There is some information in the ZoneMinder wiki on compiling and installing ZoneMinder on Centos 6, but these instructions are incomplete, and will not work. After helping a coworker get it up and running, and finding little information out there for Centos 6, I decided to turn it into a blog post.

The following procedure will allow you to compile and install ZoneMinder 1.25 on Centos 6 64bit with all options enabled. All actions should be done as root.

Procedure

1] Install Centos 6 using the 64bit minimal install DVD. I highly recommend using the minimal install, but you can probably use disk 1 of the full install if you want.

2] Run updates:

yum -y update

3] Disable SELinux by editing /etc/sysconfig/selinux and changing the SELINUX line to disabled:

SELINUX=disabled

4] Reboot

5] Install RPMForge yum repository:

rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -ihv http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

6] Install needed dependencies:

yum install gcc gcc-c++ wget mysql-devel mysql-server php php-mysql php-pear php-pear-DB php-mbstring \
bison bison-devel httpd make ncurses ncurses-devel libtermcap-devel sendmail sendmail-cf caching-nameserver \
sox newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel php-gd audiofile-devel gtk2-devel libv4l-devel ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel \
zlib zlib-devel openssl openssl-devel gnutls-devel php-process perl-Time-HiRes perl-CPAN pcre-devel libjpeg-devel \
perl-Date-Manip perl-libwww-perl perl-Module-Load perl-Net-SFTP-Foreign perl-Archive-Tar perl-Archive-Zip perl-Expect \
perl-MIME-Lite perl-Device-SerialPort

7] Install Sys::Mmap module if you want mmap enabled. Also install MIME::Entity and X10 camera support, if desired. Just hit enter to accept the default for any question you’re asked. Do each of these separately, one at a time (ie, don’t just copy and paste the following three lines in one go, do one at a time).

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Sys::Mmap'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install MIME::Entity'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install X10::ActiveHome'

8] Download Zoneminder install:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://www2.zoneminder.com/downloads/ZoneMinder-1.25.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf ZoneMinder-1.25.0.tar.gz
cd ZoneMinder-1.25.0

9] Run configure. NOTE: The database username and password specified in this step are also used in step 13.

CXXFLAGS=-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS ./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/html/zm  --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin --with-webuser=apache \
--with-webgroup=apache ZM_DB_HOST=localhost ZM_DB_NAME=zm ZM_DB_USER=YOURZMUSER ZM_DB_PASS=YOURZMPASSWORD ZM_SSL_LIB=openssl \
--with-extralibs="-L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/lib64/mysql -L/usr/local/lib" --with-libarch=lib64 --with-ffmpeg

If you don’t want mmap support, add “–enable-mmap=no“:

CXXFLAGS=-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS ./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/html/zm  --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin --with-webuser=apache \
--with-webgroup=apache ZM_DB_HOST=localhost ZM_DB_NAME=zm ZM_DB_USER=YOURZMUSER ZM_DB_PASS=YOURZMPASSWORD ZM_SSL_LIB=openssl \
--with-extralibs="-L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/lib64/mysql -L/usr/local/lib" --with-libarch=lib64 --with-ffmpeg --enable-mmap=no

10] Compile and install:

make
make install

11] Start mysqld for the first time:

service mysqld start

12] Set your root mysql password by following the instructions in the output:

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'NEWPASSWORD'

13] Create your Zoneminder database and user, and give the user access to the database, and reload privs. NOTE: YOURZMUSER and YOURZMPASSWORD need to be the same as in the configure statement in step 9. When prompted for the password for root, use the one you set in step 12.

mysql -u root -p
create database zm;
CREATE USER 'YOURZMUSER'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOURZMPASSWORD';
grant CREATE, INSERT, SELECT, DELETE, UPDATE on zm.* to YOURZMUSER@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

14] Load in initial SQL data for ZoneMinder:

mysql -u root -p zm > /usr/local/src/ZoneMinder-1.25.0/db/zm_create.sql

15] Copy the start script to /etc/init.d and configure it to start on boot. Also set other services to start on boot:

cp /usr/local/src/ZoneMinder-1.25.0/scripts/zm /etc/init.d/
chmod +x /etc/init.d/zm
chkconfig zm on
chkconfig mysqld on
chkconfig httpd on

16] Copy Cambozola jar file:

cd /var/www/html/zm
wget http://www.zoneminder.com/sites/zoneminder.com/downloads/cambozola.jar
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/zm/cambozola.jar

17] Edit php.ini and set:

short_open_tag = On

This is off by default.
18] Start Apache and ZoneMinder:

service httpd start
service zm start

19] Browse to your web interface using http://YOURIP/zm. You should see the ZoneMinder Console web interface.

Troubleshooting

If you are not able to pull up the web interface, check the following:

Iptables - Centos 6 comes with a restrictive set of iptables rules. If you’re providing firewall through some other method (ex, a hardware firewall), you can shut iptables off and prevent it from starting on boot by doing the following:

service iptables stop
chkconfig iptables off

If you need to use iptables for firewalling, edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables and add a line just below the line for port 22 (SSH) to allow web (port 80) connections:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Then restart iptables:

service iptables restart

PHP Short Open Tags – Check your /var/log/httpd/error_log file. If you have error messages like the following, redo step 17.

PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected $end in /var/www/html/zm/includes/functions.php on line 2437

After editing the /etc/php.ini file, you must restart httpd:

service httpd restart

Next Steps

Once you have the web interface up, you’ll want to click on Options in the upper right.

The System tab will allow you to turn on authentication. By default, ZoneMinder does not require any username and password.

Under the Images tab, click the check box next to OPT_CAMBOZOLA to use the Java streaming client for better refresh rates.

On the main page, click Add New Monitor to start adding cameras to monitor.

I get it. We all get it. It’s winter. You want snow for the holidays. And there are even some tasteful ways to put snow on your website. For example, Picnik’s got unobtrusive, non-page-killing snow on their homepage. That’s some nice snow.

FIX YOUR DAMN SNOW! Or take it down. Either, or.

I know it’s new. I know Google+ isn’t as big as Facebook. But honestly? I like it better.

But the +1 button isn’t just for social networking, y’all. It’s for relevancy in a Google search, too! Gimme one and I’ll click it. YOU’RE WELCOME!

If you’ve Googled as often as I do, I’m sure you’ve noticed that while the results often bring you to relevant sites, they don’t always bring you to the information you’re looking for. Chances are the sites you find have the information, or can at least lead you to it. But if there’s no search feature, it could take you hours to sift through all the articles.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for that. So I click away. Please! Put a search feature on your site!

On a more serious note, I just plain hate most social networking sites. I have accounts on some. Not a lot of them, but a few. A couple art sites, Twitter (of course), Fet, YouTube, damn near all the popular social bookmarking sites and… And now?

I want to go retrieve all my information and say, “Fuck internet socializing!” But I can’t. Cause it’s all out there forever, thanks to things like The Wayback Machine and Google archives. And I’m so incredibly glad I’ve been married to a man who specializes in internet security since before social networking sites were so huge. Because compared to some of my friends, I’m an internet ghost.

MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, FetLife, B.com, the five billion and one different dating sites, YouTube, all the hundreds of different ways to save and share your bookmarks, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, GoogleTalk, and Buzz, and Friend Connect, and Reader, and…

Wikipedia lists over 100 different social networking sites, and each of them does exactly the same thing as at least a dozen others. Some people (especially bloggers) have a profile on each and every one. And they re-post what they said on each over, and over, and over again. “Johnny had peanut butter and jelly for lunch!” shows up a hundred times in your inbox if you follow the same people on each site.

But that’s only the beginning.

People put every single tiny detail of their lives on these sites. Their real name. Their address. Their email address, which is often connected to at least one credit card, if only because they use eBay on occasion. What they’re doing, and where, at any given moment, on any given day. Where they’re going on vacation, for how long, and when. What they eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and their midnight snack. How often they masturbate and with what. All their favorite things. All the things they hate. All the people they love.

We’re doing the government’s and advertisers’ jobs for them.

Looking at any single average profile on FaceBook links you to that person’s boss, coworkers, any and all companies they work for or with, the vast majority of their extended family, their children, all of their friends local or online, the schools they went to, where they grew up, their age, their birthday, the kind of car they drive, what size they wear, how much they weigh, how often they’re online, when they leave the house…

And I’m really at a loss for words. Why don’t we see the problem with this giving away of one’s anonymity?

People are posting that they’ll be on vacation for X amount of days, and acting surprised when they come home and their house is empty. Allowing sex blogger friends who only have one account (for their sex blog) to add their non-sex-blog FaceBook page to their friends list and acting confused when suddenly their friends’ reblogging of their posts are showing up in their bulletins (Or whatever it shows up in. I am not FaceBook-app savvy.). Using the same email address for their sex-blog, and their mommy blog, and their FaceBook page, and their Twitter, and then can’t figure out how Jessica Fucksalot found them in real life.

While you may think it’s awesome having over a thousand friends, the reality is, it simply means you can look at a web page and find out the names of a thousand people who have computers. I know I don’t know who half the people I follow on Twitter are. I follow most of them because they follow me. Which is probably why I’m so anal about unfollowing everyone who unfollows me. For me, it’s more about exposure, and if I make friends along the way, that rocks! But that is not the reason I chose to join Twitter, or any of the social networking sites I belong to.

People complain about internet stalkers, but we’re perpetuating it with our undying need to tell the whole world who we are, and our overzealous desire to be eFamouser than John Doe in North Dakota. Get-rich-quick schemes –that really only work for those who jumped on them before the social networking site became popular– and hopes of being noticed by some major company or publisher feed our frenzied sharing of information, when the truth is we’re just enabling more people to destroy our lives. And total strangers we’ll probably never meet face-to-face at that!

People are getting fired because they forgot they friended their boss and updated their status to say, “Called out sick. Going to the beach.”, or because their sex blogs have been found through other social networking sites, or because they posted a picture of themselves bombed out of their mind, running down the street naked and peeing in the gutter.

And you wouldn’t do those things in real life. You wouldn’t go to the grocery store and pin up pictures of yourself at last Friday’s “Girls Gone Wild” party, or a letter about how shitty your wife is, or a picture of you with a joint in one hand and a straw in the other surrounded by empty beer bottles and leering frat guys. You wouldn’t stand in the middle of the street screaming, “My name is Jefferey Fitzgerald McCofski. I live at 1617 Applejack Way in Eureka, California. My phone number is 555-867-5309. My email is FitzMcCof@gmail.com. I’m an internet shopping addict, so that email address is attached to at least three credit cards, and I just paid the premium on all of them. By the way, I’m going on vacation this week, and I won’t be back till October. PLEASE COME ROB ME!!!” (Shamelessly stolen from M.)

Or maybe you would. I sure as fuck wouldn’t.

M and I were talking, last night, about how I feel like I should be begging Him to reconsider His adamant “No way, no how!” rule when it comes to most social networking sites. How I’m being bullied into at least setting up a FaceBook page for ID and Mindcryme by the companies I work with, and my friends, and my family, and companies I don’t work with, and people I bump into on the street, and the effing government, for crying out loud.

Yeah, I know those emails I get saying, “Please ‘like’ us on FaceBook! And tell your friends to ‘like’ us, too!” are mass-mailings. I know they don’t really look at me and go, “This chick doesn’t have a FaceBook! What is wrong with her?! We need to get her on board!”

But a couple companies I’d love to work with are only on FaceBook. I miss out on a lot of opportunities by not having a FaceBook. And not just the contests. Some of my friends know that pretty much the same group of friends is following them everywhere, so they try to make each social profile different, which means I miss out on some important events in their lives because they post about them somewhere I’m not allowed to be and don’t mention them to me because they assume I read it.

“I posted about this on Tumblr. Why aren’t you keeping up with me?! Don’t you like me anymore?”

Sure, I like you fine. But not enough to jump on the social networking bandwagon anymore than I already have. Not enough to put my life, my stuff, my job, my family, my privacy (Yes, I see the irony of me, someone who babbles incessantly to anyone who’ll listen about personal aspects of my relationship, bitching about losing my privacy to the internet.), my bank account, my credit cards, my pets, or even my plants in danger.

No, I will not “like” you on FaceBook. “Liking” someone on FaceBook requires me to have a FaceBook, and it’s just not gonna happen. And I’m not gonna tell my friends to “like” you on FaceBook, either. It’s not my job to convince my friends that you, or your company, or your cause, or your campaign are awesome. It’s yours. Do your own legwork. Cause you sure as fuck ain’t doing mine for me. Hell, I’ve considered unfollowing most of you (you meaning companies, not my super cool friends and readers) on Twitter for just that reason.

“You see we all perpetuate this. And whether you realize it or not, you welcome the government, cause we say, ‘Fuck the Patriot Act!’ but we do their job for them.”

Until yesterday there wasn’t a jailbreak for the MC iPods. @comex on Twitter released an “in-device” jailbreak for all devices (except iPad 3.2.1, which apparently is buggy and being worked on). By “in-device” I mean that all you need to do is go to http://jailbreakme.com in Safari on your device to jailbreak it. No fiddling with Windows or Mac apps, and it seems to work for most people.

The iPod Touch 2nd generation devices have multitasking and background support disabled, supposedly for performance reasons. I’ve enabled them both following the instructions I’ll put in this post and I have to say that both multitasking and background support work just fine. I’d even venture to say that the native multitasking is faster than when I was using Backgrounder installed via Cydia.

So, here are the steps to jailbreak your iPod Touch 2g (MC model) and enable multitasking and background support.

For battery percentage support, download the correct file in step 5 and follow the instructions for editing General.plist in Update 3 at the bottom of the post.

IMPORTANT: Plug your iPod into your computer and sync via iTunes. Always take a backup before trying anything like this so you have something to restore to! Also, I think this jailbreak is supposed to be done on an un-jailbroken device. I’m not sure what happens if you try running this on an iPod that’s already jailbroken.

1. On your iPod touch, load Safari and go to http://jailbreakme.com. If that site is overloaded, you can also try http://jailbreakme.modmyi.com.

2. Slide the slider bar on that page to the right to begin the jailbreak process. First it will download some files and then it will apply the jailbreak. This took a few minutes on my iPod, so please be patient. The download servers for the jailbreak have been hammered since yesterday. If you end up at a screen with a purple background and it does nothing else, reboot your iPod and try it again. I did have to do this reboot trick to get the download of the jailbreak to work.

3. When the jailbreak is done, you’ll see a message saying that Cydia has been added to your home screen. At this point, you can exit Safari and reboot your device.

NOTE: When I reboot my iPod after the jailbreak, I get a small line of multicolored pixels on the top of the display. This doesn’t seem to hurt anything, and as soon as everything is booted that line goes away (at least for me). So I’m just ignoring it. I rarely ever reboot my iPod anyways.

4. This step is optional. At this point you have a jailbroken iPod. If you want to be able to install .ipa files, launch Cydia on your iPod, go to Manage and then Sources, hit Edit and then Add and enter http://cydia.hackulo.us. When you’re finished adding that repository, search for AppSync and install it. Make sure you install the AppSync version for 4.0! Once that’s done you can install any .ipa file.

5. To enable multitasking and backgrounds, you’ll need to replace a file on your iPod. Download N72AP.plist by clicking HERE. I got this file from http://devonharvancik.com/plist.html which includes instructions on how to use SSH to replace this file. However, the site appears to be down at the moment, and I’m going to provide instructions on how to use iPhoneExplorer to replace this file, rather than installing and using SSH.

NOTE: The plist file has a different filename on some devices (starting with N8 in the filename). I only have a copy of N72AP.plist for 2nd generation MC model.

NOTE 2: If you would like battery percentage support as well, download THIS copy of N72AP.plist instead. This copy has all 3 options enabled. If you want to enable battery percentages, you’ll also need to edit /var/stash/Applications/Preferences.app/General.plist. Please see Update 3 for instructions on editing the General.plist file.

6. Download and install iPhoneExplorer (http://www.macroplant.com/iphoneexplorer/). I have only used the Windows version, so instructions will be for Windows. I imagine the Mac version is similar.

7. Plug your iPod into your computer and run iPhone Explorer. You should be prompted to select the root directory when you first run iPhone Explorer. If you’re not prompted, you can go to File and Select Root Directory. Since your iPod is now jailbroken, you should choose “/” as your root directory and click OK. You should see your “iPhone Root Directory” listed, with many subdirectories.

NOTE: Be careful what you do here as you’ve now mounted the entire filesystem on your iPod. Random clicking and deleting of files will surely brick your iPod, so use caution!

8. In iPhone Explorer, browse to System->Library->CoreServices->Springboard.app.

9. iPhone Explorer supports dragging and dropping files. So open up an Explorer window and create a backup directory. It doesn’t matter where you put this as long as you remember where it is. This should NOT be the same directory  where you put the downloaded copy of N72AP.plist (because then you’ll overwrite your downloaded copy with the normal version from your iPod). Once you have your newly created backup directory open in Windows Explorer, drag the N72AP.plist file from iPhone Explorer into your backup directory (just so you have it if you ever need it).

We’re also going to delete a few PNG files that will greatly speed up the Home screen once backgrounds are enabled. Drag and drop the following files from iPhone Explorer into your backup directory on your computer:

• WallpaperGradientLandscapeBottomT.png
• WallpaperGradientLandscapeTopT.png
• WallpaperGradientPortraitBottomT.png
• WallpaperGradientPortraitTopT.png
• WallpaperIconDockShadow.png
• WallpaperIconDockShadowT.png
• WallpaperIconShadow.png
• WallpaperIconShadowT.png

This should be all the PNG files that have filenames starting with “Wallpaper”. I have noticed no difference in display quality with these files gone, but I have noticed a huge increase in speed when they’ve been removed.

10. Now in Windows Explorer, browse to the directory where you saved the downloaded copy of N72AP.plist. Drag and drop that downloaded file into the SpringBoard.app directory in iPhone Explorer. Once the file is copied, and iPhone Explorer has finished syncing, delete those PNG files from your iPod by right clicking on each in iPhone Explorer and clicking Delete.

11. Once again reboot your iPod.

At this point you should have a jailbroken iPod Touch 2G that is able to install any .ipa files and has multitasking and backgrounds enabled. To multitask, open an app and double click the Home button. To set a background, use the Photos app.

You should also download TinyUmbrella (http://thefirmwareumbrella.blogspot.com/) and save your 4.0 SHSH blobs. It’s very likely that Apple will fix the bug that’s being used in the latest jailbreak. If you save your SHSH blobs to your computer, you should be able to jailbreak even after Apple fixes the bug.You can also do this from your iPod in Cydia.

Update: If something happens and it looks like your ipod is bricked, try rebooting. If that doesn’t work, you’ll probably have to restore via iTunes and try again. I have no idea why someones iPod would get bricked unless they followed these instructions for something other than an iPod Touch 2nd generation MC model, which is what this guide is written for. I don’t have any other devices, so I can’t say if this would work or not. TRY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Update 2: When you set a custom lock screen, it only shows up when you don’t have the iPod plugged in. Plugging it in seems to switch it to the standard battery screen. Unplugging it (at least on mine) brings up my custom lock screen. Since I don’t have a newer iPod that natively has backgrounds turned on, I’m not sure if this is normal or not. Doesn’t bug me, as I only plug it in for syncing and charging.

Update 3: Some people have asked how to manually edit the N72AP.plist file and how to enable battery percentages. These plist files are binary, so you need to use a plist editor. If you’re on a Mac, Apple’s PlistEdit Pro is probably the best app to use and can be found HERE. For Windows, I used iPodRobot which can be downloaded HERE. Basically you want to open up iPhone Explorer, drag the N72AP.plist file to your local directory, and then open it with the plist edit. The keys that have been added to the capabilities section to add support for multitasking and backgrounds (and optionally battery percentages) were:

<key>gas-gauge-battery</key>
<true/>

<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key>
<true/>

<key>multitasking</key>
<true/>

To fully enable battery percentages, once again in Iphone Explorer browse to /var/stash/Applications/Preferences.app. Drag and drop the General.plist file to your computer and edit it using one of the editors linked above.  Search for the word cellular-data. That section will look like this:

<array>
<string>cellular-data</string>
</array>

Make that section look like the following instead:

<array>
<dict>
<key>cellular-data</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</array>

Once you’re done, save the file and drag General.plist back into the /var/stash/Applications/Preferences.app directory. If you manually modified the N72AP.plist file, drag it back into System/Library/CoreServices/Springboard.app directory. Then reboot your ipod.

Once you’ve changed both the N72AP.plist and General.plist files for battery percentage support, after your ipod is rebooted  go into Settings and then General. You’ll have a new menu option named Usage which you can use to turn on the battery percentages.

Additional info:

Clayton Braaschs Blog (FAQ on jailbreakme)

I recently got an iPod Touch. I love this thing. There’s so much to play around with. At first I ran into some confusion with reading ebooks and went through alot of trial and error trying to find the best method of not only reading ebooks on the Touch, but getting them on there in the right format. I’ve settled on a pretty good system, most of what I’ve picked up here and there via googling, so figured I’d pass it along.

I have alot of ebooks. Most of them are in .LIT format, but there’s PDFs, .TXT, .RTF and a ton of other formats. When I was primarily using a Palm Tungsten E2, I would normally use something like ConvertLIT Gui to extract the .LIT files to HTML and then use Plucker to convert and suck them into the E2. To be honest, it was a pain in the ass.

I’ve tried a few applications from the Apple App Store for the iPod Touch. The 2 I had narrowed it down to were BookShelf or Stanza. BookShelf had a “lite” version that was available for free, but you have to pay for the full version. Stanza, on the other hand, is completely free.

As far as features go, both of them were full featured, with control over how the text looks on the screen. There was one feature in BookShelf that I couldn’t seem to find in Stanza, and that is auto-scroll. When you’re on your back in bed reading, tapping the screen to change pages can get tiring. On the Palm, I used the auto-scroll feature of Plucker most times that I read. Once you found the right speed, it was perfect. I’ve been unable to find something similar in Stanza, and hope they add it in the future. It’s seriously my only complaint.

Initially getting ebooks onto the iPod for both apps was a major pain as well.

For BookShelf, you can download a server from their website which you install on your Windows or Mac desktop. This server is written in Java, and to be honest I found it not to work most of the time. When you go to the Available Shelves screen you see the shelf server listed as a nearby shelf. That part works fine, but much of the time when browsing to a directory the server application would hang, with the Java process consuming alot of CPU. Eventually the iPod app would time out. This seems worse the more files you have in a given directory, but I had hangs and freezes even with 4 or 5 .LIT files in a directory.

For Stanza, there’s a number of ways of getting ebooks into the app on the iPod. You can download a beta version of Stanza Desktop from their website. To be honest, I was not impressed. To get an ebook into the iPod app, you have to open each individual ebook in Stanza Desktop and then enable sharing. Way too time consuming if you want to load a large number of ebooks. Another method is to download and use iPhone Explorer to copy any .EPUB files you may have manually onto the iPod. If all your ebooks are in this format, this is probably the quickest and easiest way to load alot of files. More information about that method can be found in their FAQ HERE. Since I had almost no .EPUB files, that didn’t help me very much.

Finally, also in their FAQ, there’s mention of Calibre. Calibre is a free ebook management application that can also convert between formats. Even better, it includes a content server so that you can browse and download books directly from Calibre in the Get Books section of Stanza on the Touch. Using Calibre is also helping me organize my ebook collection, with the proper meta data and cover art.

I did run into one problem with the Calibre content server. I was never able to start it via the Preferences interface inside of the Calibre application. I always got errors about port 8080 (or any other port I tried) being unavailable. This with firewalling and antivirus turned completely off. I got around this problem by just browsing to c:\Program Files\Calibre and double clicking on the calibre-server.exe application. By default it binds to port 8080, which was fine for my needs.

So, even tho I’m sure it’s documented on a number of blogs out there, let me outline the process I have for organizing ebooks and making them available to Stanza. Calibre is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’m going to talk about the Windows version here.

Prerequisites

• Stanza installed on your iPod Touch or iPhone – LINK
• Calibre install on a Windows desktop – LINK
• Wifi (both your iPod/iPhone and your Windows desktop need to be on the same network)
• Ebooks
• Time!

Calibre

Download and install Calibre as you would any Windows application. When you run it for the first time it’s going to ask you to identify a directory to store ebooks in. When you import ebooks into Calibre they are copied into subdirectories under the one you choose. The subdirectories are broken down by author name and book title.

Once you’re in Calibre, click on the Preferences button in the upper right of the window. In the General section, make sure the Preferred output format is set to EPUB. Stanza likes EPUB! I didn’t fiddle with anything else in the Preferences. As I mentioned earlier, I was never able to start the content server from here. Maybe you’ll have better luck, but I’ll assume you won’t. Anyways, click OK and close Preferences.

In the upper left, you can click on the small triangle to show more options for adding books. If you only have a single directory, choose the Add books from a single directory option. If you have a master directory with many subdirectories (ie subdirectories by author), choose one of the Add books from directories options. Wait for it to add all the books to it’s inventory. Don’t worry about incorrectly detected author names or book titles yet.

Once the books are added, you are going to want to edit the meta data for each book. This is a slow process, but when you’re done you’ll have all the correct information for each of your ebooks, including synopsis and book cover art. To do this, right click on each book, click Edit meta information and then Edit metadata individually. The bulk editing feature is good if you need to correct the spelling of an authors name for many books, or something to that effect.

In the edit screen, the first things I do is make sure the correct book title and author name is in place. For the Author field I’ve been doing first name first (ie Terry Brooks). The Author Sort field is last name first, and once you have the authors correct name in the Author field, you can click the little icon next to the Author Sort field and it will put the correct thing in the box for you.  Once that’s done, click the Fetch metadata from server button at the bottom.

By default, Calibre uses Google Books to find metadata. It’s also highly recommended to use isbndb.com. Simply go to isbndb.com and sign up for a free account. Once you’re logged into their site, you can create a free access key. Once you have a key, put it in the box provided in Calibre when you fetch metadata. It saves the key after you use it once, so you won’t have to keep putting it in.

From the list, click the result that best describes the book (and edition) and click OK. One thing to point out here is that when you go to fetch cover art it’s going to use the ISBN number from the metadata you chose. So make sure there’s an ISBN number for the result you use. I’ve also noticed that some entries with ISBN but no published date usually has no corresponding cover art, so I usually try to find the result from a publisher I recognize (ie Del Rey) that has a published date.

Back at the metadata screen, it’ll fill in the comments box with a synopsis, the published date, publisher, and various other info. To get the cover art, click the Download cover button on the bottom right. You can also provide your own if the automated search doesn’t work out for you. Once you’re done with cover art, and making sure everything else looks ok, click OK.

Certain ebook formats include all this information already, so you may not even have to do all this for all formats. At any rate, do this for all your imported books. It’s time consuming, but everything will be organized with cover art when you’re done.

Once you’re done, select all your ebooks (shift-click), click on the triangle next to the Convert E-books button, and choose Bulk convert. Depending on how many ebooks you have, this can take a very long time. Out of the 60 ebooks I’ve added so far, I’ve only had 2 return an error when trying to convert. I’m fairly sure the .LIT files are damaged, however. What this is doing is converting the ebooks to .EPUB format. The file will be located in the same directory as the format you imported.

Once the conversion is done (or any time you want to load ebooks into Stanza), navigate to the directory you installed Calibre in (by default it’s C:\Program Files\Calibre2) and double click on calibre-server.exe. This will load up what looks to be a blank command window. At that point, the content server is running on your Windows desktop IP on port 8080. If you get a Windows Firewall notification, make sure to allow the application access to port 8080.

Stanza

On your iPod Touch or iPhone, go to the App Store. Search and install Stanza. It’s very easy to find.

Once Stanza is installed, go ahead and run it and tap the Get Books icon. Click on the Shared tab. At this point, as long as you have no issues, you should see Books in calibre (on NAME) (where NAME is the name of your Windows computer). Tap on that and you can then view books in the Calibre database by author, or a number of other ways. If you have a number of books by a single author, you can navigate to that sub menu, and then tap the icon in the upper right which will download all the books in the current view. Alternately you can tap on individual books to download them.

When you’re done downloading your books, you can close the calibre-server.exe window on your Windows computer.

There’s alot of things I like about this process. I have alot of ebooks, and using a free app to organize them is something I like. That it makes it easy to get the books onto the iPod is a huge draw as well.

Things are different now, or rather they’re supposed to be. There’s alot of blog posts and such that talk about how Linux is ready for the normal Windows user. Mostly, I would agree, but I have a story here, about Amarok and a webcam.

Now just a little background on me. I’ve been a system and network administrator professionally for over 13 years. Most of the system administration in the early days was on BSDi servers. I converted these to Linux (Slackware) as soon as I could convince the owners of the ISP I was working for that it would benefit us in the longrun.

These days, I almost exclusively use Centos 5 for any servers I manage. For workstations (when it makes the most sense to use Linux), I’m very partial to Ubuntu. I’ve used Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) a bit in the past as well and thought it was a good distribution.

I recently brought a server home, after virtualizing it, and wanted to turn it into a media machine. I have past experience with MythTV, and various other media packages, but I didn’t want to go that route this time. What I need is pretty simple: Amarok, Zoneminder w/ webcam, and eventually full video codec support. Pretty simple? I thought it was going to be, but boy was I wrong. Below I’ll outline the distributions I tried, and the pain I had with each:

Ubuntu 9.10 - I figured I’d start with the latest version of Ubuntu. The install is super easy, and it’s a really nice looking distribution. Amarok installation, and MP3 support (after doing a quick google search), was very easy. This distribution comes with Amarok 2.2.x, and it was neat using the webUI script to easily create a web interface for controlling Amarok. Then I got to the webcam portion. I have a Logitech Quickcam Chat that I bought at Walmart. I imagine, since Walmart sells them, that a lot of people have this same webcam, as well as the other lower end Logitech models. I know the drivers are being hacked together, but I figured since so many people have these, that drivers would be readily available. They aren’t. In fact, the last time these webcams worked was in Ubuntu 8.04 (see notes below). I spent hours recompiling drivers, and doing google searches, only to find out that many others are having the same trouble. It’s apparently something to do with a change made to the gspca drivers. Oddly enough, noone seems to have a fix except “buy another new webcam”. So, to be clear, this was previously supported, but now it’s not and noone seems to know why. I have an older Logitech Quickcam here as well which also doesn’t work. After many kernel and driver recompiles I gave up.

Ubuntu 9.04 - Same problem as with Ubuntu 9.10. There seems to be no fix, nor any real explanation why the support was broken.

Linux Mint 8 - I didn’t expect much, since Mint is based off of Ubuntu, but figured I’d give it a try. Really slick GUI, but I was disappointed to find the same issue as with Ubuntu 9.10. Like I said, I pretty much expected this since it’s based off Ubuntu. I didn’t bother with the kernel and driver recompiles, since I’d basically already done that. Amarok and MP3 support worked straight out of the box, with no extra fiddling needed.

Centos 5 - I figured, what the hell, might as well give it a try at least. Centos is really a server oriented distribution, tho, so I really didn’t have much hope of getting things working. First up in Amarok. It’s not included in the default yum repositories. I ended up adding the EPEL repository and used that to install Amarok. Getting MP3 support, however, is another story and I wasn’t able to do it in the hour I fiddled with it. According to several google searches, I’m not the only person who has been asking this question, with very few answers (and none of which worked for me). The problem is that the xine extracodecs package is not available in the EPEL repository, nor the main Centos repositories. I eventually gave up, since this system wasn’t exactly supposed to be brain surgery. I gave the webcam a try, but I didn’t feel like downloading and manually installing cam applications, and it didn’t detect it anyways. So, Centos is a huge winner in the server realm, but in the workstation area it’s just not worth the hassle.

Ubuntu 8.04 - Finally I decided to go back to a distribution that I knew worked. Where Amarok was easy to get going, and I knew the webcam was supported. Version 8.04 is a solid release, don’t get me wrong, but there have been 2 major releases since then. Updates are promised through 2011, but as time goes on less and less software will be updated. I spend enough time compiling and managing systems at work, I don’t want to do it at home as well. Unfortunately 8.04 only has Amarok 1.x available, but it’s fairly easy to get up and running with MP3 support. Zoneminder is as easy as installing it via apt-get install zoneminder, copying /etc/zm/apache.conf to /etc/apache2/conf.d/zm.conf and restarting apache. The webcam is supported out of the box and there’s no additional issues that I’ve found with either. The only thing is, this has a limited shelf life, and in many areas I’m stuck with older application versions, unless I want to fiddle and compile them myself (which I don’t). At any rate, this is a winner for now.

I know it’s silly to judge a distribution based on support for a specific webcam, and that’s really not what I’m doing here. I have a couple of simple and specific needs that I figured would be easy to meet, and was surprised at how much of a hassle it was. Even with my advanced knowledge, I ended up being frustrated, so it doesn’t bode well for the Windows user who wants to just play some music and get on webcam with someone.