LincolnBlogs

From the twisted mind of me!

Sep 27

OLF 2009

By linc Books, Friends, Linux, Ohio Linux Fest, TLLTS 1 Comment »

Wow! What a weekend!

We had a great time again this year, no surprise. It’s always great to be able to hang out with all your friends and all you linux folk and TechShow listeners are my friends!

My thoughts are still a bit disjointed from the weekend so here are some random notes about OLF this year:

Special thanks to Richard Querin and Mordancy for the new logo and t-shirts. They were fan-freaking-tastic! We took small donations in exchange for a TLLTS t-shirt this year and that provided us with enough money to pay some of the booth and bandwidth fees and get a good head start on getting some more shirts for next year’s festivities.

Prentice Hall, Neuros Tech, Oreilly and APress deserve BIG thank you’s for once again sponsoring us with some excellent giveaways for our free raffle this year.

This weekend was the start if our 7th broadcast year on the TechShow and I am still consistently amazed when someone walks up to me, recognizes me and tells me they listen to the show!

I saw Ubuntu’s netbook remix v 9.10 boot from bios to full desktop in 4 seconds while I was there. Astounding!

Oracle has this python sql interface that they are working on that is probably one of the coolest things, as a developer, that I have seen in a long time. It’s like stuffing bash into the sql command line. Nifty things like colored columned table listings, easy piping from sql command line to bash commands and files. This was some seriously cool stuff. I can’t wait for them to get it working with not only orcacle but mysql and postgres too!

This year was definitely the year of the netbook. It seems like everyone had one, they were all constantly using them, they all loved their netbook and anyone who didn’t yet have one was dying to get one. I must have seen hundreds of them this weekend and they were all running Linux except one.

The one netbook that wasn’t running Linux was at the booth right next to ours. They were the guys from Haiku, the new BeOS implementation. This is some seriously neat stuff and these guys are to be commended. While not ready for primetime just yet, they are going that direction full force and have some really slick stuff going in their favor. This OS is FAST man. I saw an average netbook doing some AMAZING video rendering feats like playing high def movies while running 3D video demos at 700fps and the thing wasn’t even breaking a sweat. There was another old thinkpad laptop playing 5 different videos at the same time with no lag whatsoever. I Bet it won’t Be long Before this OS has the full attention of, at least, some video processing nuts! You can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

There are a few things I will do differently next year, mostly with my time management, like getting there a day earlier, but I had a great time. If you haven’t been to one yet, make sure you go because you are missing out. Put it on your calendar for next year. I’ll see ya there!

Sep 15

New Music Server

By linc F/OSS, Home Life, Music No Comments »

Kplaylist

Some of you might remember that I used to run GnuMP3d as my home music server of choice. While this is still a great choice, after my recent new server install, I had an interesting choice to make.

The newest versions of GnuMP3d work fantastically like always, but they do not provide for any measure of security at all. You can use the music library as long as you can get to it. Now I know I can employ measures like iptables and hosts.deny, etc., but I decided I would still feel much more secure if I just ran my music server on a different VM that was only accessible from my intranet. I also did a little performance testing and found that GnuMP3d hogged up a lot of my system resources when it was starting up as well. All these factors and more sent me on a quest to once again look into some different streaming music servers.

There are really not very many of these available now that are current and full featured. There are, in fact, 4 that are hands down above the rest. The first was GnuMP3d, which, still, is a great piece of software. I just wanted something different for a while. I looked into Jinzora, which seemed to me to be completely overcomplicated and quite broken when not importing music collections via mp3 tags (stay away from this one). The one I almost settled on was Andromeda, a non-free software program, which works absolutely perfectly for what I wanted. For a measly $20 you can purchase the full version and I was *this* close to doing so until I decided I would give kPlaylist a spin.

kPlaylist is a LAMP app that is actually very easy and quick to get going, looks and works great and it’s strict OSS as well. It even provides the little bit of security I need to feel better about running it in my main server VM

If you are looking around for a nice way to access your personal music collection, you could surely do worse than kPlaylist. Do yourself a favor and hit the website and check it out today!

Sep 15

Most unlikely BP install

By linc BashPodder No Comments »

It’s been a long time since I posted about BashPodder and this is great news. BashPodder seems to show up in the most unlikely of places. Today I got a letter from John C. pointing me to a post on how he uses BashPodder *on* his iPod Touch. I think this is absolutely brilliant. Make sure to head on over to his site to read the details!

Sep 08

Increase LVM Volume

By linc Uncategorized 1 Comment »

I had the occasion to need some extra filespace on the LVM’d root partition of a RHEL(or CentOS) vm. This is how to do it:

First off, VMWare allowed me to create a second HDD on the fly while the vm was running (YAY!)

Once that was done, I rooted into the server and:

# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host#/scan
(partprobe should also do the trick ??)

# fdisk -l
(Just to see that the new disk is available – in this case /dev/sdb)

# fdisk /dev/sdb
(create a new partition here)

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

# vgs
(list the volume groups here)

# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
(add new physical volume)

# vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1
(extend my default volume group from the vgs command)

# vgs
(check to see pv and vg has another volume now)

# lvextend /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /dev/sdb1
(extend my / volume by the entire size of /dev/sdb1)

# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
(resize filesystem to match vol size increase)
(requires a 2.6 kernel to resize while fs running)

That was it! And remember that all this was done on the fly, on the root partition and filesystem, WHILE the vm was running.

Sep 02

Your chocolate in my peanut butter

By linc BashPodder, LinuxPlanet No Comments »

Just thought it was worth a mention that BashPodder and LinuxPlanet happen to go together particularly well. Just grab a copy of BashPodder and in your bp.conf file put the rss feed for LinuxPlanet Casts (http://www.linuxplanet.org/casts/?feed=rss2) and you’re ready to rumble. You will get all the great podcasts who post to LinuxPlanet and because they are there, you’ll have a convenient place to catch all their show notes and notices too!