A nerdy blog??

SVN calypso!!!

2009-01-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

My linux installation was not having svn and I wanted to checkout the webkit code to my system. The steps I did for it are-

- Get the latest code from svn
- Running the configure script asked for apache runntime(apr) and apr-util and errored out.
- After downloading apr and apr-util and compiling it I run configure script of svn again. This time, there where some warnings regarding neon and berkeley db. Unfortunately I did pay much attention to it and proceeded with make and make install.

Allas, everything went fine but the svn doesnot run!!!!! It errored out with the following message-
svn: Unrecognized URL scheme

A bit of googling and I found that its caused because of the libraries that I skipped!! The neon and berkeley db. Getting those libraries and bingo, svn is working fine!!!

Webkit calypso

2009-01-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

AIM: Try out the webkit browser engine.

STEPS:
Read this link-
http://webkit.org/
It has very good information about how to get the code, build it etc...

svn checkout http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk WebKit

Update the checkout-
WebKit/WebKitTools/Scripts/update-webkit

Specifically, I was trying to build for QT on a Linux platform in red hat. This link was very useful
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingQtOnLinux

Also I didnt have QT version 4.4.3 which I downloaded from the QT website. Because of this, I had to struggle a bit to figure things out.

Basically you need to do the following before compilation-
- set QTDIR
- add $QTDIR/bin in the path so that we will get the latest
- set a soft link
ln -s $QTDIR /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.4.3.
Alternatively, you can do a "make" and "make install" of qt. This will copy QT sources to the system. But then again you need sqlite sources which resides in QTDIR/src/3rdparty/sqlite. Since the build system looks for sqlite in QTDIR, we might need to manually copy it to the location.

- set QMAKESPEC
export QMAKESPEC=$QTDIR/mkspec/default

After this, its all ready to go!!!
WebKit/WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit --qt

After around 40 mins, I got the following error
/home/robbinm/sandbox/mytests/browser/webkit/WebKit/WebKitBuild/Release/lib/libQtWebKit.so: undefined reference to `WebCore::JSWebKitCSSMatrixConstructor::JSWebKitCSSMatrixConstructor(JSC::ExecState*, WebCore::ScriptExecutionContext*)'

This I couldnt do easily-
- download webkit in cygwin and compile. The downloading it self was failing with errors. I tried the svn checkout as well as downloading the tar file, but both bailed out with errors

- compile for GTK-webkit. It was failing for wanting libicu-dev. Checking the net showed that it required many more!!

Malayalam mp3 download sites

2008-12-28T14:45:00.001-08:00

I was searching for latest mallu/hindi/tamil songs and these seems to be good sites-

http://indian-musiq.com/
Has lots of latest movie songs

http://beemp3.com

http://music.cooltoad.com/music/
This site has a big collection of ever green hits

http://www.4shared.com/
This site has lots of songs but make sure that you play the songs as the names and songs does always match

LFS calipso

2008-03-23T01:02:00.000-07:00

LFS seems to be the ultimate karma for Linux nerds. For those of you who are new to LFS like me, it's Linux From Scratch. Its a quest to build Linux and all Software that go in the system from their sources rather than use prebuild binaries. It is definitely not for the faint hearted.

The following are useful links-
This link gives a nice prelude to what it takes to build software from scratch-
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Building-HOWTO.html
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/essential_prereading.txt

Start on LFS with the link-
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/index.html

Makefile calypso

2008-01-16T14:35:00.000-08:00

This was about my tango with Makefile intricacies

Mission:
How to check whether a directory is present inside makefiles?

It first seems to be a trivial problem but soon I realized it was an illusion!!!

I saw the following solution-
http://loxos.blogspot.com/2005/08/file-and-directory-check-in-makefile.html
But unfortunately it does not work because the "echo exists" is never called.

Another nice resource to look for is-
http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html

Solutions:
Finally I realized that I am on my own and needs to work out a solution. I did some reading on Makefile functions and found a generic solution using shell and call macros-

Solution 1:
# Check for directory

isDirectoryExists = $(shell if [ -d $1 ]; then echo "exists"; fi )

ifeq ($(call isDirectoryExists,DIRECTORY_YOU_LOOK_FOR, exists)
# DO SOMETHING
else
# DO SOMETHING
endif

This is the solution I really liked!!

Another way to do it is to you pure shell syntax in some rules-
Solution 2:
RULE_XXX:
if [ -d DIRECTORY_YOU_LOOK_FOR ]; then \
// DO SOMETHING \
else \
// DO SOMETHING \
fi

I think this solution cannot really work without a rule. Atleast I was not able to get it working without a rule :(

Titbits on Cygwin :)

2008-01-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

The following are small tidbits of information that I can comeback to refer... and hopefully helpful to others too...

Cygwin:
Cygwin is an interesting tool for those who are familiar with linux and wants to do something similar in windows. It gives a bash shell in a windows system and permits compilation of most linux programs.

Well one interesting thing to keep in mind while installing cygwin is to remember that you need to choose the components that you may want to install. The default installation of cygwin does NOT install the gcc compilers and most of the libraries which might interest a developer.

The installation takes quite sometime as it downloads stuffs from internet. Maybe a wiser choice is to download it locally and then install it as the internet installation fails often.

waiting... waiting... for the downloading to finish. Probably I am downloading more stuffs that I really need...

Finally cygwin is installed with compiler on my PC!!!

My aim is to compile squashfs tools in windows so that I will have the utility available to make a squash fs image in windows AND Linux.

SquashFS:
The following are some leads on squashfs filesystem-
http://www.roseindia.net/linux/tutorial/linux-howto/SquashFS-HOWTO/creatingandusing.html

The source code for the tools can be found at the following link-
http://sourceforge.net/projects/squashfs

It compiles cleanly in Linux. I am trying to see whether its the same case with windows cygwin compilation too.

SquashFS tools Compilation on Cygwin:

In cygwin, squashFS tools does not compile cleanly. Its to be expected as the squashFS providers does not claim to support windows platform.

Compilation fails because it references system header files. Looking a bit closely in the code, it looks like the mksquashfs.c is trying to get the number of processors in the system.

My aim is to compile the code in a Windows PC with one processor. So thats it. #ifdef away the code thats trying to get the number of processors and #else to processors=1..

Summerising the changes required to compile squashFS(version3.1r2) in cygwin-
-Define linux macro in the Makefile to make the compilation work similar to linux
-#ifdef away a few calls done to get the number of processors and include files

Bingo it works!!! I have mksquashfs that work on windows. I am able to mount the squashFS image made in windows in the target Linux!!!!

If this tool is to be invoked without cygwin, we will have to copy the following cygwin DLLs to the same directory as the executable mksquashfs.exe is.
-cygwin1.dll
-cygz.dll

Useful Linux links - Linuks

2008-01-10T06:46:00.000-08:00

The following are some interesting articles that I came across internet

General Linux kernel-
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-embdev.html
http://lwn.net/Articles/21835/

Block devices driver in Linux-
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2890
http://lwn.net/images/pdf/LDD3/ch16.pdf
http://lwn.net/Articles/58720/

Flash FS on Linux-
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4678
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cramfs

Static/Shared/Dynamic linking in Linux-
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO.html

Database calypso!!!

2007-05-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

Well I wanted to play around with mysql. Reason being its free, and database is a subject i almost flunked during my college days!! Flunked not literally though. Luckily for me the examinar was able to see things in my paper that I didnt!!

Anyways cut the crap!! Here is a list of usefull SQL statement syntax. The statements themselves are self explanatory..

CREATE USER 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mysqlpassword'; SHOW DATABASES;
Am I digressing to a windows calypso?? Well in any case this might be of some use later!!! To remove mySQL as a service, execute the following in windows command-
sc /delete mysql

I will add to it

The first calypso..

2007-05-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

This is a funny name i got nerdycalypso. How can a nerdy calypso ever look like or hear like? Lets wait and see. Certainly it wont be like the caribbean kind.

Expect a lot worse!! hulalaahula hulaaahooo