ArchBang Dead, Long Live Fedora

So just moments after the last post, I realized that the only iso of Archbang that I had was actually from early 2012. Why does that matter, you ask? Well because Arch changed their basic structure during ArchHell, the name I am giving the update in question. After hours of attempting to update the system, I said to hell with all of this and moved back to a distro I knew would work.

So after another hour and downloading and installing Fedora Core 17 XFCE spin, I was back at a usable desktop. It took a while later before I had all of the post-install stuff completed. Don't listen to what they tell you, Fedora is not ready out of the box.

So ArchHell was avoided and I am back to Fedora. I still have a couple of little issues with PlayOnLinux and getting my Dropbox symlinks to act properly, but those are little things that are not preventing me from working and playing as I like to do.

Now for some Legend of Grimrock and Temple of Elemental Evil from gog.com!

UbuntuStudio Died...

So in a fit of exasperated rage I replaced UbuntuStudio with ArchBang. We had a power outage here that completely fried Ubuntu. How you ask? I have no fucking clue. While loading the kernel during boot, the system would freeze, no TTY, no nothing. After letting it sit for a bit, to calm me down more than anything else, I tried again. Same results. So that was it.

ArchBang is simple so far and, being a minimalist, I like it. It is going to take some time to get eberything set back up and re-learn Arch thoguh.

Port Forwarding on DD-WRT Not Working?

This is really for my own benefit, so chill out. If I post it here I am much less likely of forgetting just what in the hell has gone wrong.

For those of us running DD-WRT firmware in our routers, port forwarding can be a complete pain in the ass if you do not know what you are doing. And let us be clear up front, I do not know what I am doing with IPTABLES! That shit is completely foreign to me and I would consider myself a pretty well-rounded geek.

So here is the trouble. You just installed or re-flash dd-wrt, this includes the version of dd-wrt that is running on the Buffalo routers by the way, and lo and behold your port forwards are not working. WTF?!? I thoguht this shit is supposed to be awesome, etc., etc. bitch bitch bitch.

The issue is that a port forward is from WAN to LAN, and that is actually working just fine for you. Go ahead an NMap yourself if you think I am crazy. But dd-wrt does not allow port forwarding on the loopback, so your nifty port forward is essentially lost at the router.

This is how to fix this.

1. telnet  into your router (alternatively you could goto the Administration tab in the webgui and then to the Commands box)
   

   telnet 192.168.11.1

2. Enter the following into the prompt:
   

   iptables -y nat -I POSTROUTING -o br0 -s 192.168.11.0/24 -d 192.168.11.0/24 -j MASQUERADE

   Remember to change the line above to match your local network path.
3. Hit enter and close telnet.
4. Voila! Your port forwards are working!

Basically all the above actually does is force a loopback into.... fuck it I don't know what the hell it does, but it works. And this might help someone else who has this fun little problem in the future.

Delta Green: Angel Review

So I finished reading the online only Delta-Green novel by David Farnell, Angel. Most times when I come across an online only novel I am a little leery about reading it. Most people these days can come up with an epub with virtually no work what so ever.

Either way, this is a must read for Cthulhu/Delta-Green & horror fans alike. The images that Mr. Farnell evokes are just downright disturbed and are worthy of the genre.

I'm not going to ruin this one for you guys. Just know that it is a really good read, I devoured it in about a day, reading from HTML no less.

USB Headset has Finally Died

Well my old reliable Creative Fatal1ty USB headset has finally been killed by a 10 month-old's slobber. It had seen a solid 3.5 years of heavy daily use with no issues at all, well until Jackson found it that is. It was an awesome headset. It will be missed.

As for the replacement I ordered a Kinivo BTH220 Bluetooth Stereo Headphone Headset from Amazon last night. As you can see, it was pretty cheap and had some decent reviews, so it won't be a total loss if they don't work. Honestly, I just need something without wires so the little ones can't commandeer them. Hopefully, I can set it up in Fedora to work as good as my old set did.

Setting Up Skype to Use USB Headset in Fedora

I use Skype as a business line in my home office, which means I use it religiously. It has its ups and downs for sure, but it is cheap, and runs fairly well. That is unless you run Linux and you want Skype to pipe output to separate channels for ringing and voice actions. In other words, I want to use my USB headset as my default Skype communication device, but have the ringing (and all other system sounds) still pipe through the main speakers. After a whole lot of messing around I finally got it working, here's how.

1. Install pavucontrol. I am not really certain why this isn't included in Fedora by default. But, to be honest, you might never need it unless you want to do what we are doing today.
   
   

   sudo yum install -y pavucontrol



2. Open Skype and go to Options -> Sound Devices
   Un-check the option to allow Skype to adjust your mixer levels.
   
   


3. Make sure you USB headset is plugged in!


4. Open pavucontrol and get it side-by-side with the Skype Options screen.


5. In pavucontrol, go to the Output Devices tab and you should see two options, the Internal Audio Analog Stereo, and your USB audio device.
   
   


6. Each device has three buttons on the top right hand side for Mute, Channel Lock, and Set as Fallback. Choose the Set as Fallback option for your USB headset.


7. Switch to the Input Devices tab. You should see two items here, maybe just one if you don't have an internal microphone. Select the Set as Fallback option for your USB device again.
   
   


8. Now comes the easy part, go to the Playback tab. You might want to make the window a little bit bigger so that you can see all of the feeds.


9. In the Skype Options Sound Devices page, (you didn't close it did you?) click on the Make a Test Call button.


10. You should see the Skype output here now and it will be piped to the Internal Audio Device at the little button on the top.


11. Click that button and select your USB headset.
    
    


12. End the current test call and start another one. You should hear your Skype audio in your headset.


13. Have a friend call you on Skype and it should ring on your main speakers. When you answer, however, all of the voice action will be piped to the USB headset.

So I hope that helps someone else out there that might be having the same issue. I know it drove me crazy for a while.

Making Chromium View PDFs

Chromium by default has no built-in PDF viewer unlike its cousin Google Chrome. I am not really certain why the hell this is, but it is. This is the easiest way that I could get this to work on Fedora (sometimes I wish I was back in Arch).

1. Install Google Chrome. 
Yeah I know, just trust me here, besides we only need one file, libpdf.so.


sudo yum -y install google-chrome-stable



After Chrome is installed, copy the libpdf.so file out of /opt/google/chrome to Chromium

sudo cp /opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/plugins/


Go ahead and change the file permissions on libpdf.so to 755.

sudo chmod 755 libpdf.so


Now open Chromium and go to chrome://plugins. You should see a plugin called libpdf. Mine was enabled at this point but if your's is not, then do so.


That's it!

See that wasn't too hard was it?

A side note you should be aware of, in this format libpdf.so will not get updated. So it might be a good idea to do so manually every once and a while. Or you can leave Chrome installed and create a symlink to the chromium install for libpdf.so. 

Running Evolution in Dropbox

After switching to Fedora several months ago I have been using the Evolution Mail client solely. I got away from my long-time friend Thunderbird over some rather ridiculous issues that I won't go into here. And so far, Evolution is great. And it integrates into the default Fedora 16 desktop beautifully.

My only gripe is when Fedora 17 is released I don't want to loose everything or spend mass amounts of time backing everything up for the re-install. (Or if something goes completely haywire with the linux kernel during an update.) So I mapped all of the Evolution data into my Dropbox folder. Here is how you can do the same thing.

Evolution stores basic settings and such in ~/.evolution/ and even though nothing of any real import is stored there, you still need to move it to Dropbox.

mv ~/.evolution/ ~/Dropbox/evolution

Now make a sym link to the default location for Evolution.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/evolution ~/.evolution

The main data files and all of your emails are stored in ~/.local/share/evolution so we need to do the same thing to that folder. I changed the name to evolution-data in my Dropbox but you can use anything you want.

mv ~/.local/share/evolution ~/Dropbox/evoulition-data/

And then make the sym link.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/evolution-data ~/.local/share/evolution

That is it. Now Evolution will save the files into the Dropbox folder and it will in turn be synced to the web. If you have crap loads of emails, like I do, then you might need to purchase the 50gb plan to deal with the space. For $9 a year it is definitely worth it.

Flushing DNS in Linux

This is the easiest possible way that I know of to flush your DNS in Linux when you are not running a DNS server. Simply toggle the lan port off and then back on.

Installing Chromium on Fedora

For some reason you really have to work to get Fedora to install the chromium browser. Hopefully this will help someone else out there, and serve as a reminder to myself when I need to do it again.