Planet Sabayon Linux

Here’s my desktop, running Ubuntu 8.04, Gnome 2.22.2 and compiz-fusion…

Wallpaper: 1280×800

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Some of you asked me about our Entropy Build Server. Here are some pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/netvandal/sets/72157605189172834
The NLNET Foundation just started to help us The first step has been buying a hardware RAID controller (3ware FTW!) with two 1TB hard drives, THANKS!

More in the next weeks

I think we can. Last week we released the last beta release of 3.5. As we had planned, this has been a really long release due to the amount of work needed to prepare Entropy, in its basic features. We expect to go final before the end of June, once we’ll be done with the “ironing” of Entropy.

At the moment, we are working on two sides: improving our build server I/O performance (it’s the server which builds Entropy binary packages – help needed) and on preparing Entropy 0.15, featuring full i18n support, Community Repositories and lots of bug fixes (more later this week).

After Sabayon Linux 3.5, we’re gonna discuss about a possible “time-spot” to place the miniEdition and, most of all, we’re gonna change the development cycle a lot. This means that we are going to have new stable releases every 2-3 months, starting from 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, … with incremental features (KDE4! is the first). So, expect 4.0 soon then . As usual, our Core development team will be in charge of testing it out.

Have fun

What were adobe thinking when they released a package which has to use an rpm/deb distro?

I understand that it is an alpha version and that they feel it is important for users to agree to their EULA, but they pop up that question after the install - no one is paying for the software, nothing serious happens if someone disagrees to the EULA after installing - worst case, they lost a minute and a half of their time for the install/uninstall. Why not provide a tarball with the software? But that's not even the real issue, since one can go and copy the files which the installer unpacks into /tmp/ and put them in the appopriate locations to get the same effect as the regular installer (unless the regular one does more? I found a need to also manually create ~/.adobe/Certificates and install the ones provided with the install into said dir, using /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/installCertificate).

The real problems began when I tried to install air applications - all of them refused to get installed. After a few searches on the net, I found this forum discussion. There I found out it is possible to add the empty files ~/.airinstall and ~/.airappinstall which then gets logged into. Just for the sake of it, I tried the regular install option - to see what I would get in the log file. This is what I got:

Performing runtime install
UI SWF load is complete
UI initialized
enter confirming
Installation type: new
stateInstallingWithElevation: enter install
received unknown message type from subinstaller: Adobe AIR is currently not installed
received unknown message type from subinstaller: Installing with version 1.0
subinstaller: Scheduling runtime installation operations
subinstaller: new installation
subinstaller: new installation scheduled
subinstaller: Beginning runtime installation
subinstaller: Beginning install
subinstaller: Error occurred; beginning rollback: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="" errorID=1]
subinstaller: Rollback due to error complete
Failed during elevated install: error 1
runtime install entering error state: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="" errorID=1]

One thing I can say is that this log sucks! Maybe the developers @Adobe know what it means by the error ID (although a few more IDs and they will have to start memorizing - who wants to do that?) but anyone who wants to quickly figure out what's wrong is left in the dark.

Anyway, I whipped a tarball out of the files in /tmp/air.*/build and created an ebuild to install it (I attached it here for your enjoyment). I also put up the tarball on the web, and this is where the ebuild gets it from (Although you can recreate it yourself). I didn't deal with the QA warnings because I didn't get the functionality itself to work well yet...

Which reminds me I'm getting a little sidetracked. After installing the ebuild, I got the adobe air application installer as an item in my menu - I couldn't install any app, however - the errors from the log look like this one:

waiting to receive open event
UI SWF load is complete
UI initialized
enter waitingForOpen
Converting to /home/user/.adobe/AIR/tmp/FlashTmp1
Failed while converting AIR file: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled exception Error: Unable to identify the distribution that the application is running on. Adobe AIR is only supported on rpm and debian based distributions." errorID=0]
Starting cleanup
Installation exited

Ok, the installer checks (assuming it does) which distro I'm using - that could have sore reasons (although none valid imho) - but damn it! Let me run the apps! Why check the distro after it is already installed? What could possibly be fundamentally different about throwing stuff into ~/.adobe between Gentoo and Ubuntu? No idea. I decided to fool the app, and tried running an strace and an ltrace on the proccess, but couldn't find the place where it checks for the distro. I tried getting uname to print a message from a debian machine - didn't help. If I had a deb/rpm based distro install somewhere I might do an fs diff to see how air performs the install, but I don't so it won't happen.

I tried unpacking the files and placing the stuff in several locations, but no go. I found instructions on the forum to use the SDK to play air apps in a half hackish way, decided it's not worth my time and gave up. So... If anyone from adobe reads this, please remove the distro check and let users play with it! and if anyone can walk the last mile, I will be happy to know.

Great week reader!

What were adobe thinking when they released a package which has to use an rpm/deb distro?

I understand that it is an alpha version and that they feel it is important for users to agree to their EULA, but they pop up that question after the install - no one is paying for the software, nothing serious happens if someone disagrees to the EULA after installing - worst case, they lost a minute and a half of their time for the install/uninstall. Why not provide a tarball with the software? But that's not even the real issue, since one can go and copy the files which the installer unpacks into /tmp/ and put them in the appopriate locations to get the same effect as the regular installer (unless the regular one does more? I found a need to also manually create ~/.adobe/Certificates and install the ones provided with the install into said dir, using /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/installCertificate).

The real problems began when I tried to install air applications - all of them refused to get installed. After a few searches on the net, I found this forum discussion. There I found out it is possible to add the empty files ~/.airinstall and ~/.airappinstall which then gets logged into. Just for the sake of it, I tried the regular install option - to see what I would get in the log file. This is what I got:

Performing runtime install
UI SWF load is complete
UI initialized
enter confirming
Installation type: new
stateInstallingWithElevation: enter install
received unknown message type from subinstaller: Adobe AIR is currently not installed
received unknown message type from subinstaller: Installing with version 1.0
subinstaller: Scheduling runtime installation operations
subinstaller: new installation
subinstaller: new installation scheduled
subinstaller: Beginning runtime installation
subinstaller: Beginning install
subinstaller: Error occurred; beginning rollback: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="" errorID=1]
subinstaller: Rollback due to error complete
Failed during elevated install: error 1
runtime install entering error state: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="" errorID=1]

One thing I can say is that this log sucks! Maybe the developers @Adobe know what it means by the error ID (although a few more IDs and they will have to start memorizing - who wants to do that?) but anyone who wants to quickly figure out what's wrong is left in the dark.

Anyway, I whipped a tarball out of the files in /tmp/air.*/build and created an ebuild to install it (I attached it here for your enjoyment). I also put up the tarball on the web, and this is where the ebuild gets it from (Although you can recreate it yourself). I didn't deal with the QA warnings because I didn't get the functionality itself to work well yet...

Which reminds me I'm getting a little sidetracked. After installing the ebuild, I got the adobe air application installer as an item in my menu - I couldn't install any app, however - the errors from the log look like this one:

waiting to receive open event
UI SWF load is complete
UI initialized
enter waitingForOpen
Converting to /home/user/.adobe/AIR/tmp/FlashTmp1
Failed while converting AIR file: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled exception Error: Unable to identify the distribution that the application is running on. Adobe AIR is only supported on rpm and debian based distributions." errorID=0]
Starting cleanup
Installation exited

Ok, the installer checks (assuming it does) which distro I'm using - that could have sore reasons (although none valid imho) - but damn it! Let me run the apps! Why check the distro after it is already installed? What could possibly be fundamentally different about throwing stuff into ~/.adobe between Gentoo and Ubuntu? No idea. I decided to fool the app, and tried running an strace and an ltrace on the proccess, but couldn't find the place where it checks for the distro. I tried getting uname to print a message from a debian machine - didn't help. If I had a deb/rpm based distro install somewhere I might do an fs diff to see how air performs the install, but I don't so it won't happen.

I tried unpacking the files and placing the stuff in several locations, but no go. I found instructions on the forum to use the SDK to play air apps in a half hackish way, decided it's not worth my time and gave up. So... If anyone from adobe reads this, please remove the distro check and let users play with it! and if anyone can walk the last mile, I will be happy to know.

Great week reader!