On a gentoo system you may get the error

QA Notice: Package has poor programming practices which may compile but will almost certainly crash on 64bit architectures

during emerge. This is usually a wanted behaviour since one does not want to have broken packages installed, but sometimes you may want to decide yourself or you need the program and can live with crashes that may occur under certain circumstances. As far as I know portage does not give us an easy method to override this.

You may change this behaviour by changing line 477 in /usr/lib/portage/bin/misc-functions.sh to i.e.

if [[ ${abort} == “disabled” ]] ; then

After emerging the brocken package you usually want to change the line back to

if [[ ${abort} == “yes” ]] ; then

to prevent having broken packages on your system without knowing about it.

Hoping this information is of some help.

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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One year ago I provided a gentoo ebuild for mplayer which included support for quad-buffered stereo, enabling mplayer to display stereoscopic movies like the great movie Avatar3D I watched in cinema today. To learn more about the movie look here and here. Sadly the patch I referenced there does not apply over newer mplayer versions. So I had to modify the original patch from Stuart Levy to work again with newer mplayer versions. You may download the updated patch from here:

[download#35]

New version available!

The patch should work at least with nvidia quadro boards, probably with some others. It can be used with CRT and generic shutter glasses or HMDs like the Vusix VR920. Some stereoscopic sample movies for trying it out can be found on www.3d.wep.dk.

For Gentoo users I also modified the mplayer ebuild from portage to include the patch. The modified ebuild is available here:

[download#36]

New version available!

The older ebuild is still available on mygnu.de.

To use the ebuild it just copy it to /usr/local/portage/media-video/mplayer and copy the the patch to the “/usr/local/portage/media-video/mplayer/files” directory.  You probably have to create these directories. Then run

ebuild /usr/local/portage/media-video/mplayer/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20091026-r1.ebuild digest

Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf.

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then just re-emerge mplayer.

Now start mplayer with -vo gl2:stereo and enjoy the experience in the 3rd dimension again.

Jürgen

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 9 Comments »

After upgrading my system from libsmbios-2.0.3 to libsmbios-2.2.19 my scripts for setting up wireless failed. After a short search on dell linux wiki I found out, that some Scripts have got a new name. So dellWirelessctl is now smbios-wireless-ctl. The usage seems to be the same.

What is libsmbios?

It is a cross OS library intended to be used to obtain common information available in BIOS using a unified API. Currently, it can programmatically access any information in the SMBIOS tables. It also has the ability to obtain Dell system-specific information such as the Dell System ID number, service tag, and asset tag. Future plans include APIs for $PIR, and mptable mapping.

If you want to know more about libsmbios, have a look at http://linux.dell.com/libsmbios/main/cmdlinetools.html

I hope this information is useful for you

best regards

Thorsten

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Today I found this petition for Gimp. Have a look and support gimp. It seems that gimp should be removed from the next ubuntu release. There for have a look at Bring Out The Gimp petition. Below is a copy from this site. Now Sign the Petition and stay tuned.

To:  GNU/Linux major distributions

We, the undersigned, kindly ask all major distributions not to cripple their release CD’s by removing important applications like OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and others.

These applications may have their set of problems. Granted. Let’s work on them as well.

However, removing such important applications in order to save space for any “current trendy application” just because said application depends on bloated, problematic and polemic runtime environments reveals a worrysome mindset: form over substance.

If the functionality said application provides, is also provided by another application which is far leaner, then please fix the problems with the leaner applications rather than removing important applications such as The GIMP.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

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Today I patched the  brand new zen-sources-2.6.31-r2 with tuxonice. Again it required the modified tuxonice patch of my last ebuild.

Suspend to RAM works at least on my Dell Precison M65 as well as suspend to disk does.

Download the zen-sources 2.6.31-zen2 patch here: zen-sources.org. Then apply the patch to vanilla kernel sources. Afterwards download my modified tuxonice patch from here: [download#29]. Then apply it.

For Gentoo users there is a more easy way: Download my modified overlay (including the patches) from [download#33] 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 zen-sources-toi and buld the kernel as you wish.

Tuxonice is not officially supported in 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#34]

All Information regarding the iwl3945 driver, the aha152x pcmcia scsi card and cpu undervolting in my last post on zen-sources-toi still apply to this version.

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

best regards

Jürgen

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The iptables mirror target I published here does not work anymore with kernel version 2.6.31. You can download the newer version for 2.6.31 and probably future kernels here:

[download#32]

To build the module, boot  the kernel you want to use the module with. Afterwards unpack the archive, run the compile.sh script and the install.sh script.

Now you may use the mirror target in place of the reject or drop target  in the INPUT, FORWARD and PREROUTING chains, like this in your firewall script:

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -j MIRROR

Beware: The use of the mirror target may have strange results, i.e. if you want to connect to the iptables protected machine, you may end up connecting to the local machine without recognizing it. It also may use much bandwith. Worst case: if you have two machines using this module they may end up playing pingpong. So you have been warned, use with caution and at your own risk. For more information see: MIRROR target.

Downloads for older kernel versions are below. Notice the version numbering 2.6.25 works for kernels up to 2.6.27. 2.6.28 also works for 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels.

[download#12] [download#13] [download#14]

These versions do not work with 2.6.35 kernels. See iptables mirror target for kernel version 2.6.35 for the newer one.

regards

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in kernel, linux, security | 3 Comments »

Today I patched the  new zen-sources-2.6.31-r1 with tuxonice. This time it was a bit more complicated since the two patches are conflicting. So I modified the tuxonice patch to apply cleanly over the zen-kernel.

Suspend to RAM works at least on my Dell Precison M65 as well as suspend to disk does.

Download the zen-sources 2.6.31-zen1 patch here: zen-sources.org. Then apply the patch to vanilla kernel sources. Afterwards download my modified tuxonice patch from here: [download#29]. Then apply it.

For Gentoo users there is a more easy way: Download my modified overlay (including the patches) from [download#30] 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 zen-sources-toi and buld the kernel as you wish.

To work around the black screen problem with some nvidia-drivers versions occuring with 2.6.30 kernels, discussed at gentoo forums, I had to upgrade to nvidia-drivers-190.18. Most probably this problem persists with 2.6.31. Strangely the issue did only occur on my Precision M65 with a Quadro FX350M. It did not occur with the Quadro FX3400 in my Desktop PC, Nvidia-drivers-185.18.31 are running there without any problems.

Tuxonice is not officially supported in 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#31]

If you want to use all channels with the iwl3945 driver change the line static char *ieee80211_regdom = “US”; to static char *ieee80211_regdom = “JP”; in the file net/wireless/reg.c.

If you also own of those old 16 Bit Adaptec pcmcia scsi cards using the aha152x_cs module you might want to enable it also for 64 Bit kernels. It was masked for 64 Bit kernels somewhere before 2.6.13. I was unable to find out the reason for this so I tried to compile the module. When I insert the card, the module loads properly. Since the drive I could test it with, is currently attached to another box and in use, I can´t try it out for the moment. Once I tried I´ll keep you updated.

To enable the driver remove the line

depends on !64BIT

in the config PCMCIA_AHA152X section in /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/pcmcia/Kconfig and select the module in menuconfig.

Addon: I tried a SCSI cdrom with this and it works perfectly. I just filed a bug on this on bugzilla.kernel.org and hope for the driver being unmasked for future  64 Bit kernels.

If you are using this kernel on a notebook with i.e. a Core2 CPU you might be interesting to undervolt your CPU to save power and to produce less heat (keeps the fan off longer). This works like a charm on my M65. Information on this topic can be found here: aldeby.org. The linux-pch patch mentioned there is already included in zen-sources, thus you only have to perform the userspace part begnning at (3).

For image compression in tuxonice include Compressor lzo in your suspend2.conf file.

Sadly the iptables mirror target I published here does not work anymore with the 2.6.31 kernel. A newer version will be available soon on mygnu.de.

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

best regards

Jürgen

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Posted in gentoo, kernel, linux, zen-sources | 1 Comment »