Mostly Harmless

Learning to use the command line is one of the hardest things about moving to Linux, however once you’re used to it, doing things becomes second nature and you actually miss being able to use the terminal in those cases where you have FTP access but no shell account. For some things using a GUI is laborious, upgrading web apps is a major case in point.

One way of getting around this is the curlftpfs package. The software allows you to mount your FTP account and access it as you would any other part of your Linux File System.

After installing the package, you may have to modprobe fuse and may have to add your user to the fuse group. The former was necessary on Suse 10.2 and the latter on Kubuntu Feisty. After that simply create the folder you wish to use as a mount point and issue the command.

curlftpfs -v ftp://user:pass@ftp.somewhere.net/ MountPoint/

Once everything is working you can do away with the -v which enables verbose output. This is great if you need to do work on a web app where there is no shell access.

Caution

It is easy to forget this is not shell access, commands like unzip, unrar etc will use the binary on your machine with the resulting backwards forwards data transfer. Use such commands at your peril if working on an unstable connection, with large files or if you don’t have a backup.

Whilst this can be used with the rails command (again not recommended), bear in mind that you’ll need to copy the contents of the vendor directory to the server manually, as this is normally symlinked when working on the shell.

References

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_FTP_Mount

Rowan :: Sep.02.2007 :: Linux, Quick Solutions, Web Apps, Web Hosting :: No Comments »

After adding a PCI soundcard to my machine for the purposes of having a gameport my Kubuntu 7.04 install wasn’t always choosing to use the on-board Intel chip for sound meaning I could near nothing. The solution seems to be the following

sudo asoundconf list

Names of available sound cards:
au8830
Intel

sudo asoundconf set-default-card Intel

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
* Shutting down ALSA… [ OK ]
* Setting up ALSA … [ OK ]

You’ll also need to restart any apps to get sound, there is no need to reboot to get Amarok working

Rowan :: May.02.2007 :: Linux, Quick Solutions :: No Comments »

Doing an OS upgrade is often troublesome. It is better to back up your data and do a clean install. Most of us don’t for various reasons. I always try upgrades before clean installs - it’s probably a form of self abuse.

This version of Kubuntu has a shiny new upgrade wizard which made this a pretty easy upgrade and would definitely be do-able for the Linux Newbie. However there are still a couple of gotchas that might catch out Mr “average user”.

Following the upgrade instructions here is simple, but could do with being in better English. Screenshots or even a screencast would lessen the opportunity for error. A user who wishes to upgrade may not be wholly comfortable adding a source for example and need a little hand holding.
The upgrade took about three hours to download (2GB) and then about half an hour to apply on my Core2 Duo system.

The only actual difficulty was when mdadm installed. This is probably part of my system because my hardware features onboard RAID controllers, however the only active RAID is hardware only and thus transparent to the operating system. I was asked the question “which arrays should be started on boot?” - the correct answer is none. Answering all or entering devices may prevent your system booting if like me you do not have any arrays. If questions like this are likely to occur, information on how to answer the questions (other than the normal “go read man mdamn” bs) should be readily available to the user when the question is presented.

On reboot, SMB4K refused to mount shares once again as a user, this can be fixed by a quick

sudo chmod +s `which smbmnt`

Aside from that everything seems to work without issue. That’s very nearly a flawless upgrade. I’m impressed.

Rowan :: Apr.25.2007 :: Linux, Operating Systems, Reviews :: No Comments »

Since finally getting round to installing OpenSuse 10.2 on my laptop, I’m going to be trying to live without MS Operating systems on the desktop during working hours. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. The reasons are mainly stability, transparency of errors when they do occur and ease of upgrading / adding software.

Featured Linux Distributions

OpenSuse 10.2

Kubuntu 6.10

For completeness, I ought to state that at work we are currently standardising on CentOS for our Cpanel/WHM servers (there are a few instances of Fedora Core hanging around but those are being phased out).

I will also have to run Microsoft OS’s in Virtual Machines for support purposes at work as we need to be able to attempt to replicate reported issues with XP and Vista - as well as keep them around simply to remain familiar. Having these as (hopefully) throwaway virtual instances will aid us in instances where the problem must be reproduced with an esoteric set of desktop software that would be difficult to put in place or downgrade to on a “proper” work desktop.

Whilst I personally believe it’s fine to promote and indeed increase your skills in one technology over another, being too blinkered can lead to a sort of career sepuku No matter how much as a troubleshooter or admin you may learn to love Linux keep your existing skills polished.

Next time

I’ll be looking at the applications on Linux that have replaced their Win32 predecessors.

Rowan :: Apr.15.2007 :: Giving up Windows, Linux, Operating Systems, Vista :: No Comments »

I’m typing this from my Dell M1210 laptop after finally installing OpenSuse 10.2 on it. Not everything works (the webcam may need a little work) but the things that really ought to work out of the box do

• Wireless (WPA-PSK)
• Flash (with sound)
• DNS resolving at full speed thanks to the installer option to disable IPV6
• Fonts available out of the box

There were however a few downsides

• Installer couldn’t cope with the fact that Dell by default use all four partitions and the fifth extended one and suggested deleting everything and starting again
• Despite adding Internet sources during the installation the main, non oss and update repos had to be added manually using Yast after the install was complete

Seemingly we’re getting very close to a desktop Linux, freely* available on the Internet for download that can be installed on a consumer laptop without too much hassle. If we imagine the user wants to wipe all their partitions and not be able to download updates that is…

In all seriousness though, the amount of extra configuration really isn’t anymore onerous than after installing XP (and in terms of downloading updates, is actually easier because constant rebooting is not required). Yes I’ll have to install Nvidia’s drivers to get 3D support, but I’d have to do that on Windows too. It feels slick on the Core 2 Duo and practically everything works.

Maybe when 10.3 is released eh?

*And by freely I mean with mostly everything working out of the box whether or not you’ve had to agree to a tiresome EULA or similar that you didn’t read anyway. (Naughty I know).

Rowan :: Apr.13.2007 :: Linux, Operating Systems :: No Comments »