LincolnBlogs

From the twisted mind of me!

Feb 25

Neuros Link

By linc F/OSS, Home Life, Linux, Ubuntu 1 Comment »

(sung to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song)
Oh, this is a story ’bout a man named Joe.
He sent me an OSD a couple years ago.

An’ just the other day he said “You really should review…”
Then he boxed up and sent me a Neuros Link too…

OK, OK I know, but it was playing on continuous loop in my brain all last night. Don’t judge me!

Seriously though, Joe from http://www.neurostechnology.com sent me out a Neuros Link (snappy name a?) and I thought it only fair I talk about how great it is.

For some reason I don’t quite understand, most companies are not like Neuros. Neuros “just gets it”. They have this mystical power which clues them in on what kinds of stuff we really want. They understand that we want “our media, our way” and they set out to make that possible with their fantastic line of products.

The Neuros Link (still love that name) is just such a gizmo. This is MORE than just a set-top pc, it’s the convergence of tv, computer and internet. What they have done is to take a very decently spec’d computer, remove most of the breakables (moving/spinning media), add the ability to display to your tv set, and throw in a robust OS, with some customizations that let you easily find video content you can play/watch for free, all for $300. Yes, really, I am serious.

I got this Link delivered yesterday and pulling it out of the box I noticed, first of all, how good looking it was. It’s smaller than I had pictured and has a sleek looking black pc case which would go well in any entertainment-center equipment stack. Included with this is the Neuros KeyMote, which is the wireless keyboard/tackball combo. I have to say I really like it. Nice tactile feel and it works quite well (apart from that nagging windows key).

Setup was a breeze. They include a little one page setup document and if you follow it you should be going in no time. Just make sure to pay attention to the “configuring your keyboard” section. Once the machine was running and my keyboard was connected, I configured my wireless connection (also in the setup docs). Once that was up and running, I had to make a quick adjustment to X. You see, in the docs, they say that the only “supported” video configuration is hdmi and if you use something else you may have to tweak your config. Well, unfortunately I don’t have anything with hdmi, and my other choices on the back of the machine were dvi and vga, so I pulled out my spare lcd monitor and used that. After booting the X config was stuck in some 16:9 setting which would be wonderful for hdmi, but looks a bit odd on vga, so I moved the xorg.conf file to another name, restarted and I was in business at 1280×1024, perfect for my monitor.

With everything set, you are left in the Link’s customized browser, which is pointing to Neuros TV, a page where the folks at Neuros aggregate and manage (and index) video content across the web for you. This was seriously fun and is where I spent the remainder of my evening. I watched some “A Team” and a bit of “Adam 12″ too. No, I am not that old, just a child of the 70′s and was reliving some great TV moments of the past. I also noted that there is plenty of new content too like Fringe, Eleventh Hour, Heroes and the list goes on forever practically.

The rest of the computer runs a fairly standard, full featured Ubuntu, which means that you can do on there what you need to do. Things like IM, Email, Web surfing, etc., are all right there at your fingertips. In fact, the only thing I think this Neuros Link is missing is an internal Neuros OSD

Go and BUY ONE NOW! You’ll regret it if you don’t. And as I get more time to play on this one I will put more information here for you all to drool over.

Feb 16

Building an rpm to install script files

By linc CentOS, Linux, Programming, RedHat, work 3 Comments »

On an rpm based system, say CentOS, first make sure that the rpm-build package is installed.

In your user account, not as root (bad form and all) make the following directories:

mkdir -p ~/rpm mkdir -p ~/rpm/BUILD mkdir -p ~/rpm/RPMS mkdir -p ~/rpm/SOURCES mkdir -p ~/rpm/SPECS mkdir -p ~/rpm/SRPMS mkdir -p ~/rpm/tmp

And create an ~/.rpmmacros file with the following in it:

%packager Your Name %_topdir /home/YOUR HOME DIR/rpm %_tmppath /home/YOUR HOME DIR/rpm/tmp

And now comes the fun part. Go to the ~/rpm/SOURCES directory and create a working package directory under that with the package name and a dash and the major revision number. For example, ~/rpm/SOURCES/linc-1. Now in that directory you will copy all the scripts/files that you wish to have in your package. For example, I might have a script in that directory called myscript.sh that I want to be installed as part of the linc package.

Once that is done, make a tarball of that directory in the ~/rpm/SOURCES directory named programname-revision.tar.gz. Using my previous example it would be:
tar czvf linc-1.tar.gz linc-1/

Now for the glue that makes this all stick together. Go to your ~/rpm/SPECS directory and create a spec file for your package. We’ll call mine linc.spec and it’ll look like this:

Summary: My first rpm script package Name: linc Version: 1 Release: 1 Source0: linc-1.tar.gz License: GPL Group: MyJunk BuildArch: noarch BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-buildroot %description Make some relevant package description here %prep %setup -q %build %install install -m 0755 -d $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/opt/linc install -m 0755 myscript.sh $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/opt/linc/myscript.sh %clean rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT %post echo " " echo "This will display after rpm installs the package!" %files %dir /opt/linc /opt/linc/myscript.sh

A lot of that file is pretty self explanatory except then install lines and the lines after %file. The install lines tell rpm what to install where and with what permissions. You also have to do any directory creation there as well (the one with the -d in the line). The things after %file are similar in that this tells rpm’s database which files are attached to this package. The %dir signifies a new directory, otherwise the files are listed with their complete paths.

Now that you have all that together. The last thing you need do is create the package. Just go to ~/rpm and do an “rpmbuild -ba SPECS/linc.spec”. You will end up with an ~/rpm/RPMS/noarch/linc-1-1.noarch.rpm if all goes well.

Feb 12

The Mothman Lives!

By linc CentOS, Linux, Ubuntu, VMware, work No Comments »

Many of you know that I am strangely fascinated by what sorts of things people name their servers after. I, personally, use cryptids. I have machines named things like Sasquatch, Nessie, Yeti, Chupacabras and the like.

Last night I had to do some work. One of the things I needed to take care of was getting some sort of development environment at home for me to be able to work on some work-related projects at home in a less confined atmosphere. A lot of those projects involve needing an rpm based machine, which I didn’t have.

I decided I would set up VMware Server, which I use all the time at work, but this time I would use the Server 2 product. I have been using the Server 1.6 for a long time and love it. It’s fast, easy to use, and reliable. Server 2 came out some time ago, but I haven’t had a need to upgrade, so this seemed to be the perfect time.

I used the tutorial over at HowtoForge which steps you through things really well. The only real problems I encountered were that I couldn’t get to the license page for vmware for some reason (I did happen to have a couple spares from a previous one though) and during the install I was prompted that my gcc version didn’t match my kernel version, but I chose to continue on anyhow and all was well.

My initial impressions were mixed. I kind of like having the interface be web based now, which is pretty convenient. It is, however, slower. The other bothersome thing was that running vmware server on my 3ghz machine with 3gb of ram used *all* of it’s resources and brought the machine to it’s knees. This really frustrated me until I decided to just reboot the machine…. For some reason this cleared up a lot of my problems with the resource utilization and things started behaving better. I am not sure why, but my advice to anyone trying a new install would be to reboot after the install before you actually start trying to use vmware

Once that was all taken care of, I set about to get a vm running. I picked CentOS, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately I only had a CentOS 5.1 dvd image available (usually try to get the greatest and latest) but I decided to use it anyhow rather than spend time downloading the newest one. I started setting up the new vm, which I called Mothman, and got to the installation media section and hit a small speed bump. I specified that I wanted to use an iso image, but the browse function directed me only to some strange volume where there was nothing. I couldn’t pick my home directory for the iso file. As it turns out, the default volume that VMware is looking in is the directory you picked during the install to hold your vm’s. In my case, it was the default /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/. Once I dropped the iso there, I could find and use it.

The install went off without a hitch. The new popout console is pretty slick and works well. All in all, I liked it and would recommend it. I still think I need a way faster machine to host this stuff, but that’s another story altogether. Even so, with my host and vm both running, right now top reports my system usage as ” load average: 0.12, 0.14, 0.09″ and I haven’t used any swap either. Not too shabby!

Feb 04

RPM help

By linc F/OSS, Linux, RedHat 4 Comments »

OK, I must be doing something wrong here, so if you are familiar with building rpms and can help me out, please do!

I am trying to build an rpm which has (for the sake of discussion) a script file in it that I want to install. The first thing I did was to install the rpm-build package so I had the correct tools. Afterwards I made an rpm directory to contain my rpm build trials, and under that dir, other dirs of BUILD, RPMS, SOURCES, SPECS and SRPMS to house my code, etc., as required by the “rpmbuild” program.

I go to ~/rpm/SOURCES and make a dir myscript-1 and in that dir I place my script “myscript”. Back in ~/rpm/SOURCES I create the requisite tar file “tar czvf myfile-1.tar.gz myfile-1″.

Now, I flip over to ~/rpm/SPECS to create the spec file myscript.spec, which looks like so:
Summary: Lincs Myscript Name: myscript Version: 1 Release: 1 Source0: myscript-1.tar.gz License: GPL Group: LINC %description This script does things. %prep %setup -q %build %install install -m 0755 myscript /usr/local/bin/myscript %post echo "HA, yur dun!" %files /usr/local/bin/myscript

Now I can go to ~/rpm and actually create the rpm by doing:
sudo rpmbuild -ba –target noarch SPECS/myscript.spec
and this will indeed make an installable rpm file of myscript-1-1.noarch.rpm in the ~/rpm/RPMS/noarch/ directory. All this is fine and what I want EXCEPT:

While building the rpm, the process seems to BUILD/INSTALL everything on the local system as well. This means that after the build, I end up with an /usr/local/bin/myscript even though the package has not been installed on my system. Now for my purposes now, it’s not that big of a deal, however, I am sure there are times that I will NOT want to have the package I am building installed on the same machine. There just has to be a way around this that I cannot find so far and it’s annoying me to no end. HELP!