Acadiana Open Source Group
While the Acadiana Macromedia Multimedia User Group has been around for a number of years and the recently formed Acadiana .NET User Group (requires Silverlight) has added to the number of user groups in the Acadiana area, there was still a void left by the long since defunct Linux user group of the area that needed to be filled. To that end, I decided to spearhead an effort to start a local user group for the open source software community.
The Acadiana Open Source Group now has a web site, a Facebook group, and a first meeting scheduled for the end of April. So, if you're in the Acadiana area or know someone who is, tell them about AOS! I've sent out press releases to various media sources, sent Facebook invites to friends, and will likely end up posting flyers in various places around nearby UL campus before the meeting date. I want to pack the conference room we have reserved and have a large number of return visitors for the next meeting, so bring it!
Phergie on C7Y
I've written a two-part article for C7Y on experiences gleaned from developing the PHP 5 IRC bot Phergie. You can check out the C7Y web site for part one and expect part two to appear there next week. Feel free to leave comments in the article's forum.
Do What I Mean and Not What I Say!
If you posted a comment recently and don't see it on the blog, I apologize. I managed to accidentally delete some when going through comments to approve them. If you wouldn't mind, please repost them, as most had very good content relevant to their respective posts. Thanks!
Watch Your Include Path
It's pretty rare that I encounter a bug in the software I run that hampers my ability to work or my server environment's ability to function normally. However, I encountered one last week that has taken me and several Rackspace support technicians nearly a week to figure out, namely PHP bug #43677.
The bug is in at least PHP 5.2.5, if not in previous releases in the 5.2.x branch. For the moment, we've downgraded the PHP installation to RHEL version 5.1.6, which I'm told includes backports of relevant bug fixes from the 5.2.x branch, to see if that doesn't stabilize the situation.
So, if it seems that PHP starts to "forget" your include_path setting, your issue may be with PHP and not Apache as I initially suspected since the include_path setting was being set via an Apache configuration file. Hope this saves someone else time and grief.
More Kubuntu Developments
I finally figured out how to control the monitor brightness via this forum thread using the xbacklight command. I'm really happy for that, because it was a bit of a strain on my eyes and I couldn't find a way to do it through the desktop manager. One other nice point about the forum thread is that it also walks you through how to execute this command automatically when battery power kicks in.
Kubuntu doesn't install it by default, but if you search Adept for ndiswrapper, you should get an option to install Windows WiFi Drivers. This includes drivers for the Intel PRO/Wireless 4965 AG/AGN card, and once installed, it worked without requiring me to track down and install drivers manually.
I wanted to see if some of my games would work under Kubuntu. I tried Wine, but wasn't able to get it to run Warcraft III without crashing immediately after selecting the play option from the splash screen. Apparently the supporting libraries for my particular graphics card (Intel 965 chipset) are fairly buggy when it comes to hardware acceleration.
I also attempted to install VMware in order to run the game in a virtual machine, but that was a dead end as well: the game won't run with the display drivers provided by VMware tools
and that it's not possible to install the host machine's drivers and
have them work correctly. Incidentally, this forum thread provided some feedback about how to remove a partial installation so that aptitude will allow you to do a reinstallation.
sudo dpkg --purge --force-remove-reinstreq vmware-server ended up doing the job.
So, as much as I hated the idea of having to go back to Windows, I set out to configure my system to dual-boot. Small problem: I have a SATA drive, which requires special drivers that Hitachi claims can only be installed via a floppy drive. My laptop doesn't have one, and I'm not overly inclined to purchase an external one just toinstall XP.
My friend Jeff Jones pointed me to a forum thread detailing how to integrate the SATA drivers as well as Service Pack 2 into a custom XP CD. Since I didn't have another existing XP installation, I had to use a VMware machine. It took some digging to find the Intel 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller drivers and how to extract them for unattended installation. I used XP-ISO-Builder to create a custom ISO image and DeepBurner Free to burn it to CD.
In attempting to boot with the CD, though, I got as far as being prompted to install the drivers before being presented with the error "The file iaStor.sys is corrupted." Setup wouldn't proceed any further, so I gave up on it for now. If you have any experience with a working solution rolling SATA drivers into a custom XP CD, I'd be interested to know. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog entry.