Category: English

A friend of mine bought a new 1TB hard drive from Samsung (HD103SJ with firmware 1AJ100E4). He used Windows Vista to partition it and format 2 partitions for NTFS, one to install Windows 7 and one to move data from an external drive. Everything worked well, Vista used the drive as intended. When he rebooted to install Win7 everything – Windows 7 setup, BIOS and unfortunately also Vista – saw the drive with only 33 MB capacity, reporting one unformatted partition on it.

Searching the internet we found out it must be a problem with the drive’s host protected area (HPA) in conjunction with his mainboard/SATA controller (ironically from Gigabyte). He updated BIOS and chipset drivers but the problem persisted. According to some forums there are some tools for Windows to fix that issue. Since many people reported data loss afterwards and he didn’t have another copy of the data he moved from his external drive we decided to boot into the new Gentoo Live DVD that also allowed me to log in remotely via SSH to investigate the problem (we are more than 500km away from each other).

Following a short guide on how to detect and disable HPA we could see the settings of his drive:


# hdparm -N /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
max sectors = 65134/1953525168, HPA is enabled


This seems to have been the opposite configuration of what should have been set according to the guide: While the examples from the guide had a much greater value before the slash his drive seemed to show the intended remainder to be allocated to the HPA set for “public” use, so his HPA seemed to cover almost the entire 1TB of his HDD.

Before we tried to correct that value we wanted to check if we can access any data right away. Unfortunately everything prevented us from accessing the HPA – the kernel did only register /dev/sdb1 but not /dev/sdb2, smartmontools showed 33MB capacity as well, parted refused to work and fdisk finally showed the correct partition table but reported a mismatch in geometry, so at least we still seemed to access the same start sector of his HDD:


Disk /dev/sdb: 33 MB, 33348608 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x24c2a85c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 38245 307200000 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(38244, 193, 29)
/dev/sdb2 38245 121601 669558784 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(38244, 193, 30)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(121600, 247, 55)


We also tried to access /dev/sdb with dd but only got the 33MB until the drive “ended”. Considering the HPA modifications to be the last resort we tried to change it only temporarily at first, but had to set it permanently to get any effects on the system after a reboot. Please note that the manpage for hdparm explicitely states that changing that setting is “VERY DANGEROUS, DATA LOSS IS EXTREMELY LIKELY”. I copied the old value to a text editor before making the modifications, so I hoped we could at least set it back to what it was before our changes in case it didn’t work well. To make a permanent change, simply run the same command with p (for permanent) followed by the new maximum value to be set (to disable HPA this would be the exact same value as written after the slash):


# hdparm -N p1953525168 /dev/sdb


Having rebooted, fdisk did not complain any more and the kernel recognized both partitions:


Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x24c2a85c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 38245 307200000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 38245 121601 669558784 7 HPFS/NTFS


hdparm confirmed that we just disabled HPA:


# hdparm -N /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
max sectors = 1953525168/1953525168, HPA is disabled


We mounted his data partition read-only using ntfs-3g and since everything seemed fine we started to copy everything back to his external drive, just to be sure we had a backup of his data in case that Windows would decide to crash his partition after another reboot. However, Windows Vista did recognize the drive correctly again and so did Windows 7; he can access all data and nothing seems to be corrupted or missing.

It appears strange that Windows initially ignored the HPA and worked well until he rebooted. But having had extreme, sporadic problems myself using a Silicon Image SATA controller with Windows XP SP2 as well as Windows Vista (without SP, back in 2007) it did not really surprise me any more.

I updated my Gentoo system last week (amd64) and ran into multiple problems.

Due to compile errors on many ebuilds I decided to run a revdep-rebuild. After about an hour it recognized that about 380 ebuilds were broken and had to be remerged. I began but could not finish that day so I left revdep-rebuild (which happened to stop due to an error anyway) and shut my system down.

The next day I realized that about half my system was broken. CUPS crashed repeatedly, reporting a segfault with libc whenever I tried to print anything (visible in the kernel log). Remerging cups or glibc did not help, so I went to the Gentoo forums and found the advise to run

emerge -e system 
etc-update 
perl-cleaner all 
python-updater 
emerge -1 libtool 
revdep-rebuild

It took a long time involving the usual stop-and-go caused by build errors but finally it finished. CUPS worked again and so did most of the system. Unfortunately 64 bit binaries like nxclient still did not run because libjpeg.so.62 did not exist any longer. Well, it did for 32 bit apps (so the 32 bit Firefox binary could still run) but not for 64 bit. (the 32 bit version is belongs to app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-baselibs) As usual, linking to the 32 bit library was without success (wrong ELF architecture) and linking to libjpeg.so.7 didn’t work well (I was able to run NX but all JPEGs were missing).

I was lucky enough to find a rather unrelated bug report on the bugtracker that indicates there is a second ebuild for libjpeg called media-libs/jpeg-compat which actually contains the missing 64 bit version of libjpeg.so.62. Having emerged that everything works fine again now.

I don’t know what they did, but Opera 10 Beta 3 (build 4537) finally got Flash working again on my Linux system. Back in 2007 Flash 9 started to use GTK solely and Opera 10 could no longer run the plugin: Opera would simply freeze and/or crash. Due to security updates I finally had to upgrade the Flash player and had to start Firefox for every flash website (or Flash video) I wanted to view. With every update I checked if support returned but it still would not run. In 2008 I changed to 64 bit and while many people reported it started working again on their 32 bit systems I still only got crashes. In February I started using KDE 4 (and Qt 4) and while people started reporting Flash to work on 64 bit I – again – could not use it.

Maybe I was always upgrading/updating at the wrong time – there is one thing I can read from the filenames portage downloaded:

opera-10.00-b1.gcc4-shared-qt3.x86_64.tar.bz2
opera-10.00-b3.gcc4-qt4.x86_64.tar.bz2

It seems like older versions have only been built (or downloaded) with Qt3 libraries but with beta 3 there finally is a Qt4 version available. Maybe that’s the fix – finally, after 2 years, I can use Flash again in my primary browser! :D

I checked some websites and while all Flash movies run and most run fine, videos still run jerky, highly depending on the players being used and the mode (fullscreen is worst). While these performance problems happen to be worse than in Firefox, it’s still mainly a problem of the Linux version of the Flash player (xkcd made a cartoon about it recently).

The next thing I could not use since I switched to 64 bit was the Java plugin. It was the same as with Flash, I got freezes and/or crashes and no useful error messages. I was quite surprised when I saw a useful backtrace on my terminal: For some reason, Opera 10 tried to use Blackdown JDK 1.4 which some ebuild must have had as a dependency. I unmerged it and now I got errors complaining about libjvm.so not being found. To point Opera to the correct path simply go into Tools/Preferences/Advanced/Content, enable Java and open the Java Options dialog. The path to be entered can be found by running locate libjava.so and should be something like /opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/amd64/ (excluding the filename; you will need to update this on version changes).

On Gentoo you may still get an error message telling you that libjvm.so cannot be found. You may need to symlink it from …/jre/lib/amd64/server/ to …/jre/lib/amd64/ and it should be working after a browser restart.

I don’t know since when there was a Java Options dialog, so maybe I could have been able to use Java for quite some time now. Anyway, it’s great to finally have both plugins working again.

Finally, that’s possible. I will explain what’s necessary in case it’s not yet in portage (just saw the patches are making it to overlays now :D ) but not without a warning and explanation: Amarok 2 has been blocked by MySQL not compiling correctly for use as a shared library. The main bug report on Gentoo’s bugtracker is here for MySQL. Although it now seems to have made its way into mysql-extras overlay (?) it may still take a while to be verified for not causing any problems at all.

DO NOT TRY THE FOLLOWING STEPS ON A PRODUCTIVE SYSTEM!

Read all instructions carefully. I’m not responsible for any data loss or corruption you may experience by following this howto and using the patched MySQL or beta release of Amarok.

You may want to backup your databases before you go into patching. You have been warned (although everything seems to be fine on my system).

Patching MySQL
When I got it working yesterday, I still patched the eclass file to add a USE-flag “pic” for triggering a GCC option. The current status from the bug comments is that it should be a false solution and not be necessary anymore. However, I still get a linker error “recompile with -fPIC” when compiling Amarok 2 afterwards. So you still need to patch the eclass file using the files stroken out on the bug report (mysql.eclass and a patch to it, apply the patch or grab the resulting file here). You may want to try if it works for you without the patched eclass, though. If you choose to apply the patched eclass, you need to put it in your overlay into /eclass directory (top-level like a category). On the next emerge you will be warned to add “metadata-transfer” to your FEATURES variable in /etc/make.conf and run emerge –regen after each sync (this will take a while; ~20 minutes on my 3GHz Core2Duo).

Now we need an ebuild, too. Download the patch file to MySQL’s source code (better check if it’s still current) and store it in your local overlay’s dev-db/mysql/files. Copy the latest ebuild for MySQL from official portage to your overlay and rename it to match version numbers with the patch. Run ebuild mysql-whateverversion.ebuild digest, unmask and emerge it! (using “embedded” USE-flag)

Amarok 2.1 Beta 1
If we go unstable, we do it right. So we are going to create an ebuild for Amarok 2.1 Beta 1, too. Again, BE WARNED: There are some possible corruption issues with ID3 tags (also reported for 2.0.1). You don’t want that to happen, so be careful not to do any writing operations to your files in Amarok until that bug gets fixed. (I got a couple more with reading tags but my files are still intact, so I’m fine; all bugs are already in the bug tracker)

Amarok 2.1 depends on taglib-extras, which is currently not in portage. So simply go to http://gpo.zugaina.org/media-libs/taglib-extras and grab 0.1.2’s ebuild, put it in overlay, digest, unmask and emerge.

For Amarok itself, Beta 1 seems to be version 2.0.90. Simply grab my ebuild, which is a slightly modified version from official portage tree. I removed the iPod patch and the webkit string replacement, added 2 dependencies and had to fake the check for Qt script bindings. Of course, I needed to replace the download URI and add ~amd64 keyword:

--- /usr/portage/media-sound/amarok/amarok-2.0.1.1.ebuild       2009-03-16 11:36:10.000000000 +0100
+++ amarok-2.0.90.ebuild        2009-04-12 17:53:18.000000000 +0200
@@ -14,10 +14,11 @@
HOMEPAGE="http://amarok.kde.org/"
LICENSE="GPL-2"
-KEYWORDS="~x86"
+KEYWORDS="~x86 ~amd64"
SLOT="2"
IUSE="daap debug ifp ipod mp3tunes mp4 mtp njb +semantic-desktop"
-SRC_URI="mirror://kde/stable/${PN}/${PV}/src/${P}.tar.bz2"
+#SRC_URI="mirror://kde/stable/${PN}/${PV}/src/${P}.tar.bz2"
+SRC_URI="ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/${PN}/${PV}/src/${P}.tar.bz2"

DEPEND=">=app-misc/strigi-0.5.7
|| (
@@ -25,6 +26,8 @@
>=dev-db/mysql-community-5.0[embedded,-minimal]
)
>=media-libs/taglib-1.5
+       >=media-libs/taglib-extras-0.1
+       >=x11-libs/qt-script-4.4.2
|| ( media-sound/phonon x11-libs/qt-phonon:4 )
>=kde-base/kdelibs-${KDE_MINIMAL}[opengl?,semantic-desktop?]
>=kde-base/plasma-workspace-${KDE_MINIMAL}
@@ -46,7 +49,8 @@
app-arch/unzip
daap? ( www-servers/mongrel )"

-PATCHES=( "${FILESDIR}/${PV}-ipod.patch" )
+# PATCHES=( "${FILESDIR}/${PV}-ipod.patch" )
+PATCHES=( )

pkg_setup() {
if use amd64 ; then
@@ -77,9 +81,10 @@
fi

# Remove superfluous QT_WEBKIT
-       sed -e 's/ -DQT_WEBKIT//g' \
-               -i "${S}"/src/scriptengine/generator/generator/CMakeLists.txt \
-               || die "Removing unnecessary -DQT_WEBKIT failed."
+#      sed -e 's/ -DQT_WEBKIT//g' \
+#              -i "${S}"/src/scriptengine/generator/generator/CMakeLists.txt \
+#              || die "Removing unnecessary -DQT_WEBKIT failed."
+       sed -e 's/CHECK_CXX_SOURCE_RUNS/set( BINDINGS_RUN_RESULT 1 )\n#/g' -i "${S}"/cmake/modules/FindQtScriptQtBindings.cmake

mycmakeargs="${mycmakeargs}
$(cmake-utils_use_with ipod Ipod)

You may need to uninstall Amarok 1 before emerging 2 or you will get file collisions.

Some problems
I have 2 soundcards and Amarok was playing everything on the wrong one on first start-up although I reordered my cards in the configuration dialog. I seem to have gotten rid of that problem by simply restarting Amarok after changing the order. GStreamer backend currently crashes, so you may prefer xine (which I do nevertheless).

I couldn’t get Ampache working yet, but I assume the fault is on Ampache’s side. We were able to track the problem down, likely being the hash being used on authorization which seems to be an issue between 32 bit servers and 64 bit clients (seems to be a different timestamp; I really don’t know why that’s still a problem, I guess it’s very bad programming or at least testing…).

Amarok doesn’t index all files correctly. Some files are not shown with metadata but only with their filenames instead. You may be able to work around it by rescanning your collection multiple times. There also seem to be some index issues on the collection when updating the collection while browsing through it. However, I still got some MP3s not showing up in my collection although they seem to be counted.

Oh, and you scrobble streams to Last.fm which I consider a bug since that’s not the intended behaviour (or at least has not been until now).

I will try to confirm these bugs and report them if they are not already listed in KDE’s bugtracker.

Some scripts currently don’t work. That’s because we faked around the script bindings dependency in order to be able to compile. You may get some ebuild to compile qtscriptgenerator, but it depends on Qt 4.5 which I haven’t yet installed (yes, I know I blogged about the recommendation to use it one post earlier, but I haven’t had time to recompile it yet – I should do that next). Do not report errors about scripts not running to Amarok devs; it’s entirely our own fault. However, if you need those scripts, you are free to get into compiling that dependency as well. ;)

Make it prettier
Amarok’s default theme doesn’t look appealing, at least not when using KDE’s Oxygen theme with default colors. You may have a look at alternative Amarok themes on kde-look.org. Most themes inherit their colors from your color theme, so don’t be surprised if it looks different than on the screenshots. I went for “Amarok Highlights” for the time being.

Unfortunately, Amarok 2 is still lacking a theme manager, so you have to install the themes manually by copying them to ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok/images/ (one at a time; stylesheet.css goes one level above). You should quit Amarok before changing themes and clean caches before restarting it:

rm ~/.kde4/cache-YourHostname/kpc/Amarok-pixmaps.index
rm ~/.kde4/cache-YourHostname/kpc/Amarok-pixmaps.data

Everyone wanting to upgrade to KDE4 with Gentoo should be adviced not to trust the official guide completely. It’s a good start but incomplete and misleading. You should have a look at it nevertheless:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kde4-guide.xml

You should know the following facts before getting yourself into trouble:

• You need KDE 3.5.10 (unstable) prior to KDE 4 if you plan to use both along each other. Some applications of KDE 3.5.10 will break nevertheless, at least if you install without kdeprefix (see below). You will be blocked otherwise.
• You don’t need an unstable portage 2.2 for EABI 2. Well, you kind of need it nevertheless. portage 2.1.6.* IS portage 2.2 but with all new features (except EABI 2) disabled. If you have enough time, know Python and want to help the portage developers please do it, you know where you find them. If you run a more experimental system (you are unmasking KDE 4, right?), you could unmask 2.2 nevertheless and help Gentoo by testing and submitting bug reports.
• You need to unmask lots and lots of packages. You can use this file and NOT the file you get there (both are linked in the KDE4 guide but the last one is for kde-testing overlay only). Unfortunately you will need to unmask even more. You can use unmasker, a nice tiny tool that does all that nasty unmasking stuff for you while you can do better things. Following the comments you will end up with a directory /etc/portage.keywords/ and some files in it. Emerge will use all of them. Have a look at the generated file(s) and modify/comment/delete any lines you don’t like. There will be some (e.g. SVN versions).
• Before starting that huge 250 ebuild session (twice that size if you need KDE 3.5.10), make sure you have kdeprefix in your USE flags! The guide says it would not be necessary to use it but trust me: it is if you want to save yourself some headaches.
• Having compiled all ebuilds and noticing random crashes and disfunctionality? Start dbus and hald first – you need them in KDE4 or you get weird problems. (that’s not in the guide either :( )
• Using unstable xorg 1.5 and have no keyboard anymore? Or are you just wondering why you should use 1.5? See this short thread.
• You use NVidia drivers and see flickering red or black checkerboards covering your videos? Well, guess you are using Amarok. It took almost a year to find that out. Just exit Amarok or open and close the playlist and control window a few times, the flickering will disappear. BTW that also happened with Compiz Fusion and KDE 3.5.
• Having stability problems? Make sure you use nvidia-drivers 180.27 or 180.29 for the time being, do NOT use 180.37 for now.
• Your icons disappeared? Check for the Inherits=hicolor setting to be correct (find the icon set configs and possible options for Inherits using locate index.theme), also check for deprecated icons (folder icons etc.) and switch them. Maybe it also helps to upgrade to QT 4.5 and of course x.org 1.5 if you didn’t do that already; this could also fix some weird stuff going nuts in your system tray. Still missing icons? Bad luck I guess. The Oxygen icon set still seems incomplete and Inherits doesn’t seem to work in all cases, so you may try switching to some other icons instead. (Although this is 4.2, isn’t it? But what did other distributions do to fix it if it’s really incomplete/broken?)

These won’t be the only problems you come across, and I wrote some of them from memory because I upgraded about a month ago. Maybe it’s not sufficient what I wrote but it should save you at least 5 hours of work (or even more) figuring everything out yourself.

Good luck!