Yan Li's Words

Using rsync to migrate data between Linux and Apple Mac OS X

2011-10-10T12:40:00.002+08:00

I got a new MacBook Air running Mac OS X (10.7.1) "Lion", and I managed to migrate my archive data (around 1.3TB) from an old Linux laptop running Debian Testing "Wheezy." The process was not smooth and I hit several blocks. Here I document several points that you need to pay attention to when migrating data across operating systems:

Zeroth

Use the latest rsync (3.0.8 from MacPorts was used here). The old version of rsync is buggy on Mac. The version of rsync on Linux doesn't matter much because rsync on Linux has been quite stable since long ago.

First

Disable "Ignore ownership on this volume" (you can use Finder or from command line). If not rsync won't be able to set file permission correctly. I think if you don't instruct rsync to preserve permission and mode then you might not need to do this but I'm not very sure.

Second

Disable antivirus software like McAfee because they interfere with rsync's time preservation.

Third

Use rsync's "--iconv=UTF8-MAC,UTF-8" option (only available after rsync 3.0), because Mac's HFS+ decompose UTF-8 before storing it so the filename would be different from that of Linux if no conversion is done right.

If you saw "iconv_open("UTF-8", "UTF8") failed", try swapping the parameters of iconv.

Fourth

This is not directly related to rsync nor Mac, but a general rule for handling archive data: use another piece of software to do the verification. Your rsync might be buggy, the OS might be buggy, the disk or USB cable might be kaput, you might have used the wrong options or settings. Therefore you should always use another piece of software other than rsync to verify the data before and after the migration. I used AIDE to do file checksum and time verification.

openSUSE Build Service (OBS): Break the Link Between a Branched Package and Its Source

2011-02-17T10:34:00.004+08:00

We are using openSUSE Build Service (OBS) for the development of MeeGo. I have an old package, which was branched from a Trunk package long ago. But every time the source pakcage in Trunk is updated my package would be broken because the changes between them are so large that it's become meaningless to keep the link between them any more. So I think I should just remove the link between them.

The simplest way may be just removing my package and start a new package from scratch, however, this action not only removes the package history but will also reset the cumulative release version number, which is unacceptable since that would make it impossible for client machines to follow updates to this package.

I have carried out a long search but failed to find a hint to this issue, and after some trail-and-error I think I have found a way:

Check out the project's unexpanded files by using "osc co -u PRJ/PKG"

Remove the "_link" file by running "osc rm _link"

Copy in the latest package files since the link is now broken

Check-in the changes

I've done a test and the steps above worked. However, it seems that by those steps the release version number will also be reset.

Update: darix from freenode/#opensuse-buildservice said 'osc in git has "osc detachbranch" exactly for that.'

Easy way to align Linux partitions for SSD and myths debunked

2010-12-26T08:47:00.008+08:00

Recently I got a laptop from my employer with an Intel X25-M SSD drive in it. I have spent some time trying to figure out the best and easiest way to install Linux onto it while retaining the Windows 7 (so I have to use MBR instead of GPT). There are numerous discussions you can find on the net, some of them are quite complex and some are simply misleading (if not wrong). In fact this task is quite easy with modern Linux and here's a documentation of what I've done. This blog is not meant to be a full discussion on this topic, but only intended as a cheat sheet for those experienced Linux users (if you want a more detailed and correct discussion on this topic, I recommend Ted Ts'o's blog: Aligning filesystems to an SSD’s erase block size.)

For those impatient readers, here's an overview: the disk geometry (or C-H-S value) you see from partition programs as well as the warning about partitions are not aligned to cylinder boundary don't matter at all so there's no point to spend time on tuning loose knobs. New GParted (I used 0.7.1 from SysRescueCD, not to be confused with "GNU parted") is a very easy to use tool and it now defaults to create partitions aligned on 1 MiB (I heard that Ubuntu 10.10 and later can do partition alignment automatically too but I haven't tried that).

Here's the detail:

The myth: Does the C-H-S value still matter?

A lot of discussions were about checking the disk geometry after partitioning. However, in fact no modern operating system pays attention to those values any more (see the comment by Ted Ts'o). And those "-H xx -S xx" options passed to fdisk are only meant to make that fdisk program happy so it can create partitions aligned with cylinder boundaries. Although the C-H-S values are stored in MBR, they are not used by the Linux kernel who runs the whole system. Instead of paying attention to choosing or checking those C-H-S values, you should only need to make sure that the start and end sectors of partitions are multiples of the size of your erase block. Of course you can use any good partition programs to do this.

So you don't have to use that fdisk program

and you can simply chose any program that you are familiar with. For me I'm comfortable with sfdisk and GParted. This time I tried latest GParted and was very happy to see it had supported partition alignment on 1 MiB boundary. So my work is done in one minute without using a calculator. After that I also carefully checked the partition table with "sfdisk -uM" and was sure that those partitions were aligned on MiB boundaries. The extended partition was not aligned but I thought that didn't matter as long as all logical partitions in it were aligned correctly.

A few more tips:

If you want to have TRIM/DISCARD support you can use a 2.6.33+ kernel with Ext4 file-system, mounted with -o discard.

When making the Ext4 file-system, make sure you use the stripe-width option and let it align with erase block boundary too (see Ted's post above).

Don't use LVM or dm-crypt since they don't support TRIM/DISCARD command yet.

compilebench test result:

Intel's X25-M is very smart that even if you don't align the access correctly the drive will do magic under the hood so the initial benchmark data doesn't differ too much, however, the performance will degrade much more quickly as the internal mapping tables getting more and more complex due to unaligned writes. Here I post the file-system benchmark result when it's still new. I'll try to do benchmark again after several months to see if there's any performance degrade (although my usage is not heavy).

I used compilebench v0.6 because I think it mimics daily desktop usage very well.

Machine spec:
System: Debian Squeeze (testing)
Kernel: 2.6.37-rc5-amd64 from Debian experimental repo
Test command: sudo ./compilebench -D t -i 10 --makej (the same option used by Phoronix Test Suite)
File system: Ext4, mount option: rw,noatime,discard

compilebench Initial Create test result: 105.24 MB/s (on 2010-12-27).

MeeGo: Auto-Start an Application on Session Start

2010-12-21T10:47:00.003+08:00

For modern Linux desktop, it's a common way to auto-start an application in a user-session by placing a ".desktop" file into /etc/xdg/autostart. But if you are writing or porting an application to MeeGo and found that the application is not auto-started after you put in a seemingly correct .desktop, please check this:

If there's an "OnlyShowIn=" item, it must contain the string X-MOBLIN-NB. For example:


OnlyShowIn=GNOME;X-MEEGO-NB

Another caveat is that MeeGo's uxlaunch doesn't honor AutostartCondition key yet, for the sake of simplicity and fast-boot.

For code under the hood, check MeeGo's uxlaunch/desktop.c.

Very hard to make bootable USB drive from Ubuntu 10.10's CD Image

2010-12-18T20:20:00.003+08:00

I was spoiled by MeeGo's super convenient USB live image so I was very surprised when I found that it was very hard to make a bootable USB drive from Ubuntu 10.10's CD-ROM image for my wife.

On Linux, Ubuntu only officially supports making bootable USB drive from its CD-ROM image by using "ubuntu-usb-creator", which is not available in any Linux installations I'm using now (MeeGo, Debian, CentOS). Ubuntu's official help document mentions one alternative way -- to download a small image and combine it with the iso file -- doesn't work, and community posts pointed out that that methods only worked with "alternative iso" (not desktop iso).

Finally I found a way (and the only way) to make a usable USB drive for installation is from this post.

So what? I think Canonical really should release official USB images since most netbooks shipped today have no CD-ROM drive.

Google Chrome (Chromium) Sync Server Address

2010-07-15T10:30:00.003+08:00

If you want to know the host name and address of the sync server Google Chrome (or Chromium) uses, see here:

http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/sync/profile_sync_service.cc

For now, the sync service's URL is

https://clients4.google.com/chrome-sync

HOWTO: Run Plants vs Zombies™ in Linux under Wine (includes how to Register!)

2010-06-27T15:33:00.004+08:00

I have to admit that I found PopCap's Plants vs Zombies™ (referred to as PvZ below) interesting. It runs on Windows, Mac and iPhone but not on any Linux yet.

You can download the trial version from the official site above, and it runs amazingly well on a recent Wine, without any special configuration. Well done, Winehq!

Now comes the problem, if you decide to buy it after 60 minutes play, the registration process is a bit hard with Wine. The reason is that PvZ requires an Internet Explorer or Firefox to finish the registration process. Obviously it has to gather some local hardware/system information and upload it to their activation server so that they can know how many machines you are running PvZ on, therefore you won't to able to give away free copies of the game to all your friends. I think this whole thing is OK, though instead of writing codes in PvZ to let it communicate with their server, instead, sadly, they choose to use ActiveX running in IE for this.

Some early posts reported that the registration process can be finished if you install an IE into the same Wine directory. Running IE on Wine is not impossible but hard, especially when IE4Linux project is no longer maintained.

The HOWTO

Now I have found that you can also finished the registration process using not IE but Firefox instead. Thanks for their being in the same free software camp, Firefox runs very well on Wine. Just grab a Windows copy and install it into the same Wine directory.

Then run Firefox in your Wine, go to PopCap's Registration Page, follow the instruction there to download and install the Firefox plugin. After that, close your Firefox (for some unknown reasons, the Firefox Wine process may still linger in the background after its window is closed, run "ps -ef | grep -i firefox" and kills the linger process if need).

Now starts PvZ by running its in your winefile. Because the PvZ and Firefox need to be started in a same Wine instance so they collect the identical hardware/system information. Register it following the normal process. It may fail at the first attempt to start a web browser, keep clicking the "Retry" button until it shows it's waiting for the registration process to finish (it's waiting for web browser plugin to return registration key). Start a Firefox instance from that same winefile program. Go to PopCap's Registration Page, now if your plugin is installed successfully, it should show a web page asking for your POP Order Number, give it and the registration process should finish successfully and the PvZ program should proceed to the game.

It's not rocket science, just nuisance.

PvZ runs very well in Wine during my 2 days play. I can say it's perfectly running on Linux for now.

Known Problems

Sound effects may not work on some machines with some old Wine versions (try upgrade to latest Wine.)

The full-screen mode will be always "full-screen," which means that if you have a non-4:3 screen, it will be slightly torted.

The between-battle preview screen may be a bit slow sometimes, but as soon as the battle begins the speed returns to normal (not sure if it shows similar issue when running on a real Windows.)

Running Wine on MeeGo

2010-06-27T13:28:00.003+08:00

One of the good thing of MeeGo is that it contains a standard X server along with full 2D/3D acceleration. Having a full X stack running on your netbook enables the possibility to use a good variety of exist fun Linux programs. Such as Wine.

In order to play Plants vs Zombies™ and Zuma™, I have installed Wine on MeeGo. Wine is not in MeeGo's official repo (yet), so I just downloaded all wine-*.rpm from Fedora's rawhide repo and the installation was a breeze. I hope MeeGo will have it's own Wine package soon, it should be quite easy to repackage with minor tweaks from Fedora's packaged Wine. Thanks Fedora project! Anyone in the community want to volunteer?

HOWTO: Disable IPv6 in MeeGo

2010-05-03T10:47:00.003+08:00

With traditional desktop Linux distros, the IPv6 can be disabled by removing the ipv6-related modules, but not with MeeGo since it's ipv6 module is compiled in kernel (for fastboot). The following instructions apply to similar situations where you can't remove the ipv6 module (like you have no control over the kernel, or using a Xen VM, etc.)

The ipv6 module will always assign an address to all NIC during startup, there's no way to disable it, we have to disable ipv6 autoconf, and remove all assigned IPv6 addresses:

Create a file /etc/sysctl.d/disable_ipv6:


# disable autoconf
net.ipv6.conf.default.autoconf=0
net.ipv6.conf.all.autoconf=0
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.autoconf=0

# block all received Router-Advertisement (RA) packets
net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_ra = 0
net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_ra = 0
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.accept_ra = 0

# NOTE: the *.all* above applies to newly created NICs only, 
# not to existing NICs. So you have to list all NIC's explicitly
# here. For example, if you have a wireless card wlan0, add the 
# following lines:
#net.ipv6.conf.wlan0.autoconf=0
#net.ipv6.conf.wlan0.accept_ra = 0

Then delete all pre-allocated ipv6 address by adding the following lines in /etc/rc.local:


ifconfig lo inet6 del ::1/128
IPV6ADD=`ifconfig eth0 | grep inet6 | awk '{print $3}'`
ifconfig eth0 inet6 del "$IPV6ADD"

Don't forget to:


chmod +x /etc/rc.local

Update:
I've discovered that sshd running on MeeGo can't accept X11 forwarding requests after made above changes. You can find the following error message in /var/log/secure:


sshd[]: error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket.

The reason is that sshd is still trying to bind to an IPv6 address but there's no IPv6 address available. To solve this issue, we need to start sshd with "-4" option.

Create a new file For MeeGo at /etc/sysconfig/sshd:


OPTIONS="-4"

And restart sshd:


service sshd restart

Reference:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WebBrowsingSlowIPv6IPv4

http://beranger.org/index.php?article=1127&page=3k

MeeGo is in Google Summer of Code 2010

2010-03-28T19:11:00.005+08:00

MeeGo has joined Google Summer of Code 2010. If you are a student, have some free time this summer and have interests in developing operating system or applications for new small form factor devices, please consider join us!

MeeGo is the combined Moblin and Maemo and is sponsored by Linux Foundation, Nokia and Intel. To make it simple, MeeGo is the new operating system, inspired by the rising interests and challenge in smart phone and mobile internet devices, for future Intel and Nokia ARM platforms (or more if other handset makers join).

To distinguish it from other smart phone platforms such as iPhone and Android, MeeGo is proudly bearing the badge "open." It is not controlled by a single authority, but under the non-profit consortium Linux Foundation and welcome all parties and individuals who interests in making the best mobile platform in the world.

Another thing that distinguishes MeeGo from other mobile platforms is that MeeGo runs full Linux desktop stack. It is running unmodified Linux kernel, X server, compiled by unmodified GCC, includes full GTK / GNOME and Qt libraries. So all your expertise on desktop Linux continues to thrive here.

But MeeGo is not yet-another-Linux-distro. Smart minds may already spot the great challenge here. How could we build a competing platform by using just commodity GNU/Linux OS codes? The answer from us is that we are focusing on usability plus aggressive optimization. We believe the codes from those great upstream free software community is the best in the world and we can build the solid state-of-art platform based on them. What we have to do is try our best to integrate them together and focus on design a great user experience.

So if you are interested, please take a look at the MeeGo project ideas. Of course we are more than happy if you can come up with you own great ideas. And try to get yourself a $5,000 stipend.

(all words above are my personal opinion and reflect no idea from MeeGo committee, Linux Foundation, Nokia or Intel)

Understanding how fontconfig scan conf files

2009-10-20T18:26:00.003+08:00

I've been fixing fonts issues in Moblin for some time, and I've to admit that GNOME fontconfig is really hard to understand.

The rules in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ are scanned in alphanumeric order. After carefully read the fontconfig user's manual, I thought that if they were processed in alphanumeric order, the later conf should overwrite the earlier conf. WRONG! But rules scanned first take precedence over rules later. Let's see how they are applied to the Pattern.

For example: if you run `fc-match sans`, the Pattern here is family="sans".

Let's say we've a 01-rulefile:

<alias>
  <family>sans</family>
  <prefer><family>DejaVu<family></prefer>
</alias>

After processing it the Pattern becomes:


family="DejaVu", "sans"

Then a 02-rulefile:

<alias>
  <family>sans</family>
  <prefer><family>Droid<family></prefer>
</alias>

After it the Pattern becomes:


family="DejaVu", "Droid", "sans"

Noted that the "Droid" from 02-rulefile is prepended to "sans", not
the whole Pattern. So 01-rulefile takes precedence over 02-rulefile.

Zero Config! Huawei EC1260 / China Telecom CDMA2000 EVDO 3G USB Dongle on Debian Sid

2009-10-14T11:14:00.003+08:00

I bought a Huawei EC1260 USB modem to access the CDMA2000 EVDO mobile broadband provided by China Telecom. To my big surprise, the USB modem works out-of-box on my Debian Sid. Plug the USB modem and click the CDMA item in my NetworkManager and Bingo! I'm online! This is really zero config!

Thank you, great developers of NetworkManager and Debian for making this great progress.

Beijing Tax Declaration Website Supports Firefox, Great!

2009-03-16T11:06:00.005+08:00

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

2009-03-15T15:03:00.004+08:00

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:

download, build and install babl 0.0.22

download, build and install gegl 0.0.22

install intltool RPM from Fedora 10

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.

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

Another GPL violation case from top China IT firm? Hanwang this time.

2009-02-05T13:54:00.003+08:00

Hanwang's eBook Reader products (汉王电纸书产品系列, http://www.hw99.com/product/productkind-13.htm) are very popular in China market. They features an ARM processor and are running Linux with cramfs, which can be easily discovered from the update firmware the company has released. Also they are shipping BusyBox within them.

By no means I can find the source code to their Linux kernel / BusyBox. So perhaps this is yet another GPL violation case from top China IT firm. Anyone bother a law suit?

Safely remove an USB hard drive in Linux

2009-01-03T16:40:00.007+08:00

I bought a new USB hard drive, Western Digital My Book® Essential Edition™ 1TB, and use it with Linux. Here I'm discussing about how to safely remove (then disconnect) it from a Linux system.

The problem: according to its user manual, you should disconnect the drive safely when it is not active, but in a Linux system how to do this is not very straightforward. You may notice that after you unmount it (whether through command-line or a desktop environment), the drive is still spinning and it's LED on. If you read it's user manual carefully you'll find that the manufacturer never said it's safe to disconnect it from your system in such condition.

The quick solution to this problem:

send SYNC, then STOP command to the device, this can be done easily in Linux by unbinding the device

suspend the USB port by echoing a "suspend" to the "/sys/bus/usb/devices/$DEVICE/power/level", where $DEVICE corresponding to the device of your USB device.

To put it simple, I wrote a script to do this for you. Download and try it. For developers, you can get it from the github repo.

If you saw an error message like this when running it:


bash: /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-8/power/level: No such file or directory

that means your kernel doesn't support USB suspend. You can just disconnect your device now, it's already safer enough to unplug it.

To those who is interested, discussion of technical detail following.

From the hardware aspect, the drive should only be removed when the following requirements are met:

there's no pending I/O request and software cache flushed

it's hardware cache flushed

it's driver spins down (means "not spinning")

(optional) the USB port is put into "suspend" mode

The user's manual read (page 6, section "Turning Off/Disconnecting the Device"): "(for Windows systems): Right-click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in your system tray and select Safely Remove Hardware. You may hear the drive power down before the Power LED turns off. The drive is now shut down properly, and you may disconnect the drive safely. (for Macintosh systems) Drag the My Book icon to the Trash icon for proper dismount. You may hear the drive power down as the Power LED flashes. When the Power LED is steady, you may press the Power button once or disconnect the drive’s power cord to turn off the drive safely." (there's a mistake, this device doesn't have a Power button) If you read carefully you can tell that Windows and Macintosh don't do the same things when told to remove an USB device. As the bold text as shown, in a Windows system it will be turned off while in a Macintosh system you hear the drive power down but the Power LED would finally become steady rather than off. Therefore we know that Windows does all 4 steps and Macintosh do the first 3 steps only when told to remove a USB device. (BTW, it's funny that you have to use your ear before disconnecting a device.)

(This is only the case for Windows XP. For Windows Vista seems only the first 3 steps are done thus the drive remained active after you removing it from the system.)

Some may argue that they always disconnect their drives directly after unmounting (step 1 only) and never experience any damage, but as an operating system developer and a serious user, I always follow the manufacturer's manual or specification whenever it make sense and possible because I know electronic devices are fragile, rigid and obtuse if you don't use them as the way they are designed. For a well-designed and robust piece of hardware, theoretically you can disconnect the device safely when the first two steps are done. The firmware on the device would notice the USB cable was unplugged and shut down the disk drive properly. If not, the drive would be stopped sharply as if you pulled it's power when it's running and this damages the hardware gradually. As an outsider of the manufacturer, we hardly know whether it's well-designed or not so the only safe principle is to follow it's manual, means we should not disconnect the device until at least all three steps are done.

At the Linux kernel part. To finish all the 4 steps, you have to unmount the device, unbind the device from the driver, then tell the USB core driver to put that device into suspend mode, as shown in the solution above. And you have to be running a kernel with CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND enabled.

CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND is not enabled by default in a vanilla kernel. I'm pushing it in this discussion.

Properly removing a device from a running Linux should be done by either the HAL or desktop manager. If you can, please push the developers you know working on any DM that missing this feature to implement this function properly.

Try my script, and write me if you found a problem. Welcome patches.

Google Picasa Web Album's Horrible Automatic Translations

2009-01-01T23:46:00.001+08:00

See the comments at http://picasaweb.google.com/rjmaomao/XUwsFC#5214582494506069602 you'll know the latest trick from Google about web comments.

Using ext4 and 2.6.28 kernel on my new laptop

2008-12-28T13:22:00.002+08:00

Hoolia! Now on my new laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T61). I'm using Debian 5.0 (Lenny) with self-built shinning new 2.6.28 kernel and ext4. So far so good.

Next step is to install the latest Intel Graphics drive to benefit from GEM.

Don't use APT::Default-Release in Ubuntu unless you know what you are doing

2008-11-08T15:37:00.002+08:00

Setting APT::Default-Release in Ubuntu blocks all future security fixes and updates.

This is related to all versions before Hardy (include). I haven't tested this on Intrepid so I'm not sure about those versions after Hardy.

According to apt_preferences manpage, the target release can be set on the apt-get command line or in the APT configuration file /etc/apt/apt.conf, and "APT::Default-Release "stable";" is given out as an example. This is a very common and popular practice used in Debian community to set the default release and using apt-pin, but doing this in Ubuntu leads to serious security impact with no obvious warning.

After setting APT::Default-Release to "hardy", which is the "Suite" name for main hardy source, no security fixes nor updates would be installed unless their priorities are also set explicitly in apt_preferences. This is because that in Ubuntu's world, security fixes are from "hardy-security" source and other updates are from "hardy-updates" source, which bear different "Suite" from the main source. Setting APT::Default-Release rises the priority of packages from main source to 990, but doesn't cover packages from hardy-security and hardy-updates, so the latter are ignored since their packages now has lower priority (priority 500 only) than those old ones in main source (990).

I set APT::Default-Release to "hardy" on Sep this year until I found this problem today. Removed that setting and I'm surprised to found that I can install 46 security fixes and updates accumulated. Which is pretty sad to me that got known I haven't got security fixes for more than 2 months.

This is a radical deviation from the Debian practice. In Debian all security fixes and updates bear the same "Suite" (etch or lenny) so setting APT::Default-Release to "etch" covers all security fixes and updates.

I think it's unlikely that Ubuntu changes the organization of it's source, so at least a fix to this problem is patching the apt_preferences manpage, alerting people not to use APT::Default-Release like they have used this in Debian and the reason and the following impacts.

I've opened a bug about this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/295448

Ripping VCD in Linux

2008-10-31T21:11:00.005+08:00

I've got some old VCD discs so I've spent some time on studying how to rip them for backing up.

There are two methods available:

To make a perfect ripping, use cdrdao read-cd:

cdrdao read-cd --device ATA:1,1,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw --read-raw image.toc

the --device is optional. By using this you got a TOC/BIN file pair that contains all the tracks from VCD which can be used to produce exact 1:1 copies. You can also generate a CUE/BIN pair by passing a filename with .cue extension. Although it is said that mplayer and totem can play the BIN file if proper decoding plugins are installed, I have never been able to do that, which is a big problem for me.

Credit goes to manmath: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-217997.html

For easy playing back, you can extract MPG files by using GNU VCDImager, which is included in many popular distros. Using the vcdxrip program:

vcdxrip -C=/dev/cdrom

By this you got all videos in usable MPG files.

Though you may be able to copy DAT files from VCD to your hard drive directly in Windows, this is not the case in Linux systems, you'll get I/O errors. The reason is that the file system of VCD disc is not valid ISO-9660 and never meant to support direct copying video data as plain files. Windows must be doing some conversion behind the hood.

mplayer and ASS subtitles in UTF-16 with BOM

2008-10-31T20:34:00.002+08:00

Tina got a piece of .mkv video with ASS subtitles, which was in UTF-16 and began with BOM (0xFF 0xFE), perhaps generated by using some programs from Windows kingdom. mplayer can't load ASS that begins with BOM and produces the following error message:


Matroska file format detected.
VIDEO:  [avc1]  864x480  24bpp  23.976 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
SUB: Could not determine file format
Cannot load subtitles: file.ass

The remedy:

Convert the ASS file to UTF-8 (or whatever encoding you are comfortable with). I used iconv: iconv -f utf16 -t utf8 < file.ass > result.ass

Play it by using the "-utf8" switch of mplayer: mplayer -ass -utf8 file.mkv. If the ASS contains special characters (such as CJK chars), use a good font by "-font /usr/share/font/cjk.ttf"

Fix nVidia's Proprietary Driver's Poor 2D Performance on Linux

2008-09-20T22:10:00.004+08:00

Call me a fool. I bought an XFX GeForce FX 5200 PCI for my workstation (which is actually a Dell SC440 tower server who has no AGP slot). And nVidia's poor proprietary driver is notorious slow of 2D on Linux. The CPU usage of the Xorg process easily goes up to around 70% on my Xeon Core 2 @ 1.86GHz even when scrolling the text in gnome-terminal, not to say reading web pages in Firefox, which slows down everything else. And I've been sticking to a years old pristine GNOME (2.14 shipped with Debian 4.0 Etch) with nothing eye-candy here.

Finally I've found a workaround: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1704073&postcount=1: Update (2008-07-18) worked for me. In courtesy of xsolarwindx.

The improvement: now with this little fix the time used to build an Linux kernel on my workstation is only half as before just because the little baby likes writing its progress onto the terminal and old nVidia hates this so it made the displaying of text even more time-consuming than compiling the multi-million-line kernel itself!

I've been running nVidia's driver 173.14.12 x86_64 on a stock Debian 4.0 Etchnhalf kernel (2.6.24-etchnhalf.1-amd64).

I'll never buy an nVidia unless they released full GPL drivers.

Install ATI's fglrx Catalyst 8.8 Driver (v 8.522) on Linux 2.6.27

2008-09-14T18:14:00.004+08:00

The Linux kernel 2.6.27 has changed an API (smp_call_function()) that breaks compilation of ATI's Catalyst 8.8 fglrx driver. You get error like this:


/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080:50: error: macro "smp_call_function" passed 4 arguments, but takes just 3
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c: In function ‘__ke_flush_cache’:
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080: error: ‘smp_call_function’ undeclared (first use in this function)
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/usr/src/fglrx-8.522/firegl_public.c:3080: error: for each function it appears in.)
...

Loïc Minier has made a patch for Catalyst 8.7, and I've adapted it to Catalyst 8.8:


From 42a6390f599294c60a4960b0a6cd4e399b1a81ee Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Yan Li 
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:45:48 +0800
Subject: [PATCH] patch for building on 2.6.27

ref: http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/6086b1cb7674fc43
---
 firegl_public.c |   15 +++++++++++----
 1 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/firegl_public.c b/firegl_public.c
index bdc94b2..d85a567 100644
--- a/firegl_public.c
+++ b/firegl_public.c
@@ -202,6 +202,13 @@
 #define preempt_enable()
 #endif
 
+/* Since 2.6.27 smp_call_function doesn't have a nonatomic/retry argument */
+#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,27)
+#define SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(func, info, retry, wait) smp_call_function(func, info, wait)
+#else
+#define SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(func, info, retry, wait) smp_call_function(func, info, retry, wait)
+#endif
+
 // ============================================================
 /* globals */
 
@@ -3077,7 +3084,7 @@ int ATI_API_CALL __ke_flush_cache(void)
 {
 #ifdef __SMP__
     /* write back invalidate all other CPUs (exported by kernel) */
- if (smp_call_function(deferred_flush, NULL, 1, 0) != 0)
+ if (SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(deferred_flush, NULL, 1, 0) != 0)
   panic("timed out waiting for the other CPUs!\n");
 
     /* invalidate this CPU */
@@ -4796,7 +4803,7 @@ struct _agp_memory* ATI_API_CALL __ke_agp_allocate_memory_phys_list(
 void ATI_API_CALL KCL_CallFuncOnOtherCpus(firegl_void_routine_t func_to_call) 
 {
 #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
- smp_call_function( firegl_smp_func_parameter_wrap, (void*)func_to_call, 0, 1 );
+ SMP_CALL_FUNCTION( firegl_smp_func_parameter_wrap, (void*)func_to_call, 0, 1 );
 #endif
 }
 
@@ -4910,7 +4917,7 @@ static int ATI_API_CALL KCL_enable_pat(unsigned int save_orig_pat)
    }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
-   if (smp_call_function(KCL_setup_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
+   if (SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(KCL_setup_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
        return 0;
 #endif
    KCL_setup_pat(NULL);
@@ -4929,7 +4936,7 @@ static void ATI_API_CALL KCL_disable_pat(void)
     }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_SMP
-    if (smp_call_function(KCL_restore_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
+    if (SMP_CALL_FUNCTION(KCL_restore_pat, NULL, 0, 1) != 0)
        return;
 #endif
     KCL_restore_pat(NULL);
-- 
1.5.4.3

I suggest use the --buildpkg function of the ATI driver to build packages for your system. Those packages use dkms to build the kernel module needed. (For Debian/Ubuntu flavor Linux, I suggest use the way as described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI.) Apply the above patch after installed the fglrx-kernel-source.*.deb to /var/lib/dkms/fglrx/8.522/source, then run "sudo dkms build -m fglrx -v 8.522" to build the kernel module.

Reference:
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/6086b1cb7674fc43

Generating Gantt from Bugzilla Tasks by Using TaskJuggler

2008-08-07T17:52:00.003+08:00

We've been using Bugzilla in various projects to track tasks' status and it turned out to be an excellent tool for collaboration and project management. Gantt is useful in various ways for project status checking and planning. Today I've spent some time to set up automatically generation of Gantt from Bugzilla tasks by using a combination of various tools.

TaskJuggler: excellent free software on task scheduling and report generation, with beautiful GUI and powerful command-line interface.

Bugzilla:TaskJugglerIntegration: export Bugzilla tasks to TaskJuggler project file.

The script bztotj.py from Bugzilla:TaskJugglerIntegration is easy to understand, and by changing the SQL in it you can export tasks from Bugzilla by arbitrary filters.

TaskJuggler's task is written in plain text so it's good for change management. It also features a nice GUI editor. You may need some time to learn to write project files but once you get it you can write versatile project files and, by writing scripts to manipulate them, implement complex project scheduling schema.

If you want to generate Gantt from TaskJuggler tasks without human interference, you can use this tool: http://blog.gustavobarbieri.com.br/2007/04/19/generating-gantt-graphs-from-taskjuggler-projects-without-using-its-ui/

My Home Storage Reached 2 TB

2008-07-22T21:26:00.002+08:00

Today I bought and installed a 750GB hard drive to my backup server. This made my total storage at home reached 2.11 TB. The usable storage is more than 500 GB (others are used for backup).

OpenStreetMap is an Interesting Project

2008-07-03T22:01:00.005+08:00

www.openstreetmap.org is an really interesting project, I've been contributing to it for some time, mainly covers Beijing urban and rural area.

My HD High Load/unload Cycle Problem Fix

2008-06-29T18:09:00.003+08:00

I've just applied http://en.opensuse.org/Disk_Power_Management to fix the high load/unload cycle problem of my IBM ThinkPad T43p laptop. My Load_Cycle_Count grows at around 30 per hour, which is not very high, but theoratically limit my HD's life to around 4 years.

PS. though I dislike SuSE due to their pact with Microsoft, they are doing really well in some fields. The article mentioned above is well written, neat and clean, and the script is in good quality. I was told that openSUSE has already included patches to fix this problem, while Ubuntu's users are still struggling to either fix it by themselves or talking in the forums, trying to understand what to do.

IBM/Lenove ThinkPad Battery Maintenance in Linux

2008-05-26T19:52:00.003+08:00

I felt the deteriorate of the lifetime of the battery on my IBM ThinkPad T43p. This article has a good discussion on best practices. I also installed the tm_smapi driver and set charge threshold for my laptop.

Save battery, no waste. :)

China Earthquake Relief, Sichuan, 2008

2008-05-13T22:28:00.005+08:00

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake occurred at 14:28:04.1 CST (06:28:04.1 UTC) on 12 May 2008, with its epicenter in Wenchuan County, Sichuan province of the People's Republic of China. It had a magnitude of 7.8 Ms according to the State Seismological Bureau of China and 7.9 Mw according to the United States Geological Survey.

With more than 60,000 recently confirmed dead so far, it was the deadliest and strongest earthquake to hit China since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed approximately 250,000 people.

Please consider donation to China Red Cross! Thank you!

Qt Problem of Google Earth 4.3 Beta for Linux

2008-05-04T19:09:00.002+08:00

On some systems (as Ubuntu Hardy 8.04) the Google Earth 4.3 Beta doesn't work very well, the fonts are ugly and tiny. You may try this workaround:
http://groups.google.fr/group/earth-linux/browse_thread/thread/e10a5337b0b47ba1#

On other systems (as CentOS 5.1) it may work very well out-of-box.

HOWTO: vsftpd's Virtual User Use Local Privileges

2008-04-22T10:51:00.003+08:00

If you are using vsftpd with virtual users, as described in official example, and are suffering problems like this:


226 Transfer done (but failed to open directory).

(you may see above text in client or server log), you may consider using "virtual_use_local_privs".

Per study of cpdohert, if you want vsftpd's virtual user follow local privileges, you have to use:


virtual_use_local_privs=YES

FTP Ascii Mode in KDE (kioslave)

2008-04-21T14:45:00.001+08:00

Write a ~/.kde/share/config/kio_ftprc, with


[hostname]
textmode=true

Or use [] instead of [hostname] to make it used everywhere.

Warning: this will likely mess up any transfers of binary files.

In courtesy of David Faure.

Steps to Upgrade MoinMoin Wiki from 1.5.* to 1.6.*

2008-04-21T10:49:00.004+08:00

I've been using the MoinMoin Wiki from Debian Testing for some time and this morning I found it was upgraded from 1.5.8 to 1.6.2, and unsurprisingly, my Wiki installation stopped working, very obviously some data migration may be necessary.

After wasted some time, I found a good article: Thomas Waldmann's AnotherWayToMigrateFrom1.5To1.6. I couldn't find a good official migration guide like this, which told you that you must run cache cleaning and data migration.

Hope this is useful to other MoinMoin users.

Use pdftk to Update PDF File's Meta Data

2008-04-17T14:41:00.003+08:00

A good tool, pdftk, can be used to manipulate PDF files, changing meta-data, page-juggling, etc., you name it! And it's GPLed.

Easy, peasy, japanesey.

Error of Running VMware Server 1.0.5 on Debian 4.0 Etch

2008-04-15T17:35:00.003+08:00

I installed VMware Server 1.0.5 on Debian 4.0 Etch (i686) today and couldn't start vmware-console due to this error:


(vmware:20921): libgnomevfs-WARNING **: Cannot load module `/usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libfile.so' (/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6))

To fix this problem, start VMware by running:


VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes vmware

For more information on this please click the title, which leads to a post on VMware community website.

RPM Spec: conditional build based on host distro

2008-04-14T14:36:00.004+08:00

When writing spec of RPM, often you need to write some special instructions that are needed only on some distros or versions, but not all. You can use this:


# Do something for FC4 and beyond.
%if 0%{?fedora} >= 4
    # ...
%endif

Tweak GNOME Auto Mount Options

2008-04-09T09:49:00.003+08:00

Use gconf-editor to edit the key:


/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options

The most useful one for me to add is "iocharset=utf8".

Ignoring .svn directories with grep

2008-04-04T18:15:00.004+08:00

Have lived with Subversion for many years and finally I found this (link to outside my blog) simple little trick. :)

Wikipedia Unblocked (temp) in China

2008-04-04T17:09:00.000+08:00

Now I can access Wikipedia in China without using a proxy, not all contents, only a large part. This is a big step forward.

As well as blogspot.com, wow!

May His Holiness let this last.

Choose a Linux-friendly Bank in China

2008-03-16T11:21:00.000+08:00

At last I thought I should spend some time on finding a Linux-friendly bank. By Linux-friendly I meant that the e-Bank services should be able to achieved from a Linux machine running native browsers such as Firefox. I've been using China Merchant Bank for nearly 10 years and although generally good, their eBank services are designed around IE and ActiveX. What's more annoying is that their bank software could not be run within a virtual machine, alleged for the sake of better security, which shut all doors to run it on Linux.

I used eBank to manage loads of things such as utility payment, donations, credit card payment and investment management. So it's really a waste of time to reboot to MS Windows^TM to do them.

So finally I chose Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. It's eBank services are great with Firefox! Till now I'm happy with it. I've also applied for the credit card and hope to move all my credit card subscriptions to it gradually.

Now the only gray area for me is that my employer doesn't support to pay into SPDB. I'll keep complaining to my beloved HR manager. :)

N.B. HSBC is doing very well with Linux too. Who (I guess) has been running IBM's AIX and System z for a long time and is generally browser-independent.

A Talk with Andrew Morton

2008-02-28T20:32:00.001+08:00

On Feb 20th, 2008, Tina and I attended the Eating the Linux Kernel party:
"Thanks to the Linux Foundation and China OSS Promotion Union we're
organizing a diner with all the great speakers of the Linux Developer
Symposium. This is going to be the one opportunity to share food and
thoughts with people like Andrew Morton, Jonathan Corbet, Dave Neary,
Jeff Waugh and many many others. In total probably 20 specialists from
the kernel development, Linux embedded or Gnome development
exclusively for Beijing LUG members..."

Fortunately I had a chance to have a talk to Andrew Morton who seated
besides me:

(This is not a verbal transcript of the talk, nor has Andrew Morton
endorsed it and he has no responsibility for whatever listed here.
This is just a fast record of a gossip and please don't take it
seriously.)

YL: Hi Andrew, you look tired, are you working busy on 2.6.25?

AM: Yes, it takes me lot of time.

YL: When will you leave Beijing?

AM: Friday. Take a tour tomorrow (Thursday) in Beijing.

YL: Can I ask you some questions about the kernel? Why Linux doesn't
maintain a stable ABI. Currently each time the kernel updates, all
3rd party modules will have to be recompiled. And this is really
annoying for many users.

AM: What 3rd party modules?

YL: For example, the one of Madwifi, and fglrx, the proprietary driver
for ATI cards.

AM: Are they GPL?

YL: Oh, no, part of it is a non-GPL blob. So I see the reason why the
kernel doesn't support them well is that they are not free software.
So can I say that the rumor is true that you intentionally break the
ABI to make using 3rd party modules difficult?

AM: No, we don't break them _intentionally_. We just don't care about
it. If we were to support a stable ABI, it will make the development
and maintenance of the kernel much more difficult. We won't support
non-GPL code by compromising free software.

YL: But if you made the installation of some proprietary drivers
easier, more users would come to use Linux. And if you had more
users, you have more developers. And this will promote the development
of the kernel.

AM: Yeah, it's true. But we just can't support proprietary software by
ways of compromising free software.

YL: Do you have a plan, or a long-term goal of the kernel development?

AM: No, we have no plan. And this is just the point of kernel
development (and maybe other free software project). The users decide
where the kernel goes. If you need a function, just as he (a man sit
besides AM) just said, if you need to support Chinese display in
Linux, just implement it and send me the patch, and if it's good
enough, we'll include it in the kernel.

YL: If the kernel itself has no concrete plan for what functions
should be supported and what not, and accepts everything good enough
from the users, won't the kernel became bloated quickly?

AM: No it won't. Everything is configurable. If you don't need it,
disable it.

YL: But the kernel is already very large, the binary is 20Mb, and the
source codes are somewhat more than 300Mb.

AM: I think it's not a problem. The core part of the kernel takes only
1Mb memory at run-time. And I see 300Mb is not a problem for today's
hard drive.

YL: The kernel is so large, and has too many things in it. I see
another problem with this approach. Say if you found a bug in a driver
for an ancient piece of hardware and you updated the kernel. Then all
users have to update just to pull in something they'll never used.

AM: Oh, I've to say sorry for that. You can say it's a problem.

YL: Can we just split this large kernel into several loosely coupled
projects? Say, one project for a kernel core, one project for file
systems, one project for the network layer and some other projects for
drivers.

AM: That maybe to difficult for maintenance.

YL: So do you thing micro-kernel would solve this problem, or are you
a fan of monolithic kernel?

AM: Monolithic kernel is much more efficient and easy to develop.

YL: Another question, does the kernel team have a plan to add
automatic test to cover some key functions?

AM: No, auto test doesn't work as we tried before. I've been
following the LTP project for more than 2 years, and only 2 bugs were
found by those automatic tests. Most of the kernel bugs are only
reproducible on some special pieces of hardware and you just have no
way to use automatic test to cover them.

For the core part, things like scheduler, file system, etc., is used
by everyone so they are thorough tested by everyone, and for the other
parts, like various drivers for special hardware, only those have that
hardware can test it. So auto test has few use for this.

YL: Do you think the kernel can be better maintained or developed by a
team?

AM: No. It won't get better if you put a lot people in a building.
The communication would take too much time. I see it's efficient
enough to communication by using mailing list. I get bored soon
during a long meeting so I just leave and ask them to send mails and
code snips to me and we can have better understanding on technical
problems.

YL: Do you think attending symposiums, lectures and parties like this
is a waste of time? Do you think you can better use the time for
hacking?

AM: Oh, I don't like this before I go, it's not good to travel for
long time on plane. But when the event was finished I thought "oh,
it's not bad." These are things for promotion. For example, before I
went to Japan some years ago, there's few patch from Japanese
developers. And after some lectures there, the patches from Japan now
skyrocketed to be around 20% among all patches. So it has a snowball
effect and that's why I attended these events. I hope I can get more
patch from Chinese developers.

YL: Do you have a laptop?

AM: Yes, it's a ThinkPad.

YL: Oh, I'm using a ThinkPad too. But I have to use proprietary blobs
to support the wireless as well as ATI video card. Though I don't use
3D acceleration much, I do need the 2D acceleration for daily work.
The open source driver is slow on 2D performance.

AM: Yeah, ThinkPad has poor 2D performance but it's bearable. I just
use the default open source driver. For wireless my laptop is running
ipw3945 driver and that's the only binary blob on my laptop.

YL: So does your suspend and hibernation work well?

AM: No, they don't. (shrug)

YL: What's your main work time and for how long you sleep a day?

AM: Huh! I work most of the time, and sleep from around 3am to, say,
11am.

YL: I remember you wrote an article said that the 2.6 kernel is slowly
getting buggier.

AM: Yes. People should spend more time on fixing bugs.

YL: What's your personal plan for the following years?

AM: I may quit in about 1 or 2 years and then I won't spend much time
on maintenance. I'll continue to work on the kernel, perhaps focusing
on bug fixing.

YL: So how about the mm tree?

AM: No need to worry, some other people will set their own branches to
take the position of it.

YL: Have Google asked you to do something special for them?

AM: No, they just pay me to do whatever I want to do.

(Don't) Use "Subpixel Smoothing" for Fonts in GNOME

2008-01-10T14:32:00.002+08:00

I proposed that "Subpixel smoothing" was slow in my testing. But that result was machine-dependent. Some drivers were doing better than others. Personally I think Intel's video cards are better than that from nVidia (ATI's seems not bad either). I have to admit for some configurations subpixel rendering products better result. So it's totally up to you to decide whether to use it or not (I found myself enabled it on all my machines for now, even on a slow machine with nVidia card).

Old post follows:

It's extremely slow, while the gain in font appearance is little. This setting has contributed a lot to my bad impression about GNOME's sluggish display. Now I'm happy with "Best shapes."

In gnome-terminal, Subpixel smoothing is 3 times as slow as "Best shapes" rendering, on my laptop.

Gmail, Fetchmail and Sendmail on UNIX/Linux

2007-08-14T21:01:00.000+08:00

Linux Home Automation hosts a good article, Linux, Sendmail and Gmail.com on how to configure sendmail to work with Gmail. My config is a bit simpler than his (tested on Fedora Core 4, 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, CentOS 5, should work on most modern Linux distros).

My fetchmail run control file (.fetchmailrc):

 
 set syslog
 poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns
     user 'abc@gmail.com'
     pass "WriteYourPasswordHere"
     ssl

Modification to sendmail's mc file (/etc/mail/sendmail.mc):


 define(`SMART_HOST',`smtp.gmail.com')dnl
 define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')dnl
 define(`ESMTP_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')dnl
 define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', `EXTERNAL GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5 LOGIN PLAIN')dnl
 FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/auth/client-info')dnl

To generate the authinfo file used above, refer to
Linux, Sendmail and Gmail.com. It's very simple and you can done it within 3 minutes.

Install Amarok on CentOS5/RHEL5

2007-07-23T18:10:00.001+08:00

Now I prefer to build amarok by using SRPM from latest Fedora on CentOS/RHEL. Though I think the following method should still work, it's not the best solution. The first problem is that Fedora 6 is no longer supported and you get no security patches, the second is that some packages from Fedora 6 Extra repo conflicts with similar packages from RPMForge, which is a must for nearly all CentOS/RHEL systems.

Install livna and rpmforge repo.

Add fedora-extras.repo:


[fedora-extras]
name=Fedora Extras 6 - i386
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/6/i386/
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=extras-6&arch=i386
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
includepkgs=libnjb* libtunepimp* libifp* libmtp* libgpod* libofa* amarok* xine-lib wavpack

You see, we should include necessary packages only.

Edit CentOS-Base.repo, add following lines:


# exclude libgpod 0.4.0 to install libgpod 0.4.2 from FC6 repo for Amarok
exclude=libgpod

Add fedora-updates.repo:


[fedora-updates]
name=Fedora Core 6 - $basearch - Updates
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-fc6&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
protect=0
includepkgs=libnjb* libtunepimp* libifp* libmtp* libgpod* libofa* amarok*

Edit rpmforge.repo, add:
```
exclude=xine-lib
```

Disable one user's remote login on Linux

2007-06-11T15:19:00.000+08:00

I have to disable one particular user's remote login on Linux, sounds simple, but it costed me some time. The normal way is to change PAM settings, using pam_access.so to control user login. Following steps are tested on Red Hat Linuxes (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc.)

First you should enable pam_access.so:

Unlink "/etc/pam.d/system-auth", which is a link to "/etc/pam.d/system-auth-ac".

Create a new "/etc/pam.d/system-auth", includes all settings from "/etc/pam.d/system-auth-ac", like this:


auth        include       system-auth-ac
account     include       system-auth-ac
password    include       system-auth-ac
session     include       system-auth-ac

Insert "pam_access.so":


auth        include       system-auth-ac
account     required      pam_access.so
account     include       system-auth-ac
password    include       system-auth-ac
session     include       system-auth-ac

Now you can config pam_access.so by editing "/etc/security/access.conf", like this:


+ : player : LOCAL
- : player : ALL

For more info, read "man access.conf".

Use Exim with Gmail SMTP on Fedora

2007-03-21T17:09:00.000+08:00

I've managed to setup Exim to send mail via Gmail SMTP on my laptop running Fedora Core 6. It was a bit tough work, for I can't find any precedent of using it on Fedora. Most talkings and guides regards Exim were based on Debian, and Fedora just doesn't have that config tools of Debian.

If you just want to know what to do, skip this paragraph, which talks theoratical things. My work started by following Use Gmail as a Smart Host, but it doesn't work. Checked Exim's log I found that the connection to Gmail's SMTP server was rejected, because Exim had been trying to connect to port 25 of it. Add a line "port = 587" solved this problem. Another problem is about the TLS authentication, because Exim thought the server it were to connect is called "gmail-smtp.l.google.com", which was got through DNS lookup, rather than the "smtp.gmail.com" set by me. So in the configure file, you should use "gmail-smtp.l.google.com" instead of "smtp.gmail.com."

So what to do is: edit "/etc/exim/exim.conf", add:


# routers section
send_via_gmail:
  driver = manualroute
  domains = ! +local_domains
  transport = gmail_smtp
  route_list = * gmail-smtp.l.google.com

# transports section
gmail_smtp:
  driver = smtp
  port = 587
  hosts_require_auth = gmail-smtp.l.google.com
  hosts_require_tls = gmail-smtp.l.google.com

# authenticators section
gmail_login:
  driver = plaintext
  public_name = LOGIN
  client_send = : youraccount@gmail.com : yourpassword

I do think Exim should write an official FAQ regards this problem.

For some time, you may see such errors in Exim's log:


SMTP timeout while connected to gmail-smtp.l.google.com [72.14.253.109] after EHLO yourhostname: Conne
ction timed out

This is network or Gmail's problem. Want you can do is just waiting or switch to another ISP and try.

S60 Phone Error: Nokia 5500, "App. Closed: Calendar" (Solved)

2007-02-20T07:40:00.001+08:00

I've got a problem with my mobile phone, Nokia 5500 Sports, bought 3 months ago.

Phenomenon:

Phone detail: Nokia 5500 Sports, 3 months old. Symbian OS v9.1 (S60 3rd Edition).
More detail from Nokia forum: http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/5500

Can't open the Calendar program. Before the Calendarprogram's graphical user interface was fully displayed, it crashed, exited automatically and an error message "App. Closed: Calendar" displayed by the system

Entries in Calendar: two daily morning alarm entries. 3 to 5 other appointments. Very few data

Every morning at the time when the daily morning alarms are supposed to ring, the whole phone would HANG. No operation is possible except for the "Task Switch" (long press Menu key), which would bring up the task list but no further operation is possible. The only way to recover is to remove the battery and wait until the display faded out

Memory usage of phone main memory: half. Memory usage of memory card: 1/3

I can think of NO particular operation that may be designated as the cause. Daily use is very common: phone, SMS, camera, web surfing, notes, etc.

Haven't synced with PC before. After this problem occured, I tried to sync it with my PC by using bluetooth or IrDA, everything was synced successfully except the Calendar

Two custom themes downloaded from local operator's website

One or two custom rings transferred from my friend's MOTO phone by using bluetooth, 2 MONTHs AGO

Installed 3rd party programs: Gmail client (Java)

2 weeks ago I've transferred 3 small Java games from another MOTO phone. But those games can't run on my phone & I deleted them

Phone software edition (by dailing *#0000#): V 03.18 07-09-06 RM-86

Fix attempt:

Reboot the phone, no help

Sync with PC, no help

Remove those custom programs & themes, no help

Reset to factory settings (by dialing *#7780#), no help

Whole phone backup, then format C: (by dialing *#7370#). After formating, the Calendar is OK, but after I restored my data by using Nokia's PC Suite, the Calendar broken again

Analysis:

My first guess is that the Calendar's data files are corrupted, so the bet maybe delete those files to reset the program. But for this 3rd edition of Symbian OS, I can't figure out which files are its data files (after a long search on net)! I checked some of the folders under C:\system\data but no good luck.

Solution:
Format C: (by dialing *#7370#), then sync my contacts back to phone. The trick is to avoid using whole system backup, which would keep the corrupted calendar data files.

PS:
I wanna try "Nokia Phone Software Update", but I've no cable now.

Configuration of Ad-hoc Wireless Network with Linux boxes

2007-01-19T17:15:00.000+08:00

I've connected two Linux boxes (laptops) with wireless network without an AP. This is called "Ad-hoc Mode". It's as simple as connecting a wired network with a switch or hub. For a full explanation, please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad-hoc_network

Set up your wirelss NIC first. This varies upon different machine models. Usually a web search would solve your problem. For my scenario (Intel IPW2200 card on Fedora with rpm.livna.org), a "yum install ipw2200-firmware" is enough.

Then the only thing you need to config is your NIC's config file, usually named "ifcfg-eth?". For Fedora it's in "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/". Here's mine:


# Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
DEVICE=eth1
ONBOOT=no
BOOTPROTO=none
TYPE=Wireless
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=yes
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
IPADDR=192.168.0.2
DOMAIN=
HWADDR=
CHANNEL=1
MODE=Ad-Hoc
RATE=Auto
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
ESSID=

To bring it up, use "ifup eth?".

Font Config of Gtk2 and Gnome2 Applications Outside Gnome2

2007-01-19T16:37:00.000+08:00

I have switched from GNOME to KDE, and have been happy with it, since it's A LOT faster. A small problem is those GNOME applications will appear in default theme/font style regardless your settings done in GNOME. Perhaps they rely on some global environment settings that exists only when GNOME is loaded.

Here's a workaround from Ed Hurst: Gtk2 and Gnome2 Applications Outside Gnome2.

Quote:
Fonts: Create a config file in your home directory -- ~/.gtkrc-2.0. In this file, place one simple line:


gtk-font-name = "Arial 12"

Theme: To get the color scheme you like, choose one that is available on your system -- /usr/share/themes in SuSE/Fedora -- and make sure it is indeed Gtk2, as not everything there is. Edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and add a line like this one:


include "~/.themes/Dirty-Ice/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

Quote end.

This is my ".gtkrc-2.0":


gtk-font-name = "Sans 12"
include "/usr/share/themes/Simple/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

Have fun with KDE! :)

Switched from MSN Space

2007-01-19T03:48:00.000+08:00

I switched from MSN Space to here. Since MSN Space is extremely slow in Firefox on Linux, greatly reduced my ardor to write things with it.

Tips: Use VMplayer/VMware on Linux 2.6.16 Kernel

2006-05-17T00:10:00.000+08:00

A patch is need. Refer to VMware on Fedora Core 5.

My new blog, on the road!

2004-12-16T12:01:00.000+08:00

This blog is better than MSN Space in "free software" world in various ways: speed, compatibility, etc.