Sniptools

No worries Craig. Where is your blog located?

OK, I just ran the perl part from step 6 on my PC and got this error:

C:\sambar53\perl>perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1
Can’t locate IPC/Run.pm in @INC (@INC contains: extlib C:/sambar53/perl/lib C:/sambar53/perl/site/lib .).
BEGIN failed — compilation aborted.

I installed the contents of the IPC.zip file in my MT/extlib directory and still get this same error message.

I’m starting to think that I am just not going to be able to do the thumbnails… :(

1. I downloaded this file: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/netpbm-10.6-bin.zip?download and unzipped it.

2. c:\sambar53\cgi-bin\mt\netpbm If you want to see my mt-cfg details, I have installed mt-medic at this address: http://198.109.164.98/cgi-bin/mt/mt-medic.cgi (The password to login to view the configuration is ‘yasgur’)

3. I just tried copying the IPC folder into the perl/site/lib and still get the same problem…

Thanks for the help! -=kt=-

Kate, I tried visiting your medic site but the password is invalid. I guess I am not interested in the entire config you have going, but only the lines for NetPBM and thumbnailing. Let me try some stuff and see if I can come up with anything.

Thanks for the thoughts. Yes, using mt for photoalbums soon gets pretty tiring. But for people who don’t know (or don’t want to know) coding themselves, it definitely helps to use mt or any other tool (e.g., PHP Gallery).

As for the thumbnails, that I agree with totally. After a while thumbnailing is a lot simpler without online “intervention”. But that would defeat the purpose of this page so I’ll try to find some ideas for Kurt anyway :-)

came to your page from mt forums, thx for the useful page. i got my netpbm working. can u aslo make the IPC file available in tar.gz so that linux users can also use it?

Shashank — thanks a lot for this page. Came from the MT forums and got lost. Too many threads with dozens of opinions but on this matter but no intelligible solutions
I still have a big problem, though, it seems. After the thumbnail options, I get this error message: >>> Broken pipe: write( 14, […] ) at /usr/home29/hinrichs/public_html/cgi-bin/movabletype/extlib/IPC/Run/IO.pm line 582

Happiness is a warm blog

I’m happy for a number of reasons. I found out that [function+delete] does a forward delete on laptop keyboards and my friend mz_informed showed me a program called uControl that lets me set [function+touchpad-drag] like a mousewheel. The way i…

i found this site via the MT forums. I followed your directions, but I do not get an option for thumbnails. I am at a loss here, any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks so much for your instructions. NetPBM now works on my webserver hosted externally. I still would like to know about ImageMagick since I checked and it is installed on the server as a Perl module. any idea when you will post instructions for that?

Thank you so much for providing this tutorial!

I downloaded all kinds of different netpm packages, and none looked like what you provided with your zip-file here. I was totally confused what I needed to upload. Having wasted two hours, with your tutorial I was set within 5 minutes! Thank you!

Eva, please follow the instructions on the 4th comment on this page which show you how to install your own IPC::Run stuff.

TO find what server your host is running, our DIG A URL feature above is pretty useful as well. :)Just go to the top of this page, for instance, and enter your website. Lots more info than Netcraft website.

Install ActivePerl on NT and execute in your DOS prompt. ActivePerl: http://www.activestate.com

If you dont have shell access, you can try executing that as a “system” command through Perl. Cannot help you much there, sorry. Let me know it goes.

Is there a script to check if the IPC::RUN module is installed in the Freebsd server., like the way mt-check.cgi performs the modules check ??

Hi there! Great tutorial, pretty idiot proof, but sometimes you know the evil machines just refuse to work.

Just a little clarification though, when
1)I execute the “perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1” do I have to be in any particular directory to run that? And

2)For me I executed that line but nothing seemed to happened. I thought that was a good sign, until I tried uploading in MT and it didn’t offer me the thumbnail option.

Thank you. Regards.

Hey there,
yeah I tried that but still no cookie. My server runs on Linux and I used a gzip file initially I found somewhere, and I tried the ZIP from above. Well, I think my arms are up and waving a white flag.
PS: I just realise it says “On July 27, 2003 09:44 PM thus >spake

I have followed all instructions both with the Netpbm and IPC::Run. However, i am still not getting the create thumbnail option when uploading a file.

Maybe a stupid question, but do i have to re-build MT or something?

At the moment i am recieving no errors so i have no pointers to give.

MT-Check isn’t checking IPC::Run as Shashank suggested before, so i can’t even confirm if this is working either.

One question: I am presuming my host doesn’t have Netpbm (and therefore the libraries you mentioned), so is it right for me to just install the binaries as directed above or do i need more?

Hello.

I’ve come here from the MT support forums too. Many thanks and congratulations on a well written tutorial (and site!).

Unfortunately, I’m having the same problems as nosa: I’ve installed NetPBM under my ..www/mt/netpbm directory with the correct permissions, and I’m not getting the create thumbnail option at all now.

I don’t have shell access to my webserver, so I can’t verify that libraries work properly by running the command line suggestions in point 4. mt-check doesn’t specify anything about IPC::Run either.

Its rather frustrating since the reason I’m trying to setup NetPBM is that the default MT setup with ImageMagick doesn’t work. I’ve spent hours scouring the MT support messageboards, but despite many people reporting the same problem, the only hint of a resolution was to use NetPBM (with a link to this post).

I’ve to’d-and-fro’d with my webhost on this. They claim both ImageMagick and NetPBM are installed correctly on their Linux servers. But the “out-of-the-box” MT setup causes Apache to throw a 500 Internal Server error when trying to use the create thumbnail feature. Pointing mt.cfg at the main NetPBM install (under /usr/local/)only throws the same error. Notably, I get the option to “create thumbnails” in _both_ cases.

Alas, after following your instructions, I no longer even get this option.

Any ideas?

I don’t understand the step (6)Upload your mt.cfg. Let’s check if MT can indeed find your NetPBM. From within your
perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1

What am I suppose to do with this? I download all the required file and upload all the necessary file to my hosting server accordinly to the instructions but still can’t see the thumbnail option.

Hi,

Thank you for the help. Sorry I don’t know what do you mean by “shell”. Should I execute it by “http://www.mydomain.com/movable/perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1 ?. Thanks

Hi Shashank,

Thank you. Is it necessary to run that command in order to get the module function?

I used to install other modules which my hosting server doesn’t have in the extlib and it’s works fine but this one seems not working.

Hi Shashank,

Thank you very much for the help. I saw in the NetPBM’s website that the download file that you provided are categorized as an old type. May it does’nt work with Perl version 5.006.

I noticed there are many download version, very confused which one to download. My hosting server using Perl version 5.006. on windows 2000

Shashank, Ok let go through again on the setup routine on these IPC and Netpbm stuff.

1. Download the Netpbm binaries file (follow your link)
2. Upload it into the mt folder(in may case it’s movable/netpbm)
3.Download and upload the IPC folder into the Extlib folder
4.Changed the MT.cfg file in these two lines -
ImageDriver NetPBM
NetPBMPath /home/domain/www/movable/netpbm

Is there anything I left out? Can’t seems to get it to work….lol stranged!.

Sorry to double-post, but I hit the “post” key too quickly:

You said: >>it is really a lot more productive to just KNOW your folder structure and use Adobe PS or Paintshop to do auto thumbnailing (you can create batch jobs in PS for example) and just upload the stuff in to the right folders, and then use whatever MT templates you are using

I am not using ImageMagick. My ISP has NetPBM installed and I have installed it - for good measure - on my local directory as well, as per the instructions here. I just re-confirmed that my mt.cfg file specifies the NetPBM driver and path.

Any idea what might be calling Size.pm if not ImageMagick?

Rich,

If you have “ImageDriver NetPBM” in your mt.cfg, then it should be using NetPBM, no worries. As for the message, I am not sure what is driving it. I can only suggest you to redo the steps in this tutorial once again, one by one. You really should not be getting error messages in your “extlib/Images” folder, we have set up NETPBM inside the mt folder itself. Keep me posted.

Thanks for this extremely usefull page!

I followed the instructions, but I keep getting the error 500 page (which I got when I was trying to use ImageMagick too).

My info:

Uploaded the NetPBM stuff from your zipfile in /home/flabber/public_html/netpbm/

Chmodded it all to 755.

Then I got the error that IPC was missing, so I installed IPC::run with CPAN.

Running “perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1” then resulted in nothing, so that’s good, right?

Then testing creating a thumbnail resulted in an error 500.

I uploaded the IPC stuff to /home/flabber/public_html/extlib/IPC/ just to be sure on the IPC part.. Didn’t help.

My entries in mt.cfg:

ImageDriver NetPBM
NetPBMPath /home/flabber/public_html/netpbm

Thanks in advance for your reply!

(1) Which version of MT are you using? I will assume the latest given that it is free anyway.

(2) Which IPC run are you using? The files from the fourth comment here ( http://sniptools.com/av/IPC.zip ) should work on your system. Please run the test again.

Let me know how it goes.

Hi. After many attempts at Image::Magick, I gave up even though my webhost swears it works for others. I came upon your tutorial for Netpbm in Movable Type forums. Your instructions were helpful and I finally got it working, but I have some comments which may help you and other Movable Type users.

1. I wasn’t sure if the Netpbm binaries you are distributing would on a linux server, since the instructions don’t give details. They do. The Netpbm website (which you have linked) will point you to a dead link for the “official” linux distribution.

2. I tried putting the Netpbm folder under the /mt folder on my server, but for whatever reason, that did not work. So, I just put the folder under /public_html with success.

3. My host (Dayana Host) apparently did not have IPC::Run installed, or it could not be found by MT, so I installed it under /mt/extlib with success. Perhaps you should include instructions for downloading and installing IPC::Run in the main text of your tutorial. Right now, the details are in the comments. This is probably a common problem rather than an exception.

4. Finally, one thing that is not made clear anywhere until you notice it yourself… when using Netpbm (and probably the same with Image::Magick), you will be creating new image files which are the thumbnail images, and they will take up space. Folks need to keep this in mind as using thumbnails can eat up your disk quota. This might seem obvious to the experts among us, but it was not obvious for me until I noticed how much extra disk space I was using. Also, the Netpbm and IPC::Run files take up space too!

Many thanks for your tutorial.

I had the problem where ImageMagick appeared installed, but wouldn’t work. A few others appear to have encountered it as well.

Solution:
You need to install the perl-ImageMagick rpm. I installed this, yelled, “Thumbnail options, show thyself!” and I had instant gratification!

As I’m using apt-rpm, all I had to do was type:
apt-get install perl-ImageMagick

Hope that helps anyone who’s trying to get those thumbnails working!

Thanks so much for this article. My photoblog finally works thanks to you!

I was having the ‘Broken Pipe’ problem described above until I went to the Gallery site (http://gallery.menalto.com/index.php) and found the precompiled binaries for freeBSD, which my host runs.

I can create thumbnails for images under 64k in size. Bigger than that and I get…

Resource temporarily unavailable: write( 9, ‘…’ ) at extlib/IPC/Run/IO.pm line 582

Has anybody seen or fixed this problem?

REPOST

I thought the ‘resource temporarily unavailable’ problem might be related to using pipes in the IPC::Run package.

To test this, I made changes to MTs Image.pm so that the NetPBM package wrote all of the intermediate results to temporary files instead of using pipes.

These changes are under package MT::Image::NetPBM

In sub init …

changed

    IPC::Run::run(\@in, '<', ($image->{file} ? \undef : \$image->{data}), '|',        \@out, \$out, \$err)        or return $image->error(MT->translate(            "Reading image failed: [_1]", $err));

to

    IPC::Run::run(\@in, '<', ($image->{file} ? \undef : \$image->{data}), '>temp1');    IPC::Run::run(\@out, '<temp1', '>temp2');    open (TEMP, "<temp2");    $out = <TEMP>;    close(TEMP);

In sub scale …

changed

    if ($type eq 'gif') {        push @quant, ([ "${pbm}ppmquant", 256 ], '|');    }


    IPC::Run::run(\@in, '<', ($image->{file} ? \undef : \$image->{data}), '|',        \@scale, '|',        @quant,         \@out, \$out, \$err)        or return $image->error(MT->translate(            "Scaling to [_1]x[_2] failed: [_3]", $w, $h, $err));

to

    if ($type eq 'gif') {        push @quant, ([ "${pbm}ppmquant", 256 ]);    }


    IPC::Run::run(\@in, '<', ($image->{file} ? \undef : \$image->{data}), '>temp3');    IPC::Run::run(\@scale, '<temp3', '>temp4');    if ($type eq 'gif')     {     IPC::Run::run(@quant, '<temp4', '>tempq');     IPC::Run::run(["cat"], '<tempq', '>temp5');    }    IPC::Run::run(\@out, '<temp4', '>temp5');    local $/=undef;    open (TEMP, "<temp5");    $out = <TEMP>;    close(TEMP);

In my case, the temp files are wirtten (by default) to my MovableType installation directory (where the MT .cgi files are).

There may be an easier way to fix the real problem or cleaner ways to make these changes, but this seems to be working for me and for images over 64k in size.

Also, since the NetPBM download I found included ‘pngtopnm’ and ‘pnmtopng’, I added ‘png’ file support by changing sub init

from

    my %Types = (jpg => 'jpeg', gif => 'gif');

to

    my %Types = (jpg => 'jpeg', gif => 'gif', png => 'png');

this worked like a charm! I love the Web! Just search and you shall find…

Sorry to post again - I thought I should add that I only get the error message when trying to include thumbnails.

Hi swf, thanks for that useful change. I’ve installed NetPBM to work with MT on several machines and never faced that problem, but sounds good! Thanks, Shanx

Cheers mate, you’ve sorted me out!

thanks, ill be sure to link you on my blog :)

Ive tried everthing, seriously. But still doesnt work for me I still get 500.
I never though I was THAT stupid.

I have Windows XP, I use MT v. 2.64 and Im hosted at Netrillium. If you wanna see my site it’s http://memento — mori.org The place where I installed MT though is http://memento — mori.org/photo

Well you know what? I dont even know how to do the shell thing Maybe if you could tell me? I mean… do I do that with my FTP prog or something else?

annette, in your telnet shell, just go to the directory where the files are, and then do the following:

chmod 755 *.*

The “*.*” is the same as on any OS, it is a wildcard that means all files. If you don’t want all files then just specify the files you wish to change the mode for.

If you don’t know what a telnet shell is, then even in your FTP software you may be able to just select the files on the server, then “Change Mode” or anything such. Most modern FTP software will allow for this.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks for a CLEAR set of instructions, I’m not a server expert like many that use this and I was feeling a bit lost trying to figure out Image Magik.

Does anyone have any examples of a good photoblog format? I’m trying to use a nice once from Quixotic.com, http://www.quixoticpixels.com/index.php?qp=photoblog

It uses ImageMagic but I’m going to try and integrate Netpbm here.

Thanks again!

Hi nana,

The good news is that this is not a grave issue, my guess is that it’s got something to do with your Perl version. Fields.pm is an important “pragma” for doing OOP in Perl. Can you run this at your shell prompt…

perl -v

…and let me know which version it is? Also, if you know, what OS (and version) are you using? Shanx

Nana, your Perl version is borderline ok, as per the requirements according to MT. Actually, my bad, your first error message does say that it is Perl 5.00405)

I guess this is a message you may have to show to your server host, and ask them why you don’t have access to Fields.pm. It depends on how they may have compiled Perl on the server for you. Just FYI, the latest version of Perl is 5.8.3, which is a LONG way off from the Perl version you seem to have.

Let me know what they say.

Cheers, Shanx

I installed NetPBM to my MT configuration as per the instructions. I also installed the “IPC:Run” components.

Now when I upload an image file to my photoblog I get the MT dialog which asks if I want a thumbnail image in addition to the popup or embed choice. So far so good.

After selecting the thumbnail option, create a new entry and selecting the embedded image option and clicking OK, I got an error page with the following information…

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
An error occurred:

exec failed: Permission denied at lib/MT/Image.pm line 126 at lib/MT/Image.pm line 126 exec failed: Permission denied at lib/MT/Image.pm line 126 at lib/MT/Image.pm line 126
++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Any ideas as to why I’m getting this error?

Matt, did you change your MT.CFG file to specify the paths of NetPBM (Step 5 of above article)?

Second, what do you see when you execute IPC testing command (Step 6 of above article) on your shell prompt?

Third, what happens if you download the more recent IPC files from CPAN?

This is a fantastic tutorial. Thanks very much for writing it.

I’ve installed NetPBM in the httpdocs. I’ve also installed IPC after the thumbnailing didn’t work.

My worry now is that I’ve got the wrong version of NetPBM. When I used “dig this” at the top of the page, I get the following information:

Apache /1.3.27 ( Unix ) Python .org/’>mod_ Python /2.7.8 Python /2.2.2 mod_gzip /1.3.19.1a mod_perl /1.27 mod_throttle/3.1.2 PHP /4.3.2 Frontpage /5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl /2.8.14 OpenSSL /0.9.7c

So, as far as I know (and I don’t know much) my server uses Unix, specifically Apache. When I go to search for a NetPBM version for Apache or Unix, I cannot find one. Plenty of Linux, yes…

Is there anything else that I can do?

Btw, I did modify mt.cfg, as stated in the tutorial.

Any insight into this will be greatly appreciated.

Hello. Great tutorial. I have followed it too many times now and unfortunately no success
My environment:

OS: Redhat/Linux
Perl: 5.6.1
MT: 2.661
MT dir: /var/www/html/blog
MT.cfg in: /var/www/html/blog/cgi-bin
netpbm in: /var/www/html/blog/cgi-bin/netpbm
IPC in: /var/www/html/blog/cgi-bin/extlib/IPC

Using IPC version 0.75 I get nothing when I run
perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1 in both the cgi-bin directory and the cgi-bin/extlib directory.

However, MT still does not display a thumbnail option when uploading files.

Using IPC verison 0.78 I get the following error:

Can’t locate IPC/Run.pm in @INC (@INC contains: extlib /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.6.1/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.6.1 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl .).
BEGIN failed — compilation aborted.

Any suggestions for what I might try next would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Well I moved IPC to /var/www/html/blog/extlib/IPC
and I can run perl -Iextlib -MIPC::Run -e 1 in both the /var/www/html/blog and /var/www/html/blog/extlib directories without error.

However, there is still no thumbnail option when uploading images in MT
Note: the extlib subdirectory was added to /var/www/html/blog merely to follow your suggestion, it previously did not exist

Maybe it would helpful if I described the contents of /var/www/html/blog and /var/www/html/blog/cgi-bin

/var/www/html/blog contains all the blog’s html, templates, style sheets and syndication feeds.

/var/www/html/blog/cgi-bin contains mt.cfg, cgi files, lib, tmpl, and well basically everything else.

Is there any chance that if my host has NetPBM installed elsewhere there would be a conflict and thus MT is bypassing the thumbnail feature?

Any further assistance/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks. -Michael

Glad to hear that Michael. The next thing I was going to suggest was to confirm your cfg file. Anyway, all that ends well..

Grrr!
I’ve read the post, read all the comments, followed all directions.

I do not receive the IPC error, it’s just that nothing has changed in my upload options at all. Exactly the same. No option for thumbnailing.

I’ve changed my cfg file, I’ve set permissions on the binaries, I’ve done it all. Grrr.

The only thing I could not do was check the binaries in my “shell”. In fact, I don’t even know what that means!

After reading this fine tutorial and doing it more than 40 times and reading everyone comments i give up My MT refuses to show the Thumbnail option when i upload a image
Just to get this clear i did install NetPBM in my public html directory (who is called simple “www”)and chmod it 755. My final path is this one:

/www/NetPBM

Next i have edited MT.CFG and changed the lines “ImageDriver NetPBM” (i simple removed the #) and changed the NetPBMPath to NetPBMPath /www/NetPBM/ (also removing the #)

Since i don’t have shell access i tried to do an upload of a picture… And them nothing No Thumbnail option
I checked if my webserve had IPC::Run perl module and since it doesn’t i have installed it on the /cgi-bin/MT/extlib/ folder having in the final this folder /cgi-bin/MT/extlib/IPC

And still nothing I also have checked my full paht to my server (in this case /mnt/web_j/d40/s40/a000k508/www) and changed the NetPBMPath to /mnt/web_j/d40/s40/a000k508/www/NetPBMPath and still no luck
I’m almost giving up and i hope some one can see what I’m doing wrong and tell me…

Btw, my MT version is 2.64. Thansk!

Hi Shashank!

If i remove the slash i still don’t get the thumbnail option… i also did the same thing using full NetPBMPath /mnt/web_j/d40/s40/a000k508/www/NetPBM and it also didn’t show the option
Btw, thanks for you help :)

Thanks for this! This site comes up nicely on Google when you search for Movable Type & NetPBM so found it easily and got it all working within five minutes!

Thanks from the UK!

I’ve been trying to get NetPBM to work on a Windows 2003 server. I have followed the instructions and I am receiving the following errors when I run #6:

Prototype mismatch: sub Socket::IPPROTO_TCP > vs none at C:/Perl/lib/Socket.pm line 395

Prototype mismatch: sub Socket::TCP_NODELAY > vs none at C:/Perl/lib/Socket.pm line 395

If I try to upload a picture in MT, this message shows under the two buttons for pop-up and embedded image.

Any ideas on what is causing this? Thanks.

Thanks for your perfect instructions. I just install it on Mt 3.121 with IPC folder. Every thing is fine and I have my Thumbnail as well. But at the bottom of the pop-up window, there is an unlimited line of errors like these:

Pseudo-hashes are deprecated at extlib/IPC/Run.pm line 2452.
Pseudo-hashes are deprecated at (eval 14) line 68.
Pseudo-hashes are deprecated at extlib/IPC/Run/IO.pm line 556.
extlib/IPC/Run/IO.pm line 563.
Pseudo-hashes are deprecated at extlib/IPC/Run.pm line 3003.

Any suggestions to solve this?

Hi,

I read your very useful tutorial about MT and NetPBM. I’ve followed all the instructions, and now I get it to let me try and create a thumbnail, but when I click “pop up image” or “embedded image,” I get the Broken Pipe error that a few on the thread have gotten. Do you have any idea for a fix for this? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks :) — Arthur Che
arthur.che@gmail.com
http:// http://www.arthurhungry.com /