Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

After upgrade of Ubunto to Jaunty (9.04) release, I came across an annoying issue. The System menu on the gnome-panel is missing the "Log Out" and "Shutdown Entries". I've red in Google in ubuntuforums where discussion emerged about the topic. It seems that this missing entries are not a bug but a feature in this release of Ubuntu. To simply restore back the entries it's necessery to remove the fast user switcher from the panel. Here is a link to a blog describing the whole problem and what is causing it Ubuntu 9.04 restoring the Shut Down entry to the System menu

I've used the following Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 upgrade tutorial to safely upgrade ubuntu to Intrepid Ibex (8.10). The only thing that seemed a bit broken on the first view is splashy which seemed not to show up properly anymore.

I wanted to have my gnome windows be handled in a Vista / XP like fashion in other words I wanted my Gnome to Group Windows (that means if many Windows originating from the same source program then let them be grouped in one Window so any time you press that Window a menu pops up letting you choose between the desired Window). This window management aproach has one main advantage it saves space on your desktop and least but not last makes it much more ordered.
Here are the steps you need to follow to achieve Gnome Group Windowing.

1. Right click on the dotted section 
(that's just to the left of your windows list section) 
you should find that between "Show Desktop" 
button and the rest of the windows buttons.

2. Select "Preferences" there and then choose according to your preferences 
either: 
"Group windows when space is limited" or 
"Always group windows".

The same is also explained on on Lifehacker therefore credits go to the above article.

I needed to install jdk16 (e.g. java on my FreeBSD) system, I had some struggles doing that. It's a real pain in the ass everytime I have to install Java on FreeBSD. I have to download a bunch of files, both from Sun's website and eyesbeyond's website . Afterwards still the built failed due to failed MD5 and SHA265 checksum of bsd-jdk16-patches-4.tar.bz2. It took me some time to notice the problem and the solution to the problem was proposed by a guy in ##freebsd irc.freenode.net. The solution comes to:
1. md5 /usr/ports/distfiles/bsd-jdk16-patches-4.tar.bz2; edit /usr/ports/java/jdk16/distinfo and replace the file MD5 checksum.
2. sha256 /usr/ports/distfiles/bsd-jdk16-patches-4.tar.bz2 and again edit /usr/ports/java/jdk16/distinfo replacing with the right SHA256 checksum.
Now Thank the Lord! And hopefully enjoy your build

I wanted to have running Quake3 on my Debian GNU/Linux just like I have it running on my FreeBSD system thus.
1. I've downloaded linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run .
2. I executed :# chmod +x linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run; linux32 ./linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run

 Note: make sure you have installed linux32 and ia32-libs packages!

I tested directly executing # linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run, but that was a failure, since the self extracting binary could not recognize the amd64 system architecture
After installing it via linux32, all went smoothly. Next I needed to copy all my game pak files into

/usr/local/games/quake3/baseq3

. Remember that here it's absolutely vital to have q3config.cfg file to your baseq3 directory. To make your life easier I've tarred the Quake Arena pak files, so you can freely fetch them via this baseq3 link
Now untar the newly fetched baseq3.tar.gz to /usr/local/games/quake3/ Last step in the installation is to link the game binary to your /usr/games, I did this via
ln -sf /usr/local/games/quake3/quake3-smp /usr/games/
In your case it might be not necessary to link quake3-smp if you're not running 2 Core CPU.
Hopefully, Now with God's grace you should be having a fully functional Quake 3 Arena installation on your Debian Unstable GNU/Linux.
Enjoy!

I've noticed an ex-colleague as well as a friend of mine's recently started company who does provide just Wonderful Web Development, SQL database and data processing System Administration services. The new company is named dreamupweb . The whole project looks quite promising. The already completeled projects do testify the good quality work of the company.

I was examinining my Desktop machine which I haven't played with for a year and I found a nice dir "from_jivko". Jivko is a friend of mine who played in a nice old school band in Dobrich. The band is called Alegoria. That was awesome times, probably because this was the times of my youth, I would hardly forget all the nice Rock concerts organized in the "Mladezhki Dom" (Young's House), a place left from communism dedicated to be a center of development in the spheres of art, music, dance etc. for the teenagers and developing youth. Alegoria was a band who played actively in music genre of Punk/Rock in the period (1997 - 1999), it's possible that there latest concert was in 2000. Even though the band does existed for so little time. It was quite productive and their sound I would call unique :). In the same period there was another interesting band playing in Dobrich, their genre was mostly similar to Nu metal (Coal Chamber and alike), as well they played sort of mix of Coal Chamber and Rage Against the Machine , the letter band was named BFD. Last year a friend of mine Jivko who was a member of Alegoria playing the drums. Sent me an Archive which included some of the Alegoria songs as well as if I recall correctly one of the tracks baked by BFD, the archive also included also an old school bulgarian in the punk tradition called Abort.
Anyways Download the Alegoria songs here , the rest of the Abort songs could be found in here . I enjoyed a lot listening to this nice old crap! Hope somebody out there would enjoy it too.

Today I went for the church feast of Nativity of The Theotokos (ever virgin) - a title assigned to our Mother of God. Herein I include a bit more about the feast. And yes, I have to say OrthodoxWiki is a great resource for Orthodox Christians.

Since I've upgraded to Debian Sid / Squeeze e.g., Debian unstable I'm using compiz and the default patched debian metacity to support it. Thus until today I've it setupped to start up with
1. compiz --replace on each and every login session on my account. Today I had my doubts that this is correct since I've noticed that compiz terminates after some of the OpenGL games I have started. After some Googling I found a blog post which was discussing the issue. Here is the post how to properly start compiz in gnome . As you could read in the blog post it is wrong to start compiz with compiz --replace cause in that case metacity starts for a couple of seconds during gdm login screen as well as it has to replace metacity afterwards. It is explained that the proper way to start compiz is via the .gnomerc . BTW I was not aware that gnome had that handy .gnomerc file which pretty much like the good old .bashrc. So back to the proper way of running compiz.

 Edit ~/.gnomerc in and put export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz 

Congrats now you should have compiz to run properly.

I was digging to my old files and I digged up some old nice pictures taken with Niki (Shanar). Who has recently left us for heaven Here are the pictures themselves . I also found on my FreeBSD 7 old system some pictures of me Toto, Nomen, Niki and some others who more or less relate to my past. Here are the rest of the pictures 100SSCAN .

I wanted to have running Quake on my Debian GNU/Linux. Thus I looked as usual in google for the possible solutions. There were a couple of options I could approach. One of them was to use QuakeForge's (QF)'s Quake engine. I tried to compile Quake Forge from it's latest version 0.5.5, however that didn't worked out. Therefore I needed another solution. I wanted to make installation of quakeforge as quick as possible. After some googling I found The Following Quake Debian Repository . Next I've downloaded all the necessery deb files on the Apache and installed them. File by file. I have to install the files with debian package manager file options --force-all because I'm running a Debian amd64 release. I did the deb binaries installation using the command:
. dpkg -i --force-all quakeforge*.deb. It might be a wise idea before executing the above binary to install either quakeforge-oss or quakeforge-alsa binary file otherwise while dpkg executes dpkg-reconfigure to quakeforge-common the package configuration will fail. There is one more thing to be done before you're having a runnign version of Quake on your Linux. Be sure to download Quake's original binary pak0.file and place it into the /usr/share/games/quake/id1 directory. Of course as you could expect in Linux things almost never work perfectly. I was unpleasently suprised when I started quakeforge and I realized I can not run the good old Quake with sound effects :(.

Today I've taken my time to watch two nice. Spiritual movies on christian thematics. Here are the movies titles:
- Luis Bunnel - Nazarin (1959)
- Diary of a Country Priest (1951) Robert Bresson.

First movie is in the protestant lutheran tradition about a priest who more or less imitated our Lord and saviour Christ in his daily lives. Second one emphasizes on a life of a true Catholic priest who used to have a spiritual insight, a monk like so to say.
I felt a bit refreshed watching the movies hope that it would be of any value to somebody out there.

I wanted to make my preferred mail client application Thunderbird look a bit more decent and Gnome like. Thus I've downloaded tango_icons_for_thunderbird-0.7.0-tb.jar . The add-on is also available for download via Thunderbird's Official Addon web page . Another option for changing the outlook of Icedove (as named in Debian for some licensing reasons) is to use GNOME-Tb2 a thunderbird theme addon by Hugo Gonçalve.

I've recently been to a friend's work place for a reason and in the mean time I got a couple of suggestions of a nice christian bands. This are:
1. ApologetiX - A nice christian band who does cover a famous rock / metal / pop songs changing the lyrics with a christian bible based lyrics. More about the band here .
2. Andy Hunter - A Christian DJ who happens to be the creator of the music of some famous computer gmes like for example Need for Speed Undeground.
3. Glenn Kaiser - A band named after the guy Glenn Kaiser who was a long time guitar player and a singer in the great famous christian hard rock band "Resurrection Band" or as we fans call it in short "Rez Band".

Next I'm going to list a couple of nice Christian Industrial bands worthy to listen.
1. Argyle Park
2. Klank
3. BrainChild
4. Chatterbox
5. Circle of Dust
6. Cyber Shadow
7. Juggernautz
8. X-Propagation

Something else really valueable to me is a band called: Neuropunk Ru, I've downloaded this from another friend of mine known under the alias Static. I have to express my gratitude to him for sharing this valueable peace of music with me.

I've recently upgraded my Debian as you've probably red in my previous posts, anyways. I've noticed that after the upgrade I couldn't play parallel sound streams of let's say rhythmbox and audacious. So logically I started looking for a fix. First I tried to install the

paprefs

debian package. That nice gtk interface for configuring pulseaudio includes a menu called

 Simultaneous Output 

there I've ticked the

 Add virtual output device for simultaneous output on all local sound cards 

hoping that this would solve my issues. However that was no go, so I googled around looking for a solution and I came upon The following forum thread discussing howto solve the simultaneous sound issues. I tried some of the solutions proposed there and figured out the fix for me.
Here is the solution itself:

1. I've created .asoundrc file in my home directory containng:

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
    }

    ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
    }

    pcm.!default {
    type pulse
    }

    ctl.!default {
    type pulse
    }

I needed to restart my gnome session in order to make the changes in .asoundrc noticeable to pulseaudio although probably simply restarting the pulseaudio server would be a solution that won't require to restart your current gnome session. Cheers!

I've loosed big time trying to compile ipw3945 on my debian amd64 system running kernel 2.6.30, unfortunately at the end I couldn't make ipw3945 run correctly. However I'll try to explain just in case if somebody out there succeeds in running the ipw3945 driver on kernel 2.6.30. First I needed to compile the ieee80211-1.2.18 subsystem correctly. That gave me a hard time cause the damned thing won't compile on my kernel version. I've googled about the solution and had to combine a couple of solutions before I succeed compiling. Here is what was required
1. First in ieee80211.module.c change proc_net for init_net.proc_net.
2. Next change in ieee80211_crypt_wep.c and ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c .page for .page_link
3. Next download ieee80211_wx.c-2.6.27.patch.txt
4. Patch ieee80211-1.2.18 e.g. in my case: # cd /usr/src/ieee80211-1.2.18; patch -p0 < ieee80211_wx.c-2.6.27.patch.txt
5. Overwrite the file ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c in /usr/src/ieee80211-1.2.18 with the following ieee80211_crypt_tkip.c file.
6. Now with God's help you might try: # make && make install

Now let's proceed to the compilation of the ipw3945 driver itself.

I've used the the ipw3945-1.2.2 driver from the Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG Driver Website . In kernels newer than 2.6.22 on 64 bit architectures in order to make the driver compile, you have to apply the fix-for-64-bits-2.6.22-onwards.patch patch.
Now enter the ipw3945-1.2.2 source directory and execute patch -p0 < fix-for-64-bits-2.6.22-onwards.patch ,hopefully it should patch correctly.I had to also use the ipw3945-1.2.2.patch patch.
Again patch it with: # patch -p0 < ipw3945-1.2.2.patch.

Next in order to compile it I had to execute: # make IEEE80211_INC=/usr/src/ieee80211-1.2.18 IEEE80211_IGNORE_DUPLICATE=y && make install. Next I have downloaded the ipw3945d-1.7.22 . Untarred the archive file
# tar -zxvf ipw3945d-1.7.22.tgz and last but not least:
# cp -rpf x86_64/ipw3945d /etc/init.d/ The ipw3945 loaded correctly with modprobe ipw3945, however the wireless device wasn't detected ... Even though the failure to make the ipw3945 driver running what I did gave me hope that eventually if I invest some more time and efforts attempting to make it work I could eventually succeed and enjoy the benefits of a better wireless networks signal strengths. Until that happens I'll hold up to the newer iwl3945 to use my wireless.

I've happily installed and use compiz-gnome. In order to succesfully run compiz I was required to execute it via the command
1. # compiz --replace &
Compiz broke the default behaviour of some of my assigned keys like for example the nice handy Alt+F2 Run Application dialog box. That made me irritated and therefore I wanted to have the handy feature working as before. The suggested solution to the situation was proposedby user kiprit on the following post in ubuntuforums . I will quote here what the valueable post reads:
Start Compiz Config Settings Manager Go to General Options, under Commands tab under the commands fold, command line 0, type: gnome-run go to "key bindings" fold, Run command 0, assign Alt+F2
It seems gnome for some reasons does not include application that invokes the Gnome Application Run menu. To fix that somebody out there has written a small program in C language that refers to the Run Application dialog.
Download the program gnome-run.c here . To properly compile the program use:
2. gcc -o gnome-run gnome-run.c -L/usr/lib/X11 -lX11
If you're lucky gnome-run should be now poping up the Run Application dialog.
Afterwards please follow the instructions in above's forum post . I wasn't completely happy with the solution because gnome-run doesn't execute the Run Application dialog front focused. I've googled for other swift way to execute commands through a command and I came upon gmrun . Happily for me gmrun was already included in a packaged deb binary so all I had to do is install it via apt-get install gmrun and set it for execution on alt+f2 key press again as explained above.

I decided to upgrade my Debian to Squeeze on my Thinkpad R61 because I was not happy with the software prebundled with Debian Lenny 5 is already one year behind the recent versions available in unstable.
The update wasn't anything special as a procedure. I've googled around to find a tutorial or somebody else experience on the topic and I stumbled upon The following upgrade instructions . I've followed literally the steps described there.

1. aptitude update
2. aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
3. aptitude full-upgrade

After that I had to confirm a couple of times that I do agree the selected packages for upgrade to proceed. After the packages were downloaded and installed, I was required to decide if I want to keep some of the old custom configuration files I've edited or accept the package maintainer version. This was the hardest part of the upgrade since I have to check file by file what custom settings have I set in a numerous conf files. After some time when all that was over. I had to execute again
4. aptitude full-upgade, one more or times until no more packages were left for upgrade.
. Then I executed,
5. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and upgraded even some more packages :). After that I had fully functional update. Debian Unstable Squeeze/Sid prooved to run correctly, it comes with kernel 2.6.30, Gnome 2.6.26.1. Right after I did login into my Gnome Profile, an error message poped-up. I did a quick check in Google about the problem just to find The following Bug Report . The gnome-settings-daemon package that was problematic is 2.6.24 just to compare the rest of the gnome package versions are 2.6.26. The suggested solution to the problem was to install gnome-setting-daemon from Debian Unstable or simply ignore the error message, since the message showed up and seemed not to have any impact on the gnome operation. Many things changed there behaviour like keyboard settings and the way the system works. That irritated me a lot. My video players (mplayer, vlc) subtitles in cyrillic (cp1251) aren't showing correctly as well. I have to note here that my default language settings are on a purpose set to en_US.UTF-8. I'm still looking for a permanent solution to the problem. I've discovered that if I do
set: # export LANG=bg_BG.CP1251 to my gnome-terminal and then execute the players the cyrillic show up correctly. I've tried various things and configurations in both mplayer and vlc. My current mplayer.conf settings are:

zoom=1
subfont-encoding=unicode
subcp=cp1251
subfont-autoscale=1
subfont-text-scale=3,60
subfont-osd-scale=6
font=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/arhangai/arhangai.ttf
framedrop=yes
slang=bg
alang=bg

This settings are reported to work by many people out there and they really do if I export my LANG to bg_BG.CP1251, however with a different LANG settings they fail to work :(.
Right after the upgrade I was also experiencing warnings during boot, proclaiming messages like:
WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
. To get rid of this annoying messages I had to enter /etc/modprobe.d/ and assure myself that all file names possess the extension .conf.
To sum up I was quite disappointed of my stupid idea to upgrade my debian distro to unstable. I would probably not upgrade it if I was aware of the consequences ...