Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

Recently I needed to download 2 videos from vbox7 , a youtube like site for Bulgarians. In order to achieve that I followed a tutorial online which suggested the usage of a Firefox plugin called "Download Helper". All that's needed to use the plugin is download it from Here . Then click on the new moving icon which should have appeared in your FF and then click on the derised video you wanna download, you should have the link leading to the video. Enjoy

My sister and a friend of mine had a birthday yesterday. For a present I and Alex decided to buy him a pc camera (embedded in the nose of a teddy bear). I, Niki, Alex Bino went to celabrate the birthday in a place located in the beginning of the central park e.g. "Life". We ate pizza's prepared on open oven, after that we went home where there was the birthday party of my sister happening :). The day after yesterday, today I should say that I'm in a sort of big spiritual sorrow and despair :(. The main reason for that is that I'm a sort of person who is asking himself questions like "why do we exist?", "why is this or why is that" and that happens all the time probably it's wrong but I'm searching for the truth all the time of my life although I know God is the truth himself, and our Lord Jesus is with me as he said I still fear of so many things and still I'm so imperfect ... Day after day I the sinner am fighting with my disbelief and it's such a struggle.

Few days ago after a period of doubt what kind of unix to install on my laptop, e.g. should it be bsd or gnu/linux? I decided at last to install debian, I'm using debian for a lot of years from now so I can say usually it's a good choice for a desktop. I really wanted to install FreeBSD on the laptop but I realize what a pain in the ass it would be to administrate update and manage it. Since I already I'm running FreeBSD as a desktop on my desktop machine. FreeBSD is a great OS but still it's management isn't well differentiated and very often when managing many packages the package system becomes extremely slow when you install and manage more than 1000 packages (because it's database design is pretty old). As most of you know It's almost impossible to have nowheredays a decent Desktop *nix system with less than 1000 packages installed. Another obstacle for me was that gnome and system updates in general tended to "eat" too much of my personal time that's why I made my final choice and it was to install GNU/Linux instead of BSD. Of course as every Linux/BSD user know just after installation there is a tons of things/programs you need to install and customize in order to have a fully functional Desktop system. I first was thinking to install sidux on the laptop, But changed my mind after I saw sidux in a friend (bundled with kde). From what I've seen sidux isn't much of a different than normal debian system and I didn't saw any advantages over normal Debian system, so I decided to install Debian testing/unstable on my lap. I downloaded the debian lenny amd64 iso file from debian.org , and started the installation. The installation went smoothly and my newly debian installed system with gnome and X booted just fine (It wasn't even required to configure xorg manually !wow! ). Still although debian was using the right video driver, 3d acceleration wasn't configured on my system. Since my laptop comes with integrated Intem Mobile GM965 I googled for the solution and came across a forum which said that it is required to install the package libgl1-mesa-dri in order to make use of the 3d acceleration features of my video. First I had to use this command hipo@noah:~$ glxinfo | grep "direct rendering" direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose), it indicated that direct rendering for my video wasn't enabled. Just after that I used apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri in order to make the video support direct rendering. To test if the video is fps has significant increase after that I used a tool called "glxgears". For all not knowing it I'll say glxgears is the ultimate fps linux/bsd testing tool, e.g. everytime you need to test if your video is configured to work with heavy 3d graphing correctly you have to use it. glxgears is located in the package mesa-utils so I installed that package and hooray! my 3d rendering was working. After the install I have to install vlc, audacious (have to note xmms is not any more in the Debian), mplayer, xine, xvncviewer, gftp, transmission (a pretty neat bittorrent client) , iceweasel, icedove (thunderbird in debian). Adobe Acrobat reader 8, grip, k3b, abiword, wine, gbgoffice, chmsee, wifi-radar, lastfm, mozilla-plugin-vlc, skype, irssi, centerim, wireshark, tcpdump, kwifimanager, sun-java6-bin, iptraf, sniffit, ettercap, kismet, gnomesword (a King James bible for gnome), verse (displays a daily quote from the scripture), pulseaudio, wireless-tools, aircrack-ng and some associated packages (for all not knowing pulseaudio is proggie which is supposed to substitute the old gnome sound daemon esd. Because I wanted to use my thinkpad function keys I had to install tpb debian package and read and follow the guidelines in thinkwiki and tp_smapi kernel module. In order to make tp_smapi work I had to follow the Debian install section of tp_smapi on the thinkwiki website. In the meantime I red online that the recommended (charge boundaries) in order to prolong the battery life of thinkpad batteries are between (30% to 85% charged). On the thinkpad wiki it was suggested to configure tp_smapi to charge and discharge in the interval of 30% to 70% but I decided to alter the interval and use the (30% to 85%). In order to do this I add this 2 lines to my /etc/rc.local file echo 40 > /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh
echo 85 > /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh
I also put the following in my rc.local to make my thinkpad backward and forward buttons work in the virtual terminals
# Backward/Forward button console (VT) switch:
echo keycode 158 = Decr_Console | loadkeys
echo keycode 159 = Incr_Console | loadkeys .
Since I used the debian lenny amd64 port and skype was builded for ia32 architecture in order to install skype it was required to use the command $ dpkg -i --force-all skypename.deb. Just after forcing the installation of skype and trying to launch it I found, skype was linked to a bunch of missing libraries. In order to find which package I required to install to satisfy the dependencies I installed and used the "apt-file" util. For the iceweasel/epiphany/opera etc. java browser plugin to work correctly it was required to install ia32-sun-java6-bin. My wifi card which is Intel 3945A A/B/G wasn't detected correctly so eventually I googled around and had to install the firmware-iwlwifi and firmware-ipw3945. After a reboot the wifi card was properly detected and ready for use :). Since I'm Bulgarian and I like the Microsoft truetype corefonts I installed the msttcorefonts (which installed the Microsoft corefonts truetype fonts) which downloaded and installed all the required fonts for me. In order to make mplayer display subtitles in Bulgarian Language I put the following into /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf vo=xv
zoom=1
subfont-autoscale=1
subfont-text-scale=6
subcp=cp1251
subfont-encoding=unicode
font=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/arhangai/arhangai.ttf
framedrop=yes
slang=bg
alang=bg
. I also have installed some games for entertainment this are:
supertux, frozen-bubble, bsdgames, gnomegames, extremetuxracer. I used extremetuxracer as a testing game to see if my video card 3d acceleration works just fine. In order to install the flashplayer-nonfree I had to use the backports Debian repository ( for all not familiar with checkout the Debian backports . To make the 32 bit player work on my 64 bit system I had to install the following ia32 backward compatability packages, ia32-libs-xulrunner, ia32-libs, ia32-libs-gtk. To enable adobe acrobat reader into iceweasel and the other browsers it is was required to install the package mozilla-acroread (I can slightly remember where did I have taken it from). During my Debian install and configure "trip" I used the following repositories.

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
# beryl repository deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-lenny/desktopfx/unstable/ ./
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org lenny main
#deb ftp://ftp.logos-bg.net/debian-addons-bg/ ./
#deb-src ftp://ftp.logos-bg.net/debian-addons-bg/ ./
At a point I decided I want to have the shiny compiz fusion effects embeded into my debian system so after a bit of googling I found this tutorial , following it literally in few minutes of time I had my gnome desktop more beautiful than ever Still there are few things I would like to have configured on the system one of the things is patching my kernel against the disk-protect patch which embeds a sort of Lenovo's Active protection system. At a point I found out that my system has problems running simultaneously multiple sound streams. I started researching the topic online and found out that Lenovo's Thinkpad R61 soundblasters (and particularly mine Intel Corporation 82801H) comes without a hardware mixer. In order to fix that I followed the instructions for dmix enabling located on the alsa wiki. You can read and follow them too on
this URL . I had to create a file .asoundrc in my user's home directory or ( ~/.asoundrc ). Currently my .asoundrc contains the following lines: pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmix"
}
# mixer0 can stay unchanged, because
# it isn't used anyway, I guess
ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}
After the dmix alsa software mixer was enabled successfully and now I am able to play multiple sound streams at the same time. Another problem I observed and solved was that I wasn't able to use my Laptop Internal Microphone. In order to make it work I had to open Gnome's Volume Control -> Edit -> Preferences and tick the following lines:
* PCM
* Microphone
* Internal Mic
* Capture
* Capture 1
* Digital
* Headphone
* Speaker
* Input Source
* Input Source
After which I unmuted and rised the volume in of PCM, Microphone and Internal mic (located in the Volume Control: Playback Menu), also I unmuted Capture, Capture1, Digital ino the (VC: Recording submenu) in Volume Control Options Menu I changed (on both of Input source menu to Internal Mic). In order to test the correct operation of the microphone I used the arecord ~/test.wav and respectively aplay ~/test.wav to test the recoreded stream. In order to make the microphone work in gnome-sound-recorder, audacity and other external sound capture progs, I did set the following into System -> Preferences -> Sound -> Devices:
Sound Events

Sound Playback: Autodetect
Music and Movies

Sound Playback: Autodetect
Audio Conferencing

Sound Playback: Autodetect
Sound Catpure: Alsa Advanced Sound Architecture

Default Mixer Tracks

HDA Intel (ALSA Mixer)
I wanted a way to be able to turnoff the monitor and after a bit of googling I found that this piece of shell code turns it off
$ xset -display :0 dpms force off Since that is so handy I decided to create a file monitoroff and put it into /usr/bin/ in order to be able to easily switch of the laptop display. Next I needed to make that command executable when custom key combination is pressed so I researched online and was able to achieve that through:
Running
$ gconf-editor
Apps -> Metacity -> Keybinding Commands -> command_1 Edit key)
Apps -> Metacity -> keybinding Commands -> global_keybindings -> run_command_1 (Edit Key). (Alt>F10) or anything you like .
I would say just perfect now almost everything is configured the way I like it I hope this sort of tutorial is useful to somebody out there. The credit for writing this whole document goes to God Almighty who strengthened me and give me the power, wisdom and knowledge to gather all the required information and write that. Please excuse my English which is far from perfect.

Today the day was pretty normal for which of course I have to thank to Our Awesome God I didn't have much work, I stand up somewhere around 11 o'clock. I did my usual morning exercises. By the way since I started practising everyday exercise I feel physically better. After that I prayed a bit. Afterwards I red the road regulations and laws book (as I mentioned in my previous bloggings I have started a driving license courses). Somewhere around 12:30 Gery did called and asked me if I'm willing to go out for a coffee. I accepted and we saw each other infront of the fountain. Because all the tables outside was occupied we and in the coffee itself was too hot we decided to move to the Kukla coffee. We coffeed a bit talked about stuff shared how our lifes are going etc. etc. After that I had to go to the college because I need a copy of my school completion diploma because my driver lessons teacher requires as well as the rest of the documents my ID card, a picture etcetera, etcetera. In the college I met Todor Dyankov who was teaching me at Statistics and in Marketing II at the college and Ertan also Nina the librarian, I have to say all of them are pretty cool :). Ertan showed me what he has made using Adobe's flex product and explained how convinient it's usage is for creation of books and various other web based sort of manuals. Later at home I red more some chapters of the road regulations book. After which in 18:45 I went to the stomatology (this is the usual place where driving teachers park their cars and where we met with my instructor), he asked if it's possible to change the driving lesson to be in Tuesday for 18:30 to be honest I haven't had much choice since the teacher had some urgent job to do. Right after that I went to my mother and father grocery shop because previously we had a stipulation that I my father and a close family friend (Georgi a namesake) would go somewhere out of the city because the 32 hours for which it suppoed that I had to be ready for the exam were far from enough for me to become a proficient driver. Eventually we went with my father's car (Opel Astra) to a place which was before used as a Driving Polygon and is a perfect place for a novice driver like me. The most hard thing for me in governing the car was starting the car from first speed using the clutch pedal simultaneously with the "gas" pedal. With some practice there I can say I got better at starting the car on 1st speed although still it's pretty hard for me to move the car on 1st speed from stopped position when the car is on a small hill. After that we went out of the polygon and I drive on the road of Bogdanovo village. Right after we went back to the city. I went to see Bino because I have promised him to go out for a walk together. We had a nice walk in the city park, I came back home I went to see my grandma just like I often do lately I stood there for 20 minutes and went home, ate and here I'm now blogging

Looks like the guys from Mozilla foundation are trying to set a new guiness record. They're striving to win a record for the most software downloads for 24 h until today. Everybody willing to participate please follow this link . Today we went out with Niki to the bookstore and he bought a book for Linux. Later I worked at home and in the afternoon I went to aunt Zlatina and Ivailo's furniture shop I told them I have to buy a new sport shoes because my old ones are torning apart and they directed me to a very cheap shop which is importing there there commodity directly from china (Phenix), I went to Bino's home and we went together to that shop I bought a short trousers for 3 EU, sports shoes for 9.25 EU and a really nice t-shirt (a green one for 1.30 EU. Later in the evening we went to Niki because he wanted to help him something about his Ubuntu Linux. It happened that after upgrade from 7.10 -> 8.04 his mplayer no longer functioned. I tried changing the audio output, I tried a lot of things but all of them without success I wasn't able to make his mplayer work correctly. I suggested Niki to install something which is closer to Debian. Because I personally am a fan of Debian and dislike Ubuntu in general. We downloaded sidux and burned it to a cd, but unfortunately it didn't booted. For all that didn't know sidux is a project (debian derivative) which is trying to fix the Debian famous problems with the long release cycles. Basicly sidux is better tested debian testing/unstable. Well that's mostly how my day passed.

I was in Varna today in order to solve a server problem. We traveled together with UTP (hellpain) an old school friend of mine. We took the bus at 8:30. We were in Varna at 9:15. As I already mentioned in my blogging yeasterday the developer working server at the office in Varna stopped responding. It happened that the problem consists of a port broken port on the switch. The only thing I had to do is attach the server UTP patch cable to another network port. I had to change a network adapter to the pc of one of our web designers gandalf, because he was randomly experiencing network problems accessing a samba share on the server. Thanks to our God who is an awesome God during the lunch break I took a pizza and a banica and used my free time to go to the center and attend The Cathedral. It's the second time I enter there and I should say that God's grace there is really a lot. I prayed a little for the restoration of my health and my relatives and to God to have mercy on us the sinners. Later at 19:00 we met with Ivo (order) and went to The coffee/food place called "The Formula". I should mention that some time ago I don't consume coffee. For some people and even for me in the past it looked like impossible to live without coffee nowheredays thanks to our Mighty God I quited drinking coffee and smoking so I exchanged my coffee drinking habit with herb tea. Although on most places the herb tea offered in coffees is awful, still the tea in general absolutely rocks.

At Saturday I had my first driving license. The instructor let me drive on the road for Balchik. Happily the driving went smoothly of course I made a lot of mistakes which is pretty normal for a first time driving. In the afternoon we went out for a walk with Niki. We just went out when Vlado (Hellpain) called, he came back to Dobrich for a day, we met for a coffee after which we stayed for 2 hours in the central park. Today as usual I attended the liturgy at the orthodox Church. Today it's a big Christian Orthodox holiday, it's the day in which the Our Lord Jesus Christ send the Holy Spirit to the early Church fathers (the apostles). The apostles heard a great noise and they see the Holy Spirit descending from heaven in a form of burning tongues, each tongue coming above the head of each of the apostles and the rest of the first believers in our Lord and Saviour Jesus. I'm still in doubt should I decide to go or not to the Netherlands. I applied for a room there through http://vivare.nl yesterday. But still haven't received a confirmation for approval and I haven't send a deposit for a room. I made research about the Arnhem Business School (ABS) and talked and I'm talking with a friend who went to study in Holland the last year. In the afternoon I watched an old russian movie which is marked as a SCI-FI genre (Kin Dza Dza), I got the title from the top 20 in IMDB. Yeah I can say that the movie was pretty freaky :). Vladi did call me again and said one of the servers in the office had crashed I spoke with of my colleagues with a request to go to the office and restart the box but it seems the box isn't booting. Tomorrow I'll catch an early bus for Varna and went to the office to see what's wrong with the machine (hope it's not a serious hardware problem). That's most of it. To be honest although God grants me a lot of his divine grace I still feel a bit of lost and pathless and struggle to fight my lack of faith, and bad habits. I'm praying everyday for a physical healing but I still haven't completely recovered from my sickness. I have sinned badly in my past and I deserve to have that sickness but still I honestly I'm repenting day after day for my bad life in the past and the near present ... Another think I should say is that a friend of mine has died I saw his obituary hanging on a tree , His name was Alexander (Sashe) known among us by the nickname (Saketo), he was a drug addict and that killed him I hope he is with God know peace be upon him.

Some time ago I think I had a post about a herbalist called Bai Dimitar. He lives in the village of Kamenarci and is well known natural healer hear in Bulgaria. He has a gift to find out what kind of disease you suffer from only through looking at your eyes and yes he definitely guesses a right disease. The last time I went to him he had no idea about my disease he just looked into my eyes and tell me what kind of disease do I have he then has prescribed me and gave me herbs and I had to drink them for a 2 months. Here I am 2 months later and I can I feel better although I don't feel completely recovered. Of course my complete healing depends on the God We started the journey to the village at 4:45 a.m.. My driver was a driver and we the passengers were Niki e.g. Sha'nar my and my grandma who suffers from diabetis already in advanced stage and all time is having serious pains in the legs. The Herbalist Dimitar Kucerov told her she would get better. To me he said that I'm healed and if I haven't went to him before I would be probably disabled until know. I don't know if what he says is truth but I definetely has to mention that although he is a good herbalist he have bad manners he speaks directly to the people and doesn't much of a care what he says. The herbalist told to Niki (who is currently disabled), "he is going to be better", he said "you're going to even run in the future". At monday I was in Varna and worked in the office. A colleague of mine has told me about a very nice firefox plugin called YSlow. YSlow is a little tool who uses firebug on the first hand. Firebug is a firefox debugging console it shows you the Net, DOM components, CSS Scripts etc it's a nice proggie to look at if you're an advanced user, administrator or programmer. So let's come back to the point Yslow shows gathers infromation on a specified site you're currently browsing and provides you with hints of how to better optimize your website in order to increase performance. I should note that I personally have forgot to include mod_deflate (Apache 2.x) module which gzippes specified files and send them to the browser in that way saving you a lot of bandwidth. I red that little howto to get impression on mod_deflate and check if there are differences with (mod_gzip) which is the same module for apache 1.3.x and enabled the module. Yslow showed that that using cache could als� vastly increase the speed of browsing for our clients so in order to get familiar with caching I red this interesting cache tutorial. What I did after that was to enable the so called Etags, for all those who are not familiar what is Etag then read here . The news around me is that I'm goint to start a driver license course which eventually would teach me how to drive and I hope with God's blessingin a month and a half if I'm able to pass the driving exam and the written exam I should have a valid driver license and be officially a driver.

At Saturday me and two friends (Static and Bino) went to Varna. We went to Kavarna with Mitko's car Mitko is known with the alias (Metallikata). I went to the Orthodox Church which was still opened at 19:00. And I was lucky to meet Borko there an Orthodox Chirstian at a service in a temple in Varna. When I was in Varna I went I attended his lectures and also the groups formed to help ppl enter the Church life and help the ppl to develop better communication skills. The Apocalyptica concert wasn't bad at all although it sounded to me banal, recently I'm listening to alot of classical music so there performance which probably is starting to develop a different musical views/tastes in me. So as a result the Apocalyptica perforamce was like a big scramble comparing to the wonderful works of Buxtehude and Bach and musicians of that rank. The supporting band in the concert was from Bulgaria, Plovdiv they were called "The Strinngs", interesting band they had 3 violion players two guitar players and a drummer.