MyDebian Group

Background on Ubuntu

2011-06-03T12:47:00.030+08:00

Recently, I installed Ubuntu on my machine. I have a folder called climbingwallpapers in

/usr/share/backgrounds/

with all kinds of background pictures. Anyway, I wanted to have a bunch of desktop background that changes from time to time. I notice that there is an xml file that does this in one of the default installation folder with images.

I'm sure there is an easier way to come up with the xml file for the backgrounds in my folder.

But I didn't bother to google. Just wrote this short script....and ran it. If you would like to use it, I've attached it here. Just make the necessary changes and run it like...

$ python generatedesktoptheme.py > background-1.xml

the script is below...

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import re

transition = '5.0'
duration = '300'
count = 0
firstfile = ''
ffrom = ''
path = '/usr/share/backgrounds/climbingwallpaper/'

print "<background>"
print "  <starttime>"
print "    <year>2009</year>"
print "    <month>08</month>"
print "    <day>04</day>"
print "    <hour>00</hour>"
print "    <minute>00</minute>"
print "    <second>00</second>"
print "  </starttime>"
print "<!-- This animation will start at midnight. -->"

for f in os.listdir(path):
 if re.search("\.jpg|\.gif", f):
   count+=1
   if count == 1:
     firstfile = f
 else:
   continue

 f = path+f
 if ffrom == '':
   ffrom = f
   print "  <static>"
   print "    <duration>"+duration+"</duration>"
   print "    <file>"+f+"</file>"
   print "  </static>"
 else:
   print "  <transition>"
   print "    <duration>" +transition+"</duration>"
   print "    <from>"+ffrom+"</from>"
   print "    <to>"+f+"</to>"
   print "  </transition>"
   ffrom = f
   print "  <static>"
   print "    <duration>"+duration+"</duration>"
   print "    <file>"+f+"</file>"
   print "  </static>"

print "  <transition>"
print "    <duration>"+transition+"</duration>"
print "    <from>"+ffrom+"</from>"
print "    <to>"+path+firstfile+"</to>"
print "  </transition>"
print "</background>"

Debian Wheezy/Sid/testing

2011-05-01T13:41:00.001+08:00

Hi,

I rarely blogged here - since most of the time I wasn't using Debian, but it's derived work - Ubuntu. Now that I'm getting bored facing the workable and hardly to break distro, I dare myself to use Debian Testing for my Dell D430 laptop.

The installation isn't taking so much pain, but the first problem that I met is my keyboard and my mouse weren't worked even during the GDM session. I managed to use its rescue DVD and get the shell works. Later I installed gpm and walla, it's worked.

I hanged at #debian but the communities suggested udev to be backdated(meaning, since I am using Testing distro, it will break, and don't complain, use Stable instead). However prior to trying udev workaround, gpm IS the answer and it's working. Experience does solve this problem.

Actually I installed OpenSuse 11.4 before.. since I want to open my opinion to other distro as well. But I keep breaking my machine, and does not get my binaries straight away.. meaning it lacking software compared to Debian based.

Debian however, lacking Kamoso, a webcam software that I chose to record. (actually I'm using ffmpeg to, but ffmpeg does not show real time video, I don't want to spend my time write another script just for that).

So still, Ubuntu IS the most relaxing distro for desktop as for me, as for now.

Trolls are welcomed.

Several important Bash shortcut

2010-10-01T17:47:00.000+08:00

I've been using Bash a lot, and sometimes when typing long command line, having to press the arrow button multiple times to go to the first character is very tiring.

This are few important shortcut that I start to use:

Ctrl + a - Jump to the start of the line
Ctrl + e - Jump to the end of the line
Alt + d - Delete word
Alt + f - Move forward a word, where a word is composed of letters and digits
Alt + b - Move backward a word

More info from this blogpost : http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/08/bash-shell-shortcuts.html

Or from Bash Reference Manual regarding Readline Movement : http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Readline-Movement-Commands

Going deeper to look for what we have lost.

2010-08-23T21:36:00.003+08:00

There are not much blog writeup on MyDebian blog, but occasionally, when i find something useful, no matter how mundane or easy it is for the experienced user, I will try to document it somewhere. The objective is that, maybe somehow, somewhere, someone will benefit from it.

Recently, I accidentally formatted one of my windows partition by mistake. I know this is something stupid to do.

And that's what happens when you start to use w1#%#0%s for a long time. You tend to stop thinking.

To cut the story short, I wanted to format one of my partitions, and accidentally formatted the wrong partition. Worst, I reformatted the partition with

$ mke2fs /dev/sdb5

When i realized what I have done, it was already too late. All I can do now is unmount it immediately and try to figure out a way to retrieve the files back from some forensics software. Supposedly, mke2fs allocates a new filesystem on the partition and does a low level format of putting zeros. I'm not sure how true is that. I felt so stupid for doing something without thinking...and I was banging my head on the table. The particular partition had many files....aside from my collection of movies, anime and tv series videos, a whole lot of research work is in that partition.

Anyhow, i wasted no time and tried to look for a way to recover the files. Thankfully, I found a forensics software tool on linux, and conveniently, you can use aptitude to install it. The software I installed is testdisk.

After....

$aptitude install testdisk

I ran the software with testdisk /dev/sdb, and i followed the menu and run an analyses and a deeper search

analyses on the whole disk. I'm not very sure how testdisk work, but its pretty cool. It managed to detect and identify my missing ntfs partition that was deleted. I managed to recover the missing ntfs partition and made copies of my missing files in that partition.

Well, I heard some people using it to find files they deleted by mistake. I hope you'll find a good use for it too.

Compiling Pidgin from source. Updated

2009-06-25T09:14:00.008+08:00

It seems that a better method suggested by Donald P. Kong in the mydebian mailing list works better than compiling pidgin from scratch. Basically, you can use Apt-Pinning. A method to install unstable packages on a stable debian distribution. This is assuming that the package you want to install exist on the unstable version of debian and all dependencies can be resolve. Otherwise,

If the package still does not exist under unstable version of debian, you can use the method below.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently, I had trouble using pidgin. The pidgin I have installed is 2.4.3-4lenny2. though I usually just wait a while and aptitude update and upgrade for the latest version when using sid, however, on Lenny it seems to be a little bit slower, and I don't know if its the x86_64 bit architecture that I'm using or it just takes time to have the latest version of pidgin debian package to be included into Lenny repository. Seems yahoo made some changes to the server, yahoo messenger plugin does not work anymore on Pidgin. As of this date, the best way to go around this problem is to get the latest 2.5.7 version. Unfortunately, there is no .deb package for this yet on lenny. I can't wait. Yahoo messenger is already part of the daily life routine. And I dont want to boot on windows or install a VM for windows.

So what I did, was I had to compile it from scratch.
Long story short, just for the sake of documentation for others, I have included what I did here.


$ wget -c http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pidgin/pidgin-2.5.7.tar.bz2
$ tar zjvf pidgin-2.5.7.tar.bz2
$ cd pidgin-2.5.7
$ aptitude install intltool libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libdbus-1-dev gnutls-dev libnss3-dev
$ ./configure --disable-screensaver --disable-startup-notification --disable-gtkspell --disable-meanwhile --disable-avahi --disable-dbus --disable-perl --disable-tcl
$ aptitude purge pidgin
$ make
$ make install
$ ldconfig

I choose to disable some features of pidgin since I didn't think I will need it. I just need it to work until lenny comes up with an stable and updated working package.

After that, you can run pidgin as usual and connect to yahoo without any problems. The above instructions may not work since my PC is setup differently, if it doesn't, write a comment or join our mailing list. Maybe we can help you out.

Here are some references on the yahoo issues on pidgin. [http://theflamingbanker.blogspot.com/2009/06/some-clarification-on-yahoo-issues.html]

Java Plugin

2009-06-24T02:15:00.006+08:00

Upon getting a new PC with a Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU to play around with, I have encountered many problems due to the 64-bit architecture being used. Particularly, many applications still does not have the 64-bit version yet.

Among the problems is java plugin for firefox or in the case of debian, its iceweasel. Previously, sun did not have the 64 bit version java plugin for firefox. But I googled around and found out that recently, for the version java6 update 12, they have already include the 64 bit version plugin. Among the reference I found was at http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux-amd64.html which gives all supported plugins and what not for mozilla.

1) The easiest way to install sun java on debian is to:
$ aptitude install sun-java6-jdk
This will fortunately, as of this date, lenny installs java6 update 12.

2) After doing this, you will need to choose your default java to use. Just for compatibility with other applications, if you are using netbeans or what not. To choose the default java to use, type:
$ update-alternatives --config java
then select the sun java you just installed.

3) Next is to create a symbolic link for the firefox/iceweasel to the java plugin
$ cd /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so
That should install the java plugin for firefox, for x86_64 bit version, and those using the amd64 kernel.

4) I later restart firefox, and check to see if the java plugin is installed. At the location bar, i type about:plugins. To see if there is a java plugin support. Looks like things look good.

5) also tried to upload some pictures into facebook. The upload features requires java plugin. Seems to work great.

So there you go...java plugin seems to work. Have fun.

Experience installing Debian on Lenovo S10

2009-02-09T09:40:00.015+08:00

You know one of those new lines of UMPC that's being displayed here and there. It seems too small for anybody to use it, and most of the time it looks like a toy rather than a serious piece of machine. Anyway, I got one, and here I am sharing some of my experience using the Lenovo S10.

The Lenovo S10 has no optical drive, you have to be creative in installing Debian on it. The factory default comes with Windows XP pre-installed and it has 3 partitions in its 160G HDD. The partition is used for Windows XP, a second partition where all the drivers are kept just incase you need to do a reinstallation, and the third partition is used for auto-recovery feature where Windows XP installation files reside.

I didn't get rid of windows totally. This is because, I still use Windows XP occasionally. Some of the work I do just runs on Windows and I have no choice but to be dependent on XP. But I can make it dual boot and have the freedom to choose which OS I want to use on the laptop. The first thing you need to do is partitioning the hard disk. For this, I use gparted loaded onto a usb pen drive. I went to gparted website to download the image and also for the instructions of creating a Live USB image. After creating your gparted live usb, you can enter the bios, and boot through the usb pen drive. Then you need to partition the harddisk to your liking and create a partition for Linux. I only took about 20G of harddisk space for Debian. I figured the windows partition is in FAT32, and that i can mount later to use for storage if I need to use it. Make sure you don't delete the Windows XP recovery partition if you want to keep Windows XP recovery feature on your Ideapad.

After partitioning, you can now download and create an usblive pen drive for your debian installation. I use Debian Lenny. Make sure you get the latest weekly or daily built for lenny debian installer for this if you want to detect the ethernet network card. I download the i386 netinstall for the usb image. After downloading the image, you need to create the usb live CD. I followed the easiest way to create a live-usb stick, which is just zcat an image into a usb thumb drive.

pontianak:~$ zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sdb1

This is the simplest way to create a live-usb thumb-drive, but it limits your thumbdrive partition to 250M. so hence the image you'll be using is netinstall. And you have to install the other packages through network install. You can download a larger image if you followed a different method. Someone made an excellent documentation in creating usb live images, you can go here to his site to see the other methods you can use.

Then after setting the bios to boot from usb, you can boot your debian image and install debian on the partition you've created with gparted.

After a few hours as debian download all the necessary packages for your system (this can take a while if you are using streamyx, unless you have a really fast T1 connection at the office, you might be better off just having a base install and work from there by downloading only the necessary packages.) I anyhow waited several hours to get all the packages, like gnome, office and etc for a complete system. After all the waiting, I have debian complete lenny system installed. Everything seems to work, except for the internal mic and wireless network. Luckily, there are some work around. As for now, below are the things that seems to work.

Processor	Yes	Shows up as 2 CPUs due to HyperThreading.
Screen	Yes	1024x600 resolution, because the screen is really small, the windows doesn't seem to fit nicely in the screen. It might be better to make the font smaller. Under the gnome preferences-->appearance, I've made mine to size 6.
HDD	Yes
Graphics	Somewhat	Looks ok, however, the touch pad mouse seems to be moving really fast. You can adjust this on gnome, but it seems that the vertical movement of the cursor is faster than the horizontol movement.
Sound	Yes	Alsa seems to work nicely
Ethernet	Yes	Should work with lenny daily built
Wireless	Yes	You need to download the latest broadcom driver for this, then you can easily use gnome network manager to get the wireless working. Of course, you can also use iwconfig if you prefer the old fashion way. Thanks to another person who have done it, his instructions was helpful and can be found here. And the driver can be downloaded from broadcom website.
Bluetooth	Not Tested	S10 does not come with Bluetooth built in,at least not the current models being sold. I believe the next coming models would have it by default. You can buy a bluetooth module, and install it manually, of course you need some kind of hand shop skills.
USB	Yes	Seems to work nicely.
Card Reader	Yes	Seems to work, automounter detects my SD card and mounts it automatically. I tested this using the SD card from my digital camera.
ExpressCard Slot	Not Tested
Camera/Webcam	Yes	Tested this with skype and managed to keep a conversation going for about 30 minutes.
Battery	Yes	It seems to detect correctly if the power is plugged in or not, and is capable to tell you how much time you have till the battery runs out. I'm not really sure if the calculated time is correct...but it looks like its working.
Microphone	Somewhat	The internal mic does not appear to work on debian lenny. However, if you need to use the mic to make a skype call, using the mic-in jack seems to work nicely. Its only the internal mic that is not working. So you need to get a headphones with microphone to make skype calls. There is some people saying that recompiling the latest Alsa may help, I haven't tried this yet.

Time Drift

2008-08-06T01:58:00.009+08:00

Recently, I noticed my linux box in the lab is slowly drifting in time. After resetting the time for 2 times, I think I got to do something about it. So, wasting no time, I installed ntp. It's no big deal, and I'm sure a lot of the old-timers in linux are very familiar with this, so this is something for newbies and people wanting to explore the use of linux.

To install, on debian, just use:

$ aptitude install ntp

Then after that, you can start your ntp daemon. To do this, just type, as root:

$ /etc/init.d/ntp start

That should give you the utmost correct time.

Suppose you would like to edit your configuration to use the local time server or a time server in your department. Well, all you need to do is to edit /etc/ntp.conf. I've added these lines to add the server in my department.

server ntp1.cs.kent.edu iburst dynamic
server ntp2.cs.kent.edu iburst dynamic
server time.kent.edu iburst dynamic
server 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst dynamic

and rerun ntp daemon with:

$ /etc/init.d/ntp restart

Now, some of you might be a little curious on the options given to the servers. Well here is an explanation taken from the man page.

iburst

When the server is unreachable and at each poll interval, send a burst of eight packets instead of the usual one. As long as the server is unreachable, the spacing between packets is about 16s to allow a modem call to complete. Once the server is reachable, the spacing between packets is about 2s. This is designed to speed the initial synchronization acquisition with the server command and s addresses and when ntpd(8) is started with the -q option.

Now, I can't find a good explanation for dynamic option on the web. But I'm sure since the original .conf file has it, so I'm just going to keep the dynamic option there.

There are people who thinks that we might as well use a ntp-client like ntpdate to synchronize time, however, ntpdate needs to be run manually or by cron. It is however more resource friendly, and only runs when you want it to run, unlike ntp server which would be running as a server all the time. However, there is an issue about time drift. And the problem with ntpdate, it does not have the algorithm to handle time drift. Hence, since I'm a little obsessed about time to the milliseconds, time drifts is an important thing for me, and ntp has the algorithm to calculate the time drift and readjusting time as necessary. :) Hope that helps, comments by experts are highly appreciated to get a better understanding of things, questions are also welcomed.

How to delete a file starting with a character "-"

2008-08-04T09:05:00.005+08:00

Recently, I tried to delete a file which has a starting "-". The filename is called --ahlong.avi. Unfortunately, running

$ rm -- --ahlong.avi

gave me an error. So how do you delete a file that has a "-" starting character. Well i found out there are a few ways to do this....

$ rm ./--ahlong.avi
or
$ rm -- --ahlong.avi

Both seems to work.

Debian@Youtube

2008-02-22T18:15:00.001+08:00

Debian startup script

Pine and IMAP over SSL

2008-02-13T05:00:00.003+08:00

Anybody used pine before for reading emails. Some of you may not, but if you started using email pre-2000, you probably have used pine before.

This entry may be a little trivial for those of you who are familiar with it,
but, the community website is also for newbies. I know there are also other
alternatives, but talking about one alternative is an option for a newbie to
decide whether he is a pine, elm, mutt, thunderbird or evolution user.

What is pine?

Pine is a freeware text-based e-mail client developed at the University of Washington. It is no longer under development, and has been replaced by the new Alpine client, which is licensed as free software rather than freeware.

Many people believe that Pine stood for "Pine is not Elm", in the manner of "GNU Is Not Unix", ie. a recursive acronym. However, one of its original authors, Laurence Lundblade, insists this was never the case and that it started off simply as a word and not an acronym, and that his first choice of a backronym for pine would be "Pine Is Nearly Elm". Over time it was changed by the university to mean Program for Internet News and E-mail.^[1]

In 2006, the University of Washington announced that it stopped development of Pine with Pine 4.64, although Pine continues to be supported.^[6]

In its place is a new family of email tools based upon Pine, called Alpine and licensed under the Apache License, version 2. November 29, 2006 saw the first public alpha release,^[7]^[8] which forms a new approach since the alpha test of Pine was always non-public.

Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007.

***All this is taken from wikipedia.

Why I use Pine? No particular reason. I just like the text based email. Its a matter of preference really. Some consider it less l33t, since arguably, mutt is more flexible. However, I found it good enough for me, its about the most l33t I want to get when reading emails. Plus, arguably, its faster than web based email. Although there is a web version of pine called webpine. Never used it so can't comment much.

Particularly, pine is flexible enough it most environment. I will be concentrating on using Pine over SSL with IMAP. On my debiana, a debian unstable distro, I installed pine/alpine, using

debiana:~# aptitude install alpine

This should install alpine. You can choose to run alpine by simply typing...

debiana:~# alpine

My biggest problem was to get pine fetch my mail from my IMAP server, and to do that securely without people sniffing in between.

When pine runs, you'll see this....

Press "S" to enter setup to start configure your pine.
Enter "C" to enter the basic setup of your configuration menu.
Which allow you to configure it to connect to your IMAP server.
Below are the configuration options I use, for my client:

SMTP Server (for sending)= smtp.yourServer.com/user=your_username/tls/novalidate-cert

Since I do not have a validated cert from the SMTP server, i use this configuration, i also put the username name there to make it auto key in, for the particular user i want to send email. The novalidate-cert is not necessary, but its hack to avoid some hassles of pine keep asking you whether you allow an unvalidated cert be used.

Inbox Path=
{imap.yourServer.com/user=your_username/tls/novalidate-cert}INBOX Default Fcc (File carbon copy)= {imap.yourServer.com/user=your_username/tls/novalidate-cert}Sent

Similarly, I do the same same for reading my INBOX in IMAP and the SENT directory.

Exit and now all you need is to add your mailboxes directories in IMAP.

To do this, enter Setup again and now choose "L" for the collectionLists setup. Which is where you may define groups of folders to help you better organize your mail. In my case, I already have my email boxes organized on the campus server. To do that, I choose "A" to add a new entry, and entered the following options.

Nickname : Mail on imap.yourServer.com/tls/novalidate-cert
Server : imap.yourServer.com/tls/novalidate-cert
Path : Left blank
View : Left Blank

When you change all that, you can view all your email boxes, INBOX,SENT and etc in the directory list. Have fun exploring using pine.

Skype on Debian?

2008-01-30T11:20:00.000+08:00

I was working on debian when someone wanted to chat with me on skype.
I quickly run the command aptitude search skype. Nothing came out.
So I went to http://www.skype.com and click the download page.
I found out that they have skype for various different distro for linux.
They also have tarballs for static and dynamic libraries.

I was happy to see they have a version for debian etch. But unfortunately,
I was using debian unstable. I tried my chances anyways, and downloaded
the .deb for etch. After downloading, I tried to install, but apparently, I didn't
have the qt-libraries to install it. That was easy, all I needed to do is aptitude install it.

And so I did....a quick

debiana> aptitude install libqt4-core libqt4-gui

Then I can run this command...

debiana> dpkg -i skype-debian_1.4.0.118-1_i386.deb

Everything installed nicely, and I can run skype.
Running skype is as easy as

debiana> skype &

Skype run nicely, and I logged into skype. All the users were there displayed nicely.
I configured my sound device, and tried to play around alsamixer to get the microphone volume louder.

Unfortunately, the linux version has no support for video yet.
So I might still have to revert to windows when I want to use skype.
But the voice communication is excellent.....

3G, Sony Ericsson and Debian

2007-08-25T00:44:00.000+08:00

Recently, with a new phone purchase and current offers for 3G on maxis, I was trying to get Maxis 3G to work on my Linux box. I have been busy and my search for a solution was always interrupted, but the mydebian mailing list and the community have been supportive. Particularly to Donald and Irwan who have given me obvious clues, and Maxis website too helped (if only I have looked into it first).

So now I managed to browse the net using 3G, in fact, I'm using it right now, on debian and dialing to Maxis 3G. I decided to update this blog entry and give some pointers to whoever wants to use 3G on their Linux boxes.

I could have found a solution to it much sooner, but went with the hard way. I did a serial port scanning on windows to figure out what was going. I sure did learn a lot, but for the most things, the clues could have been easier to find if I went to Maxis website instead. They too gave some clues of how to connect on windows. With almost the same configuration based on Maxis instructions, it should work as well. Well too late to be crying over spilled milk, all that time wasted...hmmmm

Anyhow, for those of you who wants to use 3G Celcom with Debian, please take a look below for an excellent detail explanation. You can also get some hints if you are doing something a bit differently.

And for those of you using 3G Maxis with Debian, it's not so much different. All you have to do is:

aptitude install wvdial.
Run the wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf and
edit the file /etc/wvdial.conf

Your file should look like this....

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***5#
Password = maxis
Username = wap

Yeah, the main changes was just the number to be dialled, username and password.

After that, running wvdial will get you connected. You can browse now..

I'm not sure about other telco, but if you are in doubt, and can't figure out was is happening, you can always
use serial port monitor to figure out what AT commands are being sent to your modem, on windows and try to do the same on Linux. As for the username and password, you will just have to ask your telco provider, or check out their website.

Happy Hacking guys......on 3G

Linus: I’ve never used Debian

2007-07-25T16:38:00.000+08:00

What say you MyDebian Group?

Linus Torvalds was interviewed by http://www.oneopensource.it/

One of the questions:
A curiosity: which is your favourite distribution, and which one do you consider more secure?

I don’t really tend to care much, I’ve changed distributions over the years, and to me the most important thing tends to be that they are easy to install and upgrade, and allow me to do the only part I really care about - the kernel.

So the only major distribution I’ve never used has actually been Debian, exactly because that has traditionally been harder to install. Which sounds kind of strange, since Debian is also considered to be the “hard-core technical” distribution, but that’s literally exactly what I personally do not want in a distro. I’ll take the nice ones with simple installers etc, because to me, that’s the whole and only point of using a distribution in the first place.

So I’ve used SuSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, YDL (I ran my main setup on PowerPC-based machines for a while, and YDL - Yellow Dog Linux - ended up the easiest choice). Right now, most of my machines seem to have Fedora 7 on then, but that’s only a statement of fact, not meant to be that I think it’s necessarily “better” than the other distros.

You can read the rest here http://www.oneopensource.it/interview-linus-torvalds/

-ashterix-
http://ashterix.blogspot.com/

Debian Testing (Lenny) Got 2.6.21 Kernel

2007-07-11T11:20:00.000+08:00

It seems Debian Testing aka Debian Lenny just got 2.6.21 series kernel. I’m a happy man, yay!

Debian Testing (Lenny) Got 2.6.21 Kernel
http://blog.irwan.name/?p=169

Signals and Signal Handling

2007-06-20T16:06:00.000+08:00

The embedded Linux workshop was a good introduction of getting into programming in the unix environment. I really got a chance to know the kernel better and how linux works. To talk about all of it in a single post would be superfluous and too lengthy, so I will share with you some of the parts that I've learned in a few post whenever the time is right and I suddenly have a caring and sharing mood.

Lets talk about Signals and Signals Handling. Some of the things here can be obtained by looking at man pages for the keyword signal.
Signals as we usually know it, is to kill -9, or kill HUP. We also know that a process can be interrupted, killed or even stopped. But thats what most system admins use, there are alot of things about signals that we don't know about. Particularly, signals are used to control the state of a process. And so, understanding signals will help us build applications and help us control its states and handle certain states of the processes.

As for now, there are two categories of signals, Standard signals, that we all use, are dependent on most processors, and are numbered from 1 to 31. These signals are called standard signals because its an implementation of the POSIX 1.1990 and POSIX 1. 2001 standard signals.

As real-time programming and real time processors becomes rampant, the need to handle real-time applications exist, and hence, linux also support real-time signals which is numbered from 32 to 63. If your application requires real-time handling, these are the signals that you will probably be playing with.

Of course all these signals will cause the program, or process to be in a different state. Is it important to know, yes, if you are writing an application and want to handle certain signals when the kernel sends the signal to your application or program.

For example, what if you would like to ignore the interrupt signal? You can do that with signal handling by catching the interrupt signal. However, you cannot just catch any signal that is being thrown to you, basically, you cannot catch the kill signal which is the number 9. And I also think you cannot catch the stop signal....(not sure on this, i was sleepy).

here is an example program that do just that, run a program on infinite loop, and disallow any interrupt from keyboard, for example ctrl-c.

#include ‹unistd.h› /* standard unix functions, like getpid()
#include ‹sys/types.h› /* various type definitions, like pid_t */
#include ‹signal.h› /* signal name macros, and the kill() prototype */

void sighandy(int i)
{
printf("Don't do that, I will ignore it: %d\n", i);
// signal(SIGINT, (void *) sighandy);
}

main()
{
signal(SIGINT, (void *) sighandy);
for(;;)
pause();
}

Write the program and save the program as test1.c in your favorite editor like emacs. Then, you can compile it using,

$ gcc -o test1 test1.c

To run the program, use

$ ./test1

try pressing Ctrl-c and see what happens, ideally, you should be able to catch the interrupt signal sent to the process currently running.

Hope that helps you understanding a bit. Now you can create an application that can catch signals. Stealing Niibe's favorite phrase, Happy Hacking guys.

2007-06-11T20:47:00.000+08:00

fbgrab - Now, You Can Take Screenshot Anywhere
http://blog.irwan.name/?p=128

Debian to conquer bukit tabur?

2007-06-03T23:46:00.001+08:00

About 2 weeks ago, i went up and hike Bukit Tabur with a friend of mine. The view on top was amazing, and you can see KL and the Klang Gate Dam from the top of Bukit Tabur. After a 2 1/2 hour hike, I took a picture on top of the peak. I had nothing to show off except for my debian t-shirt. Anyways, I thought it would be a good idea if some of us did some non-geek activity for a change....
What say you, anybody want to claim that MyDebian conquers Bukit Tabur? It will be just about 4 hours all together....

3D-Desktop: 3D for the Impatient

2007-05-30T13:13:00.000+08:00

3D-Desktop: 3D for the Impatient
http://blog.irwan.name/?p=107

Debian Way or The Hard Way: Installing Google Earth

2007-05-29T15:56:00.000+08:00

Debian Way or The Hard Way: Installing Google Earth
http://blog.irwan.name/?p=103

Debian-Administration.org Is Now IPv6-Enabled

2007-05-28T14:46:00.000+08:00

Debian-Administration.org Is Now IPv6-Enabled
http://blog.irwan.name/?p=101

Simple Steps To Get MSIE in Debian AMD64

2007-05-27T01:35:00.001+08:00

[The original version of this article is located at http://blog.irwan.name/?p=98]

First of all, I know most of us are already familiar with well-known IEs4Linux. This article is mainly dedicated for those who are using Debian Lenny (Debian Testing) on AMD64 architecture due to probable complexity to get Wine up and running.

To get Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), I'm still using IEs4Linux script :)

0. You might think Wine is already in the repository,

meister:~# apt-get install wine
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package wine is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package wine has no installation candidate

Hey, there is an error. What the hell happened to Wine package? Until today, Wine package is only available on Debian Sid (Debian Unstable) for AMD64 architecture.

Thanks to Wine Wiki, which provides a tutorial on how to build 32-bit Wine on a 64-bit (x86-64) system.

1. So, get these pre-requisites packages; ia32-libs, libc6-dev-i386, lib32z1-dev

apt-get install ia32-libs libc6-dev-i386 lib32z1-dev

2. Download latest Wine source code.

3. Time to get dirty. We are going to compile and install Wine

irwan@meister:/tmp$ tar xjvf wine-0.9.37.tar.bz2
irwan@meister:/tmp$ cd wine-0.9.37/tools/
irwan@meister:/tmp/wine-0.9.37/tools$ ./wineinstall

It will do the compilation and installation automatically.
You will be asking to give the root password.

4. Time to get MSIE!

Download the IEs4Linux script

irwan@meister:~$ tar xzvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
irwan@meister:~$ cd ies4linux-2.0.5/
irwan@meister:~/ies4linux-2.0.5$ ./ies4linux

Sit back and relax. The installation will take a while.

5. Ehemmm, time to run MSIE
irwan@meister:~$ cd bin
irwan@meister:~/bin$ ./ie6

Simple Steps To Get IPv6 in Debian

2007-05-26T03:01:00.000+08:00

[The original version or this article is located at http://blog.irwan.name/?p=84]

Question: I don't give any crap about IPv6! Why the hell I need IPv6???
Answer: Get answer from Linuxreviews.org

Want to get working IPv6 in less than 5 minutes? Here you are,

1. Create an account from Freenet6
http://www.go6.net/4105/register.asp

2. Received Confirmation Email

Welcome to go6!

Your new go6 account gives you access to forums, documents and the go6 wiki. Your account can also be used with Freenet6, the free IPv6 access service. In order to get IPv6 access, please download and install the go6 client here.

3. Install TSPC Client
apt-get install tspc

4. Edit /etc/tsp/tspc.conf

42 # user identification:
43 # userid=anonymous|your_userid
44 # anonymous means no userid. With anonymous, you don't need to register
45 # to get an userid from the broker. However, prefixes (router mode) nor
46 # permanent ipv6 address are available in anonymous mode.
47 # your_userid means the userid you registered to the broker. The userid
48 # must be using only legal dns label names (eg: [a-zA-Z0-9-] ) since
49 # the userid is used inside your user hostname.
50 userid=PUT_YOUR_USERNAME

52 #
53 # password:
54 # passwd=your_password
55 # leave empty if userid=anonymous
56 # your_password means the password you have been assigned with your
57 # userid
58 passwd=PUT_YOUR_PASSWORD

76 #
77 # 'server' is the tunnel broker identifier
78 # Value is the tunnel broker IP address or FQDN and an optional port number
79 # The default port number is 3653.
80 #
81 # Examples:
82 # server=hostname # FQDN
83 # server=A.B.C.D # IPv4 address
84 # server=hostname:port_number
85 # server=A.B.C.D:port_number
86 #
87 # For users with accounts, 'server' should be set to the Freenet6
88 # tunnel broker with authenticated accounts (broker.freenet6.net)
89 server=broker.freenet6.net
90 #
91 # The default value is the Freenet6 tunnel broker for
92 # anonymous accounts (anon.freenet6.net)
93 #server=anon.freenet6.net

5. Start TSPC
/etc/init.d/tspc start

6. Check Network Interface
meister:~# ifconfig tun
tun Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet6 addr: 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::xx/128 Scope:Global
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1280 Metric:1
RX packets:572 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:598 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:500
RX bytes:329102 (321.3 KiB) TX bytes:61411 (59.9 KiB)

7. Test and Verify. Voila!

[1] Surf to http://www.kame.net/
[2] Surf to http://demo.nautilus6.org/
[3] Connecting BitchX to ipv6.chat.freenode.net

Now, you will say;
"w00t, I didn't know it's so easy to get IPv6!"

Embedded Linux-Featuring Mr. Niibe

2007-05-16T11:41:00.001+08:00

Habitual early morning rituals, the first thing I would do is check my email. Almost every morning there would be at least 10 announcements about what going on for training, staff and etc in the mailbox. Usually, the normal algo. would be ...

foreach mail in list{
subject = grep("subject");
if(!relevent(subject))
delete;
else
view;
}

Usually, the algo. works well and the only mails that would be left behind are emails from friends. But somehow it is different this time. The subject Embedded Systems came out and I just had to find out what it is all about. I viewed the mail and read through a brochure that is attached.

The first thing that came up to my mind is, oh no...another Embedded workshop. Usually I won't be that excited, but looking at the Trainer's background, i saw a familiar name.....Wait a minute, that's Mr. Niibe, the Debian kernel Hacker and founder of debian group and FLOSS in Japan. An old friend indeed.....I wasted no time and registered for the workshop..... Would be nice to see that old Jap again....

If you are interested, you can check out the following details....

Embedded Linux Technology Workshop
OUM Open Source Community in collaboration with MNCC Malaysia, which will be organising two workshops on Embedded Linux from June 5th-8th and June 11th-14th.

The workshop Objective:

To provide an understanding of the essentials of embedded Linux
To give a practical experience in developing an embedded Linux system
To give a hands on experience of developing Linux applications code
To give the confidence to apply these new concepts to Embedded Linux projects

The remaining details can be found here:
http://www.mncc.com.my/embedlinux/index.html

and its suppose to be here too...

www.foss.org.my, www.mncc.com.my, www. thedreamsoft.com

Return Of The Debianista

2007-05-15T23:33:00.000+08:00

Today, I’m certified myself as a Debian User again (you may call this as so-called recertification). If I really remember, the last time I use Debian was during my preparation for RHCE exam - running RHEL on Debian, using VMware Workstation.

After that (damn, about one year), I just do not have enough time and resource to use it. For the rest of this article, please click here.....

So you got some funny fonts?

2007-05-08T15:09:00.000+08:00

I got some funny font (should I call it crappy?) when I was alerted with error messages or referring manual pages.

This is how I did. It was not neccessarily the best method, but at least it work for me.

The value of font usually mapped to locale of the running systems. To know about it just type:

echo $LC_ALL

This will display the overall values of monetary,font and language of the running session.

Export the value by using

export LC_ALL=C

This setting will work on current session. If you plan to save this setting, put it in your RC in your shell profile:

Edit .bashrc and put

export LC_ALL=C

as above

Debian Etch (4.0) on Pentium III

2007-04-27T15:57:00.001+08:00

I just installed Debian Etch on my research project's machine which have specs as follows:

Pentium III (Coppermine)
128 RAM (suppose)

As I didn't play around with Debian (instead with its variant-Ubuntu on my laptop), several steps I did forgot:

Howto configure X
Howto choose nearest apt-get mirror

Anyway, for the X issue, my machine is currently using SiS video card. By default Etch unable to adapt with the settings so I opt to use VESA as the video config choice.

Another thing that I faced was the problem with "xlockmore" package which I usually use to let my machine locked while unattended. So I went to package section at Debian's website and downloaded it manually.

Annoying Beeps

2007-04-23T16:51:00.001+08:00

After having a new installation of Debian on my laptop, an annoying beep comes out of my laptop speakers every time i pressed the tab button on the X console, or whenever i do some kind of shell error. It's annoying, it keeps on beeping....
I tried to ignore the problem, hoping that selective hearing will prevail, but after making a scene in the meeting room with beeping havoc coming from my laptop during the last meeting, which I got a little too much attention from my boss. That's it, I decided to find ways to get rid of this problem once and for all.

So I googled to find an easy and minimal work around solution. One way was to edit /etc/inputrc and comment out....

set bell-style none

There was also an alternatives to this, which is to rmmod pcspkr, add it into the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to make sure it doesn't get loaded again.

Now i can slowly and quietly steal precious time and not waste my time listening to the boss rambling during my department meetings.

Meetup at Starbucks

2007-04-22T21:32:00.000+08:00

Debian group have not been active recently. But that does not mean that we are now less passionate about debian and linux. So to revive our small group of geeks, we decided to have a debian meetup, at Starbucks, near Jusco, One Utama.

The following people came, Irwan, MNajem, Syirman, Fadli, Shakir and myself (joey). Hence by default, we are now the first few writers of debianMalaysia.blogspot.com. We intend to find more writers, who can help mydebian to contribute about anything and nothing about debian. Please express your interest to be a writer, and we will add you in our respectable writers.

There are many exciting plans for mydebian, and we are thinking to pulling more group of friends and geeks alike. Also in the pipeline, install fest across Universities in Malaysia--tell me what do you think--and also beef up documentation on debian laptops and etc.

Keep an eye on our progress, join us to ultimate geekdom....
If knowledge turns you on....being a geek is ain't that bad...