handyfloss

So this is my first post in WordPress. I just moved here from my Blogger account, for no special reason. It is not even clear that I will continue posting here (maybe I’ll go back to Blogger, who knows?), but my intention is to stay.

Time will tell if the choice was right.

I recently wrote (actually, my last post, 12 days ago), a howto of sorts with my experience installing Compiz Fusion on my laptop. Yesterday I came back from my vacations, and repeated the feat with my destop computer at home.

The setup is quite different:

CPU: AMD Athlon 2800+
Graphics: nVidia FX 5700 (256MB)

And the effort is also quite different: it took me much less! Partially, this was because of my previous exprerience, but mainly the reason is that the graphics card here is nVidia. Yes, let the world know that ATI cards suck on Linux.

The problem is that ATI cards need XGL to have Compiz running, but nVidia cards make use of AIGLX natively, so the installation has only two steps: (1) installing the nVidia driver, and (2) installing the Compiz Fusion packages.

Installing the latest nVidia driver

As with the ATI card in my laptop, I decided to use the proprietary drivers from the nVidia site. The choice-making interface is so similar, actually, to that of ATI. I had to go Graphics Driver->GeForce FX series->Linux x86->Go!, and download this installer.

BIG WARNING: before actually installing anything, remove a previous installation of the nVidia drivers, if you installed them “the Debian way”. For that, do:

% aptitude purge nvidia-glx

I have a friend who did not do so and… Ok, ok, it happened to me. If you do not do the above, everything seems to work fine, but everytime you reboot the X server will crash, and you might get incredibly annoyed by that.

To perform the installation, simply run, as root:

% sh path-to-file/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.11-pkg1.run

Then, just modify your xorg.conf file to contain the following:

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier     "Default Layout"
  Screen       "Default Screen" 0 0
  InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
  InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
  Option         "AIGLX" "true"
EndSection

...

Section "Extensions"
  Option         "RENDER" "true"
  Option         "Composite" "Enable"
  Option         "DAMAGE" "true"
EndSection

Installing Compiz Fusion packages

The procedure is exactly the same covered in my previous post. In short:

1) Add the Shame repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-sid/desktopfx/unstable/ ./

2) Get the signature for the repo:

% gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key 11F6E468
% gpg -a --export 11F6E468

3) Update and install:

% aptitude update
% aptitude install compiz-fusion-all --a

Any time you want to run Compiz, just execute:

% compiz --replace -c emerald

Shorter than the ATI thing, uh?

I have a previous post with what I’ve done to my laptop, and in that post it’s not mentioned, but I managed (quite a while ago) to make Beryl work under Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Dapper is getting older, but I am not having good experiences installing Edgy and Feisty on the laptop. I have managed to install Debian Etch with no problem, but the wireless driver was not working properly (for me, a showstopper) until Lenny.

So now I have a Debian Lenny partition, plus three other: the original WinXP, the Ubuntu Dapper I am still using as “main” OS, and a Fedora 7 I installed just because it came in a DVD with a magazine I bought for a train trip I had not brought any reading material with me :^)

Since I am on vacation, and I have plenty of time (although I don’t want to spend all of it on my comp), I decided to give Compiz Fusion a try, mostly after seeing what it its capable of.

First things first, the specs of my laptop are:

Fujitsu-Siemes Amilo PI1536
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2×2.0GHz
RAM: 2x1Gb
HD: 120Gb SATA
Display: 15.4 WXGA
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 (128Mb dedicated/512Mb shared)

The only relevant parts above are that it has an ATI graphics card (which, under Linux, sucks), and that it has Core 2 CPUs, which are amd64-capable (which is both great, for performance, and sucks, for drivers and software compatibilities). So, my second step was:

Installation of ATI drivers

If you want to take the best out of your ATI card, you have to tell your X.org graphics server to use the fglrx driver, and not the default vesa one. You can install this driver from the official Debian repositories, but for me those packages (fglrx-driver and related ones) didn’t do it.

So, I googled a bit, and followed the most widespread recommendation: to install the latest non-free (sigh) driver from the ATI site. For that, I chose the options: Linux x86_64 -> Mobility Radeon -> Mobility Radeon X1400 -> Go, reaching this page, and downloading this 38MB binary (for the record, the 32bit version of the drivers is exactly the same .run file).

Next, I followed the remaining information in this excelent thread in linuxquestions.org. Namely, I downloaded the needed packages (the code is copy-paste-able):

% aptitude install module-assistant build-essential dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++5 linux-headers-$(uname -r) ia32-libs

Beware that the ia32-libs packages is not mentioned in the linuxquestions.org thread (assuming that you already have it installed), but it is required.

Next, run the ATI binary inside a dedicated directory (I did it as root, but it is not compulsory):

% mkdir /root/fglrx
% cd /root/fglrx
% mv wherever-I-downloaded-it/ati-driver-installer-8.32.5-x86.x86_64.run .
% chmod +x ati-driver-installer-8.32.5-x86.x86_64.run
% ./ati-driver-installer-8.32.5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Debian/lenny
% rm or mv the .run file wherever you want

This generates a bunch of .debs in the /root/fglrx dir. Next, install them, and compile the driver (for this, you do need to be root):

% dpkg -i fglrx-*.deb
% cd /usr/src
% m-a prepare
% m-a a-i fglrx

The linuxquestion.org thread mentions modifying the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in two ways. First, disable compositing, adding:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

to it, and then running:

% aticonfig --initial
% aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

For me, both were superfluous, because I made a copy of my Ubuntu xorg.conf, and them made minimal changes (if at all). However, the first change (disabling compositing) was straightforward wrong. If I want to use Compiz Fusion, I need to have it. Relevant excerpts from my xorg.conf:

Section "Module"
  Load  "i2c"
  Load  "bitmap"
  Load  "ddc"
  Load  "dri"
  Load  "extmod"
  Load  "freetype"
  Load  "glx"
  Load  "int10"
  Load  "type1"
  Load  "vbe"
EndSection

...

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[0]"
  Driver      "fglrx"
  Option      "VideoOverlay" "on"
  Option      "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
EndSection

...

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]"
  Device     "aticonfig-Device[0]"
  Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[0]"
  DefaultDepth     24
  SubSection "Display"
    Viewport   0 0
    Depth     24
    Modes    "1280x800" "800x600" "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

...

Section "DRI"
  Mode         0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
  Option "Composite" "1"
EndSection

After all this fuss, and to ensure you have it all running OK, try to insert the module as root:

% modprobe fglrx

Then, make sure it loads everytime you reboot (include it in /etc/modules if necessary, but it shouldn’t be).

Next, reload the X server, and check that now it is running the fglrx driver, by doing the following (as user is fine):

% fglrxinfo

It should display something like the following:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6650 (8.39.4)

If, instead, it says something about mesa3d, it didn’t work.

Now, the second step is…

Installing Xgl

With the standard X.org server we have a problem. We can load the fglrx driver, but we can not activate compositing (see last three lines of my xorg.conf file above). If we activate compositing in the xorg.conf file, the ATI driver will not be loaded (don’t ask me why, it just seems to happen). If we deactivate compositing, the ATI driver gets loaded, but without compositing, we can not use Compiz.

The solution is to install Xgl which is an X server (or, I think, a kind of layer that runs on top of the X.org server) that allows for the above trick. There seem to be two “ways” of getting proper compositing: Xgl and AIGLX. The general agreement on the net seems to be that the latter is “better”, but only the former seems to work with ATI cards (read the “AIGLX with AMD (ex-ATI) Proprietary Drivers” section in the AIGLX Wikipedia article, because it hits the problem dead-on). With Xgl I can make use of the fglrx driver and have compositing at the same time.

We are lucky here, because there are Debian repositories for Xgl. I found out about them in this howto in tuxmachines.org. Most of the info there is mostly… ehem… useless (for me), but reading it I found a repo for Xgl. I just have to add the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list (beware that the original mention in the tuxmachines.org page says “binary-i386”, and I had to change it to “binary-amd64”):

deb http://www5.autistici.org/debian-xgl/debian/ binary-amd64/

I then had to do aptitude update, and I (of course) got an error telling me that some signatures couldn’t be verified (read my own article about secure APT and/or the wonderful Debian wiki to know more). I think the key is 11F6E468, and it corresponds to Francesco Cecconi (mantainer of the repo). It is downloadable from pgpkeys.mit.edu (follow instructions on my previous post, or the ones in the Debian wiki). If you want, do not skip reading the parent page of the repository.

After the keys are OK, it’s just a matter of doing (as root):

% aptitude update
% aptitude install xgl

Now you are done installing, but will have to actually use Xgl. This gave me some headaches, not because I didn’t know where to put things, but because I didn’t know exactly what to put. I read, and followed, the instructions in freedesktop.org, and (after all, the blog seems to be useful for someone: myself) a previous post of my own.

I am using GDM, so my final setup was the following: first generate a suitable entry in the GDM menu, by creating a file named /usr/share/xsessions/xfce4-xgl.desktop (or whatever, but in the same dir, and ending in “.desktop”), and putting the following inside:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xfce-Xgl
Exec=/usr/local/bin/startxgl_xfce
Icon=Type=Application

The string after “Name=” is the one that will appear in the GDM menu, and the one after “Exec=” what will be executed when selecting that entry.

Next, we have to create the string we promise above (/usr/local/bin/startxgl_xfce), and put the following inside:

# Start the Xgl server:
Xgl -fullscreen :0 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer -fp /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc & sleep 5 && DISPLAY=:0
# Start Xfce:
exec xfce4-session

As you can see, I am telling Xgl to load a font (with -fp) that was giving me headaches, because the server would die saying that the font was missing when I didn’t include that option. Your mileage may vary.

Now, everytime we select the entry labeled “Xfce-Xgl” in the GDM menu, we will have the Xgl server running.

Installing Compiz Fusion packages

I think the aforementioned autistici.org repo has compiz packages, as well as the default Debian Lenny repos. But net consensus seems to be that they are not the way to go. Everyone praises two repositories: Treviño’s and Shame’s. I chose the latter, adding the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-sid/desktopfx/unstable/ ./

I think I went through the same chores as above for key verification, Shame’s key being A42A6CF5.

After that, I installed the following package (it installs all of the needed packages):

% aptitude install compiz-fusion-all

After that, and inside my “Xfce-Xgl” session, I just did the following, as some googling revealed:

% compiz --replace

But… it didn’t work :^( It complained in the following manner:

Fatal: Failed test: texture_from_pixmap support
Checks indicate that it's impossible to start compiz on your system.

I found a lot of pages, threads and howtos in the net stumbling upon this same problem (for example, this one at ubuntuforums.org), but none with the answer. Really. None. The most enlightening tips where the use of the -v, -h and --help switches for compiz. The first one requests verbose output, the second one help about “short” options, and the third one help about the “long” options. With the latter I discovered the --force-fglrx switch, which saved the day! Yes, I now use the following command to start Compiz:

% compiz --replace -c emerald --force-fglrx

I have two things to say at that point. First: this Compiz Fusion is visually astonishing! It is full of great ideas, and has a lot of settings to play with. The second thing is not so nice: some glitches are present. For example, my Konsole windows get transparent background for no reason, and the refresh is horrible (when text reaches the bottom on the terminal, it starts to overwrite itself. One must hide and un-hide the window for proper refreshing, which is unacceptable). The latter also affects other windows, which, all in all, makes it unsuitable for much comfort.

However, Compiz Fusion is new, hot and experimental. I love playing with it, but right now it can not be relied upon. On the bright side, in the three days from my installation, the packages have been updated three times! I suppose some aptitude upgrade cycles will fix the issues eventually.

And that’s it, dear reader.

Cierto es que no gané mucho dinero, pero ayer compré un libro y volví a casa con más dinero del que llevaba… ¿cómo?

Fui con mi hermana a comprar un libro de Harry Potter (la excusa es decir que le gustan a ella), y como era sábado y un poco tarde, nos fuimos a Eroski (un supermercado). Allí encontramos un ejemplar que nos faltaba, por 19.00 euros (¡ménudo robo!), y lo cogimos. En la caja nos cobraron 19.48 euros, aunque le avisé a la cajera de que ese no era el precio que ponía en el propio libro. Ella me dijo que fuera a Información a reclamar. Así lo hice, con mis 52 céntimos de vueltas de un billete de 20 euros, más el libro y el ticket.

Pues bien, en Información nos devolvieron el dinero, que es la política que tiene Eroski cuando cobra algo de manera incorrecta. Hasta ahí todo bien: el libro me salía gratis, por 48 céntimos de error en la cuenta. Pero lo bueno vino cuando le di los 52 céntimos, para que la empleada me diera un billete de 20 euros. Resulta que se hizo la picha un lío y me devolvió 20 euros y cinco céntimos. Yo la habría sacado de su error, pero no me apetecía perder cinco minutos aclarando semejante minucia, y opté por ignorarlo.

Así que acabé llevándome un libro, no solo sin pagarlo, sino cobrándolo.

As of today, I have reached my first year of (English) Wikipedia contributions under the identity isilanes. I have accumulated over 2100 edits in that time, and created over ten new pages, not counting dozens of pictures of chemical structures I have made for chemistry articles.

Other contributions could be the logo of my University (UPV/EHU), that appears at its wikipedia page, many vandalism warnings to misbehaving users and disambiguation of links.

The constant reader, if such there be, might notice that I have made some small changes in the design of the blog. I have made the right sidebar wider, and changed the radio.blog I had there for one of the Jamendo player widgets. It features the music of groups I like from Jamendo, and will be updated automatically when I add “preferred” groups to my stats at Jamendo.

Happy listening, and I hope you don’t find the modified layout worse than the previous one.

Following my recent trend of using the blog to talk about myself, instead of about the FLOSS that gives name to the blog, and after the Wikipedia fever I talked about some days ago, I write again to say that I have surpassed the 2000 edit count in Wikipedia, as you can see following this link.

Still, as crazy and monomaniac it sounds, guess what category of Wikipedia I belong to, regarding edit count? “Prolific editors”, maybe? Or “Wikipedians with over 1000 edits”? Or “Top X Wikipedia editors”? No! I belong to “Wikipedians with fewer than 5000 edits” :^(

Yesterday was the last day of May, and an incredibly fruitful month ended, regarding my Wikipedia edits. As you can see in the previous link, I was 75 edits short of making 1000 edits that month! Approximately one half of all the edits I have done in Wikipedia in one year (in 18 days it will be the birthday of my first edit as Isilanes), where done in May 2007!

This huge (for me) amount of edits was possible due to the kind of activity I have had in Wikipedia as of lately. I realized there are a lot of chemical structures in Wikipedia that are of low quality, and I started to improve them. The main flaw of low q images is that they are done in raster format (PNG, GIF, JPEG). This implies that they lose quality upon magnification, and that the larger they are, the more space they occupy. In contrast, vector graphics (e.g. SVG) offer a perfect quality regardless of magnification, with a constant file size, no matter what output size we ask of them.

Actually, there is a page in Wikipedia specifically devoted to listing the (chemical) images that, due to being easily translated to SVG (most chemical skeletal formulae fall in this category), and showing a low quality, are suitable for being substituted by SVG counterparts.

Once I found this page, I started using the superb free software programs ChemTool and Inkscape to draw SVG counterparts for many structures. For each structure, a file has to be uploaded, the article including the raster image has to be modified to include the SVG instead, then the raster image has to be tagged as already superseded by a SVG, and depending on the case, it can be tagged with a proposal for deletion. In that case, it has to be included in a page listing the images and media for deletion, and the original uploader of the image should be notified, as a polite measure. This implies a bunch of edits per superseded image.

A great part of my May edits also correspond to the fact that I modified a previous SVG image that was to replace a PNG of some Free Software logos. Apparently the “old” SVG had some errors, which I corrected:

PNG version of the SVG image

This logo picture was used by a tag that appears in all articles related to free software, and I starting changing the appearance of the old pic in every tag with the new pic. The result: a whole lot of edits.

Following the irrelevant custom begun with a post two an a half months ago, I’ll share my uptime data with the world again.

Short after my computer hitting 50d uptime (at the time of my previous post), I had to reboot it (I must admit it’s one of the 3 or 4 times in ten years that I had to reboot for technical reasons), so now it is “building up” uptime again. As of the writing of this post:

% uptime
10:55:22 up 61 days, 18:56,  1 user,  load average: 14.22, 14.37, 14.27

I fear I will have to shut it down sometime soon, because I will be moving to a new lab (the DIPC). I don’t know if someone will inherit my old computer and/or if it will be reformatted. Anyway, I’ll post every time a 20d milestone is hit (yes, just because I feel like it. Last time I checked, this was my blog. Got a problem? Sue me).

Now back to work.

Following the “report” series started with my previous summary of info about the music collection I listen to, I will update that info in this post.

The information has been gathered in the following ways:

1) Music file count with the following Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

printf "Files: %5i\nCommercial: %5i\nJamendo: %5i\nOther CC: %5i\n",$all,$cd,$jam,$cc;
printf "In MP3: %5i\nIn OGG: %5i\n",$mp3,$ogg;

2) Playcount and other statistics, from the music player I listen to music with (Amarok). It also gives the file count, which I used to check the results of the script above.

3) Data in my public Last.fm profile. Visit Wikipedia to know more about Last.fm.

4) The du Linux command, for getting the disk usage.

Now the data (in parentheses the difference with respect to last report, 4 months ago).

Files

Total files        6015 (+1000)
  - Commercial     4164 (+220)
  - Jamendo        1820 (+765)
  - Other CC       31 (+0)
Total playtime     16d (+2d)
Disk usage         27GB (+5GB)
Artist count       718 (+91)
Album count        515 (+102)
MP3 count          0 (-1562)
OGG count          6015 (+2547)

Last.fm

Playcount          16744
Most played artist Joaquín Sabina - 1442 plays
Most played song   La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 29 plays

Amarok

Playcount          12446 (+1536)
Favorite artist    Frank Delgado - 91.5/100
Favorite song      Las cuatro y diez (L.E. Aute and S. Rodríguez) - 97/100

As you can see, I have converted all my MP3s to OGG, so I have dumped patented music file formats for good.

You can also notice that the Last.fm and the Amarok playcounts are not equal. This disagreement comes from three facts: both counters where not initialized at the same time, Last.fm is a web service that counts all the songs I play at work and at home, whereas the Amarok count I give is the one at my office computer only, and I am not sure that the threshold for Amarok for considering a song listened to is the same as the one for Amarok telling Last.fm that I listened to a song (e.g. if I skip a song after 10 seconds of playing, maybe it counts as “listened to” for Amarok’s database, but it is not long enough for Amarok to report the song as “listened to” to Last.fm).

It is also evident that my “favorite” song is not the one I have listened to most times. It has to be taken into account that a song is taken as “listened to” if it is played at least for some seconds, but not necessarily to the end. However, if you skip a song before it finishes, it receives negative points, even if it counts as listened to.