TypeError: 'hgwebdir' object is not callable

There may be a number of scenarios under which this error can happen but in my case it was because I was using an incompatible version hgwebdir.cgi. After installing Mercurial 0.9.4 I downloaded hgwebdir.cgi from here (which at the time of writing was for Mercurial 1.0). To fix the problem I had to use the version of hgwebdir.cgi that came with the Mercurial 0.9.4 install. On Ubuntu you’ll find it here /usr/share/doc/mercurial/examples/hgwebdir.cgi.

As it happens, getting Internet Explorer to work in Linux is relatively straightforward. The tricky bit it pulling the various pieces of the puzzle together.

Install Wine and Internet Explorer
Because the problem of not having access to IE within Linux is such a common problem, some nice people have put together an install process that installs both Wine and IE with minimal fuss. It’s called IEs4Linux. To make the process as painless as possible there’s a step by step guide available here. The most important thing to remember is to carry out the install as a normal user, i.e. NOT the root user.

If you’re running Ubuntu Gutsy then for step 2 add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy universe
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt gutsy main

When asked if I wanted to install IE5.5 or IE5.0 I said no. That meant that only IE 6 was installed. Installing all three isn’t a problem but I had no need for 5.0 and 5.5.

Once the process has finished you should have an Internet Explorer icon on your desktop.

Installing the Java Runtime Environment Plug-in for IE
This was the part that I was a little unsure about. I thought getting IE to run was an achievement but I never thought the IE JRE plug-in would work. As luck would have it I came across this post by Ranjit Mathew that was exactly what I needed.

Following Ranjit’s post here are the steps I carried out…

i) Go to the Sun website and download the latest version of the Windows 1.5 JRE. The reason for using 1.5 and not the latest 1.6 is that the ROS website states that they only support Sun 1.5 on IE6. The 1.6 version may work but I didn’t want to tempt faith.

ii) Open a command prompt and execute the following lines,

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.ies4linux/ie6
wine jre-1_5_0_13-windows-i586-p.exe

iii) I was having some problems with the entire screen blacking out when I’d visit a page with a Java applet on it. If you have the same problem open a command prompt and execute these commands…

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.ies4linux/ie6
regedit

Go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JavaSoft\Java2D\1.5.0_13 and set the property “DXAcceleration” to 0.

Installing The ROS Software
When you visit the ROS website for the first time you’ll have to install the KCrypto software. KCrypto is the Java code that handles the secure transfer of data between your browser and the NIB servers. The first time I tried to install it it failed. The second time it worked fine.

Installing your ROS Certificates
Your ROS security certificates are held in the folder C:\ROS on your Windows machine. Copy this entire folder from your Windows machine into the folder $HOME/.ies4linux/ie6/drive_c. When you restart your IE browser you should see your user id appear on the ROS logon page.

Installing you NIB UserID File
i) Logon to your NIB account on your Windows machine
ii) Click on “Settings” at the top of the page and then “Security” in the left hand menu
iii) Select the function “Back up user ID” and click OK
iv) On the next screen click OK. Take the file that’s downloaded and go back to your Linux machine
v) Start up IE and go to the logon page
vi) Select “Search for user id” just under the userid and password fields. Browse to where you have the file downloaded in step iv, select the second radio button (i.e. copy to a local location) and click OK

That’s it. One step closer to going Linux full time.

The last time I installed MythTV I had the same problem with XMLTV. I don’t know if it’s something that I keep missing but after the installation mythfilldatabase never seems to works properly. The problem is that the XMLTV file containing the list of channels to fetch program information for never gets created. Luckily it’s easy enough to fix. What you do is take the name of the Video Source you setup in the MythTV Backend Setup program (in my case NTL) and then create a file in the directory $HOME/.mythtv called <video source name>.xmltv (e.g. NTL.xmltv in my case). When I refer to $HOME here I’m referring to the home directory of the user that you’re asked to create during the Mythbuntu installation. Within that file you list the XMLTV channel ids you want to retrieve program information for. Here’s what I have…

channel northern-ireland.bbc1.bbc.co.uk
channel northern-ireland.bbc2.bbc.co.uk
channel channel4.com
channel discoveryeurope.com
channel e4.channel4.com
channel livingtv.co.uk
channel mtv.co.uk
channel paramountcomedy.com
channel rte-1.rte.ie
channel rte2.rte.ie
channel 1.setanta.com
channel sky-news.sky.com
channel sky-one.sky.com
channel tg4.ie
channel tv3.ie
channel utvlive.com
channel nickelodeon.co.uk

This is the program listing for NTL’s analogue network in Dublin. Unfortunately (I suppose) Channel 6 isn’t available from the Radio Times XMLTV feed.

The second problem I had was configuring my wireless network card. The card I have is a Linksys WMP54G (version 4, PCI id 1814:0201). What I did was follow the instructions on this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper. When it comes to installing the windows drivers I used the files from the directory /Drivers/WMP54Gv4/2KXP on the installation CD that I got with the card. At the end of the process the card still wasn’t working. The problem was that a kernel module shipped with Ubuntu, namely rt2500pci, was getting loaded before (and hence interfering with) the module I wanted to load, i.e. ndiswrapper. To fix the problem I blacklisted rt2500pci and rebooted. The line I added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist was blacklist rt2500pci.

That’s it, a relatively easy install and nowhere near as timeconsuming or complicated as perfoming a MythTV installation from scratch.

P.S. another useful resource if you’re stuck is https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessTroubleShootingGuide.

1. Go to http://www.sleepycat.com/download/index.shtml and download BerkeleyDB 4.2.52
2. Download the patches numbered like this patch.4.2.52.?
3. Extract the BerkeleyDB compressed file
4. Copy all the patch files into the base directory just extracted
5. Apply the patches individually using…patch -p0 < [patchfile]
6. cd into the build_unix directory in the extracted directory
7. Run…../dist/configure
8. Run…make
9. Ensure you’re logged in as root and run…make install (installs to /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2)
10. Add the line /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2/lib to the file/etc/ld.so.conf
11. Run ldconfig to update the library cache with the BerkeleyDB libraries

Install Apache

1. Ensure that the following packages are installed. If they’re not just do an apt-get install to download and install them…autoconf libtool openssl libssl-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev
2. Download tha latest version of Apache 2 from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
3. Extract the Apache compressed file
4. cd in the extracted directory
5. Run…./configure –enable-dav –enable-so –enable-ssl –with-dbm=db4 –with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2 –enable-deflate
6. Run…make
7. Ensure you’re logged in as root and run…make install (installs to /usr/local/apache2)
8. Edit the file /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and update the User & Group tags to www-data (Assuming of course that you have that user & group)

Install Subversion

1. Download the latest version of Subversion from http://subversion.tigris.org/getting_subversion.html
2. Extract the Subversion compressed file
3. Run…./configure –with-ssl –with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2 –with-zlib
4. Run…make
5. Ensure you’re logged in as root and run…make install

Configure Apache & Subversion

1. Create a directory to hold your repositories, something like /usr/local/svn
2. Change the ownership on the directory to the www-user user (or whoever you set the User tag to in httpd.conf)
3. Add users to Apache using this command…htpasswd -cm /etc/svn-auth-file <name>. Leave out the c switch if the file already exists
4. Add the following section to /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

   LoadModule dav_svn_module     modules/mod_dav_svn.so
   DeflateFilterNote Input instream
   DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
   DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
   LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate
   CustomLog logs/deflate_log deflate
   
   <Location /svn>
   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath /usr/local/svn
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "Subversion Repository"
   AuthUserFile /etc/svn-auth-file
   Require valid-user
   SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
   SetInputFilter DEFLATE
   </Location>
   

   These config entries will password protect your repositry and allow for data sent between clients and Apache to be compressed

Starting Apache

1. Ensure you’re logged in as root and run…/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

The next step is to try and get Apache using SSL because Basic authentication uses plain text when transmitting the password from the client to the server. This article seems to do the trick.

After reading through the MythTV website and seeing what it could do I decided to see if I could get my own PVR up and running. The first decision I had to make was what Linux distribution to use. I already had Debian installed so I thought that might be a good start. I gave up on this pretty quick though because I had issues with package dependancies. Then I came across KnoppMyth. I don’t know why but every time I tried booting the CD it kept crashing. I tried a few times but gave up after a while. Eventually I came across this website (commly referred to a Jarod’s MythTV guide). It explains how to install MythTV on a Fedora system. It seemed to offer really good and detailed instructions so I went with it.

The next decision was what Tuner to go with. I already had an ancient Hauppauge Wincast card but I’m a glutton fot technology and I really liked the sound of the new Hauppauge PVR-350. After looking around a number of shops the cheapest I could find was at Amazon.

Here’s my hardware lineup…
Dell Dimension 4550
CPU: P4 2.8 GHz
Memory: 256MB
Video: ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra
Sound: Intel 82801DB-ICH4
Tuner: Hauppauge PVR-350

The first task was to install Fedora. I’ve installed quite a few distributions in the past but I hadn’t installed a Redhat distribution in years. I have to say, their install program is really good, by far the best I’ve seen. The whole install process was very quick and easy. The only problem I had (and I always have this problem with Linux on this machine) was getting ALSA (for sound) to work. The acid test was to see if I could get any sound by issuing this command…

/usr/bin/aplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Startup.wav

These are the changes I had to make…

• Added this ‘alias sound-slot-0 snd-intel8x0′ to /etc/modprobe.conf
• Muted everything in ALSAMixer except Master, Headphone, PCM. Set these to 74
• Disabled the KDE sound system, aRts (it seems to hold on to the sound device) Control Center->Sound System->Enable Sound System

After I got sound working I followed Jarod’s guide to the T. Everything went pretty smoothly but there were a few hiccups. I’ve summerized most of what I came across below.

1. In the section “Running X on the PVR-350′s TV-Out-” there’s s section on rebuilding your system’s initial ramdisk. Before running the script /sbin/mkinitrd-ivtv I had to edit it. I replaced the string tveeprom with tveeprom-ivtv.
2. I’m on NTL’s basic package so when I was setting up the channels in mythtvsetup these are the channels I used.

   Channel	Frequency ID	XMLTV ID
   RTE1	A11	rte-1.rte.ie
   RTE2	A6	rte2.rte.ie
   TV3	A9	tv3.ie
   TG4	A15	tg4.ie
   BBC1	A17	northern-ireland.bbc1.bbc.co.uk
   BBC2	A18	ireland.bbc2.bbc.co.uk
   UTV	A13	utvlive.com
   Channel 4	30	channel4.com
   E4	21	e4.channel4.com
   Sky 1	A19	sky-one.sky.com
   Sky News	A24	sky-news.sky.com
   MTV	A21	mtv.co.uk
   Discovery	34	discoveryeurope.com
   Nickelodeon	A22	nickelodeon.co.uk
   CNBC	A32	europe.cnbc.com
   Setanta	A20	1.setanta.com

3. One of my biggest problems was getting MythFrontend sized & positioned on the screen so that I could see all the fields & buttons. To correct this I went to the screen Utilities/Setup->Setup->Appearance->Screen Settings. These are the values I entered…

   GUI Width: 662

   GUI Height: 545

   GUI X Offset: 38

   GUI Y Offset: 10

4. My next problem was positioning the on screen display (OSD). What was happening was that the channel name and program information were half on screen and half off screen. After some reading I found that the problem was due to overscan/underscan. To correct this problem I went to the screen Utilities/Setup->Setup->TV Settings->Playback->Overscan. These are the values I entered…

   Vertical over/underscan percentage: 4

   Horizontal over/underscan percentage: 4

   Scan displacement (X): -8

   Scan displacement (Y): 0

5. My final problem was that the EPG wasn’t centered on the screen. To fix this I went to Utilities/Setup->Setup->Appearance->Screen Settings and ticked the box marked “Use GUI size for TV playback”.

Now that I’ve finally got my Myth box up and running there are only four remaing issues that I can’t seem to fix.

The first of these is channel changing. It’s taking about 3 to 4 seconds to go from one channel to another. Apparently this is normal behaviour. It’s to do with the way MythTV buffers the your TV signal. It’s a real pain though.

The second problem is that when you exit the program guide you get a black screen. You can still hear the TV but there’s no picture. To get it back I have to press a key on the remote that will refresh the screen, e.g. change channel, show program info.

The third issue is that I can’t get teletext. This is something to do with the PVR-350 I think.

My final issue is that I can’t control sound output from MythTV. What this means is that I have to use the TV’s volume controls. This works of course but it does mean I need two remotes, one for MythTV and one for the TV.