It's been a while since I posted here. Perhaps because I've lost interest in the idea of blogging about Linux or perhaps because it's because I've not had any interesting issues worth sharing.
Thankfully , it's the latter. Fedora has been mostly good to me recently, now running on 23.
I recently upgraded my hardware to an Intel i5 CPU and a Gigabyte 710X G1 Gaming 7 mainboard. A respectable setup for an home machine that isn't used for gaming. Editing my photos is suddenly so much more relaxing, now the computer has to wait for me and not the other way round!
Back to the topic in hand and the reason for this post.
Video playback. After sorting a bunch of issues with old nVidia drivers polutign the bootup of the machine (meaning I couldn't get to a stable desktop only CLI) I encountered an unexpected issue that seems small but will become incredibly irritating I'm sure.
Anytime I attempt to play a video, whether from a disk or YouTube/Facebook etc the display goes black for a few seconds. When the display comes back the video is playing, but I've missed a few seconds.
This also happens when I try to skip to certain points in videos using the progress bar.
I suspect this is an issue with not having relevant drivers or video codecs or some such, but as I've not been able to find any hints in logs I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment.
Sunday, 6 December 2015
Thursday, 17 April 2014
Fedora 20 and running ASP scripts
A while back I posted about trying (unsuccessfully) to run some ASP scripts on my Fedora (20) box using XSP.
I knew nothing of ASP tech at the time, so I ended up doing a fair bit learning. Turns out ASP has been largely replaced by a newer version of the tech, ASPX. XSP has a half decent go at trying to run the scripts.
I was still getting plenty of issues, so ended up installing a Microsoft IDE on my Windows laptop and doing the work there. I forget what it was called, but I was very glad to have got the project running correctly under ASPX before the trial ran out! It was a nasty to work with when used to the likes of Eclipse and IntelliJ for Java and PHP development.
In brighter news, I've now migrated that project over to PHP so there is no longer a reliance on running a Windows server. Happy days!
I knew nothing of ASP tech at the time, so I ended up doing a fair bit learning. Turns out ASP has been largely replaced by a newer version of the tech, ASPX. XSP has a half decent go at trying to run the scripts.
I was still getting plenty of issues, so ended up installing a Microsoft IDE on my Windows laptop and doing the work there. I forget what it was called, but I was very glad to have got the project running correctly under ASPX before the trial ran out! It was a nasty to work with when used to the likes of Eclipse and IntelliJ for Java and PHP development.
In brighter news, I've now migrated that project over to PHP so there is no longer a reliance on running a Windows server. Happy days!
Linux, Android, Banshee and file systems
I recently signed up to a new mobile contract, which came with a shiny new Xperia Z1 Android phone. The phone has been greate so far in the couple of months I've had it, but I've just encounted my first real irritation.
Trying to get Banshee to sync music to the SD card in phone is proving tricky. When I run the sync I get bucket loads of errors in the Banshee log:
"Error setting permissions: Function not implemented"
So I figure this must be a filesystem issue and formatted the card into NTFS, where I have had success in the past. Then when I reboot the phone it sees the card format as NTFS and wont let me use it without formatting it back to exFAT.
It seems the phone REALLY wants the SD card to be formatted in exFAT!
Before I got to this point I had to persuade my Fedora 20 system to mount the xperia z1 phone via a USB cable. At first it wouldn't recognise the card, but installing of two packages (fuse-exfat and exfat-utils) seem to sort that.
The system file explorer could copy files back and forth quite happily, so that works. It's just Banshee that's having issues with this exFAT SD card.
I closed Banshee as a bad job while I did some Googling, when I reopened Banshee I discovered the file count shown for the SD card had increased. It seems Banshee had managed to copy my music over despite lots of misleading errors.
So while I don't know how to stop those errors about not being able to set the permissions, it seems Banshee is actually doing what I want.
In case you are wondering, it turns out exFAT is a Microsoft proprietry filesystem they are hawking as the filesystem of choice for larger capacity memory cards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
Trying to get Banshee to sync music to the SD card in phone is proving tricky. When I run the sync I get bucket loads of errors in the Banshee log:
"Error setting permissions: Function not implemented"
So I figure this must be a filesystem issue and formatted the card into NTFS, where I have had success in the past. Then when I reboot the phone it sees the card format as NTFS and wont let me use it without formatting it back to exFAT.
It seems the phone REALLY wants the SD card to be formatted in exFAT!
Before I got to this point I had to persuade my Fedora 20 system to mount the xperia z1 phone via a USB cable. At first it wouldn't recognise the card, but installing of two packages (fuse-exfat and exfat-utils) seem to sort that.
The system file explorer could copy files back and forth quite happily, so that works. It's just Banshee that's having issues with this exFAT SD card.
I closed Banshee as a bad job while I did some Googling, when I reopened Banshee I discovered the file count shown for the SD card had increased. It seems Banshee had managed to copy my music over despite lots of misleading errors.
So while I don't know how to stop those errors about not being able to set the permissions, it seems Banshee is actually doing what I want.
In case you are wondering, it turns out exFAT is a Microsoft proprietry filesystem they are hawking as the filesystem of choice for larger capacity memory cards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
Friday, 24 January 2014
ASP, XSP, Apache, mod_mono and Fedora 20
It's been a while since I posted here. I've not given up on my project, in fact I'm still very happy with Linux and the Fedora distribution. I've just not been doing anything particularly interesting with it recently.
So why the post? Well I've come into contact with an ASP project I need to make some changes to.
PHP? fine, it runs under Apache.
Java? no problem, I can run that under Tomcat.
So I've landed myself a bit of work on an old website, yay. The site is running on ASP of some sort, boo.
Of course I'm running Fedora with Apache not Windows with IIS.
A bit of reading leads me to all sorts of old pages about XSP and running mod_mono under Apache. I tried getting mod_mono to interpret the asp scripts I've downloaded, but Apache can't find mod_mono plugin.
I really don't care if ASP ends up running under Apache or some other server, in fact in some ways I'd rather use a standalone ASP server. Which is where XSP comes in.
XSP is a small service/server that should enable serving up of ASP scripts as I understand it.
Installed ok with yum. Then when it comes to running it, it seems to be a simple matter of running it in the project directory.
At localhost:8080 I get a 404 page which is clearly being served up by the xsp server, so that appears to be running at least.
When I try to hit one of the scripts (localhost:8080/default.asp), rather than getting anything vaguely like a nice webpage, I get the ASP code as text. So no ASP processing has occurred.
There is no output in the terminal running the server, nor in the /var/log directory.
This one could run for a while I suspect....
So why the post? Well I've come into contact with an ASP project I need to make some changes to.
PHP? fine, it runs under Apache.
Java? no problem, I can run that under Tomcat.
So I've landed myself a bit of work on an old website, yay. The site is running on ASP of some sort, boo.
Of course I'm running Fedora with Apache not Windows with IIS.
A bit of reading leads me to all sorts of old pages about XSP and running mod_mono under Apache. I tried getting mod_mono to interpret the asp scripts I've downloaded, but Apache can't find mod_mono plugin.
I really don't care if ASP ends up running under Apache or some other server, in fact in some ways I'd rather use a standalone ASP server. Which is where XSP comes in.
XSP is a small service/server that should enable serving up of ASP scripts as I understand it.
Installed ok with yum. Then when it comes to running it, it seems to be a simple matter of running it in the project directory.
At localhost:8080 I get a 404 page which is clearly being served up by the xsp server, so that appears to be running at least.
When I try to hit one of the scripts (localhost:8080/default.asp), rather than getting anything vaguely like a nice webpage, I get the ASP code as text. So no ASP processing has occurred.
There is no output in the terminal running the server, nor in the /var/log directory.
This one could run for a while I suspect....
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Adding fonts in Fedora 17
I had a graphic designer produce a banner for me a while back. Of course the font he used isn't part of the standard Linux font packages (AFAIK), so I had find a way to add it to my machine.
I was expecting a nice easy, drop into font directory style of installation. Well it was pretty much that easy.
Copied the .ttf file to /usr/share/fonts
As root, run fc-cache. Use the -v flag to get a list of what gets noticed then you will see if your new font gets picked up.
I put mine in /usr/share/fonts/local to keep the ones I add separate from those installed by Fedora.
I was expecting a nice easy, drop into font directory style of installation. Well it was pretty much that easy.
Copied the .ttf file to /usr/share/fonts
As root, run fc-cache. Use the -v flag to get a list of what gets noticed then you will see if your new font gets picked up.
I put mine in /usr/share/fonts/local to keep the ones I add separate from those installed by Fedora.
Thursday, 9 August 2012
DigiKam and Fedora 17
Since Picasa support for Linux has been withdrawn by Linux (it was only ever partial support tbh as it runs under Wine) I've been on the lookout for new photo management software.
I've tried Shotwell, that seems to do a reasonable job but not comprehensive. It would be ok if I hadn't been pointed towards DigiKam by a blog entry somewere comparing packages.
Both shotwell and digikam can be installed direct from the Fedora repositories using yum.
DigiKam seems to have a much greater range for features. Shotwell worked well enough, what it does it does well. I'm going to try DigiKam for a while now and see how I get on.
One quirk of DigiKam in Fedora 17 is that out of the box there didn't seem to be anyway to export images to another folder ready for burning to disc or uploading to a website.
A bit of reading later and an installation of "kipi-plugins" later I seem to have a plethora of export options.
I now have options to upload images directly to a variety of website (Flickr, Facebook, ImgShack, PicassaWeb, SmugMug the list goes on and on!) as well as local export (eg as HTML presentation, email client, IM client ....) but still not yet found a simple "take these photos and export to this place on disc" option!
It does seem odd to me that such fundamental functionality isn't included in DigiKam straight from the repositories. Even if that was just a matter of saying kipi-plugins is a dependency of DigiKam.
EDIT:
Found it!
Apparently to export files to a local directory I have to go through "export -> Export to remote computer". Hardly intuitive but it works!
I've tried Shotwell, that seems to do a reasonable job but not comprehensive. It would be ok if I hadn't been pointed towards DigiKam by a blog entry somewere comparing packages.
Both shotwell and digikam can be installed direct from the Fedora repositories using yum.
DigiKam seems to have a much greater range for features. Shotwell worked well enough, what it does it does well. I'm going to try DigiKam for a while now and see how I get on.
One quirk of DigiKam in Fedora 17 is that out of the box there didn't seem to be anyway to export images to another folder ready for burning to disc or uploading to a website.
A bit of reading later and an installation of "kipi-plugins" later I seem to have a plethora of export options.
I now have options to upload images directly to a variety of website (Flickr, Facebook, ImgShack, PicassaWeb, SmugMug the list goes on and on!) as well as local export (eg as HTML presentation, email client, IM client ....) but still not yet found a simple "take these photos and export to this place on disc" option!
It does seem odd to me that such fundamental functionality isn't included in DigiKam straight from the repositories. Even if that was just a matter of saying kipi-plugins is a dependency of DigiKam.
EDIT:
Found it!
Apparently to export files to a local directory I have to go through "export -> Export to remote computer". Hardly intuitive but it works!
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Fedora 17, Eclipse and Javascript
I forget why or how I ended up in the situation but I recently ended up switching from a downloaded Eclipse installation to using the Fedora repository version of Eclipse.
So I'm now flying Juno Eclipse. Installed bunch of packages to let me do Java and PHP work in Eclipse:
So great, I have a shiny Juno installation that lets me do PHP work (not tested Java builds yet...) , woohoo!
So how do I get Javascript editing working?
When I was using Eclipse downloaded directly from the Eclipse project I just needed to install WTP (I think), so I went looking for that and found a few likely candidates:
So when I get this PHP contract out of the way I may be switching back to a 'proper' Eclipse installation direct from the Eclipse project.
Unless any Fedora people out there can hold my hand through my Eclipse Juno Javascript editing setup needs? ;)
So I'm now flying Juno Eclipse. Installed bunch of packages to let me do Java and PHP work in Eclipse:
[root@bigfoot html]# rpm -qa | grep eclipseeclipse-pde-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64eclipse-rcp-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64eclipse-phpeclipse-1.2.3-4.fc17.noarcheclipse-emf-xsd-2.8.0-0.7.e674bb28ad412fc9bc786f2f9b3c157eb2cbdae0.fc17.noarcheclipse-swt-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64eclipse-dtp-1.10-0.1.M6.fc17.noarcheclipse-gef-3.8.0-0.3.20120402.fc17.noarcheclipse-platform-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64eclipse-emf-core-2.8.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64eclipse-emf-2.8.0-0.7.e674bb28ad412fc9bc786f2f9b3c157eb2cbdae0.fc17.noarchicu4j-eclipse-4.4.2.2-11.fc17.noarcheclipse-jdt-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64[root@bigfoot html]#
So great, I have a shiny Juno installation that lets me do PHP work (not tested Java builds yet...) , woohoo!
So how do I get Javascript editing working?
When I was using Eclipse downloaded directly from the Eclipse project I just needed to install WTP (I think), so I went looking for that and found a few likely candidates:
yum install eclipse-wtp-common eclipse-wtp-servertools eclipse-wtp-sourceeditingNow when I fire up Eclipse Juno, it starts, but I get all sorts of error messages about null pointers and not being able to initialise plugin properly. I guess those packages aren't quite right somehow.
So when I get this PHP contract out of the way I may be switching back to a 'proper' Eclipse installation direct from the Eclipse project.
Unless any Fedora people out there can hold my hand through my Eclipse Juno Javascript editing setup needs? ;)
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