cooooool….

I have two computers at home, my main linux mythtv server, and a tiny mini-itx epia (OK, I have more than 3 including my MacBook Pro and Jodi’s Powerbook). Both computers once had windows XP, and yes, I bought valid copies for them. They have been running linux though for almost 2 years, and I just chalked it up as a loss for me (out $150 bucks per machine). Now, though, I want to use vmware server to serve up windows xp on the mythtv server, but, alas, I can’t find that daggone XP certificate/CD that is bound to that CPU forever and ever. That sucks.

WinTel/QEMU here I come — and another $150 to Microsoft for yet another copy of WindowsXP that I’ll probably throw away, again.

Here’s the presentation I gave to the GT LUG. I was going to be clever and record it, make an audioblog entry and then get crrrrrazy and do something with a podcast/videocast and then I realized that my life would be complete if I did that, so I didn’t.

The presentation went well, we had a good turnout at the GT LUG. I think MythTV is a great example of an open-source project with a nice clear mission and a well-run group of contributors. It’s got a good mix of coolness and hype, and the time is right for a breakout product from either Apple or WinXP in the mythical-convergance set-top-box PC-market, so until that happens, or if you don’t want to be bound by Apple or MS’s crazy DRM shenanigans, then perhaps MythTV is for you.

Without further ado, here’s the presentation:

MythTV Presentation - LUG GT.pdf

MythTV Presentation - LUG GT.ppt

Enjoy!

LUG@GT - The Linux Users Group at Georgia Tech

Meeting: Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
College of Computing Building, Room 17 (basement) at 7:00pm EST
http://lugatgt.org/

Agenda:
- InstallFest Planning
- Presentation: MythTV by Charles Brian Quinn
- Open Linux Q&A Session

This week’s presentation was described by CBQ as “A brief overview, glimpses of a possible setup/HOWTO, and some pointers to really trick out a setup.” Stop by and learn how to turn your Linux system into a DVR/PVR! We’ll also be making final InstallFest plans. Hope to see you all there!

I have lots of audio and video on my mythtv box (a big ole fedora box stuffed in the closet) that I want to share with friends (and myself when I’m on my laptop in the office). I also just got a lot of new audio (indie and electronic) from my pal Tung.

I’ve already got the mDNSResponder and mt-daapd to serve up the “share” to iTunes. So the Powerbook in the kitchen is playing it over the whole-house using the AirTunes Express, but i’m in the office, and I didn’t put any in-wall or ceiling speakers in here. Plus, I’m on my gentoo laptop, and have some headphones on.

Have no fear, NFS is tried and true. And no problem to setup:

edit /etc/exports (here’s mine):

/var/audio 192.168.0.6/255.255.255.0(rw,sync)
/var/video 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync)

Now let’s edit /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny to allow everyone who jumps on my network:
hosts.allow:

portmap: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
lockd: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
rquotad: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
mountd: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
statd: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0

hosts.deny:

portmap: ALL
lockd: ALL
rquotad: ALL
mountd: ALL
statd: ALL

OK, let’s start it: /etc/init.d/nfs start and add to boot: chkconfig –add nfs && chkconfig nfs on

Now on the client (my gentoo laptop):

# mount mythtv-server:/var/audio /mnt/audio

Now, that was just too easy.

see http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/ for more help.

I’m just keeping y’all posted:

My MacBook Pro ships March, now.

Why the MacBook Pro, you ask? Well, Apple just can’t go wrong these days. Their sleek designs and underlying cool technology (OS X based on *nix/bsd) is a techno-phile’s dream. The fact that the new iMacs and MacBook Pros are now running on Intel processors is, yes, very cool too. And while the old iBooks, PowerBooks and iMacs were no stranger to Linux — it was just linux on ppc — the code-bases will merge, and now there will be no need to have a seperate linux stack on PPC, but rather a kernel on intel dual core using EFI to boot, and now you’ve got the Mac OS X, and Linux running side by side!

Wow. I decided to refresh my MythTV installation, and went all out. My new mythtv backend/frontend server is running on Fedora Core4 with an xfs filesystem on an LVM partition (so it can be expanded with new hard drives easily). That server was easy to redo, there were only a few minor things I wanted to change about the setup: the xfs filesystem being the main change….

The cool part, however, is my new diskless (diskless by necessity, not by choice, now) mini-itx system that sits under the bed, hooked up to a projector, and plugged into an auto-switching amp (between the whole house audio and the local source) to some nice in-wall speakers. The mini-itx system uses the MiniMyth project. Despite the frontpage’s lack of updates, inside the forums there’s an active community.

The really neat part is that this diskless myth frontend is that it is just so slick. I had to convert my main mythtv-server (the frontend/backend) to be the DHCP router (configuring DHCP to give back out my IP addresses), install TFTP, and PXE server packages, and configure the pre-built epia kernel and rootfs crammed into a little 50 MB image that boots up really daggone quick, and quite frankly, looks amazing!

I’m going to post some pictures and all my setup notes soon here. Maybe, just maybe, I might volunteer with all that extra spare time I’ve got to update the linpvr.org page — I’d love to keep up that minimyth distro — it is phenomenal!

After using horde-imp mail for, well, since back in college, and squirrelmail for years — I finally decided to check out roundcubemail. It is fantastic, so far!

Fellow (and current) Georgia Techian, Paul Stamatiou has a much linked to document describing howto setup roundcube on MediaTemple and on FreeBSD. I’ll just add some shortcuts to his setup, but it is really good, and is what I glanced at before giving it a try myself.

First, I grabbed a tarball of the latest dev build:

# cd /var/www/webmail.example.com/htdocs-secure/
# wget [url_to_latest_roundcube_build_tarball]
# tar xzvf [roundcubemail_tarball].tar.gz

Then I moved it to a nicer directory (without the versioning number in the dir):

# mv roundcubemail-[version] roundcubemail
# cd roundcubemail

# mv config/db.inc.php.dist config/db.inc.php
# mv config/main.inc.php.dist config/main.inc.php

Then I edited the db.inc.php file, adding my own mysql table and user for the PEAR DSN string:

$rcmail_config['db_dsnw'] = 'mysql://user:password@localhost/roundcubemail';

I also edited the main.inc.php file to use secure IMAP on port 993 (since I don’t run unencrypted IMAP):

$rcmail_config['default_host'] = 'ssl://localhost:993';

// TCP port used for IMAP connections
$rcmail_config['default_port'] = 993;

Now to create that database (command-line style) and import the initial structure:

# mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE roundcubemail;
mysql> USE mysql;
mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE,
DROP on roundcubemail.* TO user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> USE roundcubemail;
mysql> SOURCE ../SQL/mysql.initial.sql
mysql> SHOW TABLES;

mysql> q

It should be all set, but to make sure it runs on the ssl for this webmail server, I simply toss a small index.php file in the normal htdocs directory:

header("Location: https://webmail.example.com/roundcubemail/");

So that when a user hits: http://webmail.example.com/ they are automatically forwarded to https://webmail.example.com/roundcubemail/.

This would be a great opportunity for me to create an ebuild and use the webapp-config tool to configure it - thus allowing me and others to be able to upgrade and instal easily — perhaps one day (or night) I will delve into this. Enjoy!

When they said mod_rewrite was voodoo, I didn’t believe them. Now I do.

I’ve finally come up with something decent to convert my old movable type’s permalink structure to a new one that is compatible with my static pages in the root directory, and the archives in an archive directory.

The kicker is that for each post I used to store in an archive directory, I simply do a query on the current site on just the category — I couldn’t narrow down post because they both parse postnames differently: movabletype used underscores _ , while wordpress uses - dashes.

The rule that did it in the archives directory:

# migration from seebq.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [S=80]
RewriteRule ^(.+)?/(.+)?$ index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA,L]

I’ve been having lots of fun with the new server — setting all kinds of automagically updating scripts and fun toys. I setup up automatic Bayesian-filter based learning of spam for all accounts on my box. See SpamAssassin Learning for more details.

I’ve also been loving gentoo’s ebuild system. I even managed to modify/create an ebuild for some software I wanted to install:

raop_play - a music file player for Apple Airport Express for Linux

Alas, now I am not bound to the Mac (or gasp, Windows) for streaming to my Airport Express.

So, now I have some music files (imported or bought from iTunes Music Store, stripped of DRM with Fairkeys, converted to mp3 with some scripts), served up over a mDNSresponding/ZeroConf iTunes Music Share, then I also serve them up over my own Shoutcast Streaming Radio Station (so I can listen anywhere), then I tune into it with my raop_play to stream it wirelessly to the Whole House Audio…. very nice.

Now, if only I could get that web front-end coded up in Ruby on Rails and served to a Nokia Wireless Handheld device (or my Siemens SX66 over wi-fi). Then I’d be set.