chris' random ramblings

For some reason the idea came into my head to try to apply Lennart Poettering’s avahi patch to distcc today.

Success!

I’ve packaged up the result for Debian (with some small changes) and put it here on my site (check out the Software section).

I’ve just uploaded my first version of splittar – a small utility that will create tar files for you, but limit the size of each one.

I wrote this because I couldn’t find anything that would generate tar files of a certain size for me, and splitting one giant tar file isn’t acceptable to me because that means in order to recover any data out of the piece, you need all of them assembled back into the original file…Which can mean several tens of gigabytes for me.

You can check it out at http://atlee.ca/blog/software/splittar

apt-get install debian-archive-keyring

will also work This package was added just a few hours ago.

I got sick of Thunderbird opening up links in Mozilla instead of Firefox. A friend mentioned that the preference responsible for opening up links was ‘network.protocol-handler.app.http’. I searched around in the Thunderbird pref files for what it was currently using. On my machine it was set to launch ‘x-www-browser’. This is actually a symlink into Debian‘s alternatives directory, so a simple

update-alternatives –set x-www-browser /usr/bin/firefox

did the trick.

As root (this should be all one line):

wget -q -O – http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2005.asc http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2006.asc | apt-key add -

The debian-keyring package should probably have these keys included, but it doesn’t seem to.

I was really impressed with the 20 minute wiki demo using TurboGears , so I spent a little bit of time today trying to get it running on my laptop, which is running Debian (sid). While I really like the motivation behind EasyInstall / setuptools / eggs, the implementation isn’t quite there yet…

I spent quite a bit of time fighting with it since I didn’t want to install these packages into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. My first thought was to install this stuff into my home directory somehow…Well, I never figured out if that was possible…It seems that python doesn’t look at .pth files outside of certain directories, resulting in errors like this when trying to run turbogears-admin:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/catlee/python2.4/site-packages/turbogears-admin.py", line 4, in ?
import pkg_resources
ImportError: No module named pkg_resources


So, the way I got it working was to give myself write permissions on /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages, create ~/.pydistutils.cfg with this:

[easy_install]
install-dir=/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
site-dirs=/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
script-dir=/home/catlee/bin


and then run the ez_setup.py bootstrap script to install TurboGears. Everything seems to work for now….