handyfloss

Following the “report” series started with my first summary of info about the music collection I listen to, I will update that info in this post.

The data (in parentheses the difference with respect to last report, 8 months ago).

Files

Total files        10039 (+527)
  - Commercial     6533 (+372)
  - Jamendo        3381 (+155)
  - Other CC       71 (+0)
  - Other          54 (+0)
Total playtime     634h (+34h)
Disk usage         48GB (+3GB)
MP3 count          0 (+0)
OGG count          100039 (+527)

Last.fm

Playcount           56191 (+14657)

Most played artists Joaquín Sabina - 3233 (+522)
                    Ismael Serrano - 1820 (+1342)
                    The Beatles - 1632 (+286)
                    Extremoduro - 1611 (+917)
                    Silvio Rodríguez - 930 (+148)
                    David TMX - 891 (+38)
                    Siniestro Total - 847 (+197)
                    Bad Religion - 774 (+142)
                    Fito & Fitipaldis - 749 (+74)
                    La Polla Records - 710 (+145)
                    El Reno Renardo - 660
                    Joan Manuel Serrat - 635
                    La Fuga - 570
                    Platero y Tú - 554
                    Ska-P - 554 (+114)

Most played songs   Km. 0 (I. Serrano) - 82
                    Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 74 (+8)
                    Salir (Extremoduro) - 68
                    Golfa (Extremoduro) - 66
                    Caperucita (I. Serrano) - 65
                    La extraña pareja (I. Serrano) - 61
                    Vértigo (I. Serrano) - 61
                    La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 60 (+5)
                    Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 59 (+6)
                    Un muerto encierras (I. Serrano) - 58
                    Conductores suicidas (J. Sabina) - 57 (+6)
                    Medias Negras (J. Sabina) - 56
                    Y sin embargo (J. Sabina) - 55 (+6)
                    Tierna y dulce historia de amor (I. Serrano) - 53
                    You shook me all night long (AC/DC) - 52
                    So payaso (Extremoduro) - 52
                    Laztana (Latzen) - 50
                    Esperar (E. Sánchez) - 50
                    Pacto entre caballeros (J. Sabina) - 50 (+3)

The annual [[Debian]] developers meeting, DebConf is being held this year in Cáceres (Spain), from July 23 to 30. Apart from just promoting the event, I am posting this to mention that the Spanish OpenMoko distributor Tuxbrain will participate, and sell discounted [[Neo FreeRunner]] phones. As a masochistic proud owner of one such phone, I feel compelled to spread the word (and help infect other people with [[FLOSS]] virii).

You can read a post about it in the debconf-announce and debian-devel-announce lists, made by Martin Krafft. Also, Tuxbrain responsible David Samblas uploaded a video of maddog Hall promoting the event:

Update: read second comment

I recently upgraded to [[Ubuntu]] Jaunty Jackalope, and have experienced a much slower response of my desktop since. The problem seems to be with [[Intel GMA]] chips, as my computer has. The reason for the poor performance is that Canonical Ltd. decided not to include the [[UXA]] acceleration in Jaunty, for stability reasons (read more at Phoronix).

The issue is discussed at the Ubuntu wiki, along with some solutions. For me, the fix involved just making [[X.Org Server|X.org]] use UXA, by including the following in the xorg.conf file, as they recommend in the wiki:

Section "Device"
        Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
        # ...
        Option        "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection

Well, not much of a “plan”, but bear with me.

Ever since using [[Debian]] and [[Ubuntu]], I have installed the OS just once per computer. All software upgrades, including full releases, have been done through upgrades, not re-installations. This means that I have never actually had the need to download any ISO besides the first one used when I bought the computer.

This is fine, but I always felt the compulsion to share my bandwidth with fellow Linux users, and relieve some load from the [[Canonical Ltd.]] servers. So for every new Ubuntu release, I have downloaded one or more (amd64, i386, desktop, alternate…) Ubuntu CD ISOs via BitTorrent, and kept them uploading for some time. However, the full BT download of the ISO is a waste of bandwidth, and unless my later upload share is greater than 1.0, I will have been overloading the servers, not relieving them.

Now, with Jaunty Jackalope, I have a way to fix this. I could have done similarly with previous releases, but I didn’t. Here’s the deal: download the ISO and share it with BitTorrent, but don’t upgrade from the Internet as well. Upgrade from the ISO I just downloaded! In the past I would be reluctant to do this, among other things because I don’t want to waste a physical CD for that. However, the Ubuntu upgrade instructions say how to mount the ISO (yes, mounting ISOs is not new. I’ve done it in the past), then upgrade from the mounted image. Once the upgrade is done, I can keep seeding the ISO with BitTorrent.

With this procedure I can use bandwidth more efficiently (I download the required software just once), and I can still share the ISO with other people. Moreover, there is another plus: the ISO is just 699 MB, whereas the upgrade manager in Ubuntu tells me that for the upgrade I will need to download more than 1 GB! The difference is due to the ISO being somehow compressed, I think. I will report on the size of the file system mounted from the ISO (which should be much more than 1 GB).

Update: Well, actually the internet upgrade involves more packages. If you upgrade from the CD, you are still required to download 800 more MB to complete the upgrade, so no magic there.

I recently started looking for some system/format to dump personal stuff on. I checked my own comparison of wiki software, and chose [[MoinMoin]].

I have already installed some [[MediaWiki]] wikis for personal use, and I consider it a really nice wiki system. However, one of its strengths is also a drawback for me: the backend is a database. I want to be able to migrate the wiki painlessly, and with MediaWiki this is not possible. There is no end to the files and database dumps one has to move around, and then it is never clear if there is still something missing (like edit history or some setting). I want to have a single dir with all the data required to replicate the wiki, and I want to [[rsync]] just this dir to another computer to have an instant clone of the wiki elsewhere. MoinMoin provides just that (I think, I might have to change my mind when I use it more).

So here you are the steps I took to have MM up and running in my Ubuntu 8.10 PC.

Installation

Ubuntu has packages for MM, so you can just install them:

Configuration

Create a dir to put your wiki. For example, if you want to build a wiki called wikiname:

We made it a subdir of a global dir “MoinMoin”, so we can create a wiki farm in the future.

Next you have to copy some files over:

If installing a wiki farm, you could be interested in the contents of /usr/share/moin/config/wikifarm/, but this is out of the scope of this post.

The next step is to edit wikiconfig.py to our liking. The following lines could be of interest:

sitename = u’Untitled Wiki’
logo_string = u’‘
page_front_page = u”MyStartingPage”
data_dir = ‘./data/’
data_underlay_dir = ‘./underlay/’
superuser = [u”yourusername“, ]
acl_rights_before = u”iyourusername:read,write,delete,revert,admin”

Using

You just need to run wikiserver.py, there is no need to have [[Apache HTTP Server|Apache]] running or anything (like with, e.g., MediaWiki):

Then open your favourite browser and go to http://localhost:8080, and you will be greeted by the starting page.

Apparently the online radio service my (formerly?) beloved [[last.fm]] was providing will no longer be free in the future, according to a recent official blog entry. Due to marketing/commercial/licensing decisions, the service will remain free of charge in the UK, Germany and the USA. Subscribers in the rest of the world will have to pay 3 euros per month.

In principle, I couldn’t care less for online music. I exclusively listen to my private collection, and only use last.fm to publish the list of tracks I listen to. However, I have a couple of thoughts about it.

The first one is that I think that charging web users according to location should be made obsolete. In Internet each person is just that: a person, an individual, a user. A site could ask me what my preferred language is, to interact better with me (and I could answer whatever, true or false), but my nationality, religion or race should be irrelevant. So much talk about “globalization”, and they only use it when it suits them. For example the work market is “globalizable”, but Internet is not.

My second thought is that they have been forced to charge money to their users because they have to pay for the right of broadcasting licensed music. My position? Fuck them. Yes, seriously, screw paying for the broadcasting rights! I am seriously fed up with the morons in the music (and film) industry, trying to control the uncontrollable. If I were Last.fm, or a radio station in general, I would broadcast just [[Creative Commons]] music, such as that at [[Jamendo]]. If you are an artist and want me to broadcast your music, then you should pay me, not the other way around. However, if you provide me with your music for free, I might broadcast it for free, too. Quid pro quo.

I think that radio broadcast of music, or internet sharing, or the CD market, should be completely free of charge (or, in the case of physical formats like CDs, charge just for the price of the physical medium). The musicians should see this forms of broadcast as advertising. The distribution of their music should be as wide as possible, to make them as famous as possible, so that the revenue they get by doing actual work (like performing live) is maximized.

But, hey, that’s just my view. What can I do with an industry that asks me to either comply or fuck off? Well, I guess that we, the clients/users should be asking that to the industry, not the other way around. I certainly try to.

Religion ain’t bad. At least, it isn’t bad if the believer doesn’t try to impose her views upon others. My faith is harmless if I keep it to myself. Because, when did, for example, a good old praying hurt anyone?

Apparently, the answer is August 6, 2005, when the pilots of the Tuninter Flight 1153 decided to pray instead of following the security protocol in the event of fuel starvation. Sixteen people died.

Obviously it would be unfair to say that they died because of the praying. But it would be safe to assume that following the protocol instead of dumping the controls and praying could have made for a smoother landing, probably reducing the death toll.

I noticed that after my second eeebuntu install (see a previous post for a why to this reinstall), my Eee PC was a wee bit more noisy. Most probably it has always been like that, but I just noticed after the reinstall.

I put some sensor output in my [[Xfce]] panel, and noticed that the CPU temperature hovered around 55 degrees C, and the fan would continuously spin at around 1200 rpm. I searched the web about it, and found out that usually fans are stopped at computer boot, then start spinning when temperature goes up. This is logic. The small catch is that when the temperature in the Eee PC goes down, the fan does not stop automatically. This means that the fans are almost always spinning in the long run.

I searched for methods to fix that, and I read this post at hartvig.de. From there I took the idea of taking over the control of the fans, and making them spin according to the current temperature. For that, I wrote the following script:

#!/bin/bash

TEMFILE=/proc/eee/temperature
FANFILE=/proc/eee/fan_speed
MANFILE=/proc/eee/fan_manual

# Get temperature:
TEMP=`cat $TEMFILE`

# Choose fan speed:
if [ $TEMP -gt 65 ]
then
  SPEED=90
elif [ $TEMP -gt 60 ]
then
  SPEED=60
elif [ $TEMP -gt 55 ]
then
  SPEED=30
else
  SPEED=0
fi

# Impose fan speed:
echo 1 > $MANFILE
echo $SPEED > $FANFILE

The file /proc/eee/fan_manual controls whether fans are under manual (file contains a “1”) or automatic (file contains a “0”) control. File /proc/eee/fan_speed must contain an integer number from 0 to 100 (a percent of max fan speed).

I am running this script every minute with cron, and thus far it works OK.

Did I say “bimonthly” in my last report? Mmm, that was 3 months ago… You can read an intro for my Linux World Domination project in this May 2008 post.

As usual D2D means “days to domination” (the expected time for Windows/Linux shares to cross, counting from the present date), and DD2D means difference (increase/decrease) in D2D, with respect to last report. CLP means “current Linux Percent”, as given by last logged data, and DD means domination day (in YYYY-MM-DD format).

As promised, today I’m showing the plots for POEM@home, in next issue Prime@home.

Number of hosts percent evolution for POEM@home (click to enlarge)

Accumulated credit percent evolution for POEM@home (click to enlarge)

Yes, [[FLOSS]] also has its quirks and problems, and I am going to rant about some of them, that I run into the last week.

Problem 1: fsck on laptops

The reader might know that Linux comes with a collection of file system checkers/fixers, under the name fsck.* (where * = ext2/3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs…). When one formats a new partition (or tunes an existing one), some parameters are set, as for example in what circumstances fsck should be run automatically (you can always run it by hand). The typical setting is to run the command on each partition (just before mounting it) every N times it is mounted, or every M days.

It is also set that if a filesystem is not shut down cleanly (e.g., by crashing the computer or directly unplugging it), fsck will be run automatically on next boot (hey, that’s so nice!).

However, here’s the catch: on laptops, and with the aim of saving power, fsck will (tipically) not run automatically when on batteries. This seems a great idea, but you can imagine an scenario where it fails: shut down the laptop uncleanly, then power it up on batteries, and… voilà, you are presented with a system that seems to boot, but gives a lot of problems, the X don’t work… because the disk was corrupt, and wasn’t fixed on boot.

When this happened to me, I fixed it by booting while plugged. In principle you could also boot on single user mode, then chose “Check the filesystem” in the menu you will be presented (I’m talking about Ubuntu here), and fix the problem, even on batteries. But still, it’s annoying. IMHO fsck should run after unclean shutdowns, no matter being plugged or on batteries.

Problem 2: failed hibernate can seriously screw your system

I tried [[Hibernate (OS feature)|hibernating]] my laptop (a feature I keep finding problems with), but it was taking too long, and I was forced to shut it down using the power button. This, in itself, is a serious issue, but I could live with it.

But what I can’t live with is that after the event, I had no way of booting back! I tried all I could, and finally had to reinstall the OS. I am the one whom it happened to, and I still find it hard to believe: Linux so fucked up that you have to reinstall. I thought reinstalling belonged to the Windows Dark Ages!

Problem 3: faulty SD card

Since the problems tend to come together, it’s no surprise that I came across this error when trying to reinstall the machine borked with previous problem. The thing is that I was using a SD card as installation media, burning the ISO into it with [[UNetbootin]]. The burning didn’t burp any error, but the installation failed, usually (but not always) on the same point.

After minutes (hours?) of going crazy, I burned the ISO into another SD card, and it worked like a charm.

My complain is not that the SD was faulty, which I can understand (hardware fails). What I am angry at is the fact that I checked (with the aforementioned fsck command) the FS in the card many times, and I reformatted it (with mkfs) many more times, and Linux would always say that the formatting had been correct, and that all checks where fine. I understand that things are sometimes OK, sometimes KO. I just want to know when is which!