The reason I moved to the Ubuntu VPS was that my main server was being shut down, well in reality the entire Datacenter was being shut down, and I had 24 hours notice to move.  Nice eh?  Luckily enough that worked out to 72 hours which was enough time to setup a BIND DNS, also a first for me, and make sure we didn’t have any major downtime.  We were just without email for 3 days while postfix decided to kick my ass.  all of this so that the few hundred sites on that server had a place to live while the new dedicated box I ordered was being shipped to it’s new home in Seattle.  Pretty stoked about that because I’m going from an old Quad CPU Xeon server with 2GB of ram to a dual CPU, quad core(8 cores in total) newer Xeon with 8GB of ram and twice the hard drive(and even more importantly a hard drive with all it’s sectors in tact – goodbye fschk!).  Intel® Xeon® Processor E5420 (12M Cache, 2.50 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) to be exact!  So I got word today that the new Debian server is setup just the way I wanted it(which took a few tries) and so I’m setting about to migrate off this VPS(which I’ve already killed twice in 1 week) onto a much more stable and dedicated colo box that I can play with as rough as I want

I figured that I would document the entire process as it’s bound to be a hell of a lot less eventful and painful now that we’re moving between Ubuntu and Debian, two distros that are about as similar as you can get – but different enough in their own right.

Why Debian:

Well this is a question worthy of an entire blog post but I’ll give you my opinion to be taken as that and only that.  First off Debian is more stable and that stability comes at the expense of not being on the cutting edge in terms of kernel releases.  People will argue that I could just stick to the Ubuntu LTS but I don’t know if I could trust myself with that holding back  If this wasn’t such a critical production server, responsible for 100′s of websites and dozens of businesses than I might not care as much but knowing that Debian functions on the philosophy of only releasing new updates when they are 110% good and ready and not a bloody minute before really re-assures me that a server of this size, diversity and importance is going to be as stable as possible.

Secondly, I recently switched off Ubuntu on my home machines onto Debian 6.  This is part of my solitary boycott of Ubuntu now ever since 11.10 and the release of Unity was shoved down our throats.  Ubuntu has taken the path of appealing to the lowest common demoninator with this move and that comes at the price of alienating the hard core linux users that put it on the map in the fist place.  So philosophically I refuse to use Ubuntu straight out but much to my surprise, when I switched onto Debian, I noticed gigantic performance increases in almost every area.   I read through a ton of reviews of all linux distros before making my choice and was full ready to go to Fedora, Arch or CentOS instead of going to Debian which is so similar to Ubuntu and at the end of it all of the reviews said the same thing.. Pound for pound Debian is the best linux distro in there, it’s leaner, it’s meaner and as I’ve learned it allows us hardcore users to customize our experience out the wazoo without facing the wrath of Canonical.   Like I was saying Ubuntu is much like the windows of the linux world.. As far as linux goes it’s designed to appeal to as many users as possible and this causes it’s fair share of bloat with the default install.. Debian comes stripped down and if you want extras(hell rsync isn’t even installed by default) you need to put them on.. The end result is a much more streamlined and efficient operating system, which is exactly what I want for my server.

The last reason is compatibility.  I would hands down still be with FreeBSD right now if it wasn’t for compatibility issues.. I prefer the more draconian approach BSD takes to things, it’s simpler, less flashy and just makes sense to me after 10 years of working with it.  I like going into my ports tree and doing a make install instead of apt-get install.  I like having everything in /usr/local/etc/apache22 instead of /etc/apache2.  Or I should say I’m used to it because using Ubuntu for the past week has made me udnerstand why they do it the way they do and the benefits to that(but still honestly does every single apache module need it’s own .conf file?  come on, just make a section in the httpd.conf for modules).  Anyways, there are some really really cool server applications that I just can’t run on BSD and trust you me I’ve tried.  The main one is Big Blue Button.  Probably the single coolest server application I’ve ever seen that will enable me to take my collaborative teams to a whole new level of connectivity.  Unfortunately it’s made for Ubuntu and fortunately enough for me Debian is close enough for it to work pretty flawlessly.  There is a BSD port but I cannot even begin to describe the nightmare of getting that to work properly.  Oh wait, I just remembered that I already did describe what it took to get it to work here: http://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-users/browse_thread/thread/27f89c10aae707c2/0a5ad6064ec95aa1

So all in all my need for comparability, stability and performance coupled with my need to be a little less mainstream than Ubuntu landed me with a fresh new Debian install.

Installation:

So first things first, let’s get the damn OS installed.. Or more specifically lets get a damn tech at the DC to get the damn OS installed  It’s a total barebones installation but I did specify that everything except for  /tmp should be ext4.  For some reason the techs went with ext3 on the first run around which I spanked them for and got them to reinstall it all with ext4.  Now I was running XFS on my BSD box and from what I understand overall that’s a better FS however I am not using the filesystem for anything that would need XFS at all, as amazing as it is.  That and in the last 2 years I chewed through 4 hard drives, not saying it was all XFS but I wanted something new that I haven’t destroyed.  I run ext4 at home and have been for 1-2 years now and have had no issues.  I also researched the hell out of it and for the most part it comes out well on top of ext3 in performance so I went with that.  Now I said everything but /tmp before and for that I went with tmpfs as my filesystem..  Remember, for the past 6 years I’ve been running an ever expanding and demanding empire of websites on an old server with inadequate memory and so i’ve developed this obsession with squeezing every ounce of performance out of the server(my apache res memory size on my tuned box is 29MB versus the 95MB that it is on  one of the shared servers I have some websites).  Somewhere in this obsession I stumbled across an article about running  /tmp on a tmpfs instead of ext4 and the big performance gains you see from that(assuming you have enough ram) and so here I am, going to test it out.  In the end my partition table ended up like this(It’s a 500GB drive):

Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4 ext4 392287828 341664 372019076 1% /
tmpfs tmpfs 4098612 0 4098612 0% /lib/init/rw
udev tmpfs 4093808 140 4093668 1% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 4098612 0 4098612 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 ext4 28836860 475212 26896816 2% /usr
/dev/sda3 ext4 48061320 318892 45301008 1% /var
tmpfs tmpfs 523356 0 523356 0% /tmp

It has a 12GB Swap, overkill yes I know but i’ve got room to spare.  Anyways, I won’t get into the explanation for why I went this way, it was through a lot of research and I’m sure if yuo want to verify that this is a good or bad setup you can head over to google and do some digging yourself.

Post-Install

So as I mentioned, a stock Debian install comes pretty barebones.  Not even rsync is installed.. So there’s some basic stuff we need to setup to enable us to even install any further packages and to transfer the other server over.   If your techs are a little bit on the lazy side, as it seems mine were, then you’ll notice that when you try your first apt-get install it will find the package and just sit at 0%.  Good times.. A quick trip into /etc/apt/sources.list shows that they left source as the CD-ROM disc, which now wasn’t in the drive.  So you’ll need to uncomment out the internet sources and as I noted in my previous post you are going to need to  put another repo in the sources to grab some pretty important packages.  In the end my sources.list looked like this:

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.3 _Squeeze_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20111008-14:36]/ squeeze contrib main

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze contrib non-free main

From here I ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and ugpraded my kernel to the latest version.  A quick reboot with my fingers crossed and now uname -a shows this:

Linux ded 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Nov 3 03:41:26 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Which again is a testament to how anal the Debian people are about their kernel release as the latest kernel out is .39 or higher I believe.  Now the server is ready to be used.

The first thing I install is rsync as I want to start moving everything over from the vps.  The first thing I’m moving over are all of the user accounts.  Because Debian and Ubuntu use the same hash algorithm it is possible to just copy passwd group and shadow over and it will work for the most part but problems will crop up down the road because of some small differences with group names across the two distros.  So your best bet is to go into your passwd, group and shadow files and find all of the missing user accounts and groups on your production server that haven’t yet been created on the new server.  It’s as simple as copying and pasting them onto the end of the file in question. *NOTE: You should avoid copying over any of the package specific usernames that get created upon package installation.  You’ll run into problems here and there and it’s best just to let the installer do it’s own thing*  Do all of this before hand will make it possible to just move the entire /home directory tree over and maintain all of the existing file ownerships.  Which is exactly what I’m going to get going in the background while I start installing all of the needed packages.

One of my BSD habits that I take with me is simple directory structure.. I absolutely can’t stand seeing /var/www/home/user1/site.com/public-html/ .  Who the hell needs all of that?  I’ve been running servers for 10 years and I have never in my life seen a need to distinguish public-html and private-html, what the hell is private-html anyways?  Are so many people in need of this that it really needs to be the default directory structure?  Hell no, anything in ./site.com/ is what’s going to show up on www.site.com so why not mirror that on the server if possible?  So everything on my servers just goes into /home/ which is symlinked to /usr/home to appease some programs.

So the first thing I’m doing is moving everything over from the old server’s home directory: #rsync -avpl -e “ssh” root@oldserver.com:/home/ /home/   and off she goes!  Transfering the 120 GB over should buy me enough time to setup some of the modules.

After that I’m going to go through the installed packages on the Ubuntu server and start installing them all manually according to what I actually need.  Remember that Ubuntu will install a bit of bloat that you don’t need by default, so make sure you know what everything instead of just installing it all over as you’ll no doubt be loosing some of the lean meanness of Debian that way.

Installing needed packages:

So we need to see what’s installed on the old server and install it on the new one.. There are going to be some obvious ones here like apache2, php5.3, mysql, etc etc but it’s good to make sure you’ve got a full list and don’t miss anything important.  For this we need to use the following command: dpkg –get-selections on on both servers and then compare the list, going through the ubuntu one carefully and making sure we are only moving over the necessary packages and not bringing all of it’s bloat with it.

How much bloat you ask?  Well out of a freak of coincidence the Ubuntu server has EXACTLY double the installed packages as the Debian server.  531 on the Ubuntu box and 265 on the Debian box.  Now given the Ubuntu server is a life and functioning web server and with that come a few installed packages but I can assure you that I have not installed 265 additional packages since I took ownership of that VPS.  So what I do is  I take the output from both servers, copy and paste them into two separate .txt files on my local machine here and run diff to see where the differences lie.  Time to get busy!

 *Word from the wise* :  A lesson I learned from an old sysadmin is that the first thing you should be installing when setting up a new server remotely, via ssh without KVM, is the screen package.  Take it from my experience, there will be a time when your 25 minuets into a big package installation and your connection to the server will die, or something horrible will happen forcing you to clean up and start over.  Save yourself the headache and do everything from within a screen that will ensure your procs will stay running even if you don’t.

Mysql Transfer :

So if you’re like me then you have a good number of databases, users and the like to move over.  Again because the two distros are so similar you can literally just use rsync to pull the contents of /var/lib/mysql off your old server onto the new one.. I just moved /var/lib/mysql to /var/lib/mysql_bak on the new server incase anything goes wrong and I need to reference the old files and then just pulled the mysql from the old server onto the new one.  The only issue here was that I was seeing this error on the initial startup:  ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) followed by my inability to stop the server, etc, etc.    Because of how similar they are the /etc/mysql directory was one of the only ones I didn’t overwrite frmo the old server.  I figured if anything is going to have distro specific shit in there it’s going to be mysql, so best to leave the new installs files as they are.. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case and in order to get through this error I just needed to go into the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file on the old server and copy the ‘password =’ value over.  Fixed everything from there on in.

Bind9:

As with most everything else you can pretty much copy the entire contents of /etc/bind and be fine with all of the configurations moving over.. The only area where you are going to need to do a little surgery is in regards to the IP addresses.  When moving to a new server in a new location chances are that you’re going to be assigned a whole new lot of IP addresses and you’ll need to migrate everything on over to the new ranges.  Now I suppose you could do some clever bash scripting for this with two arrays of IP addresses if you have a few dozen IP’s on the server but if you have 15 or less your probably better of just using some find and sed magic.

As with anytime you are making a ton of changes automatically let’s back up our /etc/bind/zones/ directory and then use the following command as many times as need be to replace all of the old IP’s with all of the new ones.  Keep in mind that you should be inside of /etc/bind/ before running this or it might take a while

find . -exec sed -i ‘s/old.IP.address.here/new.IP.address.here/g’ {} \;

From here it’s probably a good idea to run a cat * | more and just go through all of the files to make sure that everything is looking peachy and that you didn’t miss anything

Apache and Nginx:

Now depending on how you have your server setup you might have to do the same thing that yuo just did with bind except with apache as well.  Running find and replacing all of your old IP’s in apache conf files with new ones.  If you are like me however, apache is just acting as a proxy for nginx and in which case you need to do the same as with bind but with nginx.

Postfix / Dovecot:

I’m knocking on wood and crossing my fingers but this was incredibly painless to move over(now that it’s actually setup).  Just make sure that you carry all your certs over if you’ve setup SSL and that you’ve recreated  /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd so that everyone’s happy.  I spent a solid week setting this damn email server up the first time and I’m tickled pink to see it seamless transfer over and work right off the bat.  Again you should double check all of the conf files to make extra sure there’s nothing that needs altering and then telnet into 25, 587, 110 or 995 to test everything out

Testing:

So everything is pretty much moved over now but before you go ahead and edit your nameserver info at your registrar to point at the new server you better test the hell out of everything.  This is pretty easily accomplished by editing your /etc/hosts file(or localhost in windows) and putting in a list of domains you want to test and manually specifying what IP your computer should look for them on, essentially bypassing the nameservers.

something like 127.0.0.1 example.com would mean that instead of going to the actual IP for example.com it would look at the 127 IP instead.  This will allow you to test all of the domains you want to make sure are functioning properly.. It will allow you to check that mysql is doing what it needs to do, that php5 is happy and of course apache/nginx are working properly.  I was pleasantly surprised(shocked is a better word) that it all showed up immediately and perfectly as expected.

If you have a mail server setup you should also put your mail server address(ie: mail.example.com) in your hosts file to test that out with whatever email client you are using

I cannot express the true depth of my shock when everything came up working almost immediately.. Remember I initially moved 100+ domains and databases off of a BSD server that was having all the nameserver and email stuff managed externally onto an Ubuntu server where I was taking care of all of the nameserver and email stuff internally.  It was hell to say the least, mostly because I had to learn the nuances of the new OS and I had to re-setup everything by hand(or well with the help of some bash scripts I wrote) in terms of the domains, the email addresses, the dns entries, apache, nginx, etc etc.  This time it was as simple as copying everything over, double checking a few things and what took me 7-8 days of strife and stress now took me about 3-4 hours of work with everything basically working exactly as it should have and the troubles I did encounter were straight forward and easily solvable.  I could get used to this

So there you have it, I didn’t bother to document a lot of the setup of the individual components as there are all sorts of great guides out there written by people far more intelligent than I about that

Well I finally made the switch this week, Ubuntu 11.10 was the straw that shattered the camels back and for many reasons.  To be honest I can deal with the never ending troubleshooting that a linux power user has to deal with.  The bottom line is that this isn’t an OS designed to handle anything and everything you want to do on it straight from the get go.  If you want to do something outside the norm chances are shit’s going to break and you’re going to have to figure out why it broke and how to fix it.  None of this bothers me, infact I kind of like having to fiddle around with my OS every week as each time you learn something new and get that rush from solving a problem.  What does bother me though is when the OS distributors/manufacturer tell me how I should use their OS.  This is the MO of windows and of Apple, they have it in their heads that they know best when it comes to using their OS and in all fairness to 98% of the world they probably do.

 I do not fall in that 98% however.

I feel that my OS is the direct link, an extension of myself, with which I connect and interact with the digital world, the world in which I live the majority of my life.  I feel that the distinct way which I work and exist digitally requires an equally distinct system of interaction.  It doesn’t have to be radically different but it needs to be flexible in it’s nature to evolve with me as my philosophies and ideas on digital interactions evolve.  Just as importantly it needs to be flexible enough for those truly dedicated and gifted hackers to really rip it apart and remake it in a new and unheard of way so that less sophisticated users, like myself, can see these new hacks and try them out.  Liking some, discarding others, eventually constructing a truly unique combination of modifications from which a personal OS starts to emerge.  One which no one else truly has because it is tailored(and created) specifically to my own digital persona and habits.  Herein lies the true power of linux and of course lies the reason why 98%+ of users don’t use it because to get it to the point where it is purring at peak efficiency, or even just plain working right takes a lot work, a lot of patience and a lot of technical understanding.  The trade off after all these months or years of agony is that you end up with an OS that is completely geared towards being the most efficient interface possible for you(at the time).  Truly I feel that I am orders of magnitude more creative, more organized and more efficient in linux than I ever was in windows, I feel like I was shackled to a 100lbs weight and now I can fly, completely unhindered in what I can accomplish.  The downside of course for the OS people is that only 2% of the population has the wherewithal to get to this point and this is a hurdle that Ubuntu plans on crossing – at the expense of the users that put them where they are.

With Ubuntu 11.10 came a new philosophy.  The philosophy of Microsoft and Apple that I’ve just described above which states that they know best about how you should be using their interface.. They know best about how you should be interacting with your computer and the internet, and now Ubuntu knows best with 11.10 as they shoved their ideas down our throats.  Ubuntu 11.10 came with something called Unity which is the main GUI engine powering all the pointing and clicking that you are doing.. It’s a wonderful front-end designed with PC’s and tablets in mind that is supposed to be a step forward in the way people interact with computers.  Well it may be a step forward when compared to the defacto out-of-the-box Ubuntu setu but it’s a massive step backwards for those of us whose OS’s have evolved away from that all on their own with things like conky, awn/docky, compiz, emerald, screenlets, etc etc.  With these tools we have completely revamped our interface.  We have shed the clumsy panels, we have intergrated info tools into our desktop, our OS exists in 3D space to be rotated and spun around, hell we even have entire marine ecosystems living inside of our desktop cubes to keep our creativity and inspiration bubbling.  Our OS’s have evolved incrementally with painstaking hours and days of research about how to enhance our user experience.  Painstaking I say because of course nothing works the way it should out of the box, nor does anything stay static after an install.  Hours and days have been spent overcoming conflicts with compiz, hell every one of those things mentioned above didn’t really work with a simple apt-get, they all required minute adjustments and troubleshooting just to function.  On top of that they’ve all been tweaked and changed to no end after they finally started working.  My awn docks have radically evolved and improved since I first installed them, my UI looks different, i’ve discovered the best locations and uses for screenlets after trying them all out for long periods of time.  Huge swathes of my life have been spent tailoring my OS experience specifically to exactly what I needed to function at peak efficiency and to seamlessly integrate my physical life with my digital life.  And this just touches on the front end portion of my OS, there are hundreds of scripts running throughout the day, dozens of other custom scripts that I access through keyboard shortcuts, a whole new command structure for doing daily tasks the way I find them most efficient.

Where my OS has evolved to

And then here comes Ubuntu 11.10.  What do they do?  They bring in Unity which just royalty fucks over every single corner of what i just described above.  Worse yet they give you this bullshit Unity 2D option which simply removes the fancy addons but still leaves all the conflicts inplace so now not only do you not have all the new stuff that Conical gave us in lieu of the old stuff but now you don’t even have the old stuff.  So what do you do now?  Well you’re not going to accept unity because while it may be a step forward when compared to the old factory standard default ubuntu install it is a huge step backwards when compared to a sophisticated, highly tuned, highly customized and frankly highly pimped out Ubuntu install.  So what do you do? Well you research to high hell how to get this filth off your machine and lo and behold you find just enough material from similarly irate people on how to completely remove Unity all together and put Gnome back on there.  So you do this and you get your OS kind of back to the way it was, but only after days of resolving all these new conflicts and even when it’s gotten to this duct taped half-functioning stage it still performs like shit.  All sorts of system critical errors are now occuring like windows just not redrawing until you min/max them.  The vast majority of compiz doesn’t work or doesn’t work properly at all.  Your frame rate sits comfortably around 3-5 frames per second even when nothing is running.  In short Duke, it’s a shitstorm.   A clusterfuck of pieced together elements of Ubuntu 10.10 that don’t play well at all with 11.10.  It’s an Frankenstein like abomination and you get to a point where you just have to throw in the towel because now you’re working less efficiently than ever and you’re spending the majority of your time fixing errors that you know wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for all the garbage that went into 11.10.

Introducing: Debian

As most of you probably know Ubuntu is basically built entirely on the back of Debian.  From what I understand the majority of all the nice wonderful things yuo see in Ubunty come from the blood, sweat and tears of the Debian crew.  I’ve known this for years but Ubuntu was just the OS I picked up first after the fall of M$ and I just stuck with it.  So I knew that switching to Debian would give me almost an identical experience to Ubuntu which appealed to me however seeing as i was moving away from the mainstream of linux distro’s and was no doubt going to have to spend a good week getting whatever distro(even debian) to work properly I wanted to keep my mind open to whatever the best Distro out there was, and switch to that no matter what it was or how different it was.   So I googled around and read as many reviews as possible of the major players in the linux world before making my decision.  In the end it was actually this article: http://tuxradar.com/content/best-distro-2011 that caught my eye, mainly because it was the most up to date one that I could find and much to my delight and surprise Debian was on the top of that list. The review coming frmo tuxradar.com carried a lot of weight.

My mind was made up, I went out to grab the ISO of the latest Debian release only to find out that it isn’t contained in 1 ISO file but 5 or 6.  I mean we’re talking over 25GB for an OS install here… I started getting cold feet.  But there was no way this could be true, I knew linux better to believe my first reaction so after some googling I discovered that the OS only needs the first DVD to install, hell you can just grab the first CD iso and it will install, the rest are just all of the additional modules and applications to install incase you don’t have a net connection.  Back on the bandwagon I downloaded it and when the mood was right, when my workload was just light enough that it could do without me for a full day or two I booted off that DVD and created a new partition just for Debian.  A minimalist install later, with glee and excitement I booted into Debian for the first time, so far so good.

Issue #1: Shitty framerates

After installing compiz and rotating my beloved desktop cube for the first time my framerate dropped to 5fps or less, it was crushing.  I played and played enough to realize that even though Debian was telling me that it was, it actually wasn’t doing any hardware acceleration.  The fglrx drivers, while they said they were loaded, weren’t loaded or weren’t doing a damned thing.  This took a lot of work to figure out, resulting in black blank screens and the like.  Now with every Ubuntu upgrade I did up until 10.10 I had this same problem and that was that I had to recompile my ATI proprietary drivers with the new kernel.  I did that with Debian but still no go.  In the end it seemed like I just needed to hack away at it’s resolve long enough to get it to cave.  I honestly wish I could tell you what I did but I just kept on uninstalling absolutely all ATI Debian drivers and then downloading the proprietary drivers from www.ati.com and installing those from the CLI.  Eventually that worked and I was blown away by the result.

Why does my desktop smell like fish?

Debian was running faster than Ubuntu had EVER run.  My cube was rotating so smoothly it felt like it was on ice.  Hell I even installed a new compiz plugin which I NEVER saw in Ubuntu(probably because it was experimental and ubuntu didn’t want me taking a chance with it) that’s called ‘Cube Atlantis’.  It’s crude but man is it badass, sooo badass.  What it does is it fills your desktop cube up with water and creates and ecosystem, which you can customize in there.  coral, fish, whales, dolphins whatever you want, they live in your cube all the time.  Anyways, my point is is that even with this being rendered and tracked all the time I was still getting better performance than with Ubuntu.  At this point I was completely sold!

Issue #2: No sound in any internet browser

I could talk about this here, but it is worth of it’s own blog post: http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2011/11/19/no-sound-in-any-browser-with-debian-squeeze-64bit/

Issue #3: Jacksense doesn’t work

Same as #2: http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2011/11/19/switch-from-ubuntu-to-debian-and-now-jacksense-doesnt-work/

So where am I now?

Well as of writing this blog post Debian is now working as bug free as Ubuntu 10.04 was working, and is working about 30-40% more efficiently in terms of performance.  In short this is a complete dream come true and while I took me a couple of weeks to get it here, mainly because I was too busy with work to tackle the sound issues, I am so so SO happy to have made the switch.  Debian is very clearly a superior distro for the linux power user, it out performs Ubuntu hands down and most importantly the people at Debian have no intention of telling me how to use my OS, how to interact with my digital world.  They are giving me the freedom, which also comes with some headache as mentioned above, to use Debian as I see fit.  Without the shackles on my OS it is free to evolve with me for hopefully years to come and when I’m sitting down to write another OS related article 1 year from now the chances are that my OS will once again have evolved with me to the next level, increasing the fluidity and effortlessness with which I interact with the internet and my machine.

My kinda girl

This is something that you can’t say with Windows, with Mac OSX and now unfortunately to some degree with Ubuntu.  Those OS’s are in the hands of their authors to evolve as they see fit and to trap you in a box of their choosing. Fuck that, in the words of the great Kara Thrace:

“Outside the box is where I live”

The main issues I have to deal with right off the bat are:

• Compiz not loading when lightdm starts.  This results in the nice things like my desktop cube not working to more glaring problems like transparency on icons not working.
• So the first one’s easy enough..  You just need to add a the command ‘compize –replace’ to the startup programs.  Done and done
• Top and bottom panels are back in full force and ugly as shit.  I’m missing my system menu, it looks like it’s been jammed into Applications/System Tools/System Settings, loading up like a classic windows control panel.  If I wanted a windows control panel I’d bloody well use windows

• The solution I came to with this was to remove gnome-panel all together and just have awn handle everything.  it has a great plugin for main menu and places to replace the menus in the top panel and then clocks and running apps to replace the system tray.  It already replaces the task bar at the bottom on it’s own so there’s nothing to worry about that.
• To prevent gnome-panel from loading all together just go into /usr/bin/ and chmod gnome-panel to 444 (You’ll need to do this as root or with sudo). and viola your screen is so much cleaner
• What I chose to do next was to add 2 additional docks(bringing my grand total up to 3) placing 1 in the top left, one in the top right and leaving the main on centered on the bottom.  The top left one has my Cairo Menu and the top left contains all the goodies I’d want in a system tray and then some.. they are all tucked away so I never need to have screen space occupied by a useless panel anymore.  There were a couple extra applets I had to install which required the instructions from here

• When rotating the 3D Cube the screen redraws/flickers
• No way around this, compiz 3D cude is only operating at 80% at the moment
• Tried installing all proposed/bleeding edge updates but there was no fix
• I’m unable to move windows from one desktop/workspace to another via ctrl-alt-super left or right

• So pretty mega annoying little bug is that when you move a window with ctrl-alt-super to a different workspace and let go, it just goes right back where it came from.  I discovered a crude work around where if you move the window and then just let go of shift and rotate the cube again(without moving the window this time) the window will stay in place.
• Tried installing all proposed/bleeding edge updates but there was no fix

• Lastly the window shades doesn’t really work..  It will rollup just fine but it leaves this ugly outline where it was.  Ugh. Found a forum thread saying that instaling the proposed updates would fix this but it doesn’t so don’t waste your time or risk one of those messing up your system even more.

1. For this I need to boot into recovery mode but upon doing so I notice the lack of a netroot option.  To fix this you need to select the remount option which will remount your drives in r/w mode and then ask you to press enter which takes you back to the recovery Menu.  From there we can go into netroot.
2. Inside netroot I run sudo apt-get update but of course that isn’t going to work because why would my nic want to work properly at all.
• First I check that my nic is actually working as it hasn’t at all up until the 11.10 release on my Acer aspider 5253 E350 laptop.  Upon checking where the cat5 goes into the laptop I’m greeted by a green light.  So that’s good
• Let’s make sure that my laptop can see the nic by typing lspci and scanning for any reference to a nic.   Sure enough I can see my Atheros AR9287 come up as well as my Atheros AR8151 wifi nic.  But I’m not going to bother fiddling with the wireless nic just now, if I can get my ethernic nic working then I’ll be happy.
• Now I was to check if my nic is being acknowledged properly beyond just recognizing the hardware by typing ifconfig -a.  The first entry is eth0 with a good amount of info, after that is lo.  wlan0 is not coming up at all, an even better reason not to bother with it for now if I don’t have to.  There’s no IP address assigned to my nic as of yet so while the system see’s it and is talking to it it doesn’t know how to communicate with the outside work just yet.
• Let’s make sure that my dhcp client is running by typing service smbd start , which outputs a beautiful PID and now I can ping google.
• Funny enough though is that when I rebooted and tried this again I was greeted by smbd main process ended, respawning about 10 times before it told me that smbd was respawning too fast and killed it for good.  in my smbd.log file I see that it’s unable to connect to the CUPS server with a file not found.  I’m not sure if any of that is related but if I run ‘dhclient eth0′ first and then run ‘service smbd start’ second then it statrs
• Finally I can update and upgrade.  So first thing is apt-get update followed by apt-get upgrade .  Lo and behond I have 47 packages that need upgrading.. Off to the races
• This didn’t seem to fix the problem so after connecting samba I went back into the recovery console and ran dpkg – repair packages and was able to upgrade an additional 7 packages.  But of course this didn’t fix my issue.
3. The update and upgrade didn’t seen to solve anything, as a safety precaution I also removed all of my video drivers with apt-get remove fglrx* .  My boot now hangs for about 5 minutes at Stopping System V runlevel Compatability, then will hang for another 5 minutes or so at Stopping read required files in Advance and finally will hang indefinitely at Stopping anac(h)ronistic cron.  Joy!  Ctrl-C does nothing.. Ctrl-Alt-Delete will reboot but I can switch to another tty with alt-f1 which allows me some access
4. I’ve reached a bit of a deadend at this point trying to figure out why the boot is hanging so I’m going to tackle all of the error messages I’m seeing during my boot sequence.  Starting with this one:  Starting ftp server proftpd

   - mod_tls/2.4.2: compiled using OpenSSL version 'OpenSSL 1.0.0d 8 Feb 2011' headers, but linked to OpenSSL version 'OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011' library
   - Fatal: LoadModule: error loading module 'mod_vroot.c': Operation not permitted on line 74 of '/etc/proftpd/modules.

• this thread states that I need to install  but this page indicates this si more of an warning message than an error and that proftpd is running fine.  Would rather not have this message but the solution in the first mentioned thread doesn’t solve it and there’s no real solution out there for this that works for me so to hell with it.
5. So while my boot sequence seems to hang i am fully able to alt-f1 to different tty’s and while in tty1 I ran sudo service gdm start and viola! GDM starts up.  However during my next reboot the issue still remains where I have to go into tty1 and manually start gdm
6. I re-configred X to load lightdm instead of gdm and now it boots fine, although I’m forced to use lightdm instead of gdm for now.. both GDM and lightdm have the same problems on my machine so I figure the easiest route is just going to make the switch to lightdm(it does have some cool ass features in all fairness) and get it to work 100% the way I want it to(aka: bend it to my will).  To do that I re-installed lightdm: sudo apt-get install lightdm and then told it to use lightdm as the default greeter.  If you already have lightdm installed you can reconfigure it with this command: sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Two major problems with the upgrade, well besides the hideous GUI that greeted me as soon as I logged in for the first time.  A gui that literally gave me a headache at the thought of twisting my mind around it.  Still gives me the heeby jeebies thinking about it.

So the other issues were that my touchpad would just give up and stop working after about 30 seconds.. Great fun

This thread is a boon for people with this problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/549727?comments=all

In the end my solution was running these two commands:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

But there are a ton more solutions in there to try if that doesn’t work.

Lastly Emerald doesn’t seem to work with 11.04 and this has been a known issue since alpha apparently with the emerald guys still not releasing a stable fix.  There are a few solutions out there, mainly to git the latest repo of emerald but when I try to compile it I think what it tells me is that I need GTK 3.  For some reason I remember trying to install gtk3 in the past and it ending bad, so I’ll tough it out without emerald for now.

Hope that helps, if I could have stayed with 10.04 instead of upgrading I would have and if you are contemplating upgrading to natty I would strongly recommend you give it 4-6 months and save yourself the headache

Bad Laptop, Bad!

Alright so easily one of the most frustrating things about having a laptop is the god damn touch pad.  Either it’s jumping all over the place while you are typing, or misinterpreting a middle click and pasting junk everywhere or any number of other frustrating things it can do to make your life miserable.  Lucky for us Ubuntu allows you to dig around and reconfigure just about every aspect of the way it interacts with your hardware, touchpad included.

So today I sat down and put in the time to finally get my touch pad working the way I want it to work and this is what I came up with:

1.) Enabling 2 finger scrolling(the right way)

There are a few ways to handle this.  On the Ubuntu wiki they suggest that you Install the DKMS driver package provided in https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/308191 (comment #115, #116). Reboot, and go to System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad and select “Two-finger scrolling”.

But to be honest this just isn’t precise enough for me and I feel much more comfortable editing system files than going through the GUI so this is how I take care of that:

• Create a file in /etc/init.d and paste the following in:

#!/bin/bash
synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=0
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=5
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

It should be pretty self-explanatory what those values mean.  The only thing left to do with this is to make this program start at boot time.  You need to chmod this program to 755 or r+x and then you can go into system->preferences->startup applications and add it or type update-rc.d FILENAME defaults , obviously replacing FILENAME with whatever you called it.

2.) Automatically disabling the touchpad while typing(The right way)

So again you can go into system/prefs/mouse and set this to off, but once again it’s a limited shitty way to accomplish what you want accomplished here.  There is a little program called syndaemon that controls this sort of thing and it will allow you to fine tune it a lot more.  The main problem with doing it through the gui is that you can’t control the delay that occurs between finishing typing and when the touchpad is activated again.  By default it is .5 seconds or aruond there which is way to short and will result in the touch pad coming back to life and wreaking havoc on you after the smallest pause in typing.  We want this to be between 1-2 seconds and so for that we can create the following little script, again placing it in /etc/init.d that contains the following:

#!/bin/bash

syndaemon -i 2 -d

If you want to adjust that delay time just change the 2 to something smaller or larger, whatever suits your needs.  Follow the rest of the instructions above to make it a startup script and you are good to go

3.) Create a shortcut toggle to disable/enable your touchpad completely.

Now all of the above stuff is great but to be honest even then it doesn’t get the touchpad out of the way 100% of the time while you are typing and especially if you have a usb mouse plugged in you probably want to just turn the whole damned thing off to save yourself the headache.  But if the headache of turning it on and off is greater than it is causing in the first place then what’s the point right?  Well I did a little bit of simple bash scripting today and came up with the following script that will allow you to toggle the damned thing at the touch of a button.

If you don’t have a ~/.local/bin directory now then go ahead and make one, it’s a real handy place to have for custom scripts.  You are also going to have to add that path to your environment, I do that by simply putting the following in my ~/.bashrc:

PATH=”$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games”

Before we can properly make our script we need to find the ID number for your touchpad.  You do this by typing xinput -list in shell and looking for the touchpad.   It should have an ID= next to it with your ID number.  My touchpad is device #14 so I use 14 in the script below but if yours is different you will need to change that number to correspond with your touchpad’s ID.

Inside your ~/.local/bin/ directory you are going to create a file, I call mine toggle_touchpad and insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash

idNum=$(xinput -list | awk /Synaptics/ | grep -o “id=..” | sed ‘s/id=//’)
state=$(/usr/bin/xinput -list $idNum | grep “disabled”)

if [[ $state ]]
then
/usr/bin/xinput set-prop $idNum “Device Enabled” 1
else
/usr/bin/xinput set-prop $idNum “Device Enabled” 0
fi

This guy just looks up the state of your touchpad, greps it for the word disabled and if it finds that word it assumed the touchpad is off and turns it on, if it doesn’t find that word it assumes the touchpad is on and turns it off.  Easy Peasy.  Now just go to system –>Preferences –> Keyboard Shortcuts and create a shortcut for that command and you’re done.

Now, finally your touchpad nightmares should be over and you can live a laptop life without fear and dread of it destroying data, pasting garbage everywhere or moving your cursor where it doesn’t belong.

Huzzah!

But for me, stability in XP is still worth less to me than 15 seconds of instability in linux so I rebooted and performed mouth to mouth on the old girl, blowing into the exhaust port to offset the lack of a fan, keeping her cool enough to get through the boot cycle and allow the cpu to go idle and cool back down again.

Very fortunately for me in my latest foray in system customization I installed CairoDock, and very very fortunately for me Cairo dock has a CPU frequency monitor and adjuster called ‘CPU Frequency Monitor’.  All I really wanted to do was to put up a cpu temperature gauge so I could monitor the heat and keep my activity to a min but when I saw that frequency applet my heart soared.  Loaded that up and now my cpu is permanently throttled down 66% to 1Ghz, I also disabled one of my cores so I’m only running a single core on the chip, Ive turned off all graphic effects and dimmed my monitor by 60% to lessen the voltage flowing through the system and finally I removed the battery to get any heat from that away from my CPU.  In the end I’m able to work fairly uninhibited and even play a game of overgod without the CPU rising above 50 degrees.  I’m not going to be doing any Audio Visual work anytime soon and if worse comes to worse I’ll have to switch off wifi(the R405′s wifi nic is notorious for heat) and work in the coldest room in the apartment but I have a working machine for a little while longer until my long awaited AMD Fusion chips come out.

How ironic is it that this morning my power supply on my quad-core xeon server blew, frying the hard drives and forcing me to do a fresh OS install and emergency transplant the server to an older P4 2.8Ghz box and then just when I have that all squared away my CPU fan on this machine blows forcing me to underclock it by 66% and shut down one of the cores.

Oh well, even gimped and limping along you still have to marvel at what these machines can do.

So moral of the story, if your laptop starts overheating on you or worse yet your CPU dies and you can get it fixed immediately a short term solution is to do the following:

In Ubuntu:

• Go into your Bios and shutdown one of your cores to cut your heat
• Boot into linux, performing CPR to get your machine over that big boot time hurdle
• Install Cairo Dock, it’s pretty spiffy anyways
• Install the CPU Temp monitor applet to keep an eye on your heat levels
• Install the CPU Frequency Monitor and clock it down to the lowest frequency.  I tried setting it to ‘conservative’ first but it still jumped up to 1.4 ghz so I just perma throttled it to 1ghz
• Now that your system is stabalized you can go one step further and undervolt your machine and see up to 7 degrees less heat by following this guide: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UndervoltingHowto

In XP:

• Boot into XP, performing CPR if necessary to buy yourself enough time and follow this guide: http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/guides/12900-guide-undervolting-your-processor.html .  I use RMclock personally as I find it’s options the most use friendly for getting the job done

This is all assuming you are running an intel chip and don’t have the handy bios options to adjust your frequency there, if so do it there first and go as low as you can while remaining stable and then dink around with the stuff above.

Right now I’m working normally and my cpu temp is sitting at 50 degrees, compare this to the 80 degrees it was at before and I’m a happy camper.  It’s also sitting on my lap and if I were to work on the table in a colder room it sits around 40

The line in question was:

AuthorizedKeysFile      ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

and whoever set it up originally bunged it up because it needs to be

AuthorizedKeysFile      %h/.ssh/authorized_keys2

to work properly or else sshd will always refer to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 no matter who’s loggin in..

Hopefully this will help someone else save the nearly full work day of time to narrow this mother trucker down

Seeing as there are little no reviews of these kind of things specific to linux I thought I would share my thoughts on the first day with my new lover and how they react to my other lover: Ubuntu.  I’m not going to go over packaging and all the other nitty gritty details that most reviews dive into, I’ll just let you know the one thing you care about: How do they sound?

Well up until now I’ve been using  a pair of Panasonic earbuds (Best pair of ear buds I have ever owned for bass which is saying a lot as these cost me 30,000 pesos – 15$ – in Colombia and they out perform my $200.00 Bose buds sitting in my room) and the sound has been fairly impressive up until this point so it would take something pretty special to really make me say ‘wow’.  Obviously an over ear headset is going to outperform buds but the quality of those buds was so high with the music I listen to that I wasn’t sure at how much to expect.

If you want to skip the review and just get to the goods I’ll lay it out right here: If properly setup these headphones will absolutely blow your mind.  The key to remember is that the proprietary drivers that make them sound so god damn good in windows dont’ exist in linux so you have to make sure you use a program with a good equalizer and open up alsa-mixer in terminal to make sure that your levels for this USB device are cranked.  By default they will stay at 80% everytime you plug em in, leading to some disappointing results.

First Impressions

My first impressions were pure disappointment and this disappointment lasted for months and months until I went into Alsa-mixer.  For some reason I figured that it wouldn’t make a difference and avoided alsa-mixer completely, living in sadness for the lack of volume and bass I was experiencing in linux.  All that changed when I saw that by default, upon being plugged in every time, alsa-mixer set the volume levels to 80%.  You have no idea the difference that makes to deep low level bass.  I would say that the quality and depth of the bass tripled when those levels from from 80% to 100%.   So my first impressions sucked, but only because of my ignorance.  My impressions now are that these are the best god damn headphones that have ever graced my head

Volume

After levels were tweaked in Alsa mixer these things rock the house.  Combine Alsa mixer with pushing the levels over 100% in pulse manager and I think I can get more out of these in linux without proper drivers than I could in windows.  The key is to open alsa-mixer in terminal as Ubuntu wants to set these to 80% or so when they are plugged in.

The Microphone:

Truth be told one of the main reasons I’m buying this is the mic.  I haven’t done an IndustryBroadcast in months and months and month because my old usb mic kicked the bucket.  So a critical criteria was mic quality and most of the reviews had nothing but good things to say about the mic.

First thing that rocks about it is that it is detachable.  So if I’m out or whatever and don’t need it, I don’t need to have it sticking off my head.  Definitely like that.  The quality of the sound is decent.  It’s nothing amazing by any stretch, and this has nothing to do with the software as it sounds the same in windows.  My voice comes across as really damn deep, almost unnaturally so for those who are used to hearing me through my built in lappy mic, and while they claim this is a noise canceling mic, when I was in windows with the proper drivers loaded and software running I really didn’t pick up a crystal clean sound even though all windows were closed and appliances off in my surrounding area.  It was dead quiet in my apartment and i was still getting a bit of noise that I had to clean up with Audacity.  So overall the mic works decently but I wouldn’t buy these just for that.. If you’re doing podcasting you’re better off getting a proper mic and a proper pair of headphones.  If you’re gaming then these will definitely do the trick and make you sound like a manly man while you’re at it.

Size, Shape, Comfort

My ears are totally covered, I picked these up at 2pm today, and outside of a workout and dinner I’ve had them on ever since.  Totally comfortable, no pinching or anything anywhere.  Cushioning is soft and fluffy and I have lots of room inside for my ears

The Design:

See picture above, these things are badass!  I bought these because they received the best overall review of any gaming headset around and they were under $100.00 at New Egg.  I also haven’t bought a SoundBlaster product in 15 years so it felt awesome to support a company that’s done so much to change the audio landscape of the digital world.  But I am not going to lie and say I wasn’t super super stoked to have this gorgeously designed throw-back to 1980′s sci-fi on my head.  I mean if storm troopers are grooving to good tunes they are doing it with the SoundBlaster Arena on their head, and dammit so am I!  This goes for the color and general shape, but these bad boys are sleek and not bulky by any stretch.. I was actually surprised at the small size of the box when I picked them up.  I was expecting, from the pictures, that these things would be much more obtuse and large but they are the perfect size.  That and the black on a white body is brilliant.  Best looking headset on the market in my mind.

So there you have it!  If you want something that just cranks the sound out and you are using linux only I would go for a Senheisser or something else that goes into your audio jacks.

• The sound quality is good in these,  overall decent but nothign to write home about and my ears certainly aren’t going to be bleeding(in the best way possible) anytime soon.  I’m almost considering running VMware all the time just for music because these things absolutely rock in Windows.  So if you’re a windows user put your money into these bad boys, they will rock your world like nothing else.
• Mic is decent, good for gaming, decent enough for podcasting but nothing to write home about at all.  If you’re serious about casting go and buy a professional mic for $70.00 and use a cheaper $30.00 headset.  If you are gaming this is the way to go.  The mic detaches which is a huge plus
• Design rocks the cock, these are wicked looking phones that set your head apart from the rest
• Comfortable as anything else.  But phat padding around the ears with plenty of room will keep the tunes coming for hours and hours without discomfort.

Bottom Line:

Until I figured out that it was alsa-mixer limiting the levels on these things I was so against them, but now that I enjoy 100% volume levels these things deliver the best bass I have ever heard out of a headset.  I’ve traded my friend a pair of 200$ phones and they didn’t even remotely come close to touching these babies.. House music has never sounded so good

So today I stumbled upon a motherload of amazing 3D space art at http://joejesus.deviantart.com and I go completely gaga over space art.. My wallpapers are all sci-fi scenes, I just can’t get over how breath taking some of these are.  So I raided the guys stash and ended up with around 30-40 new pieces for my wallpaper slideshow and like hell was I going to enter all of these in by hand so off I went searching for a nice little script that would do it for me.  I mean come on, one of the reasons I’m a linux user because I gave up the notion that time consuming repetitive tasks were something that you had to do by hand and sure enough I found a wonderful gentlemen over at the ubuntu forums who coded up a beauty of a script that worked like a charm.  So make sure to head over to : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9578962 and give the guy a big thank you hug for saving you hours of work, and read the instructions on how to use it.

Here’s the script, just copy and paste this into a file, chmod it to 755 and you’re off to the races:

#!/bin/sh
#This script creates xml files that can act as dynamic wallpapers for Gnome by referring to multiple wallpapers
#Coded by David J Krajnik
if [ "$*" = "" ]; then
  echo "This script creates xml files that can act as dynamic backgrounds for Gnome by referring to multiple wallpapers";
  echo "Usage: mkwlppr.sh target-file.xml [duration] pic1 pic2 [pic3 .. picN]";
else
  files=$*;
  #Grab the name of the target xml file
  xmlfile=`echo $files | cut -d " " -f 1`;
  #remove the first item from $files
  files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;
  if [ "`echo $xmlfile | grep '\.xml$'`" = "" ]; then
    echo "Your target file must be an XML file";
  else
    inputIsValid="true";
    firstItem=`echo $files | cut -d " " -f 1`;
    duration="1795.0";#set the default duration
    if [ "`echo $firstItem | grep '^[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+$'`" != "" ]; then
      echo "The duration must be an integer";
      files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;
      inputIsValid="";
    elif [ "`echo $firstItem | grep '^[0-9]\+$'`" != "" ]; then
      #If the item is a number, then use it as the duration for each wallpaper image
      duration="`expr $firstItem - 5`.0";
      #remove the duration from the list of files
      files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;
    fi
    if [ "$files" = "" ]; then
      echo "You must enter image files to associate with the XML file";
    else
      for file in $files
      do
        if [ ! -f $file ]; then
	  echo "\"$file\" does not exist";
	  inputIsValid="";
        elif [ "`echo $file | sed 's/^.*\.\(jpg\|jpeg\|bmp\|png\|gif\|tif\|tiff\|jif\|jfif\|jp2\|jpx\|j2k\|j2c\)$//'`" != "" ]; then
	  echo "\"$file\" is not an image file";
	  inputIsValid="";
	fi
      done
      if [ $inputIsValid ]; then
        currDir=`pwd`;
        echo "<background>" >> $xmlfile
        echo "  <starttime>\n    <year>2009</year>\n    <month>08</month>\n    <day>04</day>" >> $xmlfile;
        echo "    <hour>00</hour>\n    <minute>00</minute>\n    <second>00</second>\n  </starttime>" >> $xmlfile;
        echo "  <!-- This animation will start at midnight. -->" >> $xmlfile;
        firstFile=`echo $files | cut -d " " -f 1`;#grab the first item
        if [ "`echo $firstFile | sed 's/\(.\).*/\1/'`" != "/" ]; then
          #If the first character in the filename is not '/', then it is a relative path and must have the current directory's path appended
          firstFile="$currDir/$firstFile";
        fi
        firstFile=`echo $firstFile | sed 's/[^/]\+\/\.\.\/\?//g'`;#Remove occurrences of ".." from the filepath
        files=`echo $files | sed 's/^\<[^ ]*\>//'`;#remove the first item
        prevFile=$firstFile;
        currFile="";
        #TODO add absolute path to the filenames
        #if $currFile =~ "^/.*" then the file needs to path appended
        echo "  <static>\n    <duration>$duration</duration>\n    <file>$firstFile</file>\n  </static>" >> $xmlfile;
        for currFile in $files
        do
          if [ "`echo $currFile | sed 's/\(.\).*/\1/'`" != "/" ]; then
            #If the first character in the filename is not '/', then it is a relative path and must have the current directory's path appended
            currFile="$currDir/$currFile";
          fi
          currFile=`echo $currFile | sed 's/[^/]\+\/\.\.\/\?//g'`;#Remove occurrences of ".." from the filepath
          echo "  <transition>\n    <duration>5.0</duration>\n    <from>$prevFile</from>\n    <to>$currFile</to>\n  </transition>" >> $xmlfile;
          echo "  <static>\n    <duration>$duration</duration>\n    <file>$currFile</file>\n  </static>" >> $xmlfile;
          prevFile=$currFile;
        done
        echo "  <transition>\n    <duration>5.0</duration>\n    <from>$currFile</from>\n    <to>$firstFile</to>\n  </transition>" >> $xmlfile;
        echo "</background>" >> $xmlfile;
      fi
    fi
  fi
fi