Entries from June 2005 ↓

Oh, yeah. It’s been a long time since I got a mailing list with more than a thousand people in it. The Cooker ml is a huge font of information (as misinformation sometimes), and some tiny little mesages can grow exponentially to very long discussions about anything (somethings even get lost among so many parallel topics).

I saw this happening to me this weekend. It was a local holiday thursday, and I didn’t need to work thursday and friday (can’t remember what was it about now), so I stop reading my e-mails wednesday evening. When I had enough courage to open my mailbox on monday (ugh) I was punched by 700+ messages awaiting for me. There were topics that extended about 100/150 messages long, one of them consisted 80% of a parallel topic that araised in the middle that has nothing to do with the original message. (!!) I had no choice than using my fast reading technics (if the first 3 lines aren’t interesting, delete) so I wiped out about 70% of them (I really think I’ve lost some interesting or either important discussions).

So, if you attend to a mailing list with this many people, or some that tend to create such long topics, read all your e-mails as soon as they get to your mail box, or suffer the consequences in the future.

– en

Do you remember the old times where Linux users suffer to make a simple piece of brand new hardware work? Well, I see those days going away.

Today I had a change to test a Linksys WPC54G (PCMCIA wireless card). The first test was getting it working under Windows 2000/XP using the software that comes in the bundled CD. Stick the card and it’s detected, the software installed, the SSID/WEP configured and the link comes up with 80-90% of quality (excelent for the environment). But, how surprisingly was that when everything seems to work but there was no traffic at all. Neither DHCP or static IP works. Nothing.

So I said “let’s try on my Linux laptop”. Unfortunatelly it didn’t work immediately. But, after 5 minutes googling, installing NdisWrapper, getting the same driver from the installation CD-ROM, and finally get ping, e-mail, web browsing and all the hole stuff working, I look at the sky and thought: “oh, good times never come back”.

– pt_BR

Você se lembra dos velhos tempos quando usuários Linux sofriam para fazer uma simples peça de hardware extremamente novo funcionar? Bom, esses dias já eram.

Hoje eu tive a chance de testar um Linksys WPC54G (cartão wireless PCMCIA). O primeiro teste foi fazer rodar no Windows 2000/XP usando o software que veio na caixa. Cartão espetado e detectad, sofware instalado, SSID/WEP configurado e o link sobe com 80-90% de qualidade (bom para o ambiente). Mas, qual não foi minha surpresa quando tudo parecia funcionar mas não havia tráfego algum. Nem DHCP ou IP estático funcionavam. Nada.

Então eu disse “vamos tentar no meu laptop Linux”. Infelizmente não funcionou de imediato. Mas, depois de 5 minutos procurando no Google, instalando o NdisWrapper, pegando o mesmo driver que estava no CD-ROM de instalação, e finalmente funcionar ping, e-mail, web e tudo mais, eu olhei pro céu e pensei: “ah, os bons tempos nunca voltam”.

For all of you that wishes to have a full Conectiva system in a chroot environment, here is a tip.

If you are running a Conectiva host, or any other system that has apt, delete /etc/apt/sources.list, then run the command apt-cdrom add to add the Conectiva CD-ROM to your sources list.

Now, create a dir, remote mounted filesystem, loop or disk image and note the location (in this example, it will be /mnt/chroot. Now run the following:

apt-get -o RPM::RootDir=/mnt/chroot update
apt-get -o RPM::RootDir=/mnt/chroot install task-profile-minimal kernel26 apt-data-cnc

That way, a minimal system will be installed into the specified dir.

Ok, before someone asks me what is it for, I have no idea. I just wrote it because a friend of mine asked how to do it, and I decided to document the procedure.

If something is wrong, or it doesn’t work for you, please leave a comment.

Good luck.

Essa é especial para os brasileiros. A instalação do Mandriva LE 2005 tem um problema que ao invés de instalar o pacote de tradução pt_BR (português do Brasil) do Firefox, instala o pacote pt (português de Portugal). Por esse motivo, você precisa instalar por conta própria o mozilla-firefox-pt_BR. Isso pode ser feito ou usando o comando rpm com o pacote do CD, ou usando o urpmi (ou o smart, tanto faz). O problema já foi reportado no bug #16447

My day-by-day work demands one constant VPN connection, since I work allocated remotely on our client’s site. Because of some company requirements that connection must be made using PPTP.

Important note: The following is a transcript of my own experience. Not that everyone would have this problem (I’m not sure about this), but that problem really annoyed me for a couple of days.

I had it working quite well with my old Conectiva system, running a PPTP Client package built by myself (contrib). I really can’t remember now why I was not using pptp-php-gtk (can be found on the client site), but the fact is that using pptp-command to configure my tunnels was doing the job for me.

When I got my new Mandriva system working, I tried to learn the new tools that has been a long time present in old “drak” days. So I checked out drakvpn (part of the DrakXTools package) but unfortunately I could not get it working for me (see bug #16502).

So, if you have the same problem, read on.

I got the pptp-php-gtk package installed (from the contrib media). Still can’t get it working, since it’s very outdated, and has a lot of problems (see bug #16418).

So, my last try was getting it working the the old pptp-command, since it the never let me down (don’t bother about a post install script failed, as reported in bug #16499). And it really did the job, so I got my tunnel configured, but not working yet. If you check the previously mentioned bug, and also bugs #16419 and #16501, you’re going to see that there are missing options in that would make the MPPE encryption working (required by this tunnel).

After all that, you still have to make Shorewall understand what you want to do with this connection. There is a little howto that could help you with that.

At last, if you want PPTP with MPPE, you need:

a) Install pptp-linux;
b) Configure the tunnel with pptp-command;
c) Edit /etc/modprobe.conf and insert the line alias ppp-compress-18 ppp_mppe_mppc;
d) Edit /etc/ppp/options.pptp and change line 22 to mppe required,stateless;
e) Reconfigure Shorewall.

Now the tunnel is up and running.

I just realized that the XFS (X Font Server, not the filesystem) has a bug when using UTF-8 as the default system charset. I discovered it when I was trying to load fluxbox and it was hanging, but if I stopped the xfs service it loads. Digging into Mandriva’s bugzilla, I found out about the bug #14636. When I disabled the koi8-u font it all went well (see comments #19 and #23).

I hope they get it working anytime soon, since UTF-8 will be the default charset in future releases. As also stated in the bug report, it looks like that any gtk1 based application won’t load because of this bug. Well, I didn’t test any yet, but I’m quite positive about it too.

BTW, before installing Mandriva I questioned some people about why it uses reisefs as the default filesystem, and some of them argued that it was having problems with xfs (the filesystem). Well, I’m working with it, and it’s fine until now. Posted this comment just to clarify the differences about xfs as font server and filesystem.

– pt_BR

Antes que alguém me pergunte, devo esclarecer que o objetivo desse blog é simplesmente agregar algumas das minhas idéias e experiências. Basicamente vou falar sobre Linux e assuntos relacionados a tecnologia, mas também muita coisa inútil (ou não) vai ser postada de vez em quando.

A idéia do blog partiu do fato de que neste momento estou em uma fase de transição de distribuições Linux. Como muitos sabem, houve uma fusão entre a Conectiva e a Mandrake, dando origem à Mandriva. Como já sou um usuário ativo de Conectiva há muitos anos, inclusive como colaborador informal, e tendo o Linux como uma das partes mais importantes da minha vida (em vários sentidos), vou usar o blog como uma maneira de documentar e demonstrar minhas idéias, expressões, impressões e movimentos dentro deste novo mundo.

O site original será mantido e atualizado (de vez em quando), pois lá é que fica o conteúdo estático. Aqui a coisa vai ser um pouco mais dinâmica.

Espero que isso tudo seja útil pra alguém, se não vai ser uma grande perda de tempo.

– en

Before someone asks, I should clarify that this blog’s objective is simply aggregate some of my ideas and experiences. Basically I will talk about Linux and some other technology relatec topics, but also some very useless (or not) stuff will be posted once in a while.

The blog idea came from the fact that at this moment I’m on a Linux distribution transition state. As many may know, Conectiva has merged with Mandrake, originating Mandriva. As being a Conectiva user for so many years, even acting as an informal contributor, and having Linux as one of the most important things in my life (in many ways), I will use the blog to document and demonstrate my ideas, expressions, impressions and movements inside this new world.

The original site will remain maintained and updated (once in a while), because it’s where all the static content is stored. Here the things will be a little more dynamic.

I hope that it’s all useful to somebody, otherwise it will be a great waste of time.

– pt_BR

Beleza! Este é meu primeiro post em um blog, e logo de cara é o meu. Acreditam que eu fiquei fora dessa moda por tanto tempo?
O caso é que no fim das contas eu resolvi iniciar um blog porque vejo tanta gente postanto tanta bobagem por aí, e mais um monte de gente lendo o que os caras escrevem. Parece que hoje em dia pra aparecer na internet tem que ter blog.
Bom, não prometo nada, mas vou fazer o possível postar tópicos bi-lingues. Acho pouco provável que consiga, mas tentar não custa.
A propósito, por hora fica o tema padrão, e permissão pra todo mundo comentar. Com o tempo eu vejo o quê precisa ser ajustado.
T+

– en

Cool! This is my first blog post, and it’s my own. Can you believe that I’ve been out of this trend for so long?
Bottom line is that I decided do start a blog because I see so many people posting so many foolish themes around, and another big bunch of people reading that nonsense. It seems that today you must have a blog so you can be someone on the net.
Well, I can’t promisse anything, but I’ll do what I can to post bi-lingual topics. I gues I’ll have problems accomplishing that, most because of my poor english writing skills (in my oppinion), but it’s worth trying.
By the way, I’ll stick with the default theme here, and everyone can comment on the posts. With time I’ll see what needs to be adjusted.
cul8r