Radix Fidem Blog

RHEL 6.0-Beta: Replace That Glacial OpenJDK

Posted on May 5, 2010 by ehurst

Java on RHEL 6.0 is in dire need of assistance. I understand the issues of patent encumbrance, but for the average desktop user, it’s just not that important. If something better is available, we use it.

The bundled OpenJDK on RHEL 6 is painful to use. Among other things, I have a copy of jShisen I downloaded some years ago, and drag it from one system and OS to the next. On Linux, I don’t want to install all the supporting junk with KDE 4 just to get Kshisen. Under Windows, nothing compares for the price. But with OpenJDK, it was unusable, hogging system resources for almost no return.

For quite some time the instructions for replacing it with Sun’s Java have been easy to find. For the peculiarities of RHEL/Fedora and friends, there is a more recent procedure available in several places around the Web which includes all the official methods for changing system defaults.

You’ll need to create an account with Sun (now owned by Oracle), but I’ve had mine for years. I’ve never found the Open Source version adequate for my uses.

The current version from Sun is jdk-6u20-linux-i586. You can opt for the lighter Java Runtime Environment (JRE), but since I expect to have to compile so very many things in the absence of official Red Hat support contracts, I chose the Java Development Kit (JDK). When following one of the guides linked above, simply remember to substitute the name of whatever you choose to download for the somewhat outdated references to older versions of the package.

In my case, the result went from painfully useless to lightening fast. The game works exceedingly well, and I keep find ways in which RHEL 6 is so much faster, lighter, and more stable than the current favorite. However, I have to admit the latter is a lot easier to introduce to non-techie Windows refugees.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged computers, linux, redhat | Comments Off

RHEL 6.0-Beta Additional Multimedia Stuff

Posted on May 4, 2010 by ehurst

Note: The linked text instructions are sorely out of date and no longer work with the current release or RHEL 6, nor will it work with the Beta-2 release before it. I’m betting it will not work with either of the Red Hat clones, either.

As promised, I wrote up my experience with building restricted multimedia stuff on RHEL 6.0-Beta. Because it was so long and involved, even a very terse explanation was too big to post here. So I’m offering it as a linked plain-text file on my static server archive. Feel free to keep a copy of the file for your own use. Comments welcome, because I am just a duffer.

Building Restricted Media Support on RHEL 6.0-Beta

If you have a compelling reason for asking, I may be persuaded to burn the rpms to a CD for you. Try emailing me at user account “eddie” on the same domain as the file liked above.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged computers, linux, redhat | Comments Off

Greece and More: What to Expect

Posted on May 4, 2010 by ehurst

Vox Day has it covered well. Without dragging in the mysterious Illuminati, he explains the real conspiracy in terms of function, not labels. There exists a known coterie of wealth and power in the world who don’t love Jesus and care even less for you and I. They have for some generations been building their abilities to simply take what they did not produce from those who did.

Credit is merely an arrangement where you receive today some representation of what you plan to produce in the future. You promise to work your booty off paying back something you get to enjoy today. It’s based on advertising provoking your burning lusts for things you cannot afford yet. It’s so normal for us, we believe folks are derelict if they don’t go into debt for all the finer things in life.

That trick with the housing finance bubble was simply creating a false investment vehicle which suckered in millions of investors. When it failed, as it was designed to do, they still own all this debt. That is, they own an awful lot of calls on future production. Those who managed to stay out of this mess and keep some of their future production uncommitted are now being roped in by taxation. So the rioting kids in Greece are simply trying to opt out of debts to which they did not agree. They are trying to tell their government elite — who are participants in this scheme — they will not play along. Here in the US, we aren’t smart enough to riot in the streets.

Yet.

We may get there, but probably way too late to do any good. I fear the kids in Greece aren’t going to win because they are too late, as well. These financial elite don’t have it all yet, and they are determined to get it.

What can we look forward to here in the US? This thing will not come down clean. It’s too complex to be anything but messy. We may or may not suffer a VAT tax system, but we will most certainly find the various government folks here creating new ways to confiscate what you have now and may someday gain. What the government agencies have committed to give you, for whatever reason, will eventually fail. You’ll be cut off in one way or another from those pensions, benefits, etc.

At the street level, across the board, everyone will find the relative price of things will go up. Whatever you have in your pocket will get you less and less of what you want. That’s what a depression does. Don’t think in terms of absolutes on this, but picture an economic crash as the painful loss of buying power. It combines the loss of income, the increasing scarcity of goods, and brings all the unhappiness of folks who feel they have somehow been denied their rightful due.

Those who were already given to such senseless demands will simply increase their predatory practices. We call that crime: burglary, robbery, petty theft, fraud, etc. It will be increasingly difficult to differentiate between crooks and the government folks who don’t like the competition from private enterprise crime. Well, the only difference is you voted for one group, not the other. One group bothered to convince you that you were on their side. The other doesn’t even pretend to care what you think.

So your Internet connection won’t go away, for example, but you may have a tough time paying the bill. Maybe you’ll switch from cable to dial-up. Got a modem on that luxury multimedia box? But then, you may be among those having a tough time just paying for the electricity to run it. If you struggled in the past, it won’t get any better. Those who survive will be the ones who adjust their thinking, primarily their expectations, to match the changing reality. The only question is how quickly things will become difficult in your area, in your personal situation, and so forth.

What I don’t expect is Americans to riot any time soon, though by rights they should have already lynched — literally — an awful lot of folks in DC.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, economics, government, survival | Comments Off

ATI and Nvidia Broken on RHEL 6

Posted on May 3, 2010 by ehurst

Update: In the comments below, Sean Kane provides a detailed explanation of how to get NVIDIA to work. Thank you very much, Sean!

Second Update: For those of you using ATrpms Repo, the NVIDIA kernel modules can be installed directly, and kept up to date that way. You still have to modify the Grub configuration, but it’s about as simple as it gets.

I don’t know that any one person is doing this, nor any one focused decision of a group, but the net result of all the decisions involved have made it impossible to run either the Radeon or Nvidia proprietary drivers on RHEL 6.

First, there is no third party repository for the drivers as with Fedora 12. Second, all those Fedora 12 users who tried and failed to work with the provided package from the manufacturer have shown me no reason to expect any better for RHEL 6. It’s bad enough ATI and Nvidia don’t really care, but I detect an on-going trend among developers and project managers to sabotage what little possibilities are left.

For the past three days I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Net searching with various different search engines the various techniques. Most of them who succeed at all have to go through manually blocking kernel modules, mucking about with initramfs, and some have downgraded their X.org packages. The official setup pretty much forces the bundled inferior drivers early in the boot process. While this makes for a very nice boot display, with a good high resolution screen and all, it also means you have to fight tooth and nail to keep them from loading.

Having tried all the various tricks others claim work, I have struck out completely. With my onboard Nvidia chipset, the Nouveau driver offers no better than 280FPS for my GeForce 6150. With the Radeon driver, it’s about the same on my HD 4350 card (512MB VRAM), but adding the experimental glx drivers at least gets me about 800FPS on a card capable of some 3000FPS or better. It’s okay if that’s the best you can do, developers, but for goodness’ sake, stop making it so impossible to work around your puny results!

At any rate, this is probably my only real complaint about RHEL 6. Otherwise, try and take it from me. This is great!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged computers, linux, redhat | 13 Comments

RHEL 6.0 Beta Test Drive

Posted on May 2, 2010 by ehurst

Downloaded the DVD ISO from RedHat; even gave them my details representing Open for Business. I’ll be writing a longer report for that, but for now, just a few notes.

Because I’m using a new-ish Radeon HD 4350 card on my machine, I expected some troubles. Didn’t happen. The bundled X.org handles it well enough I haven’t yet bothered to build and install ATI’s Catalyst drivers yet. Indeed, after the nice graphical greeter, this was the first ever Linux distro to offer a full text-mode screen display properly on my Dell 23″ LCD. The entire thing had that standard RedHat TUI blue background, but the fonts were in correct proportion. I was really surprised. Nice, tight little fonts on the 1920×1080 scale instead of huge scaled fonts to crowd my screen at 80×25 characters.

Then the graphical installer also did something new, because it was properly scaled to the pixel resolution, but in the center of the screen, still large enough to read clearly, in spite of the rather large black borders. Nice and sharp fonts, etc.

I made a mistake and misread the part about selecting which harddrives I wanted to include. For my own amusement, I did some frantic clicking on the screen. I think the installer noticed, because it went back and started over at the part about selecting the drives! Got it right on the second run.

I chose the desktop installation profile, with refining the selection with more packages later. When the packages were all finished, upon reboot, I was nearly blinded by my screen filled with intense red. I don’t like it, but that’s the boot screen. Cute little pie-chart progress meter. I had to configure the ethernet connection by manually selecting to have it connect by default on startup. Otherwise it was correct. While Kudzu recognized my printer, the version of HPLIP is just a little too old, and prints poorly. I’ll be updating that later.

The package manager window is a little wonky. I had to close it and restart every time something changed much, because it didn’t refresh very well. This was the first time I got a little confused picking the developer stuff I wanted. I really needed to add the bytecode hinting and subpixel rendering to the Freetype libs. It was easy enough, but now you add switches to the rpmbuild -bb command to rebuild a source RPM, instead of editing the SPEC file. Still, nice results, cleaned up the fonts display on my LCD very nicely.

Then, I looked into how hard it would be to add the usual hacker-multimedia packages. There is currently no 3rd party repository for this. While most of this release is built on Fedora Core 12 (FC 12), it’s not precisely the same, from what I could find. So I decided not to use the packages themselves, but built everything from SRPMs designed for FC 12. I started with Gstreamer Bad Plugins. That was a huge task.

Now, I did it because I knew I’d learn something, even if I failed. In keeping with the policy of staying as close as possible to the original release, I first checked the FC 12 official repos, then the RPM Fusion stuff. I simply ran the rpmbuild -bb gstreamer-plugins-bad.spec and took notes on the dependencies. One at a time, I first tried to see if the RHEL 6.0 Beta Yum repo had the item. Sometimes it took a bit of research to find a certain library was part of a package with a totally different name. The dependencies branched out sometimes 5 deep before I got back to main branch. It was about eight hours on a pair of Xterm consoles, after I figured out to install Xterm and the miscellaneous bitmapped fonts of X.org.

BTW, on this release, everything was built under root’s home directory, instead of the traditional /usr/src/redhat. So I kept jumping back and forth between two open Xterms logged in as root, keeping one in the SPECS directory and the other jumping around doing the other work with Wget, RPM commands, etc. Having watched how it was all neatly scripted on FreeBSD to build from source that way (but always finding some critical ports broken) it wasn’t too hard to figure out how to keep track with a notebook, scribbling notes on the various branching dependencies. I really learned a lot, and it was quite doable. I had to hack only one SPEC file to finish (Mplayer), and one package I had to install directly from the FC 12 repo (x264) because of a circular dependence on building ffmpeg.

The reason I went to so much trouble is an idea which struck me the other day. Having learned progressively more about getting what I want by building it myself, why not just create my own DIY-RedHat clone? I know when the final release comes out in September (currently planned) I won’t likely be able to afford the basic support from RedHat. But the SRPMs are always available for updating, so I’ll just keep an eye on those. By then, at least one of the 3rd party repos should be up and ready to update all the other stuff I’m already building.

For the Fedora fans, thanks, but I despise rolling release and want to keep the same core system running for at least three years. Fedora drops previous releases like a hot rock when the new one comes out. I realize that’s pretty much by necessity, but it’s not for me. I’ll keep the RHEL installation and do whatever work is necessary to keep it up to date. If it all breaks down, I can tuck my tail between my legs and switch to CentOS when they finally pick up on 6.0. This way, I at least get a head start on learning the peculiarities.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged centos, computers, linux, redhat | 2 Comments

First Brush with Lucid Lynx

Posted on April 30, 2010 by ehurst

This time, I chose the upgrade using the Update Manager. Naturally, due to the massive competition from thousands of others doing the same thing, it took five hours over my cable connection. That’s no big deal. The jump from 9.10 to 10.04 was otherwise pretty smooth.

I am in no position to test everything, nor even the most commonly used applications. That’s not how I work. However, I did test the things I use. So the upgrade-in-place left my default browser — Chrome — working just fine. Stuff I built on Karmic still works fine in Lucid. The upgrade picked up everything I had installed from the standard repositories. Yet, not all of my settings were preserved, and a few things were downright broken.

We have already heard much about the changed window frame buttons, but I didn’t get any frames at all on first reboot. Indeed, the primary graphic display took a long time to come up on my fast card. I did appreciate not having to fool with the Fglrx driver installation, but I had to go and select a theme, because no part of the default, about which everyone was kvetching, appeared. Nothing, and no multiple desktops, etc. Once I chose the Human theme, everything was pretty much back to normal.

I despise the Gnome Screensaver. It is a badly crippled version of the old Xscreensaver, lacking some critical fine granularity in options, so I usually substitute. This time I actually had to uninstall the Gnome version, because it insisted on running after I killed it repeatedly, and disabled it in my options. It still came up. It’s gone now.

Evolution reminds me every time this is GNOME. It hangs, some frequently used options are hidden, some keystrokes are broken, and so forth. Though it’s not the best browser, Opera is a superior mail client. That’s what I use.

Alsa reads my onboard chipset fine, but does less to accommodate than the previous release. I had to add several lines to get the minimum controls in the mixer. And why Lucid decided I had to have a /dev/fd0 when I never had one before, I can’t comprehend. The error created massive logs before I noticed it.

There were other minor glitches, but it was pretty much worth upgrading. For those of you who insist I should file bug reports, you need to understand my history. Apparently I am utterly incompetent in writing them, because over the past decade, they were all deleted, on every buglist I joined. From the GNOME folks especially, I’ve been told to get lost. It’s possible I annoyed someone important, though I have no idea how. Thus, I don’t even get the faint moment of warm glow knowing I’ve helped others. Besides, the developers have no interest, and are sometimes hostile, if you dare to request a fix for the previous release. Everything is rolled into the next release, and I am somehow evil for daring to suggest anything different.

So every OS stinks, and right now, Lucid Lynx stinks least. We’ll see how long that lasts, because I really like the idea of the LTS.

Posted in computers | Tagged culture, linux, ubuntu | Comments Off

Selected Failures of Western Civilization

Posted on April 29, 2010 by ehurst

Efficiency does not scale. Just because you can detect refinements does not mean they will work. No living human, nor group of them, can effectively account for even a minimum of complex factors when attempting to apply efficiency measures above the scale of their immediate personal ownership.

The poor and lowly, regardless of individual or class morality, are represented by nobody. It won’t matter a whit your level of involvement, of first-hand experience with their sorrows, you can’t be one of them unless you forever dismiss your option to eventually go back to the other world. When you cut yourself off that way, you have no power to help them politically. As long as you can do something, you can’t possibly do the right thing, though it’s all too easy to manipulate them into voting for you.

The Myth of Tomorrow in Western Civilization is so fundamental, it will not die until the civilization itself does. This is the myth by which almost the entire Merchant Culture (the soul of Western Civilization, AKA Babylon) lives, banking on future events. It is the very essence of material progress in a world which denies God’s direct intervention. It assumes control on a level which is unrealistic, but because so very many people at one time and in one place accept the myth, it works for a time. It is possible to have economic growth without credit. Such growth will be slow, but it will be fully supported by reality — that is, it won’t come without God’s support in the first place. Credit systems are inherently sinful, because they seek to bypass the hand of God. Disregard His interests at your own peril.

Complain all you want, but fallen man cannot possibly live in a multi-cultural environment without becoming utterly mercenary. If he is not loyal to his own people, he will be loyal to some lesser thing; if not the gods of his people, some far lesser deity of demons. To raise man above such filth is possible in only one setting, and that is the tribal social structure of a segregated society, even if only on a small scale. Nothing about it requires genuine hatred, only the ineffable love of one’s own kind. This is so deeply burned into us by the Fall, no power on earth can overcome it.

The Myth of Modern Israel is rooted in the single greatest failure of Western Christianity — the utter inability to operate on a spiritual level. That is, the very nature of Western Christian faith is anchored in this fallen realm, and cannot see everything God is doing is anchored in the spirit realm. Thus, we realize organized religion cannot see how the Cross ended the Covenant of Moses. Israel had so utterly rejected God, He gave them their demand, and the only legitimate meaning to the word “Israel” now is other-worldly. There was at one time both a literal Israel and a Spiritual Israel, but no more. There is only a Spiritual Israel. God does not deal with nations redemptively, only His own Kingdom of the Spirit.

This is no Replacement Theology, since that posits a worldly anchor, too. No church on this earth is organized by God. Rather, God calls His spiritual nation His church, His congregation of mixed multitudes who cannot be a nation except in the Spirit. To the degree we organize at all in this fallen realm, it remains a purely human organization, subject to all the foibles of human politics and fallen nature. There is no expectation from God such organization will accomplish anything, no measure of success; it is simply a tool by which revelation is accomplished.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged economics, government, propaganda | Comments Off

Chrome Browser for Linux: Worth a Shot

Posted on April 28, 2010 by ehurst

All browsers stink. Some are simply able to choke you less.

I am fully aware Google lies about compromising your privacy. Very early on I knew they were allied with the CIA and other clandestine agencies of the US government through investment funding, and they allow the likes of NSA full run of their massive data on Internet user habits. They threw a very public fit about China cracking their mail system, but I’m pretty sure NSA has carte blanche to read anything they please from that same mail system. If you are worried about privacy, stay off the Internet. Or, you can take my path, which is utter transparency. I don’t hide my despite for the US federal government, but I am no real threat, since my allegiance is utterly outside this world.

The real issue is not paranoid privacy, but keeping the advertisers from annoying you while you try to surf the web for information which actually matters. Aside from restricting yourself to plain text browsers, you can use browsers which permit a certain amount of crippling the normal browser functions. So I give kudos to Opera for allowing the placement of settings in the browser interface itself. Explore the various interface toolbars and discover you can put the cookies button there and turn them on or off depending on the sites you visit. Most websites still allow you to see them without any cookies at all. The Mozilla gang at least allows you to set the browser to ask you for each different server, and making them all session cookies is a nice option. The whole idea is avoiding advertisers using those websites as a way to assign you a tracking ID by which they present ever more intrusive advertising aimed at your “profile” of behavior. It’s creepy, unwarranted, and in my opinion justifies any action you can take to frustrate it.

These days I’m much more concerned with actual technical aspects. For example, we all hate Flash because it’s a resource hog. Worse, some of the most useful information is available only be video, which has become a very bad habit, since it often takes longer to extract it from the video viewing process than from simply a few lines of well written text. And you may probably be quite annoyed at the implementations of JavaScript because most sites overdo it. But when your browser also handles those things poorly, it only gets worse. These days, cookie games bother me less than just getting stuff done without pegging my dual-core CPU for mundane activities. On Linux, such things are easier to track (I use GKrellM).

The Mozilla gang changes their stuff so often, you might as well get used to building it yourself. Way too many Linux distros do not track Firefox properly when security fixes are released. Then again, Firefox makes no path for upgrading modular elements, so you have to build the whole darn thing. Fortunately, they at least make it fairly easy for mainstream distros with relatively easy instructions for those who have built anything at all from source. It works a whole lot better built on my machine: faster, sharper fonts, etc. I do it with every new release, primarily because the underlying rendering engine is the best there is for turning complex webpages into simple text. That’s about the only reason I use it.

Opera, as previously noted, is really simple to use, and allows a wealth of guerrilla settings. However, the most annoying thing is the very poor linking with browser plugins and the incomplete support for JavaScript. It’s great I can have buttons to toggle plugins, scripts, cookies, images, etc., but enabling them reveals how little the Opera developers understand Linux. The plugins are an ugly hack, at best. If you visit a site which has embedded YouTube videos, for example, and run even one of them, however brief, you will find the browser continues to pound away on your CPU even after FlashPlayer is finished. You literally have to reload the page to get it to stop. And no browser I have ever tested freezes on scripts half so bad as Opera, including on Windows. When it does, Opera can lock the entire X server.

Enter Google’s Chrome browser. Since I’m running Ubuntu, it’s pretty simple to download the Debian-based build. It’s faster than most other graphical browsers, far more stable with scripts, and plugins work much better. For example, after watching a Flash video the browser does not continue hogging the CPU. It manages to disengage the FlashPlayer until I need it again. Rendering is much quicker on everything, and fonts are pretty sharp. The drawback is the optional controls. Right now, you cannot turn off animated GIF images. I see dozens of requests for it, and I suppose they might actually implement it, since every other graphical browser does. Even if it required editing the configuration file manually, I’d be happy. On pages with too many moving GIFs, I simply use another browser, or have to turn off all images for that server. There are some extension modules you can download, such as FlashBlock and AdBlock, both of which save you from distractions, but the implementation is far from simple to use. AdBlock is pretty much all-or-nothing.

There are some other flaws, such as no option to treat cookies on the fly as session cookies. You either accept them or not. Also, I cannot get the Linux version to honor any sort of user CSS file, which is a basic requirement under the standards. Plenty of other fine-grained controls are missing, and some of the chatter on their developer lists indicates a poor attitude on some issues. Yet, in the balance of things, simply because what it does, it does better, I have made it my default browser. Give it a test drive.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged browsers, computers, internet, linux | 2 Comments

Mate Selection: The Eyes Lie

Posted on April 27, 2010 by ehurst

After 30+ years, I confirm today I could not have made a better choice in whom to marry. It won’t matter how you choose to measure such things; my wife is the one smartest decision I ever made.

You would not call her “a hot babe.” She was cute enough in her youth, but never what most Westerners call “beautiful.” Nor was I madly in love, as most people would phrase it, when I sought her hand in marriage. I had only one thing on my mind: Would she support the calling and mission of God in my life?

It didn’t matter how little I knew of where that calling would take me over the years ahead. The question was primarily one of commitment to faith. Hers had to be the equivalent of mine. Otherwise, no other variable would make a bit of difference. You may not have such a sense of calling, but I’ll wager if you take the time to get to know yourself and what really and truly matters to you, you’ll also realize what you have to have in a spouse. If you don’t know yourself well enough to even think that way, don’t bother pretending you even understand romance enough to go out on a single date. If you aren’t aiming at longevity and stability under the fancy paint job called “romance,” shame on you.

Already, we have probably eliminated the vast majority of females you are likely to have encountered in your world. That is to say, the vast majority of Western women have no clue what they are supposed to be, how they should view themselves in the mirror of the soul. What we see with our eyes will surely call out to the hormones here in the Western world, but it is easily the biggest lie. So utterly false is our culture on this, I can state with utter confidence the correlation between physical attractiveness and marriage failure is far, far higher than mere chance. If she really appeals to your eyes, she’s probably the wrong gal for you.

Since we lack the fundamental understanding of human nature in the West to make assisted mate selection work properly, I am left warning you men of good conscience to close your eyes when you consider anything beyond cold and calculating acquaintance with a female. The very moment you seek warmth with any female not close enough to qualify as incest, close your eyes. Don’t think about the rush of hormonal urges; don’t let the hormones vote. Your personal taste is not a reliable indicator. Stop and consider in full depth whether it would actually work. You have to be utterly cruel to yourself for this to make any useful difference.

Yes, a big chunk of this depends entirely on how you are put together, and how you rate with the women, and many other factors. Just because you are utterly certain she’s the perfect fit does not oblige her to respond favorably. Don’t forget the constant factor of truth: You can’t take yourself too seriously, and can’t trust your own judgment on everything. In the end, you really must get help from those who care about you and know you best. At the same time, if she’s really right, it will eventually work out. You have to make yourself care most about the long term.

Aside from all this business of getting your head on straight first — insofar as that’s possible — there is one eternal principle you must seize upon and never let go. True lasting marital love and peace arises from a wise choice; it comes behind the commitment, not before. Choose wisely and the true romance will come later. We are built that way. Romantic love is not some unstoppable force which drags you into a relationship; it is sheer madness to think that way. True love comes later, and rightly so.

Posted in religion | Tagged culture, health, psychology | Comments Off