aashiks'in

Yesterday , Santhosh pinged me on GTalk and told me to head over to #smc-project. Little did i know that it will be a night long test session then >_< . Ani was there asking people to test Firefox Malayalam version. Yup . You read it right. Firefox Malayalam. The latest ( GNU/Linux) build is available at

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-1.9.1-l10n/firefox-3.1b3pre.ml.linux-i686.tar.bz2

Builds for other OS’s are also available there.

Anyways we found that Preferences and Addons dialogues were broken. Ani fixed those with the help of members from Mozilla l10n. Abhi and Sunil helped with windows version and me and Ani looked at the GNU/Linux version.

It was fun.  We have to wait for the build servers to build the firefox installation after commit. ( the wait was not too long, five maybe six minutes ) . So Ani will make commits, and then we will download the whole 9 MB , find bugs , fix, commit , download… I don’t exactly remember how many times we did this , but now, we have a working version of Firefox 3.1 Pre Beta. The Litmus tests ( https://litmus.mozilla.org/test_run_report.cgi?test_run_id=36 ) were awesome and helped us track down things easily.

Kudos to the localization team and Ani who worked hard to squash the bugs.

Coupled with Gnome malayalam, this will provide a complete Malayalam UI. The localization of  firefox was a very very important factor.

I noticed one nice thing. If you go to http://smc.org.in , the malayalam version of the website gets loaded automatically.  Same with Google and Wikipedia. That was a minor change but it felt really good

PS : Syam tried to scare us today morning by reporting that  Firefox 3.1 pre Beta crashes on Fedora 10 .  He says “  It seemed to be a problem with the xine plugin. Don’t know why. So I renamed /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins and now firefox works fine “

SMC released an English-Malayalam Dictionary for dict servers. I have made a package so any Arch – Malayalam (!!!)  users out there can use it. You can get the PKGBUILD from AUR.  If you have yaourt installed, you just have to run
yaourt -S dict-freedict-eng-mal
in a terminal.

I have also built a package that is available here. You can download and install it using
pacman -U dict-freedict-eng-mal-0.1-2-i686.pkg.tar.gz

The recent brouhaha over the government’s publication of a utility for Tax filing in Excel format, which goes clearly against the stated software policy ( link ) and community’s ( specifically, Anoop John’s ) response to it shows why FOSS should be encouraged.

When an issue like this occurs, if there is a healthy free software community in place, they will respond to it loudly and some actions speak louder than words. Kudos to Anoop for doing this. Anoop, your time was not wasted at all.

I have packaged, rather created the PKGBUILD scripts for Malayalam fonts (from SMC repos) and the latest scim-tables for Arch Linux. Both PKGBUILDs are hosted at the AUR repository. The fonts package are just that – the fonts from SMC repos. The scim-tables package in the current arch official repos are outdated and does not include swanalekha input method.  So I created a PKGBUILD script for it and put it up in AUR. Please verify and vote for these packages if you have tested them and they work well. [ Update : scim-tables might go into the official repositories as per this ]

There are two ways to go about installing packages from AUR.

1) Get the PKGBUILD from AUR and create a package yourself. Then install it using pacman. This involves the following things

• Get the PKGBUILD and put it in a directory
• Open a terminal and execute the following commands

cd Directory/where/PKGBUILD/resides
makepkg # This creates the package.
sudo pacman -U pkgname # pkgname is the name of the file that makepkg just created.


2) The easy way is to install yaourt from AUR first and use it to search and install the packages. After installing yaourt run the following commands in a terminal.

yaourt -S scim-tables-v0.5.8

yaourt -S ttf-malayalam-fonts

These are the standard ways of getting these packages. I have hosted the fonts package alone  here .You can download it and then use the ‘pacman -U’ switch to install it like above. The scim-tables package is too big to be put up here.

Report bugs to aashiks at the rate gmail dot com.

I installed Arch. The setup is neat and I like it so very much , I am going to keep this for a while ( thats all I can say because my friends know me as a distro hopper ). Only one thing bugged me. I could’nt get Malayalam input methods working. Even though I tried copying Santhosh’s swanalekha m17 script, it didnt work properly. Yesterday I had a chat with Santhosh and he asked me to check the m17 version. On a whim , I checked scim-tables version too. It was 0.5.7 and scim-tables 0.5.8 contains Swanalekha. So I thought, why not try building it. I installed the Arch Build System ( pacman -Ss abs ). Running abs as root got all the build scripts that are used to build the distro into my system.

Now comes the actual package build part. I went digging into the tree that abs created in /var/abs. Thanks to the locate command, i found where scim-table package’s script resides. This build script, named PKGBUILD is an awesome piece. The makepkg program uses this script to create an Arch package. If you write this script properly, the package creation process is a breeze. It has all the information needed to get and build a package from source – its version,download URL, dependencies, build time dependencies, and md5 to verify if the downloaded package is corrupted and a lot more information. It also contains a function called build() which is called by makepkg to compile the package.

What i had to do was copy the PKGBUILD corresponding to scim-tables to an empty directory ( a work area ) of my choice, change the package version number from 0.5.7 to 0.5.8 and change the md5 sum to the one corresponding to v0.5.8 source tarball. Thats it .. or so it seemed, until I ran makepkg and I saw the build failing.

Now, what goes on during the build is simple. makepkg parses the PKGBUILD and uses the source found in it to get the source tarball. Then it extracts it to a sub directory called src and calls build(). The build(0 function usually contains the standard ./configure , make and make install ( to a sub directory called pkg in the work area directoy, not to the system directories ).

The build failed during make. This was shitty. I googled the error and found that a bug was filed against it in Debian tracker ( build fail ). Santhosh appeared online right then, and he asked me to go check Debian’s sources. And voila ! there was a patch !. But that patch contained a lot lot more other patches. So I checked what the patch did. It was just changing <string> to <cstring> in a source header. So I made the change and took a diff ( I used Kompare to do this. I like GUIs ).

Now i need to stick the diff file in the PKGBUILD script somehow so I can run patch inside the build() function just before ./configure. So I went to the Arch Package Making wiki. It said that I can just put the diff ( or any other file I want to use during build ) along with the PKGBUILD script and then refer to it from inside the script. I did so and added a line to patch the source file just before running the configure script.

Now I ran makepkg again, and Voila ! there it is. The shiny new scim-tables-0.5.8 package. I installed it ( pacman -U pkgname)

അതു കഴിഞ്ഞു സന്തോഷിന്റടുത്ത് മൊട കാണിച്ചു കഴിഞ്ഞപ്പൊഴേ സമാധാനമായുള്ളൂ. All this took around half an hour. I am loving it

The build script and patch I used are here.

I installed Arch Linux on my laptop. I started yesterday and finished today. That is a little long for a GNU/Linux installation nowadays, but Arch is special. Arch claims to be a simple lightweight linux distribution. And after using it for 24 hours I must say that it is.

Imagine Debian and Slackware coming together. Slackware’s simplicity in configuration and the vanilla approach and Debian’s powerful package management. Add in some Gentoo like source package management and an excellent community that provides these packages. There, you have it. That is Arch linux. Now I have my share of glitches to solve, but what I have now gives me satisfaction. I now know exactly what hardware my system has and what all drivers should go with them. I know exactly how the computer goes about from loading the kernel to the login manager. And I can manage everything on my own. No silly GUI needed . Thats not what Arch Linux stands for though. It stands for the Arch Way. A.k.a Keeping it simple

Why Arch ? Well I hated the initial partitioning scheme I had and had wanted to do something about for a long time. Since I have some time on my hands now, I was planning to re install my Mandriva One 2009 ( which by the way is an excellent OS ). Now I had a CD burned off my desktop computer ( or so I thought ) only, I found that I had forgotten to click the ‘Burn’ button, and I instead had a blank CD. This was kind of rummy. I absolutely _had_ to get a newly partitioned laptop running a fresh GNU/Linux install. I had no ISO files to burn and hence no install media. So I headed over to distrowatch.com and decided to try something different. And I picked Arch , because I had no idea how it worked and whether it was a derivative of some distro. Imagine my surprise when I found that the ISO file was just under 300MB. Anyways I downloaded it, and burned it on to the CD and had the install going.

The install process is kind of like Slackware, only here we have to do more work. It is text based and is fairly straightforward if you know what you are doing. So before starting the install, I headed over to the Arch Linux website which again is well designed and well maintained with a wiki that will guide you through anything concerning Arch. I have not had to consult any other source for documentation on Arch. The beginner’s guide posted there is excellent and is a good read even if you are not installing Arch.

The following is not a walk through for arch install. You will get a better one at the Arch wiki. This is just what I felt about Arch

Okay so I got started with the installation which was run of the mill- partition disk,choose mount points, start install. At the end you are left with a bare bones system sporting nothing other than the barest minimum of what you require. A shell to login to, an editor and the package management tools ( of course along with network management tools). Anyone installing Arch has to build the system up, according to his needs, just like Gentoo.

All configurations are handled inside a single config residing at /etc/rc.conf. You define the OS here in this config file. Very well documented with sane default values and neatly laid out. There is no fiddling with GUI’s, editing init scripts and such lot here. Just a simple little config file. After you have stopped admiring the way the system is organized, you turn your attention to package management.

Pacman is the name of the tool that takes the role of apt-get here. This guy is introduced very early on. While the initial install goes on, you can see that the packages are all just tgz files, just like Slackware, only pacman manages them. After the system is built and configured, you use pacman to install all software you want.

For installing packages

pacman -S packagename

For updating the system.

pacman -Syu

Nothing great in that. Yum, urpmi and apt-get does that. Well, the great thing comes when you need some software that’s not there in the core/extra/community repositories. That is when you head over to Arch User Community Repository. You can download packages sources from there and get build scripts to build them. Then you can just use pacman to install the generated package. If all that sounds too tedious, there is a package in AUR called yaourt that does exactly this, only you use it like pacman. I know . This build script thing sounds like Slackbuilds.

I ended up installing fluxbox first to get into a graphical system ASAP and then getting firefox. I got KDE 4 yesterday night and tonight I am all set. All of the packages are vanilla ( except the most arch specific things like yaourt and arch linux artwork ). I have most of the things i need now. Except …

• Wireless [ UPDATE : I fixed it after reading through the Wireless Setup ]
• Malayalam input [ UPDATE : I fixed it by creating an Arch package for myself. Took about half an hour.]

I haven’t yet been able to get wireless working, but I haven’t spent much time on it either. Malayalam input is a pain. They don’t seem to carry swanalekha yet. I got the m17n version of swanalekha working with scim, but it seems to be full of glitches.

I almost forgot to mention. The system is superfast ( like F10 ) and is super responsive now.  I couldn’t believe it when i clicked on OOO Writer menu entry , it showed the splash screen for a moment and then Writer just appeared. Thats the fastest OOO Writer launch I have ever seen.

Overall, I don’t feel like moving away from it. This feels like Slackware done right. For someone who has been stuck to Slackware for three major versions, it is too good.

എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും എന്റെ പുതുവത്സരാശംസകള്‍.

ഈ ഒരു പോസ്റ്റോടുകൂടി ഈ നാടകം വീണ്ടും തുടങ്ങുകയായി എന്ന് അറിയിച്ചുകൊള്ളുന്നു.

പിന്‍കുറിപ്പ് : ഓ. മതി ചിരിച്ചത്. ഞാന്‍ മാസം ഒരെണ്ണമെങ്കിലും എഴുതും. നോക്കിക്കോ (^_^)