thesauri sapientiae et quisquiliae
Posts tagged search engine fodder
Installing MySQL for Python in Ubuntu
0343 days
иконографияКартинивик услугиWhilst on the grind this evening, hacking on some Python code in a newly-installed Ubuntu virtual machine, I needed to install MySQL for Python. Building the package, pre-installation, requires mysql_config — which I had some difficulty locating in the repositories. After flailing about a bit, the solution is to install the libmysqlclient-dev package.
$ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
The package also requires setuptools, which is available here. Download it (I’m running Python 2.6.5, so I downloaded setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg) and run it as a shell script.
$ sh ~/Downloads/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg
A second error — i.e. gcc could not find python.h — was resolved by installing the Python development package.
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev
Back to it …
Installing RExcelXML from The Omega Project in R
1A quick post to capture the resolution to the past 20 minutes I have spent in frustration trying to install RExcelXML from Omegahat (The Omega Project for Statistical Computing). As this is a source package, the dependencies need to be satisfied manually (which is a bit baffling, frankly — surely there is a workaround for this using a makefile-like facility in install.packages()). The package depends on ROOXML, Rcompression and XML. The solution is two-staged:
> install.packages(c('Rcompression', 'XML'))
> install.packages(c('ROOXML', 'RExcelXML'), repos = 'http://www.omegahat.org/R', type = 'source')
Back to the grind …
Netflix “Error N8156-6013″ Resolution
17A seemingly pervasive problem purportedly caused by a recent update to Silverlight, the Netflix streaming player bombed-out on me this evening, whinging about “Error N8156-6013″ and complaining that it had issues both with playing DRM content and — for reasons which transcend reason — the date on my (virtual) computer. The solution was simple enough. Delete the following small file:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\PlayReady\mspr.hds
I was back to cackling irreverently at Archer in no time.
Virtualbox + XP + Firefox = Netflix in GNU/Linux
4Having recently wrested control of my machine from Windows Vista, I’ve had to implement a workaround for Netflix streaming media. Netflix, unfortunately, has yet to see the mistake in building their streaming architecture on Microsoft’s near-dead Silverlight platform. Until they recognize the error of their ways, I need a workaround. I’ve settled on virtualizing XP, as Silverlight (and Moonlight, for that matter) will not successfully run Netflix in WINE. (As a side note, WINE runs Excel 2007 — one of my must-have Windows apps — flawlessly and, ironically, faster than my Windows installation used to.)
So, I installed VirtualBox OSE from the Lucid repo (a few versions behind current, but no worries) and installed my XP Pro SP3 image on a small virtual hard disk. It took entirely too long, although I had shortcut the process by ripping the CD to my hard disk using dd (+1 for GNU!):
$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=~/home/captivus/win_xp.iso
(Seriously … dd is bloody brilliant. One of the most useful tools in the GNU suite.) Anyway, it works like a charm and I’m not without my new love, Archer, despite no longer running Windows.
Superfluous fstab Entries After Upgrading to Lucid LTS
0A quick post to outline a stupefying problem I encountered after upgrading one of my machines to Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) this weekend. By way of background, I am anything but an early-adopter of OS releases — especially on my production hardware. I haven’t the time to debug network-critical software on systems on which I rely heavily, so I typically lag a major-version-release or so behind the “cutting edge”.
Yesterday I finally made the move to upgrade to Lucid LTS on one of my servers on my home network. The automatic upgrade apps downloaded and executed without a hitch, so I was optimistic upon reboot. For reasons which surpass understanding, however, I received an error indicating that the hard disk upon which I had installed the OS refused to mount at boot time — although, to Lucid’s credit, I was given an option to skip this mounting and continue with the boot.
The whole episode was absurd, as the disk was clearly mounted and booting — how else was the OS loading at all if the disk upon which it resides would not boot? Upon logging in, a quick cat /var/log/boot.log suggested that there was, indeed, an error in mounting /dev/sda1. cat /etc/fstab made clear what the problem was — somehow there were additional entries in the fstab file which tried to mount the partitions on /dev/sda subsequent to their initial mounting. I’ve not the slightest idea how these entries made their way into the file. I am, however, confident that they were not there prior to the upgrade as this error was entirely new. A few keystrokes in vim and I had commented-out the offending entries. Upon reboot, all was well with the server.
Most perplexing …
recently on cg.com