Permissions, why u so important!

Ah!!!! I spent all weekend struggling with the koji setup, and today my classmate Daniel pointed out a big derp in my environment! The folder where the certificate from FAS2 that should be saved in ~/.fedora.cert/ were incorrect, and even changing them to the defaults didn't work. a Rename to the folder, and letting it recreate itself worked like a charm.

The mock lab went by flawlessly. I ran into no errors. I still went over the logs and really liked how it records everything that happens in the mock build process. I feel that this allows maximum troubleshooting for software packagers, and aim's to provide efficiency in problem solving. As well makes interacting with the community easier. I used my previous posts SRPMS, so no upload was necessary. Mock took a total time of 20 minutes!

I sucessfully started building on koji, and have a few packages in queue. The query for my users history of builds is currently taking time to load, and i hope to post a link to my history ASAP! I will come with a new blog post as soon as i can, and off to the repo lab!!!

UPDATE: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/tasks?owner=damha&state=active&view=tree&method=all&order=-id

Arnd Bergmann on the Status of Arm!

I just found this talk about the current state of Linux on the Arm architecture. Definitely an interesting watch for our upcoming project selection!

Fixes Fixes Fixes!

I managed to fix all of my errors on both packages and used another package because inetutils was giving me too much of a hardtime for my timeframe. So i picked up grep!

 GREP

My grep spec file ended up looking like this! 
The biggest trouble i had with this particular package was the language files and translations for the man pages. I finally got to talk to Professor Chris Tyler over IRC and he lead me to the Packaging:Guidelines#Handling_Locale_Files Post where i read about a macro called find_lang.

In my spec file i used:

%find_lang grep%files -f grep.lang

Which in turn solved 43 warnings! This grabbed all my lang files and properly put then in the right places.

Heres my uploaded Grep spec file and created RPM  grep.spec grep-2.9-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm

GZIP

Here are my updated spec and rpm files to download as well! I am very glad i got these working, and i am now VERY excited to do the koji and mock labs! 

gzip-1.5-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm gzip.spec

Keyboard Map Fix for Pipe key!

I was having trouble using my pipe key on my machine because everytime i would press it, a greater than sign would come up. Upon HOURS of searching, i finally found a fix.

1. Go into your Users home directory, and create a new file called: .Xmodmap 
2. Add the following lines to the file

keycode 94 = backslash bar
keycode 77 = Insert
keycode 118 = Num_Lock
clear mod2
add mod2 = Num_Lock

Save the file and log out and log back in. Your pipe key should now be working. I hope everyone finds this usefull!

 

 

                    

Another week, Another Build

SO after the lab got cleaned up, I attempted to build my packages, gzip and inetutils. I began by creating my rpm build tree, and made sure sure all dev tools were installed.

Gzip

My first attempt at building gzip came out with this response:

gzip initial build errors

Upon a quick google query on this error, i realized i left the %files section of the .spec file empty. i attempted to just dump the file listing above, into the spec file and added one extra line under the %files line:

%defattr(-,root,root,-)

After adding the files under the %files section, I remembered the macro'a, and made sure to use them where applicable.
The final gzip spec file looked like this.  gzip.spec
rpmlint outputs:  gzip-1.5-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm gzip-1.5-1.fc17.src.rpm gzip.spec
File uploads: gzip-1.5-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm gzip-1.5-1.fc17.src.rpm gzip.spec

inetutils

This time I had more of a sense of what i was doing and ran into no build errors this time. I made sure the %files and %info section were properly filled out this time and used more macros then the previous gzip build i did. 

rpmlint output: inetutils-1.9-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm inetutils.spec inetutils-1.9-1.fc17.src.rpm

I did receive a bunch of errror and warnings here, but I will be addressing them later this evening or tomorrow morning. 

My final spec file for inetutils at the moment looks like this : inetutils.spec

File uploads:  gzip-1.5-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm gzip-1.5-1.fc17.src.rpm gzip.spec

I hope to practice building packages and making spec files more this coming week, I feel it is terribly important to master this!

CPR for your Computer!

I just found this Linux OS aimed for troubleshooting your Windows Machines! Definitely something i recommend adding to your ISO collections!

Trinity Rescue Kit | CPR for your computer

Heres the features listed on their site!

-easily reset windows passwords with the improved winpass tool
-simple and easy menu interface
-5 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability
-full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g
-winclean, a utility that cleans up all sorts of unnecessary temporary files on your computer.
-clone computers over the network via multicast.
-wide range of hardware support (kernel 2.6.35 )
-contributed backup utility called "pi", to automate local machine backups
-easy script to find and mount all local filesystems
-self update capability to include and update all virusscanners + local changes you made to TRK.
-full proxyserver support.
-run a samba fileserver (windows like filesharing)
-run a ssh server
-recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
-recovery of lost partitions
-evacuation of dying disks
-full read/write and rpm support
-UTF-8 international character support (select keyboard language from the scrollable textmenu at startup)
-2 rootkit detection uitilities
-most software updated to recent versions
-literally thousands of changes and bugfixes since version 3.3
-elaborated documentation, including manpages for all commands (also TRK 's own)

Raspberry Pi Super-Computer Guide!

NOW this is something I would love to do myself. I have been reading this tutorial and it makes me excited!

The guide provided helps you make a 2 node setup, or a 64 node setup!

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/Raspberry_Pi_supercomputer_11Sept2012.pdf

Building from source

I began last night picking 2 GNU packages to build, and ran into tons of problems because of missing packages. Here are some of the errors I ran into.

Error 1 : [From package gnufdisk]

configure: error: GNU Fdisk headers are missing, install headers and try again.
configure: error: ./configure failed for backend

Error 2: [From package icecat]

 configure: error: Library requirements (gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10.0 gtk+-unix-print-2.0 glib-2.0 gobject-2.0 gdk-x11-2.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.

Error 3: [from package complexity]

./configure: line 11685: autoopts-config: command not found
configure: error: libopts was not found

I finally got 2 packages to properly configure, and make and run from binary. I built gzip, and inetutils. Both hyperlinks are my compiled applications, and for inetutils i only uploaded, ifconfig.

The thing that i noted was that the configure time was the longest. But its what makes me LIKE the build process more, because of how it checks everything that is required to run before actually attempting to compile.

Sample program outputs: gzip, inetutils

First week into play!

So I am a week into the course, and got Fedora 17 installed, and figured I would post some Applications that I have been using to make my linux experience smooth and fun.

• Terminator - A great terminal and efficient workplace, that allows you to slice up your teriminal horizontally or vertically to more screens!
• Konversation - A feature rich IRC client. Don't forget to automate the msg nickserv to identify yourself!
• GNOME-Tweak-Tool - This tool adds an advanced options in your application menu. It gives you Desktop, Shell, Window and more customizations for your fedora system.
• I would be adding blogilo to this list, but found it far too buggy to reccomend, and THIS is a rewritten blogpost because blogilo ate up the previous one i wrote -_-;;;;;

 Other applications I included in my setup are, Skype, SoulSeek, GIMP, and youtube-dl. Soulseek is a p2p sharing application mostly for music, gimp for editing images quickly for posts, Skype for communication, and youtube-dl because I prefer saving videos in HD format to watch later on my television.

Upon using my machine for a couple days, I found out from a source on fedora IRC that Google has newly redesigned their repo setup apparently and everytime i attempted to call yum, i would get the following error:

#Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit, tidy-cache
#http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: 
[Errno 14] HTTP  Error 404 - Not Found : http://dl.google.com/linux/ 
rpm/stable/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml
#Trying other mirror.
#Error: failure: repodata/repomd.xml from Google: [Errno 256] No more 
 mirrors to try.

I found a temporary work around for this problem, but would like to get the machine working back without the additional command. To get by this error if one runs into it, just disable the repo thats currently giving you trouble. For instance Google is giving me an error right now, so to get by i run the following with my yum command:

yum [option] --disablerepo=Google[or other problematic repo] [package name]

 My final note is how to Install Flash on your Fedora 17 Machine. People have been asking me, and I constantly have to remind myself, so I will add it below for any heads curious or need a quick reminder!

  rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
   rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
 yum check-update
    yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper als-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl
    yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl

Greetings And Salutations

Greetings and Salutations!
My name is Ahmad Taychouri [020939096] and am currently in my Final Semester Seneca College for Computer Systems Technology. I am excited to be taking the SBR600 course with Chris Tyler and Raymond Chan. I hope to see a future in Linux development and be apart of a future big release!

I have looked into Raspberry Pi and am highly interested in acquiring one for a home media centre. I am thinking of using XBMC to run the media software and sharing needs. It's phenomenal how small and powerful technology has come, and its amazing that I have the opportunity to help make it better. I can see this piece of software evolving more and being a base model for lots of gadgets to come.

In this Blog I hope to document all my progress within my project progression and course completion. I hope to continue with it afterwards as a digital diary of my Linux pilgrimage.

My page: Here!
My Email:taychouri.ahmad@gmail.com
IRC: damha @ freenode

My first IRC msg!