Category Archives: Linux

Click to stream .m3u files in Ubuntu

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I just recently heard about CCMixter.org on FLOSS Weekly. CCMixter.org is a resource and collaborative space for musicians and remixers. They have thousands of music tracks which can be downloaded, remixed, sampled, or streamed.

I recently did a fresh install of Ubuntu on the computer I was using, and clicking on any of CCMixter’s streaming links caused a window to pop up asking me if I wanted to play the stream using Rhythmbox or “Other”. Selecting Rhythmbox popped up Rhythmbox, but it wouldn’t play the stream. Googling around a bit led me to discussions of Rhythmbox brokenness going back to 2008, so I took a different tack.

I fired up Synaptic Package Manager and installed the VLC Media Player.

Then I clicked the gear icon on Unity’s upper right menu bar, selected “About this Computer”, clicked Default Applications, and changed the default application for Music to “VLC Media Player.”

Now when I click on a link to an .m3u stream, Ubuntu sends the link to VLC, and the music starts to play.

Hope you find this useful.

Increase a VM’s available memory with virsh

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If you try to increase the amount of available memory using the obvious command it fails with an error message:

# virsh setmem <vm name> 16G --live
error: invalid argument: cannot set memory higher than max memory

The physical host in this case has 128G RAM and 32 CPUs. Plenty of capacity. To increase the maximum amount of memory that can be allocated to the VM:

# virsh setmaxmem <vm name> 16G --config

There are also –live and –current options which claim to affect the running/current domain. These options do not actually work. You have to use the –config option (changes take effect after next boot) and then power off the machine by logging in and running “poweroff”.

Once the machine is off set the actual memory with:

# virsh setmem <vm name> 16G --config

Then start the vm:

# virsh start <vm name>

Once the VM starts up it will have more memory.

Hope you find this useful.

Increase a VM’s vcpu count with virsh

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You have a virtual machine you created with virsh. You want to increase the number of vcpus in the virtual machine, so you use the obvious command:

virsh setvcpus --count 8 <vm name>

… and get the irritating error message:

error: invalid argument: requested vcpus is greater than max allowable vcpus for the domain: 8 > 2

This is virsh telling you that you can’t increase the number of vcpus to a number larger than what you started with.

Although virsh doesn’t support increasing the number of vcpus while the VM is running, you can change the number of vcpus if you’re willing to reboot the VM. All you need to to is to edit the virsh XML file with:

virsh edit <vm name>

Look for the line “vcpu placement” and increase the value to the number of vcpus that you want. I changed the vcpus from 2 to 8 here:

<vcpu placement='static'>8</vcpu>

Save the file.

Shutdown the VM:

virsh shutdown <vm name>

Wait until the VM’s status is “shut down”.

virsh list --all

Destroy the VM:

virsh destroy <vm name>

Start up the VM:

virsh start <vm name>

Once the VM starts you’ll have more vcpus running.

Hope you find this useful.

Getting rid of the “redirecting to systemctl” message in OpenSUSE

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On OpenSUSE systems running systemd all rcX scripts now redirect start, stop, reload, restart, etc. service commands to systemctl. The messages that  used to appear on STDOUT telling you that a command is successful (or not) are now logged, but are no longer displayed on STDOUT.

That I can deal with, but every call to an rcX script now generates the message “redirecting to systemctl” to STDERR. I have a lot of scripts that call rcX scripts, and they interpret STDERR messages as “something just broke”.

The culprit is the new /etc/rc.status script that ships with OpenSUSE. It spews out the “redirecting to systemctl” message to STDERR for every operation that you do. The following command will modify the script and remove this stupid message:

if ( grep -q 'redirecting to systemctl' /etc/rc.status ) ; then
    # Save a copy of the original file
    cp -p /etc/rc.status /etc/rc.status.orig;

    # OpenSUSE 12.1:
    perl -i.bak -pe 's,echo "redirecting to systemctl" >/dev/stderr,,;' /etc/rc.status;

    # OpenSUSE 12.3:
    perl -i.bak -pe 's,echo "redirecting to systemctl \${SYSTEMCTL_OPTIONS} \$1 \${_rc_base}" 1>&2,,;' /etc/rc.status;
fi

This works for OpenSUSE 12.1 and 12.3. I did not have a 12.2 system available to test with.

Hope you find this useful.

Bring Pidgin’s window into front focus when there’s an inbound IM

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I was talking to a co-worker about Pidgin not coming into focus when there’s a new, inbound IM. The Pidgin window used to come into focus, front and center, when I was running Ubuntu/Gnome and when running OpenSUSE/KDE, but when I upgraded my office desktop to Ubuntu/Unity it stopped behaving this way. My co-worker noticed the same behavior with Fedora17/Gnome. A new IM would come in, but the Pidgin IM window would remain in the background, hidden, unseen and unread.

I thought “There has to be a setting that controls this,” and there is…

  • Bring up Pidgin’s Buddy List
  • Click Tools > Plugins
  • Locate the Message Notification plugin and highlight it
  • At the bottom of the Plugins window is a Configure Plugin button. Click it
  • Under Notification Methods check both Raise conversation window and Present conversation window
  • Click Close

That’s it. The next time someone IM’s you, your Pidgin Conversation will pop up in the center of your screen, in front of all of your other windows.

Hope you find this useful.