Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

I usually run debian/sarge on my laptop, but tonight it is booted to Ubuntu ‘Hoary Hedgehog’ and wanted iPodder running in this environment too.

The current ‘released’ version of iPodder today is v2.0rc3 for Linux.

First off, go grab and install the the kit from http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/

You’ll need to use python2.3 instead of the default python which is v2.4. I already had it installed, but you many need to install it. Also the older version of the xmms python library needed to be installed, but the current version of libwxgtk2.5.3-python is needed.

The commands to install those packages is:

sudo apt-get install python2.3 python2.3-xmms libwxgtk2.5.3-python

Finally the PYTHONPATH needs to be extended to pick up the wx 2.5.3 libraries.

Either edit /usr/bin/iPodder to look like this, or just do it manually when you want to run iPodder:

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
cd /opt/iPodder
python2.3 iPodderGui.py

Enjoy!

I listened to Dave Winer’s Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble’s voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box


$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...]
$


* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft’s voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I’m creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as ‘nozzel’, so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like ‘dec-tork’ and ‘december’ (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:


$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav


* Convert from wav to mp3 format


$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3


* Listen to the result:


$ xmms hi-dave.mp3


In addition to a work-provided nc6000, I also have personal Compaq Armada M700 and gave ubuntu 4.10 a install this evening.

Absolutely no problem installing or having X properly configured! One nice touch is the installer found the Orinoco wireless PCMCIA card and configured it so the network was available immediately on boot.

Here are my notes on install ubuntu 1.0 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop.

Used warty-install-release-i386.iso downloaded on 21-Oct-2004. (md5sum a491903a2d2197651864dec3836d85e0)

The laptop has currently installed WinXP (hda1), Debian/Sarge (hda7) and now ubuntu (hda6).

Booted the laptop while in the docking bay and started install. Complained that it couldn’t find a NIC, I told it to continue and not to use a static IP address.

The nc6000 has:

* Pentium M (should do power management, but stock debian kernels don’t seem to include it), 1G memory, 60g internal drive, 30G or CD/RW in multibay
* embedded intel wireless — works with ndiswrapper
* bluetooth — don’t have any other bluetooth devices, haven’t tried
* IR — haven’t tried, but should try to get going with my palmpilot
* Broadcom nic — works
* SD bay — works under WinXP, but appears to be impossible under Linux

The docking bay pretty much just has a USB breakout, passthrough nic and power. There are 2 multibays which usually have a CD/RW and/or an extra disk.

At the point it asked about installing GRUB in the master boot record, I skipped that and continued
on with the installation. I prefer to let debian/sarge manage grub.

After the ubuntu installer finished, I booted into debian/sarge and added the following to
it’s menu.lst file:

title Ubuntu 1.0
root (hd0, 5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro
initrd /initrd
savedefault
boot

Then rebooted to Ubuntu…

After about 40 minutes it started poking around and found that kacpid was sucking up 95% of the cpu. I did

renice 19 -p 5 (which was the pid of kacpid)

and the install proceeded much faster.

The X displayed looked nice along with the drum sounds.

But the Broadcom or tg3 driver wasn’t loaded. Using ’sudo network-admin’ fixed that.

Still looking around.

[still installing — watch here for more info]

This evening I noticed that there was a new perl module in CPAN by CPB Flickr::Upload. So I hacked together a Nautilus script to integrate Flickr.com uploads with the Gnome file manager.

If you want to give it a try,

* Install the perl module Flickr::Upload using either CPAN or download from http://search.cpan.org/~cpb/
* Grab this script
* put it in your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory
* edit the following lines for your own use:


my $FLICKREMAIL = 'your-flickr@email-address-here.com';
my $FLICKRPASSWORD = 'somesekretword';
my $FLICKRTAGS = 'i like traffic lights'; # space separated list


It works find on my debian/sarge laptop, but should work fine on any other gnome desktop.

Patches would be welcome.

Adding lines like the ones below does a pretty good job about tagging
the KLEZ virus as spam. It does miss some of the KLEZ variations
because the KLEZ_CONTENT is slightly different.

$ grep -i klez /usr/share/spamassassin/*
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:rawbody KLEZ_IFRAME            /iframe
 src=3Dcid:/i
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:describe KLEZ_IFRAME           Frame u
sed by the KLEZ virus
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:rawbody KLEZ_CONTENT           /TVqQAA
MAAAAEAAAA/i
/usr/share/spamassassin/20_body_tests.cf:describe KLEZ_CONTENT          Content
 of part of the KLEZ virus
/usr/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf:score KLEZ_IFRAME              10.0
/usr/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf:score KLEZ_CONTENT             10.0

Newer versions of lifelines
requires autoconf 2.50 or later and
(maybe) a more recent gettext to build. Upgraded to autoconf 2.53
(autoconf-2.53-5.noarch.rpm) and gettext 0.11.2
(gettext-0.11.2-2.i386.rpm)

Now that Galeon has released a version that works with Mozilla 1.0 now
is the time to upgrade both packages. See href="http://ftp34.newaol.com/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.0/Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/i386/">http://ftp34.newaol.com/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.0/Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/i
386/
and galeon.sourceforge.net

A tip from #linuxdoc regular gleblanc suggested upgrading to rawhides
newer href="http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=xmltex">xmltex
and href="http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=passivetex">passiv
etex.
Stock Red Hat 7.3 has: xmltex-20000118-8 and passivetex-1.12-3,
rawhide has one minor version later.

I put filters for mailing lists that are for the most part spam-free
above these to entries and those lists that are spam-heavy below it.

:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamassassin -P -c /usr/share/spamassassin

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
caughtspam