Recently in UNIX Category

The last week I was in Vidin, Bulgaria with no internet access and I had to fix my MTA (Postfix) at host.0.buetow.org which serves E-Mail for all my customers at P. B. Labs. Good, that I do not garuantee high availability on my web services (I ve to do a full time job somewhere else too). My first try to find an internet cafe, which was working during christmas time, failed. However, I found with my N95 lots of free wlan hotspots. They refused me logging into my server using ssh (I am using a non standard port for ssh in order to avoid lots of login attempts). Without knowing the price I was using then the GPRS internet access of my german phone provider (yes, I ll have to pay lots of roaming fees). With Putty for N95 and configuring Postfix with Vim and the T9 imput mechanism I managed to fix the poblem. But it took half of an hour. My next mobile phone MUST have a full qwerty keyboard included. This would have made my life lots easier. :)

ATM I am in Sofia, Bulgaria. Here I can use at least an unprotected WLAN hotspot which belongs to one of the neighbors which I don't know in person and it is not blocking any port at all :)

I want to have a GNOME (or stand alone) application which captures a screenshot of the area of my mouse pointer and automatically detects all IP numbers and hostnames on it and runs the host command on it and displays the results in a small extra window.

This would make every day work a little bit easier. I detect myself typing 'host $somehostsoripaddress' several times a day into an extra terminal.

Vim is my favourite editor (and IDE) for programming, editing, writing etc. Vim is like Perl: You always find something new how do do things. I think this is amazing! I found a small advanced Introduction to Vim in the internet. The following commands I didn't know until now: gs ga gf gD :later :earlier :mkview :loadview :bufdo . It's worth reading it, because it's not so much to read and it should contain a few tricks you don't know already :)

As many of you know, I am a big fan of open source software and UNIX and UNIX like platforms! So the perfect mobile phone should use an UNIX like OS and it should be made out of open source software!

Symbian is now open source but it is not UNIX like.

The iPhone uses an UNIX like operating system, but the user can not make advantage of it officially. And it's not open source at all!

The Android platfrom looks very promising. It's complete open source and it's a Linux operating system. However, no official phone for Android yet available. However you can already develop applications with the Android API, but Java only.

The OpenMoko project looks the most promising for myself. It's a complete open source phone platfrom as well and it's, like Android, a Linux. The advantage of OpenMoko over Android for me: You are not bound to the Java programming language, but you can use all kind of APIs including C, Python, probably Perl and C++ as well. And there is already the first running OpenMoko phone, called Freerunner, out to buy. However, the phone looks so damn ugly.

OpenMoko offers the most flexibility to a Linux user and programmer. An OpenMoko user should develop his own applications, or make use of the forming community. Probably, then the first phone running Android comes out, OpenMoko will get ported to it too. Maybe this will be the time I will get myself a new phone?

There are several other Linux based phone platforms I did not mention yet. That's because I don't know much about them yet. :)

At the moment I am using the Nokia N95. Well, it's not using an UNIX like OS and it still has a closed source version of Symbian on it. But it does it job well: Nice pictures, WLAN, SMS, phoneing, etc. It's a tool and not a toy for me. The perfect mobile phone would be also a toy for me (e.g. programming my own applications for it with fun in an environment I like).

Well, as mentioned, I think that this blog is also good for introducing some subdomains of the *.buetow.org (*.bue) namespace. So here we go again! curses.buetow.org (curses.bue) is a small website which lists several nice Linux/UNIX tools which use the ncurses library. There are probably many more applications and tools which could be listed there. You may recommend a few tools as well and I'll think about inclusion!

Der Trick ist zwar alt, aber ich wollte es hier im Blog auch noch gepostet haben :) Wenn man sich das TV-Programm (aus Retrozwang, oder weil man einfach kein X11 mag, oder wenn man einfach kein X11 hat) ansehen will, dann halten die Textbrowser Links oder Lynx oder sogar W3M her! Folgendes Beispiel hab ich mal mit dem Lynx (der übrigens auch ein prima Gopher-Client ist) durchgeführt.

Man muß einfach lynx http://text.hoerzu.de/tv-programm in die Konsole oder in den terminale emulator (bei mir mrxvt) eingeben und man bekommt das TV-Programm im Textmodus präsentiert :) Hörzu, der Betreiber des Portals, bietet diesen Service schon mehrere Jahre an. Die text Subdomain ist wohl eigentlich extra für behinderte Internetbenutzer eingerichtet worden.

It has always been a pain to get a recent version of Adobe Flash running on a FreeBSD desktop system. I am a fanatic FreeBSD user, and I use FreeBSD not only for servers but also on my Desktop as well as on my Laptop!

First, Adobe does not offer a native version of Flash for the FreeBSD operating system. However, FreeBSD has the capability to run Linux binaries natively. Therefore there are Linux Flash binaries in the FreeBSD Ports Tree available, which are www/linux-flashplugin7 and www/linux-flashplugin9. I was able to get Linux Flash 7 working on FreeBSD, however the Flash 9 version never worked well for me. Doesn't matter which browser I use. I don't want to list all errors and trails here I faced already. Lot's of websites however already require Flash 9. I found a suboptimal, but at least working, solution for having Flash 9 on FreeBSD. It's called using Windows Firefox on Wine. It works flawlessly :)

First install Wine 1.0 or higher (may ll work with an older version too). Afterwards download Firefox 3 for Windows XP. Run the installer with wine. The installation will work out without any complications.

After installation you can start Firefox with wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe.

Now browse to the Adobe website and download the Flash Player for Windows. Afterwards close Firefox and run the Flash installer via Wine using wine install_flash_player.exe.

Now start Firefox again. As you can see, the Flash Player works flawlessly :-)

I hope some day I'll be able to run a more native version of Flash on my FreeBSD. A working Linux Flash 9 would be fine. Even better would be a 100% native version like Gnash, which is an open source implementation of Flash. However, Gnash is still to unstable and lacks features. Maybe next year?

First, it was a nice suprise that I was able to install and run the Elster Formular application (proprietary software for Windows of the german government for registering your taxes online) under Wine.

However, after trying to submit my taxes online, I recv. the following error dialog (and Elster on Windows XP works without problems):

Too bad :/ Well, but recently the german government also offers a Java Applet for submitting the tax infos. I think I'll have to give it a try, so I can avoid using my Windows XP installation :)

I don't know why Elster is not working on Wine. I remember about half an year ago, I was able to submit my tax infos once using Elster on Wine.

I've added a new TLD zone .bue to my home router's DNS server (which runs OpenBSD on an old IBM ThinkPad T20) and forwarded all its subdomains to my webserver (the server, which also runs this blog):

* IN CNAME host.0.buetow.org.

And I've added the following mod_rewrite rule to the Apache of my webserver host.0.buetow.org:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*?)\.bue$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://%1.buetow.org/ [L]

This rule forwards all *.bue hosts to its *.buetow.org counterparts! E.g. science.bue will become science.buetow.org! (or you may use sc.bue, which will become sc.buetow.org, which will become science.buetow.org).

This way, I can reach all my sites faster, without bookmarking anything etc. If you want to take advantage of it, you need to edit the DNS server you use or, if you are using an *NIX operating system, you can add the desired hostnames to your /etc/hosts file! The entry for sc.bue and science.bue and screens.bue would look like this then:

85.214.66.253 sc.bue science.bue screens.bue

Well, If you have an account on my server (via labs.buetow.org aka labs.bue), you can request such a pseudo TLD for free :)

Well, as you may know, people tend to watch the european soccer championship. Recently I compared an internet TV stream to its analog cable TV counterpart. The watch in the upper right corner of each transmission represents a countdown until the match starts. As you can see, the analog cable TV (to the left) is 16 seconds ahead of the "live" internet stream (to the right). I like my old fashioned Hauppauge WinTV (with BrookTree chip) card. Oh, and here is the screenshot:

BTW: The SS shows FVWM on FreeBSD.