Monday, July 21, 2008

» rtorrent with DHT

rtorrent is a lightweight, low-memory footprint BitTorrent client that runs in the console (and teams up nicely with GNU screen). The latest version is now available for openSUSE 10.1 to 11.0 in the Packman repository and supports DHT. YMP

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Saturday, July 19, 2008

» Reattaching to ssh-agent

A rather rare situation, hopefully... I happened to clean up /tmp and delete a temporary directory used by ssh-agent, that held the UNIX domain socket that was used to communicate with it. Arguably, that's a pretty stupid thing to do and fixing it is as simple as logging out (of your X session) and in again. But I didn't want to close running applications and hence, hacked a little bash function to re-attach to a running ssh-agent (which means setting the environment variables SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK appriopriately) after having started another ssh-agent process. As it might be useful to others (or just an interesting sample of bash scripting), here it is:
function reattach-ssh-agent {
   local pid
   local line
   local r=$(ps h -o pid -C ssh-agent | while read pid; do
      sudo lsof -a -w -LPn -p "$pid" -U -Fn \
      | grep '^n/tmp/ssh-.*/agent\..*' | while read line; do
         line=${line#?}
         [ -e "$line" ] && {
            echo "FOUND: pid=$pid sock=$line" >/dev/tty;
            echo "export SSH_AGENT_PID=$pid; export export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=\"$line\"";
         }
      done;
   done)
   [ -n "$r" ] && { eval $r; } \
   || { echo "Failed to find running and operational ssh-agent" >&2; }
}
Note that it must be a function, not a script as the latter would be executed as a sub-process of the current shell and, hence, not be able to modify the environment of the current shell (which is the whole idea about it). So if you need that function here and then, make sure to add it to ~/.bashrc Also note that a major drawback of this function is that it requires executing lsof as root (here using sudo) as the open files of ssh-agent are only visible to root. Another approach would be to implement the above in a separate script that would just output the shell code to execute (export SSH_AGENT_PID ...) and run setuid (using a C wrapper or such) but.. not necessarily easier nor much more secure.

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Sunday, July 13, 2008

» lame-3.98

Today I've upgraded the package lame (an MP3 encoder that is available in the Packman repository) to the latest version (3.98). I've taken the opportunity to revamp the package a bit:
  • split into lame, libmp3lame0, libmp3lame-devel
  • add -debuginfo support, making the package smaller and enabling debugging/backtracing
  • build lame-mp3rtp, an MP3 to RTP streamer
  • build lame-mp3x, an MP3 frame analyzer (uses GTK 1.x)
It does have a drawback though, which cannot be solved automagically by rpm: if you install libmp3lame0, it will conflict with the package lame-3.97 (because libmp3lame.so.0 is now in the package libmp3lame0 instead of lame as with previous versions). Make sure to also upgrade the package lame to 3.98, which should then work out smoothly.

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Friday, July 11, 2008

» MPlayer package updates

I made a few changes to the MPlayer package in the Packman repository, now version 1.0rc2-4.pm.4:
  • -debuginfo package to help trace down crashes and such
  • added libnemesi support for RTSP/RTP streaming (which is also available in the Packman repository)
  • added the following Provides symbols to the MPlayer package: mplayer, mplayer-gui, MPlayer-gui, gmplayer and mencoder
  • fixed FAAC support in mencoder
Please test and report success or issues to us, especially if you are using RTSP/RTP streaming.

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» Reporting Packman package bugs

Coincidence or not, recently I ran into several people (on IRC or on openSUSE mailing-lists) who did not know how to report bugs for packages from the Packman repository. So, once and for all, here is how to do it: just send an email to packman@links2linux.de It's an open mailing-list you may (but don't have to) subscribe. Obviously, this also works for package requests, informing us about new upstream releases of your favourite packages (in case we didn't notice, as unfortunately not all projects report releases to sites such as freshmeat), but also for telling us that a package works great for you. Well, feedback in general. One must always keep in mind that most people in the Packman packager team maintain several hundreds of packages and, obviously, we can only test a fraction of them. Hence, we're interested in any feedback, positive and negative. So if you want to do your part in having high quality packages there, please take a few minutes to send us feedback about them -- remember that this is a collaborative process ;)

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Friday, July 04, 2008

» Deluge 0.5.9.3

Packages of the latest Deluge (a torrent client), 0.5.9.3, are finally available for openSUSE, in the Packman repository. It took so long to upgrade because the Deluge developers upgraded the in-tree rblibtorrent to a more recent build that, in turn, requires the very latest Boost 1.35. Took me some hours of work to make a boost1_35 package that can be installed aside the (older) boost package that ships with openSUSE. BTW, if Deluge doesn't start properly, run "deluge" from a shell and if you see the following error message: "deluge.core.DelugeError: 'No such unique_ID.'" then you have to delete your Deluge configuration (rm -rf ~/.config/deluge) and start+configure Deluge again. YMP

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» openSUSE and Packman mirror in India

debayan told me today that he has an 8mbit mirror for openSUSE (and other distros) as well as Packman in India. Cool stuff, definitely an added value for openSUSE users there :).

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Wednesday, July 02, 2008

» Freetype2 packages with subpixel hinting

openSUSE packages of the latest freetype2 (2.3.7) are available on opensuse-community.org, with subpixel hinting enabled. See SubpixelHinting for further details. YMP

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» Miro 1.2.4 for openSUSE 11.0, 10.3 and 10.2

The latest Miro (1.2.4) is now available for openSUSE 11.0, 10.3 and 10.2 in the Packman repository. YMP

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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

» Miro 1.2.4 for openSUSE 11.0

The latest Miro (1.2.4) is now available in the Packman community repository for openSUSE 11.0. Builds of Miro 1.2.4 for openSUSE 10.3 will follow shortly.

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