Travels with FatCatAir

Wednesday August 31, 2005

Solaris@Home Episode IV

I've given up trying to come up with meaningful or catchy headlines for my on going efforts to replace my old linux server with a solaris based server at home. I'm just not that imaginative so unless I have something that just stands out I'm switching to a totally generic boring caption.

I'm actually got to the point I'm actually using the new server (wiz ) daily. It's still along way from being my imap server but it is the repository for music collection. I'm really late to the iPod phphenomenabsp; I just finally got a 60gb iPod yesterday. Until recently all my music was all on CD's in a 300 carousel player. I'm now in the process of slowly ripping my collection.

I didn't want to go to mp3's  as my archival format and I don't want to use Apple's proprietary  lossless format so I'm using flac. I convert the .flacs to  mp3's  to let iTunes see it and download to the iPod. So as a result of this I'm using cdparanoia to do the ripping to .wav and converting the .wav to .flac. I'm using crip to control all the various engines. Since cdparanoia doesn't exist on solaris (they talked about it 4 years ago but that seems dead now) I started out doing all the work on my old slow linux box with the data  being written onto the solaris box via an nfs mount. This was slow, really really slow. The ripping by cdparanoia wasn't too bad and it is constrained to a large degree by the cdrom drive. The conversion to flac was pathetic though. Some cd's were talking almost two hours to be converted!

I decided to modify the crip script so that it would run the flac conversion step remotely via rsh on wiz. So I downloaded all the stuff I needed to wiz and went to build flac. Well partly thru the make it blows up during a link step trying to reference the xmms library in a very strange location. One of the things I really hate to debug is a bug during a complicated recursive make process. Yuck. Well after adding a fair amount of debug code to one of the scripts the configure created and the make was using I discovered that the xmms library as delivered by the SunFreeWare CD that seem to be installed incorrectly. Actually a bunch of them seem to have the same issue. If you look at the .la files in /opt/sfw/lib you'll see that the .la file for libxmms has a line:

installed=no

Well this causes the build process for flac to think that libxmms is not installed and that it must have been built as part of building flac and therefore the library resides in the .../.lib/ directory that the build process creates. Well since it isn't there the link explodes. Changing
that line to say;

installed=yes

let the flac build complete normally. Yeah!

So once that was done it was no problem getting crip to run flac on wiz. That helped immensely. Now runs that were taking nearly 2 hours were finishing in less than 5 minutes. Now if only I could get cdparanioa to run on Solaris...



Aug 31 2005, 11:54:25 AM EDT Permalink