briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Gentoo)

VMware: What's in a name?

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:05:01 -0800

VMware never ceases to confuse me. Not the program, which is a pretty good piece of software. Just the name of everything. Look at this list of VMware software; can you figure out what any of those things are via their names? The VMware official site is no less confusing.

Hilariously, all of these things seem to be named different things than a year or two ago when last I tried to install VMware. It seems this company, like many others, enjoys renaming everything at random, just to keep you on your toes.

If you search for vmware in Gentoo you get these results, among others:

app-emulation/vmware-dsp
app-emulation/vmware-gsx-console
app-emulation/vmware-modules
app-emulation/vmware-player
app-emulation/vmware-server
app-emulation/vmware-server-console
app-emulation/vmware-view-open-client
app-emulation/vmware-vix
app-emulation/vmware-workstation

The descriptions are wonderful:

Emulate a complete PC on your PC without the usual performance overhead of most emulators

In some cases, multiple packages have the exact same copy/pasted description, which is awesome. But maybe the Gentoo devs couldn't figure out what any of these things are either.

After some trial-and-error I narrowed it down to vmware-server, vmware-player and vmware-workstation. I think vmware-workstation is the non-free one, so that narrowed it down to the other two.

vmware-server required me to register at the VMware site and download something myself, after giving my name and shoe size and blood type to VMware and registering, then clicking a download link in an email. Then vmware-server installed via Portage OK. But it comes with a horrible web-only interface and the OS runs in a browser plugin. This crashed hard and often. I'd like a standalone client please.

There's vmware-server-console in Gentoo which sounds like it should let you connect to vmware-server, but ha ha, no, it doesn't. At least not the versions I ended up with via Portage. Then I read somewhere that you can't use VMware Server Console to connect to VMware Server 2.0, it only works with earlier versions. I think? I don't even know if this is true, all I know is vmware-server-console froze or crashed no matter what I tried.

I read on some random mailing list that you can use something called "VMware Infrastructure Client" to connect to VMware Server, but I couldn't for the life of me determine what this is or where to get it.

So I uninstalled vmware-server, made sure to rm -rf /etc/vmware /opt/vmware /var/lib/vmware first, and then installed vmware-player. This opened in a GTK2 GUI, which is what I wanted to begin with. But I couldn't create a new image. I could only open existing ones, which I could download from the official VMware site apparently.

Mind-bogglingly, an image in VMware isn't called an "image", it's called an "Appliance". Clearly someone in the marketroid department at VMware ran out of names, saw a toaster on the shelf and went with it. A washing machine is an appliance, not an OS image. Did you know the "Virtual Appliance Marketplace" has "Expanded Capabilities from the Largest Library of Applications for the Cloud"? Is there seriously someone in the world who can read this without needing to fight back a reflex to vomit? (Images are also referred to as "Solutions", to which I say only uggggggh.)

Anyways, it seems that they only added the ability to create your own images in VMware Player version 3.0; this feature was absent in previous versions. And 3.0 is not available through Gentoo yet.

So I uninstalled everything, rm -rfed any cruft I could find, and went and downloaded VMware Player 3.0 from the VMware site directly. I had to register AGAIN, but then I got it.

During the install, VMware Player 3.0 asks you for the location of your runlevels directory. It didn't accept /etc/runlevels on my box; I guess Gentoo's is non-standard. So I had to make a fake directory and go into it and mkdir rc0.d rc1.d rc2.d rc3.d rc4.d rc5.d rc6.d init.d and let VMware pretend that was my runlevels directory. All so the installer could spew an initscript into it, which doesn't even work. Oh well.

After trying to run vmplayer, failing because the kernel modules weren't loaded properly by the broken initscript, modprobeing the modules myself and restarting a bunch of times, then running vmware-networks --start manually, behold! I had a running VMware Player 3.0 and I made my own image and everything was good.

Are you confused yet? It's all free, so I guess I shouldn't complain. But I guess I just did complain anyways. Names don't have to be this confusing. So many companies do this, and why?

How about "light" (or even "lite"), "trial", "full", "free", "paid", "server", "client"? Those are nice words. We all know what those words mean. "VMware ESXi" might sound EXTREME or trendy or whatever, and maybe it really does "Deliver Enterprise Performance to Your Applications" (ugggggggggggh), but what the hell is it? What is VMWare ThinApp? What does it do? How am I supposed to buy what you're selling when you're speaking a foreign language to me?

Ker-crash

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:56:52 -0700

I can pretty consistently crash my X server nowadays just by opening too many programs. I think I need a new computer.

Or maybe my idea of "too many programs" has been warped by how well Linux multi-tasks. Let's see. I'm seeding 20 torrents in KTorrent, I have Amarok playing, Konversation has a few IRC channels open, Kopete is doing some Jabber for me, Akregator is fetching feeds every 10 minutes, Gimp has a dozen PNGs open, Emacs is visiting around 20 files (and running SLIME + Clojure obviously), Squirrel SQL is running so I can peek at mysql, I have maybe 5 or 6 Konsole windows open, and I have four browsers running (Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Konq) for testing my websites while I develop (multiple tabs in each obviously). And so on.

In Windows not only would the single, sucky taskbar be full to overflowing, but all of my programs would be slowed to a crawl. In Linux I somehow get away with this level of activity for days at a time, but eventually I do something wrong and something crashes. Just now, it was opening one Konsole window too many. I think it's KDE4 instability, or else my ancient video card can't handle the screen resolution I'm running. But I get crashes in Gentoo and Arch both so I don't know.

Buying a computer is such a pain. I never know what to get. I don't keep up with hardware news. Every time I turn around there are twelve new processor families. I know whatever I buy will suck in a month. My current computer is from way back in 2006 and I haven't upgraded it since. My geek cred is non-existent if judged by the computer I'm using. It's embarrassing.

Trying Arch

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:52:41 -0700

Thanks to all who gave helpful suggestions about running VMs in Gentoo. The main reason I wanted a VM was to play around with some other distros and see what I liked.

But then I got to thinking, and I realized that I have over 250 GB of free hard drive space sitting around. So I made a new little partition and per Noah's suggestion, threw Arch Linux on there.

I'm fairly impressed so far. The install was easy. In contrast to the enormous Gentoo handbook, the whole Arch install guide fits on one page of the official Arch wiki. Why doesn't Gentoo have an official wiki? I know there are concerns over the quality of something anyone can edit, but in practice is it a big a deal? Is it worth the price of sending users elsewhere, to potentially even WORSE places, when the Gentoo docs don't cover everything we need? The quality of the unofficial Gentoo wiki is often very good but sometimes hit-or-miss, and it also sort of crashes and loses all data without backups every once in a while.

The Arch installer is a commandline app using ncurses for basic menus and such, which is more than sufficient and a good compromise between commandline-only and full-blown X-run Gnome bloat. The install itself went fine, other than my own mistakes. I'm sharing /boot and /home between Gentoo and Arch so I can switch between them easily. During the install Arch tried to create some GRUB files, but they already existed care of Gentoo, so the install bombed without much notification and I didn't notice until 3 steps later. No big deal to fix, but I'd have liked a louder error message right away when it happened. The base install took about 45 minutes.

Another nice thing is that the Arch install CD has vi on it. I didn't have to resort to freaking nano or remember to install vim first thing. A mild annoyance to be sure, but it bugged me every time I installed Gentoo.

After boot, installing apps via pacman is simple enough. KDE 4.2 installed in about 15 minutes, as you'd expect from a distro with binary packages. I found a mirror with 1.5 Mb/sec downloads, which is awfully nice. Syncing the package tree takes less than 2 seconds, which is also nice compared to Portage's 5-minute rsync and eix update times. Searching the tree via regex is also somehow instantaneous in Arch.

Oddly, KDE didn't seem to pull in Xorg as a dependency, but other dependencies worked fine so far. Time will tell how well this all holds up. Most package managers do fine on the normal cases but the real test is the funky little obscure apps. pacman -S gvim resulted in a Vim with working rubydo and perldo, which means Arch passed the Ubuntu stink test.

Another nice thing is that KDE4 actually works. My Gentoo install is years old and possibly crufted beyond repair, or something else was wrong, but I have yet to get KDE4 working in Gentoo without massive breakage. Possibly if I wiped Gentoo and tried KDE4 without legacy KDE3 stuff everywhere it'd also be smooth.

Regardless, it all works in Arch. NVidia drivers and Twinview settings were copy/pasted from Gentoo, and compositing all works fine. No performance problems in KDE with resizing or dragging windows, no Plasma crashes (yet), no missing icons or invisible notification area. QtCurve works in Qt3, Qt4 and GTK just fine. My sound card worked without any manual configuration at all. My mouse worked without tweaking, including the thumb buttons. Same with networking, the install prompted me for my IP and gateway etc. and then it worked, no effort.

I've mentioned before, but one nice thing about Linux is that if you have /home in its own partition, it's no big deal at all to share it between distros. With no effort at all I'm now using all my old files and settings in Arch, and I can switch back and forth between this and Gentoo without any troubles.

So we'll see how this goes. So far so good though. Arch seems very streamlined and its goal is minimalism, which is nice. Gentoo has not felt minimalistic to me in a while. Again, may be due to the age of my install, cruft and bit-rot.

Gentoo VMWare Fail

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:59:55 -0700

According to this bug, VMWare on Gentoo is in a sorry state, with one lone person trying to keep it going. I can't get vmware-modules to compile on my system no matter what I try, which is depressing. Kudos to all of our one-man army Gentoo devs who are keeping various parts of the distro going, but I wonder how many other areas of Gentoo are largely unmaintained nowadays.

KVM was braindead simple to get set up in comparison with VMWare, but I can't get networking to work. This is because I'm an idiot when it comes to TUN/TAP and iptables. I've read wiki articles that suggest setting up my system to NAT-forward traffic into the VM but I couldn't get that working and don't have a lot of time to screw with it.

On one of the Gentoo mailing lists I noticed that a dev has posted some KVM images of Gentoo suitable for testing. But I'm looking to start up an image from scratch and that doesn't help, and it's not going to help me get networking going any easier.

Why do I feel like this'd take 10 minutes to set up on Ubuntu? Look at this, or search for "ubuntu vmware" and see the hundreds of results. Given that it's a VM and it doesn't really matter what the host OS is anyways, I'll probably do that on my laptop, but it's still depressing.

Conky Goodness

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:52:59 -0700

I uploaded a new screenshot:

The conky with weather pictures in it is stolen from RAMC's conkyrc which you can find on the Gentoo MB and also apparently here. There's a python script there to fetch and display weather info.

Whoever thought up the idea of making a font that consists of little weather pictures was pretty clever. Whoever thought up making a font that consists of Linux distro emblems has a bit too much time on his hands.

Oddly enough, Unicode itself includes glyphs for weather symbols. e.g. this is Unicode character 2603:

☃

If your font supports it, it should show up as a snowman. If your font doesn't support it, it may show up as an ice cube.

Goodbye, sweet uptime

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:48:06 -0700

I finally had to reboot my Gentoo box today. My uptime as of reboot:

315 days, 54 min

Not spectacular, but not bad for a dust-covered desktop machine, and it probably could've gone another 300 days or so. I only had to reboot because I bought another 500GB hard drive.

Funny thing about rebooting after that long, you have no idea what's going to happen. I finally unmasked and compiled a newer kernel, and there were quite a few new options and features in there to root through. My disk hadn't been fscked for 396 days, and after rebooting and 15 minutes of grinding away, it found a few dozen orphaned inodes. A few init scripts having to do with modules gave me some warnings, but I fixed that up.

But I think I can spare an hour every year or two to update my system.

KDE 4.2.... so close

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:31:13 -0800

I tried KDE 4 (again) on Gentoo last night. It's unmasked in the tree so it was simple enough to install (if you're willing to use a masked Portage so you can use sets).

You can easily see improvement in KDE 4.2 compared to older versions of KDE 4. Everything generally works now, which is itself a change. Performance issues are almost gone; I can at least move and resize windows now without my system freezing. Delays in rendering popup menus are gone. All the shiny desktop effects worked right away with no hassle and everything looked great. A lot of the little nooks and crannies of previous missing features are filled in.

Some things are still not quite right though. I experienced massive stuttering in mplayer when I tried to watch a movie and do some other things at the same time. I managed to crash plasma once or twice just by resizing the main panel. I'm using two monitors and one monitor went totally blank for no reason I can determine, with only a one-inch strip of blue wallpaper at the top which was still right-clickable, while the other monitor kept working fine.

And other things are still broken beyond belief. All my system tray icons were invisible (reading the Gentoo MB apparently I'm not alone with that problem). Icons were a problem in general; random parts of the kmenu still had question-mark icons. Trying to download new themes of any sort via the "New Themes..." buttons in various system dialogs silently did nothing. When I opened Dolphin, all the menus were labeled "No Text", which was amusing. And I did manage to freeze-crash KDE4 when I tried to quit once, just like old times. Qtcurve wouldn't let me configure itself. GTK apps were themeless until I found an ebuild for a gtk-engines-kde4 ebuild in an overlay.

Installing KDE 4.2 and KDE 3.5 in parallel breaks tons of things in KDE3, e.g. the K menu is missing tons of stuff and has tons of extra KDE4 stuff that doesn't work, KControl no longer functions at all, the splash screen when you start is just a blank blue box, and so on. I'm now in the process of uninstalling KDE 4 (again) and trying to salvage my system (again).

Starting KDE 3 again after using KDE 4 for an hour, it's depressing how much smoother and more responsive it feels. I have hopes for KDE 4, it's clearly headed in the right direction, but I feel like it's going to be another year before it comes close to catching up to KDE 3.

Remote webcam viewing: Ubuntu 3, Gentoo 0

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:04:32 -0800

One could argue that boringness is a good attribute for a distro. Gentoo has stayed out of my way for a good long time. I update world once a week and I haven't had a package fail to build or fail to work in a while.

Until a few days ago. I wanted to view video from my laptop's built-in webcam, on my desktop, over my local network. My laptop is running Ubuntu, and my desktop is running Gentoo. One point in favor of Ubuntu, my webcam works without any effort on my fault. It works right on a fresh Ubuntu install off the install CD. I never did get any webcam working on any Gentoo install whenever I've tried over the years. Maybe the situation has rectified itself at this point, but I don't anticipate trying.

Unfortunately, viewing my laptop's feed on my desktop also failed to work. First I tried an X-forwarding SSH tunnel, and running xawtv -remote, but I got all kinds of nasty errors along the lines of

X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  2 (X_ChangeWindowAttributes)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x1a5
  Serial number of failed request:  55
  Current serial number in output stream:  56

Extensive Googling turned up nothing on this, which isn't surprising given how un-informative an error message this is. Maybe some extension in X needed to be built to get xawtv to work. Maybe it's a version incompatibility. Maybe some hardware thing with my video card driver. Who knows. On the other hand when I tried to view my laptop's feed on another laptop running Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu), it worked fine. Albeit incredibly slowly.

Then I noticed Ekiga comes installed on Ubuntu by default, so I figured I'd try that, in spite of it being a bit overkill. But installing Ekiga on Gentoo died with a build error, because I needed to build pwlib with ldap support. Ekiga between the two Ubuntu laptops worked fine without any effort too, so at that point I gave up on getting it working in Gentoo, since it was no longer worth it.

No big deal, but slightly annoying. Probably could've gotten it to work in Gentoo eventually, but I have less and less patience for fiddling with installation nowadays. This is probably one of the benefits of the sort of mono-culture Ubuntu is turning into. Everyone using Ubuntu has the same basic crap installed. Whereas there's probably no one in the world with a Gentoo install quite like mine.

But Gentoo is still working well for me overall.

KDE4 disaster

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:49:10 -0700

From reading the bug it sounds like KDE4 is getting close to being ready to hit the tree, which is awesome. Foolishly, I decided to try it early from the overlay last night. It was a total disaster. Things were crashing left and right, panels would resize themselves to be fullscreen (with hilarious results), half of my apps didn't work at all. I found three or four ways to bring down the entire X server. It took me many hours to get KDE3 running again. This is totally to be expected from installing masked packages as I did, so it's my own dumb fault, it was amusing and I wanted to get a taste.

I'm afraid it's going to be inevitably difficult or impossible to migrate cleanly from KDE3 to KDE4. I had the same problem in Kubuntu when I tried a while back. KDE is so huge and so many things link to it or interact with it that it's going to take a year to track down and remove all the cruft after the switch.

I couldn't even import my old KDE3 color schemes or Konsole color schemes into KDE4, which was surprising. QtCurve was un-configurable, dekorator didn't work, and so on. I didn't get far enough to figure out if my preferred icon themes work or not. I didn't realize they broke backwards compatibility to that large an extent, but I maybe it's to be expected.

There were other problems that were seemingly due to the lingering immaturity of KDE4. I can see all the pieces there which are going to allow people to do really neat stuff eventually. In the meantime KDE4 feels horrible.

KDE4 fonts look nice though.

Gentoo still rules

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:56:44 -0700

The version of akregator I have always displays article link text in an ugly dark blue, which doesn't show up well against my dark Qt theme. I can barely read an ebuild to save my life, and the KDE ebuilds are full of all kinds of odd KDE-specific stuff, but it still took me just a couple of minutes to:

Find the sources in /usr/portage/distfiles
Cludgily patch akregator to use normal text color for links (underlines still distinguish them)
Copy the akregator ebuild into an overlay, throw the patch in there and add one line to the ebuild to read it
emerge away

Et voil?, custom-patched, package-manager-managed app. Gentoo is pretty good for this kind of thing, whatever its other shortcomings. Does any other distro make it this easy to do such things? (I'm genuinely curious.)

Interview with a new Linux user

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:53:06 -0700

After countless, endless hours of nagging on my part, my girlfriend finally put Linux on her laptop. I thought it would be interesting to hear what a long-time Windows-using non-programmer thinks of Linux (Kubuntu in this case) after a few weeks of use. So I interviewed her. Read on. My thoughts and conclusions are at the end.

Q1: How would you describe your level of expertise or skill level when it comes to computers in general?

A: I think I'm better with computers (at least Windows) than the majority of my classmates (I'm starting third year accounting next week). I know my way around the internet, I'm decent with programs like Office and GIMP, and I know how to fix most problems that affect me as a lay user. As for Linux, I would know how to look for help, but I probably wouldn't understand it yet.

Q2: You used Windows for a long time in spite of my constant pestering. What kept you from using Linux until now?

A: A few years ago you tried to get me to use Gentoo. I was younger, and apparently Linux in general was more difficult to use, so I got frustrated pretty quickly. A lot of my reluctance was from remembering that time. I was also worried that I might do something wrong and lose all my schoolwork. At least in Windows I know it wouldn't be directly my fault if that happened (disregarding the fact that I'm slow at backing things up).

Q3: You decided to use Kubuntu. Why did you pick that distro instead of another?

A: I heard it was easy for Windows users to pick up. It's also the one you have on your laptop, so it's easier to get tech support.

Q4: Why did you pick KDE instead of Gnome, XFCE, or some other desktop environment / window manager?

A: I don't remember. Something about having multiple wallpapers on multiple desktops and being able to make them change randomly whenever I want. There might've been other reasons, but that one is the most enjoyable so far.

Q5: How hard was it to install Linux? Compared to Windows?

A: It was about the same.

Q6: How hard was getting everything set up the way you like it after Linux was installed? How long did it take you?

A: There's always a lot to set up on a clean install of anything. It took me a few days to find something I'm comfortable with. I mostly just ripped off your setup because I liked it, though, so that made it a bit easier. Getting SKIM to work was quite difficult, though, since I couldn't find good instructions for my version of Kubuntu (or Kubuntu at all, really). I think I just ended up making you fix it.

Q7: Does Linux have any features or applications you really enjoy, that Windows is missing? Can you do anything in Linux that you couldn't do (easily) in Windows?

A: Even just doing a small amount of image editing yesterday, I'm beginning to see the appeal of multiple desktops. I also like how easily it's detected various wireless networks so far. The package manager is pretty nice too. I wouldn't have a Gmail checker if you didn't write one for me, but the one you wrote is better than the one I was using before.

Q8: Do you miss anything from Windows? Is there anything you could do in Windows that you can't do (easily) in Linux?

A: It's easier to install programs in Windows than it is to install non-package programs in Linux. I still don't know the difference between a source and a binary. I don't miss playing games too much, since I'm more of a console person. But I do miss OtaClock. The default clock is boring and not cute at all.

Q9: How comfortable are you with using a command prompt?

A: Not very. I know how to chmod things, but that's about it. I need to look for a guide for basic bash commands that explains them in plain English.

Q10: How do you like the general look and feel of the Linux desktop compared to Windows?

A: It's a lot nicer looking overall. I like being able to use all the Buuf icons easily. At first I was resistant to using anti-aliased font, but it's growing on me. Windows displayed aliased fonts so nicely, and I still kind of miss it.

Q11: You have a dual-boot set up. What do you still plan to use Windows for?

A: I have a couple games that don't work in Linux. I also use my laptop for school, and my university is dominated by Windows, so I feel comfortable having it around for compatibility purposes if I ever need it.

Q12: It's been a few weeks since you switched to Linux. How has it been overall? Do you plan to stick with it long-term?

A: Overall it's been about the same as Windows. Something about Vista still creeps me out, so it feels good using an OS that doesn't feel evil. I like being able to get pretty much any program I want free and on demand.

Here are some Linux programs I know you've used... tell me something you like and something you dislike about each one.

Dolphin It's minimalistic, but it doesn't have the view options I like.
Konqueror I can get all the info on a file that I need just by mousing over it. It took me a while to figure out how to both display thumbnails and then sort them by size or date, though. I'm quite obsessive about collecting and sorting pictures, and in Windows that was how I used to see which pictures were new or duplicates.
Gwenview It finds duplicate pictures for me, making the above method obsolete. It even finds similar pictures, which is pretty intersting. So far I can't think of anything I don't like about it.
Amarok Win-B is my friend. There's too many unnecessary features for me, though. I don't care about album art or smart playlists. It's good that I can just ignore them.
Kopete It has custom themes. I really like the Metal Gear theme you made. For some reason I can't figure out how to make our text different colours, though. The text is different for my friends who use the real MSN, but for you it's the same colour is mine, so it's harder for me to read.
Kate It's like tabbed Notepad. I'm one of those people who actually likes Notepad, since I don't do much coding at all. I can see where Vim is better, but Kate is fine too.
KDE as a whole When it's set up properly, it looks really nice. The amount of stuff I needed to change to get it to look nice was quite overwhelming, though.

Thoughts and conclusions: I used to try to push Gentoo on people, and that was a mistake. Gentoo isn't for everyone. A bad experience can kill people's opinions of Linux.

It's a lot easier to make a big switch to a new operating system when you have knowledgeable people to back you up and help you out. This is one area where Linux shines: There are a LOT of people willing to help newbies. The community aspect of Linux is by far one of the best parts of using it. We're all doing this because it's fun and Linux people like to share the fun with others.

Is Linux ready for the desktop? I think so; I think it has been for a while now. A Windows power-user can find a lot to like in Linux. There are a lot of features and apps in modern desktop Linux that offer a lot of things many people would find very appealing if they only knew they existed.

Gentoo 2008.0

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:08:33 -0700

Kudos to the release team for getting this release out. I wasn't waiting on the edge of my seat of course, Gentooers don't need releases to stay up to date. But I do know a few people starting Linux who specifically didn't install Gentoo because the install CD was so old. You don't need a Gentoo liveCD to install Gentoo (I don't even think I have one in my house) but most people don't know that, and appearances can be deceiving / first impressions can be important / etc.

I just read about a problem that John Alberts mentioned having when updating his profile to 2008.0. I had the same problem with the "releases" folder not being synced properly, causing all kinds of mess. I though perhaps I was the only one but I guess it was more widespread. Another sync cleared it up though. I imagine (I hope) the problem is fixed on all the mirrors by now.

I was curious about what the new profile consisted of so I started reading a few files. Did you ever wonder if Gentoo devs know what they're doing? According to /usr/portage/profiles/targets/developer/make.defaults:

# As much as it pains me, we hope that developers know what they're doing.

I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING="yes"

I can rest easy now.

FAT

Mon, 05 May 2008 17:13:36 -0700

I had to undelete someone's files from a FAT partition today. My first thought was to use good ol' Windows to do so, given that Windows is the unholy ground which spawned FAT to begin with. I remember there used to be an UNDELETE command of some sort in some old version of DOS. But this doesn't seem to exist in XP any longer.

There are however lots and lots of third-party "shareware" programs which can do this kind of thing, as Google reveals. There is in fact an overwhelming number of such shareware programs. Most of these programs are total crap and cost around $30. One program required me to burn a CD and reboot my computer from the CD before I could run it. Many of the programs "intelligently" scan a partition looking for chunks of things that look like JPEGS or WMVs. I tried a few "demos" before I gave up, not having an hour to waste finding the one program that would work. Thus bringing the current score to Windows: 948, Brian: 0.

Instead I brought the drive home and plugged it into Gentoo and used this post as a guide. I dd'ed the partition to a file, fscked around with it a bit, mounted it via loopback, and had my files back. Took 10 minutes, and worked as expected. And it didn't cost me $30.

The moral of this story: I need to burn a Knoppix disk to take to work with me.

My only quibble is that I can never ever remember what Gentoo package contains fsck.vfat. Note to self, it's dosfstools. I can never think of the search terms even to locate that package. I had to google it.

SBCLish host wanted

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:44:08 -0800

After sleeping on it, I think I'm going to switch hosts and try to keep going with SBCL and Hunchentoot.

If you're reading this and you know of a VPS unmanaged web host that's known to work well with SBCL, could you please comment and let me know what host you use, and what plan at that host, if it offers more than one plan, and what OS you prefer? So far I've heard Slicehost and OCS Solutions suggested. (Slicehost offers Gentoo. Do I dare?)

Note to all, my current host for my SBCL-driven site is FutureHosting. I'd advise people to avoid them if you plan to run SBCL. Their support and service is usually pretty good as long as you don't push it too far, but their servers are pretty wonky at times and after the comments from my last post, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of my problems were due to some kind of VPS misconfiguration. Their support staff told me nothing more than "pay for more RAM" when I informed them of the problems I was having.

SBCL on Gentoo (rules)

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:51:21 -0800

The SBCL download page shows version 1.0.14 released today, and it's already in Portage (masked). The gentoo-lisp list says we got a new Lisp project lead recently. Looks like there's plenty of Lisp going on in the Gentoo world. Personally I am very pleased with the state of Lisp in Gentoo.

Sometimes I wonder what purpose this blog serves. One purpose I found for it today was looking back through my old entries, to see how things have changed over the past couple years. I very strongly believe in introspection for the purpose of refining beliefs to make them more accurately reflect reality. In other words, I know I'm probably wrong about a lot of crap and I really don't like the thought. It bugs me. So I'm always looking for ways to change my perspective on things, if it needs changing.

I first tried Lisp in August 2006, it seems. Some of what I said was somewhat amusing, and wrong. Quoth myself:

My prediction is that Ruby will end up being mostly a superset of Lisp except for a few areas Lisp is specifically targetted at.

Oops! In fact just the opposite is true. Common Lisp is easily a superset of Ruby in all the ways that matter, specifically meta-programming and the flexibility of the object system, to name a few.

Lisp is sadly just a subset of Ruby in terms of the amount of libraries available. Ruby has tons of people writing tons of code for it. But I am finding that Common Lisp actually has a LOT more libraries than you'd guess from a quick glance. The problem is that Common Lisp is so much less "mainstream" than most languages that you have to do some digging to find the libraries you need. Once you do find them, they tend to be of high quality and great utility, from my brief experience.

Then again, Ruby itself is a subset of Perl in this regard. There's a critical mass where you probably have "enough" libraries to get the job done. Perl+CPAN is probably over the top in this regard. Ruby is there. Common Lisp is pretty close.

Quoth myself:

I must admit, properly formatting Lisp seems confusing.

Yeah, I do remember indentation of Lisp code to be pretty confusing back then. In PCL Seibel talks about how "experienced Lispers" use indentation to tell them if something funky is going on with their parens. I realized today I actually do this too now (though I am not an "experienced Lisper"). LET forms look a certain way, IF forms look a certain way, standard function calls look a certain way. You can tell immediately if something fishy is going on if the indentation is being screwy.

Actually I think people probably do this in most languages. If you've written any amount of Ruby, you know that eventually you often end up with 87 end's in a row, some closing if-then statements, some closing iterator blocks, some closing method definitions, some closing class definitions. If you type an end in Vim and it launches all the way to column 1, but you weren't expecting it there, that can tell you that you have something wrong (an extra end somewhere).

But it's much more necessary in Lisp. It seems to me that it would be extremely difficult to write good Lisp code without an editor's help. There are way too many parens for a human to keep track of. That's not to say that Lisp requires a full-blown IDE just to make the language usable (*cough*Java*cough*). Lisp syntax is regular enough that it's REALLY EASY for an editor to very consistently help you keep your parens balanced. The rules are highly logical, simple, and surprisingly standard across the Lisp community (compared to the tabs vs. whitespace, 2 vs. 4 vs. 8 spaces, curly-braces-on-newlines-or-not sorts of wars you'll find in some other languages' communities). If you use paredit or something similar, keeping your parens balanced and indented nicely is a no-brainer.

SBCL on Debian (sucks)

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:44:01 -0800

In my oh-so-neverending quest to learn Lisp and make a webpage using it, today I actually bothered trying to install SBCL on my server, which is a VPS running Debian.

Failure. I got errors like this:

mmap: Cannot allocate memory
ensure_space: failed to validate 536870912 bytes at 0x09000000
(hint: Try "ulimit -a"; maybe you should increase memory limits.)

This is a well-known error involving CMUCL and SBCL and Debian (and some other distros), especiall when running from a VPS apparently. Lots and lots and lots and lots of people have this problem, seemingly. Reading through all of that, it's hard to figure out whether it's a bug in SBCL, a bug in Debian's package, or a bug in the kernel.

Given that I'm on a VPS on someone else's server, memory and other resource caps are set and I can't touch them, so a lot of the (probably unhealthy) hacks that some people list as solutions above don't work for me.

Fortunately there's a solution posted to one of the SBCL lists. Download the SBCL source, and edit src/compiler/x86/parms.lisp, find the section for your OS and change one of the lines to read:

(def!constant dynamic-space-end         #x10000000)

Then it's a matter of recompiling SBCL. You have to do this on a machine that already has a working SBCL (or other Common Lisp) installed. The install instructions on the website are not as complete as the INSTALL that comes in the source tarball. The included INSTALL doc has some important things you need to do if you want to compile SBCL with threading enabled. (Note: You probably do want threading enabled.) If I'd read that first it would've saved me 30 minutes worth of compiling an SBCL that I couldn't use for Hunchentoot due to no threading.

Here is yet another example of where a binary distro fails and fails hard. If this was Gentoo I could've tweaked an ebuild and thrown it into an overlay and taken care of most of this bookkeeping crap for me. With Debian I get to compile everything by hand and SFTP files around between servers and look up to make sure I have install prefixes set correctly and so on and so on. With Gentoo I wouldn't have forgotten to enable threads because I'd have a USE flag right in front of my face.

In any case the above mess at least got me a working SBCL that let me install and run Hunchentoot. Time will tell whether it's going to survive when I actually start hosting a web page on it, or whether reducing SBCL's memory allocation is going to starve and kill my program.

Roll call results

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:04:13 -0800

Six developers (or people pretending to be developers) responded to my survey.

Now, given a random online poll that I might stumble upon, I estimate a 3% chance that I would ever bother to respond to it. Extrapolating from this the fact that only 3% of the devs reading Planet Larry responded to my poll, this means that there are actually approximately 200 devs reading this right now. That's science, right there.

Roll call!

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:39:50 -0800

I was wondering today how many Gentoo devs actually read Planet Larry.

If you're a Gentoo dev, and you feel so inclined, could you leave me a short comment? Just say "hi". In this way, I shall count you.

I'll at least get a lower bound answer this way. Unless no one responds, in which case sucks to be me huh?

Lisp on Gentoo; Hunchentoot thread slaughter

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:32:23 -0800

Via this page I learned of the existence of apachebench, which was installed on my system already (probably along with Apache2) as /usr/sbin/ab. This tool lets you hammer a server and see how it handles concurrent requests etc. Long before I read this diatribe I knew that I didn't know crap about statistics and that benchmarks in the end are of marginal use to me, but apachebench lets me partially answer the questions I had about how SBCL+Hunchentoot handles concurrent requests.

I got mixed results. Hunchentoot happily gives birth to worker threads to handle all the requests, so that answers one question for me. But when running Hunchentoot behind mod_lisp and Apache, when I hit it with too many requests at once I get dropped into the debugger in the REPL. (Actually, I get dropped simultaneously into tens or hundreds of debuggers. Ouch.) And I get all kinds of errors spewed into my logs. Things about broken pipes, missing sockets, dead streams, unbound HUNCHENTOOT:REPLY variables, you name it.

One thing I looked at first was whether my packages were up to date. This brings me to a side rant: They were not, because many / most of the CL packages (even unstable) in the Portage tree are really really out of date. Because this is Gentoo, it's not hard to version-bump some new ebuilds into /usr/local/portage myself, which I did, but I didn't realize the tree was lagging this much.

(There is (was?) a Gentoo "Common Lisp Portage Overlay project" linked from CLiki but it seems entirely abandoned since 2006. Apparently there was a lone dev (Matthew Kennedy) back in 2006 who was really pushing a lot of CL stuff for Gentoo but he quit in January 2007. But according to the gentoo-lisp mailing list, there's a newer git overlay repo that's serving the same purpose nowadays.

It's kind of sad how much detective-work I needed to do to track this information down. I'm sure the Gentoo Lisp-devs are doing the best they can though. If only I had the skill, knowledge, time, and ambition (in that order of importance) to help out myself.)

In any case, upgrading packages to current versions didn't help. Even loading a fresh SBCL image and loading hunchentoot and starting a server and serving just the default Hunchentoot "Hey you have no pages defined" page, I get a thread massacre and SLIME is debugger-bombed even if I simply hit refresh in my web browser a bunch of times quickly.

The good news is that if there's no human around to handle these thread errors / debugger sessions in the REPL, the threads quickly timeout and die off. This is probably what I'd want to have happen on a server I wasn't monitoring 24 hours a day. The bad news is that requests dying left and right isn't that great when you're a user waiting for a page to be displayed.

However the other good news is if I just use Hunchentoot by itself and ditch mod_lisp and Apache, I have no problems at all. Requests are handled quickly and even with lots and lots of concurrent requests in apachebench I get no thread-slaughter. So it seems likely that the problem is with mod_lisp, or with the communication between it and Apache and SBCL.

When it comes right down to it, why do I even need Apache? I don't really. My first thought was that Apache was hogging up port 80 on my machine and I don't want a Hunchentoot-driven site to have my URL always include some non-standard port, but then I remembered I pay for two IP addresses with my host anyways, so I can use one IP for my other, Apache-driven sites and dedicate the other IP to Hunchentoot.

If I can set that up, why use Apache? There's no real reason other than the one that bites me so often as I've been learning Lisp: It's what I'm used to, it's what I'm comfortable with. The idea that a hierarchy of web pages are actually all coming from a single Lisp script running in a single persistent Lisp image that's parsing and fiddling with request URI strings and calling functions appropriately, is very different from the naive filesystem directory tree full of HTML files or PHP scripts that I suppose I usually think of when I picture a web page. It's different, but also very nice in many ways.

And so the journey continues. We'll see what tomorrow has in store.

Lisp on Gentoo

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:21:40 -0800

Gentoo is a good platform for playing with Lisp. Given it's the only platform I've used for playing with Lisp other than Windows, and I doubt anything could be as bad as Windows. But Gentoo works fine.

Here are some other links that I'll probably find useful in a few months even if no one else in the world does. Funny how my blog serves as my sticky-notes.

Gentoo Common Lisp Guide. Tells you how to avoid using Debian-derived common-lisp-controller, which I take it many people hated. Hint: Read the bottom of that guide first, it tells you about gentoo-init.lisp so you can avoid dumping tons of stuff into your config files.
XFT fonts in Emacs on Gentoo. I have Emacs 23.0.0.1 (built 2007-09-20, installed as emacs-cvs) and XFT fonts work fine for me.
Be sure to throw
```
(require 'site-gentoo)
```
into ~/.emacs if you install any Emacs stuff via Portage. If you plan to use SLIME you probably also need this in there:
```
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl")
```
(inserting the path to your implementation of choice of course).
Portage is chock-full of CL packages. Of course pretty much every free CL implementation you could ask for is in Portage. But the dev-lisp branch of the Portage tree also has 200+ other CL packages. Get CL-PPCRE.
A CLiki page about Lisp on Gentoo.
This post on the gentoo-lisp mailing list has some nice information about where things go when you install CL packages via Portage. Might come in handy.

QT-GTK

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 22:30:34 -0800

For a long time in Gentoo, if I had the "Use my KDE style in GTK applications" option selected in KDE, certain themes would cause all GTK apps to fail to even start. Only certain QT themes did it though. Domino for example, which happens to be my favorite QT app.

I also had some redraw problems with GTK apps no matter what QT theme I used. When changing between virtual desktops, bits and pieces of certain GTK apps wouldn't redraw properly until I moved them around or resized them. And as I mentioned an entry or two ago, I had some lag problems when switching between desktops in general. Nothing show-stopping. Just barely bad enough to annoy me at times.

Strangely, all of those problems seem to have been corrected. Must've been something fixed in the past month. Or maybe something on my system was b0rked and the slew of updates that accumulated over the past month caused me to have to recompile something that fixed it. That included a new version of xorg, tons of KDE apps, a new nvidia driver, and lots of other things, and I upgraded freetype to the latest keyworded version. I wish I knew what it was in particular that fixed things so well. Such are the mysteries of Gentoo.

Match made in heaven

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:29:19 -0800

Imagine if you will, a field of daisies. In the background, some sappy music. Perhaps Chariots of Fire? At one end of the field, running in slow motion, arms spread wide, is a pasty white, lanky, bespectacled geek. At the other end, a nondiscript black box. What is this box? Could it be? Yes, it's a computer, and it comes bearing the gift of Linux.

That was more or less the scene today. After a month of agony, my Gentoo box arived today. It sustained minor damage during its trans-continental journey. The case has a dent in the corner, which is impressive given that my case is solid steel. Both optical drives were bashed into the case, and one drive's front panel was broken off, but it snapped back on OK. The video card came unseated, but I took it out and put it back in and it worked fine. This is mostly expected. I should've packed it properly before I moved, but I didn't have time. Next time maybe I'll send the parts separately, or else pack the inside of the case with something to pad it.

Either way, I'm immensely glad to have it back. All my precious music files, and my precious source code, and my precious desktop shortcuts and conky configs. I'm now slowly but surely updating all the packages that are out of date, and there are a lot of them.

Also 1920x1200 lags KDE pretty badly. I need to figure out how to liven it up a bit.

What's happening to me?

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:01:23 -0700

I had to buy a mouse for my laptop, and this Microsoft mouse is what I got. Microsoft does actually seem to make decent mouses. It's a nice little mouse, takes one AA batter that supposedly lasts 6 months, has a little USB antenna that snaps into the base of the mouse for travel and which also turns off the laser when embedded.

First I managed to tolerate C#, and now I'm using a MS-spawned mouse. What's happening to me? What next, will I become a Microsoft MVP (r)(tm)(r) and start hanging pictures of Ballmer all over my living room?

Or maybe this shows that I'm open-minded and that my undying hatred of MS software isn't due to bias but is actually a valid and well-founded opinion based on the inferiority of the software itself. Phew.

In other non-news, I'm really trying to get my Gentoo box shipped out to me within the next week or two. I'm going through heavy withdrawal symptoms. Today I dropped into a terminal and tried to wget a file, only to realize that Windows Vista doesn't have such nice things as wget. Then I curled up into a fetal position under my desk and shook uncontrollably for a half hour.

Vista sucks

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:52:47 -0700

After moving recently 2,500 miles across the country, my Gentoo machine is on the east coast while I'm on the west coast. All I have with me is my laptop, which to my everlasting regret runs Vista.

Having been forced to use Vista exclusively for a week now, I find myself more and more wanting my precious Linux back. It's the little things, like wanting to fall to a command prompt to do something quickly but not being able to. I have cygwin on here, but it's not the same. And I want to play some MKV files, which either mplayer or VLC plays fine in Linux (I forget which) but which sucks in Windows, even VLC in Windows. The subtitles are screwed up no matter what I try. I found a player that works finally, but it's non-free (as in beer, speech, freedom, and everything else). I want to at least re-arrange the order of running programs in the task bar, if not have multiple desktops, but nope, the task bar is still as pathetic as Windows 95.

Today I wanted to fire up the Windows Photo Gallery program, so I opened the start menu, clicked in the search box, and typed "photo gallery". My single result was an entry labeled only "setup.ini". Note, Photo Gallery IS installed on my computer. Although to be honest, I had removed the Windows Photo Gallery from the TOP-LEVEL of my start menu, where MS and many other programs had spewed far too many icons that I have to continually scroll past. And when I put the icon back into my start menu (top-level), then a search for "photo gallery" gives me the launcher icon for the program as well as my good old random "setup.ini". But you'd think the search thing would index program names anyways, wouldn't you?

Many of my games aren't compatible with Vista, like ZSNES for example. Maple Story barely runs. "XP compatible mode" proves to be entirely useless, as I expected. Personally, I'm convinced "XP compatible mode" does absolutely nothing. Other programs, for no reason I can determine, cause Windows to bail out of Aero and drop back to some dumbed-down interface. Then when you close the program, Windows bumps back to Aero again. These aren't games or anything fancy; SPSS for example, a statistics program, causes this to happen. This is a feature of Vista, but one I can't explain.

I managed to go a week without disabling UAC, but I just broke down and killed it. A more stupid idea, I have never seen. When you show a user a box which says "Is this safe?" 1,000 times, and 999 of those times is for a safe operation, and 1 of those times is something manevolent, there's no chance in Hades that the user is going to get it right. Vista also retains the continual nagging about not running a firewall or anti-virus program that XP brought into the world.

Vista blue-screened on me yesterday too, which is great. Good old IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I also love how my laptop loses my internet connection every time I put it to sleep (it always has a 30-second lag when I turn it back on where it THINKS it still has a connection, but then fails, just to make things extra special annoying). I very much love how the computer won't go to sleep at all or activate my screensaver if I have my USB mouse plugged in. And I love how unbelievably laggy simple file copy/move/delete operations are, for no reason I can determine. (Note: by "love", I mean "hate".)

Windows Vista: A polished turd.

Yikes

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:53:11 -0700

>>> No outdated packages were found on your system.
 * Regenerating GNU info directory index...
 * Processed 176 info files.
 * IMPORTANT: 96 config files in '/usr/share/X11/xkb' need updating.
 * See the CONFIGURATION FILES section of the emerge
 * man page to learn how to update config files.

Good thing they could all be blindly overwritten. The thought of etc-updating that many config files almost gave me a heart attack.