Colin Charles Agenda

Most of the software I use is open source software. However, some software I use is just plain free software that has no source associated with it (like Skype and Gizmo Project). I took the challenge of wanting to run a 64-bit desktop, and I guess there are problems, but thats the beauty of Linux – you’ll want to fix said problems.

Google is always helpful – I found the Cedega wiki on how to setup a clean 32-bit chroot with debbootstrap. I improvised a little. I now have Skype running.

Setting up a 32-bit chroot on your 64-bit Ubuntu

• sudo apt-get install dchroot debootstrap
• sudo mkdir /chroot (/chroot is arbitrary. You can call it /feisty32 or /hoary32 or whatever you please depending on your requirements.)
• echo "feisty /chroot" > /etc/dchroot.conf
• sudo debootstrap --arch i386 feisty /chroot http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
• sudo chroot /chroot
• dpkg-reconfigure locales (I chose en_AU, you probably want to chose whatever else you use)
• Edit /chroot/etc/apt/sources.list and make it so that its:

  deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty main restricted universe multiverse
  deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse

• Now, perform the apt-get update; apt-get upgrade routine
• Out of the chroot, there are some interesting files to copy into the chroot:

• sudo cp /etc/passwd /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etc/shadow /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etcgroup /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etc/sudoers /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etc/hosts /chroot/etc/

/home   /chroot/home    none    bind 0 0

/tmp    /chroot/tmp     none    bind 0 0

/dev    /chroot/dev     none    bind 0 0

/proc   /chroot/proc    none    bind 0 0

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/dchroot -d "`echo $0 | sed 's|^.*/||'` $*"

That’s it. You’ve now got a 32-bit chroot environment, and can install any 32-bit apps you please.

Installing Skype
First up, go download the .deb file from Skype. Then:

• dchroot -d
• dpkg -i skype.deb (Now, it will complain about missing debs. Then, I ran sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 libqt3-m. It will complain, so just do a sudo apt-get -f install.)
• Excellent, Skype is now installed. Exit the chroot.
• sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/do_dchroot /usr/local/bin/skype
• Now, run Skype!

I did this similarly for Gizmo Project. Sound works a charm (thanks to /dev being mounted). The applications seem to run just fine.

Technorati Tags: skype, 64bit, 32bit, chroot, gizmo, debian, ubuntu

Yes, in the real world, we all have to run applications that are not provided via the excellent universe of Debian software packages. Some of these, even have to be binaries that you download via the Internet.

But with stupid error messages like these:

[-(~/Downloads/skype-1.4.0.58_alpha)> ./skype 
bash: ./skype: No such file or directory

It sure makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Thats right, this is 64-bit Ubuntu trying to run a 32-bit application. In fact, these failures will apply to upstream Thunderbird (because in Ubuntu’s infinite wisdom, its stuck at Thunderbird 1.5), GizmoProject and so on. On Fedora, multi-arch is handled a lot better – RPM actually brings in useful 32-bit libraries, and you can run upstream Skype, Gizmo, Thunderbird, with no worries. Its all transparent.

I just wish there was better error reporting. So I don’t have to fire up strace (I sure as heck don’t expect my mother do to so) to see what the real problem is.

Note to Debian-based-distros (Ubuntu in particular): You’re a big boy now. Dell is going to ship you. Most likely on Core 2 Duo machines. People are not going to want to run 32-bit Ubuntu on them, because they bought an advertised 64-bit processor. Laptops (mine even) support 4GB of RAM out of the box (yeah, except 2GB chips cost an arm and a leg).

I’m told that a 32-bit chroot is what I need to set up to make my life better again. Is that so?

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, multi-arch, multiarch, 32bit, 64bit, binaries, dpkg, chroot

Today I cooked. 2nd time in the week – chilli con carne when I arrived back on Monday, and marinara wine-o mix pasta.

Chilli con carne was easy to prepare: 500g shredded beef, 1 can tomatoes, 1 can kidney beans, a couple of onions (chopped), and add the Maggi chill con carne mix ;-) Goes well with garlic bread, wholemeal bread, and so forth.

Marina wine-o mix pasta is a lot more interesting. Chopped onions and garlic, wine, assorted marinara mix (i.e. go get crabsticks, prawns, squid, mussels, etc.) all in a pot. Add more wine (white) liberally. Make sure the flame is at medium. Toss in some lemon rinds and lemon juice. Add a dash of parsley and basil. Cook pasta separately, and when al dente, toss into the big wok containing marinara wine-o mix. Stir properly. Add a little more wine. Stir.

Tastes delicious. YP, my housemate, decided to try some sauce because she dislikes seafood in general. “Tastes like wine,” she said. Oops. Minor problem is that with ~750g of pasta, and ~1kg of marinara mix, I’ve got two large container loads of this stuff.

Yes, I’m cooking to de-stress. And to sure as heck consider it payback for the horrendous amounts of hotel food I ate while in the US of A.

Everyone likes to scale – Peter Van Dijck has got some top 10 presentations listed – Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, Six Apart (Vox), Last.fm, SlideShare, etc. Guess what these sites are all generally backed by? You guessed right – go MySQL. I however didn’t know that Bloglines was backed by Sleepycat.

If you’re interested in viewing some rather swanky MySQL-related presentations, check out the mysql tag on SlideShare, as well.

I especially like Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal: Behind the Scenes talk that he gave at Yet Another Perl Conference Asia 2007. The LiveJournal folk (Brad mostly?) have built some amazing tools that we all take for granted daily – memcached, perlbal, djabberd, OpenID and so much more. In fact, for those thinking about presenting at the MySQL Users Conference Japan 2007 (in September), I’d suggest looking at Brad’s slide deck – look at how he does dual languages! I don’t know if he wrote the Japanese as well, but I think this is definitely a good idea.

Now to go read up on mogilefs and all the other cool tools at Danga Interactive.

Technorati Tags: mysql, scaling, livejournal, slideshare, japanese, presentation

This is where all the rave is at, today. Guess May really is a good month :-) I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a while (linux being pre-loaded), and this seems to be a fairly good time.

It all started with Morgan Collett’s post about Linux preloaded – useful out of the box? Its been sitting in a tab awaiting comment, and I must say the history of Linux on Dell’s is somewhat funny – desktop installation on a server! Its interesting to see that Slackware gets shipped in South Africa on a laptop. Imagine the support nightmare? And then Jerome mentions that in the Philippines he got Linpus (first time I’ve heard about it). He also mentions that Acer bundles Red Flag or older Mandriva’s.

Linux makes bundling software hard. So many distributions to pick from, everyone liking something else, different release versions between distributions, spread package management formats, and the list of differences go on. Different kernel? Oops, that might react badly to your BIOS or hardware. Shipping a cheap winmodem? There goes your Linux options.

So its with pleasure that I see Dell offering Ubuntu on some of their machines. When it came to voting in IdeaStorm, I personally picked other, and wrote “Fedora or Ubuntu”. Only because my ties with Fedora go back so many years. But deep down inside, I felt it would have been a nightmare for support – fast changing releases every 6-9 months, new features, things changing rapidly, and you get the drift – it might not be useful out of the box. Ubuntu has focused on usability, they have a mix of some binary driver offerings, and their manifesto is to have a “just works” OS. Best of all – you can get support the moment you need it. Fedora is always touted as being unsupported.

This news is great for the Ubuntu community. Training, support, certification, a lot of good things can happen around this.

Why Ubuntu 7.04? Its not a Long Term Support (LTS) release. I guess this is why its on selected desktops and laptops – I see servers being the next market (alongside RHEL and SuSE) when the next release of Ubuntu comes out.

Speaking of community, Canonical is getting some flak for gagging bloggers on Planet Ubuntu. Guess as a company, they’re also dealing with change, and moving into more of the corporate world.

In other quick news, Jerome, a friend and semi-regular IRC buddy is even co-writing Ubuntu Server in Action.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, dell, pre-loaded, book, ubuntu server

Filed in the “I wish I had done this, instead of just thinking about it and sitting on my arse” department.

Fedora Daily Package
The Fedora Daily Package is a great site. Chris Tyler, even gets to pimp his book! Its filled with nuggets of useful information, tips and tricks on how to get things going, and introduces you to some new software that you thought might not have existed. I can only wish the energy to continue, and for us to keep on getting great tips and tricks. Inspired largely from the Debian Package of the Day, one day we might see Fedora’s package count match Debian’s universe.

Full Circle Magazine
Full Circle Magazine, is touted as the free Ubuntu Community Magazine. It looks very, very interesting, but makes a few classic mistakes. Having only a PDF version of the online magazine, is a bit of a bummer – the web is largely best viewed in a web browser, so the individual articles should really be sitting as individual links, and searchable by Google, and so forth. The other mistake I think is not offering monetary rewards for article contribution – IBM developerWorks and Red Hat Magazine offer USD$500 per accepted article, and no matter what you want to say, money is always handy. In these days when one can publish so easily on their own blog, get their own AdSense dollars, it probably makes more sense to pay for content thats going into a “magazine” or being used for commercial marketing purposes (to show an active, vibrant community, even).

Here’s hoping Canonical decide to adopt Full Circle Magazine, make a web-also version, pay even USD$100 per article, and continue its success.

Low cost French computer
The Minitel is something I saw in my French textbooks, back during my high school days of learning a new language. It seems that Neuf Cegetel, a French ISP is now aiming to create a low-cost computer for folk that are unable or unwilling to buy a computer. Reminds me of the PC Gemilang. It has open source software – Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric. It comes with very little space, but with the world moving online, thin clients seem to make more sense, everyday. There’s also a good chance this has more success than the PC Gemilang, as its ISP supported. And cheap – €167.90 buys you a computer, keyboard, mouse, camera, and a 14″ color monitor. Thats only about €50 cheaper than the PC Gemilang.

I think its safe to say that the Internet has reached everyone that matters, in most first world countries. Anyone else (with such low broadband and Internet penetration rates) is probably not into the Internet, because they’re not even wanting to get a computer. Various reasons probably apply here, but when you bring the cost of accessing the Internet down to a rate where people see it as a consumable, thats where the next wave of Internet customers are coming from. ISPs and online business folk probably should see this shift coming, soon.

Technorati Tags: fedora daily package, debian package of the day, fedora, ubuntu, full circle magazine, ubuntu magazine, minitel, low cost computer, france, pc gemilang