Saturday 15th December, 2007 @ 4:26 am
Today I battled with trying to get IBM’s Cell SDK 3.0 (now known as the SDK for Multicore Acceleration) installed on my Debian AMD64 machine. This would cause slight grief even with a regular Debian machine as IBM only formally supports Fedora and RHEL so only provides RPMs. This is worsened by the fact that a bunch of the packages aren’t even available from IBM but require perusal of some provided yum configuration files to find.
Firstly I recommend you download the CellSDK-Devel-Fedora_3.0.0.1.0.iso and CellSDK-Extras-Fedora_3.0.0.1.0.iso (current at time of writing) from here.
Then when you have downloaded them mount them somewhere on your filesystem.
mount -o loop $HOME/CellSDK-Devel-Fedora_3.0.0.1.0.iso /tmp/CellSDK-Devel-Fedora/
mount -o loop $HOME/CellSDK-Extras-Fedora_3.0.0.1.0.iso /tmp/CellSDK-Extras-Fedora/
We’ve downloaded the two RPMs by IBM. If you install these on Fedora they will provide you with some yum repositories for the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. These will need to be downloaded manually as we aren’t on a RPM-based system.
If you are running Ubuntu Gutsy on x86_64 or x86 run:
apt-get install ppu-gcc ppu-gdb spu-g++ spu-gdb cell-programming-primer
If you are running Ubuntu Gutsy on the Cell run:
apt-get install cell-sdk
Otherwise run the following:
apt-get install wget #Install wget if it is not already
mkdir openrpm
cd openrpm
wget -l 1 -c -np -nd -r http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/cellsimulator/sdk3.0/CellSDK-Open-Fedora/x86_64/ -A .rpm
The aboveassumes you are on an x86_64 machine. If you are using the Cell, a regular x86 or a PPC 64-bit machine change the ‘x86_64‘ to ‘cbea’, ‘x86‘ or ‘ppc64‘ accordingly.
The following instructions apply regardless of your Debian/Ubuntu variant or architecture.
Next, if we are on x86_64, we want to create a nice little script to handily convert the i386 architecture files to amd64 so they will install nicely when we convert them to debs. This is safe as all the stuff these packages install gets chucked into /opt/.
I recommend we name it “fixcelldebsarch.sh” and stick it in your $HOME. This is only necessary if you are on x86_64 not x86 and (probably) won’t work on the Cell or another PPC64.
#!/bin/bash
#~/fixcelldebsarch.sh
OWD=`pwd`
for i in `ls -d */`
do
cd $i
sed -ie ’s/Architecture: i386/Architecture: amd64/’ debian/control
dpkg-buildpackage
cd “$OWD”
rm -r */ *.gz *.changes *.dsc
done
(Thanks to Jon for the fix to avoid mess when using symbolic links.)
Next we want to convert the various RPMs into DEBs for our Debian system so the dependencies are nicely handled and they can be uninstalled. Install the ‘alien‘ package if you have not already.
On the following lines replace the occurences of “/x86_64/” with ‘/cbea/’, ‘/x86/’ or ‘/ppc64/’ using the same criteria as above.
cd open
for i in ../openrpm/*.rpm; do alien --scripts $i; done
~/fixcelldebsarch.sh #Only needed on x86_64
dpkg -i *.deb
cd devel
for i in /tmp/CellSDK-Devel-Fedora/x86_64/*.rpm; do alien --scripts $i; done
~/fixcelldebsarch.sh #Only needed on x86_64
dpkg -i *.deb
cd extras
for i in /tmp/CellSDK-Extras-Fedora/x86_64/*.rpm; do alien --scripts $i; done
~/fixcelldebsarch.sh #Only needed on x86_64
dpkg -i *.deb
It should have been fairly obvious what was going on above. This should have installed all the necessary packages for the Cell SDK without breaking your system and allowing Debian/Ubuntu packages to override these versions.
I hope this all works; if anyone spots any typos, has any suggestions or needs any help then give me a shout!
Updated: Added Gutsy information. Thanks Bart!
Posted in Software Development
16 Comments »
Saturday 8th December, 2007 @ 7:16 pm
The Catholic League in the US has called for a boycot of The Golden Compass, the film based on Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights.
I had the chance of seeing the film this afternoon and enjoyed it. The story is fairly predictable (in the film anyway) and the trailers I had seen ruined some of the twists and turns for me but this didn’t detract overly from my enjoyment of the film. The main reason I went to see it, to be honest, was for the CGI which met far exceeded my expectations. I wish my grandparents were still around so I could show them some of the imagery that we can create with computers now, I think they’d be pretty blown away.
Apparently the novels are a lot more directly anti-Church but this doesn’t really seem to come across in the film. From what I’ve read from Wikipedia even the novels aren’t that controversial, being more anti-dogma and encouraging free thought rather than blind adherence to what those in authority tell you. I don’t find this to be a negative message really at all, in fact I think it is a good one to give to our children.
When I’ve worked with children I’m always amazed by those who seem to want kids to stop thinking and just accept what they are told. This is the way to mental stagnation and the decline of the sciences and, ultimately, halting the advances in our society.
I want to try and read the books for myself rather than relying on second-hand summaries but, as far as I can see, Philip Pullman doesn’t attack my faith but he challenges me to form my own beliefs rather than relying on others to find the answers for me . There was another guy who liked to criticise and rebuke the guys in authority around 2007 years ago. It’s his birthday soon….
Posted in Christianity
15 Comments »
Wednesday 5th December, 2007 @ 11:37 pm
Some stuff happened a few weeks ago which put a sour taste in my mouth about my blogging. Those who follow my posts regularly can probably work out what it was but I’m not going to say anything explicitly.
I’ve been toying around with the ideas of free speech the last few weeks and how free is free enough. I don’t have the right to make rascist insults or violent threats. Is this a bad thing or simply sensible?
I was reading James the other day and it talks about the tongue being “a restless evil, full of deadly poison” and sometimes I feel mine is certainly like that. So much of we say can upset others or make us look foolish. How does this affect free speech though?
“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words shall never hurt me” is told to children in the UK. This can’t be further from the truth. The question is not whether free speech can be a bad thing; it is clear it can hurt and cause damage, violence and hatred, but what limits we put on it and what sacrifices are acceptable in its name.
There was some controversy two weeks ago with two controverisal speakers at an Oxford debate being allowed a free platform to speak at the prestigious university. Some claim this gave legitimacy to their views and furthered their movements. Also we saw Aaron Seigo ask for people to give constructive criticism rather than just “sucking lists” for the KDE4 release and there was some heated discussion about whether this was a fair ask or not.
Even although these two discussions probably hurt some people and annoyed others I feel both were beneficial. Abraham Lincoln once said “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt” and I feel this is pertininet in these days when free speech is under discussion and heated debate fills the internet.
If you try and force people not to say certain things; be they complaints, rascist comments or denial of history then these views don’t simply die, instead they tend to occur behind closed doors and cliques and this is far more dangerous than being aware of them. The best way to confront idiotic or bigotted views is through public debate where they can be reasoned with rather than ignored.
With this in mind I personally think anyone should be able to say what they want, where they want and to whom they want. If it isn’t true, if it is offensive then they should be verbally repremanded but I don’t believe words and ideas should be punished simply for being.
With this in mind I’m glad to see the amount of heated discussion that occurs on Planet KDE and elsewhere on the internet. It may appear brash or rude but people only argue when they care and I think KDE is lucky to have a bunch of developers that cares so much about the software being great, even when sometimes their methods of vocalising it could be improved.
Posted in Christianity, My Life
9 Comments »
