As I mentioned in an old comment, I use cron-apt to keep my Debian servers fresh.
This post is just a quick reminder to my future self, about how I setup cron-apt on my machines.
First we install the package:
aptitude install cron-apt
Then we configure it:
sed -i 's/# MAILON="error"/MAILON="always"/g' /etc/cron-apt/config sed -i 's/# MAILTO="root"/MAILTO="kevin@deldycke.com"/g' /etc/cron-apt/config
That’s it !
Today I stumble upon a bug in the Kdenlive 0.7.8 running on my Kubuntu 10.10: the crop filter was messing with the display ratio of my video clips. Digging the web I found a bug report that was really close to my problem. According to the comments, this issue was fixed in the upcoming version of MLT. Is that bug the one I encountered ? The only way to find out was to install the development version of MLT. Here is how I did it…
First, make sure to use the latest stable Kdenlive stack for you system. For me, the Sunab’s alternative repository for Kubuntu 10.10 was the ultimate source:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdenlive
The idea is to keep the version of Kdenlive installed above, and replace the pre-packaged MLT on our system with a custom development version of our choice.
But first, we’ll install all the libraries required to build MLT from sources:
sudo apt-get install libavdevice-dev libswscale-dev libvorbis-dev libsox-dev libsamplerate-dev frei0r-plugins-dev libdv-dev libavformat-dev libquicktime-dev libxml2-dev libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev
Let’s now remove the installed MLT. If we use apt-get or KPackageKit, this will remove Kdenlive. So we’ll use the following command to remove MLT while ignoring all the dependencies:
sudo dpkg --remove --force-depends libmlt2 libmlt++3 libmlt-data melt
At this point, and every time we try to use it, apt will complain of broken Kdenlive dependencies, and will try to remove it. This mean we can’t upgrade other packages on the system.
To avoid this issue, I tried to freeze the state in which Kdenlive and MLT are, by setting the hold flag on kdenlive, kdenlive-data, libmlt2, libmlt++3, libmlt-data and melt packages. I tried with both dpkg and aptitude, but unfortunately it doesn’t work as expected. So we’ll continue our hack anyway…
Let’s get MLT sources:
git clone git://mltframework.org/mlt.git
The command above will give you the latest development version. But if you target a particular revision (like commit 21a3f68 in my case), you have to use this additional command:
git checkout 21a3f68
We can now follow the procedure detailed in the Kdenlive manual:
cd mlt ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl make clean make sudo make install
That’s it ! Now you can launch Kdenlive, and if you run the wizard, you’ll see that the MLT version on your system is the latest:
Oh, and by the way, it fixed my problem with the crop filter ! 
Finally, if you want to revert the mess we created on the system, you have to remove the MLT we built in place:
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/libmlt* sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/mlt* sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/pkgconfig/mlt* sudo rm -rf /usr/include/mlt* sudo rm -rf /usr/share/mlt*
I came with the list above by searching my system with the following command:
sudo find / -path "/home" -prune -or -iname "*mlt*" -print -or -iname "*melt*" -print
Then, we can let apt handle Kdenlive and MLT properly and get back to the pre-packaged binaries:
sudo apt-get remove kdenlive && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdenlive
eAccelerator is an open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache (to quote the official website of the project). It can effectively speed-up PHP processing on a server by caching bytecode.
As Wikipedia tells you, several tools of this kind exists. Why choosing eAccelerator in particular ? I really have no clue… I’ve never used any of these tools, so I had to start somewhere. That’s as simple as that !
Now, I have a Debian server as a target system. Unfortunately, eAccelerator is not bundled in Lenny. Browsing the web, I found some personal repositories of people kindly sharing their deb packages, like Andrew McMillan and schnuckelig.eu. The former provides a version of eAccelerator for the i386, the latter for the amd64 architecture. In this how-to, I’ve combined the 2 repositories to give both 32 bits and 64 bits users a chance to use eAccelerator on Lenny.
Let’s start the installation ! First, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/debian lenny awm deb-src http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/debian lenny awm deb http://debian.schnuckelig.eu/ lenny main contrib non-free
To kill annoying warning messages, register the cryptographic fingerprint of each repository:
$ gpg --keyserver keyring.debian.org --recv-keys 0x8f068012; $ gpg --export --armor 0x8f068012 | apt-key add - $ wget -O - http://debian.schnuckelig.eu/repository-key.gpg | apt-key add -
Then, update your package database:
$ aptitude update
And finally, you can install eAccelerator for PHP5 without any pain:
$ apt-get install php5-eaccelerator
Happy fine-tunning !
dpkg -l
zcat -f /var/log/dpkg.log* | grep "\ install\ " | sort
apt-get -t squeeze-backports install my-package
apt-get -d --reinstall install my-package dpkg --install --force-confmiss /var/cache/apt/archives/my-package.deb
apt-get clean
apt-get remove --purge my_package
dpkg --remove --force-depends libsomething
deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge
aptitude changelog linux-generic
apt-file search file_to_search
apt-file list package_name
dpkg lock file:rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock
dpkg or aptitude:echo "kdenlive hold" | dpkg --set-selections
aptitude hold kdenlive
echo "kdenlive install" | dpkg --set-selections
aptitude unhold kdenlive
dpkg --get-selections | grep hold
