’t installed by default.

So, that about sums it up so far.  I’m running ext4, on an md RAID5 array, and things seem to be reasonably stable thus far.

Please note that I did not install Ubuntu on top of Fedora.  I’m not sure what would happen if one were to do this.  I did a clean install on fresh disks, and then copied my data back from a backup.

I’ve compiled a hacked version of the X11 Synaptics driver that includes a fudge factor for the Y component.  It does hw.y *= 0.6 internally, and this pretty much compensates for the incorrect coordinates.

Here’s a link to a modified replacement Ubuntu .deb package.

Just download that file, and then run:

dpkg –install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_0.15.2-0ubuntu7_i386.deb

And you should be good to go.  If/when the Ubuntu maintainers publish a new or upgraded version of this package, this version will be overwritten, so you’ll be SOL.  So, be careful with those autoupgrades!

In other news, there are patches underway to do this in a more configurable way, and its possible that future versions of the Synaptics driver will include the ability to adjust the vertical sensitivity.

Here are my first thoughts:

1. The screen is actually more functional than I thought it was going to be.  1024×600 is just fine for pretty much everything.  There’s a little more scrolling than normal, but nothing huge.  I do find that I am running Firefox in fullscreen mode more, so maybe that makes up for it.
2. The keyboard is actually quite good.  There are only a few weird things.  The number keys are offset to the left a bit more than I’m used to, and that means I hit 2 instead of 1, for example.  There are some other keyboard quirks, like the ~ key and PgUp/PgDn buttons, but I’m sure I’ll be able to get used to those.  The key autoreapeat happens a bit faster than I’m used to, and doesn’t seem to be adjustable in Ubuntu.  (Although repeat on/off does work).  I’m just tapping faster than normal.  The keyboard is large enough that I can touch type at full speed with nearly no problems at all.  Excellent!
3. The synaptics track pad works, but the vertical motion is way too fast, and I’m tracking an xorg bug and discussion on mailing lists about the patches that are proposed to fix it.  As soon as I can get a build of the .deb for people to check out, I’ll do so.
4. Battery life.  I only have the “3-cell” version, and people complain a bit about the battery life.  It seems to be working for 2.5-3 hours for me, which is really just great for what I’m using the laptop for.
5. The CPU is plenty fast, the graphics are plenty fast, and 1GB seems like plenty of RAM.  It really doesn’t feel like it needs an upgrade.  I’ve even been doing some ./configuge && ./make stuff for the drivers, and it works speedily and well.   The Atom shows up as Dual Core, due to hyperthreading.  CPU Frequency scaling works, and the steps are 800Mhz, 1.07GHz, 1.33GHz, and 1.6GHz.
6. It’s very light, and seems very well built.  The LED backlit display is very bright (on full brightness, which I don’t really use at night).

There are a couple of weird quirks, that I’ve mentioned above but will reiterate here:

1. Touchpad vertical movement is too fast.  I’m getting used to it, but it would be nice for it to be “normal”.
2. Screen brightness is very dim after a resume from suspend.  (Dimmer than anything I can set with the brightness buttons, and it returns to normal when I adjust brightness manually)
3. I haven’t tested video (webcam) or microphone yet, but sound works great.
4. Keyboard quirks (~, PgUp, Home, F12, are all hard to press.  There are buttons unused by Ubuntu (The ‘Home’ button and Windows Menu Button)
5. I’m having a bunch of trouble with 3-button (middle mouse button) emulation in X11.  Supposedly the synaptics driver does it automatically, but I haven’t delved into this much.  It does work, but just not predictably.  I’d like to just set some key+click combo to middle mouse.
6. Keyboard key repeat rate is too fast and delay is too short, settings under Ubuntu don’t seem to take effect. (this is minor, and I’m sure I’ll get used to it)