Upgrading Linux

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It still never ceases to amaze me at the how easy it is to upgrade between versions on linux (debian for me) whilst there are obviously alot of complexity for super custom machines but still, the ability to be able to edit a single config file (sources.list) and run 3 commands and then your done is nothing short of awesome. Also to do this all whilst on SSH well nioce..

edit sources.list

# apt-get update
# apt-get install apt dpkg aptitude
# apt-get dist-upgrade

answer a few questions then..

reboot

 

 

NTFS-3G read write mode and dirty journal

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There are still, after all these years, still only two ways to get around the issue of a unclean NTFS, ie goes into hiberation, power loss or however else it gets a dirty journal. Note this still permits the drive to be mounted as RO.

1) drop the drive out and put into a external enclosure and attached then de-attach to a windows machine. Removing from within windows (ie no reboot is adequate)

2) Boot system using a liveCD like knoppix and mounting the system, this sometimes seems to correct the drive.

Nonetheless, the benefits of being able to read and write to NTFS from non-window machines makes this all worth it.

Customising Gallery3

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More of a record of what I have done then anything else!

Theme installed; Gerrys modified version of Dark Canvas Theme

Why I modded it? I wanted drop shadows around my albums, no crappy icons, fluid width and my own CSS header.

The great thing about Gallery3 is the way you mod the theme and how things look, the only files you have to touch (well for me anyway) are;

1) /dark_canvas/views/page.html.php

2)/dark_canvas/css/screen.css

So, onto the mods

Drop shadows;

Insert the following into the top of /dark_canvas/views/page.html.php

<style>
img.g-thumbnail, img.g-resize{
border:0;
-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #111;
-webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #111;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #111;
}
</style>

and

<script type=”text/javascript”> $(document).ready(function() { $(“img.g-thumbnail, img.g-resize”).css({‘behavior’: ‘url(/PIE.htc)’}); }) </script>

and get hold of PIE to hopefully sort out some the older IE issues!

http://css3pie.com/

Just extract this into the root gallery3 directory

Icons;

just delete them from the images directory, quick and dirty!

Fluid width;

Change

<div id=”doc4″ class=”yui-t5 g-view”>

which gives you a fixed 974px width
to

<div id=”doc3″ class=”yui-t5 g-view”>

which gives you 100% width!

thats the easy bit, now to jump into the CSS and play with teh containers to get the content to not be fixed to a set number of columns!

I have tweaked a few little things like heading text size, but forgot to note where I changed stuff, normally I try and comment when I change stuff so when I drop by in 6months time I know whats changed!

This is what I ended up with

/*gerry*/
#g-content {
padding-left: 20px;
position: relative;
width: 95%
}

/*gerry*/
#g-sidebar {
padding: 10px 10px;
float: left;
width: 220px;

This makes the gallery a true fluid width, just adjust the number of items on the page thru the theme options and your good to go!

Custom header and footer;

This is pretty easy, gallery3 gives a place to include html for the header and footer, however you have to be careful since it strips away CSS, this makes things a bit interesting when you want your CSS header!

All I did was modify the

/dark_canvas/views/page.html.php

to include my CSS code and hey it worked! you may also need the html_purifier module which helps – not sure how or why.

probably a better way would be to include your CSS in the screen.css file!

this is my code for the CSS stuff;

<style type=”text/css”>

.gbutton, .gbutton:visited {
background: #222;
display: inline-block;
padding: 3px 10px 3px;
color: #ddd;
text-decoration: none;
-moz-border-radius: 4px;
-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 3px 8px rgba(255,255,255,0.50);
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 3px 8px rgba(255,255,255,0.50);
text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.25);
border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.25);
position: relative;
cursor: pointer;
}

.gbutton:hover                            { background-color: #111; color: #fff; }
.gbutton:active                            { top: 1px; }
.small.gbutton, .small.gbutton:visited             { font-size: 10px; padding: ; }
.gbutton, .gbutton:visited,
.medium.gbutton, .medium.gbutton:visited         { font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1; text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.25); }
.grey.gbutton, .blue.gbutton:visited        { background-color: #505050 ; }
.grey.gbutton:hover                            { background-color: #707070; }

</style>

and my header text, which is set through -> Appearance ->Theme Options

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html >
<head>

</head>

<body>

<body bgcolor=”#222222″><img name=”galleryheader” src=”http://www.avernus.com.au/gallery-header_V4.gif” width=”850″ height=”80″ border=”0″ id=”galleryheader” alt=”” /><br />
<br />
<div align=”left”><a href=’http://www.avernus.com.au/’ class=’small grey gbutton’>Avernus »</a>
<a href=’https://blog.avernus.com.au/’ class=’small grey gbutton’>Blog</a>
<a href=’http://gerry.avernus.com.au/avernus/IS/’ class=’small grey gbutton’>Imagery</a>
<a href=’http://gallery.avernus.com.au/’ class=’small grey gbutton’>Gallery</a>
<a href=’http://gerry.avernus.com.au/slide/’ class=’small grey gbutton’>File Repository</a>
<a href=’http://www.avernus.com.au/avernus/pages/hardware/temperature/temperature.htm’ class=’small grey gbutton’>Temperature</a>
<a href=’http://www.avernus.com.au/avernus/pages/misc/about-avernus.htm’ class=’small grey gbutton’>About</a>
</div>
<br />
</body>
</html>

and footer;

<html> <head>    <!– function MM_openBrWindow(theURL,winName,features) { //v2.0   window.open(theURL,winName,features); } //–>  </head>  <body link=”#CCCCCC” vlink=”#CCCCCC” alink=”#CCCCCC”> <div align=”center”><font size=”1″ color=”#999999″>© Copyright 2001-2011, www.avernus.com.au ,<a href=”http://www.avernus.com.au/avernus/pages/misc/copyright.htm” target=”_self” /avernus/pages/misc/copyright.htm’,”,’scrollbars=yes,width=700,height=800′)”>[View Copyright and Terms of Use]</a><br>   Pages maintained by: <a href=”mailto:webmaster@avernus.com.au”><i>Gerard Blacklock</i> </a> Last Modified –   <!– #BeginDate format:fcAm1m –>Thursday, January 6, 2011  23:04<!– #EndDate –>   </font></div> </body> </html>

Getting Sharp images out of Gallery3

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The default settings and graphic package for Gallery3 will make any real photographer shudder at the look of the images, by default they are way too compressed and pixelated, a couple of things to get them looking better, and for me it was trial and error until I was happy with the quality and file sizes!

Firstly get hold of ImageMagick version 6.xx and get it installed! its a better processor.

Secondly, get into the advanced settings tab and tweak the following settings, these values are what I have ended up with – after about 5 iterations!

gallery     image_quality     95
gallery     image_sharpen     16

Gallery 3 – the revolution is here!

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Alright, so to try and get myself motivated to get more of my images back on a gallery I thought I would check out the latest offerings from Menatlo Gallery. Gallery3 has been in the pipelines for quite some time and there was a significant focus shift in the way the software was to be used, in a nutshell and looking in hindsight I think that was primarily to reduce the complexity of teh software and move towards a simple clean interface which concentrated more on easy quick photo management.

I was dubious at the start, however Gallery1 and Gallery2 were a bit painful in managing images, moving things around and other little quirks made me neglect my gallery.

A couple of issues came to mind when thinking about upgrading;

1) I had a nicely modified theme which I liked the look of this would not work with gallery3

2) How would the import process go? with 5k images this could be a breaking point.

3) I wanted to move the address from somewhere deep in the server to a nice easy possie like /gallery with a subdomain of gallery.avernus.com.au this could throw a spanner in the works.

4) I had a multi gallery site to confuse issues as well!

Anyway, installed the latest release of Gallery3 which was first non beta version, talk about great timing huh! The install was very easy and i put it in the new location with teh new domain name. The whole interface and software reminds me very much of wordpress, it now has a dashboard and a sidebar with ‘widgets’ i guess you could call them that! And has modules, which were there before in gallery2.

So first thing was first get the module called ‘gallery2 import’  thats a good place to start, ran that baby for quite a few hours and it imported all albums and images flawlessly, took a while but it did it! It also left the old gallery2 install in place – great if it all went pear shaped.

Themes were always gonna be an issue, there is only a few themes out there, I realised I was gonna have to tweak them to get what I want – check the next entry for details about this.

Getting Sharp Images from Gallery3

and

Customising Gallery3

In terms of modules – I have steadily added to the module collection and I think I am pretty close to what I want now;

Akismet    –     Filter comments through the Akismet web service to detect and eliminate spam (http://akismet.com). You’ll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.
Shopping Basket     –     Provides a simple shopping basket and checkout with paypal integration
Carousel     –     Add a vertical carousel for recent & popular items in the sidebar.
Comments    –     Allows users and guests to leave comments on photos and albums.
Digibug   –      Digibug Photo Printing Module
Exif Data     –     Extract Exif data and display it on photo pages.

Read More →

WordPress – when life needs a change

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So, your blogs feeling a bit left out, your web directory resembles a 12 year olds bedroom and its time to pull up your pants, well with the worlds most popular blogging software (amoungst other uses) things are not necessarily that easy to shuffle and move around, especially when you want to change the URL and also the fullweb directory path! Nontheless it can be done, but be prepared, its not a five minute job, probably a half hour one 🙂

Onwards and upwards…here are my notes, cause I am gettign old and I will forget this after lunch  : -/

Relocating blog to another directory!

log in to the blog and change the URL for the blog under the settings
WordPress address (URL)     https://blog.avernus.com.au
Site address (URL)    https://blog.avernus.com.au

save, then relocate the files to the directory – in this case it is the root directory for the virtual host.

Read More →

Wow! CSS has been updated!

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Well it has been several months since logging on to smash a few pimpled faced teens in the cyber world of Counterstrike – so the other day I had a few minutes to spare so I fired up Steam and Gamearena only to find it wanted to update, no surprise really – however the 600mb download was a giveaway that something significant had changed!

So from the official sources;

The #1 online action game in the world, Counter-Strike: Source (CSS) has just received a major update and is now available for the Mac. CSS is a SteamPlay title, so if you own it on the PC – you own it on the Mac. Besides PC Vs. Mac cross-platform play, this update also adds achievements, stats, engine updates and more.

New match and lifetime player stats and summary screens give you insight into how you play. You can tracks your kills, your deaths, and compare yourself against other players. Learn your accuracy with each weapon so no more guessing where you should be spending your money.

Over 140 unique achievements have been added. The achievements cover everything from defusing bombs and winning pistol rounds to dominating your first foe. Can you kill 5 opponents with a blast of C4 to earn the “Clusterstruck” achievement?

Can you earn MVP by getting the most kills or defusing the bomb? Always know who on your team is contributing the most with the end round MVP award. And all your favorite Steam features have been added including avatar pictures, domination icons and more.

A new Death Cam that shows who killed you. The new domination and revenge system makes it personal. We have also included various Source Engine updates, bug fixes, and more.

which is a far cry from the the previous version which I played in July!

which, when compared to a screenie from 2005 ear, things were pretty much the same back then!

and before that, in the stoneages of Dialup internet..wow, that makes my head spin, crazy times eh? CS and dialup, brings back memories of my trick gateway server and my beloved roadstar modem, which by th eway was USB and worked like a dream under Redhat – back before it turned into the Fedora shitfight..now its pure Debian all teh way..but I am getting sidetracked, where was that screenie again?

Almost Silent Cocytus

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I have to say, I have had it up to teh neck with shit 20mm fans, I have had three in this box, all of which have seized and stop, not that its super critical from a cooling point of view, but nonetheless, three different branded 120mm fans locked up in a relatively dust free environment, also its not like there are being switched on and off all the time, they just about just sit there running 24hrs a day…The first one was a Zalman, not particularly quiet either, but cheap, the second was some non-descript number an dthe third a coolmaster one, which seized after only 3 or 4 months I did not even notice it had stopped until I checked the temperature logs…

Nonetheless, it now has a Artic Cooling one in there, which is pretty quiet, so that sorts out the exhaust fan, however the CPU cooler is a tired old Arkua Socket A CPU cooler Arkua7228 , great heatsink, but the fan is built for performance rather than quietness, so it was off with that bad boy and on with a 80mm fan adapter and a old/new nexus 80mm fan – the space was a bit of a issue but it is a multi-processor machine so I just moved to teh other socket position – I don’t think my gateway/firewall really needs to be a dual processor number 🙂

Now, cocytus is suspend high above all, literally and running very quite with the most noise coming from the harddrive!

Mental note, buy up big on the dirt cheap socket 370 coolers from eyo soon, damn cheap and great for us oldies running ancient systems..

http://www.eyo.com.au/items_CatID_20_SubCatID_4_Cooling_CPU_Cooler_for_Socket_A_370.html