Category Archives: Sysadmin

Firetray for Thunderbird 8

Posted by on November 13, 2011 Comments Off on Firetray for Thunderbird 8

Since the upgrade I bet a few people are searching for a working firetray plugin for their thunderbird 8 (myself included). After a quick google search turns out there’s an upcoming version of firetray 0.4.0 that works with 8. You can download the xpi from the official google code page: http://code.google.com/p/firetray/downloads/detail?name=firetray-0.4.0a2.xpi&can=2&q=

Installing Firetray in Thunderbird 6

Posted by on August 21, 2011 11 comments

After installing Mozilla Thunderbird 6 I quickly discovered that one of my favorite add-ons was no longer working. Firetray is listed as incompatible with Thunderbird 6 but after searching around I discovered that it worked for some people after they compiled it from source.

Searching around in the build files revealed that the add-on needs a version bump to properly install. Once I changed the max version number and compiled the add-on it worked flawlessly!

You can download my x86_64 build or follow the steps below to compile it on your PC. The patch file (in the steps below) will bump up the version number. Compiling the add-on requires you to have gecko-sdk and scons already installed on your system.

mkdir firetray
cd firetray
wget "http://firetray.googlecode.com/files/firetray-0.3.1-src.zip"
unzip "firetray-0.3.1-src.zip"
wget "http://pavelshub.com/files/firetray-thunderbird6.patch"
patch generate_install_rdf.sh firetray-thunderbird6.patch
./build.sh

FATAL: Error inserting w83627ehf

Posted by on December 8, 2010 Comments Off on FATAL: Error inserting w83627ehf

It was many months ago that lm_sensors stopped working and only recently have I decided to investigate. I have an Asus P5Q-E board with a Winbound w83627ehf chip.

When attempting to insert it, I got the following error:

Turm ~ # modprobe w83627ehf
FATAL: Error inserting w83627ehf (/lib/modules/2.6.36-gentoo-r3/kernel/drivers/hwmon/w83627ehf.ko): Device or resource busy

Investigating this further we find that there’s a conflicting ACPI driver.

Turm ~ # dmesg | tail
[fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:f921000, size:3df000 
[fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:3fff4000, size:c000 
NET: Registered protocol family 10
lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth1: link is not ready
sshd (5426): /proc/5426/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/5426/oom_score_adj instead.
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
w83627ehf: Found W83667HG chip at 0x290
ACPI: resource w83627ehf [io  0x0295-0x0296] conflicts with ACPI region HWRE [io  0x0290-0x0299 pref]
ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it instead of the native driver

After googling around a bit, it turns out that after kernel 2.6.31 they deprecated the use of sensor chip modules in favor of ACPI drivers when they’re available. To get your sensors back you need to use the asus_atk0110 acpi driver. You need to make sure it’s compiled into your kernel and lm_sensors is at least version 3.1.0. Then just issue

modprobe asus_atk0110

and everything should work. There is no need to rerun sensors-detect because lm_sensors is no longer involved in loading proper sensor modules.

Then you may want to adjust the lm_sensors startup script to load proper modules. On Gentoo look at /etc/conf.d/lm_sensors and change any instance of w83627ehf to asus_atk0110

Keeping a Desktop & Laptop in Sync

Posted by on October 12, 2010 Comments Off on Keeping a Desktop & Laptop in Sync

This post is tagged as backlogged, so the stuff I’m writing here isn’t exactly “new”. Anyway a few years ago (2) I became an owner of a 12″ laptop which was useful to take to class but needed to be constantly synced with my desktop.

Fortunately Gentoo had Unison in its repository. This program works very well and presents a graphics merge window when conflicts arise. After searching for a Sync solution for a while, this is the best that I could find. Emerging unison on Gentoo gets you an executable with a version number to it. A quick

ln -s /usr/bin/unison-2.27 /usr/bin/unison

fixes that inconvenience.

Below is an example unison config in case anyone finds it useful. I saved the file as default.prf in the unison directory. 

# Unison preferences file
root = /home/cogent
root = ssh://Turm
# Paths that I want to sync

path = my_stuff
path = school
path = workspace
#path = work
path = .ssh
path = .purple
path = .gnupg
#path = .thunderbird
path = archive/music

ignore = Name *~
ignore = Name .purple/status.xml
ignore = Path .purple/accels
ignore = Name .purple/blist.xml
ignore = Name .purple/prefs.xml
ignore = Name .purple/accounts.xml

log = false
height = 40

Having done that, running

unison default

resulted in a purely automatic sync. To get the process as smooth as possible, you should add your ssh keys to the respective machines. That way you won’t be asked for the password each time. Also, be sure to connect to the machine at least once before connecting with unison. If I remember correctly, it doesn’t present the “add this machine to know ssh hosts” dialog correctly. Possibly resulting in a silent failure.