The Linux Experiment

I came across this neat script somewhere on the internet while trying to batch convert a folder full of FLAC files to mp3 files. Hopefully it will help somebody else:

for file in *.flac; do flac -cd “$file” | lame -b 320 -h – “${file%.flac}.mp3″; done

Do your GTK applications (i.e. Firefox) look like something designed in the 90′s in KDE? I think I can help you.

I installed the latest Firefox, (not the one in the screenshot, I stole this.) and was very disappointed to see something like the following:

Tyler pointed me to the Gentoo guide here, which helped me find out which packages I needed.

If you install Chakra-Gtk-Config, and either oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (make sure to download the gtk2 theme), you will have better looking GTK applications in no time. Note that there are probably tons of other GTK themes for KDE4, these are just some suggestions to get you started.

That is much better.

If you’re going through the Beyond Linux From Scratch guide, and run into this error while compiling qca-2.0.3 (and I assume many other versions of qca), I think I can help.

You don’t seem to have ‘make’ or ‘gmake’ in your PATH.
Cannot proceed.

The fix is relatively easy. Just make sure to have which installed on the machine. Jake found this out the hard way by looking through the configure script. Doing this experiment on Linux From Scratch has really given me an appreciation for distributions that come with basic utilities such as which.

Since which is very difficult to find on Google, here is a link: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/which.html

We’re currently in discussions to begin a new Linux Experiment for 2011. Stay tuned to the website as we should have new posts, a new podcast and new contributors very soon! If there’s anything you’d like to see us try out or do differently this time, please post your thoughts in the comments section.

When I’m not rocking out my ninja-like linux skillz here at The Linux Experiment, I like to spend my spare time working on SlightlySauced, a weekly round table podcast. When we started the show, we chose to host it on a simple Tumblr blog, because it offered a fast setup experience and didn’t require much additional configuration to work well enough for our purposes. In light of this week’s Tumblr outages, we’ve decided to move the show off of the cloud and onto the same hosting provider that this site resides on.

Since I find myself with a little bit of spare time recently, I’ve also decided to write a custom site for the show using Django, my new favourite web framework. If you’re interested in trying your hand at Django development (and honestly, if you’re doing web development of any kind, why haven’t you tried it yet?), you can follow along with my progress here.

Step 1: Installing MySql

Because Django is a Python-based web framework, it includes SQLite out of the box. My web host of choice provides solid MySQL support, so I’ve decided to swap out SQLite for MySql. This requires that I install a local MySQL server for development purposes. Ubuntu has posted some handy documentation that I followed loosely. I’ll repeat the relevant steps here for posterity and ease of use.

From your terminal, type:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

During the installation process, you’ll be prompted to enter a password for MySql’s root user account. If your server is going to be public-facing, it’s a good idea to enter a strong password. If it’s just for development purposes, you can probably use something weaker and easier to type.

Once the installation has finished, check that your server is running by typing:

sudo netstat -tap | grep mysql

This command should output something like the following:

tcp     0     0     localhost:mysql     *:*     LISTEN 2556/mysqld

Note: This command didn’t actually work for me. I had to remove the pipe and type just

sudo netstat -tap

and then search the resulting list for the MySql entry. I found it easily enough, and was convinced that the daemon was running and waiting for clients.

Step 2: MySQL Workbench (Optional)

Once your MySql daemon is up and running, you could edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file to alter its configuration. Instead, I opted to use MySQL Workbench, a decent graphical management tool that is distributed by Oracle (the same folks who make MySql). I’ve used it extensively at work, so I’m familiar with it and comfortable with its quirks. If you care to use it, you’ll have to grab it from Oracle’s website, as it’s not in the Ubuntu repositories. Luckily, Oracle provides a Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit *.deb that can be easily installed with GDebi. For those who care about such things, MySQL Workbench is a fully OSS GPL-licensed product, so there’s no funny stuff going on with regards to licensing.

With MySQL Workbench up and running, you’ll be presented with a screen like this one:

Click on New Connection under the SQL Development column in the bottom left of the screen, and enter the connection details of your local MySql server. It should be available via the loopback IP 127.0.0.1 on port 3306. The default username is root, and the password is whatever you set during the installation process. Once you get access, you can create a new schema and fire a few commands at it to test your setup.

Head back over to the Home tab and click on New Server Instance under the Server Administration column at the bottom right of the screen. In the dialog that pops up, select Take Parameters from Existing Database Connection and hit Next a bunch of times. The resulting window is a full MySQL daemon monitoring window that details traffic, the number of connections to the server, etc. More importantly, it allows you to set up user accounts and change configuration variables from a handy graphical front end instead of wading through MySQL’s extensive configuration files.

I headed over to the Accounts tab and created a user account for Django. At this stage of development, you’ll want to give this account full root access to the database, as Django will automatically create and drop schemas and tables as you code your website. Once development is done, you can pare these down to only those that are necessary.

Step 3: Installing Django

Holy crap, that was a lot of work, and we haven’t even gotten our framework of choice installed yet! Let’s get on with that. The project has some excellent documentation on this issue. I’ll repeat the basic steps here for your convenience, but strongly suggest that you read through the full instruction set if you encounter any issues or want to perform a customized installation.

Since Django is a python-based framework, you’ll need to make sure that you have a compatible version of Python installed on your system. At the time of writing, Ubuntu 10.04 ships with Python version 2.6.5. Django only works with Python versions 2.4 through 2.7. If you’re not running Ubuntu 10.04, you can check which version you have installed by typing

python –version

in your terminal. Once you’ve ensured that you have a compatible Python version installed, type

sudo apt-get install python-django

in your terminal to install version 1.1.1 of the framework from your repositories. Once the installation has finished, you should check the installed version. Since Django lives inside of python, you’ll need to start a python terminal by typing

python

in your terminal. Once started, type

import django
print django.get_version()

If you don’t see any horrendous-looking error messages, you’re good to go. As a side note, if you type

apt-cache search django

you’ll see that the Ubuntu repositories include quite a few handy Django plugins and applications that you might want to use in your projects, including a URL shortener, a user-registration module, and a contact form. Each of these can be installed on your system and included in any Django project quite easily. I’ll probably end up using one or more in my project to save me some time.

Finally, you’ll need to install an extra database connector for python in order to use MySql from within Django. In Ubuntu 10.04, this package is called python-mysqldb.

Step 4: Write Some Code!

So you’re up and running. If you’re not familiar with Django, I suggest that you run through their online tutorial. It’s well-written and provides a great introduction to some of the stuff that the framework can do.

Whatever you do, have fun! In my experience, Django makes web development a pleasure because it takes care of a lot of the nitty-gritty crap for you and lets you get on with solving harder problems.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Edit: Added an extra database connector package that’s necessary if you want to use MySql with Django.

I found an interesting bug in Mint today. It happened after I changed my monitor setup without restarting X. It looks like my panel froze with whatever programs were open earlier. What makes this interesting is that the system continue to add items to the panel without refreshing the graphics.

I like Firefox's old logo

This doesn't look like Kate to me!

As we prepare to bring The Linux Experiment to a close over the coming weeks, I find that this has been a time of (mostly solemn) reflection for myself and others.  At the very least, it’s been an interesting experience with various flavours of Linux and what it has to offer.  At its peak, it’s been a roller-coaster of controversial posts (my bad), positive experiences, and the urge to shatter our screens into pieces.

Let me share with you some of the things I’ve personally taken away from this experiment over the last three-and-a-half months.

Fedora 12 is on the bleeding edge of Linux development

This has been a point of discussion on both of our podcasts at this point, and a particular sore spot with both myself and Tyler.  It’s come to a place wherein I’m sort of… afraid to perform updates to my system out of fear of just bricking it entirely.  While this is admittedly something that could happen under any operating system and any platform, it’s never been as bad for me as it has been under Fedora 12.

As an example, the last *six* kernel updates for me to both Fedora 11 and 12 combined have completely broken graphics capability with my adapter (a GeForce 8600 M GS).  Yes, I know that the Fedora development team is not responsible for ensuring that my graphics card works with their operating system – but this is not something the average user should have to worry about.  Tyler has also had this issue, and I think would tend to agree with me.

Linux is fun, too

Though there have been so many frustrating moments over the last four months that I have been tempted to just format everything and go back to my native Windows 7 (previously: release candidate, now RTM).  Through all of this though, Fedora – and Linux in general – has never stopped interesting me.

This could just be due to the fact that I’ve been learning so much – I can definitely do a lot more now than I ever could before under a Linux environment, and am reasonably pleased with this – but I’ve never sat down on my laptop and been bored to play around with getting stuff to work.  In addition, with some software (such as Wine or CrossOver) I’ve been able to get a number of Windows games working as well.  Linux can play, too!

Customizing my UI has also been a very nice experience.  It looks roughly like Sasha’s now – no bottom panel, GnomeDo with Docky, and Compiz effects… it’s quite pretty now.

There’s always another way

If there’s one thing I’ve chosen to take away from this experiment it’s that there is ALWAYS some kind of alternative to any of my problems, or anything I can do under another platform or operating system.  Cisco VPN client won’t install under Wine, nor will the Linux client version?  BAM, say hello to vpnc.

Need a comprehensive messaging platform with support for multiple services?  Welcome Pidgin into the ring.

No, I still can’t do everything I could do in Windows… but I’m sure, given enough time, I could make Fedora 12 an extremely viable alternative to Windows 7 for me.

The long and short of it

There’s a reason I’ve chosen my clever and rather cliche title for this post.  According to lore, a phoenix is a bird that would rise up from its own ashes in a rebirth cycle after igniting its nest at the end of a life cycle.  So is the case for Fedora 12 and my experience with Linux.

At this point, I could not see myself continuing my tenure with the Fedora operating system.  For a Linux user with my relatively low level of experience, it is too advanced and too likely to brick itself with a round of updates to be viable for me. Perhaps after quite a bit more experience with Linux on the whole, I could revisit it – but not for a good long while.  This is not to say it’s unstable – it’s been rock solid, never crashing once – but it’s just not for me.

To that end, Fedora 12 rests after a long and interest-filled tenure with me.  Rising from the ashes is a new user in the world of Linux – me.  I can say with confidence that I will be experimenting with Linux distributions in the future – maybe dipping my feet in the somewhat familiar waters of Ubuntu once more before wading into the deep-end.

Watch out, Linux community… here I come.

I’d just like to wish a happy, safe, and food-filled Thanksgiving to all of our Canadian readers out there.  Enjoy yourselves – go forth and be merry!