Category Archives: GNU/Linux

All about my involvement in the free software world.

Copying Cyrillic URLs in Google Chrome and Firefox

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Using Google Chrome, I encountered strange bug affecting the copying and pasting of cyrillic urls.

When pasting, the non ASCII characters in the Url are converted to Punycode.

Performing some tests revealed that the same behaviour is present also in Firefox.

Punycode produced by Google Chrome and Firefox

Punycode produced by Google Chrome and Firefox

Doing some research led me to Issue 68718, unfortunately marked as WontFix stating:

Links on Wikipedia itself are a red herring, as comment 50 notes -- they're escaped in the page source.  The actual issue here is demonstrated by the link in comment 0.  We escape URLs when copying them.  This behavior matches Firefox 4 (by default) and Safari 5, though not IE9.

We added this behavior on  issue 2820  to fix a variety of problems in languages like Japanese.  Because those problems resulted in users unable to navigate to the pasted links, whereas this issue seems to be solely about cosmetics (in that escaped URLs are ugly and hard to read), preserving that behavior change seems like the more important thing to do.

Workarounds

Few things can be done if this issue is affecting your day to day usage of Google Chrome…

  • Before copying the URL add any character at the end of it, then erase it. After this operation the copied URL will preserve its structure not producing punycode when pasted.
  • Use the COPY URL extension.
  • Use a different browser. Microsoft Edge on Windows and Safari on OSX are producing the expected results.

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Gentoo Linux

Gentoo: No image size information in Dolphin

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Dolphin 16.04.3

Dolphin 16.04.3

One thing that was not working with my Gentoo installation was the information for image dimensions (and image data in general) in Dolphin. The resolution is to rebuild Dolphin with the semantic-desktop use flag turned on.

echo "kde-apps/dolphin semantic-desktop" >> /etc/portage/package.use/dolphin
emerge --ask kde-apps/dolphin

I thing that this flag should be on by default when building a system with KDE desktop profile or at least mentioned somewhere in the Gentoo wiki.

Gentoo Linux: Ugly fonts in NetBeans and how to fix them

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I recently installed Gentoo GNU/Linux + KDE 5 on my dev machine. One thing that was bugging me was the crappy font rendering in NetBeans.

To relolve the problem, locate your netbeans.conf file. Usually under /etc in your NetBeans installation folder, and append to netbeans_default_options the follwing:

-J-Dswing.aatext=true -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd --laf Metal

This will enable font smoothing in SWING and use default system settings for font smoothing. The last entry –laf Metal sets the preferred UI theme for the IDE, it should be Swing based theme such as Metal or Numbus.

Happy coding 🙂

ERROR: dev-python/cryptography-1.1.2::gentoo failed (compile phase)

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Latest

emerge --sync
emerge --update --deep --newuse @world

broke “dev-python/cryptography” on my development “server”. By server I mean Intel Celeron at 400Mhz with 768Mb of RAM. Currently running MySQL, Apache, Apache Tomcat, Samba and Deluge.

i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -O2 -march=pentium2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-ident -fPIC -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c /var/tmp/portage/dev-python/cryptography-1.1.2/work/cryptography-1.1.2-python2_7/temp.linux-i686-2.7/_openssl.c -o /var/tmp/portage/dev-python/cryptography-1.1.2/work/cryptography-1.1.2-python2_7/temp.linux-i686-2.7/var/tmp/portage/dev-python/cryptography-1.1.2/work/cryptography-1.1.2-python2_7/temp.linux-i686-2.7/_openssl.o
/var/tmp/portage/dev-python/cryptography-1.1.2/work/cryptography-1.1.2-python2_7/temp.linux-i686-2.7/_openssl.c:2096:15: error: ‘SSLv2_method’ redeclared as different kind of symbol
 SSL_METHOD* (*SSLv2_method)(void) = NULL;

As the build error says dev-python/cryptography is looking for SSLv2. Doing

equery u openssl
[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]
[        : I - package is installed with flag     ]
[ Colors : set, unset                             ]
 * Found these USE flags for dev-libs/openssl-1.0.2h-r2:
 U I
 + + asm                : Support assembly hand optimized crypto functions (i.e. faster run time)
 + + bindist            : Disable EC algorithms (as they seem to be patented) -- note: changes the ABI
 - - cpu_flags_x86_sse2 : Use the SSE2 instruction set
 - - gmp                : Add support for dev-libs/gmp (GNU MP library)
 - - kerberos           : Add kerberos support
 - - rfc3779            : Enable support for RFC 3779 (X.509 Extensions for IP Addresses and AS Identifiers)
 - - sctp               : Support for Stream Control Transmission Protocol
 - - sslv2              : Support for the old/insecure SSLv2 protocol -- note: not required for TLS/https
 + + sslv3              : Support for the old/insecure SSLv3 protocol -- note: not required for TLS/https
 - - static-libs        : Build static versions of dynamic libraries as well
 - - test               : Workaround to pull in packages needed to run with FEATURES=test. Portage-2.1.2 handles this internally, so don't set it in
                          make.conf/package.use anymore
 + + tls-heartbeat      : Enable the Heartbeat Extension in TLS and DTLS
 - - vanilla            : Do not add extra patches which change default behaviour; DO NOT USE THIS ON A GLOBAL SCALE as the severity of the meaning changes
                          drastically
 + + zlib               : Add support for zlib (de)compression

Reveled that OpenSSL is build with ought SSLv2 suport. Adding sslv2 use flag for OpenSSL and rebuilding resolved the problem.

echo "dev-libs/openssl sslv2" > /etc/portage/package.use/openssl

According to me, this is a bug in “dev-python/cryptography“. The ebuild should do some kind of checking if sslv2 use flag is enabled, or it should introduce use flags controlling the version of ssl used.

Hyper-V: How to change screen resolution in CentOS / Red Hat Enterprice Linux virtual machine

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I’m thinking of doing a switch to GNU/Linux as my desktop OS yet again! (My last GNU/Linux desktop experience lasted for 5 years, then back to Windows.) This time giving CentOS 7 a try.

Why CentOS? I particularly like that, it’s one of the few GNU/Linux distributions out there providing LTS, which means I will have a stable development machine for at least 2 – 3 more years.

Making a decision to migrate or stay with Windows among other things is testing various aspects of the distribution such as how things works out of the box, installing various development tools / applications required for my area of work, etc..

For testing, CentOS 7 was installed on Hyper-V virtual machine. What I didn’t liked after the installation was the screen resolution that the machine was set to (1152×864) with now way of chaining it either from KDE System Settings or Hyper-V virtual machine properties.

After a bit of digging I learned that there is a frame buffer driver for Hyper-V and that CentOS unlike other distributions I have worked with, provides a tool called grubby for managing grub.cfg. It’s way easy to work with grubby than editing “/etc/default/grub” for example and running update-grub.

To set the desired screen resolution under Hyper-V. Open a terminal, and su. Then execute:

grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="video=hyperv_fb:1280x1024"

and reboot the system.

NOTE: Replace 1280×1024 with the desired screen resolution.

See grubby man page if you need further info on what the a bought line does.