ps_files_cleanup_dir: opendir(/var/lib/php5) failed: Permission denied (13) in ...

By default, session data is stored in /var/lib/php5 which has its permissions set to only allow data to be deleted by it’s owner (and root). It’s like this because there is a cron script that periodically clears the session data. To prevent PHP from also trying to do this, switch off the session garbage collection in php.ini (/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) with the following:

session.gc_probability = 0

It is quite likely to be set to 1 by default. Save changes and restart apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

A couple of people in both forums and IRC have recommended the Acer Aspire Revo 3610 net-top machine as a candidate for running Boxee, so after a little research I picked on up from eBuyer at a bargain £180 for the N330 / 2GB / 250GB / Linpus configuration, delivered the next day for free. After firing it up for the first time, I spent less than 5 minutes poking around the pre-installed Linpus out of curiosity (the 250GB disk was oddly configured with a single 10GB partition), then promptly wiped it and installed Ubuntu 10.04 (x64) and the latest Boxee release.

Having previously read Liam Green-Hughes’ website, I was aware that I needed to tweak some settings to get the digital sound working, though there was a slight difference with my Revo in that I have three different S/PDIF levels within alsamixer – “S/PDIF”, “S/PDIF Default PCM” and “S/PDIF 1″. I un-muted all  of them but have yet to experiment to see what each of them does. I set my output device to “Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output” within the Ubuntu sound configuration as I want the audio to be sent to my amp over S/PDIF for decoding; after messing around with a few different combinations of settings within Boxee I was getting sound for files encoded with normal stereo sound, but silence for anything with multiple channels (DD / DTS). After a couple of hours of tinkering and research, it turns out that pulseaudio has a default sample rate of 44.1kHz and AC3 (Dolby Digital) is signed 16-bit little-endian 2-channel 48kHz PCM data, configuring pulseaudio to run with a sample rate of 48kHz appears to have fixed the issue, as I am now getting DD and DTS passed to my amp for every media file I have tested.

After playing around with the Revo / Boxee combination for about a day, it’s generally all positive; it plays back 720p/1080p content perfectly by passing the majority of the HD video decoding to the ION chip with the help of VDPAU available within GNU/Linux, the CPU is running at ~10% during all of this while managing perfectly with non-HD content too but with a little more strain on the N330. While “idling” on the Boxee home screen, one of the CPU’s threads is curiously always running at 100% load, though it is possible it is still indexing all of my media with it reporting “identifying” next to one of my sources. It has currently successfully identified 99% of my media requiring me to manually identify a handful of files, but this is perfectly acceptable considering the brilliant interface complete with covers and descriptions for all of my movies and TV shows. There is a slightly annoying wait when switching between the different areas of Boxee and sometimes a slight bit of lag when browsing through the media, but this could be down to it still indexing the content.

There appears to be plenty more to play with such as web content and applications, from what I have looked at, Flash video plays back fine in standard definition but HD Flash content is completely unwatchable – This is likely down to the lack of 64bit Linux support from Adobe. Other web based content such as the video made available within the Revision 3 application plays back perfectly, I’m pretty sure it’s HD too, but I couldn’t find an option to switch between the different encodings of their content.

There are a few small issues that don’t make this reconfiguration as straight forward as you would hope. First of all, the required script (mt-daapd-ssc.sh) is not installed along with mt-daapd, so I had to pull it from the svn repository and drop it into /usr/bin. Also, mt-daapd-ssc.sh uses wavstreamer to encode the decoded FLAC file, so if that isn’t available on your system, you’ll need to install that too. I believe it is built along with the rest of mt-daapd when building from source.

Next up, mt-daapd.conf needs to be modified to change how the transcoding is handled, the following lines need to be uncommented:

ssc_prog = /usr/bin/mt-daapd-ssc.sh
ssc_codectypes = ogg,flac,alac

The following line needs the ssc-ffmpeg.so part removed:

plugins = rsp.so,ssc-ffmpeg.so

At this stage, I thought that this was all that was required, but I still couldn’t get it working. Upon searching the Ubuntu Forums, someone else had already been through this and pointed out that one component of this set-up (I’m unsure which) requires an older version of FLAC, so a symlink had to be created.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libFLAC.so.8.2.0 /usr/lib/libFLAC.so.7

After restarting mt-daapd, iTunes was again playing FLAC files!

Our new printer, an HP 2727nf MFP, was a completely different experience. After hooking it up to the network and selecting to add a new printer within Ubuntu, it searched for printers, found the new HP, fetched and installed the required drivers and just worked! Pages are sent to the printer almost immediatly and have printed perfectly every time, so far.

Also, I set the same printer up on 6 machines in the office, 1 x Ubuntu, 2 x Xubuntu, 1 x OS X, 1 x Vista, 1 x XP Pro. By the time it was set-up on the first Windows machine I had already completed the set-up on all three Linux machines – Two thumbs up for Ubuntu and HP.

Upon booting there was no sign of the cards BIOS during POST and no sign of the disks attached to it either after booting into Ubuntu, though running lspci reported that the card was present. After poking around with a mixture of Google and the Ubuntu forums, a number of people were having issues with the card but no conclusive fix had been found.

So I head on over to the Silicon Image website to check if there are any new BIOS images available, and surprisingly there was! After downloading, and realising that the only flash tool available was DOS based along with my server not having a floppy drive or a CD drive to boot into a DOS shell with I managed to get a USB stick booting into DOS with the flash tool.

To cut the story short – Flashing the card with the latest non-RAID version of the BIOS fixed my issue. It was now displaying the BIOS upon boot, and the attached disks were visible when running lshw -C disk.

After doing a bit of research, this appears to be a fairly common issue. One suggestion that did work for me was to remove the bluez-* packages, but apparently there is the side effect of other Bluetooth devices no longer working. This isn’t an issue for me, so it’ll keep me happy until a real fix is in place.

Drop the following into your CLI if you’re having the same issue…
sudo apt-get remove bluez-cups bluez-pcmcia-support bluez-pin bluez-utils

After a quick poke around I found a package called uShare that serves media over the uPnP protocol that the Xbox 360 utilises. Before we go installing uShare, it has a few dependencies: libupnp and libdlna. First up, libupnp…

wget http://dfn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pupnp/libupnp-1.6.1.tar.bz2
tar -xf libupnp-1.6.1.tar.bz2
cd libupnp-1.6.1
./configure
make
sudo make install

…and then libdlna…

wget http://libdlna.geexbox.org/releases/libdlna-0.2.3.tar.bz2
tar -xf libdlna-0.2.3.tar.bz2
cd libdlna-0.2.3
./configure

This is where I hit my first problem:

Error, can't find libavformat

After consulting the almighty Google, it would appear libavformat is a part of ffmpeg, so I then installed ffmpeg, still no luck compiling. I also tried installing libdlna via apt-get, which looked to have worked but I later discovered it didn’t when configuring uShare.

We can serve content to the Xbox 360 with DLNA disabled so I took that route for now. Lets install uShare…

wget http://ushare.geexbox.org/releases/ushare-1.1.tar.bz2
tar -xf ushare-1.1.tar.bz2
cd ushare-1.1
nano src/mime.c

You’ll notice we just opened mime.c for editing, this is because we need to change the following line:

{ "avi",   UPNP_VIDEO, "http-get:*:video/x-msvideo:"},

To this:

{ "avi",   UPNP_VIDEO, "http-get:*:video/x-ms-wmv:"},

We have to change this line so that uShare thinks that avi containers are actually wmv as it currently assumes that the Xbox 360 only supports wmv. On with the uShare install, as you can see below we’re disabling DLNA as I couldn’t get it to install – Feel free to try it without that option, you might have managed a successful libdlna install.

./configure --disable-dlna
make
sudo make install

Now that we have uShare installed, we can launch it with the following command. I have used two options, -x enables Xbox mode, and the -c is for marking the directory we want to serve to the Xbox 360.

ushare -xc /media/tv

We can now fire up the Xbox 360, browse to the media blade, select videos, hit the X button to change the source and select uShare to start browsing your shared content.

So, can I demote my original Xbox? No, and here’s why:

• The Xbox 360 only decodes DivX that was encoded with version 5.0 or higher. I have a fair number of pre 5.0 files that I don’t fancy re-encoding.
• There is no support for subtitles (.srt) – I sometimes find myself watching films that have some foreign dialog.
• A large number of my encoded films are playing back in a small box using only a quarter of my screen – I’m not sure if it was the way I ripped and encoded the files, but I can’t pinpoint a consistent attribute in those rips that could be causing this. It doesn’t happen on the Xbox.
• There is no support for playing media compressed in archives, which I find myself doing on a regular basis. But to be fair, I wasn’t expecting to be able to do this anyway!

It’s definitely a start, but also something I can’t see Microsoft improving on any time soon. It may also be perfect for a lot of people, but just not me.

As you could imagine this was becoming rather irritating, it being my main dev-box and all! I started monitoring my system from another machine on my desk over SSH by running top. It would appear that whenever my machine ‘crashed’ Xorg would be the culprit, consuming 100% of my processors cycles.

It turns out that many people were experiencing this problem over at the Ubuntu forums and there seemed to be a trend developing where a large proportion of us were using 64-bit AMD X2 chips and the Nvidia GeForce 7 series cards, namely the 7300. My fix involved downgrading my video drivers from the proprietary 100.14.19 to the 100.14.09 release, obtainable from the Nvidia website. This fix didn’t work for everyone in the thread at UbuntuForums, but did for some.

Although IEs4Linux doesn’t fully support IE7 yet, there is enough support in their latest beta for testing code on – It pretty much loads up the IE7 rendering engine into an IE6 GUI, although there are still bugs, it should work well enough for testing.

Check out IEs4Linux here.