Linux on ShrimpWorks

Run Your Java Services with SystemD

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a strong tendency to want to run everything in Docker these days, especially if you’re trying to run something as an always-on service, since passing --restart=always to your run invocation or Docker Compose configuration ensures that running containers start back up after reboots or failures, and seems to involve a little less “black magic” than actually configuring software to run as services directly on a host.

The downside to this is the approach is that running a service in a container leads to significantly longer startup times, more memory and CPU overhead, lost logs, and in my opinion offer a false sense of security and isolation since most images are still configured to run as root, and more often than not large swathes of the host filesystem are mounted as volumes to achieve simple tasks.

There’s also a belief that your software will magically run anywhere - but if you’re writing Java (or any JVM language) code - that’s one of Java’s biggest selling points - it already has its own VM your code is running in, no most platforms!

Therefore, let’s see how easy it actually is to configure our software to run as a standard system service, providing us with the ability to run it as a separate restricted user, complete with standard logging configuration, and give us control over via standard service myservice start|status|restart|stop commands.

Running Unreal Tournament 99 on Linux (part 1)

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With all the talk of Unreal Tournament 4 possibly being cancelled one of these days, due to Epic’s runaway success with Fortnite, I’ve decided there’s really no reason to not be playing UT99.

Thus, we set about trying to run it on modern hardware, with a modern Linux installation.

As much as this is about setting things up on Linux, it’s also partially my own attempt at some knowledge preservation, as a lot of this stuff ends up being forgotten or lost over time (it’s been almost 20 years! a lot of the old sites and things you expect to find this info on simply do not exist anymore :()

This is part one of two, and will focus on installing and running the game using Wine.

User Directories and PHP with nginx

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 08:53:16 +0000

I’ve become fond of using nginx on my development machines, rather than a full Apache.

There are no explicit options built-in which allow something along the same lines as Apache’s userdir, however it’s easy enough to tweak the default configuration to support that behaviour without the need for external modules.

I also do some PHP dabbling from time to time, so need to enable that as well.

Install the required bits:

Simple photo enhancements with GIMP

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 22:04:21 +0000

So, being stuck without access to Photoshop and my regular Windows PC has taught me a little about GIMP – basically it’s exactly the same as Photoshop with a less slick UI :D.

Also, since I haven’t really written anything tutorial-ish in many many years, so this is as much about brushing up on those skills as anything else.

This is a guide for quick and simple photo enhancement using GIMP.

Broken Apper on Debian Unstable/Sid

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 12:08:42 +0000

All of my Debian desktop installs running KDE received an update a month or two ago which rendered the “Apper” package management application broken, failing with the following error:

Unable to open database read-only: Database action 'prepare dependency insert 
statement' failed: table dependencies has no column named items_installed

The solution is to delete the Listaller cache DB:

rm -r /var/lib/listaller/db/

The cache will be recreated automatically with the expected structure on the next run of Apper (or other PackageKit type thing).

Check your email through Telnet

Mon, 30 May 2005 20:42:23 +0000

Ok so this is a little trick I picked up a few years ago when I developed the first version of ECheck and I started learning the POP3 protocol. It’s come in very handy when I’m away from my email client and don’t want to receive email anywhere and fragment my mailbox by spreading it across a few machines.

Firstly, this’ll work on both Linux and Windows systems, with no extra software needed (assuming most Linux distros come with a Telnet client by default).

Change your console resolution and colour depth

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 20:22:42 +0000

OK so not much is going on… Thought I might as well pass along some general knowledge.

Changing the resolution of a Linux console is a fairly simple task (and requires a reboot) and is generally a nice thing to do if you intend using the console a lot.

Start off by logging in as root, and open your Grub menu file (mine is in /boot/grub/menu.lst). Next, find the option that would normally boot your Linux system (probably looks something like the following):