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3 Jan 2008This version can be compiled in gcc 4 and run under qemu. Hilariously useless.
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28 Dec 2007Brian K questioned my use of rand(), which lead to a discussion and an investigation into random algorithms. Perl's srand() uses /dev/urandom to seed the PRNG, and it turns out that urandom is really clever.
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11 Dec 2007I spent an hour trying to get VNC working properly this morning, until I found this bug report. It looks like a patch is done and ready to roll, so hopefully there'll be an update any day now.
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11 Aug 2007SCO's ridiculous lawsuit against all Linux users is all but dismissed.
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6 Jul 2007All of the Democratic candidates' websites except for Hillary's are running on Open Source. Most of the Republicans are running on Windows.
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27 Apr 2007RHEL5 is shipping with a one page SLA. This is amazing.
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21 Oct 2005
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has ridiculously old versions of packages — especially those that are intended for a desktop audience. The GIMP 1.2.3 is so old that it's hardly worth using, so yesterday I spent an hour getting the latest version (2.2.8) working. There were a lot of steps involved because almost all of the prerequisites were a bunch of versions behind, too. So here's what I had to do to get Gimp installed and working on RHEL3.
- You'll need some Red Hat packages installed. XFree86-devel, libart, and libart-devel are necessary, and you'll probably want some image libraries, too. I installed libjpeg, libpng, and libtiff, along with their respective -devel packages.
- Set environment variables PATH should include /install/dir/bin, LD_LIBRARY_PATH should include /install/dir/lib, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH should include both /install/dir/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/lib/pkgconfig. Don't use /usr or /usr/local as your install dir. Who knows how these updated libraries could affect things if they clobber the older versions. I installed in /opt/gimp.
- Get the sources for pkg-config, glib, fontconfig, freetype2, ATK, cairo, pango, GTK, Gimp. Links are located on the GIMP from Source page, except for cairo which is available from cairographics.org. I got the most recent version of all of these libraries except for freetype2. Version 2.1.10 will cause some problems that I haven't resolved, so I used 2.1.7.
- Unpack all of the sources, and compile them in this order: pkg-config, glib, fontconfig, freetype2, ATK, cairo, pango, GTK, Gimp. (This was the hard part, figuring out the right order.) For each package, just add the argument "--prefix=/install/dir" to configure. Then make and make install. No other flags are necessary.
- Gimp will be in /opt/gimp/bin/gimp. Delete the source files.
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23 Sep 2005
Recently, Sun released version 3.1 of the Sun Ray Server Software. It now has Linux support for USB devices connected to the thin clients. Instead of being kernel-level, this support is user-level — in the form of a modified libusb. Unfortunately, roughly 97% of applications expect kernel devices, and thus lack support for libusb. Luckily, pilot-link belongs to the minority. The following are my (roughly chronological) notes on getting a Palm (in the form of an old Handspring Visor) to sync with my Sun Ray.
- You'll need to have libusb 0.1.8 or newer installed. For reference, RHEL3 doesn't have a new enough version; I needed to find a non-standard RPM.
- Get the latest version of pilot-link from http://www.pilot-link.org/. I used 0.12.0-pre4. You'll almost certainly need to compile it, since even if your distro has a package for it, it probably won't be compiled with libusb support.
- Be sure to add the --enable-libusb flag when you run configure for pilot-link. (I assume the reader knows how to compile and install stuff under Linux)
- When you run commands that you want to use the Sun Ray libusb support, you need to run them with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable to include "/opt/SUNWut/lib/libusbut.so.1".
- I'm not sure what most of the executables that pilot-link installs do, but I know the important one is pilot-xfer. This command line works for me:
bin/pilot-xfer --port usb: -s $HOME/.pilot-link
This command will fail unless you have the Palm already trying to sync. You'll also need to run it as root, although the pilot-link guys say they're working on a fix for that.
I'm still on the hunt for something that will allow me to access data on a USB thumb drive.
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3 Sep 2005
Yesterday, I passed my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam with flying colors. I'm willing to call it a legitimate certification. The entire test was hands-on troubleshooting ("Here's a machine that won't boot. Fix it") and installation and configuration ("Here's bare metal, and a four page description of how we want the machine setup. Go"). It's very indicative of the kind of work I do on a daily basis, so it's far more useful than a multiple-choice test would have been.
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29 Aug 2005
I'm at Red Hat training this week in Westford, MA. The water bottles here have the logo on them, along with the following in tiny print: "Free (as in water)". Geek humor at its best. (Read about Gratis versus Libre for an explanation of the joke.)