Category Archives: linux

Eclipse and TPTP – Profiling Java Applications

Ever wondered why your code is so damn slow? Where are the bottlenecks of the application? Read on for some information how to setup the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform under Linux

The Eclipse TPTP is supposed to be a swiss army knife for everything in the domain of profiling and testing. Unfortunately, the installation via the Update Manager of Eclipse is broken. Totally broken. The agent controller required to gather statistical data does not work and fails with a “No controller on port 10002” message. Not really helpful.

So, starting with the information blogged here and here and with a custom eclipse installation from a tar.gz archive the following steps are required:

1) Install the support library:

  sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

2) Set all agent controller bin files to executable:

  chmod +x eclipse.tptp.platform.ac.linux_ia32_4.4.1.v200709261752/agent_controller/bin/*

3) “Fix the symbolic links for the linked libraries. The following list of files should point to their .so.4.4.0 counterparts. The easiest way to do this is just to download a copy of the standalone Agent Controller and to copy the lib directory to the lib directory of the Integrated Agent Controller”

4) Define a TEMP variable in your shell:

  export TEMP=/tmp

5) Finally start the agent controller manually.

In my case this gave me a running agent to profile my application against. Once. And then no more. A restart of eclipse fixes this. Sometimes.

Sorry, folks, I guess I will stay with the integrated netbeans profiler for now. Here, at least, everything works reliably (!) out of the box without patching code, extracting libraries.

VirtualBox and Ubuntu Gutsy

Yea, Ubuntu Gutsy is out!! Just updated my system using the instructions on the kubuntu site. After the upgrade – about 20 minutes – even my mysterious ATI drivers still work perfectly.

Unfortunately, the ubuntu guys decided to remove the usbfs from Gutsy. As virtualbox relies on this system for usb support > no usb support in virtualbox under linux.

As a quick workaround edit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh and remove the comment #’s from the following lines:

#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Running /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start afterwards reenables the usbfs, virtualbox is happy again 🙂

Just Stuff to Know :-)

Subversion

Ever wondered how to get back to a pervious (probably old) version in svn?

$ svn merge -rHEAD:123 .

reverts from head back to 123.

Pöl

Biosprit und die Klimaerwärmung? Hierzu gibt es einen schönen Artikel bei Telepolis. Auch lesenswert die Diskussion um Poel und die Krebsgefahr, siehe die weiteren Studienergebnisse. Einige Infos zum Russfilter sind sicher auch interessant.

Weiterhin: Eine schöne Linkliste von Ricardo. Und eine Liste umbautauglicher Fahrzeuge von rodionenkin

Und letztlich: Schlauch in Schlauch als Do it yourself

PS: Auch Klaus Hipp faehrt Poel

Another ATI X1300 madness….

… or why the xorg.conf configuration is not everything!

For testing purposes of some graphics related bug I disabled the xinerama setup using amdccle, the AMD/ATI control center. Later on I just copied the old xorg.conf file back into place, rebooted and – tada – one screen still blank. Fire up the control center again, everything is as required.

Once you actually know the reason for this behaviour the solutions is quite easy 🙂 But throw away the control center, it won’t and can’t help you here.

aticonfig –query-monitor

aticonfig –enable-montiro=tdms1,tdms2i

The first command gives the information about the monitors connected. Due to some reason the ATI configuration utilities disabled the second monitor while testing without Xinerama. The second command actually enables both monitors. In my case, 2 LCD screens.

So, normally, the xorg.conf is responsible for any X related configuration. Think again, if you are using ATI. Here, the videocard (or whatever else) is responsible for enabling monitors and storing these settings.

About Seamless Integration of Windows

Sad but true… synchronization of my cellphone is possible only with MS Outlook. Nothing else, period. Having done the “dual-boot and sync if I think about it” dance in the past a better solution was needed.

Well, with the new release of VirtualBox a seamless integration of Microsoft applications into my KDE session is possible. And thats the way it looks now:


virtualbox

Windows XP is running as guest operation in the virtual machine, the windows are shown just as normal unix / kde windows. Even better, with my dual-screen xinerama setup the left taskbar is from KDE while on the right the Windows taskbar is available. Well, finally a solution that does’nt suck 🙂

ATI X1300 made Easy with Envy

Just a follow-up to my post reagarding the installation problems of an ATI X1300 card in Ubuntu 7.04….

Envy is a brilliant little tools that supports all the required steps for an automatic manual installation of the ATI drivers on my machine. From the documentation:

E) What happens if the kernel is upgraded (e.g. via system updates)?

You will only have to follow these steps:
1) Restart your computer and the Xserver will crash (since it will lack a module).

2) Then launch Envy’s textual interface from the command line by typing sudo envy -t

3) Done.

That’s all there is to do. Sounds neat, doesn’t it?

ATI X1300 and Ubuntu – Installation Woes and Success

ATI support for linux is there, ok. Personal notes about what to do (and what not to do!) to get the ATI X1300 installed on Ubuntu 7.04

Prerequisites: Two monitors with 1600×1200 pixels each connected via DVI to a single ATI X1300 card. The objective is BigDesktop mode with OpenGL and Direct Rendering (DRI) support using KDM as window manager.

Only the ATI binary drivers provide DRI support with BigDesktop mode (aka Xinerama). See the BinaryDriverHowto ATI for various methods of installation. Please make sure you start with a fresh (clean) installation.

Here is what worked for me:

  • Download the latest ATI driver
  • Install all the required packages for a fakeroot instalaltion, namely module-assistant build-essential debhelper debconf dh-make fakeroot libstdc++5 linux-headers-generic
  • Create ubuntu packages from the driver as explained here
  • Install the .deb-packages via dpkg -i
  • build and install the required kernel modules, see here
  • Install the restricted-manager via apt-get and enable the ATI drivers via the restricted-manager gui. Also, install the package linux-restricted-modules-generic
  • Important: Edit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common to include DISABLED_MODULES=”fglrx”
  • Reboot and Pray

Now, using aticonfig –input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf Option1 Option2 configure your desktop as needed.

Ubuntu and Remote X-Windows

By default Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) does not allow remote X-Windows via port 6000. With my new desktop installed and in place this is a pity as some applications are still only installed on my laptop.

So, either you need to allow tcp connections to the X server, as shown in this blog post or you just use ssh to tunnel the X session:

 $ ssh -X -l <user> host

That will do the trick.