Nat!'s Web Journal

... you will know why .
These are two of the caricatures, that are causing all the ruckus. Klick the image to see them all:

Thats about as political as this weblog is ever going to get.

The reason of this exercise was, that I want to release MulleEOInterface 0.9 and since I made numerous changes I want to see if it still compiles on GNUstep. After talking with ZNeK about it, I decided that it probably would be easiest to install a Debian release on Virtual PC and go from there. I put this in my weblog, because in two years I will have forgotten about it, and then I can backtrace my previous efforts and mistakes.

It was not as easy as I thought would be. The first problem was, that the networking didn't work. Maybe there are other ways around it, but I see no other way to get this to work then to unset the default networking option of Virtual PC and to use what is called "Virtual Switch":

and to enable on Mac OS X

I have no idea who in this setup provided a proper DHCP response for the booting Debian, but I was in no mood to look after that. There is no DHCP server configured on my home network and my Mac, if setup as a DHCP client, does not receive an IP address.

I haven't yet figured out how Virtual PC 7.0.2 lets me send '@' and '|' on a german keyboard to the shell. This makes it effectively useless. Apparently this is a known bug in some other version too, hooray.

Virtual PC 7.0.2 is slow. I am running it on my PPC 2.5 and, I don't know, it feels like a 486 speedwise. Maybe this is unjust, but it's definetely not fast.

GNUstep and GDL2

Installation of GNUstep on sarge is a cinch! You say apt-get install gnustep and just minutes later, everything is ready and installed.

Everything that is very, very old. GDL2 wouldn't compile with it. So I went to download a new GNUstep directly from the subversion repository. Again apt-get install subversion gets me a very old, but in this case workable version of subversion and in hardly anytime I had core downloaded.

But core doesn't build right out of the box. And the build guide is just about useless.

Here's what I did for a system, that only needs base. GNUstep doesn't build on its own, you need to get some other libraries and to me it wasn't all obvious where to get them.

• First I needed the ffcall library. The link on the build page broken, but I found it elsewhere. I ./configure --prefix=/usr/GNUstep it to a place that I thought was appropriate. Well maybe not.
• Because now I need to run the ./configure script like this: ./configure --prefix=/usr/GNUstep --with-ffi-include=/usr/GNUstep/include/ --with-ffi-library=/usr/GNUstep/lib/
• libxml2 is the next problem. This drove me nuts. apt-get showed that libxml2 was installed and with the proper version but ./configure didn't find it. It complained about a missing xml-config. Turns out: you need a special developer package apt-get install libxml2-dev and xml2-config is actually the file that is needed.
• ok you also need openssl which is easy again: apt-get install openssl. I like Debian :) But openssl is still reported as missing. Hmm. openssl-dev doesn't exist, so I give up on that.
• Next problem: ./configure complains about libxslt missing. libxslt ? I thought that was Java only :) Oh well, I searched all over tried different names, but I couldn't apt-get anything. After some research it turns out that libxslt is already installed *groan* and ./configure is just too dumb to find it or whatever.

At that point I dediced I could live without libxslt support and openssl. Basically all I really want are the GDL2 headers and I think with hindsight, I should just have used a lot of include paths and accessed the headers directly from the unpacked directory.

Thus ends an exercise in futility and a display of stupidity. Thanks for reading.

One day later: Helge gives some advice. All of this being totally obvious of course :)

The openssl package I need is named libssl-dev and not openssl.
To find libraries like libxslt one can do for instance apt-cache search libxslt, that sounds useful.
I suck at Debian. :)

So I actually did release something as promised. It's version 0.9 of MulleEOInterface, I didn't make it a 1.0 because there will likely be some more changes until I got the main application ported to MulleEOF.

Also quite near is also the release of version 2.0 of MulleImagePrinter. It works already but I need to remove two of the display glitches.

<bgsound src="http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/weblog/files/Rant%20on%20Music.mp3" autostart="true" loop="false" hidden="true" loop=true volume=12> This quote is just so funny, that I wanted to clip it and preserve it on this weblog for posterity. What you are listening in the background is a clip from the David Lee Roth radio show. DLR has no problem pissing everybody off including his classic rock stations and his audience. Speaking the truth usually hurts though :)

It's funny. If you look at Stepwise there is never an article like Dangerous Bug in Safari or something. Instead the articles are mostly about damage control, if there's something slightly negative about Apple, if there are articles at all.
The smuggest of smug Mac users is right: the platform is more secure, and these new security threats are no more threatening that a paraplegic kitten. says one columnist. And Gruber's Daring Fireball says: It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.

But...

Have you ever downloaded something from Sourceforge ? Isn't it curious how there is a download happening from a page, where you did not click anything on it ? This is done using a http-equiv="refresh" META tag. If you load a page with this code embedded, you don' t have to do anything: the exploit will get downloaded and executed automatically on a standard Safari installation.

You do trust the others, not me, don't you ? You don't think this will work ? Then please visit this page and join my Botnet. I could have put the META tag also on this page right here and my Botnet would be even stronger, but I am a nice guy basically.