Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT sphinx] Any users of sphinx here
On Sun, 2010-06-06 at 15:37 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote:
Brandon Vargo brandon.va...@gmail.com writes:
As an example of how it works, suppose I am making a news website and
have a bunch of news posts, each of which has an author, category, and
Thank you brandon for such a nice through answer... Yeah, looks like
I'm barking up the wrong tree.
I know about htdig.. Not much though. Far as remember it didn't have
much in the way of search interface... something like google. Where
as webglimpse has a rich set of search terms, including some regular
expressions and regular expression like operators... all the same
tools as glimpse (and agrep). So many in fact it can be a bit
daunting to try to become proficient with.
Maybe you can enlighten me about htdig... its been yrs since I tried
htdig.
Sorry, it has been awhile since I have used it as well.
Even webglimpse fails though when it comes to trying to search for
snippets of code like perl or C etc. No body want the sloth and cpu
overhead of serious regular expression searching and that maybe the
only (good) way to search for things like /,{,$,(,[,!,@ etc etc like
one would need to find types of code snippets. Also I guess it
would be pretty hard to build an index with that in mind.
Certainly it is a hard problem to index for arbitrary regular
expressions. Even Google's code search [1] is not terribly good at it.
However, I also do not think it is something most people will want to
do. When I go to find code that I have written, I do not remember
variable names, lines of code, etc that I can match with a regular
expression. Thus, that kind of search is pointless for me. I remember
what the code does, the project for which I wrote the code, and
approximately where the code is located within the project. I remember
function calls for libraries that I probably used. If I cannot find what
I am looking for, I use grep on the name of a function call I remember,
or I have a ctags file containing all the information I need about
function definitions.
I suggest, for code, you just organize whatever you have in a sane
directory structure. Or, even better, you can put your code in a central
place using a version control system (SVN, git, hg, CVS, etc), where it
is organized in a way that makes sense to you. After all, it sounds like
this is for your personal use, so use something that makes you happy.
Personally, I have a series of git repositories that I use to keep track
of my code and some of my documents.
I keep thinking some good developer will come out with a tool aimed at
websites like might be found on a home lan (in scope)... where regular
expression searching wouldn't be so far out.
Or maybe there just is no herd of people who are competent in regular
expression searching, and hence no audience for such a tool
I do not think the problem is a lack of people with knowledge of regular
expressions, but rather the lack of a need for such a product. Many
people, at least those I know, do not think Oh, I want to search for
xyz; I'll write a regular expression to search for what I want across
all my data. Instead, they have a directory structure of organized
documents that makes finding that particular document or series of
documents on xyz easy. When that fails, there is the find and locate
commands for terminal users, which support regex searching in filenames,
desktop search tools such as Beagle [2], and of course grep.
Certainly it would be really nice to have a search tool that would
produce results for show me all the code on this computer used for
validating HTTP POST requests in Python for a submitted HTML form,
preferably using Django. If you find one, let me know, as I would love
to try it. In the meantime, `grep -RE 'form|POST'
projects/python/django/project_xyz` works fairly well once I figure out
that what I want is probably in that directory. (grep -E, or egrep,
supports extended regular expression; -R is recursive) Or, I just go
search through the documentation, if available.
Maybe someone here can suggestion something better for code searching.
For everything else, use Beagle/something similar or a web-based search
engine you can install locally if you really want to be able to search
through your documents. Maybe there is something better for that too; I
do not know. I still use directories and git repositories in said
directories, where appropriate, as it is more efficient for me. Of
course your mileage may vary.
[1]: http://www.google.com/codesearch
[2]: http://beagle-project.org/
Regards,
Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT sphinx] Any users of sphinx here
On Fri, 2010-06-04 at 17:52 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote: I've been looking for a perl based search tool that uses some kind of indexing to index and render searchable my home library of software manual and the like. Quite a few html pages involved, maybe 15-16,000. Webglimpse is something I've worked with before and know a bit about but thought I might like to see what else is available. Googling lead to a tool called Sphinx that apparently is coupled with a data base tool like mysql. It is advertised as the kind of search tool I'm after and has a perl front-end also available in portage (dev-perl/Sphinx-Search). The trouble is I haven't been able to figure out the first thing about using it. The overview, and Introduction, like a lot of such documents fails to give a really basic idea of what the tool does. The call it a `full text search engine', but never really say what that means. There are 12-15 FEATURES listed, and none appear to describe sensibly what they really do. The faq is a string a questions about using sql.. really. So far I haven't found a good statement of what the darn thing really does or how to aim it at data. The manual is probably great if you already know a lot about using sphinx but very thin for my case. I've not even been able to get a rough idea of how to aim the darn thing at the desired (Local lan) web site. Or, to show how thin it really is or how dumb I really am, I've been unable to tell if it can even do what I want to do. I've posted on a sphinx list on gmane... but it appears to be only moderately active and haven't gotten any replies... I hoped some one here may be familiar with sphinx and willing to coach me a bit or at least let me know if it can even do what I want to do. Also any other perl based search tools involving indexing and some kind of versatile search query capability.. like regular expressions I'd be interested to know about. If you can put your HTML pages into a database, Sphinx might be able to help you with your issue. Basically what Sphinx does is let you search databases. You specify one or more SQL sources of data ans associated queries, and Sphinx provides an API (or a emulated SQL server) that makes searching easy. Sphinx is for full text database searching; it does not index files or websites directly. (Note that is this not actually true; it can search XML files directly, but you still specify XML attributes instead of database columns, etc, so it is treating the XML as a data store and not as a generic document.) I recall reading that Craigslist uses Sphinx to search their database of listings. As an example of how it works, suppose I am making a news website and have a bunch of news posts, each of which has an author, category, and text. With Sphinx, I can setup a source -- let's call it news_catalog -- that will index this data. news_catalog will be associated with an SQL query that will allow Sphinx to access the data it needs to index. Let's use SELECT id, author, category, text FROM catalog as our query. Note that catalog is a table or view in your database, though this query can also use complex joins, etc, as long as the database supports it. Via the Sphinx API, I can say I want to search for Europe | America and it will return a list of news articles containing the terms Europe, America, or both, as a pipe is the or operator. It actually returns a list of ids which correspond to the id I specified in my query; a unique key is always the first argument in the query. My application is responsible for fetching the actual data from the original database using that id and presenting the data in a useful way to the user. Extended query syntax allows for other boolean operators, searching specific fields, strict order, exact match, field start/end, etc. The documentation has lots of examples; look at http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html for the current reference manual. If you have a bunch of HTML files on a disk or website that you want to index and search, I do not think Sphinx is the software you want. Yes, you could load your data into a database and then use Sphinx, but that does not seem like the best solution. Sphinx provides the API for use in your application; it does not provide a user interface. As an alternative, I recommend you look at something like ht://Dig (htdig.org), which will search HTML pages directly in addition to PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc with the help of external converters. It also includes a user interface. After glancing at webglimpse, with which I am not familiar, it looks like it does something similar to ht://Dig. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Postfix question about auth and blocklists...
On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 17:24 +0100, Steve wrote:
On 26/05/2010 20:32, Brandon Vargo wrote:
I hope the above helps.
Thank you very much... that was very informative. Unfortunately, I
now discover I fibbed when I said I had SASL auth set up - I only
thought I had... When I correctly configure thunderbird, I get the
following postfix messages in the log:
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: connect from
ur.shic.co.uk[10.0.1.253]
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: Could not open /etc/sasl2/sasldb2:
gdbm_errno=5
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: Could not open /etc/sasl2/sasldb2:
gdbm_errno=5
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: no secret in database
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning:
ur.shic.co.uk[10.0.1.253]: SASL CRAM-MD5 authentication failed:
authentication failure
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: NTLM server step 1
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: client flags: 8207
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: NTLM server step 2
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: client user: myusername
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: Could not open /etc/sasl2/sasldb2:
gdbm_errno=5
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: Could not open /etc/sasl2/sasldb2:
gdbm_errno=5
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: no secret in database
May 27 17:06:20 ken postfix/smtpd[19973]: warning:
ur.shic.co.uk[10.0.1.253]: SASL NTLM authentication failed:
authentication failure
I'm sure I'm doing something silly - because googling the first
warning just gives me this bug, which doesn't seem to fit. I have
this installed:
$ eix mail-mta/postfix
[I] mail-mta/postfix
Available versions: 2.6.5 ~2.6.6 {cdb dovecot-sasl hardened
ipv6 ldap mbox mysql nis pam postgres sasl selinux ssl vda}
Installed versions: 2.6.5(09:08:29 05/27/10)(ipv6 pam sasl ssl
-cdb -dovecot-sasl -hardened -ldap -mbox -mysql -nis -postgres
-selinux -vda)
Homepage:http://www.postfix.org/
Description: A fast and secure drop-in replacement for
sendmail.
If I alter thunderbird to not use secure authentication, I get the
following instead.
May 27 17:14:26 ken postfix/smtpd[20115]: connect from
ur.shic.co.uk[10.0.1.253]
May 27 17:14:26 ken postfix/smtpd[20115]: warning: SASL
authentication problem: unknown password verifier
May 27 17:14:26 ken postfix/smtpd[20115]: warning: SASL
authentication failure: Password verification failed
May 27 17:14:26 ken postfix/smtpd[20115]: warning:
ur.shic.co.uk[10.0.1.253]: SASL PLAIN authentication failed: no
mechanism available
May 27 17:14:26 ken postfix/smtpd[20115]: warning: SASL
authentication problem: unknown password verifier
May 27 17:14:26 ken postfix/smtpd[20115]: warning:
ur.shic.co.uk[10.0.1.253]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: no
mechanism available
Which seems quite strange.
My /etc/sasl2/smtpd.conf is the default for gentoo - i.e. it contains
the single config line:
pwcheck_method:pam
I don't care if I use PAM or something else - as long as it lets me
authenticate. In the medium term, it would be best if neither IMAP
nor SMTP passwords had any relation to my system password (not that I
allow remote logins unsing it) - but, for the time being, I just want
it to let me authenticate and send from my phone.
By any chance can anyone give me any further clues?
You mentioned in your first mail that you use Dovecot. The easiest way
to setup SASL for Postfix is to have Postfix authenticate against
Dovecot, assuming that you want the same usernames and passwords for
both. Recompile mail-mta/postfix with the dovecot-sasl USE flag enabled.
Then, add the following to Postfix's configuration file after
commenting/removing the other SASL lines:
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth
Then, in dovecot's configuration file, add the following to the auth
default section:
socket listen {
client {
path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
mode = 0660
user = postfix
group = postfix
}
}
Adjust the path, user, and group as appropriate. The user and group
should be set to whatever user postfix is running under. Note that
private/auth in the path corresponds to the smtpd_sasl_path setting in
Postfix. Restart Dovecot and then Postfix.
I also recommend adding the following option to main.cf if your clients
support TLS encryption, which will not allow authentication over
unencrypted connections:
smtpd_tls_auth_only = yes
See http://www.postfix.org/SASL_README.html for other SASL mechanisms,
if you do not use or do not want to use Dovecot.
Regards,
Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Postfix question about auth and blocklists...
-users mailing list, as your issue relates to Postfix more than Gentoo. I hope the above helps. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] revdep-rebuild looking for non-existant dev-libs/poppler
On Sat, 2010-05-22 at 17:44 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: I'm doing revdep-rebuild --library libjpeg.so.7. It finds broken packages, It gets to the point of... = * Generated new 4_raw.rr and 4_owners.rr * Cleaning list of packages to rebuild * Generated new 4_pkgs.rr * Assigning packages to ebuilds * Generated new 4_ebuilds.rr * Evaluating package order * Generated new 5_order.rr * All prepared. Starting rebuild emerge --oneshot app-text/ghostscript-gpl:0 app-text/wv:0 dev-libs/poppler:0 media-gfx/gimp:2 media-gfx/graphviz:0 media-libs/gd:2 media-libs/gegl:0 media-libs/imlib2:0 media-libs/libmng:0 media-libs/libwmf:0 media-video/mplayer:0 x11-libs/openmotif:0 x11-libs/qt:3 .. Calculating dependencies... done! emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy dev-libs/poppler:0. = The obvious first step is equery depends dev-libs/poppler ...which finds absolutely nothing. No hits from the commands... grep poppler /etc/portage/package.* grep poppler /etc/make.conf Not only that, but there doesn't appear to be a dev-libs/poppler in my portage tree. Now what? The old poppler ebuilds (dev-libs/poppler*) were reunited and became app-text/poppler awhile back. The old poppler ebuilds should not be referenced anywhere, but apparently they still are on your system somewhere. Try remerging app-text/poppler manually (using --oneshot, so it isn't added to world), then running revdep-rebuild again. Make sure you have run emerge --sync recently, so that the portage cache is up to date and any global updates have been applied. You could also try removing the revdep-rebuild cache files in /var/cache/revdep-rebuild/, but according to the output you included, the package atoms are not coming from the cache. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Looking for x86 or AMD64 disassembler
On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 19:33 -0500, David Relson wrote: I'm looking for a disassembler so that I can see the underlying assembly code in a variety of files, for example elf executables, DOS executables, binary files (such as the master boot record (MBR)), etc. [snip] What do you all recommend for disassemblers? Are there any good ones for Gentoo? I've used objdump (part of binutils) in the past for looking at ELF files; look at the -d option for disassembly. A quick test shows that it seems to work for exe files too, but I've never used it that way as I don't use Windows much, so I don't know for sure. For the MBR, I don't know of any disassemblers per-se, but hex editors work well depending on what you are doing. hexdump (part of sys-apps/util-linux) works well. You might want to make an image of the MBR first with dd, depending on which tool you use, as some do not support reading from the disk directly. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: my xorg-server 1.6 seems a bit unstable - what am I doing wrong?
On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 01:18 -0400, Denis wrote: libguide.so I don't have this one, and I don't know what it is. libgmp.so.3 This is probably the gmp (GNU Multiple Precision) arithmetic library. libvml.so I don't have this one, but I'm pretty sure it is part of Intel MKL (see below). libmkl.so libmkl_def.so libmkl_lapack32.so libmkl_lapack64.so libmkl_p3.so libmkl_p4.so libmkl_p4p.so libmkl_vml_def.so libmkl_vml_p3.so libmkl_vml_p4.so libmkl_vml_p4p.so These are part of the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL). My original Mathematica install had the following Qt libraries, in addition to a Qt plugins directory: libQt3Support.so.4 libQtCore.so.4 libQtGui.so.4 libQtNetwork.so.4 libQtSql.so.4 libQtSvg.so.4 libQtXml.so.4 These are all Qt 4 libraries, which did not exist when Mathematica 5 came out. I do not know what toolkit Wolfram used instead, but I was hoping it would be Qt3, GTK, or some other standard toolkit, as that would have potentially solved your issue. Are the files you listed all of the .so files under your Mathematica installation directory? Also, could you post the output of ldd on your main Mathematica executable? The main executable for me is (installdir)/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/Binaries/Linux-x86-64/Mathematica. This will indicate what libraries Mathematica uses. Another thing to try is playing with Java. Mathematica also ships its own bundled version of Java (again, Mathematica 7, I don't know about version 5). I have never tried to have Mathematica use sun-jdk instead of the bundled version, but it may be worth a go. As far as I know, Mathematica only uses Java for J/Link and not for the user interface (unless using custom interfaces with GUIKit - I've never tried that), so this probably is not the culprit, but you might try it. I have had problems with Java and Xlib/XCB in the past, even when there was no GUI. Another place where you might find more information or issues is Help-About-System Information-Devices (or similar). You might also check to see if you have any updates available: http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/updates/ If none of the above works, I would suggest reverting the upgraded packages individually to figure out which package or packages causes the issue. From there it would be much easier to figure out what is causing the issue. If you post the output of the ldd command above, I might be able to find the source of the issue, or at least narrow down the search for which package is causing the issue, but other than that there's not much more I can do. Sorry, I don't have a copy of Mathematica 5 to play with to see if I can reproduce this; I still used Maple back then, before I made the switch to Mathematica 6. Is there a particular function that seems to trigger the crash when scrolling or does scrolling crash X every time? Good luck. I hope any of this helps. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: my xorg-server 1.6 seems a bit unstable - what am I doing wrong?
On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 03:18 -0400, Denis wrote: Brandon, Thank you for helping me along here! Here is the output of ldd Mathematica: linux-gate.so.1 = (0xb8042000) libm.so.6 = /lib/libm.so.6 (0xb800c000) libpthread.so.0 = /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7ff4000) librt.so.1 = /lib/librt.so.1 (0xb7feb000) libXt.so.6 = /usr/lib/libXt.so.6 (0xb7f9a000) libXext.so.6 = /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb7f8b000) libXmu.so.6 = /usr/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0xb7f74000) libSM.so.6 = /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0xb7f6a000) libICE.so.6 = /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0xb7f51000) libX11.so.6 = /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7e3a000) libc.so.6 = /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7cf7000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb8043000) libuuid.so.1 = /lib/libuuid.so.1 (0xb7cf2000) libxcb.so.1 = /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7cd7000) libXau.so.6 = /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb7cd3000) libXdmcp.so.6 = /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb7ccd000) libdl.so.2 = /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7cc9000) So far, I see a bunch of references Java directories in the installation and a few .jar files. I haven't seen any reference to Qt. I did see the GUI-Kit and JLink in the AddOns directory. Basically, the only thing that triggers the crash is if I hold down the mouse button and drag the scrollbar UP right after I drag it DOWN. Dragging it down doesn't seem to make any difference by itself and hasn't crashed the program until I reverse and drag UP. Sometimes going up slowly will be OK too, but if I drag UP rapidly, it will crash. I can use the scroll arrows on top and bottom of the scrollbar, and it will scroll without incident, albeit slowly. That sounds really bizarre. I have no idea what would be causing that. Can the integrity of the above library links be checked, or would rebuilding all of them again make any difference? What is the command to determine which package the given .so.* file belongs to? equery (from app-portage/gentoolkit) can tell you which package a particular file belongs to. `equery belongs /path/to/filename` should do the trick. You could try downgrading those packages to see if it fixes your issue. I have not tried downgrading just one or two X libraries, though I have heard that it can break pretty badly (especially with respect to libxcb), so I would make a backup first. Another option could be trying an updated version of X from the x11 overlay. Maybe someone else on this list has experience with either case and can offer some pointers; I unfortunately have none. Packages with the above-listed libraries: x11-libs/libXt, x11-libs/libXmu x11-libs/libSM, x11-libs/libICE, x11-libs/libX11, x11-libs/libxcb, x11-libs/libXau. Good luck; I cannot think of anything else to suggest. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: my xorg-server 1.6 seems a bit unstable - what am I doing wrong?
On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 21:46 -0400, Denis wrote: But X crashing from my use of Mathematica is absolutely unacceptable - I agree, it shouldn't crash. Are you starting Mathematica by clicking on an icon in a menu? If so, I'd suggest starting it from an xterm command prompt because you may see some helpful error messages before the crash. I tried that, actually. There is no warning in the terminal window. And I have been looking at Xorg error logs also, but there is nothing useful at the end of them! All I have is: (WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory) (EE) Failed to load module dri (module does not exist, 0) (EE) Failed to load module dri2 (module does not exist, 0) One curious thing... (II) Module nvidia: vendor=NVIDIA Corporation compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Video Driver Why does it say compiled for 4.0.2 when all the other X modules say compiled for 1.6.3.901, which is the xorg-server version? I'm sure that's nothing, but I'm just grabbing at straws here. I am a Mathematica 7 user on amd64 (gentoo-sources 2.6.30-r5) with an nvidia graphics card, and I just completed the same X upgrade this evening. So far Mathematica has not given me any issues. For what it's worth, I also receive the same compiled for 4.0.2 messages in my logs for the nvidia module, though I have not recompiled my drivers (180.60) since the upgrade. dri and dri2 are not loaded, as you have above. After glancing through your xorg.conf and X logs, I do not see any glaring issues that would cause the problems you are experiencing. Two suggestions (apologies if they have been suggested already): 1) If you haven't already, recompile your xf86* packages. Somehow I missed those when upgrading X, which caused issues for me. 2) Mathematica (at least version 7) ships its own version of Qt, which it will use instead of the system version of Qt. If Mathematica 5 does something similar -- sorry, I have never used that version on Linux, so I do not know -- then it's possible that the old libraries are causing issues. At least in version 7, removing the Mathematica-supplied Qt libraries will cause Mathematica to use the updated system Qt libraries. For me, the Qt libraries shipped with Mathematica are under (install_directory)/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64/. If Mathematica 5 ships libraries that are also installed system-wide, then I would suggest moving the Mathematica files to another location and seeing if using the system libraries helps with your crashing issue. For me, removing the Mathematica Qt libraries made Mathematica faster and look better. Good luck with your issue. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] mythtv dependencies
On Thu, 2009-08-27 at 20:51 -0500, Neal Hogan wrote: I posted this to getoo-media@ mut the list looks to be . . . not-active. I'm new to gentoo and the main reason for coming to gentoo is that I have an extra machine that I'd like to use as a DVR. Thus, I've installed mythtv. Welcome to Gentoo. In general, the experience has been pleasant. However, I wonder about two things regarding emerge and mythtv's dependencies. The first is that mythtv failed to fully compile the first time because unzip was not installed. Next, is once mythtv finished compiling I tried to fire it up (mythtv-setup) and it was apparent that X was not installed. I do not know anything about the unzip issue, as I have not run into it in the past. However, regarding the second issue, an X server is not a strict dependency of mythtv. As a result, it is not included in the list of dependencies. On the other hand, certain X libraries such as libX11 and libXext are included in the dependency list, as they are necessary to compile mythtv. As an example, I run a mythtv server on a box that lacks any form of video output. The box sits in a corner of a basement and streams video over the network to my main workstation. The initial mythtv setup process was performed by forwarding the X setup application over ssh. An X server has never been installed, as it was never needed, nor could it be used without adding hardware. Why have mythtv require an X server if it is not strictly needed? That is software I would have to download, compile, and install that would never be used. It would be great if there were a text interface to configure mythtv, so I do not need all those pesky X libraries and Qt, but that is another issue. Sure, the argument could be made that many people will run the mythtv frontend on their system, so X should be installed automatically when mythtv is emerged to make it easy. The same could be said about firefox or mplayer. But then again, there are those people who will install full desktops for use in a VNC session and not on an X server, or those who want to use mplayer right on the framebuffer instead of using the normal GUI to watch a movie. For the most part, Gentoo tends to require opt-in of features, rather than opt-out, so everyone can get exactly what they want out of their system without any extra bloat. That is the purpose of the use flags. There are packages with an X use flag, but this is usually for features that require X libraries, not an X server itself. For example, adding the X use flag to gkrellm builds both the desktop application and gkrellmd, the server component; omitting the X use flag builds only gkrellmd. So an xserver use flag could be added to every package that could possibly use X, such as mythtv, but then I could also say a vnc use flag should be added for every package that uses X libraries in addition to an NX use flag in addition to an ssh-forwarding use flag in addition to whatever else might display X applications to the user. It is much easier to install whatever software best displays X applications for your particular setup, rather than trying to handle it through the dependency system and use flags, even if the majority all install xorg-server. Having said that, X is about the only piece of software where this is the case. Most everything else is handled by dependencies and use flags. I can think of a few minor exceptions, but there are not many. These are not major problems, since gentoo seems to be a friendly distro (so far) and emerging unzip and X went/is going just fine. I just found it odd that the mythtv package didn't make sure unzip and X were present before it was installed. Submit a bug report for the unzip if it caused the build to fail. The zip files for the mythtv ebuild are fairly new according to the changelog. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge mythtv fails
On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 08:37 +0930, Shawn Haggett wrote: This has been broken for over a week now (normally I just wait, resync and these things go away if they're an ebuild problem) but I'm starting to think it's a problem on my end. Anyone have any suggestions on how to track down where the error is coming from. It the environment file, but I'm not sure if that's a distributed file, or generated by portage (I suspect the later). So where does that file get its contents from? I ran into this same problem approximately two weeks ago on my amd64 box with the same version. I also needed to rebuild mythtv due to a library upgrade. I originally thought that the problem arose when the ebuild switched from using a SVN checkout to a tarball download. However, the changelog shows that this happened on March 2nd, but I successfully emerged mythtv-0.21_p18314-r1 on April 24th. I upgraded mythtv to 0.21_p20877. It builds correctly on my system and also corrects an issue I was having with the backend process occasionally segfaulting when the frontend exited. Sorry I do not know how to fix this particular issue, but so far 0.21_p20877 has been working great for me on amd64 after a few days of light usage. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] wakeup in virtualbox vm?
On Sat, 2009-07-18 at 08:49 +, Konstantinos Agouros wrote: I have a gentoo-guest in a virtualbox vm that is running on a mac. When I do not use it I just put it to sleep and wake it up, when needed. Is there a way that the guest recognizes the wakeup and than sets the time using ntpdate or based on the clock of the host-os which is ntp-synchronized? If you install the virtualbox guest additions in your Gentoo guest, virtualbox can take care of syncing your guest's clock with the host's clock. I use app-emulation/virtualbox-guest-additions on a development VM at work that I suspend every night, and the clock is always correct when I resume the machine in the morning. If I remember correctly, it is only necessary to start the virtualbox-guest-additions service for the clock syncing to work. My host machine is an XP box, but I suspect it should work the same for a Mac host. I do not have access to the machine from home, but if you cannot get it working, respond back and I would be happy to check my setup on Monday. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] NVidia setup instructions?
On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 14:25 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: Hi, Is this the right page to follow for up-to-date installation instructions for a 6200-based card? http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml If it is then is it at all out of date in terms of xorg.conf setup for the newer xorg-server/hald setup, or is it OK? I have the PCI version of the 6200, and I can confirm that 180.29 (stable for my arch) work great as well as the vesa framebuffer. I had problems with the uvesa framebuffer a few kernels back, and never got it to work, though I haven't tried since. The rest of the nvidia guide looks good, though I do not use the same options as the guide for my xorg.conf configuration. For example, I've never had to set the VideoRam option in the device section, and set things such as NoLogo, RenderAccel, etc in the screen section. Take a look at [1] for all the options. That's the amd64 version, though it should be similar if not the same for other architectures. I don't use hal, so I cannot comment on that. I would recommend using the nvidia-xconfig utility to configure another xorg.conf once you get a basic X display running. It works pretty well, particularly regarding 3D settings and multiple monitors, so it's a good starting point from which to customize. [1]: http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.29/README/appendix-b.html Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] NVidia setup instructions?
On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 15:24 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: Thanks Brandon. I'm up in X now on the 6200 AGP so it's functional. glxgears seems sort of slow at about 230FPS but I probably don't have things set up right yet. I had questions about the setup instructions as I went through it. 1) Do you completely drop out DRI support in the kernel? Seems this document says not to load the dri driver in xconf and it wasn't shown in the kernel options so I took it out. Maybe that should be enabled? I do not have direct rendering enabled in my kernel, and I have never heard of it being needed for nvidia cards. The nvidia kernel module takes care of that as far as I know. 2) I used to have /dev/agpgart and framebuffer suppport as modular but this setup doc seemed to go with built-in so I switched to that. I do have the Intel chipset AGP GART support as modular and it does load OK. Not sure if I should use that or NVidia's? I have always compiled the framebuffer support into the kernel so that I can use it for the console when the system starts booting, before any modules are loaded. I've never tried to compile it as a module. Regardless, if the module is going to be loaded anyways every time you boot, and you don't have any special options to pass to the module, it's usually best to compile into the kernel. I'm not familiar with AGP, as my system does not support it, nor have I ever used Intel graphics in conjunction with any other graphics chips, sorry. No problems getting the card up and running. Now it's a matter of figuring out how to do it right. I am using hald but it wouldn't load the nvidia driver automatically, opting for the nv driver. Do you have that problem? Should I put it in modules.autoload? I had this problem with a NVidia 9600 GSO in a machine I was setting up as part of a computational cluster when trying to use X's autoconfiguration (no xorg.conf at all). X would try to load the nv driver, even though I had not even compiled it. Creating a simple xorg.conf and specifying the nvidia driver in a device section loaded the nvidia driver fine. modules.autoload should not be necessary. The nvidia module should be automatically loaded when X starts with the nvidia driver. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] sync'ing two computers (not related to emerge)
On Sun, 2009-05-03 at 10:32 -0400, Simon wrote: How long is unison taking to check for changes? I can usually reconcile changes in my home directory (approximately 45G, 125,000 files) in less than 10-15 seconds between my slow laptop drive and a remote machine. However, if you are syncing with a Windows machine, expect the sync to be much slower. Fast checking is not safe on Windows, as unison can miss changes, so it scans every file every time unless you tell it otherwise. Ok i had to try a few times and now with tcpkeepalive being turned on it doesnt disconnect. But when the scan is done, it 'reconciles' the changes (so it has received the changes from the remote end) and Begins the transfer of a dozen files, but not a bit is transfered. The sshd and unison process on the remote host are waiting/sleeping or in coma, but nothing happens. I just tried again and let it sit on the transfer to see if the processes would wake up, but it read from remote host that connection timed out. I'm not sure but this may be due to the fact i'm on an unstable link... I'll try once more with a ssh session on the side to see if that session will get disconnected or not... It would be so nice if unison could 'remember' the changes on my HD against its local archive... anyway... Thanks, Simon An unstable link is probably triggering your issue. If the link dies and comes back, unison (at least version 2.27.57, what I have here) gets confused and just sits there. What's interesting is that if unison is killed on the initiating machine, the remote process stops as well, which leads me to believe this is a bug in unison; they can talk, but they don't do anything. I've glanced at the code before despite my lack of familiarity with OCaml, as my wireless connection will often die, causing much grief, but I've never found a solution. You could try syncing subdirectories iteratively within what you want to sync and hope that your connection does not die during the smaller sync, but that really isn't a good solution. I personally use this method to speed up synchronization if, for example, I only need my latest CS project synchronized but not any new music I may have. Unison is smart enough to use the same hash database if you use the same root directories and use the Path directive in your configuration to limit what is synchronized, so it should not re-hash your files on a later sync. As for other solutions, if you cannot get unison to work with your connection, I would suggest using a DVCS. I tried synchronizing my home directory with git before finding unison. The DVCS approach is better than SVN or CVS because it takes up less space and does not require a server. The disadvantages are the increased space used to store the backend files and the need to commit all of your files before pushing/pulling to/from the other machine (though I guess that could be an advantage, depending on your needs). It isn't optimal, but it can work, despite the git manual specifically mentioning that git was not made to do such a thing. Mercurial might work better, but I've never tried to use it. You might hit the same issues if the connection dies; I don't know. If you do find something that works similar to unison, but is more robust, I'd love to hear about it. I've tired a number of things, but I keep coming back to unison, despite its issues. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] sync'ing two computers (not related to emerge)
On Sat, 2009-05-02 at 17:33 -0400, Simon wrote: hi there! I've been using unison to synchronise and backup my computers. unison is based on rsync IIRC but with the difference that it 'remembers' the state of the folder that was synchronised. This way, if I delete a file on A, when sync'ing it will be deleted on B. While rsync would leave the file on B... I see rsync as a very good 'cp' program, but I need something that can deal with conflicts (file changed on both hosts/directories) and can propagate changes like deletes properly. Is there a way to get this behavior with rsync (maybe i missed something)? No. Unison implements the rsync protocol for transferring files, but it does not actually use rsync itself. You can make rsync transfer files that are not in either the destination or a reference location with the --compare-dest option, for example if doing an incremental backup, but this will not propagate the deletion of a file or directory. The delete file will come back on the next synchronization. The reason i'm asking is that unison has been having problems recently in sync'ing two pc... On my laptop, when i start the sync, it first checks it for changes against the 'unison snapshot'. Changes done since last sync are those that will be propagated. But it takes so long to check for changes (disk input rate is too slow i think) that once it finished, when it's time to send the changes to the remote server, the remote end has already disconnected! Thanks for the help/suggestions! If you are using ssh with unison, are you using the KeepAlive yes option in your ssh configuration? If not, add it, and your connection should not close from inactivity. If you are using direct sockets, unison will use a keepalive so it can timeout if the communication link is broken. How long is unison taking to check for changes? I can usually reconcile changes in my home directory (approximately 45G, 125,000 files) in less than 10-15 seconds between my slow laptop drive and a remote machine. However, if you are syncing with a Windows machine, expect the sync to be much slower. Fast checking is not safe on Windows, as unison can miss changes, so it scans every file every time unless you tell it otherwise. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Konqueror and https sites
On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 23:40 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Could someone please double check using konqueror-4.2.1* if this link works, or if I have done something stupid config-wise: The login page does not work here with konqueror-4.2.1-r1 (amd64), giving a ssl negotiation failed error. Other https sites work fine, however. $ konqueror -version Qt: 4.5.0 KDE: 4.2.1 (KDE 4.2.1) Konqueror: 4.2.1 (KDE 4.2.1) I have not used the kde overlay for quite some time, so that is not the issue, at least for me. Regards, Brandon Vargo
Re: [gentoo-user] Laptop Lid Close...
On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 02:14 -0500, Joshua Murphy wrote: if radeontool or something will allow you to disable the display even when you aren't in X, or without proper access to the display (like xset requires) you might be able to even escape needing that xhost setting. No way of testing it at all myself though. I use the dpms feature of sys-apps/vbetool to control the state of the display from a shell script called by acpid. It works even when X is not running and does not need access to the X display if X is running. Also, it works with graphics cards from multiple vendors, as it uses VESA extensions. From personal experience, I know it works with the Intel graphics chipset in my laptop (x86) and also with the Nvidia graphics card in my desktop (amd64). The latter does not have a lid to close, of course, but vbetool can still turn off the display. --Brandon Vargo
