miscellaneous.debris

I kept getting these error message during the boot process and also after issuing the command ‘sudo update-initramfs -u’:

W: mdadm: unchecked configuration file: /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
W: mdadm: please read /usr/share/doc/mdadm/README.upgrading-2.5.3.gz .
W: mdadm: no arrays defined in configuration file.
W: mdadm: falling back to emergency procedure in initramfs.

The mdadm-package is needed for software raid array. If you don’t have a raid array you can solve this problem simply by removing the mdadm package: ‘sudo apt-get remove mdadm’. More information is at launchpad.net.

Though you can usually install most programs in Linux comfortably with the package manager of you Linux distribution (rpm, deb, etc.), sometimes you need to compile something from source.

For example gnuplot in Debian/Ubuntu has the readline functionality not compiled in, which makes it rather hard to use. But I’m somewhat reluctant to install these programs with “make install” since they are somewhere copied into system and it’s practically not possible to remove them except with “make uninstall” – but this option is not always available and you have to keep the sources of the program you installed.

But don’t renounce yet. There is paco. This little gem allows one to log the “make install” process. paco is than able to remove all installed files if one decides so. Installing paco is easy.

• Download and untar it somewhere, cd into new directory
• sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev (if you don’t have gtk devel installed) or sudo apt-get install libgtkmm-2.4-dev (if you install paco 2.0 or newer)
• ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
• make
• sudo make install
• sudo make logme

paco is now installed, paco itself is also logged in its database. If you want now to install something if it should be logged with the name of the current directory as the name for the package replace the last “make install” command with

sudo paco -lD make install

to set the name of the package yourself, use

sudo paco -lp foo-1.0 "make -C src install"

In order to see what packages are installed or to remove a package use sudo gpaco.

I installed today Ubuntu Server Edition 7.04 on one of my machines and here practically nothing is installed. Therefore for example X11 forwarding doesn’t work if you remotely log in with “ssh -X” (after you installed openssh-server . So, if you start a X11 program you get e.g.:

xterm Xt error: Can’t open display:
xterm: DISPLAY is not set

I found the solution here. You need to install the program xauth with

sudo apt-get install xauth

and off you go.

The new album of Clara Luzia “The long memory” was the Album of the week in FM4 in the first week of May. The song “Morning light” is a very good song, well arranged and produced – it’s just a wonderful song. There is also a video of this song which was published at youtube:

The cool thing about that is that Clara Luzia is actually an Austrian band and it’s not taken for granted that you have a lot of such bands in this country … Visit also their myspace account to listen to other songs.

I once again updated these instructions for Gnuplot 4.4.0 RC1 and newer Ubuntu versions. Find these instructions in this post.

There is an updated Howto for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon available.

Though there is gnuplot available in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories, there are reasons to compile gnuplot – first and most important gnu readline support! I don’t know why Debian maintainers don’t compile the GNU readline support into GNUplot – it’s some license issues – but it’s like that and this makes gnuplot practically unusable. Second having the pdf and wxWidgets terminal is not that bad at all

So here are the instructions: Read the rest of this entry »

I recently installed Beryl on my Kubuntu Feisty Fawn distribution and I run into two problems:

1) The window decorations were missing – here you need to add the line
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”
to Section “Screen”.

2) My windows were all black and this is a bug in the NVidia driver which doesn’t seem to be fixed soon or at all – the problem is, that if you have a card with not much memory, like my NVidia Go 6200, windows content gets black since there is no memory available. There is a lengthy discussion about that here.
An easy fix for this problem is, right click on the red diamond (Beryl manager) in the system tray and choose “Advanced Beryl Options->Rendering Path->Copy”. This should have an effect on the performance but at least it works . Thanks Nil.

More info can be found at these links:
An automatic easy solution for nearly (all) problems
Opening too many windows leaves some of them black

I use the subfig package and when I compiled my thesis in Linux I encountered a problem, when I used the \subref command in the caption of a figure. The compilation was stopped with the error message “Argument of \@tempf has an extra }.”

Scanning the internet I found this forum entry in German where it was proposed to add the command “\protect” before “\subref{fig:1}, which actually did the trick for me. I didn’t have this problem though with MikTeX.

This was a rather long break from posting something to this blog, I wanted to write often, but never did actually. But let’s resume with something which is related to my first blog entries. For my thesis I was looking for a book about thermionic emission of ions, called “The Emission Of Electricity From Hot Bodies”, and since it was published 1916 or so, I thought maybe I find something in the net – and guess what? The Internet Archive was providing a scanned copy. Such a cool service!

So I remembered, that I had already used it before to download a live concert of Fugazi, and there is another concert, one of their last, which you should download. It’s a 400MB download and the files are shn audio, but here is a tutorial how to convert shn files to mp3 files.

Last Monday I have been to the Karikaturmuseum in Krems, which also showed an exhibition about Wilhelm Busch, which is well known for his story “Max & Moritz“. But I didn’t know “Der Virtuos” – and one of the pictures is really funny and could also be drawn by today’s cartoonists.

By accident I found a nice website which offers a program which allows access to ext2 or ext3 partitions in Windows: Ext2 Installable File System for Windows (which also is capable of reading ext3 file systems). This project provides a nice installer package, which installs an ext2 device driver in Windows – and it also has write support which others (Expore2fs, LTOOLS – though I just found out, that it also provides write access, but not as convenient as Ext2IFS) don’t provide. I use it for some time now it seams to be very useful though there are some minor drawbacks (no user access rights management).

This comes very handy if you use Linux and Windows on the same computer.