The HTC Desire is a beautiful phone that, at the time of writing, only has official firmware going up to Android 2.1 – which is a great OS, but it’s not the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Android 2.2 which comes with the ability to make your phone act as a wireless hotspot and lets you install apps to your SD card rather than the phone memory (hence, more apps can be installed) amongst other neat features – so, why not root your Desire and install newer, unofficial 2.2 stuff? Well, because you might not really need it, and you might brick your phone in the process for starters – but that’s no fun! Have at it and don’t settle for the easiest route of just making do! Sweet, sweet Android 2.2 goodness is a mere hour or two away! So let’s get it on!

Tools needed:

• A non-64 bit Windows PC, or Linux PC with a copy of VirtualBox running a non-64 bit version of Windows XP or later (Note: 64-bit Windows not recommended for reasons I’ll describe later on. 64-bit Linux host for the VirtualBox side of things is fine if that’s the route you’re taking.)
• An Internet connection
• A HTC Desire with a bootloader at version 0.80 or earlier (you can check this by turning off your phone, then turning it back on whilst holding down the Back button – the second line will say HBOOT-x.xx.xxxx – this needs be 0.80.0000 or lower for the process to work)
  
• A spare (i.e. not the one you intend using with the phone), small microSD card (512MB or larger is fine, Kingston brand preferred for reasons I’ll also go into later, but I used a Samsung brand 2GB microSD with no problems)
• A microSD to normal-SD adapter card or some other way to access the microSD card in your PC
• The ability to follow instructions to the letter.

Once you’ve got all this together, it’s just a case of following the instructions step-by-step, and in less than an hour (assuming everything goes smoothly – to figure all this out and get it working properly took me several hours!) you’ll have a de-branded, fully rooted HTC Desire running Android 2.1, but from which you can install Android 2.2, which I’ll write up in a separate article shortly.

Final Warning: It’s very, very unlikely that anything bad will happen during this rooting process, and the phone can always be restored to normal, un-rooted status should you wish – but the final responsibility for this lies with you. If you turn your phone into a paper-weight, it’s not my fault, okay? But saying that – I’ve successfully managed to root my phone and it all works perfectly, so if you follow these instructions carefully you can do the exact same thing.

Okay, enough preamble – let’s get on with the show!

Step 1 – Get the Android SDK

We’re going to be creating what’s called a Goldcard, which is just a specially modified microSD card which can be used to gain root access to the phone. Each Goldcard is unique to the phone you’re using it with, so for example, I’ve created a Goldcard for when I rooted my phone, but this card wouldn’t work to root your phone, because it has to be individually tailored to match up with the unique ID of your phone.

To get the details we need to kick off the Goldcard process, we need the Android SDK (Software Development Kit), so click this link and get the SDK for your platform of choice: Android SDK Download

Note: I did this section of the process using Windows 7 64-bit without issues.

Once that’s downloaded, extract it to a location of your choice, I’d suggest something like C:\HTC so the full path to it once extracted would be C:\HTC\android-sdk-windows.

We’ll come back to using the SDK in a little bit, but for now we need to set up some USB drivers, so lets get that out of the way.

Step 2 – Install Proper USB Drivers

You can connect to your phone as a hard drive just by connecting it to your PC, but we need to be able to access the phone in a kind of special way through the Android adb service, so to do this we need better drivers than just the standard ones.

Thankfully, these drivers come as part of the HTC Sync application, so head on over to this link and get yourself a copy of HTC Sync for Windows: HTC Sync Download

Note: I haven’t been able to find a Linux version of HTC Sync, so you really do seem to need a copy of Windows for this bit. Again, Windows 7 64-bit worked fine for me.

Once you’ve downloaded the application, double click on it to install it and follow the standard Next | Next | Finish prompts.

Step 3 – Enable USB Debugging Mode on your Phone

For this to all work properly, we need to have our phone connect via USB in USB debugging mode, which can be accomplished by simply going to Settings | Applications | Development | USB debugging

Step 4 – Get the Phone ID Details

With the Android SDK in place, HTC Sync installed, and the phone in USB debugging mode, it’s time to get the phone details, so using a USB cable connect your phone to your Windows PC – if the phone asks, it wants to connect in hard drive mode, and not Charge only or anything.

Once you’ve connected your phone, Windows will thrash around a bit setting up drivers, and bring up a window showing that you can connect to the phone which should show four ways of connecting, one of which should be ADB service or such, and all four options should have a green tick after them.

With the phone connected, on your Windows PC go to Start | Run and enter cmd followed by the enter key to open up a command-line window (if you don’t have Run enabled as a Start-menu option, just go Start | All Programs | Accessories | Command Prompt).

In the command line window, navigate to the android sdk by entering:

cd \HTC\android-windows-sdk\tools

Then, check that the SDK can see your phone by entering:

adb devices

If everything’s going according to plan, you should see the HTC detected and showing your phone’s serial number in output similar to the following (Note: This is not my real HTC serial number in case you were planning any shenanigans ):

C:\HTC\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb devices
adb server is out of date.  killing...
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached
HT076R317015    device

If you get “no devices found” type output at this stage then head on over to this post on setting up adb connectivity for assistance.

Assuming you can see your phone, the next step is to get (what I think is) the microSD card ID by typing the following at the command prompt:

C:\HTC\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb shell
$

When you see the $ prompt like above, enter the following:

cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:*/cid

You should then see output like this:

cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:*/cid
1d254d3040404030102a80143440a2a0

If you get an error at this point I’ve read that some people have changed the 1′s to 0′s to have it work, which would make the line:

$ cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc0/mmc0:*/cid

Once you’ve got the number, either write it down carefully or copy and paste it into a text file, notepad or such will do just fine.

Step 5 – Reverse the MicroSD Hex ID

We need to perform some voodoo on the number we generated on the last step, which is as simple as going to a web page, entering number or pasting it in, then clicking submit. I’d imagine they’re doing something like this – but I’ve not tested it at the time of writing – all I know is that it works!

Reverse yer number here: Soaa’s Hex Reverse for Goldcard Creation (Thanks, Soaa!)

Once you have your reversed hexadecimal ID number, copy and paste it into a text file for later use!

Step 6 – Get your Goldcard image

The Goldcard image is just a tiny (a few hundred bytes) disk image file (think like an ISO image) that contains some voodoo generated from your reversed hexadecimal ID. To get this image file emailed to you, head over to this link and fill in all the details: http://psas.revskills.de/?q=goldcard

Step 7 – Format your Spare microSD Card

In this stage we’re going to be wiping all data from the microSD card, so make sure there’s nothing on it you want to keep.

The easiest way to format the card in the correct format is via your phone, so turn it off, take off the back casing, remove the battery (so the microSD card can be inserted), put the card in the phone, then boot the phone and select Settings | SD & phone storage followed first by Unmount SD card and then Format SD card.

Once this is done, turn off your phone, remove the microSD card and place it into a microSD to normal SD card adapter or whatever adapter you’re using and plug it into your Windows PC.

Step 8 – Make your microSD card into a Goldcard

For this step we need a hex editor, the one recommended in the guides I read is called HxD and is available here: http://mh-nexus.de/en/downloads.php?product=HxD (the english version is about half-way down the page).

Once you’ve downloaded a version, extract the zip file and fire up HxD.exe, remembering to Right Click on it and choose Open as Administrator if using Vista or Windows 7.

Now, from the file menu in HxD, select Extra | Open Disk, then from the disk selection window that comes up first untick the Open Read-Only checkbox, and then click on your SD card under Physical Disk (this is important!) to select it followed by hitting the [OK] button.

In HxD, Open the SD card as a Physical Disk with Write access allowed

HxD is an editor that uses tabs, so we’re now going to open the goldcard.img file that you were emailed in Step 6 by selecting Extra | Open Disk Image and then navigating to and opening your goldcard.img file. At this point you’ll have two tabs open, and the next thing we need to do is simply copy all the data from the goldcard image directly to the SD card in a kind of raw mode, so we’re not copying files – just some data.

To do this:

1. With the goldcard.img tab selected, go to the menu and choose Edit | Select All followed by Edit | Copy
   
   

   Open a second HxD tab, this time opening the goldcard.img Disk Image

   

   From the Goldcard tab, select all the data and copy it to the clipboard like you'd copy some text

2. Click on the Removable Disk 1 tab, and look at the first column of data which says Offset(h) – what you need to do is Highlight (i.e. Select – just like you would use to copy and paste text) ALL THE DATA from offset 00000000 to 00000170, and once you’ve got all that selected (I found it easier to find the 00000170 row, go to the far right of it, then Left-click and hold and drag up and to the far left of the very first 00000000 row) go to the menu and choose Edit | Paste write.
   
   

   This is important - select the 00000000 to 00000170 region of your SD card, and then paste the goldcard data OVER this selected region (i.e. the data from the goldcard replaces whatever was in the region you've now selected on the SD card)

3. Now you can save the changes to your SD card by hitting Ctrl+S or File | Save or whatever you want and close down HxD.

At this point you want to be able to eject the SD card and put it back in without Windows moaning. If Windows pops up a message saying that the card isn’t formatted correctly and would you like to format it now, you’ve either done one of the above steps wrong, or you’ve got an incompatible microSD card. If it were me (and believe me, from the less than crystal clear instructions I read it was me – three times!), I’d reformat the card and go again, slowly and carefully. When you’ve done it right and you eject then re-insert the card without Windows saying anything other than just mounting the card, then you’ve got yourself a Goldcard! Phew!

If you have any problems, I got my set of instructions from here: http://android.modaco.com/content/general-discussion/305672/creating-a-goldcard/

Step 9 – Get the Rooted Firmware and Install It

Okay – we’re nearly there! This is the stage that I DO NOT recommend using 64-bit Windows for, as when I tried it, it simply didn’t work, and I gave myself a minor panic when my phone wouldn’t boot and was stuck halfway between flashing it – BUT this could well have been because I got the wrong firmware for the phone! I got the normal firmware, whilst the Telstra A8183 models need the alt firmware (second link below).

Either way, I ended up using Linux 64-bit (Ubuntu 10.04) to do this final bit – so just be aware that you might run into problems on 64-bit Windows, and consider using something else – probably even a Linux live CD would do the job if you don’t have multiple OS’s available to you.

So to get the rooted firmware:
- If you have a bootloader version 0.75.xxxx or below AND a current ROM of 1.15.xxx.x or below – DOWNLOAD (MediaFire) / MIRROR (ROMraid / CoBlitz) – MD5: 28dd5acc4104bb49bd4b292cc8e8437c

- ONLY if the above download is not suitable – if you have a bootloader version 0.80.xxxx or below AND a current ROM of 1.21.xxx.x or below – DOWNLOAD (MediaFire) / MIRROR (ROMraid / CoBlitz) – MD5: eb2ed5bca1334cacd70e4720f5b29960

For my phone model (Telstra branded A8183 model HTC Desire – even though it showed bootloader version 0.75.xxxx before being rooted) I went with the the second set of firmware above (r6-desire-root-alt.zip).

Now, once the firmware is downloaded:

• Unzip the file you downloaded to a directory, then open a command prompt / terminal window at that directory.
• Copy the ‘update.zip’ file (which is part of the firmware download zip) to your microSD. Do NOT rename it.
• Turn off your HTC Desire, then turn it back on with the Back button held down. You’ll see FASTBOOT written on the screen in a red box. Connect the phone to the computer.
• In the terminal window, enter either ‘step1-windows.bat’, ‘./step1-mac.sh’ or ‘./step1-linux.sh’ as appropriate.
• Navigate to the BOOTLOADER and then the RECOVERY option on the menu, using the volume buttons to move and the power button to select.
• When a black screen appears with a red triangle (don’t worry, you’ll know it when you see it), press and hold the Volume Up button on your phone and then tap the Power button.
• Your device should now be at the ‘recovery’ screen. Select the wipe data/factory reset option, then select the option to Apply sdcard:update.zip. This will take a little while, so go make a nice cup of tea. When the flash has finished, reboot, and you are DONE!

My information for this section came from this guide should you run into any trouble: r6 riskfreeroot – HTC Desire Rooting Guide

Conclusion

With all this done, you will be the proud owner of a de-branded, rooted HTC Desire with no more branded unremovable bloatware apps hogging up your application list, a new Superuser Permissions application (which I have, as yet, no idea what it does – but it proves the phone’s rooted!), and the ability to flash custom firmware to the phone like DeFroST or DJ DROID Android 2.2 (froyo) stuff, with all the lovely, bleeding edge goodness that provides, as well as over-clocked and under-volted kernels so speed up your phone and lower the power consumption!

To be perfectly honest, I haven’t as yet installed any of that cool stuff – but I’m pretty sure that I’ve done the hard part with the rooting process, and when I get the time to install some 2.2 goodness, I’ll document it to the hilt, too.

Cheers!

Thanks: Shouts out to the Android community for all their good work, from the devs and hackers to the pioneers and bit-players, without whom none of this would be possible! And of course many thanks to the people writing guides whose work I based this guide on in an effort to plainly state and illustrate the process with minimal ambiguity.

Related posts:

1. HTC Desire FTW!
2. How To: Use NAND Emulation on the Wii
3. How To: Hack/SoftMod Your Wii To Run Pretty Much Anything

The track I’m using in this example is the first 50 seconds of Ben Folds – Zak and Sara, where the voice kicks in at the 11 second mark, and the original sounds like this:

Once you’ve got a copy of Audacity for your platform of choice, fire it up and follow these simple steps to get rid of the vocals from most songs:

1.) Import Some Audio

From the menu in Audacity, choose File | Import | Audio and then select an mp3 (or any audio format Audacity understands) to work with.

2.) Duplicate The Tracks

We’re going to come back later and use the bass from this to give it a nice, full sound – but for now just duplicate your imported audio by going to Edit | Duplicate:

Once you’ve duplicated the tracks, we’ll mute our copy for now by clicking on the Mute button to the left of the waveform as shown:

3.) Separate Our Original Tracks, Convert To Mono and Invert One Of Them

This is the key part of the process: because vocal tracks on songs are commonly recorded as mono and then mixed into stereo – by separating the tracks and making them act as separate mono tracks, we can then invert one of them to have them cancel each other out! And since usually only the vocal waveform is identical (i.e. mono mixed to stereo) it’s only the vocals that magically disappear from the sound! Ha!

So, to start off we need to click on the little down-arrow to the left of our original wave form and select Split Stereo Track:

Once the waveform’s been split (so we can mess with both channels individually) double click in the lower of the two waveforms (the right channel) to select it all, and then from the menu choose Effect | Invert as shown:

Now for the last really important step – simply set both left and right channels to output as mono by clicking on the little down-arrow to the left of each waveform and selecting Mono. Don’t forget to set both of them to Mono or the magic won’t happen!

With that done, give it a play and see what happens! With any luck, there won’t be any vocals in the track – so with my example, it now sounds like this:

You’ll notice at the end that the vocals come back (the backing singing etc.) – why? Because it wasn’t recorded as a mono source, and hence doesn’t get cancelled out by the inversion we did earlier – so this technique won’t work for all songs – only ones where the voice is recorded in mono and then mixed into stereo, which to be fair, I think it a pretty large swathe of ‘em, and it’d be perfect for karaoke or something like this anyway because you’d want the backing vocals there!

If you wanted to know more about how this wave-form cancellation works, you can always look up Superposition of Waves, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the curious =D

4.) Filter Our Original To Add Back The Bass

The voice cancelled audio above sounds pretty good, and the vocals are definitely gone, but in the process we’ve stripped out a lot of the lower frequency sounds (i.e. the bass). So remember when we duplicated our waveform and muted it right at the beginning? This is where it fits in…

Un-mute our duplicated (and still stereo) audio copy by clicking on the Mute button to the left of the waveform, double click on the waveform to select it all, and then from the menu choose Effect | Equalization as shown:

When the equalisation window pops up, we’re going to filter it so that all sounds above 200Hz are stripped out. To do this, just click somewhere on the main part of the window and a white dot will appear, click again and another will – then click on them to drag them around until you get a shape that looks kinda like this:

Notice that I’ve dragged the bottom-left slider all the way down to get access to the full 120Db and not just the 30Db on the scale by default.

You might have to have a bit of a play to get it right, but all we’re really doing is saying “Leave anything with a frequency of 200Hz or less alone, but drop the volume of anything over that frequency by around 120Db” (i.e. remove it entirely!).

If you mute our top two mono tracks and play it back, you should get the filtered version of the stereo track with only the bass remaining, which for my example sounds like this:

5.) Un-mute Our Original Voice Cancelled Tracks

With the vocal-free (but a bit tinny) audio playing at the same time as our bass-only version, we get a pretty neat sound with good bass and no vocals! Result! =D

You can then just go to File | Export to save the finished vocal-free version to an mp3 or such, if you wanted to keep it.

Wrap Up

I’ve read that some people like to cut out the sections between 200Hz and 1000Hz or so (1KHz, although I’ve also seen people push it up to 6KHz) to keep the low-end and high-end sounds, but when I was playing with this I kept getting some voice creeping back into the mix. This could well have been because I was only dropping 30Db when I was messing around with it though – so go nuts and experiment if ya wanna!

The shape I used for that EQ setting was:

With that all said and done, I hope you found this guide useful – I didn’t come up with the technique or anything like that, I just saw a 10 line how-to and had to mess around for half an hour to get it to work, so thought I could knock up a quick guide that shows how it’s done really clearly, and I hope you have fun with the technique!

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. How To: Seamlessly Remove Things from an Image in GIMP
2. How To: Remove Adobe Drive
3. How To: Easily Convert FLAC audio to MP3s in Linux

1.) Add the Lucid Partner repository to your Sources list

We’re going to be installing the Sun JDK through the repos, and it just so happens that we need the partner repo enabled, so you can either add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list, or you can check the box in System | Administration | Software Sources (assuming you’re using Gnome – pick whatever source managing front-end KDE uses if that’s your poison):

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner

or..

2.) Install the Sun JDK and Plugin

Before you install the good stuff, it’s an idea to check your current version so you can see the changeover’s worked. To do this, just run java -version from bash and you should see something like this:

java version "1.6.0_18"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8) (6b18-1.8-0ubuntu1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)

Once you know what you’ve currently got, again from the shell, enter the following to install the official Sun JDK (don’t worry about multiple JDKs being installed – we deal with that later):

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

During this process you’ll have to agree to the license agreement – just hit Tab to switch focus in the text window onto the Yes button (assuming you do agree), and hit Enter to accept.

3.) Remove the old OpenJDK stuff

In Synaptic, you want to fully remove the following packages:

default-jdk
default-jre 
default-jre-headless
icedtea-6-jre-cacao
icedtea6-plugin
openjdk-6-jdk
openjdk-6-jre
openjdk-6-jre-headless
openjdk-6-jre-lib

If you do this before installing the Sun JDK, all packages depending on Java will be removed as well – so in this rare instance, later is better, and any packages depending on Java can now stay on the system.

4.) Check it all works

From the command line enter: java -version and you should see the new details:

java version "1.6.0_20"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode)

If you want the new plug-in to take effect in Firefox or such you need to restart the browser, then you should be all good to go! Maybe test it out at sodaplay for kicks too

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. How-To: Transform Your Stock Ubuntu 10.04 Install into a Fully Operational Battle Station Operating System
2. How-To: Build a Working Version of Handbrake for Ubuntu 10.04
3. How To: Get a Canon MP240 Printer Working in Ubuntu 10.04 32/64 Bit

I posted about a cleverly designed glass which spells out what you’re drinking through linking dots on the glass with the liquid colour the other day, but to get that image, I needed to do a little bit of manipulation first. For this example we’re going to be using GIMP with the Resynthesizer plugin (package name: gimp-resynthesizer):

1.) Get an Image to Work With

I wanted to use a picture of the glasses, but the bar across the top was too close to them for it to be a nice shot with enough white-space around it, so the first thing I did was just stab the Print-Screen key to get a screengrab:

Remember that to fill in the missing details, you need as much as possible of what should be there – that is, a very high background to selection ratio! If you have a picture of someone’s face taking up a large section of the image and you try to remove the face – where can the plug-in get data from to know what to replace it with? It can’t! So it’ll make a guess, and it’ll fail badly. On the other hand, if you have a large swathe of grass with a football on it, and you’re removing the football, the plug-in has all the surrounding image to consider when doing the replacement!

In this case, I kept as much of the background as possible in the image while I was replacing the section I wanted removed so the plug-in could use that data for replacing content.

2.) Select the Section to Remove

Because the bar is rectangular in shape, the rectangular selection tool was the easiest option to select it – if you’ve got a more ragged section then use the lassoo selection tool, or a quick-mask or whatever to get your selection; just make sure it’s pretty tight to what you want to remove…

3.) Run the Resynthesizer Plugin

Once you’ve got your selection (i.e. what you want to remove selected), just pick Filters | Map | Resynthesizer from the GIMP menu and use the checkboxes as ticked below:

4.) Admire Your Handiwork

The Resynthesizer plugin is a little bit curious, in that running it, then undoing it, then running it again will produce different results. The first two times I ran it on the exact same selection on the exact same image ended up with some artifacts of text being dragged in, but the third time did the entire thing cleanly.

If you end up with stray artifacts from other parts of the image, you can either re-run the resynthesizing process, or just select the artifacts and re-run resynthesizer on them to remove them (remembering to keep the selections tight to what you want removed).

And voila…

That’s pretty awesome… Kudos to Paul Harrison for the plug-in – that’s some killer code – what a guy! =D

Related posts:

1. Photoshop CS5: Content Aware Fill
2. How-To: Easily Remove the Vocals from Most Songs
3. How To: Remove Adobe Drive

So, if you’re looking to make the jump too, this article should give you the first few stages of the how of things (whilst the previous Part 1 article dealt with the why) – so let’s make it happen, shall we?

Step 1 – Find Yourself a VPS Provider

There are thousands upon thousands of hosting companies who can offer you a VPS, ranging from fully managed (i.e. everything set up for you, but expensive) to unmanaged (where you set up everything yourself, and you pay much less per month). I’ve taken the latter route so I can gain some experience and pocket the difference.

The first thing you’ll want to do is take a look at some hosting sites which bring together offers from various hosting companies so you can compare and contrast them. I spent a while looking at a website called LowEndBox to find some good deals. Quite often, it seems, you can get offers which re-occcur, so if you sign up and enter a code you get 40% off or such, and this applies across the lifetime of your VPS hosting with the chosen company.

After a bit of looking I came across a new start-up company based in the UK called RackVM, who were offering a bunch of attractive packages for decent prices. Web hosting is one of those things where you get what you pay for, so be wary of going with companies based solely on them having the most absolute rock-bottom price you can find, as the service you get might not be too stellar. I’ve only been signed up with RackVM for about two weeks or so at this point, but during that time everything’s been great. Being a new start-up I’m running the risk that they fold in the near future, but I’ve got everything from my old site (files/database etc.) backed-up, and if I go dark I could just get another VPS provider and re-do the config to get it all back up and running in less than a day, so I’m not too concerned about it.

When looking for a package there are a number of key factors to take into account (I can only really discuss this from a standpoint of what I, personally, wanted and signed up for – but you can happily extrapolate for your own needs):

• Virtualisation Technology – The main two options for the technology that does the division of a single, physical machine into multiple VPS slices are OpenVZ and Xen. You can read a brief head to head comparison of them here or by putting something like “OpenVZ Vs Xen” into google. I chose OpenVZ for its lower memory footprint and increased speed, although either would have been fine, and likely Xen would have been a touch stabler and more secure as it runs a separate kernel per VPS slice rather than sharing a single kernel across all VPS’. Really, either option will be fine.
• Disk Space – How much file space do you have available? This is used for any packages you install on your VPS (web servers, FTP servers + storage area, MySQL databases – everything!), I really don’t need more than about 1GB or so for everything, but then I don’t really host a lot of files. The package I got came with 30GB – which is lots, and lots, of breathing room.
• Bandwidth – How much data does the server need to upload to people? A site with a 300KB front page being hit 500 times a day will use 4.5GB per month at a minimum. When I signed up I got 300GB bandwidth per month, which is orders of magnitude more than I need, but things like FTP count into it, so if I upload something that’s 100MB, and it gets downloaded 50 times, that’s 5GB on top of whatever the site HTML will take, and when you add in running an email server it could easily get higher again. I still don’t see myself using more than 10GB a month in my wildest dreams, but if you can get a high number then you can always try to find inventive ways to use it (like maybe running sabnazbdplus or something).
• RAM – this one’s important – really important. Remember that you’re going to be running a whole heap of things on the server and that it’ll eat through plenty of RAM. You might be able to get away with 256MB and keep 99% performance. 512MB is a lot nicer to work with and will give you a little bit of breathing room after correct configuration. I got 512MB with my package, and after tweaking apache to use a little less memory am running at roughly 370MB with apache, mysqld, php, postfix (Mail Transfer Agent), courier (POP3/IMAP Server), spamassasin, webmin and a couple of other bits and pieces running. It’ll spike up to 600MB under load, but then it drops back down below 512MB, which is my magic number.
• Burst RAM – Every server running VPS’ will have more RAM than it needs so it can offer it on a temporary basis to any one of the VPS’ on the server. With my package I have up to 1GB Burst RAM, which means that when my site’s under load and the memory usage increases, I’ve got that additional 512MB to use. Be warned – if you go for a VPS with a low memory limit, and your site’s memory usage sits up in the Burst RAM all or most of the time, they’ll be on to you to upgrade your package to one that provides greater RAM, and costs more per month.
• Operating System – OpenVZ and Xen can be run on any *nix, so you’ll have the option of picking your server platform from a bunch of choices like: Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, FreeBSD or OpenBSD, Slackware, Gentoo etc. Some people say Debian is the metaphorical win as a server platform as it’s extensively tested and as such very, very stable. However, I chose Ubuntu 10.04 64-Bit as my server platform of choice, because 10.04 is a LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu, which means it’s gone through a pretty extensive testing period during its gestation, and as it’s pretty new it has all the latest versions of software available for that cutting-edge goodness. Also, I happen to run Ubuntu 10.04 as my OS of choice (normal, not server edition obviously), so anything I know works on my local machine is pretty much guaranteed to work on the server, and I can test things out on my local box before putting on the server.

Step 2 – Sign Up and Provide the Correct Server Details (Server name, NS1, NS2 etc.)

When you sign up, you’ll pick a package that gives you the combination of above options that best fit your needs, then you’ll need to enter some additional details for the VPS slice – you’re likely to see a screen asking you for details like this:

For this example, let’s say we have the site www.foobar.net on shared hosting, and we’re transitioning it to a VPS.

The first field, hostname, is asking you what you want to call your server. If it was just an email server, you might enter mail.foobar.net here, if you were going to have multiple servers serving files for the same domain (foobar.net) you might enter server1.foobar.net or server2.foobar.net. As I’m only ever going to have a single VPS serving everything, I thought I’d just call it server, and as such for our example I’d enter server.foobar.net and for my own particular instance, I entered server.r3dux.org.

The next two fields are asking you for the name of the primary and secondary nameservers that might run on the domain (i.e. what you would call them if you decide to run a DNS service such as bind) – they are NOT asking you for the name and address of the DNS servers which currently host the record for your shared hosting! It’s kind of like a “If you were a name server, what would you call yourself?”-type question =D For our example, we could happily put ns1.foobar.net for the primary nameserver and ns2.foobar.net for the secondary nameserver, and in my specific instance, I put ns1.r3dux.org and ns2.r3dux.org. I’m not even going to run a DNS service, as I simply don’t have to, I’m just specifying what I’d call the nameservers if I did!

The fourth and final field is asking for the password you want to set for your root account on your VPS. By this we mean, you have full access to your VPS using the top-level administrative account root, through which you will log in and administrate the the system. When your root account is created, on your VPS – what password do you want to use? I’d recommend setting this as something pretty strong (at least a dozen characters) which uses a combination of upper and lower case letters plus some numbers and punctuation, because if it gets compromised – your box will no longer be your box…

For our foobar.net example, this means that we’d end up with something like this:

With these details provided, proceed through the registration process, and you should be sent an order confirmation either:
- Detailing and confirming your order and asking for payment before it gets set up, or
- If you already paid at the registration stage, detailing the IP address of your spanky new VPS! (and optionally, a separate IP address and details of your username and password to connect to the server through SSH).

Step 3 – Connect to your Spanky New VPS!

Once you’ve paid and received an email giving you the IP address of your VPS, it’s time to connect to that bad boy!

VPS’ are servers, and as such don’t run graphical desktops – it’s all administered through the command line. So the best way to hook up to your VPS is through a SSH connection. With RackVM, remember that this is my first VPS so I have no other knowledge of what other VPS hosting providers do, they send you an email with a separate IP and username to use to connect to the VPS.

To connect to the VPS through linux, I can run the following command and enter my root password (the one we specified earlier in Step 2!):

ssh 1.2.3.4 -l <YOUR-SSH-USERNAME> -p 22

Where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address given for SSH access in the confirmation email. Once connected, you can install stuff using apt-get, or dpkg or whatever you like…

To connect to the VPS through a Windows system, your’re probably best off using PuTTY.

At this point, you can go to the HTTP address of your server (for example, http://5.6.7.8, where 5.6.7.8 is the IP address of your VPS server itself [and not the IP address of the SSH access - assuming that, like mine, they're different]) – but there’s likely to be nothing at all there because Apache isn’t installed! If you wanted to install and run Apache quickly you could always SSH into your VPS and run:

apt-get install apache2
/etc/init.d/apache2 start

And then try http://5.6.7.8 (again, replacing 5.6.7.8 with your VPS IP address) – and TA-DAAAA! She lives!

Next Steps: After this we’ll want to configure Apache, add MySQL as a database server, add PHP, an Email server, add an FTP server and some Web Administration tools plus a couple of other bits and pieces – all the while keeping the memory usage low!

It’s easily do-able, it’s just a slightly lengthy process – which I’ll save for a Part 3 article, me thinks

Oh, and if you’ve seen anything in this article you think is wrong, technically inaccurate or plain bat-shit crazy – please feel free to correct me in the comments!

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. How To: Change from Shared Hosting to a VPS, Part 1 – The Calm Before the Storm
2. If You Can See This Post…

You can easily check your current swappiness value like this:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

And you can change the swappiness of the system on the fly (but it’ll go back to the value in the sysctl.conf file after a reboot) like this:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

My laptop has 4GB of RAM, and even with a bunch free, Linux decides to swap stuff out to file quite often with a swappiness setting of 60, which can slow the box to a crawl. To fix this, and permanently insist that all physical RAM is used up before starting any paging at all,, simply change the setting to something like 10 like this:

gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Then, when the file is open, either add the line vm.swappiness=10 to the bottom of the file, or if it already exists just modify the value, then reboot.

To find out more about the whole swappiness thing, try this article.

No related posts.

The kicker is that my hosting package is exactly what it said on the tin when I bought it: Shared hosting – this means that this site, plus a large number of other sites are all hosted on the same server with no separation of any kind between them – so when a bit of JavaScript or PHP or ASP or whatever goes and thrashes the box, or hangs using 100% CPU, it takes everything else down with it. 503 Site unavailable. Game Over.

And this has happened a lot.

The file server goes down, so the MySQL server isn’t asked for files, or the MySQL server goes down, so the requests for data go unanswered – if it’s not all working together, you’ve got a blank page. Over the years I’ve bit my lip, fired off support tickets, waited patiently, put up with very sluggish performance just being thankful that it works – but no more! We’re moving on to greener, and faster pastures… Enter stage right: VPS

A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is a slice of a full hardware server. The full server might have 32GB of RAM, my slice might have 512MB of that. The full server might have a TB of storage, my slice might have 30GB of that. The full server might have 2 x 4Ghz processors, my slice might have full use of them for 5ms out of ever 1000ms in a second. And the slices are strongly separated, commonly with virtualisation software such as OpenVZ or Xen.

This means that if, for example, Joe Blogg’s server has some nasty script that’s thrashing the CPU, it’s thrashing his slice of the CPU (i.e. his 5 milliseconds) – but not mine! From a users perspective, this means that his site might be down, but all the other VPS’ on the physical server will still be up. In effect, one errant site or script can’t scupper all the sites on the server – Win!

But it’s a little more complicated than that…

VPS’ come in different flavours – fully managed, and unmanaged. With a fully managed VPS you have people to help you set it up; they can set up or help to set up web-servers (apache etc.), email servers, ftp servers, MySQL servers etc., but you pay $30AU more for the VPS. Per month.

With unmanaged VPS’s you just get the VPS plus an install of an operating system of your choice (Debian, Centos, Ubuntu etc.) – but that’s it. It’s up to you to install and set up apache. It’s up to you to run your own ftp server. It’s up to you to run your own mailserver… For example, if I wanted mail at r3dux dot org to be a valid email address – *I* need to install, configure and administrate the email server for that to happen. You get complete control of your VPS, but you get complete control of your VPS, if you see what I mean… For $30AU a month saving, I think I’ll run everything myself, thanks

After all this, there’s still the matter of the DNS records – currently my hosting provider runs a DNS server (well, two really – a primary and a secondary; ns1.somehostingco.com and ns2.somehostingco.com) – once I have my site hosted on the VPS, I need to be able to update the DNS records so when you go to http://r3dux.org it translates to the IP address of where I’m now hosted, instead of the IP address of where I was hosted, and with my current hosting people I don’t believe I can change that, so I need to transfer my domain to a registrar where I’m able to edit the records to say I now live here!

As you can see, it’s no small task – but I reckon I’m up for a weekend project

If you never see anything on this site ever again – I’ve failed! But with with any luck, at least at some point in the very near future, I’ll see you on the other side

Related posts:

1. How To: Change from Shared Hosting to a VPS, Part 2 – Choosing a Hosting Provider, Signing Up & Connecting
2. If You Can See This Post…

So let’s build a fresh version that works!

Step 1.) Get the Necessary Libraries

A quick trip to the command line will get everything you need (where everything you already have in this list is simply ignored):

sudo apt-get install subversion yasm build-essential autoconf libtool zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev intltool libglib2.0-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgudev-1.0-dev libwebkit-dev libnotify-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev

Step 2.) Get the Source Code

Create a folder for it, move to it, then grab the latest source code via subversion like this:

mkdir handbrake
cd handbrake
svn checkout svn://svn.handbrake.fr/HandBrake/trunk hb-trunk

Step 3.) Build It!

Once we’re in the right place, this configure line with the given switch will configure and make Handbrake in one fell swoop:

cd hb-trunk
./configure --launch

Step 4.) Test It!

After a successful build, you’ll see the executable HandBrake-CLI in the build folder – but you’re probably after the GUI version, which is tucked away in build/gtk/src and called ghb – just go to the right folder, launch it and give it a try out – should be absolutely mint.

There are a stack of different options for the encoding process which can slow down the encode/transcode process and increase the quality – I went with these final settings to get high encoding quality without the encode process taking all week:

ref=2:bframes=2:subme=6:trellis=2:b-pyramid=1:b-adapt=2:direct=auto:no-fast-pskip=1

HandBrake - Now Working! Woo-Hoo!

Cheers!

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1. How To: Get a Canon MP240 Printer Working in Ubuntu 10.04 32/64 Bit
2. How-To: Install the Official Sun JDK in Ubuntu 10.04
3. How-To: Transform Your Stock Ubuntu 10.04 Install into a Fully Operational Battle Station Operating System

Because I’ve done this a couple of times over the last few years, I feel I’m getting pretty good at getting the machine up & running with everything I need at a pretty fast pace: maybe a day for all the core stuff, another to tweak the vast majority of everything so I have it as I want, and then just bits and pieces as they come up. This time, I thought I’d make a list of all the things I install (yes, I know you can automatically generate a list of installed packages) – because I also wanted to note why I install ‘em, you know, what are they good for, so the next time I install a fresh system I can just grab it all even quicker.

Now, a stock/standard Ubuntu distro is a pretty good thing – but it doesn’t come with everything you need, so with that in mind, I’d like to present a list of things that I think you also need, and that once you have in place you’ll be able to do most anything you need with your system with just a few clicks. Before you do any of this, it’s a good idea to open up System | Administration | Software Sources and enable the restricted, universe and multiverse repositories as shown below:

With that done, here’s the list of things you’ll likely want to have installed in no particular-order, and only roughly sectioned off into classes (system, sound & media, social networking etc.):

There’s a few other things you might want which aren’t in the standard Ubuntu respositories, too. Such as:

You might not need some of that stuff, but for me it turns a good basic install into the real deal that does everything I need. And I absolutely love it

Related posts:

1. How To: Install Open Office 3.1 from .debs in 9.04 Jaunty
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Run At Any Resolution

By default, Q3 gives you a rather poor list of available resolutions – to see what’s available, just hit the tilde key (i.e. ` – backtick, just left of the “1″ key) and type: \modelist and you’ll see something like this:

Well, we can do better than that – just enter the following couple of lines (changing the width and height to any valid, known resolution) and you’re set! Personally, I use these:

\r_mode = -1
\r_customwidth 1920
\r_customheight 1080
\vid_restart

And presto – full resolution! Be aware than if change any options in the Options | System part of Q3 it’ll override your custom resolution, so you’ll need to set it back by repeating the above lines.

You might see some people talking about changing \r_customaspect (which by default simply has the value 1), but I didn’t really see it doing a great deal. But if you want to experiment yourself, your aspect ratio is just your horizontal resolution divided by your vertical resolution, so for me it’d be 1920 divided by 1080, which gives 1.7777778, so I might put it just as 1.7 or 1.8 – but really, I didn’t see much if any difference when I’ve messed with it, apart from a possible slowdown when I actually used 1.77777778, which could have just been my perception of things… I did a quick side-by-side comparison with different r_customaspect values and did a \vid_restart between each one:

Record and Play Demos

To record demos (i.e. record you playing against your mates or randoms) you need two commands which you can happily issue from the command window (i.e. stab tilda and type ‘em):

• record – records a demo
• stoprecord – you guessed it, stops the recording…

However, typing these at the prompt can be a pain, so why not just bind them to some keys? You can do this easily enough by opening the file ~/.q3a/baseq3/q3config.cfg and adding the following lines somewhere in it (then saving it, obv!):

bind F5 "record"
bind F6 "stoprecord"

Now, all you need to do is stab F5 to start recording a game and F6 to stop the recording. You might see some moaning about needing g_syncronousclients 1 set, but you can safely ignore it as it’s a legacy requirement that doesn’t even exist in recent versions of Q3.

Your demo will be recorded with the filename demoXXXX.dm_68, where XXXX is a number starting at 0000 and going upwards with each demo recorded. It’ll be saved in the folder ~/.q3a/baseq3/demos/, but when you go to play it from the Demos part of the main menu – it won’t play. Instead, it’ll come up with the error “Couldn’t open demos/demo0000.dm_68″ or the like:

The fix/workaround for this is to go to the location of your demos (~/.q3a/baseq3/demos/) and RENAME THE FILE TO ALL CAPITALS! No, really. I guess this is a really old error which has reared it’s ugly head because Windows systems aren’t case sensitive (so myfile.txt, MYFILE.TXT and MyFiLe.TxT are all seen as the same thing to Windows) whereas Linux takes case sensitivity into account… I’m tempted to go digging in the code and apply an upcase statement to the demo filename retrieval mechanism…

Wrap-up

I guess those are the main two things I’ve been concerned about getting working properly, besides getting the thing to work in the first place, so I guess I’ll leave the VOIP stuff until I’ve got some more time… Got any comments, suggestions, improvements? Sling ‘em in the comments! Cheers!

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