Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I use GnuCash for balancing my checkbook and keeping a budget. GnuCash was the program that let me be (almost) completely free of Windows. Until it was available, I ran Quicken (and before that, Managing Your Money).

It’s never given me any trouble until this morning when I tried to run a transaction report. GnuCash showed this message in the report window: Report error

An error occurred while running the report.

Running it from a command line prompt showed this message:

In /usr/share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/main.scm:

245: 11 [catch ignore #<procedure #f ()> #<procedure #f (key . args)>]

?: 12* [#<procedure #f ()>]

In /usr/share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/main.scm:

248: 13* [lazy-catch #t #<procedure #f ()> #<procedure dumper (key . args)>]

In unknown file:

?: 14* [#<procedure #f ()>]

In /usr/share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/main.scm:

249: 15* [apply #<procedure #f ()> ()]

In unknown file:

?: 16 [#<procedure #f ()>]

In /usr/share/gnucash/scm/report.scm:

...

389: 17 (set! html (gnc:report-render-html report #t))

389: 18* [gnc:report-render-html # #t]

357: 19 (if (and # #) (begin #) (let # # doc))

364: 20 (let ((template #) (doc #f)) (set! doc (if template # #f)) doc)

367: 21* (set! doc (if template (let* # # # ...) #f))

367: 22* (if template (let* # # # ...) #f)

368: 23 (let* (# # # ...) (gnc:html-document-set-style-sheet! doc stylesheet) ...)

370: 24* [trep-renderer #]

In unknown file:

?: 25 (letrec (# # # # ...) (gnc:report-starting reportname) (let # # # ...))

In /usr/share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/report/transaction.scm:

1087: 26 (let (# # # # ...) (if # # #) (gnc:report-finished) ...)

1111: 27* (if (not #) (begin # # # ...) (gnc:html-document-add-object! document #))

1112: 28 (begin # # # ...)

1145: 29* (if (string=? filter-mode "include") (begin (set! splits #)))

1145: 30* [string=? none "include"]

/usr/share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/report/transaction.scm:1145:15: In procedure string=? in expression (string=? filter-mode "include"):

/usr/share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/report/transaction.scm:1145:15: Wrong type argument in position 1 (expecting STRINGP): none

I don’t speak Guile and Google didn’t come up with anything. I was running 1.8.1, and the GnuCash site news mentioned bug fixes that might apply, so I tried the 1.8.8 RPM. Thank heavens it worked, ’cause I ain’t got time to learn Guile right now!

According to XSTE’s man page, a blank line should remove the previous subtitle from the screen. But I noticed the last subtitle on a chapter was still displayed on the next chapter. The output of XSTE included the .bmp file for the last non-blank line, but nothing for the blank lines. A workaround is to put in a line with just a period in it, generate the output, then edit the .bmp (with GIMP) for that line and erase the period. Then running submux-dvd creates the blank subtitle, effectively clearing the previous line.

A friend asked for a copy of RedHat 9. XCDRoast wasn’t installed on my system, so I ran apt-get install xcdroast. It downloaded the package, ran RPM, then froze. Ctrl-C wouldn’t stop it. I ended up closing the command line window. Then this morning, I tried to run up2date and it just sat there. I also noticed my tripwire report wasn’t in my inbox. A ps aux | grep rpm showed a few stuck rpm processes (including last night’s install of xcdroast). I found Bugzilla reference 73097 about problem and tried the steps in comment #3:

• run kill -9 on the affected rpm processes
  

• rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
  

• rpm --rebuilddb

Then I got this message from rpm --rebuilddb:

error: db4 error(16) from dbenv->remove: Device or resource busy. This led me to Bugzilla reference 83281, which says, don’t worry about it. Sure enough, all seems fine now.

KSubtile needs some KDE development libraries I didn’t already have loaded. These were aquired thusly:

apt-cache pkgnames kde to see what I had, then

apt-get install kdebase-devel

apt-get install kdelibs-devel to get what I was missing.

While playing with Google’s Linux search engine, I found another subtitle editor. This one is called KSubtile. Yes, that’s KSubtile, not KSubtitle. No wonder it never turned up on searches before.

Anyway, this is a KDE app for creating subtitles in SRT format. I’ll probably get to playing with it this weekend. So far, the standout feature is that it integrates with MPlayer, so I’m hoping it can subtitle multiplexed MPEG files directly, rather than having to split them into separate audio and video streams.

The following options for burning a DVD solve the standalone player compatiblity problems I’ve had. They’re metioned below, but I keep forgetting to use the dvd-compat flag to growisofs. Maybe this post will help to remind me.

mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvd.iso dvdw

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=dvd.iso