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Configure own Media streaming minidlna Linux server to access data from your Smart TV

Friday, February 18th, 2022

If you happen to buy or already own or just have to install a Smart TV to be connected with a LAN Network to a Linux based custom built NAS (Network Attached Storage) server. You might benefit of the smart TV to Share and Watching the Disk Storage Pictures, Music, Video files from the NAS to the Smart TV using the Media Server protocol.

You have certainly already faced the Media Server at your life on many locations in stores and Mall Buildings, because virtually any reoccuring advertisements, movies projected on the TVs, Kids entertainment or Floor and Buildings Room location schedules or timeline promition schedules are streamed using the Media Server protocol, for many years now. Thus having a brief idea about Media Server proto existence is foundamental stuff to be aware of for sysadmins and programmers.

Shortly about DLNA UPnP Media Streaming Protocol

Assuming that your Smart TV has been already connected to your Wireless Router 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz Wifi, one would think that the easiest way to share the files with the SmartTV is via something like a simple SAMBA Linux server via smb:// cifs:// protocols or via the good old NFS Server, however most of Samsung Smart TV and many other in year 2022 does not have embedded support for Samba SMB / CIFS Protocol but instead have support for the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) streaming support. DLNA is part of the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) Protocols, UPnP is also known to those using and familiar with Windows Operating Systems realm simply as UPnP AV Media server or Windows Media server.
Windows Media server for those who never heard it or used it allows you to build a Playlists with Media files Video and Audio data files, that can be then later played remotely via a Local LAN or even long distance over TCP / IP remote side connected Internet network.

1. Set up and Stream data via Media server on Windows PC / notebook with integrated Windows Media server

Windows Media server configuration on Windows 7, 10 and 11 is a relatively easy to configure via:

Network and Sharing Center -> Media Streaming Options -> Turn on Media Streaming

Then you have to define the name of the Media Library, configure whether Media server should show
on the Local Netework for other conected devices and Allow or Block access from the other network present devices.

2. Using a more advanced Media Server to get rid about the limitation of DLNA set of supported file codecs.

The Windows default embedded DLNA server is the easiest and fastest one to set up, but it’s not necessarily the best option.
Due to the way DLNA works, you can only stream certain types of media codecs supported by the server. If you have other types of media not defaultly supported and defined by DLNA win server, it just won’t work.

Thus thanksfully it was developed other DLNA servers improve this by offering real-time transcoding.
If you try to play an unsupported file, they’ll transcode it on-the-fly, streaming the video in a supported format to your DLNA device.
Just to name few of the DLNA Media Streaming servers that have supported for larger MPG Video, MP3 / MP4 and other Audio formats encodings,
you can try Plex or the Universal Media Server both of which are free to use under freeware license and have versions for Linux and Mac OS.

3. Setting up a free as in freedom DLNA server MiniDLNA (ReadyMedia) on GNU / Linux

ReadyMedia (formerly known as MiniDLNA) is a simple media server software, with the aim of being fully compliant with DLNA/UPnP-AV clients. It was originally developed by a NETGEAR employee for the ReadyNAS product line.

MiniDNLA daemon serves media files (music, pictures, and video) to clients on a network. Linux Media servers clients you can use to test or scan your network for existent Media servers are multiple perhaps the most famous ones are applications such as totem (for QT users) and Kodi (for KDE).
The devices that can be used with minidlna are devices such as portable media players (iPod), Smartphones, Televisions, Tablets, and gaming systems (such as PS3 and Xbox 360) etc.

ReadyMedia is a simple, lightweight, the downside of it is It does not have a web interface for administration and must be configured by editing a text file. But for a simple Video streaming in most cases does a great job.

3.1 Install the minidlna software package

Minidlna is available out of the box on most linux distributions (Fedora / CentOS / Debian / Ubuntu etc.) as of year 2022.

Install on Debian Linux (Deb based distro)

media-server:~# apt install minidlna –yes

Install on Fedora / CentOS (other RPM based distro)

media-server:~# yum install -y minidlna

3.2 Configure minidlna

– /etc/minidlna.conf – main config file
Open with text editor and set user= , media_dir= , port=, friendly_name= , network_interface= variables as minimum.
To be add minidlnad support symlinks to external file locations, set also wide_links=yes

media-server:~# vim /etc/minidlna.conf

#user=minidlna
user=root
media_dir=/var/www/owncloud/data
network_interface=eth0,eth1

# Port number for HTTP traffic (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer).
# This option is mandatory (or it must be specified on the command-line using
# "-p").
port=8200
# Name that the DLNA server presents to clients.
# Defaults to "hostname: username".
#friendly_name=
friendly_name=DLNAServer Linux
# set this to yes to allow symlinks that point outside user-defined media_dirs.
wide_links=yes
# Automatic discovery of new files in the media_dir directory.
#inotify=yes

Keep in mind that it is supported to provide separete media_dir and provide different USB / External Hard Drive or SD Card sources separated only by content be it Video, Audio or Pictures short named in config as (A,V,P).

media_dir=P,/media/usb/photos
media_dir=V,/media/external-disk/videos
media_dir=A,/media/sd-card/music

You might want to diasble / ineable the inotify depending on your liking, if you don't plan to place new files automated to the NAS and don't care to get indexed and streamed from the Media server you can disable it with inotify=no otherwise keep that on.

– /etc/default/minidlna – additional startup config to set minidlnad (daemon) options such as setup to run with admin superuser root:root
(usually it is safe to leave it empty and set the user=root, whether needed straight from /etc/minidlna.conf
That's all now go on and launch the minidlna and enable it to automatically boot on Linux boot.

media-server:~# systemctl start minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl enable minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl status minidlna

3.3 Rebuilt minidlna database with data indexed files

If you need to re- generate minidlna's database.
To do so stop the minidlna server with the

media-server:~# systemctop stop minidlna

command, then issue the following command (both commands should be run as root):

media-server:~# minidlna -R

Since this command might kept in the background and keep the minidlna server running with incorrect flags, after a minute or two kill minidlna process and relaunch the server via sysctl.

media-server:~# killall -9 minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl start minidlna

3.4 Permission Issues / Scanning issues

If you plan to place files in /home directory. You better have a seperate partition or folder *outside* your "home" directory devoted to your media. Default user with which minidlna runs is minidlna, this could prevent some files with root or other users being red. So either run minidlna daemon as root or as other user with whom all media files should be accessible.
If service runs as root:root, and still getting some scanning issues, check permissions on your files and remove special characters from file names.

media-server:~# tail -10 /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log
[2022/02/17 22:51:36] scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Videos/FILE006.MPG
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] scanner.c:819: warn: Scanning /var/www/owncloud/data finished (10637 files)!
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.
minidlna.c:1126: warn: Starting MiniDLNA version 1.3.0.
minidlna.c:1186: warn: HTTP listening on port 8200
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/admin/files/origin/External SD card/media/Viber Images/IMG-4477de7b1eee273d5e6ae25236c5c223-V.jpg
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Video/FILE006.MPG
playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.

3.5. Fix minidlna Inotify errors

In /etc/sysctl.conf

Add:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65536

in a blank line at end of file and do

media-server:~# sysctl -p

Debugging minidlna problems, index errors, warnings etc

minidlna does write by default to /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log inspect the log closely and you should get most of the time what is wrong with it.
Note that some files might not get indexed because minidlna won't support the strange file codecs such as SWF encoding, if you have some important files to stream that are not indexed by minidlna, then install and try one of the more sophisticated free software Media Servers for Linux:

MediaTomb
UniversalMediaServer
Plex

plex-media-streaming-server-screenshot

Note that most Linux users from my quick research shows, MediaTomb is the preferred advanced features Open Source Linux Media Server of choice for most of the guys.

mediatomb-linux-media-streaming-server-picture.jpg.webp

4. Test minidlna Linux servers works, getting information of other DLNA Servers on the network

media-server:~# lynx -dump http://127.0.0.1:8200
MiniDLNA status

Media library

Audio files 0
Video files 455
Image files 10182

Connected clients

ID Type IP Address HW Address Connections
0 Samsung Series [CDEFJ] 192.168.1.11 7C:0A:3D:88:A6:FA 0
1 Generic DLNA 1.5 192.168.0.241 00:16:4E:1D:48:05 0
2 Generic DLNA 1.5 192.168.1.18 00:16:3F:0D:45:05 0
3 Unknown 127.0.0.1 FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF 0

-1 connections currently open

Note that there is -1 connections (no active connections) currently to the server.
The 2 Generic DLNA 1.5 IPs are another DLNA servers provided by a OpenXEN hosted Windows 7 Virtual machines, that are also broadcasting their existence in the network. The Samsung Series [CDEFJ] is the DLNA client on the Samsung TV found, used to detect and stream data from the just configured Linux dlna server.

The DLNA Protocol enabled devices on a network as you can see are quite easy to access, querying localhost on the 8200 server dumps, what minidlna knows, the rest of IPs connecting should not be able to receive this info. But anyways since the minidlna does not have a special layers of security to access it, but the only way to restrict is filtering the 8200 port, it is a very good idea to put a good iptables firewall on the machine to allow only the devices that should have access to the data.

Further more if you happen to need to access the Media files on Linux from GUI you might use some client as upmentioned totem, VLC or if you need something more feature rich Java eezUPnP .

That's all folks !
Enjoy your media on the TV 🙂

Tags: access, configured, data, default user, Digital Living Network Alliance, DLNA, Enjoy, file, file names, Install, linux?, Media, Open Source Linux Media Server, org, owncloud, root root, setting, software package, stuff, support, wiki, www
Posted in Entertainment, Linux, Video Streaming | No Comments »

Linux: Add fun to your terminal login screen with boxes, Draw ASCII Art Shapes with date and user info etc. on login

Friday, July 16th, 2021

boxes-ascii-art-generate-cpu-memory-and-disk-system-info-beauty
Some of you might remember my love for Linux ASCII art stuff and fact that I'm daily forced to work on many consoles, which makes life a bit boring at point and you want to have some diversity as this black and white or black and green screen becomes quite of annoyance at times, hence adding some ASCII art kindness really makes sense. In that relation some time ago I've have written the howto add colorful random ASCII art picture and a bible verse on each SSH server login, joyout sysadmins life with cowsay, fortune, caca-utils and others.
Just recently a colleague of mine Georgi Stoyanov to whom I've shown cowsay, while playing around with cowsay, researching on related cool ASCII art entertainment one could add to his boring daily sysadm life stumbled on another nice piece of 1337 h4x0r software called boxes, that is nowadays available amongs most mainstream RPM and Debian distributions out of the box in default package repositories (it is installable on Ubuntu / Debian / CentOS with apt or yum).

root@pcfreak:~# apt-cache show boxes|grep -i desc -A 5 -B5
Version: 1.3-1
Installed-Size: 253
Maintainer: Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14)
Description-en: textmode box- and comment drawing filter
Boxes is extremely configurable filter for adding and removing ASCII art
(comments, for example) around chunks of text. Most modern text editors
support filtering text through external filters. Boxes is such a filter.
Description-md5: 71d39f5c7193aab87deb83d15f0b2e82
Homepage: https://boxes.thomasjensen.com/
Tag: implemented-in::c++, interface::commandline, role::program,
scope::utility, works-with::mail
Section: text
Priority: optional

To start using the preset of nice boxes and shapes depending on the distro type:
On Deb based Linuz OS

debian:~# apt install –yes boxes
…

On RPM based Linuxes:

[root@centos ~ ]# yum install -y boxes

…

Once installed to give it a try, do list all the available basic boxen ASCII Art ( template ) shapes beauties – the art pictures is quite high, below is a short 50 line raw example cut:

root@pcfreak:~# boxes -l |tail -n 50

unicornthink
unknown artist, coded by Mike Meyer <boxes@meyer.fm>:

_________________________________
/ \
| E L E C T R O L Y T E S |
\______________________________ '\
() \\
O \\ .
o |\\/|
/ " '\
. . .
/ ) |
' _.' |
'-'/ \

vim-cmt
Bram Moolenaar, coded by Thomas Jensen <boxes(at)thomasjensen(dot)com>:

"
" comments used in the vim editor's config file (.vimrc)
"

whirly
unknown artist, coded by Thomas Jensen <boxes(at)thomasjensen(dot)com>:

.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.
( )
) (
( )
"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"+.+"

xes
Joan G. Stark <spunk1111@juno.com>, coded by Thomas Jensen <boxes(at)thomasjensen(dot)com>:

<\/><\/><\/>
<\/></\></\></\><\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\> </\>
<\/> <\/>
</\><\/><\/><\/></\>
jgs </\></\></\>

If you want to check out the full list of ascii art templates provided by boxes check out a complete dump out of boxes -l shapes here.

Next lets play a bit to give you an idea on some use of boxes you can add to your login /etc/profile or ~/bashrc or even randomize it with some little bash script to print out some cool stuff on each and every Linux SSH or tty physical console login to prit login date your user name, logged in users or whatever you would like shaped in ascii art picture. For example you can great yourself on system login with whoami command printed in one of the offered boxes ASCII art picture templates, etc.

Below is few sample ideas for use:

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "today is $(date)"

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "Hello $USER,today is $(date)"

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date)"

# boxes -a c -d mouse <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date)" | lolcat

mouse-login-greeting

# boxes -a c -d unicornthink <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date)" | lolcat

# boxes -a c -d cat <<< "Hello $(whoami),today is $(date); $(echo "Apache processes"; ps -ef|grep -i apache)|grep -v grep" | lolcat

If you have a multiple systems to monitor, it is useful to quickly have an overview of each system and add some artistic qualities for example use some tiny shell script like system_info_on_login.sh and make it look aritistic:

# cat /bashscripts/system_info_on_login.sh
free -m | awk 'NR==2{printf "Memory Usage: %s/%sMB (%.2f%%)\n", $3,$2,$3*100/$2 }'
df -h | awk '$NF=="/"{printf "Disk Usage: %d/%dGB (%s)\n", $3,$2,$5}'
top -bn1 | grep load | awk '{printf "CPU Load: %.2f\n", $(NF-2)}'

Funny cool stuff ain't it is up to your imagination to add whatever beauty you like. If you want to make a little prank you can misteriously place boxes to auto launch on some of the DMZ secured servers and print any strange form to a colleague next time he logs in by adding boxes to launch in his ~/.bashrc with some weird message such as "your account has been pwn3d by a 1337 h4x0r" and watch for his reaction 🙂
Enjoy !

Tags: amd64, ascii art, boxes, info, Linux Add, login, mail, terminal, today, type
Posted in Educational, Entertainment, FreeBSD, Games Linux, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

ASCII Art studio – A powerful ASCII art editor for Windows / Playscii a cool looking text editor for Linux

Monday, June 28th, 2021

This post is just informative for Text Geeks who are in love with ASCII Art, it is a bit of rant as I will say nothing new, but I thought it might be of interest to some console maniac out there 🙂

ascii art studio aas program windows xp professional drawing program screenshot

While checking stuff on Internet I've stumbled on interesting ASCII arts freak software – >ASCII Art Studio. ASCII Art Studio is unfortunately needs licensing is not Free Software. But anyways, for anyone willing to draw pro ASCII art pictures it is a must see. Check it out;

Isn't it like a Plain Text pro Photoshop ? 🙂 Its a pity we don't have a Linux / BSD Release of this wonderful piece of software. I've tried with WINE (Windows Emulator) on Linux to make the Ascii Art Studio work but that was a fail. It seems only way to make it work is have Windows as a worst case install a Virtual Machine with VirtualBox / Vmware and run it inside if you don't have a Windows PC at hand.

Of course there are stuff on Linux to ascii art edit you can use if you want to have a native software to edit ASCIIs such as Playscii. Unfortunately Playscii is not an easy one to install and the software doesn't have a prepared rpm or deb binary you can easily roll on the OS and you have to manually build all required python modules and have a working version of python3 to be able to make it work.

I did not have much time to test to install it and since I faced issues with plascii install I just abandoned it. If some geek has some more time anyways I guess it is worse to give it a try below is 2 screenshots from PLAYSCII official download page.

playscii_shot1-official.

As you see authors of the open source playscii whose source is available via github choose to have an amazing looking ascii art text menus, though for daily ASCII art editing it is perhaps much more complicated to use than the simlistic ASCII Art Studio

playscii_shot2-official

There is other stuff for Linux to do ASCII Art files text edit like:
JaVE (this one I don't personally like because it is Java Based), Ascii Art Maker or Pablow Draw Linux (unfortunately this 2 ones are proprietary).

Tags: ALL, Amazing, and, Anyways, are, art, art editor, art files, Arts, Ascii, ascii art, available, based, Below, binary, bit, BSD, case, check, checking
Posted in Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Rant | No Comments »

How to add colorful random ASCII art picture and a bible verse on each SSH server login, joyout sysadmins life with cowsay, fortune, caca-utils and others

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

Jesus-Christ-loves-the-world-ascii-art

There are pleny of console ASCII stuff out there that can make your console sysadmin boring life a little bit more funny and cherish some memories from the old times of 8 bit computers :).

One of this as I blogged earlier is cowsay and cowthink to generate a ascii picture with a cow with your custom message.
I've earlier blogged about that in my previous article Create ASCII Art Text bannners in Linux console / terminal with figlet and toilet

One of this cool things I'm using daily on my servers is a cowsay console goodie together with a bash shell script that does visualize a random ASCII picture from a preset of pictures on each and every ssh login to my server.
The script I use is cowrand below is code:

#!/bin/bash
# cowsay pix randomizer by hip0
# it shows random ascii from the cowsay prog during logging. :]
a=0
b=1
cowrand='/etc/cowrand';
dir='/usr/share/cowsay/cows';
var=`ls -1 $dir | wc -l | awk '{ print $1}'`
#RANGE=$var
number=$RANDOM
let "number %= $var"
var1=`ls -1 $dir | head -n $number | tail -n 1 | head -n 1`
if [ -z “$var1” ]; then
$cowrand;
else
/usr/bin/cowsay -f $var1 Welc0m3 t0 pC-fREAK … Enj0y.
fi

The script is set as executable under /etc/cowrand

hipo@pcfreak:~$ ls -al /etc/cowrand
-rwxr-xr-x 1 hipo hipo 432 Nov 24 19:21 /etc/cowrand*

I've set this script to my /etc/profile to auto start on every login on my Debian Linux systems right after the comments like so:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ grep -i cowrand -A 2 -B 3 /etc/profile
# /etc/profile: system-wide .profile file for the Bourne shell (sh(1))
# and Bourne compatible shells (bash(1), ksh(1), ash(1), …).
echo '';
/etc/cowrand | lolcat
echo '';
#/usr/bin/verse

As you can see to make my life even more funnier, I've installed another fun command lolcat

hipo@pcfreak:~$ apt-cache show lolcat |grep -i desc -A 3
Description-en: colorful `cat`
lolcat concatenates files like the UNIX `cat` program, but colors it for the
lulz in a rainbow animation. Terminals with 256 colors and animations are
supported.
Description-md5: 86f992d66ac74197cda39e0bbfcb549d
Homepage: https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat
Ruby-Versions: all
Section: games

You can think of lolcat as a standard cat command that has been made to print in colors, this gives a funny results.

cowrand-script-lolcat-os-release-how-to-make-your-linux-login-prompt-funnier

To add some spice to everything nice as a recipee for thethe creation of powerpuff girls, I've come up with a way to use fortune
console tool that uses to print quotes out of a database to use as a source a big database containing the Holy Bible books of Old and New Testament Books. The fortune prints me out a quote extract from the bible on each and every remote SSH login to my machine. The content of this bible database for fortune bible_quotes_fortune.tar.gz can be downloaded and used from here.

The command used to print out a verse from the holy bible is:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still,
       — Exodus 9:2
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning
the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions.
       — 1 Kings 10:1
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And Shelemiah, and Nathan, and Adaiah,
       — Ezra 10:39
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
For by thee I have run through a troop: by my God have I leaped
over a wall.
       — 2 Samuel 22:30
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
Unto the place of the altar, which he had make there at the first:
and there Abram called on the name of the LORD.
       — Genesis 13:4
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And there shall dwell in Judah itself, and in all the cities thereof
together, husbandmen, and they that go forth with flocks.
       — Jeremiah 31:24
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God:
many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.
       — Psalms 40:3
hipo@pcfreak:~$ /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/
And Jehoshaphat made peace with the king of Israel.
       — 1 Kings 22:44

The fortune is really awesome as it reminds me often of a verses from Holy Bible I often forget, the database is using the all famous King James Bible famous as (KJB) / (KJV) from 1611 this bible version that is like a protestant standard nowadays takes its name after James VI and I (James Charles Stuart; 19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625 – King of Scotland and Ireland) who was the sponsor of KJV collection and print.

Finally after adding the /usr/games/fortune -s /usr/local/fortune/ to the beginning of /etc/profile together with cowsay and cowrand I got this beautiful and educational result that combines fun with wisdom, below is example of what you will get after you do a remote ssh login;

ssh your-machine.com

Those who have a Linux Graphical Environment desktop might also enjoy xcowsay

Another must I recommend to the text geeks is the caca-utils package which contains cool things such as aafire (cacafire)

Or (Image to text converter) img2txt / cacaview (a text console picture viewer) that could give you a raw idea on how a png / jpg picture looks like (or at least the picture shapes) without a need for a GUI picture viewer such as Eye of the Gnome.

Here is a original bear

And here is the one you'll see in cacaview 🙂
To read more about cacaview I have and its uses, check my previous article Viewing JPEG,GIF and PNG in ASCII with cacaview in Linux.
If you want to show off even more as a '1337 h4x0r' you might also show your sysadm 1337 5K!11Z to colleagues by showng them how you check weather via console (i've a separate article for how to ASCII art check colorful weather forecast via console / terminal ).

If you're too bored in your daily sys admin job, you might make some fun and take some useless effort to install ASCII Art Aquarium ASCIIQUARIUM

If you're crazy enough and want to torture your other sysadmin colleagues and a get a nice prank, you might install and set asciiquarium to auto run for their specific account on each and every login to some server until they control C or if you're a bit evil you can even set a small auto load on account login via ~/.bashrc shell script to 'Disable CTRL + C' combination 🙂

Of course there is plenty of other cool ASCII games and stuff. I've collected some of them by launching the Play Cool Ascii games service on my machine for ASCII art geeks to test out some ASCII games here.

Tags: bible verse, colorful, console, games, hipo, How to, pcfreak, Play Cool Ascii, servers, sysadmins
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Linux | 2 Comments »

A quick and easy way to install Social Network on Linux/BSD System with Elgg

Monday, March 14th, 2011

I'm experimenting this days with Elgg – An Open Source Free Software GPLed Social Network which enables users to quickly create Communities.

Elgg is really easy to install and all it requires is a Linux/BSD or Windows system with PHP, MySQL and Apache installed.

Elgg is provided with dozens of nice plugins which for a short time enables individual to create fully operational Social Network like facebook.

Many people nowdays use facebook without realizing how bad facebook is how it breaks their privacy.
Facebook is actually a spy network, it stores data and pictures, likings and user behaviour of million of users around the world.
This needs to be stopped somehow, maybe if people start using the free software networks like elgg to build a mini-community which has profound interests in a certain spheres of work, life and amusement.
The evil empire of facebook will slowly start to loose it's position and the small projects networks based on Elgg and the other Free Software Social Networks which are currently available will start to rise up.
I'm currently really a novice into Elgg but I'm more convinced that the guys who develop it and contribute to it in terms of handy plugins have done really a great job.

It's ultra easy even for non professional middle level user to setup himself an Elgg install.
The installation procedure is not much harder than a simple wordpress blog or joomla based website install.
The installation of elgg takes no more than 10 to 20 minutes, the plugin installation and setup time further could take few days but in the end you have a full featured Social Network! This is really amazing.
The installation of new plugins in elgg is also fool proof / easy all you have to do to equip a newly installed elgg with plugins is to go to it's root directory and look for the mod directory. The new plugins which needs to be installed, could be directly downloaded and saved via links, elinks, lynx or even wget to the elgg installation directory.

Most of the elgg plugins comes in a form of zip files so after being installed simply executing:

server:/home/elgg/mysocialnetwork/mod# unzip walltowall.zip ....

The above cmd will for example unzip the WallToWall elgg plugin and the plugin will be further ready to be enabled via the administrator user set upped during your elgg installation.

The configurations of elgg are being accomplished via:

Administration -> Tool Administration

I should I'm still experimenting with Elgg social, until this very moment I've installed the following elgg plugins:

aaudio akismet artfolio blog bookmarks buddytalk captcha categories chat crontrigger custom_index custom_profile_fields default_widgets diagnostics elgg-ebuddy embed embedvideo emoticons externalpages family fbconnect file file_tree flyers forum friend_request friends garbagecollector groups htmlawed invitations invitefriends izap_videos kaltura_video lastfm likes logbrowser logrotate lucygames members messageboard messages milockergames_frameme noscript_message notifications pages polls profile reportedcontent resume river_comments riverdashboard riverfaces search siteaccess tagcloud theme_simpleneutral thewire tidypics tidypicsExt tinymce twitter twitterservice user_contact_list uservalidationbyemail walltowall weather wp1 zaudio

One very handy feature I truly enjoy about Elgg is that it gives every user an own blog which or in other words when somebody registers in Elgg, he automatically gets a personal blog! How cool this is Yeash 😉
The Elgg photo upload plugin is also another interesting story. The photo plugin is a way better from my first impressions than facebook's buggy upload client.
Elgg also uses heavily jquery for it's various operations and the user experience feels very interactive.

Of course as with all free software things are not perfect some of the elgg plugins or (mods) as they are called are not working.
For example I couldn't make by so far the weather plugin which is supposed to report the weather.

Maybe some tweakening of the not working plugins will easily make them working. What is really important is that the Elgg basis system looks and seems to work really good and enpowers the user with a social network alternatives to the ugly facebook.

In order to experiment with Elgg and I've established a small social network targetting at University College and School Students called MockATeacher – mockateacher.com>/i>. The idea behind is to help students in their report writting by providing them with a place where they can meet other students and share files.

Some other aspects I've planned for MockATeacher is to build a small community of people who would like to share about idiot teachers, teacher stupid sayings as well as to mock the idiotic type of education that we and our children are up to in this age.
Just to close up, if you're looking for some time to spend in experimenting in an enjoyable way you definitely need to install elgg and play with it 😉

Tags: BSD, bsd system, custom, dozens, elgg, evil empire, facebook, fool, fool proof, Free, free software networks, GPLed, installation, level, likings, Lynx, mod, novice, Open, php mysql, plugin, plugin installation, Privacy, root, root directory, setup time, short time, social networks, software, spheres, spy, spy network, time, unzip, weather, which enables users, windows system, wordpress blog, work, working
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Joomla, Linux, Various, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »

Heroes of Might and Magic 2: Best old-school turn based strategic game to play on your Android mobile phone

Monday, June 16th, 2014

heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-for-your-mobile-smartphone-android-screenshot

Probably many people which are my age (I'm aged 30 now), spent many days and sleepless nights being totally addicted playing probably one of the most addictive (and in my view greatest strategy game of all time) – Heroes of Might and Magic II (HOMM2).
In that thoughts it will be a great news for you if you're owning smartphone that you can turn-back some nice memories and play (for free) a port of Heroes 2 for Android.

Free Heroes 2 Android port is it is made to support multiple screened devices so game version could be played on both Android Tablet a tiny screen smart phone or a middle sized mobile. Also Free Heroes 2 mobile port allows you to choose 'The Magnifying glass' option on first game boot, so if you're on a tiny screened mobile you can still zoom by pointing on a game object. Free Heroes 2 Android port is there thanks to Gerhard Stein who is also an author of OpenTyrian mobile phone port and the amazing old computer jump-and-run arcade Commander Keen. Game pointer controls of FHeroes2 are pretty convenient and playing the game is almost as confortable as played with a PC mouse.
Free Heroes 2 is port of Free Heroes 2 engine – Free implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine in SDL and because SDL is platform independent Free Heroes is also available for both Windows / Linux. Maybe here is time too mention that Heroes2 original DOS game works perfectly on any modern Linux distribution when started through DOSBOX DOS emulator.

By default Free Heroes2 has no game campaign support yet. In order to enable campaing support into Free Heroes 2, download FULL Heroes 2 game – put data files to mobile SD card to dir app-data/net.sourceforge.fheroes2 and campaign option will be there too.

heroes_of_might_and_magic_ii_play-on-android-best-strategy-old-game-for-android

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 – The succession Wars (or HEROES2, as it is widely known in Gamers communities) is a turn based strategy game from year 1996 developed by Jon Van Caneghem by his New World Computing company it was marketed under on the market under brand of 3DO Company. Heroes II was voted the sixth-best PC game of all time by PC Gamer in May 1997. Heroes2 has also a game expansion pack called the Price of Loyalty released in 1997 as well as Heroes of Might and Magic II – Gold – from 1998. The game graphic design looks very beautiful and combined with the soundtrack makes playing it an awesome and calming experience. The game is very notable especially for soundtrack which is all of a beautiful classical music.

Heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-best-games-of-all-time-screenshot-HOMM2
(Picture taken and copyrighted by Wikipedia)

Gameplay

The titular heroes (horse) are player characters who can recruit armies, move around the map, capture resources, and engage in combat. The heroes also incorporate some role-playing game elements; they possess a set of statistics that confer bonuses to an army, artifacts that enhance their powers, and knowledge of magical spells that can be used to attack enemies or produce strategic benefits. Also, heroes gain experience levels from battle, such that veteran heroes are significantly more powerful than inexperienced ones.

On a typical map, players begin a game with one town of a chosen alignment. Each town alignment hosts a unique selection of creatures from which the player can build an army. Town alignment also determines other unique traits such as native hero classes, special bonuses or abilities, and leanings toward certain skills or kinds of magic.

heroes-of-might-and-magic-town_castle-sorceress-screenshot

Towns play a central role in the games since they are the primary source of income and new recruits. A typical objective in each game is to capture all enemy towns. Maps may also start with neutral towns, which do not send out heroes but may still be captured by any player. It is therefore possible, and common, to have more towns than players on a map. When captured, a town retains its alignment type, allowing the new owner to create a mixed army. A player or team is eliminated when no towns or heroes are left under their control. Usually the last player or team remaining is the victor.

As heroes visit special locations called obelisks, pieces are removed from a jigsaw puzzle-like map, gradually revealing 'The Ultimate Artifact location to the player. Once found, it confers immense bonuses to the player capable of breaking a stalemate: the grail can be taken back to a town and used to build a special structure, while the ultimate artifact provides the bonuses directly through possession.

heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-battle-for-castle-screenshot

Whenever a player engages in battle

The game changes from the adventure map display to a combat screen, which is based on either a hexagonal or square grid. In this mode, the game mimics the turn-based tactics genre, as the engaged armies must carry through the battle without the opportunity to reinforce or gracefully retreat. With few exceptions, combat must end with the losing army deserting, being destroyed, or paying a heavy price in gold to surrender. Surrendering allows the player to keep the remaining units intact. Battles can be led army army to army or castles / villages can be fight and (captured) occupied. Owning a town gives your hero daily an income of money later used to buy and upgrade castle buildings.

heroes-of-might-and-magic-ii-the-succession-wars-wizard-castle-building-options-screenshot

Also you your moved heroes could overtake mines producing different goods like minerals, sulfur, gold, emeralds etc. Building different buildings and building war units for army usually cost gold and some kind of resource.

Game Story

Heroes II history continues after Heroes I. Ending of Heroes I results in Lord Morglin Ironfist's victory. In the following years, he has successfully unified the continent of Enroth and secured his rule as king. Upon the king's death, his two sons, Archibald and Roland, vie for the crown. Archibald orchestrates a series of events that lead to Roland's exile. Archibald is then declared the new king, while Roland organizes a resistance. Each alignment is represented by one of the game's two campaigns. Archibald's campaign features the three "evil" town alignments, while Roland's campaign features the three "good" town alignments.

If Archibald is victorious, Roland's rebellion is crushed, and Roland himself is imprisoned in Castle Ironfist, leaving Archibald the uncontested ruler of Enroth. The ending, however, results in Roland's victory, with Archibald being turned to stone by Roland's court wizard, Tanir.

If you're more interested to play modern games and get some more games modern games more entertaining take a look at Kevin Martin's JoyofAndroid Best Adnroid Games post here.

Enjoy

Tags: building, common, experience, Free Heroes2, game version, Gameplay, games, genre, heroes, money, option, player, screen, strategic game, strategy game, support, team, Windows Linux
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Mobile Phone Apps & Games, Various | 2 Comments »

Install Slack and Mattermost clients for Start Up Business communication on Linux

Wednesday, September 19th, 2018

Many businesses nowadays are lookig for alternatives to the Microsoft dominated market of communication – Skype / Skype for Business Chat Audio and Video desktop client.
The two are the defacto standard for most of Corporate Businesses and is heavily used across most largest Corporations (companies) such as IBM / Xeror / DXC / CSC / Oracle / SAP / Microsoft / Amazon / Adobe … the list goes on and on.

However even though Skype is so easy to use across Microsoft Domain connected Computers the many start-up companies of today often try to avoid its use. The reason, well Skype is totally Proprietary non-transparent and by using it you probably get spied by Microsoft the CIA and God knows how many other Country Agencies. Besides that Skype has a bad history often had problems with Audio (Linux microphone and Video settings) in Free Software (Linux, FreeBSD etc.) realm and even though nowdays situation is improving and Skype Video / Audio runs fine on GNU / Linuxes its Skype for Business has no working release by Microsoft and has left-up Free Software users and Staring Business companies platform of the size of 20 to 1000 people that choose Linux as a main Desktop / Work had to look for other ways to communicate internally within company and with clients.

Jabber XMPP communication protocol has been one alternative for a long time and historically many compainies that were running out of Skype use for their work often were using Small internally company hosted jabber servers, however as Jabber's communication clients such as Gajim development is lagging behind seriously over the last 7 years and it prooved so buggy many businesses were looking for ways to avoid it.

Slack is multi platform just like Skype and has versions for Linux / Windows for macOS but its power comes mostly because most of its users use it via Skype Web Client (while Skype is a Desktop app and heavily used in Web Browser.

slack-web-communication-client-in-webbrowser-screenshot

Slack reminds in a what of things to the good old IRC chats and has channels in a similar fashion, it support Audio conversations but unfortunately at the moment didn't support Video.

The emergency of New Age of Computing and the quick adoption of Clouds as an aim to cut business costs put Jabber totally out of the game and in the niche and in August 2013 on the scene raised Slack (Team Messaging) which is an acronymi of (Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge) – a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services, founded by Stewart Butterfield for the purpose of online Game (now defunct) called Glitch.

asana-for-slack-integration-2018-2-linux
The problem with Slack is that it is a freemium product, whose main paid features are the ability to search more than 10,000 archived messages (the ordinary free version allows the user to make up to 10000 searches in chat history), the paid Slack versions adds also unlimited apps and integrations and theoretically unlimited number of users (though this is seriously doubtful).

slack-10000-messages-per-user-limitation-shot

One very handy feature of Slack is its integration with "The World's Leading Software Development Platform" – GitHub .

To solve the problem with the little amount of Slack Chat history in Users conversations many Start-Up Business Companies do use Slack as a communication media with Clients and does often use as a communication Media another very popular Cloud messaging Open Source Software called Mattermost deploys to Cloud infrastruture but is at IT control of your company or your hired support and not third party vendor supports, making it a great communication tool for small and mid-sized companies who want to save money of purchasing a special server and hiring an admin or paying for one to support it all the time but instead directly use their Cloud account and deploy it there.

Mattermost is capable to Reach anyone, anywhere on any device. From the airport to data center, safely connect teams with EMM apps, hybrid cloud deployment and enterprise-grade flexibility to meet the unique needs of enterprise.

It is capable to Integrate with existing applications and build new workflows and empower your teams especially operations and DevOps – to perform faster and effectively. Mattermost

To install Slack on Linux:

Go and Download slack from Slack Linux download (the DEB / RPM 64 bit package)

As of time of writting this article latest Slack Desktop packages are: slack-desktop-3.3.1-amd64.deb and slack-3.3.1-0.1.fc21.x86_64.rpm

Depending on the type of Linux distribution install it with dpkg or rpm

1. Installing Slack Desktop client on Debian / Ubuntu Linux

On Debian / Ubuntu / Mint install Slack with:

root@ubuntu:~# dpkg -i slack-desktop-*.deb

For Ubuntu users there is also unofficial third-party Slack app ScoudCloud

it integrates well with Ubuntu Unity desktop (which I personally dislike 🙂 ) and gives you some extra goodies such as showing in an Unity manner unread message count, notification, bubbles, unity quicklists for fast-switching between Slack channels etc.

2. Installing Slack Desktop client on Redhat / Fedora / CentOS Linux

…

On Redhat / Fedora / CentOS install it with:

[root@fedora ~]:# rpm -ivh slack-*.rpm
…

3. Installing Mattermost Desktop client on Linux

Download Mattermost Linux package from download URL here

As of time of writting the DEB versions are mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-amd64.deb / mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-i386.deb and there is no official RPM package for Fedora / CentOS users however I guess the .deb package can easily be converted to .rpm with alien tool.

To install Mattermost on Debian (in moment of writting September 2018):

root@debian:~# wget https://releases.mattermost.com/desktop/4.1.2/mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-amd64.deb
…

root@debian:~# dpkg -i mattermost-desktop-4.1.2-linux-amd64.deb
…

Mattermost supports file attachment (send) / Video previews (you can play sent Web videos directly within the Mattermost client) and on experimental level even supports Video and Audio Calls.

mattermost-markdown-help-linux-screenshot

One nice feature of Mattermost for those who love coding is using tags to format messages

There is plenty of features of Mattermost among the best ones are integrations Private Cloud open source integrations (Jira, Jenkins, Bots, clients), supports Webhooks, Restful APIS, CLI and Public Cloud connections via Zapier – a connect and uatomate workflows e.g. gives you ability to move info between web apps automatically.

Tags: debian install slack, install mattermost linux, install slack chat linux, mattermost, redhat install slack, skype alternative, slack communication
Posted in Cloud services, Curious Facts, Educational, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

Happy New Church Year ! – The Eastern Orthodox Church Year celebrated every 1st of September and some history on the Indiction

Wednesday, September 5th, 2018

Happy New Year, Happy New Church Year ! 🙂

On first of September every year the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church to which I belong is celebrating the beginning of a new Church Calendar feast year.

It is a common practice here in Bulgaria (as we are one of the 14 Eastern Orthodox Churches worldwide) it is a tradition to serve holy liturgies across the country and prayers are lifted to heaven for the well being of the Bulgarian nation and the world.

In the past the beginning of the new year was called also the beginning of the indiction.
In the VI-th century at the time of Emperor Justinian The Great in Byzantine Empire was introduce the Cyclical Calendar based calculation of days (based on indictions ) – this is delivered from latin word indictio (meaning announcement).
Indictions were celebrated originally on a cyclical periods of 15 years when the а financial review of the properties (possessions) of citizens that were taxated.

In the Latin Empire the word indictio has been used to mark the exact amount of taxes owed each year and in this is how with the beginning of the new indiction was beginning the new financial year of the empire according to some historians the origin of indictions system has been originating from Egypt.

The official byzantine calculation of indictions begun at the time of Saint Emperor Constantine on 1st of September year 312 A.D.
Historically it is interesting fact both in the Western and in the Eastern Latin empire March was another time marking a New Year …

On 1st of September in the Church it is accepted to read the Bible chapter where Jesus Christ red in the synagogue the prophecy of Isaiah (Is. 61:1-2) for the occurance of the favorable year of God. The Byzantines see in that reading a reference of the Lord for a celebration of a New Year.

In the Menologion of Basyl II from the 10th century it is said "From that time, he has granted to us the Christians this feast".

Primary_Chronicle_Povesti_Vremeninnih_let-baptizmal-of-Olga

It is interesting fact that in Byzantium this Bible reading was red in the Church by the Patriarch in Hagia Sophia Church Cathedral or another Church where it was common for him to serve Holy Liturgy on that date.

In Russia even though the Baptismal and Christianization of the nation until 15th century the Church New year begun on 1st of March. This is evident from all medieval manuscripts including The most famous and among most ancient Russian manuscript written by the eminent Nestor so called Primary Manuscript (Primary Chronicle) also called Tale of Begone Years.

With an Emperor decree of King Peter the I-st (The Great) the new year in Russia is transferred to 1st of January.

Saint_Simeon_Stylites-Stulpnik

Saint Simeon the Stylites

Our Bulgarian Orthodox Church by tradition according to the main Church service instructions book – the Typikon marks on the first day of the new year as a very important "tiny Lord feast" and has tradition to celebrate the memory of saint Simeon the Stylites who spend mostly all his life praying on a Stylite and was a notable ascet of the Orthodox Church.

Tags: celebrated, church, Eastern, Happy, Orthodox, year
Posted in Christianity, Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Rant | No Comments »

DOOM 1, DOOM 2, DOOM 3 game wad files for download / Playing Doom on Debian Linux via FreeDoom open source doom engine

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Doom 2 game screenshot

Every now and then as an ex-gamer I do remember the good glorious times of the DooM oldschool 3d shooter game.

As a Linux user I do have the option to play Doom 1 and Doom 2 straight using the GPLed version of the game called FreeDoom

FreeDoom comes with a custom wad file called freedoom.wad which is a considerably good remake of the doom game, but still I don't find so funny and bringing memories as the original game.

Thus in order to experience the original doom game play, levels and sound on my Linux, I need to use the original doom wad files

The DooM original wad files are already an abandonware and nowdays it's a bit hard to be found. Still the wad files for the games are available for download on some major torrent trackers like piratebay but it takes time to find them therefore I decided to publicly share the Doom 1, Doom 2 and Doom 3 wad files to be easier for me to later put and play them on Linux and BSD operating systems, on the other hand I do think this files might be useful for many other oldschool DooM fans out there.

Here are the files for download:

1. Download doom 1, doom 2 and doom 3 wad files + extra of plutonia wad and tnt wad rar archive

2. Download Doom1.wad file
3. Download Doom2.wad file
4. Download Doom3.wad file

(Note that this is not original Doom3.wad – For free, its custom doom wad for prboom engine!!!)
5. Download Doom Plutonia.wad
6. Download Doom Tnt.wad

On my Debian Linux with the freedoom package in order to play the Doom1 or Doom2 wad files it's necessary to download and place the doom1.wad or doom2.wad files into the directory /usr/share/games/doom

It's important that the WAD files names does not contain capital letters (e.g. the files need to be placed with file names doom1.wad and doom2.wad)

The FreeDoom port package in Debian Lenny and Squeeze is available to be installed easily through apt like so:

debian:~# apt-get install prboom freedoom

To start up the doom2 game, issue the command:

debian:~# prboom

prboom also allows you to select a custom .wad file you want to play, for a custom wad file you can invoke the command:

debian:~# prboom -file yourwadfilename

UPDATE: A bonus you might seriously Enjoy, if you happen to be DooM 2 game fan / addict is an Awesome MIDIS Soundtrack by Bobby Prince you can download it song by song in midi format here or if you prefer download the whole doom 2 Bobby Prince midi songs archive
Enjoy the nice oldschool game 😉

Tags: command, custom, DOOM 1, DOOM 2, doom 3, DOOM 3 game wad files for download / Playing Doom on Debian Linux via FreeDoom open source doom engine, doom engine, doom fans, doom game, download doom1, game play, games, linux user, original doom wad, piratebay, shooter game, torrent trackers, wad file, wad files
Posted in Entertainment, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 72 Comments »

Saint King Boris feast and a Holy Liturgy in the Great Basilica of Pliska – 2nd of May 2018

Thursday, May 3rd, 2018

Pliska-Great-Basilica-air-view-biggest-medieval-church-Europe

Pliska is the first capital of Bulgaira and an ancient city that traces its roots back to the Baptizmal of Bulgaria by Saint King Boris (The Baptizer of Bulgarian lands and Slavonic People) the feast is of a great importance for Bulgaria to be pressent on the map of Europe over the last XV centuries since Bulgaria's establishment in 681 A.D.

Pliska which is an enormous architectural complex dated from IX / X century hsa played a pivotal role for the Baptizmal process of Bulgarian nation as it was King Boris's palace at that time and the Christianization of Bulgarians and Slavonic (natioons) people started exactly in the newly built so called Great Basilica of Pliska which was an archibishop seat and a central Monastery and Palace Church of Bulgaria, the building was completed approximately in 875 A.D. and was the biggest Cathedral church in Europe for about 1000 years onwards with the gigantic area of 2,920 square meters (31, 400 ft).

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska-walls-reconstruction

20 century reconsturction of the Church walls based on descriptions from history annals

The Basillica was build on top of ruins of older Bulgar pagan temple and has martyrium (a place dedicated to a martyr who has been martyred there) as many of the ancient Churches had. It is believed that the martyrium may be Saint (Boyan) Enravota – the first Bulgarian saint (circa 833). The basillica has a form of a Cross shaped mausuleum.

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska-left-part-of-the-alter

Reconstruction of walls left part of the Altar

The archibishop residence was north and south of the basillica on the northern yard there was a residential building with a bath which included hypocaust (an ancient water warming system). Building south of the cathedral was used as school and scriptorium. Nearby the basillica are situated necropolis (most likely monk graves).

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska_Sarcophagus-near-altar

Pliska Sarcophagus near the Great Basillica Church altar

As with every basilica of that time there is a special allocated place of the Church for nobles. Yard northside was used as a kitchen and a dining room and accomodated other monsatic buildings.

The Old Basilica reconstruciton original model should have looked something similar to below picture which is found in the Museum (which holds a little part of the artefacts found) situated about 1.5 kilometer from the Basilica.

Old_Basilica_in_Pliska_Reconstruction-model

A presumable reconstruction model of the Old Basilica

On 2nd of May KIng Boris Feast in 2015 for a first time since many centuries in memoriam of 1150 years since Christianization of Bulgaria in the Great Basilica was served an Eastern Orthodox Christian (an open air) Holy Liturgy headed by the Bulgarian Patriarch Neofit with many Metropolitans guests from other Eastern Orthodox national Churches where the ex-president Rosen Plevneliev and the Living ancestor King Simeon the III-rd was present.

1150-years-baptismal-of-bulgaria-feast-patriarch-Neofit-Pliska-Great-Basilica

Patriarch Neofit Patriarch and head of Bulgarian Orthodox Church blessing in Great Basilica y. – 2018

The event in 2015 was continued with the idea to become an yearly event on the feast of Saint King Boris each 2nd of May yesterday in 2018 by the Metropolitan of Varna and Veliko Preslav his eminence Metropoltian Ioan (John).

Orthodox Christian Believers in the Great Basilica Preslav 2018 (People gathered being transported by free of charge buses organized by the Eparchy from Dobrich, Varna, Shumen, Targovishte

Fr. Peter reading The Apostle readings

Metropolitan Ioan (John) of Varna and Veliki Preslav Blessing in Holy Liturgy 2018

The Holy Altar with the Holy Sacraments in Pliska Basilica in 2018 (Metropolitan Ioan and his deacon)

The Church service was a big gathering for the region (if we take the fact that the current town Pliska has about 900 citizens and is in practice a village), the overall present people were perhaps about 200 to 250. More than 1/3 of the priests (38 priests) from the whole Eparchy served the service together with the Bishop. The weather before the service was rainy but just after the service and onwards, it came sunny again just like it was saint King Boris with all the Christian saints rejoiced to see so many Christians gather together just like the times when Christianity started to spread from this same place over the lands of Bulgaria country and later during the golden age throughout the territories of Bulgarian Empire and all the Slavonic borderlines such as nowadays Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Russia.

The whole set of pictures from saint King Boris feast in Pliska can be seen on the official website of Varna and Veliko Preslav eparchy here

Tags: boris, feast, Holy, King, liturgy, saint
Posted in Christianity, Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

ASCII Art studio – A powerful ASCII art editor for Windows / Playscii a cool looking text editor for Linux

Heroes of Might and Magic 2: Best old-school turn based strategic game to play on your Android mobile phone

Install Slack and Mattermost clients for Start Up Business communication on Linux

Happy New Church Year ! – The Eastern Orthodox Church Year celebrated every 1st of September and some history on the Indiction

Saint King Boris feast and a Holy Liturgy in the Great Basilica of Pliska – 2nd of May 2018

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