February 15, 2009
Ubuntu pleasent surprise

As I said, I got a new machine a couple of days… I have been trying to get the ndiswrapper to work on openSuse for about 2 days with no luck what so ever, I got to a point that I even though not to install Linux mainly because I don’t what to have an Ethernet cable from one point to the living room to the other one :(

As a last resort I decided to install Ubuntu, mainly because Ed has always said is better than openSuse and also because I have heard good things about its user friendliness. After the installation I could not boot either Windows or Ubuntu, but that might have been my fault (I had a USB stick plugged in and the BIOS did not like that :P ). and I’ve got to say, kudos to the guys from canonical, your ndiswrapper support is excellent!!!!! It took me around 5 mins to connect to the wireless (include getting the dammed WPA key) to the wireless!!!!

The conclusion is that I wont be using openSuse but Ubuntu and I ma not going to try Solaris, is to much work.

9:36pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zn5Hby4hsE3
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: linux Ubuntu openSuse life 
October 24, 2008
Flock on OpenSuse 11.0

I recently decided to start using Flock for my everyday web needs. Flock 2.0 is based on Mozilla Firefox 3.0 which means that I am going to have the same great surfing experience but spiced up with the web 2.0 feeling.

On one hand Flock is really easy to install in Windows and Mac OS X since it comes with the traditional Setup.exe for Windows and the .dmg image for Mac. On the other hand they have made a very strange choice with the Linux distribution. I have not been able to find the source files to compile (well, I did not spend to much time on it anyway) or any .rpm, .db files at all.

The installation on Linux is very straight forward, but nevertheless not the usual one, in case anyone out there is too lazy to find out by themselves, here is how to do it.

  1. Download Flock from here

  2. Extract the file doing (I always do it in a two step process, but it can be done in one)

    cd /path/to/download/
bunzip *bz2
    and 
    tar -xvvf *tar

  3. Login as the root user and move the newly extract flock folder to /opt by using:

    su
passwd
mv flock /opt/

  4. The next step is to create a quick launch icon by creating a text file on the desktop called flock.desktop and copy pasting this code:

    [Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Flock
Comment=Flock Web Browser
Exec="/opt/flock/flock-browser"
GenericName=Flock Web Browser
Icon=/opt/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
Path=/opt/flock/
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Flock Web Browser

After following the instructions you can use flock and launch it from you desktop, you can also drag&drop the icon to you Computer menu

12:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zn5Hby3M3AU
Filed under: geeky Linux internet opensuse opensource application flock installation app 
September 4, 2008
On setting up the server…

With two more days before I get back to Madrid, and from there go to Manchester, I finally managed to set up the new server just as I wanted it to be.

My first challenge was to find a host service that would allow me to use OpenSuSe or SuSe. I wanted to be able to have OpenSuse because my idea was to use a Mono project and do some Mono based applications that I wanted to have running on the server. I have tried to install the latest Mono implementation in different linux distros (CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu) and it has always been a headache to do so, or at least to get what I wanted. Because Mono is a Novell project it is easier to install on a *SusSe installation and I am not willing to waste my time with an other system :P

My host service just installs the OS for you which means that I had to do all the dirty work to get everything up and running, as usual the first thing to do was to add all the repositories I needed/wanted:

zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/ oss
zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/10.2/repo/non-oss/
non-oss
zypper sa http://download.suse.com/update/10.2/ update
zypper sa http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64 google
zypper sa http://packman.mirrors.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/10.2/ packman
zypper sa http://www.go-mono.com/download-stable/suse-102-i586 mono
zypper sa 
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Community/openSUSE_10.2/ 
gnome-community
zypper sa 
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/STABLE/openSUSE_10.2/ 
gnome-stable
zypper sa 
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Java:/addon/openSUSE_10.2/ java

After executing all the above, I updated the system with:

zypper -r update

Once I updated the system I just had to install mono, which is very simple using zypper:

zypper in mono-complete

And tried to install the tool I was going to use to manage the server. My first attempt was to use Cpanel. I like Cpanel because I have used it before in an other server I have and I wanted to give it a go on this new one. Well after a number of tries (I think 4 or 5) I gave up. Installing CPanel was not the hardest step, but getting it to work as it should was incredibly hard. I believe the main problem resides on the fact tat the CPanel developers are focused on 3 systems:

  • RedHat Enterprise
  • CentOS
  • BSD

And the leave the rest of us out of the equation… This means that it assumes a number of paths that are not used in all the different distros and after my hard work it clearly does not use the right ones on SuSe… Dammed, I wasted around 4/5 hours of my life.

If you check my Twitter you will see that I was heavily complaining about CPanels’ installation and thankfully Steve pointed me to Webmin (and told me not to spell gym the Spanish way: gim, thanks Steve :D ).Webmin installation on OpenSuse is straigh foward:


wget http://garr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin-1.430-1.noarch.rpm


rpm -ivh webmin*

Once Webmin has been installed it can be accessed through port 10000. Remember that you have to open that port in the Firewall, otherwise you will look as stupid as I did for a couple of minutes :P, I next step is to sort out everything for the virtual hosts etc… For the next day or so I’ll be reading Webmin documentation to get all my domains correctly set with the email addresses etc…

10:55am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zn5Hby2vn0m
Filed under: opensuse server setup howto 
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