Off late I noticed X applications on my Gentoo installation failing to launch in gnome sessions unless launched within first few seconds. It didn’t seem easily reproducible so it took me a few xdm and os restarts to nail the actual problem.

Problem:
NetworkManager changes the hostname after connecting to wireless network. However, it doesn’t update xauth with the new hostname, which means .Xauthority file is no longer valid once the hostname is changed, and attempts to launch applications fail with ‘no protocol specified/cannot open display’ messages.

Fix:
In my case, i believe, ‘etc-update’ was the culprit. Fix is to update /etc/conf.d/hostname with the desired hostname, which is apparently honored by NetworkManager. Once HOSTNAME is set in the conf-file, and OS is rebooted, ‘xhost list’ can be used to validate the .Xauthority contents and hostname can be matched. X applications should start without any trouble.

Problem:
Recently Gentoo x86 profile 10.0 pushed x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers version 185.18.36, which made ‘xdm’ launch on my laptop(Dell D630 Latitude) really noisy. First few minutes of X session on my box started to push fan to the limit making it unbearable.

Fix:
Some digging up on the web revealed it is a known Dell bios bug, and has been fixed in upstream.  So, the solution is to upgrade bios to latest available version.

Steps to upgrade:
Install ‘libsmbios’:

sudo emerge --sync
sudo emerge libsmbios

…and follow further instructions here: http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Tech/libsmbios_dellBiosUpdate (this page has steps to download updated bios and install it using dellBiosUpdate (a15 is the latest available release at the time of writing, and fixed the problem for me))(Ignore distribution specific instructions).

I recently got my 1.5 TB external storage(usb) unit, which i had planed to use as a shared datastore, between:

• my laptop(Dell D630)(usually runs Gentoo, sometimes Debian-Lenny)
• Sweta(my wife)’s laptop(MacBook Black running OS X Snow Leopard)
• our desktop at home (runs Ubuntu(as of now), which im planning to move to Lenny too, as Ubuntu is obnoxiously irritating)(this one was supposed to be the permanent docking station for the unit as well)

So given the situation, the disk was obviously going to live most of its life flirting with GNU/Linux setups, so it made sense to have it on ext3 (or ext2/jfs/xfs etc?). So, i did the partition tables then mkfs.ext3, some spicing up with tune2fs and after e2labeling it, with some amount of satisfaction mounted the partitions to verify i had done them right.
Having verified disk’s working state, i unmounted and jacked the disk into the MacBook(OS X) which decided not to mount it. dmesg showed kernel figured the disk was there, which indicated to me the reason for it not being mounted(it probably didn’t know what ext3 was). Some reading on internet revealed i needed ext2fsx to save the day. My attempt to install it however, was thwarted with a not so intuitive error message(which gave me no clue as to what the fuck was wrong with my installation). With some frustration, i accepted that user friendly softwares are supposed to obfuscate the error messages/stack traces, so that user gets no fucking clue about failure and has no way to fix it(not quite what i call ‘user friendly’, but whatever). Some more reading indicated i needed MacFUSE and FuseExt2 to do userspace shit since my kernel didn’t think i as someone who paid for the piece of shit(OS X) deserved the right to use other filesystems than HFS+ and crappy windows file systems(like NTFS and FAT32).
FuseExt2 made it work alright, but automount was not writable and doing writable mount required ‘-o force’ option, which essentially meant Sweta had to hit the terminal every time she jacked the disk in, but that was no more than tip of the iceberg. Actually mounting the ext3 volume, as we figured, was a fourty minute process, as you are forced to wait after the mount command returns, for Finder to unfreeze and mounted volume to appear. User friendly, isn’t it?
Having it mounted was however, not the end of my miseries. We tried to transfer a movie(700 odd MBs worth of data i believe), which took forever to get to 33%, not cool by any standards. I finally had to give up and cancel the transfer, and then uninstalled FuseExt2.
Irritated, i popped the Disk Utility app, and started my hunt for options. It seemed to have Ext2 as one of the items in filesystem selection box on the repartition tab, which i decided to go with, only to find it harassing my new disk for one and a half hour without moving the progress bar beyond 50%. I finally ran out of patience and unplugged it. On jacking it into my Dell, fdisk revealed the state of affairs. Mac had made an ass of my disk, the partition table was total mess(and by the way, it hadn’t even begun creating the second partition(i had requested two ext2 partitions to start with). I don’t know what world OS X team lives in, but in the world that i know, it usually doesn’t make sense to write the partition table after formatting the filesystem unless you enjoy doing the same thing over and over. Anyways, i finally had to redo the partition cutting exercise and decided to go with ext2 this time, as it seemed like mac would read that. But guess what?, i jacked the disk into mac only to find out it does not read ext2 either. Fuck! Why does disk utility have an option to create partition using format the OS can’t read?
Annoyed and frustrated, i gave up and decided to have it the Mac way. Once again i resorted to disk utility in order to create 2 Mac Extended(HFS+ partitions). Surprisingly, the partitioning tool that took one and a fucking half hour without completing even one of the two ext2 volumes i requested, managed to finish HFS+ on a 1.5 TB disk under 2 minutes flat.
Those who compile the Linux kernel for themselves know that HFS+ support(under file systems -> miscellaneous…) is not default. You have to enable it and recompile. I had to go back to menuconfig, do the hunting, enable it as a module, make it, modules_install and modprobe it before i could use the fucked up proprietory filesystem the jack-ass created. All because OS X doesn’t know one of the most widely used filesystems in GNU/Linux world(i failed to get any reasons for it supporting NTFS and FAT filesystems inspite of it being a flavour of a very respected Unix distribution, such a bad ass child). Even though i had to compile the module to get things flying, it took me no more than 3 minutes. Thats usability for you.
End of the day, it worked! But i had to compromise. I had to do it the proprietory way, the mac way. You pay for the software and get your license, but even after you own it, you pay every single day, not in terms of money but freedom. You just don’t have a choice. The software decides what you can and can’t do on the hardware you own, and fighting your way through is insanely difficult and grossly unproductive excercise. A good software should always help the user and never come in the way. I don’t know about you, but i do not remember anything ever coming anywhere close to GNU/Linux when it comes to usability.
Software being a dumb-ass tantamounts to it being unusable and un-userfriendly. I can only hope propritory software makers will someday figure what a pain in the butt products they create are, and will start to work towards making user’s life easy and the softwares usable. I really feel sorry for users that have to put up with this kinda shit everyday.

I recently did X on a headless Debian blade. This post is about the setup that worked for me. I used Xvfb to setup the virtual X frame-buffer. The usual choice for accessing virtual display is vnc, so i decided to go with x11vnc. Used blackbox as window manager for the setup(because it is believed to be pretty light weight).
However, this setup has a problem. x11vnc doesn’t handle key modifiers(Shift/Ctrl/Alt) too well, it aborts when key combinations involving Shift key are used in vnc session with the setup. Since there was not much help available around x11vnc and the bug, i decided to give tightvnc a shot which worked really well.
Here is how the setup be repeated:

For last few weeks Pidgin(from lenny stable repo) was failing to enable my Yahoo account. I tried reading up on the internet and changing hostname etc, but none of that worked. Upgrade to pidgin/testing or unstable looked like too disruptive and could have made my installation unstable. So i decided to compile it from source, which worked, but with a few quirks. So here is what you need to do:
Get the source from http://www.pidgin.im/download/source/

The same executable can be added to session preferences to start pidgin on session load.

I have a Dell D630 Latitude(running Lenny) that i use at work. While trying to push the framebuffer size, i had to experiment a bit with numbers, because i couldn’t get ready to use values off google for widescreen framebuffers. ‘865‘ is what worked for me(it gives me 1280×800). If you got a widescreen laptop(i guess most laptops these days are), appending ‘vga=856‘ to grub boot line should make it come up in 1280×800 mode. For example, your kernel’s menu.lst(/boot/grub/menu.lst) entry should look like…

...
title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/sda1 vga=865 ro quiet
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686
...

Hope this helps someone.

For me to call an editor decent(for Ruby based WebApps), it must have:

• A good Ruby editor
• Good Haml editor
• Good rhtml/html+erb editor
• Good JavaScript editor
• Terrific auto-completion
• Decent ruby debugging support
• Decent tag navigation(eg. navigating from method/class/module/variable usage to definition)
• Ability run Test::Unit/Rspec tests from the editor
• Ability to show multiple files at the same time(by splitting windows)
• Ability to jump between related files(controller – model – view – spec/test etc)
• Ability to run an interactive ruby console within the editor
• Auto-generatable snippets (some call this one LiveTemplates)

RubyMine has support for certain things like decent ruby editor, showing multiple files at a time(i am assuming it works well, because this was supported in IntelliJ Idea when i used it last), ruby debugging and auto-generatable snippets, but it lacks on certain other fronts. For example, it does not have Haml editor and no key-binding to jump between related entities(controller, model, view, spec, helper etc). However, the major drawback with RubyMine is its resource footprint. I have seen developers force shutdown their OS X (running on MacBook Pro) because RubyMine decided to go unresponsive and `kill -9 <pid>` failed to get rid of it. Even GNU/Linux users are forced to kill it sometimes because it freezes too often(however `kill -9 <pid>` does work reliably on Linux, hence no operating system restart required ). JavaScript support is dumb and doesn’t highlight errors too well. I do give it some points for navigation and searching though.

TextMate unlike RubyMine is light on resource footprint. But unfortunately, it also is low on features. Ruby editor is decent, but auto-completion is retard(it completes words from the current buffer(file) only).  Besides, key binding for auto-complete(which is such a common operation) is Esc(no touch-typist in the sane world would like that). It has no debugging support at all, and running rspec needs a plugin which in turn needs rspec installed as a gem, and if you have a frozen version of rspec/rspec-rails in your application codebase, then tough luck(there is no easy way to configure it to pick things up on a per project basis, you need to roll your sleeves up and dig into /Application/TextMate.app, to modify some badly written ruby/shell-script mess). Navigation and searching is horrible(slow and unintuitive). Command-T has no notion of priority, and brings up all the wrong files first. Haml support has to be installed seperately as a plugin, and is terrible(be it indentation, or syntax hilight). There is no interactive console and no spliting of windows supported.

There is more that i expect from an editor before i call it a good programming environment. Here is what I think my definition of good programming tool looks like(in addition to the features in the bulleted list above):

• Ablity to run multiple terminals within the editor
• Ability to open directories as buffer(allowing easy selection of files)
• Ability to run IRC client(i like to be on IRC channels all the time, helping people and seeking help is a great way to learn)
• Snappy frontend and sensible keystrokes(close to the host row, not forcing user to get out of touchtyping mode too often)
• Straightforward key-bindings for macro record and play.(Both TextMate and RubyMine claim to have Macro support, but its hidden somewhere under the MenuBar-Submenu(s))
• Ability to run commands without leaving the editor or creating a terminal within it.

Emacs is a pretty powerful and mature editor which has passed the test of time and has got several refinements and enhancements over the years it has lived. Most of the major things that i want in my development environment are bundled with Emacs out of the box(and the once that aren’t, are available as plug-ins). I believe the best thing about Emacs is its written in lisp, which means you can change things very easily and cleanly. I do Ruby/Rails development in my day job, and have been customizing my Emacs repository for some time now. Over a period of time, i have accumulated/tweaked some emacs goodies which have not only made Emacs a better Ruby, JavaScript, Lisp, C++ editor, but a better IRC, Mail, RSS, Atom and News client. I keep my add-ons and customizations on github.com as a public repository, which helps me share it with other developers, and also gives me protection against disk failures and other bad things.
So here is what my setup looks like.

• Ruby: ruby-mode(written by Matz) + ruby-electric(minor mode)
• Haml: haml-mode(Nathan Weizenbaum) (by far the best support for HAML syntax highlight and marvelous indentation strictness, people who write haml know how painful it can get in TextMate/RubyMine to hunt bad indentation and fix it, but not with Emacs)
• Rhtml/Erb: rhtml/rhtml-erb (Paul Nathan Stickney) Great syntax highlighting and indentation support.
• JavaScript: I was waiting to come to this one. js2(Steve Yegge) has the best JavaScript editing support I have ever seen. js2 has remarkable indentation, very good syntax highlighting and terrific error detection(warns you even about missing var and semicolons, let alone the more obvious errors).
• Auto completion: Of course. This one works across buffers, across modes and unlike TextMate’s `Esc` the key binding(M-/) is quite sane. You don’t have to go out of touch-typing mode, and the same shortcut can be used to browse through other possible completions.
• Ruby Debugging: rubydb3x to rescue (rubydb2x for Emacs 19.2 and older). Just fire rubydb and get rolling. It uses GUD (Grand Unified Debugger), and has sensible(easy to remember) shortcuts(unlike F7, F8, F9 that most IDE(s) have). Some common key bindings are C-n for next line C-s to step in, C-f to finish function, C-r to resume and <, > to roll stack frames up and down(the name-space used is C-c, so it doesn’t override any of the usual actions that those shortcuts are supposed to perform).
• Tag navigation: Navigation is a breeze. M-. to get to the implementation, M-* to pop out of it. I enhanced it to make it a look recursively up the directory hierarchy to find the tags file(a file named TAGS) and load it up and navigate seamlessly, all by itself. (etags doesn’t have ruby support, so use exuberant-ctags)(“/usr/bin/ctags -e -a –Ruby-kinds=-cmfF -o TAGS -R <dir_name>” can be used to generate a file named TAGS which emacs will read to navigate ruby code).
• Test::Unit/Rspec tests: test-runner(a tiny add-on) runs your test as you load a test file, and then autoruns it every time the test file is saved. It supports Test::Unit by itself, I added support for Rspec(even running single spec) to it. Works like a charm, and is very easy to tweak.
• Ability to show multiple files by splitting windows up: Do i need to say anything about windows support? Emacs is loved for this capability. However, navigation between windows was a bit painful before i added window-numbering.el (Nikolaj Schumacher), which made it sweet.
• Ability to jump between related files: Rinari(Phil Hagelberg, Eric Schulte) uses jump(Eric Schulte) to make jumping between controller-model-view-helper-spec-test on a Rails project seamless and quick.
• Runing interactive console: ruby-mode has a this hook called run-ruby(bound to C-c C-s), which can be used to start an interactive ruby session.While in a Rails project C-c M-s can be used to load script/console (irb with the project environment loaded).
• Auto-generatable snippets: YASnippet(pluskid) has this awesome snippet support which can be used to selectively load snippets for a particular mode. Snippets can be overridden by adding a custom location to pick snippets from after loading the default snippets(no need to dive into library code base to make changes)
• Ability to run multiple terminals: Not just one, there are multiple flavors of terminal supported within Emacs(ansi-term, shell and eshell to name a few). Each one has its own strong points, but they are all great.
• Ability to open directory within a buffer: dired is your friend (its a full blown file manager).
• IRC client: rcirc can be used to keep in touch with IRC channels. A line or two of lisp can be dropped in to change its default behavior(such as what channels to join, on which servers, using what alias… etc).
• Snappy frontend and sensible keystrokes: Its has lower footprint than most other editors, TextMate and RubyMine are no match. I can not say it has not frozen ever, it does(but very occasionally). Even when it is frozen, 3 Esc hits or C-g can be used to abort the activity causing it to freeze. I don’t remember killing it(have been using it for more than a few months now). It just never gets that bad.
• Straightforward key-bindings: I feel key-bindings are very carefully chosen. More common the key, closer it it to the home row index finger positions(f and j). Macro record/play is bound to C-x ( <definition> C-x ) (parenthesis make sense to developers at once, and i believe its quite intuitive a binding to define something. C-e can be used subsequently to play the macro(macros can be stored by numbers and names too). Even complicated keyboard shortcuts like kill-rectangle have sensible C-x r k (r -> rectangle, k-> kill), paste rectangle similarly is C-x r y (y -> yank). Navigation keys are C-n (n -> next), C-p (p -> previous), C-f (f -> forward), C-b (b -> backward). Sensible key bindings are much easier to remember. Orthogonality is maintained across actions C-u <x> <action> does something x number of times and works across different types of actions.
• Running single commands: M-! can be used to run commands from within emacs(output is captured in a buffer and shown to the user).

In addition to these emacs comes with some not so well-known features(which need a little exploration), for example make-frame-on-display can create frames on other hosts(making pair-programming really simple). It has terrific Mail/News/Feed reader called Gnus, a beautiful mode for organizing yourself up called Org-mode and a host of other great things like TRAMP(Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol) which lets you edit remote files over a whole bunch of protocols(including ssh, smb, rcp etc) and also allows editing of local files as root(using su). It can open compressed archives(and edit files in place), java jars, PDF files, images…. you name it. Combined with dired, these capabilities make it a great tool. This post has only tried to explain what Emacs is capable of with respect to other editors, and trust me, I haven’t even skimmed the surface of it. One really needs to use it to find out what a brilliant tool it is.

It can be a little daunting for a beginner to set Emacs up from scratch(it is not difficult; its just takes some time and patience). I have spent time setting it up for myself, and I think it is a good setup to start with for people doing Ruby(Rails)/JavaScript and Lisp in general. My repository is available at http://github.com/janmejay/emacs. One of my motivations to put it out is to help other developers(especially people starting out with Emacs), so feel free to pull it up and take it for a ride.

Like every other powerful tool, Emacs has bit of a learning curve, but i believe it pays off, and it pays off pretty well. To a programmer, its not just an editor, it is a “friend for life”.

pluskid

While creating a chroot jail on my machine(using debootstrap), i came across this weird problem with apt-get/aptitude cache, where apt-cache search was yielding an abnormally small subset of packages and apt-get/aptitude install was failing to find packages which i knew for sure existed in Debian package repositories.

Problem:
Snapshot of my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

I unsuccessfully tried apt-get/aptitude update/clean several times, and apt-cache search emacs still failed to yield any more than 7 packages. Actually  it should have summed up to around 300 packages with main contrib and non-free repositories as sources.

Apparently, my debootstrap source being a locally mounted netinstall iso image had something to do with apt building bad caches, which subsequent apt-get updates failed to clear.

Solution:
The solution is to follow this procedure as root:
# rm -rf /var/lib/apt
# mkdir -p /var/lib/apt/lists/partial
# touch /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
# apt-get update

After this, apt-cache search emacs should yield around 300 packages. Try `apt-cache search emacs | wc -l` to confirm.

This post is about my experience developing with Mac OS X vs. GNU/Linux. Im a developer by profession and working on Ruby these days, and a sizable part of the Ruby world happens to use OS X. Its considered the best platform for Ruby development(at-least by some) and TextMate is supposedly the most loved editor for ruby(or rails, camping, rack???) hacking. When ThoughtWorks offered all ruby developers Mac Book Pro with TextMate licenses, i switced. Almost an year with Mac frustrated me to the core and the tiny Ctrl key injured my wrist big-time, and thats when i decided to move back to the operating system i have been in love with since puberty(oops… college). I moved back to Debian 5.0(Lenny) and am a happy hacker once again. No other operating system that i know of, matches the usability and simplicity of Debian, and thats what finally brought me back to it.

People(even experienced developers) often don’t understand what made ‘otherwise excited me’ hate mac this bad. Here are a few things that started it all.

• User/Group administration(adding an unprivileged user to another group): I started the usual *nix way. Tried usermod/useradd, modifying files under /etc without any luck, post which i was left with no choice but to seek help over the web. I wasted a lot of time before a blog post saved the day(never thought i’d end up wasting time over something as trivial as that). OS X apparently has a notion of databases for storing user and group on Leopard(what the fuck?), and has some insane command to add a user to another group(which works by specifying the directory that the relevant db lives in, and a key-value pair[aagh....]). There is a groups file under /etc, but that exists for aesthetic reasons(or may be to fool people like myself) as its supposed to have effect ONLY in single user mode.
• Microscopic Ctrl key: Before moving back to Debian, I changed my editor(dumped TextMate in favor of Emacs). Post which, Mac made my life miserable. It has just ‘ONE’, really tiny Control key, and i had to put my wrist in all sorts of weird, twisting positions to get emacs shortcuts going. Within a month or two, i ended up with a dorsal ganglion on my left wrist.
• Java upgrade: While trying to upgrade to JDK 6 from 5(which came pre-installed), i was forced to register on the apple website(to get the package) and fool around with symlinks in various places, only to find IntelliJ Idea failing to load-up. No logs, no error popups, no messages on the terminal. I HAD to give-up and revert.
• No emacs -fs: Most of the times when im in front of my laptop, im actually using Emacs. Its my IMAP/SMTP client, IRC client, editor, terminal, feed reader… everything. I like to use every pixel thats available on the display(if you are used to coding with 5 irc windows open, you have to), and OS X/Emacs Carbon(i don’t know which one was responsible) didn’t like me going full-screen.
• No Meta key: I spend a lot of time in bash terminals. Any one who uses bash for serious work knows how important Meta key is. M-b, M-f, M-<bksp>, M-d…. just goes on. How can you work without those shortcuts? On mac terminal, i was forced to hunt the tiny Esc on top left corner every time i did a Meta combination. Trust me, and hour of Esc – p, Esc – f is enough to drive anyone NUTS.
• X11: My interest in game development makes me pull Gimp up every now and then. Gimp on OS X runs under X11.app, and while using Gimp i was forced to use Ctrl in place of Command/Apple key. When you use mac, you build your muscle memory around the Command key, and switching to Ctrl for every little shortcut is both difficult and frustrating. The non-X version refused to let me work with layers(to shorten it up, it refused to work).
• Package Management: Typical OS X app install workflow: Register on an unknown website. Download a DMG. Mount it. drag-drop the app directory(or whatever it is). Double click, and answer the “downloaded from internet, dangerous program” kinda question to get a new application running. And then tolerate all the spam that site sends your way. User’s misery doesn’t end there, if you want a clean uninstall, you need to have AppTrap running. I neither have time nor patience to take this kind of shit. MacPort exists, but i had to wait for more than 3 months to get a version of HTTrack that compiled successfully(that says something about ports repository, doesn’t it?).

The list just goes on….

Debian on the other hand comes with robust and incredibly powerful package management infrastructure called dpkg and apt. I just can’t imagine living without them. The gnu tool kit makes customization such a breeze, the day i don’t like something, i hit the project’s version control, pull the tag up and rebuild it with my changes(developers know getting dependencies right can be a nightmare….. for a dev on debian, its just a matter of firing sudo apt-get build-dep blah). Life is straightforward with GNU/Linux. Changing behavior is as simple as finding some file in /etc and editing it. Can things get any simpler than that? It is the “principle of least surprise” embodied.

Is there anything about Mac Hardware/Software that i really liked, things i miss now as a GNU/Linux user? Nothing major, but coming to think of it, i wish GNOME had a translucent dashboard(with configurable widgets) , just for the “cool-factor”, but thats pretty much it.

Developers spend so much time with computer that having a no-nonsense system is absolutely essential and i believe it pays-off to find out what works for you. The motivation for this post is not sharing my frustration/findings but making people aware of why any “proprietary operating systems” fail to get there. Everyone knows how horrible an operating system Windows is, but OS X is way too hyped which can mislead people like myself. I hope this post will help other developers form a balanced opinion of Mac.

Long live GNU/Linux!!!

Spent a few minutes today to get TuxGuitar(debian package) midi output working on my laptop. I am on ALSA, and these steps will not work for OSS users(but don’t worry, it should be as simple for OSS setup too). Here is what i did….

• sudo apt-get install tuxguitar timidity
• sudo emacs /etc/default/timidity
  it should look like….

  # Enable MIDI sequencer (ALSA), default is disabled
  TIM_ALSASEQ=true
  # Setting overrides (of /etc/timidity.conf) for the ALSA sequencer daemon
  TIM_ALSASEQPARAMS="-iA -Os"

• sudo /etc/init.d/timidity restart

Fire TuxGuitar up, and go to Tools -> Settings -> Sound (use “Tux Guitar Sequencer” and “TiMidity port 0 [129:0]“).

This should fix the no-sound problem. Apply changes and try to play tabs to validate.