Tags: ubuntu

RSS - Atom - Subscribe via email

Calibre and Qt 5.5

| geek, linux

A recent apt-get dist-upgrade resulted in the removal of calibre and calibre-bin from my system. I've been using Calibre to convert e-books from HTML and EPUB (some developer references, some fanfiction =) ) and copy them onto my Kindle.

It turned out that the Calibre packaged in Ubuntu required qtbase-abi-5-4-2 and my recent dist-upgrade installed Qt 5.5. I needed to upgrade to Calibre 2.49, which wasn't available on any of the PPAs I checked (despite instructions to the contrary).

Installing Calibre from the Calibre website made it work, though. In fact, the Calibre website says:

Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below.

I wasn't too keen on piping the output of a wget command to sudo , but a quick scan of the script didn't turn up anything suspicious. Anyway, now I can convert EPUBs to MOBIs and easily copy them onto my Kindle, yay!

Using supervisord for Nginx+FastCGI+PHP

Posted: - Modified: | geek, linux

I was having problems with spawn-fcgi-standalone occasionally resulting in dead PHP processes, which caused 502 Bad Gateway errors on my site. Crontabbing an /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi start didn't help much, so I looked for other ways to do it. Supervisord looked promising.

Here’s how to get Supervisord:

apt-get install python-setuptools
easy_install supervisor

 

Here’s what to add to /etc/supervisord.conf:

[fcgi-program:php5-cgi]
socket=tcp://127.0.0.1:9000
command=/usr/bin/php5-cgi
numprocs=5
priority=999
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
user=www-data
autorestart=true
autostart=true
startsecs=1
startretries=3
stopsignal=QUIT
stopwaitsecs=10
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/php5-cgi.log
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=10MB

So far, so good. When I kill the php process, supervisord starts it back up. Progress!

supervisord doesn’t come with an init.d script, but you can get one for Ubuntu.

Getting sound to work again

| laptop, linux

Things to remember when setting up sound in Ubuntu Linux on a Sony Vaio U1:

  • modprobe trident
  • modprobe snd_trident
  • Be very very thorough with alsamixer settings. For some brain-dead reason, all the important stuff is muted.

Moved to Vaio!

The power adapter on my Fujitsu Lifebook P1110 has just completely given up. Fortunately, my parents had given me the Sony Vaio U1 to use as a backup computer. After a day of upgrading it from Ubuntu Breezy Badger to Ubuntu Dapper Drake (that should teach me to deselect all of the GNOME packages before I dist-upgrade!) and another afternoon for getting my various CVS Emacs stuff compiled and put together, I'm now back on an approximately working system. I still need to get software suspend working, but everything else works beautifully.

The Sony Vaio U1 is actually a pretty sweet machine. It's *tiny* – 8.9″ screen and a keyboard that even I find just a bit small. No Dvorak on this one; the combination of a Japanese keyboard and chiclet keys makes it too difficult for me to remember the proper keyboard mappings through muscle memory. I type with four fingers: the middle finger and index finger of my left hand and the thumb and index finger of my right.

When Simon saw me setting up the Vaio, he insisted that I borrow a proper-sized keyboard. Heh. ;)

So I'm on Ubuntu now. It's certainly slicker than the Debian system I've just moved from, with a pretty bootup sequence and a lot of other things that Just Work. I'm no longer a poseur. The Ubuntu stickers on my skateboard actually mean something. ;) Sweet.

Now that that's sorted out, maybe I can work on my writing backlog. I owe so many people e-mail and I owe Don Marti an article…

Wireless wonders

| linux

I struggled with installing the DWL-650 wireless LAN card on my
Microsoft Windows XP partition for half an hour before I gave up and
booted to Linux. I suppose that if the operating system hadn’t been in
Japanese, I might’ve had a shot. What do you expect from Sony recovery
CDs for a unit primarily for the Japanese market?

On the other hand, Linux was a breeze with Ubuntu Linux, a
slick Debian-based distribution backed by
Canonical. My copy came from
Jerome Gotangco, Ubuntu documentation guy
for the Philippines.

Setting up wireless was just a matter of plugging my DWL-650 in.
D-Link really screwed up with that card by using the same model number
for cards using completely different chipsets, but Ubuntu
automatically found and loaded the module I needed.

Because we don’t want the next-door Internet cafe to sponge off our
wireless access, we protect our router with a simple MAC address
filter list. I couldn’t figure out where to find my MAC address in the
graphical network configuration tool, but a quick whiz through dmesg
turned up the magic numbers I needed to add to my router’s filters.
After I plugged that into the router’s web-based configuration tool,
set the ESSID in Ubuntu’s friendly network admin interface, and
activated the device, I was off and running.

Great stuff, huh? Now if I can just get it to work under stock Debian…