Mostly Harmless

One of the things that I sometimes miss on Linux is the ability of voice chat. Skype is the only IM network that supports voice call to and from Linux machines. However, with recent release of libjingle by Google, it is now possible to call my friends using Google Talk from Linux. psi-jingle branch of psi has implemented the support of libjingle. I recently installed it on my desktop running SuSE 9.3 and it works great. Here is the procedure for installation.

1. Get the sources either directly from the darcs repository

darcs get --partial --set-scripts-executable http://dev.psi-im.org/darcs/psi-jingle

or download this tarball.

2. Install all required packages (use apt)

apt install speex-devel
apt install qca-devel

3. Compile ORTP from source because the version of package in repository was not compatible.

wget http://www.linphone.org/ortp/sources/ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz; cd ortp-0.7.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make && make install

4. Install psi-jingle

cd psi-jingle
./configure --enable-jingle --with-qca-inc=/usr/lib/qt3/include/ --with-qca-lib=/usr/lib/qt3/lib/   
           --with-ortp-lib=/usr/lib/ --with-ortp-inc=/usr/include/  
           --with-glib-inc=/opt/gnome/include/glib-2.0/ --with-glib-lib=/opt/gnome/lib/ 
           --with-glibconfig-inc=/opt/gnome/lib/glib-2.0/include/
make

5. Fire up psi and login to Google Talk network and start voice chatting.

It is important to note that psi-jingle is an under development code and there may be bugs (although it works fine for me). If there are problems, check artsd is not running and mic is functioning fine.

Note: these instructions will work only with 32-bit OS. While I was able to successfully compile it on amd64, the procedure was non-trivial and required me to edit many Makefiles and source files manually.

RPMs referred here are available at http://www.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/linux/rpms/RHEL3/.

1. Install NX and FreeNX rpms

rpm -ivh --nodeps nx-1.5.0-12.el3.at.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh --nodeps freenx-0.4.4-6.el3.at.noarch.rpm

2. Setup everything

nxsetup --install --setup-nomachine-key --clean --purge

3. To start/stop use

nxserver --start
nxserver --stop
nxserver --status

Optionally create /etc/init.d/nxserver with following content

# File /etc/init.d/nxserver
# RHEL startup script
[ -f /usr/bin/nxserver ] || { echo "ERROR: /usr/bin/nxserver doesn't exist" ; exit 1; }

function start()
{
  /usr/bin/nxserver --start
  /usr/bin/nxserver --statistics start
}
function stop()
{
  /usr/bin/nxserver --stop
  /usr/bin/nxserver --statistics stop
}
function restart()
{
  /usr/bin/nxserver --restart
  /usr/bin/nxserver --statistics restart
}
case $1 in
start)
      start
   ;;
stop)
    stop
  ;;
restart)
    restart
  ;;
*)
  echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
  exit 1
  ;;
esac

and run the commands

/etc/init.d/nxserver restart
chkconfig nxserver on

To install MediaWiki on RedHat Linux Enterprise Edition, follow thw following instructions:

1. Download MediaWiki from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download and untar it

tar zxvf mediawiki-1.5.5.tar.gz
mv mediawiki-1.5.5/ /var/www/wiki

2. Check that httpd and php are installed (from the default installation). I have the following rpms installed.

httpd-2.0.52-19.ent
php-4.3.9-3.9

3. Install MySQL and php-mysql. I had following RPMs.

MySQL-shared-standard-4.1.16-1.rhel4
MySQL-server-standard-4.1.16-1.rhel4
MySQL-devel-standard-4.1.16-1.rhel4
MySQL-client-standard-4.1.16-1.rhel4
php-mysql-4.3.9-3.9

4. Create account on MySQL for media wiki. Either use mysql-administrator or phpMyAdmin or the following commands

[root@queens]# mysql -uroot -hlocalhost -p mysql
mysql> create database wikidb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wikidb.* to 'wikiuser'@'%' identified 
       by 'wikipasswd' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

5. Change the permissions of MediaWiki config directory.

chmod a+w /var/www/wiki/config/

6. Visit the wiki URl (http://yourhost/wiki/) and enter all configuration details. When finished move LocalSettings.php to parent directory and change permissions of config directory.

mv /var/www/wiki/config/LocalSettings.php /var/www/wiki/
chmod -R og-w /var/www/wiki/config/

All RPMS are available at http://www.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/linux/rpms/RHEL4/.

Recently I installed subversion with trac by compiling Apache and everything. I have written a howto explaining the process in detail.

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~nilesh/linux/subversion-howto/