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Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated.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