I admin a web server that is used by some students to experiment with web technologies. In the past I ran this using Fedora Core Linux. I had cause recently to upgrade to something with longer term support so I chose CentOS 5.5 (being that I also admin a large number of Red Hat Enterprise servers I’m fairly comfortable with the Red Hat way of doing things).
Along with the normal html, php, mysql, SOAP, perl, and CGI things I was asked to add support for Ruby on Rails. I remember when I added this years ago to the Fedora Core 5 server and It was kind of painful. I believe I have it setup for CentOS 5.5 (took a lot of reading, trial and error, and web searches but finally after about 2 full work days I think I have a working system figured out). I’m posting what I did here in case someone else finds it useful.
I have to assume that you already have a working apache and UserDir setup to use public_html
Quick Notes:
Intstalled Ruby 1.8.7 from source ( initially tried 1.9.1 which I could not get to work so I downgraded with better success)
Installed RubyGems 1.3.5 from source and updated to 1.3.7
Installed sqlite-3.6.23.1 from source ( the packaged sqlite3 apparently is not recent enough to work with the sqlite3-ruby)
Installed mod_fcgid-2.3.5 from source
Used gem to install rails-2.3.6 (had issues with 2.3.8)
Used gem to install sqlite3-ruby v 1.2.5 ( there are issues apparently with 1.3.0) Read more…
In December of 2009 I bought a Chumby One from chumby.com. My main reason for purchasing it was so that I could have an easy way to play my music collection from my home server. I’ve been using my Sansa e230 or my wifes Sansa e130 connected to my home stereo via headphone jack to stereo RCA. This works but it means I have to put the music on the player and fiddle with the limited playlist abilities.
The Chumby has a headphone out and a touch screen. I have a DVD player that can play mp3 cd/dvd but I don’t want to have to turn my TV on in order to listen to music so that is why the Chumby caught my eye. Especially since the Chumby One had an intro price of $99 which was about the cheapest thing I could find that would do what I wanted and not require a Windows box.
My other plan would have been to buy a beagleboard and try to put something together myself or possible shell out a lot more cash to pick up a Touchbook from Always Innovating.
Chumby One Back and Bottom View. The back has heat vents, one USB port, one headphone jack, and a 5V power plug. Bottom has access to the battery (optional) compartment and the FM radio wire antenna.
I contacted chumby.com through their chat before purchasing and I found their chat support to be very helpful. The person suggested to me that I could use a the Squeezebox server and use the Chumbys music function to connect to the squeezebox server. He also told me that he had his Chumby connected to his receiver at home and that it sounded good. ( My other problem with the Sansa players that I was using was that the headphone jack doesn’t really provide line level output so I have to crank up the reveiver and have the player volume maxed out in order to get decent volume to listen to.)
I wasn’t too sure about this but I thought I would try out the Squeezebox server and see what it had to offer. So I set that up on my home CentOS server and then after some searching I found Squeezeslave which I installed on my eeebuntu netbook. This seemed to work pretty well so I thought I would go for the Chumby and see.
That’s all the time I have for right now. More on the Chumby One later.
While tinkering with a Viewcast Osprey-230 on one of my Linux boxes at work I found the following commands and information useful. Maybe someone else will too. The command deal mainly with getting information about my card and video and audio settings. Read more…
The goal that I am trying to achieve is to capture video from an external source and encode it into a format that will be easily authored to a DVD. I will cover the DVD authoring process in another article.
Since I am using Linux one obvious solution is to use ffmpeg which is what I am going to use.
My video source is a dvd player (via composite video out and RCA audio) and I’m capturing video with a Viewcast Osprey 230 (capturing via the composite video ) and audio via the motherboard onboard AC-97 line-in.
The Osprey 230 uses the Bt878 chipset and does have both audio and video capture capabilities but I have not yet had any success in actually capturing audio from the device so I’m using the motherboard onboard audio.
Here is the ffmpeg capture line that I am currently testing:
