The Troll-Range » Linux

Backporting new code to Debian packages

Ghworg — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:30:23 +0000

I like Linux distros packaging systems, especially Debian’s. It makes it trivial to install, remove and change to different versions of programs. The only problem is that sometimes there is a delay in packaging the latest version of an app.

Never fear though, if you are willing to do a little bit of work you can shoehorn the latest code into a package yourself without needing any special knowledge of how to create packages. Note this will only work with programs that already have been packaged since it re-uses the old packaging info with the new code.

I refer to Debian, but the exact same procedure will work on any deb based distro, such as Ubuntu.

Before starting make sure you have the devscripts and build-essential packages installed. These will install all the tools needed to build debian packages.

First download the source package of the old version.

apt-get source $NAME

Then, as a sanity check cd into the created directory and run

debuild -i -us -uc

This will probably complain about missing packages needed for building, so go ahead and install them with apt-get or aptitude or whatever. Then re-run the build command. Assuming that works you should end up with some .deb files in the parent dir.

Now grab the code for the latest version from its website. If it is not already in a tarball you’ll want to make one from it with

tar czf application_version-1.orig.tar.gz applicationdir

If it is a tarball already then just rename it to match the formatting application_version-1.orig.tar.gz. For example when backporting mesa I name the tarball mesa_7.7.0-1.orig.tar.gz.

Next copy the debian dir from the old application directory to the new one.

cp -a application-debianversion/debian application-newversion/

Then cd into the new directory and run

debchange -v version-1 "Updated code to latest version"

It is vital that the version number used in this command matches the naming of the .orig.tar.gz file you created earlier. For example for mesa I use 7.7.0-1. This is the magic that will make everything work.

The final step is to build the new package.

debuild -i -us -uc

and tada! With a bit of luck your shiny new version should be packaged up and ready to be installed.

Firefox 3.5 startup problem (solved)

Ghworg — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:06:28 +0000

Firefox^[1] 3.5 has been out for a while now, but I’ve only recently managed to switch due to the program not starting up unless I use a weird command line hack.

By using the strace command I found it was hanging on a futex call, starting in safe-mode and even deleting .mozilla didn’t fix it. I found a forum thread on the mozilla forum that shows I’m not the only one to come across this. There was a fix described in a post linked from there, but it only worked by editing the launch command, and I’m not prepared to dig through the OS and replace every instance of the launcher to make it work.

Yesterday though I found the real culprit, it was padsp! A long time ago I had set Firefox to use padsp in order to get flash sound to work correctly with pulseaudio. I had totally forgotten I had done this, because I had made the change in /etc not in my home folder.

So if you find Firefox 3.5 won’t start on linux even though 3.0 works fine then check if you have a FIREFOX_DSP (or ICEWEASEL_DSP if on Debian) set somewhere. For me the fix was this:

In file /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc:

# which /dev/dsp wrapper to use
ICEWEASEL_DSP="padsp"

See the ICEWEASEL_DSP line, delete it or comment it out and Iceweasel starts working. If you are using vanilla Firefox then obviously replace every instance of the word iceweasel with firefox to implement the fix on your system.

Hope this helps someone. Oh and flash now works fine with pulseaudio without the padsp thing too.

^[1] I’m actually using Iceweasel but it is Firefox in all but name so I’ll call it that here

Control your Music player via bluetooth

Ghworg — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:36:28 +0000

I don’t need no steenking iphone with its fancy apps. I have a fairly low end phone, a Motorola RIZR Z3 but it can run Java J2ME apps. The other day I found an awesome one that lets me control my music player MPD via bluetooth, with a nice little GUI and everything (it also apparently works for XMMS and Winamp).

I was going to twitter about it, but it is so frickin awesome that it deserves more than 140 characters about it. The app is called JAM SE and it looks like it will run on just about any phone that supports J2ME and has bluetooth.

There is a Debian package for the computer-side which makes installing on Debian/Ubuntu a doddle. For others you can grab the program from its own site Bemused-MPD bridge.

With a little bit of extra work I can even get it to control the other music playing computers in the house (all running MPD), mpdproxy on the laptop with the bluetooth connection will redirect all MPD clients to my currently active server.

It is so cool to be able to control my music playback from anywhere in the house just by whipping out my phone, geektastic.

Virgin Media are petty scumbags

Ghworg — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:27:56 +0000

For a few days now I’ve been working (a few minutes at a time) on writing a post about how to monitor your bandwidth usage using munin by directly querying your cable-modem. Today however, when I checked my nice munin graph I found it had stopped working at about 8AM. Some further diagnostic procedures revealed that the cable modem was no longer responding to SNMP requests.

After a bit of googling I discovered the reason for this is that my ISP, Virgin Media, have deliberately disabled SNMP access. Reports vary on the reasons for this, some claim “performance” others “security”, but both are utterly bogus reasons. All this does is deny customers basic information about their connection like bandwidth usage, and I can only conclude that Virgin Media want to make it more difficult for people to dispute their figures.

This isn’t enough to make me ditch VM, but it has pissed me off, and the next time I move house VM are going to be waaay down the list of providers I’ll look at.

PS. My router doesn’t support SNMP either so I can’t use that.

Who-T: Synaptics 1.1 and what your touchpad can do now

Ghworg — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:00:15 +0000

The synaptics driver. So, here’s a list of things that have changed recently with version 1.0 and 1.1.

Perhaps the most important changes have to to with auto-scaling. Synaptics obtains the touchpad dimensions from the kernel and adjusts speed, acceleration, the edges and more depending on these dimensions.

via Who-T: Synaptics 1.1 and what . . . → Read More: Who-T: Synaptics 1.1 and what your touchpad can do now

Let my kernel be Free

Ghworg — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:00:24 +0000

Playing a movie using Free driver

There has been some interesting progress on the open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards recently. It has long been a goal of mine to have a completely Free kernel, it’s why I bought this laptop rather than an NVidia-based one. I want better 3D performance than Intel can offer and was originally going to go NVidia because their Linux support was better. Then ATI released the first load of specs for their cards and I switched my preference. In the end I bought a Toshiba laptop with a Radeon Mobility 2600 graphics chip (also known as an M76 chip).

I’m not a zealot when it comes to Free software, I am a pragmatist, I use whatever works best for me. But experience has taught me that when it comes to Linux kernel code the non-free stuff is always problematic. Practically every kernel crash I’ve ever had can be traced back to some non-free driver I had in there. Who is to blame for this I’m not going to go into, there are arguments on both sides, but the fact is that if you want a completely stable Linux system you are better off keeping the kernel Free.

Of course it takes time to write drivers for something as complex as a graphics card, so up till now I’ve been using the proprietary fglrx drivers from ATI. A necessary compromise, since when I first installed Debian they were the only thing that would get X to even run. It works well enough once you learn to avoid doing the things that cause it to crash (like logging out of KDE), but it adds a hassle to upgrades (having to recompile a kernel module, which often fails and needs custom patches) and is rather finicky about its settings. I’ve periodically tested the state of the Free drivers, both radeon and radeonhd, and seen steady progress.

Today I found that they have finally reached the good-enough point where I can switch. The must-have feature for me is tear-free video playback that doesn’t cause my CPU usage to skyrocket (and hence kick the fan up to unacceptable noise levels). This means the driver needs accelerated 2D and xv support, which has now been achieved.

One quick point for anyone else wanting to switch to the Free driver from fglrx. It won’t work unless you uninstall fglrx, if you just install them side-by-side and tell X to use the Free driver it will show a corrupted image or a black screen then hang. I thought there had been a major regression until I tried removing fglrx, after which both free drivers worked perfectly.

I’m using the xserver-xorg-video-radeon driver from Debian sid, along with a custom kernel to get the required DRM support. The latest (2.6.29) kernel in sid doesn’t have the right versions of radeon.ko and drm.ko that are needed for the 2D acceleration to work. There are two ways to get these, you can either compile a new kernel using the drm-rawhide branch of Dave Arlie’s kernel http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git;a=summary. Or you can just use the instructions on the X wiki to just compile new versions of those two modules.

I’m using a whole new kernel because I also want to experiment with kernel mode setting. Since radeonfb has never worked on this hardware and the best resolution vesafb can give me is 1024×768 (native res of the LCD is 1280×800), KMS is the only hope I have of getting a VT at the proper resolution.

There is no 3D support in the version of the driver I’m using, but support for that is being written as I type so I’m hopeful I won’t have to do without for long. It isn’t a huge loss for me since I only use it for playing KotOR under wine and if I get desperate I can reinstall it in Windows (I dual-boot the laptop). 3D would be good for when I switch to KDE4 but again, I can live without it for a while. I’m happy with what I have for now, and it won’t be that long before full 3D support comes along (and I won’t have to fiddle with code to get it, just aptitude upgrade).

KDE4 will rock

Ghworg — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:12:00 +0000

I’ve been playing some more with KDE4 v4.2 mainly Debian unstable in a VirtualBox VM, but also a Fedora 11 beta livecd on my main laptop and installed on my EeePC. The most important thing, stability, is definitely there now, it hasn’t crashed on me at all. I really could pull the trigger on the switch-over today if I had to, but I’m going to wait a little while longer. There are still some not essential but nice-to-have features missing but it is eminently usable as-is.

KDE Desktop screenshot

All the hardware I’ve been testing with has had either no 3d-acceleration, or practically none in the case of the EeePC. I was hoping that VirtualBox’s new opengl acceleration feature would let me use some of the desktop effects but while it is apparently sufficient to run compiz it is no enough to handle KDE4s effects. So I have yet to experience the full-on KDE4, and won’t until I make the switch proper.

Network-Manager Plasmoid

To control Network-Manager there is no stable tool, but there is a plasmoid in Debian experimental. It works for the most part, but sometimes playing with the settings can make it crash. Not critical since it restarts automatically and the underlying network connection isn’t affected by the crash.

There is no bluetooth support yet, not a deal killer, but I do use it to sync my phone contacts and transfer the odd file so I’d like to wait till something is in place for that. I saw some mentions of bluetooth in the Fedora GUI, but couldn’t get it to actually talk to anything. That might be due to the wireless switch on my laptop though, as it has both a hardware and software switch which both need to be enabled to make bluetooth transmit.

Both in my VM and on my EeePC sound did not work out of the box unfortunately. No matter what I did to try and configure Phonon, which is the replacement for ArtsD in 4, it just wouldn’t output any sound. In both cases the fix was to install the xine backend to replace the gstreamer one. After which sound worked perfectly.

When I booted the Fedora live CD the sound did work out of the box, but when I looked what it had done differently, I found that it was using the xine backend by default. The conclusion I’m drawing here is that gstreamer is shit.

Lancelot launcher menu

I’ve found Lancelot to be excellent, once I realised you can resize the menu. Lancelot is an alternate to the regular “Start menu” style launcher. While the normal launcher has also been altered to a new style I don’t like it so much. If you are trying out KDE4 I’d suggest giving Lancelot a go, I think it is the better of the two. Both have built-in search, but the mechanism of navigating the tree works better in Lancelot.

The slide mechanism in the main launcher means that when you’ve gone into the wrong branch and want to back up one you have to move to the far left and click a little line that is a back button. In contrast in Lancelot you can still see the previous level in the tree and so it is much easier to recover from mistakes (of which I make many).

It still doesn’t work so well when there are too many entries on one page, having to grab the scrollbar and scroll is unacceptable. I’ll have to either edit the menus to prevent that or find some way to shrink each entry so more can fit at once. I don’t really need the double line entries with the description, the app name is enough for me.

And for those who don’t like either and want the old start menu back, an applet for that is still there too.

Trash Settings window

Date-based deletion of items in the Trash is an excellent idea, if that means what I think it means. I’m hoping it means that regardless of how much is in the Trash an item will be deleted permanently after $TIME_PERIOD of being in there. That will satisfy the OCD part of me that can’t stand the disk being used up by stuff I don’t need any more.

As I’m intending to use the GUI as my primary interface when I do the switch for real, in large part for the safety net that the Trash can gives you it is important that it operate correctly. I hate the implementation on Windows where the Trash is practically always full. I end up manually emptying it at least once a day, which removes a lot of the point. I need to wait for a few days to confirm it works how I hope.

Dolphin file browser

Dolphin works well, I much prefer having separate apps for file-browsing and web-browsing. Combining the two in Konqueror always felt confused. I don’t want to see my web bookmarks when I’m looking at my Music/ dir, but hiding them meant losing them when I was browsing the web. Now I can just keep Konqueror for the web and Dolphin for local, much neater in my opinion. The preview feature seems to slow things down too much for my taste, but I’m sure that can be switched off somewhere. I just haven’t looked for that setting yet.

Browsing in general is a little slow, but I’m putting that down to being on slow or virtual hardware. On a decent machine I’m betting it will be snappy enough, I hope.

The Dragon player that comes with it seems dreadful, that will have to go. Particularly on the Fedora boot where it couldn’t play anything on my system due to not having any codecs installed. I presume it had the OGG Theora codec, but who has videos in Theora format laying around? I’ll need a KDE4 or QT4 based GUI for mplayer, or at worst I’ll fall back to using the command-line for launching videos.

Of course the biggest reason to upgrade to v4 is the revamped patience card game which can now play the 3-card variant of Klondike! I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be running KDE4 on free ATI drivers with KMS, and that day is within sight.

I need an idiot-proof shell

Ghworg — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:24:55 +0000

After decades of never losing any significant data, last night I deleted my Video dir for the second time in six months, along with my Music this time. Fortunately I had learned my lesson and had a complete backup this time. The first time I lost a large amount of non-critical videos I had downloaded off the internet (okay, it was porn. I said it, happy now?). This time I just lost a couple of episodes of This Week in Fun I hadn’t watched. If I can be bothered I can easily re-grab them from ODTV.

I’m not sure how I accidently deleted the stuff, I was moving my config files from being stored in Subversion to git, using this method. I must have accidently rm -rf them somehow. This is my problem, it’s incredibly easy to shoot yourself in the foot from the command-line.

I’ve always used a combination of the GUI and shell, my first proper computer was an Amiga 500+ which, while it had an amazing modern GUI while Windows was still stuck with 3.1, also had a pretty good shell interface. Not quite up to unix standards, but much better than DOS. So I’ve always used both, depending on what was easiest for the task.

When I switched to Windows (after my last Amiga died on me), I started using the GUI much more heavily since DOS is so underpowered. When a short time later I switched to Linux though that got reversed since the Linux GUI at the time wasn’t so hot and the shell was incredibly powerful. So I currently default to using the shell, which makes me nice and productive but also means I’m working without a safety net.

If recent experience is anything to go by, I either need to start relying on the GUI much more or I need to find myself an idiot-proof shell. Since I don’t think the latter is possible it looks like I’ll be GUI-focused from now on. This is going to be a hard transition for me, much like giving up a narcotic, but I think it is necessary.

I’m going to start this transition at the same time as I install KDE 4, which is looking excellent in my tests on my EeePC by the way. I could almost transition now, there are just a couple of things (that are in the works) that I need before I can convert. A Network-Manager controlling plasmoid being the main one.

That way I only have to relearn how to do things in one GUI, rather than learning how to do it in KDE 3.5 and then a new way in 4. I’m not going to give up the shell completely mind, just change my balance so it is 80/20 in favour of the GUI instead of the other way round.

Wish me luck.

KDE 4 finally ready for Prime time?

Ghworg — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:01:49 +0000

KDE 4.2 desktop

I’ve had a virtual machine running KDE4 from the Debian experimental repos for a while now. Every few months, when I notice some announcement of a point release I update it and give it another try. Up till now I’ve always been disappointed in some way.

I first tried it on my EeePC 701 netbook, back when 4.0 first launched. I was impressed that it ran at all on that hardware, even with desktop effects enabled, some of them at least. This is on a machine that struggles to run Windows XP, let alone Vista. While it was okay from a performance perspective, it was horribly unstable. I can live with applications crashing (as long as I don’t lose data), but parts of the desktop going boom is unacceptable. I eventually gave up on the netbook and put KDE 3.5 on it instead.

That is when I setup a VM on my main Debian laptop, at that time running Lenny, so I could keep track of KDE’s progress. I’m not one of those people who baulk at change, who objects to learning new interfaces irrespective of whether they are better or worse than what they replace. On the other hand I absolutely need my desktop to be rock-solid, any flakiness in any essential part of the OS I will not abide. On the gripping hand I want to be in control, this is why I use Linux and KDE in the first place. They allow me to configure the OS to work the way I want. I’d really like to run KDE4 on my production machines ‘cos of the shiny, but until I can be sure of its stability I won’t risk it.

KDE 4.2 just recently transitioned from Debian experimental to unstable, so I fired up the VM to give it another whirl. As I had already played with 4.2 a few weeks earlier I was expecting to have the same nearly there experience. Things mostly working but still the odd crash, but I was wrong.

KDE 4.2 Calculator plasmoid.

After two days of playing with it I have had but a single crash (kwallet), and that was just after the upgrade process so can be dismissed as an artefact. Other than that it has been completely stable and usable. I have to say, I really like it, some of the defaults are not to my taste but they can all be configured with a bit of searching through the interfaces. KMail in particular defaulted to something horrid, but on the other hand it seems to be even more configurable than the 3.5 version, so it’s a win overall.

It’s the little things that make me want to switch though, like the calculator plasmoid that can be stuck on the panel for incredibly fast access. A dictionary right on the desktop and many other useful widgets. Previous attempts at widgets on KDE (superkaramba I’m looking at you) have been mediocre at best, glorified system monitors is the best you could hope to run. The plasmoids seem to be the real deal from the built-in examples, if the community starts writing these things we should be in for some real treats.

The application launchers are a little different, and I have to say at the moment I prefer the old “start menu” style one, the fixed height of the new designs mean I have to keep scrolling to find what I want which is icky. But I’m going to give them a while, it may be just one of those things that you have to get used to, and if it turns out I still hate them the old style is still available.

Being in a VM means I can’t use the desktop effects, so I’m missing a lot of the fun stuff. So the next step is to sacrifice my netbook again to try those out. I’m hopeful that by the time it transitions to testing (squeeze), which my main laptop now runs, I will be completely happy to switch to it, it is certainly looking positive at the moment.

Moving from svn to git

Ghworg — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:20:26 +0000

I’ve spent most of the evening trying to figure out how to use git. For a long time I’ve wanted to have the repositories for some of my personal projects available on the web. For a time I was allowing external access to my apache internal apache server, but I’m wary about that because I’m not confident about my ability to secure a box.

I was planning on setting subversion up on my web host, but I didn’t want to depend completely on that and mirroring subversion is non-trivial. So today I decided to have a go at git, which is much more suited to this sort of thing.

Thankfully there is svn import capability built in to git, so converting my guinea-pig project over was a doddle. Much more tricky was setting up all the syncing between the repos. I think I have the magic incantations down now though.

git remote add NAME URL
git config branch.master.remote NAME
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

I understand the first line, the other two seem to be necessary, but I don’t know exactly what they do yet.

Also, it is better to run git pull than git push when dealing with a destination that has checked out files as push doesn’t update them whilst pull does.

One thing that is a little weird is I can’t push changes from the live site to the public repo, which is on the same server. But I can pull the changes down to my local machine then push back up to the public. Tried a couple of different ways but all failed for one reason of another.

Treating the other repo as local throws up permissions issues,

error: unable to create temporary sha1 filename

File exists

, due to the way webdav is setup on dreamhost. Treating it as remote (http) doesn’t work because the binary is compiled without curl support. Still, the round-trip method works well enough.

I also installed gitweb and pointed it at the publicly accessable repo, this was very easy contrary to all the web pages I read about it. Just name the config file gitweb_config.perl and tell it where to look for the git repos and away it went .

http://git.trollgod.org.uk/ is now available for anyone to view.