The Right Way To Install Postgres

Ughh, my Ubuntu distro is acting up again, and this time it is for something as stupid as it being unable to connect to the PostgreSQL server on my machine. I mean, how hard is it for the OS to be able to report a conflict between versions rather than just give up with a “directory not found” error when it fails to get a response from a Unix socket? Apparently, with the mess that is apt-get and its lethargic rate of package updates, not to mention Canonical’s refusal to support forward compatibility of packages, very hard!

As Prof. Jennifer Widom has said, databases are ubiquitous, and Postgres is an industrial strength relational DBMS claiming to be the most advanced of its type, hence my preference for it (not going to open the NoSQL can of worms today, sorry).  However, as we are well aware, advanced and user-friendly are seldom synonymous, choosing to be strange bedfellows more often. Installing Postgres via binaries is a great idea if you work at a huge corporation and update your systems once every 5 years. However, us little folk wish to receive the latest and greatest as best as we can, and hence the reliance on package managers such as aptitude a.k.a. apt-get. So what’s the catch? There has to be one since I am making the effort to write this. Well, Postgres 9.6.2 released last week and apt-get still only shows me 9.5. 2 WHOLE patch updates later and apt-get is still coughing up furballs when I look for 9.6. So before I pull out all my hair, let’s get Postgres installed the right way, with Megadeth’s Dystopia aptly playing in the background.

First things first, how to get setup so that we can easily upgrade Postgres no matter what distro of Linux we use. Here’s where I introduce you to this handy little tool called linuxbrew. Linuxbrew is a package manager inspired from OSX’s extremely popular Homebrew package manager. What’s great about Linuxbrew is that it uses Github repos as its source rather than inaccessible private channels. This ensures we always have access to the latest fixes and updates. Installing linuxbrew is fairly straightforward:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Linuxbrew/install/master/install)"
PATH="$HOME/.linuxbrew/bin:$PATH"

Don’t forget to add that PATH update to your ~/.(zsh|bash)rc file so that you have access to the brew command. Once you have that done, the next step is super easy:

brew install postgres

This should take a while, since it will get the latest tarball, untar it, make it and get postgres up and running for you. On my dated machine, it took around 3.5 minutes, enough time for me to get a nice hot cup of mocha.

To verify that the Postgres server is up and running, type psql into your command line. This should open up the SQL prompt and you’re good to go and can stop reading here and go build something awesome. If not, then guess we have a few more steps to go. We have installed Postgres with the magic of linuxbrew, but linuxbrew isn’t a service manager, so it doesn’t quite know that it needs to start the server. Let’s do that. Type the command into your terminal:

pg_ctl start -D $HOME/.linuxbrew/var/postgres

Some online forums such as StackOverflow may have answers which add the -l flag to define a logfile. I am omitting that since I want Postgres to manage its logs and not have random logfiles throughout my filesystem. You should see the message server starting and a bunch of other status messages. Just hit enter and you should see your terminal again if you don’t already. Now if you type in psql, you should see that your Postgres SQL prompt functions perfectly.

As you have seen, with literally 4 lines of code (3 if you’re one of the lucky few), you’ve got a working installation of a super advanced RDBMS and that too one that is easily upgradeable. If you wish to update Postgres ever, just type in:

brew upgrade postgres

That’s it! Hope you enjoy using Postgres along with all your sweet NoSQL datastores. Looking forward to seeing what you build.

Eviva!

PintOS on Ubuntu

Note: This process is currently broken and seems to throw up unexpected errors. I am trying to look for a solution but the internet is just not helping me at the time of writing this. Until I figure out a way to fix this, I recommend trying out NachOS or xv6 for your OS cravings.

PintOS is one brilliant skeletal Operating System and, given the right time and effort, is a great way to consolidate your knowledge on the design of modern operating systems. However, its installation can be quite a pain especially since the instructions on Stanford’s official site can be a tad bit confusing at times. Here I will walk you through the installation instructions. If you would rather just install than spend time reading my post, feel free to download an install script I wrote to automate the installation process from here: pintosInstall.

If you are using the script, please remember to change the file extension as WordPress does not accept .sh files. After that just run “bash pintosInstall.sh”, without the quotes, from a terminal for a completely automatic process. Also, while I can guarantee you the script runs well on Ubuntu in a folder you have root access to, the script is simple and generic enough for you to hack and customize to your distribution if required.

1. Install some pre-requisites: GCC, Perl, QEMU, Make, GDB. Just run:

   sudo apt-get install gcc binutils perl make qemu gdb

2. Create and installation folder. The script makes a folder ‘co302’ (the course number for OS in my college).
3. Download the PintOS tar from here and extract it in the installation folder. I used the totally awesome wget tool in Linux (just like Mark Zuckerberg in the Social Network 😛 ).
4. We need a folder where the PATH variable can point to, as it will have some executables that we need to run when coding the OS. I made a folder ‘bin’ in the base installation directory i.e. co302/pintos/bin.
5. Move all the perl scripts from the src/utils folder of PintOS to the bin/ folder. The important ones are ‘backtrace’, ‘pintos’, ‘pintos-gdb’ and ‘pintos-mkdisk’.
6. Edit your .bashrc file to add the path for the above bin/ folder. At the end of the .bashrc file, simply add the line

   export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/co302/pintos/bin/

   Again for this, I have used the awk tool as it provides a convenient, independent way to edit files programmantically.

7. Now we have to make a change to one of the PintOS files. Open up the ‘pintos-gdb’ file (in Emacs I hope)  and edit the GDBMACROS variable to point to the ‘gdb-macros’ file in misc directory of the src directory. At this point, you have officially installed PintOS, so give yourself a pat on the back.
8. Time to compile the utilities. Head over to the pintos/src/utils directory and run

   $ make

   . If you get a “Undefined reference to ‘floor’ ” error, simply open the Makefile and substitute LDFLAGS for LDLIBS and run make again.

9. Copy the ‘squish-pty’ file to the PATH pointed bin directory.
10. Head over to the pintos/src/threads/ directory and edit the ‘Make.vars’ file. Change the SIMULATOR variable from bochs to qemu, which should mostly be the last line of the file.
11. Run make on the threads folder.
12. Now we need to edit the ‘pintos’ util file in the bin directory with 3 edits. Many other sites will give you  the line numbers, but I will not use that as it is too variable and you get a chance to experiment with the text processing features of your favorite editor:
    1. Change $sim = bochs to $sim = qemu to enforce qemu as the simulator.
    2. Comment out the line push (@cmd, ‘-no-kqemu’); by prepending it with #.
    3. Put in the absolute path wherever required as Perl doesn’t seem to be able to interpret the ~ shorthand. Do this especially for the kernel.bin location path.
13. Finally, edit the ‘Pintos.pm’ file in the bin directory and put in the absolute path for the line having the location of the loader.bin file.
14. Congrats, you now have PintOS set up on your machine. Try running pintos run alarm-multiple as a test.

There you have it. A pretty easy and straightforward way to install a great experimental skeletal OS from Stanford University. I bet it took more work for me to write this up that it will take you to install PintOS. The good part about this little adventure of mine is that I got a chance to dabble in sed and awk, 2 Unix tools that no hacker can afford to not know the basics of. Add to that some wget magic and Emacs power, and you can potentially become a hacking superstar. Infact, this hack has proven really useful as the Computer Engineering department of my college has used it to install PintOS on all the machines so that the students can do meaningful OS practicals. My small way of giving back, you could say. 🙂

As a final note, at the time of writing, this post is as comprehensive a set of instructions you can get. This may not hold true forever as tomorrow someone might make some script-breaking changes. So if you find some change that I need to include, please feel free to comment and let me know about it.

Eviva!

TinyOS Installation Made Easy

Howdy people! Long time since a post but couldn’t help it, busy being a busybee.

Well, I have started a project on Wireless Sensor Networks and the best way to go about it has been using an amazing operating system called TinyOS. This OS is so tiny, it uses only 400 kb of memory to run! Holy Cow!!

But getting TinyOS on 64-bit machines hasn’t been well documented and I assume that lack of documentation brought you here. Well no fear, I will be showing a stepwise guide to getting TinyOS up-and-running on any 64-bit machine you have.

Note: I am using Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit as my host operating system, but the method should work on all distros of Linux.  If you’re using Windows, may God have mercy on your soul. Also, this post involves installing TinyOS 2.1.1. I cannot guarantee that all the steps will work as is for other older versions. You’ll have to do some research for that.

Step 1:

First up, we need Java, the JRE and the JDK as a lot of the TinyOS and Mote communication frameworks are built in Java. You can use the OpenJDK but I have found using Sun’s original JDK yields better results!

Open up a terminal and simply type in these commands to get the JRE and JDK installed in your machine.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

You can choose the appropriate JVM by running the following command in the terminal:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Step 2:

Now that we have our environment setup, we are ready to install the TinyOS development environment.

1. Install the Synaptic Package manager by running “sudo apt-get install Synaptic” in a terminal.
2. In Synaptic, go to Settings ->Repositories.
3. Click on 3rd party software and add the following (simple copy-paste):
   deb http://tinyos.stanford.edu/tinyos/dists/ubuntu * main
4.  Click OK and reload your repositories.
5. After reloading, simply search for TinyOS and select it. Click install and allow Synaptic to handle dependency installation for you.
6. Once the packages have been properly installed, go back to a terminal and type “sudo gedit ~/.bashrc” and add this line at the absolute end:
                        source /opt/tinyos-2.1.1/tinyos.sh
7.  Finally, close the current terminal and open up a new one and type in $MAKERULES. If all went well, you should get the path.

Congrats, we have TinyOS ready. But we’re not done yet!

Step 3:

Now, when writing TinyOS programs, you’ll very much want to simulate them to see what are the results. A very handy tool for TinyOS simulation is TOSSIM. But when you run the make micaz sim to generate your executable you might get a Python related error. Try these steps:

1. In a terminal, run sudo apt-get install python-dev.
2. Even after installing python, some configuration is required.
3. Run python –version  and note the version of Python installed. In my case, it was 2.7.
4. Go to /opt/tinyos-2.1.1/support/make/
5. Open the sim.extra file in gedit with super user privileges.
6. In the entry labelled PYTHON_VERSION, check to see if the entry matches with the Python version installed. For me, it was 2.6, so I changed it to 2.7.

The Python version entry to be edited

Step 4:

As the final step, this involves some minor configuration to your tinyos.sh file found in /opt/tinyos-2.1.1. This is done so that when you run the make micaz sim command to generate TOSSIM related files, the appropriate Java classes are generated to help in the simulation. Otherwise you’ll get a long list of errors that will make no sense at all.

Editing the tinyos.sh file makes the change permanent which is exactly what you need. Simply go to the directory in which the tinyos.sh file is located (given in the start of  this step).

Open the tinyos.sh file in gedit with super user privileges. There is an entry called CLASSPATH. Simply edit the original to $TOSROOT/support/sdk/java/tinyos.jar, similar to how it is in the image.

Change to CLASSPATH entry in tinyos.sh file

And voila!! You’re done and ready to start writing some incredible TinyOS code.

I hope this blog entry has been useful to you. For any doubts or problems, the TinyOS mailing list is a great place filled with really helpful people and I highly recommend posting both newbie and advanced doubts there.

Till next time, Eviva!

———————————————————————————————————————————
P.S. These are some of the links I used to get TinyOS up and working. Thought they might be useful for the future:

http://superuser.com/questions/353983/how-do-i-install-the-sun-java-sdk-in-ubuntu-11-10-oneric
http://mythicalcomputer.blogspot.in/2008/08/installation-of-tinyos-in-ubuntu.html
http://mail.millennium.berkeley.edu/pipermail/tinyos-help/2011-October/052537.html
https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/pipermail/tinyos-help/2010-November/048947.html

Tweaks To Suit Your Style

Alrighty people! I now have Ubuntu 11.10 aka Oneiric Ocelot on a Mactel laptop and I am totally relishing the computing experience.

However, it seems the MacBook has some quirks while running Ubuntu, namely to make use of function keys, I have to couple them with the fn key, else I end up adjusting my LED brightness or sound levels! Also, my left internal speaker had gone dead for some odd reason!!

But as Geoff Johns says, “no fear”, as I was working on Linux. 🙂

To use the function keys without having to press the fn key, simply run the following commands:

$sudo -i
$echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode

That was a temporary fix. A more permanent fix is this one:

$ echo options hid_apple fnmode=2 | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
$ sudo reboot

And on restart, you’ll have your Function keys working just the way you’d want them to.

To fix the speaker problem, just install a little tool called GNOME AlsaMixer by running the command

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

Then go to the Alsa Mixer, unmute the Surround Sound and bring it up to max and we’re good to go! 😀

A very important tweak that I always use is changing my login screen background. This symbolized the customizability of linux. To change your login screen background, type:

gksu gedit /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf

This opens the configuration file where there is an entry called background. Just change that to point it to your favorite image and there you go! Mine personally is The Dark Knight logo. 😀

As a music freak, another important tweak is getting tuxguitar running. But on simple apt-get installs, you usually encounter sound problems. Thankfully, there is a very simple command for that:

sudo apt-get install timidity tuxguitar-jsa

Run a gp5 file after it finishes. If you still don’t get any sound, go to Tools->Settings->Sound and in the MIDI Sequencer drop down list, select ‘Real Time Sequencer’. In the MIDI Port field, select ‘Gervill’ and click on Ok. Click on Yes when it asks for confirmation.

As a final tweak, installing the Gnome3 desktop is always a great idea, so just run

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

and enjoy the Gnome experience!

Eviva!