Every­body who runs an AMD64 Linux sys­tem might have seen these errors before:

I’m run­ning Ubuntu Linux and it is quite well known that some 32-bit apps refuse to start on an AMD64 (x86_64) sys­tem. Recently I’ve found out how to get Acrobat Reader and VMware star­ted, even with my nat­ive GTK2 theme.

After a sys­tem update yes­ter­day, Fire­fox crashes far too often. It crashes (seg­faults) everytime I reload a webpage. I assume that it is due to a sys­tem mis­con­fig­ur­a­tion on my behalf. Don’t actu­ally know.

Any­way, I wanted to install a new nightly snap­shot of Fire­fox today. No chance. The only thing the firefox-installer pro­gram returns is a bunch of error mes­sages (see above). After brows­ing some for­ums, mail­ing lists, and webpages, I finally found out how to get the 32-bit Fire­fox installed:

It is quite simple: In Ubuntu, there is a pango con­fig­ur­a­tion dir­ect­ory for 32-bit mod­ules in /etc/pango32/. Cre­ate a pangorc file in /etc/pango32/ with the fol­low­ing content:

Unfor­tu­nately, the Pango mod­ules in /usr/lib32/pango/1.4.0/ seem to be miss­ing in Ubuntu (breezy). You’ll have to copy them from another 32-bit system.

Next, ini­tial­ize the GTK\_PATH and PANGO\_RC\_FILE envir­on­ment vari­ables prior to run­ning Fire­fox (or the firefox-installer):

export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/
export PANGO_RC_FILE=/etc/pango32/pangorc

That’s it. Fire­fox will start nor­mally now — maybe with some addi­tional warn­ings. I haven’t checked if Thun­der­bird can be installed this way, too. I nev­er­the­less think so.

Update: Here’s a FAQ: http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianAMD64Faq

Update: Alex­an­dre Strube told me that breezy actu­ally con­tains all requires Pango lib­rar­ies. Maybe I was miss­ing some­thing. On his sys­tem, how­ever, some other funny phe­nomenon occurs — the but­tons have no bor­ders anymore:

It is never easy to stop think­ing when thoughts are going crazy. The same is true for deal­ing with idi­otic people. Even though these prob­lems are not dir­ectly related to each other, both are awk­ward. You can only try to give you best, dis­reg­ard­ing the actual con­sequences. Think­ing about past events is often futile. Some­times, how­ever, it can be help­ful. It’s up to you.

If, how­ever, some stu­pid, ignor­ant and arrog­ant guys think that they’re omni­scient and impec­cable, some guys that can influ­ence your mood and your pro­fes­sional repu­ta­tion in a way that you are almost unable to get your work done, you often can’t do any­thing by your­self. This is one of the most unpleas­ant situ­ations one can get into.

Just wanted to men­tion this … dazzlingly, me.

Why’s everything so drat­ted com­plic­ated and why am I so madly fascinated?

Pre­sum­ably due to a SSM bug in the Linux ker­nel, the backup npw.net server crashed some days ago. Since my ISP is about 500 km from here, I had to wait until Monday for my pro­vider to restart the server. Now it is up again. The fol­low­ing mes­sage was logged to syslog:

Jul 18 08:39:20 localhost sm-mta[30237]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA-v6: load average: 978

Quite a high load, isn’t it? :)

The “Bundes­amt für Sich­er­heit in der Inform­a­tion­s­tech­nik” (BSI) [1] has pub­lished a state­ment on cop­ies of music for private use [2]. It is avail­able in Ger­man only!

Fabian Keil found sev­eral flaws in therein [3]. The BSI, how­ever, obvi­ously doesn’t fol­low Fabian’s argu­ments. They seem to insist on their inter­pret­a­tion of the legal pos­i­tion. In my opin­ion that’s char­ac­ter­istic for the cur­rent atti­tude to private cop­ies, (partly) thanks to the advert­ise­ment cam­paigns of the music and film industry.

[1] http://www.bsi.de/
[2] http://www.bsi-fuer-buerger.de/recht/12_0403.htm
[3] http://www.fabiankeil.de/urheberrecht-richtigstellung.html

(From: law blog)