cpan2rpm - perl modules and rpms

Today I discovered this amazingly useful utility. This helps in building the perl module rpms that are necessary for other perl module rpms (dependencies) to install.

If you have an rpm install, the dependent rpms need to be listed in the rpm database on your machine. The number 1 source for perl modules is CPAN but they don't necessarily release rpms for the modules. With the cpan2rpm, you can get the required perl module from CPAN, make the rpm and then install the module with rpm.

The really nice thing about cpan2rpm is that it can locate the module from CPAN automatically, for ex: if you invoke it like this: cpan2rpm XML::Simple, it will locate the XML::Simple module from CPAN, copy it over and build the rpm at /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/perl-XML-Simple-2.14-1.noarch.rpm.

Sometimes, cpan2rpm won't be able to find the module on CPAN. Then you can manually locate it from CPAN archives, download it and then point cpan2rm at the local gzip file and it will go ahead and build the rpm.

ex:
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/SB/SBURKE/HTML-Format-2.04.tar.gz
cpan2rpm /home/downloads/HTML-Format-1.23.tar.gz

Rather long winded - instead of simply installing the module, but if a latter part of the install uses rpm, you need to make sure the rpm database knows about the dependencies, so this is a necessary step.

Once again, it is a good thing that there's more than one way to do it!

Backing up DVDs - Elizabeth Town

I used DVDShrink to create a backup of this movie. The movie played fine on the hard disk but after copying it over to a DVD, I found that the DVD did not play past chapter 10.

I then used pgcedit to open the movie files on the hard disk. It immediately found the problem - apparently there is a bug in DVDShrink that creates a slightly corrupted index. Pgcedit offerred to correct the problem and change the DVD files accordingly.

After doing this step, I could burn a successful DVD with Roxio.

I'm not sure if DVDShrink encountered some form of copy protection or if it was actually a bug on DVDShrink. Most recently released movies seem to come up with different and newer DRM techniques.