My words on free/open source software

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Beijing Tax Declaration Website Supports Firefox, Great!

I'm glad to finish my tax declaration online by using Firefox running on Linux. Every function of Beijing Taxation Bureau's website works well with Firefox.

Though there are spaces for them to improve, such as adding HTTPS support.

Compiling GIMP 2.6.5 on CentOS 5

GIMP 2.6.5 is the fantastic tool for photographers that live in the free world. But sadly it has no official RPM built for CentOS/RHEL users. I have spent 4 hours and compiled GIMP 2.6.5 on CentOS 5 for Tina by using the official tarball.

I planned to use the GIMP SRPM from Fedora Rawhide (which was 2.6.5) but after Fedora 10 the Rawhide had moved to a new format of RPM and I have no way to install nor unpack those new SRPMs to get the code (neither on CentOS 5 or Debian Unstable). Therefore I had to fall back to use official tarball and install it to /opt. By this I lost the benefit of package management. So I have no RPM here to share with you but only a rough record of the steps:

  1. download, build and install babl 0.0.22

  2. download, build and install gegl 0.0.22

  3. install intltool RPM from Fedora 10

  4. download gettext SRPM (gettext-0.17-8.fc10.src.rpm) from Fedora 10 and rpmbuild it (with Java disabled). the GCJ shipped with CentOS 5 couldn't compile the Java code within gettext so they had to be disabled by the patch following.

  5. build GIMP 2.6.5


The patch to disable Java of gettext:

--- /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/gettext.spec 2008-08-29 09:07:58.000000000 +0800
+++ gettext-for-el5.spec 2009-03-15 11:06:11.000000000 +0800
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
# libintl.jar requires gcj >= 4.3 to build
-%define buildjar 1
+%define buildjar 0

Summary: GNU libraries and utilities for producing multi-lingual messages
Name: gettext
@@ -86,12 +86,12 @@
export JAR=fastjar
%endif
%configure --without-included-gettext --enable-nls --disable-static \
- --enable-shared --with-pic-=yes --disable-csharp --enable-java \
+ --enable-shared --with-pic-=yes --disable-csharp --disable-java \
--disable-rpatha
make %{?_smp_mflags} GCJFLAGS="-findirect-dispatch"

# For generating gettext-tools/src/gnu.gettext.*
-make -C gettext-tools/src gnu.gettext.DumpResource
+#make -C gettext-tools/src gnu.gettext.DumpResource


%install
@@ -215,7 +215,7 @@
%{_infodir}/gettext*
%{_mandir}/man1/*
%{_libdir}/%{name}
-%exclude %{_libdir}/%{name}/gnu.gettext.*
+#%exclude %{_libdir}/%{name}/gnu.gettext.*
%dir %{_datadir}/%{name}
%{_datadir}/%{name}/archive.tar.gz
%{_datadir}/%{name}/styles
@@ -244,8 +244,8 @@
%{_libdir}/preloadable_libintl.so
%{_mandir}/man3/*
%{_datadir}/%{name}/javaversion.class
-%doc gettext-runtime/intl-java/javadoc*
-%{_libdir}/%{name}/gnu.gettext.*
+#%doc gettext-runtime/intl-java/javadoc*
+#%{_libdir}/%{name}/gnu.gettext.*


%files libs

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Santa Cruz, California, United States