No, nothing to do with Up Pompeii.

Internet forums, I’m just about done with them. You seem to get a small number of categories that the people who frequent them fit into. It could just be life, not forums – as you seem to come across these people at work too.

1. Clueless. Like the PHB’s who are security penetration testing using Windows machines, oblivious to the broken IP stack thats probably causing them to miss hundreds of vulnerabilities. Computer forums for this lot, as the people who have a clue are on mailinglists or usenet – used to be IRC, but now thats just full of kids trying to get on Bash

After having a chat with an old friend about RISC OS, I decided to hunt out my old ROMs and disk images and try out the RPCemu Linux port.

Actually its pretty good, certainly no VirtualRPC, but not bad, it runs RISC OS 4.02 just fine, I couldn’t get networking to work but did get HostFS to work (allows you to store RISC OS files on your plain Linux partition instead of using disk images). I tried to get Select to work, and whilst it installed and softloaded, it didn’t boot.

I got JunOS Olive 9.0 installed under VirtualBox today.

Basically followed the VMWare instructions here, which are essentially:

1. Do a minimal install of FreeBSD 4.11, with the majority of disk space allocated to /var (4Gb disk, 256Mb RAM)
2. Setup a serial pipe and connect via “socat unix-client:/tmp/vbox.pipe -”
3. Setup a network interface via the CLI, reboot:

cli
configure
set interfaces em0 unit 0 family inet address 192.168.0.115/24
commit and-quit

4. scp the files across and “pkg_add jinstall-7.3R3.6-domestic-signed.tgz”, reboot
5. repeat #3 to upgrade to 9.0R1.10
6. install jWeb: “pkg_add jweb-9.0R1.10-signed.tgz”, reboot
7. enable jWeb via the CLI, which requires changing the root password, reboot:

cli
configure
set system root-authentication plain-text-password
set system services web-management http interface em0.0
commit and-quit

8. enable SSH and other goodies via jWeb

Here is a screenshot of the web GUI and the console – with Olive9 the serial pipe is not needed as it displays on the VGA console.

I just figured out how to get my EpsonRX425 multifunction printer to work under Fedora10, over the network via CUPS to the CentOS 5.2 server its connected to.

1. rpm -Uvh pips-sprx420_425_430s-cups-2.6.2-3.i386.rpm
2. uncomment the application/octet-stream line in the server’s /etc/cups/mime.convs file, to allow raw printing (fix found here)
3. on the local (F10) machine, add a printer with uri ipp://centos52box/printers/EpsonRX425

In fact the Avasys (Epkowa/Epson Japan) website now lists Fedora 10 as a supported platform, and even provides 64-Bit iScan RPM’s!

I’ve just discovered a GKrellm replacement, kind of like gDesklets called Conky. Its pretty nice as it draws itself on the X11 root window (known as the desktop/wallpaper to mere mortals).

Its very customisable, you can gather the information from commands such as lmsensors and ifconfig. Here’s my .conkyrc, I still need to figure out how to remove spaces before the %age sign.

own_window yes
own_window_colour brown
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
use_spacer right
use_xft yes
alignment bottom_right
gap_x 10
gap_y 10
update_interval 2.0
maximum_width 250
stippled_borders 3
border_margin 9
border_width 10
default_color grey
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
font Monospace:size=8:weight=bold
uppercase no
draw_shades yes
TEXT
${color orange}SYSTEM INFORMATION ${hr 2}$color
${color white}${time %A},${time %e} ${time %B} ${time %G}
${color white}Machine$color $nodename (up $uptime_short)
${color white}Kernel$color  $kernel
${color orange}CPU USAGE ${hr 2}$color
Core0 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu1}%) Core1 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu2}%)
${cpugraph cpu1 25,120 000000 ff6600 } ${cpugraph cpu2 25,120 000000 cc0033}
Core2 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu3}%) Core3 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu4}%)
${cpugraph cpu3 25,120 000000 ff6600 } ${cpugraph cpu4 25,120 000000 cc0033}
${color orange}TEMPERATURES ${hr 2}$color
Core0: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 0:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}GPU:   +${execi 60 nvidia-settings -q gpucoretemp | grep '):' | awk '{print $4}' | cut -c -2}.0°C
Core1: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 1:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}Therm: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'temp1:' | cut -d" " -f8}
Core2: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 2:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}Case:  ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'temp2:' | cut -d" " -f8}
Core3: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 3:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}HDD:   +${execi 60 hddtemp -n /dev/sdb}.0°C
${color orange}TOP 5 PROCESSES ${hr 2}$color
${color #ff9999}NAME               PID      CPU      MEM
${color #ffff99}1. ${top name 1}${top pid 1}   ${top cpu 1}   ${top mem 1}$color
2. ${top name 2}${top pid 2}   ${top cpu 2}   ${top mem 2}
3. ${top name 3}${top pid 3}   ${top cpu 3}   ${top mem 3}
4. ${top name 4}${top pid 4}   ${top cpu 4}   ${top mem 4}
5. ${top name 5}${top pid 5}   ${top cpu 5}   ${top mem 5}
${color orange}MEMORY / DISK ${hr 2}$color
${color white}RAM    $color $memperc% ${membar 6}$color
${color white}/      $color ${fs_used_perc /}% ${fs_bar 6 /}$color 
${color white}/data7 $color ${fs_used_perc /data7}% ${fs_bar 6 /data7}$color 
${color orange}ETH0 (${addr eth0}) ${hr 2}$color
${color white}Down:$color ${downspeed eth0}KB/s${alignr}${color white}Up:$color ${upspeed eth0}KB/s
${downspeedgraph eth0 25,120 000000 00ff00} ${alignr}${upspeedgraph eth0 25,120 000000 ff0000}$color

I also figured out how to stop NTFS-3g from automounting my Vista partition: