The Linux Experiment

I mentioned in the podcast that I was having problems viewing Flash stuff in Firefox and I blamed it on KDE. I may have jumped the gun here, because the same issue started cropping up in GNOME. I went on the Linux Mint forums and other users were having similar issues. I’ve run the code that they suggested in the terminal, but I’m not sure if it worked because the problem doesn’t manifest instantly – sometimes it takes over half an hour before websites that run flash white themselves out.

I use FTP for a lot of things, mostly related to website administration. On Windows, my client of choice is WinSCP. It has this great feature that allows you to constantly synchronize a local directory with a remote directory, allowing you to make changes in your local editor of choice, and have them reflected on the site as soon as you save the file.

On Linux, I’ve been remoting into the server via SSH, opening the remote file in nano, and copying and pasting my local code to the server. While the combination of SSH and bash scripting can allow for some really cool code, I’d rather just find an application that mimics the WinSCP functionality that I’m looking for.

To that end, I have raided Synaptic and downloaded as many different graphical FTP clients as I could find. Read on, dear reader, as I delve into the depths of FTP on Linux, and share my findings with you.

1. BareFTP
This app is written in C# (for really cool cross-platform action), and targets the Mono framework on the GNOME desktop environment. It supports the FTP, FTPS, and SFTP protocols, and has a nice, clean looking interface:

It's pretty and functional, no?

I really like this app. It has a nice, intuitive interface, feels quick, and supports bookmarks that let you automatically connect to a remote server and set your local and remote directories with a single button click. Unfortunately, the program does not appear to support any kind of scripting or directory watching, so while it may see use as a client for occasional file transfers, it likely won’t suffice as a WinSCP replacement.

2. Filezilla
Before discoving WinSCP, I used this app for a long time on Windows. It’s an excellent utility that seems to have improved quite a bit since the last time I used it.

More features along with a more cluttered interface.

Of particular interest to me are the Synchronized Browsing and Directory Comparison features. The former changes the remote directory whenever you change the local directory, so that you can always keep an eye on the difference between local and remote files. To that end, the latter feature applies a colour coded scheme to both local and remote files so that you know exactly what has been synchronized to the server and what hasn’t. However, like bareFTP, there is no synchronization support.

And Others…
The unfortunate part about this little exercise is that after trying another three FTP clients, I realized that they’re roughly all the same. Sure, some are uglier, like JFTP, and some are uber streamlined like kasablanca. Unfortunately, even though they all do the same task in a slightly different way, none of them do quite what I want.

And so I ask you, the reader – is there an FTP client that allows me to synchronize a local directory with a remote one?

Wine, or W.I.N.E. Is Not an Emulator, is a set of compatibility libraries that allow some Windows applications to run pseudo naively on Linux by mapping Windows API calls to native Linux calls. In the past I have been sort of successful with using Wine but I have never really given it a good go. So I decided that I should put Wine through it’s paces!

Approach

Rather than approach this from an expert’s standpoint I am going to use Wine starting from a novice’s ability and then move up if needed.

1. Try and run program from graphical shell
2. Try and run program from terminal
3. Try and adjust WINE settings to see if I can make it work
4. Search the web for ideas and consult Wine’s App DB

The Programs

I have selected a number of different applications to test with Wine – some productive software and some games. I have done no research as to the compatibility of these programs under Wine, they just happen to be easy to use for testing, so it’s going to be a surprise for me no matter what happens. As I’m sure you can tell it’s been a while since I’ve played games on my PC…

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
  • Windows 95+/DOS
  • 75 MHz Pentium Processor (120 MHz recommended)
  • 8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended)
  • 4x CD-ROM
  • 1 MB video card
• SimCity 3000 Unlimited
  • Windows 98+
  • 233 MHz Pentium Processor
  • 32 MB RAM
  • 2 MB DirectX 7.0a-compatible video card
• Stronghold
  • Windows 95+
  • 300 MHz Processor (550+ recommended)
  • 64MB RAM
  • 8x CD-ROM
  • 4MB DirectX 7.0-compatible video card
• Notepad++
  • Unknown requirements
• µTorrent
  • Windows 95+
• Internet Explorer 8
  • Windows XP+

First thing we need to do is make sure Wine is installed!

How to install Wine on Fedora 11

Technically all you need to do is:

sudo yum install wine

but you might want to install some of the additional packages as well, just in case!

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Now that EA has released this game as free getting a copy of it was a simple download. Once downloaded and unzipped I mounted it and tried running the autorun script.

Red Alert autorun

Error

Sadly this resulted in the above error. Next I tried opening it using a simple double-click on the SETUP.EXE. This launched the program but gave me the following error message:

5.1 = Windows XP?

1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE

With that failure I decided to try and run it from the terminal so that I would at least be able to see errors in the print outs.

wine SETUP.EXE

This however only resulted in the same error message.

2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILURE

If this problem is truly related to the fact that it thinks I’m running Windows XP maybe I can change that. So off to the Wine configuration menu I went and lo and behold I found an option to do just that!

You can even set different programs to think they are running on different versions of Windows!

This time I got a different error message about not being able to find all of the files. I decided to burn the ISO to a disc to eliminate any problems with the way I mounted it. Putting the newly burned disc into the drive and using the terminal to launch autorun.exe made everything work and the installation finished. A simple click of the menu icon and I was playing Red Alert!

3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: SUCCESS

Command & Conquer: Red Alert Final Result: SUCCESS

Well that wasn’t so bad. Let’s try the others!

SimCity 3000 Unlimited

The first thing I did was pop the CD in the computer.

In goes SimCity 3000 Unlimited

Autorun

Which promptly gave me this:

Nothing could be that easy...

I even tried browsing to the setup exe’s location and running it directly. Still no luck.

Stop teasing me!

1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILED

Next I tried to run the game from the terminal. I navigated to the setup folder and ran the exe with wine.

cd /media/SIMCITY3000/SETUP/ENGLISH/

wine SETUP.EXE

To my amazement this resulted in the installer starting correctly! A couple of quick Next button clicks and some typing of my serial key and the game began to install. Exactly 3 minutes later the game was finished installing. I then navigated to the application through the GNOME menubar:

Applications > Wine > Programs > Maxis > SimCity 3000 Unlimited > SimCity 3000 Unlimited

Holding my breath I clicked the button and… nothing. Hmm. Turning back to the terminal I browsed to the location where Wine installed SimCity on my hard drive and ran the program from there.

cd /home/tyler/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Maxis/SimCity\ 3000\ Unlimited/Apps/

wine sc3U.exe

This presented me with the following error screen… about 30 times until I killed it from the terminal.

I just kept on getting this error message... over and over and over and over...

2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILED

I looked around in the Wine settings and couldn’t find anything that would be causing the game to fail so miserably so I gave up on this step.

3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: FAILED

Turning to the web I quickly looked up “SimCity 3000″ on Wine’s App DB. From the look of things SimCity 3000 works with Wine but SimCity 3000 Unlimited does not.

4. Search the web for ideas and consult Wine’s App DB: FAILED

SimCity 3000 Unlimited Final Result: FAILED

Try as I might SimCity 3000 Unlimited just does not work under Wine.

Stronghold

Once again I started by inserting the CD-ROM and tried to run the autorun that popped up.

Will this work better than SimCity?

Will this autorun work?

CRAP!

Next I tried once again browsing to the CD-ROM in Nautilus.

Do I run autoplay.exe?

Or maybe Setup.exe? Or even Stronghold.exe?

Unfortunately once again no success using the graphical shell.

1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE

After that, and recognizing the limited success I had with SimCity, I repeated the steps but this time using the terminal. To my surprise the installer appeared!

cd /media/030819_1208/

wine autoplay.exe

A little over 4 minutes later the game finished installing and I was presented with the launch screen. Again I held my breath and clicked on Play. It launched! Holy crap it’s actually working… well… sort of. Something wasn’t quite right so I closed the application and opened up Wine configuration. In that window I checked the box next to “emulate a virtual desktop” and set the resolution to 800×600. Once again I restarted Stronghold… GREAT SUCCESS! It worked flawlessly!

2. Try and run program from terminal: SUCCESS

Stronghold Final Result: SUCCESS

Stronghold proves that Wine is capable of providing a seemingly fully compatible Windows experience.

Notepad++

After a quick download from the SourceForge website I began, again, by trying to run the installer from the graphical shell.

Can you guess what happened next?

1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE

Back to the command line I went and after entering the typical commands I was once again presented with the installer.

cd ~/Desktop/

wine npp.5.5.1.Installer.exe

By this point I honestly don’t know why Wine has a graphical launch option or why it fails so badly. Less than a minute later, using the terminal, Notepad++ was up and running perfectly, albeit with some odd graphical issues.

Notice how the text doesn't look quite right?

2. Try and run program from terminal: SUCCESS

Notepad++ Final Result: SUCCESS

While not without its odd graphical problems, Notepad++ seems completely stable and quite usable on the Linux desktop.

µTorrent

After three successes I was on a roll and jumped over to the µTorrent website in anticipation of another success.

I’ll save you the details,

1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE

Turning to the trusty terminal (wow that was a lot of t-words) I started up utorrent.exe with Wine.

wine utorrent.exe

The install went fine and even placed a desktop launcher on my desktop when I clicked the ‘Create Desktop Icon’ box. Running the application proved to be a bit more challenging and when I tried to run it from Wine’s Program Files using the following command,

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/uTorrent/uTorrent.exe

I was presented with some rather odd behaviour in the form of another installation. In fact no matter what I did I couldn’t get it to work.

2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILURE

Again I poked around in the Wine settings but there just didn’t seem to be anything in there that would help.

3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: FAILURE

Getting frustrated I turned to the internet, specifically Wine’s App DB, for help. I tried following a number of suggestions but nothing seemed to work. I even ended up on µTorrent’s Wikipedia page but still nothing. On a funny note, Wikipedia lists µTorrent’s platforms as “Wine officially supported”.

4. Search the web for ideas and consult WINE’s App DB: FAILURE

µTorrent Final Result: FAILURE

Try as I might I just can’t get this BitTorrent client to work properly.

Internet Explorer 8

Once again I started by using the graphical shell – although I honestly didn’t believe it would work. And guess what?

1. Try and run program from graphical shell: FAILURE

Following the pattern I tried the terminal next. This started up the application but ended abruptly when IE prompted me saying that “This installation does not support your system architecture (32/64 bits)”. That doesn’t make sense though because the Internet Explorer I downloaded was for x86…

2. Try and run program from terminal: FAILURE

Poking around again in Wine’s configuration proved to be fruitless. There just didn’t seem to be any way to tell it to run the application as x86.

3. Try and adjust Wine settings to see if I can make it work: FAILURE

Finally I turned to the web and searched the App DB for Internet Explorer 8. This made it pretty clear that I wasn’t going to get IE 8 to work under Wine as every version listed, aside from 1.0 and 1.5, had a rating of Garbage – Wine’s worst compatibility rating.

4. Search the web for ideas and consult Wine’s App DB: FAILURE

Internet Explorer 8 Final Result: FAILURE

I guess Microsoft’s iconic browser was just not meant to play nicely with Tux.

Well there you have it

I have put Wine through its paces and while there were quite a bit of failures I am very impressed. Wine might just spark a trip down memory lane with my favorite Windows game classics!

I honestly can’t remember how I stumbled across this website but there is a lot of useful information there. Rather than go through the 14 pages of tips and tricks I will just highlight some that I found to be very useful and let you go to the source for the rest.

NOTE: These are all tips for Fedora 11, but with some simple tweaking you should be able to apply them to your distribution of choice.

Modify the sudoers file

By default your username is not included in the list of those accounts who can use sudo. To change this do the following (altered to use nano instead of vi because I prefer things that way):

su -c ‘nano /etc/sudoers’

Then find the line that says:

root    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

and below it add

[username] ALL=(ALL)      ALL

where [username] is the username you want to allow to use sudo. Press Ctrl+O and Enter to save.

You can test if this worked by running the following command:

sudo whoami

If it worked you should see the word root. From this point forward I will assume you have given yourself the ability to use sudo.

Let yum downgrade

By default yum does not allow you to downgrade, or revert to a lower version numbered package. If you would like to change this run:

sudo yum install yum-allowdowngrade

To use it run this command:

sudo yum update –allow-downgrade

Add an ‘open in terminal’ option to Nautilus

This will let you right-click on directories and select open in terminal.

sudo yum install nautilus-open-terminal

Then just log out, and log back in.

Use the backspace key to go back a page in Firefox

Open Firefox and in the URL bar type:

about:config

Then use the filter box to search for

browser.backspace_action

Right-click on it and select Modify. Change the value from 2 to 0 and press OK. Restart Firefox.

Force GTK programs to use QT in KDE

I actually tried this and it seemed to work just fine. In fact it might solve some of Dave’s problems. In a terminal run:

sudo yum install gtk-qt-engine

Then log out and log back in. Next go to System Settings > Appearance > GTK Styles and Fonts and select KDE style in GTK Applications.

Many more

As I said there are 14 whole pages of similar tips and tricks available at the website. Check them out for yourself!

Since making my switch to GNOME earlier in the week I have finally settled into my new desktop environment. I must admit that while the transition has been almost completely seamless, and in fact has fixed a lot of my issues, I find myself missing KDE. Without trying to spark the holy war that is the GNOME vs KDE argument, allow me to quickly outline some of the reasons for my homesickness.

Look and Feel

Yes I get it, GNOME is supposed to be stripped down and functional. KDE, on the other hand, is supposed to allow for full customization, sometimes at the expense of clutter. Neither of these however explains why GNOME icons and artwork feel so dated when compared to KDE. Take the following as an example.

See the above? See how the Fedora stock icons are just simple shade jobs? Heck that’s better than most default GNOME icon sets. See how the KDE version has actual work put into it? Time and time again KDE wins points for putting more effort into the artwork. And yes I know that you can completely theme GNOME to ‘make it look pretty’ but why should you have to? Why are the defaults so terrible? Surely there are some open source artists out there somewhere. It’s simple things like this that lead to an overall better feel while using KDE when compared to GNOME.

Interaction

The first thing I did back in KDE was to turn off that single-click to open things nonsense. Once that was done my interaction with the two desktops has been more or less identical. However recently GNOME has been ‘losing’ my touchpad tap-click. When I first boot into the desktop it seems to work just fine, but then after a random amount of time I have to resort to the physical mouse buttons. This is really, really annoying.

Battery Life

I have configured both desktop environments for optimal battery life and have some interesting findings. Perhaps as a result of the sparse power management abilities in GNOME I actually get about a half hour less of battery life compared with KDE. I really do wish GNOME would allow for additional power customization; for example I don’t even know if GNOME scales down my CPU clock when it’s running on battery…

One week and counting

Well that’s it for now. At the end of the day it really is a short list of complaints. If anything new crops up I’ll be sure to write about it, if not you’ll have to wait for our podcast!

As you know we are all going to be transitioning from our current desktop environment (DEs) to something new. I did a bit of quick research and it seems as though Fedora offers the following DE options: KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE. However because KDE is my current DE I  obviously can’t use that one.

Goodbye KDE, you served me well

LXDE

Let me start by saying I didn’t chose LXDE as my replacement. With that out of the way I think LXDE could have a lot of potential given the right scenario for its use. From what I have read, it is an extremely light-weight DE that is mostly menu driven. So much so that you can actually script the right-click menu!

Xfce

I consider Xfce to be GNOME-lite, and I mean that in a good way. It is designed to remove some of the clutter found in more fully-fledged DEs, thus speeding up your ability to be productive. However with my system’s beefy specs and the fact that I have been running KDE this whole time I doubt I need to shed that much DE weight.

GNOME

GNOME is the default desktop for Fedora and something that I had initially passed up in order to differentiate my experience from that of Dana’s. Now though it seems as though GNOME is the best (for me!) alternative to KDE.

Installation

After some quick Googling I found a forum post that described installing GNOME through yum by typing the following command into a terminal:

sudo yum groupinstall “GNOME Desktop Environment”

I could only assume that this means that yum will go out and grab anything that has to do with the string “GNOME Desktop Environment”. So I bravely hit the Enter key only to be presented with a list of 57 packages that needed to be installed for 106MiB worth of download!

Is this ok [y/N]: y

The downloads were actually very quick with an average speed somewhere between 650KiB/s and 1MiB/s. The install process on the other hand took significantly longer. Once it was finished I decided to reboot (just in case!) before switching the session options to load GNOME instead of KDE.

First impressions

Oh god what am I doing here? I am not very good with GNOME. It seems as though the first thing GNOME did was get rid of my pretty KDE log in screen and replace it with a sparse looking GNOME one. Par for the course I suppose. A quick switch of Sessions from KDE to GNOME and I logged in.

My new GNOME desktop

Once my desktop loaded GNOME presented me with a pop-up telling me to unlock the default keyring. Is this the same as kwallet? Apparently not because I had to keep guessing passwords until I finally hit the right one.

Holy crap! My wireless actually connected without prompting me for the wifi password. That is a feakin’ miracle!

The next thing I did was try and install Compiz, which enables desktop effects for GNOME. This took some work but eventually I got it to work by running the following command:

sudo yum install -y ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-gconf fusion-icon-gtk emerald compiz-fusion compiz-fusion-gnome yum install -y ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-gconf fusion-icon-gtk emerald compiz-fusion compiz-fusion-gnome libcompizconfig compiz-gnome compiz-bcop compiz compizconfig-python compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-extras-gnomelibcompizconfig compiz-gnome compiz-bcop compiz compizconfig-python compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-extras-gnome

and then turning on some effects within CompizConfig Settings Manager.

CompizConfig Settings Manager

Next I had to turn off some stupid default setting that made my file manager open a new window for every folder I browsed into. I don’t know why this was enabled by default but it was awful and had to go.

Why GNOME? WHY??

To finish things off I quickly install GNOME Do and set it’s theme to Docky at the recommendation of Phil D. And welcome to my new desktop!

Is this Mac OSX?

Differences

I haven’t had a long time to play with GNOME on Fedora yet but I will certainly be comparing it to KDE along the way. So far from what I’ve seen GNOME seems to be a little bit snappier. Another thing I noticed was that while both KDE and GNOME can mount Windows shares, GNOME can’t seem to write to them for some reason. I actually quickly booted back into KDE to make sure this wasn’t just a fluke and sure enough KDE could still write to those same shares. On the plus side KDE now also remembers my WiFi password!

2 weeks and counting…

That’s all for now. In the two weeks leading up to our next podcast I will continue to post about new discoveries and little differences between GNOME and KDE. Until then…

Here at The Linux Experiment we are all about shaking things up. After all, we have committed to using Linux for four whole months just to see if we could! The next big thing that we are going to introduce into the experiment is a little environmental change. No I don’t mean the Al Gore kind of environment, but rather the desktop environment like GNOME or KDE.

For a week or so, leading up to the recording of our next podcast, each of us will be switching our current desktop environment to something else. The point is to once more branch out of our comfort zones a little bit and see if we don’t end up liking something else better!

Stay tuned!

Here’s another fun little tidbit – today I tried to use OpenOffice.org Writer seriously for the first time, and realized rather quickly that I was running version 2.1 of same. For those who don’t already know, OpenOffice.org was close on unusable prior to version 3.x. While it has since matured into a very capable suite of programs, the first few versions were just awful. In particular, I couldn’t get the formatting correct on a numbered list with bullet-ted sub-points.

A quick apt-get -t lenny-backports install openoffice.org did the trick, and removed my system-wide dictionary as a bonus. Now both Icedove (Thunderbird) and Pidgin claim that everything that I type is spelled incorrectly. A quick check with Synaptic confirmed that the aspell package had mysteriously disappeared from my system; when I tried to mark it for re-installation, Synaptic refused, claiming that it aspell depended on a package called dictionaries-common, which wasn’t going to be installed for some unspecified reason. Christ.

Figuring that it was a version issue (since the only thing that has changed on my system is my version of OpenOffice.org), I tried apt-get -t lenny-backports install aspell. It worked, and also warned me that my OpenOffice.org upgrade had left about 25 packages lying about that ought to be removed:

bluez-gnome, libmtp7, python-notify, obex-data-server, libgda3-common, python-gnome2-extras, evolution-exchange, rhythmbox, system-config-printer,
libgpod3, gnome-themes-extras, bluez-utils, python-eggtrayicon, openoffice.org-style-andromeda, libxalan2-java, python-4suite-xml, libgda3-3,
transmission-common, libgdl-1-0, libxalan2-java-gcj, serpentine, transmission-gtk, libgdl-1-common, gnome-vfs-obexftp

The strange thing is that some of those packages look like they might be required by software other than OpenOffice.org. You know, like Evolution, or maybe Transmission? What the hell is going on here? I’m upgrading to the Testing repositories as soon as I get the chance. Hopefully that will solve some of my old-ass-software issues.

After my first two attempts at getting my Blackberry to sync with Mozilla Thunderbird, I got pissed off and went right to the source of my problems. I emailed the developer of the opensync-plugin-mozilla package that (allegedly) allows Thunderbird to play nicely with OpenSync, and gave him the what for, (politely) asking what I should do. He suggested that I follow the updated installation instructions for checking out and compiling the latest version of his plugin from scratch instead of using the older, precompiled versions that are no longer supported.

I set to it, first removing all of the packages that I had installed during my last two attempts, excluding Barry, as I had already built and installed the latest version of its libraries. Everything else, including OpenSync and all of its plugins went, and I started from scratch. Luckily, the instructions were easy to follow, although they recommended that I get the latest versions of some libraries by adding Debian’s sid repositories to my sources list. This resulted in me shitting my pants later in the day, when I saw 642 available updates for my system in Synaptic. I figured out what was going on pretty quickly and disabled updates from sid, without ruining my system. If there’s one thing that Windows has taught me over the years, it is to never set a machine to auto-install updates.

Once I had the source code and dependency libraries, the install was a snap. The plugin source came with a utils directory full of easy to use scripts that automated most of the process. With everything going swimmingly, I was jarred out of my good mood by a nasty error that occurred when I ran the build-install-opensync.sh script:

CMake Error at cmake/modules/FindPkgConfig.cmake:357 (message):
None of the required ‘libopensync1;>=0.39′ found
Call Stack (most recent call first):
cmake/modules/FindOpenSync.cmake:27 (PKG_SEARCH_MODULE)
CMakeLists.txt:15 (FIND_PACKAGE)

CMake Error at cmake/modules/FindOpenSync.cmake:46 (MESSAGE):
OpenSync cmake modules not found.  Have you installed opensync core or did
you set your PKG_CONFIG_PATH if installing in a non system directory ?
Call Stack (most recent call first):
CMakeLists.txt:15 (FIND_PACKAGE)

It turns out that the plugin requires OpenSync v0.39 or greater to be installed to work. Of course, the latest version of same in either the Debian main or lenny-backports repositories is v0.22-2. This well-aged philosophy of the Debian Stable build has irked me a couple of times now, and I fully intend to update my system to the testing repositories before the end of the month. In any case, I quickly made my way over to the OpenSync homepage to obtain a newer build of their libraries. There I found out not only that version 0.39 had just been released on September 21st, and also that it isn’t all that stable:

Releases 0.22 (and 0.2x svn branch) and before are considered stable and suitable for production. 0.3x releases introduce major architecture and API changes and are targeted for developers and testers only and may not even compile or are likely to contain severe bugs.

0.3x releases are not recommended for end users or distribution packaging.

Throwing caution to the wind, I grabbed a tarball of compilation scripts from the website, and went about my merry way gentooing it up. After a couple of minor tweaks to the setEnvOpensync.sh script, I got the cmpOpensync script to run, which checked out the latest trunk from the svn, and automatically compiled and installed it for me. By running the command msynctool –version, I found out that I now had OpenSync v0.40-snapshot installed. Relieved, I headed back to my BlueZync installation. This time around, I managed to get right up to the build-install-bluezync.sh script before encountering another horrible dependency error:

– checking for one of the modules ‘glib-2.0′
–   found glib-2.0, version 2.16.6
– Found GLib2: glib-2.0 /usr/include/glib-2.0;/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include
– Looking for include files HAVE_GLIB_GREGEX_H
– Looking for include files HAVE_GLIB_GREGEX_H – found
– checking for one of the modules ‘libxml-2.0′
–   found libxml-2.0, version 2.6.32
– checking for one of the modules ‘libopensync1′
–   found libopensync1, version 0.40-snapshot
– checking for one of the modules ‘thunderbird-xpcom;icedove-xpcom’
–   found icedove-xpcom, version 2.0.0.22
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_VERSION 2.0.0.22
–     THUNDERBIRD_VERSION_MAIN 2
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_MAIN_INCLUDE_DIR /usr/include/icedove
–     NSPR_MAIN_INCLUDE_DIR /usr/include/nspr
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_LIBRARY_DIRS /usr/lib/icedove
–     THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_LIBRARIES xpcom;plds4;plc4;nspr4;pthread;dl
– checking for one of the modules ‘sunbird-xpcom;iceowl-xpcom’
–   found iceowl-xpcom, version 0.8
SUNBIRD_INCLUDE_DIRS /usr/include/iceowl;/usr/include/iceowl/xpcom;/usr/include/iceowl/string;/usr/include/nspr
SEVERAL
–      SUNBIRD_MAIN_INCLUDE_DIR /usr/include/iceowl
–      SUNBIRD_VERSION 0.8
– Found xpcom (thunderbird and sunbird):
–   THUNDERBIRD_XPCOM_VERSION=[2.0.0.22]
–   SUNBIRD_VERSION=[0.8]
–   THUNDERBIRD_VERSION_MAIN=[2]
–   SUNBIRD_VERSION_MAIN=[0]
–   XPCOM_INCLUDE_DIRS /usr/include/nspr;/usr/include/icedove;/usr/include/icedove/addrbook;/usr/include/icedove/extensions;/usr/include/icedove/rdf;/usr/include/icedove/string;/usr/include/icedove/xpcom_obsolete;/usr/include/icedove/xpcom;/usr/include/icedove/xulapp;/usr/include/iceowl
–   XPCOM_LIBRARY_DIRS /usr/lib/icedove
–   XPCOM_LIBRARIES xpcom;plds4;plc4;nspr4;pthread;dl
–   SUNBIRD_VERSION 0.8
CALENDAR_VERSION=[8]
LIBTBXPCOM_INCLUDE_DIR
XPCOM_LIBRARIES  xpcom;plds4;plc4;nspr4;pthread;dl
ENABLE_TESTING [yes]
TESTING ENABLED
– checking for one of the modules ‘check’
CMake Error at cmake/modules/FindPkgConfig.cmake:357 (message):
None of the required ‘check’ found
Call Stack (most recent call first):
cmake/modules/FindCheck.cmake:27 (PKG_SEARCH_MODULE)
CMakeLists.txt:73 (FIND_PACKAGE)

CMAKING mozilla-sync 0.1.7
– Configuring done

From what I can gather from this output, the configuration file was checking for dependencies, and got hung up on one called “check.” Unfortunately, this gave me zero information that I could use to solve the problem. I can verify that the install failed by running msynctool –listplugins, which returns:

Available plugins:
msynctool: symbol lookup error: msynctool: undefined symbol: osync_plugin_env_num_plugins

Ah, shit. Looks like I’m stuck again. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, if any of our readers has ever seen something like this, I could use a couple of pointers.

It’s no secret that Linux, as with any other operating system (and yes, I realize that I just grouped all Linux distributions into a collective) has its idiosyncrasies.  The little things that just sort of make me cock my head to the side and wonder why I’m doing this to myself, or make me want to snap my entire laptop in half.

One of these things is something Tyler previously complained about – a kernel update on Fedora 11 that just happened to tank his graphics capabilities.  Now, I might just be lucky but why in the hell would Fedora release a kernel update before compatibility for two major graphics card manufacturers wasn’t released yet?

Fortunately for Tyler, a kmod-catalyst driver was released for his ATI graphics card yesterday (today?) and he’s now rocking the latest kernel with the latest video drivers.  Unfortunately for me, some slacker has yet to update my kmod-nvidia drivers to operate properly with the latest kernel.

While this is more of a rant than anything else, it’s still a valid point.  I’ve never had trouble on a Windows-based machine wherein a major update will cause a driver to no longer function (short of an actual version incrementation – so of course, I would expect Windows XP drivers to not function in Vista, and Vista drivers to not function in Windows 7; similarly, I would not expect Fedora 11 drivers to function in Fedora 12).

<end rant>