ChichaPlanet

The Chrerokee Web Server is an extremely fast modular opensource HTTP daemon written by my good friend Alvaro Lopez Ortega from Spain. The project has recently been making great progress towards the 1.0 release. The product has been very stable for years and since version 0.6 includes a web-based administration interface so you can avoid tweaking text files manually like you still have to do with Apache, Lighttpd or nginx.

Installing the latest Cherokee package in Ubuntu Hardy can be a little tricky. The version that’s included with the distribution is mantained by the MOTU team and based on the Debian version mantained by another good friend Gunnar Wolf from Mexico.

The packages for the latest version of Cherokee are mantained by Leonel Nuñez, also from Mexico, and are found in his PPA apt repo so in order to install them on Hardy you have to follow these steps:

STEP 1) Add the PPA repo to /etc/apt/sources.list

Simple adding this two lines to the files does the trick:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/leonelnunez/ubuntu/ hardy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/leonelnunez/ubuntu/ hardy main

STEP 2) Configure the prefered version of the packages at /etc/apt/preferences

This is the most tricky part, simply add these lines in this file. If you don’t have it just create it.

Package: cherokee

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: cget

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-base0

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-base0-dev

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-config0

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-config0-dev

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-server0

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999
Package: libcherokee-server0-dev

Pin: version 0.9.4-1*

Pin-Priority: 999

When a newer package appears in the PPA repo it will be installed or upgraded. Version 0.9.4-1 is there simple because it was the current packaged version at the time of writing this blog post. The important bit is having Cherokee 0.9.x and not Cherokee 0.5.6 installed in your box.

STEP 3) Update your APT sources and install Cherokee

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install cherokee

That’s it. Give it a try! I’ll be using it for serving static content here on my blog.

Keep this link with you and help spread the word:

Just a few minutes ago I realized the locale configuration of my Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Linode VPS was not using UTF-8 when I was checking out an SVN repo.

So I checked the current available locales:

locale -a

C
POSIX

As you can see en_US.utf8 was not there. So I had to be added manually:

sudo localedef –no-archive -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

Now, checking the locales again I got listed:

If you’re an experienced Linux user this is not big deal but in this blogsphere-powered days I figured out this kind of info will be helpful to somebody out there so I’m sharing it here.

locale -a

C
en_US.utf8
POSIX

So the last step is to set this in the environment so it’s configured correctly the next time you log into the server and also if the server gets rebooted.

The following two lines have to vi added to /etc/environment

LANGUAGE=”en_US.utf8″
LANG=”en_US.utf8″

And that it’s. You might one to reboot the server not it’s not really neccesary.

If you’re Ubuntu server is not configured this way I’d recommend tweaking the configuration.

Keep this link with you and help spread the word:

Since I got a Macbook around six months ago I planned a triple-boot setup but didn’t really do it until recently. One of the first things I did when I got the laptop was using Bootcamp to repartition the hard-drive and install Ubuntu. When I then wanted to add Windows to the mix I found out it wasn’t that easy after struggling a bit with partition schemes and installers that don’t mix so well. The result was I just gave up for some time resorting to run Windows from VMware Fusion.

A few friends that own Macs and do Windows and Linux are happy running the OSes inside virtual machines. I was not. Windows under VMware runs nicely and the Unity integration features are quite cool but since I got the laptop with 1 GB or RAM running heavy enterprisey development tools for Windows among other stuff wasn’t working that well. Besides, OS X is fine and before the triple boot setup I got mostly used to run it all of the time but from time to time I run benchmarks, show demos or give talks and I needed the real Linux running on top of the bare metal. So I went for the real thing

Since I’ve switched to this machine as my primary computer I needed more RAM and disk space so I upgraded it from 120 GB to 250 GB and from 1 gigs of RAM to 2 gigs. Since I was going to have Leopard installed in a brand new disk this was the chance to finally go for the triple boot setup.

So the story starts with Boot Camp, Apple’s utility tool for resizing the Leopard’s HFS+ partion and have Windows Vista or XP installed aside of Mac OS using the drivers included in the Leopard installation media. As you might guess, given the propietary nature of Apple, Boot Camp is not the most flexible tool around and demands the hard drive to be formatted as a unique HFS+ partition using the whole disk. The good news is the process of installing Windows with Boot Camp is pretty smooth and works correctly almost every time. My experience was not the exception.

There are quite a few guides all over the Internet proposing different strategies for having OSX coexists with Windows and Linux on the same hard-drive and almost all of them are very emphatic on following the instructions to the letter. I read most of them but given my previous experiences and the information I had gathered I went for my own approach with I’ll briefly describe in this post.

GUID Partition Table (GPT)

GPT is a modern partition scheme that is part of the Extentensive Firmware Interface standard proposed by Intel. This is the scheme Apple uses for all Intel-based Macintoshes and Leopard’s installer only agrees to install the OSX on a GPT-partitioned hard drive so that’s one of the first things you must be aware of. GPT is an alternative to the old and well-know MBR partition scheme most of us are used coming from a PC world. EFI is a replacement of the old PC BIOS. EFI uses GPT where BIOS uses MBR. Nonetheless, Boot Camp uses a mixed GPT-MBR partition scheme under EFI in order to simulate the PC BIOS and have BIOS/MBR-only OSes like Windows XP installed in the new Macs. That’s why you CAN’T use Windows partitioning tools you might be used to like fdisk. They’ll simply ruin the setup and you’ll have to start all over again by partitioning the hard drive under GPT.

The current versions of Ubuntu Linux, like Feisty or Hardy, support GPT-partitioned hard drives in the installer, so they are not a problem. Windows Vista being a new OS only seems to support this in some 64-bits versions. That’s why you’ll want to rely on Boot Camp for the Windows installation and then try to mess the less you can with the arrangements the software has made

Installing Windows

There are many guides around for this part. I’ll link here to Apple’s official instructions in the 101: Using Windows via Boot Camp with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard article of their support site. When installing XP don’t even think of creating or deleting the partitions. At most you can switch from NTFS to FAT but I went for NTFS since Linux is already supporting it well and my partition was 60 GBs big. You can opt for the quick formatting option for reformatting the drive C: but don’t try reformating, I repeat, since you’re not installing over an MBR-partitioned standard PC hard drive.

After booting XP you’ll find the look is so lame compared to OSX or Linux with Compiz that you’ll want to make the appearance a little bit more decent so I turned on the ClearType option, the Royale theme, XPize and finally Y’z Shadow for adding extra transparency and drop shadows to the windows.

Since Macs only have one click you’ll find useful the tiny Apple Mouse utility for XP which switches the left and right click options while you’re holding the Ctrl key. Just run it from XP’s start folder adding the /s parameter to the executable path for avoiding the start dialog and you’ll have right-click working the same way as under OSX.

rEFIt

So after Windows install my MacBook was booting straight into Windows. Horrible! Yes, I could still choose from which partition to boot by pressing the right Option (Alt) key or setting my choice using the Startup disk dialog under OSX’s System Preferences but I wanted a cool graphical bootleader that soon would be spotting a cute Linux penguin so I went with rEFIT, a superb opensource bootloader for EFI-based hardware that dynamically detects your partitions and even bootable media.

I grabbed rEFIt as a DMG file and run the graphical installer under OSX. When I booted again it wasn’t working so I had to resort to running the manual installation instructions which are a breeze to follow using the OSX terminal app. Rebooted and the nice rEFIT screen was welcoming me featuring both OSX and Windows icons.

Installing Ubuntu

So at this point my Mac was dual-booting Leopard and XP but I need to add Hardy to the mix. Since the biggest partition was Leopard’s I had to shrink it in order to make space for Linux. There are a few options for doing this: I could have used the opensource gParted tool included in the Ubuntu Live CD or OSX’s own diskutil command under the terminal, or even the Disk Utility GUI under Applications/Utilities but I went with iPartition, a commercial product included in a Coriolis Recovery CD a friend had lend me. The partitioning worked nicely and I had 60 gigs for getting Ubuntu installed to the hard drive.

The problem here was the brand new partition for Ubuntu is physically the third one but Boot Camp will only want to boot Windows from the last partition, in this case the third. So the trick comes here: I booted the laptop with Ubuntu’s LiveCD which at disk point is offered as a boot option represented by rEFIT as a Linux penguin with a tiny CD icon and had the new partition formated as NTFS and Boot Camp’s windows installation copied to the third partition. Of course I had to do all of disk manually so I used mkfs.ntfs over /dev/sda4 to create the new partition, then mouted both /dev/sda4 (Boot Camp’s Windows installation) on /bootcamp and /dev/sda4 (new Windows location) on /windows and had all the files copied by simply issuing a “cp -r /bootcamp/* /windows” command and waiting for it to complete before starting the Ubuntu installer.

Then, when perform the actual Ubuntu installation I switched to manually setting the partition in which Ubuntu was to be installed, /dev/sda3 in this case, created no SWAP partition since many guides replaced it by a swapfile inside the main Linux ext3 partition and had GRUB installed not in the MBR but in /dev/sda3 and everything worked nicely.

Due to Ubuntu’s bug #222126 the Ubuntu’s installer clears the MBR and after rebooting you’ll get a “no bootable device” error when selecting the Linux or the Windows icon from rEFIT. I knew about this problem and the fix from my previous attempts so I didn’t panicked It only takes to run the eEFIT’s built-in partition tool to resync the GPT and MBR partitions and you’re done. At this point my system had a fully operational triple-boot setup.

Configuring Hardy to use the MacBook’s hardware

For this part I mostly followed the instructions at the MacBook Santa Rosa and MacBook Santa Rosa on Hardy pages from the Ubuntu wiki. Sound is working. Wireless is working too. The only thing I’m missing is having the laptop suspend correctly which is currently preventing me from using Ubuntu extensively when relying on the laptop’s battery. I’ll be looking into this issue soon and will be updating the article properly.

Conclusions

Triple-booting Leopard, Hardy and XP wasn’t an easy but a fun journy. Yes, it can take quite a bit of time waiting for the installations to complete and even much more configuring the system so I really helps to know what your’re doing since you risk loosing data or at least a good piece of your precious time. Was the price well worth for my? Definitely, yes. It’s not just all the cool kids who happen to be Linux geeks and own a Mac are doing this but the chance to use all of the system resources running under the proper drivers and being able to forget for the most part what is the hardware platform you’re using what has value to me. Of course, it all depends on your very specific needs. Due to academic reasons I do a lot of team work with other people and at some points we switch laptops or I have mine used by someone else to complete a task. In this situations I’m now booting into Windows and forgetting about any ocassional OSX interferences like switching to a different desktop using OSX’s Expose. It’s also way easier to have Windows run from it’s own partition and not a VM’s disk if you plan to install a ton of software as I’m having to do this days. So for me, it’s working nicely and I can still use Virtual Machines under any of the three OSes to virtualize any of the two others or a different one if that’s what I need. So i’m happy with the end result.

I really hope this post is interesting and useful to some of you out there on the internets For further reference most links are available from my Delicious account under the tripleboot tag.

Keep this link with you and help spread the word:

Terminator 0.9 Feature Freeze has come, i’m really excited to see the new features working, they are awesome, but what are this new exciting features?

• Tabs: Now terminator supports tabs, you have different tabs with splited terminals on each one.
• Drag & Drop: Now you can reorder your terminals, you just need to press Cntrl + right click and drag and drop your terminals wherever you want!
• Terminal zooming: This is one of the more exiting ones, have you expect problems when using splited terminals and one of them turns to little for some seconds? Now you just need to press ctrl+shift+z to have this terminal on the whole window and then use the same key combination to put it back on it’s place! It’s awesome!
• Terminatorrc: Don’t like gnome environments? Now you don’t depend on gnome-terminal to configure your terminator, you can use ~/.terminatorrc to tune your terminal as you want it to be
• Titles: kind of confused when using ssh connections inside terminator? Now we support titles, so you always have a title on each splited terminal to know where you are working on

It’s really awesome to see al this changes comming, they make terminator really usefull, want to try them? Help the terminator team to test it, just add my ppa to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvalcarcel/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvalcarcel/ubuntu hardy main

Download it:

$sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install terminator

And report bugs if you find some: https://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator

Excited? Digg it!

Ok, i’ll alsol take part of the meme which is going in Ubuntu Planet

• Conky
• Sticky Notes
• Terminator with and ssh connection and an irssi running
• Empathy with all my open protocol IM’s and 1 conversation
• Pidgin with my MSN account
• Firefox with 15 tabs
• Evolution with my 4 mail accounts
• Gobby with a UDS session document
• Terminator with 3 terminals on it

Today i see an amazing picture, and i need to thank the one who made it for including my name on it, and all the people listed! Thank you for Hardy Heron!!

I think everyone would like to have a T-shirt with this image on it, so please someone make and sell some of them!!!

We are having our Release Party on Perú also!! So if you are on Lima - Perú we expect to see you at the “Universidad Ricardo Palma” on May the 3th.

WoW! Hardy Heron pre orders are now available!! Order them while they are hot!!

This have been busy week’s so i have been a little offline, but as usual when it happens i will do a little summary of what happened, so here we go:

Buster is here
Finally i have my brand new Thinkpad T61 on hands, i installed Hardy Heron Beta and it works really good, i have almost no problems with it working out of the box, the only thing i need to tune is the hibernation feature which doesn’t work properly, but i haven’t have time to report it or check what is happening.

I’ve got my visa
Everything is in order now, i have all my papers for attending to UDS, last week i got my visa, so it’s confirmed, i’m going to Praga, i’m really exited about it, i hope to finally meet face to face the people i work almost every day with it will be a really nice experience, so see you un Prague!!!

University started
Last week i started classes at the university once again, i have a really interesting course named “computer graphics” in which we use the MFC library, i was hopping to have a little fight with my teacher about the final course work, because i don’t even have a windows machine to do it, but i was really surprised when he had the idea and propose me to do the final course work using OpenGL and Free tools, that’s surprising because on the university i study almost everything is done with Microsoft tools and technologies and they doesn’t allow the students to use anything different, but it’s finally changing!!!

Hardy Release party
We have almost everything ready, we are running a Release Party on May the 3th, we have been working on the place, the talks, and making everything works, and we are almost ready! So if you are in Perú i hope to see you at the San Marcos University that day!

She came finally
The last 4 months have been really long and hard for me, my girlfriend have been working on Vail Colorado as part of an exchange program i missed her SO much, but she’s finally here again since Friday morning and we have spend a wonderful weekend together, i love you so much!!

Hardy is comming, let make the world know about that:

Just include this code inside your webpage:

<script src=”http://www.ubuntu.com/files/countdown/display.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

So, this week the number five will become significant, Daniel has made a purpose for the Ubuntu Community, so try to reach the goal, is not hard just to look 5 bugs per day (not to patch them, just work on them) you don’t even need to be a developer to join the goal, take a look at the wiki on how you can help. I will do my best effort, but as this week is a really busy one (or it seems it would be) i don’t know i will reach the goal, but my best effort is a promise!

Mon 18th Feb - Fri 22nd Feb @ #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode!

Digg It!

Welcome everybody! I’m very very pleased to announce the first ever Ubuntu Developer Week . What this means? We’ll have one week full of action-packed IRC sessions where you can:

• learn about different packaging techniques
• find out more about different development teams
• check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community
• participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers
• and much much more…

I’m absolutely excited to have such a diverse programme and thrilled we have so many excellent speakers in the first ever Ubuntu Developer Week. All your favourite Ubuntu developers will be there who will introduce you to lots of parts of Ubuntu development including packaging, virtualisation, desktop application testing, development processes, collaboration techniques and lots lots more. This is the perfect time to get started, get up and running and in touch with future team members.

So, what are you waiting for? Go and see the timetable and then see how to attend. I look forward to seeing you all there at Ubuntu Open Week. Oh, and lets spread the word!

The Sessions:

• Patching packages - Martin Pitt will explain the different techniques of patching packages. His session will help you get started with UbuntuDevelopment as it’s a good entry point to improving the software we use every day.
• Launchpad PPAs - Launchpad Hackers Celso Providelo and Matthew Revell will introduce you to a great feature of Launchpad: Personal Package Archives. Building packages for testing and preview reasons made easy.
• Packaging 101 - Daniel Holbach will talk you through the most important properties of Ubuntu and Debian packaging.
• MOTU School - Working with Debian - We’ll have James Westby around, who is very interested in collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. His session will showcase tools, initiatives and processes to make this happen.
• Introduction to the ServerTeam - Interested in servers and services in the Ubuntu landscape? Matthias Gug introduces you to the ServerTeam.
• MOTU Processes - Interested in becoming a MOTU? Daniel Holbach will explain the MOTU processes: how to get involved and how to get things done.
• Virtualisation - Virtualisation is definitely one of the hottest topics at the moment. Virtualisation Specialist Søren Hansen will talk you through the state of things and answer all your questions.
• Kubuntu - For those of you interested in development of the big K, we’ll have the Kubuntu developers around.
• Ubuntu Derivatives Team - We have new Derivatives coming up almost every day. The Derivative Team aims to make collaboration seamless and help derivatives to get things done.
• Debdiffs and how to get them submitted - Daniel Holbach will showcase one of the most important entry points to get involved: how to produce good patches and explain how to get them submitted for inclusion.
• First steps on contributing (MOTU/TODO & MOTU/TODO/Bugs) - MOTU contributor Nicolas Valcárcel will talk about his experiences and give you first-hand hints how to get started.
• Desktop Packaging Session - Mastermind of the french Desktop mafia Sébastien Bacher will take you on a tour through Desktop Packaging: your entry point to the Desktop Team
• SRU/Security updates - Two of our MOTUs, William Grant and Luca Falavigna, experienced in doing security and stable release updates will talk about exactly that.
• Firefox 3 Extension Packaging - We’ll have Mozilla hacker Alexander Sack around, who will talk you through packaging of Firefox 3 Extensions.
• Writing Scripts For Automated Desktop Testing - QA developer Lars Wirzenius spent quite some time thinking about testing of applications and will take you on a tour through testing Desktop applications.
• Bughelper - making bug work easier - Bugmaster Brian Murray and bughelper hacker Markus Korn are the de-facto maintainers of python-launchpad-bugs and bughelper. Numerous tools make use of the interface and make working with bugs much much easier.
• BugTriage - Pedro Villavicencio has an incredible record of triaged bugs and even managed to give Sébastien Bacher a run for his money. He’ll get you started doing bug triage which is one of the most important points of development.
• MOTU Q&A session - This session has become an institution and happens every Friday at 13:00 UTC. For once we’ll move this to a later time and invite you all to be there. Prepare your questions and let’s get started together.
• Library Packaging - Long-time MOTU Stefan Potyra will talk about the bread and butter of almost all packages: libraries and how to package them right.

Well, these have been busy days, i have been working on some ubuntu MOTU tasks, involving me in the Server Team and i have felt in love and involve myself on the developing of terminator. Finally i can easy split my monitor with terminals and see all of them at the same time! it’s what i was looking for!

The last days we where working on the 0.7 release and all the packaging work for it’s inclusion on Ubuntu and Debian, for ubuntu there was a LOT of feedback, comments and help from the MOTU’s and finally after some work done it’s have been uploaded today and it’s on the build queue waiting for the admins to approve it, i’m so happy to see it there after all the work we put in there. I hope to receive some feedback from the Debian developers on the next few days so it can also be included up there, for now let’s start working on 0.8 and on the hardy development circle

This is a new i need to post on English and Spanish.

English:

On December the 5th we are having our next Ubuntu Hug Day. We
will be targeting on bugs that haven’t a package assigned to them [0] and on getting more information from the original reporter about the errors [1], so it’s more about triaging bugs, there is no need of programming skills for joining, everyone can join.

So did you want to join? You can go to #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net, take a look to the list [2] and start working, don’t forget to write down your name on the list if you are done with a report.

Original announce.

Español

Este 5 de Diciembre será el próximo “Ubuntu Hug Day“, nos centraremos en bugs que no tienen un paquete asignado [0] y en obtener mayor información de la persona que lo reportó originalmente [1] así que no son necesarios los conocimientos en programación, todos pueden participar.

Bueno, quieres unirte? Solo debe entrar a #ubuntu-bugs en irc.freenode.net, darle una mirada a la lista [2] y comenzar a trabajar, no se olviden de poner su nombre cuando terminen de trabajar en un reporte.

Anuncio original.

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProcedures
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20071205

Today is the release of Ubuntu Hardy Alpha 1, it’s only for testing purposes don’t use it on production machines because it has very high possibilities to crash or/and lose data, but please if you can download and test it and report the bugs, you can find more info the the wiki.