hesa’s blog

GNU Xnee: Workaround for Xvfb bug

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GNU Xnee, Software, Uncategorized, geek | 2 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)]
0×08156e2b in FreeColormap ()


GnuPG: commiting files again

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GnuPG, Software | No Comments

After a rather (read very) busy period, main focus have been FSCONS, I am again commiting files to projects as I should

Started to commit files to the swedish translation of The GNU Privacy Handbook.

Great to get started again…. and thanks to Stian for helping out

New GNU releases Ocotber 2008

Friday, November 14th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, Software | No Comments

This is a compilation of the GNU software releases as
announced during October 2008 on the mailing list:

http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

glpk 4.33 / 2008-10-30
GLPK (GNU Linear Programming Kit) is intended
for solving large-scale linear programming (LP),
mixed integer linear programming (MIP), and
other related problems.
http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00016.html

Libidn 1.11 / 2008-10-29
Libidn is a fully documented implementation of the Stringprep,
Punycode and IDNA specifications defined by the IETF
Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) working group, used for
internationalized domain names.
http://josefsson.org/libidn/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00015.html

Binutils 2.19 / 2008-10-29
The GNU Binutils are a collection of binary tools.
The main ones are: ar, ld
http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00014.html

GNU Gama 1.9.06/ 2008-10-29
GNU Gama is a project dedicated to adjustment of
geodetic networks.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gama
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00013.html

GNU CLISP 2.47 / 2008-10-24
ANSI Common Lisp is a high-level, general-purpose
programming language.
http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00012.html

GNU SASL 0.2.29 / 2008-10-22
GNU SASL is a modern C library that implement the
standard network security protocol Simple
Authentication and Security Layer (SASL).
http://josefsson.org/gsasl/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00011.html

bzr 1.8 / 2008-10-17
Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works.
http://bazaar-vcs.org/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00010.html

Gnash 0.8.4 / 2008-10-14
Gnash is a GPL’d Flash movie player and browser
plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00009.html

GNU ed 1.1 / 2008-10-14
GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant
implementation of the standard Unix line editor.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ed/ed.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00008.html

Gnash 0.8.4 / 2008-10-13
Gnash is a GPL’d Flash movie player and browser
plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00007.html

GNU swbis 1.0 / 2008-10-13
swbis is a software administration system for GNU/Linux systems and
systems that are UNIX system-like
http://www.gnu.org/software/swbis/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00006.html

GNU M4 1.4.12 / 2008-10-11
GNU M4 is an implementation of the traditional
Unix macro processor.
http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00005.html

pspp-0.6.1 / 2008-10-10
PSPP is a program for statistical analysis
of sampled data.
http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00004.html

GnuTLS 2.6.0 / 2008-10-06
GnuTLS is a modern C library that implement the standard
network security protocol Transport Layer Security (TLS),
for use by network applications.
http://www.gnutls.org/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00003.html

coreutils-7.0 / 2008-10-06
The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text
manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system. These
are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every
operating system.
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00002.html

glpk 4.32 / 2008-10-03
GLPK (GNU Linear Programming Kit) is intended
for solving large-scale linear programming (LP),
mixed integer linear programming (MIP), and
other related problems.
http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00001.html

GNU Ball and Paddle 0.8.0/ 2008-10-01
Ball and Paddle is a ball and paddle game with
blocks, a ball, a paddle, and some powerups.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ballandpaddle/
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2008-10/msg00000.html

If you have any comments or questions regarding this
compilation, contact Henrik Sandklef hesa@gnu.org

GNU Xnee, Xvfb and Xephyr …. and evdev?

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GNU Xnee, Non GNU, Software, geek, swinput | 21 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.