Chris Schuld's Blog » Fedora

RHEL5 init (init.d) script for OpenOffice.org (2.3+)

Chris Schuld — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:25:49 +0000

For a recent project I needed to perform document translations from DOC to PNG which requires an essential intermediate step to PDF. The transformations required us to go to from DOC to PDF which can easily be done very nicely using openoffice 2.3 in a headless configuration. The downside is you need a process running on a machine which you can connect to to make the transformation.

Here is the init.d script for starting up the soffice.bin (soffice) program in a headless mode:

#!/bin/bash
# chkconfig: 345 20 80
# description: init.d script for headless openoffice.org (2.3+ for RHEL5 32bit)
#
# processname: soffice
#
# source function library
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
 
RETVAL=0
SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib/openoffice.org/program'
SOFFICE_ARGS='-accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp" -headless -nofirststartwizard'
SOFFICE_PIDFILE=/var/run/soffice.bin.pid
 
start_soffice() {
       echo -n $"Starting OpenOffice.org"
       $SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS >/dev/null 2>&1 &
       [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo_success || echo_failure
       pidof soffice.bin & $SOFFICE_PIDFILE
       echo
}
start() {
       start_soffice
}
stop() {
       echo -n $"Stopping OpenOffice"
       killproc soffice.bin
       echo
}
case "$1" in
       start)
               start
               ;;
       stop)
               stop
               ;;
       restart)
               stop
               start
               ;;
       *)
               echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac

NOTE: in 64bit the lib path has a ’64′ in it so

SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib/openoffice.org/program'

becomes

SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib64/openoffice.org/program'

Playing MP3 Files in Fedora 8 using KDE

Chris Schuld — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:21:11 +0000

To play MP3 files in Fedora 8 with KDE you need to add software to your default installation. This software does not come “stock” with KDE because the software is not free and RedHat is required to filter it — therefore if you download this update make sure you check the licensing agreements:

First, add Livna sources using rpm

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

Next, Install kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree^** using yum
```
yum install kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree
```

That is it, next launch Amarok as an example and hello MP3 music!

Q: Hey Chris, why does the kdemultimedia-extras package end in “-nonfree”
A: Good question, tough answer, the kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree package contains plug-ins which cannot be shipped by Red Hat / Fedora because the license is not LGPL. Please note the the license of the entire library is not LGPL! So of course you shouldn’t install it unless you pay the owners for licensing rights.

Playing MP3 Files in Fedora 8 using Gnome

Chris Schuld — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:06:12 +0000

To play MP3 files in Fedora 8 you need to add software to your default installation:

First, add Livna sources using rpm

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

Next, Install Rhythmbox (assuming you are using Gnome) using yum
```
yum install rhythmbox
```
Next, Install gstreamer-plugins-ugly^** using yum
```
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
```

That is it, next launch Rythmbox and hello music!

Q: Hey Chris, why does the gstreamer-plugins end in “-ugly”
A: Good question, tough answer, the GStreamer is a streaming media library which contains plug-ins which cannot be shipped in gstreamer-plugins-good because the license is not LGPL. Please note the the license of the entire library is not LGPL! So of course you shouldn’t install it unless you pay the owners for licensing rights.

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries

Chris Schuld — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:45:26 +0000

If while using ‘yum’ or ‘rpm’ you receive the following error:

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries

Your RPM dB files are screwed up… here is how you unscrew them!

This error tell you the Berkley database files which RPM uses are damaged and in order to clear the error you must rebuild the Berkley dB files from scratch.

Here is how you fix this error:

Make a backup of your current files
Remove the damaged files
Rebuild your RPM Berkley dB files
Use yum again

Here is the command walk through:

As root, execute this:

cd /root; tar cvzf rpm-backup.tar.gz /var/lib/rpm

Remove the Berkeley dB files which yum and rpm use:
```
rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*
```
Instruct rpm to rebuild the databases files:
```
rpm --rebuilddb
```
Test your yum command again:
```
yum install somepackage
```

Playing MP3 files in Fedora 7

Chris Schuld — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 00:00:55 +0000

To play MP3 files in Fedora 7 you need to add software to your default installation:

First, add Livna sources using rpm

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

Next, Install Rhythmbox using yum
```
yum install rhythmbox
```
Next, Install gstreamer-plugins-ugly^** using yum
```
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
```

That is it, next launch Rythmbox and hello music!

Reload fstab (/etc/fstab)

Chris Schuld — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 14:31:59 +0000

If you make a new entry in fstab it will not auto-mount. Therefore you must reload / refresh the entries. A reboot will do this but that is not a friendly way to do it. A quick way to reload new entries in /etc/fstab (fstab) is to use the mount command:

mount -a

The HTML Validator Firefox Plugin In Linux

Chris Schuld — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 20:15:57 +0000

I use the “HTML Validator” Firefox plugin daily. I found it does not work out of the box in Linux namely Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7. You immediately get a HTML-rendered screen that states:

FATAL ERROR : The dynamic C library contained in the extension file could not be found

Getting rid of this message took me a few minutes of research and I never found a step-by-step HOW-TO for Fedora — so here goes!

Here is how you get rid of this message and get the plugin working in Fedora Core 6 or Fedora 7:

First, uninstall the plugin by clicking on Tools–>Add-ons and clicking uninstall
Second, close all instances of Firefox
Next, install three packages using yum
- compat-libstdc++-296
- compat-libstdc++-33
- tidy
```
yum install compat-libstdc++-296 compat-libstdc++-33 tidy
```
Reinstall the HTML Validator plugin
Restart Firefox, done!

HTML Validator should now be installed inside of Firefox on Fedora Core 6 or Fedora 7

Missing phpize?

Chris Schuld — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:06:08 +0000

In an attempt to add the PECL Upload Progress package, I received the following error:

[root@zebra cbschuld]# pecl install uploadprogress-beta
downloading uploadprogress-0.3.0.tgz ...
Starting to download uploadprogress-0.3.0.tgz (4,677 bytes)
.....done: 4,677 bytes
3 source files, building
running: phpize
sh: phpize: command not found
ERROR: `phpize' failed

Hmmm, it turns out I never added the package php-devel (oops). If you are missing phpize on your machine add it with:

yum install php-devel