My cur­rent project (as of a few days ago, noth­ing long term ;)) is get­ting a work­ing php­Sys­Info page with trippy tem­per­a­ture mon­i­tor­ing and other such kah-razy features.

So, I grabbed the lat­est from the SF CVS server (2.3-cvs) and installed it, because my old ver­sion (2.2-release) has some seri­ous issues with SuSE’s way of doing things — it “worked”, sans Mem­ory Usage and miss­ing much of the Hard­ware Infor­ma­tion.  Not that that is really rel­e­vant any­way, see­ing I (of course!) wanted to try out the latest.

I’m not sure if 2.2 sup­ported the trippy hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing thing, but even if it did, I’m over it already ;)  2.3 has a nicer ver­sion num­ber :p

Yeah.  So.  Hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing.  I down­loaded a few (it sup­ports 4 dif­fer­ent back­end pro­grams) and tried to com­pile — xmb­mon down­loaded and com­piled fine (well, okay — mbmon com­piled fine, the x exten­sion didn’t… not that it mat­ters, because for my pur­poses I only want the CLI ver­sion)… except it’ll fail except when run as root.  It’s a doc­u­mented prob­lem, although the only ref­er­ence to it was in rela­tion to *BSD sys­tems, and the fix refers to some kernel-related file which appar­ently doesn’t exist.

So I gave up on that… it was prob­a­bly a sur­mount­able prob­lem, but still, other peo­ples code scares me off.  Mov­ing on to the next (non-BSD-only) option!

LM Sen­sors… hey, that’s okay.  Relies on ker­nel hooks, which prior to 2.6 ker­nels involved rolling your own with an i2c exten­sion com­piled in.  I am, for the first time, as great­ful as I should be for SuSE’s lean towards the cutting-edge!  Hmm.  That said, LM Sen­sors appar­ently won’t com­pile with­out ker­nel source.

So.  I want to install a 780KB app, and wind up down­load­ing ~700MB of stuff!  Hmm.  This works, really it does.  Ker­nel sources are only ~180MB (at least, the SuSE respir­i­tory RPM’s are that big… last time I checked the size of the ker­nel (admit­tedly, that was back when 2.4 was the new thing), it was about 60MB!), but I got dis­tracted in package-selection, and saw that a newer ver­sion of Opera was avail­able, so I grabbed that.

Appar­ently the old ver­sion of Opera had no prob­lems at all with­out a cer­tain depen­dency, but this lat­est one requires Eclipse… a ~170MB Java library thingo.  At least, I think that’s what it was… OSS is way too trust­ing with depen­den­cies!  Hehe.

So after hav­ing down­loaded all that, I’m think­ing the com­pile still isn’t going to work!  Doh!

Ah well.  php­Sys­Info is still cool ;)

Tags: BSD, Java, Kernel, Shure i2c Headset, SuSE, trippy hardware