LincolnBlogs
From the twisted mind of me!

OK, everyone else has now had time to review S.E.L.F. and now it’s my turn.

My trip started out on Thursday night around 11pm when Allan arrived to pick me up. The trip was long, 12+ hours, and mostly uneventful. Driving at night through Virginia is murder. Nothing to look at for literally hours at a time. Luckily Allan was in rare form and kept on singing show tunes at full pipe

Once we finally arrived in Clemson, SC around noonish, we were told that out rooms were not quite ready so Allan and I ventured out for some food at the local Wafflehouse and then to BestBuy, where I picked up a neoprene sleeve for my Acer Aspire One, and Allan picked up a Sansa Fuse. Hey, boys gotta have their toys right?

Finally we were able to get into our room and after showers and naps (hey, we’re old guys), we headed over to the bar to join in the pre-show festivities. Much merriment was had there as everybody trickled in from their trip. Most people were enjoying their beer and I even got Allan to man up with me and hit the scotch. It was a great time. I just want to pause here and say that I feel soooo sorry for Danns wife. He must put her through hell with the wash. While we were eating, I watched him take 2 equal sized portions of fat and gristle, and put one in each pocket to save for later. Don’t ask. This is life with Dann At around 11ish I decided it was time to hit the sack so that I could function the next day. Remember, I am old

Believe it or not, Allan and I were beat to the conference by Dann and crew. I was astounded to learn he was there before we were, but the tables turned when we arrived and saw Dann horribly ill. He thought it was something he *ate* Anyhow, he went off to rest up for an hour or so. He looked so bad after a while I went back to poke him and see if he was still alive. He was and recovered in no time. I also learned that in SC you can still get Mellow Yellow. I really love Mellow Yellow and you cannot find it in PA except in the movie theater on tap. Bummer, but I did enjoy some while I was there.

The conference itself was fantastic. I can’t believe this was the first one. I did not, myself, get a chance to attend any of the talks, save the ending keynote, but I hear they were all really good. That Dave Yates fellow sure puts on a good show! Seriously though, I don’t want to diminish anyones involvement or contribution. They all did a really good job! There were, by my estimates, roughly 400-500 people there, and most wandered by the TLLTS booth at one time or another. We, of course, held our raffle/giveaway and had great prizes from our great sponsors Neuros Technology and Prentice Hall, along with a bunch of goodies from S.E.L.F. sponsors including APress, O’Reilly, and more. We even gave away a Google Phone from Chris DiBona. What a guy! Of course we had a sea of people lined up for the giveaway and I made them yell and scream like always. It was a blast and a huge success!

The after-show party was at the same bar as the pre-show and, once again, a good time was had by all. There was much reveling, eating and drinking and I enjoyed every minute of it. I particularly enjoyed having the time to catch up with my friends like Dann and Chad and Dave and the gang.

This brings us to the ride home. I had anticipated that the ride home would be slightly more fun in the daylight. It felt even longer, probably because we were already worn out. Allan and I did have some fun watching the crazy people that stopped in to eat at the same time we did at iHop in NC, and afterward we stopped to see what JR was all about. It’s a giant discount type store which just happened to have a big old cigar store attached. I could spend a lot of money in there! Other than that, the drive, particularly through VA, seemed absolutely endless and I was supremely happy to be home at the end.

The bottom line, though, is I had a great time and am looking forward to going again next year!

Many of you heard me giving rave reviews about my new Sansa Fuse earlier. Well, I just saw that Woot.com has the Sansa Clip (smaller version of the Fuse) on sale RIGHT NOW 6/17/2009 for just $15. Go get one now. You’ll be mad if you miss out.

I finally caved over the weekend and bought a new mp3 player. It has been a LONG time since I bought one, in fact the newest one I had was a one gb player (a _few_ years old). I have been listening to my tunes portably on my Nokia N800, but that is a pain in the butt. Let’s face it, the N800 is a full fledged computer and not just a media player, hence it’s not really designed with that sort of ease of operation, not to mention it’s a good bit bigger than your average mobile music player these days.

As an OpenSource kinda guy I tried very hard to stay away from the vendor lock in that the iPods provide, even though they are pretty darn slick. I kept looking around for one that looked a bit more OpenSource friendly. What I found was the Sansa Fuse (I picked up the silver 8gb version). It’s a credit card sized player that does pics, videos, fm-radio and all sorts of music formats including ogg. I have to say that so far, I really dig this little thing. It sounds great and works well. Just plug in the USB cable and it mounts up as a mass storage device and you can drag your music to the Music directory. When you unhook, you are ready to start listening within a few seconds.

Of course, I ran into an issue. Nothing with the player, mind you, but with my aging music collection. Much of it is so old that it is either not tagged or not tagged correctly, resulting in everything showing up on the Fuse as “unknown”. FEH. I had to fix it, and after some searching I came across EasyTag, which, oddly enough, really is easy to use. Just a quick apt-get install and I had it running on my Ubuntu machine and then proceeded to fix the tags of the initial set of music files I was putting on the Fuse. It was a piece of cake, and once they were reloaded on the Fuse with tags, I had working genres and albums and band names, etc. It was great except for one last thing. I needed album cover art. With a couple quick googles, I found that the Fuse would display album art named “folder.jpg” in each folder. And I found a fantastic place to get this art too: AlbumArt.org. Everything I have copied from there has displayed perfectly on the Fuse.

So there you have it. A great little music player which appears to work end to end with Linux. What more could a guy ask for? Well, the best part is it was $50 cheaper than a similar iPod!

I always push VMWare because I use it a *LOT* and believe it to be a superior product. My friend Dann was no exception. When it came time for him to get a new server I suggested he could do several virtual machines on one good physical box and save his resources.

He did the same type of install on his server that I did, and that was to install CentOS 5.3 as a base and put VMWare Server 2 on it to handle his virtual infrastructure. Now for me, this has been bulletproof. Dann has had a couple minor instances where his VMs lost their registration after a power failure and he had some issue connecting to the web interface to fix it.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that there have been a couple instances where managing VMWare Server 2 from the command line have been a big help. It’s not readily apparent that you *can* manage it via the command line and the information was hard to come by, so I thought putting it here for my future reference was probably a good idea.

The command you mostly need to be concerned with is “vmrun”. The tricky part is the switches afterward. Some examples:

List Running VMs:
vmrun -T server -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u root -p rootpassword list
List Registered VMs:
vmrun -T server -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u root -p rootpassword listRegisteredVM
Start a VM:
vmrun -T server -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u root -p rootpassword start "[standard] ogopogo/ogopogo.vmx”
Stop a VM:
vmrun -T server -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u root -p rootpassword stop “[standard] ogopogo/ogopogo.vmx”

The biggest issue is just getting the syntax correct in as far as the name and location of the VM. My suggestion would be to list them, and then copy that output and enclose in quotes for your start and stop commands. In particular, vmware seems to use [standard] as it’s default volume name reference, so, as is listed above, my machine Ogopogo is listed and referenced at “[standard] ogopogo/ogopogo.vmx” or vmrun will just error out.

Hope this helps!

Here’s one for the book…:

I have a script that monitors a process and I want it to email my cellphone (to page me) if things don’t look just right. The problem is that just using “mail” or “mailx” in a script fails because my carrier divines whether or not my return address is real. Obviously a from field that looks like “root@localhost” is just not getting through.

What’s the solution? Enter “mutt”.

Mutt, it seems, will let you specify your from field in the ~/.muttrc file. Also, it works pretty much the same on the command line as mail or mailx. So, I set up mu ~/.muttrc like so:

set realname = "menotyou"
set from = "menotyou@myrealdomain.com"
set hostname = "myrealdomain.com"
set use_from = yes

And then, in the script I send mails like so:

echo "Wow I can send mail!" | /usr/bin/mutt -s "A present for you" myphoneaddr@provider.com

All in one line of course, but BINGO, all the sudden my cell phone springs to life at all hours of the night with information I don’t want to know

Enjoy!

So here I am with this beautiful Macbook. A Macbook 5,2 as a matter of fact.

My original intentions were to put Linux on this kickin’ machine, but, as it happens, I have procrastinated until now. I looked around a bit and read through several sets of documentation on how to get things going on this laptop the way I would like, and it seems that all I had to do was install Refit and shrink down my OS X install to give me a little hdd space to work with and that would let me run Linux…. Well, that was what I thought.

Indeed, you *can* run Linux on a Macbook 5,2, however, there is a real annoying point for me right now that’s a show stopper. You cannot even boot the kernel without an acpi=off. This means no power management. This means having to hard-power-off my laptop every time I shut it down.

Now the kicker is that supposedly the system will boot *with* acpi if I pass a nosmp or maxcpus=1. Dang. I don’t know what I worse, hard powering off the machine each time, or no being able to use my cpu horsepower. Sheesh. I hope they get this stuff fixed soon!

(edit:) Did you ever notice that, when blogging, how easy it is to make gigantic run-on sentences?

I wanted to elaborate a little on putting Linux Mint on my Acer Aspire One. For starters, my AAO is the 8gb flash drive model. No HDD in there baby!

First I removed all the SSD cards from the AAO. Didn’t want to accidentally overwrite any data I may be saving there you know.

I downloaded the Linux Mint 7 (Gloria) main addition iso and, using unetbootin, put it on a usb thumb drive.

I booted the thumb drive in my AAO by pressing F12 on boot and choosing the USB drive.

Once the Linux Mint live environment was running, I clicked on the install icon on the desktop and followed the prompts.

The only real diversion I made from just pressing “accept” the whole time through was the partitioning scheme. I chose advanced there and made sure that the install was using 100% of my AAO’s drive as root “/” and with an ext2 filesystem. There is no sense in using a journaling filesystem on an AAO without an HDD in it. It just wears it out faster.

The installer reminded me that I was about to install without a swap space and I told it I knew that and it was ok.

The rest was a piece of cake and I just followed along until it told me I could reboot the machine and pull out my installer media.

After reboot I was presented with a fully working system. I could instantly connect to my wireless network and I was immediately able to play mp3 and avi media files from my personal collection without having to mess around and look for codecs, etc..

From this point, I made just a quick couple changes and tweaks I think are necessary for a non hdd AAO:

in /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

in /etc/fstab:
Change the "realtime" to "noatime"

in /boot/grub/menu.lst:
add "elevator=noop" to the end of your kernel line and to the "defoptions" line as well.

And that was it! A quick reboot later and the AAO is happy as a clam.

I just wanted to say that I thought I would give the newly released Linux Mint 7 a spin because I have heard so many good things about it. I decided to give it a run on my Acer Aspire One since none of the Linuxen on there have yet satisfied me. Well, to my surprise, Linux Mint works fantastic on the AAO. It’s almost like they made Mint for this machine. Literally everything I have tried has worked flawlessly. The only things I have not tried yet are hibernate and suspend (I usually just turn the machine off), the right hand SSD slot and the camera. I am sure the SSD and the camera will work fine and I suspect that one or both hibernate and suspend will work fine as well. All I can say about this distro is WOW. It’s fast, it works great and it’s really good looking to boot. Seriously, folks, I’ll have to check this out a while, but it could be a contender for my main desktop linux!

As of late, I have come to think that I should perhaps throw my hat into the book author pile. Specifically, I have noticed that there seems to be a lacking of a concise book about good/logical Linux server administration. Now I am not talking about just setting up a home server, but rather correctly setting up and managing a number of servers, whether for your personal use, or professionally.

I have read a great number of books and documents on server administration, just none specifically designed with large Linux installations in mind. Maybe its time has come? Maybe this old Linux crumudgin, as Dave Yates put it once, has something left to contribute to the greater good.

One of my big questions is, do you think anyone would buy it? If there is really a want/need for something like this, do I pursue any particular publisher or do a lulu kinda thing?

The other big question is what is Dann going to say when I tell him he has to co-author?

Things that make ya go Hrmmmmm…

I have been watching the news articles about netbooks since before I actually owned one. Lately, there has been an increasing sentiment that Linux on netbooks is on the way out and Windows is in complete command of the market. Even Lenovo jumped on the windows bandwagon about this. it’s really been pretty rampant. Well, today I read a news article about some netbooks running Windows that are already virus infected right out of the box. Now, granted, these just happen to be XP machines and not the supposedly fantastic Windows 7, but I remember the hype about Vista too

Personally I find this pretty funny. For those of you looking to purchase a nice netbook in the near future, please take this as a reminder to give a second thought to a faster, more stable, more cost effective and more user friendly operating system. Demand that your netbook run Linux.