LInuxSIG 2008-10-02
Last month
There was no meeting as noone with a key to the room could make it.
Note about the latest Gnome desktop: trackerd. Turn it off if you want any kind of performance.
AstriCON: Eric went to the Asterisk Conference and will be demoing the Call Center in a Box. Running on Linux.
Intro Topic: Q/A
Q: Can I run 32-bit software on my 64-bit linux?
Yes. there are compatibility libraries.
There are extensions in the CPU that really do let the CPU use the 64-bit width address system.
Q: I'm having trouble installing X Plane.
Linux cannot actually run Windows software. WINE: Wine Is Not an Emulator, is a tool that will run with *reasonable* success, most Microsoft Windows software.
You are running Ubuntu. There is a version of Wine that you can install from the Ubuntu package manager.
You still have to put the CD in the drive, mount it if it doesn't mount automatically. You will have to open a terminal window (command line) and run the installation program, install.exe or setup.exe typically, and put the word 'wine ' before the program name.
Example: TeamFortress 2 via steam. This installs on Linux. However, the hardware requirements are somewhat higher. Systems that just meet the minimum requirements will not play well.
For games there are three options:
- wine as mentioned above
- the commercial fork of wine called cedega
- the commercial version of wine from Crossover meant for playing video games
Recommended that you bring the game next month if you cannot get it running.
The CD may mount somewhere. Modern Linux systems mount CDs under the volume label. You will need to check the /media directory for this. For example:
wine /media/my\ facny\ windows\ cd/install.exe
The '\ ' are to escape the spaces for the shell.
Q: I started using Pidgin. Is it like Yahoo with rooms?
Depends on the service. Some services do require you do know the person's name.
Q: How do I fix the fonts, they are too small?
In GNOME, goto Appearance Preferences. Select the Fonts tab. Update the size of the Fonts. They will apply immediately and be saved.
Ctrl+ or Ctrl- in firefox will change the size of the font of your webpages. You can set a minimum font size and force pages to use your font sizes. This will make layout bad on webpages written by people who have their fonts on their systems set to Huge size.
Side Note: In Ubuntu 8.04 the update manager will not steal focus.
AstriCON CD
ContactQ is a queue management software application built on top of Asterisk. It is supposed to be used for a call center, particularly for in-bound call routing.
Hardware: IBM Laptop with 512 MB ram + 64 swap, P3 850 Mhz (speedstep)
To check the 'hardware' use
cat /proc/cpuinfo
and you will get the low value (throttled back)
To check the real hardware performance use
bash
while :;do:;done
in another window
cat /proc/cpuinfo
and the result should tell you the real Mhz.
For example: the laptop showed 700 Mhz. The final count was 850 Mhz.
This is due to binning of processors. When built originally all the CPUs come off the same assembly line. Tested under adverse conditions (usually low voltage and high heat) the ones that fail get put in the slow bins. As the assembly line quality improves, the number of slow processors declines and can actually cause shortages. So faster CPUs will get labeled as slower ones and sent to customers.
The CD contains CentOS, a whitebox version of RedHat's commercial RedHat Enterprise
ContactQ is the software. It will 'shoot the box' it is installed on. This is 0.9 version demo software. Buyer beware.
Note this is a netbooting Laptop. In Eric's home, booting while pressing F12 will cause the laptop to install Linux and the child-apeasement tools (games) in his post-installation.
This is a hands-free install apparently.
The ContactQ software does not want to allow a local login. The http://10.0.0.223/admin/ page shows us the login screen. What is our user name, password and domain? Per
http://contaq.org/index.php/demo and the Demo guide
http://contaq.org/index.php/User the username is superadmin, password is contactq, and leave the domain blank. The Demo's domain is admin, admin, Default.
This is Linux + something on top of it + a preinstalled application.
Checking the system:
cat /etc/lsb-release
returns nothing, so checking
cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5 (Final)
This is not a Linux Standards Base compliant system. This is a RedHat based system. RedHat is a commercial, sold, system based on free software. CentOS takes the free source packages from RedHat and removes the RedHat logos, brands, etc out. What is left is the compilation of software identical to that shipped by RedHat. RedHat ships and sells a copyrighted compilation including trademarked logos.
Whitebox was a similar attempt, but CentOS is currently the most popular free respin of RedHat of choice.
The CentOS on the ContaQ box is a pretty nice little setup:
Seperate /var of 6 Gb good size, possibly to hold spool files. Seperate /boot per the modern way of dealing with old BIOSes, 3.9 G root. This is out of a 12Gb Harddrve (23579136 blocks of 512 bytes each per cat /proc/ide/hda/capacity and is a Hitachi per cat /proc/ide/hda/model).
Eric logs in to the system as the super admin.
The web ui has the basic info pages including disk usage.
The maintainanence section includes the ability to create a backup image of the contaq system.
The Domains section lets you setup more domains. The 'Default' domain is already setup.
The Contact Plan section includes a set of regular expression patterns for extensions of which 12 are configured.
The built-in documentation is rather limited to mainly legalese. The
http://wiki.contactq.org/index.php/User page shows more information.
Eric then logged out and relogged in as the domain admin. Many more options are available, all of them pertinent to the setup of phone extensions. He set up a new user, ericsales at extension 1234.
A phone was attached at 10.0.0.214. This is a grandstream so it has a web ui at http://10.0.0.213/. The phones have downloaded firmware are are trying to register. Some of the configuration information is not obvious (Eric has gotten into the astrisk config in the ContaQ system and is setting up by hand.)
The ericsales account was added to the ACD group and the ACD queue. You cannot see a user in the membership tabs is you did not select 'enable'
Now when you dial 1001, you get the ContactQ lady telling you about the software.
The problem: we now have 1 phone. It is setup for the ericsales extension.
Eric adds an account for Eli as elisales and adds him as a SIP user. Using the apply changes on the left-hand menu, Eric applies changes to the sip system. This user is setup on the 2nd phone.
The logs are being checked. While this setup an Asterisk with SIP accounts, all the functionality is in binary external proxies.
Turns out you have to apply the system config, too. The proxy logfiles reported that the Default domain was not found.
The dashboard feature dynamically updates and reveals that agents are automatically made available on login.
We will be meeting in November.