dbaranski.net

For some reason the Pidgin messaging program that comes with Ubuntu seems to think users want to receive messages from the entire world. That's not necessarily a bad thing but there are too many spam bots out there to make this particular feature quite annoying.

Luckily it's a simple fix to turn off said spam (thanks to Techtites article)

1. Run pidgin and open the buddy list window.
2. Go to Tools > Privacy.
3. Choose the account that's bothering you with spam (in my case MSN) and select the desired contact options (again, in my case it was Allow only the users on my contact list)
4. Enjoy spam free living.

If things over at the Server tutorials section seem messy it's because I'm redoing that part right now.

I decided to lay out the pages as a 'drupal book' instead of just basic pages. That gives the section more navigation and layout options.. I'll really have to do an article on using the Drupal CMS. I've tried many different CMS systems and Drupal is, in my opinion, the best on the open source market (and with a very active community too).

I've been running srcds servers on Linux for over a year now and I could say that I'm modestly happy with the support and software that Valve gives to the community. But more frequently then not (even over the course of one year) Valve has repeatedly broken its own server binaries multiple times and released them to the public as "usable".

To me this seems rather stunning that such a well sized company could possibly produce software so unstable. Though mind you that building computer games is exponentially harder then other types of software there is still a line that must be drawn!

The mind boggling thing is there are many simple solutions to this problem that once implemented could be re-used forever! Note that there are two sides to Valve's software: the server side and the client side. The client side software has seen its own share of problems but today I'm going to focus mainly on the server aspect as it goes generally untouched. I, personally, believe that server side software must be far more stable then the client simply because no server equals no players. So here's a small list of things I've got qualms with that Valve could have avoided from the get go:

Exhibit A)
Crashing server binaries after a just freshly released update.

Now this has happened MORE then frequently and can be avoided by some testing setups. First thing that comes to mind is the use of Mozilla's Tinderbox or Jira's Bamboo systems to set up a testing network with various OS distributions that constantly rebuild and/or run the servers. This would show most problems instantly and after initial setup there is little maintenance.

Exhibit B)
Features no one asked for are put in before features that are asked for

Now this has always bothered me so I'm going to stray from the "server side banter" into a general one for a second. I'm a subscriber to the Valve mailing list and day in and day out people request the SAME features. For example, a way to connect to their own left 4 dead servers and play versus mode.. These useful requests seem to get bypassed for other needless improvements which in no way help the game become more playable. I'm not entirely sure why these requests are passed on but it would be good to have some feedback as to why they are passed on. (Except to make it look more like an Xbox release..)

Hopefully Valve will shape up a bit with it's client base and start telling us when things will be implemented and when stable binaries will become the norm. Otherwise they make great games :)

For quite some time I simply couldn't get Ubuntu to recognize my bluetooth adapter! I knew it worked because when I got the adapter and tried the provided software (Which just happened to be Bluesoleil) everything worked. After deciding not to use the proprietary software i removed it and the adapter stopped working.

running the general comand to start up bluetooth only gave a cryptic message..

$ bluetoothd -d -n
Can't open HCI socket: Address family not supported by protocol (97)

After googling around lead me to the fact that some kernel modules wern't loaded for bluetooth. "Heh" I though since it WAS working fine before. So I tried to enable the missing modules as per some other instructions:

$ sudo modprobe bluetooth
FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.27-9-generic/kernel/net/bluetooth/
bluetooth.ko': No such file or directory

again.. more head scratching.. so after going to where the missing bluetooth.ko file should be located i find bluetooth.ko.bak instead. since there is no bluetooth.ko file I just removed the .bak extension and retried modprobe again.

$ sudo modprobe

Success! As to why it was a .bak file I had NO idea untill i googled it. I found another user with the same .bak file which commented on bluesoleil doing the move and I had found the culprit of my bluetooth despair.

It seems that for some time now my website has been recieving a healthy dose of spam in every comment box and regular comments by real people were going un-noticed!  For those of you who commented, I'm sorry for not noticing your comments sooner!  I've implemented a few things to prevent this from ever happening again (Like the use of mollom to smite the evil bots!).

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 comes a relatively radical change from the norm; The obsolescence of the xorg.conf file!

The xorg.conf file is now replaced with the use of .fdi files that can be "plugged" and "unplugged" without the need to restart the computer.  More information on the usage of these fdi files can be found on Ubuntu's wiki site. Overall they provide more flexibility then the previous xorg.conf syntax, make use of XML, and allow for "matching" or "pairing" if the system has enabled components.

Here's a .fdi file I whipped up for my touchpad that I called touchpad.fdi and placed in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy folder as per the wiki's instructions.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.Device" type="string">/dev/psaux</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.Protocol" type="string">auto-dev</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizEdgeScroll" type="string">0</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">on</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.FingerLow" type="string">7</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.FingerHigh" type="string">8</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.MinSpeed" type="string">0.60</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxSpeed" type="string">1.10</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.AccelFactor" type="string">0.030</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

If you're trying to install Zend Studio on a 64 bit install of Ubuntu you will run into trouble unless you install the  libc6-i386 and ia32-libs.  Here is the command you need:

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 ia32-libs

(This information came from the ubuntu forums)

If you've ever used the GNOME CPU Scaling Monitor before you will know that it does not allow the switching of stepping speeds or governors off the bat.

Thanks to Carthik it is only a matter of entering one command in your console and selecting the option 'Yes' to enable said scaling:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

enjoy :)

I've re built the rcon connection so that it's a lot faster now.. (There are no slow page loads anymore)  And I've also figured out how to read all logaddress information from the server.  With that I hope to make a relatively decent running console in the rcon tool.
 
More updates to follow as I do them.  Otherwise check out the remote srcds management tool at http://rcon.dbaranski.net and report bugs / requests at http://rcon.dbaranski.net/trac

I enjoy using Ubuntu as my OS of choice.  But there are always a few quirks to work out to make things "just right".  Here's a short list of changes I've done to make Ubuntu work better for me.
Wireless light
The wireless light always remains turned off.  My laptop (and probably most other dv4000's) uses the ipw2200 wireless card made by Intel.  This card is actually supported very well in the open source community thanks to Intel releasing the driver code.  Here is the command to get this working:

$ sudo echo "options ipw2200 led=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/ipw2200

Mute light
The Mute LED never worked on my laptop.  The muting itself worked fine, but the light never turned on.  Here's a fix to solve this problem.

$ sudo echo "options snd-intel8x0 ac97_quirk=mute_led" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options

More information on different quirk options is available on this forum topic.
More information to follow as I remember / do it!