Fixing the annoying “perl: warning: Setting locale failed” error message

I was getting really annoyed getting these messages while anaging my Debian and Ubuntu VPSes


perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.utf8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").


Turns out the solution is simply to run these commands

export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
apt-get install locales
dpkg-reconfigure locales


The export lines above can also be saved into either ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc or ~/.cshrc

Running Diablo 2 on OS X Lion

I upgraded my Macs to OS X Lion a few days ago and have been very pleased with all the new features.

But when the nephews came vistiing today and wanted to play a local LAN game of Diablo 2, all we got was …

Ooops!

As it turns out, Blizzard had, a few days ago, posted some information regarding OS X Lion not being able to run their classic games, including Diablo 2! Diablo 2 was released for Macs running PowerPC processors (remember: Intel Macs only stared appearing in 2006). It’s been able to run previous in Intel Macs due to the inclusion of the Rosetta translation software, but this is no longer available in OS X Lion.

Thankfully, a solution exists!

The first thing to do is you need to have a free Battle.net account. Create one if you don’t already have it.

Now click on Add a Game. You will be prompted to key in the CD KEYS of your Blizzard games,
Do this.

Your games will now appear in your list of Game Accounts.

When you click on the game, you will be presented with the option to download the Game Client.

Click on the client for Windows to download the game installer.

Now go on to Codeweavers website and purchase their CrossOver Games Mac product at 50% off using the code DEADDUCK.

Or, if you’re not sure whether to commit yet, just download the 14-day trial.

Once CrossOver Games Mac has been installed and launched, use Configure –> Install Software and select the following options to install Diablo 2 on your Mac from the installer client for Windows.

Be sure to select the options above before you hit the Install button.

At the end of the game download and installation, you will see the application link for Diablo 2.

If you also own the Lord of Destruction expansion back, you can repeat the same process but be sure to also select the same Diablo 2 bottle where the original game has been installed!

Now have fun going after the Prime Evils and their minions!

How to update iOS on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad

I couldn’t find anything similar on Apple’s support site, so I thought I’d do up a quick tutorial for iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad users who have no idea how to go about getting the latest and greatest software updates on their devices.

In this tutorial, we are updating an iPhone to iOS version 4.3.4

Step 1

Launch iTunes on your computer and connect your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to your computer using the cable.

Step 2

In iTunes locate your iPhone under DEVICES

Step 3

At the Summary screen, click on Update.

Step 4

Click on Update again at this new dialogue box.

Step 5a

Click on Next etc throughout.

Step 5b

The software update will start downloading. This may take a while depending on the speed of your internet connection and the size of the update.

Step 5c

Once downloaded, the update will be extracted and automatically installed in your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
This will definitely take some time – so be patient!

Step 5d

When the update is complete, you will need to wait for a short while again while your device restarts.
Remember to leave your device connected to your computer!

Step 6

Does iTunes now show that the Software version of your device is the latest one? If so, you’re done!
Enjoy!

KnowledgeTree speed on VPSes

I was trying out KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 (Community Edition) on 3 different virtual private servers just to see how they fare  with “heavy” websites, and here’s how they perform generating a page of 20 items. All VPSes are 512MB instances running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS .

APC Hosting (Virtuozzo)

Request created in 17.190s

Rackspace Cloud Server (Xen)

Request created in 0.446s

Club Uptime (OpenVZ)

Request created in 0.299s

The most ironic thing is that the above VPSes are listed in order of most expensive to least expensive. It seems here we do not get the best performance from the most  expensive service? In fact it performs much worse than the other two!

At this point, the Rackspace offering is the most attractive with its built-in manual and scheduled daily and weekly snapshots, from which you can quickly spin up new VPSes.

Debian Lenny to Squeeze upgrade

Debian 6 i.e. “Squeeze” was released almost a month ago. Although there are still about 11 months more before Debian 5 “Lenny” is no longer supported, I figured I would upgrade one Debian Lenny Xen-based VPS hosted on a Rackspace Cloud,  currently functioning as an OpenLDAP server, as a weekend project.

The upgrade steps were straightforward:

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all instances of lenny to squeeze.

2. Run the following commands in succession in terminal

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install apt dpkg aptitude

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Surprisingly enough the upgrade went well with Apache and even OpenLDAP migrated successfully. Just the following issues related to phpldapadmin were encountered:

1. The upgraded phpldapadmin would work until I ran

sudo apt-get purge phpldapadmin

sudo apt-get install phpldapadmin

2. I would face a screen full of “Automatically removed objectClass from template” warnings upon logging into phpldapadmin. This I resolved this by renaming the .xml files in /etc/phpldapadmin/templates/modification once again to another non- .XML suffix.

3. Every time I attempted to edit an try, I would get an annoying “Select a template to edit the entry” screen. This was resolved by renaming the files for the templates referenced in the error screen, at /etc/phpldapadmin/templates/creation, to have non- .XML suffix.