Seti@Home with a PowerPC running Debian

I’ve been trying to get my Seti@Home to work on my old Mac Mini (PowerPC) running Debian. First I got some precompiled binaries(http://www.dotsch.de/boinc/SETI@home%20applications.html) that didn’t work.

Since I am a programmer at heart, I decided that I would get the source code for boinc and seti@home and compile them both.

I first checked out the following code:

svn co http://boinc.berkeley.edu/svn/branches/boinc_core_release_6_2
svn checkout https://setisvn.ssl.berkeley.edu/svn/seti_boinc

With this set of code, seti@home didn’t compile. It turns out that the current release of seti@home(revision 575) depended on values that weren’t in the boinc_core_release_6_2.

I next checked out the following release of boinc, and the example app didn’t work.

svn co http://boinc.berkeley.edu/svn/trunk/boinc

The example app would error out with some of the following information:

[New Thread 805426400 (LWP 15190)]

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x100073d4 in __gnu_cxx::__exchange_and_add ()
(gdb) backtrace
#0 0x100073d4 in __gnu_cxx::__exchange_and_add ()
#1 0x1001ecec in ~PROXY_INFO (this=0x10046728)
at /usr/lib/gcc/powerpc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/../../../../include/c++/4.1.2/bits/basic_string.h:232
#2 0x10015ad4 in ~APP_INIT_DATA (this=0x10045250) at app_ipc.cpp:60
#3 0x10011a58 in __tcf_0 () at boinc_api.cpp:89
#4 0x0fdc31b4 in exit () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#5 0x10002378 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fd46874) at uc2.cpp:168

It turns out the main trunk isn’t functioning at the moment. So if you update your code to a diffent revision we should be okay. After some searching I found the following seems to work.

svn update -r 18818

The next issue that I ran into was that my computer mentions it is a PowerPC, so the source code tries to act like I have Mac OS X or Darwin installed, which I don’t.

After running _autoconf in the seti_boinc folder, change the following in the configure file.

 if test -n "`echo ${target} | grep 'powerpc'`" -o -n "`echo ${target} | grep 'ppc'`" ; then
  PPC_TRUE=
  PPC_FALSE='#'
else
  PPC_TRUE='#'
  PPC_FALSE=
fi

to

 if test -n "`echo ${target} | grep 'powerpc'`" -o -n "`echo ${target} | grep 'ppc'`" ; then
  PPC_TRUE='#'
  PPC_FALSE=
#  PPC_TRUE=
#  PPC_FALSE='#'
else
  PPC_TRUE='#'
  PPC_FALSE=
fi

This is to bypass the auto detection of the OS that seems to break the compile process.

This is everything extra that I needed to do to get Debian PowerPC Seti@Home to work!

Kim

Openoffice DNS Delay

Hello!

I was working with Openoffice and I seemed to be missing some fonts I wanted. So this short blog will maybe help you.

I was trying to install msttcorefonts and I kept getting the following type of errors.

Resolving umn.dl.sourceforge.net… failed: Connection timed out.
–14:13:43– http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/arialb32.exe
=> `./arialb32.exe’

After much searching I finally found the script that was failing. The script is at /usr/sbin/update-ms-fonts

The problem that I have is that my DNS always seems to take forever. So increased the DNS timeout for the wget function call on line 131 to 30 seconds.

I hope this helps someone out!

-Kim

file_get_contents and Godaddy

Godaddy.com and more problems. I was trying to use file_get_contents in PHP to access an HTTPS server. It worked fine for HTTP servers, but once I tried using it ot access an HTTPS server…everything went to …..

After a bunch of research, I finally found the answer on godaddy’s website. It works, but its a pain. I wonder why everyone likes to make things more complicated then they are? Most likely a security feature.

http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=289&topic_id=435

In case you are board, here are a bunch of links I went to trying to figure out what the problems was.

http://help.godaddy.com/article_list.php?topic_id=435
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php
http://paypaldev.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=13079
http://www.higherpass.com/php/Tutorials/Using-Curl-To-Query-Remote-Servers/
http://us.php.net/curl
http://us3.php.net/ref.info
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.fread.php
http://us.php.net/fopen
http://us3.php.net/fopen
http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread706918.html
http://forum.jajah.com/index.php?showtopic=4563
http://www.google.com/search?q=php+file_get_contents+times+out


And it goes on. I needed to get a file in a downloadable form from my website without ever actually existing. Using PHP I managed this trick by following the following webpage’s suggestion.

http://us3.php.net/header

It took me a while to get everything the way I wanted it to…but it works like gold! Anyways, if you are bored….here are a bunch more of the random links for some sort of random entertaining purpose.

http://www.sweeting.org/mark/blog/2005/07/12/base64-encoded-images-embedded-in-html
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.ircg-html-encode.php
http://www.google.com/search?q=embedded+files+in+html
http://www.alternatiff.com/howtoembed.html
http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1682
http://www.ozzu.com/ftopic67590.html
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5206450&tstart=30
http://www.paulstimesink.com/post/2005/06/29/http_post_with_curl
http://www.google.com/search?q=curl+post+php
http://curl.haxx.se/mail/curlphp-2006-07/0003.html
http://netevil.org/blog/2006/nov/http-post-from-php-without-curl
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050525.php3
http://blog.mypapit.net/2006/02/sending-http-post-with-php-curl.html
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/sending-post-form-data-with-php-curl.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=php+file+extension+change
http://radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$8979
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php
http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/Book/Book-3ed/appb/mimetype.html#imag
http://www.google.com/search?q=%3CA+href%22+post
http://aujava.wordpress.com/2007/01/17/postable-html-links/
http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=93227
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2005-May/003897.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/isa/2006/http_filtering/9a0d125c-1ee9-4f5c-be28-7d5a185d4c93.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.google.com/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427
http://us.php.net/nl2br