linux to an imac: 2003/11: steamin' with the Beeb::AxKit and libxml2 catalog pain::fink, libxml2

Damned useful, and educational too. Steam is a freeware BBC radio schedule watcher for OS X. It keeps an auto-updated list of the current schedule for what seems to be the majority of BBC digi-channels, with program details in a separate window. From the latter you launch realplayer to listen. There's a reminder facility as well, but I hate leaving (GUI) apps running all the time so avoid it.

Screenshot.

I'd never before listened to 'The World Today', BBC World Service 23:00ish GMT - which tonight has had one report about the handful of glass harmonicas that the world has (7), how expensive they are (several k), and why they're useful (they make sounds very close to those of opera singers), and another about how Washington DC is the AIDS capital of the US as well as the political one. So there's the education.

2003-11-16 09:12 / fink, libxml2 »

Post-Panther and of course every little toad needs recompiling. Fink seems a little screwed as well, I just ended up reinstalling the whole thing then avoiding dselect like the plague.

Anyhow, even before Panther I had problems with the combo of libxml2, libxslt, the perl wrappers XML::LibXML, XML::LibXML::Common, XML::LibXSLT, and fink. The short, well the only answer, if you get errors like ...

dyld: /usr/local/bin/perl Undefined symbols:
_libiconv_open
make: *** [test_dynamic] Trace/BPT trap

... is to simply download libxml2 and libxslt from xmlsoft and get them going with the standard configure-make-install dance, rather than fink. God knows why.

2003-11-16 13:16 / AxKit and libxml2 catalog pain »

That, however, wasn't enough to get the latest xml liibraries working with AxKit. Since I last installed all this, xml catalogs have been introduced into gnome.

Alas, not properly, it seems. I kept getting errors such as ...

 [AxKit] [Error] input match callback died: 
Undefined subroutine &CODE(0x278cc8)/sw/etc/xml/catalog:1: 
error: Document is empty

.. every time the xslt processor kicked in. Hours later I finally configure both libxml2 and libxslt with --without-catalog, apply this patch against XML::LibXML, and all now seems dandy. If rather manual :-(