blog.crox.net

There is no 64 bit version of Google Earth for linux, so you'll need to make sure you have the latest version of the following packages first:

app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-baselibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-compat
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-gtklibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-qtlibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-soundlibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-xlibs

This allowed me to start GE in the first place. But then it was horribly slow, although glxinfo reported "direct rendering: Yes" etc.

When started from the console, GE would output the following:

do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.

Doing a search led me to try setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 before running Google Earth. Indeed the warning disappeared, and GE was really faster. However, as soon as I would zoom too close, the whole screen was getting more and more sky-blue, until no image was being displayed anymore...

Finally, I found this article, and especially the comments from Eduardo Habkost and "Researcher".

I followed Researcher's instructions, and Google Earth is now working perfectly. For your convenience, I've put drm_nowaitVblank.c here to download (you cannot copy-paste from the original page because the parser there treats the includes as html code). Also to compile the code on amd64 you'll want to use gcc32 and not gcc...

An update to my initial article on installing Gentoo on my nx7400 laptop:

I've switched to kernel 2.6.21-gentoo (latest gentoo-sources available currently with ~amd64), and to the latest versions of ipw3945, alsa and xorg, and suspend to ram works fine now. (the screen would not switch on again with vanilla kernel 2.6.19)

Hibernation (suspend to disk) seems to work as well, apart from the fact that the screen resolution is not restored correctly, but for now I'm happy with suspend-to-ram.

Fondu is "A set of programs to interconvert between mac font formats and pfb, ttf, otf and bdf files on unix."

I think that says it all :o) In particular, it allowed me to convert a .dfont-packaged font from a Mac to a set of .ttf files that I can use on my linux desktop.

For years I've been annoyed by the habit thunderbird has to set "Content-Disposition: inline" when you attach a text file to an outgoing e-mail.

Experimenting with our mail to fax gateway, I finally took the time to fix it today. As with some other "advanced" settings in Fireforx/Thunderbird, there is an option you can set to achieve the (imho) correct behavior, but no GUI dialog for it.

So in order to have outgoing text files attached with "Content-Disposition: attachment", you need to set mail.content_disposition_type to 1 (default is 0). You can do this by going to "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Config Editor". (Using the windows version it's probably "Tools" -> "Options" -> etc.)

Initially written on 2006-05-17

On my other (x86/amd64) diskless machines, I use PXE with pxegrub. My setup is quite similar to (and inspired by) this one.

Now, on sparc machines, there is no BIOS nor PXE. But you don't need all that, since you have the Open Boot... This is how I managed to make my Sunblade 100 totally diskless (using a "vanilla" kernel, the latest version being currently 2.6.16.16).

Note: In this example, 10.0.0.10 will be my dhcp/nfs/tftp server which I will refer to as 'fileserver'. 10.0.0.30 is the sunblade.

- when configuring the kernel:

[*] Default bootloader kernel arguments (ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=10.0.0.10:/diskless/sunblade)

(in "Networking" -> "Networking support" -> "Networking options")

[*]   IP: kernel level autoconfiguration
 [*]     IP: DHCP support
 [*]     IP: BOOTP support
 [*]     IP: RARP support

(in "File systems" -> "Network File Systems")

<*> NFS file system support
[*]   Provide NFSv3 client support
[*] Root file system on NFS

Configure all other settings as you would do for a disk install, but make sure you compile your NIC driver in the kernel (not as module)

Then:

make
make modules_install
make tftpboot.img ROOT_IMG=/dev/null

(the resulting tftpboot.img will be in arch/sparc64/boot/tftpboot.img)

I copied tftpboot.img to fileserver as tftpimage-2.6.16.16, and added the following entry in my dhcpd.conf:

host sunblade {
    hardware ethernet 00:03:BA:08:12:34;
    fixed-address 10.0.0.30;
    always-reply-rfc1048 on;
    filename "sunblade/boot/tftpimage-2.6.16.16";
}

Finally, to net-boot your diskless Sunblade you'll need to enter

boot net:dhcp

in the Open Boot prompt. When you are happy with it, you can set it as default:

setenv boot-device net:dhcp cdrom disk net

Notes:

- apparently, instead of using make tftpboot.img you can just "elftoaout" vmlinux

- another alternative would be to use tilo, which comes with silo, to build the image