Category Archives: Geekery

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Arch-ery

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I’ve decided that as I’m using Linux as my primary OS now, I ought to get to know it a bit better than I currently do. I’m not a complete novice by any stretch of the imagination, I’m happy enough using the shell for basics, but really I’m being spoiled by Mint and Cinnamon (sounds more like a cookery blog…) as I don’t really have to get my hands dirty at all. It’s a bit like having a car, modern distros mean you can just get in the car and drive. However, if you want more control over what you’re doing and want to be able to fix things yourself, you’ve got to open the bonnet and get to know the engine.

How best to do this then? Well, I have a very nice Mint setup at the moment that I’m not about to wreck for the sake of it, so I need something else to play with. So I’ve installed the very helpful VirtualBox to run a virtual machine on my laptop, meaning I get a ‘free’ PC to mess about with, and if I make a complete hash of it I can just delete it and start again. Nothing lost, no damage done.

I’ve been having a look around at different distros to decide which one to play with, and in the end ruled out the likes of Slackware and LinuxFromScratch, and went with Arch. Arch is a current Darling among linux stalwarts who want a bit more control over what’s on their computer, and what’s going on under the bonnet. It’s backed up with a seriously impressive wiki and forums, so almost everything is documented, it’s just a case of doing the homework when you hit a problem instead of giving up.

So far, it’s gone well. I’ve managed to create my virtual machine and virtual disk, boot from the mounted Arch install iso and use fdisk to partition that virtual disk. I managed to use mkfs to prepare the partitions, and used Arch’s awesome pacman package manager to install the base system. So far so good.

That’s where it got trickier. I wanted to build a GUI system, not just sit at the command prompt, and I haven’t tried to do that without help for probably about 10 years or so, the first time I wrestled with Red Hat and Mandrake. Ok, let’s take it step-by-step then. I know I needed X installed, regardless of which Environment I ended up with, so a quick search on the wiki and I had x.org installed. I installed the TWM basic window manager just to test it but no, it didn’t want to work!

Of course, I needed video drivers, and I know I have integrated Intel HD3000 graphics on that laptop, so duly installed the Intel drivers. Still, it refused to play ball, no X environment for me… what the hell?? That’s when it dawned on me – I’m not using the Intel graphics, not directly, I’m using the VirtualBox graphics adapter! Another quick look on the wiki and I had the relevant additions and drivers installed, and BAM! X works!

TWM is very, very basic though, and I wanted something more. I’ve got Cinnamon on my main install, have played with XFCE before too, so opted for the other big name – KDE. KDE has been up and down in peoples’ opinions like a yo-yo, but the latest version is supposed to be great, so I installed that. Pacman once again provided an interface and install just as easy as Apt, and half an hour later (and once I’d realised that I needed to use the KDM command to launch it…) I had a working, pretty, KDE desktop for my Arch box.

KDE/Arch VM on Mint 14

KDE/Arch running in a VM on my Mint 14 install w/ Cinnamon

Considering that all the configuration I had to do was from the command line, with various commands and lots of config file editing with the lovely little Nano editor, I’m pleased that it went so well. I had a great guide that I found online to help out, but there were still obstacles that came up that I didn’t expect, so I’m really pleased to have gotten this far so far.

More updates as and when I break it, and then hopefully fix it again :)

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Djangetting it!

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I’m slowly getting my head around Django, and the more I do, the more I appreciate what it’s doing.

The Models part of it I found pretty easy, it’s just defining fields in a database and any additional parameters, and writing templates has been pretty good too, but tying views.py to urls.py (basically telling the website what data to load when a certain URL is requested) has had my head in a mess.

The fact that regular expressions feature in the URLConfs (urls.py) doesn’t help. If you’ve never had the pleasure of working with regexs, have a look at the following, which is actually a very simple one to load a record by its ID number for displaying on the webpage:

url(r'^(?P<pk>\d+)/$'

Yeah, fun…

So not only have I been trying to get my head around learning Django and regexs, I’ve been trying to make it actually do what I want it to. One of the hardest things I found was trying to get my urls.py to pass variables to views.py in order to have them rendered in a template. Now that I’ve actually figured that out, it’s like opening a flood-gate, all of a sudden I seem to just be understanding everything better.

Obviously I’ve now jinxed that, and am about to hit another brick wall, but at least I know I can get past those walls, even if it means picking the mortar apart and taking it down brick-by-brick.

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Why Linux?

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I realised a couple of days ago that I’ve chirped on about Linux in the past on here, but never really explained why anyone would want to use it, or mentioning any of the common reasons people initially resist changing, so here’s my (not so) quick rundown in a stream-of-consciousness stylee. Word.

Linux is another operating system for your computer, just in the same way ‘PCs’ use Microsoft Windows, and Macs use OSX (or whatever cat they’re on at the moment.) The big difference between those and Linux though, is that you don’t have to pay for it!

But if you don’t pay, surely it’s a bit rubbish and outdated?

No, quite the opposite. Linux is available in lots of different versions, or distributions (distros) as they’re known. Because Linux is free and open, anyone can alter it how they see fit, and whole other versions are created for one reason or another. Some of the differences are operational, some political. What it means however is that there are massive communities of people actively developing and improving it as they go, so many of the features only now appearing in the major operating systems. It’s about as cutting-edge as as you can get, and if that worries you, there are plently of tried and tested solutions available that are rock solid. If you want to see how swish it can look, have a look on YouTube for Compiz showoff videos.

I’ve heard that there are no drivers for all my hardware and things won’t work.

This used to be true to an extent, some stuff in the past was a pain to set up, but the truth is if you’ve got any hardware from the last five years or so, it’s very likely to work straight away once you install Linux. I recently bought myself a cheap new laptop (Lenovo) and installed my current favourite distro – Linux Mint – and after a quick install, just about everything worked instantly. The screen resolution was set up, bluetooth worked, wifi worked, in fact the only thing I had to install was a driver for the ethernet port, which took a two-minute google and couple of commands. Let’s face it, it’s not like you never had to download drivers for something in Windows…

I’ve never used it, is it difficult to learn after using Windows or a Mac?

Not at all. The popular desktop environments/window managers like Gnome, KDE, XFCE should be immediately familiar to anyone who’s used a computer in the last fifteen years. Some even go as far as making it look as close to windows as they can, check out PCLinuxOS for example. Best of all, if you end up with one you don’t like, you can install others to try without formatting or losing anything, in fact you can even choose which to use at the point of login.

All of my software is Windows/Mac, how am I meant to do anything without it?

True, a lot of commercial software is made for Windows or Mac, but have a look at your own most-used programs a moment. How many of them are things you bought, and how many did you download for free (legally, mind!)?. The vast majority of software people use is either available for Linux, or has a very capable alternative. Firefox? Chrome? If you spend a lot of time browsing the web, both are available and identical to use. Download a lot of stuff with uTorrent? Check out Deluge and tell me if you can spot any glaring differences. Microsoft Office? Yeah, this is usually a big sticking point, but for how much the majority of people use that suite of software, LibreOffice is more than a capable, compatible replacement.

Games! I mean games! I want to play my games!!!!

I hear you, I use my PC for games too, and it’s true, Linux has always been on the fringe, but that’s changing…

Valve (developers of Steam) recently announced a couple of things that mean life as a Linux gamer looks very rosy indeed. Gabe Newell of Valve makes no secret of his loathing of Windows – especially the debacle of version 8 – and publicly announced that Valve have started developing their software for Linux! I can vouch for this, as I’ve been playing both Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 very happily. Valve also announced a Steam Box which will be coming out this year, a PC-based living room console that will run Steam and their games catalogue, and be powered by Linux.

On top of this, a lot of Indie titles are developed for Linux, so if you’ve been smart enough to pick up any of the Humble Bundles so far, playing the likes of Trine, Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, Braid etc. is very easy.

When it comes to other ‘big name’ titles though, like the current Darling of bedroom dungeoneers – Skyrim – there’s Wine or PlayOnLinux as a front-end for Wine. Wine lets you use windows software (games and other apps) under Linux. It doesn’t do it through emulation, so there’s often no performance hit. There can be a little bit of configuration needed, but that’s what PlayOnLinux does for you. Have a look at the curernt support games.

Ok, ok, so I like the idea of it, but which distribution should I try? And can I try it without losing my current Windows install?

Choices, choices. Linux distros have real trends, what’s true today certainly won’t be in a years time, but here’s my rundown of the current big names and who might use them.

Ubuntu – It’s practically impossible to look at Linux today without being bombarded by Ubuntu. They’ve made big inroads into making Linux easy, friendly and popular. It’s a great choice for beginners for those reasons, there’s also a ton of support available. However, they recently introduced their own window manager (Unity) which has a lot of people annoyed, as it’s very different and not very intuitive (IMO). You can install others, but that change combined with money-making changes like adding Amazon shopping search results into file searches on your computer was the final nail in the coffin for me.

Linux Mint – A fork/offshoot of Ubuntu (which is itself a fok of an older, well-regarded distro called Debian), it takes the excellent software and support base of Ubuntu and adds some nice changes. They also introduced two new window managers, namely Mate and Cinnamon. Mate is based on Gnome 2, a tried, tested and much loved older one, and Cinnamon is a bit more modern, taking Gnome 3 and changing the bits people tend not to like. The support, clean look and Ubuntu underpinning are what made me choose this as my current choice (with Cinnamon.)

Arch – Takes a bit of work to get it up to match something out-of-the-box like Ubuntu, but a real fan favourite at the moment it seems, backed up with *excellent* support on their website. Probably not the best choice for a first-timer.

Fedora – An off-shoot of stalwart Red Hat, they recently released a long-awaited new version, which has had mixed reviews. They famously seem to hold off of big updates until they’re sure everything is mature and stable.

Actually, I’m going to leave that list there. There’s really not much point in going on to the likes of Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Mageia and friends, as if you’re reading this with a view to trying it for the first time, I’d just go for Ubuntu or Mint. Preferably Mint. Whichever you go though, there are nice safe ways of trying before you commit to anything. Most distributions have a downloadable DVD iso which you can just burn and boot from, giving you a chance to play with it before deciding if you want to replace Windows, or go for a dual-boot solution, giving you the best of both worlds. More on that another time though.

I’d also recommend having a look at PenDriveLinux which lets you burn a DVD/CD iso to a USB stick, which is much faster to boot and work with than a DVD and will give you a better idea of how it suits you.

Any other business?

From a personal point of view, there are a few other things I really like about using Linux. It’s rock-solid for a start, I’ve not once had a crash or had to reboot my computer because it’s gotten so slow it’s unusable. I can’t say the same about Windows, even 7 which is my favourite version suffers to some extent from those. It’s also really, really quick, I don’t have to wait for anything to happen, it all just works, and quickly. It’s also very secure, viruses aren’t something you even need to think about really. The most popular Linux virus protection is there not to protect the user, but any Windows users who may access files sent which have come via a Linux box.

Because I’ve been throwing myself into programming and web development I’ve also found it really useful. Yes, I could do most of it under Windows, but things like Python and Django are really made to work in Linux, and for someone learning from tutorials and guides, they’re all written from a Linux point of view.

Last but not least, I have to mention the command line/shell/terminal. The command prompt in Windows is handy at times, but the Linux shell is something else. There’s a ridiculous amount of funtionality and shortcuts available by using it, if you can be bothered to learn. That said, you can really do 99.9% of tasks without ever opening it on a modern distro, but I’d encourage anyone giving Linux a whirl to get stuck in and not be scared :) .

I can honestly say I’ve not booted my dual-boot Windows 8/Linux Mint laptop into Windows once since I installed Mint. I’ve not missed it in the slightest.

 

(note: all of the above is based on my own experiences, questions asked of me and my own opinion. Please don’t take any of it as gospel, I’m still learning, but hopefully this post answers some of the questions I found myself asking when I first looked at switching.)

Bananapad!

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I’ve been meaning to tart-up my xbox pads for a long time, and given the cheap prices on ebay (and the fact that anything I want to do these days needs to be possible in an hour or two in the evenings and quiet while RAR goes to sleep,) I finally got around to doing it last week.

Controller shells are nothing new, they’ve been around for quite a while now, but they’re so commonplace these days that the prices have dropped to very-affordable. That coupled with the abundance of different colours you can get now makes it an easy option for just about anyone.

I’ve had my pads in pieces a few times now, so I wasn’t too worried about doing it. They’re fairly simple when it comes down to it, as long as you aren’t planning any soldering (lights, auto-fire etc.,) it’s just a plastic case around a small pcb with surface mounts for the buttons. I’d never used a third-party shell, so I was a bit worried about the build quality; no-one wants something squeaking and creaking like an arthritic mouse in their hands.

It turns out my fears were unfounded. There were only two small problems as such that I came across, the rest of the pad is just as solid as the official ones. Firstly the transparent ring around the guide button in the middle of the pad – the original was just too tight to fight in the new shell. I probably could have forced it, but didn’t want to risk it, especially as the new shell shipped with its own version. Secondly was the sync button. If you take one of your pads apart you’ll see that the sync button on the back of the pad is a teeny piece of plastic sitting on a plastic pin. The original is very tight-fitting, the new is much looser. In my ham-fisted attempts to get the two halves of the pad back together when I’d finished, I dislodged the button far more times that I’d have liked. With hindsight, the tiniest bit of blu-tak on the pin would have solved everything.

After about half-an-hour I had a completed pad with new triggers and thumbsticks, and best of all, a T8H (the security screw the controllers use) screwdriver to use again. The cost of one of these in mose shops would be more than half the cost of the whole shell, which only makes it an even bigger bargain.

bananapad

Bananapad!

As you can see in the photo, I opted to keep the original coloured guide and action buttons, the yellow replacements were just a step too far for me when it came down to it. With another two pads sat idle at home – with increasingly worn thumbsticks – some more changes are in the offing.

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Django Fett

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(the quality of my post titles is really going downhill…)

So as part of submerging myself in code of all sorts, and hoping that some of it sticks, I’ve been reading and working through as much Django as I can possibly manage – which, with a four-month-old child at home, isn’t that much.

Django, as well as being part of the title of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film (which is really annoying in search results), is a web development framework built on Python. I’ve got to admit, I found it initially very difficult to get my head around, as in the past I’ve always either made simple pages in html/css, or used a CMS which does all the database and template jiggery-pokery in the background for me, leaving me free to concentrate on content. But with Django I’m now using a programming language to define and work with the database, create the templates, and add the content! It’s a bit odd to me, but with each bit more I do the more I’m liking it.

Django was created to build content-driven websites really quickly, and I can see how now. When I read that it was possible to create a full blogging system from scratch, within half an hour, I was skeptical, but I’ve actually done that now (albeit with the help of a tutorial). It’s very clever stuff, it just needs a new way of thinking to pull it all together. Once I’ve worked my way through all the various tutorials I’m going to have a go at pulling something together for myself. My hosts here seem to be pretty good, so hopefully I can get an development environment set up to actually show what I’m doing, as well as boring you senseless with this :) .

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New Turf

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For the first time in about 8 years, you’re reading this post on a new webhost. I left it pretty late to choose, in fact today was the expiration of my old hosting, but I’m very glad I did.

For the last best part of a decade, I’ve bought hosting through a company called Web-Mania. They were always cheap and pretty good value for money for what you got in terms of space and bandwidth. Unfortunately over the last year or so the level of service just plummeted. Speeds got really slow, uptime was ropey with  sites down for up to a day at a time, and customer service non-existent. Phones not answered, the once-useful live chat gone, and I’ve NEVER had a reply from an email. Then in the last couple of years they folded and were taken-over/bought out by a company called Yorhost, where absolutely nothing changed except for some new graphics on their site (it and when it was available).

Anyway, I got fed up with it, and having moved our club sites to new hosting, decided to follow suit with this place. So now I’m hosted on tsohost.co.uk and it’s a breath of fresh air. The backend is FAR more comprehensive, utilising the de-facto Cpanel for service maintenance. I was able to create a new database, new user and new FTP account in a few minutes and then import the SQL dump from the old hosting so I didn’t have to start this place from scratch. A quick re-upload of the WordPress install, a much needed update to the core (which I couldn’t do at the old place thanks to their out-dated services), ~21,000 spam comments deleted and everything’s feeling much fresher.

I almost forgot to re-do my email redirection, but luckily found that part of my brain working before I’d much of a chance to miss much email.

So, if you’re with Yorhost/Web-Mania and fed up with it, you can do a lot worse than heading over to tsohost.co.uk. Cheaper, much better service, and much more for your money. Obviously this is just my opinion, YMMV, but that’s what this place is for; my opinions. And no, I’m not on commission/referral ;) .

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Wii Will Overcome

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Despite being a insatiable technology fan, I’m actually quite a Luddite in some ways when it comes to tech at home. I have television available in one room, no means of recording what’s on the TV, no Sky TV (although I’m still working on that, my feud with the trees of the world continues…) and it’s barely possible to get mobile phone reception indoors. Yeah, awesome.

Of all of these, the one that seems like it should be one of the easiest, isn’t. Is it really so difficult in this day and age to get a TV signal in the bedroom? Apparently, yes. I have a big main external aerial on the front of the house and the coax from it runs down the front of the house and straight into the living room. There’s no junction box, no feed from the attic, just one wire to one room. The bedroom is in the back of the house and upstairs, basically as far away from the point where it comes in as possible. I’ve got the same problem with the wireless connection, the router is in the living room too and the signal barely makes it to the bedroom. Why do I mention wireless? Because if I had that I could at least access all of the media on my computers in the bedroom without wires running everywhere. Oh, and that’s supposing I have a wifi media player too, which I don’t have.

Or do I?

In a fit of boredom I started following links on Instructables.com, a site which makes me wish I had a massive, fully equipped workshop and a load of money. One of the guides in there was for softmodding a Wii, which I’d heard about doing before with a hack for the Zelda: Twilight Princess game, but never really bothered with. This was mostly because I didn’t want to brick my Wii, but also because I had no real reason to. However, over the last year or so I’ve only really turned my Wii on for one game (the very excellent Sin & Punishment: Successor to the Skies), so it’s just sitting there taking up room beneath the TV gathering dust.

After reading more about it I found there are a lot more elegant ways to do it nowadays, without the use of a modchip, and with brick-proof reliability afterward. Me being me and reading this was like a red rag to a bull, there was no way I could resist giving it a go. Armed with a blank SD card, a laptop and an excellent guide, I set about it.

I’m not going to lie and say this is a five minute, idiot proof piece of cake, because it isn’t. There are a few places where you could slip up, and more than once I found myself having to google specific things, but in the end the guide worked, and after an hour or so I had a fully modded Wii.

This newly opened Pandora’s Box has lots of possibilities, but the one which immediately grabbed my attention is WiiMC. The small app gives the Wii the ability to play just about any media, from any source. While the idea of filling a USB drive with stuff and playing that is a good one, I was taken by the idea of streaming it over the home network. After setting up the Samba share in WiiMC (much easier than it sounds) I tested it in situ, about eight inches from the router, and it worked perfectly. A Triumph!

Except, of course, for the rubbish wifi signal in the bedroom, where the Wii is now destined for. Oh no, not more ethernet!? There’s no way I’d be allowed to run ethernet all over the house. But I’ve got a PC in the room across the hallway from the bedroom with a PCI wifi card doing nothing, surely there’s some way of getting that to provide me with a wireless signal? Actually, yes there is! Most computers offer ad-hoc wireless networking but it’s very limited in what it offers and in terms of range. I discovered a gem of a program called connectify which proved to be the answer. Run this little beauty on a windows 7 machine and it acts almost like a bridge between networks, and acts as a wireless access point all in one. I gave it an SSID of my choosing, chose a password and chose to share the ethernet connection on it (that’s how it’s connected to my router), and sure enough it appeared straight away in my phone’s list of wireless networks! This means I can now move the wii and the spare TV into the bedroom and stream any media on my computer straight to it, along with any internet content too, like youtube or iplayer!

Genius.

Of course it still doesn’t solve my problem of just getting an aerial signal in there, but that’s the next problem to solve. Hopefully the next time I update it’ll be to tell you how I did it.

Google Plus – What’s The Fuss?

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So Google+ has been released to the world and his dog (providing they have an invite at the time of writing), Google’s answer to Facebook, Twitter et al. I’m managed to wangle an invite and have since messed around with the mobile web site and the Android app, and so far from that (and reading loads about it over the last week or two), I’m really impressed and looking forward to seeing what they can do with it. For me so far the highlights have to be:

  • Circles. I never bothered grouping friends in Facebook, or anything else really, with maybe the exception of my Gmail contacts. The main reason is because I had no reason to. I only shared things I was happy for everyone to see, and I didn’t use it for mass-messaging. G+ and its Circle mechanism are great though, they’re basically just nice, big, friendly ways to group people together. The sharing of everything under G+ (photos, links, posts etc) is based around which circles you want to share it with. People can belong to as many circles as you like to, and you can have as many different ones as you like. Simple eh? Why’s no-one made it this easy before?
  • Photo sharing. Much more intuitive and integral. In fact the phone app can be set to intercept every photo you take and upload it to a private album. This way you don’t need to manually upload pictures before grouping, they’re already there. You can move them about to other albums once they’re there, but on the whole it feels far less disjointed than the Facebook approach.
  • Huddle. Huddle seems to be a bit of a mix between SMS and MSN. It’s a group messaging thing that lets you chat with your Circle members in a text/instant messaging stylee. I’ve not got enough people in my circles to test it yet, but in theory it sounds great. I hate not knowing who’s been texted in a group text, or trying to remember to add everyone for every reply.

There’s lots of other stuff I’ve still not even touched yet, such as Sparks and the group ‘Hangout’ video chatting, but for the time being it all seems very promising. The way it all hooks into my phone and the ‘always connected’ way smartphones are now feels a lot more natural than Facebook ever has.

Once I get a chance to try to full web service I’m sure I’ll be able to form a more informed opinion, and hopefully get some invites out to the people I know will want to use it, but for the time being Google+ gets a firm thumbs up (or should that be +1) from me.

Adding Another String to my Bow

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Regular readers will know I’m a geek. Possibly also a nerd. Ok, definitely a nerd. Point being, I like traditionally ‘nerdy’ things, and that usually involves anything to do with computers. I work with computers and numbers all day, and for the most part I guess I enjoy it too, but with work the way it is these days, I don’t want to rest on my laurels, so I need to expand my knowledge and get some more things under my belt.

I’ve posted on here before about mucking about with Linux, starting programming again and suchlike, but these have invariably fallen by the wayside (saying that, I do still have an active Linux install at home, I just never use it). I think it’s mostly because I’ve got no actual reason to use them, or any ongoing projects I can apply them to, and it’s hard to keep myself inspired enough to keep going.

However, I’ve embarked on something new now (well, kinda new to me), and I’m getting my web developer credentials back up-to-date. I was reasonably handy with HTML back in the day, when most sites were being coded by hand in Notepad, and Dreamweaver was in its infancy, but since then I just haven’t bothered to do any more – I don’t need to thanks to freely downloadable, idiot-proof CMS software. Ok, I might dip my toe in and alter some CSS or basic code, but that’s it. Database-driven, PHP-based dynamic sites making judicious use of Javascript is where it’s at right now – until HTML 5 hits hard in the not-too-distant future – and so that’s what I’m teaching myself.

I got myself a rather excellent book called *Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript – A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites* which I’m learning from, and it’s excellent. I’m already 200 pages in, of about 500-ish, and for the most part it’s not too hard, but you really need to get your head around the concepts. So far the PHP is just about sinking in, MySQL I’m finding a bit easier (thanks to the very readable commands), and we’ve not even touched on JavaScript yet. I’m really enjoying it too, it’s fascinating to watch all the pieces come together, and I’ve had some real ‘Eureka!’ moments when concepts have finally clicked.

All the software I’ve needed so far has been completely free too, as to be expected. When you’re developing for a home PC, like me or in a development environment, you’ll generally use what’s known as a WAMP system – Windows (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (generating web content), although if you’re using a Mac or Linux that changes to MAMP or XAMP respectively. They can be a pain to install and set-up if you’ve no experience, but there are some excellent bundled packages out there, so I’m using one called EasyPHP which is a one-time install that sets it all up. Brilliantly, it’s portable too, so I can copy it all to a USB stick and take the whole package anywhere. Other than EasyPHP the only thing I’ve needed is a decent text editor to write the code in the first place, and despite having used the rather excellent Crimson Editor for ages, I’ve decided on Notepad++ instead, and I’m just as happy.

If you want to learn any of this stuff, to get an insight as to how your forums, blog or just about any other website works, and how you can start to build your own, I can’t recommend the book enough. I’m really hoping this all sticks, because these skills are really easily transferrable to other jobs too.