Zagura’s blog

If you encounter the following error when you try to mount a cifs filesystem:
CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

try to:
#emerge mount-cifs

I did not find any indications on the net that a separate package should be installed in order to use cifs.

Later Update: same problem in ubuntu, you need to install smbfs
#apt-get install smbfs

As I started to look at GWT and its related widgets, tutorials and utilities, I thought that it might be an idea to put the information together into a Wiki site. This way, GWTpedia.com was born. Everyone is free to edit.

Here is a python script to generate words using Markov chains. The archive also contains some dictionaries (English, Romanian, Romanian names). This is similar with http://www.fourteenminutes.com/fun/words/ but you have the possibility to use your own word dictionaries.

Disable confcache in /etc/make.conf if you are getting this when trying to emerge device-mapper.1.02.19 on Gentoo:
checking target system type… config.sub: missing argument
Try `config.sub –help’ for more information.
configure: error: /bin/sh autoconf/config.sub failed

!!! econf failed
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
!!! A complete build log is located at ‘/var/tmp/portage/sys-fs/device-mapper-1.02.19/temp/build.log’.

Oldstyle

Extreme Programming

(And YES, that’s a keyboard)

Kernel 2.6.21 is out ant it contains my Logitech Formula Force EX force feedback patch

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Are you using a CentOS or CentOS derived distribution and you experience deadlocks in dl_sysinfo_int80 function like this?:

#0 0×00ace7a2 in _dl_sysinfo_int80 () from /lib/ld-linux.so.2
#1 0×00cb248b in __read_nocancel () from /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0
#2 0×080bdf39 in el_push ()
#3 0×080bdfda in el_getc ()
#4 0×080bde50 in el_push ()
#5 0×080be11b in el_gets ()
#6 0×080a6f59 in main ()

Then you need to upgrade the kernel to the lastest version from the CentOS repositories (2.6.9-42.0.10.EL as of today):

yum upgrade kernel

Have Fun!

Yesterday, for a small project of mine, I needed to implement a small utility to deform jpeg images from command line. The idea was to use texture mapping for deformations, so I needed a way to manipulate the jpeg images at the pixel level.

The first thing I tried was the imagemagik utility. I’ve browsed their documentation but I couldn’t find anything close to what I needed. I wanted to be able to draw textured mapped triangles into a picture. I knew that the Allegro library that I’ve used back in the old DOS programming days could do the texturing part. The bad thing that I found out is that it does not know how to handle jpeg files

Then I googled the Internet for a free and easy to use graphic library and I found libGD. The good thing is that it can handle jpeg files. The bad thing is that it cannot do the texturing part. The next thing I had in mind was to use both libraries but this would mean to add lots of dependencies to my small application for a simple texture mapping function. So I decided to write my own texture mapping function to remember the good old days. I will not describe how texture mapping works as there are plenty of tutorials on the internet for this.
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Having a Gentoo32 chroot as a fallback on a Gentoo64 system is not unusual. Some things simply do not work on Gentoo 64 (as FlashPlayer 9) or you need a distcc server for the other (32 bit) systems.

I wrote a simple bash script that allows the X applications under chroot jail to connect to the XOrg server runing outside the jail.
You can find it here.

Example:

linux32 xchroot /mnt/gentoo32

firefox

I only tested it on Gentoo.