Until recently, I couldn’t care less about shiny new mobile phones. When mine broke or it was time to change to a new one due to my mobile operator contract ending, I simply went for the “free” phones that were somewhat compatible with Linux. My current phone, a Nokia 5310, can for example serve as a modem in Fedora vie USB connection or Bluetooth thanks to NetworkManager and it perfectly synchronizes with Banshee for my music and podcasts. It’s just slow as hell, but that’s another story.
Maemo or Android, N900 versus Hero
November 22nd, 2009Fedora: Configure the KDE Dashboard to behave like in OSX
November 1st, 2009One thing I absolutely loved on my Mac (OSX 10.4 Tiger at the time), was the way the Dashboard behaved. All other implementations of this feature I have seen on Windows Vista/7 and the default KDE 4.3 configuration sucked in comparison. For those of you unfamiliar with the OSX Dashboard concept, let me explain it to you…
EDIT: since KDE 4.4, options have been moved!
I’m giving KDE 4 a shot in Fedora 12
November 1st, 2009For many years, I have been an exclusive Gnome user for a couple of reasons:
- Its interface is pure and usable (aka. the nazi interface)
- It’s usable directly with the default Fedora installation, no tweaking needed
- Many of the UI ameliorations for PackageKit, NetworkManager and a ton of other small improvements have hit Gnome recently, thanks to all the major Linux distributions using it as their default desktop.
- I’m too lazy to try something else
So what’s wrong with Gnome? Well, nothing. I’m perfectly happy and productive with it, but there is also this shiny thing called KDE looking at me with sad little puppy eyes.
Catchall maintenance page with Apache
October 23rd, 2009Today I had to search quite a long time how to use Apache’s mod_rewrite to create a “maintenance” page for a web server. The goal was to:
- Redirect all URLs usually going to http://foo/go/bar to http://foo/maintenance-light.html
- Redirect all other URLs to http://foo/maintenance.html
All the maintenance pages are also using some CSS and images. Creating this redirection sounds really stupid and simple, but one thing wasn’t clear in the documentation and it took me quite a while to figure it out…every RewriteCond is only valid until the next RewriteRule! Not knowing that, I had infinite loops on the second RewriteRule…so I hope that this post will help someone else to avoid this problem.
The lines to add to your Apache config are:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance-light.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/img/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/css/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^/go/ /maintenance-light.html [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance-light.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/css/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/img/(.*)$
RewriteRule $ /maintenance.html [R,L]
The first line is there to simply enable the Apache rewrite engine. Then we have 4 lines to “exclude” some paths from being rewritten and finally we find the rewrite rule. Note that they are processed in order. The “L” flag instructs Apache to skip all the following RewriteRule statements as soon as the one is matched.
Skype 2.1 Beta for Linux
August 28th, 2009After quite a while, Skype has released a new version of their client for Linux (2.1 Beta). It FINALLY supports PulseAudio without having to tweak your whole sound system…It’s supported for Fedora 9+, Ubuntu 8+, Debian Lenny and OpenSUSE 11+.
Should yum/PackageKit go the Solaris way?
August 22nd, 2009Recently I got a new job as a sysadmin in a company running Solaris 10 servers. I’m not really used to this OS, so I’ve ordered some books and read a ton of articles about it. As always, it’s quite a challenge to switch from one OS to another; you have to learn its way of doing things, its admin tools, its legacy…
Solaris 10 feels particularly old compared to modern Linux distros like Fedora or enterprise-class Linux distros like CentOS/RHEL, but there are also a couple of very cool technologies included. This blog post is probably the first of a series dedicated to Linux -> Solaris migrations, and how we can learn things from Solaris to improve Linux.
Quake Live available for Linux and OSX
August 20th, 2009Good news! Quake Live is available for Linux and OSX since yesterday. For those who don’t know what it is, imagine Quake III playable in your browser with a simple Firefox/Safari plugin. Oh, and it’s free too. http://www.quakelive.com
New 64-Bit Flash plugin from Adobe
August 15th, 2009I didn’t notice it before, but Adobe has released a new version of their 64-Bit Flash plugin for Linux. I quote: “The 64-bit Flash Player 10 alpha refresh for Linux was released on July 30, 2009.”
Grab it on the Adobe Labs page and follow my instructions on this blogpost to install it. these instructions are valid for Fedora 10, 11 and basically any 64-Bit Linux OS.
CentOS 5.3 on HP DL380G6 NIC weirdness
August 5th, 2009Recently I ordered a new server for my company, a HP DL380G6 to be precise. We already have the previous generation of these servers (G5) and are very happy about them. It’s a beast with 5 network cards (4 usable by the OS, 1 for ILO management); in our setup we only need one active NIC, so I went to the BIOS and deactivated all NICs except the first one…then I installed CentOS 5.3.
I’m not really sure about it, but there seems to be a bug in the current BIOS revision which has a rather annoying consequence: if you only activate ONE NIC in the BIOS, the OS can’t see it. As soon as you activate 2+ NICs, the OS sees all of them. And by “see” I mean that they even don’t show up in an “lspci”… Odd. This probably also happens on RHEL 5.3, which is an officially supported OS by HP on this machine.
Here are the culprits:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
02:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
Banshee + Podcasts + Nokia phone = epic win
July 30th, 2009The last time I tried the Banshee music player it was around Fedora 8/9 and it was very buggy with a lot of crashes. So until now I was using the default Rhythmbox application provided with Fedora 11/Gnome to listen to music and manage my podcasts. To be honest, Rhythmbox was a bit flawed for my use case as it didn’t allow to synchronize my podcasts to my music player (a Nokia 5310 phone); I was using an rsync script for that. Recently, things went downhill…DAAP music sharing worked when it wanted to work and with the latest update, Rhythmbox has bricked all my podcast feeds. Great.
So it was the perfect opportunity to look for another application…it turns out that Banshee is now a really great and mature product (if you don’t mind installing the Mono stack). It supports smart playlists, automatic cover art download, dynamic music library update, videos using the gstreamer back-end, online radios, podcasts AND an automatic synchronization to my Nokia phone! Wooohooo…the only drawback in comparison to Rhythmbox is that it doesn’t act as a DAAP music server.
