After installing Mac-OS X Tiger, Ubuntu-eee and Xandros on my Asus EEE-pc 900, I now swiched to Debian Lenny. Installing was easy. Running a normal Gnome now. For the wireless I used these links:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_5.0_(Lenny)_on_a_ThinkPad_X200#Atheros_Chipset
http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager
http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse
Everything else worked out of the box ;) Nice and easy installer too! I think this one is a keeper. And I love Debian!

I’ve attempted this a lot of times. Now it works (sort of, but it still needs some tweaking). What you’ll need is a Debian server running a slapd daemon. You can get this with apt-get, of course… It could be handy to have the utils too and I use the GPL-ed handy web based ldap management tool phpldapadmin. I like it, it’s small and easy to work with… So the apt-get command should be like;

apt-get install slapd ldap-utils phpldapadmin

Now after you’ve configured your slapd and phpldapadmin you should be able to login into your ldap server. I used phpldapadmin for that. Remember that you’ll have to use the DN you’ve configured earlier. It look something like ‘cn=admin,dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=com’. Yes it’s the complete string, not only ‘admin’!

Now go to addressbookserver.com and download the latest version of ABxLDAP (AddressBook X LDAP), I’ve used for this how to ‘ABxLDAP_v1.1.16_31_May_2008.dmg’.

After you’ve installed it, check the mounted disk image. You should have a file called ‘abxldap.schema‘, it can be found in the folder ‘LDAP Schema Extension’. This file should be uploaded and placed into ‘/etc/ldap/schema’ on your Debian server. Edit your /etc/ldap/slapd.conf and add the schema with this include line;

include         /etc/ldap/schema/abxldap.schema

Now restart the ldap server…

/etc/init.d/slapd restart

Now comes the magic… You’ll have to populate the ldap directory, so ABxLDAP can sync with it… What I did was this:
I’ve made a text file called ‘populate.ldif‘. This file contains the following text:

dn: ou=addressbook,dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=com
objectClass: organizationalUnit
ou: addressbook

NOTE: ‘dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=com’ should be what ever you’ve configured slapd with in the first step!

Now use phpldapadmin to import the ‘populate.ldif‘ into your ldap directory. When you don’t have any errors, you should be able to sync with ABxLDAP for the first time.

Go to your System Preferences on your Mac and pick the ABxLDAP panel. Fill all the fields. What I use is this:

That’s it, all should be working fine. Every time you edit something in your Address Book on your Mac, it should sync the whole ldap. Also when you delete or edit a record directly on your ldap, it will sync. The only thing I’ve to figure out is, how to sync periodically, so the Mac always have the latest version. Now it only syncs when something is changed in your Address Book, or when you hit the sync button in your ABxLDAP in System Preferences.

Almost forgot to mention. In case of troubleshooting set in slapd.conf loglevel to 448 instead of 0 to get debug log messages in /var/log/syslog.

So more is coming later… Now it’s time for a beer!

It has been a while after my last post, been very busy with a few big projects. But I found the time to buy a Asus EEEpc. It’s a real small laptop running Xandros Linux. I’ve reinstalled the little machine with Ubuntu. There is a dedicated Ubuntu distro for the eee. You can find it on http://www.ubuntu-eee.com. The first attemt to install it, I used a USB stick, but it crashed after a vew seconds… The USB stick was corrupt. After a view tries I thrown the stick in the trash an got a SD card. Now the installer did his work without any errors! Now I’ve got a real distro! Apt-getted quanta, apache, php, mysql and now I can develop anywhere!

Okay, after some googeling I’ve found two options for a free GPS and navigation solution. The first one is a multi-OS GPS software ‘Roadnav’ http://roadnav.sourceforge.net/ This GPL-ed software is build for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Also source packages are available. Maps are available and downloadable for free!
The second is for smart phones, ‘Nav4all’ http://www.nav4all.com/ I’ve tested it on my Nokia 9300i and it works like a charm. Only thing is that you’ll need a working internet connection. Trough GPRS or WiFi. I have a flat-fee GPRS account, so I have no worries. It is real fast. More info coming later. Will test the two packages now! ;)

I had this problem after a new installation of Debian Etch on one of my machines at home. Fetchmail, Exim, Freshclam and all other mail related software could not connect to the ClamAV socket. The file /var/run/clamav/clamd.ctl was missing. Touching the file and changing rights and ownership didn’t do the trick. The trick is this under Etch;

Unofficial packages for sarge and etch are available through the Debian volatile project (AMD64 arch is also supported). They are usually more recent than official ones and they are maintained by Stephen Gran too, so they follow the same layout as the official ones.

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add a line like this to it:
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile etch/volatile main contrib non-free

Than do an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade to upgrade the ClamAV and all related software ;-) The only thing you need to do is add the user clamav to the Debian-exim group, restart exim and clamd and open a bottle of that nice cold beer! All is okay now!

Revised version: Tue March 10, 2009
We use an Axis 206w and a 207w webcam at work. This camera has an build in webserver that serves an MJPEG (Motion JPEG video) stream. Later cams servers also MPEG4 streams, but the 206w doesn’t. It has an buildin .swf feed, but that one does not work on my browsers. Now I have a work around to use swf files. What I do is using FFmpeg to convert the MJPEG feed to swf and flv. I use a separate server, not the build in one on the cam!

(Just for explanation; 10.0.0.1 is my server and 10.0.0.106 is my camera)

What I did to make it all work… Installed the latest ffmpeg. (Downloaded the source, compiled it (./configure;make;make install;) Or on Debian Lenny I used the ‘unstable’ packages. (FFmpeg version 0.5-svn17737+3:0.svn20090303-1) I’ve tried older versions, even the ’stable’ Lenny version, but the swf would not load every time in my browsers. So when you have a good ffmpeg and ffserver, then comes the real trick… Configure your ffserver. Edit /etc/ffserver.conf , use this source:

# Port on which the server is listening. You must select a different
# port from your standard HTTP web server if it is running on the same
# computer.
Port 8090

# Address on which the server is bound. Only useful if you have
# several network interfaces.
BindAddress 0.0.0.0

# Number of simultaneous HTTP connections that can be handled. It has
# to be defined *before* the MaxClients parameter, since it defines the
# MaxClients maximum limit.
MaxHTTPConnections 2000

# Number of simultaneous requests that can be handled. Since FFServer
# is very fast, it is more likely that you will want to leave this high
# and use MaxBandwidth, below.
MaxClients 1000

# This the maximum amount of kbit/sec that you are prepared to
# consume when streaming to clients.
MaxBandwidth 1000

# Access log file (uses standard Apache log file format)
# '-' is the standard output.
CustomLog -

# Suppress that if you want to launch ffserver as a daemon.
NoDaemon

<Feed feed1.ffm>
	File /tmp/feed1.ffm #when remarked, no file is beeing created and the stream keeps working!!
	FileMaxSize 200K
       # Only allow connections from localhost to the feed.
       ACL allow 127.0.0.1
</Feed>

# SWF output - great for testing
<Stream test.swf>
	# the source feed
	Feed feed1.ffm
	# the output stream format - SWF = flash
	Format swf
	# this must match the ffmpeg -r argument
	VideoFrameRate 5
	# another quality tweak
	VideoBitRate 320
	# quality ranges - 1-31 (1 = best, 31 = worst)
	VideoQMin 1
	VideoQMax 3
	VideoSize 640x480
	# wecams don't have audio
	NoAudio
</Stream>

# FLV output - good for streaming
<Stream test.flv>
	# the source feed
	Feed feed1.ffm
	# the output stream format - FLV = FLash Video
	Format flv
	VideoCodec flv
	# this must match the ffmpeg -r argument
	VideoFrameRate 5
	# another quality tweak
	VideoBitRate 320
	# quality ranges - 1-31 (1 = best, 31 = worst)
	VideoQMin 1
	VideoQMax 3
	VideoSize 640x480
	# wecams don't have audio
	NoAudio
</Stream>

<Stream stat.html>
	Format status
</Stream>

<Redirect index.html>
	# credits!
	URL http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/
</Redirect>

Now your done with your ffserver configuration. Now make a little shell script to start your converter. It uses cCurl Wget to get the stream from the camera. But it could also be done with a php or perl script that opens a socket and parses the content to stout. Curl does that real fast, so I use that. Curl breaks some frames, I use wget now. I’ve made some crude scripts to keep the server up, even when something goes down. I’ve noticed that the server sometimes stops without warning. That is the reason I don’t use the ffserver in daemon mode. Also change the port 8090 when you have some other service running on that port, like OpenERP… (That was my first mistake ;)

Make a file called ’stream.sh’ and put the following source in:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
wget -nv -O - http://10.0.0.106/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi |
   ffmpeg -er 4 -y -r 5 -f mjpeg -i - http://127.0.0.1:8090/feed1.ffm
done

You can change http://10.0.0.106/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?resolution=320×240 to your own URL.

Now create a file server.sh and put this in:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
  ffserver
done

Now change the mod of the scripts so you can start them…

chmod +x stream.sh server.sh

And now your done, just start the the script with nohup so the process keeps running after you close your terminal…

nohup ./server.sh > /dev/null &
nohup ./start.sh > /dev/null &

If you don’t use nohup, the converter parses all messages to stout. Easy for debugging ;)
Now just point your browser to your ffserver :

http://10.0.0.1:8090/test.swf

And it should work! Open a bottle of beer!
Here’s our webcam, viewing Alkmaardermeer, Akersloot, the Neterlands.

Just bought a Juicebox (Mattel) from e-bay for $24,00 (incl. shipping!) and I’m waiting for it to arrive. It’s a portable video player for kids (think this was never on the European market?), but most of the big kids around internet are hacking the Juiceboxes into all kind of gadgets. Just google for Juicebox hacks and see ;) Take a look at the links on this page. Lets see… What are we going to build from it. AI ;)

Update: (16 jan 2007) It has arrived! eBay rules! Search for JuiceBox there.

This is cool! http://www.dynebolic.org/ (just a copy paste of the first page ;) lazy me…)
You don’t need to install anything, you don’t even need an harddisk to run a whole free software operating system running out of the box on your PC! Download the ISO-image, burn your own CD, reboot your machine and you’ll get back true love ;^)

dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb and more; all using only free software!

You can employ this operating system without the need to install anything, and if you want to run it from harddisk you just need to copy a directory: the easiest installation ever seen!

It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into a full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console - and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters.

Check these nice QuickTime movies and make your choise, Windows Vista or Mac OS X… I know ;)

This was just posted on Slashdot.org! Mortimer.CA writes "In a weblog entry, Paul Murphy mentions a Microsoft report (40 page PDF) that in many instances FreeBSD 5.3 and Linux perform better than Windows XP SP2. The report is about MS\’ Singularity kernel (which does perform better than the OSS kernels by many of the metrics they use), and some future directions in OS design (as well as examination of the way things have been done in the past)." From the post: "What’s noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants. For example, they show the number of CPU cycles needed to "create and start a process" as 1,032,000 for FreeBSD, 719,000 for Linux, and 5,376,000 for Windows/XP."