sartek's blog

World champ Semenya cleared to return

2010-07-06T21:19:00.000+03:00

The Associated Press: World champ Semenya cleared to return

Caster Semenya was cleared to immediately return to track by the sport's governing body Tuesday, ending an 11-month layoff while she underwent gender tests after becoming the 800-meter world champion. The International Association of Athletics Federations said medical details of the 19-year-old South African's case would remain confidential and it will have no further comment on the matter.

A Closer Look at ZFS, Vdevs and Performance

2010-06-05T17:30:00.001+03:00

A Closer Look at ZFS, Vdevs and Performance: "

When looking at the mails and comments I get about my ZFS optimization

and my RAID-Greed posts, the same type of questions tend to pop up over and over again. Here's an example from a reader email:

'I was reading about ZFS on your blog and you mention that if I do a 6 drive array for example, and a single RAID-Z the speed of the slowest drive is the maximum I will be able to achieve, now I thought that ZFS would be better in terms of speed. Please let me know if there is a newer ZFS version that improved this or if it does not apply anymore.'

This is just an example, but the basic theme is the same for much for the reactions I see: Many people think that RAID-Z will give them always good performance and are surprised that it doesn't, thinking it's a software or a ZFS issue.

In reality, it's just pure logic and physics, and to understand that we should look a little closer at what vdevs are in ZFS and how they work.

What is a Vdev?

Another reader pointed out that I should define vdevs as short and simple as possible, so here we go:

A ZFS vdev (aka 'virtual device') is either:

a single disk, or
two or more disks that are mirrored, or
a group of disks that are organized using RAID-Z.

There are also special kinds of vdevs like hot-spares, ZIL or cache devices, etc. but we'll leave that to another post. Look up the full definition in the zpool (1M) man page.

So there you have it: A disk, a mirror or a RAID-Z group.

A ZFS pool is always a stripe of one or more vdevs that supplies blocks for your ZFS file systems to store data in.

Vdev examples

The following typical command creates a new pool out of one vdev which is a mirror of two disks:

zpool create tank1 mirror c0t0d0 c0t1d0

And this example creates a new pool out of two vdevs that are RAID-Z groups with 2 data disks and one parity disk each:

zpool create tank2 raidz c0t0d0 c0t1d0 c0t2d0 raidz c0t3d0 c0t4d0 c0t5d0

And when you decide to grow your pool, you just add one or more vdevs to it:

zpool add tank1 mirror c0t2d0 c0t3d0
zpool add tank2 raidz c0t6d0 c0t7d0 c0t8d0

You see: Whenever the keywords 'mirror', 'raidz', 'raidz2', 'raidz3' etc. show up in a zpool command, a new vdev is created out of the disks that follow the keyword.

And in all cases, a ZFS pool is always a stripe of vdevs, no matter what.

Since a vdev can be three different things, let's look at them in more detail:

Single Disks

The simplest of vdevs is a single disk. Not much to say here other than whenever we say 'disk', it could be a physical disk, an SSD, a LUN in a SAN, a USB stick or even a simple file sitting on another filesystem (useful for testing and demo purposes): Anything that looks like a block device in Solaris can be used as a 'disk' in vdevs.

Single disks don't offer any protection: If you lose a vdev that is a single disk, all data on it is lost.

Single disks also don't offer any special performance characteristics, you'll get the IOPS and bandwidth that the physics of the disk gives you, not more, not less.

The other vdev types combine single disks into groups of disks:

Mirrors

ZFS mirrored vdevs function similarly to traditional mirrors: Two or more disks can form a mirror and data is replicated across them in an identical fashion.

If you have a mirror vdev with n disks, you can lose n-1 disks and ZFS will still be able to recover all data from this vdev. Same as with RAID controllers or traditional volume managers.

But ZFS can do even more: If any block is corrupted and the hardware didn't notice (aka silent block errors), ZFS will still detect the error (through the block's checksum) and correct it using the other disk's copy of the block (assuming it was stored correctly).

This works even if both halfs of the mirror are affected by data corruption, as long as for any given block there is at least one disk in the mirror group that carries the correct version of that block.

Mirrors in ZFS are always more robust than mirrors in traditional RAID systems.

Mirrored Performance Considerations

When writing to mirrored vdevs, ZFS will write in parallel to all of the mirror disks at once and return from the write operation when all of the individual disks have finished writing. This means that for writes, each mirrored vdev will have the same performance as its slowest disk. This is true for both IOPS (number of IO operations per second) and bandwidth (MB/s).

When reading from mirrored vdevs, ZFS will read blocks off the mirror's individual disks in a round-robin fashion, thereby increasing both IOPS and bandwidth performance: You'll get the combined aggregate IOPS and bandwidth performance of all disks.

But from the point of view of a single application that issues a single write or read IO, then waits until it is complete, the time it will take will be the same for a mirrored vdev as for a single disk: Eventually it has to travel down one disk's path, there's no shortcut for that.

RAID-Z

RAID-Z vdevs are a variant of RAID-5 and RAID-6 with interesting properties:

You can choose the number of data disks and the number of parity disks. Today, the number of parity disks is limited to 3, but this may become larger in the future.
Each data block that is handed over to ZFS is split up into its own stripe of multiple disk blocks at the disk level, across the RAID-Z vdev. This is important to keep in mind: Each individual I/O operation at the filesystem level will be mapped to multiple, parallel and smaller I/O operations across members of the RAID-Z vdev.
When writing to a RAID-Z vdev, ZFS may choose to use less than the maximum number of data disks. For example, you may be using a 3+2 (5 disks) RAID-Z2 vdev, but ZFS may choose to write a block as 2+2 because it fits better.
Write transactions in ZFS are always atomic, even when using RAID-Z: Each write operation is only finished if the überblock has been successfully written to disk. This means there's no possibility to suffer from the traditional RAID-5 write hole, in which a power-failure can cause a partially (and therefore broken) written RAID-5 set of blocks.
Due to the copy-on-write nature of ZFS, there's no read-modify-write cycle for changing blocks on disk: ZFS writes are always full stripe writes to free blocks. This allows ZFS to choose blocks that are in sequence on the disk, essentially turning random writes into sequential writes, maximizing disk write capabilities.
Since all writes are atomic and since they naturally map to sequential writes, there's no need for a RAID-Z with battery backed-up cache: There's no possibility to have an inconsistent state on disk and ZFS already writes at maximum disk write speed. This saves money and lets you leverage cheap disks.

Just like traditional RAID-5, you can lose up to the number of parity disks without losing any data. And just like ZFS mirroring, for each block at the filesystem level, ZFS can try to reconstruct data out of partially working disks, as long as it can find a critical number of blocks to reconstruct the original RAID-Z group with.

ZFS RAID-Z is always better than RAID-5, RAID-6 or other RAID-schemes on traditional RAID controllers.

RAID-Z Performance Considerations

When writing to RAID-Z vdevs, each filesystem block is split up into its own stripe across (potentially) all devices of the RAID-Z vdev. This means that each write I/O will have to wait until all disks in the RAID-Z vdev are finished writing. Therefore, from the point of view of a single application waiting for its IO to complete, you'll get the IOPS write performance of the slowest disk in the RAID-Z vdev.

Granted: A large IO may be broken down into smaller IOs across the data disks and they'll take less time to complete. But the seek time of the disk outweighs the actual write time, so the size of the IO is not of much significance.

For write bandwidth, you may get more: Large blocks at the file system level are split into smaller blocks at the disk level that are written in parallel across the vdev's individual data disks and therefore you may get up to n times an individual disk's bandwidth for an n+m type RAID-Z vdev.

Unfortunately, in practice, the cases where performance matters most (mail servers, file servers, iSCSI storage for virtualization, database servers) also happen to be the cases that care a lot about IOPS performance, not much bandwidth performance.

When reading from RAID-Z vdevs, the same rules apply, as the process is essentially reversed (no round robin shortcut like in the mirroring case): Better bandwidth if you're lucky (and read the same way as you've written) and a single disk's IOPS read performance in the majority of cases that matter.

I hope that it's now starting to become apparent why copying a single large file from one directory to another is not a realistic way to measure performance, if ultimately one is interested in delivering storage to a virtualization server over NFS or iSCSI :).

Vdev Performance Summary

Mirrored vdevs outperform RAID-Z vdevs in all cases that matter.

The only case where RAID-Z performance can beat mirrored performance for the same number of disks is when you look at sequential bandwidth. Good for a tape-replacement archive, but not exactly the majority of real-world performance situations.

Is that all there is to say about performance? No! Vdevs are only the beginning:

Putting Vdevs Together

ZFS pools are always created out of one or more vdevs. When using more than one vdev, they're always striped.

Striping is good: ZFS will send reads and writes down to all the vdevs in parallel, maximizing throughput whenever it can.

Simply said: The more vdevs you stripe together, the faster your pool becomes in terms of aggregate bandwidth and aggregate IOPS, for both reads and writes.

Notice the caveat involved in the little word 'aggregate': Your single little app waiting for its single IO to finish won't see a shorter wait time if your pool has many vdevs, because it'll get assigned only one of them.

'Aggregate' means here that the server as a whole will be able to sustain a higher load of IOPS and bandwidth altogether, across multiple parallel IO streams when using a pool with many vdevs.

How much higher? For n vdevs that make up your pool, it will be able to deliver n times the IOPS and n times the bandwidth of a single vdev (assuming all are equal etc.).

Theory vs. Pratice

Now all of this is just theory. It's based on logical considerations on the way ZFS handles data to and from disks, so it tells you what performance to expect in the worst case, which typically means lots of random read or write IO operations.

If you want the raw, unfiltered practical data up to ms and rpm, check Richard Elling's excellent post ZFS RAID recommendations: space, performance, and MTTDL. Lots of good, foundational stuff.

In practice, you'll almost always see better numbers, because of many possible reasons:

You were lucky because the disk head happened to have been near the position it needed to be.
You were lucky and your app uses large IOs that were split up into multiple smaller IOs by the system which could be handled in parallel.
You were lucky and your app uses some portion of asynchronous IO operations so the system could take advantage of caching and other optimizations that rely on async IO.
You were lucky and your app's performance is more dependent on disk bandwidth than latency.
You were lucky and your app has a bottleneck elsewhere.
You're benchmarking your ZFS pool in a way that has nothing to do with real-world performance.

So, if you see better numbers, be thankful for your luck. If it's because of the last case, use a more realistic approach to measure your disk performance.

The Fastest Vdev

So if you have a number n of disks to create a single vdev with, what would be the fastest vdev?

This one is tricky. For writes, the situation is as follows:

Mirroring n disks will give you a single disk's IOPS and bandwidth performance.
RAID-Z with one parity drive will give you a single disk's IOPS performance, but n-1 times aggregate bandwidth of a single disk.

Does it make RAID-Z the winner? Let's check reads:

Mirroring n disks will give you n times a single disk's IOPS and bandwidth read performance. And on top, each disk gets to position its head independently of the others, which will help random read performance for both IOPS and bandwidth.
RAID-Z would still give you a single disk's performance for IOPS, but n-1 times aggregate bandwidth of a single disk. This time, though, the reads need to be correlated, because ZFS can only read groups of blocks across the disks that are supposed to hang out together. Good for sequential reads, bad for random reads.

Assuming a workload that cares about both reads and writes, and assuming that when the going gets tough, IOPS is more important than bandwidth, I'd opt for mirroring whenever I can.

Keeping the Cake and Eating it Too

So is that it? Is there no way to make IOPS faster than a single disk?

There is, if you don't use regular disks.

The place where write performance hurts most is typically where the application is writing in single blocks in synchronous mode:

The app sends the block down the ZFS pipe using write(2), waiting for the system call to finish.
ZFS sends the block to its ZIL structure on the disk.
The disk positions its head to write the block, then writes it. This takes a few milliseconds: About half a rotation of its head on average. In the case of a very fast 15,000 rpm disk, this is 2 ms, or 4 Million CPU cycles of a typical 2 GHz CPU.
After writing the block, the disk reports success to the driver, ZFS finishes the write(2) call and the application continues its thing.
During the next pool update, ZFS writes the data again, this time to the regular pool structure, then discards the ZIL data.
In the event of a power loss, ZFS will replay the ZIL data into the pool structure as soon as it imports the pool, so data on the ZIL is always as safe as if it was written to the pool already.

The longest part is taken up by the disk drive positioning its head. Even though ZFS optimizes synchronous writes by writing them to a special ZIL structure on disk (instead of going through the whole ZFS on-disk pool update procedure), it still needs to wait for the disk to complete the transaction.

The only way to accelerate that is to use a faster disk. A much faster disk, an SSD.

Because if you assign an SSD as a ZIL to your ZFS pool, the following happens:

The app sends the block down the ZFS pipe using write(2), waiting for the system call to finish.
ZFS sends the block to its ZIL structure on the SSD.
The SSD doesn't need to position anything. It just writes the data into flash memory. Granted, flash is not the fastest memory, but it is much cheaper than RAM and it's still about 100x faster than a disk. Now your program only needs to wait about 40,000 CPU cycles.
After writing the block, the disk reports success to the driver, ZFS finishes the write(2) call and the application continues its thing.
Pool update and ZIL replaying works the same as described above

That's why SSDs are becoming so popular, especially with ZFS.

Conclusion

A ZFS vdev is either a single disk, a mirror or a RAID-Z group.

RAID performance can be tricky, independently of the file system. ZFS does its best to optimize, but ultimately it comes down to disk latency (seek time, rotation speed, etc.) for the cases where performance becomes critical.

Mirrors are almost always faster than RAID-Z groups, especially for the cases that are interesting to databases, fileservers etc.

The best way to accelerate your ZFS pool is to use SSDs.

Your Turn

What are your experiences with ZFS and/or RAID performance? How did you measure it? What kind of applications do you use and with what ZFS setups? Share your experience in the comment section below!

Digi Net Mobil finally at home

2010-04-19T16:43:00.003+03:00

As a follow-up from my previous post

finnally i got one now.. it's like this:

speed.. well it's not 7.2 .. but i't arount 2mB/s .. well not so good but im sure it'll improve.

here's the coverage map not that bad too..

PS: works ok on linux

UPDATE:

some pics:

A common conversation on Facebook (-like) site

2010-04-15T21:48:00.000+03:00

I get a mail from Facebook:
"Boglarka Vasilovici added you as a friend on Facebook..."

I have no idea who she is.. i check her profile .. we have 1 friend in common.
just in case I sent her a message..

"- Do I know you?
- It's unlikely...
- .. And you know me? or why do you added me?
- 'coz we have a friend in common
blablabla "

I dont get it .. I mean of course I have "friends" who I dont know personally or talked only a few times.. but this is far from everything

Dacia Duster vs. Dacia Duster

2010-03-24T11:50:00.000+02:00

I hope that there will be a two-door "sport" version of Dacia Duster... because the "normal" one looks like ubuntu...

OpenSSO thoughts

2010-03-21T15:40:00.001+02:00

I'm quite sad since Oracle bought Sun (who ain't?).. and many ppl pre-assumed that Oracle will shutdown some Sun stuff..

So... they removed OpenSSO from the download site, but being an opensource project it can't be killed.

The reason for the shutdown is that Oracle has its own Identity Managment software and probably it's better than OpenSSO.

Anyway ForgeRock "forked" OpenSSO under OpenAM name, so it doesn't get lost.

links:
Oracle Identity Manager
h-online article
OpenAM

PS: It seems that Oracle is not really community oriented.. I think that instead of killing OpenSSO it would have been better if they *give* OpenSSO to the community.

We'll see what will happen next..

SLS AMG will be the Safety Car in Formula One

2010-03-06T17:59:00.000+02:00

SLS AMG is the awesome... don't know what to say else

some reading here

videos:

The Fast and The Famous, starring Jay Leno:

Michael Schumacher driving the SLS AMG:

SLS AMG Safety Car Presentation:

OpenSolaris Text installer screenshots part #2

2010-02-05T14:30:00.005+02:00

Susan Sohn announced text-based installer media for b131.

what changed since the last release?
* supports SPARC/x86
* 512 MB minimum memory requirement
* cpio based install
* installs basic headless server environment (no Gnome Desktop)
* tip/serial line install recommended for SPARC
visual changes:
color :), they removed warnings (ex. when *destroying* the disk) probably they will add them back + here are the screenshots about the important steps:

A new approach to China

2010-01-13T08:04:00.000+02:00

A new approach to China: "Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that 'we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.'

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

RCS & RDS lanseaza internetul mobil Digi Net Mobil cu abonamente de pana la 15 lei

2009-09-18T02:48:00.001+03:00

Meaning .. our ISP finally launches mobile internet..
I/We already have mobile* from them (+ internet + phone + tv), so no *new* subscription (and other tools - i guess) needed.

Some weeks ago I wanted to buy an usb modem from Orange but I bought a WRT54GL instead.

* the mobile is theoretically a 3G phone.. but only the SIM card is. (meaning no 3G services are available with it, or with other 3G compatible phone)

source | source (en)

wow Google acquires reCAPTCHA

2009-09-16T19:54:00.000+03:00

Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

Paris Jackson - Memorial

2009-07-07T23:38:00.000+03:00

Paris-Katherine Michael Jackson at the memorial.. so sad.

OpenSolaris Text installer screenshots.

2009-07-01T20:00:00.001+03:00

OpenSolaris iso's with the text installer is now available here

I tried it in virtualbox, it works without issues.

more infos here and here

Now here are the screenshots that i made:

gstreamer stuff on OpenSolaris

2009-05-07T17:34:00.006+03:00

I've compiled some "encumbered" stuff for gstreamer. (and added the mp3 codec available from fluendo.com)

if you want to give it a try.. download them:

gstplugins support a wide range of audio + video codecs

install instructions:
download it, unpack it, put it in /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/

so:



mkdir /tmp/gst

cd /tmp/gst



wget http://pkgsrc.sartek.net/gst/gstplugins.tar.gz



gtar xf gstplugins.tar.gz



pfexec cp gstplugins/* /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/



cd

rm -r /tmp/gst

opensolaris graphical boot

2008-11-09T14:35:00.001+02:00

XMMS is back in Slackware!

2008-09-18T02:45:00.005+03:00

As you may know XMMS was removed on Mar 15 2007 from Slackware.

But on Sep 11 2008 was re added:

xap/xmms-1.2.11-i486-1.tgz: Added xmms-1.2.11. This is an audio player that
is similar to audacious, but uses about a third of the CPU power.

Well done Pat!

Boggle For Linux (with Maemo support)

2008-07-15T02:30:00.002+03:00

GBoggle is a classic boggle game for GTK+ platform.
you can download it at the official page at http://gboggle.sourceforge.net

Features

* Support for internationalization of dictionaries and alphabets. Currently English and Hungarian are supported.
* Visual feedback is provided on the board for input words.
* Shows missed words at the end of the game.
* Support for maemo platform (Nokia Internet Tablets)

Confused

2008-06-26T08:22:00.005+03:00

I started a thread on desktop-discuss with title "mplayer with sun studio"
I asked them if somebody hacks mplayer to be compilable with sun studio, dennis clarke said that blastwave has it but still not pushed to their repo, ok we asked about the patches, he said that they will pushed to the svn repo too, [...] and he said:

"don't be so whiney about a *free* software package service that tries to *give* you what you need."

if I understand correctly: we do not need the sources, use the software and stfu.

I only wanted to see those patches upstream, my dream is "./configure;make;make install" on solaris without any additional effort.

The funny thing is that in another thread he said:

"I support the open source needs of the Solaris customer."

so, he talks about only the "open source" philosophy not about the actual source, or the patches are not sources or what? don't understand.

PS: I dont like blastwave's repo, but that's another story

Egg attack !!

2008-05-27T19:33:00.002+03:00

Want to throw eggs at ballmer?

Click here: http://www.egg-attack.com

Quote from the site:
"Live as a CEO is not easy. Especially when your company is Microsoft.
Last week Steve Ballmer was egged by an angry student during a speech at a Hungarian University. Ballmer showed great reflexes and dodged the attack, hiding behind the desk."

MPlayer from source with 3GP support on Ubuntu

2008-05-02T00:05:00.010+03:00

UPDATE: Instead of amrnb,wb you need to use opencore-amr for now.

* Download the required packages .
# sudo apt-get build-dep mplayer
# sudo apt-get install subversion

* Download MPlayer, MPlayer skin (for the gui), 3GP AMR codecs.
NOTE: we will get the current sources of MPlayer not the stable RC2. It has more features, bugfixes.

# svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
# wget http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/skins/Blue-1.7.tar.bz2
# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/opencore-amr/opencore-amr/0.1.2/opencore-amr-0.1.2.tar.gz

* Extract the files.
# tar xvf opencore-amr-0.1.2.tar.gz
# tar xvjf Blue-1.7.tar.bz2

* Compile and install opencore-amr
# cd opencore-amr-0.1.2
# ./configure --prefix=/usr
# make
# sudo make install

* We can now compile MPlayer.
# cd ../mplayer
If you need GMPlayer (GUI) please use --enable-gui.
For more configuration options see:
# ./configure --help

I will enable GUI this time because I want to show how we can install Skins for it.
# ./configure --enable-gui
After this you can read what will be enabled and disabled, what you will see will be enough.

Now we can compile and install it:
# make
# sudo make install

NOTE: it seems that the current Makefile is broken so the GUI wont be installed we need to execute:
# sudo make install-gui

* Install the Skin and Font.
# cd ..

This will copy the Blue directory recursively to /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins
# sudo cp -R Blue /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins

We need to create a symlink because else MPlayer won't recognize it:
# sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/Blue /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/default

For subtitles and menus we need a font:
So, we create a symlink.
# ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

* Remove the "working directry".
# cd ..
# rm -rf ~/build
NOTE: You can keep this time at least the mplayer directory if you want to weekly checkout the sources and rebuild it.

Now you can enjoy your movies :)

PS: if something is not clean or it fails somewhere, please leave a comment or:
- you can subscribe to MPlayer mailing lists at the MPlayer site
- you can enter #MPlayer at Freenode

Install XMMS on Ubuntu ( 8.04 ) Hardy Heron

2008-04-26T21:48:00.008+03:00

First: I'm not an Ubuntu user, but I would like to help newbies to get XMMS working on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
Why: a) A guy entered #xmms on Freenode and wanted to install XMMS on him Ubuntu, so I tried to help him.
b) XMMS is still a good player, and if somebody wants to use it, why not help him?

We will install XMMS from source, but there are alternatives though like:
1) change your distro
2) try gutsy packages

OK, let's start

First Step:
We need to download the required packages to compile XMMS
# sudo apt-get install autotools-dev automake1.9 libtool gettext libasound2-dev libaudiofile-dev \
libgl1-mesa-dev libglib1.2-dev libgtk1.2-dev libesd0-dev libice-dev libmikmod2-dev libogg-dev \
libsm-dev libvorbis-dev libxxf86vm-dev libxml-dev libssl-dev build-essential make

Depending on your internet connection and your machine this may take some minutes.

Second Step:
Prepare the XMMS for compiling
Create a directory in your HOME directory:
# mkdir ~/build
Change the working directory to it:
# cd ~/build
Download XMMS sources:
# wget http://xmms.org/files/1.2.x/xmms-1.2.11.tar.gz
Unpack it:
# tar xvf xmms-1.2.11.tar.gz
Change the working directory to the source directory:
# cd xmms-1.2.11/
Third Step:
Compiling it:
This generates the necessary files, and checks your system:
# ./configure --prefix=/usr
The actually compiling
# make
Fourth Step:
Install it:
# sudo make install
After install we no longer need the source directory:
# cd
# rm -rf ~/build

That's it, now we can run XMMS: press ALT+F2 write xmms there and hit enter and enjoy your music.

NOTE: many people say that XMMS is old, buggy,no UTF-8 support, etc. Yes maybe all is true, but it's an audio player not a media library organizer, so it plays music and you listen, that's all and it does that job.

UPDATE:
Flac Plugin

We need to get the build dependencies
# sudo apt-get build-dep flac

You already know what's this ;)
# mkdir ~/build
# cd ~/build

Get flac's sources
# apt-get source flac

Another well known step:)
# cd flac-1.2.1
# ./configure
# make

It's enough to copy the plugin, not to install the whole flac stuff, this is good if will be flac update, note, an update wont break the plugin.
# cp src/plugin_xmms/.libs/libxmms-flac.so ~/.xmms/Plugins
# cd
# rm -rf ~/build

UPDATE2:
Knuta's Ubuntu & Debian repo

Check out here

Nexuiz On OpenSolaris

2008-04-21T15:47:00.006+03:00

I knew nexuiz for a while, to be honest it's not my style, but I need something to play here, so I tried to build it, finally I got it work.. if you are interested "howto" follow me:

So, we need to get nexuiz from here: http://alientrap.org/nexuiz

unzip it:
# unzip nexuiz-24.zip

change the working directory:
# cd Nexuiz/sources/

unzip the engine's source:
# unzip enginesource20080229.zip

# cd darkplaces

now, we need to change some files:
1. open `makefile` with your favorite text editor
add `SHELL=/usr/bin/bash` at the beginning, and if you have installed OSS (opensound system) add `DP_SOUND_API=OSS` I added it after `ifndef DP_MAKE_TARGET`
save & close

2. run this command:
# perl -pi -e 's/\bmodel_t\b/lh_dp_model_t/g' *.c *.h
it will replace the `model_t` function with `lh_dp_model_t`, we need this because `model_t` it's an internal solaris function

3. open `vid_glx.c` comment out line 292:
// vid_usingdgamouse = !!vid_dgamouse.integer;
save & close

4. open `snd_bsd.c`
a) comment out line 95
// break;
b) comment out line 197 and add `SndSys_Shutdown ();`
// SNDDMA_Shutdown ();
SndSys_Shutdown ();

5. now we can compile it:
# gmake cl-nexuiz
it should compile OK.

6. move the data files from Nexuiz to our folder:
# mv ../../data .

7. we can now play!

here are some screenshots:

thanks goes to guys @ #alientrap on irc.anynet.org

That's NOT OSS!

2008-03-31T22:15:00.009+03:00

I always see on mailing lists, irc and such forums that people speaks about OSS (Open Sound System), but that's NOT that OSS, if you ever saw a linux (kernel) configurator you may know that if not take a look at these pictures:

So: what are you using that's ALSA's emulation !
as you can see that OSS what is in the kernel only supports a few devices and it's deprecated.
If you want OSS, download it at http://opensound.com
OSS is now available in 3 OSI licenses: BSD, CDDL and GPL!

So true!

2008-03-25T19:19:00.001+02:00

On #MPlayer, a guy wanted to play 3GP files, he is using debian..
So he installed amr codecs from source.
As u may know it installs in /usr/local, so we said to him to (re)compile MPlayer.
All done, but when he tried to play any kind of file he gets:
./mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libamrnb.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
OK.. we said him to edit ld.so.conf and if /usr/local/lib isn't there.. add it.
After he added it the same problem...
I suggested to run MPlyer like this: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib ./mplayer file
It works...
Thoughts:
<iive> portwolf: debian/ubuntu are kind of apple products. If you use apt-get everything is just fine.
<iive> but if you try to step out of the known path you are getting in a world of pain.

That's true!

Opensolaris Developer Preview 2 ( Indiana ) in VirtualBox on Linux with screenshots

2008-03-25T03:19:00.012+02:00

Just tried Indiana in VirtualBox on my "testing" (as in just experimenting with it) Debian.
I installed VirtualBox from svn.
What will i do ?
Install Indiana, configure the network and the audio card.

Well, I set up VirtualBox with NAT, Audio enable, gave 4.5Gigs, 57x RAM, and Mounted Indiana's ISO.
I started it:

It takes some minutes to load:

Now it's up, I choosed the default Keyboard layout (US-English):

After it configures devices, mounted some stuff, it gives a login prompt:
NOTE: Don't log in, it will start the graphical environment automatically.

It's up:)

Now let's install it!
Here's the welcome screen:

Choosing the disk, well being in VirtualBox I added only one disk:

After clicking Next we need to set the Time Zone:

Now let's set up the users:

Carefully verify the settings:

HIT Install !
This will take a while.. depending on you machine of course.

Finally done :happy:

Let's reboot..
You can remove the iso, from VirtualBox because it will boot from it, here's the bootmenu now from the disk drive:

Let's boot in, as before when the prompt comes up don't log in.

Finally let's log in:

Here's the default desktop:

There's no driver for VirtualBox' interface, so we need to get drivers from here we need the 13th "ae driver for AMD am79c97x PCNET ethernet chipset series".
Since we don't have internet connection in VirtualBox we need to create an ISO image with the file in it, I used the following commands:
# mkdir drv
# mv ae-2.6.0a.tar.gz drv/
# /opt/schily/bin/mkisofs -J -R -l -V "driver" -o driver.iso drv/
I rebooted Indiana and mounted it in VirtualBox, and started it, it mounted out ISO automatically so i saw this screen after login:

I clicked on it and dragged the contents to the desktop:

I opened a terminal ( right click on the desktop), and cd'ed into it, and executed the following commands:
# cp i386/ae /kernel/drv/
# ./addrv.sh
# modload ae
Well.. NWAM auto detected it.. but I made a reboot.
Let's test the internet:
NOTE: the 'ping' command not works (maybe a VirtualBox bug)

Great, works:)
As you noticed the speaker icon in the top right is crossed, so let's download the driver from http://www.opensound.com
Select "Solaris 10/11 (x86/AMD64)".
After the download finished I executed the following commands:
# su -
# pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.0-1015-i386.pkg
Just hit enter and somewhere you need to type "y".
After it has been installed I made a reboot.
I logged in, now at the top right the speaker isn't crossed it must work!:)
So I downloaded an audio file from my NetBSD powered machine:

Fire up rhythmbox from the menu or use ALT+F2 and write it there and press enter.

It plays, so no driver issues, but I heard some garbage sound, on a real system it must work correctly ( this seems a VirtualBox bug too ).

Well that's it, I hope you enjoyed and you will install at least in VirtualBox ;)

More info about Indiana and OpenSolaris can be found at http://opensolaris.org
VirtualBox' website is here: http://virtualbox.org