To change the users home directory, execute the following:

usermod -l <newname> -d /home/<newname> -m <oldname>

And to change the group of the user, execute the following.

groupmod -n <newgroup> <oldgroup>

Just make sure you are logged in as a different user before executing the same. You can either login as root user or create an other user with sudo privileges to execute the commands.

Zend Debugger: Cannot read a valid value of zend_debugger.httpd_uid or zend.httpd_uid, will not perform dropping of privileges

then your setup will fail when you try to debug over a tunnel. This is caused by the debugger not being aware of the uid of the process which runs the web server.

To fix this, we need to find the user ID of the httpd process that runs the Zend Debugger. One way of finding the UID is by opening up the /etc/passwd file. You should see something similar to:

_www:*:70:70:World Wide Web Server:/Library/WebServer:/usr/bin/false

Now to fix the problem, we update the zend config in the php.ini file and restart the webserver. Here is my complete zend debugger configuration:

[zend]
zend_extension=/opt/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/ZendDebugger.so
zend_debugger.allow_hosts=127.0.0.1,10.1.1.2,10.1.1.3,10.0.1.149,10.0.1.123,10.0.1.124
zend_debugger.expose_remotely=always
zend_debugger.httpd_uid=70

Now for some real debugging .

Since current Flash Builder is basically built on Eclipse Galileo, you just have to add the update site for Galileo

In Flash Builder, go to
Help > Install New Software

Click on “Available Software Sites” link, which should open up “Available Software Sites” window. If you don’t have the Galileo update site already configured, add a new Software site. Call it “Eclipse 3.5 updates” and add the URL: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo/

Back in the “Available Software” screen, select “All available sites” for the “Work with” section. In the search input below that, type in PDT and you should see PDT as an item on the search result. Select it and click the next button. Eclipse will now prompt you with a review screen of the packages which are going to be installed. Click next and complete the installation. You may have to restart the IDE for the changed to take affect.

Shown below is the review screen of PDT installation.

PDT Installation for Flash Builder

I have used here a MySQL stored routine to achive this:

DELIMITER $$
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `my_database`.`getage` $$
CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` FUNCTION `getage`(pdate DATE) RETURNS char(30) DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
DECLARE years INT;
DECLARE months INT;
DECLARE days INT;
 
DECLARE current_year INT;
DECLARE current_month INT;
DECLARE current_day INT;
 
DECLARE year_diff INT;
DECLARE month_diff INT;
DECLARE day_diff INT;
 
DECLARE yearstring CHAR(6);
DECLARE monthstring CHAR(7);
 
SELECT YEAR(pdate) INTO years;
SELECT MONTH(pdate) INTO months;
SELECT DAY(pdate) INTO days;
 
SELECT YEAR(CURRENT_DATE()) INTO current_year;
SELECT MONTH(CURRENT_DATE()) INTO current_month;
SELECT DAY(CURRENT_DATE()) INTO current_day;
 
SELECT (current_year - years) INTO year_diff;
SELECT (current_month - months) INTO month_diff;
SELECT (current_day - days) INTO day_diff;
 
if (current_month < months) THEN
	SET month_diff = (((months - 12) * -1) + current_month);
	SET year_diff = (year_diff - 1);
END IF;
 
if ( month_diff = 1 ) THEN
	SET monthstring = "month";
ELSE
	SET monthstring = "months";
END IF;
 
if ( year_diff = 1 ) THEN
	SET yearstring = "year";
ELSE
	SET yearstring = "years";
END IF;
 
if ( year_diff = 0 ) THEN
	RETURN CONCAT_WS(' ', month_diff, monthstring);
ELSE
	if (month_diff > 0) THEN
		RETURN CONCAT_WS(' ',year_diff, yearstring, month_diff, monthstring);
	ELSE
		RETURN CONCAT_WS(' ',year_diff, yearstring);
	END IF;
END IF;
 
END $$
 
DELIMITER ;

You can then make use of the stored routine to convert Dates into ages by doing so:

SELECT getage(BirthDate) as UserAge FROM my_database.users

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/routine-restrictions.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/stored-procedures.html

Arduino

Unfortunately the serial port communication driver (RXTX) which comes with the arduino download is not 64 bit compatible. I will describe here how I successfully compiled & installed the driver to get the Arduino IDE running on a 64 bit openSUSE installation. Most of the instructions should be pretty straight forward to be replicated on an other rpm based distribution. For ubuntu/debain based distributions, you can find the instructions provided by Tero Karvinen useful.

Packages Required for Arduino IDE

The following packages are required to run the Arduino IDE:

• java-1_5_0-sun
• cross-avr-gcc
• cross-avr-binutils
• avr-libc

Linux USB Serial Converter Driver

Besides the above software, you will also need a compatible kernel. This means version 2.6.x or at least 2.4.30. For example, it needs USB serial support with the FTDI driver. After connecting an Arduino board to your computer via an AB USB cable, it should load the ftdi modules automatically. Ensure ftdi_sio and usbserial modules are loaded by executing:

lsmod | grep ftdi

It should return output similar to whats shown below:

ftdi_sio               54280  0
usbserial              52688  1 ftdi_sio
usbcore               156456  6 ftdi_sio,usbserial,usbhid,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd

If not, as root, run:

modprobe ftdi_sio

If there are no errors from the above command, then the module is loaded successfully.

System Requirements

The Arduino IDE is java based and RXTX [2] is a native java library providing serial and parallel communication for the Java Development Toolkit. The RXTX lib uses lock files by default. So Before you use lock files you need to do one of two things:

1. Be the root or uucp user on your machine whenever you use rxtx
2. Or add the specific user that needs to use rxtx to the group uucp. (preferred)

Add your user account to the uucp group by going to yast2 > Security and Users > User Management. Once you have added yourself to the group, you will need to restart your session to make it affective. Once you are in the new session, verify that your account belongs to the uucp group by executing “groups” on the shell. It should give return you a list of groups your account belongs to.

Packages required for building rxtx-java

• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• gnu make
• gcc
• jdk > 1.3 or java-1_5_0-sun-devel
• checkinstall (optional)

After installing the necessary libraries, you can download and start building the library with the following commands:

wget http://rxtx.qbang.org/pub/rxtx/rxtx-2.1-7r2.zip

unzip rxtx-2.1-7r2.zip

cd rxtx-2.1-7r2

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib64/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/

./configure

make

Once the libraries are built, you can install them by following either one of the following two methods:

1. Build an RPM package with the help of checkinstall
   (preferred)
2. Copy the libs to the arduino libs folder.

If you are opting for the checkinstall method, I suggest to name the package rxtx-java. You can then install the package using normal rpm commands. Once you have done that, you need to determine the path to the libraries. Execute the following to obtain the Path to the rxtx libraries:

rpm -ql librxtx-java | grep RXTXcomm.jar
/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/lib/ext/RXTXcomm.jar

We will now remember to add the path (‘/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/’) to the arduino bootstrap script.

To install the libraries the second way, you can copy the compiled RXTXcomm.jar and librxtxSerial.so files to the arduino lib directory. The libs are built and placed into “x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/.libs/” folder while the jar file should be in the same folder you are in.

Setting up the Arduino IDE

Download and untar the Arduino IDE from Arduino Software page

wget http://www.arduino.cc/files/arduino-0010-linux.tgz && \
tar -xvzf arduino-0010-linux.tgz

In the arduino/tools directory, make symlinks:

cd arduino-0010/hardware/tools

 ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-gcc avr-gcc && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-g++ avr-g++ && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-objcopy avr-objcopy && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-objdump avr-objdump && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-size avr-size

Copy the compiled RxTx-java libray into the arduino-0010/lib folder. Before doing so rename the existing libraries.

cd ../../lib/

mv librxtxSerial.so librxtxSerial.so.DISABLED

mv RXTXcomm.jar RXTXcomm.jar.DISABLED

Now copy the freshly compiled rxtx libraries into this folder

cp ../../rxtx-2.1-7r2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/.libs/librxtxSerial.so .

cp ../../rxtx-2.1-7r2/RXTXcomm.jar .

Once you have copied the library and jar file, you are ready to execute the arduino bootstrap script to launch the Arduino IDE.

./arduino
Experimental:  JNI_OnLoad called.
Stable Library
=========================================
Native lib Version = RXTX-2.1-7
Java lib Version   = RXTX-2.1-7

The Arduino IDE

Resources

1. http://www.arduino.cc
2. http://www.rxtx.org
3. http://ftdi-usb-sio.sourceforge.net/
4. http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/3rdPartyDrivers.htm
5. serproxy: http://www.lspace.nildram.co.uk/freeware.html
6. ser2net: http://ser2net.sourceforge.net
7. Java Comm Serial API How-To for Linux: http://wass.homelinux.net/howtos/Comm_How-To.shtml

Using the openSUSE Build Service, you can provide software packages for most popular Linux distros using one single service. Rather than maintaining separate systems to build packages, you can take advantage of the openSUSE Build Service and let it do most of the work.

To learn how to leverage the build service, join the openSUSE community on April 4th and 5th on IRC to hone your package building skills. The Packaging Days II event will be held on Freenode at #opensuse-buildservice. Community members will be standing by to provide support and answer questions about using the build service and creating packages.

Find out more about the Packaging Days II event at: http://en.opensuse.org/Packaging/Packaging_Day

But wait, just when you think its not possible to import a show into the mythtv recordings, there is a way to do so. There is a perl script called “myth.rebuilddatabase.pl” which comes with the mythtv-doc package of mythtv. Usually the “myth.rebuilddatabase.pl” script resides at “/usr/share/doc/packages/mythtv-doc/contrib/” folder. Else, If you are on an rpm based system you can look for its path with the following command:

rpm -qal "myth*" | grep "\.pl"

This should return all the available perl scripts which are distributed with mythtv. Now to use the script, we need make a copy of the script to your home folder and configure it. Edit the file and update the relevant mysql mythtv database connection details. Now copy the tv show files which you want to import, into your mythtv recordings folder.

Meta Data

To import the show into Mythtv, you have the option of importing the meta data associated with it. The meta data consists of the show title, sub-title, description, show time and most importantly the channel id. To retrieve the channel ids which are available on your mythtv installation, you can query the mysql database with the following shell command:
mysql --host [localhost] --user [mythtv] -p -e 'use [mythconverg]; select chanid, name, callsign from channel where visible=1'
Change the appropriate values in the command shown above (in brackets) to reflect your database setup and hit enter. It should now prompt you to enter the database password for the mythtv database table and then will list the available channels on your mythtv installation.

Import Show

To import the show we change into the recordings folder and just execute the script followed by the file extension of the show we are importing:

~/myth.rebuilddatabase.pl --ext avi

In this instance I am importing an .avi file. The rebuild script scans your mythtv directory and each file will be checked against your database to see if it exists. If they do not, you will be prompted for a channel-id, the show title, subtitle, description, show start time and duration of the show, and a record will be created. Finally it will prompt you with the question of whether you want to “build a seek table for this file”. Just say yes and it will update the “seek” information for that show. Another important thing to remember is not to give the same “show time” of an already existing show for the same channel id, else it will produce a mysql database error “Duplicate entry”.

Final Note:

I have noted that only the following files types can be imported: {nuv,mpg,mpeg,avi}. I am hoping to import a few ogg based files into mythtv. I will update this entry on my attempt to import those ogg files.