Search Results: "Sebastian Rittau"

11 October 2009

Sebastian Rittau: VirtualBox on i386 with amd64 Kernel

I have recently started to use an amd64 kernel on my i386 Debian unstable system. Unfortunately, VirtualBox OSE does not work with that setup. When I try to start a virtual machine, it fails with an oblique error message:
RTR3Init failed with rc=-1912 (rc=-1912) The VirtualBox kernel modules do not fit to this version of VirtualBox. The installation of VirtualBox was apparently not successful. Executing

'/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup'

should fix that problem. Make sure that you don't mix the OSE version and the PUEL version of VirtualBox.
Debian bug #456391 explains the problem. In that report Michael Meskes alludes to running VirtualBox in an amd64 chroot jail, so I tried this myself. It works flawlessly, once I got it setup. Here is what I did (as root): 
robinson:~# mkdir /srv/amd64
robinson:~# cdebootstrap --arch amd64 sid /srv/amd64 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/
[...]
robinson:~# chroot /srv/amd64
robinson:/# apt-get update
[...]
robinson:/# apt-get upgrade
[...]
robinson:/# apt-get install virtualbox-ose # add more packages here if needed
[...]
robinson:/# adduser --uid 1000 --no-create-home --disabled-password --disabled-login srittau
[...]
robinson:/#
These commands install the base system and create a user account. Now I created a script called /usr/local/bin/amd64.sh: 
#!/bin/sh
CHROOT=/srv/amd64
if test ! -e $CHROOT/dev/.udev; then
    mount -t none /dev $CHROOT/dev/ -o bind
fi
if test  ls $CHROOT/proc   wc -l  = "0"; then
    mount -t proc none $CHROOT/proc
fi
if test  ls $CHROOT/sys   wc -l  = "0"; then
    mount -t sysfs none $CHROOT/sys
fi
if test  ls $CHROOT/home   wc -l  = "0"; then
    mount --bind /home $CHROOT/home
fi
chroot $CHROOT sh -c "su - srittau"
Running sudo amd64.sh will now enter the chroot environment as user srittau where I can start virtualbox normally.

26 November 2006

Sebastian Rittau: Gaia shut down by Google

Clint: Did you actually read the letter sent by Google? I actually consider this to be a perfect example of "don't be evil." There are no threats in that letter, Michael Jones, the writer, is just explaining why Gaia hurts Google and in what way he think the Gaia project is violating Google's Terms of Service. He tells the Gaia project members that he understands their curiosity, even calls them "smart engineer[s] like ourselves", but asks them to "refocus [their] work toward building an open earth viewer that uses open earth images." I don't think that Google is free to do whatever they want with the images of the earth stored on their server. They most likely have a rather restrictive deal with the actual image providers. And even if they hadn't, Google probably pays a rather large amount of money to these image providers. I can understand that they don't want to offer these images for everybody to grab. I consider this letter to be very kind and understanding, compared to what seems to be standard today: Let the lawyers do the talking, or don't bothering with the talking at all and just sueing.

14 January 2006

Sebastian Rittau: Ubuntu (Non-)Collaboration

Today I discovered on Debian's Package Tracking System that Ubuntu has patched my Netatalk package. The patch seems to be rather useful (start cnid_metad in init if the user requests it). I just wonder why it was never submitted directly to me. Isn't it easier just to take the upstream message than to (re-)sync every time I release a new version?