Ubuntu Tutorials

Today I finally replaced my out-of-date streaming music server with something a little more recent.  I had long been using gnump3d, and even wrote up a tutorial on it some time ago.  Development on the project has pretty much died off completely and even though it has worked great for nearly three years I felt it was time for a change.

I replaced the gnump3d service with Ampache, a PHP/MySQL based audio file manager and streaming server.  It looks like it has a lot more features than gnump3d had, but then again its also getting a lot more attention.  So, without further ado here is how I setup Ampache to allow me access to my .ogg collection via the web.

Installing Ampache via PPA

First I’ll outline how to install Ampache via the Launchpad PPA.  This will make the process much simpler, if you’re the type that is willing to use a PPA.  If not, read below for the manual installation method.

To install Ampache via the Launchpad PPA you can run the following command that matches your release, which will auto-add the PPA to your sources list.

Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy”

sudo wget http://zelut.org/projects/sources.list.d/ampache-gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ampache-gutsy.list

Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy”

sudo wget http://zelut.org/projects/sources.list.d/ampache-hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ampache-hardy.list

Next you can install the package and a few of its dependencies using the command:

sudo aptitude install ampache mysql-server-5.0 phpmyadmin

Once these packages are installed you should be able to access the Ampache server via http://your-webserver.com/ampache

The first time you connect it will walk you through an installer.  I think the installer could be a tad simpler, but basically you’ll need to know your mysql-server username and password (the password you set when the mysql-server-5.0 package installed).  There is a graphical walkthrough of the installer along with a few more tips here.

Install Ampache Manually

The manual installation method will take a few more steps, but its not anything you can’t handle I’m sure.  The first thing we’ll need to do is make sure Ampache has the dependent services installed, so we’ll install our webserver (in this case Apache2) and our MySQL server.

sudo aptitude install apache2-mpm-prefork mysql-server-5.0 php5 php5-gd

Next we’ll download and unpack the latest release into /var/www/.

cd /var/www/
wget -c http://ampache.org/downloads/stable.tar.gz
sudo tar xf stable.tar.gz
sudo mv ampache-* ampache

You should be able to access the Ampache server and initial installer via http://your-webserver.com/ampache

Check out the Ampache website and Wiki for more details on features and support.

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After some testing on some of my less-popular blogs I’ve upgraded this one to WordPress 2.5.  The whole ordeal seemed fairly painless (although with the number of blogs I host I really should consider WPMU).

I use svn to manage my installations which makes it really simple.  If you’re considering an upgrade, these are the steps I followed:

1. Make a backup of your current data–can’t be too safe.  Export your current database & php.
2. De-activate current plugins
3. change to the root directory of your blog and execute:
4. svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
5. I had an issue with Akismet, so I also then did:
6. rm -r wp-content/plugins/akismet/
7. svn up
8. visit http://your-site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php
9. re-activate plugins
10. Done

I want to congratulate the WordPress team for a great release.  Things look really sharp this time around and there look to be a lot of UI improvements.  I’m also glad to see I didn’t have any issues upgrading like I did after the early 2.2.x series.

The release of the next Ubuntu LTS (8.04 “Hardy Heron”) is just around the corner and as a community of Ubuntu members its our responsibility–nay, our obligation– to celebrate!  What are you planning to do for the greatest release to date?

If you’re part of a LoCo Team (you know who you are!) you need to have a release party.  If you’re not party of a LoCo Team you really should be!  Fill a room with geeks, add good food and drinks and toss in a reason to celebrate and who knows what might happen!

I want to remind everyone (particularly those in US Teams) to get cracking and post your release party details online here.

“What can we do for a release party?” you might ask.  Well, anything!  It can be as simple as meeting in a coffee shop with a few of your in-real-life buddies and celebrating Ubuntu’s latest achievement.  Perhaps meet up with your LoCo in a pub and have a toast to Ubuntu.  Maybe even go all out and have a big install fest in cooperation with your local university or LUG.  It doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that you’re celebrating the release and having a good time after six months of hard work!

It would be great if you could take pictures while you’re there and post them on blogs (and subsequent planets), flickr–even use twitter to share the fun.  Get the word out about where you’ll be, who can come and what’s involved.  Let’s really make it a big day and make sure the whole interweb hears about it!

If you’re looking for a local release party, or wondering if there is already one being planned, see the hardy release party list.

I’m trying to come up with a more creative name for my folding @ home management tool.  I put up a quick poll on the Ubuntu Forums.  If you care to offer a vote or suggestions please take a minute and drop by.

folding.sh renaming poll

I’m generally not one to advertise bugs but this has been my pet bug since upgrading to hardy and using Firefox 3b.  I have been putting up with the issue, but I’d *really* like to figure out a fix for it.

I’d be very interested in any feedback the rest of the community can suggest.  Please see my pet bug for details.

Many of us in the Free Software community have a certain level of “activist” within us, pushing those around us towards the ideals that we cherish.  Ideals such as freedom.  Freedom of communication, freedom of data, freedom of choice.  This March 26th is Document Freedom Day, another occasion where we can band together and help promote Open Document Standards.

DocumentFreedom.org is a site that drives to promote the use of Open Document standards, such as ODF.  From the website:

The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation. It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general.

To find out how you can participate this year, visit DocumentFreedom.org to find a team (or start a team!) near you.  Even if the best you can do is blog about it, do so.  One more person reached is one more “Open” mind.

I wanted to quickly toss something out there for all of you on the interweb.  I spent some time last evening cleaning up a few of my code projects.  If you have been using either of them you may want to update.

apturl for Gnome Do

I spent some time in the #gnome-do channel last nite seeing what needed to be done for the apturl plugin to become better supported.  The end result is that its much cleaner, properly licensed and has been submitted to the do-plugins branch on launchpad for possible future inclusion in the “official” plugins package.  If you have been using the apturl plugin for Gnome Do and saw some recent breakage, you can download the new known-to-be-working-on-0.4 version here.

GoogleSecure Greasemonkey Script

I’m a big fanboy of data encryption, including encrypting as much of my web traffic as I can.  I hacked together a small Greasemonkey script long ago that will force encryption on any supported Google application (gmail, reader, docs, calendar, etc), and recently added Twitter as well.  I guess that might be cause for a name change, but I didn’t get that far.  I would like to extend the list of sites that it supports, so if you know of any sites that offer https on login but don’t require (but support) https session-wide, let me know.  If you’re interested in this tool you can download Greasemonkey here and GoogleSecure here.

folding.sh

I also have time set aside today to try and squash two remaining bugs in folding.sh.  For all of you great folks that have been using folding.sh, expect an update fairly soon.

update: I have also found that prefetching is active in the Epiphany browser as well. The instructions to de-activate it are the same, see below.

I recently found out that Firefox has a feature called “prefetching” that tries to pre-download items that it suspects you might click on soon.  This could help in pre-downloading content that you would visit next (ie; it is linked on the page you are visiting therefore you might access it next), but it can also have the nasty negative effect of wasting your bandwidth on items you don’t ever want.  This can also download cookies from sites you haven’t visited, etc.  Seems like a nasty feature to me!

I also found that this prefetching feature will cause your connection to the ubuntuforums.org (and a few other sites) to be refused if you are also going through a squid proxy.  So, this is a quick suggestion on how you can disable prefetching in Firefox.

Disable Prefetching in Firefox

In your browsers address window enter the address:

about:config

This will pull up your browser settings (in FF3 it will warn you that there be dragons ahead!  Just accept the warning.)  You’ll now want to search for the following string, which you’ll toggle off:

network.prefetch-next

To toggle off this setting simple double-click the listing and it will set to false.  Prefetching items that you might download is now disabled.  Your machine will now kindly only download the content, cookies and images that you actually access directly.

I’m really happy to announce that SELinux is now available in Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”.  This is the result of the amazing work of the ubuntu-security and ubuntu-hardened teams, as well as the huge contributions from the folks at Tresys.  (note: SELinux will not be the default, but is available as a security option.)

If you would prefer to use SELinux over AppArmour, or if you’re just a good soul that would like to help test Ubuntu’s SELinux implementation, please read on.

Install SELinux in Ubuntu 8.04

All that is needed is to install the SELinux package, which will remove AppArmour and apply the SELinux policy.

sudo apt-get install selinux

If you run across any issues or bugs please report them against SELinux on launchpad. Welcome to a more secure Ubuntu!

As some of you may have read yesterday, Jorge Castro and I put together a twitter-powered Ubuntu Planet of sorts.  Our thinking is that we wanted a way to aggregate the army of Ubuntu users within the ‘twitterverse’, and give users a way to see what is going on within the Ubuntu community on a more up-to-the-minute basis than the existing Planet and blog formats.

So far the response has been really good and we’ve got a good collection of Ubuntu users and developers aggregated at the Pulse of Ubuntu.  If you’d like to see what is going on within the worldwide Ubuntu community check out the site, or follow the feed.  If you’re a twitter user and you’d like to be added drop me a line and you can become part of the Pulse!

If you’re not a Twitter user consider giving it a try, and we’ll plug you in.