Linux

I wanted to play audio on my home computer using a daemon. The best things about that are that you don't need a graphical interface and you can easily control it remotely. I was a bit struggeling with the xmms2d to make this all work, when I discovered that the mpd project was way ahead of xmms2. I also have a Nokia 770, and I looking around a bit I found this description on how to setup the whole thing.

In Ubuntu there is the mpd package, which you just have to apt-get. But I couldn't find phpMp in the repository. I always have apache2 running with php, and downloading, installing and configuring phpMp was really easy. In /etc/mpd.conf you can change the location of where your mp3 files are (mpd doesn't play wma but I don't keep them around anyway). If you go there with your browser, you're ready to run the update of your music database, which will be filled with the files in your music directory. Then all you music will appear in your browser. With a Nokia 770 go to the webapp and play your music.

To control mpd from you desktop or laptop, there is the gnome client gmpc, also in Ubuntu's repository. It's a very basic player which doesn't have a lot of features. But enough for my needs.

The Ubuntu repository also contains the command line client mpc. I installed that one to run a crontab to wake me up every morning on weekdays. Just make it run mpc play. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to do a fade in with the volume. The alarm plugin of xmms made me wake up a lot more friendly.

Perl is not something I am good at, but shell scripts are even worse in my case. I needed to have a list of files renamed to lower case and it took me more than half an hour to come up with this:

find . | perl -n -e 'chomp; $a=$_; $_ =~ tr/[A-Z]/[a-z]/; rename($a,$_);'

Why would you need Java when you can do it this easily in Perl?

Yesterday I learned that it's not possible to install WebSphere Portal 6 on a Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 box. But today I managed to get around it! I found out that the failure with the creation of the profile was due to a malfunctioning wsadmin.sh. In the logs it said that it gave a syntax error, and that's really strange, because that would mean somebody at IBM has been writing bad code.

It turns out that that is exactly the case. The people at Ubuntu have changed the default link of sh. In Ubuntu Edgy it doesn't point to bash anymore, but it points to dash. That means that code written specifically for bash doesn't run correctly anymore with the #/bin/sh prefix. IBM assumes that sh is always bash, so IBM does not follow the standards.

There are several ways to solve this, but the easiest way to do it is to change the sh link back to bash:
rm /bin/sh ; ln -s /bin/sh /bin/bash

And then install all the WebSphere stuff you want. After that you can leave it like that (shouldn't give any problems) or you can make sh point to dash again. In that case also run this:
sudo perl -p -i -e "s/\/sh$/\/bash/" /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/bin/*
sudo perl -p -i -e "s/\/sh$/\/bash/" /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/bin/*

But then keep in mind that every time you install fixes or fixpacks, you have to have sh point to bash again during the install. And you have to change the script files again too.

Update: part 3

Yesterday seemed to me the perfect day to install IBM's new Rational Software Architect 7 on my Kubuntu Edgy laptop. Version 7 had been out for a couple of weeks (I'm not sure when it came out exactly though). The fact that I had nothing to do anyway and the prospect of a boring long christmas made me switch on IBM's very own download manager to download IBM's bloated Eclipse variant. The download of RSA 7 was larger than 5GB(!), so I was in for a long wait. It looks like they made a version that contains every single file for every single platform. Nice, I don't have to download it again when I want to put it on my Windows box.

After the wait the installation went like a breeze. No problems whatsoever. I clicked through it quickly, ran a good old WPS 5.1 server configuration, and everything seemed fine. Oh no.. and christmas hadn't even started yet! What was I to do?

Well.. Portal 6 was on the shelf too. I already installed the beta without any (installation) problems a few months ago, so I was fairly optimistic about this one. Although WPS 5.1 did give me some problems after the updrage from Dapper to Edgy, there weren't any problems with the WPS 6 beta. No LinuxThreads are necessary like in WPS 5.1. So with the assumption that everything would go well, I boldly removed portal 6 beta. I wouldn't be needing that one anymore, now would I?

I started the installation process this morning and got back to my newspaper and coffee. In the background I heard my laptop blowing hot air into the room and a quick look told me that it was busy installing the application server. The installation process of portal isn't quick, but at least you know what it is doing. You can do a tail on the log file which tells you exactly what it is doing, but I passed on that one. What on earth could possibly go wrong?

After the sudden stop of the hot air flow I quickly got to know that. The thing that goes wrong is the creation of the Portal profile on the application server. The message was this:

EJPIC0217E: The Portal profile creation step failed with WebSphere Application Server.

Right.. after trying three times with different settings it still came with that message. Changing the .WASRegistry and the vpd.properties files didn't work either. I was seriously stuck. And that's where I am now. I know that Ubuntu is not supported by IBM but that hasn't stopped me in the past. Today I will install WAS 6 that comes with the RSA installation and I'll try to put WPS on that one. Maybe that'll work.

Update: part 2