Category Archives: Community

a point-and-clicky (ruby) addition, dobbage!

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Some time ago, the brainstorm of a simple GUI package viewer for my Slackware desktop would be handy. While completely unnecessary, I thought it would be neat.
So what did I do? Created a project on github.com for an application that did not exist yet, and commenced to reading the source of others with similarly simple application frameworks.

While having the project created out on github was a reminder, it was not much for encouragement, so the idea lay dormant for a while. With a free moment this past weekend, I solidified several ideas and actually sought to make headway on this task. But I will say, that having the project on github for so long, has increased the rank on Google’s search results for “dobbage” so that is a plus :)

While I am crafty with many tools/languages, my weapon of choice remains ruby. For my development time, I can get an idea prototyped very quick. At which point I can decided whether it is worth it to use another language (for performance, etc.). All that to say, dobbage is written in Ruby.

Initially, I had thought that ruby-gtk2 would be the windowing toolkit to use, but then Qt and QtRuby are included in the stock Slackware installation.
I must say, there is not an abundance of applications to find, that are written in QtRuby, the bindings to access the Qt libraries is very nice and extensive. This is my first “GUI” application, so it’s all new to me. The Qt API documentation is written for C++, but once you get the hang of translating their C++ explanation to a Ruby implementation, then it’s all gravy! :)

Dobbage only has one dependency, that is not included in a stock Slackware install, and that is my slack-utils ruby library, which can be built as an installable Slackware package, or available as a rubygem. slack-utils does provide several command line tools, but more importantly, it includes a library for a Slackware Linux harness.

Right now, dobbage only shows information for packages currently installed, and for “removed” packages. Removed packages include previous iterations of upgraded packages. There is a little fancy-ness in the status bar too. Other ideas include the ability:

  • sorting the Removed packages by date removed, instead of alphabetical
  • to open an installable Slackware package (a *.t?z archive), and get a tab with information about that package.
  • to have a tab for fetching information from a Slackware repository /mirror
  • good ideas from others :)

In any event, the code is available at github.com/vbatts/dobbage and here are a few screen shots.



Take care,
vb

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Getting started with compiling Wii apps in Linux

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First off, setting up a development environment, and then the ability to run the games on the Wii are very different. Since my Wii was on the latest official system upgrade (v4.3), there were not many options for getting a custom game boot loader on it. Thankfully, I went with the Indiana Pwns and it was super easy and straight forward. Now I have the Homebrew Loader installed by way of using the BootMii installer, and I am free to load my own compiled projects as well.

To get the development kit up and operational it involved a bit of guess work, but thankful I can still use my GNU C utilities.

From the “devkitPPC” directory, you’ll need the appropriate download for you host type. For me, it was devkitPPC_r21-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2

http://sourceforge.net/projects/devkitpro/files/

It extracts to ”devkitPPC/”. You can put this where every you’d like, but I kept everything as my limited privilege user, and created a directory $HOME/bin/opt/, and put the directory there. Next you’ll need to set a couple of ENV variables that most projects look for in their Makefile’s. In my $HOME/.bashrc I added

export DEVKITPPC=$HOME/bin/opt/devkitPPC/
export DEVKITPRO=$DEVKITPPC
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$DEVKITPPC/man
export PATH=$PATH:$DEVKITPPC/bin

The manpath is for me :)

From the portlibs folder you’ll need everything with “ppc” in the name. The Wii’s proccesor is an IBM PowerPC chipset

http://sourceforge.net/projects/devkitpro/files/portlibs

Once you have all of these downloaded, a simple for loop will do well.

mkdir ${DEVKITPPC}/portlibs

for file in *ppc.tar.bz2 ; do tar -C ${DEVKITPPC}/portlibs/ -xjf $file ; done

Next, download libogc-src-*.tar.bz2 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/devkitpro/files/libogc/, and lets get it compiled and installed (also, it depends on the ENV variables and the libraries above). The make install below will put it in $DEVKITPPC.

mkdir libogc ; tar -C libogc -xjf libogrc-src-*.tar.bz2 ; cd libogc

make clean && make && make install

Lastly, getting libfat present and respectable. http://sourceforge.net/projects/devkitpro/files/libfat/ get the libfat-ogc-*.tar.bz2 tar ball

tar -C ${DEVKITPPC}/portlibs/ -xjf libfat-ogc-*.tar.bz2

cp ${DEVKITPPC}/portlibs/lib/wii/libfat.a ${DEVKITPPC}/portlibs/lib/libfat.a

At this point there is enough present to begin hacking or least compiling as a tester. To validate we have a good compiling ENV, lets try out libwiigui . It is a great framework to learn/use/get started with, but for now if we use it to a validation test. At the time of writing this, the latest was libwiigui-1.05.zip. So:

mkdir libwiigui ; cd libwiigui ; unzip ../libwiigui-1.05.zip

make clean && make

You should be left with two  new files (libwiigui-demo.elf and libwiigui-demo.dol).

On the SD card that I keep my HomeBrew applications on, I make a directory sd://apps/libwiigui/ and copy these two files into that directory, and rename them boot.elf and boot.dol respectively.

Now when I put the SD card in the Wii and launch the HomeBrew loader, I have a blank button (because I didn’t take the time to add icons and descriptions), and when clicked and loaded, there it the basic libwiigui framework app!

YAHTZEE!!

Take care,

vb

p.s. here are a couple of additional information links.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Libwiigui/tutorial

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Developer_tips

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using the new rpm2tgz, with flags!!

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In slackware-current as of 2010-02-23,  the traditional command used for very basic archive conversion of RPMs into a TAR’d.Gzip’d archive, just got a hint of flare. :)

Normal usage is typically for easily converting an RPM that you’d like to review, like a ‘src’ RPM.

But you may find yourself saying, if I could just quickly/easily install <xyz>.rpm on my system as slackware package, it would make life a bit easier. Well now there are several flags available, to be used AT YOUR OWN RISK ;)

If you execute rpm2tgz with no arguments, it will output the following

$ rpm2tgz
/usr/bin/rpm2tgz:  Converts RPM format to standard GNU tar + GNU zip format.
            (view converted packages with "less", install and remove
            with "installpkg", "removepkg", "pkgtool", or manually
            with "tar")

Usage:      /usr/bin/rpm2tgz [OPTION] 
            (Outputs "file.tgz")

  -s    extract the install scripts to /usr/doc/$PRGNAM-$VERSION/
          for review.
  -S    extracts the install scripts to be executed on package installation
          (only pre-install and post-install scripts used)
          USE WITH CAUTION!
  -n    name the output package using the rpm's metadata
  -r    extract what the rpm's "requires" (dependencies)
          as documention to /usr/doc/$PRGNAM-$VERSION/
  -d    attempt a wellformed slack-desc from the rpm meta data

Everything is pretty straight forward on what it does, but lets have an example. Say you want hulu-desktop, so you download a file called “huludesktop-x86_64.rpm”, and with traditional usage of rpm2tgz, you would have a resulting archive named “huludesktop-x86_64.tgz”. This is fine if you are not going to install it, but if you do plan on installing this archive, now it does not conform to the naming convention.

With the flags available, you can specify the following command

$ sudo rpm2tgz -srdn huludesktop-x86_64.rpm

and get a resulting package called “huludesktop-0.9.7-x86_64-1.tgz”.

All flags are not needed, for every situation, and particular ones should be used with care (-S), which can and may frequently wreak havoc on your system.

Take care,

vb

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