Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux, Lisp
Monday, January 22. 2007
Finally, I wanted to give the not-so-new-by-now SBCL 1.0 a whirl. Google led me to Peter van Eynde's Dapper packages, which you can install if you add the last of the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
root@elendil:~# grep cl-dapper /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-dapper-packages ./
Unfortunately, on Dapper this breaks CL-SQL or more exactly the version 3.53 it is shipping with. SBCL, or more exactly PCL barfs
When attempting to set the slot's value to (OR NULL T) (SETF of SLOT-VALUE),
the slot TYPE is missing from the object
#<CLSQL-SYS::VIEW-CLASS-DIRECT-SLOT-DEFINITION CLSQL-SYS::VIEW-DATABASE>.
[Condition of type SIMPLE-ERROR]
I haven't seen any complaint about this on the CL-SQL mailing list, so I guess I'm the only one using such an old CL-SQL version with the shiny new SBCL. So, currently I have a broken CMUCL on Debian Sarge and a broken CL-SQL on Ubuntu Dapper. Sigh.
Update:Manually switching to CLSQL solved the problem. Just in case you have relied on Debian or Ubuntu to supply you with the right packages, I found replacing them to be dead easy. I just 'apt-get remove'd cl-sql, but left cl-uffi and cl-md5 in place. Then, I untar'ed the source archive of CLSQL to /usr/local/src/clsql/. One link from there to /usr/share/common-lisp/source and a 'cd /usr/share/common-lisp/systems/ ; for i in ../source/*.asd; ln -s $i . ; done' later, SBCL 1.0 loaded CLSQL 3.8 like a charm.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Monday, January 8. 2007
Today, I finally gave the port of the Lotus Notes client for Linux a try. Don't. Waste. Your. Time. I should have believed the PDF they've put alongside the zip files: One way to read the system requirement would have been "if your system isn't mine, this ain't gonna work out." And so it did (or didn't). Installation aborts. Crashes. Unable to complete the configuration. And our Notes guru even sat beside me. Actually, I think this experience is the last proof (if I ever needed one) that Notes is such a bloated application that even such a large company is utterly doomed to fail to do it right. And did I mention that Notes on Linux is a Workplace Application, i.e. built atop of Eclipse? I guess that port is sponsored by Intel or at least the hardware department of IBM, huh?
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Friday, December 22. 2006
"Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass."
-- Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Hall of Mirrors"
Well, if that's so, Sun should probably take a second look at their new 3D desktop, Looking Glass. As they even provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu, getting the stuff installed was a quite easy journey. But unfortunately, the target wasn't really worth it -- Looking Glass is not really ready for prime time (i.e., daily usage), it's more a technology study. Sometimes it's the details that make the difference, e.g. blurry background and fonts, missing keyboard shortcuts to switch between virtual desktops etc. But this time, it's not only the details: I didn't manage to get the 3d file manager to display correctly (i.e. in front) after moving it out of the way, for instance, and I got a hanging desktop altogether very quickly (after about five minutes usage). Most of the apps that you'll get with Looking Glass were non-functional either. Looking Glass is also really slow, even Gnome or KDE are light-weight by comparison. I'll have a second look next year. Or make that 2008.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Thursday, December 14. 2006
No, I'm not talking about the lasershow Tool were playing their music to.
Yesterday, I finally got my new printer, a Lexmark E240. I was pretty certain that it would work, as the E120n is known to work as a Generic PCL6 printer and Lexmarks specs for the E240 claimed it understood PCL6 as well. So I just tried the driver (pxlmono) that's recommended for the E120n and it worked right out of the box (the entry for the E240 is from me). I believe that the E240d(n) as well as the E340 series are likely to be the same as the documentation coming with the E240 applies at least in part to those as well.
Lexmark does provide it's own set of drivers, btw. They ship (at least on the supplied CDROM) as RPMs, although they claim to support Debian. It looks like they provide some administration tool, and from a quick sketch in the documentation, I think they mainly provide a wrapper around the usual printing tools. But I haven't tried this stuff at all. Speaking of documentation, the Unix docs ship as HTML, and at least in part they are broken. I.e., the main navigation frame links to some HowDoI.html file, but on the CDROM there's only howdoi.html. Let's hope the hardware engineers paid a tiny bit more attention to what they were doing.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux, Music
Monday, December 4. 2006
After about sechs years of XMMS usage, I think I'm finally done with it. Playlist handling is a major pain. And I usually just shuffle my way through my collection. But don't even try to find a song in that long, long way down south ... sorry, down the playlist.
I've tried Rhythmbox, but as it is to closely bound to Gnome (and gstreamer, in particular) it doesn't work for me (I'm using WindowMaker without Gnome on my workstation at home). And no, I don't have any KDE libraries installed and yes, I like it that way -- although I've heard quite a lot good things about amarok.
Dear Lazyweb, please what kind of audio player might fit my needs? I just need a little more functionality than XMMS. Selection by album, artist and/or genre would be nice.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux, Lisp
Monday, December 4. 2006
A recent apt-get broke CMUCL again:
Reinstalling for cmucl
Recompiling Common Lisp Controller for cmucl
Installing Common Lisp Controller in CMU CL ...
Error in batch processing:
Error in function UNIX::SIGSEGV-HANDLER: Segmentation Violation at #x10044F88.
FAILED
Hooray.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Thursday, November 16. 2006
Peter vanEynde discusses his experience with binary-only drivers for his ATI card:
The machine (a Lenovo Z61m) uses a X1400 ATI chip, so I have to use the ATI binary-only driver. Well. I'm trying to use it. The amount of grief I'm getting from it would convince even billg himself that opensource drivers are mandatory in an opensource system. Strange errors pop up and you're just lost, googling only gives you forums where other poor users are trying to make it all work.
I think he's wrong about convincing that billg. Isn't that just the current Windows experience brought to Linux?
FWIW, when I needed a new laptop for work, I also ordered one with an ATI chip. There is a working X.org driver for it, though, and I double-checked prior to the order. On the other hand, I'm currently using the Ubuntu provided proprietary ATI driver without any trouble. But even if ATI decides in half a year that it no longer wants to support my ATI M300 with their linux driver, the open source driver will be there. So yes, I'm all for open source drivers, but I would be happy with a scheme that has been applied by several vendors in the past: keep the driver proprietary for some time, but release it as open source when your technology has moved to new heights. Perhaps Nvidias and ATIs current behaviour just reflects that there hasn't been any advances in their drivers?
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Monday, July 3. 2006
It's no fun when the only thing you can't check in a virtual machine test installation is the connection thingie you have to use when on the road. In my case, the AVM Fritz capi module shipped with Ubuntu Dapper Drake is broken. The bug report is about two months old and still has status "unconfirmed"? At least the bug is not in the binary only firmware but in the source around it. I knew there is a reason I like open source, even if this "open" tastes more like "open beer" in this case (the Fritz drivers still only target the ancient SuSE 9.3).
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Wednesday, April 12. 2006
Yesterday, I ranted about Cincoms inability to fix an apparent incompatibility of VisualWorks with Xorg on Ubuntu. Today, it looks like it's not Cincom fault, but a user-overfriendlyness by Gnome. I can use VisualWorks on Xorg with e.g. WindowMaker without any problem. Gnome (2.8, at least, as shipped with Ubuntu) generates an empty fonts.dir file in ~/.gnome2/share/fonts which seems like a very pointless idea. It also breaks other applications besides VisualWorks. I will have to wait for Dapper to arrive to see whether Gnome 2.10 fixes the issue.
The other possibilty, of course, would be to drop Gnome (and that Metacity) again. Seems we won't become friends.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux, Programming
Monday, April 10. 2006
.. can get rather old. In fact, Cincom, producer of VisualWorks Smalltalk seems to enjoy dispeased customers complaining that they can't use it with Xorg. Oh yes, I do have an alternative -- going back to Woody and XFree86 4.1 something. Not.
Fortunately, our service providers somehow found out that a simple 'xset fp rehash' will fix the issue of not being able to display any window. Now, that's really hard to implement, right Cincom?
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Tuesday, April 4. 2006
For the first time in twelve years of Linux experience, I encountered a problem with a command line solution that doesn't show up with a GUIzed version of the same procedure. I tried mounting a samba share from on of our file-servers via smbmount, which works flawlessly with my old Debian Woody install. Using the exact same settings on Ubuntu mounts the share, however I can't look into it at all. I.e., I can't even call stat on the mount.
Using Nautilus/Gnome, however, I can succesfully connect to the server and even open a file browser on it. However, how gnome-vfs, which obviously handles the mount, does it's magic is beyond me. I can't even see a mount of the share via /proc/mounts or with lsof. Seems like gnome-vfs uses a socket connection directly, perhaps thereby not running into the problem I have with smbmount?
Update: cisfs instead of smbfs was the reason.
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Linux
Monday, April 3. 2006
Ubuntuis really close to Debian, no? No. At least not for the X.org packages. The bitmaps files holding color definitions have been extracted to some xbitmaps library, breaking the compilation of XEmacs, for example. As I was also unable to find the analog to packages.debian.org, I had to resort to ridiculous web searching and clueless installation of packages from Universe.
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