Mindstab.net

So Ubuntu hardy doesn't ship with the handy git wrapper/tool cogito because git has all the features in it incoperated... somewhere...

But documentation is surprisingly sparse. Anyways, if you want to set up a git repo nowadays using just git, it should go as something like follows:

root@server # cd /git
root@server # mkdir newrepo
root@server # chgrp git newrepo
root@server # chmod g+ws newrepo
root@server # cd newrepo
root@server # git init

And if this is a public repository

root@server # touch git-daemon-export-ok

On the client side.

user@client $ cd project
user@client $ git init
user@client $ git add *
user@client $ git commit -m "Initial code dump"
user@client $ git remote add origin ssh://user@git.server.com/git/reponame
user@client $ git push origin master

and after that regular

user@client $ git push

works just fine.

So I recall aoss being glitchy at times and generally not working with complex apps. At least that's what I recall.

So what is aoss? It's a program that acts as a wrapper around Unix apps that use the OSS sound system and silently converts their OSS calls to ALSA ones. Why is this useful?
a) I'm pretty sure each OSS app can lock the sound card, which is pretty lame on any modern system.
b) Because for some reason, some apps still use it, or are compile with OSS support instead of ALSA suport, still in this day and age.

Case point: Qemu on Ubuntu hardy still seems want to use OSS. I can't imagine why and I'm pretty sure it should support ALSA. I never had problems with it on Gentoo, but on Ubuntu it initializes it's OSS sound driver, and then fails to lock the sound card and so Qemu runs silently. Since I only use it to emulate Win98 for a few classic games, sound is pretty needed. So today on a lark I thought I'd try aoss.

 
aoss qemu -hda hd/win98.img -cdrom cd/dk.iso -soundhw sb16
 

And what do you know? It worked like a charm. Kudos. I'm impressed, pleased, and thankful.

So this has been more or less fun so far. Lots of updates everyday, and it's good to keep up with them and fun. Sure occasionally they break a few things, but more often than not things are getting fixed. Thankfully I missed that libc update that was broken and pretty much disabled systems, not that tossing in a liveCD and copying over a working libc would have been the end of the world.

Over the last week, my sound has gone from not working to working, and my blingy desktop with compiz gained the ability to play movies fullscreen without grinding to a halt, so woo! And things crash less.

Still, there are a few hazards. Hibernating is still kind of a crap shoot. It works, but usually sound and sometimes the wireless won't work when it comes back up. And my 'del' key still doesn't work. But I'm sure that'll get sorted in the next month. Gnome 2.22 was officially released so now lots of the software itself isn't even beta, but official release stuff. Now it's just Ubuntu that's "alpha", meaning the general arrangement of software and configurations. However it's in "freeze" just before the beta is released. So things progress.

So I walked into class today and my buddy waves me over to sit with him. I look over once seated and see a nice brown screen with a progress bar. Apparently that morning he finally had enough of Windows Vista being slow (his complaint) so he decided that class was a good time to install Ubuntu, and he picked the upcoming release 8.04, which is currently in alpha 6. Now I know since I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop I've been a little less on the bleeding edge than I was when using Gentoo, but I didn't feel like being out done, so I decided to upgrade my nice stable Gutsy (7.10) to Hardy right then and there.

Easy really. Open '/etc/apt/sources.list' in your favorite text editor under sudo and comment out the CD source line and search&replace all instances of 'gutsy' with 'hardy'

then

 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-update
 

Apparently you can also

 
sudo update-manager -d
 

and tell it to check for updates and then it will offer you the option to upgrade to the development version, but the console version is slightly more interactive when it comes across system files you modified.

It was a 1.8GB download for all my software, and that might be large compared to some people because I installed a bunch of open source FPS games a bit ago and they do have a habit of taking up lots of space. Thankfully the UBC pipe is very fat and in 14 minutes everything was downloaded and it then went ahead and installed and updated everything.

Reboot.

And volia! Nice stable desktop is now a bleeding edge Alpha quality desktop with all the latest.

The good: My laptop's graphics card, and Intel i965, is 'new' and desktop bling wasn't supported under Gutsy, but it is under Hardy. Awesome. I installed compizconfig-settings-manager and tweaked away for a while. Things are very blingy.

Firefox beta 3 is pretty fine, but my Google browser sync plugin isn't supported for now. Hopefully in a bit.

Surprisingly, my latex plugin for Tomboy still works so awesome!

Everything else so far has more or less worked.

The not so great: Sound initially completely failed to work. No sound card detected, and the sound card module failed to load. Apparently a whoops over at Ubuntu HQ, they'd just compiled it against the wrong kernel. When I checked there was a 2 hour old bug. It was fixed this afternoon, and I got the fix from the update manager. Woo.

So everything so far seems to work. However things do crash every now and again. 'Eh, it's alpha software, everything. I knew what I was getting into, I've done this before.

So rad, I'm pretty pleased and impressed. Such an easy update to the bleeding edge system. And considering it's still all Alpha software, stuff is running fine enough. And I have all the cutting edge toys.

Now the fun will be in the next month as everything moves from alpha to beta to release and all my shiny toys become stable. :D

I heart free software.

Update: Oh wow! Firefox 3 finally shows image's full alt over text, which is fantastic because several comics I read have second punch lines there and previously you had to look at the image properties to get the full thing (lame). So awesome they fixed that.

References:

• akso.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/upgrade-ubuntu-gutsy-to-hardy-alpha-4

Upgraded the kernel on the server today. That went fine but the reboot exposed some library update problems with moving from libexpat 1.9.* to 2. revdep-rebuild -X solved it. All is good.

I just stumbled on an really neat simple little article on how dead easy rsync is for doing backup work. It's easy to use, can use existing infrastructure (SSH) and does diffs to minimize data transmission.

It's as simple as this

rsync -a -e ssh Documents haplo@kvasir.mindstab.net:~/backup

And then the reverse to get new stuff.

The full article is at www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/10951_1573881_2. I'm doing this with a bunch of my data now! I'm excited because I'd been thinking about setting up some backup solution for a bit but this is so trivially easy and more than good enough it's delightful.

So I finally got around to setting up a Jabber/XMPP server. Every now and again over the last few years I've thought I should (like when LiveJournal started offering it with accounts, and when Google Talk popped up) but I never got around to it.

Anyways, today I sat down and installed EJabberd, a decent Jabber server. The quirkiest part of the whole thing is it is written in Erlang and it's configuration files appear to be Erlang code as well. Still, I wandered through the install with the help of the Gentoo Wiki EJabberd documentation and got it set up. It was fairly straight forward (not dead easy, but not super bad). I had to disable a couple of modules in the configuration file till the testEJabberd.sh test file stopped giving me errors but hen it worked. Right now, it's just a one user system, me, but thats all I need right now. Now I should be able to chat with people on Google Talk, Livejournal, and other Jabber servers. How very open source of me ;).

My account is dan@mindstab.net.

Well rock on! So my laptop had two minor driver related glitches that I'd hopped would be fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. But I'm also damn impatient. So I've been bumming around the web a bit looking for a solution every now and again.

One of those problems was that the headphone port was deathly quiet with anything plugged into it, and also it acted independently of the speakers so you had to manually turn them off once a headphone was plugged in. Testing under Vista, the headphones at least turned off the speakers but were pretty much just as quiet, maybe a smidgen louder. Still not really usable in any kind of noisy environment.

Well, I was reading through one of the bug reports about this on Launchpad (there seems to be a couple all roughly about the same thing), Ubuntu's made at home version of Bugzilla. The sound card my laptop comes with is an Intel HDA card and the module is snd-hda-intel. Seems that when Gutsy first shipped sound worked not at all, but there was a backport of the module from a newer kernel. I went to check, but I already had that installed. However lower down was the gem I needed.

 
echo "options snd-hda-intel model=acer" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
 

For reference, I have an Acer laptop so you might get better mileage out of your Intel HDA sound card suggesting your laptop's model, but this did the trick for me. I finally get loud volume out of the headphone jack, so the slightest background noise doesn't overpower it, and as a "bonus" plugging headphones in turns off the speakers. Better than Vista now.

Again, I have to thank Rob for a year or two ago chewing me out over the fact I used to just use this site to mention the cool things I did without documenting them. I just dug up a tutorial I wrote last year on setting up Laptop internet access over a cell phone and got it set up on Umbriel, my new laptop, in about 5 minutes. Awesome. That was easy. And handy for when I'm downtown as people have finally started securing their Wifi routers. And yeah, easy as compared to the day of research I did the first time to figure out how to get this working. So thanks Rob for making me document my work!

Is it weird that half way through stats class I realized my ear rings still weren't in from monday's Aikido class, and so I flipped on my laptop's webcam and used it like a mirror to simplify putting my rings back in? (Because as good as I've gotten at putting them in "blind" it's still faster and easier when i can see)

And then I was pleased at the amazing integration my Gnome desktop has. My webcam app Cheese can export photos trivially to my gallery app F-Spot, which can trivially export photos to my web gallery. A few clicks and done, webcam to internet.

Then I spent a bit of time and found out that Gallery 2 now has the ability to install plugins from the web, and they have a community repository of plugins, and there is a tagging plugin, which I installed, because tags are awesome. So woo. I'm probably going to start using my web gallery more often again, and I'm wondering if it's too late to start the 365 Project. :P