Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

Bishop Cariño is a traveling sort of guy. Just yesterday he went to Sorsogon for another conference. And a few days before that, he was in Malinao, Albay, his hometown, to bring some things he fetched from Manila to his sister who lives there, as well as to fetch his jeep for use of the Parish.

After yesterday’s hack back in time I decided to install Debian Woody on the good bishop’s Compaq Deskpro SB. I gave the name malinao to the Deskpro in Bishop Cariño’s honor, even while he’s gone, so when he uses this it will remind him of home :-).

The install, though far from short, was sweet and simple. I guess that being enough of a blockhead to install Debian into zaks several times before settling down was an advantage, since I can see for myself how different installation styles produce different builds of the same Woody. When I first installed Debian almost 2 years ago, for example, I was still stumbling in the dark (even when I was fresh after reading the install docs,) so I had to do tasksel, then dselect, then follow the debconf dialogs rather blindly, ultimately pushing X into an unusable (though not hopeless) state. A little while, I came by the answer myself by not using framebuffer under X.

Today’s install was no different. I didn’t run tasksel this time, only relying on dselect –expert to do the job, and fetching real packages (instead of metapackages that just clutter space.) I got the full install of malinao with Emacs21, minimal xserver-xfree86 with Ion, Enlightenment, and GDM (which forced recommended gnome-session and friends,) the GIMP, most-used elisps and other programs well under a gigabyte, which is good, considering my total space is just about 9 GB on ext3.

Remember the Vanta video problem I had on this box? It’s still there, and it messes X a lot. It is quite obvious that I need to get this card replaced, RSN, with at least a geForce 2. It messes enlightenment very much, so I had to resort on using Ion for my WM.

But I’m quite happy that I got Debian working once again. The Bishop is happy too: he came back sometime before evening, and saw his 3-year-old brand-spanking-new machine back to life. He was greatly pleased, for he is interesting in learning how to use computers and keep abreast with the latest tech developments. Curiosity isn’t stopping him. =)

I’ll take a rest hacking malinao tomorrow. Mom’s throwing a party (didn’t I mention she just had her birthday last Wednesday, on the 23rd? Happy Birthday Mom! You’re the Best Mom ever!) and she needs me to do the cooking.

I guess I have to postpone my UP Admission, Debian and Elisp reviews again…

This afternoon, Bishop Cariño, the Parish Priest of Daet, asked me to help him bring down his very own computer from his room to be installed down at his office. He was planning on this for a long time already, and not until now did the chance arrive, since he was a busy bishop, more often than not going to conferences outside of town (and even outside the country, as he had many important duties.) In fact he had one such engagement today, as he was bound to Sorsogon for another conference, and he was to leave me with his machine so I can set it up and have it ready for him by the time he comes home.

The box is a branded Compaq Deskpro SB, a small form-factor ATX with a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz core, Intel 845 chipset motherboard with built-in LAN and AC’97 audio, 20GB Maxtor hard disk and Samsung CD-ROM. It has 3 USB, 2 serial and one parallel ports, and an nVidia Vanta LT video card. It came preinstalled with Windows 98 SE, untouched and untold for 3 years, since the whole set was purchased in December 2001. Wow, that’s more or less three years, well past the expected lifetime of most PCs, but this one was just to be opened now.

Well, I for one just couldn’t resist of hacking a new, virgin box anytime, so I had to shelve my plans for today (which, as could be seen in my day page, was about reviewing Debian package management and policy, as well as to review my Emacs-Lisp education.) I was also curious about whether this machine would still work, since 3 years have passed already without this machine plugged in, and the CMOS must have dischared by now.

To my surprise, it wasn’t. In fact, after getting all those wires plugged in to their correct receptables and turning the machine on, it went on beautifully. There wasn’t much of a hitch, except for the video, as when I turned it on there was much of a helter-skelter of pixels, and even after the boot process and I was now on the desktop, Windows 98 had a hard time identifying the Vanta. I tried reinstalling the driver, then reinstalling the OS via the Compaq Quick Recovery CD, but to no avail. However, this doesn’t seem to be a software error, since I tested this by running Knoppix on the machine, and in KDE I also had these unnerving pixellations.

So, the next thing to do was to inspect the hardware itself. Since the machine was WAY past its warranty timeframe, I can just open up the CPU myself and have a look. Opening it was easy enough, just as taking a look, and there wasn’t much to look at: there’s not too much dust (the CPU was well preserved in plastic,) the wires and ribbons look okay. Just to make sure, I pulled out the Vanta AGP card, rubbed an eraser from the back of a pencil to the connectors (an old-school trick to reduce ionization/static) and pushed it back again. It partially worked, as most of the pixellation was gone, but not entirely.

Well, so far, so good. I decided to reinstall the OS anyway, since I divided the drive in half, in the hopes of convincing the Bishop to have Debian Woody installed (naks!)

And that, I think, is tomorrow’s hack…

Today, I was tasked to do the cover design for the Lenten program for our Parish. Naturally, I was going to use TheGimp for grabbing the scanned images and compositing them into one nice, coherent statement. The only trouble is, I had only reinstalled Debian Woody a few days ago on eliza, and the default kernel had trouble recognizing the key components (i.e., IDE chipset for DMA hard disk accels, USB printer and scanner) to have it work effectively.

After recompiling eliza’s 2.4.18 kernel to work on a modern Pentium 4 system, I got tired of waiting for it to finish writing pixmaps from memory to disk, so I decided to try out using the latest 2.6 kernel on Woody. In fact, I’ve been meaning to do this for quite some time now, as eliza (with its Asus motherboard supporting features like hyperthreading, on-board audio, IDE channels and LAN) was badly needing an overhaul. It had been slow before during the last Debian install, and even slower in Windows XP (despite being already in SP2.)

So, in the days before, I prepared myself. By reading the fine documentation at /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/HOWTO-Linux-2.6-Woody.gz, I was able to glean that to run 2.6 all I needed was only two packages: modutils (for working with 2.4 kernels) and module-init-tools (for handling the new 2.6 module system.) I checked these out at DebianPackages and got the source .dsc, .orig.tar.gz and .diff.gz, unpacked these via dpkg-source, and followed the build dependencies manually (I can’t do apt-get build-dep on eliza because (1) she’s not on any network, and (2) I don’t need to needlessly pull up packages from unstable even if I had a connection.)

Following the doc, I did dpkg-buildpackage -d on both modutils and module-init-tools. The former built rather quietly, though I was expecting to make a patch to debian/rules per the doc, but none was needed. The latter, however, didn’t build as it went wrong at dh_installinit borked, apparently using a flag, –sourcedir, that debhelper under woody didn’t understand.

I found that I only needed debhelper >> 4.2 to get both packages to build correctly under woody. Needless to say I got the source files for debhelper also, followed the build-depends (there weren’t any that wouldn’t be absent on woody, so I’m lucky here) and built it using dpkg-buildpackage -d. It build flawlessly, but when I got to install it using dpkg it only went halfway, saying it needed debconf-dev and po-debconf. I took a quick look at dh_installinit, and via its man page, I knew it was updated, though not fully so.

But that was enough, enough for me to rebuild the needed packages from scratch. Doing the fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage mantra again, I successfully got modutils and module-init-tools, and also installed them successfully. So far, so good.

Time to grab linux-2.6.5.tar.bz2 and the patches right up to 2.6.10! Unpacking and patching the 2.6 sources took more than 30 minutes on this Pentium 4 2.8 GHz box (but that was because IDE UDMA hard disk acceleration was turned off, due to 2.4 not recognizing my chipset.) Filled up all that was necessary for .config…


zakame@eliza~/dev/linux-kernel/kernel-source-2.6.10$ make-kpkg clean
...
zakame@eliza~/dev/linux-kernel/kernel-source-2.6.10$ make-kpkg -rev 1.0 build
...
zakame@eliza~/dev/linux-kernel/kernel-source-2.6.10$ fakeroot make -f \
debian/rules kernel-image-deb
...

Installed the resulting kernel-image-2.6.10-1.0_i386.deb, then rebooted.

Ahh, 2.6 heaven at last!

BTW, greetz to my Dad for his birthday yesterday! (Actually around just a few minutes ago as I write this You’re the best Dad in the whole wide world, and you do know that :D. May you have more birthdays to come!

I just moved my desktop from Ion2 to Ion3 today. It sure feels the same as with the former, but I’m excited to play with WPaneWS, the new workspace module in 3, as shown by Rene van Bevern (who also happens to be a Lisp fan.) I’ve managed to restore my old layout and look, sparing only a few moments on Dired, and editing some of the cfg-stuff in Emacs. I’m gonna take a look at the docs later (which reminds me, where’s ion3-doc in sid?) and hack on getting WPaneWS working…

Also took a look at the bug reports on mmm-mode and gtklp today, and I’m now working my head off squashing those bugs. For mmm-mode, it seems it needs a new package layout, instead of dumping all those .elc’s into /usr/share/emacs21/site-lisp, and many bugs are more than 2-3 years old, which needs to be pinged ASAP. As for gtklp, my main concern is in the handling of 271640, which I think could be handled by an upgrade script or a debconf dialog…

Most recent first:

I have reinstalled Debian woody on eliza (our Parish’s second machine) today. It had managed to accumulate a lot of cruft in less than a year, especially with all those software in /usr/local (I haven’t done it in the same way as zaks, my home box, to put custom software in stow and organize it like apt.) I’m planning to upgrade to sarge ASAP as our Parish is considering getting an ADSL package (woohoo!)

I got my UPOU Undergraduate Assessment Test permit from snail mail yesterday, and the day before that, the notice in my email. The exam’s on March 5, 9:00-12:00, and my testing center’s in the National Computer Center in UP Diliman, but I’ve yet to verify from the TC the exact location. I’ve got the dates in my planner on priority A Wish me luck!

I’ve upgraded WordPress to 1.5. Everything’s neat! The only thing lacking now is PlannerMode integration: while Sacha gives a hint, I reckon planner-rss can export notes to RSS only, not the tasks. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to export these as well, perhaps as planner-rss-add-task? At any rate, though, I’m inclined to work on this :-).

I’ve been busy learning Emacs Lisp for several days now. I find myself alternating between the elisp and emacs-lisp-intro, and PlannerMode really helps on a one-Info-node one-task basis. I’ve read on the Hacker-HOWTO how Lisp changes the way you program, but really experiencing it is another matter

I’ve adopted mmm-mode for Emacsen on Debian. I’ve yet to complete a new upstream package, probably I’ll have it uploaded to my server at the same time as gtklp…

…

I guess this hints I’m havin’ a helluva good time forgetting to blog

I just uploaded my PlannerWiki pages. Along the way, I learned to use rsync to transfer files, as well as gleaned a lot of Emacs Lisp snippets from #emacs.

I still need to figure out a way to integrate it with WordPress, though. There are a few approaches: one is to write a master script that would be the main index of the site, getting feeds from both PlannerMode and WordPress, and parsing the day and plan pages to show the rest of Planner. Another would be to write a plugin for WP that takes as its input the planner files and merge it to the rest of the blog site…

Thus, using PlannerMode has given me a lot of excuses to try out new things;

• To learn (Emacs) Lisp,
• To learn PHP and catch up on XHTML, and
• To try and make sense out of my (almost) /dev/urandom life

I noticed that I’m blogging more in PlannerMode than in WP, especially the small, fleet-footed stuff like hacks on IRC or on w3m. Really, Emacs integration comes a looong way in doing your job (and your life) right…

After soooo long…

Thanks to Chris Biasbas for the invite!

BitTorrent is keeping me very awake. Finally, a way to get extra-large amounts of everything (music, movies, ebooks,) and a good excuse to get more prepaid Internet cards…

So, I’m reminding myself to sleep. Except that Rammstein - Du Hast (a real classic) is also blasting my eardrums…

“…but who needs sleep anyway? Me? I’m WIRED!!!” - The Violator, from SPAWN. That would be an appropriate description of me right now. Been up and about since 7 o’clock yesterday (Sunday) morning: I’m now blogging on a Monday.

And what could be keeping me from the sweet embrace of sleep, you ask? Well, several things, that is. Rediscovering Emacs thru planner-el is one. Using it to formulate my attack strategy on the Dalaw-Pamilya Datamining Operation is another. Finding other means of improving myself through ebooks on BitTorrent is yet another. Chatting on IRC and on instant messengers through bitlbee (through ERC through Emacs) is also another.

I could keep going like this. What’s a hacker got to lose? Well, except maybe a few dead, numb brain cells, that is…

Sacha, you’ve finally convinced me.

I’ve dselected planner-el from Debian Sarge, and have been learning the ropes via Info. So far, I’ve been successful in establishing my plan and day pages, and have been helping me in completing my work on moving GtkLP package development from good old devscripts to hosting in a Subversion repository via svn-buildpackage. Currently my repo’s local, but I’m applying for an account on Alioth and Debian svn, so I might upload the source soon.

I’ve really been surprised by Planner, now that it has helped me very much. Though I won’t be able to publish my Planner pages on my site for now (pending integration to WordPress,) I was nontheless impressed by its sheer simplicity and extensibility, especially integrating itself well with almost everything I do (and almost everything I do is done via Emacs, save graphical browsing and some chatting.) Somehow it kept everything in focus, something that I’m lacking for sometime now ;p.

And focus is what I needed. I found myself quite lacking in maintaining the Debian package of GtkLP for some time now, since 1.0rel (which is 1.0 upstream, but due to my petty ignorance to details and oversight in IRC, has to be 1.0rel since uupdate (debian/watch) complains of version outdate. I’ve fixed watch already, but since my upstream has a versioning system of its own, it is still borked.)

I’ve folded the last source package into a Subversion repo using svn-inject, and updated to 1.0b (1.0relb) from there. I’m now preparing a Tagalog localization po-file for the package (as it uses gettext,) inspired my pusakat’s recent adventures in localizing Debian; and here’s the real irony, since I’m so weak in using (much more writing) in my own native language, expressing myself rather through English. So guys, I need some help here… ;p

Perhaps many of you felt relieved after receiving news of PCS scrapping Digital Pinay. I for one was most amused, particularly since I first heard about the contest from Hanna Wallach in Planet Debian, who in turn got it from Sacha. Perhaps the intentions were good, but the means could have been more inventive than just some beauty contest. Anyway, this isn’t the way to go, PCS, for trying to advance computing and the digital revolution here in the Philippines: there are a lot of better ways to do that, like a national programming contest or two, or a semi-formal conference gathering some of the best programmers in the world, like Debconf.

Speaking of intentions, it seems that even our parish has followed this curious trend: we here at the Parish of St. John the Baptist have announced our Jesus Christ Look-Alike Quest, for our upcoming Lenten Cenaculo presentation. Really, its for the street play that would rove the streets of Daet, bringing to life the time-honored story of the Passion and Last Hours of the Christ.

Now before you folks call this an even stupider idea, let me elaborate: Yes, we need someone to play Jesus for the cenaculo/street play, so there is the issue of look. No suprise there. And yes, it does sound corny and all, but its still tenable since what we need is someone who not just does look like Christ, but feels, moves and understands like Christ as well. Really clever idea, unless you’re outside the Judeo-Christian-Islamic bent of things, and would rather just sit in a wet, slimy hole purring “precious” for a living and yet learn nothing.

Seems simple? Yeah right! As of today there are nine candidates. We expect more until Sunday, when we’ll announce who will be the winner. The prize? 3,000 pesos and a short-term acting contract, good for the coming Holy Week. Heh.

Well, as for me, I’m mostly amused at this turn of events. If its really to help something get going, I think there’s no harm in doing it. There’s no use ranting about it either, so you might just get a DVD of The Passion Of The Christ and have all the grisly details, or watch our presentation and see how things turn out in this small town in Bicol…

…and before I forget, let me say that this Quest is in no way connected to PCS’ racket. Any correlation to it is purely coincidental. Hell, we’ve been having the inklings of this thing well before the geeks announced their tilt…