Today I recognized my Staroffice 8 not starting any more on my gentoo box.  I know, StarOffice is old, but it is still doing the job and most newer word processors just have tons of more features that, to be honest, most people do not use. For most real work I use Latex, but StarOffice enables me to write a short document on the fly and to open Microsoft Office files.

When trying to start StarOffice it instantly crashed with the following dialog (Translated to english language with export LC_ALL=C):

No further Information in the console or where ever was available.  I already thought about unistalling StarOffice and installing a newer word processor like OpenOffice, then I remembered that StarOffice is a 32bit application, which uses the 32bit emulation libraries on an amd64 system.  Well, I also have remembered, that there recently has been  an upgrade of the  emul-linux-x86-libs to version 20110722.  With try and error I found out that emul-linux-x86-baselibs-20110722 was the one which was causing the problem. Most probably emul-linux-x86-baselibs-20110722 is also incompatible to other applications.

To solve the problem include

>=app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-baselibs-20110722

into your /etc/portage/package.mask file to prevent the newer emul-linux-x86-baselibs from getting emerged.

Well, emul-linux-x86-motif-20110722 requires a recent version of emul-linux-x86-baselibs as dependency and refuses to install afterwards. To fix this include

app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-baselibs-20110722-r99

into your /etc/portage/profile/package.provided file. This may break some 32bit motif applications. In this case it may be necessary to downgrade the emul-linux-x86-motif package, also. Since I do not have any 32bit motiv based applications on my system I did not try that out.

Afterwards StarOffice 8 starts as usual. Hopefully the next version of emul-linux-x86-baselibs is compatible with StarOffice again.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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today skype doesn’t start, after short search I found that a config file break the system. remove ~/.Skype/shared.xml and login again.

best regards xexplorer

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A few days ago nvidia-drivers-270.41.06 appeared in the gentoo partage tree. During my regular updates it got installed. Afterwards turonice did not work anymore with the configuration I wrote about in zen-sources-2.6.38_p20110501 with tuxonice.

The dmesg output during supend to disk was:

Freezing processes & syncing filesystems.
Stopping fuse filesystems.
Freezing user space processes … (elapsed 0.01 seconds) done.
Stopping normal filesystems.
Freezing remaining freezable tasks … (elapsed 0.01 seconds) done.
Preparing Image. Try 1.
Restarting normal filesystems.
Stopping fuse filesystems.
Freezing user space processes … (elapsed 0.00 seconds) done.
Stopping normal filesystems.
Freezing remaining freezable tasks …
Freezing of tasks failed after 20.00 seconds (1 tasks refusing to freeze, wq_busy=0):
khugepaged      R  running task        0   619      2 0x00800000
ffff88004ef24fa0 ffffffff81692eb9 ffff88004ef24fa0 ffff8800cf13e0c0
ffff8800c861e000 ffff8800c861e010 ffff8800c861e000 ffff8800cf13e330
ffff8800c861ffd8 ffff8800c861e010 ffff8800cf13e148 ffff8800cf13e330
Call Trace:
[<ffffffff81692eb9>] ? schedule+0x729/0xea0
[<ffffffff8169308b>] ? schedule+0x8fb/0xea0
[<ffffffff8110d4ab>] ? __page_check_address+0x10b/0x190
[<ffffffff8110d9f6>] ? page_referenced_one+0x96/0x220
[<ffffffff8110eb7a>] ? page_referenced+0x2da/0x370
[<ffffffff810f13fd>] ? shrink_page_list+0x21d/0x5d0
[<ffffffff810f1b9e>] ? shrink_inactive_list+0x15e/0x4d0
[<ffffffff812d74b8>] ? __next_cpu+0x18/0x30
[<ffffffff8103877b>] ? resched_best_mask+0x3b/0xd0
[<ffffffff810f22bb>] ? shrink_zone+0x3ab/0x500
[<ffffffff810f32bf>] ? do_try_to_free_pages+0xcf/0x470
[<ffffffff810f3965>] ? try_to_free_pages+0xa5/0x1c0
[<ffffffff810e7d5c>] ? __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x49c/0x900
[<ffffffff81050496>] ? try_to_del_timer_sync+0x76/0x110
[<ffffffff81050690>] ? process_timeout+0x0/0x10
[<ffffffff81126461>] ? khugepaged_alloc_hugepage+0x51/0xe0
[<ffffffff81061c70>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x30
[<ffffffff811266bd>] ? khugepaged+0xad/0x10e0
[<ffffffff81061c70>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x30
[<ffffffff81126610>] ? khugepaged+0x0/0x10e0
[<ffffffff81126610>] ? khugepaged+0x0/0x10e0
[<ffffffff81061706>] ? kthread+0x96/0xa0
[<ffffffff8103c6af>] ? schedule_tail+0x4f/0x110
[<ffffffff81003bd4>] ? kernel_thread_helper+0x4/0x10
[<ffffffff81061670>] ? kthread+0x0/0xa0
[<ffffffff81003bd0>] ? kernel_thread_helper+0x0/0x10

Cleaning up…
Restarting all filesystems …
Restarting tasks … done.
video LNXVIDEO:00: Restoring backlight state
TuxOnIce debugging info:
– TuxOnIce core  : 3.2
– Kernel Version : 2.6.38.4-zen
– Compiler vers. : 4.4
– Attempt number : 1
– Parameters     : 17 700428 2 1 -2 4
– Overall expected compression percentage: 50.
– Compressor is ‘lzf’.
– Block I/O active.
Used 0 pages from swap on /dev/sda6.
– Max outstanding reads 1. Max writes 0.
Memory_needed: 1024 x (4096 + 360 + 112) = 4677632 bytes.
Free mem throttle point reached 0.
– Swap Allocator enabled.
Swap available for image: 2098481 pages.
– File Allocator active.
Storage available for image: 0 pages.
– No I/O speed stats available.
– Extra pages    : 0 used/500.
– Result         : Hibernation was aborted.
: Freezing filesystems and/or tasks failed.

Somehow there seems to be a problem with nvidia-drivers-270.41.06. After downgrading to nvidia-drivers-260.19.44 tuxonice worked as usual.

Addon:

This solution was partly wrong. As I noticed later, the problem still persists occasionally. With the older nvidia-driver the probability that the problem occurs just was lower. However, the main reason  for the tuxonice abort is some incompatibility between tuxonice and the new transparent hugepage feature of the kernel. As a workaround one may disable the transparent hugepage support before suspension and reenable it afterwards. I.e. one can include something like the following in his hibernate configuration:

OnSuspend 90 echo ‘never’ > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

OnResume 90 echo ‘always’ > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

or

OnResume 90 echo ‘madvise’ > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

Jürgen

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Recently I wrote about bino, a stereoscopic video player that is usable with linux and also supports quad buffered stereo. In the meanwhile the first stable version 1.0 has been released. Its main features are:

• Support for 2D and stereoscopic 3D video in a wide variety of input formats and stereo layouts.
• Support for many 3D output methods, including anaglyph glasses, shutter glasses, autostereoscopic displays, 3D TV sets, and distributed multi-display installations such as powerwalls or Virtual Reality installations.

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild: [download#68] Download the overlay and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 1 Comment »

Starting with 2.6.36 tuxonice has been removed from zen-sources again. A few days ago the zen-sources-2.6.37_p20110325 ebuild appeared in the gentoo portage tree.  Since I did not want to stick to my old 2.6.35 kernel I patched the brand new zen-sources-2.6.37_p20110325 with tuxonice. The official tuxonice patch from tuxonice.net did not work, so I had to slightly modify it to apply cleanly on zen-sources.

Suspend to RAM works at least on my Dell Precison M65 and my Desktop, as well as suspend to disk does. Well, I have to mention that I wanted to use BFS, the brain fuck scheduler, to increase performance. This resulted in tuxonice freezing during  atomic copy when trying to hibernate, thus I had to use the CFS scheduler again.

Download the zen-sources 2.6.37_p20110325 patch here. Then apply the patch to the vanilla kernel sources avalable from kernel.org. Afterwards download my modified tuxonice patch from here: [download#64]. Then apply it and continue with the standard kernel building process.

For Gentoo users there is a more easy way: Download my modified zen-sources-overlay (including the patches) from [download#65] and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

If you want to use tuxonice include toi in your USE-flags. Then emerge zen-sources and build the kernel as you wish. It would be nice if this USE-flag and the ebuild modification find their way into the portage tree.

Tuxonice is not officially supported in current zen-sources. So If you’re using the files above, don’t report any bugs to zen-sources.org. You are on your own.

For my Precision M65 I used the following kernel config: [download#66]

For more information on the zen-sources patchset see www.zen-sources.org.

best regards

Jürgen

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Recently I basically got Flightgear to work with quad buffered stereo. The only thing that was still missing for having the Vusix VR920 head mounted display fully supported in the flight simulator was headtracking.

However, with my new headtracking driver, VR920 headtracking in Flightgear is possible at last. A good part of the work has been done by Anders Gidenstam who provided the original Nasal module, the headtracking protocol description and usage instructions for his webcam based headtracking solution for Flightgear.

Download and copy the protocol description [download#59] to $FG_ROOT/Protocol. For me (gentoo system) this location is /usr/share/games/FlightGear/Protocol/, probably for many others it is /usr/share/FlightGear/Protocol/

Afterwards download unzip the modified Nasal module [download#58] to ~/.fgfs/Nasal. It is important to use your home directory and NOT i.e. /usr/share/games/FlightGear/Nasal/.

Then make sure that the vr920 headtracking driver runs in UDP mode. If running Flightgear on the same machine as the headtracking driver, which should be the usual case, just use 127.0.0.1 as destionation IP for the driver and use 4242 as destination port. These are the default settings of the driver.

Finally run Flightgear with these options: –generic=socket,in,<hz>,,<port>,udp,headtrack –prop:/sim/headtracking/enabled=1

If you also want to have quad buffered stereo with it (you need an nvidia quadro board, with assumably a pre G80 Chip or probably an ATI FireGL, never tried that, and a stereo enabled xserver) use the patch from FlightGear with quad buffered stereo. For instructions on how to get the xserver to work in stereoscopic mode see: Vuzix VR920 with Linux and active 3D stereo

For the described configuration you can use the following little startup script:

export OSG_STEREO_MODE=QUAD_BUFFER
export OSG_STEREO=ON
fgfs –generic=socket,in,25,,4242,udp,headtrack –prop:/sim/headtracking/enabled=1

Now have much fun and enjoy a new experience with your VR920 and Flightgear in stereo with headtracking.

best regards

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, drivers, games, gentoo, linux, networking | No Comments »

Recently I wrote about bino, a stereoscopic video player that is usable with linux and also supports quad buffered stereo. In the meanwhile the versions 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 have been released. The new version includes multithreading to read, decode, and display video data in parallel, for better performance and some bugfixes.

Bino still does not work properly with linux, at least it still does not display anything on my gentoo box. The patch for bino, I provided here, does not work anymore.

Problems

At least on my gentoo box bino failed to display anything. When starting bino  it failed with a window popping up:

Cannot set GL context format

The reason for this was the same as before. Bino was requesting an alpha visual, which did not succeed. I have not seen the point in requiring an alpha visual for bino, so I just removed this. You may download the patch from here: [download#60]

Addon: The patch is only necessary when the X server does not provide an alpha visual, which may i.e. be the case when using only 16 bits of colour  depth.

Getting things to work

Download Bino from here: bino-0.9.2.tar.xy and extract it.

tar -xf bino-0.9.2.tar.xz

Afterwards apply my patches and compile Bino.

cd bino-0.9.2

patch -p0 < bino-0.9.2-quad-buffered-stereo.patch

./configure

make

make install

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the ebuild: [download#62] Download the modified overlay (it includes the patches) and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge bino and enjoy viewing your 3d movies again.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 1 Comment »