Thanks to Archive.org, this article has been saved from the galactic Bit-Bucket. It still drives a ton of traffic to this site so I’m glad to have the content again.
Well, there are a lot of reasons you’d want a linux server at home. Here’s just a small sampling of what you can do:
I generally try to keep politics out of my personal blog, but I’d like to share some thoughts on the Occupy Portland/Anti-war march held yesterday. I went down there to observe and ended up following them most of the way through their march. I’ll start off with some pictures, and then brain dump my thoughts on the movement:
STOP. I mean STOP IT RIGHT THERE. Nobody gives a shit. Your crappy video will wallow away on youtube. You want to actually do something productive? WRITE A HOWTO. This skill seems to be lost on the current generation. A paragraph of explanatory text, folowed by some ASCII graphics, are INFINITELY more useful than a dimly lit spazzed out video in which I can’t see what it actually is you’ve done to make the thing.
I spend a lot of time each day behind a terminal. Most of which, actually, is by choice. I work on a windows laptop, and my workplace is primarily a windows shop, but whenever possible I offload work to my VPS and use command line apps for nearly all of my critical functions. ”Back to basics” if you will.
Currently I use a VPS from RapidXen running ArchLinux. This VPS has a whole 128MB of RAM. Yes, that’s right! I’m all about efficiency. I love taking something and making the absolute most of it, and to that end you’ll find that 128MB is actually way more than I really need, even with everything I do here. I chose Arch for this machine because of it’s barebones nature and the fact that pacman (and yaourt for community repositories) is freaking badass. Having bounced around amongst all the major VPS providers, I find RapidXen’s offering to be the most in line with what I need — fairly cheap, gets out of my way, sane base OS install. So far no performance issues a week in… will update this later.
This little 128MB VPS currently includes (off the top of my head):
As you can see… that’s quite a lot. I’ll be breaking this whole thing down into sections, and explaining why the text-only alternatives I’ve chose are simply better than the big bloated desktop choices out there. Stay tuned.
It appears that AOL has disabled the TOC protocol, which was their open, well documented AIM protocol. The goal of this would appear to be to force people to use their proprietary ad-supported client. Boo. I do a vast majority of my AIMing via console using bitlbee and CenterIM — both of which are now rendered inoperable. Finch (the command-line version of Pidgin) appears to work as libpurple uses the proprietary AOL protocol.
I wonder why AOL not only gave no notice about this shutdown, but refuses to make any kind of statement confirming the fact that they have indeed shut it down.
I said it. I have a new linux distribution of choice. Arch is just simply better than any of the other distros I’ve tried. It’s as stable as Debian. Newer packages than ubuntu. The package manager is just amazing. Oh, and it’s FAST. And lightweight. Currently, I’ve got a box setup running screen, irssi for IRC, CenterIM for AIM/Yahoo, rtorrent, a few shells, and i’m using all of 40MB of ram. Incredible. I had ubuntu 10.04.1 server on this machine previously and it was slow as hell, rtorrent caused the whole thing to grind to a halt, and i had to watch my ram usage carefully. No more. It also doesn’t treat you like an idiot, and assumes you know what you’re doing and why. I’ll be using Arch whenever possible from now on, and suggest you do too. Unless you’re a sissy.
Dear Ubuntu,
Honest question for you here. Why do you bother to release a new server version every 6 months?
I don’t see a good answer to this question. The desktop has a lot more motion in terms of compiz, x.org, gnome, etc. and having fresh packages means having the coolest features. But that’s not what the server build should be about. The new apache version isn’t going to change the way HTTP works. So why would anyone bother installing Maverick server, which will only be supported for the next 18 months, instead of the 5-year lifespan of the previous Lucid Lynx?
IMHO, Ubuntu desktop should stay on a 6 month release schedule(where fresh packages really do matter) and do LTS releases for business desktops every 2 years. The LTS release should also include a RC for ubuntu server, and then Desktop LTS+1 should be the server LTS build to give time for bugfixes and tweaks. Server builds are about stability, not necessarily bleeding edge code.
[The following is a repost of a diatribe I wrote almost 2 years ago, that's worth repeating on my new blog]
Below is the transcript of a exchange i saw in #fedora this afternoon. It’s a perfect example of why people don’t like linux. They ask for some kind of help, and get shot down and told they’re dumb for not knowing something they’ve never been taught.
(12:09:09 PM) The topic for #fedora is: F9 - F10 Fedora End User Support (12:09:16 PM) tw2113: rcshah01, pastebin the output of this (12:09:23 PM) tw2113: ls /etc/yum.repos.d/ (12:13:10 PM) rcshah01: fedora-rawhide.repo rpmfusion-free-rawhide.repo (12:13:10 PM) rcshah01: fedora.repo rpmfusion-free.repo (12:13:10 PM) rcshah01: fedora-updates.repo rpmfusion-free-updates.repo (12:13:10 PM) rcshah01: fedora-updates-testing.repo rpmfusion-free-updates-testing.repo (12:13:24 PM) Khaytsus: rcshah01: STOP (12:13:32 PM) Khaytsus: rcshah01: If you want to paste, fpaste.org (12:13:51 PM) tw2113: i even said pastebin (12:13:59 PM) rcshah01: what is pastebin (12:14:18 PM) ***Khaytsus points rcshah01 to http://fpaste.org (12:14:19 PM) tw2113: mostly what it sounds likea place to paste textual information (12:15:26 PM) rcshah01: http://fpaste.org/paste/2376 (12:16:02 PM) tw2113: rcshah01, you have the repos available, they may not be enabled though (12:16:12 PM) rcshah01: i see, how to enable? (12:16:29 PM) Khaytsus: rcshah01: FPASTE this: yum repolist enabled (12:16:41 PM) rcshah01: fpaste means paste? (12:16:47 PM) ***Khaytsus smacks rcshah01 (12:16:58 PM) Khaytsus: rcshah01: It means paste the output into the fpaste website. (12:17:02 PM) Khaytsus: Pay attention.
This superiority complex lives in IRC support as shown, all the way up to, say, developers. A perfect example of the latter is this bug in ubuntu(naim). I submitted a newly compiled version and the wrong diffs. So, 3 months later, the bug is still open and the package is still useless. I’m not the only one who has this experience — there are many blogs talking about the lack of response and rude behavior of ubuntu’s bug squad.
As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey, regardless of what XKCD says. If we are to fix ubuntu bug #1, the linux community as a whole needs to do their part. If you’re going to hang out in IRC, prepare to be nice, and give newbies a hand. You were there once, and I’m sure someone pointed you in the right direction.
Dinner tonight was my (apparently) famous homemade mac and cheese. It’s dead easy, so instead of just a picture on facebook, here’s the recipe. Tonight I used a spiral pasta of sorts but elbows or even penne work fine.
Fry a few strips of bacon sliced into medium-sized pieces. Chop a few leaves of fresh spinach roughly the same size as the precooked bacon pieces.
For the cheese sauce, start off with a roux… melt 3/4 stick butter in saucepan on medium heat at most. When its just melted, whisk in an equal amount of flour. Whisk until the color just starts to change. Add 2 cups or so of milk and whisk regularly until it just starts to thicken. It’ll curdle if it gets too hot too quickly so be careful. Congrats, you have a Bechamel sauce. Season this however you like — salt/pepper of course, some diced garlic browned in the bacon fat does great too. At this point, turn the heat to low or remove from heat entirely. Stir in a cup of your choice of cheeses, then add the cooked bacon.
When the pasta has about 90 seconds left, drop the spinach in. Drain and mix in the cheese/bacon. Done.
I was too busy drooling all over myself to take any progress pics… or any at all until I’d dished everyone up actually. Here’s half a pot (which was gone by the time the night was over):
So I encountered a *lot* of misinformation and bad howto’s out there on how to root the sprint HTC Evo Shift and install CM7. Rather than rehashing the whole thing, I’ll show you the howtos I used to successfully install CM7, which is based on Gingerbread(Android 2.3) on my Evo Shift.
1: Root your phone. This guide is a great step by step. NOTE: You CAN do this on linux. Just get the linux version of the android tools, everything else is platform independent.
I had some issues here — It took several tries with both Visionary and Z4 to get it rooted. Both would hang and I’d have to remove the battery to reset the phone. Eventually I figured out that enabling Airplane mode is the key — they started working a bit better once I did that, but I still had to try twice to temproot after installing the new SPL. So, keep trying — just because it doesn’t work once doesn’t mean it won’t work after another restart.
2: Once your phone is perm-rooted, install ROM Manager from the Android market. Then, select the option to install ClockworkMod Recovery. This gives you a ton of flexability to install new roms, backup your phone, etc.
3: Reboot the phone.
4: Copy the CM7 ROM for the Shift(‘speedy’) to your SD Card. Click here for the official link to the latest ROM.
5: Also copy the latest Google Apps to the SD card as well
6: Follow this guide to install the ROM itself, but use the ROMs linked here.
This should cover it. The only real danger is flashing the SPL — be super careful there. For what it’s worth, I didn’t have md5sum on my phone, so I had to use the version in ubuntu to check it via mounting the sd card as a disk drive. Make 100% sure you’re positive the flash went well (the ‘dd’ command) before restarting your phone.
This worked perfectly for me, running CM7 on my Evo Shift now and loving it!