Via Flickr:
I'm addicted to trying out new distros and different versions of Linux.

Upload from Dropbox March 04, 2014 at 02:52PM

Thought I'd give Rails another go on my newly created Manjaro Linux VM.






After filling in a couple of required packages the above screenshot shows it firing through the Rails install.

To get to this stage I did the following;

• sudo pacman -S base-devel ruby sqlite3 nodejs
• Added /home/alastair/.gem/ruby/2.1.0/bin to my path in .bashrc
• gem install rails
• gem install execjs

After a few minutes got the following successful install




Now to dig out that Rails tutorial I was working through.

Update,
Turns out can't start a rails server do it a missing JavaScript Runtime, bit more searching require.

Update2,
Found the answer on the Arch Linux Wiki which worked updated the instructions above.

• sudo pacman -S nodejs 

Success


Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Via Flickr:
Based on Arch Linux so seems pretty nippy at the moment in the VM.

Upload from Dropbox February 26, 2014 at 01:46PM

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Another day another Linux distro to try.

Giving the Gentoo based Linux a try on a VM.

My Internet provider doesn't supply me with a static IP address with my broadband, so my Raspberry Pi external web address can wander if my router or connectigets reset. There are third party sites which will provide you with a static URL which follows your wandering IP address but its fun to do it yourself.

To keep me updated on the current IP I wrote a Ruby script which I run via crontab to check and Tweet me is the IP address changes.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'open-uri'

require 'twitter'



twitDM = "twitter_username"



remote_ip = open('http://whatismyip.akamai.com').read

old_ip = File.open('remote_ip.txt', 'r').read



if (remote_ip != old_ip) then

    File.open('remote_ip.txt', "w") { |file|  file.write(remote_ip)}



    client = Twitter::REST::Client.new do |config|

      config.consumer_key        = "xxxx"

      config.consumer_secret     = "xxxx"

      config.access_token        = "xxxx"

      config.access_token_secret = "xxxx"

    end



    client.update("D #{twitDM} My IP address is now #{remote_ip}")



else

    puts "IP addresses match"

end

You can clone the script at Github https://github.com/alastairhm/myip it uses a Ruby Twitter API library which can be found at https://github.com/sferik/twitter to do the direct message with the new IP.
Full details about getting your Twitter API keys can be found at https://dev.twitter.com/


Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery