Keep your SSH sessions alive

When part of your job entails connecting to many different machines over SSH it’s common to leave sessions open for later use. Unfortunately with the default settings you’ll often find yourself navigating back to a terminal window only to find it locked up or spitting out a Broken Pipe error.

Fixing this problem is simple, you just need the correct line in ssh_config to have your machine send continuous keep-alive traffic to the servers you’re connected to.

The relevant line is:

ServerAliveInterval 60

The interval is denoted in seconds, so with this exact line your box will be sending a keep-alive packet every minute to the servers it is connected to via SSH. You can of course change this to any number of seconds, if you have very low bandwidth you may consider bumping it up to 4 or 5 minutes to keep the network cost lower.

GTK2 Themes in Slackware

If you’re a Slackware user chances are you aren’t using gnome, and if you’re anything like me you might even be using a minimal window manager like Fluxbox. If the above assumptions are correct you’ve probably realized just how awful all of your GTK2 apps look ( think pidgin, claws-mail, libre-office, thunderbird, firefox, etc ).

Once upon a time I handled this problem by setting environmental variables to GTK theme files but I knew there had to be a better way.

The Better Way

The better way comes in the form of a small app called gtk-chtheme, which can be installed via slackbuild.

First go grab both the source and the slackbuild archive over at the Slackbuilds page.

Then we’ll build and install like any other Slackbuild:

tar -xvf gtk-chtheme.tar.gz
mv gtk-chtheme-* gtk-chtheme
cd gtk-chtheme
./gtk-chtheme.Slackbuild
installpkg /tmp/gtk-chtheme-*.tgz

Once installed you can run the command from the terminal to see a listing of current themes, most of which are XFCE related. I personally was looking for more choice in dark themes so I jumped over to GNOME Art and picked a few that I liked. After downloading a theme just untar it and move it over to /usr/share/themes/ and it will automatically show up in gtk-chtheme.

Chyrp + Google Analytics

After sending an email and submitting a patch to the guys over at Chyrp the Google Analytics module is now working correctly. For anyone having problems try switching to the newest version ( 0.3 ) and see if it fixes them, it should.

If you’ve installed it and your wondering why the frak your GA dashboard still says “Tracking Not Installed Last checked: Dec 31, 1969 4:00:00 PM PST” ( Or why it would ever say that for that matter ) then you’re probably on the beta UI and experiencing a known bug.
Switch to the classic UI and look for a green checkmark under the Status column, that means you’re receiving data and the tracking code has been detected.

Thanks again for the quick work on this issue to Arian over at Chyrp, analytics are finally a go!

 

Spotify on Slackware 13.37 Linux

I’m a big Spotify fan, I have a paid account over there and enjoy the service. One minor annoyance however has been running the client on my machine. I did run it in wine for a small period of time but eventually switched entirely to using it on Android. This morning I got fed up with that and decided to get the native beta working on my Slackware 13.37 laptop.

The Install

First we’re going to jump over onto the repo and grab the .deb binary for the beta:

wget http://repository.spotify.com/pool/non-free/s/spotify/spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_i386.deb

Now we’ll extract the files from that deb with the ar command:

ar vx spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_i386.deb

Now you should see a file named data.tar.gz, this contains everything we’re interested in, lets extract that:

tar -xzvf data.tar.gz

Now all we need to do is move the binary and theme files to the correct locations on the system:

cp bin/spotify /usr/bin/ cp -R share/spotify /usr/share

Yes we could just copy the entire directory to /usr, but we don’t need everything in there, this keeps it more clean.

That’s it, really, now just run the spotify command:

spotify

You’re good to go. You’ll probably notice a couple of dependency errors on the execution of the command but nothing that will stop it from launching. Enjoy.

Thoughts on Chyrp: Part 2

Analytic Woes

On my second day of using Chyrp I’ve decided to spend some time getting analytics set up for this site. At first glance there seems to be two options as extensions go: Google Analytics and Clicky.

My first attempt was with GA, I got an account and installed the extension just fine. However when I then tried to go to my admin page to enable and set it up, I was met with a nasty error 500. This as it turns out was due to the use of some tabs in the comments in info.yaml, I fixed this and my admin pages started showing up again. Past that enabling the extension seemed to work, but no GA code was getting generated on my site and stats were not showing up in the GA panel. I emailed the dev with the tab issue but have yet to pursue that further.

I then moved on to create a clicky account and install that plugin. This also had problems during the install phase, the clicky page on the admin panel did not exist. I fixed this by copying the clicky.twig file into admin/default/pages/analytics.php which is what it seemed to be looking for. After this everything worked fine and a view source even looks like it’s loading the js for clicky. I assume I’ll have to give it some time to see if the stats are working correctly, and I’d rather be using GA, but at least something is working.

I’m not a developer but I do hope to help the devs of these plugins get them functioning. I’ll add posts to this series as the issues progress further.

 

Thoughts on Chyrp: Part 1

When I set out to build this blog I made a conscious decision not to use WordPress. Not because it couldn’t do the job, rather I just wanted to see what else was out there. That is how I found Chyrp.

Chyrp is what this blog is currently run on, you can check out their project page over here : chyrp.net

I have a serious thing for lieghtweight software, and that combined with nice looks is what made me give Chyrp a try. As I’m currently two posts and an install into using it I can’t really say I have that worthwhile of a review, but I’ll try and give some initial impressions.

The Install

The install for Chyrp was pretty bog standard, and not dissimilar at all to what a longtime wordpress user expects. It involves downloading the php code in an archive, extracting it, chmoding the includes directory to allow writes to it from the web server, setting up a mysql DB, and finally running a familiar /install.php script.

This all went off without a hitch and it seems to be functioning quite well. I was mildly concerned it would biff writing to my .htaccess file as wordpress is known to do, but there were no problems there.

First Impressions

My first impression of Chyrp is that it’s very easy to navigate for a former WordPress user. I’ve been able to add themes and enable them without problems or referring to any documentation ( there’s a “themes” folder, imagine that ), and write my first two posts.

The lack of themes on the Chyrp site is a little disappointing, and I think i’ll have to go search for further options there, but what they do have looks pretty nice.

The post editor is very lightweight and doesn’t offer as much as the huge bloated WordPress one, but that is the goal here. Overall I’ve found using it to be very pleasant.

On the topic of the post editor however I am still a little lost on how to get back to a saved post for editing in the nice looking Write screen. As I type this I am stuck in a much smaller box on a tiny popup screen that shows up when Edit is clicked on a saved post. It could be a case of PEBKAC but I’m not seeing any other way around it.

Inconclusive Conclusion

These are just my initial thoughts on the software and I’ll be sticking a few more parts on this series as I try out all the options that exist for it. So far it seems like a powerful and minimal platform. I’m not going to pass any judgement on it until I spend some more time using it.

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Thoughts on Chyrp: Part 1

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