Mostly Harmless

I recently installed SUSE Linux 10.1 on my workstation. While installing, I saved screenshot for each step and prepared a step by step guide to installing SUSE 10.1 for newbies.

# posted by nileshbansal @ 6:04 pm 43 comments - -   -bookmark at -del.icio.us   -

VMWare workstation allows user to run multiple operating systems on one machine. I decided to try the eval version on my newly installed SUSE 10.1 box. The installation however was not as smooth as I would have liked. Installation fails while compiling vmmon module for my kernel version (2.6.16.13-4-bigsmp, SuSE 10.1). Fortunately, there is a workaround as mentioned in this forum, but it took me considerable time to figure out what to do in order to make vmmon compile. Hence, I am posting what exactly needs to be done.

I downloaded the tarball for evaluation version of VMWare workstation from their website and tried to install it using the provided installation script.

tar zxvf VMware-workstation-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz
cd /vmware-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl

I answered all the questions with their default answers. The script after installation executed vmware-config.pl, which exited with the following error while compiling vmmon.

Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.16.13-4-bigsmp/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.16.13-4-obj/i386/bigsmp'
make -C ../../../linux-2.6.16.13-4 O=../linux-2.6.16.13-4-obj/i386/bigsmp modules
  CC [M]  /tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:20,
                 from /tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:37:5: warning: "VMW_HAVE_EPOLL" is not defined
/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:43:5: warning: "VMW_HAVE_EPOLL" is not defined
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:20,
                 from /tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:60: error: conflicting types for ‘poll_initwait’
/usr/src/linux-2.6.16.13-4/include/linux/poll.h:45: error: previous declaration of ‘poll_initwait’ was here
/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:145: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:149: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
make[4]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only] Error 2
make[2]: *** [modules] Error 2
make[1]: *** [modules] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.16.13-4-obj/i386/bigsmp'
make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config3/vmmon-only'
Unable to build the vmmon module.

For more information on how to troubleshoot module-related problems, please
visit our Web site at "http://www.vmware.com/download/modules/modules.html" and
"http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/linux/prebuilt_modules_linux.html".

The workaround is to modify the Makefile.kernel, by adding -DKBUILD_BASENAME=\"$(DRIVER)\" just after -Iinclude2/asm/mach-default (on the same line). Do the following step by step.

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
tar xf vmmon.tar
tar xf vmnet.tar
vim vmmon-only/Makefile.kernel #EDIT as mentioned above
vim vmnet-only/Makefile.kernel #EDIT as mentioned above
mv vmmon.tar vmmon.tar.save
mv vmnet.tar vmnet.tar.save
tar cf vmmon.tar vmmon-only
tar cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only

After modification, first few lines of vmnet-only/Makefile.kernel looks like

and that of vmmon-only/Makefile.kernel looks like

After modifying both the Makefile.kernel files, execute /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl again. The compilation should go fine this time.

# posted by nileshbansal @ 6:08 pm 31 comments - -   -bookmark at -del.icio.us   -

While trying to enable web based admin gui for our sun ray server, I discovered that, httpd on RHEL 3 has some problems with libraries.

[root@manhattan root]# httpd
httpd: relocation error: /usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0: undefined symbol: gdbm_errno

Since I had not installed or changed anything after installing RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 3, I believe, this bug comes packaged with the distribution. And I expect Red Hat to test their software more carefully, at least httpd.

To debug, I checked dependencies for libaprutil-0.so.0 and symbols in libgdbm.so. To my surprise, gdbm_errno was in the libgdbm.so, and httpd should not have reported error. Everything (LD_LIBRARY_PATH and ld.so.cache) was fine.

[root@manhattan root]# rpm -aq | grep httpd
httpd-2.0.46-54.ent
redhat-config-httpd-1.1.0-4.30.2

[root@manhattan root]# rpm -aq | grep gdbm
gdbm-devel-1.8.0-20
gdbm-1.8.0-20

[root@manhattan root]# ldd -d /usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x00cc8000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x008c2000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00216000)
undefined symbol: gdbm_errno    (/usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0)
undefined symbol: apr_pool_cleanup_null (/usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0)

[root@manhattan root]# nm --dynamic /usr/lib/libgdbm.so | grep gdbm_errno
000061c4 D gdbm_errno

After trying out many things and googling, I was able to fix the problem. Before starting httpd, I had to run

[root@manhattan root]# export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libgdbm.so.2

I am not sure why and how it worked and why exactly was their a problem in the first place. This will probably remain a mystery for me.

# posted by nileshbansal @ 3:51 pm 4 comments - -   -bookmark at -del.icio.us   -

When I read news about availability of linux version of democracy player, I decided to try it. But unfortunately no SuSE packages or build instructions were available. But, after hours of hard work, I managed to install it on my x86_64 machine running SuSE linux 10.0. Here is what I did.

First I installed Pyrex. Since version 0.9.3 of Pyrex is buggy, I installed v0.9.4.1 by compiling from sources. I also installed mozilla-config from rpm using YaST. Then I installed boost from source (rpm I had, had some problems). To install boost, bjam is required, which fortunately was available as rpm, and I used YaST to install it. After installing bjam, I used the following procedure to install boost.

tar zxvf boost_1_33_0.tar.gz
cd boost_1_33_0
export PYTHON_VERSION=2.4
export PYTHON_LIB_PATH=/usr/lib64/python2.4/
export PYTHON_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/python2.4/
sudo bjam "-sTOOLS=gcc" install

I then proceeded to install Democracy player from source. Democracy source must reside in directory named tv. Also libboost_python-gcc-mt-1_33.so.1.33.0 had to be manually linked to libboost_python.so. Since boost was installed in /usr/local/, I also had to set appropriate CPPFLAGS and LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

tar zxvf Democracy-0.8.2-Source.tar.gz
mv Democracy-Player-0.8.2/ tv
cd tv/platform/gtk-x11/
export DEMOCRACY_RESOURCE_ROOT=/usr/share/democracy/resources/
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/boost-1_33/"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/mozilla/bin/:$PATH
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libboost_python-gcc-mt-1_33.so.1.33.0 /usr/local/lib/libboost_python.so
python setup.py install --root=/

This installed Democracy player, but I still wasn't able to start it, because gtkmozembed was not available. I then had to compile gnome-python-extras-2.12.1 from source.

tar zxvf gnome-python-extras-2.12.1.tar.gz; cd gnome-python-extras-2.12.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install

Now to start Democracy Player, I need to

cd tv/platform/gtk-x11/
export DEMOCRACY_RESOURCE_ROOT=/usr/share/democracy/resources/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/mozilla/bin/:$PATH
python democracyplayer

After installation, I started Democracy and downloaded a few videos (which were saved to ~/Movies/Democracy/). While videos played fine, there was no sound. I tried playing videos with mplayer they worked fine. The problem was with xine, and I had to install xine from source again. After all this, Democracy is now working fine (except that it has loads of bugs and is very unstable).

# posted by nileshbansal @ 12:21 am 0 comments - -   -bookmark at -del.icio.us   -