LOTUSCONNECTIONS.org

I run MythTV 0.23 on my openSuSe 11.2 server. I use this box to serve my
website lotusconnections.org but also as my home-cinema set to watch movies.

Because everything is not pre-configured it takes a lot of time to smooth the
whole system to your needs. From time to time you come up with additions
that make it all work even better.

I use fluxbox as the window manager which always has a toolbar in the bottom
center of the screen, you can enable auto-hide for this thing. But you will
always see of few pixels. And this can be anyoning if your are wathing a movie
with MythMovie and your are still looking a little blue bare a the bottom of the screen.
( MPlayer doesn’t have this problem is just overtakes the whole screen, but you
  want MythMovie to wath DVD’s because it support DVD menus. )

To get rid of this toolbar I decided to compile it again with the parameters –disable-toolbar
and –disable-slit since I couldn’t find out how else I had to disable the bottom screen toolbar.

I was somewhat confused what was the slit and what the toolbar so I took the hard way
and compiled fluxbox agein with these two options.

Later on I found out that there seems to be an option you can use to disable the
toolbar with a option in the init file. ( Didn’t try this one out )

session.screen0.toolbar.visible:        false

Configured a image flubox with fbsetbg ( just a wrapper ) it uses feh as the program

install@hertogjan:~> /opt/fluxbox/bin/fbsetbg -i

feh is a nice wallpapersetter. You won’t have any problems.

Also configured an custom background for GDM. GDM stands for GNOME Display manager,
it’s a graphical login program. In previous releases of GDM there were GUI’s for configuring
custom things like your own background image, but since they started rewritten code
some of the functionality has been dropped. ( don’t pin me down on this, but it’s what I have
read here and there on the internet ).

To get my own background image working I had to install this RPM package

gconf2-branding-openSUSE-2.28-4.4.noarch.

After this RPM install, you can edit the background tag in this XML file

/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.vendor/%gconf-tree.xml

I configured this one as my GDM background

Further more I wanted to get rid of the mouse cursor when MythTV was loading
once X was started up. In Xorg you can’t disable the mouse cursor it will be always there.

I found some hack so that you can configure a mouse cursor which is so small you won’t
be able to see it.

This shows how it can be done, create a file with the following content.

#define nn1_width 16
#define nn1_height 16
static unsigned char nn1_bits[] {
0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00,
0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00,
0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00};

In the /home/mythtv/.fluxbox/init file of the user which is running MythTV
configure the rootCommand as follows.

session.screen0.rootCommand:   xsetroot -cursor /home/mythtv/emptycursor /home/mythtv/emptycursor

I still don’t get why I can’t put this option in the startup file just as the other
commands but I found this is the only combination that gets it working.

Further check my startup file of the mythtv user below with some more adjustments I made.

/home/mythtv/.fluxbox/startup

xset -b                           # disable the bell
xset -dpms s off              # disable the -dpms option disables DPMS (Energy Star) features and the screensaver.
xsetroot -solid black        #Background of the root window to black
xsetroot -bg black           #Background color to black
xvattr -a XV_COLORKEY -v 66048        # NVIDIA fix blue bars
#xsetroot -cursor /home/mythtv/emptycursor /home/mythtv/emptycursor
/opt/fluxbox/bin/fbsetbg -c /home/mythtv/mythtvbackground.png   #set a custom wallpaper

A couple of weeks ago Fixpack 2 for Connections 2.5 was released.

Mitch Cohen is alway one of the first to bring the good news to the
world check his blog entry for the important links.

http://www.curiousmitch.com/CuriousMitch/mitch2.nsf/d6plinks/MCON-85ZFQU

But as an addition to this information I would like to share
my experience installing this update.

When you read through the update guide you will bump into iFix
LO52087 which is an update for the TDISOL config directory as
used by Tivoli Directory Integrator.

This is an mandatory fix, and although English is not my primary
language this means “required”, Google translate is my friend .

Before getting to the upgrade process of Fixpack 2 I first wanted
to install this iFix. The first problem was that it was mentioned
in the documentation but wasn’t available yet at Fixcentral.
After it was released the Technote was not available. So again
waiting for this to complete, a few days later the technote was
updated and a installation instruction were available.

Unfortunate the instructions where far from complete, the iFix
itself is just a new version of the TDISOL directory. The instructions
are somewhat similair as in the InfoCenter for setting up a initial
TDISOL config directory.

There are no instructions for how you have to copy/migratie
your old property files to the new TDISOL config directory.
You can’t just copy your old property files because the syntax
used is different and there are some new options.

In my current TDISOL config dir. I made edits to the following
three files.

- profiles_functions.js
- profiles_tdi.properties.
- map_dbrepos_from_source.properties

To get the correct information from my profiles_tdi.properties
and combine this with the new options from the profiles_tdi.properties
from LO5287 I jused sdiff.
With sdiff you can merge two files in an interactive mode and save
the outcome in a new file so you will have the best from both worlds :-p.

#sdiff -o profiles_tdi.properties profiles_tdiOLD.properties profiles_tdiLO5287.properties

For profiles_functions.js I just copied my self written functions.
And to migratie the file map_dbrepos_from_source.properties I just
placed both files next to each other and created my own new version.

That concludes the fun I had with LO52087. I filled in the “Rate this
page” section of the technote to do some more then just
throwing mud at the walls of big blue.

Next thing to do was to really apply Fixpack 2.
Starting from the third point the Installation instructions are
documented very good.  Except the point what time frame you
have to keep in mind when installing this Fixpack. Because what
the UpdateInstaller does when installing Fixpack 2 is uninstalling
all iFixes applied after Fixpack 1.

( Probaly all applied after Fixpack 1, but I don’t know this for sure ).

As an overactive Connections administrator I applied all
iFixes until 13 may 2010. Which then brought me a very long
upgrade process which took twelve hours, only waiting for the installer
to finish. Only installing the Fixpack will take you like twenty minutes.
Post installation tasks can be done in an hour.
( note, time needed is of course related to used hardware )

This all disappointed me a bit, cause I thought yeah a Fixpack no
need to wait such a long time for applying al these iFixes one
by one Unfortunately the truth is some what difference under
certain circumstances.

This upgrade fact is certain something to keep in my mind
when you want to upgrade a production cluster deployment
with a lot of iFixes applied.

“The update installer does not currently support 24×7
updates. You must apply the updates at a time when
no one is logged into the product.
See PreparingLotus Connections for maintenance
for more information.”

Getting to run Lotus Notes 8.5 on your Ubuntu install isn’t that
easy as you would like it to be. There are a lot of guides which
describe extra steps you have to take to get it running smoothly
depending on the release you are using.

After I upgraded my Ubuntu to version 10.04 I again had the problem
that opening attachments and URL links with FireFox
weren’t working.  With earliers releases of Ubuntu I found the guide
printed below to be helpful but for this release it was a no go.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4268844

“Issue #9: Open, Edit, or View attachment dialog disappears
“When a customer clicks an attachment within the Lotus
Notes® client for Linux®, the Open Attachment dialog box
provides the customer with options to Open, Edit, or View the
attachment.  When any of these three options are opened
the dialog box disappears and no action is taken.
Generally, this problem is seen with attachments that are
not of a common file type in Linux. However, this problem
can also occur for common Linux file types such as odt
and pdf.” -Harmony Pirate Blog

Do the following:
Code:

     sudo mv /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith.old
    sudo ln -s $(which gnome-open) /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith
“

Because the tip above wasn’t working anymore I gave up the struggle
I couldn’t find any helpful links on Google as well. Which didn’t make it
less annoying, copy paste URL between Notes and Firefox, because I
really prefer to work with Firefox instead of the internal browser of Notes.

This weekend I decided to give the search to the fix one more try. I saw
that Fixpack 3 of Lotus Notes 8.5 was released so I installed this one.
All with the hope that it maybe would resolve my issue.

No luck, after the update the issue was still there. But because I started
my Notes client in a terminal screen I saw all the startup code scrolling
by including a few errors.

(:10049): Gtk-WARNING **: GModule (/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines/libclearlooks.so) initialization check failed: Gtk+ version too old (micro mismatch)

Also when I clicked on external link or tried to open a JPEG attachment
I saw the following error printed in the terminal.

/usr/lib/firefox-3.6.3/firefox-bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.3/libxul.so: undefined symbol: gdk_x11_window_get_drawable_impl

After some searching I found out that this was related to this
Technote of Lotus Notes on Ubuntu. I probaly also took this
step when installing Lotus Notes 8.5 for the first time
because I saw that the files were there :-p.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21409777

$ cp /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0.1800.3
/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0

$ cp /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.1800.3
/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0

$ cp /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0.1800.3
/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0

$ cp /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1800.3
/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0

To give it a try I moved the four files to a tempdir an started
up Lotus Notes. It gave me no more Gtk+ version too old warnings
and external URL’s were working again as well as JPEG attachments.

For now I don’t know what is the cause that it is working, just
deleting these four files and the fact that I’m running Ubuntu 10.04.
Or that it that I deleted all the fours files and that I upgraded my
Lotus Notes 8.5 client to Fixpack 3?

Nevertheless I hope somebody will profit from this information.

Technote SPR included in Fixpack3 maybe related?

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21418210