Gallery, ImageMagick and Ubuntu

There is a very real possibiliy that I am the only person on the planet running this exact mix of software (isn't that always the case?). Anyway, I was getting deeply frustrated at my inability to get Gallery (a PHP / mySql photo gallery app) running on my Rackspace rented cloud server. The sorts of issues I was seeing included;

Running any task in Site Admin / System Maintenance just led to a white screen
Uploading a single image just led to a white screen
Trying to use the Java Remote / Upload applet led to a "Error: java.io.EOFException: Premature EOF encountered" message
Multiple errors about ImageMagick not being installed or configured properly

It was really quite yucky and, as is sadly so often with the [...]

September 19th, 2010 | Category: Blog, Linux, Ubuntu | Leave a comment

Installing MythTV onto a 586, using a shell script

For background, see Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

First, the basics. You need to install MythBuntu 8.10 onto your system first. The reason I stipulate this is that MythBuntu already has all the pre-requisite scaffolding and configuration to get MythTV up and running – we are just going to update the applications to be 586-friendly.

You can probably take the manual instructions (see separate post) and get MythTV compiled on anotehr distro but that will take a little experimentation.

So; you’ve got MythBuntu up and running. Now download the script from here, and make it runnable by typing;

  chmod 700 ./BuildMyth586.sh

Then execute the script by either;

  ./BuildMyth586.sh

or

  sudo ./BuildMyth586.sh

the latter may be the best bet as a number [...]

February 23rd, 2009 | Category: MythTV, Ubuntu, Via Epia | 2 comments

Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

I have four of these old 586-based 800Mhz EPIA boards lying around and I’ve been desperate to find a (funky) use for them. Eventually, I concluded that these would make great (if not super-powerful) media front-ends and, after a bit of R&D, I settled on MythTV as the app that was going to make this happen.

So I toyed around with MythTV on a faster test box and decided to install the excellent MythBuntu distro onto the EPIA and promptly got extremely confused. Whenever I started any of the Myth apps I was rewarded with… nothing! Starting the apps from the menus had zero effect so I started a shell and ran first the backend (mythbackend) and then the front end (mythfrontend) [...]

February 22nd, 2009 | Category: MythTV, Ubuntu, Via Epia | 7 comments

MythTV and some very old EPIA 800′s

A couple of years ago, I thought it would be a wizard idea to buy a bunch of Epia Mini-ITX boards, shoe-horn them into a single chassis, and then set each one to a specific task (file server, uPnP media server, mail server, apache server).Needless to say, the project never really got off the ground and I’m now running all of these applications on an HP ML110, bought for £95, which is running VMWare Server 2.0 64bit.

So, now, I’m left with four Epia boards that I must be able to find a use for, right?

The plan is… use them as dumbish media front-ends. One in the study, one in the living room and one on the kitchen, all able to surf [...]

January 11th, 2009 | Category: MythTV, Ubuntu, Via Epia | Leave a comment