Permission Problems

Although I love testing new Linux distros, I've got two dedicated testing partitions on my current machine, I like to have a constant distro for my day to day computing use and my main distro of choice for a few years now has been Debian. I've noticed in recent updates over the past year that SystemD was installed as a dependency and has been updated regularly, however after some issues I decided to stick with SysVinit as it has served me well over the years and I am comfortable if I need to tweak it.

However on a recent update I realised that I no longer had permission to perform some trivial day to day tasks such as mounting drives, partitions and even rebooting or shutting down my machine.  I was asked to provide the root password each time.  I immediately thought that my user account had been removed from the various groups, but on checking I found that I was still a member of all of the groups, but didn't have the privileges they were supposed to grant me.  Following a lot of searching, I finally discovered the problem: conflicting packages between the old (SysVinit) and the new (SystemD). Well, it was actually to do with ConsoleKit and PolKit, but these are linked too.  Trying to remove SystemD was not a quick option, it has become so integrated into the desktop that I would essentially have to wipe the whole thing and build it again and blacklist the SystemD package.

So the solution that worked for me was to remove consolekit, including the package polkit-consolekit and then install systemd-sysv (this in turn required the removal of SysVinit).  Then I double checked that I had polkit installed (I think it is pulled in when SystemD is installed).

Upon restart my permissions were back to normal: I could mount and unmount drives and partitions as well as reboot and shutdown without the need of providing my root password.

Not the solution I was after, however without a complete rebuild of my system it appears that I am forced to use SystemD as my init system for the present time.

Although I love testing new Linux distros, I've got two dedicated testing partitions on my current machine, I like to have a constant distro for my day to day computing use and my main distro of choice for a few years now has been Debian. I've noticed in recent updates over the past year that SystemD was installed as a dependency and has been updated regularly, however after some issues I decided to stick with SysVinit as it has served me well over the years and I am comfortable if I need to tweak it.

However on a recent update I realised that I no longer had permission to perform some trivial day to day tasks such as mounting drives, partitions and even rebooting or shutting down my machine.  I was asked to provide the root password each time.  I immediately thought that my user account had been removed from the various groups, but on checking I found that I was still a member of all of the groups, but didn't have the privileges they were supposed to grant me.  Following a lot of searching, I finally discovered the problem: conflicting packages between the old (SysVinit) and the new (SystemD). Well, it was actually to do with ConsoleKit and PolKit, but these are linked too.  Trying to remove SystemD was not a quick option, it has become so integrated into the desktop that I would essentially have to wipe the whole thing and build it again and blacklist the SystemD package.

So the solution that worked for me was to remove consolekit, including the package polkit-consolekit and then install systemd-sysv (this in turn required the removal of SysVinit).  Then I double checked that I had polkit installed (I think it is pulled in when SystemD is installed).

Upon restart my permissions were back to normal: I could mount and unmount drives and partitions as well as reboot and shutdown without the need of providing my root password.

Not the solution I was after, however without a complete rebuild of my system it appears that I am forced to use SystemD as my init system for the present time.

Permission Problems

Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a home server

A lot of people have spoken about the potential uses for a Raspberry Pi, however a lot of these are often very specific to be of use to anybody other than the project creator (using it as part of a home made weather balloon system for example).  When I purchased my Raspberry Pi it was for a specific purpose; the old PC that I used as a home server had given up the ghost and I needed a replacement.  The Raspberry Pi seemed like the ideal answer as it was small and used a lot less electricity (a big plus for a piece of equipment that is going to be on 24/7).

Before we start there are a few things you will need:

• A Raspberry Pi
• A computer with internet access 
• Raspian linux distro
• An SD Card (4GB minimum)
• An SD Card reader/slot on your computer
• External USB hard drive (this will need to be large if you plan to have video and music files on it, I recommend about 2TB minimum)
• Micro USB charger (my old one from a previous Android phone did the job)
• A wired USB keyboard
• An ethernet cable
• An HDMI cable
• A monitor/TV with an HDMI connection

1. Firstly we are going to need to install Raspian onto the SD card, for full instructions on how to do this I recommend reading this how to guide. However I kept it simple and used the command line on my Linux system.

Firstly we need to extract the file out of the Zip archive.  Navigate to the place where the downloaded file is and enter the command:
unzip {thefilename}

As these change every time a new version is released the command will alter depending on the image that has been downloaded.

2. Now to get the image onto the SD card.  I needed to use the bs=1M option in the command as the install failed twice with bs=4M, it stated that it would take 'considerably' longer, but the whole process was still fairly quick:
dd bs=1M if={location of raspian.img file} of={location of SD card}

If your not sure what the location of the SD card is then make sure it is removed from the computer and in the command line type:
df -h

Then insert (and mount) the SD card and retype the command:
df -h

There will be an additional item on the list:

In the example above the location of the card is /dev/sdc, we ignore the number as this refers to the partition.

3. Once the process has been complete, unmount the SD card and insert it into the Raspberry Pi.  Connect your keyboard and external hard drive via the USB ports and then connect the Pi to your router and TV before finally giving it power.

4. When you first power up the Raspberry Pi you are asked for some initial settings:

Firstly we'll want to expand_rootfs, this means that we'll be able to use the entire SD card if we ever need to.

We need to know the password, so the next thing we'll do is change the password, to do this simply select change_pass and enter in your new password.

configure_keyboard, change_local and change_timezone allow the user to set the keyboard layout, the location and the local time zone (these are all UK by default).

As this is a server we won't have it connected to a monitor for the majority of
it's life so make sure that we do not start the graphical desktop on boot, boot_behaviour changes this setting.   Although this may look nicer, the Raspberry Pi has limited power and we want this to focus on sharing our files over a server, not looking pretty.

5. To allow us to share our files over a network we will install Samba:  
sudo apt-get install samba

6. To find UUID and the file system of the drive, enter:
sudo blkid

This will give an output similar to the one below:

We can ignore the line that has the TYPE="fat32" as this is the SD Card, take a note of the other line, you need the UUID and the Type, the labels aren't important at this point (depending on the formatting some drives may not have a label)

7.  We need to mount this drive automatically whenever the Raspberry Pi is switched on. Firstly, we'll need to create a location to mount the external hard drive, we can do this by using the command:
sudo mkdir /media/external

Now we need to edit the fstab to tell the Raspberry Pi to automount the external drive every time it is switched on
sudo nano /etc/fstab

Insert the following line at the bottom of the page:
UUID="{the UUID you noted down in step 6}"     /media/external    
{type noted in step 6}     auto,user,rw      0     0

The above should all be on one line, pressing the key to create a gap between each piece of information.

8. Now we need to set up which folders are going to be shared.  I'll assume that we are going to make the whole of the external drive available over the network
nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

at the bottom of the page add the following, note that you can call this anything you wish, just exchange the word external but you must include []
[external]
path = /media/external
available= yes
browsable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes

It's worth noting before we continue that I've set the option writable - yes, this means that you can add to or remove the contents of the external drive over the network.  If you are not comfortable having this option then simply change it to writable = no. Now save and exit (ctrl + X), make sure that you answer 'yes' to save your changes. 

9. We will now set the Raspberry Pi to log in automatically on startup, if the user Pi isn't logged in then all of things we've just set up will not work. Type:
sudo nano /etc/inittab

navigate down to the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 tty1 

and add --autologin pi after getty to make the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --autologin pi --noclear 38400 tty1

save and exit (ctrl + X) make sure that you answer 'yes' to save it.

10. We're going to need one more piece of information before we finish.  I've had trouble in the past browsing Samba share folders using assigned names rather than IP addresses.  So to find the IP address of the Raspberry Pi type
ifconfig eth0

You'll be given a an output similar to what is shown below:

The part that is circled in orange (inet addr) in the above image is what you need to note down.  We'll need this to test the share drive later on.

11. We can try it out our system and auto-login by using the command
sudo reboot

Assuming that everything goes well, your system should be up and running.

Lets try this out on a different computer or device.

Load up your chosen file manager, most have location bar at the top (similar to the address bar on a browser).  Enter the following in the location bar: smb://{your Raspberry Pi's IP address from step 10}

You should now be able to access the files on the external hard drive connected to your Raspberry Pi.

Congratulations you've now set up your home server.

A lot of people have spoken about the potential uses for a Raspberry Pi, however a lot of these are often very specific to be of use to anybody other than the project creator (using it as part of a home made weather balloon system for example).  When I purchased my Raspberry Pi it was for a specific purpose; the old PC that I used as a home server had given up the ghost and I needed a replacement.  The Raspberry Pi seemed like the ideal answer as it was small and used a lot less electricity (a big plus for a piece of equipment that is going to be on 24/7).

Before we start there are a few things you will need:

• A Raspberry Pi
• A computer with internet access 
• Raspian linux distro
• An SD Card (4GB minimum)
• An SD Card reader/slot on your computer
• External USB hard drive (this will need to be large if you plan to have video and music files on it, I recommend about 2TB minimum)
• Micro USB charger (my old one from a previous Android phone did the job)
• A wired USB keyboard
• An ethernet cable
• An HDMI cable
• A monitor/TV with an HDMI connection

1. Firstly we are going to need to install Raspian onto the SD card, for full instructions on how to do this I recommend reading this how to guide. However I kept it simple and used the command line on my Linux system.

Firstly we need to extract the file out of the Zip archive.  Navigate to the place where the downloaded file is and enter the command:
unzip {thefilename}

As these change every time a new version is released the command will alter depending on the image that has been downloaded.

2. Now to get the image onto the SD card.  I needed to use the bs=1M option in the command as the install failed twice with bs=4M, it stated that it would take 'considerably' longer, but the whole process was still fairly quick:
dd bs=1M if={location of raspian.img file} of={location of SD card}

If your not sure what the location of the SD card is then make sure it is removed from the computer and in the command line type:
df -h

Then insert (and mount) the SD card and retype the command:
df -h

There will be an additional item on the list:

In the example above the location of the card is /dev/sdc, we ignore the number as this refers to the partition.

3. Once the process has been complete, unmount the SD card and insert it into the Raspberry Pi.  Connect your keyboard and external hard drive via the USB ports and then connect the Pi to your router and TV before finally giving it power.

4. When you first power up the Raspberry Pi you are asked for some initial settings:

Firstly we'll want to expand_rootfs, this means that we'll be able to use the entire SD card if we ever need to.

We need to know the password, so the next thing we'll do is change the password, to do this simply select change_pass and enter in your new password.

configure_keyboard, change_local and change_timezone allow the user to set the keyboard layout, the location and the local time zone (these are all UK by default).

As this is a server we won't have it connected to a monitor for the majority of
it's life so make sure that we do not start the graphical desktop on boot, boot_behaviour changes this setting.   Although this may look nicer, the Raspberry Pi has limited power and we want this to focus on sharing our files over a server, not looking pretty.

5. To allow us to share our files over a network we will install Samba:  
sudo apt-get install samba

6. To find UUID and the file system of the drive, enter:
sudo blkid

This will give an output similar to the one below:

We can ignore the line that has the TYPE="fat32" as this is the SD Card, take a note of the other line, you need the UUID and the Type, the labels aren't important at this point (depending on the formatting some drives may not have a label)

7.  We need to mount this drive automatically whenever the Raspberry Pi is switched on. Firstly, we'll need to create a location to mount the external hard drive, we can do this by using the command:
sudo mkdir /media/external

Now we need to edit the fstab to tell the Raspberry Pi to automount the external drive every time it is switched on
sudo nano /etc/fstab

Insert the following line at the bottom of the page:
UUID="{the UUID you noted down in step 6}"     /media/external    
{type noted in step 6}     auto,user,rw      0     0

The above should all be on one line, pressing the key to create a gap between each piece of information.

8. Now we need to set up which folders are going to be shared.  I'll assume that we are going to make the whole of the external drive available over the network
nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

at the bottom of the page add the following, note that you can call this anything you wish, just exchange the word external but you must include []
[external]
path = /media/external
available= yes
browsable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes

It's worth noting before we continue that I've set the option writable - yes, this means that you can add to or remove the contents of the external drive over the network.  If you are not comfortable having this option then simply change it to writable = no. Now save and exit (ctrl + X), make sure that you answer 'yes' to save your changes. 

9. We will now set the Raspberry Pi to log in automatically on startup, if the user Pi isn't logged in then all of things we've just set up will not work. Type:
sudo nano /etc/inittab

navigate down to the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 tty1 

and add --autologin pi after getty to make the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --autologin pi --noclear 38400 tty1

save and exit (ctrl + X) make sure that you answer 'yes' to save it.

10. We're going to need one more piece of information before we finish.  I've had trouble in the past browsing Samba share folders using assigned names rather than IP addresses.  So to find the IP address of the Raspberry Pi type
ifconfig eth0

You'll be given a an output similar to what is shown below:

The part that is circled in orange (inet addr) in the above image is what you need to note down.  We'll need this to test the share drive later on.

11. We can try it out our system and auto-login by using the command
sudo reboot

Assuming that everything goes well, your system should be up and running.

Lets try this out on a different computer or device.

Load up your chosen file manager, most have location bar at the top (similar to the address bar on a browser).  Enter the following in the location bar: smb://{your Raspberry Pi's IP address from step 10}

You should now be able to access the files on the external hard drive connected to your Raspberry Pi.

Congratulations you've now set up your home server.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a home server

Installing Linux on Acer XC600

I was recently given an Acer XC600 machine with the instructions "Install a Linux system on this machine, I hate windows 8 and have already deleted it."

Whenever I'm given a challenge like that I am always quite happy to introduce somebody to Linux, but I didn't quite realise what a challenge it would be.

The main problem is that a lot of new computers are being sold with secure boot and it is enabled by default.  The official line from microsoft is that it is to stop any malware loading up at the time of boot and make your system more secure.  However after wrestling with this system for more than a week, I am not convinced.

There is a specific order which you must switch secure boot off otherwise it will not work, the annoying part is that it will let you boot up the liveCD and install the system, but upon restart the system will never load, giving a device error message.

Here are the steps, I seriously hope that this helps and avoids the huge amount of time I wasted on this relatively simple task.

1. Upon switching the computer on hit the delete key, this will take you into the bios

2. Go to security and change secure boot to "Disabled"

3. On the boot option, make sure CSM is "Enabled"

4. In advanced, go to "integrated peripherals" and change the SATA option to IDE (regardless of the actual hardware in the machine)

5. Save and exit bios

You will now be able to install a Linux distro from a CD, DVD or pen drive as before on the Acer XC600.

Free your PC to install Linux

I was recently given an Acer XC600 machine with the instructions "Install a Linux system on this machine, I hate windows 8 and have already deleted it."

Whenever I'm given a challenge like that I am always quite happy to introduce somebody to Linux, but I didn't quite realise what a challenge it would be.

The main problem is that a lot of new computers are being sold with secure boot and it is enabled by default.  The official line from microsoft is that it is to stop any malware loading up at the time of boot and make your system more secure.  However after wrestling with this system for more than a week, I am not convinced.

There is a specific order which you must switch secure boot off otherwise it will not work, the annoying part is that it will let you boot up the liveCD and install the system, but upon restart the system will never load, giving a device error message.

Here are the steps, I seriously hope that this helps and avoids the huge amount of time I wasted on this relatively simple task.

1. Upon switching the computer on hit the delete key, this will take you into the bios

2. Go to security and change secure boot to "Disabled"

3. On the boot option, make sure CSM is "Enabled"

4. In advanced, go to "integrated peripherals" and change the SATA option to IDE (regardless of the actual hardware in the machine)

5. Save and exit bios

You will now be able to install a Linux distro from a CD, DVD or pen drive as before on the Acer XC600.

Free your PC to install Linux

Installing Linux on Acer XC600

Updated: MP3 files in Debian

A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

Whilst I personally use Ogg Vorbis and would encourage all others to, I am realistic that a lot of people still want to use their MP3 files and even build up their collection.

*If you are unsure what the term "as root" means then simply add sudo before each command that requires root privileges, you will be required to enter your password as sudo is a powerful tool*

Playing MP3 files

For playing MP3 files, the quickest method is to download VLC player. This is available from the software repositories from the majority of distros. This can be installed very easily:

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install vlc

This now gives you a player.

Ripping CDs to MP3 format

Should you want to rip your CDs to MP3 format then we still have another few steps to take.

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install sound-juicer

This gives a program that will rip the music from a CD and save it onto the computer. We can load it up from the main menu (usually listed under the multimedia or sound and video), called Audio CD Extractor.





















If we open this up and click on edit and preferences we should be greeted by a window as shown below:





















Down near the bottom of the window we should see Output Format, this by default is set to CD Qua;ity, Lossy (.ogg type). At this point if we click on this it will not give us the option of MP3. We still have a few more things to do.

The package we need is not available in the Debian repos due to Debian's commitment to free software. But we can add this. We need to go back to our terminal.

3. As root type: nano /etc/apt/sources.list (if you are met with the message unknown command nano, then you can retype the command replacing nano with gedit)

4. Decide what repos you would like to add:

Stable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org stable main non-free
Testing: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
Unstable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org sid main non-free

Add only one of the above choices, just type the part in bold to the end of document.

5. Exit the file by pressing Ctrl + X, it will then ask you if you wish to save press y and then hit return twice.

This will add the repos to our system, but we also need to have the keyring before the repos will work.

6. Download the Debian Multimedia keyring, as of Debian Wheezy (the current stable version) it is in the repos.  As root, type: apt-get update

7. Navigate to the directory and, as root, type: apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

8. as root, type: apt-get update

9. as root, type: apt-get install gstreamer0.10-lame gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That's it.

To check it has worked open up Audio CD Extractor again, click on edit and preferences. This time when we click on Output Format, MP3 should be an option.

Enjoy your music.

A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

Whilst I personally use Ogg Vorbis and would encourage all others to, I am realistic that a lot of people still want to use their MP3 files and even build up their collection.

*If you are unsure what the term "as root" means then simply add sudo before each command that requires root privileges, you will be required to enter your password as sudo is a powerful tool*

Playing MP3 files

For playing MP3 files, the quickest method is to download VLC player. This is available from the software repositories from the majority of distros. This can be installed very easily:

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install vlc

This now gives you a player.

Ripping CDs to MP3 format

Should you want to rip your CDs to MP3 format then we still have another few steps to take.

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install sound-juicer

This gives a program that will rip the music from a CD and save it onto the computer. We can load it up from the main menu (usually listed under the multimedia or sound and video), called Audio CD Extractor.





















If we open this up and click on edit and preferences we should be greeted by a window as shown below:





















Down near the bottom of the window we should see Output Format, this by default is set to CD Qua;ity, Lossy (.ogg type). At this point if we click on this it will not give us the option of MP3. We still have a few more things to do.

The package we need is not available in the Debian repos due to Debian's commitment to free software. But we can add this. We need to go back to our terminal.

3. As root type: nano /etc/apt/sources.list (if you are met with the message unknown command nano, then you can retype the command replacing nano with gedit)

4. Decide what repos you would like to add:

Stable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org stable main non-free
Testing: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
Unstable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org sid main non-free

Add only one of the above choices, just type the part in bold to the end of document.

5. Exit the file by pressing Ctrl + X, it will then ask you if you wish to save press y and then hit return twice.

This will add the repos to our system, but we also need to have the keyring before the repos will work.

6. Download the Debian Multimedia keyring, as of Debian Wheezy (the current stable version) it is in the repos.  As root, type: apt-get update

7. Navigate to the directory and, as root, type: apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

8. as root, type: apt-get update

9. as root, type: apt-get install gstreamer0.10-lame gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That's it.

To check it has worked open up Audio CD Extractor again, click on edit and preferences. This time when we click on Output Format, MP3 should be an option.

Enjoy your music.

Updated: MP3 files in Debian

The Humble Weekly Sale

The Humble Bundle has been on the go for a while now, offering a selection of games on a "pay what you want" basis, which is available for a limited period only.  Not only are these games cross platform, DRM free but also part of every donation goes to help a charity.

They have now just launched the first of the Humble Weekly Sales, and what a title to begin with: Bastion an RPG-action game.  If you would like to find out more about the game then watch the promotional video below or go to the Humble Weekly Sale website.


The plan is that a new game will be launched every Tuesday with added incentives for those who are willing to donate more of their hard earned cash.

This shows that the market for indie gaming is alive and well in a very difficult economic time.

The Humble Bundle has been on the go for a while now, offering a selection of games on a "pay what you want" basis, which is available for a limited period only.  Not only are these games cross platform, DRM free but also part of every donation goes to help a charity.

They have now just launched the first of the Humble Weekly Sales, and what a title to begin with: Bastion an RPG-action game.  If you would like to find out more about the game then watch the promotional video below or go to the Humble Weekly Sale website.


The plan is that a new game will be launched every Tuesday with added incentives for those who are willing to donate more of their hard earned cash.

This shows that the market for indie gaming is alive and well in a very difficult economic time.

The Humble Weekly Sale

THQ looking into Linux ports

I’ve previously mentioned The Humble Indie Bundle before on this blog.  A collection of cross platform, independent games are made available for a brief period and a part of the money goes to charity.  Recently, to my horror, they released the Humble THQ Bundle.  THQ are far from being an independent developer, releasing games on PS3, xbox 360 and PC, probably their most notable recent products has been the sandbox game series Saints Row.

I thought that this was the owners of the Humble Bundle falling away from their independent roots and starting to chase after more money from the bigger companies, especially given that this bundle was advertised as “Windows only” and the majority of the games that I checked out on the Wine website listed their performance as “Garbage” so this meant that the deal was truly aimed at the windows user.

However, following some recent news by THQ I have a renewed sense of optimism.  The company were pleased with the sales over the limited period, but even better were the number of requests on their forum and Twitter to offer a Linux port in keeping with the tradition of the Humble Indie Bundle.

In a recent interview with Polygon, THQ president Jason Rubin stated "The message I took away from a large number of tweets and comments around the THQ Humble Bundle sale is that there are vibrant communities of gamers using other operating systems besides the dominant ones, and a company like THQ should not overlook them," 

"Complicating the analysis (in a positive way), gamers have tweeted inventive ideas to me, such as letting the community help in the porting to bring down costs," Rubin said. "THQ is committed to look at anything that makes sense."

"I'm sure we will have more to announced shortly," Rubin added.

We shall look forward to hearing the announcement, whilst this will not get much praise from the freedom lovers, a lot of Linux users still keep a Windows partition purely for gaming purposes.  This is certainly a step in the right direction for gamers on Linux.

I’ve previously mentioned The Humble Indie Bundle before on this blog.  A collection of cross platform, independent games are made available for a brief period and a part of the money goes to charity.  Recently, to my horror, they released the Humble THQ Bundle.  THQ are far from being an independent developer, releasing games on PS3, xbox 360 and PC, probably their most notable recent products has been the sandbox game series Saints Row.

I thought that this was the owners of the Humble Bundle falling away from their independent roots and starting to chase after more money from the bigger companies, especially given that this bundle was advertised as “Windows only” and the majority of the games that I checked out on the Wine website listed their performance as “Garbage” so this meant that the deal was truly aimed at the windows user.

However, following some recent news by THQ I have a renewed sense of optimism.  The company were pleased with the sales over the limited period, but even better were the number of requests on their forum and Twitter to offer a Linux port in keeping with the tradition of the Humble Indie Bundle.

In a recent interview with Polygon, THQ president Jason Rubin stated "The message I took away from a large number of tweets and comments around the THQ Humble Bundle sale is that there are vibrant communities of gamers using other operating systems besides the dominant ones, and a company like THQ should not overlook them," 

"Complicating the analysis (in a positive way), gamers have tweeted inventive ideas to me, such as letting the community help in the porting to bring down costs," Rubin said. "THQ is committed to look at anything that makes sense."

"I'm sure we will have more to announced shortly," Rubin added.

We shall look forward to hearing the announcement, whilst this will not get much praise from the freedom lovers, a lot of Linux users still keep a Windows partition purely for gaming purposes.  This is certainly a step in the right direction for gamers on Linux.

THQ looking into Linux ports

Updated: MP3 files in Debian

A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

Whilst I personally use Ogg Vorbis and would encourage all others to, I am realistic that a lot of people still want to use their MP3 files and even build up their collection.

*If you are unsure what the term "as root" means then simply add sudo before each command that requires root privileges, you will be required to enter your password as sudo is a powerful tool*

Playing MP3 files

For playing MP3 files, the quickest method is to download VLC player. This is available from the software repositories from the majority of distros. This can be installed very easily:

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install vlc

This now gives you a player.

Ripping CDs to MP3 format

Should you want to rip your CDs to MP3 format then we still have another few steps to take.

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install sound-juicer

This gives a program that will rip the music from a CD and save it onto the computer. We can load it up from the main menu (usually listed under the multimedia or sound and video), called Audio CD Extractor.





















If we open this up and click on edit and preferences we should be greeted by a window as shown below:





















Down near the bottom of the window we should see Output Format, this by default is set to CD Qua;ity, Lossy (.ogg type). At this point if we click on this it will not give us the option of MP3. We still have a few more things to do.

The package we need is not available in the Debian repos due to Debian's commitment to free software. But we can add this. We need to go back to our terminal.

3. As root type: nano /etc/apt/sources.list (if you are met with the message unknown command nano, then you can retype the command replacing nano with gedit)

4. Decide what repos you would like to add:

Stable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org stable main non-free
Testing: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
Unstable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org sid main non-free

Add only one of the above choices, just type the part in bold to the end of document.

5. Exit the file by pressing Ctrl + X, it will then ask you if you wish to save press y and then hit return twice.

This will add the repos to our system, but we also need to have the keyring before the repos will work.

6. Download the Debian Multimedia keyring from here.

7. Navigate to the directory and, as root, type: dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring*.deb

8. as root, type: apt-get update

9. as root, type: apt-get install gstreamer0.10-lame gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That's it.

To check it has worked open up Audio CD Extractor again, click on edit and preferences. This time when we click on Output Format, MP3 should be an option.

Enjoy your music.

A lot of new users move from Ubuntu to another Debian based distro to limit the ammount of change they experience. But often can be a bit daunted by the challenges that Ubuntu made easy for them. One such is music files in MP3 format.

Whilst I personally use Ogg Vorbis and would encourage all others to, I am realistic that a lot of people still want to use their MP3 files and even build up their collection.

*If you are unsure what the term "as root" means then simply add sudo before each command that requires root privileges, you will be required to enter your password as sudo is a powerful tool*

Playing MP3 files

For playing MP3 files, the quickest method is to download VLC player. This is available from the software repositories from the majority of distros. This can be installed very easily:

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install vlc

This now gives you a player.

Ripping CDs to MP3 format

Should you want to rip your CDs to MP3 format then we still have another few steps to take.

1. Open the terminal

2. As root type: apt-get install sound-juicer

This gives a program that will rip the music from a CD and save it onto the computer. We can load it up from the main menu (usually listed under the multimedia or sound and video), called Audio CD Extractor.





















If we open this up and click on edit and preferences we should be greeted by a window as shown below:





















Down near the bottom of the window we should see Output Format, this by default is set to CD Qua;ity, Lossy (.ogg type). At this point if we click on this it will not give us the option of MP3. We still have a few more things to do.

The package we need is not available in the Debian repos due to Debian's commitment to free software. But we can add this. We need to go back to our terminal.

3. As root type: nano /etc/apt/sources.list (if you are met with the message unknown command nano, then you can retype the command replacing nano with gedit)

4. Decide what repos you would like to add:

Stable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org stable main non-free
Testing: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
Unstable: deb ftp://ftp.deb-multimedia.org sid main non-free

Add only one of the above choices, just type the part in bold to the end of document.

5. Exit the file by pressing Ctrl + X, it will then ask you if you wish to save press y and then hit return twice.

This will add the repos to our system, but we also need to have the keyring before the repos will work.

6. Download the Debian Multimedia keyring from here.

7. Navigate to the directory and, as root, type: dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring*.deb

8. as root, type: apt-get update

9. as root, type: apt-get install gstreamer0.10-lame gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That's it.

To check it has worked open up Audio CD Extractor again, click on edit and preferences. This time when we click on Output Format, MP3 should be an option.

Enjoy your music.

Updated: MP3 files in Debian

Valve looking for Linux testers

Valve are requiring the help of Linux users for the upcoming beta of Steam.  Valve are looking for 1000 testers to help out with their first Linux port of their extremely popular gaming client software.  Steam makes purchasing boxed games off the shelf a thing of the past and allows users to purchase/try games online and download them instantly.  One of the major advantages to this system is that games are updated regularly and there is no waiting period as delivery is simply as long as it takes for the users download to reach their computer.

The concept is nothing new, indeed Desura has had a native Linux application for a while now, however the games available for Linux compared to number for windows leaves users with a bad taste in their mouths.  However steam does offer a range of big name titles that Linux users have sadly been lacking.  That’s not to say that all of the games on Steam will be ported to Linux immediately, but as the early ports are Portal, Team Fortress 2, Serious Sam 3 BFE and Left 4 Dead 2 then this is enough to gain significant interest from the Linux gaming community.

If you would like to try and gain a place on Valve’s testing team then all you need to do is create an account at https://steamcommunity.com (if you don’t already have one) and fill out an online survey here

Valve are requiring the help of Linux users for the upcoming beta of Steam.  Valve are looking for 1000 testers to help out with their first Linux port of their extremely popular gaming client software.  Steam makes purchasing boxed games off the shelf a thing of the past and allows users to purchase/try games online and download them instantly.  One of the major advantages to this system is that games are updated regularly and there is no waiting period as delivery is simply as long as it takes for the users download to reach their computer.

The concept is nothing new, indeed Desura has had a native Linux application for a while now, however the games available for Linux compared to number for windows leaves users with a bad taste in their mouths.  However steam does offer a range of big name titles that Linux users have sadly been lacking.  That’s not to say that all of the games on Steam will be ported to Linux immediately, but as the early ports are Portal, Team Fortress 2, Serious Sam 3 BFE and Left 4 Dead 2 then this is enough to gain significant interest from the Linux gaming community.

If you would like to try and gain a place on Valve’s testing team then all you need to do is create an account at https://steamcommunity.com (if you don’t already have one) and fill out an online survey here

Valve looking for Linux testers

Sound problems

I was recently tearing my hair out attempting to get 32 bit games (and indeed any other type of software) to work on my 64 bit Linux system.  Every time I loaded them up they ran but without any sound whatsoever.  The error I was getting was:

Cannot open shared library libasound_module_conf_pulse.so

Upon searching the internet I found that I was not alone and it appeared to be a problem with the 32 bit sound libraries (well I could tell that without trawling the internet).  However according to the software available in the repos (Debian Sid/unstable) I had all of the necessary 32 bit libraries installed.

However reading through a post on the Zsnes forum, I found that the specific package (or the lack of it as the case may be) that was causing this problem was lib32asound2-plugins.  I had lib32asound2 installed, but lib32asound2-plugins did not appear to be in the Debian Sid/unstable repos.

I installed the package by downloading the deb file directly from here.  It does say to use the repos rather than downloading debs directly, however at this point I was out of luck.  After installing lib32asound2-pluigins all of my programs (OK then ...... games, if I'm being honest) now ran with sound.

Not the most technical of posts, however I hope that it is able to quickly help anybody else experiencing similar problems.

I was recently tearing my hair out attempting to get 32 bit games (and indeed any other type of software) to work on my 64 bit Linux system.  Every time I loaded them up they ran but without any sound whatsoever.  The error I was getting was:

Cannot open shared library libasound_module_conf_pulse.so

Upon searching the internet I found that I was not alone and it appeared to be a problem with the 32 bit sound libraries (well I could tell that without trawling the internet).  However according to the software available in the repos (Debian Sid/unstable) I had all of the necessary 32 bit libraries installed.

However reading through a post on the Zsnes forum, I found that the specific package (or the lack of it as the case may be) that was causing this problem was lib32asound2-plugins.  I had lib32asound2 installed, but lib32asound2-plugins did not appear to be in the Debian Sid/unstable repos.

I installed the package by downloading the deb file directly from here.  It does say to use the repos rather than downloading debs directly, however at this point I was out of luck.  After installing lib32asound2-pluigins all of my programs (OK then ...... games, if I'm being honest) now ran with sound.

Not the most technical of posts, however I hope that it is able to quickly help anybody else experiencing similar problems.

Sound problems

Updated: cross posting from Diaspora to identi.ca

Diaspora is widely described as the open source version of facebook and google+, however it is disappointing that, using your Diaspora settings, you can link with facebook, twitter and tumblr but not identi.ca. But there is a workaround.

In the spirit of this blog, I always try to keep everything open source, I'm going to link the accounts using brdcst.it a free, open source project by Michele Azzolari or @macno on identi.ca. Whilst brdcst.it is a free service; you need an invite, simply send an email to brdcst@brdcst.it

Once you have received your invitation log in to your new account at brdcst.it We'll do the destination first, trust me it's easier. I'll now break this into steps to make it easier to follow.

Before we can setup brdcst.it properly, we need the feed for your Diaspora posts.

1. On Diaspora, when you are about to make a post, you should see a text box similar to the one shown below:

 


Click on the spanner icon.

2. This will open up a new floating window, click on RSS, this will open up a new page. Take a note of the web page address.

In this example my address is https://joindiaspora/public/kevie.atom
*the recent rss feeds have .atom at the end

3. Go to the brdcst.it website.

4. On the welcome screen you'll see the number of feeds and destinations you currently have setup. Click on Add/Edit beside destinations, this will lead you to a new screen.

5. Click on Add new destination

6. Click on Identica

7. This will take you to identi.ca, log in (if necessary) and the site will display the message:


Click on Allow

8. Now go back to brdcst.it, this time click on Add/Edit beside feeds

9. In the first box add the address of your Diaspora feed that we noted in step 2. In the second box give this setup a name (I have imaginatively called it 'diaspora')



10. Now it's time to choose what you wish to export, for text only enter %s, if you want a link to be posted then add %u (you don't actually need this as it will be added automatically if your post exceeds the 140 character identi.ca limit)



11. On the next screen, put a tick beside your identi.ca username and click on Save


12. Now log out of brdcst.it and your done, your posts from Diaspora will be updated on your identi.ca timeline.

Please note that when you post on Diaspora you must change from All Aspects to Public, only Public posts will be sent to identi.ca

Diaspora is widely described as the open source version of facebook and google+, however it is disappointing that, using your Diaspora settings, you can link with facebook, twitter and tumblr but not identi.ca. But there is a workaround.

In the spirit of this blog, I always try to keep everything open source, I'm going to link the accounts using brdcst.it a free, open source project by Michele Azzolari or @macno on identi.ca. Whilst brdcst.it is a free service; you need an invite, simply send an email to brdcst@brdcst.it

Once you have received your invitation log in to your new account at brdcst.it We'll do the destination first, trust me it's easier. I'll now break this into steps to make it easier to follow.

Before we can setup brdcst.it properly, we need the feed for your Diaspora posts.

1. On Diaspora, when you are about to make a post, you should see a text box similar to the one shown below:

 


Click on the spanner icon.

2. This will open up a new floating window, click on RSS, this will open up a new page. Take a note of the web page address.

In this example my address is https://joindiaspora/public/kevie.atom
*the recent rss feeds have .atom at the end

3. Go to the brdcst.it website.

4. On the welcome screen you'll see the number of feeds and destinations you currently have setup. Click on Add/Edit beside destinations, this will lead you to a new screen.

5. Click on Add new destination

6. Click on Identica

7. This will take you to identi.ca, log in (if necessary) and the site will display the message:


Click on Allow

8. Now go back to brdcst.it, this time click on Add/Edit beside feeds

9. In the first box add the address of your Diaspora feed that we noted in step 2. In the second box give this setup a name (I have imaginatively called it 'diaspora')



10. Now it's time to choose what you wish to export, for text only enter %s, if you want a link to be posted then add %u (you don't actually need this as it will be added automatically if your post exceeds the 140 character identi.ca limit)



11. On the next screen, put a tick beside your identi.ca username and click on Save


12. Now log out of brdcst.it and your done, your posts from Diaspora will be updated on your identi.ca timeline.

Please note that when you post on Diaspora you must change from All Aspects to Public, only Public posts will be sent to identi.ca

Updated: cross posting from Diaspora to identi.ca

Tizen 1.0 "Larkspur" is released.

Tizen, the Linux based mobile operating system that is replacing the short lived Meego project, is now out of beta and has announced it first full release codenamed "Larkspur".

In contrast to Mozilla's Boot2Gecko, which aims to use all of it's features on a cloud through a browser interface, Tizen adopts the more traditional format of the applications running natively on the mobile device.

The platform looks like it has been setup to meet the needs of the majority of users, with compatibility for various audio (both MP3 & Ogg Vorbis) and video files.  A full list of all the features of the new release can be seen here.

Tizen's graphics are a window system built upon X11, this includes support for OpenGL and indicates that it has the potential for both 2D and 3D graphics.  Web support appears to be embedded in the new code with full support for HTML5.

The official announcement from Tizen also stated " There are also a number of back-end changes, designed to improve stability and scalability of the infrastructure."

All of the pieces are there to make a decent cake, but developers are still being sought in order to put some icing on.  The SDK is available for download, however at the present time the supported operating systems are limited to Windows XP & 7, Ubuntu 10.04-11.10 and only the 32 bit versions. SDK release notes, along with a wiki, bugtracker, IRC (#tizen at irc.freenode.net) and guide to help you developing your first Tizen application are currently in place in order to aid developers and testers.

Tizen, the Linux based mobile operating system that is replacing the short lived Meego project, is now out of beta and has announced it first full release codenamed "Larkspur".

In contrast to Mozilla's Boot2Gecko, which aims to use all of it's features on a cloud through a browser interface, Tizen adopts the more traditional format of the applications running natively on the mobile device.

The platform looks like it has been setup to meet the needs of the majority of users, with compatibility for various audio (both MP3 & Ogg Vorbis) and video files.  A full list of all the features of the new release can be seen here.

Tizen's graphics are a window system built upon X11, this includes support for OpenGL and indicates that it has the potential for both 2D and 3D graphics.  Web support appears to be embedded in the new code with full support for HTML5.

The official announcement from Tizen also stated " There are also a number of back-end changes, designed to improve stability and scalability of the infrastructure."

All of the pieces are there to make a decent cake, but developers are still being sought in order to put some icing on.  The SDK is available for download, however at the present time the supported operating systems are limited to Windows XP & 7, Ubuntu 10.04-11.10 and only the 32 bit versions. SDK release notes, along with a wiki, bugtracker, IRC (#tizen at irc.freenode.net) and guide to help you developing your first Tizen application are currently in place in order to aid developers and testers.

Tizen 1.0 "Larkspur" is released.

Early Tizen Screenshots Leaked

Tizen, the open source platform that has been created to replace the short lived Meego, has had some initial screenshots leaked. These are reportedly originating from a Samsung I9500 device and it is also expected that the earliest appearance of these could be next month (February 2012) at the Mobile World Conference 2012 in Barcelona, which runs for four days starting on the 27th of the month.



From early signs the user interface looks promising, it is clean and tidy and I suspect owes quite a lot to the Android setup. Given that this is one of the most popular and fastest growing smartphone operating systems then why not borrow some of it’s features.



However, despite how impressive the user interface, how well it may run or how truly open it is; technical superiority will count for nothing unless the community gets behind it. Developers need to be actively making and maintaining apps as well as some major manufactures supporting and shipping the Tizen operating system on devices. If this is limited to simply the technology experts and hackers then sadly Tizen will follow the path of Meego which it replaced. Currently Intel and Samsung are backing the project, but until it is released on a device we won’t know the public will take to the new operating system.



I for one will be very pleased to see another device, especially one that stays true to it’s word and remains mostly open source; something which can’t be said of Android. However the sad truth is that ‘Average Joe’ on the street doesn’t care about openness, but simply about performance, looks and what new apps they can get. By the time this is available to the general public (as much as it grates against me to say this) Tizen will need to have apps ready and polished for all the major social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, G+), email clients, shopping, games, navigation and the variety that is widely available in the Android and Apple stores.



I really hope that Tizen can gain enough ground to be around for a long time, but as so many have come and gone before, it may end up being another short lived adventure.

Tizen, the open source platform that has been created to replace the short lived Meego, has had some initial screenshots leaked. These are reportedly originating from a Samsung I9500 device and it is also expected that the earliest appearance of these could be next month (February 2012) at the Mobile World Conference 2012 in Barcelona, which runs for four days starting on the 27th of the month.



From early signs the user interface looks promising, it is clean and tidy and I suspect owes quite a lot to the Android setup. Given that this is one of the most popular and fastest growing smartphone operating systems then why not borrow some of it’s features.



However, despite how impressive the user interface, how well it may run or how truly open it is; technical superiority will count for nothing unless the community gets behind it. Developers need to be actively making and maintaining apps as well as some major manufactures supporting and shipping the Tizen operating system on devices. If this is limited to simply the technology experts and hackers then sadly Tizen will follow the path of Meego which it replaced. Currently Intel and Samsung are backing the project, but until it is released on a device we won’t know the public will take to the new operating system.



I for one will be very pleased to see another device, especially one that stays true to it’s word and remains mostly open source; something which can’t be said of Android. However the sad truth is that ‘Average Joe’ on the street doesn’t care about openness, but simply about performance, looks and what new apps they can get. By the time this is available to the general public (as much as it grates against me to say this) Tizen will need to have apps ready and polished for all the major social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, G+), email clients, shopping, games, navigation and the variety that is widely available in the Android and Apple stores.



I really hope that Tizen can gain enough ground to be around for a long time, but as so many have come and gone before, it may end up being another short lived adventure.

Early Tizen Screenshots Leaked

Problems with Nvidia on update to kernel 3.1.0-1

I recently came into some problems which gave me a great deal of hassle whilst updating to Linux Kernel 3.1.0-1, I have a 64 Bit System and source my software from the Debian Testing repositories.

On what should have been a fairly routine update, I restarted my system later in the day to find myself dropped into a command line with a message stating that X server had failed. Running the command nvidia-xconfig would produce a new xorg.conf file, but I would still receive the same error message about the nvidia module being unknown.

I spent a few hours trawling the forums on the net and they all pointed to a rebuild of dkms, however putting in the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms, left me with the error message

Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed.

This left me scratching my head and very frustrated as I knew that the kernel source was installed. Finally I started looking at the installed components and noticed that the kernel headers did not match the kernel source number, my kernel source was 3.1.0-1, whilst the installed headers were linux-headers-3.0.0-1-common and linux-headers-3.0.0-1-amd64, a miss match.

1. I simply ran the command: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-3.1.0-1-common linux-headers-3.1.0-1-amd64
2. then I followed it with: sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms

and viola, upon restart I was back in my graphical environment. This, of course, will not solve every bodies problems, however this is the simple fix that worked for me, but it took me a long time to find it. Hopefully this will spare some people a few hours of pain and frustration.

I recently came into some problems which gave me a great deal of hassle whilst updating to Linux Kernel 3.1.0-1, I have a 64 Bit System and source my software from the Debian Testing repositories.

On what should have been a fairly routine update, I restarted my system later in the day to find myself dropped into a command line with a message stating that X server had failed. Running the command nvidia-xconfig would produce a new xorg.conf file, but I would still receive the same error message about the nvidia module being unknown.

I spent a few hours trawling the forums on the net and they all pointed to a rebuild of dkms, however putting in the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms, left me with the error message

Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed.

This left me scratching my head and very frustrated as I knew that the kernel source was installed. Finally I started looking at the installed components and noticed that the kernel headers did not match the kernel source number, my kernel source was 3.1.0-1, whilst the installed headers were linux-headers-3.0.0-1-common and linux-headers-3.0.0-1-amd64, a miss match.

1. I simply ran the command: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-3.1.0-1-common linux-headers-3.1.0-1-amd64
2. then I followed it with: sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms

and viola, upon restart I was back in my graphical environment. This, of course, will not solve every bodies problems, however this is the simple fix that worked for me, but it took me a long time to find it. Hopefully this will spare some people a few hours of pain and frustration.

Problems with Nvidia on update to kernel 3.1.0-1

Putting Browsers to the test with Acid3 and Peacekeeper

During episode 5 of TuxJam I reviewed a browser called SRWare Iron. This is a fork of the Chromium browser (an open-source community version of Google Chrome) with a few tweaks under the hood.

I put three different browsers to the test using two online tools: Acid3 and Peacekeeper. The three browsers in question were:

1. SRWare Iron
2. Firefox 9.0a1
3. Seamonkey 2.3.3

From the Acid3 test, all the browsers performed very well:

SRWare Iron


Firefox


Seamonkey


However, it is during the second test using the Peacekeeper resource that SRWare Iron really separated itself from the other two. A brief look at the overall points:

Then we can break these down into more detailed reports of how the browsers final score was achieved.






From these findings on the Peacekeeper website, it appears that SRWare Iron performs doubly well compared to Firefox and Seamonkey. Whilst I did find it was a fast browser, I didn't notice that much difference between the three. However all of these browsers noticeably outperform Internet Explorer which I have to use day to day in my place of work. I do not wish to install it and run it using WINE to perform a fair test.

During episode 5 of TuxJam I reviewed a browser called SRWare Iron. This is a fork of the Chromium browser (an open-source community version of Google Chrome) with a few tweaks under the hood.

I put three different browsers to the test using two online tools: Acid3 and Peacekeeper. The three browsers in question were:

1. SRWare Iron
2. Firefox 9.0a1
3. Seamonkey 2.3.3

From the Acid3 test, all the browsers performed very well:

SRWare Iron


Firefox


Seamonkey


However, it is during the second test using the Peacekeeper resource that SRWare Iron really separated itself from the other two. A brief look at the overall points:

Then we can break these down into more detailed reports of how the browsers final score was achieved.






From these findings on the Peacekeeper website, it appears that SRWare Iron performs doubly well compared to Firefox and Seamonkey. Whilst I did find it was a fast browser, I didn't notice that much difference between the three. However all of these browsers noticeably outperform Internet Explorer which I have to use day to day in my place of work. I do not wish to install it and run it using WINE to perform a fair test.

Putting Browsers to the test with Acid3 and Peacekeeper

Using WeeChat with Freenode (the basics)

I recently tested out WeeChat which is a very fast and lightweight IRC client that is used in the command line.

I must say that I was extremely impressed with the program, but not with the documentation. The quick start wasn't of much help and the user guide was way too heavy and detailed, going into things that were far beyond what I was needing for internet chat.

I'm assuming that the user has already installed the program, if not check the repos or visit http://www.weechat.org for installation details.

Start the program:

weechat-curses

Set your username (dont forget to include the quotation marks"):

/set irc.server.freenode.username "{enter your username here}"

Set your real name (optional):

/set irc.server.freenode.realname "{enter your name here}"

Connect to Freenode:

/connect freenode

However if you would like to connect to Freenode by default every time you start up WeeChat:

/set irc.server.freenode.autoconect on

If you've registered your username (highly recommended so that nobody can pretend to be you) then you will need to prove you own the username by supplying the password:

/msg nickserv identify {your password}

Identify your username automatically every time you log on:

/set irc.server.freenode.command "/msg nickserv identify {your password}"

Join a channel (don't forget the hash # tag):

/join #{channel name}

Automatically join a channel (or channels) every time you log onto freenode:

/set irc.server.freenode.autojoin "#{channel 1},#{channel 2}"

These channels will open up side by side, one does not replace the other. However as this is a command line tool there are no tabs to click on for different chats. The next few commands give some examples of navigation, they all produce the same outcome using slightly different techniques, try these and decide on the ones you are happiest with.

Move to the next channel:

/buffer +1

Move to the previous channel:

/buffer -1

If you remember the channel name:

/buffer #{channel name}

All of the channels you join are assigned a number (the channels start at 3, 1 is the Freenode front page) To jump straight to the channel:

/buffer {channel number}

All of the above /buffer commands all essentially allow the user to navigate through the active chatroom channels, decide which one works best for you.

Should a user send you a private message, you are able to navigate using the above commands, it behaves just like another channel. When a user sends a message, their username will appear at the bottom of the screen, above the text entry box.

Any messages that mention your username during the chat, their username will change to a yellow text with a purple background. This makes it easier to keep track of a conversation in a busy chatroom.

Send a user a private message:

/msg {username} {your message goes here}

A condensed version of this post is available for download in odt format here, this is ideal if you wish to print these off and can also be easily edited.

This isn't even close to all of the commands and tools available to the end user, however it should be enough to allow the user to perform most of the basic required functions for an internet chat on the Freenode network.

If there are any tasks or command that you feel this guide is missing then please leave a comment below.

I recently tested out WeeChat which is a very fast and lightweight IRC client that is used in the command line.

I must say that I was extremely impressed with the program, but not with the documentation. The quick start wasn't of much help and the user guide was way too heavy and detailed, going into things that were far beyond what I was needing for internet chat.

I'm assuming that the user has already installed the program, if not check the repos or visit http://www.weechat.org for installation details.

Start the program:

weechat-curses

Set your username (dont forget to include the quotation marks"):

/set irc.server.freenode.username "{enter your username here}"

Set your real name (optional):

/set irc.server.freenode.realname "{enter your name here}"

Connect to Freenode:

/connect freenode

However if you would like to connect to Freenode by default every time you start up WeeChat:

/set irc.server.freenode.autoconect on

If you've registered your username (highly recommended so that nobody can pretend to be you) then you will need to prove you own the username by supplying the password:

/msg nickserv identify {your password}

Identify your username automatically every time you log on:

/set irc.server.freenode.command "/msg nickserv identify {your password}"

Join a channel (don't forget the hash # tag):

/join #{channel name}

Automatically join a channel (or channels) every time you log onto freenode:

/set irc.server.freenode.autojoin "#{channel 1},#{channel 2}"

These channels will open up side by side, one does not replace the other. However as this is a command line tool there are no tabs to click on for different chats. The next few commands give some examples of navigation, they all produce the same outcome using slightly different techniques, try these and decide on the ones you are happiest with.

Move to the next channel:

/buffer +1

Move to the previous channel:

/buffer -1

If you remember the channel name:

/buffer #{channel name}

All of the channels you join are assigned a number (the channels start at 3, 1 is the Freenode front page) To jump straight to the channel:

/buffer {channel number}

All of the above /buffer commands all essentially allow the user to navigate through the active chatroom channels, decide which one works best for you.

Should a user send you a private message, you are able to navigate using the above commands, it behaves just like another channel. When a user sends a message, their username will appear at the bottom of the screen, above the text entry box.

Any messages that mention your username during the chat, their username will change to a yellow text with a purple background. This makes it easier to keep track of a conversation in a busy chatroom.

Send a user a private message:

/msg {username} {your message goes here}

A condensed version of this post is available for download in odt format here, this is ideal if you wish to print these off and can also be easily edited.

This isn't even close to all of the commands and tools available to the end user, however it should be enough to allow the user to perform most of the basic required functions for an internet chat on the Freenode network.

If there are any tasks or command that you feel this guide is missing then please leave a comment below.

Using WeeChat with Freenode (the basics)

Barrage - the life of a defence turret

Are you old enough to remember the days when the Westwood released the game Dune 2 (one of the first real time strategy war games on the market)? Then a few years later the genre went from cult status to instant classic due to the popular Command and Conquer series. We built up our bases and always included several strategically placed defence towers. If you ever wanted to know what life was like as a defence tower in the first Command and Conquer game then Barrage is the game for you.

The graphics are taken directly from the original of the C&C series games, with the vehicles, tanks and soldiers all members of the GDI (Global Defence Initiative) along with a familiar dessert landscape. They move around smoothly and are accompanied by some nice sound effects of guns firing and bombs exploding, however I feel that background music would have been a nice addition.

The sprites move vertically up and down the screen, some of the tanks change their pace slightly, but overall they remain mostly at the same speed. The game is contained within a three minute timeframe: kill as many of the enemy as you can within the allotted time. Any of the enemy units that cross the screen safely will result in points being deducted. The game is controlled using the mouse; simply move about the screen to target; left click shoots rockets; right click reloads and middle click fire grenades (useful on soldiers only).



Although the sprites do not move that quickly, the sheer number of them will have the user requiring quick reflexes and a sharp eye along with a wee bit of anticipation depending on the enemy unit being aimed at.

Overall this is fun, but without the ability to move the game soon becomes repetitive. Also there is no way of increasing your allotted time: 3 minutes and that's it. The main reason for returning to the game is to beat your top score. There are no extra missions (as far as I can see) and given this game is dated 2003-2010 then it's probably unlikely they will be added, however I will update the post if this happens.

There are some good ideas in here and the game is fun for a few minutes, however it soon becomes repetitive and the lack of progression hurts this games longevity.

Are you old enough to remember the days when the Westwood released the game Dune 2 (one of the first real time strategy war games on the market)? Then a few years later the genre went from cult status to instant classic due to the popular Command and Conquer series. We built up our bases and always included several strategically placed defence towers. If you ever wanted to know what life was like as a defence tower in the first Command and Conquer game then Barrage is the game for you.

The graphics are taken directly from the original of the C&C series games, with the vehicles, tanks and soldiers all members of the GDI (Global Defence Initiative) along with a familiar dessert landscape. They move around smoothly and are accompanied by some nice sound effects of guns firing and bombs exploding, however I feel that background music would have been a nice addition.

The sprites move vertically up and down the screen, some of the tanks change their pace slightly, but overall they remain mostly at the same speed. The game is contained within a three minute timeframe: kill as many of the enemy as you can within the allotted time. Any of the enemy units that cross the screen safely will result in points being deducted. The game is controlled using the mouse; simply move about the screen to target; left click shoots rockets; right click reloads and middle click fire grenades (useful on soldiers only).



Although the sprites do not move that quickly, the sheer number of them will have the user requiring quick reflexes and a sharp eye along with a wee bit of anticipation depending on the enemy unit being aimed at.

Overall this is fun, but without the ability to move the game soon becomes repetitive. Also there is no way of increasing your allotted time: 3 minutes and that's it. The main reason for returning to the game is to beat your top score. There are no extra missions (as far as I can see) and given this game is dated 2003-2010 then it's probably unlikely they will be added, however I will update the post if this happens.

There are some good ideas in here and the game is fun for a few minutes, however it soon becomes repetitive and the lack of progression hurts this games longevity.

Barrage - the life of a defence turret

Simply Mepis 11: simple enough?

Mepis was one of the distros that I had not tried until very recently. It was often described as the distro for newbies before Ubuntu was around. With Ubuntu's move to Unity and a lot of other distros embracing Gnome 3, more and more users are looking to other, more traditional desktop environments, such as XFCE and KDE.

Mepis uses KDE as it's choice of desktop environment and is intended to work 'out of the box', which is not the norm for a KDE distro. Upon loading my graphics card, Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP, worked without any tweaking; an impressive feat by any distros' standards. I was able to get the extra effects working straight away. This was the experience with all of my hardware; inlcuding my microphone and webcam. The black and blue theme of the distro looks nice and modern, very appealing to the newbie switching from Windows for the first time.

Some of the stickier points of a Linux distro for a newbie have been addressed, flash and Java come pre-installed, DVDs and MP3 files play without any need for tweaking. There is a good range of software including VLC and Amarok (media players), Libre Office suite, Dolphin, Kopete (instant messaging client), Inkscape and the GIMP. Some exclusions are noticeable, no software has been pre-installed for micro-blogging or torrents. In my opinion these are some essential user tools that most users expect to be present. With such option as Choqok and Ktorrent available it does baffle me as to the exclusion of these applications.

This brings me onto another point in need of development: installing software. Mepis is aimed at newbies, but only includes Synaptic as a graphical package manager. This is the one significant thing this distro lacks: an equivalent of the Software Centre that Canonical provides in it's Ubuntu distro. Synaptic is not a tool for a newbie user, whilst I personally use the command line tool aptitude (which I had to download using the command sudo apt-get install aptitude) this is not ideal for the new user.

Firefox 4 is the pre-installed browser of choice in Mepis 11. The odd thing about this is that by default the page opens up to a blank screen (shown below). Most users like to see something when they load a browser, even if it's just to show that their internet connection is working. I would like to see the startup page being linked to Mepis or a search engine, but a blank page, in my opinion, isn't the best option.

However these issues aside, Mepis is a very solid ditro, with a lot of features that work out of the box, this makes it very difficult to pass up as a good newbie distro. No tinkering to get the basics done, youtube etc will work without any tinkering. This approach may not win the support of the puritan freedom lovers, but this isn't the target audience of Mepis. However the lack of a software centre really does hurt the newbie appeal of this distro. Highly recommended, but make sure there is a Linux user nearby to help setup the system.

Mepis was one of the distros that I had not tried until very recently. It was often described as the distro for newbies before Ubuntu was around. With Ubuntu's move to Unity and a lot of other distros embracing Gnome 3, more and more users are looking to other, more traditional desktop environments, such as XFCE and KDE.

Mepis uses KDE as it's choice of desktop environment and is intended to work 'out of the box', which is not the norm for a KDE distro. Upon loading my graphics card, Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP, worked without any tweaking; an impressive feat by any distros' standards. I was able to get the extra effects working straight away. This was the experience with all of my hardware; inlcuding my microphone and webcam. The black and blue theme of the distro looks nice and modern, very appealing to the newbie switching from Windows for the first time.

Some of the stickier points of a Linux distro for a newbie have been addressed, flash and Java come pre-installed, DVDs and MP3 files play without any need for tweaking. There is a good range of software including VLC and Amarok (media players), Libre Office suite, Dolphin, Kopete (instant messaging client), Inkscape and the GIMP. Some exclusions are noticeable, no software has been pre-installed for micro-blogging or torrents. In my opinion these are some essential user tools that most users expect to be present. With such option as Choqok and Ktorrent available it does baffle me as to the exclusion of these applications.

This brings me onto another point in need of development: installing software. Mepis is aimed at newbies, but only includes Synaptic as a graphical package manager. This is the one significant thing this distro lacks: an equivalent of the Software Centre that Canonical provides in it's Ubuntu distro. Synaptic is not a tool for a newbie user, whilst I personally use the command line tool aptitude (which I had to download using the command sudo apt-get install aptitude) this is not ideal for the new user.

Firefox 4 is the pre-installed browser of choice in Mepis 11. The odd thing about this is that by default the page opens up to a blank screen (shown below). Most users like to see something when they load a browser, even if it's just to show that their internet connection is working. I would like to see the startup page being linked to Mepis or a search engine, but a blank page, in my opinion, isn't the best option.

However these issues aside, Mepis is a very solid ditro, with a lot of features that work out of the box, this makes it very difficult to pass up as a good newbie distro. No tinkering to get the basics done, youtube etc will work without any tinkering. This approach may not win the support of the puritan freedom lovers, but this isn't the target audience of Mepis. However the lack of a software centre really does hurt the newbie appeal of this distro. Highly recommended, but make sure there is a Linux user nearby to help setup the system.

Simply Mepis 11: simple enough?

Humble Bundles

Over the past year there has been a collection of games released under the name "humble ...... bundle". they have been released in the donation format, you can pay what you want in order to receive a pack of 4-6 games. The first pack included:

• World of Goo
• Aquira
• Gish
• Lugura
• Penumbra (overture)

The second pack included the following:

• Braid
• Machinarium
• Cortex Command
• Revenge of the Titans

The current collection called the Humble Frostebyte Bundle includes:

• Trine
• Shadowgrounds
• Shadowgrounds: survivor
• Jack Claw
• Splot

The continuing arguement is that Linux users will not pay for anything. Well lets look at the facts: over the last three bundles: the average Windows user has donated $6 whilst the average Linux user has donated over $11, almost twice as much. The fact that the average Linux users pay double shows that there is a market out there for Linux gamers. Hopefully this will get some of the established companies taking note that games are important to Linux users. The sad fact is that we are treated as second class. We need native Linux games to be a success in order to promote growth. With the recent expansion of independent gaming companies, this is becoming more of a realistic challenge daily. OK we may never have even close to the number of windoze and xbox gamers on Linux, however the fact that companies are taking note of the needs of Linux gamers is a step in the right direction.

Over the past year there has been a collection of games released under the name "humble ...... bundle". they have been released in the donation format, you can pay what you want in order to receive a pack of 4-6 games. The first pack included:

• World of Goo
• Aquira
• Gish
• Lugura
• Penumbra (overture)

The second pack included the following:

• Braid
• Machinarium
• Cortex Command
• Revenge of the Titans

The current collection called the Humble Frostebyte Bundle includes:

• Trine
• Shadowgrounds
• Shadowgrounds: survivor
• Jack Claw
• Splot

The continuing arguement is that Linux users will not pay for anything. Well lets look at the facts: over the last three bundles: the average Windows user has donated $6 whilst the average Linux user has donated over $11, almost twice as much. The fact that the average Linux users pay double shows that there is a market out there for Linux gamers. Hopefully this will get some of the established companies taking note that games are important to Linux users. The sad fact is that we are treated as second class. We need native Linux games to be a success in order to promote growth. With the recent expansion of independent gaming companies, this is becoming more of a realistic challenge daily. OK we may never have even close to the number of windoze and xbox gamers on Linux, however the fact that companies are taking note of the needs of Linux gamers is a step in the right direction.

Humble Bundles

Flattr-Wikileaks logo

A while back I was asked by Marie Axelsson (@maloki on identi.ca) to come up with a logo for a blog post that combined two things she was going to write about: Flattr and Wikileaks. This was mainly in response to the knee jerk reaction from Paypal and the major credit card companies Visa and Mastercard along with a bank in Switzerland that froze Julian Assange's funds. Flattr has continued to allow support for Wikileaks, you can view the profile here.

But the challenge was to create a logo that would incorporate the two companies. After a good few hours developing roughs and then tweaking the idea, the final logo is shown below:

The image has been created using Inkscape and is made entirely from scratch. Although both logos are widely available on the internet, the beauty of creating it from scratch as an svg (scale vector graphics) file is that it can be blown up to the size of huge banners without any distortion or pixelation. For viewing purposes the files on display in this post and flattrchattr's are png files, these will distort when stretched.

The article in question is located on flattrchattr.com, you can view it directly here

If you like the logo then you can make a flattr donation by either clicking on the flattr button at the bottom of this post or by clicking on the image itself within the flattrchattr post.

A while back I was asked by Marie Axelsson (@maloki on identi.ca) to come up with a logo for a blog post that combined two things she was going to write about: Flattr and Wikileaks. This was mainly in response to the knee jerk reaction from Paypal and the major credit card companies Visa and Mastercard along with a bank in Switzerland that froze Julian Assange's funds. Flattr has continued to allow support for Wikileaks, you can view the profile here.

But the challenge was to create a logo that would incorporate the two companies. After a good few hours developing roughs and then tweaking the idea, the final logo is shown below:

The image has been created using Inkscape and is made entirely from scratch. Although both logos are widely available on the internet, the beauty of creating it from scratch as an svg (scale vector graphics) file is that it can be blown up to the size of huge banners without any distortion or pixelation. For viewing purposes the files on display in this post and flattrchattr's are png files, these will distort when stretched.

The article in question is located on flattrchattr.com, you can view it directly here

If you like the logo then you can make a flattr donation by either clicking on the flattr button at the bottom of this post or by clicking on the image itself within the flattrchattr post.

Flattr-Wikileaks logo

Crunchbang Statler R20110207 Review

Following my trial and review of Crunchbang Linux Statler Alpha 1 quite some time ago I recently decided to give the latest release R20110207 a try. Again, having little to no experience with openbox, I opted for the XFCE 64 bit version of the distro, all the versions are available here http://crunchbanglinux.org/downloads/statler/20110207/ . For those of you that may have tried Crunchbang in the past, the one main change within the distro is that it is now Debian based instead of Ubuntu based. People have different opinions on this, but for the majority of users the main thing you will notice is the software available in the repos is different, especially if your only previous experience is the Ubuntu software centre. But then again, if your a relative newbie then I'm not convinced that this is the correct for you. For the new users venturing out of Ubuntu for the first time then I would probably recommend gaining experience with Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Mandriva or Pardus. A potentially unstable system is great for learning and experience, but not so convenient for inexperienced users as an everyday system.



The first thing that you notice about Crunchbang is the speed: it's fast. This distro is one of the quickest implementations of the XFCE desktop I have come across. The desktop, by default now comes with a taskbar along the bottom, the workspace switcher is implemented in a much neater fashion, in the traditional way beside the newly added system tray. The Conky widget displays system information and some useful keyboard short-cuts is positioned in the upper right area of the screen. Whilst this may be useful to some users, I really would like there to be a quick way of disabling it.

The menu can be accessed via a right click on any part of the desktop, a new feature is a quicklaunch toolbar on the left hand side of the screen. This is hidden by default but appears when the user moves the mouse over to the left edge of the sceen. This can be easily modified to suit the users taste.

For such a nimble distro Crunchbang comes with a large variety of pre installed programs:
GIMP (photo editing)
Viewnoir (image viewer)
Hey Buddy (microblogging client)
xchat IRC (Chat client)
Chromium (web browser)
Abiword (word processor)
Gnumeric (spreadsheets)
VLC (media player)
Thunar (file manager)
Synaptic (software centre)

Whilst everybody has their own personal preference, this distro comes with a minimalist approach, but is highly usable out of the box.

Despite the inclusion of the Synaptic Software Centre, I've found that I have installed all my apps from the command line, Crunchbang opts for apt-get, I personally prefer aptitude, but this can be easily installed from either a Synaptic or using apt-get.

The overall system feels a lot more polished this time around. Philip Newborough (@corenominal on identi.ca) has done a really good job of tweaking this distro and having it run very smoothly. I've been using it for a month now and have not run into too many problems.

The biggest concern for the average user is the lack of pulseaudio. Most people may think 'who cares' but pulseaudio is needed to run Skype. I have had some problems trying to setup Skype on Crunchbang, but if I'm being truthful I haven't spent much time on it.

Being Debian based, there is a huge commitment to pushing free software. Getting MP3 and other non free media types to work isn't simply a matter of clicking 'ubuntu restricted extras' from the software centre. For those who are having problems with this I recently produced a guide here. But at the end of the day Crunchbang isn't design for the newbie. It will require a bit of knowledge to get everything setup to the way the end user likes.

It's a great starting point if you want to build your own Debian based distro, or is especially good at running older hardware. An improvement under the hood and smoother running has lead this to become my joint day to day distro, probably one of the main reasons I haven't fixed some of the pulseaudio issues is that I've already setup Skype on my Gentoo distro. If you haven't tried Crunchbang before or if it's been a while, then I recommend that you give this superfast, Debian based distro a go. It won't be to everybody's taste, but if your interested in creating your own distro and don't feel ready for Arch or Gentoo yet, then this may be a very good starting point.

Following my trial and review of Crunchbang Linux Statler Alpha 1 quite some time ago I recently decided to give the latest release R20110207 a try. Again, having little to no experience with openbox, I opted for the XFCE 64 bit version of the distro, all the versions are available here http://crunchbanglinux.org/downloads/statler/20110207/ . For those of you that may have tried Crunchbang in the past, the one main change within the distro is that it is now Debian based instead of Ubuntu based. People have different opinions on this, but for the majority of users the main thing you will notice is the software available in the repos is different, especially if your only previous experience is the Ubuntu software centre. But then again, if your a relative newbie then I'm not convinced that this is the correct for you. For the new users venturing out of Ubuntu for the first time then I would probably recommend gaining experience with Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Mandriva or Pardus. A potentially unstable system is great for learning and experience, but not so convenient for inexperienced users as an everyday system.



The first thing that you notice about Crunchbang is the speed: it's fast. This distro is one of the quickest implementations of the XFCE desktop I have come across. The desktop, by default now comes with a taskbar along the bottom, the workspace switcher is implemented in a much neater fashion, in the traditional way beside the newly added system tray. The Conky widget displays system information and some useful keyboard short-cuts is positioned in the upper right area of the screen. Whilst this may be useful to some users, I really would like there to be a quick way of disabling it.

The menu can be accessed via a right click on any part of the desktop, a new feature is a quicklaunch toolbar on the left hand side of the screen. This is hidden by default but appears when the user moves the mouse over to the left edge of the sceen. This can be easily modified to suit the users taste.

For such a nimble distro Crunchbang comes with a large variety of pre installed programs:
GIMP (photo editing)
Viewnoir (image viewer)
Hey Buddy (microblogging client)
xchat IRC (Chat client)
Chromium (web browser)
Abiword (word processor)
Gnumeric (spreadsheets)
VLC (media player)
Thunar (file manager)
Synaptic (software centre)

Whilst everybody has their own personal preference, this distro comes with a minimalist approach, but is highly usable out of the box.

Despite the inclusion of the Synaptic Software Centre, I've found that I have installed all my apps from the command line, Crunchbang opts for apt-get, I personally prefer aptitude, but this can be easily installed from either a Synaptic or using apt-get.

The overall system feels a lot more polished this time around. Philip Newborough (@corenominal on identi.ca) has done a really good job of tweaking this distro and having it run very smoothly. I've been using it for a month now and have not run into too many problems.

The biggest concern for the average user is the lack of pulseaudio. Most people may think 'who cares' but pulseaudio is needed to run Skype. I have had some problems trying to setup Skype on Crunchbang, but if I'm being truthful I haven't spent much time on it.

Being Debian based, there is a huge commitment to pushing free software. Getting MP3 and other non free media types to work isn't simply a matter of clicking 'ubuntu restricted extras' from the software centre. For those who are having problems with this I recently produced a guide here. But at the end of the day Crunchbang isn't design for the newbie. It will require a bit of knowledge to get everything setup to the way the end user likes.

It's a great starting point if you want to build your own Debian based distro, or is especially good at running older hardware. An improvement under the hood and smoother running has lead this to become my joint day to day distro, probably one of the main reasons I haven't fixed some of the pulseaudio issues is that I've already setup Skype on my Gentoo distro. If you haven't tried Crunchbang before or if it's been a while, then I recommend that you give this superfast, Debian based distro a go. It won't be to everybody's taste, but if your interested in creating your own distro and don't feel ready for Arch or Gentoo yet, then this may be a very good starting point.

Crunchbang Statler R20110207 Review