ootput burst!

A New Direction for My Blog

2012-03-04T02:18:25+11:00

“I will strive to learn how to cultivate the resilience to deal with change, the agility to explore different aspects of myself, and the vision to use change to forge empowering new perspectives on the future.”
- Joseph LP (ootput)

Henceforth, I will start using this site as a staging area for other aspects of my life: ex. health, interests etc.

Expect to see even shorter posts.

Parse /Usr/Ports/UPDATING for Relevant Issues

2012-03-03T17:25:55+11:00

Tired of sifting through /usr/ports/UPDATING for notes that affect only those packages installed on your system?

Tired of grepping for issues that may have arisen from/to certain dates?

pkg_updating(1) analyses /usr/ports/UPDATING and does the heavy lifting for you.

To obtain the relevant entries from, say, two weeks ago, do:

# /usr/sbin/pkg_updating -d $(/bin/date -v-2w +%Y%m%d)

Use:

-v-1d for a day;
-v-1m for a month;
-v-1y for a year, and so on.

Disable Mouse Acceleration in Xorg

2012-03-03T16:31:26+11:00

You first need to identify the device number of the mouse you’d like to configure:

$ xinput list

Logitech USB Gaming Mouse id=10 [slave pointer (2)]

To list the properties of the mouse:

$ xinput list-props 10

Device ‘Logitech USB Gaming Mouse’:
…
Device Accel Profile (252): 0

The value given determines how the driver handles the acceleration:

-1: none no velocity-dependent pointer acceleration or deceleration. If constant deceleration is also unused, motion processing is suppressed, saving some cycles.
0: classic (the default) similar to old behaviour, but more predictable Xorg Wiki - Development/Documentation/PointerAcceleration

Setting this property to -1 it will disable mouse acceleration entirely.

$ xinput set-prop 10 252 -1

After confirming that the above command works, you can create a shell script to be executed at boot. You may choose to replace the index numbers, eg. 10 and 252 with the more meaningful property names "Logitech USB Gaming Mouse" and "Device Accel Profile" respectively.

My $HOME/bin/macceloff.sh script contains:

#!/bin/bash

sleep 05
xinput set-prop "Logitech USB Gaming Mouse" "Device Accel Profile" -1
exit 0

Gist Extras in Habari

2012-03-03T15:44:47+11:00

Gist Extras embeds gists in post content, and allows for the use of custom CSS.

Unfortunately, the author has not updated the plug-in for Habari 0.7 - where plug-in information now resides in a separate XML file. To address this, make the following changes to gistextras.plugin.php:

*** user/plugins/gistextras/gistextras.plugin.php.orig 2010-06-26 22:11:59.777117173 +0800
--- user/plugins/gistextras/gistextras.plugin.php 2010-06-26 22:11:32.328366681 +0800
***************
*** 2,20 ****
  
  class GistExtras extends Plugin
  {
- public function info()
- {
- return array(
- 'url' => 'http://andrewhutchings.com',
- 'name' => 'Gist Extras',
- 'description' => 'Embeds gists in post content, and allows for the use of custom CSS.',
- 'license' => 'Apache License 2.0',
- 'author' => 'Andrew Hutchings',
- 'authorurl' => 'http://andrewhutchings.com',
- 'version' => '0.0.2'
- );
- }
-
      public function action_update_check()
      {
          Update::add( 'GistExtras', 'A6A9D42C-2F4F-11DE-BB63-026155D89593', $this->info->version );
--- 2,7 ----

You’ll also need to create gistextras.plugin.xml:



        Gist Extras
        Apache Software License 2.0
        http://andrewhutchings.com
        Andrew Hutchings
        0.0.2
        CDATA[Embeds gists in post content, and allows for the use of custom CSS.]]>
        2009

Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot Installation

2012-01-13T06:27:57+11:00

With a freshly installed FreeBSD 8.2-Release on my system, I knew that I had a lot of tinkering to do on the extremely bare bones system. With that in mind, I also chose to install a meta-distribution of Linux that had everything set up from the get go, so as to have a working environment while I slowly familiarized myself with FreeBSD.

Enter Ubuntu Linux 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”.

Negative reviews of the product from other users did not affect my decision to use Oneiric one bit. Never having frequently used the old Gnome 2 GUI, I hardly found Gnome 3’s GUI to be offensive - in fact, I found it quite easy to use. With Oneiric, all of my devices were detected, 3D graphics acceleration was working splendidly, and web-browsing was smooth as could be. Additionally, with the help of this site, my Oneiric installation was also able to fully utilize my FreeBSD’s zpools.

SABnzbd and SICKbeard on FreeBSD

2012-01-12T23:15:58+11:00

For my own archives, from Syah of the FreeBSD forumsFreeBSD Forums - FreeBSD +Sabnzbd/Sickbeard/CouchPotato:

1. install sabnzbd+ from ports.
# cd /usr/ports/news/sabnzbdplus; make install clean
2) install some dependencies if they are not already present on your system. Needed to run & acquire python scripts (Sick Beard, Couch Potato, Headphones)
Python
# cd /usr/ports/lang/python; make install clean
Cheetah
# cd /usr/ports/devel/py-cheetah; make install clean
Git
# cd /usr/ports/devel/git; make install clean
3. Fetch most recent builds of the three tools
Sick Beard
# cd /usr/local ; git clone git://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard.git sickbeard
4. Configure auto-start for python scripts and sabnzbd+
Sick Beard
# cp /usr/local/sickbeard/init.freebsd /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickbeard
Add the following to /etc/rc.conf:
sabnzbd_enable="YES"
sickbeard_enable="YES"
5. configure all the tools to play nice together.
Totally beyond the scope of a quick & dirty update. You should read the installation instructions and refer to the individual websites for each of these projects to fully leverage this tool set.
Hopefully this gets you a bit further towards your goal.

To keep track of upstream changes to SickBeard:
# cd /usr/local/sickbeard && git pull

A few notes:

Step 4. will fail as SickBeard currently only comes with an Ubuntu startup script. Hatchling, from the SickBeard Forums, kindly published a working copy of a FreeBSD rc script that is available here (and duplicated here.)SickBeard Forums - A FreeBSD rc.d script

I also found it necessary to add: PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin to: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sabnzbd and /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickbeard