Make a text file with the following type of content as ‘svnignore.txt’

folder1
cache
uploads
.project
*.txt


Then run this to update the SVN ignore properties

svn propset svn:ignore -F svnignore.txt .


With the new release of Ubuntu 11.10 I managed to give it a full week of release before going ahead and updating anything, which is good going for me. I went ahead and updated from 11.04, which I thought was a bit of  a let down. I’m not a big fan of Unity, but was able to use Classic Gnome in 11.04 still which was nice.

I’m still not a big fan of Unity, so the fact it’s basically forced on you when you upgrade again wasn’t great. You can still find a way to go back to Classic Gnome, but they’re no longer supporting it and I thought I’d best find something else. In my search I had a quick look at XCFE but I decided it wasn’t for me before I even installed it.

So I’ve gone to Gnome Shell – It’s a lot… different. I’ve spent a few hours with it and have got around most of the main complaints that people have it, and like the idea of increasing number of virtual screens depending on workflow, so I’m going to stick with it for a bit. It’s pretty slick, and I like pretty slick stuff.

Doesn't look much like linux to me

I’ve learnt 3 things from this:

• Unity still sucks. That’s my opinion, and I’m right on this one.
• I won’t be upgrading my work laptop any time soon – need the familiarity to remain productive, and can’t spend too much time faffing about trying to get stuff working since I get paid to do my job, clearly.
• The original upgrade on my home laptop had left me with my 802.11a/n (5 Ghz) Wifi not connecting, 802.11b/g/n (2.4Ghz) are fine. A cursory glance at Google didn’t show too many other people having this problem, and I’ve done a fair amount of driver blacklisting in the past which could have contributed so I went ahead and did a clean install on a spare partition, as you do. This has got exactly the same Wifi problem which means I’m actually going to have to investigate it, but this is a great live-standby setup for future upgrades until I know what I’m going into. As it is I’m staying on my clean install and will ditch the old eventually.

Not Sexy but Better than the Old Server

A few things I noted during the first few weeks of running XBMC Live installed on the HP Microserver:

100% CPU Usage

Lots of old posts on various forums about this that can lead you down all sorts of dead ends. For me, I was running Nvidia Drivers 195 which came with the XBMC Live install; updating these sorted it out. Now processor usage is around 25% tops when playing back music/video.

Find out which version you’re currently on:
cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version

Upgrade with this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo reboot

Sleep/Standby

HP have confirmed that ACPI S3 Standby Mode will not be supported. You can try, but you will fail, it would need to be available and supported in the BIOS. There are some hacked BIOS versions out there that will enable AHCI for the ODD SATA connection, but nothing as far as ACPI goes. If this changes in the future I’d love to know about it.

Let me know if you find any other useful tips on this, there’s a ton of people running these boxes now.

Old Server. Not Sexy.

For some time now I’ve been wondering whether to chop my existing media centre PC in for something a bit more lounge friendly. It was a bit noisey, even with a low noise PSU and to be honest a Novatech Desktop box sitting in the corner of the room isn’t the most attractive room decoration.

My media content has always sat on the same box that I ran XBMC, and I’ve always been happy with it that way. Some decide to split front/back end with NAS for media storage and something light like XBMC on Apple TV 2 to feed the TV, but I like having a single box solution – only one thing to go wrong.

With this in mind I drew up a list of specs (in no real order):

• Able to handle 1080p content
• Nice to look at
• Quiet as it sits in the lounge
• Capacity for on-board storage – Want to keep existing SATA drives
• Surround Sound – Ideally through optical output
• Able to run my preferred media application, XBMC

Enter the HP Microserver

Not Sexy but Better than the Old Server

As luck would have it, a mate of mine mentioned the HP Microserver. It’s basically designed to suit the needs of Small Business, as with the recommended Operating Systems (SBS / Server 2008 R2 or Redhat) so it can sit in the corner holding important documents and handling email all day.

Basic Specs for the box are:

• It’s Quite Small
• AMD Athlon II Neo N36L / 1.3GHz
• 1GB DDR3 SDRAM
• HDD 1x 250GB
• 4 x Front Accessable SATA HDD Bays
• Gigabit LAN

The server retails for £229.96 inc VAT, which sounds great, but then you get £100 cashback! That’s a rolling offer which I think has always been there, and always will.

I did a bit of research in the usual places and reports came back that although it’s a low power box, adding a Low Profile GPU and something to handle sound, 1080 playback should be achievable.

Nail in my thought-process coffin was that it’s available from ebuyer.com, Quickfind 253305. I’ve never had a problem with ebuyer, and even though I could have shopped around for a better deal, £130 sounds OK to me so I went for it.

It's got a fan on it so it won't cook

Graphics

While waiting for the box to arrive I did a bit more research and settled on the ASUS 512Mb GeForce 210 Low Profile Graphics Card.

I’d read a few reports of heat possibly being a problem in the case, and the size of the server meant that most of the passive cooled (heatsink) cards don’t fit into the box. You also have to make sure you get a Low Profile PCI-E card as well otherwise the case gets in the way and you have to return your card that doesn’t fit.

The card went into the server no problem, although the low profile bracket that comes with it is still in the box since it would have occupied the space on the wrong side of the card. Not a problem, in fact some extra ventilation for the card through the gaps around the side.

Turtle Beach Micro II - Pokey

Sound

I could have gone for low profile PCI-E again for the sound, but had read good things about the Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro II, which should be plug and play as far as XBMC is concerned. This proved to be true, after about 4 hours of messing about with XBMC / TV / AMP / Remote Controls / Linux command line and config files.

Learnt an important lesson about checking your Amp is set to decode DTS/Dolby Digital even if the only way to do that is using a remote control you don’t use and has no batteries in it.
Now that it is, digital passthrough is working a treat.

XBMC

I love XBMC, it’s been my choice of media player since the good old days on the XBOX. In fact I’m sure I still have the XBOX somewhere…

Testing with various XBMC builds was varied, although the initial install of Ubuntu 11.04, following by XBMC install from PPA wasn’t so good. Menu control was sluggish and HD playback choppy and glitchy, both technical terms.

Following this I tried installation to hard drive from XBMC Live (10.1 Dharma, which is current stable). This was a lot better, clearly the optimisations they’ve done has taken a lot of hard work out of the process, so there’s no need to install Ubuntu first. I like having a Desktop available, usually for nxserver sessions, but this works a lot better if you install XBMC Live first, then the ubuntu-desktop.

It’s now doing 1080p no problem thanks to VDPAU doing all the hard work, processor usage bobs about at around 15% and sound is kept entirely digital (ok, to a point) which is the way it should be. I considered getting additional RAM when I placed the order, but surprisingly it doesn’t look like it needs it.

There were a few teething problems; flickering graphics on the start up process which I’ve spent hours looking into and trying to resolve. It turns out everyone else in the world has the same problems and there is no solution – but now I’ve run all the Ubuntu updates, it seems to have sorted itself out. Either that or one of the hundred config changes I made over the weekend actually did work. Such is life.

cssh - Better than doing same damn thing 3 times

Again, there is a lot of information about this elsewhere but I drop this here as a guide for myself. This is written for Ubuntu, tweak according to linux distro.

Install cssh with:

$ aptitude install cssh

Generate default configuration:

$ cssh -u > $HOME/.csshrc

Edit config file ~/.csshrc – editing clusters and set cluster name with host details:

$vi ~/.csshrc

clusters = dave demo
dave = user@81.137.222.215:8021 user@81.137.222.215:8022
demo = beans@47.83.249.70 carrots@47.83.249.71 peas@47.83.249.76

Connect to cluster:

$ cssh dave

Enter something safe like:

$ date
$ uptime

References

http://linux.die.net/man/1/cssh
http://www.debianadmin.com/ssh-on-multiple-servers-using-cluster-ssh.html

ssh -vvv user@host - If you run into problems

There are many guides on doing this, I’m just dropping it here as quick reminder to myself.

On server1…

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh
$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Copy to server2; then on server2…

$ cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
$ rm -f id_rsa.pub
$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh
$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

If you’re running Centos 6, you might run into bug 4959 which prevents this working.
Workaround (on server2)

$ restorecon -R -v /root/.ssh

References:
http://bugs.centos.org/print_bug_page.php?bug_id=4959
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Network/SecuringSSH

You got an invite to Google Music and found out they don’t do a linux client? It’s ok… run it under Wine. Here’s how you do it.

• Install wine from the wine ppa with these commands in terminal
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install wine1.3
  (wait til it installs)
• Download the Music Manager folder from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?n4k334kki094d51
• Unzip the folder, and run the application under Wine. That’s it.

Thanks to the chaps at ubuntu forums for the tips. Let me know how you get on below, this worked fine for me and I’m now uploading my collection.

Update 29-06-2011 - I ran into problems during uploading my music after around 2000 tracks. Google Music Manager would start, run for around 30 seconds, then die with an error that it was unable to continue. I couldn’t find a solution to this so instead went down the Virtual Machine route, installing Virtualbox 4 and Windows XP Guest. This is working fine and Music Manager is now working without any problems.

Screenshot - Version 0.1

Should Totally Be?!

It’s a conceptual website: Should Totally Be is a glorified chatbox. You enter a thing that’s pissed you off recently, and what you would like done to that thing. Press the “Go Button”, and it displays it to the world making you feel slightly less angry than you were before you arrived at the website. It’s entirely pointless really, but most good things are. In future I might tag on comment threading since flame-wars always appear to be popular, although that goes against the initial point of keeping it extremely simple.

Smoke and Mirrors

Technically we’re talking about a heading and a few form fields, with some database stuff at the back-end to store the input values. It will then display recent entries in the bottom half of the screen, and update often so you can see the list of entries live-update. Web 2.0 you know. Coding will be done in php because it’s what I know, although in redevelopment I’m going to try and keep things tidy with a MVC approach to separate inner workings from the presentation bits. It’s hosted on my existing shared hosting plan which seems to let me have unlimited domains, databases, disk space and bandwidth which is dead handy.

This sounds great, will it take long?

Most likely. The test project will rise, like a phoenix from the ashes to become moderately infinitely better than it was while I hopefully (a) finish it this time, (b) learn some good stuff about web development. I plan to post updates of stuff I learn on here to harvest traffic, and by that I mean share my learning. Feel free to check back for updates, but they may be few and far between.

Although it’s entirely possible at some point I may go on another holiday and forget all about it.