November 29, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Apache, Configuration, Graphics, HowTo, Installation, LAMP, PHP, Programming, Server

How To: Install PHP-Ming

Yesterday, I came across a library called ming for php which can do wonders while converting videos to .swf (flash), images to .swf and much more. The best thing is that ming provides wrappers in C/C++/PHP/Python/Perl/Tcl etc. So, can be used within any one of these languages. But, the damn thing drove me crazy while installing. It was very tough experience installing it as the available howtos didn’t help much. But finally I somehow managed with the installation and it worked 🙂 So, I thought of writing this how to, so that anyone having the same problem can find it helpful.

Here is a complete howto on installing php-ming in Fedora. (I installed it on Fedora 7 and with php5, but howto is supposed to work with other versions as well.) Though there are rpms available for earlier versions of ming, but I wanted the latest, so installed from source.

Resources:
libming : http://www.libming.net/
PHP : http://php.net/

Step 1

First of all make sure that you have php-devel package, otherwise you will not be able to install ming at all. Do the following as root.

[root@bordeaux root]# rpm -q php-devel [Enter]

If the above command says php-devel is not installed, then fetch php-devel for your php version from here and install as given below, else proceed to step 2.

[root@bordeaux root]# rpm -hiv php-devel-5.2.2-3.i386.rpm [Enter]

Step 2

Download latest version of ming from here.

Step 3

Untar the downloaded package.

[saini@bordeaux saini]# tar -xvzf ming-0.4.0.beta5.tar.gz [Enter]

Step 4

Change directory to ‘./ming-0.4.0.beta5’ and issue ./configure and make as given below

[saini@bordeaux saini]# cd ming-0.4.0.beta5 [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux ming-0.4.0.beta5]# ./configure --enable-cXX --enable-php [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux ming-0.4.0.beta5]# make [Enter]
[root@bordeaux ming-0.4.0.beta5]# make install [Enter] (as root)

Step 5

Go to ‘./php_ext’ directory and issue ‘make’ and ‘make install’.

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[saini@bordeaux ming-0.4.0.beta5]# cd php_ext [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux php_ext]# make [Enter]
[root@bordeaux php_ext]# make install [Enter] (as root)

Step 6

Open make_modules.sh in your favorite editor and uncomment the line ‘make install’ and run make_modules.sh.

[root@bordeaux php_ext]# bash make_modules.sh [Enter] (as root)

Step 7

Go to ‘./tmp/modules/’ directory and copy ming.so to ‘/usr/lib/php/modules/’

1 2	[root@bordeaux php_ext]# cd tmp/modules/ [Enter] [root@bordeaux modules]# cp ming.so /usr/lib/php/modules/ [Enter] (as root)

If ming.so is not found in ‘php_ext/tmp/modules/, then update your db using ‘updatedb’ and locate ming.so and if found on locate, then copy it to ‘/usr/lib/php/modules/’. If not found at all, try recompiling or issue some random commands related to make.

Step 8

Go to ‘/usr/local/lib/’ and check if libming.so, libming.so.0 etc. are present there. If yes proceed else I don’t know what to do 🙁

Step 9(a)

Go to ‘/usr/lib/php/modules/’ and issue these commands.

[root@bordeaux modules]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so libming.so (as root)
[root@bordeaux modules]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so.0 libming.so.0 (as root)
[root@bordeaux modules]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so.0.3.0 libming.so.0.3.0 (as root)
[root@bordeaux modules]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so.0.4.0 libming.so.0.4.0 (as root)

Step 9(b)

Go to ‘/usr/lib/’ and issue these commands.

[root@bordeaux lib]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so libming.so (as root)
[root@bordeaux lib]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so.0 libming.so.0 (as root)
[root@bordeaux lib]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so.0.3.0 libming.so.0.3.0 (as root)
[root@bordeaux lib]# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libming.so.0.4.0 libming.so.0.4.0 (as root)

Step 10

Restart the httpd service by issuing the command below

[root@bordeaux root]# service httpd restart [Enter] (as root)

Step 11

Write a file ‘/var/www/html/info.php’ with following contents

phpinfo();

and point your web browser to http://localhost/info.php . Now search for ‘ming’ and check whether its enabled or not.

If enabled, yes you have successfully installed php-ming 🙂 Hope this helps.

November 23, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Extensions, Firefox, Fonts, FTP, Internet, Linux, Review, Screenshot

Review: Firefox 3 Beta 1

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is available now. I downloaded the package yesterday morning and started using it right away. While using, I figured out some of the good things and at the same time there are some bad things about this test release. Here is what I feel about Firefox 3 Beta 1.

BTW, you can get beta 1 for Firefox 3 here. I am not going to tell, how to install firefox 🙂

Positives:

1.Nice Default Font:

Well someone may argue that you can configure any font in any version of Firefox, so whats the good thing about this default font in Firefox 3 Beta1. Well, I’ll say that configuration is always available but nobody gives a damn to configure the font in browser. I am liking this default font in FF3 Beta1 and everything now seems interesting to read. I have Read more than 40 wiki pages since last two days.

2.New FTP Listing Style:

The FTP listings in Firefox 3 Beta 1 has got new stylesheet. Its not dirty any more. It feels good while browsing ftp now. See the screen-shot below.

3.Website Identity:

This is new feature, but I couldn’t find it useful. When you click on favicon in the location bar, a pop-up kinda thing comes up, which tells about the identity of the site you are visiting. Check out the snapshot below.

4.Drag n Drop:

You can now hold any thing in Firefox 3 Beta 1 and drag it anywhere you want. Though I could not drop the images to gimp or anywhere else, it looks good. I think its in the development stage right now.

5.Bookmarks:

Bookmarking a website or editing your bookmarks is far easier now. You can edit a bookmarked site while its loading or can bookmark the site by just clicking a button. A new star-shaped button has been added in the location bar before the go button. If a site is not bookmarked, clicking the button will just bookmark it without asking for anything. If you again click on the button, now you can edit or delete the site you just bookmarked.

6.Adding Search Engine:

In firefox 3 beta 1, you can add the site you are browsing in you search engine list just like google, imdb, wikipedia, yahoo or whatever. But this is not valid for every website. Every website in this world can’t be a search engine 😛 Checkout the snapshot or KDE.

7.Link sorting/searching in location bar:

Firefox 3 beta 1 implements a new searching/sorting mechanism for links in location bar. As you type some letters, those are now searched in the link as well as the title of the page and then the links are sorted and displayed as list. In drop down list, you can also see the sites on your bookmarks.

8.Places Folder:

A new bookmark folder named ‘Places’ has been added. It has 6 sub-folders which contains links to different site based on a particular criterion. Some of them are ‘Recently Starred Pages’, ‘Recently Visited Starred Pages’, ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ etc. I was looking for something like this since a long time. Because every time I login into my PC and fire up my firefox, first of all, I visit 8-10 sites (students mail, slashdot, iiit blogroll, yahoo mail, gmail, forum, orkut etc.). Now, I can open all of them in just one click. I click on ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ and done.

9.Low Memory:

Well, a review of Firefox 3 Beta 1 on zdnet, say that Firefox 3 beta 1 is consuming low memory than Firefox 2 and IE 7. That review is for Firefox in windows. But in Fedora 7, I didn’t experience any reduction in memory usage.

10.Faster:

I don’t know how to justify this, but Firefox 3 Beta 1 seems to load pages faster. What I could think was that, when you click go, it loads the page in the background for some-time and then suddenly flushes the page to the screen and it appears that the entire page has been loaded in one go. I may be wrong though.

11.Improved GUI:

The rendering of buttons, input fields, images in the pages have improved a lot and buttons and drop down menus look better now.

Negatives:

1.Extensions:

Life is a bit or I should say a byte difficult with Firefox extensions. Now, I am too much used to use these extensions that I can’t live without them. I’ll crash if I don’t have ‘Undo Closed Tab’ extension. I keep making stupid mistakes. All the extensions are not yet available for Firefox 3, so its a problem.

2.Multiple Tabs:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 immediately dies if I open more than 20 tabs. I opened my wiki saved session (39 tabs) and after sometime I was searching for Firefox. Where the hell firefox window has gone?

3.Crashes:

I don’t know what exactly is the problem, but I think Firefox 3 revolts against Yahoo Mail and GMail. Whenever I open Yahoo Mail or GMail, Firefox 3 Beta 1 crashes. Either there is some problem with the heavily loaded mail pages or it doesn’t want me to use GMail or Yahoo.

Well, there may be lot more positives and negatives. These are the things I noticed about Firefox 3 Beta 1 in last two days. As the positives list is ruling the negatives, I am using Firefox 3 Beta 1 full time these days.

PS : @Paresh I think FF3 is better than FF2 in many ways. But you may want to wait for all the extensions to be compatible with FF3.

November 20, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, Hacks, HowTo, Installation, Linux, Server, Tips - Tricks

How To: Install and Configure Shoutcast Radio

Shoutcast is a mp3 broadcasting/streaming media server software provided by NullSoft. One can setup a server on any system, GNU/Linux / Windows/ MacOS and can stream mp3 over the network, internet/intranet. I setup shoutcast on my system a long back and found it very useful. Here is a step by step how to on how you can setup shoutcast on a GNU/Linux system.

Shoutcast can be installed even if you don’t have root privileges. But in that case you can’t use port less than 1024 for broadcasting. Below, I’ll explain how to install it for a non-root user.

Shoutcast server depends on a tool shoutcast DNAS for audio input in Linux. So, here we go

Step 1

Download the latest version of shoutcast from here. Download the one for Linux (glibc).

Step 2

Let us assume we want to install shoutcast in a directory named ‘shoutcast’ in user’s home directory and we want to broadcast punjabi songs.

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[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# tar -xvzf sc_serv_1.9.8_Linux.tar.gz [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# mkdir punjabi [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# mv sc_serv.conf punjabi/sc_serv_punjabi.conf [Enter]

Step 3

Open sc_serv_punjabi.conf in your favorite editor and modify certain parameters as per you requirements. The essentials are below.

MaxUser=20
Password=yourPassword
PortBase=8300 #(Confirm that this port and the port PortBase+1 is not being used)
LogFile=none
RealTime=0
ScreenLog=0
ShowLastSongs=10
SrcIP=ANY
DestIP=ANY
Yport=80
NameLookups=0
AdminPassword=yourAdminPassword
TitleFormat=%s [IIIT Radio]

etc. My sc_serv.conf can be accessed here. That was all for installing the shoutcast server.

Now, the installation of DNAS tool is still pending. Here is a step by step procedure to install DNAS tool.

Step 1

Download the latest version of DNAS tool from here.

Step 2

[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# tar -xvzf sc_trans_posix_040.tgz [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# cd sc_trans_040/ [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux sc_trans_040]# mv sc_trans_linux ../ [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux sc_trans_040]# mv sc_trans.conf ../punjabi/sc_trans_punjabi.conf [Enter]

Step 3

Go to punjabi directory and open sc_trans_punjabi.conf in your favorite editor and make changes according to your needs. Here are some

PlaylistFile=/exactPathTo/punjabi.lst
ServerIP=
ServerPort=
 # 8300 in this case
Password=
 # yourPassword in this case
StreamTitle= %s
StreamURL=
Shuffle=1 # (1 for random songs)

etc. My sc_trans.conf can be accessed here.

Step 4

Generate a list of all the songs (mp3) you have and put it in punjabi.lst in punjabi directory.

[saini@bordeaux punjabi]# find /pathToPunjabiDir/ -type f -name "*.mp3" > punjabi.lst [Enter]

My dummy punjabi.lst can be accessed here.

The configuration part of shoutcast server with audio input is complete. Now we have to run the server so that we can listen to music.

Go to the shoutcast directory and run the sc_serv first and then run the sc_trans_linux. Here is way to do that.

1 2	[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# ./sc_serv punjabi/sc_serv_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null & [saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# ./sc_trans_linux punjabi/sc_trans_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

Now your system is a shoutcast server. Any client can use mplayer, vlc, amarok or any other multimedia player that support streaming media to listen to the music being played on your server.

1 2	[saini@bordeaux saini]# mplayer http://yourIp:port [Enter] [saini@bordeaux saini]# mplayer http://localhost:8300 [Enter] # (in the above case).

If you want shoutcast to start every time your system boots. Put these lines in /etc/rc.local

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/home/saini/shoutcast/sc_serv /home/saini/shoutcast/punjabi/sc_serv_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &
/home/saini/shoutcast/sc_trans_linux /home/saini/shoutcast/punjabi/sc_trans_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

Shoutcast is fun and its more fun when everyone listens to what you are listening to 🙂

November 12, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, HowTo, Installation, LAMP, PHP, Wordpress

How To: Install WordPress on LAMP

Recently, I bought this domain name and shifted all my blogs here on saini.co.in . As I chose wordpress as the software to blog. So, just installed it and started using it right away. Installing wordpress is one of the most easiest things that you’ll ever do. Below is a step by step howto on installing wordpress and importing your current wordpress.com blog to your domain.

Step 1:

Download latest version of wordpress from here.

Step 2:

Go to the directory where you want to install it. Here I am taking gofedora.com as reference website where we want to install the wordpress and ~/htdocs/ as the web directory for gofedora.com . Modify above details in accordance with your needs.

If you downloaded .zip format then do this

[saini@bordeaux htdocs]# unzip wordpress-X.X.X.zip [Enter]

If you download .tar.gz format then do this

[saini@bordeaux htdocs]# tar -xvzf wordpress-X.X.X.zip [Enter]

Step 3:

[saini@bordeaux htdocs]# mv wordpress/* . [Enter]

If you visit http://gofedora.com now, you’ll get an error as shown in the image below …

Step 4:

Open the file wp-config-sample.php in your favorite text editor and edit the things shown in the image below.

Enter your database name, database username, database password and the table prefix for the wordpress database. e.g. one can use linux_ as table prefix. If you have the database on the same system, then there is no need to change the database host otherwise change it accordingly.

Step 5:

[saini@bordeaux htdocs]# mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php [Enter]

Step 6:

Go to http://gofedora.com/ and you’ll see a welcome page if you gave correct setting in wp-config.php . The page is like in the image below.

Fill the settings properly. Anyway you can change them afterwards. Fill the blog name and email id and click Install WordPress.

Step 7:

You’ll see a web-page like in the image below, if everything goes fine. Copy the password on the page and paste at some temporary place and click login.

Step 8:

You’ll be presented with a login page. Enter ‘admin’ as username and the password you copied from the previous page.

Step 9:

Congratulations ! You have successfully installed wordpress and created the admin login. Go to Users -> Authors & Users and click Edit in the row with admin as author. Change the password on the next page as below ..

This is all you have to do to install wordpress. Below is how you import wordpress.com blog to your domain.

Step 1:

Login as admin on you wordpress.com blog and go to Manage -> Export and download the exported blog to your system as show in the image below.

Step 2:

Create directory named ‘uploads’ in ~/htdocs/wp-content/ and change permissions to 777 so that wordpress can upload your blog there.

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[saini@bordeaux htdocs]# cd wp-content [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux wp-content]# mkdir uploads [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux wp-content]# chmod 777 uploads [Enter]

Step 3:

Go to Manager -> Import section and click on ‘wordpress’ . Upload the .xml file that you download from your wordpress.com blog in step 1 on the page as shown in the image below ..

Step 4:

If uploading goes successful, then all your posts will be imported from your wordpress.com blog and will be stored in the database as gofedora.com . Now it will ask you for the author of the new blog posts at gofedora.com as show below …

Step 5:

Change the permission of uploads back to normal as show below

[saini@bordeaux wp-content]# chmod 744 uploads [Enter]

Everything is done. Now you blog has been shifted to your domain and you can go on with the new blog. But keep in the mind the the images you used in wordpress.com blog posts are not stored in your local database, they are still linked back to your wordpress.com blog images. So, don’t just go and delete your wordpress.com blog. That would be fatal.

The steps for installing wordpress on a windows system are the same, but you have to use some notepads and whatever to edit files 🙂

Enjoy blogging at your domain. Hope the above howto helps.

November 10, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Compiz, Drivers, Eclipse, Fedora, GNOME, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA, Remote Desktop, Review, Screenshot, Sound, Tips - Tricks, VNC Server, VNC Viewer, Wireless, Xorg

Review: Fedora 8 – Warewolf

I installed Fedora 8 32 bit from a leaky mirror on Nov 7th and I just had a very bad experience with it. Nothing seemed to be working. But I can’t accept that. As I am a hardcore fan of Fedora, I just can’t sit back and say “ah, Fedora 8 sucks, i am not gonna use that”. I fetched Fedora 8 x86_64 (64bit) from a mirror yesterday, after the release. I installed it and everything worked out of the box. I can’t believe that I wrote something wrong about Fedora. How could I do that ?

First of all, I would like to say that The artwork team at Fedora has done a very fantastic job. The graphics right from installation up to the desktop are just awesome. Especially the default background is very nice. Here is shot of the default Gnome Fedora 8 Desktop.

Right after the installation, I fetched the nVidia proprietary drivers from here and installed them. And those were installed successfully without giving any errors or problems. [ If you want a complete howto on installing nvidia drivers. Its here.] A reboot after the installation and compiz worked out of the box. Here is shot.

Ok, graphics done. What now ? I just realized that there is no mp3 support. No worries. Codeina aka Codec Buddy is there. Just issue ‘codeina’ command from command line and a window like this will appear.

Check Fluendo MP3 Audio Decoder and click get selected, accept the license conditions and you’ll see that codeina is fetching the codecs. [If codeina does not fetch codecs or give error like timeout or some other network error. Try checking your proxy setting in System -> Preferences -> Internet And Network -> Network Proxy . It may help. ]

Ok. Now, codeina has done the job. Lets play some mp3. Note that amarok still can’t play mp3 files because it uses xine engine. So, you can choose either Totem or Rhythmbox to play your mp3 files. Here is a shot of Rhythmbox. So, Codeina also works out of the box.

Another major improvement in Fedora 8 in audio section is introduction or pulseaudio. Issue command ‘pulseaudio’ from command line and you will see a window like this.

You can control the sound stream from different players or whatever. You can mute individual streams and can even set the default devices for certain streams through this fantastic gui.

Another good thing in Fedora 8 is Eclipse. Eclipse 3.3 is back in Fedora 8. They excluded it from Fedora 7. I am happy to see it back here in Fedora 8.

Another utility that I found helpful is Remote Desktop utility. Launch System -> Preferences -> Internet And Network -> Remote Desktop and you’ll see a window like this.

Set your preferences and now you can browse your desktop from anywhere using ‘vncviewer <yourIP>:0’. Though one call always configure vncserver to get that done. But for newbies it’ll be a great help.

Also, My wireless lan card, Ralink rt2500 WNC-0301 is detected successfully in Fedora 8. But I am not sure whether it works or not, because there is not wifi environment in my lab and I can’t check it without that. [ Anyway if your wifi card doesn’t work, here is a howto on installing Ralink rt2500 WNC-0301 using drivers from serailmonkey. ]

Another improvement is that cursor was never invisible. Up to Fedora 7, I suffered cursor invisible problem on first login. [ If you are facing the same problem, add line

Options "HWCursor" off

to “screens” section in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and issue ‘gdm-restart’ command. It’ll be fine afterwards. ]

The boot time has also improved significantly. My Fedora 8 boots in just 45 seconds.

These Fedora 8 Screenshots and other related to Fedora 8 can be reached here.