Linux on a usb drive

Today I decided to play around with Linux on a usb drive. I want slackware but could not find zip slack. So I googled a bit and found wowarea and damn small linux these boch lead me to Slax. Slax is based on slackware. So I figured I better Download it.

I installed the Slax image on my usb stick, a 4GB pleomax, unfortunately I had to use window$ for this installation :( Nevertheless, the installation went smoothely and Slax booted smothely on my first usb boot.

I then attempted to create a specific package for Slax, namely netbeans IDE as I'll have to use this in my new job. I installed netbeans on a redhat machine, yawm, and used the slackware package approach.

I installed the netbeans IDE, the profiler, the c/c++ support and the CLDC packages. I also had to install the latest JDK to get the darn thing running. See previous posts for this. Then, I created the packages from this installation. I grouped all the netbeans packages into one huge slackware package, but I'll divide these into a package each later.

Once the package was done I searched for the tgz2mo program, but couldn't find it anywhere for redhat. So I booted with the pendrive and mounted /tmp to a place on the stick with enough space, 1-2 GB.

Then, then I used tgz2mo and the package was created, I inserted the package with uselivemod and fired up the netbeans IDE. This did not start directly since it could not find JDK. I then installed the JDK module and activated netbeans with --jdk-path pointing to the JDK installation.

That fired it up, everything but the emulator worked, this was due to the same GLIBC problem as I met earlier on the redhat installation. I installed the Slax module containing the GLIBC library but that completely broke the Slax installation.

It seems like the boot attempts to install the 2.5 files so I cant boot slax now. I'll see if I can remove the GLIBC 2.5 files and boot teh darn thing again. Then I'll do a proper GLIBC package for Slax created from my fresh slackware distro.

I'll let ya know once I have it running again.

Upgrading to openoffice 2.0

Since the Linux box updating has now started I also decided to update the open office package. First I had to rid the old installation:
rpm -e openoffice.org-i18n openoffice.org-kde openoffice.org-libs openoffice.org

The above removed all openoffice 1.1 dependencies. Then the latest open office package needs to be installed:
tar -zxvf OOo_2.2.1_LinuxIntel_install_da_rpm.tar.gz

Since the installation script did not seem to work for me, I decided to use RPM to get the packages in manually. To avoid dependency problems here a one liner:
ls *.rpm |xargs rpm -ivh

Yes I like to know what is going on ;)
Now all you have to do is create the links you need for the old open office desktop links to work,
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/swriter /usr/bin/oowriter
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/scalc /usr/bin/oocalc
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/sdraw /usr/bin/oodraw

Finally a link to the openoffice common program:
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/soffice /usr/bin/soffice

That's it you're now ready for the open document standard. Have phun!? Notice, that my OO could not import the old user settings? Seems there was an error in a script file. This may very well be because my installation was way to old!

Firefox and thunderbird upgrade

Today I updated to firefox and thinderbird version 2.0. I also decided to get rid of the redhat packages as the firefox and thunderbird updates are usually distributed in tarballs . Change to superuser and then issue:
rpm -e firefox thunderbird

While you're at it remove the whole old mozilla stuff as well since it's nolonger needed. On my system I had to do:
rpm -e mozilla-devel mozilla-js-debugger mozilla-dom-inspector mozilla-mail devhelp mplayerplug-in mozilla

Notice: You can get the dependencies by issuing just rpm -e mozilla, since the dependencies will keep the rpm manager from removing the package.

To remove the rpm's, Next, get rid of the old version's entries in /usr/lib/firefox-xx and /usr/lib/thunderbird-xx by:
su -c "rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox-xxx /usr/lib/thunderbird-xx"

Now extract the latest firefox and thunderbird to the preferred location by:
tar -zxvf thunderbird-2.0.tar.gz --directory /usr/lib
tar -zxvf firefox-2.0.tar.gz --directory /usr/lib

create the links to the installed applications in the /usr/bin/ directory by:
ln -s /usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-2.0/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Testing the installation:
firefox --version
Should produce something like:
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2007 mozilla.org

Edit:- 03 September 2007:
Just after the installation I wanted to add the new calendar support to Thunderbird, and the local weather should be viewable in my new Firefox :) I just love these small application addons

Netbeans mobility pack installation

Phew, it took a great deal of try and error before it finally managed to get installed, this was mainly because my Linux system was very outdated. I'm running on an old redhat ETP 3.0 and netbeans 5.5.1 is very new in comparison.

I had to update the glibc library to 2.4 (or above) on my system because the netbeans mobility pack emulator depend on this library. On most new distributions, like slackware 12, debian , and ubuntu this is no problem since they all use glibc version > 2.4

To install the netbeans SW on an updated system just follow these steps:

1. Change to root
su -

2. Check that you have everything
ls *.bin

jdk-1_5_0_12-nb-5_5_1-linux-ml.bin
jdk-6u2-linux-i586.bin
jdk-6u2-nb-5_5_1-linux-ml.bin
netbeans-5_5_1-linux.bin
netbeans-c++-5_5_1-linux.bin
netbeans_mobility-5_5_1-linux.bin
netbeans-profiler-5_5_1-linux.bin
sjsas_pe-9_0_01-nb-5_5_1-ml-fcs-bin-linux.bin
sun_java_wireless_toolkit-2_5_1-linux.bin


3. chmod all the binaries
ls *.bin|xargs chmod u+x

4. Install the jdk
./jdk-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin

The reason for using this file and not the tarball is that it actually contains rpm's. These rpm's will ensure that the netbeans installer(s) can see the new jdk you just installed.

5. Install netbeans 5.5.1 package
./netbeans-5_5_1-linux.bin

6. Install the c/c++ add on
./netbeans-c++-5_5_1-linux.bin

7. Install the profiler
./netbeans-profiler-5_5_1-linux.bin

8. Install the Mobility package The actual CLDC sdk :)
./netbeans_mobility-5_5_1-linux.bin

This way all netbean components are placed in:
/opt/netbeans/

To try netbeans IDE create a link/symlink/set the path/ or execute the file: /opt/netbeans-5.5.1/bin/netbeans

This is the final result of a generated test midlet running in the netbeans simulation environment:

My system was a modified redhat ETP, but I guess that it'll run on most rpm based machines. Perhaps I should try a slackware installation to verify everything.

Problems:
Installion went fine, so did creating a project test midlet. If you could execute the midlet and simulate it youre done. But if executing the emulator failed due to wrong GLIBC version, follow the step below as well.

I had to update glibc on my instalation to 2.4. This is not a trivial task as it may break your entire system. And yikes, the glibc 2.4 installation failed, some issues with one og the gcc compilers libraries :( So I installed the latest gcc as well. And yes it takes a while!
Read the following howto carefully.

The fast way to do this is to find the appropriate rpm's somewhere and then install these using the --nodeps option. This is because the rpm's have interdependencies that cannot be resolved.

The full expressing looks something like this:
rpm -Uvh --nodeps binutils-2.16.91.0.6-5.i386.rpm glibc-common-2.4-11.i386.rpm glibc-2.4-11.i686.rpm glibc-headers-2.4-11.i386.rpm glibc-utils-2.4-11.i386.rpm glibc-devel-2.4-11.i386.rpm gdb-6.3.0.0-1.134.fc5.i386.rpm gcc-4.1.1-51.fc5.i386.rpm gcc-c++-4.1.1-51.fc5.i386.rpm

Notice the above is quite rough on your system.! You can actually break the systems stability if you do not resolve all the dependencies for all the packages.

Grep

I sometimes forget the syntax, so in order not to forget heres a link to one of the best Linux blogs available: Grep magic

PS3 the wonderfull new toy

Just in, PS3, damn what a fine piece of machinery. After spending many evening as a lego starwars character or as a Member of the Corleone family I decided to get the PS3 to run as a Multimedia center. Here's how get the PS3 running as a Hd recorder with a small USB TV input device.

DVD, AVI and the rest of the video world

A long time ago when I bought my first DVD player here in Denmark I didn't need to worry about regions. Since the law of my contry did not bother about these things. We simply allowed all regions as we where a free country.

On a vacatin to the US of A I bought a number of DVD's that I found interesting , good and could not get as region 1 movies. Besides most European movies has been rated differently and are therefore not the original movie once they are released in Europe.

Then I bought a new DVD player, but something had changed! We where no longer a free country, the regions on our players where locked! So all my movies could now lolonger be played on my new DVD player. Why????

I decided to start converting them to something I could watch on my mac and my new player. For this I needed a good tool. The darwinport's Handbrake seemed like the answer to my call. I then changed the region on my mac for 1 and started ripping all my dvd's from the US one by one.

Then I needed a good player that handled all videoformats. I found the VLC player. This player took all my troubles away. It plays AVI, VOB and what ever you could imagine.

Why WMA files for gods sake?

This Xmas I bought a song on the web. The hit of this Xmas. But I cannot play it om my mac because the file is in WMA format.

How stupid! Why cant these distribution sites use a regular format like mp3???

I wanted to listen to my new song, so I started looking for some converter tools so I could listen to my newly bought song. I found switch.

Apparently I wasen't the only one with the problem, since Dave taylor knew. Thanks Dave.

TOR

I got sick and tiered of internet commercials!!! I hate those commercials. I got tiered of internet statistics and server traffic. So I decided to install TOR.

This beautiful distributed network tool is no less than fantastic. Ok my bandwidth is reduced a bit, but the reduction is worth it, since you rid all the crap.

After the installation in Firefox and Thunderbird the world has become much more anomymous ..... Ahhhh the commercial free life.

Stuff for kids

Based on this article from The Linux Journal I decided to download some of the things in their Mac format
Tux Paint - Download, Tux type , Mr potato head, Tux on the run & finally The Free Range Community–Linux Training Centre Project (fraw).

GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual

Emacs Lisp & the GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual

ScummVW

Speaking of good clean family entertainment you can trust!

Need I say more?

Well ok DOTT and of course the world known game comic Day After the Day of the Tentacle. Most of the world famous Lucas Art Games are now known as Abandonware. This means that you can get them for free.

I downloaded a couple of Monkey Island from this place www.downloadcentral.dk. They have most of the famous ones. Problem is though they are all packed in the ACE format.

Luckily this is ported with darwinports, so sudo install grace will dump the much appreciated unpacker on your box.

When it's done you should be able to unpack you ownloaded game by:
unace e monkey.ace I created a directory for each game I downloaded, and extracted the game in there. Then I added the game to scumVM.

Subversion & mail man

A long forgotten tool is the command line mail, I decided to start using it again for sending attachments. As this is much neater.

Then I decided to write a block entry here but someone bet me to it: 'SHELLdorado - Sending files as mail attachments'. SHELLdorado is a great resource for shell stuff.

With nothing better to do I decided to read the latest Linux Journal, especially the Subversion article. Rumor has it that subversion will be replacing cvs.

I'm not that big a user of cvs but I decided to have a look at subversion and use for handling my general set up on both my powerbook and my office linux box.

sudo port install subversion ...... Did I mention I'm in love with Darwinports? Then simply follow the article to create repository, or just read the Subversion documentation.

The Gimp Deux

I need the gimp, luckily darwinports.org has a resent port of gimp2, and you can install it by typing:

sudo port install gimp2

Wait .......... Once the installation is done typing:

gimp

in a shell'll launch the application. Now you want to set your own splash screen. I choose mine from the GIMP 10th Anniversary Splash Contest. Just dump the splash image as

~/.gimp2.2/gimp-splash.png

There's loats more configuration for the gimp where that came from check the Gimp man page for details.

I found, however, that my XDarwin application needed a good window manager instead of 'just' using TVM, which it is born with. So, I installed Oroborus for Mac. This gives the nice transparent frames just like Tiger.... Grrrr...

All I had to do was to change to my preferred key mapping from the USA.xmodmap to DK.xmodmap. Then Orobrus was good to go. With all the work related issues ready I guess I'm ready to go else where, it's entertainment time: scumVM

Emacs revisited

I already installed auqa emacs but that application did not copy an paste at all :( So I decided to install GnuEmacs.

First, I tried the binary package but that didn't work ;( So, I attempted to build the latest version for mac. In the instructions the cvs commando has been replaced. So do a

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs

Cause the cvs ssh has been replaced with the pserver.

To build enacs for mac use the carbon app framework

cd emacs
./configure --enable-carbon-app --without-x
make bootstrap
sudo make install

According to the ./emacs/mac/INSTALL file, The application is installed in /Application/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

I found mine in /Applications/Emacs.app. I don't know is this application is the one mentioned in the INSTALL file, I think it is, but that doesen't really matter.

I simply dragged the Emacs.app to the Dock for fast and easy execution. There's a great reference for setting up your mac for programming

MagicPoint

Well, once the text processing progam of the office suite was installed I found that I was now lacking my favorite presentation tool.

I hate Powerpoint and most of its humongous cusins. That's why I setteled once again for MagicPoint. Editable from Emacs!

Documentation can be found at http://www.freeos.com/articles/3648/ and the SYNTAX file from the tarball.

Getting an office suite

On my old slack box I used to run OpenOffice. On my Mac box I want to run OpenOffice as well. So I started looking around to find the mac compatible version. Notice the X11 at the end of the filename.

This means that X11 is needed to run the darn thing! But phear not, here's how to install open office and x11 and even the official apples guide. This was my starting point! I spend some time looking at instalation results and comments before I decided to go else where.

After googling about I choose NeoOffice and XDarwin. Both installed from binary images with no setup, the easy way. First I installed XDarwin, then NeoOffice. This was really easy all you have to do is follow the instructions for both items.

Once you're done two application icon are added to the /Applications/ directory, namely: neooffice and xdarwin. Started NeoOffice and it was like my old slack box! I can start documenting my work for work ;)

One thing happened though, this was after installing the XDarwin application X11 server. My dock changed to the default values? I guess that this came from startig the xservices in Tiger but I'm just guessing here.

I could change the dock back to my prefered setting, and it is still keeping them so I'm a still a happy guy.

Configuring apache for PHP

The next step I need is to get apache running on my machine. I need it for maintaining my website, not that I spend a lot of time maintaining this :)

I made a stupid mistake, I completely forgot that MAC OS X was based on FreeBSD. So, I installed apache and PHP via darwinports. Installation went great though!

sudo port -v install apache2
sudo port -v install php

In case you ever need to install them ;) I then struggled and suffered for a while until I realized that all I had to do was to enable the web server on my box, since it was already there!

The you'll have to update apache to run with PHP, if you need to do PHP stuff. Basically all you need to do is to remove the comments from the PHP parts of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file.

You'll have to be super user to make this change so:
sudo emacs /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
Change emacs with your favorite editor, if you prefer.

The remove the comments from these lines:
LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so, and AddModule mod_php4.c

Usually you'll have to add the application types, but my file was born with the IfModule mod_php4.c section I didn't

Add the lines:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Now all you have to do a small PHP page to test your new PHP enabled web server.

The web server has two sets of sites enabled. These are available from the UI the first one is, the machines main website http://localhost present at the local path: /Library/WebServer/Documents/

The second one is http://localhost/~user/ present in your home directory under ~/Documents/Sites/

I never managed to get PHP enabled in my specific user space. Not that it matters much since I simply use the main website on the box anyway.

darwinports.org

Darwinports the next step. This i just one of the ways to get all the familiar Unix applications running om my machine. Here's how to get the port installed.

There's a similar project called Fink, which I have not tested or used yet. Fink is a port of debian package handling system. There's a guy who blogged a comparison af Fink and Darwin.

I tested Darwin by installing wget, one of my favorite Unix tools, which I found that I really missed. sudo port -v install wget did the trick nicely, And I can now grap those sites using wget.

Dashboard

The first feature I started lovin' is the Dashboard. An unique apple thing, that from a clink on the mouse or F12, that bring to life a number of small and graphically cool applications.

I have my gmail, wifi finder, network traffic, and .mac available. Then I have my calendar and the two sets of world clocks my own, Copenhagen, and my sisters, San Diego, time. Plus, the weather. Not to mention a calculator, and the much appreciated iTunes lyrics karaoke widget.

There are thousands of widgets available, and even a small and neat tutorial. The apple site is packed with cool tips on this here yet another one.