User Feedback :: Bug in mydslBrowser.lua



Hi. I just bought a copy of DSL from the DSL store. I was sent a copy of 1.1 (which I know isn't the latest), but it works well enough for me.

I found a couple bugs which prevented me from using MyDSL to install software over my cellphone modem. The symptoms: mydslBrowser windows either never show up or come up with raw HTML. The workaround: copied mydslBrowser.lua to my home directory and edited it to add linefeeds to the "index.html" file. I also switched to using links(1) to download instead of BusyBox's wget(1).

Code Sample

dsl@box:~$ diff /usr/bin/mydslBrowser.lua ./mydslBrowser.lua
25c25
< execute('wget -q http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/mydsl/' .. library .. '/index.html')
---
> execute('links -source http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/mydsl/' .. library .. '/index.html' .. '| sed "s/>/>\\n/g" > index.html')


After editing the mydslBrowser.lua file, I added . to the front of my PATH and  reran mydslPanel.lua.

Code Sample

dsl@box:~$ PATH=.:$PATH
dsl@box:~$ mydslPanel.lua


Boring details start here for people interested in fixing this or who might be googling for the same problem.

First bug: clicking on a category (such as "Apps") from the mydslPanel would bring up a window with raw HTML code (instead of a list of packages). The reason for this seems to be that the index.html file was being downloaded as one long line. I used a simple sed(1) command to simply put a new line after every greater-than sign. After that, mydslBrowser would properly show me the list of packages, but only if wget(1) didn't fail (see below).

Second bug: occasionally, clicking on a category (such as "Apps") from the mydslPanel, the button would depress, I would see network traffic in wmnet, and then the button would pop back up. The mydslBrowser window would never show up. When mydslPanel.lua is run from the command line, I can see that it is wget(1) that is losing:

Code Sample

dsl@box:~$ mydslPanel.lua
wget: content-length 19742     is garbage
Cannot open file index.html: No such file or directory


Note that this is not the real wget that is failing, but the version included in BusyBox. (To be specific: BusyBox v1.00-pre10 (2004.06.12-14:15+0000)). Hopefully a newer version of BusyBox will fix the problem, in the meantime I've worked around it by using links(1) instead of wget to download the index.html file from ibiblio.org. (Side note: BusyBox's wget has never failed to download the actual .dsl files from ibiblio.org, only the index.html; I don't know why).

After making these changes I've been successfully downloading and installing lots of packages (particularly XFree86 and a DVD player). Yay for Damn Small Linux!              

--Ben
DSL User since July 2005

P.S. My friend, who works for Microsoft, now has DSL running on her laptop. The killer app which made her give Linux a look? She loves playing xtris against the builtin tetris-bot.
Just got my 1.2.1 disk from the DSL store, and verified that this problem still exists. I've also tried this on two different machines and had the same errors.

It seems like myDSL works for other folks, so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong. Just as a sanity check:

A) Has anybody else used myDSL to install apps over a dialup connection?

B) Is anybody else using a USB modem for dialup?

(I'm thinking that it's probably a bug in mydsl*.lua, but could be something wonky with the ACM kernel module included with DSL.)

--B
I have been having a problem with mydsl icon as well. When i click on like SYSTEM all the dsl pkgs are listed as only .info
files or something and i can't d-load a package. I found this to be so in 1.3 and 1.3.1 the one i had before that worked fine.
dsl@Hot2:/home$ mydsl-load bittorrent-gui.dsl
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

error: could not open display

original here.