AltME groups: search

I give Ubuntu a go. I can reinstall Fedora if I'm not satisfied.

Has anyone been successfull displaying a rebol window without dragbar 
or borders using view/options [no-title no-border]

It does not work with gnome kde but perhaps some other window manager?
or is it the window manager or Xwindows itself?

Is that a problem with the manager or Xwindows system?

I just compiled window2.c from 
http://www.unix-manuals.com/tutorials/xlib/xlib.html

and it opens a window without titlebar, and can open a borderless 
window (with BORDER_WIDTH 0).

I'm not so familiar with X Windows programming, but the above example 
appears to be just making use of the X Windows system, not going 
via the window manager... (not sure).

Anyone know how to obtain the X Window pointer for a Rebol window?

It appears that I can get the process id using a DLL.

I've got a shell/rebol script (test-get-process-id.r) which starts 
with a shebang line, then the rebol header etc. :


#!/home/anton/dev/rebol/view/rebview2.7.006.4.2 -cswq --script test-get-process_id.r
rebol [
...


what's strange is that rebol starts up in trace mode, so it outputs 
a lot of trace information to the bash shell. I'd like to suppress 
the trace mode, and it's strange that it is switched on without me 
asking for it. Anybody have any information on this?

I now seem to be able to list windows associated with a given process 
id. I've tried the konsole pid, and I get five result windows...

Gabriele, thanks, I'm having a look inside. Do you know if associated 
windows can be found?

I'm still looking for a way to identify the windows opened by a rebol 
process... Lots of info to wade through.

Well, there could be something there (I had a quick look), but I 
probably want to target the X Window core system, or, look at all 
resources allocated by a process and then see which ones are opened 
windows.

I will ask one person tomorrow whom I do regard being a guru. Not 
sure he is working with windows - he's a typical kernel and console 
guy :-)

I got reply from my other colleague who started to write video player 
upon ffmpeg. He uses SDL, and there is a parameter called - SDL_NOFRAME. 
Maybe you could look, how SDL handles it? What is more - their wrappers 
should be cross-platform, so we might find solution for more than 
one OS actually ....

Right, but before I get to manipulating the window, I need to have 
the window pointer. If I don't have a way of getting that from the 
process id,  then it remains hypothetical.

X.org maillist doesn't have any easy answers to this, either. Looks 
like it really is time to hack. This will be a big job.

-f file
	True if file exists and is a regular file.

There's a whole host of other one-letter variants for checking other 
types of objects that may be present in the filesystem.

It's completely brain-damaged for bash to use one-letter options 
for this - but that's the situation.

Probably that env var is set up by SDL, and only for a window which 
the SDL system knows about. Since rebol doesn't use SDL to open its 
windows, SDL (most likely) won't know about those windows.

But anyway, I'm heading down the DLL injection path, using LD_PRELOAD. 
I have a simple LD_PRELOAD example working, which intercepts calls 
to the time() function (and works with rebol). The next example I'll 
try will intercept X window calls.

Not Rebol callbacks. A DLL built using C is injected using LD_PRELOAD 
when running any executable. The executable I'm interested in is 
Rebol, of course. This injected code intercepts calls to XCreateSimpleWindow 
(which creates the X Windows window), and adds some properties to 
it, including one which stores the process id of the application 
opening the window. This means that each X window can be ensured 
to have the process id of the application that opened it (which is 
otherwise not mandated by X). So I could do that to any program and 
it would ensure that there is a way to get the process id. I'm doing 
it to Rebol, and this means it is now possible for another DLL function 
(called from Rebol) to scan all the windows opened on the X display 
and see which one has the Rebol process id. All you need is the process 
id, and this is easy to do with a very small DLL function call.

I was starting to think about how I could possibly get a rebol callback 
happening, though. That should obviate the need to scan all open 
windows, which is a crude way of getting information.

I've just got another method of passing the Window XID to Rebol, 
obviating the need to scan all open windows. Much more direct, it 
sets an environment variable, which Rebol can read with get-env after 
VIEWing a window.

But I think I caught up to where RT left off on the hunt to implement 
NO-TITLE and NO-BORDER. It looks like there is no window manager 
agnostic way of separately specifying these window decorations. I 
will investigate some more, though. I have managed to open a window 
with no title and no border, but it doesn't respond to events at 
all, because this was achieved by basically telling the window manager 
not to  manage the window at all when X is opening it.

I have a program I would like to run on a netbook (Small screen 800x480) 
so I do not want to lose any realestate to title bar...
(I know it can come with XP but for another $50)

Also, I like the idea of the application "taking over" the netbook 
as if this device and the App are one.

It's for use by non-techies so as little interaction with linux as 
possible is desired...

Sort of like an appliance...


The perfect setup would be to boot into a slim xwindows environment 
with no or minimal wmanger running my app but have  key combo at 
start up to boot into full linux desktop

I've just opened a little Rebol window without title bar or border, 
but it can be moved around and handles events as a normal window 
does (eg. view layout [button area] works).

I think this method, which uses a small amount of code, may be window 
manager agnostic too.

On KDE here, I can press and hold Alt key, then left-click drag a 
window with the mouse.

For R3, it looks like a very similar trick should work, even through 
wine.

This window without title bar can be moved in R2:


main: layout [origin 0 box "Drag me!" feel [engage: func [f a e] 
[if a = 'down [pos: e/offset] if find [over away] a [main/offset: 
main/offset - pos + e/offset show main]]]]

view/options main [no-title]

So you can build your own title-bar and make it behave like a normal 
title bar.

In two weeks I am going to set-up new Linux server finally. I have 
got the HW - SuperMicro board. I will install Mikrotik RouterOS on 
it, and it allows me to serve as a FW/router, and iside of it I want 
to install Ubuntu server in XEN

Tested with a simple "view layout [box]" on Ubuntu Hardy with the 
wmii window manager, View does not crash when using xrandr to change 
resolution.

I've tried ubuntu many times with the latest trying ubuntu server 
edition. I installed webmin (not too hard). I ended up installing 
a low-end desktop environment...

But as usual I hit too many walls...

It also ran like a dog on this low end PC. It was a slow 800mhz but 
should have been fast enougg..I probably need more memory as I thing 
there was alot of disk swaping going on..


Now, I'm using ms server 2003...Atleast now I can go to my brother 
if I have a problem...He does not know linux.
I want to support Linux but I'm never happy with it in the end.

Perhaps, Syllable can one day be my server of choice ..

Don't know anything about the server questions, but Ubuntu by default 
doesn't have a root password - use "sudo su" to get a root terminal, 
then passwd if you want to give root a password

OK, so you are saying that I need to use some older Ubuntu version? 
They officially release 8.10 version and some main packages don't 
even work? I thought that by going Ubuntu I would be more safe from 
such a hassle. I probably need to go with LTS version then?

Petr, on Ubuntu there's no root password, unless you set that manually. 
On a server, this is debatable, but on workstations/desktops (which 
is Ubuntu's focus) it makes no sense to have two passwords for what 
is basically the same user.

I now have several entries in Grub to boot different Kernel versions. 
Can someone explain to me how this works with all the rest of the 
applications and libraries?


I can imagine that you just use a different boot image to get a different 
kernel. But how does Linux handle all the "kernel dependent" libraries?

IIRC VMS had a very cool method to handle different version if the 
same file in a transparent way.

Brian: still, distributions would not send out a kernel update that 
would break the userland. If there's an incompatible kernel, it simply 
never gets into that distribution, until next version of the whole 
distro

the only case when i had problems upgrading a kernel was when i was 
on Gentoo, and the new kernel would use different names for my hd 
partitions (switched from /dev/hdX to /dev/sdX), which meant that 
I had to fix the /etc/fstab for it to boot. these things don't happen 
on normal distributions, and even on Gentoo I could have avoided 
it if I paid attention I guess.

Gab, ah, sorry I didn't mean going from 2.6.a to 2.6.b

I mean having 2.4.x and 2.6.y on one system.

It's not, but it looks like using dist-upgrade on Debian ADDs a new 
kernel and release without removing the old kernel (and maybe old 
apps). At least you get a new entry in Grub.

even when going from 2.4 to 2.6? I guess that if they do that, they 
must have tested it. i'm not aware of debian being able to keep multiple 
versions of programs though, so if it's installing a new version 
of a program, most likely it will remove the old one. (it can keep 
multiple versions of the same library, but not always)

I am interested in improving the display of fonts by R2 on Kubuntu 
Gutsy 7.10.

I am not yet aware of what font rendering systems are used by Kubuntu, 
but I can see lots of True Type Font (.ttf) files anyway.

I can get R2 View to display a font (eg. gentium), but the scaling 
looks pretty bad. eg.
	view layout [text "Hello" font-name "gentium" font-size 16]

Actually, what I'm primarily after is a fixed-sized font that looks 
nice at different scales.

Thanks Gabriele. I wanted to know in case we convert the Script library 
to utf-8 what conversions we would need to support Library Data Services. 
I already have a utf-8 to iso-8859-1 conversion function.(It on't 
be as good as yours or one of  Oldes but it works).


(When I say if we convert the script library, I really mean Sunanda 
as he does all the hard work).

hi, has anyone had this problem before? I got to a new VPS .. I downloaded 
rebol and cheyenne and I can't run them ... 

- when they weren't chmod +x  if I did ./rebol ./cheyenne I get  
Permission denied
- once I make them executable I get No such file or directory .. 


If I type ls they are there in both  cases, I also copied them into 
bin and tried to run them there but same thing, I could run neighbour 
files in bin like ./readlink but not ./rebol and by the looks of 
ls -l they had the same rights/owner everything .. I also copied 
and renamed both files and the same .. any ideas how this can happen 
.. file is there

There is a way to hack the executable. It's been discussed previously 
on this AltME world. You should be able to Google it.

Although you might want to consider just switching to 32 bit if you 
don't have a specific reason to use 64 bit Linux.

64 bit uses more memory, and memory is usually the most significant 
constraint on a VPS.

kcollins ... this VPS was given to me as a present by long time customer 
... I said I wanted 32 bits but I guess his admin mixed up things

I will try getting 32 bits, if it won't be possible I will google 
for hack ..


Doc : I tried ldd and it said >> not a dynamic executable  (so I 
guess that isn't the problem)

[root-:-www]:/usr/bin# ./rebol
-bash: ./rebol: No such file or directory
[root-:-www]:/usr/bin# ldd ./rebol
        not a dynamic executable
[root-:-www]:/usr/bin# ldd ./who
        linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fffe89fd000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007ff4e02bc000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007ff4e060f000)

client said that reinstalling linux would be a little problem, so 
this will do for now ... 


I installed the ia32-libs ( apt-get install ia32-libs ) and now rebol 
works

rebol now works, but I have a problem with cheyenne , something similar 
to what Doc said before
--------------

[root-:-www]:/usr/share/cheyenne# ./cheyenne

** Script Error: Library error: /lib/libc.so.6: wrong ELF class: 
ELFCLASS64
** Where: do-cache
** Near: all [
    any [
        exists? libc: %/lib/libc.so.6
        exists? libc: %/lib/libc.so.5
    ]
    libc: load/libra...
[root-:-www]:/usr/share/cheyenne# ldd ./cheyenne
        libm.so.6 => /lib32/libm.so.6 (0xb7ef7000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xb7ef3000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xb7da1000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f24000)
[root-:-www]:/usr/share/cheyenne#

I fix that issue in my developement version of Cheyenne a week ago. 
Just edit %misc/unix.r and change the access path to libc like this 
: 
	any [
		exists? libc: %libc.so.6
		exists? libc: %/lib32/libc.so.6
		exists? libc: %/lib/libc.so.6
		exists? libc: %/lib/libc.so.5
	]

ManuM, can you do something similar for a file manager window? That 
would solve a bug in R3 Chat. Thanks.

Henrik: If you are talking about bug#779 I have added a comment at 
bug
http://curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=779&cursor=1
Something similar can be:
open-file-manager: funct [ dir ][ call reform [ "xdg-open" dir ]]

Robert: I work with kubuntu 8.10 but I think that can help

This is one line from my "/etc/fstab" file. It mounts a fat filesystem 
at /media/DESARROLLO ( dir /media/DESARROLLO already exists )
/dev/sda7 /media/DESARROLLO vfat rw,utf8,umask=000 0 0

With umask=000 the access to /media/DESARROLLO will be rwxrwxrwx 
( the owner is root and the group is root, I don't know how to change 
it )

There is a tool to convert filenames (convmv) to UTF8. I'm wondering, 
what influence this has on running programs?

For example: IOS has a registry, if I conver the filesystem names 
to UTF8, will this render the registry entries invalid?

re: ios, if you have non-ascii chars, it could be a problem.

most programs do not check that the file name is valid utf-8. normally, 
you're using a utf-8 terminal so there is no way you can type an 
invalid filename. but you can easily create one using rebol for eg. 
or using escape sequences in the shell and so on

I haven't played with unix for so long I'm a bit (very :-)  rusty.

when doing an 'ls -al'

I get:

total 20
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 May 16 05:37 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 May 16 12:10 ..
-rw-------  1 root root  437 May 17 09:35 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  412 Dec 15  2004 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  140 Nov 19  2007 .profile


I can't remember what the "total 20" stands for. 

it doesn't map to file numbers, block counts used by files, or anything 
I can gather... is this some type of millisecond count of time it 
took to perform the file list?

I used to be an IRIX certified integration expert... working on 1M$ 
+ systems ... this feels strange...I feel like a newbie all over 
again  :-)

I never really liked linux... (being a fan of "real" unixes which 
actually do work all the time  ;-)  and now I am remembering why.

I got a bare-bones debian install, and am trying to add X11 to it. 
can any one point me to a real link with explicit instructions?

apt-get install xserver-xorg
 might be a good place to start

I've tried following instructions from a few sites which show a 3 
command line install, but that fails, since it doesn't install x11 
, only xwindows, and then it reports its missing about 2% of the 
files from the distribution server itself.

yep that fails so far.

getting a number of missing packages.

there are a few missing files, but so far it at least was able to 
get to the point where it actually installed the X 11 apps and utilities... 
not just a few libs

this is an exciting time for me...


 I've been inching my way to this point for almost a decade.  building 
 libs and tools one by one with a precise vision in mind.   I am now 
 at the point where I can start integrating all of that into "products", 
 and so far there is very little things to change, all the lego bricks 
 fit together  :-D

there is a !remark group.. more details are there, ask remark questions 
there ;-)

I am sourcing a file with alias commands in them, but they aren't 
actually being applied.

typing those exact commands directly in the shell works.


I know alias is not a file command, but a bash internal operation, 
but how can I get bash to source the files and apply the aliases 
to my login automatically?


the echo within the file IS printing on the shell, so its not just 
chmod thing... any linux gurus can help me?

maybe the originally sourced files are executed a bit differently.


on sgi IRIX I never had any issue with sourcing files into the .cshrc 
files...  I was using tcsh, which I usually prefer over bash, but 
isn't included by default in all flavors of unix.

I remember that things like aliases are a bit more flexible (dangerous 
too) in csh and tcsh

its soo cool my ssh based tool reports the login errors in a nice 
rebol alert box hehehe

what's strange to me is that the echo within my sourced file was 
sent to the console, clearly indicating it was being call as a script, 
unless there are different bash script evaluation levels and I don't 
know how to set it up.

Any idea how to start a rebol script via ssh (I have a VPS) .. and 
detach it from my console so when I close it it won't stop running?


cheyene executable file does this automagically (I have no idea how) 
.. if I run cheyenne through .r script it exits with me .. but my 
problem now is not with cheyenne but I have a custom script that 
should run in the background. After googling yesterday I found out 
about >> nohup script-to-run & which seemed to still work if I closed 
ssh and started another one but now I see for the second time that 
after a while it exited as it isn't running any more ...

btw ... I have a wiki where I write down these things so I don't 
forget ..  http://www.manage-websites.com/doku.php?id=tutorial-linux-shell
 .. if you are linux-stupid like me maybe you can find something 
helpfull.. or you can add something :)

You can use screen to detach a session and reconnect with it later, 
possibly from an entirely different machine

Another way is to have the program detach itself, possibly switching 
to running onder a different user account

yes, nohup is very usefull too , with &  .. for example nohup some-longer-tast 
&  .. but for my concrete example I wasn't able to figure out why 
rebol script terminated after a while, not on every exit but at some 
point I just saw it wasn't running any more .. and by the look of 
nohup.out file there was no error .. but "rebol terminated"

Janko, it's just that everytime I learn something that I know I will 
forget .. I write it in a wiki somewhere :)

what I am missing is a synch with a server so I can always have the 
same info everywhere... which AltME works nice for as would the wiki.

Janko, basically the thing is, if you want to see the program's output, 
you need to use screen. This allows you to have output and detach 
it. Otherwise, you can just redirect the output to a file (or to 
/dev/null), then you can exit your ssh session without problems.

i'm not sure if it's installed by default anymore, but there also 
used to be a "nohup" program which would redirect your program's 
io and detach it (run it in the background).

Gabriele: I was using nohup like this >> nohup /.../rebol script.r 
&  << but at 2 times rebol script got terminated for some reason 
after a while.. it did stay alive after I closed and reopened ssh 
but when I came later it wasn't running any more and by looking at 
output file nohup.out last thing was "rebol terminated" so it didn't 
 exit on error but got terminated in the same way if I press Ctrl+C 
(maybe I just need to read more about nohup)

Janko, it's hard to say what could have sent a sigint or similar 
to the rebol process. you could though catch those signals from REBOL 
if you wanted, via the system port.

OK, so I've downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 (64bit) and got it running under 
VirtualBox, then I download and untar/zip the REBOL SDK and open 
a console session. cd to the REBOL dir and do a chmod +x and type 
./rebview ... which comes back with a "file or dir not found message" 
... anything else I need to do to get REBOL working? Oh, and what 
font looked best with RebGUI in your opinion?

I am using Ultimate Extreme-a custom Ubuntu-under VmPlayer and installed 
View. It works fine. Then I emailed my license and put it in the 
root of .rebol but when I start View it does not see the license 
? Ideas ? Thanks !

why do you need a license for rebol?

In any case, it's easier to do a "sudo apt-get install ia32-libs" 
than do a new installation, no? :)

OK, I've got it running under a clean install of Ubuntu 32bit. Now, 
how do I determine what scaleable fonts REBOL can actually use? (%/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/ 
doesn't seem to have all that many ... and they look pretty ordinary 
atsize: 72).

The later. Windows fonts are easy enough to find (c:\windows\fonts) 
as are Mac (/System/Library/Fonts & /Library/Fonts) ... I was hoping 
there was a simple "they're located here" equivalent for X11-based 
*nix.

All I want is a simple way of finding out what fonts REBOL can access 
on a clean install of Ubuntu.

a simple way from REBOL? you probably have to parse the fontconfig 
files.

(and all I want is the clean install of Ubuntu to use a good looking 
font)

OK, got it working on Ubuntu (and Mac) with:

fonts: copy []

foreach [font-name style] parse/all (call/output "fc-list" s: copy 
"" s) ":^/" [
	all [
		not find fonts font-name

  (size-text make face [text: "A" font: make face/font [name: font-name 
  size: 10]]) <>

  size-text make face [text: "A" font: make face/font [name: font-name 
  size: 12 style: 'bold]]
		insert tail fonts font-name
	]
]
sort fonts