Aigarius Blog

This is highly unofficial, but if you want to upload your World of Warcraft statistics to WoWHead in Linux, then you might be able to do so by using the following script. You will need curl and wget installed.

(Continued)

Popularity: 16% [?]

With the cost of plane tickets approaching 2000 USD it is rather hard to sell me going to the Debconf 8 as that can be approximated as 3-4 months of my income. I did apply for travel sponsorship, but due to some kind of brainfart I misread “Amount I am unable to fund myself” as “Amount I am able to fund myself” and thus asked for far less money than I actually need. Therefore, after the Debconf team strictly stated that the requested amount can not be changed at this point, it has become clear that I cann’t come to Debconf 8.

/sadpanda

I would still love to come if there was sponsorship money to cover my fare and even suggested putting me to the end of the sponsorship priority list, but apparently that is not happening. Have fun, and see you all in Spain in 2009.

Popularity: 25% [?]

I am having a problem of my tiny Fonera router restart on me endlessly whenever I have two laptops with Azureus running connect to the network, so I started to investigate. I could not get any meaningful error messages from the router before it reboots and the only weird thing I could find in the statistics was the huge number of active connections. When I have one laptop with Skype running, Firefox browsing a few pages and Internet radio playing the number of active connections was around 200. Starting Liferea for RSS bumps that to 300. Nothing serious. However, as soon as I start Azureus (with no active downloads!) the number of active connections jumps by 400-500, starting one download adds another 300 connections. That is despite setting a maximum global limit of active connections to 100 in Azureus preferences. After 5-10 minutes the number of connections goes down to 500 (with one download active), but with two laptops with Azureus in the same wireless network the initial spike is high enough to kill the router in 2-3 minutes, force it to reboot and then do it all over again, and again, and again …

No I am thinking whether to spend around 50€ for another router or try to work with Azureus folks to try to fix this.

Popularity: 33% [?]

I have this USB hard drive enclosure that can also share the files on the local network (LAN DRIVE HD9-U2LA, vendor id - 05e3:0702). Due to that it has an operating system and some other software inside. Unfortunately this software is rather slow to start and that cause the following kernel error when trying to mount this enclosure:

[90459.236000] usb 5-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
[90459.368000] usb 5-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[90459.368000] scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[90459.368000] usb-storage: device found at 9
[90459.368000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[90464.368000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[90470.148000] usb 5-5: USB disconnect, address 9
[90470.148000] scsi 4:0:0:0: scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery


The device is fine, it is just slow to start. To work around this bug you can change /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/delay_use from a default 5 second delay to something larger. 15 seconds worked fine in my case.


echo 15 | sudo tee /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/delay_use


Update:
To do that permanently, create a file in /etc/modprobe.d (with a name slow_storage for example) that contains such line:


options usb_storage delay_use=15


Popularity: 24% [?]

My girlfriend is annoyed with USA timekeeping. More particularly with the way Sunday is the first day of the week in the Gnome calendar applet that shows up when you click on the time applet. After some searching I am unable to find how to change that short of changing the source code.

Help me, lazyweb!

Edit: yes it was meant to be Sunday and not Saturday.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Everyone knows that Webmin is nasty - it does things in wrong way on a pure and nice Debian (and Ubuntu) systems and for some reason is not included in Debian (post-sarge) or Ubuntu. That does not inspire confidence in a root-running web based software to say the least.
I have a need to have a Linux server and give an administrator the ability to add/remove users, configure some LAMP settings, some email settings (SMTP, POP, IMAP, Spam/Virus protection), Samba and those kinds of everyday system administration tasks on a SOHO Linux server without having to know much about Linux.

Unfortunately I am very hard pressed to find anything that I could just set up and forget. Does anyone have any good experiences on this?

Popularity: 38% [?]

If you are playing World of Warcraft on a Debian or Ubuntu system with newest Wine packages from WineHQ, then you might run into a problem - WoW-2.1.2.6803-to-2.1.3.6898-enUS-patch.exe files will crash on Wine 0.9.40 with some nastygrams sent in the direction of its mshtml implementation. Downgrade to 0.9.33 (like the version in feisty) and the patching will work just fine.

Popularity: 47% [?]

Many manuals of installing and using World of Warcraft (or simply WoW) in Linux using Wine (Windows emulation) are outdated and provide lots of complex instructions for old Wine version. The truth is very simple:

1. Take a recent Wine version. Any version from this year (2007) will do. Debian and Ubuntu users can either use the wine from the latest releases of the distros or use the winehq.org repositories.
2. Install WoW via the usual installer
3. Edit $WOW/WTF/Config.wtf and add following lines:
   
SET gxApi "OpenGL"
SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "100"

4. Run ‘wine regedit’ and set HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Wine->OpenGL->DisabledExtensions to “GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object” (you will need to create this string value)

That is it! You can now simple run ‘wine WoW.exe’ and play the game. Updates also work perfectly. The speed is a bit faster then in the other operating systems and (just like in MacOs X) you can have all your software opened on one virtual desktop, WoW on another and switch between them instantly.

Popularity: 36% [?]

After last post about a FHS amendment to address the structure of user’s home folders, I received a lot of comments and there is one very significant thing that can be changed in the proposal - instead of having $HOME/{.data|.cache|.config}/appname structure, to change that to a mandatory $HOME/.library/appname/{cache|config|…} . This version still has all the benefits of the first solution (configuration for an application can be easily identified and erase, and all cache can easily be excluded from backups using “$HOME/.library/*/cache” regexp) and also has additional benefits, main of which is the ability to later introduce the concept of user installed packages. The idea is that it would be possible to support having /bin, /lib and /share subdirectories in these application directories thus making an ability for the whole application to e packed in a single directory and allowing the application to be installed simply by unpacking this directory. I admit that much of this is glanced over from MacOS X world, but I do not think that it diminishes the idea itself.
Some problems appear there - support of these distributed bin folders, support of separate lib folders, handling of application plugins, handling of dependencies, handling of the application menu, upgrading notifications for the user software vs. system software. But nothing there that can not be solved. I feel that this can bring together FHS and LSB by providing something of an API for software being installed by users. Having no registry of the software in this solution allows for some interesting things, for example having multiple versions of one program just by renaming the application folder.
A lot of specification work is required here, therefore I proposed a workshop on this topic in Debconf7. I hope to have something that everyone can agree on and maybe even some code by then, so that after Debconf7 there can be a formal policy amendment proposal.

So there are two questions:

1. Is there something better in $HOME/.cache/appname vs. $HOME/.library/appname/cache ? Any other trade-offs that I have forgot?
2. What do you think about the further idea of users having the ability to install software in their home folders or remove such software in a very simple fashion?

Popularity: 50% [?]

Justification.

Currently there is a huge mess of files and folders that start with a “.” in any users home folder. There is no structure or policy on how applications should choose file and folder names for data that needs to be stored in users home directory. Additionally there is no established consistency between Gnome, KDE and most other applications. Gnome application have part of their configuration information in gconf folder and other part in a gnome subfolder. KDE applications have a complex structure under .kde/. And most other applications either have one file directly in users home folder or have their own dot-folder there.

Problems.

There are two major problems with current ad-hoc approach:

1. Namespace pollution of users home space. In any desktop system “ls -al” in the home folder would be a very lengthy affair. Moreeven this namespace is folded - KDE and Gnome apps live in their own subfolders.
2. Lack of structure in folders makes it much harder to properly understand their purpose. For example, if a user has misconfigured an application and would like to reset it to default settings, it currently could be hard to figure out how to do that. Especially without losing his data in that application.

Proposal.

I propose to implement a policy on where an application can store data and configuration information in users home folder. Such specification would be proposed as an extension for FHS, first implemented in Debian and then promoted for inclusion upstream and in other distributions.

Structure.

I propose a following structure for a users home folder:

• data/appname/ - each application, that stores user data in application-specific format, will have to store this data into this folder. Only configuration information that is essential to load this data would be permitted into this folder (in hidden dot files). For example, Evolution could store emails and email access information here.
• .conf/appname/ - each application that stores any configuration information whould have to store all of it in this folder. GConf will have to also store applications configuration info here. If this folder would be deleted, application must revert to default configuration, but still be able to fully access user data in data/appname/ or other, generic folders (below). For example, if .conf/evolution/ is erased, then on next start-up Evoution should still be able to access all email that is stored in data/evolution/ without any configuration wizards.
• .tmp/appname/ - each application that would need to create temporary files that survive reboot, would put them here. These folders can be safely deleted at any time with no data or configuration loss. For example, Firefox cache information and Nautilus thumbnail cache would have to be here.
• Desktop/ - the desktop folder, just like it is now
• Media folders - (Documents/, Photos/, Videos/, Music/, …) a suggestion of basic document structure for user to use or ignore. Applications dealing with particular media types would default to use files from such folders, but should also cope with working with any other folders on users choice. For example, a screensaver with slideshow function would by default use photos from Photos/, but will have to have a configuration option for user to change that setting.
• Additionally I would propose having a .mounts/ folder where applications could mount user specific media and other mounts, such as FUSE. For example, FUSE could be used for automatic archive introspection.

Benefits

The main benefit for such system for me is twofold:

• SBackup can be configured to exclude .tmp/ and .mounts/ by default thus saving significant space in backups.
• A tool can be made to restore settings and/or data for specific applications in an uniform fashion.

So, any suggestions on the idea and on where this should be best discussed?

Popularity: 100% [?]