Linux-tips

Network proxies can be useful. Maybe you want private browsing or proxied IM connections. Maybe you'd like to filter ads for your entire LAN including browsers without adblock support. All this and more can be accomplished using privoxy and
tor.

On Debian based systems: apt-get install privoxy tor

Take a look at /etc/privoxy/config - you need to set a listen address for you LAN and/or your ip in place of domain.org for remote access. You may want to adjust email address and hostname also. Here's a sample config file.

For additional privacy, we can forward connections from privoxy to tor. Add this line to the privoxy config file (be sure to include the trailing . ):

forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

It's already been added at bottom in the sample privoxy file. This assumes you set tor to run on localhost port 9050 - which is the default. Restart privoxy after making any changes:

/etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Point any program on the LAN (or outside network if enabled) to the ip/domain and port privoxy runs on, http proxy. In the provided example this is:

192.168.0.1:8118 or for remote access domain.org:8118 (obviously you'll need to adjust domain.org to your ip)

lire is a groovy little tool for generating html or text reports from syslogs. Debian users can: apt-get install lire

to list log types lire handles:

lr_log2report --help dlf-converters

generate a html report from apache logs:

lr_log2report --output html combined /var/log/apache2/access.log apache_report

generate a txt report from apache logs:

lr_log2report combined /var/log/apache2/access.log apache_report.txt

generate a html syslog report:

lr_log2report --output html syslog /var/log/syslog syslog_report

lastlonger is a groovy little program. It's a command line last.fm player that also rips streams to a specified directory creating nice, separate mp3 files of each track played. Grab it at the link above.

Here's a dependency list (to save time):

perl splay libid3-3.8.3c2a libterm-readpassword-perl libdigest-md5-file-perl libmd5-perl libcompress-raw-zlib-perl libcompress-zlib-perl libio-compress-base-perl libio-compress-zlib-perl libmp3-info-perl libmp3-tag-perl libunicode-string-perl libansicolor-perl or perl-modules libterm-readkey-perl libterm-readpassword-perl

This began as an effort to purge all non-free blobs from my machine. In that quest I found an interesting program: vrms. From the wikipedia: "vrms (Virtual Richard M. Stallman) is a program that analyzes the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian-based system, and reports all of the packages from the non-free tree which are currently installed. Software gets placed in the non-free tree when it is agreed not to be too problematic for Debian to distribute but does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines and therefore cannot be included in their official distribution. For each program from 'non-free' installed, vrms displays an explanation of why it is non-free, if one is available."

Neat.

This mostly follows instructions found on the nouveau wiki page.

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev xorg-dev libdrm-dev git git-core libtool mesa-common-dev automake autoconf

grab the drm source:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm/

and the driver:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/nouveau/xf86-video-nouveau/

I placed these in the /usr/src directory. cd into drm.

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/

./configure --prefix=/usr/

make LINUXDIR=/path/to/kernel-headers

sudo make install

then cd into the linux-core directory.

make nouveau.o

then I made sym links for the modules (which only worked if I first cd into /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/char/drm directory):

ln -s /usr/src/drm/linux-source/drm.ko drm.ko
ln -s /usr/src/drm/linux-source/nouveau.ko nouveau.ko

cd out of that directory and into xf86-video-nouveau

./autogen.sh

make

cp src/.libs/nouveau_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers

depmod -ae

Final task is editing xorg.conf - This configuration worked for me:

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nouveau"
Option "Randr12"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
EndSection

If you have troubles compiling, specifically a complaint of "Module.symver is missing; modules will have no dependencies and modversions" - cd in to your /usr/src/linux dir and run:

make prepare scripts

After a day of pulling out hairs and tweaking - It works! Now I think I'll boldly test Gallium3D.

Update - galluim 3d works for me with openarena! I built using the instruction from the link above - and fired up openarea for a successful test. It actually ran the game - too fast. Here's some screenshots from a few other games I tried - supertux, freetennis, and netpanzer.

First we need to install postgresql:

sudo aptitude install postgresql

Then change the default password for the postgres user - replace password with your password:

sudo -u postgres psql -c "ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD '<password>'"

Now we add a user *in this example username should be your system username - setting up non system users requires additional steps*:

sudo -u postgres createuser -D -A -P username

you will be promted to enter a password for the user

Then create a database for amarok *replace username with your sytem user name as above*:

sudo -u postgres createdb -O username amarok

Finally we configure amarok to use the database. If you are running amarok for the first time enter settings then using the username/password and amarok database just created. Set hostname to "localhost" and port to "5432". Otherwise from amarok goto settings, configure amarok, collection