Guy Rutenberg » Ubuntu

Creating a Deb for an Updated Version

Guy — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:16:04 +0000

Say you’ve an existing package like gitg and you want to use the new version of gitg or even apply your own patches. You could directly make install but you will probably regret it as soon as you’ll want to upgrade/uninstall, and you want to create a better package than the one created by checkinstall. Apperantly, creating a deb package for a new version of already packaged deb isn’t complicated.

Getting Started

Start by pulling the sources for the already available package. I’ll by using gitg as an example throughout this tutorial.

apt-get source gitg

This will create a folder according to the version of the package, something like gitg-0.2.4. Extract the new version besides it and cd into its directory. The next step is to copy the debian/ directory from the old source package the code you’ve just extracted.

cp -R ../gitg-0.2.4/debian/ .

Update `debian/` Files

The next step is to update the files under the debian/ sub-directory.

DEBEMAIL="Guy Rutenberg " debchange --nmu

This will update the debian/changelog and set the new version. --nmu will create a new “non maintainer upload” version, meaning if the current version was 0.2.4-0ubuntu1, it will change it to 0.2.4-0ubuntu1.1. This will make sure that there won’t be any collision between your package and an official one. If you update to a new upstream version. It might be more suitable to use something like this:

debchange --newversion 0.2.5+20111211.git.20391c4

If necessary, update the Build-Depends and Depends sections of debian/control.

Building the Package

If your building a package directly from version control and not part of an official release, you may need to run

./autogen

at this point.

Now to the actual building:

debuild -us -uc -i -I -B

-us -uc tells the script not to sign the .dsc and .changes files accordingly. -i and -I makes the script ignore common version control files. -B tells debuild to only create binary packages. You can also pass -j followed by the number of simultaneous jobs you wish to allow (e.g. -j3, like in make) which an significantly speed things up.

Installing the Package

The package will reside in the parent directory, for example:

../gitg_0.2.5+20111211.git.20391c4_amd64.deb

At this point you’re basically done. If you want to install the package you can use

sudo debi

while you’re still inside the build directory.

References

UpdatingADeb
Man pages for debuild, dpgk-genchanges, dpgk-buildpackage.

Reinstall grub in Ubuntu

Guy — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:45:04 +0000

My brother asked me to repair his boot loader, after he accidentally erased his MBR. This can be done easily via LiveCD and the command line.

Boot the system using a LiveCD (I’ve used Ubuntu from USB stick) and do the following:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt
$ sudo mount --bind /usr/sbin /mnt/usr/sbin
$ sudo mount --bind /usr/lib /mnt/usr/lib
$ sudo mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/dev
$ sudo chroot /mnt
 
# grub-install /dev/sda

I hope it will be useful for others as well, as the Ubuntu community documentations offers a solution based on Boot-Repair, which seems an overkill for me.

Disable Touchpad Tapping in Kubuntu

Guy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:13:50 +0000

In Ubuntu (gnome) there is an easy graphical way to disable tapping on the touchpad. However, KDE lacks such thing. But lacking graphical configuration doesn’t mean this should be difficult. All you need is the gsynaptics package. The package provides a small utility called synclient. Now you can disable tapping by doing

 synclient TapButton1=0

To disable the tapping permanently you should use the following to run the command at the start of every KDE session.

echo "synclient TapButton1=0" > ~/.kde/env/disable-tapping.sh

Blocking IP Range using UFW

Guy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:19:15 +0000

Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is one of the greatest frontends to IPTables I’ve encountered. It is very simple to use and I just wish it was also available for Gentoo. Up until recently everything went smoothly for me and ufw, but we hit some rough waters when I’ve tried to block an IP range.

To block an ip or I’p range in ufw you should do

sudo ufw deny from 188.162.67.197/21

But here is the catch. Only the recent versions of ufw (which the version that comes with Ubuntu 8.04 isn’t one of them) support inserting new rules. When you add a rule it gets appended. So if you had a rule before that allows everyone to connect to your server on port 80, it also allows the IP range you’re trying to block, to connect to your machine.

As it’s impossible to foresee all the rules you might use, one has to resort to deleting all the rules he has to override, then re-add them so they will be after the rule that blocks the IP range. However I disliked the idea and looked for a simpler solution.

The easiest method I’ve found was to manully edit ufw‘s configurations:

sudo vim /var/lib/ufw/user.rules

And then move the rule I’ve added, which looks like this:

### tuple ### deny any any 0.0.0.0/0 any 188.162.67.197/21
-A ufw-user-input -s 188.162.67.197/21 -j DROP

above any other rules in the configuration file.

Afterward, you’ll have to restart ufw so it will reload its configurations.

sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw enable

Installing Lighttpd-1.4.22 on Ubuntu 8.04

Guy — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:43:19 +0000

I had some problems with the lighttpd-1.4.19 that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, mainly it’s problems of handling the HTTP header Expect: 100-continue (which older versions of Lighttpd return error 417). The problem was fixed in Lighttpd-1.4.21, but 1.4.22 is the newest version so I’ve decided to install it.

As I mentioned before, Ubuntu doesn’t have lighttpd-1.4.22 for 8.04, and it’s also not available in the updates or backports repositories. Fortunately, I’ve found that the package is available from Debuian Sid (unstable). Here are some instructions on how to install it.

Start By downloading the following packages.

wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lighttpd/lighttpd_1.4.22-1_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pcre3/libpcre3_7.8-2_amd64.deb

You can statisfy using the offical repositories all the dependencies of lighttpd-1.4.22 except the libpcre3, which is also available from Debian Sid. So start by installing it.

sudo dpkg -i libpcre3_7.8-2_amd64.deb
sudo aptitude markauto libpcre3

You statisfy the rest of the dependencies by using apt-get and the official repositories. In case you encounter the following problem when starting lighttpd:

/usr/sbin/lighttpd: Symbol `FamErrlist' has different size in shared object, con
sider re-linking

it can be solved easiliy by installing libfam3.

sudo apt-get install libfam3

(don’t worry if it complains about needing to remove libgamin0). You should be done now, and you can start enjoying your shining lighttpd-1.4.22.