K-Squared Ramblings

Google It! (Also: Fedora 12)

• Whenever my site gets hits from Google’s Italian site, my brain insists on reading it as “Google It!” #
• Fedora 12 is out today. I’d actually lost track of the schedule. With any luck, PulseAudio will actually work. #

Audio, Social Worker Spam, & Prius Hatch

• Fedora 12 claims PulseAudio improvements. Here’s hoping sound will actually work after suspend+resume again. #Linux #
• Also: iPod train wreck of the morning was the Cardcaptor Sakura theme followed by Garbage’s Supervixen. #
• What’s with all the “Be a social worker!” spam lately? It’s a change from the usual porn, pills, watches & software, but out of left field. #
• Future reference: Though there’s no lever to pop the hatch on the Prius, unlocking the doors allows someone else to open it from outside #

SCOpe

• About time! RT @brionv: After 6 years SCO finally dumps the exec who ran Caldera’s Linux biz into the ground. #
• Doozy of an update in the copyright case over Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster. (via @ThisIsTrue) #
• RT @sans_isc: Backed up, lately? #
• Found a pack of screen protectors while cleaning yesterday & replaced the one on my phone. HUGE difference in clarity! #

@font-face Crashes Firefox on Fedora

With the release of Firefox 3.5, I decided it was finally time to get serious about setting up a custom headline font on Speed Force. Cross-platform @font-face embedding in CSS is now possible on Firefox, Safari, the beta version of Opera, and (I think) Chrome. So I pulled out some bookmarks, looked for some fonts with licenses that allowed embedding, messed around with a test page and finally settled on two custom fonts: one for the post headlines, and one for the title and the sidebar section headers.

I tested it in a couple of browsers, both on my Linux desktop and on the Mac laptop, and planned to test it on the Windows desktop when Katie was done with it. But then something weird started happening.

Firefox started crashing. Repeatedly. Not quite predictably, but only when that test page was open.

I figured maybe it was a corrupted font, so I removed one, then the other, then both. If the page tried to download an embedded font, Firefox would eventually crash. If not, it was rock solid.

This seemed kind of bizarre for such a high-profile new feature to cause consistent crashing.

I did some searches online but didn’t come up with anything until I tried running Firefox from the command-line, so that I could read the error message. It complained, "firefox: cairo-ft-font.c:554: _cairo_ft_unscaled_font_lock_face: Assertion `!unscaled->from_face' failed." Searching for that led me to Fedora bug 509501 and bug 502274, and this blog entry.

To make a long story short:

• On Linux, Firefox uses a library called cairo to handle graphics, including fonts.
• An old version of cairo had a bug that would cause crashes with fonts under certain circumstances.
• Cairo fixed the bug in December.
• Fedora 11 is still using the old version of cairo.

So until Fedora ships a newer (or at least patched) version of cairo, my primary browser on my primary desktop will crash on any web page with an embedded font.

Nice.

I guess I could patch my own system for now and put the fonts up for the benefit of the rest of the Firefox+Safari+Opera-using audience on Windows and Macs (and probably other Linux distributions). But that means causing a crash for anyone else running Fedora 11 when they visit my site. I’m not too thrilled about that idea. I have no problem with adding enhancements that only appear under certain browser+os combinations, but actively crashing a browser? Not something I want to do.

Update (July 21): Aha! Fedora submitted an updated cairo for inclusion in the stable release last night!

Pushing Daisies, WaMu, Bees, Ubuntu and Vortex

• Brian Fuller talks about the future of Pushing Daisies #
• WaMu building has taken down its sign. Giant Chase banner at street level. #
• Guy w/ sign by side of road: “Homeless kind soul stuck in vortex.” I get the 1st half, but WTF does “stuck in vortex” mean? Downward spiral? #
• Retweeting @ThisIsTrue: possible cause identified for honey bee colony collapse #
• Odd: If Ubuntu is the biggest desktop Linux out there, why is my torrent for 8.10 64bit idle? Fedora 10 64bit found 7 peers in 30 seconds. #

This is why you vote

The code name for Fedora 9 Linux has been chosen, and it’s going to be Sulphur. Because a foul-smelling rock associated with rotten eggs and depictions of Hell is just what we want to identify an operating system. (Actually, it might not be too far off for Windows Vista.)

Bathysphere was only 8 votes behind. Weird, but considerably cooler.

Oh, well. At least it’s not Mayonnaise or Chupacabra. And some of the other names on that list are considerably worse.

When digiKam Failed to Connect

In the decade I’ve been using Linux, it’s gone from something that required lots of technical know-how just to set up, to something that (in its major flavors) can auto-detect most hardware and provides friendly GUIs for most configuration tasks. But every once in a while, I have the kind of experience that would turn a new user off of Linux. Usually because Fedora has decided to change something during an update.

In this case, it was a digital camera problem. Since we bought our Canon PowerShot SD600 last December, I’ve used KDE’s digiKam to transfer and manage the photos. DigiKam detected the camera and accessed the photos right out of the box, no configuration needed beyond telling it to remember the model. But something changed in the last two weeks, and last night I started getting an error message: Failed to connect to the camera. Oddly enough, it could still detect the camera when it was connected. But it couldn’t display or download the images.

I searched all over, hitting dead end after dead end, until I got a hint that it was a permissions problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Double helping of Moonshine

A question over at the Comic Bloc Forums reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to writing a full profile of the Impulse villain, White Lightning. Fortunately I had a full list of appearances already, so I was able to look up the answer to the question, but it felt like being caught totally unprepared. So yesterday I re-read all her appearances, and tonight I wrote up a profile of White Lightning.

Just for fun, I did some searches for her name. Mostly I came up with cars, horses, wax and, of course, booze. And an alpaca. Back to the booze, there was one point at which the character was mistakenly identified as as Moonshine (later explained away as an in-world mix-up, which would have made more sense if she hadn’t been the one calling herself the wrong name!)

Now the funny thing: the “…in pop culture” section in Wikipedia’s article on Moonshine reminded me that Fedora 7, which just came out last week and which I installed at work a few days ago, is codenamed Moonshine.

The only way the timing could have been more appropriate would be if I’d written the character bio the same day as the Linux release.

Fedora 7 problems with glint video driver

Just a warning for any Fedora Linux users preparing to upgrade to Fedora 7: Grab the Live CD first and make sure that all your hardware works properly. If not, see if the fix is available before you actually upgrade.

I upgraded a system with a Permedia 2 video card, which uses the glint drivers. The installer couldn’t launch the GUI, but I’ve run into that fairly often, so I just used the text-based installer without thinking much of it. The upgrade process itself went fine, but on booting into the new system, it was unable to launch X. I kept getting the following error: Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla + Linux

This is good news: Mozilla will be working more closely with various Linux distributors including Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, and yes, even Debian, to coordinate Firefox updates, configuration, etc.

There are two main issues: making Mozilla’s Firefox installer work everywhere (it mostly does, but on some systems you need to install some compatibility libraries first), and keeping the distributions’ versions in sync with the official one.

After the Debian IceWeasel debacle, and Fedora deciding to skip Firefox 2 and wait for Firefox 3, it’s good to know that Mozilla has recognized the problem and is working on it. One key piece of information: Red Hat and Novell will both be providing extended support for Firefox 1.5 past its official EOL next April.

(via Fedora Weekly News)

Fixing Flash in Fedora Core 5

I upgraded two computers at work to Fedora Core 5. One was a network upgrade that went without a hitch.* The other was trashed so badly I had to do a fresh install.

I’ve run into a couple of gotchas, among them the fact that text is missing in Flash animations. I messed with my font settings, checked SELinux logs, tried switching from the binary installer to the RPM package, to no avail. I tracked down a Fedora mailing list post that pointed to a mozilla bug that had been languishing for a few months, then added what I knew—which was that it affected Flash regardless of the browser.

On Sunday, commenter Dawid Gajownik tracked down the problem: Flash hard-codes the paths where it looks for fonts, instead of letting the X server tell it where to look. Fedora Core 5 includes a new X server, which no longer puts things in /usr/X11R6. Apparently symlinking the old font paths to the new ones works around the problem:

[root@X ~]# mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
[root@X ~]# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
[root@X X11]# ln -s ../../../../etc/X11/fs
[root@X X11]# ln -s ../../../share/X11/fonts

I tried it with absolute links (to /etc/X11/fs and /usr/share/X11/fonts) instead of relative, and it worked fine.

Also, if SELinux is in enforcing mode, you need to allow text relocations on the Flash library. More info on that in Dawid’s bugzilla comment.

So this should take care of Flash until Macrodobe releases an updated version. They’re apparently heading straight for 8.5 on Linux, which is why they haven’t released Flash 8.0 yet.

*Almost. It turns out the repodata on disc 1 isn’t enough for a network or hard disk installation. I copied all the discs onto an internal web server, then had to grab the repodata folder from a mirror. Would’ve been fine with the CDs except for the annoying problem that the CD drive on that machine doesn’t work. Once I had that, though, the upgrade went smoothly.

Fedora Core 5—and Airport Extreme on Linux?

Fedora Core 5 was released today. I started downloading it this morning, and it should be done this afternoon. I’ll probably start updating the Fedora boxes at work later this week, though for my home system I may wait until RPMForge catches up.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the release notes, and found one item particularly interesting:

There are new experimental drivers that provide support for the widely-used Broadcom 43xx wireless chipsets (http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/).

Read the rest of this entry »

Firefox DnD/Save As Hang on Linux Fixed!

The most annoying thing I’ve had to deal with in Firefox 1.5 is a Linux-only bug in which the first time you do something in a certain class of actions—drag-and-drop, Save As…, and a couple of other things—it will lock up for a period of time (1 second to 30+ seconds, depending on how many tabs & windows you have open), scroll all pages back to the top, and in some cases, bring up an unclickable extra copy of the pop-up menu.

The bug was fixed before Firefox 1.5 was released, but it was too late for the fix to make it in. I actually suspect this bug is one of the reasons that so few Linux distributions have upgraded their built-in Firefox releases to 1.5, though they could always have just added the patch to their build process. Fortunately, Mozilla has decided that it’s worth including in the first bugfix release in the 1.5 series, which is now available for testing. Firefox 1.5.0.1 should be out sometime in the next few weeks.

Mandriva: Dual Upgrade

I just updated a system running Mandriva Linux 2006 and in the release notes I discovered that not only will it upgrade a Mandrake system, but it can now upgrade a Conectiva system. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given that both used RPM as their package format/database, but I really had the impression that Mandriva was primarily Mandrake with some extra stuff from Conectiva. It’s nice to see that there really is a true upgrade path for both distributions.

Apache, mod_ssl, and syntax errors in krb5.h

Upgraded the Apache web server today. I’d forgotten about a problem compiling mod_ssl on some systems. Fortunately I had left myself a note about it.

If you get syntax errors in krb5.h while trying to build Apache with mod_ssl, it’s probably because your Linux distribution puts the Kerberos include files in their own subdirectory (Red Hat/Fedora and derivatives do this), and the configure script has somehow missed them.

Solution: Configure mod_ssl and Apache as normal. Then edit the file path_to_apache_source/src/modules/ssl/Makefile. Look for the CFLAGS1 line and add -I/usr/kerberos/include to it.

Then continue with the build as normal.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.