Well, apparently it’s almost impossible these days.
First I went to some site that needed flash, which I pretty much why I thought of it in the first place. Firefox asks “Hey man, you need a plugin for this page, want me to fix it?”.
So I told it “Amuse me”. Firefox responded with “I’m sorry, I automatically failed”. Nothing new there.
“Do you want to do a manual install?”. Sure thing.
So it sent me to the adobe flash installation page: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

The first big scary thing you see if the DEFAULT ENABLED Mcafee installation which most users will ignore.
So when you disable that checkbox and hit the “Agree to get abused and give all your children to Adobe as slaves” button, it gives you a big “THANK YOU!” page.
This gives you a nice pop-up in firefox, asking you to allow the installation of a an addon.
At first I was positive “Well, that’s easier than I expected”. How wrong I was.

The addon it tried to install was none other than “Adobe DLM”. Short for “Adobe Destroyer of Local Machine”. I DO NOT WANT THAT PIECE OF GARBAGE, I ONLY WANT THAT FSC!@#$(#4#%$
Needless to say I was very annoyed. Not only that, but on that page (including the previous) I couldn’t find a normal download link to the flash installer.
Fine fine, I’ll use the cancer DLM, after which I’ll uninstall it.

Next problem: the DLM can’t download files!
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but the only thing the DLM can get right is installing that fscking piece of rubbish from McafayeeEEEEEEE (never mind that I already have a decent FREE virus scanner). On the flash download it fails to check the integrity of the file. Repeatedly.

Adobe Cancer

For those of you in the same situation, there’s still a place to get the normal installer:
As described in this article from adobe, you can download it HERE (other browser flash installer for windows).

Now please die adobe. Take your habbrokrat reader with you, and your picture crap, and flash, and all the rubbish software you create these days. What’s next, Adobe Anti-virus? Just stick to photoshop, thanks.

However, I expect them to revert their plans when enough badmouthing hits the news and make them “only” half as bad as they currently are.
We’ll see.

(put it in a file in /etc/profile.d to have it loaded all the time).
Unfortunately this won’t save you from all CMake builds. For instance I just tried to build Awesome (messing around with a new window manager can be fun sometimes) but when I saw that they use CMake I almost aborted instantly. To make the installation use proper paths you would have to add this to the CMAKE_ARGS for instance:

Ridiculous.

Anyhow, if I still feel like messing around it once it finally compiles I might talk about it later.

Did you know that CMake also fails to create an uninstall target…. gah.
Because oh dear, it might remove useful files from the system. NO SHIT SHERLOCK, WHY DO YOU THINK I WOULD WANT TO RUN AN UNINSTALL?!?!?!
Fortunately it does support DESTDIR, so we can handle the uninstall through our package managers. Phew.

Dragon Age and Wine

First I decided to check it if the game would run in Wine. The appdb has some info that doesn’t sound too terrible, and since the latest git builds sometimes give better results I needed to test no matter what the test results said. So I built the latest git version of wine (which should be version 1.1.33 by now, but since they had WineConf it’s still labeled 1.1.32) and fired up the installer in a new prefix. I always install games in their own wine prefix so they don’t bug eachother with dlls and hacks needed to get them running. The game seems to need a few hacks from winetricks, specifically gecko and vcrun2005. Without the gecko component the Dotnet part of the installer crashed for me (it takes forever to install though). You might also want to install physx, since the game uses that as well. (and a lot of ppl had the physx installer fail through wine, good thing it’s in winetricks now). Finally I also installed d3dx9 just to be sure, since it needs DirectX to run.

Installing using the Installer

The installer should now come up, like this.

Dragon Age - Installer (wine)

Dragon Age Installer Adminerror (wine)

Dragon Age Installer under wine (2)

Dragon Age – Manual installation

Since the installer is pretty much a bitch, and I noticed it didn’t do much except for bitch and wine and unrar some packages, I tried to see if I could get it to run without needing the installer. Here goes! (you need the rar utility for this).
I created a new wine prefix and installed the required winetricks parts as above, but instead of running the installer I did this:

After this you should have a directory listing that looks very much like after using the official installer. The only worry I had was the game looking for registry entries, but it seems like those aren’t needed that much. (read, for me it started without asking stuff).
In fact, what baffles me is: this way it doesn’t even ask about a CD key. Very very interesting. However, I did need to use a no-cd patch to get it to run under wine (for both installation methods). Meh, nothing new there.

Running it under wine

Starting up the game will probably give you a black screen that does nothing until you click/bash your keyboard a few times. This is because the intro movies don’t work under wine at the moment.
However, you can disable those movies in the .INI file:

(or use a text editor).

Dragon Age Title Screen (wine)

For me the flickering was basically gone (during gameplay at least) when I reduced the graphics detail to “low”. (I could have Framebuffer effects enabled and also texture details set to high).
What helps is basically lowering the graphics settings:

• Lower the resolution
• Don’t run fullscreen

Anyway, that makes it playable under wine.

BenV’s opinion on the game

It’s a very worthy game to play if you’re into Baldur’s gate etc. The graphics are very nice compared to what I’m used to (especially under windows ) and the interface works properly.
The intro story is completely different depending on the race, class, and background (noble or commoner) you pick. I played as a casteless dwarf rogue and had the intro story living in the slums of the city, my sister being a whore trying to marry her way up to the noble class, while thieving and robbing my way around myself. Needless I butchered my way through the intro, cheating my boss out of some money and fighting a lot.
On the other hand my girlfriend started out as a human mage and had a lot less fighting and a lot more blabla and stuff from dreamworlds etc and could talk her way through a big part of the intro. (of course she also ran into the necessary fights, if it were only to teach the combat system of the game).
Speaking of which, the combat system is also well done. The party can be told to hold ground and they will actually stay there instead of having your archers/mages being raped in the front. Stealthing around and backstabbing also works very nicely

No LAN games

Anyway, I’m sure you can read enough reviews about the game that explain all that in much more detail.
But the one thing that is very very bad is the lack of multiplayer LAN games.
If there’s one thing we loved about Baldur’s Gate it was the ability to play the game with 3 computers all controlling the very same party, all players with their own character.
So why is it not in this game? I’ve seen a lot of BS on slashdot and other sites where the basic arguments are:

• It would take too much time to implement and therefore reduce the quality of the single player game
• It’s not possible without having a linear story / it would need a completely different story not geared to “the one”
• UI must be more complex for multiplayer
• I’m a fucking retard

Well, I think:

• Adding multiplayer would require LAN support which is extra code (but they already need that pretty much because of the DLC garbage). However, it’s not THAT MUCH more. A few screens to setup a game and deal with permissions together with a few tweaks to deal with synchronisation. That’s all. Peanuts compared to the rest of the game.
• See Baldur’s Gate, we -loved- that kind of multiplayer. Doesn’t need a different story at all, exactly the same story was excellent.
• The UI can be exactly the same, worked fine for Baldur’s Gate. There are however a few details that are nice to have when doing a multiplayer game, like people still being able to walk around and do stuff while others talk to NPCs, but no major overhauls.
• Yes, you are.

I’m sure most people who scream “NO” to the multiplayer support (and I wonder why) assume that big changes are needed to the game to make it multiplayer. Perhaps they have the wrong idea about what kind of multiplayer makes us happy.
However, since EA games got involved (see the whole DLC fiasco) there’s little hope that it’ll be changed.
Pity. Anyway, it’s still a very nice game. Time to play!

As a side story, since we moved our junerules.com domain from our very kind previous host to our own Xenbro machine, the amount of spam we receive plummeted. Apparently not because they stopped spamming on the domain though. I’m sure our previous host is glad he doesn’t have to deal with all the attention and traffic anymore .
The main reason for this spam drop seems to be spamdyke. I’m sure you have your own opinion about how nice or acceptable it is to run graylisting and reverse DNS checking and all that, but my opinion is that if you have a badly configured mailserver (read: windows zombie machine) you can die in a fire for all I care. Fix your mailserver and then I’ll accept your mail.
Too bad for the few properly configured mailservers out there that now have to try twice to get through the graylisting…. then again, it’s a small price to pay.

Anyway, to get rid of assholes trying to bruteforce their way into my ssh daemon I run fail2ban, which lets you try to get in a few times and then blocks your IP for a week. That’s how much I like them. So I decided to add a new filter to fail2ban, which gets rid of asshole mailservers that will fail their next attempts anyway. Those are the mailservers that spamdyke denies with the following errors:

• DENIED_RDNS_MISSING – in other words, the mailserver doesn’t have a reverse DNS entry. You can’t be serious, that has to be a zombie.
• DENIED_IP_IN_CC_RDNS – means the mailserver probably has a dynamic IP address from their local ISP. Mostly zombies. Sorry for the 2 mailservers our there that are legitimate that mail like this. I’ll whitelist you whenever I see complaints.
• DENIED_RDNS_RESOLVE – means the reverse DNS does not resolve to the IP address it connected from. Get lost. However, this one should be used with care, because if the DNS resolver fails for whatever reason spamdyke will also issue this. So make a real good consideration if you want to use this in the fail2ban filter.

Since above failures will keep coming back if they retry, I block these asshole servers for a week.
Here’s my /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/spamdyke.conf:
Fail2ban spamdyke filter - Version 0.1 - SHA: 1ee23545d87998d0314d2683eb8f2a099cf9fca9

Simply put it in /etc/fail2ban/filter.d and edit /etc/fail2ban/jail.local and add something like this:

Then reload fail2ban:

After enabling it about 12 hours ago, this is the result:

Simply amazing. We’ll end up blocking half the internet. Oh well, it’s only the bad part of internet anyway.

Either patch it manually:

• Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
• The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.

The Settlers 1

The Settlers 2

Anyway, today I decided to try out this free open source clone (that can even import Settlers II maps these days, isn’t that cute?).
So on to the build process. I leeched the SVN version (you know me, official releases are for sissies) and took a look through the source. Waaaah! SCONS…. so much for getting my hopes up. Oh well, let’s see how well it does today.
Running scons started with some notifications about not having optipng and pngrewrite and such (might get those later if I care about those 3 bytes they might shave off, I like the programs though) and then bailed out with this:

To which I told it “No, it is not.”. Guess I’ll have to fix that for you huh? Fine. (yeah, I don’t bother to check requirements these days… they’re all for pokemon OS anyway, I’ll just find out where the train stops by letting it derail).
So I find the SDL_gfx site from google and copy paste the latest release link to slackbuild.pl, which leeches it and starts compiling. Until:

Oh really, asshole… mhm, maybe google did not give me the latest release page. Or maybe SDL_gfx fails. Let’s find out.
So I run into ohloh’s sdl-gfx page, that has a button that made me slightly mad/angry/annoyed/I kill you.
It looks like this: Where’s the download?. Yeah, where’s the fscking download, that’s what -I- want to know. So I follow the link and get the option to

provide your users with downloads in 2 ways

. *RAAAH*. Do I look like a project manager to you? *RAGE*.
The quickest way to fix these kind of issues is usually to forget about official sources and immediately walk to the pokemon OS repositories to get the patches. Funny how they are convenient sometimes. So I run to their latest repository version, fetch their patches and check them out. Huh, no patches for this? After which I finally read the README from the official SDL_gfx source. *hehehe*, maybe I should have done that before I started ranting about this. The README mentions:

To build without MMX code enabled (i.e. PPC or for AMD64 architecture
which is missing pusha/popa):
./configure –disable-mmx

Aha! To be fair, it was kind of hidden in the README after a lot of blabla about stuff that I really don’t care about like what primitives it supports. Normally I do read the INSTALL file, but that contains the boilerplate GPL install file for this source. Makes me wonder why they don’t automagically disable MMX, that’s what configure is for after all. Oh well.
With the –disable-mmx configure switch it compiled and I had a package. Back to Widelands:

What the heck is libgigglez?

libggz wraps many common low-level functions which are often used in C programming.

I see, another Boost wannabe. Or maybe libc. Or glib. You get the point.

The first such group is memory handling, which offers functions such as ggz_strdup() or ggz_malloc(), which resemble their counterparts from libc but are more convenient to use. For instance, ggz_strdup(NULL) returns NULL instead of crashing, and ggz_malloc() includes a reference counter to be used for debugging in combination with ggz_free().

Ahaha, yeah, more convienient. Instead making sure you’re not trying to copy garbage in the first place you could simply copy NULL by using ggz_strdup and have your program end up with empty strings or a not working communication protocol. Much more convenient indeed
And obviously they haven’t heard of the malloc debugging features that are already present in the libc library. Hopefully their debugger is more easy to use and shows more info, but I don’t care for now. I’ll regard this ggz library as “More choice is always better”. Let’s see if it works on slackware64.
I stashed libggz-0.0.14.1.tar.gz through slackbuild, which compiled it without any issues. Good. Scons also wanted ggz-client-libs so I also ran it through slackbuild. Another win for slackbuild.

Back at Widelands scons finally agreed on the libraries and went on, then complained about my TERM variable since it was not equal to “xterm-color” or “dumb”… seriously, why bother checking if you’re going to act retarded anyway. Stick to terminfo/termcap for color support. After that it complained about me not having ‘krazy2′ and

you will submit code with i. a. spelling errors!

Yeah, that’s just what I was planning to do. And they will quake in their boots when looking at my code.

After 5 million more “Checking for errors” checks it went on compiling. Finally it said:

Time to play!

Widelands titlescreen

Widelands ingame (1)

Widelands ingame (2)

While it’s still very much in development, it already is fun to play. You’ll recognize a bunch of stuff from the original game, but Widelands also changed some things like buildings and resource names. For example where Setllers 1 required a Sawmill, Widelands requires a “Wood hardener”. Convenient stuff like watch windows are implemented so you can keep track of a building, roads can be built piece by piece but also in 1 go like in the later Settler games, statistics about buildings and production, and there’s tons more. They included background music and sounds like birds singing etc, which is cute, but it’s a good thing they can be turned off as well.

Widelands with watch window

Widelands ingame story stuff

So far I enjoyed playing the tutorial campaign. However, I haven’t done the combat part yet, I’m quite sure I’ll get bored of the game when I run into that….. but don’t let that stop you!
Go give the game a try, it’s fun

Widelands ingame Statistics

… huh? What’s taking so long? Our server with issues? That’s unlikely since I still used it 5 minutes earlier. After checking out the NFS server and deciding nothing was wrong with it (or at least, it didn’t look like it) I got fed up with it and went to bed.
Don’t you hate it when stuff stops working just when you’re tired and want to go to sleep? Fortunately for me this is our own internal problem so I could actually do so

Today I decided to go find out what the hell was wrong with it. So again I booted the machine to find out the above kernel messages.
Time for some tcpdump on the nfs server to see if that can shine some light on this situation. (needless to say there were no useful log entries anywhere).
Tcpdump:

Hmm, interesting. The first request seems to “work” (read: it receives an answer) while the rest of the messages are somehow ignored. Wonder why…
Just to make sure I checked the firewall on the server, which should allow pretty much everything:

Well, that seems to be true. Maybe something weird in the mount options? Let’s see the /etc/fstab for the NFS client:

Nothing weird… or is there? After messing around with it for a bit I decided it really wasn’t anything in there.
Time to do a test on a different machine in the network. On my workstation I tried to mount the root path after giving myself permissions and re-exporting the nfs paths:

And there it was, being stuck for what seems to be forever. So in other words: the mount worked, but then it doesn’t respond for the ls command. What… the… fuck.
Mind boggling, while the logs on the nfs server gave no hints at all. (as usual).
To make this even more interesting, there is another export on that same nfs server that most workstation use, called general_stores. (to access the music collection etc).
Can’t remember that being broken…. let’s test:

How can this be?! This mount works fine while the other doesn’t? What the hell is so special about that NFS client’s export?

And then it hit me.

*WHACK*
(ouch)

The window that I had open with the ls -al tmp suddenly decided to work. It gave this listing:

Doh! /proc … of course that’s the problem! That’s why tcpdump showed the “proc” entries!

But why?

Well, recently I moved some disks around and added a ‘crossmnt‘ option in the /etc/exports file on the NFS server.
This option gives the nfs clients the ability to cross mount borders, so for example if I have this on the nfs server:
* /mnt/disk with device /dev/sda1 mounted there
* /mnt/disk/stuff with device /dev/sdb1 mounted there
And then export /mnt/disk and mount it on my nfs client, I can see /mnt/disk/stuff with its contents because of the crossmnt option. Without that option the directory would be empty on nfs clients.

So how does this relate to proc? Well, since proc is “special” it has a ton of special files that nfs can’t deal with and therefore can not export.
Now normally this wouldn’t be an issue, since it shouldn’t be mounted in the first place (the nfs server has its own /proc, the nfs cilent mounts its own version so it only needs a place to mount it on). However, a little earlier my girly friend mounted it “because she had to build E“. Don’t ask.
E again…. always the same…
After unmounting the proc dir and rebooting the NFS client it had no more problems and booted fine.

Conclusion:
NFS can’t deal with proc. Don’t hide a mounted procfs in your nfs exports.
NFS sucks because of stuff like this, but I haven’t found anything better so far. Guess we’ll stick with it for now.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Aion installation on XP in Virtualbox 3.0.6

Aion Updater

Aion GameGuard part`

Aion dies

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)

Oh. Boost….. that time of the month. If there’s one piece of trash I’ve run into very often on my compilation expeditions…. it’s boost. What a cancer piece of trash that is. You wouldn’t believe the amount of cursing I’ve gone through on my trails through “build from source” land because of boost. It never works, and when it does it’s limping on. They should have called it “blast” instead.
These days boost is in the official slackware repositories. You’d think that would help, since I can’t mess up the paths etc anymore. (compiling boost is another disaster btw, don’t go there unless you like torture). But noo, as usual the programs that use boost (“because we can’t code ™”, or at least, that’s what I think) are so good at coding stuff themselves that they fail the autoconf for it as well. Prutsers. Well, to be honest, if they can’t code it themselves it’s probably smart to use a library that handles it for them….. but boost? :/

Anyway, back to qBitTorrent. Actually, it’s libtorrent-rasterbar that’s failing. Attempt 1, configure with only a prefix and no other options:

WHat?! Do you ahve Boost::System? Yes. I mean no!
… seriously, who comes up with this shit….
So we dig into config.log and find:

Or in other words: nothing we didn’t already know. FUCK.
Time for a trace.

…. /usr/lib? Says who? Not me, that’s for sure. idiots.
In fact, I’m quite sure that it’s in /usr/lib64.

Jup, as expected. Boost is kanker. Since boost doesn’t have the usual pkgconfig issues, we can only conclude that the reason is that either this configure.in was written by a moron, or that
boost supplies invalid tests for finding itself through the autoconf system. I suspect the latter, but that’s just me

In this case the solution is simple, since the configure script has an override option. Wonder why… maybe they ran into boost idiocies before?
The solution:

This runs through configure, it finds the boost garbage and runs through. And guess what? It even compiles!

The gist of this rant: autoconf is pretty useless if you make assumptions that autoconf is supposed to detect. If you write software, don’t assume this stuff, try to detect it.
Also: when it fails, give me an error message that is useful, not some generic error code. “Library not found” vs “library not found because libblabla.so doesn’t exist in /usr/lib”.

About qbittorrent: it’s a cute little torrent client for linux. Especially if you like faily lightweight stuff that does has a gui. The thing I like about those lightweight clients: they’re fast.
This one even has an RSS reader these days…. cute.
Here’s a screenie:

qbittorrent v1.5.0

So qBittorrent: keep up the good work, and get rid of boost

Simple question:
“Where in /proc can I find a list of IP addresses with corresponding interfaces?”

Simple answer:
Try /proc/net/if_inet6!

… that’s great…. but I really wanted the IPv4 addresses as well.
“/proc/net/if_inet4″ or “/proc/net/if_inet”? Noooooo….

Conclusion: KANKER LINUX!

Obviously I can get the address by calling ‘ip addr show‘, ‘ifconfig‘ or a heap of other solution involving calling ioctl on sockets or using the netlink interface… but seriously, blegh.

The most retarded thing is that pretty much every other statistic about my network devices is there… including active connections and whatnot, but ipv4 addresses? Nooooo….. *RAAH*

(HAAAAAT!!!)

Solution:

(Don’t confuse fileformat with filetype, one is used for encoding, the other for things as syntax highlighting)

Solution 2:

I never use this since I never have that piece of cancer called dos2unix, but some distros do.

Solution 3:

That should fix it. On to the “let’s trash my home directory with my fancy new perl script that I just converted”

So after the latest local root exploit thing, and testing it on some machines during har2009, I figured it might be nice to get the patch into my kernels. Running a webserver usually means you’re at risk after all, especially when it’s running wordpress

So I grabbed the latest kernel that had that patch and went for the usual make menuconfig ordeal. After half an hour of selecting “yes”, “maybe”, “I guess so”, and
some XEN options (CONFIG_PARAVIRT_GUEST=y, CONFIG_XEN=y, CONFIG_HVC_DRIVER=y, CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_FRONTEND=y, CONFIG_XEN_NETDEV_FRONTEND=y, CONFIG_XEN_KBDDEV_FRONTEND=y, CONFIG_HVC_XEN=y, CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON=y, CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES=y, CONFIG_XENFS=y, CONFIG_XEN_COMPAT_XENFS=y) I built the thing.
As I usually build bzImages I also did so here. make bzImage modules modules_install.
Half an hour later I had a shiny bzImage. Let’s try it on a test domain!

I copied the bzImage to /boot, changed the kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-xen-old" option to the new place, and GO!
This is what it told me:

Huh, where’s my console?
Checking xm list it seemed to be there… but paused… and with constantly increasing ids. Waaait a minute!
Checking the log files (xend.log in this case) revealed a secret:

Note the ‘WARNING’ line. Crashed?!
Gee, that’s … interesting. Why? Took me 5 minutes to find the other log file, but xend-debug.log had a magic line:
ERROR Invalid kernel: xc_dom_find_loader: no loader found
… great. Another why.
In case you’re wondering, the increasing status in ‘xm list’ was caused by the on_crash = 'reboot' line in the xen host config.
I quickly destroyed the doman and changed it to a oneshot try: on_crash = 'destroy'

After some searching another hint presented itself. Aren’t they nice?
This hint was: “Xen is a retarded piece of cancer and can’t decypher the bzImage format, try vmlinux instead”. Aha!
Back to the kernel, make vmlinux, copy, and another try to boot it. Obviously this was way too simple. It still crashed.
Checking my old kernel that works for both dom0 and domU with file I noticed that gz should at least work.

Some more details about the crashing domains can be found using xm dmesg
It gave me something like:

As you can see, that’s really useful…..

A useful page with some info can be found here. It confirms that a gz kernel should work (but bz probably doesn’t) since I’m still running Xen 3.2. However, I can’t find a good reason for why it won’t work.

Google to the rescue! Hard to find a useful keyword, since most xen kernel issues seem to be similar, but eventually I found this tidbit:
tiny kernel patch.
Weird that this should be needed, one would hope that basic shit like this would work after 8 kernel versions, but obviously they’re all retards when it comes to this.
Thanks Jeremy Fitzhardinge for the patch!
Just for quick reference, this is the actual patch:

So much for ‘vanilla’.

However, it boots now:

and a lot more yadieyada until it hits a new wall: root device.
Well, that sounds solvable.

In fact, here’s a solution. What you say?
“AAAAH, I GET NOTHING, IT WON’T EVEN CRASH ANYMORE, JUST NO OUTPUT???!”
Ah yeah, I forgot to mention: they changed the console device as well as the block device. So here’s a solution for both issues:
Edit your xen host config file and make it so:

(xvda1 is what used to be sda1, you can figure out the rest).

And after all this: HAHA! Success is mine!
Except of course for the undeniable fact that my domU has a fucked up fstab and all, but no issues there
Now go mess up your own system! Oh, I see… you already did. Good luck fixing it

Update

I just tested a testing kernel — 2.6.31-rc8, and it seems like they fixed it. Probably has been fixed in the testing branch for quite a while now, but still not in stable 2.6.30
Let’s hope they release 2.6.31 soon.

Record companies: please die. Now.

I decided to work on making slackbuild.pl a bit more acceptable in terms of usability and looks. The reason for this is that the dialog program doesn’t exactly do what I want.
That is, it works…. but that’s pretty much all I can say about it. It doesn’t allow me to make a comined checkbox/menu thing that I want for my configure options part. Next to that it’s tedious to fork and parse its output all the time, and let’s not even get started about looks and input issues.
So I figured: hmm, dialog is made in ncurses, perl has a Curses lib…. let’s play!

First off I read through most of NCURSES Programming HOWTO. Somehow it felt familiar, probably because I already went through it when messing with iotop. Next, I realized that google is pretty much useless when you try to search for ‘curses’ and perl, probably because it’s the misspelled version of ‘cursus’ which means ‘course’ in dutch. However, ncurses is something you can search for and find -some- (but few) bits and pieces of information.

Time for a hello world.

And we run this, and voila:

Well, that was easy enough. Of course I already knew all this shit, I made iotop after all…
Now time for more advanced trickery: windows.
What I want is simple: tailbox, yesnobox, checkboxconfigureoptionsthingy and all that with some good style.
“YOU SAID SIMPLE!”
Well, I never said it would be easy

So my idea was to make the stdscr the backtitle, should be easy enough to always paint that the same way right?
And then make the other things windows above that. Now the mysteries start.
A little code to test the windowing concepts:

And here’s our beautiful result:

…. what the.
Our window is empty?
But how could this be?
MAGIC!!!!
However, it does wait for the ‘q’ button before exiting, so not everything failed…

This sort of nonsense is exactly the reason why I started this post. Right now I’m having some serious doubts about continuing this curse*COUGH*s project, but on the other hand, it’s a nice challenge. Probably one of the reasons dialog is such a piece of junk… the library is garbage!
Note that there are a few other options, such as Curses::UI, but they seem to be a bit more junk than I want, not to mention another depedency. Nah, I’ll figure it out using Curses for as long as I can manage to not go crazy.

Some pointers I found out:

• Printing stuff outside a window (because the window is too small) makes it go bonkers. It might not appear at all, overwrite other stuff… you name it.
• A big pitfall is the y,x syntax. Where one would expect coordinates in the x,y format, curses makes you curse and reverse.
• Another pitfall is forgetting the refresh, or messing up the order of the refreshes. I’m writing some wrappers for that in slackbuild.pl.
• Overlapping windows are another source of fun, in order to make sure the overlapped window gets repainted properly you can use touchwin($win); on it.

Oh yeah, if you ever decide to write a curses program:
Make sure to set a __DIE__ handler that RESTORES THE TERMINAL PROPERLY! If one thing annoys people it’s messing up their stuff…. and not closing Curses properly does exactly that.
For those who wonder how to get out of such a broken terminal, type in ‘reset‘ and hit enter. (or twice if you’re a bad typist). No, this won’t reset your pc, it will simply reset your terminal to sanity.

“But what about the broken code in the second example?”
Oh yeah… another case of forgetting to call refresh. What we did there was to properly refresh the imaginary windows.
However, we forgot to refresh the real stdscr window that contains them! So nothing was output to the screen. Lovely.
It’s still a bit fuzzy here though, so don’t mind me if I screwed up the reasoning, but that’s what I understand about it now. It’ll get better
Anyway, insert a refresh(); at line 25 and it’ll do what you’d expect. It’ll look like this:

Good luck with your cursed rabbits!

***followup here:ncurses magic part 2***

I felt like updating my shit today. Somehow I enjoy updates so I do it whenever I see interesting stuff.
So glancing through the slackware changelog I noticed a new Apache2 version (2.2.12 with a bunch of security updates). Meh, not my favorite piece of garbage to upgrade, but local upgrades were easy enough and also the remote (slackware 11, custom builds) ones went without hickups.

Then there was a new version of Irssi - 0.8.14. Fine, updated that too. Good to see it didn’t break my scripts

Meanwhile I checked out if the apache upgrade broke my notes, but it didn’t. While on the notes page I decided to write this little snippet,
and found out that also WordPress had a new release – 2.8.3. More security stuff.
And the codecolorer plugin that I use for the code snippets also had an update.
Updating wordpress was easy enough btw, just go to admin – tools – upgrade and hit the upgrade automatically button. I like features like that in a product.
Note that this failed at least two times because of a 60 second timeout on the download. Guess they need to invest in faster servers
“Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1226456 bytes received”…. too bad they don’t give me other options when that happens.
And while I’m moaning about their ‘automagic upgrade’, how about some ajax progress indicators etc guys?
In case you also run into the timeout issue:
Don’t bother downloading the file yourself and putting it in the /your/wordpress/path/wp-content/ dir. Hitting the button over and over will
only swamp their servers even more and won’t make it any better either.
I tried increasing the php timeout on the sockets, but that didn’t seem to help. Pity guys, real shame… in fact, it angers me. *grumble*morons*grumble*
You might as well go for the manual upgrade.

At some point I got pissed enough to grep and read through the source for half an hour (AAARGH MY EYES) and distill this patch:
Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php with your favorite editor and change line 448 so it has a more reasonable timeout, I put it to 300:

Now it finally worked

While on the update tour I also updated my MPD to version 0.15.1, although I’m running the git
version of course, but that went fine (through slackbuild.pl of course).

Well, that’s enough updates for today. Time for some coding on slackbuild I think

So what the fuck are screenlets? Looks cute, feels cute, and once you think about it for a bit you immediately realize that it’s cute for 10 minutes after which you’ll kill the thing because it slows down your PC and you never really look at it anyway, but regardless I feel like checking it out.

“<BenV> Download… … I thought this page said download… and fuck off with your .deb file, gimme the source Ah, there we go - Source”

It’s funny how some people write software that they don’t want anyone to use. How the shift-3 am I supposed to download that source thing? Log in? Are you insane? For a download?

(speaking of which, go to hell fileplanet, gamersheaven and all such “login to download” kanker sites).

So what they really want to change that download link into is this: DOWNLOAD.

Feeding a url from that page to slackbuild.pl gives you a “Self signed certificate, AAAARGH, I’m dying, je moeder” whining from wget, so stuff it a –no-check-certificate and patch my slackbuild, done. Wait a minute…. certificate? On a http:// link? Oooh, thanks for the redirection guys. Makes me wonder why opera doesn’t bitch about self signed certificate for that link…. while wget does… let’s try firefox… nope, no warning. WHAT THE FUCK, try opening a website and they scream bloody murder because of a self signed cert, but a download? Oooh, noo, nooo problem. Morons.

In case you’re wondering about the cert, either go there for yourself, or check what openssl thinks:

Maybe it’s OK when “they” selfsign, but it’s not ok if -I- selfsign? Guess I’m clueless…

Anyway, back to screenlets:
Untarring their ‘sourceball’ gives me a retarded directoryname (no version number), which hints me that it’s probably no decent autoconf thing. Ok, it’s python, so no surprise there.
Other than that it builds and install without issues. Note to self: have to add python setup.py support to slackbuild, they’re clean enough to support that.

So after installing, wondering what to do next… I type “screenlets” in my urxvt and hit enter.
*suspense*
Will it work?

…

OF COURSE NOT!

Big surprise, probably something I managed to not install, how stupid of me. So what does it say now?

Mhm, that’s cute….
Missing python-xdg then huh. Let’s see how easy_install handles that. Speaking of which, I don’t think I have installed that yet. Let’s go!

And we have a package. Now for xdg:

easy_install http://www.freedesktop.org/~lanius/pyxdg-0.17.tar.gz
That should fix it
However, the screenlets require more garbage, such as gnome-keyring (in case of missing GConf at least) so I ran slackbuild.pl http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-keyring/2.26/gnome-keyring-2.26.3.tar.bz2 but then also needed libtasn which was also handled by slackbuild.pl. Man I love that script. Especially the leech support
But the screenlets still didn’t function. … so I hunted for gnome-python-desktop, which had YET ANOTHER RETARDED BUILD SYSTEM CALLED ‘WAF’. *sigh*. I hate it when 5 million people think they’re smarter than the other. They should simply all succumb to me. *adds another todo note in slackbuild.pl*

But then: finally, it worked!

*time passes*

Yep, I’ve messed around with it a bit…. and it’s cute… but fluxbox has its own mind about it. (giving the widgets a nice “you’re an application!” bar)… maybe I’ll reserve a desktop for it and
see if I like it. A nice ‘widget’ screen on desktop 10 or something
The good:

• It’s cute
• Skinning support
• Seems easy to build new screenlets, so many more will spawn

The bad:

• Gnome based, so gnome deps and many screenlets assume too much
• Young, so a bit buggy (mouse clicks through some screenlets, although that could be fluxbox related)
• Eyecandy, while some could be useful it is just another resource hog.

One thing though… where’s the auto-download-and-install support? Even firefox has it these days…

Not just the DOS stuff from back then was great, but also the console games.  We had a NES and later a SNES and games like Zelda, Mario, Mega Man and Double Dragon gave us a lot of education

Somehow we missed the Final Fantasy series though, but one of the things I often play these days is one of the RPG genre.  In fact, I played Final Fantasy 2 on my laptop just a week ago

“But how, my stupid x86 machine doesn’t accept these cardridges!“.

Well, you need a bigger hammer obviously. Try stuffing them into the PCMCIA slot if you have one, I hear they are twice as fast. Or if you strip the plastic casing you can maybe insert them into an ISA slot if you still have one. You might need an adapter for the PCI slots though.

…

Oh, you’re still here? Well, ok, try an emulator if your slot smashing skills aren’t up to par.

<rant alert>

So someone explain to me:

If you’re writing an emulator…. you know, a thing that has to waste tons of CPU cycles in order to play dress-up and imitate a console with a different architecture…

Why the # wouldn’t you make it as cross platform as possible? Yeah, sure, I understand that you want to make it fast and hack in some assembly code. In fact, I love assembly code

However,  that concept is getting more obsolete every day. So if you write an emulator, MAKE SURE IT COMPILES ON BenV’s MACHINE!

That means it should run on at least x86 AND x86_64. Why write an emulator that’s obsolete even before you finish it? I’m looking at you pcsx2 -.-

Applaud to DOSBox for that matter, they get it right.

</rant>

So anyway, for the NES games I suggest using FCEUX these days. It runs on both x86 and x86_64, and it runs my games on my new slackware 64 installation… which makes me happy

For SNES I always used ZSNES, but they’re still stuck in the DOS era… trying to upgrade their obsolete assembly code to more generic stuff like the QT toolkit. It works great if you have an x86 installation, but it refuses my new slackware 64…. and I refuse to chroot back to my old slackware32 for an emulator like this. Puh, I’d sooner start it in dosbox :p. “But BenV, how do you play A Link to the Past then these days?”. Ahh, a good question, but it’s easy: I simply use bsnes. Runs all my snes games so far

Then there’s the matter of the prutsstation, or PSX. Yeah, that’s another disaster area… let me know if you have a decent emulator. Guess I’m stuck to using epsxe in a chroot environment for now.  Other than that it works pretty well once you get the plugins etc sorted, but I haven’t touched it lately. (guess why).

For N64 we have another good emulator these days, called Mupen64plus. To my surprise a simple recompile worked on slack64, so no issues there (good coder ). And it runs zelda, what more do you want?

Then there’s the new PSX, or PSX2. Yeah…. that’s in the same (sinking) boat as the PSX. Only 1 reason to play: final fantasy. Only 1 somewhat decent emulator for this: pcsx2. Unfortunately it feels like they don’t give a damn about linux, and certainly not 64 bit linux. They “dropped the 64 bit build”…. idiots. So if you feel like it you can get it running on 32 bits, which I’ve done, and it runs ok. But you need a fast pc (multicore) and a decent graphics card and then it still runs like a garbagecan on wheels. (the wheels come off every 3 meters and you have to open the lid, shuffle the garbage around and close it again before it continues). Of course they are quite active, so that’s good, there’s still hope. For kicks lotjuh tried running this thing on windows, and it runs a bit better there, but they still have a lot of work to do. Let’s hope they consider dropping the 32 bitch port and switching to 64 before they’re even obsolete in windows land.

That’s all the emulators I can think of at the moment… or at least, that I want to talk about, this page is getting long enough. Yeah, there’s plenty more, like mame,  ccs64, stella and whatnot, but you can handle google yourself if you want to play those things.

Oh yeah, one more important thing: Gamepads
If you want to play these console games, you want… I’d almost say -need- a gamepad. Final Fantasy and Zelda can be played with the keyboard just fine, but you’ll be crying me plenty of rivers if you attempt to complete Mega Man or Double Dragon with the keyboard. A little while ago I got myself a Logitech Rumblepad 2 which I’m quite happy with. Yeah, it’s not a rectangular box that’ll give you hernia and makes your skin come off after playing a few hours of mario like in the old days, so you’ll have to miss out on that nostalgia….

but like I say, I’m quite happy with it. It even vibrates if you push the right button . Needless to say it works under linux…. although you will want to enable the kernel option for it. My kernel config has CONFIG_LOGITECH_FF=y, CONFIG_LOGIRUMBLEPAD2_FF=y, and CONFIG_HID_LOGITECH=y, and so far all decent emulators play with it without much hassle.

So if you’re bored, go get one of these emulators, a gamepad, and give it a shot!

Why, oh why, do people leave out the A record for a domain without subdomains?
Mutt.org, I’m looking at you!