A Ninja Kit

Primer Dia

ankitj — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 20:32:28 +0000

, originally uploaded by radical_007.

First pic for 2011!

xmonad/gnome: Nautilus respawning problem

ankitj — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:48:12 +0000

I’m using xmonad 0.9 on OpenSUSE 11.2, with gnome. I’ve disabled the nautilus desktop.
I noticed that i can no longer launch nautilus. Digging a bit further, I found that
nautilus was respawning continually. Reading through this related bug report, I found some solutions.

A possible workaround is to re-enable the desktop:
gconftool2 --type boolean --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop true

But that is of no use to me, with xmonad. So a better workaround for me was to remove
the ‘filemanager’ entry from /desktop/gnome/session/required_components_list gconf key . Make sure
you are *not* removing the /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/filemanager key.
Use gconf-editor to do this. Logout/login and it should work fine now.

AFAICT, these are workarounds, but seems to work fine for me.

xbuild update

ankitj — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:41:54 +0000

Small xbuild update:

Better error reporting. Earlier, xbuild didn’t correctly show the filename if the source for the error was not the main project file. Like, if the error was from Microsoft.Common.targets . Now, it should report this correctly. But real improvement is that the end of the build instead of showing a dump of errors and warnings like:

Banshee.Collection/TrackInfo.cs(623,57): warning CS0078: The 'l' suffix is easily confused with the digit '1' (use 'L' for clarity) : warning : Found a conflict between : 'Mono.Data.Sqlite, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756' and 'Mono.Data.Sqlite, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'. Using 'Mono.Data.Sqlite, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756' reference.

.. which doesn’t tell which projects those warnings belong to. For solutions with lot of projects, this becomes a major issue. So, xbuild now gives better info (like msbuild):

/other/banshee/Banshee.sln (default targets) -> (Build target) -> /other/banshee/src/Core/Banshee.Core/Banshee.Core.csproj (default targets) -> (CoreCompile target) -> Banshee.Collection/TrackInfo.cs(623,57): warning CS0078: The 'l' suffix is easily confused with the digit '1' (use 'L' for clarity) Banshee.Collection/TrackInfo.cs(623,57): warning CS0078: The 'l' suffix is easily confused with the digit '1' (use 'L' for clarity)
/other/banshee/Banshee.sln (default targets) -> (Build target) -> /other/banshee/src/Core/Banshee.Services/Banshee.Services.csproj (default targets) -> (ResolveAssemblyReferences target) -> /home/radical/w1/misc/lib/mono/2.0/Microsoft.Common.targets: warning : Found a conflict between : 'Mono.Data.Sqlite, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756' and 'Mono.Data.Sqlite, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'. Using 'Mono.Data.Sqlite, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756' reference.

The other update is that xbuild now emits errors/warnings in color! So, instead of :

.. now you have this:

You can use the environment variable XBUILD_COLORS to change the default colors. You can use it as:

XBUILD_COLORS=errors=red,warnings=green,messages=brightblue,events=yellow

Or set to “disable” to disable colors. See man page for more details.

Thats all for now

xbuild and MonoDevelop

ankitj — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:49:11 +0000

xbuild (trunk) can now build MonoDevelop (trunk) !!

~/monodevelop> xbuild main/Main.sln

I’ve only tried the “Main.sln”, not the “extras”, as yet!

If you’re using or trying to use xbuild, then please fill this short survey

A small xbuild survey

ankitj — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:52:04 +0000

This is a survey to get an idea of which all projects currently work with xbuild. And those that don’t, what might be blocking them.

This can help me prioritize xbuild features and bug fixes. Please take a few mins to fill the survey.

Update: Fixed the survey link!
Update2: Really fixed this time!

xbuild and Mono 2.6p1

ankitj — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:15:41 +0000

The first preview of Mono 2.6 has been released here. This has a much improved version of xbuild.

Major new features since Mono 2.4:

Solution file support
ASP.NET project support, both WebApplication and WebSite projects
It can now resolve references from pkg-config files (eg. gtk-sharp.pc)
Pre/PostBuildEvents are supported
Before/After* hooks and *DependsOn properties have been added for various targets like Build/Clean, to allow extending them

You can see the full release notes for xbuild here.

So, effectively, you can use xbuild to build your VS2005/VS2008 solutions and projects. C# and VB.NET projects are supported out of the box. It supports the usual stuff like embedded resources, satellite assemblies, project references etc. Some opensource projects that work fine with xbuild : IronRuby, IronPython, OpenTK, etc.
Note: Multi-targeting is not implemented yet, but it should be available in the next preview release.

There might some windowism’s that might hinder things, for which you should see Porting MSBuild projects to xbuild. Feedback is welcome on improving that page.

Custom tasks and targets should work with xbuild. Not every api that your custom task might be using would have been implemented, so file a bug incase it is not.

So, this is an excellent time to try out your msbuild project with xbuild and help make it better File bugs here. Any kind of feedback on xbuild, positive/negative, is very welcome!

The wiki page Microsoft.Build has been updated with the current xbuild status.

Update: Short xbuild survey.

IronRuby with XBuild

ankitj — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:34:09 +0000

I found a mailing list post saying that IronRuby doesn’t build with xbuild (mono’s implementation of msbuild). So, I decided to give it a shot with latest xbuild. I tried the git repo git://github.com/ironruby/ironruby.git with mono 2.4.2.1, and after a few minor filename casing changes, it builds successfully !

jredville confirmed that the built binaries pass their language test suite

The patch is being reviewed by cj and jredville at #ironruby/freenode.

To try it yourself, apply the patch, and build as:
$ cd ironruby/Merlin/Main/Languages/Ruby
$ xbuild Ruby.sln /p:TreatWarningsAsErrors=false

The binaries are in “ironruby/Merlin/Main/Bin/Debug”.
$ mono ir.exe

My First Linux Kernel Patch!

ankitj — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:55:37 +0000

Last year’s FOSS.IN had a Kernel Workout session, in which i participated and tried to do a task titled ‘implement XFS preallocation ioctls in the VFS’.
Christoph Hellwig helped me understand the problem and I had a preliminary patch ready in the session, which was improved later over email with his and Hari’s help and finally got merged into 2.6.31-rc1

Here is the patch.

Thanks to FOSS.IN for this opportunity, and thanks to my friends for their support and encouragement Hopefully, this wont be the last

FQuad talks United FS

ankitj — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:50:26 +0000

We had our second session today. Suresh headed today’s discussion on United-FS: A Logical File System Providing a Single Image of Multiple Physical File Systems on NFS Server. This was longer than the previous paper. We talked about some basics of cluster filesystems (like Lustre), RAID concepts, NFS, pNFS etc. Nikanth explained about the device-mapper and LVM, and how software raid could be implemented. Techniques used by United fs for reliability, performance, were discussed and also other ideas beyond those suggested by the authors were also debated.

Srinidhi also joined us today. Overall a good, high energy and fun session!

First FQuad Session!

ankitj — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:32:56 +0000

A small group of us (Johnny, Nikanth, Suresh and me) met and discussed a paper titled “Design and Implement of Snapshots in Linux Block Level”. Nikanth led today’s _very_ active ~2 hour session. Basic snapshotting techniques were discussed, some possible variations on the ideas presented in the paper were also debated. We looked at dm snapshot, and some related code too. Nikanth and Suresh with their block layer and filesystem knowledge were very helpful in steering discussion.

On the whole it was very enjoyable 2 hours