Restricted Notes by a Geek

Some of you might get this small error, basically this happen when you click on a URL in an email.

All you need to do to fix this is install gvfs, which is a userspace virtual system using gio.

On arch:

pacman -S gvfs

I received the following whilst executing perl scripts on Archlinux and wanted to fix it.

# perl
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = “”,
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_COLLATE = “C”,
LANG = “en_US.utf8″
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (”C”)

Step1: Check /etc/rc.conf
This is mine’s contents in the Localization section

LOCALE=”en_US.utf8″
HARDWARECLOCK=”localtime”
USEDIRECTISA=”no”
TIMEZONE=”Africa/Johannesburg”
KEYMAP=”us”
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR=”yes”

Step2: Update /etc/locale.gen
By adding the following lines:

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1

Step3: Regenerate the locales

# locale-gen
Generating locales…
en_US.UTF-8… done
en_US.ISO-8859-1… done
Generation complete.

And now you won’t see those warnings anymore

Rather old issue, but if you come accross this and need a quick fix to just complete an install this is the error you would see when doing an upgrade:

(68/68) checking for file conflicts
error: could not prepare transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/Kbuild exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/a.out.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/acpi.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/agp.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/alternative-asm.h exists in filesystem

To fix it:

rm /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm

Now you can rerun the pacman update and the conflict should be resolved.

Today creative released the next version of their Linux XFi alsa based driver, in the process they also released the complete code under a GPL license.

This really excites me as I own a Auztentech X-Fi Prelude card which also happen to work with this driver. Be warned though, thus far it only works on kernel 2.6.27 and none of the previous versions. This is alright in my books, archlinux is on 2.6.27 and I believe now that it is opensource drivers can be kept up to date by users.

So far users report all of the following working:

• ALSA PCM Playback
• ALSA Record
• ALSA Mixer
• OSS Playback

The following doesn’t work:

• OSS Mixer
• External I/O modules
• No 5.1

How to get Pulseaudio to work:
Uncomment the following lines in /etc/pulse/default.pa (might be different in your distribution and I havent tested this in Arch linux) and comment out all lines mentioning module-detect.

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:1

The announcement can be found on their forums: Creative Forums

Archlinux also have a post going on how to build these via AUR: Archlinux forums

Finally a direct download to the file: XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz

Some of you might know that Mozilla’s license state if you compile their browser from source code, you are not allowed to use the official branding name in case of you changing something in the source. Henceforth having the “Grandparidiso” browser in Archlinux as opposed the official Firefox 3.0 browser.

It is possible to change it back without re-compiling firefox manually after fixing it in the source code with a usefull little utility called Firebrand.

Step 1: Add the “Archlinuxfr” repository if you don’t have it yet.
nano /etc/pacman.conf

[archlinuxfr]
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/x86_64

Note. I am using Arch x64, if you are still on 32bit replace x86_64 with i686

Step 2: Install Firebrand
pacman -Sy firebrand

This reposititory also have “yaourt” (french for yoghurt) which is a frontend to pacman and add easy access to install packages from the AUR (Archlinux User Repository)

Step 3: Rebrand firefox with the following command.
firebrand
or
sudo firebrand

spike tinuva # firebrand
This script must be launched as root to work.
Please select the branding you want to apply (Official Firefox: 1, Iceweasel: 2, Swiftweasel: 3)
1
RE-BRANDING chrome/en-US.jar
- Unzipping en-US.jar to /tmp/firebrand-VyhyfSI6… Done.
- Successfully edited /tmp/firebrand-VyhyfSI6/locale/branding/brand.dtd
- Successfully edited /tmp/firebrand-VyhyfSI6/locale/branding/brand.properties
- Replacing branding files in en-US.jar
RE-BRANDING chrome/browser.jar
- Replacing branded icons in browser.jar
RE-BRANDING defaults/preferences/firefox.js
- Successfully edited /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.3/defaults/preferences/firefox.js.
Replacing icons…
spike tinuva #

That is it!

A recent upgrade on archlinux upgraded the DHCP daemon from 3.x to 4.x series and since then my laptop started having problems getting an IP assigned when I plug it in our office network, but at home it worked. This was really strange. I have to admit though I was still using the older way of starting up the network in archlinux and not the newer profile mode via netcfg, which is in my opinion much better.

So step 1: Install netcfg
pacman -Sy core/netcfg

Step 2: Create a profile
nano /etc/network.d/ethernet-dhcp

CONNECTION=”ethernet”
DESCRIPTION=”A very basic ethernet profile, using dhcp”
INTERFACE=eth0
IP=”dhcp”
DHCP_TIMEOUT=60
DHCLIENT=no

Step 3: Edit rc.conf and add the profile and net-profiles startup process

NETWORKS=(ethernet-dhcp)
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng alsa hal fam kdm @laptop-mode network net-profiles iptables crond samba netfs sshd bluetooth avahi-daemon avahi-dnsconfd)

PS. Your DAEMONS line could look a lot different than mine however this is just how I prefer mine to start up, as I like X to be there relatively fast and the rest can start up in the background while showing me the login screen.

Here at the office multiple users use linux, some archlinux some ubuntu some some other distro. We had to come up with a way to let users not download a file/update multiple times but only once. We found the perfect application for this, called http-replicator which we installed on our nix based media server with loads of hard drive space.

Now the idea is not to sync multiple servers everyday, as that is not what we want or need, but to only download a specific update for a specific distro once a day. Http-replicator is perfect for this, if 2 or more users start to download the same file, same time or not, http-replicator automate all of this so that file is actually only downloaded once and sent to multiple users at the same time as well as saving the file in case someone want to download it later.

I am not going into detail about http-replicator in this post, maybe later, but instead on how to specifically set archlinux to use this proxy.

Step 1: Set pacman to use wget to download updates
Edit the file /etc/pacman.conf a find the line “XferCommand = ” and change it to:

XferCommand = /usr/bin/wget –passive-ftp -c -O %o %u

Step 2: Set wget to use the http-replicator proxy
Edit the file /etc/wgetrc a find the line “#http_proxy” and change it to:

http_proxy = http://10.5.1.230:680/

Of coarse use your own ip and port in your case.