Watching TV on my desktop. What do I want to be able to do?

• Watch all Freeview (DVB-T) channels.
• Be able to pause, rewind, and forward to live TV.
• Schedule programs to record.
• See the TV listings for the channels I have.
• Fullscreen or windowed viewing.

I was able to do all of the above using EyeTV on my Mac. However, I’m trying to make the complete switch to Ubuntu, and an open-source alternative is needed.

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It was very frustrating installing a fresh WordPress on my Mac and finding that the permalinks didn’t work. Turns out the default Apache settings for personal web sharing on OS X disable .htaccess overriding.

sudo mate /etc/httpd/users/yourusername.conf

Now you’ll want to enable Apache to follow symbolic links:

Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks

And to allow .htaccess overriding:

AllowOverride All

The file should then look like:

<Directory "/Users/yourusername/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Now in System Preferences, stop and start ‘Personal Web Sharing’. Things should work perfectly now.

I just bought a new Linksys router for my home network and wanted to set-up my Ubuntu Web Server with a static IP address so that I could port-forward a few things. Trouble is, with only the command line it’s a little tricky to figure out exactly how to do it. Following are the steps I used.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Inside the file, you’ll see the following line:

iface eth1 inet dhcp

We want to switch from dhcp to a static IP address. Comment or delete that line, and then add the following to the file:

iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.200
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

1. This line states we want to use a static IP address.
2. The static IP address you want to use.
3. The subnet mask.
4. This is the IP address of my router which connects to the Internet.

Save the file and then restart the network settings:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Job done.

A very handy command to see the total size of a directory on a Unix-based computer.

du -sh *

This will show the total size of files and directories in your current working directory. The s flag means to show a summary–which basically just shows the top level directory only, instead of the contents of each and every folder down the file system hierarchy. The h flag shows a human readable file size.

For my home directory, I get the following output:

404M    Desktop
 30G    Documents
6.0G    Library
 32G    Movies
 18G    Music
 11G    Pictures
2.7G    Projects
 16K    Public
166M    Sites

I’ve made a brand new spare PC that I’m hoping my parents can use in their spare room/study. I refuse to install Windows, but as everyone knows, I’m a keen Ubuntu fan.

My younger brother donated me his “old” ATI Radeon X800 GTO graphics card to use in it (I want to eventually get XGL + Compiz set-up on it for all the neat eye candy). Thing is, Ubuntu and the card don’t play nice straight away. Here’s how I got them to dance.

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This howto assumes you’ve already followed my Building Apache 2.2 from source article.

Now we’re going to install Subversion 1.4.0 from source so that it can be access via Apache with authentication.

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Two reasons you might want to do this.

1. You want to host a Rails application using Mongrel via Apache and mod_proxy_balancer.
2. You’re studying in a Website administration module for your 3rd year Software Engineering degree :)

Seriously though, if you don’t want to use mod_proxy_balancer, just do a normal apt-get install of Apache 2 and you’ll be fine. mod_proxy_balancer is only available for Apache 2.2, and currently, that’s not available from the Ubuntu repositories via apt-get.

This article only covers installing Apache 2.2 – I’ll write another one for getting Subversion and PHP working shortly afterwards.

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