Techy things

So, I'm sick for the week. I pulled something in my back that hurts like fuck everytime I take a step...I feel like an invalid.
I went to see an orthopaed about it...who in turn gave me one of the most painful experiances of my life. It was worth it tho...two days later, im feeling alot better.

So techy stuff;

I got the okay from the IHK for my Final project. "the installation and migration of an OTRS system."
This means I can get started.

I will be using a virtual box for this, running centos5.3 i386, standered LAMP pack with the installation and migration being the easy part. What you do it install the same version of the otrs system on your target box, and migrate the databases with pipe...well export first. then you just run the upgrade scripts. The database structure does not chage during minor releases, so 2.0.1 is the same structure as 2.0.5. The upgrade process happens when upgrading from say 2.0 to 3.0 and so on. Its a real easy project, and is not hard at all, the documentation will tougher :D tho the presentation infront of the designated jury will either be a breeze or....a disaster.

My experiance tho is that when I get a chace to talk someones ear off...it seems to come naturally. Just keep going till the your time is up, and leave little or no time for questions. This tactic works well hand has gotten me A+'s before...let see how it works this time.

In other news, Im working on my communication skills. backtraking: japanese culture (where I grew up) states; one must never let on the point of conflict during conversation. That means, we tend to beat around the bush, and take people on longwinded, and seemingly unstructured mental walks, never really getting to th point.... heh.

Seeing as Im running into a massive roadblock on a specific software project that I am working on, that is just cycling into oblivion...I feel I really need to get this ironed out. See being a system intigrator, I feel as if my skills dont match up for developing. I have written the odd PHP based application with database connectivity. But I dont feel as if this stuff can be marketed. Its kinda "as is" software.

But thats besides the point, I dont want to be held financially responsible for a system that I am doing for free. And I need to say that without beating around the bush. The problem really is (in german law) everything you sell/buy has to be warrentied for at lest 2 years. You as the seller will have either replace it or fix it (you may charge hours). And the software Im working on, I cant guarantee, as Im just too new to the game to know what to look for. Also did I mention Im writing the software ....for free?

Well, now its out there. . . the die is cast (melodramatic)

Now to write some software.

Cheers

nintendo 3d

I was at the cinema, watching the new New york heart-throb movie "The Adjustment Bureau" with Mat daemon. I thought it to be a bit cliche, a tad modernistic, with a subtle taste of theological sediment. but fun none the less.

there were nintentdo hawkers outside, showing off the new 3d nintendo...very simplistic. the whole 3d pictures from when I was a kid come to mind....the screen ofsets the image to corispond with the prismatic screen. I mean, inovative, but nothing new.

seeing as the graphics on these things are just so pixcelated, you can pull it off, but im not really a gamer or a console fan so .... it was a shot in the barrel for them...:)

No compiling today...

I made sushi for the office today, and spoke with some colleges about the earthquake / tsunami in Japan. I hadn't heard about it till they told me, so it came as a bit of a shock. I found it interesting to hear how people view these kinds of disasters from Europe...where this kinda stuff never happens.

I don't really know what happened... haven't looked into it just yet, let me multi-task to find out what happened.

magnitude 8.7/8.8/9.0

tsunami...in Sendai.

Tokyo subways and highways have been closed down.

After three min of Google foo...this situation seems to be an apocalypse for japan.

The tsunami seems to to have done quite some damage, but Tokyo seems to be okay. Fear of the after shock is what is probably making people leave the city.

I still need to call my family there to make sure everything is okay.

---EDIT---

My relatives a associates are doing well, according to my dad, noone they know of has been affected by this disaster.

Second Run

I had to reboot my VM. This time I'm going to run as root for the build process.

In step 4.4, I set the variables for my ~./bash_profile. since I have not yet chrooted, this means the profile will be that of the live system. Its disconcerting to say the least....that the profile is so sparse.

---EDIT---

On second thought, I will have to run as the lfs user defined in step 4.3, otherwise I cant write the bash_profile I will need.
While Running a recursive chown on the $LFS directory...I realize how friggin` huge libjava is. The recursive chown (Never EVER EVER EVER do this on a productive system) serves the purpose of kinda making a secondary root user. Im sure I actually should have just added the lfs group to root...the die is cast.

sum of the day

The configure command does alot...it builds the makefile. Since the system is sparse and has nothing installed, the makefile is also just as empty.

An interesting thought, is that you can kinda manually read out the makefile to figure out what are "must haves" for your compilation. Better yet you can google how to set the options.

I still have yet to figure out what is wrong with my make, but a few suggestions have been garnered for future use.

Maybe Im just not concentrating...

Building LFS is tougher then I thought.

"make" clean runs a fresh make... make check / make install errors: something missing in/cant find libiberty.*.

Yep, make cant find libiberty because it does yet not exist...or so I would assume....right?....no...

Hmmmm

Well the "detailed" section of this particular chapter, shows me how I can define an alternative to libiberty with sed.

The real weird thing is...the file I would replace with said "sed", apparently exists and resides in it source package... successfully built by GCC.

okay now I'm stumped.

The detailed page...is something out of the jhalfs script...googlefoo got me that far.

Wait a second, is this page telling me that there is an installer script for this... where I can just use my bash feelers to readout the cheat sheet?

My elation was quickly depleted as after getting the latest ALFS...I found it was for advanced users, and not to be a compact version of the LFS book...all references to $_anything variables would have to be set before it could be used.

Alternative solution finding skills are apparently not very useful when it comes to LFS.

--EDIT--

This page helped me for some reason...and some other quote in someones sig "Learning is the progressive realization of ignorance".

Really really simple solution....!file path! for the sed command.

iomega Storcenter ix2- 200

This nas is an interesting device. I recently got myself one...I wanted a buffalo nas but the shop I happened to go to just didnt have one.
This device runs a Linux OS, has a 1ghz processor and 256mb ram, 2 single TB drives, a usb port, and a gigabit lan port.
Its hackable, you can get at the system either by dumping the configuration file thru its web interface, or by mounting both drives as a Raid 0.
The web interface spits out a tar.gz of a dump it will create, when asked for.
iomega gives you the firmware update, or the source of the system if you register on their support page. The update "firmware" is assumably the same as a dump of the / partition without /media. the dump contains a "config" folder where sshd haas been disabled, the uncommenting of a few lines in sshd_config is easy enough.
I repackaged as a tar.gz, the update html page however dosnt want to accept my update...."unrecognised package". The firmware update is packaged as a .tgz compressed file....I cant seem to open it just yet.
Gunzip dosnt recognize the zip format, and renaming to tar.gz file dosnt do the trick either.

What have I learned from this?

I would like to assume that this device runs a slackware variant. The filesystem has configs for apt. It is capable of handling bluetooth.

Next steps?

Im going to get the source code for this device, tho I'm at a loss for words when trying to imagine how I will compile the source, as this device (theoretically) can handle a console port, but I dont feel like soldering onto the mainboard just yet, and have no real way of accessing the command line other then by mounting the raid on a linux device...and physically editing the system there.

more on this later

--EDIT--

I hadn't thought about cross compiling for an ARM processor...not now tho, I will have to make due with just manually mounting the raid and editing there...:(
while I'm at it tho, I may make some modifications to the update options/packaging system...we'll see.

LFS First steps

The first few steps in LFS involve creating a build environment, getting the sources, writing your own bash profile etc.

sourcing the first packages...went surprisingly well. Then GCC came along and ruined it all.

I supposed the purpose of the LFS book is to make you think about what your actually doing and not just find a way to get to your goal...so, the book doesn't tell you much about different library's that GCC needs to build (gmp, mpfr/mpc).

Its obvious enough to know that they are needed, as they are included in the build option for gcc. There is however no reference that these packages need to be built first.

So I build the packages, and of course...GMP starts muttering about failed tests... I'm assuming it has something to do with the environment, but seeing as most other instances of this issue happens from LFS'ing from a running dist of say Ubuntu, and I'm running from a LFS CD, I cant think that this issue happens as a result of the env. maybe it really is just a fail on the side of LFS.

---EDIT---

so yes...I was wrong...

when compiling gcc, put mpc, mpcf , gmp , as freshly unpacked tar balls into the gcc source directory, move to your build directory, remove all references in build options to the above mentioned packages and the source will compile like nothing you've seen before.

run make, make check, make install and we have liftoff...

now to compile the kernel headers

LFS

LFS is a distro most people would bash me about building. It takes time and effort, alot of time and effort. its mostly compile time so, I dont really have a problem with that.

Im going to try and post some of my experience here.