Developers' Blogs: VMiklos

we're always working on something, sometimes it worth to have a look
round and see what we've reached. so here is my list, probably
incomplete

1) syncpkgd

2) -stable support. if you want to have a secure server you no longer
have to use -current

3) OOo for x86_64, also split the language packs

4) many-many packages. really. sometimes i need a package and i'm
impressed it's already in fst

5) in connection with the big number of packages: dynamic cds/dvds based
on dependencies. i remember when we had to move something to extra just
becase the second cd was too big

6) rewritten the setup in C. do you remember the sloooow installer
written in sh?

7) Xorg 7.0. so many hours of sucking when:
7.1) do a clean install
7.2) add the xorg7 repo and -Syu
7.3) write down the occurred errors
7.4) fix them
7.5) rm -rf /
7.6) goto 7.1

8) pacman-g2. pacman without a lib? brr

9) getting rid of hotplug in favour of udev. maybe you remember how slow
it was, it took at least 10-12 secs on my pc

10) fw-xgl-control: enabling and disabling it for a normal user without
reading tons of docs, breaking your system, etc

(yes. the list is unsorted )

could you imagine living without these?

i've just noticed that finally ftp.heanet.ie has no more "connection timed out" errors, so we have a new fast full mirror

it suppors ftp, http and rsync. it has been added to the homepage and to pacman-g2's darcs

another howto, i needed to install it as we use it at the university. it's a binary application, but at least i'm not foced to use it with wine

the howto is here

i've written a small howto about $subject

you can reach it here

the bitlbee server @ im.rootdir.de seems to be down for several days, so finally i've decided to switch to testing.bitlbee.org. luckily the buddy list was not lost, just the <icq number> -> nick anjd <jabber id> -> nick bindings and the bitlbee settings

we have some problem using the normal dns at the university so we finally decided to use opendns. it seems to be working fine so far

probably you already faced with the following problem: if you past a shellscript to vim, then it's indented, so the last line of the script will have tons of whitespaces at the start of the line. there are two problems here:

1. how to disable indenting temporarily? use :paste and :nopaste
2. how to indent the text after the paste? mark the lines you want to indent in visual mode (use V) then == will indent them :)

i've just discovered my name in diamanda wiki's install script (search for "Miklos")

officially called ooe680-m2, the first snapshot of the ooe680 tree which will become openoffice.org-2.1 has been uploaded. as usual you can find the buildscript in -current (enable the 'devel' option) and the binary x86_64 fpms here

darcs-deps is a small perl script that displays darcs patch dependencies graphically. i've created a test repo with the following changes:

1. a simple shell script with lines foo and bar
2. changed foo to foo2 (this should depend on #1)
3. changed bar to bar2 (same)
4. changed foo2 to foo3 (this should depend on #2 but not on #3)
5. added a new file to the end of the file (should depend on #4)

perl darcs-deps | dot -Tps -o deps.eps
convert deps.eps deps.jpg

here is the result:

nice, isn't it?

i've just figured out how to append long comments to darcs patches from a script:
$ echo "`date +"%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Z %Y"`
> VMiklos <vmiklos@frugalware.org>
> name
> long
> comment" | dr rec -a --pipe

finally i got some time to upgrade our forums.frugalware.org to the latest 2.7.6 version. the upgrade went fairly simple, there is an upgrade script that managed the upgrade, then a db integrity check was needed (in fact that repaired/updated the db imho) and finally the small fonts in thm/default/tmpl/forum.css.tmpl has been increased a bit. hopefully everything still works

i'm currently testing firefox-2.0. here are a few issues:

• dpi is set to -1 by default
• the "default homepage" setting has changed
• the backspace button no longer works as it used to be

the first 2 will be fixed in the package, but the last one won't since this is the way the firefox developers decided. in case you want the old way (like me), you'll need the followings:

• open a new tab and type about:config
• search for browser.backspace_action
• set the value from 1 to 0

and now it'll work like before

so the python25 repo has been finally merged to -current

we have rebuilt ~155 packages, hopefully everything is fine now again

there are 2 kde packages to fix, they will be done by crazy soon

oh and there is a new test in the testsuite to avoid that big number of hardcoded python versions in the FrugalBuilds

i'm sorry to say, but it seems our free tools are not yet ready to build netbeans. first you need to add the gcj.jar to the classpath (patch here), but that's basically usual. then the compilation fails with the following casting error:
[repeat] java.io.IOException: java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl cannot be cast to gnu.xml.dom.DomDocument
(full log here)

that's something i can't fix.

after a few days of headache, the brand new netbeans package is ready!

at the moment it requires j2sdk, we'll see if i can get it compile using a free compiler or not

x86_64 fpms are reachable in my repo, as usual

glibc-2.5 has been uploaded to -current, check out the news here

as it was requested, now we have packaged documentation for the following languages: English, Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Swedish. you can install them by
pacman -S php-docs-XX
where XX is your language code, like "hu" for Hungarian and so on :)

there was a request for a long time to support installing from an usb stick, now it seems i've had time to implement this feature

you need this tarball, then you can unpack it and run ./usb_install.sh as root

if you hit a bug, then report it to us, as usual

Neon-0.26.1 has been uploaded to -current and all the necessary packages (ie. openoffice.org :)) have been updated, too. it was a challenge :)

i've uploaded Python-2.5 to a separate repo since lots of package will have to be rebuilt. once all the necessary packages are in the repo, we can merge the update to -current

i wanted to start compiling jacman (and all the libs required by it) from source using only free tools (gcj/ecj & the gnu classpath). it seems that the first dep (glazedlists) requires XMLEncoder, but it will be featured only in gcc-4.2.x. so calm down, we should wait.. :/

Mark Angeli submitted our release notice to digg: dvd, cds

here is a small cmdline to query the temperature of a hdd using smartctl:

smartctl -a /dev/hdc|grep Celsius|sed 's/.* \([0-9]*\)$/\1/'


till now the download code was in pacman's code which was meant that every frontend had to have its own downlaad code - causing a big code duplication. today i've pushed 15 patches to the pacman darcs repo which moved this functionality finally to the library

the patches:

1. new event: PM_TRANS_EVT_RETRIEVE_LOCAL
2. pm_dlfnm can be a simple char *
3. pre-register databases to avoid code duplication
4. pacman: use the libalpm downloader code, drop our own
5. util: link to libftp, too
6. _alpm_sync_commit(): download the packages, too
7. alpm_db_getinfo(): strip the newlines from the end of lines
8. alpm_db_getinfo(): added a PM_DB_FIRSTSERVER property
9. alpm_db_update() now handles downloading, too
10. libalpm: moved in _alpm_db_setlastupdate() and _alpm_db_getlastupdate()
11. _alpm_fetch_pkgurl(): added the usual _alpm prefix
12. _alpm_handle_set_option() more error handling for proxyhost and xfercommand
13. handle_free() memleak fixes
14. libalpm: new function: alpm_fetch_pkgurl()
15. libalpm: moved in the download code

i was hired to create a vpn between 2 frugal machines, alwas i was asked to share the results. so here they came.

NOTE: i'm not a vpn genious, nor want to write yet another "the best" howto. just the brief story of the vpn setup under Frugalware

you can reach it here, feel free to improve it

#!/bin/bash

foo()
{
        true
}

if declare -f foo >/dev/null; then
        echo "foo() declared"
else
        echo "foo() is not declared"
fi

that's all from the user's point of view, internally the whole package-to-sqldb script is redesigned and the sql db itself, too.

examples: reverse deps, browse by group

the new db updater here

today's project is fwmirror, a handy tool to mirror Frugalware archives. basically it handles the followings:

• it needs a server, if you want the newest stuff and don't care about being slow, then you need "rsync://rsync.frugalware.org/pub/frugalware/"
• it handles different Frugalware versions (NOTE: since -current has a new structure, versions other than -current will be supported by fwmirror only after 0.5)
• it handles different architectures, including the special "source" one
• it allows you to pass any custom options to rsync

ok, not a big deal, but useful, isn't it?

the xml that is sent to cia now contains darcsweb urls for the patches, the messages sent to frugalware-darcs, too

1) managed to prevent mutt from asking for confirmation before passing a mail to bogofilter + now it deletes the message automatically

macro index S "<enter-command>unset wait_key\n\
<pipe-entry>bogofilter -Ns;date +%y%m%d >>~/public_html/stats/spam_s\n\
<enter-command>set wait_key\n\
<delete-message>"

2) improved the generated graph: now there are two ones: filtered and unfiltered

3) added an avarage number to both graph

darcs repo still available here

yesterday i've splitted mysql to mysql and libmysqlclient. hopefully this will mean that several apps that depended till now on the whole (30mb-sized) mysql, now can only depend on libmysqlclient (2mb-sized or so) :)

...has been uploaded to you-know-where

this time the build was even quicker, "only" 582 mins

i've recently added 2 small flags to the newest (m176) OpenOffice.org development snapshot FrugalBuild resulting significant building speedup. in numbers, the build time with 4 languages is 591 mins currently, while before it was 680 minutes (13 percent difference). basically the 2 tricks:

• --disable-qadevooo: don't build automated testing tools, we don't need them and the build takes a hell of time
• --enable-gcjaot: the java tools used during the build are now native binaries (compiled using gcj)

in -current we replaced bootsplash with splashy. it's a splash implementation fully in userspace, thus we no longer need any kernel patches

to support splashy, the kbd, grub, gfxboot and sysvinit packages has been updated, too

there was an effort about generating the packages' post_install (and other) scriptlet functions dynamically. this is done via using the magic

Finclude gnome-scriptlet

command. the parameters you can includes _F_gnome_schemas(), _F_gnome_scrollkeeper, _F_gnome_desktop and so on. where it was possible the original scriptlet has been removed and now automatically generated. enjoy!

adslconfig has been merged with netconfig and this point all the old config scripts has been ported to frugalwareutils, namely: grubconfig, mouseconfig, netconfig, raidconfig, timeconfig, xconfig and xwmconfig

time to remove this very old item from my TODO

Donald Bruce Stewart has created a simple shell script to create darcs graphs, and i've modified it to create a simple spam stat. the result looks promising

what do you need?

• with bogofilter, i use the following procmail rule:
  :0:
* ^X-Bogosity: Spam
`date +%y%m%d >>~/spamstat`/dev/null

• then do a darcs get http://frugalware.org/~vmiklos/spam-graph/
  and run sh spam-graph ~/spamstat
• if you have gnuplot installed the png image should be generated soon

my problem was that (especially on some mailing lists) i use different signatures. with the folder hooks this can be solved in a very nice way. so i have 2 signatures: a default one and a special (for a given mailing list):

folder-hook . set signature=~/.signature
folder-hook special set signature=~/.signature.special

and now when i write a mail/reply from that folder the special signature is used

this post is mainly the result of the cleanup of my firefox tabs :)

predefined macros in gcc

string manipulation using bash

string functions in make

finally, we have a proper US mirror

many thanks to Eddie Torres and mirrors.tds.net!

xwmconfig has been ported to frugalwareutils, for example if you just install base&x11&xlibs in a netinstall then you're asked what wm do you want to start from xdm till you can't edit your own ~/.xinitrc

new setup isos: i686 | x86_64

after the recent freenx/knx update resume should now work in nx. a cheap trick: if you use kde the window titles may be weird after a resume, a workaround is to run

dcop kwin default reconfigure

after resume. (more info here)

the x.org foundation pulblished and then we pushed a few patches for the "setuid()return value check problem". packages affected: libX11, xdm, xf86dga, xinit, xload, xorg-server and xtrans. do a pacman -Syu

www2.frugalware.org is now equal to {www.,}frugalware.org, hopefully we broke nothing, if yes then just file the usual bugreports. probably IroNiQ or Alex will post a news entry about this soon :)

• grubconfig now uses os-prober to detect other operating systems, this means for example the boot parameters of an other existing installation are detected, or the proper title is set if you have a Microsoft installation
• kernel bumped to 2.6.17
• parted is now available - you can resize your fat/ext3 partitions on the fly from the setup
• ssh is available on the setupcd
• on tty5 there is a small nice tetris in case the installation would be boring - thanks slin for this

atm i've tested the 20060619 images with a simple base-only installation

ah, and if we're at it (just because it's a frequently asked question):

• i've installed base to a 500mb-sized partition (no, not bigger!)
• booting up the system took 20 secs

has been uploaded, all the external modules are updates (or where it's broken, the m8rs are working on it). unfortunatelly swsusp has been disabled, but don't worry, it's already fixed in darcs, so if you really need it now and can't wait till 2.6.17.1, then use the usual repoman merge kernel

when you send a mail from genesis, sometimes you get the following reply:
mail@addr.ess
Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:<mail@address>:
host mail.addr.ess [1.2.3.4]: 450 <foo@genesis.frugalware.org>:
Sender address rejected: unverified address: connect to
genesis.frugalware.org[157.181.177.34]:
Connection refused

the solution is simple, but not trivial. it depends on the user-agent you use, in mutt, you should put the following magic line to your muttrc:
set use_envelope_from
then i'll be ok again :)

i've worked again a bit on mkiso:

• now you can (optionally) define a <lang> tag, so that after the frugalware repo, not all the locale-extra pkgs will have higher priority than the other extra pkgs, just a selected language's locale pkgs
• it generates a small stat next to the iso, for example the current ones are available for a while here

have fun! :)

#809 was a request for this. the new snapshot supports using a wireless card to fetch packages. the most common problem (probably) will be that extra modules are not included in the netinstall iso. if a module is requested then we'll put it in. so, please request the modules you find to be missing! thanks

release notes, commit, x86_64 fpms. enjoy! :)

the current (old) mkiso script worked, but had several limitations:

• you had to have write access to the repo
• no dependency checking, you needed to arrange the categories by hand
• no support for more than one dvd

yes, this all has been gone, there is a new mkiso in the pacman-tools repo (and soon in the next pacman-tools release) which supports all these missing features, basically you need to specify the volume size and the wished volumes in an xml, then mkiso will do everything for you. also it comes with a nice manpage examples :)

a complete rewrite of the old xconfig script in the frugalware pkg is now included in frugalwareutils. since the code is native, it's much more faster. it should work at least as well as the old script, but who knows - if you find any bug then please report it to us

thanks!

mxw is a simple C irc bot. i've start it as a fun project (usually people write irc bots in perl or python), but currently it handles more and more functions. today i've added rss support (using libmrss) so that on the #frugalware channel mxw_ floods the users with package updates and blog posts ;-)

of course the whole code is still experimental, i hope this post will appear on #frugalware, too :)

distrowatch published an interview with me, maybe it's interesting :)

yesterday LGee, desco, voroskoi and me met each other. you can reach a few pictures taken by LGee here

hi

the newest development snapshots's fpms are ready, you can reach at you-know-where. no big changes, 4 new languages, more patches submitted to upstream (we now only use only a gcc-4.1.0 specific one) and so on

(maybe this is true for mutt(-devel) too, i'm not sure)

so. first you need a private key, there is a good howto about it here. then you need to copy gpg.rc (for example from /usr/share/doc/mutt-ng-20060402/samples/gpg.rc) to ~/.muttng, then add the following lines to your muttngrc

source ~/.muttng/gpg.rc
unset crypt_autosign
unset crypt_autoencrypt
set crypt_replysign
set crypt_replyencrypt
set crypt_verify_sig=yes
set pgp_sign_as="0xXXXXXXXX"

where XXXXXXXX is your keyid

for autmatic key downloading on checking signatures, add

keyserver-options auto-key-retrieve

to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf

that's all :)

here. also the title is not exactly correct as probably a release candidate was tested :)

i've just set up bogofilter with mutt, it was sooo easy! :)

first you should collect some spam and ham (non-spam) to separate (Maildir) folders

then bogofilter -s -B ~/Maildir/spam/, bogofilter -n -B ~/Maildir/ham. the basic learning is done

to your procmailrc:

:0fw
| /usr/bin/bogofilter -uep
:0:
* ^X-Bogosity: Spam
.Spam/


finally i've added a macro to my muttrc to be able to simply tell bogofilter it missed something (haven't noticed a spam):

macro index S "<pipe-entry>bogofilter -Ns"

(you can add a similar macro for "bogofilter -Sn" - "hey, this is not a spam" - if you want)

that's all :)

after a few days of work (and headache) we (me and janny) put togother a java-enabled version of the openoffice.org package. we built the development milestone (m163) of OOo, so it won't hit -current till 2.0.3 is released. ideally this should re-enable features like help and others which were missing since 2.0.0. at the moment the x86_64 packages are available, but janny will upload i686 ones soon, too

I've written a short howto about how to debug a pacman database error as I was asked many time to do so for others. So there it is, now i can say simply RTFM ;)