Misc fixes, incl. unbreakage on Red Hat

Michael, here are some misc. patches hanging in my tree for a while.  Builds just passed on linuxcnc.org buildbot, with the usual exception of hardy (though cdf9757 gets that a step closer, if anyone cares).

The important ones for me are 793d56d, which will allow the run tests to succeed on Fedora, and 2af4d25, which gets Red Hat doc builds closer to working (Fedora 18 works now; el6 and Fedora 19 still choking on French docs).

Others are mostly tweaks, which is why you're seeing them only now.