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CF8 error after upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy Heron - libstdc++.so.5

Thu, 01 May 2008 23:07:00 GMT

This afternoon I did an upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy on my main development environment. I experienced *almost* no disruption to my system, with one exception (so far!). When I instantiated a ColdFusion 8 application which instantiates a webservice onApplicationStart, I received the following exception:

jikes: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Jikes! Well fortunately the fix is quite simple. Go to a terminal and install libstdc++5 like so:
$ sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Restart your application and carry on! I am not sure what changed between the distros, but apparently the libraries that ColdFusion uses for invoking webservices depend on this package.

Playing with my new webcam under Linux - watch me work!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:10:00 GMT

I made an impulse buy this past week ordering a Tripp-Lite clip-on webcam for my laptop. My wife and I are leaving next weekend to go on a week-long cruise without our kids, and I thought it might be fun to post some video blog entries for them while we are gone so they (and ultimately you as well) can see what we are up to.

I chose the Tripp-Lite camera due to pretty consistently positive cost/value reviews, although I was a bit worried that I couldn't find a single instance of anyone on the internet actually using one under Linux. Why should that stop me, huh? When it arrived I plugged it in and... nada... nothing! Although my laptop could see the device, I couldn't seem to get the drivers to work. After doing some digging around I found that it uses the Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0301 WebCam chipset, which seems to be very common in the cheapo-Chinese-made webcam space. There is an unbelievably awesome project out there where a guy named Michel Xhaard has written drivers for tons of webcam chipsets, and although mine was included I just couldn't seem to get it to work, no matter what I did.

Eventually it hit me that since I am using an Alpha version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron), perhaps I should roll to a release version and see what happens. Given how easy it is to swap distros in Linux, I decided to roll back to a 7.04 (Feisty) remaster disc that was laying around. Upon plugging in my camera on the new distro it just worked natively! YAY.

So, now I am playing with the apps a bit. I found Camorama which does video captures and can FTP them to a server at regular intervals. I thought it might be fun to create a custom pod on my blog that shows a current picture of me working - or zoning out... picking my nose... whatever. So, the pic of me you see on the left is the most recent of those. The timestamp text is a little small when I resize the pic, but if you view it in full size (or pull out your magnifying glass), you can see the date.

As for recording video in Linux, I created a launcher that allows me to record AVI files with audio using mencoder. For those interested in doing that, you will first need to install mencoder:
$ sudo apt-get install mencoder

I then created a shortcut icon that starts the recording:
mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=320:height=240:device=/dev/video0:forceaudio:adevice=/dev/dsp -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64:mode=3 -o /home/dshuck/Desktop/webcam.avi

Then I have another shortcut icon to stop the video:
killall mencoder

Look for pointless videos in the near future...

Wow... rough move from Ubuntu to PCLinuxOS!

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:06:00 GMT

Seeing as it has been a few months since I tried out a new distro, I got a wild hair today and decided to give PCLinuxOS (Gnome version) a shot. The way that I keep my drives partitioned - specifically keeping my /home directory as a separate partition- swapping distros is usually a pretty painless endeavor and I can be back up and running within an our or so, with all my old apps in place and with all my preferences still in tact.

As I booted to the PCLinux Live CD, everything seemed to be business as usual. The only notable point was that I thought that PCLinux has a nice default theme and icon set in the Gnome version of the distro.

So without too much hesitation, I went ahead and began the install process. After choosing the appropriate keyboard and timezone settings, I was presented with the choice of how I would like my partitions setup, which by default uses the entire physical disk. By selecting the "do it yourself" mode, I expected to be able to choose my smaller /dev/sda2 partition as my / mount point, format it for the OS, and leave my /dev/sda3 alone mounting it has /home.

I entered what appeared to be a nice little partition configuration tool (Disk Drake I think?), which appeared to be exactly what I was needed. I then selected the /dev/sda2 partition as the place I wanted my / mount point, and chose /dev/sda3 as my /home mount point. When I chose the option to format my / mount point, I got a an error message that said that the partion could not be formatted. Considering that my plan was to wipe it out anyway, I went ahead and removed that partition, and re-added it using that utility. As I tried to move forward, I got a message that indicated that I needed to reboot, restart the installation process, then choose "Use existing partitions". Simple enough right?

I then rebooted to the live CD and entered the installation again. This time I was presented with a new option. "Choose the partitions you would like to format" and it only listed my larger /dev/sda3 partition with a checkbox next to it, with no mention of my /dev/sda2. I found this a bit interesting, and after carefully removing the checkbox I moved forward. As I entered the next step I went to a screen "Copying files...".... wait... huh? To where?

Apparently it now considered my /dev/sda3 (which I intended to be /home) as the only drive. I cancelled the process and opened the terminal. After browsing to that directory, I found new /usr and /boot directories in that directory, which confirmed my suspicions.

Things then began moving downhill and picking up speed....

I opened the partitioning tool GParted and was suprised to see that not only did my 15GB /dev/sda2 not exist anymore but that /dev/sda3 was now a 145GB partion of unallocated space. NOT GOOD, considering that about 110GB of it is *very* allocated with data that I didn't intend on losing.

Even with all the steps I have taken since, I have been unable to mount /dev/sda2. I even popped in Damn Small Linux to attempt some quick surgery and even it was unable to save me. I then tried an Ubuntu live CD and it didn't recogize anything on /dev/sda at all. At some point during this process I noticed that I was getting "bad magic number" and "corrupted superblock" type messages in relation to that device.

After putting the PCLinuxOS live CD back in, I was a bit relieved to see that it auto-mounted /dev/sda3 as /media/disk, and that I could at least access the files that were once safe and sound in my /home directory.

So.... here I sit waiting for GBs upon GBs of data to upload via FTP to various servers so that I can wipe the enter friggin thing out and start over. Tomorrow I get the fun of retrieving it all and piecing my laptop world back together.... <sigh/>

More to come....

Installing the JRE plugin in Firefox on Ubuntu

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:59:00 GMT

I have now been using Ubuntu for about 2 years, and oddly enough one thing that has always evaded me is how to properly set up the JRE plugin in Firefox. It *seems* like that ought to be an easy process, but it is one of those annoying little things that just hasn't worked for me, although it has never been important enough for me to chase down.

Yesterday I had to do a Webex presentation that required the JRE plugin, so I decided it was time to hack my way through it. One thing that I was thinking my be a factor is that I use Swiftfox instead of Firefox. I decided to take that out of the equation just to make sure, so I went ahead and removed it. When running Firefox and hitting about:plugins in the address bar, I could clearly see that the Java plugin was not in the list. I looked in ~/.mozilla/plugins, and saw a libjavaplugin.so in there, but it was obviously not doing its job.

So, after a lot of floundering, here are the basic steps I took that got me going...

First, I completely uninstalled Firefox:
$ sudo apt-get --purge remove firefox
I then reinstalled it:
$ sudo apt-get install firefox
Next, I had previously installed the sun-java2-bin package, so I wanted to wipe all evidence of that and reinstall it. I did the following:
$ sudo apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
To reinistall it I did:
$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
After doing this I opened Firefox and put about:plugins and still didn't see the Java stuff. At this point, I went into my ~/.mozilla/plugins directory. From earlier attempts I had some libjavaplugin.so and libjavaplugin-[something I don't remember].so. I decided to kill those off:
$ sudo rm libjavaplugin*
At this point looking around I found a file /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so that seemed like a decent candidate, so I did a symlink like this:
$ ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so ./libjavaplugin.so

At this point I restarted the browser, hit about:plugins and was thrilled to see an entirely new section for Java!

Now, take the steps above with a grain of salt. I certainly don't want to infer that this is by any means the right way to get it working, but it is the series of steps that finally got it working for me. Hopefully someone else might get something out of it as well.

Fix for Evolution email client error: Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:10:00 GMT

This afternoon, my Evolution email client started popping up an error message "Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync" as I would enter the various folders. I finally figured out a fix and everything is back to normal. If you ever get this error, the following steps solved my problem. First, close Evolution. Then run the following:

$ cd ~/.evolution/mail
$ cp -r local local.BAK
$ cd local
$ rm Inbox.ibex.index Inbox.ibex.index.data

Now reopen Evolution and you should be good. I imagine it's safe to delete the .BAK file, but I am holding onto it for a day or so. :)

How to delete all messages from Postfix mail server queue

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:29:00 GMT

This is probably and edge case that doesn't come up very often, but today I found myself with the need to remove all messages from my Postfix queue. I had generated a LOT of emails that were set for outbound delivery to all the users on InstantSpot using Postfix as the mail server on my laptop. After generating the messages, I realized that the ISP that I was sitting on doesn't allow outbound messages from SMTP servers as a spam prevention method. There was some urgency to the messages that needed to be sent, so I ran the process again on out production server which sits on a more open network. The messages went out from there and all was well... except that I had a few hundred outbound messages sitting in my queue. I knew that as soon as I connected to another network, all those messages in my Postfix queue would be delivered ... again.

So, after a bit of searching for files locally, I did some Googling and found that you simply have to run the following command:

(as root)

#postsuper -d ALL

(on Debian/Ubuntu)

$sudo postsuper -d ALL

Configuring Squid proxy server to require user authentication

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:32:50 GMT

This is one of those blog posts that is really just a mental note for myself in case I ever have to come back and find it again. Our company has some old legacy client-server applications that are now being required to connect to our new web services. As part of our development, one of the requirements was to make sure that the applications could reach our web services by way of a proxy server both with and without user authentication.

I temporarily set up my laptop with Squid proxy server for the Power Builder developers to test their applications through. It is a sweet little proxy server and I had it running withing just a matter of a few minutes. By default, it does not enable user authentication. After a bit of tinkering with it, I was able to easily add it. Here are the steps I took:

(NOTE: In Debian/Ubuntu, you will want to use sudo for all of the following)

First, we need to create an passwd file to use as our ACL, and give it the appropriate permissions

#touch /etc/squid/squid-passwd
#chmod o+r /etc/squid/squid_passwd

Now we will add our first user to the ACL. If you do not have the passwd command available, it can be added from a number of packages, including "apache2-utils"

#htpasswd /etc/squid/squid-passwd jdoe
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user jdoe

Now we need to edit our /etc/squid/squid.conf file. In the auth_param section, you need to add:

auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid/ncsa_auth /etc/squid/squid-passwd

In the ACL section, you need to add:

acl ncsa_users proxy_auth REQUIRED

In the http_access section, you need to add:

http_access allow ncsa_users

Now, you need to restart the Squid service and any future connections will force the client to use a username and password.

Atheros wireless made easy on openSUSE

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:13:55 GMT

I had a laptop die with a hardware death this past week, on which I had happily been running the pre-Beta Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. Upon replacing my laptop with a seemingly identical machine, I attempted to install the Beta release 7.04. When I installed I realized that the new laptop had the Atheros 5212 wireless card in it, rather than the Intel wireless that my first one had. For some reason I was never able to make it work even after going through the steps at www.madwifi.org that deal specifically with Atheros cards. Knowing that I had things working nicely with my previous card, I took it out of the old laptop and put it in the new one. For some reason, I still was not able to get wireless networking functional. The card would be detected, but I was never able to scan for networks or connect directly to one. After wasting most of a day on this, I decided to roll back to Edgy since I *knew* I had that combination working at one point. Still.... no love. I have had good luck with Mandriva One, so I decided to try that one as well.... nothing. I decided I would try a new-to-me distro of openSUSE 10.2. Still nothing!

In talking to Aaron Lynch I learned that apparently HP/Compaq laptops can be picky when it comes to swapping mini-pci network cards, and he suggested that perhaps I should pop the Atheros back in and give it another shot.

I took his advice, and did a complete new installation of openSUSE. After installing, there was no evidence of my card in networking, but I was able to see it as a pci device by running lspci at the terminal prompt.

I then went about installing the MadWifi stuff, but found that openSUSE makes this incredibly easy! Here are the steps I took to get it working.

First we need to add the MadWifi repo. To do this, open the Control Center, then open YaST Administrator Settings. Click on Installation Source, then click 'add'. Choose 'HTTP' and click next. In the following window, enter madwifi.org as the Server Name and /suse/10.2 as the Directory on Server and click next. Here is a screen shot of mine:

After it syncs up, you will need to open Software Management in the YaST Administrator Settings. In the search box, enter the text "madwifi". In the results, you should see several results. You will need to select madwifi and madwifi-kmp-default or if you do not see the latter one, choose madwifi-kmp-[the 'uname -r' of your machine]. Important Point - If madwifi was previously selected, right-click it and choose the option to update it.

That is it! After this point, I rebooted my laptop, clicked on the Network Manager applet and was able to see a number of wireless networks around me!

Installing Java 6 (1.6) in Linux

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:00:39 GMT

After experimenting with some other distros the past few weeks, I have come full circle and landed back on Ubuntu.... well... Kubuntu this time. After installing Edgy (6.10) I did the update-manager -c -d to upgrade to 7.04 (named Feisty Fawn). So far, I am really enjoying it. For an operating system that isn't even released yet and for a kernel that is less than a week old (kernel 2.6.20.10), it has been rock solid in my first day of really banging on it. One of the biggest adjustments for me is finding my way around KDE tools, but that is relatively minor.

One of the first things I had to do was set up my Eclipse environment. I figured this would be a good time to experiment with Java 1.6 (code name Mustang). From the reviews I have read, it is quite stable and is notably faster than 1.5 in many areas.

I had to jar my memory on the steps to set up a new JRE, so I decided this would make a good blog post in case others need to do the same.

First go to the Sun java download page and pull down the .bin file.

Once the .bin file ( jdk-6-linux-i586.bin in my case) is downloaded, you will need to make it executable. To do this run:

> sudo chmod +x jdk-6-linux-i586.bin

When this is done you can run the .bin file which extracts into a folder named jdk1.6.0 like this:

> ./jdk-6-linux-i586.bin

Now you will want to move that folder into a place with your other Java versions. On Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu and probably others, this is in /usr/lib/jvm

> sudo cp -R jdk1.6.0 /usr/lib/jvm/

Historically, from this point I have usually made a symbolic link from /usr/bin/java to jre/bin/java and called it quits. Today I learned a cooler approach using the update-alternatives command. Before we do this next step, take a look at the output of this command:

> sudo update-alternatives --config java

As you can see, your new Java version is not in the list of possible alternatives (or at least it shoudn't be!). We are now going to "install" it so you can then choose it as an option and it will become the version used across your system. To do so run the following:

> sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0/jre/bin/java 300

This has accomplished a few things. We have created the symbolic link to our new java binary. We have then added this version of Java to the update-alternatives and have given it a priority level of 300.

Now go and run this again:

> sudo update-alternatives --config java

You should now see your new version and be able to select it by entering the appropriate number. To confirm that your system is now using Java 6, run the following:

> java -version

If all has gone well, you should hopefully see something like this:

java version "1.6.0"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-b105)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0-b105, mixed mode)

Now... off to config the rest of my system!

We have landed

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Well, I have installed my blogging software. Time to play. :)