Following up to this post and this post, here’s quick instructions on how to actually get the proper pdo_oci package on Debian Squeeze.

First, install the pdo extension as described in the second link above.

Then, begin the same procedure for pdo_oci, but stop right after the command dh-make-pecl

Now comes the magic. Open the file debian/rules in the newly created dir (php-pdo-oci-1.0.1).

Change the constant PECL_PKG_NAME=pdo-oci to PECL_PKG_NAME=pdo_oci

Now look for the block configure-stamp-v4 configure-stamp-v5:

There, right after the line that says $(PHPIZE)$*; \

insert these lines:

sed -e 's/prefix\/include\/php\/ext/prefix\/include\/php5\/ext/' configure > /tmp/pdo_oci-configure; \
cp /tmp/pdo_oci-configure ./configure; \

Save the file and proceed as explained in the referred post. That should do it!

This will be a quick post on a subject that I think needs great attention from the music and the FOSS communities.

Ardour (http://www.ardour.org/) is a fantastic free DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. It aims to meet and supercede commercial DAW features, like Cubase, Logic and others. It already is a great tool (the latest one that I have used was 2.0 — current stable release is 2.7.1 while 3.0 is already in the works) and many people of the FOSS community benefit from it.

It just came to me today as sad news that the company that was supporting the project, SAE, is now discontinuing this much needed support, leaving Paul, Ardour’s lead developer, in need for a job and thus less attentious to the project.

Many people are already moving fingers to help the project, but it certainly needs much more help. One way to help is to spread the word (like I am doing, as I currently don’t have the means to support financially the project), another is to make donations or to subscribe to their donation plan. More info can be found in their home page.

Please do not let the best FOSS DAW die.

Hey!

This post explains my first attempts in getting PDO_OCI installed in Debian. Even though it works and has served me quite well for some time, now I’ve found a way to make actual .deb packages of these modules so I can save them for later use (or distribution, as long as their source code goes along) and have them installed in a sane way via the package manager.

So, first things first. You have to download php5 source (apt-get source php5) and its build dependencies (apt-get build-dep php5). Next thing is to build the extension you need.

I’ll take PDO for an example.

First, enter the extension’s directory:
cd php5-5.2.6.dfsg.1/ext/pdo
Now, look for a .xml file in this directory. In this case, it is called package2.xml. It contains the extension’s package description. Now, build a .tgz of the extension:
pecl package package2.xml
It will generate a PDO-1.0.3.tgz file. Now, create a Debian package source for this archive:
dh-make-pecl --only 5 PDO-1.0.3.tgz
The –only 5 parameter tells the script builder to make only the php5 package (not php4). Next step is to build the package:
cd php-pdo-1.0.3
fakeroot debian/rules binary
If all goes well, there’s a ../php5-pdo_1.0.3-1_i386.deb file, ready to be installed!

Still tryin to get DRI and Composite on my mach64, I bumped on this site: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3264969&postcount=6. I have somewhat adapted some of the steps to simplify and better organise things.

First thing is to get the latest xf86-video-ati driver from http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/driver/ and untar it to ~/src. If you have no such directory, create it first.

Then, get the headers for your running kernel and the build-essential: apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential.

Create a ~/src/drm-git directory and run git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm from inside it. This will get the latest drm drivers from upstream.

$ cd drm/linux-core

$ make DRM_MODULES=”mach64″

$ sudo cp *.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/char/drm/

$ sudo depmod -a

$ sudo modprobe mach64

(…)

$ cd ~/src/xf86-video-ati-6.8.0

$ ./configure –prefix=/usr

$ make

$ sudo make install

$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

(to be continued…)

$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)

$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
libGL: XF86DRIGetClientDriverName: 6.7.0 mach64 (screen 0)
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/mach64_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/mach64_dri.so failed (/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/mach64_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
libGL error: unable to find driver: mach64_dri.so
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
(…)

The file mach64_dri.so is in the package libgl1-mesa-dri. If you don’t have it installed, aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dri. This might not be enough, though, as the dri libs are not in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri, but rather in /usr/lib/dri. What I did to correct this issue was to check that /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri was empty, then:

$ sudo rmdir /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/dri /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri

And finaly:

$ glxinfo | grep direct
DISPATCH ERROR! _glapi_add_dispatch failed to add glAreTexturesResident!
DISPATCH ERROR! _glapi_add_dispatch failed to add glGenTextures!
DISPATCH ERROR! _glapi_add_dispatch failed to add glIsTexture!
do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don’t seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.
direct rendering: Yes

Yay! That’s it! Now, to get the transparent terminal…

I have been through a lot of trouble to get c-cedilla (cê-cedilha, in portuguese) as the default for ‘ + c (accute accent + c) on GNOME. In case you don’t know what I am talking about, this is what the character looks like: ç.

Turns out that if I set my language to portuguese, I do get the cedilla by default. The problem is that I really prefer to have my system in english, and with this language I get this character by default: ć.

After reading a bit, I found the gtk-query-immodules-2.0 command, which I have used this way:

$ gtk-query-immodules-2.0 | grep cedilla
"/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules/im-cedilla.so"
"cedilla" "Cedilla" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "az:ca:co:fr:gv:oc:pt:sq:tr:wa"

This tells me which languages will have the c-cedilla behaviour by default. After some more research I found this link which pointed me to the file /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodule-files.d/libgtk2.0-0.immodules. I have edited the cedilla section of this file by adding

:en

to the end of the languages array, like this:

"/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules/im-cedilla.so"
"cedilla" "Cedilla" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "az:ca:co:fr:gv:oc:pt:sq:tr:wa:en"

This should be enough. When I restart X I will post the results here.

Update: Yes, it did! Just as a reminder, it is also necessary to choose the international variant of your keyboard. To do that, go to System / Preferences / Keyboard, open the Layouts tab, click on Add and choose your layout (United Kingdom, in my case) and Variation: International (with dead keys).

So, here I go trying to get some transparency on my old laptop. I have done it in the past, so I know it is posible.

The laptop is a VM7000 made by RM. It has a Coppermine Celeron 500MHz and it had originally 128MB of RAM. I have recently increased that to 256, which is the maximum it supports.

The video card, according to lspci, is a “VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage LT Pro (rev dc)”. It uses the mach64 driver. My goal here is to get DRI working on it so I can have drop shadows and real translucency for the terminal windows (I know it is rather useless, but it looks cool).

The system is an up-to-date Debian Lenny. To achieve this objective, I am mostly being guided by this thread on the Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=7200.

So far, I have accomplished steps 1 – 5. The install.sh script in the mach64 directory has given trouble. First, by looking at the dri.log file generated by the script, I have found that it is trying to find a linux/config.h in the kernel headers directory. It is not there because it has been deprecated. By following this tip I have managed to get past all the config.h errors by substituting it by autoconf.h in all files that were trying to include it.

This, though, has led me to another error, a quite esoteric one: “error: size of array ‘type name’ is negative”.

After reading this I have decided to recompile my kernel with

CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START=0×200000

I know that the solution mentioned in the link is about x64 and this laptop is definitely not 64 bit, but I guess it’s worth the shot. It might just work.

Update: No, it didn’t. After recompiling the kernel, the install.sh script of mach64 still gave the same error. I’ll keep trying and will keep posting the results here.

After successfully installing the PDO extension through a simple ‘pecl install package2.xml’ from inside pdo’s directory of the php-5.2.5 sources, this is what I did:

(Note that I have done an ‘apt-get source php5′ in /usr/src, and un-tar-ed it in the same place.)

/usr/src/php-5.2.5/ext/pdo_oci$ sudo phpize5
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20041225
Zend Module Api No:      20060613
Zend Extension Api No:   220060519

/usr/src/php-5.2.5/ext/pdo_oci$ sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-pdo-oci=/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.3/client
(... usual ./configure output ...)

Now, if I try to run make, I get some dependency problems:

In file included from /usr/src/php-5.2.5/ext/pdo_oci/pdo_oci.c:31:
/usr/src/php-5.2.5/ext/pdo_oci/php_pdo_oci_int.h:21:17: error: oci.h: No such file or directory

So, I ‘vi Makefile’ and added the oracle lib path to the ‘INCLUDES=’ line, like that:

INCLUDES = -I/usr/include/php5 -I/usr/include/php5/main -I/usr/include/php5/TSRM -I/usr/include/php5/Zend -I/usr/include/php5/ext -I/usr/include/php5/ext/date/lib -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.3/client/lib

then I was able to do the usual ’sudo make && sudo make install’ and all was good.

UPDATE: I have actually found what seems to be the most correct way of telling the compiler where to look for headers. You have to use ldconfig to point to the directories that hold them.

Now, the instantclient packages install things in two different directories: /usr/lib/oracle and /usr/include/oracle. We will add links to both:

$ sudo ldconfig /usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.3/client/lib
$ sudo ldconfig /usr/include/oracle/10.2.0.3/client

These should be enough in order for our usual ’sudo make && sudo make install’ work as usual!