Michael's blog

FreeBSD w/ XFCE continued

2010-04-28T22:44:00.005-04:00

This is a continuation of my previous post. A few updates; flash plug-in cannot be installed from packages, it has to be done from the ports collection. In order to do that I had to download the ports zipped archive and extract it on the drive.

To get flash installed, I had to:

cd /usr/ports/www/linux-f10-flashplugin10 && make install

Just in case I also installed the opera-linuxplugins and nspluginwrapper packages; not sure if it was necessary.

To make Opera see the flash plug-in, I created a symbolic link in the opera folder.

ls -l /usr/local/share/opera/bin/libflashplayer.so
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 60 Apr 24 00:04 /usr/local/share/opera/bin/libflashplayer.so -> /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-f10-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so

FreeBSD 8.0 w/ XFCE on an old laptop

2010-04-21T08:52:00.016-04:00

Recently I got hold of an old Dell laptop (Pentium III / 1Ghz / 256 MB / 20G) and decided to put it to use. The obvious choices for an operating system were FreeBSD and Linux. For a while I wanted to brush up on my Linux skills and was thinking of either Debian (or Sidux) or one of the Redhat related distributions (Fedora or CentOS). But due to sheer laziness (I had the FreeBSD CD lying around + I am more familiar with it) I decided to go with FreeBSD.

The installer crashed on me when I accidentally selected the option of loading drivers from a floppy, but most of the install was done by then. The only things I didn't configure was networking (more on that below) and date.

The laptop came with a Linksys USB wireless card which was detected by the operating system without issues. Configuring the network was very easy, because I had PCBSD installed on another laptop. All I had to do was to copy
/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

network={
 ssid="freebsdap"
 psk="freebsdmall"
}

some settings from /boot/loader.conf

and a few lines from the

/etc/rc.conf

wlans_ath0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP"

Installing packages was next on the task list. I decided to go with stable packages and changed the PACKAGESITE to ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8-stable/Latest/. Since the resources were scarce (only 256 MB of RAM) I wanted a lightweight system. Nevertheless I needed some functionality like flash, a movie player, and printing support. Below is a short script that installed the desired packages.

#! /bin/csh

pkg_add -r compat5x-i386 compat6x-i386 compat7x-i386 cups-base cups-client cups-image cups-pstoraster cups-smb-backend dbus fusefs-ntfs linux_base-f10-10_2 linux-f10-xorg-libs opera

opera-linuxplugins linux-f10-tiff linux-f10-sqlite3 linux-f10-png linux-f10-openssl linux-f10-openldap linux-f10-nss linux-f10-nspr linux-f10-libssh2 linux-f10-jpeg linux-f10-gtk2

linux-f10-fontconfig linux-f10-flashplugin linux-f10-expat linux-f10-cyrus-sasl2 linux-f10-curl linux-f10-cairo linux-f10-atk polkit portupgrade xorg xorg-apps xorg-fonts-75dpi xorg-fonts-cyrillic

xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps xorg-fonts-truetype xorg-fonts-type1 xfce4 xfce4-battery-plugin xfce4-conf xfce4-datetime-plugin xfce4-mailwatch-plugin xfce4-mixer xfce4-notification-daemon

xfce4-time-out-plugin xfce4-xkb-plugin xfce4-wm-themes vlc foomatic-db foomatic-db-engine foomatic-db-hpijs foomatic-filters >& pkg_log.txt

echo 'dbus_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
echo 'polkitd_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
echo 'hald_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

echo 'linux_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

When pkg_add was done, I checked the number of installed components and it was > 370. Provided that I will need some more in the future.

In order to bring up the XFCE desktop, I created the .xinitrc file in my home directory and typed startxfce4. The XFCE desktop took a while to come up on that machine, I have to investigate the reason for that. Something that I realized was that 256MB of RAM won't cut it, since XFCE was using up most of it and if I were to start a browser with Flash for example, the system would start swapping like crazy.

Next to do (in order of importance):

Get an extra 256 MB of RAM.
System configuration (pf.conf, rc.conf -> fsck, linux, powerd).
Configure sound (should be easy, just follow the handbook).
C Shell configuration (nice prompt).
Setup printing.

Back in the wxWidgets

2008-04-30T14:54:00.006-04:00

I decided to go back to programming with wxWidgets and I don't regret it even one bit. In fact I enjoy it a lot.
Before I went back to programming wx, I tried to do as much coding as I could in Java. However despite some niceties, I saw quite a few things that I wasn't fond of.

Swing doesn't have a calendar/date picker control, which I needed on two occasions.
I witnessed NetBeans do some weird stuff - it complained about some code, even after I had deleted it. Probably a bug in Java compiler?
My company is still using JVM 1.4.2, and that version is slower and lacks support for certain features that are present in 1.6.

I do not particularly like database programming with wxODBC classes, it definitely is not as easy as doing it with JDBC, but so far I got everything working just fine. Also, wxWidgets doesn't use exceptions, which is quite disappointing for a modern C++ library; I however read through the exception handling overview in wx documentation and found out that I could throw my own exceptions and handle them quite nicely.

My experience in coding GUI programs in C++ did not start with wxWidgets. When in college I took an MFC course. At the time it looked amazing, because up until then we had been able to do only console programs in C or C++. MFC is probably more stable, because it has been used by many more people than wx. On the other hand, wx programs can be ported to other platforms with little or no effort. I also like the API much better than the one of MFC.
Compare:

Creating a push button -
in MFC:
m_wndButton1.Create (_T("CLICK"), WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE | BS_PUSHBUTTON, rect, this, IDC_BUTTON);

in WX:
searchBtn = new wxButton(WxNoteBookPage3, ID_SEARCHBTN, wxT("Search"), wxPoint(154,272), wxSize(75,25), 0, wxDefaultValidator, wxT("searchBtn"));

Adding a root item to a tree control -

in WX:
wxTreeItemId id = m_treeCtrl->AddRoot (wxT("Root"));

in MFC:

HTREEITEM item = m_treeCtrl->InsertItem (_T("Root"));

Wx is much cleaner and much more C++ like if you ask me.

Anyway, I am glad to be back programming in C++ and wxWidgets.

PCBSD in VMWare

2008-04-14T20:59:00.002-04:00

Matrix

2007-10-03T19:40:00.001-04:00

Mplayer plugin

2007-09-14T18:28:00.000-04:00

680 news is one of my favorite radio stations. They have traffic updates every 10 minutes, weather forecasts and tons of useful information. I was wondering if I could hear it on my FreeBSD machine. Appears that I could. The mplayerplug-in took care of that. All I had to do, was to install the port and it took care of installing the plug-in, such that Firefox could find it upon startup.

Here's the screenshot.

FreeBSD 3D desktop

2007-09-08T12:08:00.000-04:00

I happened to have a few spare minutes and an older MSI video adapter (which was based on ATI Radeon), so I decided to try to follow Dru Lavigne's article, called "Fun with Xorg", one of many in the excellent FreeBSD Basics column.

The driver for the card (radeon.ko) was already loaded, the dri package installed; all I had to do is edit xorg.conf and install the 3ddesk package. Looks pretty cool I must say.

Screenshots of WinXP emulated in FreeBSD (with QEMU)

2007-09-02T20:00:00.000-04:00

I can do most of what I want in FreeBSD, with an exception of a few things. For that purpose I decided to installed qemu, which is a PC emulator and install XP inside it. Here are some screenshots.

Some installation screenshots.

Inside WinXP

Internet works now as well. I will post a screenshot soon.
Here are the changes I had to make to my FreeBSD 6.2 configuration files in order to get qemu to work.

/etc/sysctl.conf:

# create and enable bridge between vr0 and tap 0, the active network interface in my case is vr0
net.link.ether.bridge_cfg=vr0,tap0
net.link.ether.bridge.enable=1
# allow user to use the tap0 interface
net.link.tap.user_open=1

/boot/loader.conf:

# Load the modules essential for qemu to work
kqemu_load="YES"
bridge_load="YES"
if_tap_load="YES"
aio_load="YES"

I also have the file /etc/qemu-ifup with permissions set to 755
It's basically a do-nothing shell script.
#!/bin/sh
#ifconfig ${1} 0.0.0.0

To start my Windows XP virtual machine, I issue this command:

qemu -hda ~/qemu/winXP.img -m 256 -localtime -snapshot -net nic -net tap

FreeBSD / Gnome Screenshots

2007-08-30T17:32:00.000-04:00

I decided to try some GNOME themes

Installing Flash Player

2007-08-27T15:11:00.000-04:00

FreeBSD and Flash

I thought I could get away without the Flash plug-in, unfortunately too many sites of the ones I visit use Flash and I simply got tired of being prompted by Firefox to install the “Missing plug-in”, Adobe Flash in my case. Since I already had the Linux compatibility layer installed, I only needed the Flash port itself. Without further delay, I dropped to the command line, sued to root and entered portupgrade –N linux-flashplugin. I had the opportunity to choose between version 7 and 9, and I chose 7, since as far as I know version 9 is yet incomplete. However this was as far as I got. I received this error message:

linux-flashplugin – critical vulnerabilities.

Reference:

<http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/portaudit/b42e8c32-34f6-11dc-9bc9-001921ab2fa4.html>

I asked in the mailing lists how to resolve this, and while awaiting an answer, I decided to give gnash (a GNU-licensed implementation of Adobe Flash player) a go. The installation was a breeze; however I was less than impressed while using it. Gnash can only display those Flash-based commercials; it cannot for example play YouTube videos. What it can do well, is crash the X server, and after a few such crashes I decided to get rid of it.

I received a few emails from the FreeBSD mailing list suggesting to build the Flash 7 port with make DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes option supplied to make. That’s what I intend to do tonight.

Finally got Flash to work following instructions from this page:

http://www.jail.se/software/freebsd/

I will post a screenshot of Firefox / Flash in my screenshots entry.

FreeBSD / Gnome Screenshots

2007-08-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

Network Info

System Info

Some menus

Mplayer (my favorite skin)
Mplayer (Windows Media Player 6 skin)
Adobe Acrobat
Open Office
Firefox / Java plugin
Firefox / Flash plugin

More screenshots coming soon.

GNOME on FreeBSD

2007-08-23T12:05:00.000-04:00

UNIX on the desktop

The revival / transition to graphical workstation of my FreeBSD 6.2 went through mostly without trouble. And now I have a very slick GNOME desktop loaded with some of my favorite applications.

For some reason installing xorg 7.2 using portupgrade –NP xorg kept on stalling on every attempt. After 3 or 4 tries, I decided to simply use pkg_add, pkg_add –r xorg-7.2. I got an error stating that there is no such package ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.2-release/xorg-7.2.tbz . I quickly realized that I needed to set my PACKAGESITE variable, which I did in /root/.cshrc. I set it to ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/, to reflect the fact that I want packages from the 6 stable branch. After that I was able to install xorg mostly without trouble. GNOME installation followed and completed with minor issues, mostly some applications complaining that they needed earlier versions of packages compared to the ones that had been installed. That might have been due to the fact that I issued the portupgrade –NP gnome2, and didn’t force the “packages only” –NPP option. I learned from my past experiences that that might break the installation/upgrade of any sufficiently large program.

I was surprised to discover that Firefox was one of GNOME’s dependencies, I guess that’s because Epiphany uses the same HTML rendering engine as Firefox, that’s the only explanation I can come up with. I didn’t know that Evolution was part of GNOME, this one will probably be replaced by Thunderbird, which I learned to appreciate when using it on XP.

When done with desktop-related packages installation, I added gnome_enable=”YES” to my /etc/rc.conf, as suggest in GNOME FAQs. I quickly configured Xorg, following the section on X configuration in FreeBSD handbook and restarted the system.

Upon restart, not a reboot (with shutdown now, exit) rc was complaining about $polkitd and $dbus not being set, I found it strange since there was no mention of that in the FAQs. After the system had initialized I was presented with a pleasant login screen which in turn took me into a slick desktop environment.

Without delay I began installing applications. Firefox was already there, so one less to go. I added the webfonts port to have some decent fonts on the desktop. Openoffice, Adobe Acrobat and the Linux emulation layer (which is required for Acrobat and Flash player to work) installed quickly and painlessly. Flash and Java are a slightly different story. Apparently, the Flash 7 port had been reported as having a vulnerability by the FreeBSD security team and portaudit (a program that scans the security databases) wouldn’t have let me proceed with the install. I guess I will have to disable portaudit in order get Flash going. For jdk15 (Java Development Kit version 1.5) to be installed I had to fetch 5 files, 3 of them from Sun, one was a BSD specific patch, and the last was diable-jre (Java Runtime). The port won’t install unless all these are fetched manually and placed in /usr/ports /distfiles. JDK is being built as I type this blog entry.

When done with Flash, some serious cleanup is going to happen. Remove unneeded packages/source files using portsclean –DD, install cutleaves and use it to uninstall the orphaned ports which I won’t use. Evolution will be gone, as well python2.4 and everything that depends on it. I have to update the pkgtools.conf to ingnore as many port categories as I can, the same needs to be done for the cvsup file, so that csup doesn’t download ports I never use. And I am also considering switching to 6-STABLE from 6.2-RELEASE, as this is not a production machine and I can afford some flexibility.

Congratulations to FreeBSD and GNOME developers! Job well done!
Screenshots will follow.

Update - Troubles with GNOME

Last night I shutdown the machine using GNOME menu and I noticed some strange message about one of the drives. This morning when I started the machine, it dropped into single user mode because it couldn't mount /home partition, which was very much related to last night error. I unplugged and plugged back in the SCSI bus and it started working, but now GNOME is misbehaving, I don't get the desktop pager and windows don't have borders/close and minimize buttons. Something wrong with the window manager.
As soon as I get home I have to run fsck on the drive and/or use SCSI utilities to scan the disk.

In a long run I must replace the aging SCSIs with a new SATA drive, which are quite cheap nowadays.

Gnome is back in business. Although I start X sessions manually from the console now. I removed the gnome_enable entry from my rc.conf, and replaced it with these 3:
hald_enable="YES"
poltkid_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"

Every time I need to shutdown now, I close the GNOME session, su to root and use the shutdown -p to power off the machine.
GNOME still misbehaves sometimes, I get those border-less windows and no desktop pager, I just remove the .gnome and .gnome2 directories in my home directory and everything goes back to normal. My guess is that it's related to session management, I should notify the Gnome/FreeBSD developers.

FreeBSD (trying to migrate /usr partition)

2007-08-20T11:11:00.000-04:00

/usr is the problem

I am trying to migrate my /usr to a newly installed SCSI drive. Up until yesterday I had /, /var, /usr on a 5 Gig drive and my /home was on another 60 Gig drive, which was fine because it had no GUI and functioned mostly as a server.

Last night I added a third drive, with a capacity around 18G; since my other two drives are hard-wired in /boot/device.hints, there were no problems with device numbering. I wrote down the device name (/dev/da2) and proceeded to sysinstall to first create a FreeBSD slice and then the only partition within that slice. I named it /user.

I then tarred up /usr

Tar –cf /user/usr.tar /usr

Extracted the tar file and moved everything one directory up, because otherwise everything were under /user/usr.

I made the necessary adjustnments in /etc/fstab, that is I switched /usr and /user around.

After reboot, I wasn’t getting the prompt, since the binaries for displaying the prompt are located under /usr/bin (or /usr/sbin?) and my guess was that /usr wasn’t mounting properly. I restarted the machine, this time going into single user mode. Trying to mount –a gave me an error message: Error mounting /usr/home. I then created home directory under the new /usr, I tried mount –a, this time it worked, but when I rebooted, I wasn’t getting my home directory. When I login as an unprivileged user – michael, the message is something like: “User has no home directory”.

For now I reverted to using the old /usr.

One of the suggestions from the freebsd mailing list, was to use dump /restore. e.g. :
$ cd /user
$ dump -L -f - | restore -r -f -

Unfortunately that did not help as well.

Fixed!!!
/home was actually a link to /usr/home and when I removed it and recreated /home as a directory instead, it all worked.

Python & COM

2007-08-15T09:44:00.000-04:00

Generating PDF with Python and Adobe Acrobat

It is possible to generate PDF files if you have Adobe Acrobat installed. I found it to be not as straightforward as creating Excel and Word files, however not that difficult at the same time. In my particular case I needed to first insert a Word file and then add some images to my PDF report. I set Word’s default printer to PDFWriter, and this did the trick of generating the initial PDF.

word_app = win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch ("Word.Application")

word_app.Documents.Open (dir_name + "mydoc.doc”)

word_app.ActiveDocument.PrintOut ()

Adding some bitmaps was slightly different.

Here, some acrobat application and document variables are instantiated.

adobe_app = win32com.client.Dispatch ("AcroExch.App")

adobe_doc = win32com.client.Dispatch ("AcroExch.AVDoc")

pd_doc = win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch ("AcroExch.PDDoc")

adobe_doc1 = win32com.client.Dispatch ("AcroExch.AVDoc")

pd_doc1 = win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch ("AcroExch.PDDoc")

Assuming mydoc.pdf was generated from mydoc.doc. I was prompted for a file name each time when a Word document was being printed into pdf.

adobe_doc.Open (dir_name + "mydoc.pdf", "")

pd_doc = self.adobe_doc.GetPDDoc

Open a picture file

adobe_doc1.Open (dir_name + “Picture.bmp”, "")

pd_doc1 = adobe_doc1.GetPDDoc

Insert the bitmap into the pdf

pd_doc.InsertPages (page_number, pd_doc1, 0, 1, 0)

adobe_doc1.Close(True)

Save the file and close the documents

pd_doc.Save (1, dir_name + "mydoc.pdf")

adobe_doc.Close (True)

adobe_doc1.Close (True)

To show the result the following is done

adobe_app.Show

adobe_doc.Open(dir_name + "mydoc.pdf", "")

When everything is done

adobe_app.Exit

adobe_doc.Close (True)

adobe_app = None

pd_doc = None

pd_doc1 = None

adobe_doc = None

adobe_doc1 = None

It’s important not to forget to catch those pythoncom.com_error exceptions.

Python & COM

2007-08-13T10:17:00.000-04:00

python excel and word

COM is one of the most confusing and difficult technologies I’ve ever dealt with, especially if you need to use it from within C++. However it is a “necessary evil” if one wants to be able to generate/update Excel and Word files. That’s where Python comes to rescue. All one needs to do is to download and install the win32com module and the rest is fairly easy.

Here is a snippet code of updating an Excel workbook.

excel_app = win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch("Excel.Application")

excel_app.Workbooks.Open (“somepath\someexcel.xls”)

excel_app.ActiveWorkbook.ActiveSheet.Range ("ClientName").Value = self.ClientName

….

excel_app.ActiveWorkbook.ActiveSheet.Range ("ReportDate").Value = self.ReportDate.strftime ("%B %d, %Y")

excel_app.ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs ("%s\\%s" % (somepath, newspreadsheetname))

excel_app.ActiveWorkbook.Close ()

In this particular case I am using set ranges in the spreadsheet. From within Excel, it is possible to highlight a cell or a group of cells, selecting Name from Excel Insert menu and Defining a new region.

In order to update an arbitrary cell (cell A, 1 in this case) this should work:

excel_app.ActiveWorkbook.ActiveSheet.Range (1, 1).Value = sometext

A similar idea in the following snipped, this time with Word files.

word_app = win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch("Word.Application")

word_app.Documents.Open (“somepath\someworddocument”)

word_app.ActiveDocument.Bookmarks ("ReportDate").Range.Text = self.ReportDate.strftime ("%B %d, %Y")

word_app.ActiveDocument.SaveAs ("%s\\%s" % (dir, document))

word_app.ActiveDocument.Close ()

word_app.Quit ()

del word_app

I bookmarked certain locations in the word file.

Of course, as usual, something might go wrong, and that’s why one needs to catch COM exceptions inside try…except block

try:

….

…..

except pythoncom.com_error

And to know what might have caused the error, com_error can be followed by a 4-tuple, which indicate the error code, error description, an instance of exception and exception arguments. This page should provide more details.

2007-08-12T10:01:00.000-04:00

FreeBSD resources

2007-08-12T09:16:00.000-04:00

FreeBSD useful links and books

I've been using FreeBSD since 2004 and the version at the time was 5.2, if I am not mistaken. To start using any operating system, one needs some guidance in form of documentation. FreeBSD handbook and the best in the industry man pages were an excellent start point. However after a while I realized that it wasn't enough and I started looking for more information. At about the same time I bought Michael Lucas' "Absolute BSD" from Amazon.ca and discovered Dru Lavigne's FreeBSD Basics page . Both of those gave me plenty of information, so much that I couldn't absorb some of it. After a while I became curious of "BSD Hacks", a book written by Dru Lavigne which has a hundred really amazing tips, mostly applicable to Free/Net/OpenBSD, as well as other UNIX and UNIX-like systems. I purchased it November last year, from Amazon as well.
Some time last year, Greg Lehey decided to release his "The Complete FreeBSD" under Creative Commons license. I downloaded the pdf version and found it to be an excellent complement to the "Absolute BSD", as Michael Lucas for example doesn't have a mention of the absolutely essential portupgrade utility in his book. Mr. Lehey also has an in-depth chapter of XFree86 (Xorg now) configuration. I hope that someone continues maintaining "The Complete FreeBSD" in the future.
Soon I am going to order/preorder M. Lucas' next book "Absolute FreeBSD" which is supposed to cover version 7 of this excellent operating system.

I forgot to mention the FreeBSD mailing lists, to which a lot of experienced FreeBSD sysadmins and users are subscribed. I mostly use the freebsd-questions list , where I get very helpful answers and very promptly too, however there are many more lists organized by topics, be it hardware related, various important software that runs on FreeBSD or even features of the operating system.

Python

2007-08-11T17:20:00.000-04:00

Python is an absolutely cool programming language. It takes so little time to get things done with python. It can be used on the web, or on the desktop.
I had previously developed Apache/mod_python software for my former company, I developed some small utility tools using Python and wxPython.
Right now I am working on a reporting solution, which will involve python, wxwidgets, COM, and SQLite. Right now there's no real user interface, I am using raw_input to gather data, I validate the data and create Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. I am planning on getting the GUI part done in the following 2-3 weeks. wxGlade is what I will probably use for this purpose.

FreeBSD

2007-08-11T16:49:00.000-04:00

I can't wait to revive my old FreeBSD machine. I just bought an inexpensive MSI motherboard bundled with AMD Sempron CPU from Tigerdirect. I pretty much have everything else - 2 decent size SCSI drives, and a good 3COM network card.
Later on I might add another SATA drive to see how Solaris progresses.