drewp

Categories: weblog | ubuntu

2008-10-19T01:53:10 Running firefox 3.1 under 64-bit ubuntu:

If you get firefox 3.1 and try to run it on a 64-bit ubuntu hardy install, you'll probably get this failure:

./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libdbus-glib-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

  1. Go get the i386 version of libdbus-glib and save the .deb file somewhere.
  2. Run "file-roller /tmp/libdbus-glib-1-2_0.74-2_i386.deb".
  3. Go into data.tar.gz -> . -> usr -> lib, and copy libdbus-glib-1.so.2.1.0 to your firefox 3.1 directory.
  4. Rename it to lose the ".1.0" at the end.

Now you should be able to test firefox 3.1 and play some of the videos from here. The one called 'video embedded in svg' is impressive, although on my system I only got one video at a time and the audio sync drifted. See this screencast (or youtube) for what it should look like.

T 2008-02-15T22:02:50 OpenCV in python:

Here's a tiny demo of using the opencv face finder on a PIL image and displaying the result with pygame:

Source code

That's using the SWIG opencv interface (available on ubuntu from the python-opencv package), not the recently-released pycv (which I know nothing about).

My headtrack project is an attempt at something like Johnny Chung Lee's head tracking project. I tried opencv since I don't have a wiimote yet. My goal is to move my desktop windows according to my head position, so I can peek around a window or lean in to look at windows that are outside the normally-visible screen.

Meanwhile, the compiz hackers started a similar project.

 

T 2007-10-22T22:48:29 Gutsy upgrade awful:

I upgraded my laptop from ubuntu feisty to gutsy, and nothing got better. Several things broke. While trying to fix them, I improved my setup a little tiny bit.

The auto installer failed several times on cupsys. Then it had some exception while working on initramfs (!) and gave up. Somewhere during the upgrade, my keyboard broke and was typing nonsense. At least that corrected after the reboot.

On reboot, I seem to be on 7.10 despite the upgrade saying it failed. I reinstalled cupsys and a few other things. I used to use ndiswrapper and linux-wlan-ng for my two wifi adapters, but neither of those work now. The bcm43xx module seems to work, so I can run my worse-quality wifi adapter. linux-wlan-ng claims not to support kernel 2.6.22, so I guess I can't use my usb wifi card for now.

The gutsy version of the power applet started waking up every 30 seconds to tell me I unplugged, when really I was running on AC power and my flaky battery wasn't charging. (It starts charging after a few remove/replugs.)

I tried 'desktop effects' to see if compiz would work. It broke my desktop switching and added window shadows. I restarted X, and lost window borders but gained wobble windows. I never got desktop shadows back. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3600201 worked for disabling Xgl, which was taking lots of CPU.

emacs wouldn't start. It said "No fonts match 'Monospace-10'". I found various matches for that phrase in google, but didn't see a solution.

Sick of gnome and its WMs, I installed fvwm2 which is what I use on all my desktops. I had it start up with gnome-panel to get the applets I was used to. I thought fvwm had a control for "don't let windows move into this panel's space", but I can't find it now. Anyway, running fvwm instead of metacity is the small improvement I performed today. The suspend button on gnome-panel now quits gnome-panel, so I made a different launcher for "gksudo /etc/acpi/sleep.sh". I'm not sure how to do suspend without requiring a sudo.

Over in fvwm (or maybe after enough X restarts), emacs started working again.

Then I discovered http://www.fvwm.org/doc/unstable/modules/FvwmTabs.html which looks like it might be great if I can stop tripping on its focus bugs.

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Forgot to mention: the text-mode virtual consoles don't have logins anymore. That's sure to bite me when I'm doing some important demo for someone.

T 2007-08-07T19:44:59 Disable launching of evolution on feisty:

This is a tip for Ubuntu users who are not evolution mail users.

I run fvwm2 with my own key bindings, and when I upgraded Ubuntu from dapper to feisty, some new key bindings started taking precedence. If you too are having the problem where pressing the mail key (keycode 236) is launching evolution, then you probably also want to run gnome-keybinding-properties and shut that binding off. There's certainly a way to do this in gconf too, but I don't know what the ids are there.

On the other hand, the new bindings to the volume keys and play/pause are nice so I guess I can thank Ubuntu for forcing me to notice them :) The play/pause button now talks to rhythmbox as you'd expect.

T 2007-07-21T21:43:51 Sharing ubuntu package caches is practically impossible:

host1 is running feisty. It has 1.4GB of package files left over from the install (and possibly past installs).

host2 is upgrading to feisty. The update-manager screen says I have 1h47m remaining to download at 164kb/s. What a no-brainer. I should be able to find the following instructions somewhere:

No other configuration should be required, except MAYBE to adjust the port for my imagined apt-cache-serve. The point here is not to become an ubuntu repository with complete sets of signed packages. The point is to save some downloading time by using local copies of files I've already fetched.

Instead of that fantasy, I find they did write 'apt-cacher' and it's a total configuration mess. I tried the instructions here: http://www.debuntu.org/book/export/html/119

By default, apt-cacher doesn't use the packages that are already on host1. You can run some importer program which moves the packages out of /var/cache/apt! Why would I want to lose my working apt cache? The instructions guide you through replacing host2's sources.list with pointers to host1. I tried appending the host2 line (since I need host2 to look at real repos as well as my cache), but I got errors like this:

Err http://host1 feisty/multiverse Packages
  500 Can't connect to dists:80 (Bad hostname 'dists')
Err http://host1 feisty/multiverse Sources
  500 Can't connect to dists:80 (Bad hostname 'dists')

where 'dists' is not a word that appears in sources.list or in any config file I touched during setup.

But, what would still be much more useful than a usable apt-cacher is the missing tool that tells me what files I modified after installing my packages. http://ideas.4brad.com/package-packager-compartmentalize-my-system-changes has more on that one.

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