Digital Sanctum

Here’s a quick and dirty on installing the latest (version 6.5.0-0 as of this writing) ImageMagick on Ubuntu 8.04.

Start by removing any old versions previously installed via apt-get:

sudo apt-get remove imagemagick

Then update apt-get and install some supporting packages:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libperl-dev gcc libjpeg62-dev libbz2-dev libtiff4-dev libwmf-dev libz-dev libpng12-dev libx11-dev libxt-dev libxext-dev libxml2-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev libexif-dev perl libjasper-dev libltdl3-dev graphviz gs-gpl pkg-config

Use wget to grab the source from ImageMagick.org.

Once the source is downloaded, uncompress it:

tar -xzf ImageMagick.tar.gz

Now configure and make:
cd ImageMagick-6.5.0-0
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

To avoid an error such as:

convert: error while loading shared libraries: libMagickCore.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Add the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

Update: If you still get an error like the one above, try running ldconfig:

sudo ldconfig

You can confirm the install and available formats with:
identify -list format

As of earlier today, JetBrains made version 2.0 of the Ruby plug-in available for IntelliJ IDEA, a popular Java IDE. For those like myself that dabble in Java and Ruby this is a welcomed event. The following links provide more detail about new features:

1. Ruby Plugin 2.0 Release Notes
2. Development Roadmap

Note that the plug-in is only compatible with the latest EAP (#8823) build.

Based on the output from the following command you can easily determine if a Linux machine has 32 bit or 64 bit kernel:

uname -a

If you see something like x86_64, then your running with a 64 bit kernel. If you use see i386/i486/i586/i686 it’s a 32 bit kernel.

Google recently announced the first beta release of Ganeti, an open source virtual server management software built on top of Xen and other open source software. Naturally, since I’ve been using VMWare for the last year or so I was curious about Ganeti.

What is Ganeti?

In short, Ganeti is a cluster virtualization platform based on Xen. An “intent to package” or ITP has been filed with Debian which describes Ganeti as “a virtual server cluster management software tool built on top of the Xen virtual machine monitor and other Open Source software. After
setting it up it will provide you with an automated environment to manage highly available virtual machine instances.”

Read the rest of this entry »

During my latest Apache configuration change I ran into an issue where I wasn’t able to restart/start. This was the first time I encountered this and I was fairly positive the issue wasn’t due to my configuration changes. I also knew that a port can only be used by one application or daemon at a time so that clued me in that something else was already using the port. While I can’t give a definitive cause for the situation, I can give pointers on resolving the issue. Note that this pertains to Apache running on Linux so your mileage may vary.

Read the rest of this entry »