Rawhide: A battle for survival (2).

After last night updates, dbus-daemon --system keeps hogging up my cpu resoures at 100%.
Personally I don't find it actually slowing down my box. But I have to admit with that kind of usage, the rigs keep restarting and that is so damn annoying. Killing it won't make me feel better since certain apps won't run if dbus is killed.

Mypapit told to me that dbus-daemon is some sort of messege bus act like a layer interaction between applications. I found out my culprit, NetworkManager!!!

chkconfig --level 123456 NetworkManager off

After disabling NetworkManager services (for now) everything went on smooth. I can execute /usr/libexec/gnome-setting-daemon without a clinch.. :)

Apa Khabar Planet MYOSS!!

Well after getting myself involves inside the FOSS world for 2-3 years actively (no thanks to somebody),
here I am inside this wonderland of Planet MYOSS.

Since this is my first post and as a proud Malaysian, I would like to shout :

Apa Khabar Planet MYOSS !!


Cheers!

Simple WM Switcher using Zenity

It's nearly weekends. I'm planning on finishing my Gundam model GN-002 Dynames!!. Life have been so packed like sardines that I didn't have the leisure or to laze around (except blogging i guess) . Anyway here is a simple script on switching your Windows Manager using zenity as our GUI front-end. I decided to write it down since i didn't find any other scripts elsewhere. (Put a comment if you find one!)


Click here to download


Some screenshots perhaps?



I`m so evilz hahaha.



Disclaimer..



Owh well here it is.

*Updates: There' s already a program call switchdesk that is more superior than this ugly bash script. Nerveless the program is written in python while here is just bash.

Switching from GDM to KDM.

For some reason, after yesterday Rawhide updates, GDM crashed my Xserver which freeze the whole UI system. After a few experiments i found out it have some sort of sigsev when dbus-daemon is being executed causing the gdm to breakdown

I'm not a funky foss devolopers besides bugzilla there's nothing i can do about it. So I started looking for an alternatives besides GDM. There are always wdm , kdm and simply xdm. All we need to do is just installed the respective Windows Manager and change our preference,

Some snippets from cat /etc/X11/prefdm:

if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then
. /etc/sysconfig/desktop
if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = GNOME ]; then
preferred=/usr/sbin/gdm
elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = KDE ]; then
preferred=/usr/bin/kdm
elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = WDM ]; then
preferred=/usr/bin/wdm
elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = XDM ]; then
preferred=/usr/bin/xdm
elif [ -n "$DISPLAYMANAGER" ]; then
preferred=$DISPLAYMANAGER
fi
fi

As we can see from the codes there's a file name /etc/sysconfig/desktop that holds a variable called DISPLAYMANAGER. By changing the value of DISPLAYMANAGER with the respective WM, we can use KDM or XDM as default.

The fastest way is just to vi /etc/sysconfig/desktop and added DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE .

Credits to Kagesenshi for poiting out the obvious!

Rawhide: A battle for survival

Yeah after few weeks of long survival battle against rawhide. I finally managed to get hold on it with a stable state. Yeap stable.

Using a propitery graphic cards such as ATI/Nvidia is usally not a good choice if you want to throw yourself up into the hell of unstable distro. (P/S: the blob binary won't be able to catchup with the kernel development for some time).

Yet here I am armed with the latest kernel a binary based distro could offer and the latest xorg.

Of course there are some sacrifies i have to make, first i can no longer continue to depends on gnome/kde desktop envy. Too much applet error is a hassle. So right now switching on fluxbox 1.0.0 which rocks!!

Gnome-setting-daemon and some gnome-apps crash alot. A sigsev error occured in all the latest gstreamer-plugins (bad/good/ugly/base). No time to dwell . Mplayer config caused flip-hebrew error on line 133 (this is not a Jew effect).

So here is my current desktop workspace proudly on Rawhide!


Workspace 1: Netzz


Workspace 2:Artz


Workspace 3: Work Maa (Sorry couldn't display the content since it's work!)


Workspace 4: Multimedia

Once again! I survived Rawhide aftermath.

Ubuntu-my Meetups February 2008 : In my Eyes

Well I'm extremely please when i heard that the guys from #ubuntu-my have make a bold movement to hold a massive gathering meetup meeting :) at Uitm Shah Alam on 24/2/2008. I used to think such massive gathering is not possible especially on weekend due to small/big problems such as families/gf/bfs/shopping time etc...3. Neverless well done.

To come to the events cost me a lot of hassle actually . The plain old kancil owned by my MakCik is actually quite dangerous to ride on!. (Break lamps and breaks not working properly and the car spotlights are very dimmed).

Around 7-8 am i decided to kidnapped KageSenshi from his hikokimori life to attend the events. I haven't met him for months so might as well snatch him . Who knows what kind of unpredictable events waiting for us over there.

Well we arrived there around 9:30 am. First time ,i miss the signboard and go to Dewan Seri Budiman (must be due to the assumption since I hack is over there so the ftmsk should be over there). But thanks to wariola we got there just in time. Hurm bringing the a Fedora guy is a bless in many events, with our KageSenshi aids everyone can connect to the Internet.

I'm so amazed , there were more girls than guys in this geeky event. What happen to the rest of the guys? Well I'm not that worried as i prefer the opposite gender as audience (joking).

The first talk is done by Kaeru , He explained about Ubuntu@Work .It's an interesting talk how he showed us the power of Ubuntu in handling multitasking Office/Desk jobs very efficiently. Tomboy + Evolution , sycn with palm, IM and so on so on.

The second talk should be coming from Mypapit. However he's gone MIA since Saturday, the commitee aren't very sured what had happen to him. So me and Kage took our time to create our community advertisment in order to locate Papit from the evilz doodlers!!( see here and here)

So wariola asked me to replace his place instead. Yeah well earlier (2-3 days ago before the events ) i was asked to make some presentation 10 Myth on Linux . Since i wasn't this, combining with what little charm i have and some slapsticks remarks. (Sorry if anyone got offended by my jokes, I'm just trying to keep things alive).

Next is our first local Fedora Ambassador , Abang Sharulzaman , he explain bout translation project and how we should change our attitude for our own mother toungue langauge. Yeah I'm feeling a little bit ashamed , yeah since i primaly use English as my main medium of technology talks rather than my own mother tounge.

Next talk comes from Project Tango arch enemies leader ,, Abang Adli from 3xb055.
He introduce us SBDCcomputing which is interesting for if you want to create a standalone firewall/server/routers etcx3. It's quite hard to find SBC boards unless you are involves in heavy industries.

Well in the afternoon Fenris and Wariola try to make a demonstration installing Ubuntu under VMs. Somehow or some things jus don't work when they need to.. Yeah well, my advise next time, don't bother explaining bout the vm just . If we can't make a live demonstration Installation , A series of screenshots is helpful ( A picture worth a thousand words). ( A bad movie attract none). Peace

Well kudos to the commitee members who dedicated their time for this events! Nice shirts by the way.

P/S: i uploaded my slides on the web . Click here

All photos are taken using Abang Sumardi Cam. Visit his flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumardi/

Live from Ubuntu Malaysia Meetups 2008;

Mypapit , a well known FOSS supporter have gone MIA!!!
It is believed that mypapit have gone missing when he arrived in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
Mypapit should be attending the 1st Ubuntu Malaysia Meetups. However he mysteriously disappearing act is worrying us.

Mypapit loves to play outside all day long. So any geeks and dorks who goes out in the sun please be careful.

Ubuntu Malaysia Official Meetup

Yeah it's the first massive Ubuntu Malaysia Official Meetups. After so long we finally have to come to an age where we (malaysian) finally managed to host a massive distro convention. It's a small step towards great future!!

Details can be found at http://ubuntu.com.my/.

I'll be going there as a volunteer/presenter for the events. I'll be presenting "10 Myth on Linux" targeted towards casual users so that they are not afraid to change from the old system.

Blergh. a little bit nervous since i usually shielded myself from public appearence.
Okay I hope everything is going to turn out allright!!

Go FOSS Malaysia!

*I'll post my presentation slides after the events.

Nmap scanning technique and SSH tunneling and various other methods.

Since my ex roomate , who is currently engage with internship somewhere around KL keeps bugging me how to do tunneling inside his own network. I think i ought to write one, please take not in the real life job world, the benefits of having good networks versus getting kicked out of office is not something we really like ( but hey somehow the rules doesn't apply to most local malaysian company).

1st. we would like to check if your internet connection is using transparent proxy or not by just opening your web browser.

If it points out to a website that you need to enter a password or something, let say it forwards the connection to service.checkout.com .

Entering password is boring so will nmap give us a clue?

nmap service.checkout.con -p 80,3128,8080

if it reveals something like this:

PORT STATE SERVICE
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Just connect it directly and you should be okay.


2nd. Bypassing firewall rules

Note this method may or maynot work depending on the level of your administrator skills. But it might helps a little bit.

Let's assume the firewall block all incoming/outgoing traffic from any other ports except 80 and 443. To make matter worst every non encrypted packet will be monitored review and etcx3.

This is a good practise actually since i ImHO you shouldn't waste time surfing stuff u shouldn't at the work place. But to continue there's a method that we call SSH Tunneling.

What it does? We can say in some case as a cheap ugly poor man lowlevel vpn. SSH have an ability called remote portforwarding and local portforwarding.

To simply matter a local portforwarding will create a connection from your choosen localport encapsulate in the ssh traffic and conect it to an's external ip with it`s chosen port.

While remote portfowarding does the thing reversely.

So how do we get this thing to work on?

1st. Setup a SSH server running at port 443 . Here is a list of good servers

2nd. Get a good client i think Putty is quite nice. Links

3. Now let's make some simple example we are using jaguars shell as a dynamic port forwarding. Here's a quick and ugly guide using screenshots .. I don't like writing too much.




Using Minefield as example:





P/S: Ghust gunalah meebo

Fedora: Virtualization made easy. with Qemu

The needs to run multiple operating system at the same time is not something that is unsual these days. Rapid developments from hardware layer to software layer need to be tested and simulated to ensure the product to work properly. In iserver enviroment, running multiple virtual operating system from one machine is a common practise.

Virtualization inside our own x86machine is not something so easy to deal with until recently. With massive distribution of Linux a we know what distro, Operating system virtualization begins to come into end user machine (since they desparately need windows for i don't know what). Unfortunely from what i read across most of the forums, this particular distro are so focused on the usage of Vmware and Virtual Box while leaving Qemu behind.

There a lot reasons why we shouldn't use Vmware and Vbox in the first place. The main reason is both software couldn't keep up with the latest kernel developments (from my experience). Also the needs to rebuild the kernel module after each updates is pain . Also have any of this users try running their virtualization at daemon level (instead of running vmware player and virtualbox player in the first place). So with that as my point of argument i left both methods and choose qemu.


Leaving my ramblings outside, let's take the easy step how to administrate qemu usage inside Fedora.

1. Install respective packages

yum install virt-manager qemu kqemu

2. Ensure libvitd is running

service libvirtd start

3. Well do we really need bridge networking? Yes/no/Idon'tcare

Kagesenshi have wrote an excellent guide on this

4. Create some raw virtual image first using qemu-img.

qemu-img create -f raw whateverimage.img 20M *or it can be K,G,B

5. Launch Virtual Manager

Application>System Tools> Virtual Machine Manager.

The rest of the step is just some simple wizard walkthrough :)

Additional information,

If "cat /proc/cpuinfo |egrep "svm|vmx" , is detected. You might want to try on setting up a KVM.

As usual some snapshots

Fedora: 3 simple steps to make booting/shutdown faster

Arjan van de Ven, in his latest comment inside the fedora-devel have critics the initscripts processing is too damn slow inside Fedora 8. So he decided to make a quick fix on this matter. Quoting directly from the email:

What I changed:
* if you do if [ -f FOO -o -f BAR ] in bash, bash will look to see if BOTH files exist,
and then decides that since FOO exits, everything is fine and executes the if body. Looking for non-existing files
(first time) is expensive.. so splitting this kind of "if" in two reduces disk seeks and IO.
[this kind of split I had to do in a few places]
* Don't let the initscripts change the VGA font; after all, this is done during early boot already.
Programming the VGA fonts is SLOW. (Note: in F7 this was done for each init script, in F8 things were
a tad, but not much, smarter than that)
* Cache the information from /bin/consoletype. this info is used (and calculated with an exec!) all over the place;
the new code just sticks it in an environment variable. (well it was in one before, just it STILl got recalculated)
* Check if the service is running before deciding if it's a good service; the common case for "telinit' is that it is and then
no further file IO on the service needs to be done. (and if it's not we need to check that regardless)
* cache the value of "the user wants me to ask"; that's not changing so just stick that in a variable rather than looking at
the file every time. We still do look at the file IF the var is set, because the user might hit continue
* don't call into "rhgb" if rhgb isn't on the kernel commandline (I have that off on all machines to make them boot faster).
rhgb got called several times, and isn't cheap, because each time it has to realize rhgb is really not there ;)
* don't grep each script just to see how to pretty print it; assume a fedora quality script and if not, it's only a tad less pretty

Attached are the new files that implement these tweaks:
/etc/rc.d/rc
/etc/init.d/functions
/etc/profile.d/lang.sh

Tested it on my rawhide box and it works . Click here to download the corresponded tweak,

Rawhide (2nd day experience): Gnome_Clock_Applet crash

After updating into rawhide and restart (exclude kernel and xorg update).



It turns out the date and time is a little bit mess out. Probably will be fixed later. Any hints anyone?

UTP-Network : RiP? probably yes....

Well since the title is quite heavy:
Do read this post first before trolling around:

• http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2008/02/open-letter-for-rector-of-utp.html

• http://rumble.yondie.org/2007/08/utp-doomsday-network-is-it-becoming.html

It's quite a sad phenomena to see the younger generation is less interested in contributing for the benefits of the community. We are in quite deep trouble as they are no padawans for the #project-tango team and IRC Network. If the UTPchat IRC network haven't been acknowledge legally by the Management. My fear for the utp doomsday network will become true. Yeap our high and glory days in bleeding edge computing is over people. Is having a small chatting daemon running inside a network is so evil?

Since i got myself involves in the Open Source development (directly or indirectly) I come to realized that we cannot escape from using the network as a medium of distributing information or for communication. Regardless the information is bad or good. We cannot escape the trend of the worlds today.

The network infrastructure inside our local campus is something that we should be proud of not shame. The ideas of the old timer volunteer should be treasured and share as a legacy of the University. But sadly trolls exist and will says something lame like:

• "Instant Massenger ada"
• "Buang masa sahaja"
• "So more people will become lazy"
• "Tak kemane pun actually, jaguh kampung sahaja"
• "Takat main fserve aje semue orang"
  

Doesn't any of the trolls know that social-networking is the latest trend on collaborating ideas and knowledge these days? Didn't they knew the chatting isn't just about a/s/l . Maybe it's our fault for not exposing these guys towards serious development chatting server such as freenode. But the channel linux@utpchat.net does this honor and so are other channels.

My idea if the IRC network is to link the service with the lecturer system , Discussion can be made openly, we know some students are not used to go and see the lecturer privately. By using the IRC network , one can just PM the lecturers and have a private conversation.
If things goes wild, there always the tracking logs to prevent abused. Also i believe our students loves to critics and arguing on certain stuff. Why not hold an open debate using the IRC networks with medium moderation and witness.


Well that's a little point on the benefits towards non-technical people or in other words normal students. In term of technical benefits it's one of a hell benefits that couldn't be put into one post . And frankly i believe those knowledge is damn helpful when you are in the working world. Teamwork , responsibility , how to act on emergency outbreak etcx3. I could elaborate each and any of them but that's another story for another time.

From my perspective point of view. Having an organized social network such as IRC does have it pros and cons. To those who thinks IRC makes your life harder to study. Do tell the mods to kline your name and spouse . We would also be delighted to block any income traffics from your MAC address. Blocking troll traffics also is a good education on how to configure firewalls on advance level. (More practical approach). The networking world should be free, it is up to us how well do we restrict and refrain ourself from bad temptation.

Best luck for Kage, hope he get a good response .

Boycott Trend Micro

Well inside the campus, I'm sure all my friends from UTP have knowledge or otherwise heard about Trend Micro. The lovely dowey antivirus company which have make itself as a permanent residents inside their Windows Box. True i have no objection against antivirus company after all they want to help making me our PC better right? right? Like I'm going to fall for it.




Quoting directly from the FSF website:

Join us and the ScriptumLibre.org Foundation in boycotting all products and services sold by Trend Micro.

The proprietary software company Trend Micro has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Barracuda Networks. They claim that Barracuda is violating their patent by distributing the free software antivirus program ClamAV.

We should avoid using any proprietary software, but companies that use software patents for aggression are the lowest of the low.

Lawsuits like this are a threat to the entire IT community, and to free software programmers in particular. There is little that can be done to stop patent trolls from exploiting the patent and legal system for financial gain, until we put a stop to the patenting of software altogether. But there is an immediate opportunity to punish and deter trolls like Trend Micro.

Let all of Trend Micro's potential customers know that by doing business with Trend Micro, they are supporting this attack on all creators of software works, including the entire free software community, and that the strongest message they can send to Trend Micro is to publicly boycott all of their products and services.

It's a shame on you Trend Micro. ClamAv didn't even have real time scanning so why the heck you guys so pissed of bout it anyway?

Transcoding using VLC . A quick fix

Say for example your ipod or any mp3 players are out of space, and you need to sacrifies a litlle bit quality of the songs file for the sake of saving space . We can use VLC to transcode the file on the fly.

Note they are many other software that we can use such as mencoder, ffmpeg and transcode itself. The reason i choose VLC since it have been ported to other platforms such as BSD, Win and Macs.


So the step that we should use.

1. File> Wizard
2. Transcode/Save to file
3. Select stream (Choose a file , and you can also use specified a range of time frame you want to transcode)
4. In the transcode menu, choose the setting that is appropriate , in this example i use a song file so i tick onl the audio transcoding.
5. Select Raw if you don't know anything.
6. Create a save file name and click on Finish
7. Test playing your song. That's it

Some screenies.

Sayonara my imouto and Dlink

It's quite a bitter moment for me for the past Chinese New Year Weeks. My dear little sister have gone back to Wellington , New Zealand to finish her studies in Tesl. (there goes my the Ipod touch). Well, I'm not sure i'll be seeing her again maybe until the next 2-3 years .(Unless i spend all my money that i've been saving for the next Uitm I-hack to buy a plane ticket).

Another sad story was, my faithful sempron box (used to be called Ahca Hub in UTP but codename Vermouth have died ". After working like crazy for 24 hours non stop batch encoding videos. It suddenly when kaput just like that. The reason the motherboard seem to busted. Too bad.

Also my Dlink DWL G710 start behave weirdly. When i check the router connectivity to the streamyx it works just fine. The problem is i can't connect to the Internet via all my nix box [Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSe] and also win box. All of my arts of geeks machine failed to connect except the Ipod Touch. I can't figure it out what exactly happens . I have tried resetting the router to factory setting but the problem still happens. In the end i've got to replace it with a new router/modem . Cost me 300 bucks. What a sad and despair mode .

However there's no time to dwell in the past . So hopefully with the new templates i hope i wouldn't be feeling bitter too much. >.<