03.30.06
Posted in Announcements at 12:22 pm by ben
I've been very sparse on blog posts this week as most of my belongings including my computer and router are packed away in boxes, while I'm doing some decorating at home. I'll get back on track next week, on my list of things to do:
- A review of CentOS
- A few HowTo's - custom configuration of a Linux kernel, and setting up RoundCube webmail
- Some details on my brief flirtation with Solaris 10
I'm looking forward to getting back to normality, as I really, really hate DIY.
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03.27.06
Posted in Blogging at 1:58 pm by ben
One thing that puzzles me in WordPress is marking a comment as spam, or marking a comment for deletion, and then clicking on "moderate comments" - seems to do the exactly same thing. I would have thought that marking 50 comments from the same IP address as spam might blacklist that IP address, but it doesn't. Between Wednesday and Saturday last week, this blog had been spammed over 350 times from the same IP address, and I eventually halted it by blocking that IP address on my webhost control panel.
This is the worst attack I've seen so far and I'm assuming it will only get worse from here, so I've started looking at anti-spam solutions for WordPress. The biggest is Akismet, which comes pre-installed on new installations of WP2.0. Akismet checks your comments against a central database and performs dosens of checks before giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. I'm not keen on the big brother approach and the added latency of using another service located on the other side of the world, even though people seem to be raving about how good it is.
I really like Adam Kalsey's approach, although more time consuming than simply blocking the spam, if it's effectively done it will result in (or contribute towards) the spammer being shut down, albeit temporarily, until they set up with a new ISP. I tried to follow his guidelines for the person that was spamming me, and found their account had already been suspended. 
For a good hands off approach though I have gone for the Anti-Spam image plugin, which makes the user type in a code displayed in the box to prove they are not a spammer. I can then confidently untick the boxes so that comments will immediately appear on the blog. I normally don't like these codes on the bottom of forms but this one is nice and easy to read while remaining unreadable by spambots. I'm interested to know what people think of this, and what others are using to combat spam on their blogs?
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Spam, Comment Spam, AntiSpam, WordPress, b2evolution
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03.24.06
Posted in Linux Distros at 2:43 pm by ben
I tried out the new Gentoo graphical installer recently and it failed to impress (although admittedly, it is still under heavy development, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much). I thought I would run it again on my new box to see if I had any more success. It did get a lot further this time, right to the end where it was "emerging" packages to my PC, it managed to do around 35 of 350 before it threw up an error and refused to continue.
Gentoo is a new experience to me and I am just learning what it's all about. It is "source based", and instead of being a package manager, "emerge" is quite different. When you emerge a package, you instruct your system to retrieve the source for that package from the Gentoo repositories (usually in b2z format), and you then watch it compile, make and "make install" automatically. As everything is compiled locally according to your hardware and software environment, this apparently has the benefit of optimising each package for your system. The downside of this is it can take a very long time to install stuff. After the 2006.0 installer failed, I was able to boot without the CD and control the system using command line only. I tried emerging a few things and quickly got bored, I left "emerge kde" running for 3 and a half hours before giving up and turning it off.
Joseph Quigley wrote an article on Newsforge this week explaining why he uses Gentoo on his desktop, but the reasons he likes it are precisely the reasons why I don't. He first explains that his PC is a "low-end desktop, a 32-bit 1.58GHz Sempron 2300 with 512MB of RAM" - personally I would not say this is a low end machine. It's certainly not the best, but it's perfectly reasonable spec and capable of running any Linux distro or Windows XP with no problems. The article continues:
"After I got my base Gentoo system set up, I decided to install KDE 3.5.0 and GNOME Display Manager (GDM). I added the kde and gnome keywords to my /etc/make.conf file and then typed emerge kde && emerge gdm. Portage then downloaded GDM, ran the configure script, and started the compile process. The compilation took about 33 hours on my low-end system. Portage calculated all the dependencies, and I just sat back and browsed the Internet from Links until Xorg finished compiling."
33 Hours to install KDE and Gnome?? Sorry but what's the point in that? Surely any performance benefits gained from installing from source are lost because of this long and tedious installation process. I bet if you calculated the seconds saved in each KDE or Gnome session after compiling from source, it would take years and years to reclaim those wasted 33 hours. It takes less than 15 minutes to "apt-get" these programs in Debian, and that includes the time taken to download them over a 2Mb connection.
By the way, for those that don't know, "links" is a text only web browser. It's useful for emergencies but I certainly would not want to browse the Internet for more than a few minutes using it.
"In three hours, I got a firewall and an intrusion detection system configured and running."
Again, this would take less than 20 minutes in Debian, or any other distro for that matter. Using apt or Synaptic to get the software takes 5 minutes, and then configuring it using dpkg or manually through editing the conf files would take no more than 10 minutes.
"For those of us on low-end systems, Gentoo Linux's speed is astounding. If you have a higher-end system, you won't be disappointed either. A Gentoo machine could easily become your favorite graphics workstation, Web server, or programming workstation.
It doesn't sound very astounding to me. 36 hours to install a desktop environment and a firewall, and that's not to mention the time it took to actually install the OS. I've always read that Gentoo takes a weekend to install and previously I thought that was because it's hard to do, but now I can see most of the reason is because it takes so long to compile everything.
Maybe I'm just to impatient to use Gentoo, but I don't think I'm alone in thinking watching lines of code go past on the screen for hours on end is not fun or productive, no matter how speedy your system is supposed to be at the end.
Technorati Tags: Gentoo, Linux, Opinion, Rant
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Posted in Linux General at 10:20 am by ben
You may not be able to install certain 64-bit distros if you bought an AMD Sempron CPU. Even though the AMD website says this: "The AMD Sempron™ processor’s full-featured capabilities can include AMD64 Technology ....", if you try to install the unofficial 64-bit version of Debian on an AMD Sempron 64 3100+, you will get the following message:
"Your CPU does not support long mode. Use a 32bit distribution"
This is a little bit annoying as I just spent 3 days downloading 8Gb's of Debian x64 discs via bittorrent just to find they are useless to me! However, after doing some further investigation and asking questions in LinuxForums, it appears I may be just as well installing 32-bit distros anyway. 64-bit distros may not be able to run all 32-bit applications apart from in a "chroot" environment. I've got a rough idea what this is and it sounds like more trouble than it's worth - a chroot is basically changing a directory somewhere in your file system into the new root directory "/". Presumably the new root would contain all the sub-directories and files needed to run 32-bit applications. It sounds like a whole lot of administrative effort for potentially very little gain.
Technorati Tags: 64-bit, Linux, Distros, Debian, chroot, Rant
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03.23.06
Posted in Software at 10:42 am by ben
My top 5 firefox extensions:
- AdBlock - AdBlocking is slightly controversial, as without ads on websites, a lot of those sites would not have the revenue to carry on existing. However that being said, I hate sites that are covered in ads, especially animated or flashing ones. AdBlock can block any frame of text or picture based on a URL, or a URL with wildcards.
- FasterFox - Makes your fox faster. It's hard to tell if it really makes any difference but I like to think it does.
- BBCodeXtra - especially useful if you post a lot in forums, this allows you to format text on web page forms using right-click context menus. The Xtra bit is HTML formatting, useful if you use blogging software that does not use a WYSIWYG editor.
- Nuke Anything Enhanced - my favourite plugin of all time. Right click on any offensive object in your browser window and "Remove this object" to make it disappear. Those flashing images that catch your eye will never bother you again. Objects that you remove will re-appear if you close and re-open the page. It's easy (and kinda fun) to get carried away with nuking stuff and nuke a whole site.
- FlashBlock - my 2nd favourite plugin, which is designed to kill those irritating adverts written using Flash. It removes all flash animations and replaces them with a button which you can click if you want to view the flash.
Between AdBlock, FlashBlock and Nuke Anything, even pages that are completely littered with ads and flashing images can become a pleasant reading experience.
Technorati Tags: FireFox, Plugins, Extensions
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03.18.06
Posted in Linux Distros at 3:02 pm by ben
Anyone that has tried to use Linux as a desktop OS and been frustrated by how difficult it is to configure the most basic things, now have a desktop distro that can really meet all of their needs. I have tried and tested quite a few distros now, and until now I would have probably said that from a newbie's point of view, Ubuntu is the best choice for your desktop. That is, until I installed PCLinuxOS this week, which has completely blown me away. I would even go as far as to say it is a better choice than Windows XP for a new computer user.
What does it do?
When you burn the iso and boot from the CD it boots into a Linux live distro, and there is an icon on the desktop to install PCLOS to your hard drive - very much like the Mepis installer. If you click on this and run through the install, as a new user the only daunting bit of this is disk partitioning - but provided you have some free space on your hard drive you can just click Next and it will install there without asking you any complex questions. You can then watch the progress of the install, or let it run in the background while you surf the net or do other things. The last page of the install wizard lets you set the root password and create a 'non-root' user. I feel perhaps this installer is a little too basic, I would have liked to have specified my keyboard layout for example, instead of having to change it afterwards in the Control Center.
You can tell this distro is aimed at newcomers to Linux as the desktop includes icons for Man Pages, New User Guide and the PCLOS IRC Channel. I briefly joined the IRC channel and found it full of people with some help and discussions going on.
The PCLOS installer sets up your fstab - in English this means it mounts your other file systems and partitions automatically, so that you can see your Windows NTFS and FAT32 drives from within Linux. It has excellent hardware detection (on my system at least, everything was correctly configured) and it is capable of finding and configuring wireless network cards automatically. The only thing I needed to configure to get wireless working was the WEP key to connect to my wi-fi at home. This really impresses me. Windows XP can't do that without driver disks.... I'm not sure if it's using hardware detection and then Ndiswrapper as a back end, frankly I don't care, I just think it's fantastic to have all this configured without having to visit the command line. Recently I tried CentOS and had to spend hours on the Internet figuring out how to get the kernel sources so that I could configure Ndiswrapper, which is exactly the sort of stuff that a newbie would not be able to do (or definitely not want to do).
Here's a small selection of the software that is packaged with this distro:
- KDE Office Suite
- Firefox, with Flash and all audio/video plugins installed
- Nvu (webpage editor)
- BitTorrent Client, gFTP, LimeWire (P2P Client)
- Loads of media players, including VLC, AmaroK, Kaffeine - with all codecs installed (mp3, aac, mp4, m4a, etc...)
- Akregator (news aggregator), gPodder (podcatching client)
- Evolution and Mozilla Thunderbird (e-mail clients)
- Loads of tools for editing graphics including the GIMP
You get tons more software than this, and way too much to list here. I think they made a great choice with making KDE the desktop environment. It's been a while since I last used it as all the distros I've been using recently use Gnome by default, and I forgot how great it is. It's really a matter of personal preference, but I find the KDE interface much more obvious and intuative than Gnome.
It took me a long time to add AAC support and get Firefox working with all the plugins in Ubuntu, but with PCLOS it all works straight out of the box. Most (if not all) other distros shy away from mp3 licencing issues so you have to download and configure the appropriate codecs yourself - which is another thing which can often be quite tricky. Although PCLOS does come with these codecs installed (and divx, xvid, wmv), the one thing you don't get is codecs for DVD playback - you need to install libdvdcss for that, and that is a particular legal grey area they obviously did not want to touch.
My personal preference for free office suites would have been OpenOffice.org rather than the KDE suite, but it's easy enough to install that through Synaptic and remove the KDE bits if that's what you prefer. There are instructions on how to do that in the PCLOS Wiki.
I tested AmaroK and Kaffeine by loading music and video and it all worked perfectly. I imported the folders containing my music from my NTFS partition into AmaroK, and I can now see my whole collection from there and search for tunes using the AmaroK interface. I've noticed before that when you launch AmaroK, the splash screen has a picture of a little character holding an mp3 playing device that looks suspiciously like an iPod. It seems that AmaroK does also have some sort of sketchy iPod support which is worthy of some further investigation, but that it outside the scope of this article.
USB hotplug devices work perfectly for me too, I attached a card reader with a 1Gb SD card inserted and it appeared immediately and was accessible through My Computer > Storage Media. I attached a digital camera containing an SC card and it also appeared and was accessible in the same way.
PCLOS Appears to be based on Mandriva Linux, which is a popular RPM based distro. The Control Center uses the same layout as the Mandrake Control Center but with some new bits and bobs and different colours and icons. Also within the KDE menu you can see items like LocaleDrake and HardDrake which also give hints as to it's origin. However, PCLOS uses Synaptic as it's GUI tool for package management, which is normally associated with apt (dpkg) and Debian. Interestingly though, if you look at the Synaptic config (in /etc/apt/sources.list) you can see it pointing to rpm repositories, so it looks like this is an RPM based distro after all and not Debian based. I don't really know how this works, but I do like to use Synaptic as I am familiar with the interface from my Debian and Ubuntu days. Searching for software and installing it using Synaptic is very easy, dependencies are also found and installed for you as part of the process.
What doesn't it do?
My iPod isn't detected. I've tried attaching it using FireWire and USB but can't find a way to browse it. I'll have to do a bit of work on that. Also I cannot view the shutdown process, instead I just get a black screen with some flashing garbage at the bottom. I think this is an Nvidia driver problem rather than a PCLOS problem as I've had the same thing before with Debain and the Nvidia drivers from nvidia.com.
Because this is a distro is aimed at the desktop market, you don't get server software like Apache, PHP, and MySQL. That's not to say you can't install these programs if you want to, but you would probably choose a distro aimed closer to your needs if that's what you wanted to use your Linux computer for. These packages have been intentionally excluded to make way for more suitable desktop applications.
Overall - my opinions?
PCLinuxOS is a superb multimedia desktop distro. If you have no interest in kernels, file systems, or spending more than 5 minutes getting your PC on the Internet, then this distro is perfect for you. If you are not interested in learning Linux commands or compiling software, and want a distro that installs everything for you with the minimum of fuss, then this will suit you down to the ground.
I'm really amazed by how good it is. I've been using Linux for well over a year now and this is the first distro I have installed that has configured everything for me, without having to open a terminal window to run some commands. I will definitely be recommending PCLOS to anyone who asks me for a Linux alternative to Windows XP.
PCLinuxOS Homepage - www.pclinuxos.com
Technorati Tags: PCLinuxOS, Linux Desktop, Distro, Linux, Review, Opinion
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03.16.06
Posted in Linux General at 9:07 am by ben
I'm trying the 32-bit version of CentOS with a view to installing the 64-bit version on my new box (if it ever arrives). One of the most important components and the first thing I try to get working is the wireless adaptor. CentOS did not detect or install it, so I was forced to use Ndiswrapper and the Windows driver for my card. Sadly, CentOS also not provide you with Ndiswrapper either, so you have to compile and install it yourself. The problem is, Ndiswrapper needs to see the kernel sources in order to compile and these are not installed by default.
This is what you need to do (presuming you are using the 2.6.9 stock kernel):
up2date -i -f kernel-devel
make clean
make KSRC=/usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`/
make install
Once you have ndiswrapper configured and your wireless adaptor working, you can use the supplied network-scripts to automatically bring the interface up at bootup. This is described here:
CentOS Wireless Configuration
Technorati Tags: CentOS, Ndiswrapper, Linux, Wireless
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03.14.06
Posted in E-Mail, Software at 1:55 pm by ben
AJAX has come a long way. You don't just clean your clothes with it anymore. These days people are using AJAX to make web pages that look and behave like applications. Writely is a good example of the capabilities of AJAX, it basically offers almost all the functionality of a desktop word processor and runs inside a browser window. AJAX allows you to do application-like things such as such as drag and drop objects within a browser, have right-click context menus, and have windows, messages or other objects that can appear and float inside the browser window. Open Source AJAX Webmail clients are starting to get a bit more popular now, the new Hotmail and soon to be launched Yahoo! webmail both use AJAX, as well as the next version of Microsoft Outlook Web Access (on the next version of Exchange).
It's nice to see technology moving on and this is a really good thing for people that have been stuck with crappy old PHP webmail clients for a while (I'm not naming any), as we can now upgrade to something a bit more modern. Old PHP IMAP webmail clients will be here to stay though, I'm sure they will still be needed for their old servers and older web browsers that will not support the latest technology.
Here's a quick roundup of what there is to offer.
Zimbra: I've mentioned Zimbra before and would still like to try it, apart from it has an inflexible installation model - it seems you just need to run a script and it does everything for you, but this is not just the webmail client - it also installs the SMTP server, MTA, and IMAP server. This is not a bad thing if you want it all done for you, but it has disadvantages, the main one being it's hard to modify a system if you don't know how it was built. Zimbra is only available for Fedora Core, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and Debian (in a beta version) at the moment.
RoundCube: I'm anticipating RoundCube will become the next SquirrelMail. It's a great little webmail client which uses few resources and is easy(ish) to configure. However, it's also very new, which means it's a bit unpolished in places - for example there is very little documentation for it yet. That being said though, I've been using RoundCube since I removed Open-Xchange from my system and think it's fantastic.
Scalix (Community Edition): I've just been reading the marketing blurb and document knowledgebase on the Scalix website. It really looks fantastic, a lot like Outlook in fact. It's probably a bit bloated for what I would use it for, it's a bit like OX in that you can use it for shared calendaring and it integrates into an LDAP directory (or you install OpenLDAP - which unfortunately moves it down my list of things to try).
DIMP: The AJAX version of IMP (Instant Messaging Program) from Horde. Not sure if this is actually available yet but it looks promising. Hopefully it will be easier to install than Horde, which has a fairly convoluted installation process.
Technorati Tags: RoundCube, IMP, DIMP, Scalix, AJAX, Webmail, E-Mail
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03.13.06
Posted in Linux General at 12:04 pm by ben
The easiest and fastest way to install software in Linux, is to locate a package for your distro, then download it and install it. This is made ultra-easy for us because of tools like apt-get and yum that do the work for us. The biggest hazard of using package management tools is dependency problems - often referred to as Dependency Hell. This seems to be worse, in my experience, on RPM (RedHat Package Manager) based distros - like Fedora Core, Mandriva, Suse, and of course RedHat (which is now only available as RedHat Enterprise Linux), but it does also affect Debian based distros too.
When you request a package, package management tools are clever enough to work out if additional packages are required, typically these dependencies are then listed and you are given the option to install them or not. For example, if I try to install the Gimp and I don’t have the X-Window-System installed, it will tell me that X needs to be installed and which packages it needs to download. Depending on your package manager, you might also get useful information like the size of the packages and how long it will take to fetch them all.
It’s a superb system in theory, but it can backfire when you want to install a package but the dependant packages are not available or cannot be installed. This usually happens because one of the following is true:
- Your repositories are not correctly configured (be careful with mixing “testing†and “stable†repos)
- The server containing the dependant packages is not available
- The dependant packages have been depreciated or no longer exist
Another common dependency issue is the compiler version you have installed is not the right one for the package (or a dependant package) you are installing. This can lead to a dependency loop of doom:
- You have compiler version1 and are trying to install package1
- Package1 is dependant on package2
- Package2 requires compiler version2
- You upgrade your compiler to version2
- Package1 will not install as it requires compiler version1
How to get around this? It can be tricky to get out of if you have a large number of dependant packages causing the failure. If there are only one or two dependant packages causing the issue, you can try to install those packages on their own, or compile them from source if you can’t get a pre-built package to install. In the example above, you would need to upgrade the compiler, install package2, downgrade the compiler and try again.
Other ways to avoid dependency problems are to request older or newer versions of your package, or compile everything from source, which can be a lot more time consuming. As a last resort you could use switches like –nodeps or –force-depends but this will often cause you more problems, as these options will just ignore the problem and your installed software is likely to give you errors or unexpected problems related to the missing packages.
Technorati Tags: Linux, Packages, Software, Dependancy Hell
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03.10.06
Posted in E-Mail, Servers at 4:50 pm by ben
A HowTo has been added to the blog:
HowTo: Configure SpamAssassin on QmailRocks
This is a collation of several older blog postings with some corrections here and there, and some new discoveries - like using mailfilters to automatically move tagged spam to a Spam folder in the user's mailbox.
Technorati Tags: Qmail, QmailRocks, SpamAssassin
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