Download ShapeWriter APK

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$ scp -r vivin@www.vivin.net:~/code/agnostic .
Password:
ps: Process environment requires procfs(5)
Initializing new SSH agent...

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$

I fixed the procfs problem by adding the following to my /etc/fstab:

proc                    /proc           procfs  rw              0       0
linproc                 /compat/linux/proc      linprocfs       rw      0       0

and then running:

vivin@enterprise ~
$ sudo mount /compat/linux/proc

vivin@enterprise ~
$ sudo mount /proc

So I try to scp again and I get:

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$ scp -r vivin@www.vivin.net:~/code/agnostic .
Password:
Initializing new SSH agent...

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$

WTF? Then I remembered making some changes to my .bashrc to be able to commit to github:

function start_agent {
  echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
  /usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
  echo succeeded
  chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  /usr/bin/ssh-add;
}

# Source SSH settings, if applicable
if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  #ps ${SSH_AGENT_PID} doesn't work under cywgin
  ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
    start_agent;
  }
else
  start_agent;
fi

I pulled all that out of my .bashrc and made a separate shell script for it. After I did that, scp started working again. I had no idea that calling scp would actually run .bashrc

I was having a conversation with Sheehan over twitter and I made a comment that “Chrome OS is doing the kiosk thing all over again”. I guess that’s true to an extent. ChromeOS will be running on approved hardware with an SSD. You’re probably not going to be able to install anything on the machine and everything seems to be a webapp. What this means is that all your data is online. To be honest, I don’t find very much use for that, but then again, I’m not part of the target market. I think this might be useful for people who are on-the-go and who need access to their data from anywhere in the world (well, anywhere in the world with an internet connection). I use my machine for a variety of things; mainly development. Since I also like to tinker with it from time to time, I’m always installing stuff on it. Google will need a very strong marketing campaign so that consumers understand exactly what they’re getting. They won’t be able to install applications (maybe webapps?) and they won’t be able to save arbitrary files to the machine. I wonder what this means for the online experience. What if they’re trying to download some sort of file? Where would they save it? Would Google provide online storage for the users? It’s a major paradigm shift. Like I mentioned before, your machine turns into a kiosk or a thin-client. Maybe some people won’t mind using one, but I view my machine as something much more and so I don’t think I will be satisfied.

ChromeOS .vmx file for the .vmdk

.encoding = "UTF-8"
displayName = "Chrome OS"
guestOS = "other"
memsize = "512"

ethernet0.present= "true"
ethernet0.startConnected = "true"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.connectionType = "nat"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:cd:8d:e6"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

usb.present = "true"

sound.present = "false"
sound.autodetect = "true"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
sound.fileName = "-1"
sound.startConnected = "true"

ide0:0.present = "true"
ide0:0.fileName="chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk"
ide0:0.deviceType = "disk"
ide0:0.mode = "persistent"
ide0:0.redo = ""
ide0:0.writeThrough = "false"
ide0:0.startConnected = "false"

virtualHW.version = "3"
config.version = "8"

floppy0.present = "false"

I’m no longer seeding the torrent. I suggest downloading the vmdk from gdgt (sign-up required, but just make a fake profile – no verification is performed) and using this vmx file with it.

openssl s_client -connect localhost:995

Everything seemed fine. Furthermore, this problem seemed to be limited to both my FreeBSD servers. My Linux box seemed to be running fine. I tried a bunch of things. I restarted both machines, restarted the network interfaces, made sure firewalls weren’t running, reset my router… nothing seemed to work. Every time I tested the connection to the machines (using this awesome tool here), the connections would time out. What was even stranger was that a netstat showed connections to be in a SYN_RCVD state, which meant that the box had accepted the connection. It’s just that the response wasn’t getting out. Eventually I was so desperate that I decided to reinstall FreeBSD on one of the machines. I also posted to a BSD forum asking for help. I figured that next evening I could probably fix it after work.

Well, next morning I still felt terrible, but it wasn’t so bad. My throat wasn’t hurting as much and I didn’t have that much of a headache so I was able to work from home. Oh, and the installation had completed. I set everything up quickly and gave it a whirl. Nope. Same problem. Yeah, I was getting pretty frustrated and annoyed at this point. I went so far as to contemplate wiping my beloved FreeBSD off both machines and putting Linux on there. I updated my post at the forum and I checked on it periodically throughout the day as I kept working. Finally, a kind soul popped in to help me out. He helped me troubleshoot using tcpdump and I was able to confirm that the machine was responding to the incoming connection, but it wasn’t going out. Finally, he asked me to check the routing information. I’m not that well-versed with that so I didn’t see the problem until he pointed it out. The routing information was all wrong!

See, I have two network interfaces on the box. One for my internal network, and one pointing to the outside world. The one pointing to the outside world is statically configured, whereas the one for my internal network picks up its configuration from my AirPort Extreme router. What was happening was that dhclient was overwriting the route information. So when the machine tried to respond back, it saw its default route as the internal router, and not my modem! I had to update my dhclient.conf and force the router address to the correct one:

backoff-cutoff 2;
initial-interval 1;
retry 10;
select-timeout 0;
timeout 30;

interface "vr0" {
   supersede routers 209.x.y.54;
   supersede host-name "enterprise";
   supersede domain-name "xxxx.xxx";
   request subnet-mask,
           domain-name-servers;

   require subnet-mask,
           domain-name-servers;
}

The important line here is the one that says supersede routers 209.x.y.54; (I’ve hidden the actual numbers from teh hax0rs). This tells the dhclient to override the router information that it gets from the DHCP server. Once I did this, everything started working again. My thanks to jggimi at DaemonForums!

[Errno 5] Input/output error

This is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.

Fun stuff. So then, I burnt myself another copy of the install CD, making sure to burn this one at the lowest speed (1x) and then verifying the image. I also made sure that the MD5 sums on the ISO matched the one on the Ubuntu website. This time when I booted up, the install proceeded along further before dying at 78% with the same error. I restarted the installation multiple times only to see it fail at the same point. I started wondering if it was a problem with the hard-drive. Since the drive is SMART enabled, I decided to run some tests on it. From the LiveCD, I started up the terminal and installed smartmontools through apt-get (sudo apt-get install smartmontools). I then got some errors about unfulfilled dependencies and postfix (strange), but smartmontools seem to be installed so I didn’t think much of it. I followed the instructions at this site and tested my hard-drive. I even ran the long test which took about two hours to complete. The tests passed. At this point I was at my wit’s end. It wasn’t the image, the CD, or the hard-drive. It had to be a hardware problem. Was it the drive itself?

Finally I figured it out. It was mostly due to blind luck/intuition that I was able to figure it out. I vaguely remembered trying to install FreeBSD a few years ago and running into a problem with ACPI. So when the LiveCD booted up, I hit F6 and checked the first three options (acpi=off, noapic, nolapic). This time, the installation went without a hitch and now I’m able to dual-boot between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04!

I figured I’d solve that problem later and decided to install Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on the 500Gb drive. The LiveCD boots up fine, but when I try to actually try out the LiveCD or even try to install Ubuntu, it fails. Everything hangs after this message:

ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

After searching on the internets, it seems to be a RAID controller issue and a fix exists in the kernel. So I don’t know why I still have the problem. If anyone knows of a solution, please let me know! I’m going to keep working on the problem and see if I can solve it.

Mike (thanks Mike!) posted a comment on that blog mentioning a small change that needed to be made. To get JavaFX 1.1 on Linux, first follow the steps in the original guide. When you need to mount the dmg, you need to provide an offset. So instead of the original command, do the following:

vivin@dauntless ~
$; sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((1024*17)) -t hfsplus javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg.out javafx

The dmg should be mounted now.

I’m assuming that you already have Cygwin installed. If you don’t, you can get it from here. In addition to whatever other packages you have selected to customize your install, you also need development packages (gcc and friends), Xorg packages (headers, includes, and libraries), and a few graphics libraries (for aterm):

• Devel
  • gcc-core
  • gcc-g++
  • libXaw3d-devel (for xv)
  • libjpeg-devel (for aterm)
  • libpng12-devel (for aterm)
• Libs
  • jpeg (for aterm)
  • libXaw3d-devel
  • libXaw3d-7
  • libfreetype6
  • libjpeg-devel
  • libjpeg62 (for aterm)
  • libjpeg6b (for aterm)
  • libpng12 (for aterm)
  • libpng12-devel (for aterm)
  • libtiff5 (for aterm, xv)
  • zlib-devel (for aterm)
  • zlib0 (for aterm)
• Utils
  • bzip2 (to handle .bz2 files)
• X11
  • libX11-devel
  • xinit
  • xsetroot (if xv doesn’t work for you)

After Cygwin finishes installing those packages, grab the sources for libAfterImage, aterm, and xv. Unpack the sources perform the requisite steps to build and install from source (./configure, make, and make install should work if all goes well).

libAfterImage:

If you get “parse error before XErrorEvent” errors while building libAfterImage, make sure that you didn’t forget to select the X11 development package.

aterm:

gcc on Cygwin expects –rdynamic and not -rdynamic. If you’re seeing these errors, edit the Makefiles under src and src/graphics within the aterm source directory. Change the “-rdynamic” to “–rdynamic”. The changes should be on line 54 for both files.

xv:

Under the tiff directory within the xv sources, there is a file called RANLIB.csh. Edit this file and make sure that you ONLY have the following line in there:

ranlib $1 >& /dev/null

Otherwise the build process will fail. Additionally, you need to edit xv.h. This file lives right at the root of your xv source directory. If you do not perform the following change, you’ll get errors from gcc complaining that “sys_errlist has previously been defined”. Change line 119 of xv.h to:

/*extern char *sys_errlist[]; */    /* this too... */

What you’re doing is commenting out the definition for sys_errlist so that it doesn’t conflict with what has already been defined in the Cygwin header files. These changes should be the only ones you need to get xv compiling and running.

Now you need to set up two batch files. One to start up X rootlessly, and another to start up aterm. Before you do that, make sure you add C:\cygwin\usr\bin and C:\cygwin\X11R6\usr\bin to your PATH variable. You can do this by going to My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Environment Variables. If you don’t do this, you’ll get “cygwin1.dll not found” errors while trying to run these batch files. The X windows binaries used to live in C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin, but have since been moved to C:\cygwin\usr\bin. Therefore, the start-up batch-file now looks like this:

xwin.bat:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\usr\bin\xwin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error
C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin\xv.exe -display :0 -root -quit -be -max /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/vivin/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Wallpapers/01707_spectrumofthesky_1920x1200.jpg

The first line starts up the X windowing system. The second line sets the wallpaper using aterm. You now need another batch file to run aterm, and that looks like this:

aterm.bat

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c "aterm -sh 80 -tr -trsb -fade 20 -tint gray -sb -st -sr -sl 1000 -tn xterm"

This file starts aterm with the background image at 50% brightness, transparent background, transparent scrollbar, 20% fading on losing focus, gray tint, scrollbar, trough-less scrollbar, scrollbar on the right, 1000 scrollback lines, and with xterm terminal emulation. Like I mentioned in my original guide. xv will sometimes fail to start with xwin. If that is the case, you can modify aterm.bat to look like this:

aterm.bat:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c "xv -display :0 -root -quit -be -max /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/vivin/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Wallpapers/01707_spectrumofthesky_1920x1200.jpg && aterm -sh 80 -tr -trsb -fade 20 -tint gray -sb -st -sr -sl 1000 -tn xterm"

Slightly inefficient, but it works. Now if you have a dual-monitor display, you’ll notice that the background image is stretched across both screens when you run aterm. This is probably not what you want. To fix this problem you need to change a few invocation options for xv. For this to work properly (meaning, not look crappy) both screens should be running at the same resolution:

xv -display :0 -root -quit -be -maxpect -rmode 1 /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/vivin/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Wallpapers/01707_spectrumofthesky_1920x1200.jpg

Notice the -maxpect and -rmode 1 options. -maxpect expands the image to fill the screen while maintaining the aspect ratio, while -rmode 1 sets the display mode on xv to tiled. So you should now have your wallpaper displaying on both screens now (under X) without being distorted.

Here’s what it looks like on my machine:

This is on a dual-monitor setup with both screens running at 1920×1200 resolution. I’ve set X’s background to be the same as my windows Wallpaper so that it looks cooler. Notice how the background image (inside aterm) is not stretched, but tiled across the two screens. That’s all there is to it. Seems like a bit of work, but I think it’s worth it. My main reason for going through all this trouble was to get a decent terminal running in windows. I guess I could have just used xterm, but aterm looks so much nicer, doesn’t it?

The default setting for Apache2 on Ubuntu for .htaccess is “ignore it”. You need to enable it by going to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and changing the AllowOverride directive, which you can find inside the <Directory> … </Directory> tags:

AllowOverride ALL

If you want to enable URL rewrites, you need to enable the mod_rewrite module as it is not enabled by default:

[11:31:14] vivin@dauntless ~/Projects/www/skyblue
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
Module rewrite installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.

[11:31:20] vivin@dauntless ~/Projects/www/skyblue
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
 * Reloading web server config apache2