Comments (1)

By Matthieu, 2011-12-21 10:35

OK, rant time.

Way back in the day (I mean 2001 or so), I used to use rpm-based distros. Red Hat, Mandriva – or rather Mandrake- and they worked fine. As long as you didn’t have to install any packages. To be fair, this was in the early days of package managers and the like, and I was a novice Linux user at the time. Mandrake had put in a good effort with urpmi, but I still had to visit sites like http://rpm.pbone.net/ and http://rpmfind.net/ very often to find this or that package.

Then, in 2004/2005, I discovered Ubuntu. (The OS, not the philosophy. Ha ha.) It was a world of difference. Need a program? apt-get install program would automagically fetch and install it for you. Don’t know the name of the package, or exactly what you’re looking for? apt-cache search can help. If that package you want installed has dependencies, and those have dependencies? No problem, everything gets pulled in and the proposed changes are listed for you. The other advantage was that seemingly any program I could possibly want was available in a Debian/Ubuntu repo.

Fast forward to today. I’ve pretty much been using Debian based distros since then, although I have tried Arch and Slax, and possibly many others that I can’t remember right now. All my servers run either Debian or Ubuntu Server, and my Linux PCs are Ubuntu or Arch. Package management has become so easy that I rarely ever have to worry about it, unless I’m trying to make some major changes outside of repo packages.

Recently, however, I’ve started using some RPM distros again, to see how things have been on that side of the fence. It’s been mostly CentOS and a few CentOS/PBX distros (Elastix, Trixbox, pbxinaflash…). I have to say though, I can’t believe the state of the package management system. CentOS has got yum, which seems to be good in principle, but somehow I’ve seen it massively fail in ways that Apt never has for me. The first issue is not really to do with the package manager, but more the repositories.

For example, we had a service on a server at work that absolutely required “Arial”. In Ubuntu or Debian, all you have to do is enable the non-free repo, or an Arch, use one of the excellent AUR frontends such as yaourt. Then install msttcorefonts (Debian) or ttf-ms-fonts (Arch). The package manager will fetch the MS fonts package and its dependency, cabextract. It then downloads each of the fonts’ self-extracting EXEs from sourceforge, cabextracts them, then installs them to the appropriate fonts directory. Now, on the CentOS 5 server, no such luck.

$ yum install msttcorefonts
Loaded plugins: downloadonly, fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: centos.mirror.nexicom.net
 * extras: centos.mirror.nexicom.net
 * updates: centos.mirror.nexicom.net
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Addons
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Base
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Extras
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-5 - Updates
Finished
Setting up Install Process
No package msttcorefonts available.
Nothing to do
$

Awesome. Time to break out the manual package manager, AKA Google. Which brings me to the corefonts sourceforge project homepage, fortunately with clear instructions on how to install on an rpm-based system.

1. Make sure you have the following rpm-packages installed from from your favourite distribution. Any version should do.
   • rpm-build
   • wget
   • A package that provides the ttmkfdir utility. For example
     • For Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, ttmkfdir
     • For old redhat releases, XFree86-font-utils
     • For mandrake-8.2, freetype-tools
2. Install the cabextract utility. For users of Fedora Core it is available from extras. Others may want to compile it themselves from source, or download the source rpm from fedora extras and rebuild.
3. Download the latest msttcorefonts spec file from here
4. If you haven’t done so already, set up an rpm build environment in your home directory. You can to this by adding the line %_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild to your $HOME/.rpmmacros and create the directories $HOME/rpmbuild/BUILD and $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch
5. Build the binary rpm with this command:

   $ rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec

   This will download the fonts from a Sourcforge mirror (about 8 megs) and repackage them so that they can be easily installed.

6. Install the newly built rpm using the following command (you will need to be root):

   # rpm -ivh $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

Sounds like fun. Let’s try and see if we’re lucky.

yum install wget rpm-build cabextract

Cool! rpm-build was installed! but wait, how about wget and cabextract? It didn’t mention those!

wget is probably installed, but let’s try anyway:

$ wget
wget: missing URL
Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]...

Try `wget --help' for more options.

OK, how about cabextract?

$ cabextract
sh: cabextract: command not found

Well then, that’s wonderful. Thanks for mentioning that you didn’t install cabextract, yum.

Fortunately the good people at corefonts provided a link to the download for cabextract, and fortunately, my server is i386 (I know it doesn’t seem like it from the screenshot), so I can use the pre-built RPM. (For those who need it, the x86_64 package) Now to the final step.

$ wget -O - http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec | rpm -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.77304
+ umask 022+ cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD

[… a hundred or so lines…]

Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
Executing(%clean): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.22861
+ umask 022
+ cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD
+ '[' /var/tmp/msttcorefonts-root '!=' / ']'
+ rm -rf /var/tmp/msttcorefonts-root
+ exit 0

Phew, that’s a lot of output. Well exit 0, that’s good. Aaand “Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm”. cool!

And finally:

$ rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:msttcorefonts          ########################################### [100%]

$

(Another thing that bugs me – no success message! After all that, not even a Yay! Package installed!? I’m disappointed, rpm.)

For illustrative purposes, Debian:

# apt-get install msttcorefonts
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  cabextract ttf-liberation ttf-mscorefonts-installer
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  cabextract msttcorefonts ttf-liberation ttf-mscorefonts-installer
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 1103kB of archives.
After this operation, 2109kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y

[…]

All fonts downloaded and installed.
Updating fontconfig cache for /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts
Setting up msttcorefonts (2.7) ...
Setting up ttf-liberation (1.04.93-1) ...
Updating fontconfig cache for /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-liberation

Wasn’t that easier? Also, a nice plain English message saying what was done: “All fonts downloaded and installed.” Take notes, rpm.

For completeness’ sake, Arch:

$ yaourt -S ttf-ms-fonts

==> Downloading ttf-ms-fonts PKGBUILD from AUR...
x PKGBUILD
x ttf-ms-fonts.install
x LICENSE

[…]

==> ttf-ms-fonts dependencies:
 - fontconfig (already installed)
 - xorg-fonts-encodings (already installed)
 - xorg-font-utils (already installed)
 - cabextract (package found)

[…]

Targets (1): ttf-ms-fonts-2.0-8

Total Download Size:    0.00 MB
Total Installed Size:   5.49 MB

Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
(1/1) checking package integrity                                         [########################################] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                                        [########################################] 100%
(1/1) installing ttf-ms-fonts                                            [########################################] 100%
Updating font cache... done.
$

A bit more user interaction, but that’s the point of Arch.

So, to summarize:

Arch/Debian package management > rpm package management (CentOS).

And that’s the end of my rant for today.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2011-12-13 01:58

My first attempt at a video to GIF conversion. Source material is a “banned” episode of Pokémon, S01E18 – “Beauty and the Beach”.

See the awkwardness that was too racy for American audiences. 😉 There’s worse later on in the episode, but I’ll leave that to you to find.

Text outline : http://www.ehow.com/how_18386_add-outline-text.html
Also, for some reason, Photoshop had to be launched in 32-bit, and the source movie had to be saved in a .mov container.

Comments (1)

By Matthieu, 2011-11-30 22:29

It’s a bit of a pain having to run upgrades on all servers. I could of course, set up unattended upgrades, but I always liked initiating the upgrade process myself. So I wrote a little bash script that will initiate apt-get update and apt-get upgrade on all running OpenVZ containers.

Note that this only works for Debian-based distros. So Debian, *buntu, Linux Mint and the like.

It’s very rough, no error-handling or safeguards, so use at your own risk. Works for me, but YMMV.

#!/bin/bash
#Delete temp file
rm /tmp/tmp-script.sh
#Get running VZ
CTIDS=$(vzlist | awk '{print $1}' | sed -e '/CTID/d' -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' )
# Echo list of running IDs
echo "$CTIDS"
CTIDarray=($CTIDS)
for x in ${CTIDarray[@]}
do
    echo "#/bin/bash" > /tmp/tmp-script.sh
    chmod +x /tmp/tmp-script.sh
    echo vzctl exec $x "apt-get update &&;  apt-get -y upgrade" >> /tmp/tmp-script.sh
    screen -d -m /tmp/tmp-script.sh
done
#Delete temp file
rm /tmp/tmp-script.sh
#Show running screens
screen -x

First, we rm the /tmp/tmp-script.sh. Starting off with very bad form, I know, feeling lazy right now. Then I use awk and sed to get the IDs of running containers from the output of the vzlist command, and place them on a single line, separated by spaces. Those IDs are than put in an array, so that the update command can be called using a for loop.

For some reason, I couldn’t get screen to launch the

vzctl exec $x "apt-get update &&  apt-get -y upgrade"

command directly, hence the hideous use of a temp file. If anyone can fix/improve this, I would be glad to hear from you!

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2011-11-23 23:04

Update: Here are a few alternatives that use Webkit:
http://derailer.org/paparazzi/
http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/

Just discovered an old but good add-on for Firefox: Screengrab.

Unfortunately the author has discontinued development, citing that he was unable to keep up with the increased pace of Firefox development.

Fortunately, the extension still works great on Firefox 9.0 beta with the good ol’ install.rdf edit. I’ve attached it below, along with an example screenshot produced by Screengrab.

screengrab-0.96.3-maxVersionmod.xpi

(Right click and download or open image in new window/tab for full view)

Comments (1)

By Matthieu, 2011-11-15 18:45

Synaptics makes great touch technology. Their performance and drivers have always been, in my experience, much better than their Alps counterparts.

Except in one specific situation: using the trackpad’s edge scrolling feature in Pidgin.

Turns out the problem is because the Synaptics touchpad enhancer app displays a custom cursor while scrolling in such a way that prevents GTK apps from reading the scrolling action. Not sure on what end the bug is, but the good news is there’s a simple registry fix:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPEnh]
"UseScrollCursor"=dword:00000000

Either copy-paste the above into Notepad and save as “DisableSynTPCursor-FixScrollPidgin.reg” or something less complex, and import it into the registry. Or make the change manually.

Fix thanks to mindelirium88. http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/10768

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2011-11-11 19:44

is deliciously retro-nostalgic.

Also, e-mail is in a really sad state following the advent of Facebook. Does anyone want to send me a real e-mail? Please?

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2011-10-29 16:34

It’s true, it’s very hard to figure out what to post on which social network. Between Google+, tumblr, twitter, Facebook, WordPress, posterous and the rest… There are so many places to “share” and yet none of them really is the be all, end all network, and I doubt they ever will be.

The consensus in my group of friends seems to be Facebook, but FB doesn’t really lend itself to long-winded posts or all the random thoughts, images and other media that I collect and want to sort of scrapbook for future reference.

Meanwhile, I’m just going to go ahead and cross-post this to Facebook, G+, my blog, tumblr….

http://mayip.tumblr.com/post/12086328596/its-true-its-very-hard-to-figure-out-what-to

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2011-10-29 11:05

I would like to report that the multi-monitor support is very broken in Lion, specifically with full-screen apps.

Full-screen apps are great, it’s nice to have an immersive view of content, however the user needs to be able to choose which display the full-screen app appears on.

On my MacBook Pro, I like to keep the built-in display as primary, but sometimes would like to have Quicktime or iPhoto full screen on the external display. In Snow Leopard, this was possible, however in Lion there is no way to make apps full screen on the external display.

Another problem is that making any one app full screen makes all other connected displays useless. My Mac Pro has 3 displays connected. Lion makes it impossible to say, watch a video in Quicktime full-screen on one monitor while simultaneously checking mail or browsing the Web on another. I’ll admit, there is a solution to this problem: not using any Apple apps. VLC is able to go full screen on one monitor with Firefox full screen on another and leaving my other display available for use.

Apple, please fix this, or this Mac Pro will be my last, and it will be running Snow Leopard for the rest of its lifetime.

—

If you agree, please submit feedback to Apple at http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Comments (1)

By Matthieu, 2011-10-05 22:57

This script will read the container ID from the file name, and use it to restore the tgz dump to the same ID on the new OpenVZ/Proxmox server.

Note that this only works if the default name for the vzdumps is kept, and it only works for the next 89 years, because I’m lazy.

Thanks to
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-loop-over-file/ and http://bashcurescancer.com/10-steps-to-beautiful-shell-scripts.html

#!/bin/bash
VZDUMPS=/path/to/backups/*.tgz
for f in $VZDUMPS
 
do
        f2=${f#*openvz-}
        VEID=${f2%-20*}
        echo "Restoring $f to $VEID"
        vzrestore $f $VEID
done

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2011-10-02 15:08

Use this link to add the default Google search provider to IE or Firefox. Useful for IE, or Firefox on Linux Mint.
For Firefox:Google.xml

For IE: MS-Google.xml