Let us pray…

Our system, who art on raised tile,
Hallowed be thy OS.
Thy portage come, thy emerge be done,
On servers, as it is on workstations.
Give us this day, our daily sync,
And forgive us our broken ebuilds,
As we forgive those who break ebuilds against us.
Lead us not into dependency frustration,
But deliver us from rpm evil.
For thine is the make.conf, the USE flags,
And the profile forever…
Gentoo.

AMEN!

Currently the problem seems to lie with Sun’s implementation of Swing and often the problem can be circumvented by utilizing another JDK such blackdown. This can be done in gentoo by doing,

# emerge -va dev-java/blackdown-jdk

# eselect java-vm list

Available Java Virtual Machines:
[1] blackdown-jdk-1.4.2
[2] sun-jdk-1.5
$ eselect java-vm set user 1

Note # represents the root prompt and $ the user prompt. If you wish to set system java-vm you must execute as root (#). The numbers shown above might vary and should be adjusted accordingly.

This solution has a problem… the blackdown JDK is only a 1.4.2 implementation (as of the time of this post) and Java 1.5.0 based applications will not execute. This can potentially be solved by utilizing another open source Java 5 implementation such as dev-java/ibm-jdk-bin (not tested yet).

Another sure shot way of solving this is to utilize a nested X server. The manner in which this works is to launch another X server inside our current one, except this time the nested X server does not have Beryl running inside it and hence does not face the problem we are currently encountering.

Initially a nested X server must be created. This can be done by,

$ screen Xnest :[display number] -ac -geometry

[display number] represents the number we assign to the X server instance and represents the resolution. Eg. to created a nested X server with a display number of 1 and of resolution 1440×900 we would use,

$ screen Xnest :1 -ac -geometry 1440×900

Now that the X server is created in a screen session we detatch from it by pressing the key combination control+alt+a. If you do not have screen you can merely launch it in a console window using the same command without adding the screen prefix.

Every application that is to be launched within the X server must now be told of the display number assigned to it. An application can be started in the nested X server by,

$ DISPLAY=:[display number] [path to app]

The [display number] is the display number we assigned to the nested X server previously and [path to app] is the path to the application we wish to execute in the nested X server. Eg. To execute the application frostwire (located at /usr/bin/frostwire) on a nested X server running on DISPLAY 1 we use the command,

$ DISPLAY=:1 /usr/bin/frostwire

This application can be executed in the background by using a screen command as shown previously.

Good luck and hope the Beryl team works on compatibility so this hassle has to no longer be encountered.

However there seemed to be no text being displayed which I infered was a result of it not find the much needed Microsoft fonts.

A quick check using “emerge -s corefonts” revelead that the fonts were installed. However upon performing “slocate -u” and “slocate tahoma.ttf” I found that the Tahoma font for some reason was not installed.

Now I had two options,

1. Install the damn Tahoma font somehow
2. Emulate the font and let another font replace it

Now when you are as lazy as me you resort to step 2. The wine registry for your user is usually located in your home folder. It can be confirmed by doing “slocate system.reg | grep wine“.

Open this file (make sure it belongs to your user id) and locate the registry key

[Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\FontSubstitutes]

If you are using nano you can do it by (replace USERID with your user id),

nano /home/USERID/.wine/system.reg

Pressing the key combination control+w (activates search mode) and using FontSubstitutes as a search parameter.

Now add the sub key below the registry key,

“Tahoma”=”Times New Roman”

This will use Times New Roman for whenever the Tahoma font is required.

Thats all that is required and now you should be able to see all the text and play Counter Strike and all the other games under Linux !

DRI or Direct Rendering Infrastructure is a framework that allows direct access to the hardware (of the graphics card) in the X window system. For the ‘children of Microsoft’, X window system is the GUI system the all too often heard but seldom used *nix (Linux/Unix) operating system.

Now ordinarilly this would not be too much of a problem as that is what the drivers of the graphics card is made for right ? To allow access to the hardware components of the graphics card …. including DRI ?? But unfortunately we never live in a perfect world and nothing comes easy.

For the Linux operating system ATi releases its own proprietary drivers in a pre-compiled binary format. These are closed source and updates are usually hardmasked (might be stable but not fully tested). These drivers also taint the kernel which prevents developers from being able to perform debugging operations normally.

The main problem with making use of the Linux ATi proprietary drivers – fglrx is that if composite is enabled then the drivers will not be loaded properly with the OpenGL implementation Mesa. In order to have the drivers working properly with DRI the Composite option in /etc/xorg.conf must not be enabled. This is not what you want to do if you want to make use of the absolutely amazing Beryl.

Alternatively the Open Source Xorg xf86 ATi video drivers can be made use of. These drivers allow you to have DRI enabled and make use of Composite at the same time (by using the preffered method AIGLX, at the time of writing this).

Prior to doing this the Kernel will require recompilation.

Compile AGP Driver

Device Drivers  --->

Character devices  --->

< M > /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)

< M > ATI chipset support

<   > Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)

Add the kernel modules you just compiled into your modules.autoload.d file using nano or whatever you prefer.

agpgart

ati-agp

drm

radeon

Now save the kernel configuration file and recompile the kernel. Make sure you save it and boot from it using your boot loader GRUB or LILO.

Compiling the kernel modules from DRM source

Since libdrm is a Mesa dependancy it is a good idea to update it to the unstable branch (atleast I had to). The latest version in portage can be obtained by adding the library to the package.keywords file and re-emerging it.

The use flag for the DRM package will also need to be modified (Optional),

Make sure you emerge x11-base/x11-drm now.

The aiglx USE flag above can be ignored if you do not use AIGLX. Reinstall Xorg to be on the safe side. Please note a xorg.conf file can be found at the end of this post. Alternatively when Xorg has finished compilation xorgcfg can be executed to generate a simple configuration. Then the key components can be added to it. To enable 3D acceleration,

Section "dri"

Mode    0666

EndSection

Make sure that the following lines are present in the config file under the section Modules,

Section "Module"

Load "dri"

Load "drm"

Load "glx"

...

EndSection

The video driver radeon is specified next,

Section "Device"

Identifier  "ATI Radeon"

VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"

Driver      "radeon"

Option      "DRI"     "true"

...

EndSection

Now all that needs to be done is set the OpenGL implementation to the correct one.

Once X is all set (feel free to use the configuration files found below), open an Xterm or Konsole (oh yea KDE) and run glxinfo. DRI should be enabled and can be confirmed by,

Good luck !!

My configuration files for reference,

/etc/portage/package.keywords/xorg-x11

/etc/portage/package.keywords/core

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

For those who do not know what SVN is here is a brief explanation of it.

Quoting the free book Version Control with Subversion,

Subversion is a free/open-source version control system. That is, Subversion manages files and directories over time. A tree of files is placed into a central repository. The repository is much like an ordinary file server, except that it remembers every change ever made to your files and directories. This allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of “time machine”.

Subversion can access its repository across networks, which allows it to be used by people on different computers. At some level, the ability for various people to modify and manage the same set of data from their respective locations fosters collaboration. Progress can occur more quickly without a single conduit through which all modifications must occur. And because the work is versioned, you need not fear that quality is the trade-off for losing that conduit—if some incorrect change is made to the data, just undo that change.

Some version control systems are also software configuration management (SCM) systems. These systems are specifically tailored to manage trees of source code, and have many features that are specific to software development—such as natively understanding programming languages, or supplying tools for building software. Subversion, however, is not one of these systems. It is a general system that can be used to manage any collection of files. For you, those files might be source code—for others, anything from grocery shopping lists to digital video mixdowns and beyond.

But yes it is going to be pretty useful for me as I no longer have to carry my code around with on a flash drive and development can be continued from any computer anywhere. All I do is check out the code and when I am done developing I commit out the code.

Helps in overcoming most of the common problems faced by developers where a piece of code is working one day and you keep on working on it and save and keep on working on it; then one fine moment in time you realised that everything that was done is nonsense…….. but by then it is too late !! You have saved over it many times and there is no way to go back.

Of course you could just copy the code to another folder but after doing that say 10, 20 or even 40 times over a period of weeks or months you lose track of what copy is what.

My IDE IntelliJ IDEA (the best Java IDE made to date) actually lets me pull up code versions and compare what lines have been changed… How slick is that ? You can then compare and revert back to an older version of the class.

SVN is actually used widely throughout the industry by several software development firms (who are migrating from obselete CVS now) so multiple developers can work on the same project. This can also help University students working on something like a group project.

Now that the hard part is taken care of it is all hard core dirty coding from here on .

It happened to be the smartest thing I actually ever did as as soon as the plane took off they made an announcement that this flight, Etihad Airlines Boeing 777 had high speed WiFi internet onboard. For a modest fee of $19 I am typing this blog entry out at 38,000 feet high up in the air and can continue to use it for the remaining 6 hours and 15 minutes of my flight duration.

There is little technology can do to amaze me nowdays but what better way to spend a boring flight that to be have the entire world through the Internet at your fingertips ?

Possibilities are ulimited and Etihad even gives live streaming TV channels once you are connected to their Internet service. No more limited boring fixed movies that they show. Hell I could even fire up Bit torrent and download a movie of my choice at the 10mbit speeds that I seem to get.

Life is good but this is a short holidady and I have to be back in UK by Tuesday, the 29th of August 2006 so that I can give a presentation to the Computer Systems Research group at 10am the next day !!!

Signing out for now…… till later