Tue 24 February 2009

How to install irssi on Dreamhost

This was a useful guide I wrote back on my old website. I was trying to install irssi, and I couldn't remember how I installed it last time. Luckily it was available on archive.org's WayBackMachine. I have updated this guide to glib-2.19.8 and irssi-0.8.15.

To install irssi, you can eigher follow the next 7 steps and install from source.

Every command on this page should be entered into a SSH Prompt on DreamHost

SSH into your Dreamhost server (for me, this is titan.dreamhost.com, you can find your server inside panel)

Create the necessary directories:

mkdir -p bin lib tmp
chmod 700 bin lib tmp

Adding lines to your ~/.bash_profile

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/lib/pkgconfig" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

Activate the new changes

source ~/.bash_profile

Download, untar, and install glib

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib/2.19/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
tar -xvzf glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
cd glib-2.19.8
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Download and install irssi

cd ~/tmp
wget http://irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.15.tar.gz
tar -xvvzf irssi-0.8.15.tar.gz
cd irssi-0.8.15
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Clean up

rm -rf ~/tmp/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz ~/tmp/glib-2.19.8 ~/tmp/irssi-0.8.15.tar.gz ~/tmp/irssi-0.8.15

Once you have installed it, simply type irssi to run it.

I asked Dreamhost if they would allow the use of a terminal application running all the time. Here is their response:

You won’t be in “trouble” for running an irc program (no servers) on our servers. However if the system becomes unstable, it would likely be one of the first processes killed by our admins as our servers are meant for hosting web pages only. In general , we just don’t want users running bots or their own server daemons on our servers.”

Mon 23 February 2009

Hello, and welcome

Hello and welcome to my new website. Its been a long time since I have had a fully working website, this time I hope to maintain and update this regularly.

The design is heavily inspired by Nathan Borrow, ever since I first saw his website, I loved how simple and white it looked. I have tried to make my website quite different, but it always goes back to a similar look and feel that Nathan Borrow has on his site.

What can you find here?

On my website you can find various projects I am working on such as: PyPPP. I am also working on lithium which is the batteries that wern't included in Django, it is a suite of applications for writing a Django website, it includes a blog, a forum, and many other useful applications.

The blog on my website is mainly as a home to post updates and notifications based on the projects I am working on, I will also post anything interesting I find in Python or Django.