For the past two days, I have been working on a small setup at the West Bengal University of Technology which would let me distribute a compilation project across three AMD Athlon 2000+ machines (with 1 GB RAM each). Working with the stock tool for such a project - distcc is pretty easy. However, having different versions of gcc in the systems can cause troubles (I learn’t it the hard way). Anyway, after my first build failed with a undefined symbol borkage, I upgraded all the boxes to Fedora Core 2 - and then it was smooth sailing all the way. I downloaded and compiled GNOME 2.6 using this setup, and it was really really fast. The only troublesome piece was Mozilla, but I don’t think it has anything to do with distcc. It has probably something to do with GCC 3.3.3 - I plan to find that out during my next visit.

Anyway, once I had setup GNOME, I started it via gnome-session - but for some reasons the icons were all white rectangles. I was quite sure that I had setup icon-themes, themes, mime-data, shared-mime-info and related stuff correctly - so it really seemed weird. Then I clicked on the Desktop Preferences -< Theme, and it gave me an error dialog saying “The default theme schemas could not be found on your system. This means that you probably don’t have metacity installed, or that your gconf is configured incorrectly.” I poked around a little, and then opened up the source code of gnome-control-center to find out what was triggering that error box. Found out that the condition was

gtk_theme_default_name = get_default_string_from_key (GTK_THEME_KEY);
window_theme_default_name = get_default_string_from_key (METACITY_THEME_KEY);
icon_theme_default_name = get_default_string_from_key (ICON_THEME_KEY);

if (gtk_theme_default_name == NULL ||
window_theme_default_name == NULL ||
icon_theme_default_name == NULL)

Duh!! A gconf borkage. Found out that the entire /desktop/gnome/interface/a branch of the Gconf tree was missing. Googled around a bit - and found out that the /desktop/gnome/interface/* keys are installed by libgnome. Reinstalled it - and the stuff ran fine. Then I setup a patched up version of Pango - and started Bangla GNOME - and here’s what I came up with up.



Now we need to find out how nicely this works in a LTSP setup.

…while SM’s recursive slurping falls into an infinite loop

While I was doing all this, SM was sitting at the other end of the room - trying to recursively slurp someone’s home directory from a lab machine into his own laptop. He was using scp for this - as ssh was running in the lab system. I was beginning to have a feeling that it was taking a bit too long, when suddenly SM shouted - “No space left - no space left”. Finally it turned out that the .openoffice directory in the target directory had a symlink to its parent directory inside. So the result was as expected - the program had got into an infinite loop at that symlink - thus filling up SM’s disk :D. Fun…