How to translate a .po file into a .mo file ?

Here is a reminder to make a translation available for a given application. Nowadays, a huge number of open source softwares are internationalized in order to be available to non English-speaking users. Under Linux, the internationalization process consists of text files, named *.po files, which contain the translation from English to any requested language of all the menus entries for example. If you use an application that is not available in your native language at the moment but you have the po file, here is what you have to do : (tested on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04.1).

Make sure that the msgfmt tool is available. It belongs to the Debian/Ubuntu gettext package. Then , you only have to issue the following command : (ekiga.po is used as an example)

root@localhost:~# msgfmt -o ekiga.mo -v ekiga.po

No error messages are displayed until the process  above has failed. Now put the ekiga.po file into the following directory :

root@localhost:~# mv ekiga.mo /usr/share/locale-langpack/THE_REQUESTED_LANGUAGE/LC_MESSAGES/

If your locales are configured according to THE_REQUESTED_LANGUAGE value, your application will be translated and available into the requested language.

NB :  The command msgfmt works for any Debian-based distro. Nevertheless, you have to install the translations data available through packages for your working desktop environment (GNOME or KDE ). For instance, if you use GNOME, the packages language-pack-gnome-THE_REQUESTED_LANGUAGE and language-pack-gnome-THE_REQUESTED_LANGUAGE-base must have been installed. All the translation data available for THE_REQUESTED_LANGUAGE are located into the following directory :

/usr/share/locale-langpack/THE_REQUESTED_LANGUAGE/LC_MESSAGES/

alsa-util.c: Could not recover from POLLERR|POLLNVAL|POLLHUP with snd_pcm_prepare()

While resolving an audio input problem within Ekiga, here is a message which occured  in /var/log/syslog on a Ubuntu Lucid (10.04.1 LTS) :

alsa-util.c: Could not recover from POLLERR|POLLNVAL|POLLHUP with snd_pcm_prepare()

I have not found yet where the problem comes from. After searching through ubuntu fora, here is the solution :

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-lucid-generic linux-backports-modules-alsa-2.6.32-24-generic

In order to make my webcam audio input work, I decided to reboot my computer. The changes I made just before were taken into account.

I hope this help !

init: ssh respawning too fast, stopped

While looking at error messages on an Ubuntu box, here is one I noticed in /var/log/syslog :

init: ssh respawning too fast, stopped

To avoid this error appearing again, here is the workout :

Add the following line ListenServer 0.0.0.0 in your sshd configuration file. (/etc/ssh/sshd_config)

root@localhost:~#echo “ListenServer 0.0.0.0″ >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

auditd: /sbin/audispd permissions should be 0750

Here is an error message logged in /var/log/user.log and found on a linux box running Ubuntu 9.10

auditd: /sbin/audispd permissions should be 0750

Auditd is a daemon which belongs to the auditd package. This package contains a bunch of user utilities to store and analyze all what it is being logged by the audit subsystem in the Linux 2.6 kernel.

The only thing to do for this release version of Ubuntu :

root@localhost:~# ls -l /sbin/audispd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 96020 2009-09-10 00:52 /sbin/audispd

root@veronique-desktop:~# ls -l /sbin/audispd
-rwxr-x— 1 root root 96020 2009-09-10 00:52 /sbin/audispd

root@veronique-desktop:~# dpkg-reconfigure auditd
update-rc.d: warning: auditd start runlevel arguments (S) do not match LSB Default-Start values (2 3 4 5)
update-rc.d: warning: auditd stop runlevel arguments (0 6) do not match LSB Default-Stop values (0 1 6)