hesa’s blog

Me in Swedish public radio

Sunday, February 15th, 2009 | Copyleft, Copyright, Free Software, Software, event, geek | 1 Comment

Tomorrow Swedish Public Radio (SR) will do a 6 hour long coverage of the court proceedings against The Pirate Bay. Somewhere between 12.00 and 13.00 I will take seat to join a panel and talk about Copyright.

I’ve prepared a short list with stuff I’d like to talk about… any tips?

GNU Xnee: Workaround for Xvfb bug

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GNU Xnee, Software, Uncategorized, geek | No Comments

I have been trying to automate some profiling (with gprof) by running some apps in Xvfb and record/replay with Xnee. Problem is, Xvfb crashes. In order to spot the bug I set up a less complex enviroment

Here’s the set up:

Terminal 1: Xvfb -ac :22

Terminal 2: export DISPLAY=:22 ; while (true) ; do xterm -e sleep 2 ; done

After executing some five or six programs Xvfb crashed. After some purely non scientific investigations it turns out that

1. the bug happens less often when I run Xvfb through gdb (see below)
   
2. Xvfb goes down with a seg fault in FreeColormap

Hmmm, colormap….. How about if we lower the colors in Xvfb? Yes, that’s it. Now, let’s move forward. To stress Xvfb a bit more, I have a new setup to test before I go on with Xnee’s automated profile (and coverage of course) tests:

Terminal 1: Xvfb -ac -screen 0 640x480x16 :21


Terminal 2: export DISPLAY=:22 ; while (true) ; do xterm -e sleep 2 ; done

Terminal 2: export DISPLAY=:22 ; while (true) ; do xdpyinfo ; xwininfo -root ; xset r on; done

…. after 1743 program executions I feel I am beginning to see a good enough work around.

And for those interested in the gdb printout, enjoy:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0xb7c2fa10 (LWP 18983)]
0x08156e2b in FreeColormap ()


bzr – Cannot lock LockDir

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Free Software, Software, geek | No Comments

After some time I realised what most people would realize directly. The var partition on my hard disk is (was) full.

A little apt-get clean did the trick

GNU Xnee, Xvfb and Xephyr …. and evdev?

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GNU Xnee, Non GNU, Software, geek, swinput | No Comments

In an attempt to automate (read cron) the Xnee tests using swinput I did the following:

• Start Xvfb (Xvfb can’t read any keyboard and mouse)
• Start Xephyr inside Xvfb (using evdev as input)
• Attach the swinput devices to the Xephyr display only

Still the faked user input (mouse, keyboard) from swinput was ‘written’ to the console. Uh oh. Bad!

So, I will now with a new computer (with more than the 500MB of RAM I have on this) test Xnee in a sandbox, probably using qemu for both x86 and ppc. Doing this I should be able to:

• Run every test case and report using the new coverage stuff in gnulib. All tests and builds can be done in x86 as well as ppc.
• Verify that cross compilation to ppc works

Can’t wait….. but I have to.