Archive for the ‘ Linux ’ Category

I am Reaching a Precipice…

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 2

I am on the edge again.  I’ve been here before, I’ve been to the other side, but this time, somehow it’s different…

I am really close.  Each time I get closer, more attuned, better acquainted.

Just what am i on the edge of?  Why, converting to Linux!  I have tried and failed repeatedly.  I have made some adjustments over time to help push this next go at it even farther.  For example, one of my main irritations is the lack of games in Linux.  Mac seems to be sort of catching up but Linux is still pretty far behind.  However I have gotten increasingly good at wrangling VMs and WINE to my will.  That and Desura has a Linux client now, and thanks to numerous Indie games bundles, I have a pretty substantial Desura Library going.

My other complaint is that Windows Live Writer does not run in Linux.  It still does not.  Which is sad and irritating and may, once again, be a deal breaker.  as stupid as it sounds, this program, which isn’t much more than a word processor, is a fantastic piece of work.  Mostly it takes the hassle out of the publishing portion.  I don’t have to upload images, I don’t have to finagle with Wodress’s slightly clunky dashboard.  I just set it in this program and hit “Publish”.  I tried doing everything in Google docs but that is such a crappy broken experience, especially the spreadsheets.  It’s not really blogging related but NOTHING beats Excel.  Open Office Calc, or whatever they are calling it these days is crappy as hell too.

I also have been using my dual boot on my laptop a bit more.  Unfortunately, once again, it’s a bit of a deal breaker because the touchpad emulation/drivers/whatever sucks and there is NO way to disable the useless “Gestures”.  Which means as I type, every time my wrists or thumbs brush the touch pad my cursor goes flying and things start scrolling undesirably.

After the move I DO plan to set up “my machine” in the office with Ubuntu.  Even it 90% of the time it runs a VM of Windows over top, it’ll be Ubuntu underneith,  I’ve also been looking into creating VMs from existing installs.  I have my Minecraft server that I’d like to push into a VM on the same machine.  Mostly because it also serves the function of being an OpenSIM server and a Radio Stream server at time.  Both of these are a pain in the ass to reconfigure and set up, especially the Radio server since I’ve done some clever hacks to do some clever things.  OpenSIM will work natively on Linux and I want to eventually convert, I imagine Minecraft will too and it’s worlds are easy to move around, but Radio DJ is Windows only.

Anyway, I feel like this could be “the time”, but I’ll probably just come crawling back to good old Windows.  The reality is, there is no need to switch, I can easy run and use both, which is really the better solution.

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Filed under: 2011, Linux | Tagged as: , , , ,

Creating My TwitterBot

Author: JoshMiller

Apr 29

I must admit, I’ve been inspired somewhat by Adam Curry and his crazy NoAgendaStream bot in this quest.  I like the idea of using Twitter for “something more”.

So I’ve set about to create my own Twitter bot.  I already have a web server that is always on, and now that server has it’s own Twitter account at twitter.com/Selphiebot.  At the moment, it doesn’t do anything too exciting.  Actually, as I write this it does nothing. I’m writing this sort of as I go along with the set up, partially just as a note taking device.

The other inspiration for this is my desire to easily download embedded files by putting the URL from the code.  My browser always wants to auto play them and there generally isn’t a link to right click and “save as”.

My first goal on this note will be to enable Selphie to attach to wget and download files that I feed it via direct message.  I’m also going to set it up to output the server’s uptime every 24 hours, mostly so Selphie has something to say.  Heck, maybe I’ll go ahead and set it up to output every hour.

The first hurdle I’ve run into is that Selphie’s version of Ubuntu (Gutsy) went out of service ten days ago and I can’t get apt-get to work or any updates.  So as I write this now, Selphie updates itself in the background to Hardy.

Here’s what I see needing to do, I plan to use Curl &Bash Scripts which I have zero experience with.  I want to set up Curl to check periodically for new @ tweets.  When it sees a new tweet, it should parse out what the @tweet says.  Initially it’ll just say (more or less) if(URL)then(download).

I’ve already got thoughts for other options.  I’m thinking if(torrent)then(OpenWithTorrentProgram).  Also maybe if(youtube)then(DownloadWithListentoYoutube.com).  For now, I need to simple download any URL passed to it with @ or DM. For now, the bot is public but if spam starts building up I’ll make it private.  Alternately, I’ll set the bot to only work if I send into to it.

These are all future plans.  For now I‘ve got it set up to tweet the uptime of the server as read from a text file.  I’ve been having some trouble getting the scheduler to work properly unfortunately. 

I’ve also gotten the basics of a preliminary conditional tweet system worked out.  The next step will be to set the bot up to parse out the tweets it receives.  That is however a post for another day.  I’ve let this one stew long enough.

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Filed under: 2009, Blogging & Social Media, Linux | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Giving Up on Linux.. for Now

Author: JoshMiller

Feb 11

Ok, latly I’ve been really wanting to get a Linux computer going for regular use. Part of my problem has been I don’t really have any decent extra hardware around.

Recently that changed, I ended up with an extra 1 ghz PC and decided that, since I actually have an extra machine that’s not a Pentium 2, I’d put gOS or Ubuntu on it.

I went with gOS, since it’s essentially a fancy version of Ubuntu and I like the slick toolbar. Also I am using a lot of Google based applications. Once I got the machine set up and running though I kind of ran into a “now what” mindset.

My secondary PC project, with this decent machine, is to set up an emulation station/media player running through the TV. The last PC I tried to do this with was an old one and it crapped out on me right off the launch pad. In fact I recently dumped that PC in the trash despite my attachment to it as my first “PC that was mine and not my parent’s”. I decided initially to set up the gOS machine as my emulation box and I’d interface with it via VNC for use of the spiffy Google apps. Then again, VNC ran kind of choppy with it and I wasn’t sure about the reliability fo Linux based emulation software.

Ultimately, it comes down to, I know Windows much much better than Linux. So I’ve pulled the drive with gOS on it and slapped a larger drive I had laying around into the PC. I’m going to put XP on it and load it up with my emulation softwar and such. Sure, I could probably do the same thingon the gOS PC, but why? And at what amount of extra work. I know I can get emulators for NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, N64, Master system, Atari, Mame, and others working in Windows with no effort. I also know my Joypad will work in Windows with no problems or without spending an hour digging through forums for drivers.

Also, as nice as the little Maclike bar is, using Google through Linux doesn’t give me any more benefit than my current system. I’m currently trying to simplify things, not “create more options”. I have a good work flow going on with Firefox in Windows. I don’t have the time or need to complicate it with a new OS and flashy interface. Heck, if I really want the Mac style launch bar, I can download one for Windows, I’ve used one before.

I’m not completely through with Linux. I still have the old Celes Laptop going with Puppy Linux. I’ll probably continue to keep it going, especially once I can get Puppy to recognize my wireless network card.

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Filed under: 2008, Linux | Tagged as: , , , ,

Still Trying to use Linux

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 16

In the past I’ve commented on my repeated attempts to use Linux as a useful operating system.  There was a time maybe 10 years ago when I made a point of fully bashing Linux and it’s peoples primarily for “trolling purposes”.

These days I sing a slightly different tune… sort of.

I’ve tried several different distros including Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, Ubuntu, and most recently Mepis.   I’ve tried these on various computers of varying ages.  My last siccessful attempt was with Ubuntu on the Pentium 2 PC known to my smallish network as Selphie.

I was attempting to set up a web/file server and ran into several hardware roadblocks that resulted in a loss of booting ability.  I hadn’t been having much luch getting wordpress to run correctly on the machine anyway despite following several detailed setup procedures for SQL, Apache, Pearl, and all that fancy stuff needed to get WordPress working correctly.

Then time became a commodity and fixing this PC became a non necessity for a while.   More recently, I managed to get a second hand laptop hard drive for the second hand laptop I had laying around in need of a Hard drive.  Gotta love free PC parts, even if they are ancient.  My first goal was to set up a new OS on this Laptop (a PC now named Rinoa).  I decided to once again try Linux.  First up was Ubuntu but I recieved an error during boot about how my BIOS was too old.  That is, it isn’t Y2K compatible.  So I instead tried an old copy of Mandrake 10 I had laying around.  The install worked but I ended up with a command line only OS.  I’m not real sure what went wrong here.

So I scrapped the Linux idea and threw on an copy of Windows 2000 I had in my “CD Wallet of OS Discs”.  It installed and ran fine.  At least I knew I could get some sort of GUI OS out of this.  Still, I don’t particularly need another Windows based machine to manage.  I really would like to actually use Linux  on one of my PCs and I’m not too keen on the idea of dual booting.  Yuna, the main PC is out since the kids and wife use it.  The main laptop, Terra, won’t work for more or less the same reason.  I don’t have time to fix Selphie right now.  So Rinoa it is.

I figure I have two hurdles.  One, I only have 2gigs of hard drive to work with.  Two, The PC’s age.  I found a BIOS update but I still received the same issue when trying to install Ubuntu.  I decided to try a smaller simpler distro.  This PC will eventually be primarily for word processing anyway using Open Office.  I’ll probably use it a bit to play Music on as well.  After a bit of research I decided to try out two alternate Linux distributions, SimplyMEPIS and MiniSlack.

I’ve tried MEPIS so far but it seems to get stuck in some sort of loop when booting up from the CD.  I get some long list of information the bottom line telling me I have 0kb swap.  I guess I’ll be trying MiniSlack next.

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Filed under: 2007, Linux | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Server Project on Hold

Author: JoshMiller

Oct 4

I’ve had a bit of a set back on setting up Rinoa as a server PC.  While moving the two larger hard drives I have and the PCI IDE controller card into it, I couldn’t get the drives to detect.  Occasionally one of them would come up but never both.  Putting them back in Yuna didn’t help either.

I couldn’t see them there either.

I thought maybe it was a power issue since Rinoa only has a 200W power supply so I disconnected the CD drives and one of the hard drives to see if I could bring up one.  No go.  I tried replacing the ribbon cable and I tried using the second IDE port on the card but still, no go.
What was really bugging me was that I couldn’t get Yuna to bring them back up either.  I was worried I’d somehow destroyed both of my 200+ gig drives.  Fortunately after trying a new IDE cable with no luck in Rinoa I got them to show up again in Yuna (using the new cable).  I’ve decided I won’t be making Rinoa a file server at least not now.  Yuna’s case with it’s 12 drive bays and 500W power supply is better suited for it anyway.  The old architecture just doesn’t seem to like the idea.

The real issue though is that Rinoa no longer boots up to the OS.  I see the huge MICRON logo and it beeps then it just hangs on a black screen with a courser.   I havn’t messed with it in a few days though, I just don’t have the time at the moment.  Other more important projects need attention, namely websites for the Cub Scouts and Miller Freelancing.

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Filed under: 2007, Linux | Tagged as: , , , , , ,
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