A Window

Partial upgrade messed my system

2012-02-22T01:37:00.000+05:30

Although I am aware of the potential risks of a partial upgrade, due to slow connection I thought I will go ahead with it. I was feeling confident that if things mess up I will be able to handle them. I had installed grep and udev without installing upgraded versions of kmod and pcre.

When I restarted [may be I should not have done that], during boot only the system started throwing errors about grep being unable to find libpcre and kmod not being found. I was able to boot into kdm but my keyboard and touchpad were not working. The root of the problem is still unknown; but I thought of trying installing pcre and kmod. However, to install I had to get to the command prompt at least.

So, I created a Gentoo boot disk using my flash drive and chrooted into my system. I connect using 3G USB dongle and from the chrooted environment the mode was not switched. So, I had to get packages downloaded separately and then install them through the chrooted environment. I should have installed the same version as in my system's pacman database; but I installed the latest one. With that I fixed the boot problems and my keyboard was working but it broke a few other things and kdm did not work any more. When I booted now, it took me to the command line. I reinstalled kdebase-workspace; yet the issue persisted. To make things worse, I found that emacs and irssi were also not working. So, I couldn't get to any IRC channel to ask for help. The only good thing that happened was I was able to get to a command line. So, I did not have to download packages elsewhere and install it.

When I connected to the internet from my system and ran pacman -Syu it showed me downloads of around 650 mb. I found that many of those packages like libreoffice and 32-bit libs are not absolute necessity from a repair perspective. So, I decided to download a small subset to get my KDE back. I downloaded


avahi 
ca-certificates 
compositeproto 
cpio 
kdelibs 
kactivities 
libxrandr 
xdg-utils 
qt  
oxygen-icons 
kdepimlibs 
kdepim-runtime 
libxml2 
libqalculate  
libxcomposite 
libmysqlclient 
libvorbis 
libshout 
sdl_image 
zvbi 
vlc

The list above is a subset of the packages pacman wanted to download for the system upgrade; but at the same time they also form a superset of the packages I believed could cause my KDM issues.This solved my problem and now I am blogging from my revived linux system.

Caution:
Experiments like these should not be undertaken unless
1. You are crazy like me.
2. You have a backup system and have your /home folder on a separate partition so that even if your system can't be fixed, you can install a fresh new system without losing data. [You can also save configurations in /etc.]
3. You have sufficient bandwidth.

Cleaning KDE "Open with" list

2012-02-05T00:49:00.001+05:30

I had installed MPlayer and uninstalled it long back. However, since then KDE always showed it in the "Open With" list for media files. Just to make sure it was not installed on my system I ran

pacman -Rcus mplayer

as root. Obviously the target was not found. After some chatting on #gentoo, I resolved the issue by deleting mplayer.desktop file from ~/.local/share/applications. Along with that, I cleaned some other stale applications from that directory.

Alarming state of linux distributions

2012-02-04T15:08:00.002+05:30

A random peek at Distrowatch showed me that the top linux distributions were all losing popularity.

Does this mean linux is losing popularity or some rarely known distribution is gaining prominence in the background?

New Blogger ate my blog post

2011-11-11T22:53:00.001+05:30

I had written a blog about Ubuntu's decline and posted it about 8 hours ago. I wanted to edit it to put some lines in unordered list format. I selected the lines and clicked on the bullet button and it took an additional line under the bullet format. So I pressed Ctrl+Z to undo it. However, to my surprise, the whole blog post was deleted. The contents are gone and not recoverable any more. I also checked Google cache; but it was not there obviously as it was only some hours old.

Speeding up KDM

2011-11-11T17:11:00.001+05:30

For some time, I have been noticing that KDE Display Manager (KDM) slows down after every version bump. I was of the idea that this was because KDE was becoming bloated. However, CPU usage of KDE had started declining after version 4.4. So, I was sure that KDE was actually not getting hung up in the background any more. However, till 4.7 the KDM load time kept increasing. As a matter of fact, after the recent update, KDM became so slow that I had to restart my system twice before actually getting to KDM. In fact, during the first two restarts, I was thinking that my installation was broken after the update.

I sometimes browse through the bugzilla to check over recent bugs to find if any of them are related to me. After the update, I decided to look up bugzilla to check if I am encountering a common problem. And, Bingo! The very first bug was about KDM slowing down. There was a suggestion about updating font cache to avoid slow startup of KDM. It can be done using the following command:

fc-cache -fv

I tried it and the next time KDM was loaded very fast indeed. The bug was closed by the Arch linux maintainer with the following comment: "Some font package (maybe unofficial) doesn't run fc-cache after its installation or its removal." However, I think a deeper investigation should be made before closing the bug. I have been a number of instances in Arch linux bugzilla when the bug is closed without sufficient investigation. Arch developers pass the buck to upstream developers very fast.

Funny Windows

2011-10-30T13:03:00.001+05:30

I am using Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Windows might have got a bit more secure and flashy than Windows XP; but it continues to be funny. Today morning only, I encountered the following queer incidents.

1. In the (My)Computer window, I wanted to see Properties for each drive. So, I directly right clicked on them. However, each time it took me to System Properties. To get to Properties of a drive, I had to first select the drive and then right click on it again and select Properties.

2. While cleaning up my C: it showed 730mb will be cleared. Before cleaning, my C: had 6.77gb free and after cleaning it had 8.33gb free. Strange calculation indeed.

3. Last night, I had just put the lid of my system down and slept. According to my Settings, the system should have gone to Sleep mode too and most likely it did. In the morning, I was unable to connect to my wireless network. After banging my head for being forced to use such a system that does not offer any clue as to what the error was, I decided to try a restart. During restart, I found some disk corruption was causing the trouble. [Using Linux on the same machine for years, never gave me a disk corruption.] Also interestingly after recovering from corruption, I found that my wireless card was set to configure to IP address 192.168.190.1 with subnet mask 255.255.255.0 though I had set it to obtain the IP address automatically.

Using Emacs for development

2011-09-18T03:09:00.001+05:30

When I started working with linux, I had the choice of the following text editors:

KEdit
Vim
Emacs

I decided to try all of them. After initial try, I was certain I would not use vi. It just did not suit my tastes. KEdit turned out to be limited in functionality. So, Emacs became my editor of choice. Initially, I was using it for trivial tasks only. Gradually as I knew more about it, I started using it more.

Compiling and debugging in emacs was fine. However, I was missing code navigation features which really come in handy during code reading phases. Searching through the world wide web, I found this blog explaining the use of etags with emacs for code navigation. I gave it a shot and it surely is fast. While working with python, I found emacs' support for python is not that good; but I am sure it will improve soon.

Arch linux: my perspective

2011-09-18T01:23:00.001+05:30

When I finally found an article covering Arch linux, I thought its time I write about the distribution I have been using for over two years. I switched to it from openSUSE. I have been a KDE user all along; seen transitions from stable 3.x to current 4.7.

I am a minimalist and Arch fits right in. It sure is "bleeding edge". Today only Chromium 14 was released and it was available in Arch repositories. In contrast in Gentoo, another rolling release distribution, the policy is they stabilize a package after a month without any bug reports about it. Due to this policy, Gentoo is still at Firefox 3.6.x while Arch provides me latest Firefox. Even when Firefox released an update after the DigiNotar issue, Arch also pushed the update to its repositories. With Gentoo's policy, it certainly is more stable. As Arch provides, bleeding edge software, you need to understand how to act/react when there are inconsistencies. Only yesterday, hit three bugs: filed one in KDE directly, another in Arch and another in Enlightenment. Another time, I was getting a bug related to valgrind because I had an updated version of it as Arch had pushed the update much before any other distribution. I should probably also mention that Arch released a patched version the following day.

Arch is really simple in the sense at the system level. I was able to create init scripts for Arch far more easily than on Gentoo for the same package. Arch however is not as configurable as Gentoo is. No distribution can match or even come close to Gentoo in this regard. It uses a unique system for this called USE flags. With Arch I can not have a custom KDE; but with Gentoo I have a large number of options as to what I want to have and what not. This flexibility of configuration in Gentoo comes at a price: every package is compiled on your system.

I have provided comparisions with Gentoo because it is the only distribution that has comparable features. Both of these distributions are in a way close to me. On my home desktop, I have Gentoo installed; but on my laptop where I do most of my development tasks, I use Arch linux and I do not see a distribution switch in near future.

For me, Arch surely is a base platform to do what I want to do. I have so to say three distributions in one: a distribution that provides nice command line environment, another that provides nice and stable KDE. I have even stopped akonadi and nepomuk search from starting up at all as they started mysql instances and I was not using any of them. The third one provides latest Enlightenment desktop. I compile it instead of using the packages in the repositories so that I am up to date and also to get debug symbols compiled in.

There have been some issues with Arch from time to time though. For example, the Ricoh card reader on my laptop works fine for some kernel versions; but does not work with others. Arch surely is not for the beginners. However, for advanced users, it provides a lean system which can be tweaked to taste.

Recovering Gentoo linux after changing hard disk channel

2011-09-12T12:03:00.001+05:30

On my system I have two hard drives a 40 gb old one [reminiscent of the times when that much was enough] and a new one of 1tb. Initially both of them where on channel 2: the new one was the master disk while the old one was the slave disk. When I installed Gentoo, I tried

fdisk -l

and found the new one to be /dev/sda while the old one was /dev/sdb. So while installing grub, I assumed the following mapping:

hd0 --> sda --> 1tb hdd

hd1 --> sdb --> 40gb hdd

Grub was installed successfully and dual boot was working fine. [For those readers who are curious about getting a dual boot system, the best place is to look at the handbook.] However, when I got a new DVD writer, the old hard disk was connected at channel 0 as slave and the new one was connected at channel 2 as master. My BIOS was set to boot from the new one and Windows booted fine but I could not boot into Gentoo. So, I decided to fix it and chrooted into my Gentoo installation from the minimal install iso that I had put on to a usb stick using unetbootin. [Recently there have been questions about the performance of unetbootin. I would just like to add that when I tried unetbootin from Windows it failed me thrice with different distributions. However, when I tried it from linux, it worked just fine.]

From within the chrooted environment, I ran

fdisk -l

and found the old hard disk was now sda and the new one was sdb. So, I assumed the following mapping while reinstalling grub:

hd0 --> sda --> 40gb hdd

hd1 --> sdb --> 1tb hdd

However, when I rebooted, grub showed error 17. A quick look at Grub error collection shows that I had somehow got root(hdX, Y) wrong. While talking about the issue on #gentoo, I found that hd0 is actually the drive the BIOS is set to boot from. So, my assumed mapping was incorrect and it turned out that hd0 was being mapped to 11tb hard drive. So, I went into the BIOS and changed it so that the correct mapping was followed.

P.S. To know more about grub read this article.

Office not working in Archlinux

2011-09-06T17:21:00.001+05:30

After dropping of OpenOffice.org, Archlinux switched to LibreOffice from the Document foundation. As this was pushed through a regular update, I went on with it. However, after some time when I tried opening Office files, I was having trouble opening them at all.

I used to get stuck at this filter selection every time I opened a file. When I opened up LibreOffice, the various files options were grayed out.

I thought of checking the wiki for the procedure of installation. I reinstalled it using the following command:

pacman -S libreoffice-common libreoffice-{base,

calc,draw,impress,math,writer,kde4}



pacman -S libreoffice-extension-{pdfimport,presentation-minimizer,presenter-screen,report-builder,wiki-publisher,ct2n,hunart,numbertext,oooblogger,typo,watch-window,diagram}

After that, I was able to get things working again. However, interestingly, each time I had upgraded my system after the switch to LibreOffice, using

pacman -Syu

I had seen these packages were installed. Now there is only one issue, tooltips are just black rectangles.

Firefox responds to fake certificate issue

2011-09-02T22:09:00.001+05:30

Recently, we have seen false SSL/TLS certificate issued by DigiNotar causing trouble to a lot of people. The Tor project's blog describes it at length. Details of such vulnerabilities are detailed here. Firefox has been fast in responding to this. They have released an update which basically prevents its users from becoming a victim.

Broadcom wireless on Arch linux

2011-08-24T21:54:00.001+05:30

My wireless card is Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g. When Broadcom had not released open source drivers, I was using b43 drivers according to Archlinux wiki. These drivers worked fine till kernel version 2.6.37. From the next kernel version, it started trouble me as described in this bug. I switched to broadcom-wl and things worked fine once again. However, starting from kernel 3.0.x, each time I update my kernel, I have to recompile my drivers using

makepkg -f

and reinstall them using

pacman -U ./<package name>.xz

Now I can successfully connect to WPA networks; but not to WEP networks.

Micromax USB Modem in Archlinux

2011-08-10T12:15:00.000+05:30

Using Micromax 3G USB modem in linux is quite simple. You can use usb_modeswitch as suggested in this wiki article. However, I think only wvdial shall suffice. Start out with dmesg output or look in /var/log/dmesg.log.

dmesg

OR

cat /var/log/dmesg.log

I got the following lines as I inserted the USB modem.

[21003.558081] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 6 using ehci_hcd

[21004.356112] option 1-1:1.0: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected

[21004.356269] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0

[21004.356381] option 1-1:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected

[21004.356470] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1

[21004.356576] option 1-1:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected

[21004.356658] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2

[21004.356766] option 1-1:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected

[21004.356874] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3

[21004.359305] scsi10 : usb-storage 1-1:1.4

[21005.364898] scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access     USBModem Disk             2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2

[21005.365401] sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

[21005.367980] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

I spotted the modem as /dev/ttyUSB3. So, I promptly modified my wvdial configuration to recognise this device.

Modem = /dev/ttyUSB3

The rest of the configuration of wvdial depends upon your ISP. You can look into my previous post for configuration for BSNL.

GridFTP on Archlinux

2011-07-07T02:29:00.001+05:30

After having globus-gridftp-server and myproxy-server work on Gentoo linux, it was easy to convert the scripts to work on Arch linux. Following their guide, I tried myproxy-server at first and it worked nicely. Actually in their guide they should mention about ensuring that the executable is in PATH.

#!/bin/bash



. /etc/rc.conf

. /etc/rc.d/functions



GLOBUS_LOCATION=/home/phoenix/gt

DAEMON=myproxy-server

ARGS=



[ -r /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON ] && . /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON



PID=$(pidof -o %PPID $DAEMON)



case "$1" in

 start)

   stat_busy "Starting $DAEMON"

   [ -z "$PID" ] && $GLOBUS_LOCATION/sbin/$DAEMON $ARGS &>/dev/null

   if [ $? = 0 ]; then

     add_daemon $DAEMON

     stat_done

   else

     stat_fail

     exit 1

   fi

   ;;

 stop)

   stat_busy "Stopping $DAEMON"

   [ -n "$PID" ] && kill $PID &>/dev/null

   if [ $? = 0 ]; then

     rm_daemon $DAEMON

     stat_done

   else

     stat_fail

     exit 1

   fi

   ;;

 restart)

   $0 stop

   sleep 1

   $0 start

   ;;

 *)

   echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"  

esac

Now, getting the script for the gridftp-server working was a bit tricky as I had to pass the parameter for the port number and also to get it work as a daemon. I tried to provide the parameters from /etc/conf.d/gridftp-server; but somehow it was not reading the parameters from that file so I had to provide it in the rc script itself.

#!/bin/bash



. /etc/rc.conf

. /etc/rc.d/functions



export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/homephoenix/gt

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GLOBUS_LOCATION/lib

source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh

DAEMON=globus-gridftp-server

ARGS="-S -f -p 2811"



[ -r /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON ] && . /etc/conf.d/$DAEMON



PID=$(pidof -o %PPID $DAEMON)



case "$1" in

 start)

   stat_busy "Starting $DAEMON"

   [ -z "$PID" ] && $GLOBUS_LOCATION/sbin/$DAEMON $ARGS &>/dev/null

   if [ $? = 0 ]; then

     add_daemon $DAEMON

     stat_done

   else

     stat_fail

     exit 1

   fi

   ;;

 stop)

   stat_busy "Stopping $DAEMON"

   [ -n "$PID" ] && kill $PID &>/dev/null

   if [ $? = 0 ]; then

     rm_daemon $DAEMON

     stat_done

   else

     stat_fail

     exit 1

   fi

   ;;

 restart)

   $0 stop

   sleep 1

   $0 start

   ;;

 *)

   echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"  

esac

GridFTP on Gentoo

2011-07-05T04:00:00.000+05:30

The Globus Project provides gridftp as one of the modules of its toolkit. I got the source and followed the quickstart guide to start the installation. However, the guide tells you how to run myproxy-server and globus-gridftp-server as xinet daemons. Although Gentoo provides xinetd package, that is not their preferred way of handling daemons. They use their own init scripts. So, I have tried to do it their way. My first script was for myproxy-server.

#!/sbin/runscript



start() {

    ebegin "Starting myproxy-server"

    start-stop-daemon --start --exec /home/titu/soc/gt/sbin/myproxy-server    eend $?

}



stop() {

    ebegin "Stopping myproxy-server"

    start-stop-daemon --stop --exec /home/titu/soc/gt/sbin/myproxy-server

    eend $?

}

My next script was for starting globus-gridftp-server as a daemon; however this process has having problems when I tried it the way I did for myproxy-server. Sometimes start-stop-daemon was not returning and sometimes start-stop-daemon was unable to stop. I tried to store PID values in a pid file by asking start-stop-daemon to create the pidfile by using -m option. However, it turned out that the PID in the pidfile was always slightly less than the actual PID. It was most likely because of forking. So, I modified the script using killall.

#!/sbin/runscript



start() {

    ebegin "Starting globus-gridftp-server"

    start-stop-daemon --start -b -e GLOBUS_LOCATION=/home/titu/soc/gt -e LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/titu/soc/gt/lib --exec /home/titu/soc/gt/sbin/globus-gridftp-server -- -S -f -p 2811

    eend $?

}



stop() {

    ebegin "Stopping globus-gridftp-server"

    killall globus-gridftp-server

    eend $?

}

It is essential to set environment variables for the gridftp server.

Automounting NTFS flash drives in Gentoo

2011-07-03T12:34:00.000+05:30

Recently, I noticed flash drives with ntfs file systems on them were nicely automounted on my KDE on Archlinux. However, when I tried it in GNOME on Gentoo, it showed me an error message. Initially I thought if it is a desktop environment issue; but automounting is usually done by udev. So I decided to check for udev and ntfs-3g driver.

emerge -pv udev ntfs3g

I found that the ntfs3g package had "udev" USE flag disabled. I douted this might be the reason. To verify I ran a quick check using the following command.

equery u ntfs3g

I found "udev" USE flag installs udev rule to make udisks use ntfs-3g instead of the kernel NTFS driver. So, I
enabled it by adding the following line to /etc/portage/package.use

sys-fs/ntfs3g udev

Re-emerging the package solved the issue and I can nicely automount flash drives with ntfs filesystems.

What happened to Thunderbird 4?

2011-07-01T02:50:00.001+05:30

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird since version 2.0. Recently I saw a version bump directly from 3.x to 5.0. This is because Mozilla wanted to keep the version numbering same as Firefox. From the release notes, the main reason for such a bump seems to be the new Gecko 5 engine.

Recently Firefox versions have come up very fast. By the time add-ons became compatible with Firefox 4.x, Firefox 5.0 was out and some add-ons are incompatible with it. Mozilla should slow down the release cycle, decide what it wants to implement as part of its next release cycle and provide a feature rich and stable browser.

Removing slotted libpng in Gentoo

2011-06-29T03:17:00.000+05:30

While upgrading my Gentoo system, I upgraded gentoolkit package and I got a message saying asking me to run the following command.

glsa-check -p affected

Running it told me that there are no upgrades available for libpng-1.2.44. I found out that there were multiple versions of libpng installed on my system:

libpng-1.4.5 and;
a slotted version, i.e. libpng-1.2.44.

The solution was to remove all versions of libpng and freshly install it. This can be achieved using the following command.

emerge -C libpng && emerge -1 libpng:0

Mouse vs keyboard

2011-06-24T04:16:00.000+05:30

Over the years, we have had a conflict between two groups of users: GUI-friendly and CLI-friendly. Mostly the CLI-friendly people think that the keyboard is faster than mouse while the GUI-friendly people think that the mouse is faster. A research by Apple shows that actually it is the mouse that is faster in most cases although people think the keyboard to be. However, it is not the metrics that matter; but the mentality that is developed.

A programmer typing in full flow is very unlikely to break his flow and hold the mouse. He probably would prefer the whole window to be controllable from the keyboard. That way the interface is letting the programmer do his job without being distracted towards using a mouse. Emacs is a classic example of this.

However, people who work primarily with the mouse like desktop users who are copying files or playing music can use the mouse with ease letting the other hand rest.

Apple and Microsoft provide a nice GUI interface and are doing good business because most of their users are GUI-friendly. However, linux allows choice. There are great GUI windows managers like Enlightenment and there are also tiling window managers like awesome.

Commandos II: Men of Courage multiplayer mode glitch

2011-06-22T03:09:00.005+05:30

Recently I have been playing Commandos II: Men of Courage, with my brother, in multiplayer mode. We have played the game in single player mode numerous times; but this was out first multiplayer experience. We found synchronizing glitches in the game.

In the following image you can see two views: one on my screen and one on my brother’s. The same enemy soldier has different positions on the two screens.

Moreover, when I killed the enemy soldier using the Green Beret my brother’s system would show that a fellow Commando has died and mission failed. The same was shown to me if he took the soldier down with the Sapper. We tried to let the game recover by continuing the game trying to get the Green Beret meet with the Sapper. Interestingly as the Green Beret was alive on my system, he showed up with the Sapper and Lupin while on my brother’s system it was only the Sapper and Lupin.

When we had encountered a similar error within a closed room, I thought it was a glitch in coordinate calculation. However, I was wrong as proved by this incident. Clearly there is a concurrency issue here.

In the mission "Is Paris Burning?", there was another glitch where an enemy soldier picks up a cigarette from a distance. Look for the 14th second and the 57th second in the video.

Installing Google Talk plugin in Gentoo linux

2011-06-20T22:54:00.001+05:30

Google provides Google Talk plugin as rpm or deb packages for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. To get it on Gentoo when you try

emerge -pv google-talkplugin

you can see that it is masked by license. It means you have to accept the license before installing. You can find all licenses at /usr/portage/licenses. To get a specific license try

ls /usr/portage/licenses | grep google

You can read the license and if you accept it then add a line to /etc/portage/package.license to reflect it. In this case, the line would be

www-plugins/google-talkplugin google-talkplugin

and in general it is:

<full package name> <license name>

Now when you try emerging it you get a message saying that the license does not allow mirroring. This is why the fetch restriction is in place. The message also tells you to download the .deb package suitable to your architecture and put it in /usr/portage/distfiles. The problem is Google provides you current version and not the version considered stable by Gentoo. Moreover, the version 1.8 which is considered stable by Gentoo is not available according a Gentoo bug [I wish I had found that out earlier].

So the 1.8 version ebuild is for those who have a copy of the older Google Talk plugin. All others have to unmask the newer version according to their architectures. I had to add the following line to /etc/portage/package.keywords.

=www-plugins/google-talkplugin-2.1.6.0 ~amd64

Now portage can fetch it for you. However, if you have already downloaded latest version of the plugin then you can use the command as root to copy it to you distfiles folder and portage will not have any checksum error either if the versions have not changed.

cp -v Downloads/google-talkplugin_current_amd64.deb /usr/portage/distfiles/google-talkplugin_2.1.6.0-1_amd64.deb

Now portage will not have to redownload the package.

Bootcharting Gentoo baselayout 2

2011-06-18T02:24:00.002+05:30

In this post I shall share my experience of yet another Gentoo installation. I keep coming back to this distribution for its stability, wonderful package management and the experiencing fine grained control.

I have been using KDE for over six years now. I wanted to try GNOME 3. However, as I found out GNOME 3 is not yet stabilized in Gentoo so I had to be content with GNOME 2. They are stabilization by the next release. I believe that it for good reason. Well GNOME 3 does not support Compiz. There are no multiple timezone clocks.

Having prior experience in installing Gentoo linux, I knew that following the handbook strictly you have to wait for downloads while there is compilation going on and vice versa. So this time I chrooted not from a single terminal but from multiple terminals. I could run package downloads separately using

emerge -f <package name>

and compile concurrently on a different terminal using

emerge <different package>

After installation, when I booted the system hung up.

Hung up Gentoo bootscreen

I read a line saying

Ext3-fs: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features(240)

Adding the following to the kernel line solved the issue.

rootfstype=ext4

However, I was still getting a hung up system. If I inserted or removed USB drives, I was getting appropriate messages printed on screen; but the system was not responding to any keystrokes or mouse, neither was it loading X. Only the error line was gone. So, I understood that it was not the filesystem issue that was causing it. Asking on #gentoo I found that it was a common issue caused by the switch to baselayout 2. Instead of old init scripts Gentoo had started using openRC. Last time heard about it was about a couple of years ago. It was a nice project started by Roy Marples. However, now it was stable and I was happy to be using it. My issue was solved following Alex's suggestions for the issue.

I wanted to see the boot time with baselayout 2 and openRC so after I had other installations I did a boot chart to find much faster boot than my previous installation on the same machine.

Also noteworthy was the fact that X worked out of the box and I was surprised to see Firefox 3.6.17 in stable tree. I was expecting Firefox 4.0. Well I hope it is stabilized soon.

Reading extended file system partitions in Windows

2011-06-07T13:01:00.000+05:30

Ext2 and Ext3 partitions can be read in Windows using the open source driver available at sourceforge. However, windows does not treat files in a case sensitive manner as does linux. So if you have two files "data.txt" and "DATA.txt" on your linux partition, Windows will only be able to show you the contents of "data.txt".

Getting nice fonts embedded in Blogger

2011-06-06T00:53:00.001+05:30

Recently I have been hearing and reading a lot about typekit. So, I decided to find out how it can be useful to me. It basically is about getting nice fonts across browsers. It is a web service that provides font. The idea is really cool.

So I decided to try it out. They offer 25000 page-views per month and two fonts per site. I don't like either of these restrictions, especially the second one. So, I looked for alternatives and I found Google Web Fonts.

Using Google web fonts is very easy. You just need to select a font and then click on the Use this font tab and you have the instructions about how you can use it in your web page.

Font-face backed out because Google entered this market. However, you still have other alternatives like WebINK.

AWS Signature mismatch with python-boto

2011-04-29T05:19:00.000+05:30

With python-boto 1.9b4, connecting to Amazon Cloud services using the following commands

>>>from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection

>>>conn = EC2Connection(<your AWS key>, <your secret key>

>>>conn.get_all_instances()

failed an error message as follows:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/boto/ec2/connection.py", line 119, in get_all_images

return self.get_list('DescribeImages', params, [('item', Image)])

File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/boto/connection.py", line 615, in get_list

raise self.ResponseError(response.status, response.reason, body)

boto.exception.EC2ResponseError: EC2ResponseError: 403 Forbidden

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Response><Errors><Error><Code>SignatureDoesNotMatch</Code><Message>The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your AWS Secret Access Key and signing method. Consult the service documentation for details.</Message></Error></Errors><RequestID>kept-out-of-post</RequestID></Response>

The issue disappears when you update to python-boto 2.0b4.