Compiz on Slackware

I installed Slackware 12.0 on an old laptop (P3 , 256 MB RAM). This laptop has no CDROM and No Floppy drive. I installed it using PXEBOOT install method introduced in Slackware 12.0. It means, I have to boot from network card to get Slackware's installer running (Disk 1). Installing packages can be done using NFS. I'll story about that next time. :-)

The laptop's vga is i830M. I can use whether i810 or intel for the driver of xorg. To run compiz was a bit tricky for this chipset. After googling for awhile, I managed to get it running good. Your mileage may vary though.

Command to run compiz :
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=true compiz --replace ccp && emerald &

Note : emerald is the window decorator I have chosen to run. There are other window decorators but emerald is one of the famous.

KSalup - Winpopup for Linux

Searching popup messaging application for Linux is not hard. Kopete has the feature but the default installation fails in receiving message. Sending message works though. Due to this problem, I try to find another application that can send and receive winpopup message via SAMBA.

Enter KSalup. I couldn't find this package in major Fedora repositories. However, it can be downloaded from the project's download page. After installation, entering basic settings like WORKGROUP, HOSTNAME, ways to find other hosts in LAN, one can use it straight away. Sending and most importantly receiving are OK. However KSalup lacks of add-on feature like some of other winpopup-like applications have, that is sending files.

Put that feature aside, KSalup is a nice winpopup application for Linux. At least you can send and receive messages with your friends who using Windows in your LAN. By not connecting to IM servers outside like Yahoo!, Google Talk, IRC or MSN, one can save a little bit of bandwidth :P.

Some screenshots


Main view

Samba settings for name lookup


Sending message setup


About

Restoring grub

Recently, I installed RHEL first with 3 partitions(/, /boot and /home) and I also created one FAT partition for installing Windows XP. After installing RHEL, I installed MS Windows XP. This left grup being replaced by MS Windows boot loader in MBR. How to restore grub?

Restoring grub boot loader should be trivial if you have the installer CD. In case of RHEL (or Fedora or CentOS), what you have to do is by inserting disc 1 of RHEL disc sets and type linux rescue. After answering a few questions, you will be dropped to console. What next? Type grub-install /dev/hda. This command will install grub boot loader into MBR.

Before this I have been googling for about an hour. The answers I found always like this:

1. chroot /mnt/sysimage
2. /sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/hda

I had error with those steps. Step 1 means to change your root dir to installed partition which is mounted under /mnt/sysimage directory. If you have no luck, skip step 1 and go straight to step 2. Good luck!.

RPM hung on me

Couple of days ago, I killed yumex because it hung. Afterthat, everything hung. I couldn't run rpm or yum in command line. I tried rebuilding the database with rpm --rebuild but to no avail. Found a solution after googling. The solution :

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.*

The above command removes any locks left on the rpm database and now you should able to use rpm command. Make sure you run the above command as root for obvious reason.

Upgrading to latest clamav for impatient sysadmin :)

I've just upgraded clamav to the latest (at the time of writing is version 0.91.1) for my firewall (Mandrake 10.1). For impatient sysadmin like me, waiting for official packages to release might take longer than u might expect. So the best way to upgrade is by compiling from source. This was how I did it.

Stopping the service
It's advisable to stop clamav service before installing the new one.

service clamd stop

Downloading the package
wget http://freshmeat.net/redir/clamav/29355/url_tgz/clamav-0.91.1.tar.gz

Extracting the package
tar xzvf clamav-0.91.1.tar.gz

Configure...
cd clamav-0.91.1
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --enable-id-check --enable-dns-fix --enable-bigstack

Note: this configure arguments matching with the previous installation by rpm except for --enable-big-stack and --enable-dns-fix (I think).

Compile and install
make
make install (as root)

Restart the service
service clamd start

Updating the virus database definition
freshclam

Checking clamav version
clamav-config --version

Writing a blog entry has never been easier

This blog entry was created using Gnome Blog. Without going to blogger.com, I can now write an entry by just opening this application. It's good to have this kind of app don't you think? Oh, you can insert pictures too by way of drag and drop (look at cutie meowie below :) ). --update: you can't see the picture because BloggerAPI doesn't support it (yet).

Where to get it?

You are recommended to use your distro's package manager. Just search for gnome-blog or something like that. In Fedora just run yum install gnome-blog.

More info can be found here.

dbmail 2.2.6-rc1 released

I have just upgraded my dbmail to dbmail 2.2.6-rc1.

Announcement : http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/dbmail/users/22531
Changelog : http://nfg3.nfgs.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=dbmail.git;a=log;h=dbmail_2_2
Download : http://www.dbmail.org/download/2.2/dbmail-2.2.6-rc1.tar.gz

How to upgrade from previous release (2.2.5)

1. Stop postfix, dbmail-imapd, dbmail-lmtpd and dbmail-timsieved using service command.
2. Download the tarball and extract it.
3. Enter the installation folder and run :

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --with-mysql --with-sieve

4. make
5. make install
6. Restart all the stopped services.

That's all there is to it.