Mandriva

now that kde team have finished the big break, kde3 is completly  moved to /opt and kde4 on / . The next steps are to finish to fix all conflicts ( for the migration 2008.0/2008.1 -> 2009.0 ) and to personalize a little our kde4 .

Testers you can now update your cooker and report bugs ( bugs = migration bugs because missing functionnality must go on upstream bugzilla ).

I spent 5 great days in Saint Petersburg this week!

This was my first visa and I was worried about the needed paperwork (insurance, hosting certificate, ...), and then the registration after arriving. Getting the visa was not easy as you need to go to the embassy on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday between 9:00 and 12:00 and spend some time there (queuing 3 times...). Then you can chose to get the visa as soon as it is ready (the same day) for 70 euros, or wait 7 days before picking it up and only pay 35 euros...

At the airport I was welcomed with huge queues for passport checks (I think I spent about 30 minutes there) and then by Ирнина which was better :)

Apart from usual buildings and museums (I admit I haven't visited some major ones), I visited a great bar/club on the first evening, which I enjoyed even if I had not slept the night before (We went there again the next day and it was much better :) ).

I can now pronounce most letters (not all) and often understand the word when it sounds like French or English (or other, like CYШИ for sushi) but reading letter by letter is so slow... And I can't manage to read anything hand written :(

I hope I'll have the opportunity to go there again!

Photos are already online!

This week’s TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, runit: Use runit to supervise Linux services. I can’t recommend runit highly enough, but ever since I started with qmail years ago and djb’s daemontools, supervised services have been a bit of a thing for me. Can’t live without them.

As a result, I’ve been putting a few packages into current contrib so that with Mandriva 2009 you’ll be able to (easily) run supervised services with my Annvix run scripts (using execline so there is an extremely small memory footprint).

Too bad Mandriva’s dietlibc is so broken that runit has to be built static with glibc, making it far larger than it should have to be. =(

Last week’s TechMail tip was Learn to use the openssl command-line program which goes into the use of… openssl… on the command-line. Stuff like generating hashes, doing general file encryption, etc.

Today I was upgrading my HTPC, which turned into a predictably painful experience. I’m upgrading from an Athlon XP 2500+ to a Pentium D 2180, adding a spiffy GeForce 9600GT, and three 500GB hard disks to form a RAID5 array.

So I get all the stuff home and realize the motherboard I bought only has two SATA ports, but I need four. D’oh. Back to the store (different one, actually) to pick up a PCI SATA controller card. SATA controller card doesn’t work. Double d’oh. Back to the original store to buy a DIFFERENT card. About to break screen when boot up with new card and find it reporting a PCI ID that does not exist. Fortunately, switching PCI slots makes it behave. Finally, all hardware is working. Frankly I think this combination of hardware is also teetering on the brink of my 380W power supply’s capabilities, but it seems to be holding up so far. So now the system is checking for bad blocks on the newly created RAID array. 1.5TB of bad block checks takes…a while. I’m estimating five hours at the moment…

Voilà une intéressante nouvelle : la Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring pourrait bénéficier prochainement du support de l’UDF 2.50 (aussi appelé format universel de disque). L’UDF est censé être le successeur du fameux ISO 9660, format tant utilisé pour graver les CD, mais comportant tant de limitations (qui sont partiellement comblées par les extensions : Joliet, El Torito et RockRidge).

L’UDF 2.5 permet notamment l’accès aux disques Blu-ray, impossible autrement. Il permet aussi la gravure au format UDF, qui offre un mécanisme de contrôle des erreurs et est plus économique en terme de place lorsque l’on effectue des sauvegardes.

Ce support sera disponible dans une prochaine version du noyau Mandriva-Turbolinux (et oui, maintenant, il est commun à ces deux distributions) : il s’appelera probablement “2.6.24.5-1mnb”, après avoir été testé par la communauté. D’ailleurs, si vous désirez le tester, on peut le trouver sur le site de Thomas Backlund (mais attention, ce noyau n’est pas supporté pour l’instant ! à vos risques et péril !).

L’excellentissime gestionnaire de bureau Xfce auquel je donnerais volontiers le surnom de “bureau qui a ce qu’il faut là où il faut” a le vent en poupe. Tant et si bien qu’une réelle communauté Xfce sévit désormais au sein de Mandriva et de Cooker. Et son travail est généralement apprécié, voire beaucoup apprécié.

Bon, tout cela pour déclarer que vous pouvez désormais télécharger une version One de Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring comprenant Xfce comme bureau. Il faut pour cela, aller dans le sous-répertoire correspondant à votre architecture, puis votre groupe de langue (pour le français, c’est “int”, pour les autres, la liste des langues est disponible sur la page wiki de la Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring).

Went with noah to see that Euro Disney thing and he seems to really enjoyed it. I am not a big fan of Eurodisney personally but the kid was so enjoying it. Last time i was there was like 11 years ago, things got way more expensive now  as well.

Went with noah to see that Euro Disney thing and he seems to really enjoyed it. I am not a big fan of Eurodisney personally but the kid was so enjoying it. Last time i was there was like 11 years ago, things got way more expensive now  as well.

If you want to use FFAP (find-file-at-point) in ruby-mode you can add this to your .emacs

When you do ffap (i bind it to C-x f) near a require ‘PP’ for example it will find it in your ruby path.

A partir d’aujourd’hui, kde3 va être dans /opt/kde3 et kde4 dans / ( étant donné qu’il va être utilisé par défaut ). Tout est prêt dans le svn, kde est en version 4.0.72 ( cependant tout est cassé et je ne sais pas encore si c’est de la faute des rpms ou si c’est à cause de kde en lui même ).

Petit à petit, les applications kde3 vont être remplacées par leur équivalent kde4, et de ce fait les applications kde4-* vont disparaître par exemple kde4-ktorrent va être renommer en ktorrent etc.

La prochaine étape de mon travail va etre de réintégrer certains patches important de kde3 tel que le support de la compression lzma dans le kioslave man:/

Linux Game Publishing has announced a competition where one can win the first copy of their new unnannounced game for Linux.

The winner will be the first person to guess which game it is, based upon the slowly revealing image on http://competition.linuxgamepublishing.com/.

The chance to know what new game is coming out for Linux and the chance to win the first copy of it produced. Yay :).

If you want Linux games already released, head to TuxGames. (Yes that’s my referral link ;)

Day Planner 0.9 has been released. It is available for download as a Mandriva RPM, Ubuntu deb, Debian deb, generic installer and source tarball.

The release focused primarily on fixes and cleanups. A bunch of minor bugs were fixed, and I rewrote most of the iCalendar back-end. It should be faster now and preserves files better than it used to.

This release includes a dummy maemo interface. It can currently fully display a Day Planner calendar, and has a UI quite similar to the desktop edition. However, it can not edit or add any events, and is as such not as useful as it might have been. The plan is for the maemo port to be ready for 0.11.

0.10 will (among other things) feature a new HTML exporting module (which has been in the works for quite a while), a cleaner, object-oriented version of the add/edit event windows (to simplify their use and maintainance. The current code that handles it is a bit ugly).

The major user-facing change will be the addition of a GUI for calendar subscriptions. 0.9 includes support for them (though it isn’t really announced because the feature isn’t ready), but one has to manually edit the config file.

Dit jaar heb ik Koninginnedag gevierd met een bezoek aan de Haagse Koninginnenach (hoi Arnoud!) Een groot deel van de tijd heb ik samen met Boris doorgebracht in het Theater aan het Spui, een kleine oase in de kolkende mensenmassa buiten. Met name was ik onder de indruk van de optredens van Hayward Williams en Dirtmusic.
. Gaat dat beluisteren!

Computerarcheologie op de vrijmarkt
Vandaag heb ik nog wat rondgekeken op de vrijmarkt in Rotterdam. Onder de opvallende zaken die uitgestald stonden waren onder andere een Commodore Datasette-taperecorder (oh nostalgie!), pakketjes installatiediskettes voor Windows 95 en een Epson Styus 800-printer (mijn eerste zwart-wit inkjet).

» Plaats op eKudos

Dit jaar heb ik Koninginnedag gevierd met een bezoek aan de Haagse Koninginnenach (hoi Arnoud!) Een groot deel van de tijd heb ik samen met Boris doorgebracht in het Theater aan het Spui, een kleine oase in de kolkende mensenmassa buiten. Met name was ik onder de indruk van de optredens van Hayward Williams en Dirtmusic.
. Gaat dat beluisteren!

Computerarcheologie op de vrijmarkt
Vandaag heb ik nog wat rondgekeken op de vrijmarkt in Rotterdam. Onder de opvallende zaken die uitgestald stonden waren onder andere een Commodore Datasette-taperecorder (oh nostalgie!), pakketjes installatiediskettes voor Windows 95 en een Epson Styus 800-printer (mijn eerste zwart-wit inkjet).

» Plaats op eKudos

En suivant une discussion sur la liste de diffusion wiki-discuss, j'ai découvert la page sur le réseau du wiki francophone de Mandriva. J'ai donc décidé d'y apporter quelques améliorations, notamment sur le diagnotistique réseau, mais je n'ai pas en même temps voulu aller trop loin. Cependant je pense que de nombreux points pourraient améliorés :

• Correction de quelques erreurs contenues dans la page
• Détailler l'emplacement des fichiers de configuration principaux ( ifcfg-ethX, networking, ... )
• Détailler les services réseaux principaux
• Présenter des solutions éventuelles si certaines des étapes lors de la vérification du réseau échouent.

As toady pointed out on IRC, you no longer need to tell tar that it needs to uncompress an archive with gzip or bzip2. So, instead of calling tar xzf on tar.gz archives and tar xjf on tar.bz2 ones, you can now call tar xf on both.

Update: To answer Beranger, this was introduced by tar 1.15 on 2004-12-29, and should be available in all recent distributions (According to Distrowatch: Mandriva since 10.2, Debian since Etch, Ubuntu since 5.10, Fedora since FC4).

As toady pointed out on IRC, you no longer need to tell tar that it needs to uncompress an archive with gzip or bzip2.

So, instead of calling tar xzf on tar.gz archives and tar xjf on tar.bz2 ones, you can now call tar xf on both.

On my machines (Mandriva cooker, bash 3.2+upstream patches, readline 5.2+upstream patches) bash now displays the long command lines on a single line and handles scrolling.

This means I can't read all the command line without scrolling, and I can't copy it...

After some search on this topic I found a readline option called horizontal-scroll-mode which exactly does this, but is off by default (at least according to the doc).

Our packages changelog does not say anything about it and grep "horiz" in the patches or the config files does not return anything related. The upstream changelog of readline and bash also does not say anything about it...

Worse, I tried "set horizontal-scroll-mode off" in .inputrc and then in /etc/inputrc, without any effect...

Any idea on how to fix this ?

I’ve just switched for a few days to GNOME and I remembered a discussion about activating metacity compositing manager. I haven’t found the information I was looking for on the Internet, but Olivier told me his “Jus de cuisson” mentioned a discussion thread back in January.

I eventually found the discussion thread, but what was stated was wrong (well, it was probably true when the message was sent, but not anymore) : the compositing manager is not enabled by default.

The compositing manager doesn’t give you as much effects and eye-candies as compiz, but it’s enough for a daily and professional usage. Here’s the list of things enabled with the compositing manager of metacity (quote from Frederic Crozat):

-Composited managed desktop (some applications might use it, like transparent applications such as gnome-terminal and probably others)
-brand new alt-TAB with screenshot of applications and highlight of to-be-focused app
-nice shadow around windows (now, you can have an idea on the initial design of Ia Ora window theme
-NO openGL required !!

So, here’s how you can enable it (should work with any distro using a recent enough metacity) :
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true
To disable compositor :
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager false