uefi boot stuff

note to self

Came across this strange problem with SLES 11 SP1.

When installing on a UEFI enabled hardware, the system doesn't allow to create a LVM based partitioning scheme. According to tech-support it is due to be a bug in SP1, only to be fixed in SP2 which is due first quarter next year. Workaround is to create a separate /boot/efi , /boot in traditional partitions and rest inside the LVM as usual. Found this out from the good folk at #lvm. Looks more like a limitation of UEFI boot, rather than a OS bug to me.

V2V Conversion of a Redhat Xen VM to vSphere

I was involved in converting some Redhat Xen based VMs to VMware ESXi recently and found out that the conversion doesn't work straight away without any tweaks. So here is how we went about getting it done. Pretty simple, but just in-case anyone needs it.. 1. Find and Copy the normal kernel ( not the xen-kernel, the one that is installed by default ) rpm package on to the Xen based VM that is to be converted. 2. Convert the Xen based VM using the VMware Converter like its done on any other machine. 3. Once the conversion is complete, on the ESXi host, attach the appropriate Redhat installation media ( 1st CD, DVD ) to the newly created VM cdrom. 4. Startup the converted VM with the attached Redhat installation media and boot into the rescue mode with "linux rescue" 5. Once the system boots in to the rescue mode, it should automatically detect the Redhat Linux installation and mount it in to /mnt/sysimage. Do a "chroot /mnt/sysimage". 6. Install the previously copied kernel rpm from within the chroot'ed environment, using "rpm -i". Once the installation is complete take a look at the grub.conf and see if the necessary entries have been made by the installer. -not really necessary, installer will do the job properly every-single-time! :-) 7. Exit from the rescue environment, detach the Redhat installation media and boot up the VM with the newly installed kernel. That pretty much sums it all up. The reason why a kernel installation is necessary is, Xen kernel on a guest system is quite different from a normal kernel, and is specifically designed to run on top of a Xen Host. ( Something to do with having front-end device drivers etc.. I never finished reading up about this ) This process shouldn't be necessary for a KVM based VM, as the guests are unmodified on that platform. I have yet to try this. Hope this helps.

sysprep stuff

note to self

Ran in to some hassle with finding appropriate syspreps with VMware vCenter Converter. Quite simple as it turned out to locate them, but i keep forgetting what to put and where. Simply extract and copy all the contents of the appropriate package from this VMware KB article into the location that is displayed in the table. And remember, its not just the sysprep.exe it needs, but also the accompanying files as well. Hope i won't run into anymore time-wasting situations by forgetting this. Another thing worth noting is, in case a conversion was done without the proper packages in place, you can always initiate a reconfigure of the that VM using the Converter after making sure necessary files are in place.

teamviewer stuff

note to self

Just happened to shut the TeamViewer from within the remote computer console and got kicked out of my session with no way to re-connect. Luckily i had ssh access to the same machine and tried a few things to get it working, as just issuing the command on the ssh'd terminal didn't go so well. Googled a bit and noticed that few others have come across similar problems starting TeamViewer from the terminal, but couldn't find a simple method that worked. -didn't look that hard anyway- Found out its a easy fix.

export DISPLAY=:0

That should do it. All it seems to need is a proper $DISPLAY with the value set to where current display manager's running. Once that's taken care of, TeamViewer can be started as a background process with "&". It should work even better with something like "screen" but didn't try that. yet.

Moovida on F12

note to self

Experienced few problems getting Moovida to work on my Fedora 12. Moovida, formerly known as Elisa is a Media Center application. Elisa is still on yum, but the newer moovida is not on that yet.

One main problem on the old version Elisa, is that the grooveshark plugin is no longer working due to some changes (gstreamer?) [1] [2]. A set of Moovida packages for F12 are already available on the above bugzilla links, but they are not yet on the yum, seem to be undergoing review.

After downloading and building the RPMs from above, ran in to some other python related problem due to a deprecated function.

DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead

The fix was to install python-twisted.noarch

To sum it all up, below steps can be followed to get moovida on F12 until it appears on yum, which I'm hoping to take place soon.

1. Grab the SRC rpms from here. 2. Remove elisa components if they are already installed. 3. Install python-twisted.noarch along with it's dependencies. 3. rpmbuild --rebuild the moovida src rpms & install them.

Just checked it, and Grooveshark plugin is working without any problem now! :-) It doesn't have the facility to add tracks to the library, hope it's on the roadmap.

dcache on fedora12

Below are the steps taken to get dcache working on Fedora. I was using my Fedora 12 for this. A lot of stuff below is coming from my chat logs with wvithanage who is the project fellow.

Install below packages via yum along with their dependancies. yum package-name install

uuid-devel mysql-devel php-mysql php-ZendFramework-Db-Adapter-Mysqli lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi

Make below symbolic links. You will have to create /usr/include/ossp directory as well )

Inside /usr/include/ossp/

uuid.h -> /usr/include/uuid.h

Inside /usr/lib

/usr/lib/libmysqlclient_r.so -> /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient_r.so.16.0.0

Make a directory, and inside it run the below. If you don't have "svn" installed,

yum install svn would get that for you.

svn co https://dalesa.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dalesa dalesa

Now, simply change the directory to "trunk" and run the below commands.

./autogen.sh ./configure --prefix=/usr sudo make install

Run sudo dcache Point the browser to http://127.0.0.1:8085/ and create a user and login. Make sure to put the mysql database access details properly, and assign a port for dcache to listen on..and you are done. Now change your browser settings to use dcache as the proxy, after few minutes of browsing you should start noticing activities on the graphs. Hope this helps..did this in a bit of a hurry. Probably will have to go through again and make sure i didn't miss anything out.

gnome autostart stuff

note to self

Seems that the prioritizing autostart scripts has been dropped for some reason. Wanted this as i wanted to get Rumpus to start as i login to my F12. But it depends on Internet connectivity or else the java starts throwing some exceptions at you. Someone on #fedora pointed this out, saying priorities are not one of the priorities ;-) of gnome-autostart dev's at the moment. Hopefully they will do something about that once the more important stuff are taken care of. For the time being, something like this can be used to get around the network connectivity by checking for the connection before trying anything.

#!/bin/bash check() { if [[ `nm-tool | grep "^State"` = 'State: connected' ]]; then -YOUR-STUFF-GOES-IN-HERE- else sleep 5 check fi } check

Nothing big, but saves sometime looking around. Hope this helps.

gnome stuff

note to self

Came across a small problem with a USB Scroll Mouse on Fedora 12, where the 3rd button functionality not proper. Simple fix was changing a gnome configuration key value. Good to have Configuration Editior installed for these sort of stuff. Change the key /desktop/gnome/accessibility/mouse/button_layout value from 2 > 3 and you are done. To get the Configuration Editor installed, yum install gconf-editor can be used.

squid stuff

note to self

Keep forgetting this one, and end up look around for it all over again. To get the Date & Time in a human friendly format on Squid, it can be piped through this.

#!/usr/bin/perl -p s/^\d+\.\d+/localtime $&/e;

Quite useful if you are going through the logs looking for activities on certain dates and times, and if you don't have a log-parser-report generator program installed. Found it over here.

Pidgin-2.6.4 RPMs for Fedora 12

Just built a set of RPMs from pidgin-2.6.4 which was released some hours ago. I think i have messed up the package naming conventions, made the build to appear as 2.6.4-0.f12pre. Had to make some small changes to the 2.6.3 .spec cuz. the .spec that comes with the source was not made specifically for current Fedora releases, as it appeared. If you are interested in checking them out, get them from the below links. libpurple-2.6.4-0.fc12pre.i686.rpm pidgin-2.6.4-0.fc12pre.i686.rpm finch-2.6.4-0.fc12pre.i686.rpm Uploading to MediaFire sucked big time! and then tried a similar site with the same result. Perhaps its their flash based upload tools that doesn't play well with Firefox-GNU/Linux. Uploading to RapidShare now, and probably won't be going back to any of those other services for a long time if it keeps working well. 2.6.4 is not on the yum yet, make sure to take this one off and put the proper one once it appears on the updates. This is only meant to be a experiment. :-)

gimp stuff

note to self I wanted to make my Twitter profile pic. animate. :-) It's quite easier than it might look, even I could get it done without much trouble! All that is necessary, is a bunch of photos in the sequence you want them to be animated. Easier if they are saved inside a single directory to minimize going back-n-forth looking for them. So, here is what you do. 1. Open up the 1st image in the sequence on Gimp. 2. Go to "File" on this newly opened up image window and select "Open as Layers..." and select the rest of the images to open. 3. Select "Rectangle Select Tool" and select a rectangular area with the content you want to have. ( Exact size of the rectangle in pixels will appear at the bottom part of the window. 4. Once the selection is made, go to "Image" either on the Top Menu bar or right-click context menu, and Select "Crop to Selection" 5. Now, go to "Filters" > "Animation" > "Optimize (for GIF)". This will open up a new window with the image. 6. Just to check how it will look in the end, once again go to "Filters" > "Animation" > "Playback" and play the animation step by step. -just hitting play is not that helpful cuz. frames move on quite fast. 7. Now save the file as a .gif & In the "Export File" dialogue, Select "Save as Animation" 8. In the "Save as GIF" dialogue select the option "Loop Forever" depending how you want it, and also give a decent amount of milliseconds as the delay between the frames. Also, check the tick box "Use delay entered above for all frames" :-) That's pretty much it! Check the file size before uploading it to twitter cuz. twitter has some limitation on the Profile Image size..I think 700Kbs. Used Gimp, cool tool it is!