I recently posted about backporting packages with pbuilder. Someone asked about forward porting PHP4, which is a huge task. PHP4 is out of date, and the entire set of PHP4 libraries has a lot of build dependencies, including some packages you must build yourself. I’m not going to take you through the process of backporting PHP4. If you really need it, you can install php4-cgi and php4-* from Ubuntu dapper directly on hardy. But I will show you how to enable a local repository in pbuilder. This will allow you to build a package with pbuilder, and then use that package to satisfy any build-dependencies that other packages need.
Finally, finally, FINALLY! The Sun Java plugin now works on Firefox amd64 in native 64-bit. It has already been included in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, but the packages work just fine on Hardy as well, and probably on Intrepid.
Just download and install the Jaunty versions of sun-java6-bin, sun-java6-jre, sun-java6-fonts, and sun-java6-plugin. Install them, and remove the old icedtea plugin if you have it:
sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-bin_6-13-1_amd64.deb sun-java6-fonts_6-13-1_all.deb sun-java6-jre_6-13-1_all.deb sun-java6-plugin_6-13-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get remove --purge icedtea-gcjwebplugin
Then restart Firefox and Sun java will load natively 64-bit. Check it:
tyler@baal:~$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_13" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.3-b02, mixed mode)
I’ve included them in the repository.
Update 2009-07-16: A more recent version is now available in the hardy-updates repository. I have removed the above copy from my repo. Intrepid users should upgrade to jaunty anyway, but can still download packages directly.
In the satellite world we frequently work with the decibel scale. Decibels (dB) are a way of expressing the relative difference in signal strength between two sources. It is a logarithmic scale, so increasing numbers represent an exponentional increase in power. In simple terms, they are a convenient way of using addition instead of multiplication.
There are plenty of good places to understand decibels. I want to focus on how this helps us answer a few important questions in carrier sizing.
- I have two carriers, P1 and P2. What is the difference in power (Y) between them? Commonly this question appears as “Customer has capacity P1 and wants P2. How much additional power does he need to support the new carrier?”
- I have carrier P1 of a certain size, and Y dB margin (additional power available). How large can I make my new carrier P2? Or if Y is negative, how small?
I frequently need to package software for install on Ubuntu systems. If you manage only one server, don’t upgrade often, and don’t need to uninstall, then you may be happy with the ancient “untar, make, make install” method. But if you’re like me you prefer to create .deb packages and install those.
I run Ubuntu 8.04 “hardy” on my servers. Hardy is almost a year old now, and although it has up to date security fixes it no longer has the latest releases of software. This is fine for most purpose, but sometimes I want an updated version of some software and I’m willing to risk the slight chance that it has bugs.
The best traceroute tool around is mtr. The version in Hardy is 0.72, but Jaunty now has a package for 0.75. So let’s backport it with pbuilder.
Update 2012-05-16: These instructions have been superseded by a new version of this guide. Follow that document instead.
Update 2010-08-18: These instructions are still valid as of VirtualBox 3.2.8 and Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. VirtualBox now creates a “vboxnet0” interface by default, but this is not a bridge.
I use VirtualBox every day. The satellite world is infested with bad Windows-based management tools that fail to run in Wine. So I often run those apps in a Windows virtual machine, safely sandboxed the way Windows belongs.
Note to hardware developers: if your network-based device does not have a standards-compliant HTTP interface, you lose. If it has a Windows-based management tool instead, you lose twice. I will buy your product only if I have no other choice.
I imagine running Windows apps is what 90% of VirtualBox users use it for, but it can do so much more than that. I also run several Linux-based VMs, and use them to test server configs, or even whole networks before rolling out the real thing. If you do this, you probably want to use more than the basic NAT networking that VirtualBox uses by default. For instance, wouldn’t it be nice to install an SSH server in the VM, minimise the VirtualBox GUI, and SSH in from a terminal just like you would a real server?
Tags: networking, virtualbox
Update 2010-03-29: This plugin is deprecated. I’ll leave it here for download, but you should use Open With instead.
I am fed up with the increasing obsolescence of Konqueror. It simply fails to deal with much of the Ajax bling and javascript doodads that are all over the web now. Facebook is nearly unusable, Slashdot has unusual formatting errors, and banking sites fail in odd ways. Compatibility changes daily as web developers tweak their javascript and CSS. Last month I switched back to Firefox.
Still there are times when I’m viewing a site in Firefox and want to switch to Konqueror. Konqueror has an easy “Open With” submenu, but no such thing exists for Firefox. Instead, everybody has written their own Firefox extension to support their personal choice of browser. Often with platform-specific requirements. And now I have too!
Behold, Open With Konqueror!
You’ll have to approve installations from my site to proceed. If you are the type of person that uses KDE, chances are you already know how to do that. I have also submitted it to addons.mozilla.org.
Credits: I copied this extension from IE View Lite by Grayson Mixon. I modified it in the following ways:
- Replace all references to IE with Konqueror in dialogs, variable, and extension names
- Include Konqueror icons from the Crystal SVG set in resolutions of 16×16 and 32×32
- Change the path of the browser to use to “/usr/bin/konqueror”, the default in Kubuntu
Sometimes running Bacula is a real pain. It’s too much infrastructure for someone who doesn’t use tape backups (we just use a big RAID store). But today it saved me.
It all began when I accidentally copied /home/tyler/bin on my laptop to another workstation’s /bin. I have a lot of little scripts and doodads for my personal use in /home/tyler/bin, but none of them are named for real executables in /bin. So I think, “No big deal, just manually remove those scripts from /bin and no harm done.”
At home I use a router flashed with DD-WRT v.24 SP1 with OpenVPN support to connect to the office private network. I upgraded from v.23 SP2 a few months ago. When I did so, I discovered that OpenVPN doesn’t seem to start automatically. Let’s fix it.
Update 2011-09-18: This post is out of date. See the latest release here.
You may have noticed the slick new header images on tolaris.com. Try resizing your browser. The site’s theme and header images will resize to match, sliding apart as needed while maintaining the right depth.
The artwork was done by my talented friend Josh Smith. Several of his photographs grace the walls of my home, and his daughter – in convincing us that breeding may be pretty neat after all – is incidentally responsible for the existence of my own child. I commissioned Josh to replace the boring old header image (and its limiting static width) with a sliding array of images late last year. I am extremely pleased with the work. From time to time, I may change the command-line text (currently using dpkg to install “Hello World”), just for fun.
The resizing and sliding is accomplished by using CSS. I am using a modified form of the Tarski WordPress template. I love Tarski’s options and clean design, but fixed-pixel-width websites are dumb. So I’ve overridden many of the Tarski theme’s settings to use percentages rather than pixel widths.
Tags: wordpress
There is a bug in the version of wine supplied with Ubuntu Hardy. This causes the version of Internet Explorer installed with ies4linux to hang when loading sites via HTTPS. I use IE for a few sites written back in the dark ages, and for testing a site’s layout before publication.
Aside: tolaris.com’s neat new automagically expanding header images look terrible in IE 5/6. I have no intention of fixing this. If you’re reading my site, you probably know better than to use IE for everyday browsing.
In October I recompiled wine from the Hardy source packages with the proposed bug fix. But I never announced it. If you missed that, you can find it in the repository.
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