ronny.haryan.to

Occasionally there are some applications that I’d like to install or try that are not in Ubuntu repositories, and there are no deb packages available, so I have to resort to compiling from source. That’s fine. I just don’t like not being able to easily uninstall them like when I installed using a package management tool (e.g. dpkg). I know some apps provide ‘uninstall’ rule in the Makefile, but it still doesn’t feel right to me.

When I was still using Gentoo, most of the times I could easily write a simple ebuild and put it in my local portage tree overlay, so that I could emerge it (and unmerge it later if I want to).

Not that easy in Debian or Ubuntu. Or, so I thought, until I found checkinstall. It’s available in Ubuntu’s universe repository. So I just do ./configure && make as usual, then instead of running sudo make install, I just do sudo checkinstall -D, answer a few questions, and I’d get a deb package that I can install with dpkg -i. Sweet. checkinstall can also create a Slackware package and an RPM package, by the way.

Note: the website seems to be down at the time of writing. Here’s a cached version.

Upon encountering weird messages in their server logfiles, someone asked “How do you make these error messages stop showing up in the logfiles?”

I think that’s just not the right question to ask.

Error messages are there to help inform the user that there might be something wrong. It’s analogous to somebody screaming “Fire! Fire!” in a quiet neighbourhood. Instead of wondering how to make them stop screaming, it would be better to understand what it is they are screaming about, and why, just in case there actually is a real danger. Don’t you agree?

Average Joe users tend to ignore error messages as if the error messages are created just to make it more complicated and look more techie. Now, I agree that some error messages are cryptic and leave a lot of room for improvements so that they can be useful to average joe users. However, system administrators should be more willing to investigate the error messages further and try to understand what’s happening instead of trying to ignore the messages. At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to try to paste the error message verbatim in Google.

Happy 2006, everyone!

So I’ve had it with Gentoo Linux. Goodbye Gentoo, I’ll always remember the good times, and the bad times. It’s not that Gentoo is bad or anything, it’s good in many ways, don’t get me wrong, but it also has some drawbacks, at least for me. I think I’m not that interested anymore in living on the bleeding edge. I just can’t be bothered to compile, tweak and tinker with a lot of stuff anymore nowadays, I just want to get my work done. If I need something, I want it quick and painless. Hey, apt-get install something sure beats emerge something most of the time, time-wise. Sure, there’s a price to pay, but nothing is free, there’s always going to be some trade-offs. I think I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

My Ubuntu install was almost glitch free. I already have some LVM volumes from my Gentoo systems, so I simply want to activate them in Ubuntu. The installer (partman?) would not let me finish the partitioning step if I enabled LVM. So I had to skip the LVM during the installation, and it was really trivial to add the entries to /etc/fstab afterwards and do mount -a from runlevel 1, et voilà, everything is there like it should be. Of course, a little bit of preparation beforehand helps. Based on my previous bad experience, I printed a text file containing the output of df -h, fdisk -l, cat /etc/fstab, pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay. So if shit happens (they do happen, trust me), I will have something to refer to. I also made, beforehand, a list of applications that I use daily, so I could quickly apt-get install them by following the list. Oh, and backups! Did I mention backups? It’s crucial to backup properly before doing something like this. At least the home directory and everything in /etc.

I’m not quite finished with the setup yet, but I’m very pleased so far. With Google by my side, everything was easy breezy (pun intended) to install and configure (there’s nothing much to configure really), the only thing left is setting up Harvard BibTeX and Ruby on Rails. There’s a rails package, but it’s out of date, so I’d prefer to install it from rubygems, unfortunately there’s no rubygems package. Looks like I have to install them manually, just like I did Sun Java, Azureus, and AllTray. Ironically, I could simply emerge all of them in Gentoo. Heh.

• My project is about “context-aware smart homes to support independent living”.
• I’m very busy with my project, probably until January or February, so I’m not sure if I will have the time and energy to write in this blog during that time, I apologise in advance for lack of updates.
• Just a clarification if you happen to pick up the October 2005 issue of InfoLINUX, I’m not the founder of linux.or.id, I was just one of the first volunteers who eventually maintain the mailing lists, website, emails, DNS and almost everything else until today. I’m not sure how linux.or.id started, actually, I think it was MDAMT who started it and announced it to the (now defunct) pau-mikro list.
• Kéré Kêmplu sent me his creation of a logo for Planet Terasi, I’ll put it in Planet Terasi as soon as possible™.
• Summer is coming soon to Sydney. Barbecues and beaches… and.. what? What project? Oh, right. Never mind.

Sudah seminggu ini saya heran kenapa linux.or.id termasuk subdomainnya sepertinya hilang dari indeks Google. Saya sudah cek file robots.txt, tidak ada. Search di Google katanya kemungkinan karena ada redirect, tapi front page linux.or.id tidak diredirect ke mana-mana. Kemungkinan lain menurut Google sih katanya kalau tidak sesuai dengan aturan main Google, misalnya ada situs yang tidak fair dengan menggunakan hidden keywords yang tidak sesuai dengan isinya atau praktek lainnya yang sengaja memanipulasi indeks Google demi kepentingan sendiri, tapi saya tidak terpikir ada di mana kemungkinan seperti ini di linux.or.id, apakah di salah satu subdomainnya?

Barusan saya upgrade Drupal (sistem CMS yang digunakan oleh linux.or.id) ke versi stable terakhir. Entah apa gara-gara tempo hari saya workaround disable xmlrpc waktu ada security bug dan waktu itu belum sempet upgrade.

Ada ide?