Scott Murphy

Here is a brief introduction to Amazon's new Free Usage Tier.

This is what you get for free with EC2:
* 750 hours of Amazon EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) - enough hours to run steady state each month
* 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
* 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 1 million IOs, 1 GB snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests
* 15 GB of bandwidth in and 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services

TV Headend URL:
http://localhost:9981/

Webmin URL:
http://192.168.1.135:10000/

Customizations:

Install Samba:
sudo apt-get install samba

edit /etc/samba/smb.conf
and add a share to the bottom

[xbmc]
comment = XBMC Share
path = /media
force user = YOURUSERNAME
inherit permissions = yes
read only = Yes
guest ok = Yes

If you want a share without guest access, create a samba user:
sudo smbpasswd -L -a username
sudo smbpasswd -L -e username

Run for configuration to take effect:
sudo /etc/init.d/smb restart

Install Locate:
sudo apt-get install locate

apt-get upgrade will upgrade all packages that can be upgraded without having to remove packages that are already installed or install new ones that are not already installed (as any version).

apt-get dist-upgrade will upgrade all packages and "intelligently" install newand/or remove existing ones necessary to perform upgrade.

Direct from man apt-get:

upgrade
upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages
currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in

My USB hard drives stopped automatically mounting on my XBMC Live installation. Fortunately, I found a fix as specified here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=71492

Apparently this was due to me installing Firefox which requires some Gnome components. Those Gnome apparently components caused the problem.

I ran:
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge firefox

rebooted, and the problem was fixed.

Note:

Shell Shortcuts

Ctrl-u Clear line
Ctrl-a Move to beginning of line
Ctrl-e Move to end of line
Ctrl-r Revere search history
Ctrl-l Clear screen/scroll
Ctrl-z Takes an executing process. Stops it and gives you a job # (From here run fg to bring it back or bg to let in run in the back ground. 'jobs -l' to get process id.)

Command-k (OSX) Clear scrollback buffer/screen.

Commands
screen - Set up multiple screens within same terminal. Save/Resume shell (Very useful if you lose a remote connection)
Control+a then ? Help mode

Prerequisites:
packages gcc, zlib-devl, and perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker, and python-devel must be installed.

yum install gcc
yum install zlib-devel
yum install perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker
yum install python-devel

First, let's build git. I am assuming you want it installed for all users so let's switch to root and build it:
su -
cd /usr/local/src
wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.1.tar.gz
tar xvfh git-1.7.1.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.1
./configure
make
make install

Now, verify the install:
git --version

You should see:
git version 1.7.1

So I just went through a few hours of pain moving Trac from my old faithful FC 6 (3 years uptime!!!) to Centos 5.4. I tried to battle SELinux for a while, but finally surrendered to it as I will discuss later.

Problem 1: ImportError: No module named genshi
Problem 2: Permission denied: 'path-to-trac-projects/projectname/VERSION'

Problem 1 occurred because I installed Genshi before installing python-devel.
The installation will go fine if you don't, but
YOU HAVE TO INSTALL PYTHON-DEVEL FIRST OR YOU WILL FACE THE SAME PAIN.