An easier solution (which works at least on bash) is to do this:

source .bash_profile

It’s something so simple and yet so powerful! I’ve heard that for KSH, you would need to simply invoke the profile file name and it would be reloaded. Will need  test this out for confirmation though :)

I had tried looking for drivers a couple of times prior to this but always failed. Finally, I found a package that supports Ricoh’s r5u87x series and the installation couldn’t be simpler. Simply get this one package and you should be set!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:r5u87x-loader/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r5u87x
sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

It should be all smooth sailing from there on out. You can go ahead and test your camera on Skype or guvcview. I do suggest you try the latter since it will allow you to play around a bit with some settings :)

Do note that every time you reboot, you would have to reload the firmware into the camera so you should probably make a bash script with the last line in it ;)

#!/bin/bash
sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

I personally put this script in an executable folder and made this script executable so that I can access it quickly from anywhere. After boot, if I do need my web cam, I simply load this script up, confirm with a “Y” and I’m all ready to use the webcam ;)

This should work on prior versions of Ubuntu as well so feel free to try this out on Ubuntu 10.04 or anything prior to that :) If the web camera on your Sony Vaio is not working, installing the r5u87x package totally seems worth the (rather minimal) effort ;)

rutorrent webUI screenshot (traffic statistics)

As of today, the primary OS on my laptop is Ubuntu and since torrenting is a good way to get open source applications (such as Eclipse), I thought I should definitely invest the time to get a decent torrent client. I’m not saying that Transmission isn’t a good client. I certainly can’t say that since I haven’t used it for more than 5 minutes. I simply lacks umph. It really doesn’t impress me as much as uTorrent does on Windows. So let’s look for an alternative client.

Using uTorrent with Wine is always a popular option, one most Windows to Linux converts happily embrace. Let’s face it, uTorrent is awesome. But I really wanted to embrace Linux which for me meant to stop using the mouse and GUI as much as possible (not that difficult for me) and getting used to native applications rather than applications via Wine. This meant no more uTorrent for torrenting and no more mIRC :( The alternative I settled for came highly recommended by quite a few users. And oh, look at that, it’s terminal based. Of course, I’m talking about rTorrent ;)

I have tried to install rTorrent before and failed. This time around, I had managed to get rTorrent to install and work fine but I couldn’t get a webUI for it to work. So I had dt walk me through the process. I’ll try to document as much of it as possible to help users going through the same issue.

If you want to see a couple of screen shots of the end result before beginning, visit the rutorrent website and check out the screen shots. The best part about it is the tracker based, per torrent and global settings along with the pretty amazing traffic plug-in which gives your multiple (group) views of your traffic statistics. It’s pretty cool ;)

The first step is to install XMLRPC-C followed by libTorrent and finally rTorrent. These steps are pretty well documented in this installation guide for XMLRPC-C and this installation guide for libTorrent and rTorrent with a few changes. I’ll note the changes in commands in bold.

Before beginning, make sure you have the following packages:

• make
• pkg-config
• sigc++-2.0-dev
• libncurses-dev
• libcurl-openssl-dev

Installing XMLRPC-C: (Note: You should have xmlrpc-c v1.07 and up for a rather bug free rutorrent)

cd /usr/src
wget http://dfn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xmlrpc-c/xmlrpc-c-1.11.00.tgz
tar xvf xmlrpc-c-1.11.00.tgz
cd xmlrpc-c-1.11.00
./configure --disable-cplusplus
make
make install

Installing libTorrent:

cd /home/rtorrent
svn co svn://rakshasa.no/libtorrent/trunk

cd /home/rtorrent/trunk
cd libtorrent
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install

cd ../rtorrent
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-xmlrpc-c
make
make install

Next, make a .rtorrent.rc file in your home folder with appropriate settings. The line in bold is what we need to set up the webUI.

# This is an example resource file for rTorrent. Copy to
# ~/.rtorrent.rc and enable/modify the options as needed. Remember to
# uncomment the options you wish to enable.

#safe_sync = yes
scgi_port = 127.0.0.1:5000
encoding_list = UTF-8

# Maximum and minimum number of peers to connect to per torrent.
min_peers = 10
max_peers = 50

# Same as above but for seeding completed torrents (-1 = same as downloading)
min_peers_seed = -1
max_peers_seed = -1

# Maximum number of simultaneous uploads per torrent.
max_uploads = 10

# Global upload and download rate in KiB. “0″ for unlimited.
#download_rate = 0
upload_rate = 20

# Default directory to save the downloaded torrents.
directory = /home/karun/share/torrents/

# Default session directory. Make sure you don’t run multiple instance
# of rtorrent using the same session directory. Perhaps using a
# relative path?
session = /home/karun/share/torrents/session

# Watch a directory for new torrents, and stop those that have been
# deleted.
schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=/home/dt/share/torrents/auto/*.torrent

# run traffic count
schedule = trafic,10,00:05:00,”execute={sh,-c,php /var/www/rtorrent/plugins/trafic/update.php& exit 0}”

# Close torrents when diskspace is low.
#schedule = low_diskspace,5,60,close_low_diskspace=100M

# Port range to use for listening.
port_range = 55556-55560

# Check hash for finished torrents. Might be usefull until the bug is
# fixed that causes lack of diskspace not to be properly reported.
check_hash = no

# Set whetever the client should try to connect to UDP trackers.
use_udp_trackers = yes

# Encryption options, set to none (default) or any combination of the following:
# allow_incoming, try_outgoing, require, require_RC4, enable_retry, prefer_plaintext
# Enable DHT support for trackerless torrents or when all trackers are down.
# May be set to “disable” (completely disable DHT), “off” (do not start DHT),
# “auto” (start and stop DHT as needed), or “on” (start DHT immediately).
# The default is “off”. For DHT to work, a session directory must be defined.
#
dht = auto

# UDP port to use for DHT.
#
dht_port = 55555

# Enable peer exchange (for torrents not marked private)
#
peer_exchange = yes

Our next step is to get the WebUI which needs the following packages

• apache2
• php5-cli
• libapache2-mod-php5
• php5-xmlrpc
• php5-sqlite
• libapache2-mod-scgi

After making sure the above packages are installed, run the following 2 commands on terminal to enable apache modules (in case they aren’t already)

• a2enmod php5
• a2enmod scgi

The next step is to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf with your favorite editor and adding the following lines

<location “/RPC2″>
SCGIHandler On
SCGIServer 127.0.0.1:5000
</location>

Once done, save and exit. You’re all ready to do get the webUI. It’s important to note that rTorrent has a plethora of WebUIs for itself. We are going to use rutorrent for this purpose. Why? Because I like the addons :P If you plan to use some other WebUI, please go ahead and ignore the rest of this tutorial. If you are installing rutorrent, follow what I say.

The first step now is to get the rutorrent files off it’s SVN. Here’s what I do.

cd /var/www
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rtorrent

Simple enough? Let’s edit the config to make sure it’s what we want. Open up config.php in /var/www/rtorrent and make sure it has

$scgi_port = 5000
$scgi_host = "127.0.0.1"

Well, we’re all done with the basic installation of WebUI. You can start using it right now! You have to make sure your apache is started and so is your rTorrent. If you don’t already know, you can start apache using sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start and rtorrent by simply typin rtorrent into your terminal though you should consider screening rtorrent which you can do by typing out screen rtorrent in your console followed by the sequence ctrl+a ctrl+d to detach from the application and keep it in the background :) To check out your hard work, go to http://localhost/rtorrent. If everything is working fine, you should get the page with no errors. The errors I got were for the scgi port and host when I didn’t have rtorrent started up in the background and when I didn’t have a sessions folder when I said it existed in the config. The former needs you to run rtorrent directly or screening it while the latter needs you to create the sessions folder as mentioned in the config file (.rtorrent.rc).

The last step for the day is getting the add-ons. These are the ones I got. None of them require any setup other than getting the files though the RSS plugin requires the curl install (sudo apt-get install curl in case you don’t already have it).

cd /var/www/rtorrent/plugins
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/choose
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/datadir
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/edit
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/_getdir
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/rss
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/seedingtime
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/throttle
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/tracklabels
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/trafic
cd trafic
gedit conf.php

Make sure you set $isAutoStart to false since .rtorrent.rc starts the plug-in up.

And you’re done. Enjoy torrenting on linux with rTorrent and ruTorrent WebUI awesomeness :)

One last thing, make sure you compile XMLRPC-C with –disable-cplusplus. The XMLRPC-C install is the one thing that kept giving me issues. The solution to this was in a bug patch that could not be found. I simply have the patched file that you are free to use if you are facing the same issue. Take this file and put it in xmlrpc-c-1.11.00\lib\curl_transport and continue the process. The patched file comes with a disclaimer of course. I am not sure what changes were made. It worked for me. Use it at your own risk.

I hope this tutorial helps you lost souls trying to get rTorrent on Ubuntu with ruTorrent as your WebUI.

Good question. I’d like to ask you a couple of things. Do you have multiple machines in your house? Do you ever feel like you should have centralized storage in your house? Do you have old hardware simply lying around the house waiting to be tinkered with? Do you like playing with your machines?

If you said yes to (most) of the above questions, having a Home Server could help you :) It can handle not only centralized storage of media and documents but also backups. Have you ever needed a file from computer x in your house and found it was shut down after being used by a family member? Well, you wouldn’t have this issue if you had a central server. People could go around switching off their machines all they want as long as you have the file you want on your Storage Server.

Lets get into it then. From now, I’ll walk you through how to make your old machine into a Network Attached Server (NAS).

1) Hardware

Any hardware is fine for a Home Server. The main purpose (at least in this case) is central file storage for all devices and this doesn’t require much resources on the processing side. Lets start with the specifications of this machine:

Now that is a pretty good processor for this purpose, I agree. You should be fine using a Celeron or even a Pentium 3.

2) Operating System

The next important question is the choice of operating systems. To answer these, you need to look at your usage of the server.

I really wanted to run Windows Server 2008 R2 but since this processor is an x86 one, I couldn’t. Windows Server 2008 gave me sluggish performance so I gave it the axe by the end of the night. I didn’t want to try Windows Server 2003 since it was quite old. More importantly, I found Windows Home Server by that time, a product made specifically for Home Servers and it was made using Windows Server 2003 as base ;)

I must say, Windows Home Server (WHS) really has the most horrible OS installer I have seen on a Windows operating system. When it was all set and done, I ran updates and everything but whilst using it, I really wasn’t impressed :( Don’t get me wrong, it is pretty darn good but India is a place where Windows Media Center doesn’t give you everything that it does in countries like the United States. It surely has potential and may be some day, it will even make its way on to my server. But for now, I can’t do so especially since I don’t have a IDE drive greater than 80GB that can run the WHS. If you read my system specs correctly, you’d have noticed this old machine has only one IDE port, which I’m reserving for at least a 1TB drive.

I started considering Linux! (yes, I said Linux). I considered using Ubuntu/Xubuntu on the machine, as an obvious choice for any Linux newbie. For those who don’t know the difference between the two, Ubuntu uses Gnome for its UI and Xubuntu uses KDE. Other than that, they are identical. If you don’t have a choice towards either, I’d tell you to go for Xubuntu if you’ve got an older machine (or just like a machine with free resources). KDE requires lesser resources and should run almost anywhere. I saw this pretty detailed article about setting up a home server on Xubuntu that you should check out if Ubuntu/Xubuntu is your OS of choice.

Then comes the final choice, FreeNAS. If you want a NAS, you can’t go wrong with FreeNAS. Weighing in at around 70 megabytes for a live CD with installer, its a really good choice. It is built on FreeBSD and I must say, its pretty extensive. Just have a look at FreeNAS’ list of features; its insane!

I’d suggest you go with FreeNAS if you just want to use your server as a NAS. It uses Samba to give you CIFS (in non technical jargon, it allows you to share files in a network like Windows does) and provides support for protocols like FTP, SSH, BitTorrent and iTunes. It can be extended to support XMBC and SlimServer. It also allows you to host a web server using lighttpd and even supports UPS, SMART, ZFS, RAID and most NICs and IDE/SATA disk controllers. If there is anything that you need to do that you can’t see on this list and can’t manage to get FreeNAS to do (I believe it will run almost anything which runs on FreeBSD) then you can move to Ubuntu/Xubuntu. You could even run ASP .NET pages off Linux web servers (haven’t tried it yet) with the limited support that Mono provides :)

Part 2 of the tutorial will have the basic setup for FreeNAS and how to get CIFS working. Subsequent parts will talk about setting up FTP, SSH, BitTorrent and Web Server with MySQL and phpmyadmin. You never know, if I can get it to execute ASP .NET as well, you guys will be the first to know! ;)