Jitu

Currently interns are trying to use bitbake to create an openembedded image for the beagle board. After setting up everything according to the step-by-step instructions, they run into a major problem: the proxy of the Indian Institute of Science.
bitbake uses wget to download the necessary packages. To tell wget that is has to send all requests to the proxy, environment variable are set:

export http_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″
export ftp_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″

However if wget is executed by bitbake to download a missing package, the environment variables are gone and wget tries to connect to the HTTP servers directly. A search in the Internet for that particular problem was not successful. A workaround (and not a solution) is to export the variables again, before wget is executed. Changing the recipes might be a never ending task. An easier way is to change the wget executable itself:

1. Open a terminal and type cd /usr/bin/. If the file is not there, you can use which wget to figure out, where it is hidden.
2. mv wget wget.executable (for this you need root permission, getting them by either executing sudo (Ubuntu) or by becoming root with su).
3. Open an editor of your choice and type:
   

   #!/bin/bash
   echo “Using alternative wget…”
   export http_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″
   export ftp_proxy=”http://proxy.example.com:8080″

   /usr/bin/wget.executable $@

4. Save this file as wget in /usr/bin/ (for that you need to be root again).
5. Change the permission for this file by entering chmod +x wget in the terminal (also as root).
6. Execute bitbake as usual. The echo directive just prints out a message, so you can check, if bitbake is taking the right executable.

I hope, it helps and saves you some time.

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Last weekend I went to the waterfalls near Hogenakkal at the border between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The Cauvery River falls down into a 20 to 25m deep canyon making the spot a magnet for tourists. With little round shaped boats tourists can travel on the river to have a close look on the falling water.

Children, maybe 13 to 15 years of age, stand on top of the cliffs and shout down to offer another attraction to the tourists in the boats below. It is a test of courage: For Rs.10 (around EUR0.20) they jump down the cliff. After the jump, they swim to the boat and collect their earnings.

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I am using twinview settings of my Nvidia graphics adapter to control the VGA port of my laptop for a second monitor. A few days ago I saw that a horizontal black bar which was not accessible by the mouse appeared on the second monitor. The lower part of maximized windows was also missing as if the whole screen moved up and the visible area stayed at the same place. I did not know, what I did or changed nor I did not recognize it immediately.

Since the space was around 25 pixels I assumed that the Gnome panel is interfering somehow first. The vertical alignment settings did not go so far to compensate that much width of the black bar. Since I assumed a software problem I started to dig around for a solution and tried to recall, what I actually did. By accident I found the solution: The monitor has a “Reset to factory defaults” setting. After everything was reset, the black bar vanished. So I must somehow changed a setting such as “Auto Adjustment” or so, which messed up the visible area. I heard that some users had a vertical black bar which also vanished after reseting the values.

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Often men can be seen with a long grown nail at the little finger in India. These photos show Chandra, a worker in the mess, with long nails at his little finger and thumb.

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