OSS Planets

SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas: Interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman – Linux Kernel Dev/Maintainer

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:46:42 -0800

Interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman – Linux Kernel Dev/Maintainer

How Software is Built: “The same amount of work one of the top 10 developers did last year wouldn’t have even made it into the top 20 this year. Our individual developers have got the work flow down, so we can actually contribute more, to an extent that’s amazing.”

Posted via email from MonkeyBoy’s Brain Trail

Salvadesswaran Srinivasan: Fedora Post-Installation

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:55:11 -0800

After I installed Fedora 12 for a friend, he asked me what software he’d need for using it as a primarily home desktop user. I have some experience with home users who just need things to work, without the hassle of installing software whenever they want to open a file. Add to that the lack of broadband penetration, or even basic internet connectivity in India, it makes for an awful situation.

I already had many packages cached in my /var/cache/yum directory. We both had the same 32 bit install, so I figured it’d work. I first deleted his /var/cache/yum directory as root, then copied my directory which was around 15 GB to his hard disk. Then I wrote him a small script, which proved pretty useful to install all that he would ever want.

Here goes a slightly modified version of the script:

#!/bin/bash # media_update.sh
# Post Install Update script
# To install many required packages that are missing from the default Fedora 12 installation
# Login as root to install the packages
# The -y flag is used to accept downloading and installing all dependencies su - # Update all currently installed software yum update # This group contains the GNU Compiler Collection and other utilities: yum groupinstall 'Build Essentials' -y # You might already have this if you installed Fedora 12 from a DVD. yum groupinstall 'Office/Productivity' -y # Add the RPMFusion repositories to your system rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm # RPMFusion contains the VLC packages: yum install vlc* -y # .. and also the unrar package to extract data from rar archives: yum install unrar -y # To install Adobe's flash plugin: rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux yum install flash-plugin alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl ndiswrapper -y yum install yum-fastestmirror # No longer needed in Fedora 12, it is in built!
# yum install yum-presto yum groupinstall 'Sound and Video' # XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment, recommended for older and low end computers. yum groupinstall 'XFCE Desktop Environment' # Moblin is an interface developed for netbooks and UMPCs yum groupinstall 'Moblin Desktop Environment' # Need to be installed from RPMFusion in order to play media files encoded using proprietary codecs. yum install gstreamer* -y # To install the open source version of Google's Chromium browser:
# Thanks a million to Spot! echo "[chromium]
name = Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F\$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0 " > /etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo yum install chromium -y

You can find the full text of the script here. Many folks find yum’s cache very useful when deploying updates/packages to multiple machines, and it is among the reasons it is my favourite package management tool too.

Jason Dobies: It Just Worked

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:53:56 -0800

I’m a bit late on any sort of post about Fedora 12 being released. That’s not to say I haven’t been taking advantage of it. On release day I did a clean install of my main desktop. From start to finish, I went from booting into the x86_64 install disk to building and running RHQ in about 70 minutes. That includes dual monitor support with no manual steps on my part and sound support. I even plugged in a tablet input I have and it picked it up without an issue.

That’s it. I ran through the installer, added a few packages I use that aren’t part of the default install, and was back up and running (I intentionally didn’t upgrade just to use it as an opportunity to clean off all the random crap I collect over the lifespan of an OS install). I literally did it during a conference call at work. The installation and initial experience has gotten extremely streamlined.

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to attack my wife’s laptop. She’s been using one of my old laptops for about a year and a half now which was running an older, non-updated version of Ubuntu (probably 8.04). After a quick backup, I popped in the i386 install disk to the same result as on my desktop: it just worked. I typed in the wifi password and she was good to go.

My wife is still a die hard Quicken user. She took extremely well to Linux when I first pushed it on her, but I have yet to mentally prepare myself to argue the accountant in her to move off of Quicken. So as part of this laptop install, I setup a dual boot into Windows (the hardware isn’t beefy enough to run it as a virt guest).

I figured I’d push my luck. I popped in the Quicken CD, pointed wine at the installer, and hoped for the best. 5 minutes later, it was installed. A few minutes after that, it had successfully updated itself from the internet and there was a menu item in Gnome for her to access it.

The worst part? Midway through the installer I called my wife over to show her. Here on her Gnome desktop sat the Quicken Windows installer. I didn’t have to do any sort of odd config file hacking, nor did I have to sacrifice any small furry animals. Her reaction?

“Cool.”

I just kinda stared at her blankly for a minute. It was almost physically painful to see her not appreciate the technological awesomeness that stood before her. I sighed and grabbed my phone intent on texting someone who could appreciate the situation.

Congratulations to the Fedora team on an awesome release. There have been some seriously great improvements in what have historically been uglier areas, such as wifi and dual monitor setups (not to mention the fact that I’ve always been cursed when it came to wine).

Luca Beltrame (einar77): After a hiatus, Klassrooms continue!

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:25:34 -0800

Do you like KDE? Did you ever find yourself in a position of wanting to help, but you didn’t know what to do, or who to talk to? Do you feel you could use help to get started?

Today, the KDE Community Forums would like to provide the opportunity to answer those questions by annoucing the continuation of the tutorial courses known as Klassrooms.

What are Klassrooms?

Klassrooms are tutorial “lessons” held in a specific area of the forum. Held by one or more “mentors”, they are focused in guiding people through helping KDE by tackling a particular problem. Examples of such problems include:

Fixing simple bugs in an application
Taking junior jobs in a specific project
Helping with documentation
Promotion work (for example, screencasts)
Helping with translations

As you can see, Klassrooms are not limited to coding at all.

Usually the sessions last from one to two weeks, with a maximum of 5 “students” participating. The work is coordinated in a specific area of the forum.

Public call for mentors

The key to hold Klassrooms is having mentors. Their role is to present the problem and guide students through the course. Compared to a live session, using the forum requires less time, and both the students and the mentor can set their most convenient schedule.

That is why we need you! You don’t need to be a developer: non-coding courses are as welcome as coding ones. How do you become a mentor? These guidelines explain everything that is needed to apply.

If you feel like helping, this is the perfect opportunity. Let us know!

Chris Ball: Btrfs snapshots proposal

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:24:24 -0800

I've written up a feature proposal on how we can use Btrfs snapshots to enable system rollbacks in Fedora 13, by gluing together the existing kernel code to do Btrfs snapshots, a UI for performing rollbacks, and a yum plugin to make snapshots automatically before each yum transaction. Lots of good comments so far, and LWN has written an article about it.

(Updated: The LWN link is no longer subscriber-only.)

Andreas Pakulat: KDevelop4 moved

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:48:05 -0800

As we decided that we won’t make the KDE 4.4 schedule and drop out of it, we thought that we should also play by the KDE policy rules and move out of trunk/KDE.

That move has just happened and KDevelop, KDevPlatform and Quanta can now be found under trunk/extragear/sdk/.

Everybody who’s running svn now needs to adjust his url using

svn switch svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/sdk/kdevelop

And similar for kdevplatform or quanta.

The tentative release date for KDevelop4 has been moved to end of march now.

Bert "biertie" Desmet: Fedora 12 release event: how was it?

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:39:05 -0800

Yesterday we had the first Fedora event in Belgium. Reason to hold one was the release of Fedora 12.

the event took place in a Don Bosco school, in Antwerp (Wilrijk), and I want to thank them once again for making this possible!

We had something between 20 and 25 people attending.. that was nice, although I expected some more people.. We had food (chips, cheese, bread), and drinks at the place, to make the event somewhat more enjoyable.

after my talk Bart got the idea of forming a ‘getting-to-know-each-other’ circle, I think that in this way we got some people interested in joining the fedora community.

As a last ’surprise’, Martin showed up, and the crowd was really interested in his talk about OLPC.. Luckily for us, he brought some olpc’s, and he let us play with them

thanks to all people who attended the event, and let’s hope we can make a strong Belgian Fedora Community out of it!

* you can find my presentation here

Yaakov M. Nemoy: FUDCon Live: Status

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:05:56 -0800

A while back i posted a call for volunteers for a new concept for FUDCon, which i called FUDCon Live. Not surprisingly, i didn't get an overwhelming number of raised hands, since i think this is a new concept that not many people get. Instead, i think we should restructure the planning just a bit.

There are a couple elements to this idea. The first is having an organized #fudcon-room-* channel for each physical space we have, complete with a meetingbot instance and any other tools people might want to use. Depending on the kind of session, running gobby and other tools will also go along way to helping things along. I'm assuming the people on the ground can help out here because they know what the rooms are. Setting something up like this is pretty low level work.

The second element is the logger. This is someone in each session who is recording the conversation and taking notes via IRC. He's (or a she, but i think FUDCon is still mostly attended by guys) also taking comments from IRC and repeating them to the group. This requires making sure there are enough volunteers. This also means making sure someone is tracking who the volunteers are and are enforcing enough typing breaks. Having done this before, i can tell you it can be stressful to do this for an entire day. Yes, you're a nerd, yes, you type all day, but you don't type at this pace for long stretches. Finally free drinks are involved, anyone who volunteers gets a beer (or other beverage, or well any other reasonable consumable if you don't drink) from me, as a thank you.

The third element is you. To make this worthwhile, you will need to interact with it. If you're at home, use it to follow that session you really wanted to see. Ask questions. If you're at FUDCon, hang out in channels to follow two sessions at once. Find out if there's a session more interesting than yours. Use the extra information to decide where to be. Finally, provide feedback. Let us know how it worked out.

The last element is the organisation. Since i only got a couple of volunteers so far, i want to do things a bit differently. This should solve a few issues all at once. Let's take a page out of Google's playbook. At the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, as part of each presentation, the guy running the session was required to ask for a volunteer to log the session. Let's take this route. For everyone giving a session, before you begin, find a volunteer in the room. There's a good chance that someone in the room already has an emotional investment in the session and will be willing to document things. One of the organizers (the original volunteers) will make sure to monitor the channels and update the wiki after each session. This way we know who's been volunteering.

Feedback?

Peter Lemenkov: Pandorum

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:31:08 -0800

Продолжается ренессанс Sci-Fi в первозданном смысле этого слова! Посмотрел с удовольствием, скачав c tfile.ru (без рейтингов и регистрации, само собой).

Comments

Karlie Robinson: NYSCATE 2009 - Bringing Open Source to Education

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:59:34 -0800

NYSCATE 2009 was, in my opinion, a big success. At least as far as short notice, first-time-out, events go. We had lots of SWAG, thanks to everyone's help. Even some more last minute Fedora SWAG by way of Charles Proffitt. And I would be remiss if I didn't thank Mike Lee. Not sure why I didn't mention him in the last post, but he did send some print collateral ideas. It was his email that

Kevin Krammer: 100% mimelib free

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:41:53 -0800

If you have no idea what this means, don't worry, neither do I.

What I do know, however, is that a lot of people around KMail and are extremely happy about this

Basically the folks working hard on porting KDE PIM apps to Akonadi have reached one of their bonus mission goals: they've got rid of a very old, very obscure, tedious to maintain, mindboggling to work with (you get the picture, right?) legacy part of the mail handling framework.

Well, I guess bonus goal might give the wrong impression here. It is not less important than any of the primary mission objectives (to stay in game jargon). It is a bonus because it makes other things easier, boost your enthusiasm, lets you look forward for the challenges to come.
Think in terms of finding the double barrel shotgun in Doom, getting the Holy Grenade in Worms, looting an epic item in WoW, getting super cow powers in Aptitude.

So, congratulations to the folks at KDAB. You rock!

Mark Kretschmann (markey): Achieving maximum bliss on IRC: Bouncers explained

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:38:54 -0800

Many of you have probably experienced this problem before: You're using an IRC client (in my case Konversation), but then your desktop crashes, or you have a power failure, and then of course the IRC client crashes too. Some time later you log into your desktop again, fire up the IRC program, but damn, you've lost a part of an important conversation. Worry about this no more!

Fortunately, there exists software that's generally called "Bouncer" (or BNC). A Bouncer is basically a proxy server that handles the IRC connection for you. Instead of talking directly to the IRC server, you talk to the Bouncer instead, which relays everything in realtime to the IRC server. Modern Bouncers even support SSL encryption for added safety (I would recommend to use this). The advantages of a Bouncer summed up:

You can be connected 24/7 to the Internet, without actually having your computer running.
When you lose your connection to the Bouncer, you can simply log in again, and the Bouncer will even replay a log of all lost information to you, fully automatically. Basically it appears as if you had never been offline, things are all back to normal again.
On networks that don't offer an IRC Cloak service which hides your real IP address, the Bouncer can use a virtual host that hides your address. This increases security.
The Bouncer will automatically log you into all channels that you frequent, without having to join them explicitly again. This is handy if you sometimes use different IRC clients.
Some Bouncers (most modern ones) even allow logging in with multiple clients simultaneously. That's a killer feature. E.g. you could be logged in with your computer at home, and when you have to leave in a hurry, you can simply log in with any other computer (e.g. a Nokia N900) in the same session again, from anywhere in the world. Awesome, no?

How to set up a Bouncer:

Get access to a server somewhere that's always online. If you don't have your own, you could ask a friend. There you install the Bouncer software, e.g. shroudBNC or psyBNC (thanks to Kevin for doing this for me!), preferably with SSL support enabled. Then you configure your IRC client to connect to the Bouncer, exactly like you would connect to a normal IRC server. And voilà, you will now be able to enjoy IRC a lot more than before.

Here's a tutorial that explains the concept in more detail: psyBNC Tutorial

Enjoy

PS: There exist IRC clients (Quassel is a prominent example) that have similar functionality built-in. However, Bouncers will work with any IRC clients, e.g. Konversation, Irssi, X-Chat, and others.

Christopher Blizzard: curious

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:36:55 -0800

Previously.

Chris Brown: We can create…

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:35:12 -0800

I finally got around this weekend to looking at my Fedora packages. They have sat in the repositories like abandoned puppies, some of them were very sick indeed.

I feel pretty bad about the length of time these have taken to resolve but in fairness just being able to sit down and work on it has been a bit like a build process in itself. ie.

Move house
Order phone line
Wait for BT to install and activate line
Order broadband
Wait for broadband box to arrive
Get old PC from work
Discover broadband signal isn’t live next to PC
Discover onboard wifi won’t connect on current card due to weird interference problem
Buy and fit additional wifi card
Finally get online and then process of remembering which password I used for FAS begins…

In the middle of all this I found an old intercity 125 sleeper carriage in original livery which I know my nephew would love. So here’s a pic.

Training to sleep

Alejandro Pérez: Yo vote en fedora 13

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:35:30 -0800

Hola,

Ya vote para decidir el nombre de fedora 13, y tu?

Ven y participa. Aqui

Come on vote here

Stormy Peters: Stormy's Update: November 21st-29th

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:07:16 -0800

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation, reprinted from the GNOME Foundation blog. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.

Attended (and gave several planned and several impromptu talks at) the GNOME Asia Summit November 20-22nd. It was great to see GNOME Asia successfully transition to a an annual conference. The GNOME Asia committee did a great job last year and they managed to transition that success to another country and a new team this year. While there were some things that could have gone better (more lead time, more sponsorships), the conference was great and added a few unique nice touches like using local business students to interpret and handing out volunteer certificates to all 115 volunteers! GNOME Asia faces an additional hurdle that conferences in the US and Europe don't face. Not only do they have to educate attendees on GNOME but also on free software!

Met with Erwann Chénedé and Leontine Binchy from Sun - it's always good to have a chance to meet companies and people involved in GNOME in person!

Spent 30 hours travelling home from Vietnam.

Worked with next year's local organizers, board and press on the GUADEC press release. (Zonker wrote the press release.) You'll see it Monday morning.

Set up plan and agenda for my trip to London for the OSS Watch advisory board meeting. (Also meeting with LiMo and Canonical.)

Got 401K plan set up for GNOME Foundation. Now we just have to set it up with our payroll company to roll deductions over to the 401K plan.

Got invited to speak at Open Mobility conference, Fort Collins Linux user group and the FOSS 2010 Research workshop. Accepted the Fort Collins user group. Waiting for GNOME Mobile group to figure out plan for Open Mobility. Thinking about the FOSS 2010 workshop.

Attended GNOME Board meeting.

Worked on CRM data structures and work flows, i.e. I wrote up what we need in the CRM system so that I can get help setting it up. (Jeff Schroeder installed CiviCRM on GNOME systems!)

Thursday and Friday were US holidays - Thanksgiving! I'm thankful for all the great people I get to work with in the GNOME community.

Peter Lemenkov: Швейцарцы, вперед!

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 07:54:53 -0800

Ландскнехты не желают видеть у себя на родине новые минареты.

http://lenta.ru/news/2009/11/29/min<wbr></wbr>aret/

Ну понятно, что если вынести на всенародный референдум любую националистическую идею, то ее поддержит большинство сторонников, т.к. национализм - идеология большинства, в противовес толерастии и интернацизму, как идеологиям агрессивных меньшинств.

Меня в статье вот что опять порадовало:

Швейцарское телевидение охарактеризовало первые данные об одобрении жителями страны инициативы крайне правых партий как "большой сюрприз".

Для интеллигенции это всегда сюрприз, что их идейки народом ну никак не поддерживаются, и что народ в массе симпатизирует совсем другим идеологиям. Такой приятный для них миф, который всегда рушится при столкновении с реальностью.

Comments

Ray Chen: 豆瓣API

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 07:14:36 -0800

豆瓣API是豆瓣为第三方开发人员提供的编程接口。利用豆瓣API，你可以在你的网站或程序中使用豆瓣
的数据和功能。

目前的豆瓣API支持的功能包括：

* 搜索并查看书籍、电影、音乐信息
* 搜索并查看用户信息，查看用户友邻信息
* 查看用户收藏
* 添加、更新、删除用户收藏
* 查看评论
* 发布、修改、删除评论
* 查看、添加、删除用户广播
……

Aanjhan Ranganathan: RTEMS Workout at FOSS.IN 2009

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:45:49 -0800

If you are enthusiastic about Free and Open Source Software and you are anywhere near Bangalore (even if you are not, there is nothing stopping to be near Bangalore during this time), make sure you head to FOSS.IN 2009. FOSS.IN is the first conference for Open Source that I attended back in 2005 and was impressed. Since then I have attended all FOSS.INs except the 2006 (away from the country on an official trip). The conference has undergone several changes over the years from being a “Just another Conference” to “Getting things done” event. Project days were introduced in 2007, Workouts in 2008 and this year, team FOSS.IN has decided to take it a little further making it more “hacker” friendly in similar lines with Chaos Computer Congress organised by Chaos Computer Club, arguably one of the most influential hacker groups.

This time around Santosh Vattam and myself are taking leads in having a RTEMS Workout. We have put up the pre-requisites, purpose and general outline on the wiki page here. Currently we are stream lining the objectives into being more specific. If everything goes well, we will be kick starting the workout with a basic introduction to RTEMS, a quick overview of the architecture, a walk through of source code structure and some basic knowledge sharing wrt what might be required during the next 4 days. So Day 1 would mostly be setting up and getting up to base. Day 2, 3 and 4 would be hard days filled with coding, debugging and lots of fun! Day 5 would be more of a wrap up – collecting patches, cleaning up things, sanity checks and reporting!

So, if you want to see your contributions go into NASA and ESA space shuttles then RTEMS workout is the place you need to head to. RTEMS community is a bunch of extremely nice people full of patience and am sure you will have fun hacking with us.

On a sidenote, I am currently at Zurich Airport calculating the probability of missing my connecting flight given that my first flight is delayed, life is full of mathematics. Number never fail to impress me. See you at FOSS.IN 2009!

Gino Alania: Instalacion de Fedora 12 en video

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:26:52 -0800

Metodo de Instalación mediante Net Install

PRIMERA PARTE:

<embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="390" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYGy0g8C" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"></embed>

SEGUNDA PARTE:

<embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="390" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYGy0g4C" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"></embed>

Espero que les sea de utilidad.

Cyrille Berger: KOffice Fall Meeting 2009 – Day 2

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:13:16 -0800

People are almost already gone, or are about to leave (myself I am leaving the office in an hour or so). The office is getting empty, the discussion are fading away. But today, started by a presentation from Jos of strigi fame on a metadata project for KWord and KOffice, and a proof of concept implementations of ODF 1.2 metadata, and how to use nepomuk. This trigger a discussion between him and Pierre on a design that could work for change tracking and metadata in the KOffice text library.

The last main topic was about making KOffice ready for end-users. And we decided to define a few use cases with an associated users for each application. And then list the features they need, and what kind of issues they face. While Krita is getting focused on being useful for the artist behind Blender movies. Of course, the biggest challenge is now to find developers resources to implement all this ideas and fixes.

This was the last topic on the general session. Afterward hacking started again, as well as specific discussion between a small group of developers. For instance, the Krita team (or what was left of it after the departure of Dmitry) started a discussion on redesigning our painting operation settings, which are currently a bit messy between GUI elements, and settings used for painting.

And now people are either gone, compiling KOffice on windows or almost asleep.

Alvaro Soliverez (Hei_Ku): KMyMoney upcoming string freeze, bugzilla open for bugs and beta release

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:07:17 -0800

The development team has made the decision to release a beta on December 28th. For that, we are issuing a string freeze on December 1st that will last until the release. If we find no blocking issues along the way, we should have a release on the 28th, one month from now. As part of that, bugzilla is now open for bugs. As part of our strategy to keep the kde3 and kde4 versions apart, a product called kmymoney4 has been created specially for this. That's because the approaches and people doing the effort are different for both versions, so it makes sense in this case.

Valent Turkovic: Ubuntu and VIA VT6421 PCI SATA Howto

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:59:50 -0800

I have seen question of how to make VIA VT6421 PCI SATA card work under Ubuntu on number of forum posts and only solutions I have seen on Ubuntu forum was: “Solved:: Installed Windows. Got data no problems.” :(

This obviously is not the solution. I found a solution that works on Ubuntu 8.10 but probably will work on any other Ubuntu version.

So in order to make this device work you need to see what module it uses:

lspci -k|grep -i VT6421 -A 2

01:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50) Kernel driver in use: sata_via Kernel modules: sata_via

So we can see that the module this card uses is called “sata_via”, now just load the module for this VIA card and of you go:

sudo modprobe sata_via

Fernando "dib" Gonzalez: “Makers” de Cory Doctorow

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:26:36 -0800

Nuevo libro de Cory Doctorow, co-editor de Boing Boing, activista anti-copyright y miembro de la Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), y gran escritor de ciencia ficción.

PDF

Projeto Fedora Brasil: Aberta a votação para escolha do codinome do Fedora 13

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:50:39 -0800

Tem conta FAS e deseja votar também? Clique aqui.

"Rafael Gomes": Eu votei no codinome do Fedora 13 e você?

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:46:19 -0800

"Your vote has been recorded, thank you!" Tem conta FAS e deseja votar também? Clique aqui. Mais informações a respeito dos nomes pode ser encontrada nesse link. Eu votei em Gloriana, e você? Fonte de inspiração

Paul Mellors: pisg + Fedora ambassadors

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:49:44 -0800

Installed PISG earlier, the perl irc stats generator. Thought i’d like to see what’s happening with the #fedora-ambassador channel on free node.

If you fancy a quick look then you can see the stats at http://paulmellors.homeip.net

It’s updated on the hour if i've got the cron right

Jan Hambrecht (jaham): KOffice Sprint Oslo 2009 – Day 1

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:32:40 -0800

After a short night (for my taste anyway) we had and ok breakfast at around 8 o’clock in the morning at the hotel. After that we gathered together, bought tickets for the public transport and went to the Nokia offices. There we’ve settled in a conference room in the 6th floor where the sales and managing people have their offices. The actual engineers are sitting a floor below where we are not supposed be. But there is enough space here anyway so that is not a problem.

Then we started to have some presenatations and diskussions on various topics like library reorganization, moving to git, a nice presentation from Suresh about Nokias effort to build the office viewer application for the N900 and an also nice presentation from Olivier about library design and source/binary compatibility.

For lunch we had some selfmade sandwiches at the cafeteria, using food bought by Thomas before. Soda and coffee/hot chocolate was also free to take so that was taken care of also. In the cafeteria there is also a table tennis table where some people tested their skills. I also did that and had a very nice game with Inge which is a very capable player table tennis player.

After lunch we had some more disussions/presentations and then some people already started to hack away at their stuff.

In the evening at around 6 o’clock went out for dinner at a nearby pizza shop. We had to wait a couple of minutes though as we were quite a lot of people which did not had place all at once first. But after some short time we got a couple of tables were all people fitted in. We decided to order a couple of huge pizzas. Nokia kindly paid for the food and the non-alocoholic drinks again. Thanks a lot!

After dinner people went back to the office to get their stuff, some people went off to a pub, others were going back to the hotel where a Krita coem together took place.

All in all it was a very densily packed day with lots of information to process and lots of fun too.

Cyrille Berger: KOffice Fall Meeting 2009 – Day 1

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:58:24 -0800

Yesterday was the first day of the meeting, we had a lot of discussions going on. It started with the move to git, when, what and how ? We decided for a list blocker, and to do the conversion as soon as this blockers were solve, this include solving some of the issues that KDE face for the conversion.

Then we decided to have the 2.2 release on a six monthes schedule, with a release in May, and to experiment a short 4 monthes schedule for 2.3. To be efficient such a schedule require a move to Git, and the ability to work on different branches and only merge what is ready. The main objection to such a schedule was whether it is not too many releases for end users, the advantage is that we solve the problem of schedules alignment with distributions.

Then we had a presentation from the Nokia guys on their work on an Office viewer for Maemo, what they achieved and what they need to have fixed (just 600 bugs…) to consider it end-user ready. And then we talk on how to integrate their work in the community.

Then we went for sandwiches at the Nokia cafeteria.

We started the afternoon with a discussion on how to improve decision making inside the community. The important thing is that we want to take decisions based on a concensus, which require to have people working on finding a solution instead of defending their current solution. But in the end, if there is still a disagreement, we decided that shared component (library and base plugins) would have three maintainers that take the final decision.

In the afternoon, Olivier Goffart gave a presentation on library design, which is interesting since we are planning to export some of our libraries and offer API/ABI stability.

Then we had hacking times, with people fixing bugs, talking design and other discussing on our library organisation.

Then we were invited by Nokia for a pizza party at a nearby restaurant. And concluded the evening with a Krita meeting in the lobby of the hotel.

Tim Horton: Clutterhs First Release

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:36:17 -0800

My good friend and roommate Matt Arsenault has just pushed the initial (0.1) release of his Clutter bindings for Haskell. This was his RCOS project for this semester.

Anyway, if you speak Haskell and enjoy Clutter, download them and see what you can do! He's looking for lots of input for the next steps, so please have at it...

Dominik Seichter: "Modifiers" in KRename

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:59:09 -0800

Andi Clemens did some amazing work on the batch renamer included and integrated into digiKam. I really like the simple UI and some of the features he included. I think I can get some inspiration from him for KRename (e.g. syntax highlighting).

Lately he posted over the topic of "Modifiers" in the digiKam rename tool, which he added to digiKams renamer and was not able to find in KRename. Modifiers are a way to convert a token, let's say the name of a directory or the artist of a mp3 in some way before inserting it. For example if you insert the name of the directory into the new filename and the directory name is in all uppercase and to match the look of the new filename, you want it to be inserted in lowercase. In digiKam's renamer it is achieved by the token:
[dir.]{lower}

In KRename you would use:
[%dirname.]

So contrary to Andi's post, KRename has modifiers, too. You can add a modifier before any token (after the opening bracket and before the actual name of the token). The modifierst are those used to insert filename's and convert there case. To list the most important ones:

$	No conversion, insert the token as it is
%	Convert to lowercase
&	Convert to uppercase
*	Convert every first letter in a word to uppercase
##	Format a number with leading zeros

So you can even use modifierst to format numbers for tokens that return number. For example [##tagTrack] will insert the track number of a MP3 formatted with one leading zero if the track number is less than 10.

It is true that KRename does not have a really readable syntax for modifiers here, I think appending {upper} or {lower} like digiKam does it, is a good idea. But there are several other places, too, where the KRename syntax could be improved. I hope that this post will help a few people that also did not know about this feature.

Modifiers in action

Jon Stanley: Doing category RSS in Movable Type

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:32:10 -0800

In order to produce a highly relevant feed for the OLPC planet, I wanted to provide an RSS/Atom feed of just that category in my blog, something that MT (annoyingly) doesn't do automagically by default (which I think it should).

No worries, though - MT is bar none the most customizable and extensible blogging platform that I've worked with (which is not many - just Blogger, some Wordpress, and MT). So knowing that, I figured that I'd try and figure out how to do it. I came up with Google searches that were less than helpful, telling me to go places that simply don't exist (they must be referring to older versions of the software).

So I took the general concept from those posts, and assumed that it would apply to the new version. It does, sort of - but the convoluted process that they point you at is much easier in 4.32. Without further ado, here's what I did:

In the blog dashboard, go to Design/Templates
Select the "Feed - Recent Entries" template
In the "More Actions" up at the top, choose "Clone Template(s)"
Click the little arrow at the bottom for Template Options
Change the output file to something else (I used olpc.xml for instance)
In the actual body of the template, where you see '<mt:Entries lastn="15">' just change it to <mt:Entries lastn="15" category="OLPC> for instance.
Save and publish the template, and everything should be good!

Christoph Wickert: Wer die Wahl hat…

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:57:20 -0800

… hat die Qual. Wie bei dieser sinnigen Fehlermeldung.

Jon Stanley: OLPC Meetup today

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:13:34 -0800

As promised, I've got the event report for the OLPC meetup that happened today. It started at about 1PM in the meeting room of a church (apparently the same meeting room that AA meetings are held in - are they trying to tell me something? :) ). People from OLPC in Boston, the OLPC Learning Club DC, and virtually, people from San Francisco were there. All in all in the room in NYC we had about 30 people show up, who represented a very broad cross-section of the constituents of OLPC - teachers, marketing people, and techies such as myself. After an update on some deployments, the XO 1.5 (which will have both the Sugar interface as well as a more traditional GNOME desktop, will have 1GB of RAM so a lot of the memory constraints that came with attempting to run a normal desktop on the XO platform are gone), and learning about the people down in DC for about an hour, we split off into three groups - marketing/communication/community development, teachers and educators, and technology people. I obviously went to the technical side of the room :).

We had an interesting conversation on getting involved in Sugar development, and more importantly, the lack of a closed feedback loop from deployments, and the understanding of pain points that real teachers in the field were having. Adam Holt from OLPC mentioned that the Sugar Labs folks had attempted such a thing in the past, and the results of the feedback, while useful and valuable, were not exactly immediately actionable by Sugar Labs (or anyone else really - things like "battery life is too short").

However, we did find something that is immediately actionable for the techies in the crowd, and Adam will be reaching out for help revising and updating the Sugar Almanac and the Activity Handbook which are both currently out of date for current versions of the operating system, and making developer documentation more accessible. I also met and exchanged contact information with George Hunt, who is also a local techie who is heavily involved with OLPC and we're going to get together and work on the documentation side of things.

Adam also mentioned that the support FAQ needs some work, and that's an area that I could really help in. I also met Kevin Mark, who from what I understand is the one man support army on IRC for the XO and Sugar, and I could help there as well.
\
All in all I think it was a good use of a Saturday afternoon (even though it was absolutely beautiful outside today, and that showed in having to get through the hoards of people in Times Square on the way to the meeting.... :) )

Jon Stanley: OLPC Meetup tomorrow

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:12:33 -0800

Just figured that I'd drop a quick note here that I'm going to the charter meeting of OLPC NYC. It happens tomorrow, conveniently located a few blocks from my apartment. Apparently we've got people from Boston, DC and San Francisco coming for this event.

Image via Wikipedia

This is an NYC local grassroots effort, and I'll be pimping Fedora obviously :) More to come after the event actually happens.

In the meantime, enjoy a picture of an OLPC deployment in Thailand :)

Jon Stanley: FUDCon Hotel Information required :)

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:36:08 -0800

If Fedora is sponsoring your hotel room for FUDCon, and I don't have your checkin/checkout information here, drop me an email and let me know. I've already sent mail to everyone, but figure that asking in another forum people might see would be good too :)

Charles Peng: Install Fedora 12 on an Eee PC 1000HE

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:44:13 -0800

I installed a Fedora 12 and Windows XP dual boot system on my Eee PC 1000HE some hours ago. The new shinning Fedora 12 system works great on this Eee PC, here’s some notes I wrote down during the installation and post-installation process.

Preparing for Installation

Eee PC has no CD-ROM, so that you can not install Fedora 12 from a Live CD disk. The best way for you is to download a Fedora 12 Live ISO and write this iso image to your flash drive, and then install F12 with this usb flash drive.

liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool to do this job, it has an easy-to-use GUI which can ensure the Fedora 12 live CD iso you downloaded is correct, and, it can also ensure you write to the right USB disk. What you need is a 2GB USB disk.

During Installation

It’s quite easy and I think you can handle yourself, but here’s some points you’d pay special attention to.

1) At the screen choosing your time zone, make sure the “system clock users UTC” option is unchecked, in order to keep your two systems both Fedora 12 and Windows XP clocks are the same time.

2) When partitioning your hard drive, please be careful not erase your Windows partition which has some of your personal data. Please mark “Review and modify partitioning layout” optioned checked, so that you will be able to know which partitions will be formatted.

3) You’d better give your /home directory a single partition so that your data will not be lost when you fresh-install your system to upgrade your machine to the future Fedora release.

When partitioning my hard drive, I chose to cover my exiting Ubuntu 9.10 Linux system, and everything is correct when I check my partitioning layout, but I lost all data on my Ubuntu /home directory… this isn’t a matter as these data has been backed up on my laptop.

Another problem I met is when installing bootloader, the installation script says it has a bug, it maybe caused because Ubuntu 9.10 uses Grub2 and Fedora installation script can’t cover it’s files on MBR. I installed the system again and this problem was solved.

Post-installation

The first thing you need to do is to add rpmfusion software repositories when you log into your system. You can find insturtions on how to add both free and non-free repositories on RPM fusion website.

After RPM Fusion enabled, you need to update your system immediately to update all your software to be the lasted. You can do this job by clicking System/Administration/Software Updates.

(Enable Chinese Input)

Chinese Fedora users need a input method to input Chinese words.

Fedora has both ibus and ibus-pinyin preinstalled, a good news is that, I installed an English environment, and ibus-pinyin can be enable on clicks, no need more configuration.

Wireless Driver

Fedora 12 comes with no Eee PC 1000HE’s Ralink RT2860 wireless card driver, I am lucky because I have a G-Sky WIFI adapter, so that I can use it to connect my neighbour’s WIFI network (Fedora has G-Sky’s Reatek wireless chipset drivers by default) and install Ralink’s driver by running the following command in the terminal.

yum install kmod-rt2860

Configure your Mouse and TouchPad

Click System/Preferences/Mouse, and under the “Touchpad” tab, check “Enable Mouse Clicks with touchpad”, this will enable you to double-click an item on your system with our using a mouse, and Eee PC comes with no mouse at all.

Check “disable touchpad while typing” this will be helpful when you’re typing while touchpad always make you annoying.

You can also check “Enable scrolling”, this will enable you to scroll up/down when you move your finger at the right side of your touchpad edge.

Desktop 3D Effects

If you enabled RPM Fusion, and you updated your system to be latest, you should have the latest graphic card driver updated.

Go to System/Preferences/Desktop Effect, and choose Compiz, and mark both “Windows Wobble when Moved” and “Workspaces on a Cube”, then some basic 3D effect will be enabled, try to move a windows or click other workspace to give a try? I know this is only basic effects, but it’s enough, because you don’t have a mouse to operate your system to be more eye-candy

Anything more? Uhhh, I forgot, this is all… If you have any problem, give me a comment below.

Jono Bacon: The Shot Of Jaq Train Begins

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:09:11 -0800

Yesterday we kicked out our first proper episode of Shot Of Jaq and I am chuffed to bits with the response. Right now it stands at 42 comments, and I am sure this will continue to grow.

The whole idea behind Shot Of Jaq is that our 10 minute shot acts as the start of a conversation, and then the conversation continues on shotofjaq.org. With Shot Of Jaq being something of an experiment, I am tickled pink that our first shot has generated so much interesting discussion. I am also excited that we are seeing the beginnings of the Shot Of Jaq community forming, and we have some awesome community members already knee deep in the Shot Of Jaq spirit. Thanks so much to you all for throwing both feet in and getting involved. If you have not yet joined the conversation, go here and join us!

In the interests of making sure the Shot Of Jaq (and Severed Fifth) sound quality is top notch, yesterday we got up at 4am and went shopping on Black Friday. There I bought a new studio computer (Quad Core Athlon 2, 8GB RAM, 640GB disk, 20″ screen), new control surface (Tascam FW-1082), bought Aq a Shure X2U XLR to USB for his side of the recording (I will give him one of our Sennheiser mics) and I have some other bits on my list to upgrade.

The next episode of Shot Of Jaq will be out on Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

Sascha Manns: Wie man einen Wikipediaartikel liest

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:25:42 -0800

Diese Frage habe ich mir schon sehr oft gestellt. Neben der kürzlichen “Relevanzdiskussion” stellt sich einem Wikipedianutzer immer die Frage, ob die Inhalte wirklich wahr sind, und wie man es prüfen kann. Kris Köhntopp einer der Aktivisten um Wikipedia zu verbessern hat einen interessanten Blog Artikel geschrieben, der sich genau mit dieser Frage beschäftigt. Viel Spaß beim Lesen…
http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2695-Wie-man-einen-Wikipedia-Artikel…-liest.html

Charles Peng: Switched back to Fedora 12

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:23:22 -0800

It’s been so long a time since I switched to Ubuntu 9.04 before the release of Fedora 11, but now I finally switched back again and installed Constantine on my Eee PC 1000HE netbook. Fedora becomes better, and it works well on this little machine.

I still remember that Red Hat 9 is my very first Linux distribution that I tried when I was on college, although I knew how to install it after reading so many Linux books and magazines in our library, I had a very bad experience, because it doesn’t have a good browser. But things changed after my graduation when I installed a Ubuntu 6.06+Windows XP dual boot system on my office computer, this is the first time I started to use Firefox browser, it worked fine and most of the webpages could be displayed perfectly, and Linux systems left me a good expression since then.

One year later after I had my own job, I bought myself an HP Compaq Presario V3805AU laptop, I always planed to use a Linux distro so that I chose this one, it’s Linux-friendly enough because it has a Red-flag Linux desktop preinstalled. But Red-flag is based on KDE with a cloned Windows interface, and it’s hard to use, so I disliked it so much.

I installed Fedora 9 in my entire hard disk after erased Red-flag, because at that time I didn’t have a broadband internet connection, I had to connect to the internet with a China Mobile EDGE wireless router, so I spent a lot of time to looking for a Linux distro that supports mobile broadband, and finally I found Fedora 9, with GPRS/EDGE internet connections as it’s new features.

Both Fedora 9 and 10 worked perfectly on my laptop, but, it always has some small problems which drove me crazy as I only have some limited Linux knowledges, and can’t solve these problems myself, I switched to Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu is more stable as a desktop system, and, what I liked most is its new notify system.

Sometimes I blame myself a lot why I didn’t learn computer science and technology or something related as my major at university, I am so regret about that, because I can’t solve my own Linux computer problems, and I also don’t know what can I do for this amazing operating system.

With so many people’s hard work, Linux is becoming better than ever, especially Fedora Community, they contributed a lot to the Linux kernel and brought us new technology and new features to the Linux world one after another, I can do nothing to help them, but, I use their product, and, I can share my using experience with others, in a hope that they finally start to use it too. That’s what I can do to thank the Fedora community and all Linux developers, that’s why I am back.

Sascha Manns: openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 99 is out!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:05:51 -0800

Issue #99 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

* Dominique Leuenberger: Compitz 0.8.4
* Michal Hrusecky: Status Report – Media Wiki Theme
* Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Vim 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Vim
* Pavol Rusnak: Fedora and openSUSE Community Engagement
* Nmap 5.10BETA1 released

For a list of available translations see this page:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/99/Translations.

Stefan Seyfried: HP does not want my wireless to work

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:56:48 -0800

I’m using an rather oldish, but still functioning hp compaq nc6000. It had built in atheros wireless. Whis is a pain. Because whenever NetworkManager thinks it is a good idea to do background scanning (at least every 2 minutes, I’d guess), the network quality degrades to it being unusable. Not only drops the data rate to ~100 to 200 kbyte/second, even worse, lots of packets get lost, so that working via SSH on a remote host becomes very annoying.
(With a recent kernel. Older kernels actually regularly stopped transmitting and dropped the connection completely during such events). Sometimes, reloading the ath5k module improves the situation (or at least it feels like it does), but then, every 5 reloads or so, the machine locks up hard (no SysRQ!) when reloading ath5k.

Today, that happened again. This was when I decided that I had enough and that I would swap the card for an intel ipw2200 I had lying around here.

But HP, THOSE GREEDY BASTARDS of course thought of a way to avoid that people upgrade their hardware. After putting the card in, the machine only shows an error “104 - we want you to pay lots of money for an HP approved Wireless” and does not boot.

Searching the internet, I found out that I had two possible options: patching the BIOS or patching the ipw2200 card’s eeprom.
The second option is possible because there actually are ipw2200 cards that are “certified” by HP and they have different subvendor and subdevice IDs, so that the BIOS can detect them.

I went for a mix of all the procedures I found. The patch for ipw2200 I used is from Obi’s Homepage (thanks), also a large part of the procedure is described there, even though he had a different goal.
Which bytes I had to change was described, ironically, in the HP support forum (search for “ethtool” on the page).

So that’s what I did:

put the card into another notebook that would boot with it
build a patched ipw2200 (too bad upstream apparently does not want to take this patch)
boot an openSUSE 11.2 live ISO (from an USB stick, of course)
unload the original module, load the patched module (important)
issue the following commands:

ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf6
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10

Note that I did get errors from ethtool for every one of those commands (invalid address and others, pretty confusing ). First I thought that it did not work, but “dmesg” told me that the write function was actually called, and so I just continued.

I unloaded and reloaded the patched ipw2200 module. I did expect an eeprom checksum error, but I actually did not get one. So I also did not do the “repair_eeprom=1″ routine that Obi describes.
Put back the module in the “target” notebook.

Now I have:

02:04.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Compaq nw8240/nx8220

and so far it has been working fine.

Attention: according to the forum post in the HP forum, if your card is from the US and not from Europe, you will need

ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf5

instead of the 0xf6 for the european version.

Oh - and if you are too lazy to patch and build your own ipw2200 module - there is the “ipw2200-eepromwrite-kmp” package for 11.2 in the buildservice, project home:seife

Lydia Pintscher (Nightrose): Let’s make identi.ca and Twitter a little more KDE!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:26:02 -0800

It’s been bugging me for a while that most sites on identi.ca and Twitter look rather boring and I thought it would be nice to give them a little KDE touch. cosmonautirussi was so kind to do some cool backgrounds for KDE contributors, developers, translators and users as well as a generic one. You can just upload them to identi.ca (or any other StatusNet site) and Twitter, adjust the page background color a little to fit your taste and voila!

You can grab them on community.kde.org.

Wanna see what it looks like in action? Check out this, this, this and this.

openSUSE News: openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 99 is out!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:22:26 -0800

Issue #99 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

For a list of available translations see this page:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/99/Translations.

Zeeshan Ali: We can has Python too

noreply@blogger.com (zeenix) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:14:00 -0800

Zachary Goldberg reports:

As I've been mentioning lately I have been working on using PyGObject + GObject Introspection (recently forked, now called PyGI + PyGObject + Gobject Introspection) and have some exciting news!

I have been working on fleshing out a whole bunch of unit tests which exercise the entire GUPnP API. I hate a major roadblock in that PyGI did not support native callbacks! So, after a week or two detour I have implemented PyGI callbacks (which now work rather nicely, but need a bunch of stylistic cleanups and error checking before its pushed back upstream.. priorities!) as well as some working GUPnP demos.

My best demo so far is about 25 lines of python which:

1) Gets all devices on one network interface
2) Scans for all the services each device provides
3) If the device is GMediaRenderer and it provides an AVTransport Service (it does...) then it
3a) Stops whatever is currently playing
3b) Loads a new URI (hardcoded from my mediatomb server for now, havn't played enough with gupnp-av to dynamically get the mediatomb data -- for now!)
3c) Initiates playing

3a->3c have been tested using the synchronous GUPnP action api (send_action...) as well as the asynchronous API (begin_action.... end_action...) with callbacks!

Update: Seems this info is out-dated already, Zach has done quite some more after this.

Liang Suilong: RPMs for Firefox 3.7

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:03:07 -0800

English:

Firefox 3.6 is coming soon, nevertheless, I still can not see any TraceMonkey support for Linux x86_64. Compared with 32bit Firefox, 64bit edition of Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6 are much slower than 32bit in the JavaScript benchmark. If you open tabs of Gmail and Google Wave and Google Reader, you will obviously feel that 32bit runs more rapidly that 64bit. So I choose Chrome/Chromium as daily-used web browser because they run fast enough. When I need to open an incompatible webpage or use proxy, I return to Firefox.

These days, I found out Firefox 3.7 x86_64 runs JavaScript much faster than previous version. Unlike Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6, Firefox 3.7 gets TraceMonkey support for x86_64 platform. So we can see Firefox 3.7 has better performance. I try to run SunSpider benchmark in Firefox 3.5.5 and Firefox 3.7a1pre at the same system configuration. We can attain the strange benchmark result: Firefox 3.7 is about 1300ms while Firefox 3.5.5 is 4500ms. It hardly make another users believe it, nevertheless, it is true.

Unlike previous reports, Firefox 3.7 still keep a classical user interface. There is no change on it now. Later a new UI will be apply in Firefox 3.7. I download Firefox 3.7 from Mozilla FTP server and Build RPMs for i686 and x86_64. These are not native builds for Firefox 3.7, just repacking from binary archives. If you want to try it, please add my personal repo on fedorapeople.org. Download this file and put it into /etc/yum.repos.d/. Then you can install it via this command:

yum install firefox37

Firefox 3.7 will not cover Firefox 3.5. But actually they can not run immediately. I do not know why. I need some some guys to help me modify launch script. They seems to use the same profiles. Additionally, you should manually create a symbol for libflashplayer.so in /usr/share/firefox-3.7/plugins, Or put libflashplayer.so into /usr/share/firefox-3.7/plugins

At last, Firefox 3.7 is under development. I can not make sure that there is no bug in it. Please use it carefully.

中文：

Firefox 3.6即将到来，然而我一直看不到在64位Linux上有任何TraceMonkey的支持。对比起32位的Firefox，64位的Firefox 3.6和Firefox 3.5在JavaScript测试中要比32位慢得多。如果你打开Gmail、Google Wave和Google Reader的页面，你会明显感觉到32位Firefox会跑得比64位要快。所以我选择了Chrome/Chromium作为日常使用的浏览器，因为他们跑得足够地快。当我需要打开一个不兼容的网页或者使用代理服务器的时候，我会回到Firefox。

这段时间，我发现Firefox 3.7 x86_64跑JavaScript测试比早前的版本要快得多。不像Firefox 3.5和Firefox 3.6，Firefox 3.7在x86_64得到TraceMonkey的支持。所以Firefox 3.7拥有更好的性能。我尝试在同一系统配置下跑Firefox 3.5.5和Firefox 3.7 a1pre跑SunSpider JavaScript测试。我们会得到一个令人惊讶的结果：Firefox 3.7大约是1300ms，Firefox 3.5是4500ms。这很难让人相信结果，但是这确实是真实的。

不像早前的报道，Firefox 3.7一直保持着古典的用户界面。到现在都没有任何改变，稍候一个新UI将会应用在Firefox 3.7。我从Mozilla的FTP服务器下载了Firefox 3.7并且在i686和x86_64平台制作了RPM包。这不是原生编译的Firefox 3.7的RPM包，仅仅是重新打包了二进制压缩包。如果你想试用一下，请添加我的fedorapeople的个人源。下载这个文件并把它放置到/etc/yum.repos.d目录里。

yum install firefox37

Firefox 3.7不会覆盖掉Firefox 3.5。但是他们不能同时运行。我也不知道为什么。我需要一些人去修改Firefox 3.7的启动脚本。他们现在好像是使用相同的profiles。另外你应当在/usr/share/firefox-3.7/plugins目录内建立一个libflashplayer.so的链接，或者把libflashplayer.so放置到/usr/share/firefox-3.7/plugins目录，这样你就可以在Firefox 3.7播放Flash视频了。

最后，Firefox 3.7依然在开发中，我不担保它没有bug，请谨慎使用。

Roger Whittaker: Google ChromiumOS

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:40:00 -0800

I got the Dell image of Google ChromiumOS to work (booting from a USB stick).

To get it to work as expected, I had to log in as dell, do a Ctrl-Atl-f2, run /etc/mount_rw.sh and edit /etc/resolv.conf.

Having done that, it worked as expected (i.e. didn't do much at all...)

Ray Strode: Plymouth ⟶ X transition

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:09:50 -0800

So one of the big polish bits in the boot process is the transition from plymouth to X. In Fedora, we worked to make it as seemless as possible when we first started on the Better Startup stuff a few releases ago.

If you haven’t seen it, when boot up finishes, plymouth settles down the boot splash to a transitionable animation frame, then the mouse pointer shows up, and GDM’s background cross fades in while the login window maps and expands to show frequently logged in users. In the best case, this transition all happens without any flicker, resolution changes, black intermediate screens, or console text showing up.

The way we accomplished this was:

I gave “plymouth quit” a “–retain-splash” option which told plymouth to keep the boot splash’s contents on screen even after plymouth exits
krh and ajax added a -nr option to the X server to make X not clear the screen to black (or a weave) at start up
krh, airlied, and darktama (Ben Skeggs) added the driver backend support for -nr to intel, ati, and nouveau drivers respectiviely. Also, Bill Nottingham made -nr work with the fbdev X driver.
ajax made the ugly big “X” mouse cursor not show up by default
I made gdm stuff the screen contents to a pixmap referenced by the pseudo-standard _XROOTPMAP_ID root window property
I also made gnome-settings-daemon cross fade from the _XROOTPMAP_ID pixmap when it loads its background. This step meant we also get a nice transition from gdm to the user’s session, because it also causes a crossfade to happen from gdm’s background to the user’s background during login.

Another big piece to the puzzle was kernel modesetting. This is what makes sure the right mode is set at boot up from the start. Jesse Barnes and krh did most of the work for that in the Intel driver (based on top of the memory manager work anholt, keithp, and other Intel crew did), while airlied did it for the ati driver, and darktama did it for nouveau.

This all works pretty well these days, but one big wrinkle in the whole process is the hand off from plymouth to gdm. Plymouth exits, leaving the system in KD_GRAPHICS mode and hopes that X starts and picks up the peices. This is not a very robust design, because if X doesn’t start, the system will be stuck in KD_GRAPHICS mode and the user won’t be able to switch VTs or really do anything at all, but reboot.

Furthermore, when plymouth exits, the kernel sets the scan out buffer to the frame buffer of the console. This is because the previous scan out buffer was owned by plymouth and goes away when plymouth exits. That means in order to keep things seemless we need to copy the last frame of the animation from plymouth’s framebuffer to the console frame buffer. This extra copy is unfortunate, because it means the kernel console has to be configured the same way as plymouth, but in multihead set ups it’s not. The kernel console “clones” the ttys across all heads, forcing every head to be the same resolution. But plymouth (and X) want every head to run in native resolution. This means in multihead setups we can’t do the copy because the pixel layouts aren’t the same, so we end up filling with black instead.

I’ve wanted to improve this situation for a while, but haven’t really been able to prioritize it above other various bits of work that need to be done. Since I’m on Thanksgiving break I can, in good conscience, ignore my priority list and just work on what I want, so I decided to work on this problem a bit :-)

I just merged the “no-fbcon” branch to plymouth master. It adds a new way to “deactivate” plymouth such that it’s still on screen and idly running, but X can start and take over anyway. This combined with some gdm changes to tell plymouth to go away in the appropriate way after X is started or fails to start means we solve the robustness issues and avoid the extra fbcon copy.

It actually only took a few hours to do. I probably should have made time for it before break.

Stefan Seyfried: eXtreme uPdating

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:01:23 -0800

I had that machine sitting in my living room which was once a media player, but is now (after I implemented VDR recording playback on my satellite STB ) only used for playing back the recordings of my i4l-vbox answering machine. It was still running 10.3.
Now, having read that 10.3 was out of service, I decided to finally kill it.
So how to do that with style? Well, update it!

I removed the 10.3 repos and added the 11.0 repos. (Does anybody still remember how slow package management actually was back then? It was horrible!) I did not trust the old zypper to already having implemented a proper “zypper dup”, so I updated with the YaST FACTORY module.
At first, YaST FACTORY updater refused to do a 10.3=>11.0 update. Well, edit the SuSE-release file and voila - it thinks it’s a 11.0=>11.0 update.
Only a few Package conflicts (I had lots of stuff installed, including self-built RPMs and Packman packages) and thus half an hour waiting for the resolver, then I found out, that the packaging had switched from bzip2 to lzma at that time, so yast could not really install anything, but updating rpm manually behind YaST’s back solved that. About four hours later (this is a lowly Toshiba Tecra with P3-1000 and 256MB RAM), I had 11.0 on the machine.

To my big disappointment, everything was still working!
Ok, so remove the 11.0 repos, add the 11.1… and zypper dup you go. Now I did not even have to patch SuSE-release…
Again, a few hours later (zypper was faster on 11.0, but not as fast as today), I had an 11.1 on the machine. And still, everything was working well, there even was still KDE3 on it.

I had intended to kill the machine, so I was not satisfied.
Remove 11.1 repos, add 11.2, zypper dup….
Yes! Finally, the X server did not produce a picture on my LCD TV (which is pretty picky about the VGA input signal, but did work before) anymore. Strike! But it was easily fixed: I just removed xorg.conf and at least had a 800×600 KDE4 Desktop. Installing sax2 (it had become lost in some conflicts, which I generally solved by “remove everything”) and calling it fixed that up also.

What was actually a pity is, that no attempt had been made to import the KDE3 config (I had a few custom mime types etc, and now will have to reconfigure everything from scratch), but apart from that, the only thing I had to do was remove the kdm from KDE3 which was still installed and use the KDE4 kdm, so that logout and shutdown etc. properly work.

All in all it was pretty impressive, and I thought by myself “that’s like the stories the debian users always tell about upgrades”.

…and even though I wanted to, I will probably not get to do a fresh installation of 11.2, since all my updates went so well

But what I found out in the end was, that KDE4 is really no longer usable on such a machine. Everything was very slow and sluggish, even with eye candy turned off as much as possible. But for the projected use of this box, XFCE will do just fine.

Greg DeKoenigsberg: Rideshare goodness

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:09:59 -0800

Thanks, Steven, for setting up the airport rideshare. I'm signed up. You should too. Especially if you're flying in on Friday afternoon -- when, as it turns out, Steven and I are arriving within 10 minutes of each other.

James Ogley: The Smartphone for Linux quest ends...?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:09:04 -0800

For quite some time, I've been trying to answer the question What is the best smartphone for Linux users? I've suggested that - ironically - Windows Mobile is a solid solution and looked forward to the release of the Nokia N900 (forever delayed it currently seems).

My use case was of using Evolution for calendaring and addressbook and one of my requirements was direct sync - that is to say, you plug your phone into your computer or pair via bluetooth and off you go rather than relaying through a third-party service. By deciding to be a bit flexible on that requirement, I've come up with an answer.

Yes, direct sync is the ideal situation but frankly, it currently leaves you in the horrible situation of using Windows Mobile. My hopes for Maemo5/Conduit remain to an extent but as yet, there isn't a Maemo5 build of Conduit (or - of course - a released N900 in case I hadn't mentioned that).

The winner is: Symbian.

I currently own a Nokia N95 which runs Symbian S60v3. Symbian is now an open source platform as of Symbian^1 which means that I'm comfortable recommending it and when I'm next able to upgrade (late next month), I'll likely opt for the N97 or N97 mini both of which run ^1 (essentially S60v5) given that the N900 almost certainly either won't have been released or won't be available with a buy-with-contract discount on Orange.

So, how to go about it? Well, the solution is in the form of SyncEvolution. At the moment (0.9.x), this utilises relaying through a service like myFunambol, which I use. However, version 1.0 is slated to support direct sync making it only necessary to be slightly flexible on my requirement of direct sync. SyncEvolution works a dream and the Funambol plugin to Symbian sync also works just how one would want.

So, just to tweak the winner slightly, it's Symbian with SyncEvolution.

SyncEvolution is the sync solution in the Moblin netbook user interface so if you're running Moblin (eg by using Goblin on openSUSE), you're good to go. I'm not using Moblin but thankfully, SyncEvolution has a straight GTK+ interface available so if you're using openSUSE, you can install the syncevolution-gtk package from my GNOME repository (1-click install for openSUSE 11.2, if you're using 11.1, search for a 1-click depending on your version of GNOME).

Of course, using SyncEvolution does mean that you can use any phone supported by whichever service you choose to for synchronising (Funambol support tons) but there are reasons to prefer Symbian:

It's Open Source.
It provides SyncML over HTTP natively which means that once direct sync is supported in SyncEvolution, you're ready to go
Thanks to ModemManager, you can tether your phone to your laptop for mobile broadband (and this actually works far more easily in Linux than Windows).
It's Open Source (bears mentioning twice).

The N900 has promise, there is the prospect of SyncEvolution being built for Maemo5 allowing for relay-based sync but Maemo doesn't provide SyncML over HTTP so direct sync won't happen so to reiterate:

The best smartphone platform for Linux users is Symbian.

Jean-Christophe Baptiste: OpenSSL : CVE-2009-3555 security fix and mod_ssl client authentication breakage

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:08:50 -0800

A security advisory on OpenSSL has recently been published. Details are there and there.

It is vulnerable to a MiTM attack where the attacker can intercept and retrieve the credential to a trusted HTTPS website, by intercepting the session cookie sent back to the client.

A proof of concept of an attack against Twitter was made.

Fine. But so far, the answer was to just disable any renegociation.

This actually causes some issues with SSL session timeout and totally broke client authentication.

I got into problems because of the latter. I am using client authentication for some location of my web server, and I recently could not connect anymore to these with the following log in apache :
[Tue Nov 24 16:56:15 2009] [debug] ssl_engine_kernel.c(1912): OpenSSL:Exit: error in SSLv3 read client hello A [Tue Nov 24 16:56:15 2009] [error] [client x.x.x.x] Re-negotiation handshake failed: Not accepted by client!?

I first was not aware of the openssl patch and tried almost anything possible. My focus was, of course, on the certificate and the client.
But, a nice guy on IRC #suse, Stittel, had a good hunch and suggested me to look at the CVE-2009-3555 fix.

After more tests, it was quickly confirmed to work well with older versions of OpenSSL (as shipped in Debian Lenny).
Finally, I downgraded the OpenSSL version on my openSUSE box to a version prior to the CVE-2009-3555 fix and it just worked fine.

Then, I dig into it and found a lot of interesting reports there and there. So far it is a real mess.
In short, the breakage will stay as long as browsers don’t also include a patch to avoid renegotiation.
So far, I could not find a browser that does include a patch.
If anyone reading it knows a version that does it, please let me know.

Meanwhile, you have actually the choice between :

low security by deactivating client authentication on your server
low security by keeping a vulnerable version of OpenSSL

As my server is not very exposed, I chose the latter, but that’s not satisfying. It is not recommended, but if like me you need to use client authentication with mod_ssl on openSUSE 11.2, do :

% zypper install --from repo-oss openssl openssl-certs libopenssl0_9_8 libopenssl0_9_8-32bit

where repo-oss is the alias to the 11.2 release (without updates) on your system.

What a brutal way to fix an issues without much notification and consideration to the users ! Even the log message is wrong and just confusing the administrator…

PS 1 : thanks again to Stittel for the good hint (I hope you will come by here) and to the always nice and helpful #suse channel in general

PS 2 : bug reported on openSUSE bugzilla

Thomas Vander Stichele: Python ugliness

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:06:11 -0800

I usually tend to think of Python as the discerning gentleman’s programming language: well-behaved, well-documented, people take care of the code written. I like the batteries-included approach and assume that the battery code in the standard library is well-written. “import this” is a vision statement directly included in the language – it’s hard to get more stylish than that.

I got an eye-opener this weekend however. I was still on my quest to get desktopcouch and ubuntuone working on Fedora. While wresting with this bug and doing things that I usually consider a hanging offense (changing /usr-installed code by adding prints to figure out where the craziness was coming from) I finally drilled down to the exception-raising reason. It all boiled down to a single line of code in httplib.py:
def __init__(self, host, port=None, key_file=None, cert_file=None, strict=None, timeout=socket._GLOBAL_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT):
where socket.py contains
_GLOBAL_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT = object()

So, in a nutshell, httplib2.py tracebacks because of this new object, which isn’t a valid argument to sock.settimeout()

Now, I’m pretty sure I’m running into this problem because I’m doing “bad” things to some of the stdlib, pulling in bits I need to make ubuntuone (coded on a 2.6.3 python where my Fedora 11 comes with 2.6) work.

But pulling the cover off like this did point out this one object that:

seems to be intended to be private, but it gets referenced from other stdlib modules
comes with no documentation at all
comes with not a single comment explaining *why* it’s there, or *why* it’s ok to just create a completely empty and useless “object” that you can’t even trace the origin of (I had to override __setattr__ on some class to figure out what the anonymous object was, and where it was being set from, to find it)

Maybe I’m oldfashioned, but this leaves me disappointed. This one line breaks beauty, explicitness, and readability that is included in the Zen of Python.

The only attempt at explaining I found is this.

Any Python guru want to set me straight on why this isn’t the incredibly ugly wart on stdlib that I consider it to be ?

Meanwhile I’ll go digging in svn to see when it was added to 2.6 and why.

Carlos (casep) Sepulveda: Yo ya voté!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:55:21 -0800

"Your vote has been recorded, thank you!"

Para votar por acá:

Fedora 13 Release Name

Más información respecto de los nombres:
Name suggestions for Fedora 13

Yo voy por Goddard, luego Langstrom. Y tu?

by Casep!

Marcela Mašláňová: RPM scriptlet

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:59:16 -0800

The main part of rpm is clear. There is some prep, build, install, clean, check and files
and functionality of these are obvious. But sometimes the specfile includes also
scriptlets.

The easy ones are:
%pre - run before an installation of a package,
%post - run after an installation,
%preun - run before a package is removed
%postun - run after a package is removed.

Nice and clean, but what if an update is needed? Now they are executed scriptlets from both releases of package:
%pre - from a new package
%post - new
%preun - old
%postun - old
Since %preun/postun are used, the spec might break an update
e.g. if %postun is touching a configuration file, which was already configured in post by new the release.

Let's check these scriptles on an example - on my favourite package cronie.
%prep
# not needed here

%post
# usual operation - adding a daemon into services
/sbin/chkconfig --add crond

%post anacron
# all changes in scriptlets should be checked
[ -e /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily ] || touch /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily
[ -e /var/spool/anacron/cron.weekly ] || touch /var/spool/anacron/cron.weekly
[ -e /var/spool/anacron/cron.monthly ] || touch /var/spool/anacron/cron.monthly

%preun
# test is a must. The return value tells whether the daemon must be stopped.
if [ "$1" = "0" ]; then
service crond stop >/dev/null 2>&1 ||:
/sbin/chkconfig --del crond
fi

%postun
# different check, but it also checks the return value.
# In this case is controlled whether daemon was up or not before the update.
if [ "$1" -ge "1" ]; then
service crond condrestart > /dev/null 2>&1 ||:
fi

In these parts are often controlled return values of daemons, but the application has to
return correct LSB compliant values. Otherwise this check is useless. Another necessity is
command ||: Something unexpected could happened and the failure would be printed on
standard output, which could upset an user.

And now the triggers. They need an option - package with/out specified version.
The most common example is, when one package is obsoleted by another and simple
adding provides isn't enough:
Provides: vixie-cron = 4:4.4
Obsoletes: vixie-cron <= 4:4.3
# the old configuration file has to be removed:
%triggerun -- cronie < 1.4.1
# After every update from a rpm smaller than cronie-1.4.1, create a backup of crontab and remove a content
# if it matches the standard configuration.
cp -a /etc/crontab /etc/crontab.rpmsave
sed -e '/^01 \* \* \* \* root run-parts \/etc\/cron\.hourly/d'\
-e '/^02 4 \* \* \* root run-parts \/etc\/cron\.daily/d'\
-e '/^22 4 \* \* 0 root run-parts \/etc\/cron\.weekly/d'\
-e '/^42 4 1 \* \* root run-parts \/etc\/cron\.monthly/d' /etc/crontab.rpmsave > /etc/crontab
exit 0

%triggerun -- vixie-cron
# For every update from vixie-cron to cronie, copy the lock, because the daemon
# shouldn't be restart without a really good reason.
cp -a /var/lock/subsys/crond /var/lock/subsys/cronie > /dev/null 2>&1 ||:

# if the lock exist, the daemon must be restarted (it was running in the past).
# add new daemon into chkconfig everytime, when cronie was upgraded from vixie-cron
%triggerpostun -- vixie-cron
/sbin/chkconfig --add crond
[ -f /var/lock/subsys/cronie ] && ( rm -f /var/lock/subsys/cronie ; service crond restart ) > /dev/null 2>&1 ||:

The order of triggers how they are executed:
%pre - of new package
%post - make some things to newly created files
%triggerin - all triggerins which are part of other rpms
%triggerin - of this new package
%triggerun - all triggeruns which are part of other rpms
%triggerun - of this new package
%preun - of old release of this rpm
%postun - of old release of this rpm
%triggerpostun - of old release of this rpm
%triggerpostun - of this new package

And nice example again. There exist packages A and B. They share one configuration file.
The A-1 contains:
%triggerin -- B which fill config
%triggerun -- B which removes content of config
%preun which removes content of config

The B-1 contains:
%post which fill config
%preun removes content of config

Every update of B calls triggerun from A which means removing content of the config. On the first look,
it could be solved by removing triggerun from A. But what happen every after update is:
rpm -Uvv A-2 B-2
update files from A-2
update files from B-2
triggerin from A-2 -> fill config
triggerun from A-1 -> remove content of config

So, the update to A-2 break things and next update to A-3 will be working flawlesly. And this is
downside of triggers. One mistake can cause problems which can't be fixed correctly during one update.
It needs another workaround with new scriptlets.

Remove triggerun from A for next succesful updates. In B must be made bigger changes.
%post
# backup of config
cp -p config config.backup

%triggerun -- A < 2
# rewrite backup with previous
mv config.backup config

%preun
if [ $1 -eq 0 ] ; then
remove_content_of_config()
fi
[ -f config.backup ] && rm -rf config.backup || :

This solution fix the issue immediately after update, but there is lot of dependencies and it could
create unexcpeted problems in the future. Also it must be updated both packages together in one command.
Otherwise the config will be empty again.

Using triggers is easy, but nex time I'd rather pass on fixing them ;-)

Remi Collet: Reviews of the week

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:45:00 -0800

Submitted : Bug 542075 - Review Request: php-pear-Net-URL2 - Class for parsing and handling URL Bug 542077 - Review Request: php-pear-HTTP-Request2 - Provides an easy way to perform HTTP requests Bug 542084 - Review Request: php-pear-HTTP-OAuth - Implementation of the OAuth spec Bug 542087 - Review Request: php-pear-Services-Twitter - PHP... Lire Reviews of the week

Jos Poortvliet: KOffice meeting

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:27:14 -0800

Had a good flight yesterday, now I'm in Oslo. The KOffice meeting has started. Was a bit late this morning - The Other Jos had put his phone (with alarm set) next to my bed. He needs to do that to force himself to get up and turn it off. However, I didn't need to get out of bed - just smash the phone. Ok, didn't do that, but I did turn it of quickly, turned around and continued sleeping. The Other Jos didn't even wake up. We had to take a cab, shared with Jstaniek and lukas Tvrdy.

Aaah well. Be on the lookout for an article later today, it's under review now ;-)

Zoltan Hoppar: Inspiring distribution - TurNkey linux

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:53:00 -0800

I have followed some links what my friend has suggested, and I'm well surprised. This *buntu based specialised distro called Turnkey linux has many things together to worth to try it out. This is an administrators dream, it has everithing on one usb key, what I really miss from this compilation is some forensics, security tools, and data recovering tools. If they sometime add these missing tools, then this could be ultimate key in admins pocket. It could be good to see this Fedora based, and more. We have Spacewalk, and several high quality software what is a must to this list.
I think this compilation on a moblin base, moblin UI with a small netbook really could be a hit. What do you think guys?

Check it out: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

Erich Schubert: Tracking Google image search in Analytics

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:52:00 -0800

I do not really understand why they don't support this themselves, but Google Analytics will not track keywords for Google image search. Instead it just shows up as "referrer". A site I'm webmaster for, Swing and the City, gets a lot of image search exposure (funnily for an image that is gone since August, Google also needs to work on their index, too), so it was a bit odd to have images.google.com show up as top referrer but not "organic search".

Here's the code I use to fix this:

var r=document.referrer;
if(r.search(/images.google/)!=-1 && r.search(/prev/)!=-1){ var e=new RegExp("images.google.([^\/]+).*&prev=([^&]+)"); var m=e.exec(r); pt._addOrganic("images.google","q",true); pt._setReferrerOverride("http://images.google."+m[1]+unescape(m[2]));
};
pt._addOrganic("maps.google","q",true);
pt._addOrganic("forestle.org","q",true);
pt._trackPageview();

Note that image search is more complicated than the maps and forestle search engines I also add for keyword tracking. The original query is encoded in the "prev" parameter, and the easiest (or only?) way to get working tracking is to use the ReferrerOverride function of analytics.

Note: this is not a straight copy & paste, since I use this code in a compressed and encoded (for injection into the page via DOM ops) form. So no guarantee of syntax completeness. You'll need to adjust it to your variable naming anyway (I use "pt" instead of "pageTracker"). This is just to show you the use of unescape on the "prev" parameter for this purpose.

Julian Aloofi: New eViacam packages

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:49:58 -0800

eViacam, the app that moves your mouse pointer according to your head movement, has released a new version.

I wrote about eViacam earlier. If you want to try it on Fedora, just check out the packages over here

Edit: The source RPMS are here

Jeroen van Meeuwen: NL Release Party (in English)

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:37:57 -0800

Weeeee! Release party is ongoing!

It's more of a socializing thing then it is about Fedora 12, really, but what the heck ;-)

Also, we're speaking English rather then Dutch ;-)

Steven Parrish: FUDCon rideshare from the airport

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:23:23 -0800

Are you flying into Toronto Pearson International? If so you have 2 options to get to the hotel.

[1] Take a bus - cheap but takes time, up to 2.5 hours
[2] Take a taxi - quick but costs 35.00CAD

So if you wan't to save some $$ and are willing to share a taxi, go here and add your info to the table. You can then check back later and find those who are arriving close to you and arrange to share a taxi.

Looking forward to seeing you all there.

Steven

Debarshi Ray: Gnote 0.6.3 released!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:58:00 -0800

Gnote 0.6.3 "The days are short" - 2009/11/28

This is a bug-fix release of the 0.6.x series.

Fixes:

* 586541 - Crashes on hitting enter twice before URLs
* 596138 - Better tooltip for panel applet

Translations:

* Updated translations:
- Bengali India (bn_IN)
- Chinese Simplified (zh_CN)
- French (fr)
- German (de)
- Italian (it)
- Kannada (kn)
- Punjabi (pa)
- Russian (ru)
- Swedish (sv)
- Tamil (ta)
- Telugu (te)
- Thai (th)
* Added translations:
- Galician (gl)
- Indonesian (id)
- Oriya (or)
- Polish (pl)
- Portuguese Brazil (pt_BR)
- Slovenian (sl)

Download, Home Page, Support:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnote/0.6/
http://live.gnome.org/Gnote
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gnote

Ariya Hidayat: putu, kelepon, terang bulan

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:23:19 -0800

While enjoying this vacation, I managed to steal few hours to do some fun coding. Nothing spectacular, but it yielded something I will surely share in the near future. However, since I am still in the mood of bombing the planet again, here is another post with food pictures.

Something else we were glad to taste during our extremely short visit to Bandung were Putu and Kelepon, typically sold at the price of 1 EUR for 25 pieces. They are basically rice cake filled with palm sugar and served with grated coconut. Putu is steamed, while kelepon is boiled. The latter is also colored using pandan leaves.

While sampling culinary specialties means that we do not cook quite often, when the opportunity presents itself, it is of course a good feeling to eat something home-made once a while. Here is one: Terang Bulan (literally: bright moon). It is some sort of pancake, very similar to Martabak except Terang Bulan is filled with sugar, sprinkles, condensed milk, cheese, and the likes. Hence, it is also known as Martabak Manis (literally: sweet Martabak), a term that is somehow I dislike (because language-wise it is unnecessary as there exists a good name for that and thus it extends and pollutes the meaning of Martabak with a very weak reason).

The recipe? Check what this lady has posted. Terang Bulan is sweet and healthy (reduce the amount of sugar if in doubt), it makes for a good snack in the afternoon.

Last but not least: Eid Mubarak to everyone!

Chani Armitage (Chani): The Future of Activities

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:18:52 -0800

Since last Akademy, several plasma people have been thinking about activities, and virtual desktops, and What It All Really Means. We had some good discussions at akademy, and at tokamak, and online too. KWin and Nepomuk people were involved as well, although I wish that KWin guy (..mgraesslin? sorry, I suck at names) had been able to stay at tokamak longer. :)

We’ve emerged with a new vision of what activities are all about, and I’d like to share that vision so that I don’t get blank stares when I mention how much I wish I had activities already. ;)

Where We’re Going

See, what we have right now, that we call activities… they’re not what I think of as activities any more. They’re just desktop containments, groups of plasmoids. They can have a name, but nothing makes use of that yet. What I think of as an “activity” is the entirety of what I’m working on at the moment – be it a kde-related project or a university course or just reading lots of comics. :) This activity includes several windows from several applications. It includes files needed for the project. It includes a set of plasmoids, like the one I put my list of math questions on and the calculator plasmoid to go with it. At times it includes only *part* of an application: show me school email folders when I’m doing schoolwork, hide the KDE lists so that I’m less tempted to procrastinate. ;) Some activities have lots of associated windows, and since I can’t carry around a spare monitor with my laptop, I’ll use virtual desktops to have more “space” to lay out my windows for that activity.

When I’m working on one activity, I don’t want to be distracted by other activites. Everything related to the other activities is out of my way, sitting on *those* activities only. If my hardware isn’t up to leaving all my activities running at the same time, or if I just want to pack one away because I won’t be needing it for a while, I can do so, and everything that’s no longer needed will be closed. When I want that activity again I can load it up and return right where I left off.

If I open a document tagged for a certain activity, it’ll be associated with that activity by default; if there’s no obvious association then the new window will be available on all activities until I choose to associate it. Windows can be associated with any number of activities, so I can have anki associated with both of the courses I use it for and still not be bothered by it when I’m hacking on plasma.

Now, that vision is fairly bold. It includes a lot of features that don’t exist at the moment. You will *not* see all these features in KDE 4.4, not by a long shot. However, a lot of the framework already exists. Code was recently committed to Nepomuk to represent activites there; and from there, any program can ask what activity we’re on and update itself to fit. KWin code can be written to hide windows that don’t belong. Plasma will have a new bar (a bit like the new add-widgets bar probably) for managing actvities (not until 4.5 now, I’m afraid). Saving little mini-sessions of windows along with the activity is something I’m going to investigate over christmas (hoping it won’t be too painful :).

There are still details that haven’t been filled in (like, what happens to the activity-per-desktop setting? is it possible to have a mode where activities and virtual desktops act as one?), but we have another tokamak in february, and I’m sure more good ideas will come from that. Once things actually begin to take shape, more of the pieces should fall into place, and in the end we’ll be another step closer to a workspace that enables you to get work done instead of having to be worked around. :)

How We Get There

Here’s a rough roadmap for when I expect these features to show up. It’s not set in stone, of course; we could get an awesome volunteer who goes and does half the work in a few weeks, or we could lose a key person to other commitments and not be able to get it done as fast… but I’m hoping it’ll go somewhat vaguely like this:

4.4
Plasma still has a ZUI, although the only feature not reachable from elsewhere is dragging a widget between activities. Nepomuk advertises which activity the user is on, but no applications are listening yet.

4.5
Windows can be associated with activities; those windows will only show on the activities they’re associated with. Plasma will have an activity manager instead of a ZUI. Saving and loading the plasma side of activities will work, but windows won’t go with them.

4.6
Windows will be saved and restored with the activity. Applications will start offering the ability to show data specific to the current activity. Experiments with automatically associating new windows to the right activity begin.

4.7
???

4.8
Profit! ;)

So, it’s probably going to take a while – but I think it’ll be really cool, and really useful… almost every day now I’m wishing I could organize my stuff by activity instead of having lots of windows all mixed together… even with 6 virtual desktops :P there’s just not enough flexibility in what we have now.

Remi Collet: thunderbird-enigmail-1.0-0.1.cvs20091121

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:31:00 -0800

A new RPM of Enigmail extension version 1.0 (CVS snapshot of 2009-11-21) for thunderbird 3 RC1 is available in remi repository for Fedora ≤ 10 and in rpmfusion (testing) for Fedora ≥ 11

yum --enablerepo=remi install thunderbird-enigmail Or download from the repository This RPM will also be available in RPM Fusion for Fedora 11 and 12 when Thunderbird 3.0rc1 will hit the Fedora repository.... Lire thunderbird-enigmail-1.0-0.1.cvs20091121

Remi Collet: Thunderbird 3 RC1

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:10:00 -0800

RPM of first Release Candidate of next major version of Mozilla Foundation messaging client is available in remi repository for Fedora ≤ 10.

WARNING : a backup of your profile (.thunderbird directory) seems mandatory. Start by reading : Thunderbird 3 RC1 Release Notes As always : yum --enablerepo=remi update thunderbird The enigmail and lightning extensions are also available. This new version introduce some new features, including the New Search (this can be disabled). Build... Lire Thunderbird 3 RC1

Sujith H (sujith_h): KDE Contribution – 3