Present Perfect

Been busy with lots of stuff recently.

This weekend, I'm doing some work on GStreamer. If you don't know it, check it out, for some of you it will be the future. Anyway, it's been quite some time since a last release, so some of us decided to just get ready and do it.

So I've been fixing build issues all over the place, while two of us are trying to make RPM's as well, and we're pretty close to being ready.

As for Dave/Dina, I got this little infra-red receiver add-on for my Asus A7V motherboard. I can't get the thing to work. It's really confusing : what modules should I be using for it anyway ? I hope I can get LIRC to work on it because using a remote will be the best thing.

At work, "marketing" asked me if they could send a html page to a thousand people. *sigh* I told them if they knew how you send a html page with images in the first place, without using Frontpage. One guy's suggestion was to send the page as HTML and make all the IMG tags point to our webserver.

"So what happens when the people reading their mail are not on-line, when they popped their mail ?" Yeah, that sounded like a problem to him.

So I sighed and decided to do it anyway because if I let it lie it's gonna blow up in my face later on. So I spent an hour or two writing a simple perl script that takes a web page with images in a directory and spits out one html page with uuencoded inline images. Then another few hours to set up mailman and off it goes.

The new laptop works fine. I made an rpm for the toshutils package and sent the spec file to the author. That's open source for you.

Been busy with lots of stuff recently. This weekend, I'm doing some work on GStreamer. If you don't know it, check it out, for some of you it will be...

Got a new laptop, a Toshiba Tecra 8200. Nice thingy, but again I need to run the video card in frame buffer mode to get decent X. Oh well, the card seems fast enough for it not to matter, though I won't be playing tuxracer anytime soon.

On another note, I decided it was time to build kernel packages for Dave/Dina the right way. Right now I was custom-building the kernel and moving modules manually into the DD module, and adding these binary modules to CVS. Yeah, I know, don't add object code to CVS.

Anyway, I downloaded a red hat kernel SRPM and checked the spec file. Then I threw that away and started from scratch, and it went suprisingly easy if you forego some of the specialised stuff. Just make a config the standard way, put that config in the DD module, type make rpm, and wait half an hour. I'd have thought I'd run into more issues.

Right now I'm looking for a way for RPM to generate a DD-OS-kernel and DD-OS-modules rpm from the same spec file without trying to make a DD-OS rpm. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

Got a new laptop, a Toshiba Tecra 8200. Nice thingy, but again I need to run the video card in frame buffer mode to get decent X. Oh well, the...

So it's 6.30 in the morning and I wake up and can't get no sleep. What better time of day to try my hand at packaging a working avifile version than this ? Now that I have a clean Red Hat 7.2 system, I should be able to make some sense out it all.

Avifile is a mess, currently. Snapshots of the 0.6.0 version get released every so often, and everyone is using different ones. I want to get vcr working so for now I'll use the tarball snapshot on that page. I wish the vcr author would at least adhere to the semi-official CVS snapshots. Oh well ...

Also, the snapshots always contain symlinks to all of the autotools stuff, so I first have to fix that. Then autogen some files here and there, because avifile looks like it's a few libraries slapped on top of each other.

All the while we try to keep a clean "fixed" tarball to build the rpm from, while trying to incorporate an extra tag somewhere in the naming scheme to indicate this is a modified version of the 0.6.0 version of the 11/11 release of avifile. I hope you see why this is a mess.

Anyway, after an hour of mucking about, rpm's seem to build. Let's see if tonight's automatic recording of Dark Angel works.

You might ask yourself, Why is this guy trying to build avifile packages when there are RPM's for RedHat 7.2 available on the site ?. Well, simply because the RedHat packages on the site are built against SDL 1.1 when Redhat includes SDL 1.2. So the packages there are worthless in that regard. And forcing the install is no good either : I'm a firm disbeliever of allowing that. If rpm complains about this, then it means the package isn't well-made or isn't suitable. Simple as that !

Anyway, if you want either the modified source or the RPM's, which install on a clean Red Hat 7.2 system, download them.

So it's 6.30 in the morning and I wake up and can't get no sleep. What better time of day to try my hand at packaging a working avifile version...

What a weekend. I was going to devote three days to work on the Dave/Dina project, but stuff got in the way. Among "stuff" was trying to fix someone's cable internet connection on Windows ME. The thing was : pings to all of the sites worked on IP address, but no name lookups, no connections possible (telnet, ftp, ...), and all programs claimed to have socket errors. Re-installed Millenium in three different ways and still nothing worked. I told him to seek professional help ;)

Anyway, I finally managed to get everything converted to Red Hat 7.2. I also worked on the install disk which now works pretty smoothly. I managed to get more than one kickstart config file on the disk, and now that I understand the disk image concept more I see the logic in it. Now it's just a matter of further tuning the package selection.

What a weekend. I was going to devote three days to work on the Dave/Dina project, but stuff got in the way. Among "stuff" was trying to fix someone's cable...

I suppose everyone sometimes gets that little voice in the back of the head telling you not to try something you're about to try. Either because it's stupid or because it makes no sense or whatever ...

Sometimes it pays to listen, as I just found out. The problem was simple : while writing a kickstart file, I needed to get one file from the floppy disk which was mounted as / to the new file system. Normally you'd do this in the %post section in the kickstart configuration file.

Now, %post executes in a chroot'ed environment equivalent to your newly installed system. So there's no way to get at the file you want to install. But you can run %post without the chroot'ed environment by using --nochroot.

Only problem is, you cannot go back to the chroot'ed environment (I thought the chroot command might do the trick, but that either starts a new shell interactively, which is bad of course, or allows you to execute the one command you put behind it).

Ok, so you think of a few ways around this :

• Actually try to mount the floppy disk in the %post script and copy the file from the disk. Works, but the user needs to keep the floppy in. He probably will, but it doesn't feel right.
• Write the new file line by line from the kickstart config file. Works, but totally style-less.
• Do %post --nochroot, and execute each of the other commands (which should run in a chroot environment) prepended with chroot /mnt/sysimage. Works, but equally style-less and cumbersome.
• Do %post --nochroot, put all of the chroot'ed commands in a separate file on the disk, and do something like chroot /mnt/sysimage /post.sh. By far the best solution, but still not satisfying.

So what do you do when none of the solutions is aesthetically pleasing, and a little voice in the back of your head says : Wouldn't it be nice if you could just have two %post sections, one labeled "%post" and another labeled "%post --nochroot" and just put the right commands in the right section ?

And you think to yourself, yeah, that would be nice, but no way would that work. I'm sure the Red Hat engineers didn't code to allow that, and otherwise I would have come across that on Usenet and in the docs.

But the voice says : Try it. You know you want to.

So you do.

And what do you know ? It works.

So to all of those out there who have the voice : make sure you listen.

I suppose everyone sometimes gets that little voice in the back of the head telling you not to try something you're about to try. Either because it's stupid or because...