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Source

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

I like Open Source as much as the next geek, but I also like it when I’m shielded from the pain the way I am in Gentoo. Check this `configure` command out from a recent Solaris PHP compile:

$ ./configure \
–with-gd=/usr/local \
–with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local \
–with-freetype-dir=/usr/local \
–with-png-dir=/usr/local \
–with-xpm-dir=/usr/local \
–with-iconv-dir=/usr/local \
–enable-freetype \
–enable-jpeg \
–with-zip \
–enable-memory-limit \
–disable-debug \
–with-regex=php \
–with-pic \
–enable-exif \
–enable-filepro \
–enable-ftp \
–with-gettext \
–enable-mbstring \
–enable-sockets \
–enable-sysvsem \
–enable-sysvshm \
–with-mysql=/opt/private/path/mysql \
–with-apxs2=/opt/private/path/apache/bin/apxs \
–with-zlib \
–with-openssl=/usr/local/ssl \
–enable-ftp \
–enable-shared \
–enable-libgcc \
–prefix=/opt/private/path/php

Isn’t that just sick? Sure, I would have had to use lots of USE flags in Gentoo to make that work, but it’s still a lot less typing/headaches, not to mention the fact that it would have gone out and compiled GD and everything else for me.

Posted in Syntaxy | No Responses »
Tags: Gentoo, jpeg, PHP, Private, Solaris, SSL

Browsers and plugins

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005

What is it with browser plugins that make them destroy an otherwise useful system? Example, on my notebook, with XP and Firefox, I can’t make use of the Acrobat PDF viewer. It takes about 3 minutes to load a PDF (no matter what size), renders my browser unusable during that time, and usually crashes the browser totally afterwards. Next is my AMD64 Gentoo system using Mozilla and mplayerplug-in. If I view a WMV file I don’t have the codec for (normally WMV10), it will sometimes play the audio without video, and totally segfault the browser when I close that window, or press back. In my book, a plugin shouldn’t crash the entire browser session. Just a worthless design I guess.

Posted in General | Comments Off
Tags: Acrobat, Gentoo, PDF, XP

SunRay demo.

Friday, February 11th, 2005

I haven’t updated this in a while, so I thought I would share a few words about the SunRay demo I’m currently going through. First off, a couple of suggestions for anyone considering SunRay’s.

A 100M network is nearly a must. I have my desk split up via a 10M HUB so I can test other machines without losing connectivity. The graphics were fairly slow and screen refreshes were terrible. I located a 100M HUB and that improved things greatly.

The server is important. I have an E250 with a couple (slow) CPUs and a bit of RAM. This isn’t the fastest machine in the world and it shows. X performs pretty poorly, especially when compared to my P4 2Ghz notebook running Linux, or my AMD64 Gentoo system at home. The benefit right now however, is that with some login changes (select “Options -> Quick Login -> Off”, then hit the “Options -> Exit” button). You can bring up a list of servers broadcasting their X sessions, and log into one of those instead.

Once you get to what I would consider a usable X Session (meaning, one running Linux), its just like a regular desktop, except much sexier. I don’t have time to test the Linux server I’m afraid, but I can make some assumptions as to its performance and usability, and those assumptions are that it will be good. Being able to install Win4Lin in Linux, and allowing each user to run their own Win98 session seems like a good thing to me as well.

We have had some problems with the systems locking up with a Panic displayed on the screen. Not sure what its all about, but you have to pull the power to fix it, but I guess that’s because there’s no power button on these things. The great part is that once you log back in, you get your old session back, just the way you left it when it locked up.

All in all, these are pretty nice systems. Something I would consider when building a network for developers, or even making a kiosk or for home use. One of these in the kitchen or dining room with a decent USB keyboard would make a nice terminal as well, especially since they’re silent.

Posted in General | Comments Off
Tags: 100M network, Gentoo, Linux, pretty nice systems, RAM

Sunray up and running.

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

I finally managed to get a Sunray server and client up and running. After a few distracted hours of tinkering with it, I realized I was crossing a subnet with a firewall on it. Once I got past that I was greated with a glorious CDE screen, which I promptly used to install Gnome 2.1. After some chest beating, I discovered a place called blastwave.org, which is a wonderous thing indeed. It gives me the convenience that I’m used to in Gentoo with its portage package, but the quickness of a binary installation of packages. It also handles all the dependancies. A thing of beauty, and something Solaris has needed for a long time coming.

Posted in General | Comments Off
Tags: firewall, Gentoo, Solaris

A Screenshot Review?

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

Caught this link on Slashdot today. I don’t know about anyone else, but seeing some screen shots of an OS, especially a Linux OS, doesn’t tell me a damn thing about. My Gentoo desktop looks exactly like that XFCE desktop there. Switch to KDE and I got that too. Its all the same. Maybe they added some logos or new fonts or something. Don’t even start on the layout of that page. 120 shots in a row of links without a single attempt to categorize them? As pointless as Fedora itself.

Posted in General | No Responses »
Tags: Fedora, Gentoo, Linux

Simple sharing of bookmarks

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004

I work. At work, I use a company supplied notebook. I cheat a little and put Gentoo on there, as it makes me more productive. At home, I have a nice AMD64 desktop that I use for everything computer related while I’m not at work. This produces a problem, that never used to exist for Netscape users. Bookmark sharing. I can’t believe that Mozilla, in all its gory glory, hasn’t produced some form of bookmark sharing that isn’t incredibly hard to use.

So, I’ve decided I’m going to solve this problem somehow. I’m not much of a programmer, so it’s going to be ugly (and ironically, hard to use), but it’ll work dammit.

Posted in General | No Responses »
Tags: Gentoo, programmer

Bash 3 and line wrapping.

Monday, September 13th, 2004

I had some trouble with my command line shortly after emerging Bash 3.0. My line was wrapping at very odd places and I couldn’t really figure out why. I originally had this for a prompt:

export PS1="u@h: [$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed 's: ::g') files - $(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed 's/total //')] w n$ "

This will show the number of files in the current directory, as well as the size of the files. This was neat, but useless so I took it out and ended up with this:

export PS1='u@h: w n$ '

Now, this was smaller, but it still messed up my line wrap. In fact, it looked as though it was wrapping the line according the size of the prompt. Some searching in the Gentoo forums revealed that Bash wasn’t counting the characters properly, thinking my prompt was part of my command line. A post from someone who actually bothered to investigate further suggested you have to escape your entire prompt with []‘s, but also escape those with ‘s. So, my final prompt is this, which works wonderfully:

export PS1='[u@h: w n$] '

Posted in Syntaxy | Comments Off
Tags: Gentoo

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