Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

I recently migrated my server to a new maschine and a new provider. After supporting Kore today with installing spamdyke on his maschine, too, I seized the chance to update my Spam Filtering with Spamdyke in front of Qmail howto on the wiki. The howto describes how to install the most recent version of spamdyke on a Gentoo system, explains the most important configuration options and gives some practical hints for such setups. You can ask Kore, it only takes about 10 minutes to do so ;) and saves you a huge lot of spam. Comments and addtions are very welcome.

Also quite old I'd like to recommend the video Revolution OS, which I stumbled upon yesterday, to you. The video deals with the evolution of the open source scene and how it started. While integrating some technical and geeky facts I think it is quite good for non-technical people, too, and can possible give them a hint on what we geeks do here on the internet and how they are affected by it themselves.

^{I especially like the sentence "I am your worst nightmare" at the very beginning. ;)}

After my server was close to wasting all its CPU time for checking email messages for potential spam using Spamassassin I decided that it was time to investigate. My friend Arne, who helped me a lot with Qmail problems earlier, recommended to install spamdyk, an SMTP spam filter that is placed in front of Qmail and does not require specially patches for the MTA itself. Spamdyk can filter mail by blacklisting, whitelisting, greylisting and using several other options.

Thanks to Arne for this great tip! Spamdyk is up and running now on my maschine and my load is now constantly below 0.40, while spam receival seems to be reduced drastically. Since I did not find much information about Spamdyk on Gentoo, I wrote down my experiences as a little howto in the Gentoo wiki. Maybe someone finds it helpfull. Any feedback welcome!

Since my new baby is not fully working under Gentoo, yet, I'm updating my kernel each time a new version of gentoo-sources occurs in portage. If you are configuring your kernel by hand, you know what that means every time (at least for me it did):

- Move around /usr/src/linux symlink
- Copy .config
- $ make oldconfig
- $ make (before that make clean, if you re-compile a kernel)
- $ make modules_install
- $ module-rebuild rebuild, to rebuild external modules on Gentoo
- Copy files to /boot
- Add the new kernel to the grub menu
- Activate it as the default one

Time to integrate these steps into a little script.

This one takes over all the mess from above. It hides a lot of nasty output from me, but allows me to watch it through a temporary log file if I tend to. It creates the rudimentary entries in my grub.conf above all others so that the new kernel is active by default.

The script (rename it to .sh only, make it executable and run it as root) should be adjustable to your needs within minutes. Maybe someone finds it useful. Please leave me a comment if you do and also if you don't!

After 2 years of really satisfied use of the IBM/Lenovo T43p I decided that time has come to upgrade. When the T61p was released by Lenovo some weeks ago I felt that this would be the right for me and so far I did not regret it until now. While I read/heart a lot about Lenovo quality constantly dropping I cannot confirm this.

My version T61p comes with a 15.4" LCD with a maximum resolution of 1920x1200 (after 1600x1200 I did not want anything smaller anymore). While it is about 4 cm wider than my previous T43p its size is still ok for me, since I don't use a desktop PC beside it. The integrated Core 2 Duo (T7700 @ 2.40GHz) compiled my whole Gentoo system (about 800 packages, including nice stuff like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and Xorg) in about 16 hours (impressive!), supported by 4 GB of RAM.

Although brand new hardware is usually a synonyme for "does not work under Linux" I was impressed, how flawlessly most things worked out of the box. As you can imagine, not everything went out of the box, what is because I'm writing this little blog. Maybe I can assist some people shipping around some pitfalls.

The integrated audio chip 82801H did not work with the latest alsa-driver package, when I first installed the box. I tried compiling the drivers from kernel with no success and only unmasking the CVS version helped. However, the latest media-sound/alsa-driver-1.0.15_rc2 works fine with the snd_hda_intel driver. Tormented by ATI driver politics for Linux, I'm quite happy with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M, which is supported by the recent binary drivers. A bit weird but quite ok for me is, that the NVIDIA X Server Settings tool tells me I have 512 MB graphics memory, while the NVIDIA website states that this chip is only available with max. 256 MB. ;)

The brand-new 4965 wireless chip by Intel ran out of the box with the driver (net-wireless/iwlwifi-1.0.0_p1 currently) and firmware (net-wireless/iwl4965-ucode) packages in portage. While connection and association works quite fine in most cases I noticed some weird speed problems and only got about 200-300 kb/s download rates in my local network. As it looks, this was a problem of having CONFIG_MAC80211=y instead of CONFIG_MAC80211=m. Since I re-compiled gentoo-sources-2.6.22-r7 with the new wifi stack build as a module it works perfectly fine and I get 2-3 mb/s. Hope that was the solution for this problem now.

The ACPI support is not perfect so far. While CPU frequency scaling works fine, I'm not able to adjust the LCD brightness through /sys or to switch of bluetooth via hotkey. Suspend to RAM using the Gnome NetworkManager works out of the box. I also tried roughly to get the fingerprint reader to work. Compiling thinkfinger and enrolling my fingerprint worked fine, but pam_thinkfinger does not accept fingerprints currently. Since enrolling worked, this seems to be a setup specific problem. The internal clock of the T61p needs the setting CLOCK_OPTS="--directisa" in /etc/conf.d/clock to work correctly.

I uploaded my Kernel config, dmesg output, the infos of lspci and my xorg.conf as examples for configurations. If anyone has solutions for any problems or tips about how to get stuff working, please post a comment here!

Today I needed to start up my VMWare to test some PHP stuff on a Windows XP installation. I was quite curious, how I would perform after more than 4 years completly without Windows. Here are my experiences...

The first thing I wanted to do was setting up PHP. After a glance of "emerge dev-lang/php" I decided to download XAMPP and install the all in one package. So far so good, PHP seemed to be running after not much hassle, although I first needed to figure out the website of XAMPP (it is here, if you are ever searching), then downlod the installer and run it manually. Anyway, it gave me a lot of extra stuff and in fact installed a complete web develompment environment for me.

Good, so I wanted to checkout eZ Components from SVN. I remebered how to open a (what they call) "console" using "Start" -> "Run" -> "cmd.exe" and typed "cd De<tab>". Wow, that even worked! I'm amazed. But that only for a few milliseconds, because "svn co http://svn.ez.no/svn/ezcomponents/trunk" produced a nice error message. So - after downloading SVN manually from the web, installing it and adding its binary to the PATH variable (thank god, someone in the office knew how to do this) - this worked, too. Setting up the eZ Components environment was as easy as on Linux, since we provide a script called "setup-env.bat", which handles that job for you.

I tried out running some of our test suites, which also worked fine and turned to debug the things I neede to debug... "vim ConsoleT<tab>/s<tab>" *gnarf*, the auto completion "feature" of the "console" only works with backslashes. Again... "vim ConsoleT<tab>\s<tab>"... gives "vim ConsoleTools\.svn"... *argh*. Whatever, when I finally had the correct path to the file I wanted to edit, I realized: There is no VI on Windows... Ok, so I downloaded GVIM for Windows and started editing and fixing.

Great, after some messing around with newlines on Windows, stuff worked as expected. "svn diff" produced a nice patch, which I could finally copy from VMWare to Linux again. Over there I noticed that I broke something and fixed that again. Another patch, copy to Windows "patch -p0 < patch.txt"... runs into an error... *grrr* So, I downloaded the patch binary, installed it and... ran into some weird error. Thank god I only changed 1 file and so decided to copy this one manually.

That's only a short abstract of my day with MS Windows XP and my personal result from this is: My finger hurts from all those mouse moving and clicking, my eyes hurt a bit from all those jumping windows and popup stuff, my blood presure is on about 180 because of the piece of shit what they call a console, I lost about 1 hour to search for software on the web and I was 3 times close to throwing my notebook out of the window...

My conclusion (again): Windows? No thanks!

^{Note: Some of the mentioned stuff definitly results from me not being used to that $%&!?§ anymore, anyway, I think it sucks...}

... at least when you are using Linux! I noticed that especially yesterday again, when I ran the small bash line to check my temperature over and over again, after trying to set my fan-speed manually to maximum (so, I wanted to check if temperature of my CPU goes down). Jakob looked kinda scared at me and asked, why I did not simply use:

I have to admit, I never even thought about that there might exists a tool like "watch"... and now I love it! :)

Jakob and me just wrote a small bash line that checks the current temperature of the IBM Thinkpad T43p notebook and prints it nicely. Hope we guessed the value meanings correctly.

Maybe someone finds that useful.

Found while searching how to place the icons inside a custom gnome splash screen. The Gnome Splash Block.

Btw. I did not find any info, yet... Seems there is no possibility. Or?

I personally hated them for years now and never really managed to build one on my own or find satisfying information on the net (especially regarding widescreen resolutions). You know, XFree86/Xorg modelines really suck. Thanks to Matthias Hopf (who I met on Linuxtag) and Jakob Westhoff (who reminded me today) I now about the tool I ever wanted to have: $ gtf. :)

It's been a long long time since I last posted in this category, but this link I received from Aaron is really funny:

A windows users view on what Linux is.

Although I could not realize my plan to install Gentoo during the weekend (because I had to recover my server from a rootkit, but that's another, much more painful, story), I managed it by now. :)

I started installing the new on monday evening and it really works like a charm... :)

Installing a