Just thought I’d share this lovely shot of my new work desktop (click for bigger)

It’s the latest Stable version of Ubuntu (8.10) with the latest, not quite so stable version of Kde (4.2).  Kde 4.2 should be released this saturday but for now I’m using the nightly builds available from Project Neon (more about that later) and it seems pretty stable as well as being drop dead gorgeous.  Some tinkering was required to get everything running, dual screen support with hardware acceleration was a complete pain for example, but by and large it’s been a pretty straightforward transition.  Here’s some notes that might help you out if you’re planning the switch for yourself:

To get kde 4.2:

First off, you need to install Ubuntu (obviously).  to make things easy you might want to download Kubuntu 8.10, which comes with kde 4.1 already installed.  Once you’re up and running with kubuntu open up the software package manager (adept) and add the following line to your software sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu intrepid main

Then open up a terminal session and run this command:

sudo apt-get install kde-nightly

Once that command has finished, log out and you should be able to select ‘kde-nightly’ as a new session.

To join a windows domain:

First you need to install likewise open.  It’s in the ubuntu repositories so (in a terminal session)

sudo apt-get install likewise-open
sudo domainjoin-cli join DOMAIN ADMINISTRATOR
sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults

Replace ‘DOMAIN’ with your fully qualified domain name, and ‘ADMINISTRATOR’ with the domain admin username. You can now log into your linux destop using ‘DOMAIN\\username’.  One problem I ran into is that my new user was unable to run the sudo command.  log into the linux machine with your original username and follow this procedure:

From a terminal do:

sudo visudo

this will open your sudoers file.  We need to add line telling linux that we want our domain users to be able to sudo.  You can use any domain group or user for this, but since I’m a domain admin I use this line:

DOMAIN\\domain^admins ALL=(ALL) ALL

log back into your domain user and you should be able to sudo.

To get dual desktops running with hardware acceleration

This was a complete arse to get working.  I tried messing with xorg, using the catalyst control centre etc etc.  The main problem I had was that the ati driver refuesed to detect my monitors as anything other than 1600*1200 screens.  Since my monitors can only do 1280*1024 this caused serious issues.  In the end I fixed it by adding the ‘proposed’ and ‘restricted’ repositories to my package manager, running a full update and then running the following commands.  Obviously this means my machine now has lots of potentially unstable software on it, but I’ve not hit any problems yet.  Anyway, once you’ve installed everything and (importantly) enabled the restricted driver (you can do this from the ‘hardware’ section of system settings in kde) do this from a terminal:

sudo aticonfig --intial
aticonfig --resolution=0,1280x1024
aticonfig --mode2=1280x1024
aticonfig --dtop=horizontal

Obviously adjust the 1280×1024 to suit your monitors resolution.  This worked for me, your mileage may vary.

Making GTK apps look good in kde:

Finally, you might find that GTK apps (such as firefox) look awful in the nightly build of kde.  This is because this pre-release version of kde installs itself in a different location than kde is expected to be in, to avoid conflicts.  The little piece of software that tells GTK apps how to behave in KDE doesn’t know about that, hence the problem.  To fix it, you need to move a script from one place to another using the following command:

cp /home/$USER/.kde/env/gtk-qt-engine.rc.sh /home/$USER/.kde-neon/env/gtk-qt-engine.rc.sh

(replace $USER with your username).  log out and back in and you should see lovely KDE themed apps.

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Update:

Apparently the method described in the original post isn’t enough to get VMWare to stop bridging to the Hamachi adaptor.  Despite removing the VMware bridge protocol from the Hamachi adaptor, VMware will still try to bridge to that adaptor.  To stop it you have to run ‘vmnetcfg.exe’ which can be found in your vmware server install directory and set the bridge network to your specific network adaptor rather than automatically select.

So, I’ve just spent 10 minutes trying to fix this problem and thought I’d share:

If you’re running vmware server and Hamachi on the same (Host) machine, you might encounter a problem where any virtual machines that are using the ‘bridged’ network access type lose network connectivity.  The problem here is that VMWare is trying to bridge it’s connections to the Hamachi network adaptor.  Here’s the solution (this is in windows by the way, no idea how you’d solve the same problem in Linux)

Open networkconnections, right click on the hamachi network adaptor and select properties.  Now, in the list of protocols untick ‘VMware bridge protocol’ and then hit ‘OK’.

Now, restart your VMs and they should connect to the right network adaptor and give you network connectivity again.

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So, some of you know how busy I’ve been recently with my new job and so-on… I barely have time to check the site every couple of days to make sure it’s still up, never mind make posts or anything else.  I just thought I’d drop a quick line about what I’ve been up to:

My major, day-to-day responsibilities here at Tyrrell systems over the last few months have revolved around TMS, our in-house management system.  It’s a PHP driven system that manages pretty much everything about the company, from expense claims to job quotes, purchase orders and time management… just about every aspect of the company’s operations.  In the last couple of months I’ve integrated TMS with our accounts package for one click invoicing, rejigged most of the javascript in the system to use JQuery (increasing performance in some areas massively), wrote a new calendar module that integrates with our Exchange server via WebDav and implemented a project management system based around RedMine, which is an awesome, open source software project management system and probably deserves it’s own post. suffice it to say if you’re looking for an app that combines version control, issue tracking, time management and even wiki based documentation then RedMine is well worth a look.  It can be a little tricky to set up (I’m running it on an Ubuntu VM) but it’s well worth the effort.  Oh, and then there’s the ACL (access control list) system that limits access to individual pages (or parts of pages) across the entire system using a couple of lines of code… My PHP coding has come on in leaps and bounds since I’ve been doing this stuff every day.

I’ve also had a project to complete based around implementing a Video surveillance / intercom system.  I went with Flash for this one, since it’s almost trivial to implement video / audio streaming using flash and a flash media server (like the open source Red5 for example).  I’ve never done any flash programming beforew, but I found some example code here and then stumbled upon the rather excellent flash develop and I was away. I’m pretty pleased with how this one went, I met the brief (streaming video and audio one way, and audio back the other way) and implemented it on our embedded hardware platform while acheiving pretty good performance.  there’s also some trickery involved to start / stop the main video stream when clients connect / disconnect (it looks quite impressive seeing the camera switch itself off when the last remote client disconnects )

Anyway, that’s pretty much it… just wanted you guys to know I’m not ignoring the site or anything, I’m just pretty much snowed under with interesting stuff at work these days.

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So, as many of you have noticed I really haven’t been spending a lot of time here recently.  The job I got a couple of months ago is taking up 90% of my time and any time I’m not actually working I’m probably thinking about the project I’m working on.  Basically I don’t have the time or energy to do anything with comicsearch at the moment and the site is suffering as a result.  There’s been a lot of downtime since I don’t check the site very often, if it goes down it’s down for a while, and as a result of that the number of visitors is falling off.  I think with a bit of effort and some time the site could flourish again, but I really can’t give either right now.

So, I’m open to offers.  If I don’t get any, then the site will remain in its current state so there won’t be a big switch off, but if someone out there thinks they can do something good with the site then make me an offer.

Included will be: the domains comicsearch.co.uk & dcpsearch.co.uk, all data and scripts relating to the torrent search (including the parser, the search function, the current database, the ‘check if torrent is active’ script etc etc and all scripts, css, templates, integration work and everything else currently on the site.  I’ll also throw in any rights or whatever pertaining to the Comictree program as well.

NOT included will be any member related information from the forums etc.  I’ll be wiping the tables for the forum of any information that could be used to identify members… so no IP addresses, real names, email addresses etc will be included.

So, anyone want to take it on?

Another quick update:

As of Thursday the 11th I’ll be starting my new job, which means much less time to spend on comicsearch. Things should keep ticking over under the watchful eye of the mods, and of course I’ll have time in the evenings to fix any glaring problems.

This week I’ve been fixing various things and generally cleaning up so that I don’t have to worry too much about the site. One of things I’ve done is implement a new RSS feed that’s compatible with uTorrents RSS downloader… so you can now set utorrent up to automagically download any new releases from comicsearch.

The feed is located at: http://www.comicsearch.co.uk/torrentfeed.php

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So, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  Thing is though, I never actually finish anything I write.  So, yesterday I decided to actually sit down and write something.  By pure chance, the writing forum over at Penny Arcade has a little writing competition thing going on.  The round I entered had these entry requirements:

1000 words or less

Involves a hospital, an interview and a packet of cigarettes.

Here’s my entry.  Remember, this is the first creative writing piece I’ve ever actually finished, be gentle with your comments

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Just a quick note: if you have firefox 3 you can now add comicsearch as a search engine, like this:

And it’s easy peasey to setup.  Just click the little drop down box next to the search engine name (yours probably says ‘google’ at the moment) and you’ll see a list of currently installed search engine plugins.  Under the list you should see ‘add comicsearch’ or ‘add comicsearch v2′ (depending on which version of the site you’re using).  Click that and voila, you can now search comicsearch from the menu.

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After this thread in the forums, I’ve implemented a forum map.

It looks a bit like this at the moment:

As you can see, it’s a bit sparse so go and add yourself, pronto!

In other news this week, as seen in this thread, I got a new job!

I’m going to be doing PHP development for a building integration systems manufacturer which should be interesting.  It’s not much more money than I’m on now but, more importantly, it’s a step onto the development career path which is where I’ve always wanted to be, and it’s much closer to home than my current job… so more time with the family. Also, the company has generously offered to pay for me to have driving lessons.  Which is always useful.

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So, the last couple of weeks have been a bit hectic due to personal stuff… but just before all that kicked off I managed to migrate the site to its new home.

Old Server:

1.66 GHz Pentium-M (laptop), 512MB

New Server:

Opteron 170 @ 2.2GHz, 2GB

Due to using this hardware as a media server as well I was unable to go with my first choice of installing Linux as the OS (the media server uses a TV Tuner card that isn’t supported by the Linux TV drivers) so I got a bit sneaky…

The hardware runs Xp and on top of that I have the actual web server running in a virtual machine. The virtual machine runs Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). This way I get the stability of a linux server for my Web stuff, and I get to use my media centre stuff (Media portal) in the XP host.

The setup seems to be running well so far except for a few teething problems, which were down to my ‘Getseeds’ script (which scrapes every single torrent in the database when it’s run) causing issues. Today I found out how to do an incremental backup of the web server over FTP to a folder on the Host machine (like this).

Nice.

Just as an aside: I read a post a few weeks ago in which two old linux hads were wondering why Ubuntu has taken off so rapidly to become the distro of choice for relatively new Linux users.  That type of community documentation, and the helpful nature of the community in general is why Ubuntu is so popular.  Up until a few weeks ago I’d never tried Linux, now I have a web server doing automated backups over FTP.  I have a latop which runs XP seamlessly (so you can have windows apps appearing on your linux desktop, it’s pretty nifty) inside a virtual machine.  I have a desktop with much fancier effects and looks than any Xp / vista or OS X desktop and it’s all down to the helpfullness and openness of the Ubuntu community.

Anyway….

The physical server was a bit noisy (it used to be my gaming machine) so I removed the 80mm fan from the CPU cooler and stuck a 120mm fan in there using the tried and tested mounting method of ‘wedging it in between the RAM and the northbridge heatsink. There’s just enough space to hold the fan securely and this method seems to be keeping everything nice and cool.

The only thing left to do now is somehow get all the data from my file server (which has a 600GB motherboard hardware RAID) into this new server (the RAID on the new motherboard isn’t compatible with the RAID on the old one) then I can decommision the old file server… and use the hardware for a hackintosh or something.

For anyone interested in pictures, here you go:

From left to right: my settee, server farm (web / media at top, file at bottom), my front window.

Compare and contrast with the Hardware the pirate bay guys get to play with:

Sigh.

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I just had a shock when I glanced at the post date on my last post here… it’s over 3 weeks ago!

I’ve been pretty busy since then dealing with some family issues (more about that later), but I’ve also done some stuff to the site:

The site has moved from it’s old home (a crappy old laptop) to it’s new, improved surroundings (a virtual machine running on an opteron based server).  I’ve also moved from windows to Ubuntu for my hosting needs and, apart from some ‘Case’ issues (Linux recognises the difference between ‘This’ and ‘this’, windows doesn’t) the move went pretty smoothly.  Since then I’ve fixed a couple of bugs and re-instated the ‘Thank-you’ functions that used to be present on the site.  Make sure you start thanking those uploaders

The Move to a virtual machine means I can now backup the entire server in minutes, and restore it ina similar timeframe if there’s a problem.  Which is nice.  I can also shift the server onto different hardware easily, should I need to fix a hardware fault with the server.  The only real issue (albeit not much of one) is that to do this backing up process I have to take the server offline briefly.  That’s not a massive problem though, especially since the site usuaully goes offline a couple of times a day anyway.

What else has been happening…. well, not much really.  I’ve been off work for over a week now, looking after my fiancé who’s recovering from being admitted to hospital last Tuesday.  She’s suffered with depression for a long, long time and after a year of dealing with that on top of the pressures of looking after a very demanding little girl things came to a head.  She’s relatively okay now, although it’s going to take a long time before she’s actually ‘okay’ I think.  Thanks to everyone who posted well wishes in this thread.

The company I work for have been really good to me during this little crisis, letting me take time off work with no notice and even finding us a counselor through their employee assistance program, which makes me feel really guilty about the fact I’m actively seeking another job.  Basically I’m bored of my current position, there’s no opportunity for advancement or anything exciting where I am so I need to move on.  Also, I need a job that’s closer to home (I currently spend 2 hours a day travelling to and from work) and pays a bit more.  Does that make me a bad person?

I actually have an interview tomorrow, for a PHP development position.  This would be pretty cool, it’s a much more interesting role and might actually keep me awake during the working day, it’s much easier to get to (20 minutes on a bus) and it pays more.  However, there’s still that niggling feeling that I’m screwing over my current company.

On the gadgets front, I’ve recently discovered Media portal.  I’ve been looking for a windows replacement for Myth TV for some time, and this seems to be it.  The major benefit of myth TV (and media portal) over other, simpler media centre solutions is that they can be run in a client / server configuration.  This means that you can have a large, beefy machine stacked with TV tuner cards hidden away somewhere in your house while you have small quiet machines connected to your TVs.  Myth Tv is perfect for what I want, but it doesn’t support thetuner card I have…so, we’ll see how I get on with Media portal.  The only problem I have now is how to connect my PC to my TV.  My TV only accepts composite or RGB over scart, the only adaptor I have for my PC puts out S-Video. However, after reading this thread over at AVforums, I’m now on the hunt for someone to build me a VGA->RGB Scart cable since by pure chance my media PC has a radeon card in it (Nvidia cards apparently can’t do direct drive of a TV).

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