Archive for October, 2009

Gentoo : Xorg X Server 3D hardware acceleration

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

You need to have read/write permissions to /dev/dri/cardX to benefit from 3D hardware acceleration in Xorg X Server. On a Gentoo linux machine, this file has the following permissions set by default :

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ls -l /dev/dri/card0 
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 2009-10-14 16:12 /dev/dri/card0

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Gentoo : Running Cacti with LigHTTPD

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

If you use Gentoo and tried to install Cacti with Lighttpd instead of Apache, chances are that you ran into this error message :

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/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/WebappConfig/content.py:27: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  import md5, re, os, os.path
* Fatal error: Your configuration file sets the server type "Apache"
* Fatal error: but the corresponding package does not seem to be installed!
* Fatal error: Please "emerge >=www-servers/apache-1.3" or correct your settings.
* Fatal error(s) - aborting

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Xfce4 : Bug with key bindings

Monday, October 12th, 2009

There is currently a little bug in Xfce4 which prevents you to bind the key combinations involving SPACE and ESCAPE. For example you can’t bind <WINDOWS>-<SPACE>, but you can bind <WINDOWS>-C . This behaviour affects only the xfce-keyboard-settings GUI, which is annoying but leaves us with a workaround using the following command line :
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HAL + Xorg X server : Using HAL to set hardware specific configurations for Xorg Xserver

Monday, October 12th, 2009

The Xorg X Server can now rely on HAL to get information about the hardware the machine is running. This allows the X Server to auto-configure most of its components such as keyboard / mouse / screen / graphic adapter. But there is still room for tweaking it if needed.

This post explains how to configure extra properties for a keyboard at the HAL level, so that X Server will correctly auto-configure it for you.

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conky : integrating rTorrent downloads monitoring

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Conky is a lightweight system monitoring tool. It has many built-in probes (processor load, memory usage, temperature sensors, etc), but it is still pretty easy to extend it if you don’t find the feature you need.

In this post I’ll describe my Conky setup and explain how to extend it to monitor your rTorrent downloads.

rTorrent is a great BitTorrent client which offers an XML-RPC interface to its core functions, making it easy to get the downloads status through scripting. You can read more about that in this previous post.
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