Sacha Chua - tag - ubuntu

Calibre and Qt 5.5

Sacha Chua — Tue, 26 Jan 2016 13:00:00 GMT

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Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated.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!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Using supervisord for Nginx+FastCGI+PHP

Sacha Chua — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:00:00 GMT

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.

You can view 8 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Getting sound to work again

Sacha Chua — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 05:20:00 GMT

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.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Moved to Vaio!

Sacha Chua — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:50:00 GMT

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…

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.