Printing USPS forms with Linux and FF 3.0

I had to ship a Priority Mail and an international package today. I went to usps.com to do it, because I found this saved a trip to the post office when I tried it last year. However, it seems that USPS has been tinkering with the site, and has messed up the print process. See this article for example (for Mac): http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2005052713194641

That thread gave me the clues necessary to achieve this workaround. Hope it helps someone.

When you get to the page where the form should be printing, open the "Page Info" window from the "Tools" menu. Click on the "Media" tab, highlight the last entry (ending in "com.usps.cns.web.pdf.LabelGenerationServlet") and download it using the "Save As" button. The resulting file is a PDF containing the form(s).

Red Hat 9 software updates

In case it's useful to someone, here are some tips on using yum to get software updates:

- Ensure you are using the version of python packaged with the distribution.

- The old repositories are gone. Here's an /etc/yum.conf that works currently:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
retries=20
exclude=kernel*

[base]
name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - Base
baseurl=http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/Linux/packages/fedora.legacy/redhat/$releasever/os/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1

[updates-released]
name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - Released Updates
baseurl=http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/Linux/packages/fedora.legacy/redhat/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1

#[updates-testing]
#name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - Unreleased Updates
#baseurl=http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/Linux/packages/fedora.legacy/redhat/$releasever/updates-testing/$basearch/
#gpgcheck=1

[legacy-utils]
name=Fedora Legacy utilities for Red Hat Linux $releasever
baseurl=http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/Linux/packages/fedora.legacy/redhat/$releasever/legacy-utils/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1

Ice 3.3.0 on RH9 progress

All 61 tests in the test suite for the C++ build now pass!

Now for the Python build...

Code changes to Ice-3.3.0 for RH9

cpp/src/IceUtil/Cond.cpp
at line 314, ifdef this out - it appears RH9 does not support it.

cpp/src/IceSSL/Instance.cpp
at line 76, change to reinterpret_cast - this older version of NPTL has pthread_t as a different type.

cpp/src/IceUtil/Time.cpp
at line 114, monotonic clock issue again.

cpp/src/Ice/Network.cpp
at lines 335 and 1365, change "1" to "tcpmux"
(getaddrinfo(3) on RH9 has some quirks).

Ice on RH9 - the quest continues

Back from vacation, once more unto the breach.

Got a compile error while building Freeze (complaining about old include file styles). I'm wondering whether the source code from zeroc is really buildable! It's not clear to me how RH9 can be the reason for these errors.

So, I'm trying it again from the top using gcc 3.4.6 (per Ice-3.3.0/cpp/INSTALL.LINUX, which says:

Ice is expected to build properly with GCC 3.3 or later. However, only
the following compilers are officially supported:

- GCC 3.4.6 on RHEL 4.6
- GCC 4.1.2 on RHEL 5.1
- GCC 4.1.x on SLES 10 SP1
)

Using '~/gcc-3.4.6/configure --prefix=/usr/local/gcc/3.4.6 --enable-languages=c++ --disable-libgcj' which seems to cut down build time.

Building Ice-3.3.0 on Red Hat 9

Here's my attempt at leaving a trail of breadcrumbs:

Yum:

- Installed Yum - had to edit /usr/bin/Yum to use the RPM Python version 2.2, not the updated version installed from tarball (needed for other apps).
- Added Yum repository (http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/Linux/packages/fedora.legacy/redhat/$releasever)
- Imported GPG keys.
- Did Yum update.
- Installed ntpl-devel, bzip2-devel

Found that RPM gcc version was too old, tried 3.3.1, then 4.3.1. Due to include header changes in the 4.3 series, rolled back to 4.1.2 (found this message to guide me: http://www.zeroc.com/forums/help-center/3794-version-gcc-does-binary-packages-use.html )

GCC installation:

- This takes a very long time. Found that using "--enable-languages=c++" option to ./configure cuts down processing time. Use this white paper: http://www.tellurian.com.au/whitepapers/multiplegcc.php. Installed to /usr/local/gcc/4.1.2 to avoid causing problems with other apps,
or kernel module updates.

Ice build:
- Unpacked Ice-3.3.0 tarball.
- Got a fair amount of help from zeroc.com - see http://www.zeroc.com/forums/help-center/3900-building-ice-3-3-0-red-hat-9-a.html
- Edited cpp/src/Makefile to remove unneeded packages (IceSSL and Glacier2). Had to restore Glacier2, due to dependencies from other modules. IceSSL build had an error, which I didn't bother with, since I don't need it for now.
- Quite a bit of fiddling to get needed libraries available:
-- Downloaded "Source Code for Third-Party Software" from http://www.zeroc.com/download.html#src_third_party - needed db-4.6, mcpp and mpfr.
-- Updated /etc/ld.so.conf: /usr/kerberos/lib, /usr/local/lib
-- export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.:/usr/local/gcc/4.1.2/lib