Bring on the Bling

Last night I gave in and decided to try out some desktop bling for my computer. My pimp'd out desktop can be seen below:



All I had to do was to enable compiz since with Foresight it comes installed by default just not enabled. I also wanted to check out Avant Window Navigator, it is the dockbar that is on the bottom of the screenshot. I also wanted to check out Affinity, it is the new menu that is in the top left corner of the desktop. If you want to install either of them on Foresight use the following commands:


sudo conary update avant-window-navigator
sudo conary update affinity


However, I do have some issues with compiz so if anybody out there has any solutions please let me know. Here are my issues:

• When I switch desktops with the Cube, i.e. alt+ctl+(left or right), it doesn't really switch desktops it just minimizes the open applications and then they will reappear after the cube spins around for the number of desktops I have, so after 4 spins. So to sum up I can't switch desktop with keyboard shortcuts.


• The desktop switcher in the bottom right corner will not display what applications are open on each desktop. It works fine without compiz enabled.

UPDATE:
I fixed Avant Window Manager to the correct name Avant-window-navigator. Sorry for any confusion.

Chicago Gnome User Group

I am interested in starting up a Gnome User Group in Chicago. If you or your friends are interested in joining/helping out with this group please join us in #gnome-chi on irc.gnome.org. If you know any Gnome developers or fan boys in the Chicagoland area let me know if they would be interested in our group.

Lights Camera Action

Videos of some previous presentations done at Chicago GLUG meetings have been posted here on our website. The current videos are for the following presentations: Dirvish by John Quigley, VSFTPD Virtual Users by myself and Objective-C by Yacin Nadji. Look for more videos of our presentations and events in the future.

[UPDATE]
The videos are licensed under the GFDL, so the videos are free to distribute in accordance with that license.

My Homepage Has Returned

It has been awhile since I had a homepage up, but now I have one back up. My homepage can be found here. I finally just decided to setup Apache on my current machine since my old server that 'died' has been robbed for parts to get my current machine back up and running. There will be updates to my homepage, once I get my blog software finished and move my blog away from blogger.

TurboGears: Gearing Up the Web

Today (Saturday, April 14th), I will be giving a presentation on TurboGears to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group. If you would like to come to the meeting and hear my excellent presentation, the meeting is at Centro (444 N. Wells Suite 601 Chicago IL, 60610) at 3:00 pm. The other presentations for this meeting are Brewing and ZipIt Wireless Messenger. Yes, brewing does not deal first hand with GNU/Linux but what goes better with GNU/Linux than beer, ala 'Free As In Beer'.

If you would like to check out the demo code that I will be using for my presentation you can check out the code from my SVN repo:

svn co http://guido.specialkevin.com/svn/TurboGallery/TurboGallery-Demo

If you don't have/like svn you can download it here. If you would like to download my presentation slides you get them here(pdf, odp).

Hope to see you there.

[Update]
Sorry I forgot to give Nadav Samet credit for the demo code. Here wrote TurboGallery demo to show off the power of TurboGears during a presentation that he did and I really liked his example. Thanks again Nadav.

Chicago GLUG Groups and Services

This post is to inform everyone of the various services that the Chicago GLUG has to offer. If you notice that I am missing or we should add a certain a group or service please leave a comment with a link and a brief description.

Groups and Services

Last.fm Group

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you. So what our group does is that it combines all the track info from our members and generates charts based on our music tracks. It also generates a last.fm radio station based upon our track info. If you already have a last.fm account please join our group and tell your friends, if you don't have an account what are you waiting for.

Flickr Group

Flickr is a service that allows user to upload and host images. Our group is used to share images taken by our members at our events, screenshots and other just nerdy pictures. For example we have photos in our group from Stallman's talk and some of our meetings thanks to Jordan. If you already have a flickr account please join our group and share your photos with us. Also on a related note, if anybody has a digital camera and would be willing to take pictures at our meetings and maybe even the after-meeting hang out it would be greatly appreciated.

Facebook Group

Facebook is an English-language social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone to join with an email address that connects them to a participating network, such as their high school, place of employment or geographic region. If you have a facebook account please join our group we will send out party invites for our meetings through facebook just so we can notify as many people as possible of our meetings.

Mugshot Group

Mugshot is a community software system created by Red Hat. Unlike social networking websites, it also has a desktop client component. It is meant to facilitate real-world interactions with friends, and make one's normal computer use more social. Current features include 'Web Swarm' which lets users share web links and join in conversations about them, and 'Music Radar', which displays which songs a user is listening to, and allows conversations about the song. Many features are planned, including 'TV Party'. Mugshot is free software. Most of the client code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Various parts of the server code are distributed under the GPL, the Open Software License 3.0, the Apache License, and the MIT License, all of which are free software licences. So if you already have a mugshot account please join our group. If you need an invitation just let me know and I can send you an invite.

Google Calendar

Here is the google calendar for our group. Currently there are not that many items added to the group but we hope to fix this very shortly. This calendar is not just for our events but any events that might be interesting to our members. For instance, Ubuntu Chicago meetings, ChiPy meetings, UIC LUG meetings, Conferences in the area and other such things.

IRC
#chiglug on irc.oftc.net
#chiglug-server on irc.oftc.net

Those are our two irc channels the first one is our general channel. This is where a majority of our members hang out. Please stop by and say Hi, we won't bite. The second channel is for discussion of work being done on getting everything back running on our server. If you are interested in helping out with working on our server than please join that channel.

Chump
Chump RSS Feed

Chump is an IRC bot that pulls urls that are posted in our IRC channel and generates a website and rss feed containing the links. If you are in our IRC channel and need help working with Chump just ask someone that is in the channel.

Planet ChiGLUG
Planet ChiGLUG Feed

Planet is a blog aggregator that pulls in from blogs of local GNU/Linux enthusiast. If you would like your blog added to the planet, just send me a link to your blog and I will add it.

Mailing Lists

We currently have 2 mailing list: Announce and Discuss. The Announce list is just used to send out notification of meetings. The Discuss list is a general discussion list. Please sign up for the Announce list at a minimum it is a very low traffic mailing list and that way you will keep up with any changes that might arise to a meeting at the last minute.

Chicago GLUG Groups and Services

This post is to inform everyone of the various services that the Chicago GLUG has to offer. If you notice that I am missing or we should add a certain a group or service please leave a comment with a link and a brief description.

Groups and Services

Last.fm Group

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you. So what our group does is that it combines all the track info from our members and generates charts based on our music tracks. It also generates a last.fm radio station based upon our track info. If you already have a last.fm account please join our group and tell your friends, if you don't have an account what are you waiting for.

Flickr Group

Flickr is a service that allows user to upload and host images. Our group is used to share images taken by our members at our events, screenshots and other just nerdy pictures. For example we have photos in our group from Stallman's talk and some of our meetings thanks to Jordan. If you already have a flickr account please join our group and share your photos with us. Also on a related note, if anybody has a digital camera and would be willing to take pictures at our meetings and maybe even the after-meeting hang out it would be greatly appreciated.

Facebook Group

Facebook is an English-language social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone to join with an email address that connects them to a participating network, such as their high school, place of employment or geographic region. If you have a facebook account please join our group we will send out party invites for our meetings through facebook just so we can notifiy as many people as possible of our meetings.

Mugshot Group

Mugshot is a community software system created by Red Hat. Unlike social networking websites, it also has a desktop client component. It is meant to facilitate real-world interactions with friends, and make one's normal computer use more social. Current features include 'Web Swarm' which lets users share web links and join in conversations about them, and 'Music Radar', which displays which songs a user is listening to, and allows conversations about the song. Many features are planned, including 'TV Party'. Mugshot is free software. Most of the client code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Various parts of the server code are distributed under the GPL, the Open Software License 3.0, the Apache License, and the MIT License, all of which are free software licences. So if you already have a mugshot account please join our group. If you need an invitation just let me know and I can send you an invite.

Google Calendar

Here is the google calendar for our group. Currently there are not that many items added to the group but we hope to fix this very shortly. This calendar is not just for our events but any events that might be interesting to our members. For instance, Ubuntu Chicago meetings, ChiPy meetings, UIC LUG meetings, Conferences in the area and other such things.

IRC
#chiglug on irc.oftc.net
#chiglug-server on irc.oftc.net

Those are our two irc channels the first one is our general channel. This is where a majority of our members hang out. Please stop by and say Hi, we won't bite. The second channel is for discussion of work being done on getting everything back running on our server. If you are interested in helping out with working on our server than please join that channel.

Chump
Chump RSS Feed

Chump is an IRC bot that pulls urls that are posted in our IRC channel and generates a website and rss feed containing the links. If you are in our IRC channel and need help working with Chump just ask someone that is in the channel.

Planet ChiGLUG
Planet ChiGLUG Feed

Planet is a blog aggregator that pulls in from blogs of local GNU/Linux enthusiest. If you would like your blog added to the planet, just send me a link to your blog and I will add it.

Mailing Lists

We currently have 2 mailing list: Announce and Discuss. The Announce list is just used to send out notification of meetings. The Discuss list is a general discussion list. Please sign up for the Announce list at a minimum it is a very low traffic mailling list and that way you will keep up with any changes that might arise to a meeting at the last minute.

A month with Epiphany

I decided that since Foresight has decided to have epiphany be the default browser I figured that I would give it try for a month and see how I like it. Today is the first day of this experiment, I have tried epiphany out before but I always find myself going back to firefox whenever I run into a problem. This time I am going to try and fix any issues that I run into. After using epiphany for a couple of hours I have generated an initial list of issues if anybody has any suggestions about fixing them they will be well appreciated.

ISSUES

• Session Saving: This is a big thing I miss from firefox. When epiphany opens it would be nice if it could open the tabs that were previously open.
  
• Have Cursor in Address Bar When New Tab Open: I would like to have the cursor be in the address bar when I open a new tab. This can be accomplished if I have the default home page be blank, but I would like to do this with a webpage set as the default home page.
  

If you have any solutions to these issues please leave a comment with the solution. Also if you know of any must need epiphany extensions please leave a comment with them.

March Madness

No, this post is not about NCAA March Madness even though maybe it should be since SIU was kicking ass until they ran into Kansas. Sorry to all my friends back home and down at SIU, I was hoping that Kansas would lose. This post is about the fun I have had so far this March. Some of you out there might have wonder why you haven't seen me online for a couple weeks and those of you who know me know that it would take a lot to keep me offline that long. Well I spent the beginning of March in the hospital, I was in there from March 1st to March 19th. I will use this post to inform everyone of what exactly happened.

The story begins March 1st when I went to the emergency room with sharp pains in my gut. The pain turned out to be due to gallstones. This in itself is rare for a man to get, let alone at the age of 21. So the doctors were already interested in my case and then their fun just continued. During a routine procedure before removing my gallbladder a complication arose, I contracted pancreatitis this only happens 5-7% of the time. So I am really starting to feel special after this considering everything that is happening is unlikely. But of course I am specialKevin so my fun was not over yet. My doctors noticed that my platelet levels were low and I was starting to bruise and my nose was bleeding and I had acute kidney failure. These were not symptoms of the pancreatitis but of a very rare blood condition known as Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura or TTP. TTP occurs in 3.5 people per million every year. TTP is such a rare and interesting illness that it was featured in an episode of House M.D. (Episode #119 Kids), not only this but the episode actually replayed while I was in the hospital suffering from TTP. The treatment for the TTP is plasmapheresis, where the take out my plasma and replace it with plasma from 17 other people. But another connection to House M.D. is that the plasmapheresis team that treated me was consulted by the staff of House M.D. on the procedure of plasmapheresis. I still have to get outpatient treatments of plasmapheresis to treat the TTP but it is nice to be out of the hospital, especially since that is not how I wanted to spend my birthday and spring break.

I would now like to thank everybody for their wishes and prayers. Also thanks to all my friends who came to visit me in the hospital and help to make the best out of my birthday.

Cooking with Conary

Tonight I had some free time between school and work, so I gave some conary love to some programs. I first upgraded rTorrent to version 0.7.1 this was in much need as the previous version was 0.6.*. If you would like to install rTorrent and run a conary based system, i.e. Foresight 1.0 just run:

UPDATE
sudo conary update --install-label specialk.rpath.org@rpl:devel update rtorrent

I also gave some needed care to Tilda, this is upgraded to 0.9.4. Some new features of this release is a cleaned up preferences screen, desktop file so it gets added to the menu. Here is a screenshot of tilda in action. I am looking for someone running compiz to help test out tilda, if you are interested just let me know in #foresight on freenode or #tilda on oftc. Just look for specialKevin in either channel. As usual if you want to install tilda and you should, just run:

UPDATE
sudo conary update --install-label specialk.rpath.org@rpl:devel update tilda

UPDATE
Sorry for the confuse for anybody trying to install tilda or rtorrent, I fixed the command to install tilda or rtorrent. You need to use the --install-label flag so it uses my repo to grab the dependencies of the main program.

Pay Your Dues

Tristan posted an article about Microsoft, Novell and the Linux kernel. In the article, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that every user of the open source Linux system could owe his company money for using its intellectual property. Tristan then came to an idea to send monopoly money to Microsoft to pay for using the Linux kernel. So lets all pay Microsoft for the code we use. You can print of money from here. The address is below:

Microsoft Corporation
c/o Steven Ballmer
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-7329

With the money send this note:

Mr. Ballmer, Since you live in a fantasy world, thought we’d pay some fantasy money for your fantasy claim.

This is a good idea and I request that everybody help participate in this action. If you like this idea please mail some money and digg the story.

FTP User Individuality

Ok, so I fixed the next issue with my ftp, which is upload access. This is an easy issue if you just want to give everybody and their mother upload access. However, I don't want to do this so I had to setup per-user configuration in vsftpd. Since this is built-in it is a lot easier than it sounds.

1. Add the following line to /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf:
   
   user_config_dir=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf
anon_world_readable_only=NO
   
   
2. Create that directory:
   
   mkdir /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf
   
   
3. Next create the users configuration:
   
   echo "write_enable=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf/fred
echo "anon_upload_enable=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf/fred
echo "anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf/fred


I created a couple simple bash scripts that can be used add users and add upload access to users. Both scripts must be ran as root.

Script to add users to your ftp.

#!/bin/bash
# Name: addFtpUser.sh
# Description: Adds users to /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt and resets the database
# MUST BE RAN AS ROOT
# Arguments: $1=Username $2=Password
# Author: Kevin Harriss
# special.kevin@gmail.com
# Version: 0.01
if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
echo "Username and Password needed!!!"
else
echo $1 >> /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt
echo $2 >> /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt
db_load -T -t hash -f /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_login.db
fi

Here is the bash script to add upload access to a user.

#!/bin/bash
# Name: grantFtpUpload.sh
# Description: Gives user upload access to ftp.
# MUST BE RAN AS ROOT
# Arguments: $1=Username
# Author: Kevin Harriss
# special.kevin@gmail.com
# Version: 0.01
if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Username needed!!!"
exit
else
echo "write_enable=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf/$1
echo "anon_upload_enable=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf/$1
echo "anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_user_conf/$1
fi

Sharing is Caring

I am so excited right now, I finally got my ftp back up and running. I run vsftpd with virtual users and this will be a guide to setting it up.

1. Install vsftpd. On foresight just run:
   
   sudo conary update vsftpd
   
   
2. Create the file with username and password (/etc/vsftpd/logins.txt). The file is an alternating list of username and passwords:
   
   tom
foo

   
3. Add the database file (This requires Berkeley DB program installed):
   
   db_load -T -t hash -f /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_login.db
   
   
4. Fix database permissions:
   
   chmod 600 /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_login.db
   
   
5. Setup pam, Change /etc/pam.d/ftp to only contain the following lines:
   
   auth required /lib/security/pam_userdb.so db=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_login crypt=hash

account required /lib/security/pam_userdb.so db=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_login crypt=hash
   
   
6. Create virtual user:
   
   useradd -d /home/ftp virtual
   
   
7. Create /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf containing the following lines:
   
   anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES
write_enable=NO
anon_upload_enable=NO
anon_mkdir_write_enable=NO
anon_other_write_enable=NO
chroot_local_user=YES
guest_enable=YES
guest_username=virtual
listen=YES
listen_port=21

   
8. Restart vsftpd:
   
   sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
   

Anytime you add a user to /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt you have to add the database again by running:
db_load -T -t hash -f /etc/vsftpd/logins.txt /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd_login.db

If you would like an account just let me know.

Banshee Issues No More

This past week I ran into more problems with banshee then ever before, but thanks to the great community behind banshee I got them all fixed. The first issue was that I was missing the plugins directory in ~/.gnome2/banshee I fixed that by reinstalling the base-plugin package. The next issue was that I couldn't search for a word in banshee that contained a shortcut key. For example, a search for "rancid" would search for "racid" but start playing the next song. This issue was fixed by this patch. I added the patch to banshee recipe for foresight so that is fixed. The latest issues was due to a mono upgrade. The mono runtime is not running correctly with banshee. This problem is that if banshee is compiled with mono 1.2, banshee can't import songs if its using mono 1.2 as the runtime; but if mono is mono 1.1.18 at runtime it will work fine. Also if banshee is compiled against mono 1.1.18 then it will work fine with mono 1.2 or mono 1.1.18. A fix for this problem is being worked on, in the mean time issuing this command will fix the problem:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/Banshee/IOBackend --type string systemio

Welcome back tilda

Well since I reinstalled foresight on my laptop and desktop I lost tilda. For those of you who don't know what tilda is go check it out. It is a drop down terminal that is raised and lowered by a key or combinations of keys, so it's like having a terminal always at your fingertips. So I decided that I would fix this problem by repackaging them, but that did not turn out as easy as I thought. Tilda would not pick up the libconfuse dependency. Thanks to mkj in #conary on freenode for helping me get this issue resolved. To fix that problem I had to add a r.Requires('confuse:devel','/usr/bin') to the recipe. Now if you run rPath Linux, foresight or the like you can install tilda with the following command:

conary update tilda=specialk.rpath.org@rpl:devel


Richard M. Stallman at IIT

This past Saturday, Richard M. Stallman of Free Software Foundation, GNU, and emacs fame came to speak at Illinois Institute of Technology. He was sponsored by the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group, IIT-ACM, IIT CS Department. He did his standard talk about the four freedoms and the use of free software. He also spoke about the defective by design initiative that has been started. The speech was very informative, even though I have seen him speak on a previous occasion. A recording of his speech can be found here.

The rPath to Software Appliances

So today I gave my presentation on rPath/Conary to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group. My presentation covered appliance creation, conary based system maintenance, and introduction to conary packaging. I feel my presentation went over very well, I even talked 2 people into trying out rPath Linux. Even more people were talking about using the rPath tools to create a 'free' distro, along the lines of gNewSense and Ututo. I hope I can continue to convince more to people to try out rPath Linux or better yet Foresight Linux and even help the community.

Chicago Fire

I decided to sign up Planet Chicago GLUG for feedburner. We got a new feed from feedburner, the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/PlanetChicagoGLUG. So if you have the old feed for the planet in a feed reader such as bloglines or google reader, please update your feed to the new feed.

Planet Got Its Groove Back

Planet Chicago GLUG has got a brand new skin. This new skin is based on the skin from Planet Gnome. You may ask "How can I get in on this kick ass planet?" Well, here are your options:

If you have a blog: Email me with your blog feed, name, nick and hackergotchi(if you have one).

If you need a hackergotchi: Email me with your photo, and I will try to make you a hackergotchi.

If you have a hackergotchi: Email me with your hackergotchi.

Even though the new planet looks sexy there is still some work to be done:

* Change updated time from UTC to CST
* Clean up the default hackergotchi
* Change feed links to images
* Add icons to add feed to google reader and bloglines
* Create .ico
* Sign up for feedburner???

Feeling the Burn

I decided to try out feedburner, mainly for that fact that I wanted a way to see the statistics of my blog and blogger had no way of showing that. So with feedburner I have a new feed, so if someone could update my feed on Planet Foresight it would be greatly appreciated. Along with a new feed I have a new hackergotchi thanks to Michael, aka l0wrd. I also fixed to auto-discovery feed from blogger to point to my new feed.

Here are the steps on how to fix this:

1. Delete old auto-discovery - To do this find in the HTML of your template:
< b:include data="blog" name="all-head-content"> and change it to this
<!-- < b:include data="'blog'" name="'all-head-content'/"> -->

2. Add your auto-discovery - To do this add this to the head section of your template.

<link href="FEEDBURNER-FEED" rel="alternate" title="FEED-TITLE" type="application/rss+xml">

Next, change the FEEDBURNER-FEED and FEED-TITLE to the feed and title from feedburner.

UPDATE: Thanks to blogger, my first post didnt display the old auto-discovery correct. It should be fixed now.