Planet Mandriva

ok, maybe the title was a bit too much dramatic - especially in those days. :-)

i like playing board games, and my wife and i discovered recently pandemic, from z-man games. it is a tremendous cooperative game, where players allies to eradicate 4 diseases. but the infections spread out, and if you aren't fast enough, you end up with a global pandemic - and loose...

it is really addictive, so i decided to write a perl module games::pandemic implementing a clone of this board game, with all its rules. it was also a good occasion to learn moose, dist::zilla and other modern perl stuff. at least, this goal is already fulfilled! :-)

i'm also using poe and tk (i know, i know). i just published the first public release, version 0.4.0. it already implements all the player actions, and here's a snapshot of a game:

of course it isn't finished, but i'm pretty happy of the result (even if the gui might change in the future). i aim for a v1.0.0 playable alone, and then allow networked game...

the code is available on github if you want to help - even "only" translating strings is welcome!

so, expect to hear more about pandemic on this blog. and while waiting for this perl version to be complete, i recommend you to buy a pandemic board game: you won't regret it...

Você já deve ter notado que ouve uma atualização do KDE4 para a versão 4.2.4 no Mandriva 2009.1, com essa atualização veio também uma nova versão do Amarok.

Essa versão do Amarok já é mais manipulável, tanto que deixei o meu Amarok com a aparência do Amarok1.5 do KDE3, caso queira fazer o mesmo siga os passos:

Primeiro execute esses dois comandos como usuário em um terminal:

• cd ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok/playlist_layouts/
• wget http://warever.info/sr/Uploads/bedi.xml

Agora abra o Amarok, e no Menu Principal dele selecione:

• Configurações >> ‘Configurar Amarok’, na tela que abrir marque a opção “Esconder a área de Contexto” e clique em Ok para sair.

Agora, na interface principal do Amarok, procure pela ícone de chave Inglesa que fica embaixo a direita, clique nela e selecione a opção ‘bedi’ Assim que fizer isso o Amarok vai ficar com a aparência da screenshot acima.

Well, the title says it all . Yep, it is true – after 5 years, 3 journal publications, 7 conference publications and 1 book chapter, I am finally a PhD .

Update: a short description about the nature of the thesis is here

Since two days, I have merged the main servers used by two research laboratories at work. One server was an old Linux server which really needed a hardware upgrade, and the other one was a Mac Pro machine running a flaky OS X Leopard. The new server is of course running Linux: Debian Lenny.

It was a very interesting experience: working out procedures to migrate the mailboxes (from Dovecot on the Linux server and Cyrus on the Mac server to Cyrus on the new server), finding out how to set up one NIC in two different subnets (especially the routing is a little bit tricky), getting all services hooked up to LDAP and managed by GOSA, getting dhcpd to do exactly what we want in a shared-network set up, and much more.

The new server is a HP DL185 G5 with an AMD Opteron quad core CPU and 8 GB of RAM and hosts two KVM virtual machines, one for public services and another one running internal services. You can visit the two websites, which are also hosted on this machine of course, of the concerned research labs:

• Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• Computational Modeling Lab

Maybe in the not too far away future, I should try to move the services hosted on the underpowered desktop machine running this website, also to a virtual machine…

While I've done a bit of pavucontrol hacking, the most interesting stuff is happening in pulse itself, specifically in relation to better KDE support...

 

KDE has a fairly robust audio framework these days. It's still got several kinks and missing features, but it's a good basis for apps going forward. Sadly pulse has had a pretty rough ride here. There are two "backends" in common usage with Phonon on Linux (it has configurable backends originally intended to allow cross platform support - e.g. DirectX on windows and QT on Mac OS). Personally, I think that this is a bad idea - while I support diversity, having a single backend that is subsequently developed by everyone and made rock solid is IMO more important than diversity - certianly in the initial stages. There are also VLC and mplayer backends too... I think this just muddies the water, regardless of the quality of these specific parts.

 

QT originally developed a GStreamer based backend for use on Linux. This is, for me, the right approach as the GStreamer library seems ideally suited for this. Unfortantely the KDE community didn't really pick up on this and rather than develop and improve the GStreamer backend (which was pretty early stage and could definitely done with improvement), a Xine based backend was created instead. While this works fine for audio decoding, I don't think that this is the right approach longer term, but such is life.

The sad thing is that Pulse support in Xine is not that great right now and causes a lot of problems for people. Improving this support will go a long, long way to gaining better acceptance of PulseAudio by the KDE community.

Speaking of which, this is where the rest of my interest lies - improving KDE integration.

Phonon has a settings GUI that lists various output devices, including those not currently connected, and allows the user to rank the devices in order of preference. These "devices" also include output special output drivers such as  the PulseAudio plugin. Now as pulse is a complete management system, it makes very little sense to include it like any other physical device and order them - when a user uses pulse on their system, they want to use it for everything (of course they may choose not to use pulse at all and that's fine too - even if I wouldn't recommend it!). In Mandriva we've long since patched the settings GUI to detect if the user wants to use pulse and simply hide all the other devices - the user is directed to use pavucontrol to move their streams around. This works OK, but it's clearly not the ultimate solution! Any self respecting KDE zealot would never run pavucontrol (it's a GTK app!) and while my own desktop is a horrible mix of just about every DE under the sun, I appreciate many people want to be "pure"!

So what do I want to see? Well, when it's in use, I'd like to off load pretty much all the handling of audio devices to pulse. It should take care of handling the device preferences and the automatic switching to higher priority devices when they become available and/or are reordered. The routing system in pulse is alreay setup to do a lot of funky things routing wise (like automatically moving music streams to RAOP devices, or VOIP streams to Bluetooth headsets), although a manual priority list is not currently supported. I am aiming to create such support for a priority list in pulse and expose it via a protocol extension. In the Gnome case, it's likely that this priority list either completely masked from the user and the existing routing stuff is used in it's stead, or that said existing routing stuff is evolved to just become a manager for managing the priority list internally. The final design decisions here are not finalised, but there will be some sort of working solution that will present itself!

In the mean time, I've started development on "module-device-manager" which acheives the rather simple goal of remembering all the past and present devices pulse has seen and allow querying of that list. As a neat little side effect, it can be used to edit the descriptions given to devices so for shits and giggles I implemented this renaming support in pavucontrol.

 Here is a quick screenie:

 

As I added support for changing card profiles in PulseAudio, now that pulse supports "ports" it's time for me to get my developer hat on again!

 

So ports are used to control which mixer is used and other such gubbins. It can be used to select the recording source - e.g. if recording from Mic or Line in. It can also be used at the output side when your hardware supports jack sensing and has different volume controls for headphones verses built in speakers.

 

Changing a port on a sink is pretty much the same as changing a card profile - the UI is sucpiciously similar!

Please note, that if your device does not have any ports then you wont see any change in the UI.

who never forgot to list a prereq in their makefile.pl / build.pl / whatever? it happens to me on a regular basis.

now that i started using dist::zilla, prereqs are not listed in a build script, but in dist zilla configuration file. but the problem is the same: prereqs are listed manually. and doing stuff manually sucks.

i had to do something. so i used dist-zilla's plugin infrastructure and just uploaded dist::zilla::plugin::autoprereq. just add:

[AutoPrereq]

in your dist.ini, and it will automatically find your prereqs for dist::zilla to use.

the parsing is somehow very rough: it will just find the lines beginning by use or require. for more advanced / hackish stuff, dist::zilla::plugin::prereq is still available. i still think that it should cover 80+% of the cases. i considered using module::info, but it evals the modules to find the prereqs and the result is damn slow... and speed was more important imo.

note that i plan to add the possibility to add modules manually, in order to add missing modules (or maybe we can use both prereq and autoprereq?), and a skip option to trim modules that should not be added to the list of prereqs.

also, i may change the algorithm used to find prereqs: maybe ppi will be fast enough? we'll see.

but in the meantime, just enjoy not writing anymore those prereqs by hand! :-)

I'm currently in UK for the week-end and this morning my French mobile phone operator (SFR) sent me a wonderful SMS: WAP sessions within European Union are charged 1.20 euros for the first 50kB and then 5 euros per MB. I was so happy to learn that the prices are still crazy...

Then a friend pointed me to this Europe press release. It tells that starting on July 1st, the maximum price in Europe will be €1/MB, then it will decrease to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011. SFR had not the nice idea to inform me about this price drop (5 times cheaper) which will happen in 34 hours...

This decision also tells that sending SMS in Europe will not be charged more than 0.11€ (before VAT). That explains why SFR was so proud to annouce me one month ago that starting on July 1st they will decrease the price of SMS in Europe from 0.30€ to 0.13 (VAT included).

I hope the 4th mobile license will be given soon and real competition will enter French mobile market, so that we don't need European laws to have reasonable prices (mobile prices in UK are so low compared to France...).

Time has come for the first msec release since Mandriva 2009.1!

This time we have several improvements, such as:

• support for audit plugins
• more msec auditing checks
• improved auditing logging
• and, of course, bugfixes.

So let me introduce some details about each one of them.

Support for audit plugins

You may remember that msec shipped with Mandriva 2009.1 introduced support for plugins infrastructure (take a look at your /usr/share/msec/plugins/ directory to see some examples). This new msec, which will be shipped with Mandriva 2010, also introduces auditing plugins.

Well, you might be asking what the ..? what is the difference between those plugins?, so let me clarify it a bit.

Msec has two main functionalities:

• Security configuration
• Security auditing

The security configuration is what you configure using msecgui or using security levels – basically, you say what settings should be used on your machine for ssh, user logins, and all kind of system configuration. The security auditing are those background checks that run daily on your machine, to determine what has changed since the last run and let you know about that.

In old msec, this security auditing was performed by security.sh, security_check.sh and diff_check.sh, so we had just three large and complex files with a lot of duplicated code. With new msec version, everything was split to reduce code duplication, improve readability and simplify plugins creation.

Let me show you a sample plugin which checks for changes in system users:

    #!/bin/bash
    # msec: check for changes in local users

    # check if we are run from main script
    if [ -z "$MSEC_TMP" -o -z "$INFOS" -o -z "$SECURITY" -o -z "$DIFF" ]; then
            # variables are set in security.sh and propagated to the subscripts
            echo "Error: this check should be run by the main msec security check!"
            echo "       do not run it directly unless you know what you are doing."
            return 1
    fi

    # files to log the list of today's and yesterday's, and difference between them
    USERS_LIST_TODAY="/var/log/security/users_list.today"
    USERS_LIST_YESTERDAY="/var/log/security/users_list.yesterday"
    USERS_LIST_DIFF="/var/log/security/users_list.diff"

    # update yesterday's list
    if [[ -f ${USERS_LIST_TODAY} ]]; then
        mv ${USERS_LIST_TODAY} ${USERS_LIST_YESTERDAY};
    fi

    # check for changes in users
    if [[ ${CHECK_USERS} == yes ]]; then
        getent passwd | cut -f 1 -d : | sort > ${USERS_LIST_TODAY}
        Diffcheck ${USERS_LIST_TODAY} ${USERS_LIST_YESTERDAY} ${USERS_LIST_DIFF} "local users"
    fi

that’s it. You just drop this file into /usr/share/msec/scripts/01_check_for_users.sh and this check will be executed every time msec security checks are run. The security log will be updated, the diff check mail will be created and mailed (along with all other checks), and it will be working automatically from now on.

More msec auditing checks

A few additional msec auditing checks were added:

• CHECK_FIREWALL — checks for changes in iptables configuration
• CHECK_USERS — checks for changes in local users (most of its code was shown above actually)
• CHECK_GROUPS — checks for changes in local groups
• FIX_OWNER — if unowned files are found on the system, this check gives the opportunity to change their ownership to nobody/nogroup, instead of blindly doing it automatically
• CHECK_RPM_PACKAGES — checks for changes in installed RPM packages
• CHECK_RPM_INTEGRITY — checks all the installed packages for changed files. Both those checks were run before under the CHECK_RPM check, but, as they are quite expensive, these two new checks were introduced instead

If you are using cooker or 2010 alpha, these options will not be added automatically to your /etc/security/msec/security.conf configuration file. The best way to experiment with them is by using msecgui, or running msec -f standard or msec -f secure to install default configuration for standard and secure levels.

Besides those items, I was thinking on an option to check for changes in PAM authentication, check for failed login attempts and support for rkhunter. And, as always, if you have any idea on some other functionality that should be interesting to have in msec, feel free to comment!

Improved auditing logging

The logging format of /var/log/security.log was changed to be compatible with syslog-based logging. This should make it easier for system applications to parse it, and for administrator to examine its contents. Now it is way easier to find information by date, kind of message and check type.

Other ideas

Among other ideas for msec I thought on the following:

• msec supports an arbitrary number of custom security levels, but msecgui only supports two basic ones (standard and secure). It could be nice to have a combobox to select a custom profile..
• gui for TOMOYO security framework, since the AppArmor project looks quite stone-cold dead. This is already a work in progress, so probably I’ll post some update on this later.
• Support for administrator-supplied rules for security and diff checks. For example, to exclude everything matching ‘/var/tmp’ from any kind of checks and reports, or excluding network ports from 3000 to 5000 from open port checks.

Besides that, there is a number of bugfixes (which are going to be backported to 2009.1 shortly).

So msec is definitely is alive and getting better and better. Stay tuned for more news!

so i started using moose like all the cool kids today. it turns out to be quite nice to use. declaring an attribute is as easy as:

has foo => ( is=>'ro', ... );

and since i'm also using poe, i was glad to find the illicit love child of moose and poe - aka moosex::poe. declaring an event without any fuss:

event frobnize => sub { say $_[0]->foo };

but when your module grows to have lots of attributes and poe events, it's difficult to go directly to a given definition in the file.

readers of this blog know that i'm using padre (the perl ide), but neither the sub nor the outline views can help. indeed, if you look the code snippets above, there is no traditional sub definition... syntaxic sugar is nice, but it means the tools need to be aware of them.

this was clearly an itch to scratch... i had a look at padre's outline code, and after some help from alias, here's the result:

the patch is surprisingly small: around 20 lines for attribute detection, and the same for event detection... that's the beauty of having cpan modules at hand - the great ppi in this case.

(note: the feature is in trunk currently. you'll have to wait 0.38 release)

so, try padre. tell us which feature it lacks. or how can we make it the modern perl editor, the one that would be recommended alongside moose and others.

I come at the Poulsbo problem from, pretty much, a plain old ‘frustrated user with the time to try and build random things’ perspective. The redoubtable Matthew Garrett comes at it from the ‘equally frustrated, very smart kernel developer’ perspective. His post on the mess is well worth reading for a different angle on the whole deal.

An update on the situation, BTW: I haven’t worked on cleaning up the packages for the driver for F11, as I said I would, because of some later experience with it. For both me and a couple of others who’ve successfully built and got it working, it causes the system to hang solid, quite reliably, about half an hour after you turn it on. Which is a bit of a big problem. With benchmarking, it also seems to be slow even for basic 2D operations, almost as slow as the vesa driver; so it’s not providing much of a benefit besides the RandR 1.2 support for external monitors.

An email I got from within Intel hints that some of the proprietary special sauce is required even for basic 2D acceleration to work right. I can’t find any indication of this in the logs, but it may be that - even though I sucked as much of the proprietary stuff as I could into the packages - I missed some, or it somehow doesn’t quite play right, and hence the 2D acceleration isn’t working. I’m not sure.

So for now I’m just using the vesa driver and sucking it up. Sigh. BTW, through this whole three week UK trip I’ll be doing all my work from the P. So far this is going pretty well, despite the slow graphics!

I may be missing something here (be great if I am), but it seems to me that the content of the Ubuntu Wiki - which contains some great stuff - is not licensed under one of the common ’shareable’ licenses, like CC, GFDL or OPL. Neither the front page nor any of the several random pages of content I checked has a license declaration that I could find, and the “Legal information” link in the footer takes you to the general ubuntu.com legal info page. So as far as I can tell, the license on that page - which is basically “for anything other than personal non-commercial use, apply to Canonical” - applies. That’s a bit unfortunate, and against the open source spirit of collaboration, if it’s true. I had a couple of people check my sanity on this one, and asked in #ubuntu-doc, and no-one could find anything to the contrary.

I got onto this by looking at the Ubuntu debugging procedures page, which is great. We’re looking at improving the Fedora wiki pages on what information to include when reporting bugs on particular components, and it would make sense to just re-use the Ubuntu community’s work here rather than spend time re-do it all ourselves which could more usefully be spent elsewhere. But if I’m right, we can’t.

If anyone knows that I’m wrong here (or can explain why there isn’t a less restrictive license, if I’m right), please do comment. Thanks!

Well, this question appeared quite frequently to me. However, I never bothered with it, as I was either on a LAN, or had a different source from which I could resume using wget, or a file was sufficiently small to redownload it again. However, this time these approaches did not work:

• The file was big (a DVD ISO)
• The only way to access it was over a SSH connection
• The only authentication method it supported was public key authentication
• The directory from where the file was downloaded was read-only
• The link was sloooow
• I already had downloaded about 70% of the file

So I started looking for solutions. Most of ideas I found on google suggested using ‘rsync –partial –rsh=ssh‘, and indeed it could work. However, rsync tried to create a temporary file on the server, and, as the directory was read-only, it failed. There probably is some option to make it work, but I don’t have plenty of rsync experience. And this approach just looked to be over complicated.

After a bit of more googling, I found out that curl supported sftp backend. And, after a few minutes trying to figure out how to make it work with public key authentication, I finally figured it out:

curl -C - --pubkey ~/.ssh/key.pub --key ~/.ssh/key \
  sftp://eugeni@somewhere/mnt/.../i586/my_precious_iso.iso \
  -o my_precious_iso.iso

To shorten it up, it is possible to write a simple wrapper function (or a script) for bash:

#!/bin/bash
function scp_resume() {
        URL="$1"
        FILE="$2"
        if [ "a$FILE" == "a" ]; then
                echo "Usage: scp_resume <sftp url> <local target>"
                return 1
        fi
        # the magic
        curl -C - $URL -o $FILE
}

function scp_resume_key() {
        URL="$1"
        FILE="$2"
        KEY="$3"
        if [ "a$FILE" == "a" ]; then
                echo "Usage: scp_resume <sftp url> <local target> <key file name>"
                return 1
        fi
        # the magic
        curl -C - --key $HOME/.ssh/$KEY --pubkey $HOME/.ssh/${KEY}.pub $URL -o $FILE
}

so it did the trick.

reminder: this article is part of a serie.

well that's it... the best things do have an end, and this polyglot exercise is no exception. i hope you learnt quite a few things during this trip in troubled programming water - and most of all, i hope you enjoyed it. i did, anyway! :-)

our polyglot program now supports the following languages:

• perl
• c and c++
• pascal
• bash (and also ksh and ksh-like shells)
• fortran
• befunge
• brainfuck and ook
• html/javascript

that's not bad. here's the compacted program:

                                                                        (*foo /*bar#[^" Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. "
*1337#) 2>/dev/null;i=0; a=1; b=1;echo $a;while test $i -lt 9;do c=$((a+b));a=$b;b=$c;echo $a;i=$((i+1));done;exit; Ook. Ook.
*0) if 0; sub C () {} # Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook. */ );
                                                                        #include <stdio.h>  /* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. */
                                                                        #include <stdlib.h> /* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. */
                                                                        #define C /* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? */
                                                                        #define $ /* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook.
C ; " Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. */
C ; main () { /*"; { # Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook? */ int $ i, $ n1, $ n2, $ n3;
C ; $ i = 0; $ n1 = 1; $ n2 = 1; printf( "%d\n", $ n1 ); while ( $ i < 9 ) {
C ; $ n3 = $ n1 + $ n2; $ n1 = $ n2; $ n2 = $ n3; printf( "%d\n", $ n1 ); $ i++; }}
                                                                        #define foo /* Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook?
C ; __END__ Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook?
*) program foo; var i, n1, n2, n3 : integer; begin i := 0; n1 := 1; n2 := 1; writeln(n1); while i < 9 do begin (* Ook! Ook?
*) n3 := n1 + n2; n1 := n2; n2 := n3; writeln(n1); i := i + 1; end; end. (* Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook?
      integer i, n1, n2, n3 ; n1 = 1 ; n2 = 1 ; print '(I0)', n1         Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook.
      do 10 i = 1, 9                                                     Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
      n3 = n1 + n2 ; n1 = n2 ; n2 = n3 ; print '(I0)', n1                Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
 10   continue ; end                                                    ]++++++++++>[-]++++++++++>+>+<<[->[>>+>+>+<<<<-]>[<+>>>>+<<
* <-]>>>[<<<+>>>-]<>+++++++++<[>>>+<<[>+>[-]<<-]>[<+>-]>[<<++++++++++>>>+<-]<<-<-]>>>>[<<<<+>>>>-]<<<<>[-]<[+++++++++++++++++++++++
* +++++++++++++++++++++++++.------------------------------------------------[<---------->-]]<++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
* ++++++++++.------------------------------------------------<<<<.>>>>[-]<<<][ Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook?
* Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook!
* Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook.
* Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook?
* Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook.
* Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
* Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
* Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
* Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
* Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
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* Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
* Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
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* <html><script language="javascript">function foo_it(){var foo;var i=0;var n1=1;var n2=1;document.writeln(n1); foo // Ook! Ook!
*= 2;while(i<9){n3=n1+n2;n1=n2;n2=n3;document.write("<br>",n1);i++}}</script><body onload="foo_it()"></body></html> // Ook! Ook!
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* Ook. Ook? ^ ,+*68-*+55/+55::,+*+338/+55:<   Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. */
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that's not to say that we cannot add other languages. out of my mind, i guess one could fit cobol, postscript, and maybe ruby... (note: i don't think python can be added since pascal renders it too difficult. removing pascal would allow it - i have some working polyglot with python).

but now it's your turn to work, and continue this serie! clone the git repository, send me your patches, and i'll post them in this blog...

enjoy! :-)

for everything gui related, my favorite toolkit is tk. it's quite powerful, easy to learn and to use, and feels quite perlish ^[0]. in a word, it doesn't get in the way.

yeah, of course, current version is not the most up to date ^[1][2] - but it gets the job done, with the help of some nice tk additional modules available on cpan.

one of those modules is tk::toolbar, from ala qumsieh. and it comes with a set of bundled icons that are loaded. they may not be the prettiest icons out there, but they are available and allow you to do something like ^[3]:

$mw->Label( -image => 'fileopen16' )->pack;

instead of having to create & load the images yourself.

knowing this, when i needed to add an icon in my new project (yes, yes, i need to present it here), i loaded tk::toolbar in my code, and re-used one of the bundled images.

well, that was my goal anyway - the image never appeared... i tried to tweak my code in every direction, but did not manage to make this icon appear.

having rebuild perl-tk package yesterday to fix a bug in mandriva's package, i thought it might be related... so i tried to run a perl/tk gui provided in one of my other modules using tk::toolbar's icons, but the icons were correctly displayed. so long for this idea...

after having fought 5 minutes, i finally managed to understand what was going on: in this new project, i currently do not have created the toolbar. and since the icons are loaded in the classinit() method, called during the creation of the first widget of this particular class, the icons were not loaded...

so i created a toolbar ^[4], and miracle! the icon i wanted magically appeared.

tricky one...


[0] contrary to wxwidgets for example - at least imnsho
[1] i'm using plain tk 804.028 and not one of those tk ersatz tcl::tk ^[5] or tkx ^[6]
[2] slaven told me he would like to update it when he'll have some tuits...
[3] tk allows you to name the images you load, to do for example:

$mw->Photo( "foo", -file=>"path/to/some/image.jpg" );
[... later on ...]
$mw->Label( -image => "foo" )->pack;

[4] i'll populate the toolbar later on
[5] which is far from complete, and does not seem to be maintained anymore
[6] which doesn't compile easily out of the box, and feels really clumsy after tk goodness. oh well, i guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

This week-end, I bought The Seldom Seen Kid, the latest album by Elbow. The album is already some time out, but I only started paying attention to it recently when hearing the song Weather To Fly on the radio. I had already heard The Bones Of You and One Day Like this before too.

The album is really awesome. Not only is the music superb, I was also pleasantly surprised to read this in the booklet:

Turn Me Up
To preserve the excitement, emotion and dynamics of the original performances this record is intentionally quieter than some. For full enjoyment simply Turn Me Up! (TurnMeUp.org)

The TurnMeUp initiative battles the notorious loudness war. In the majority of recent commercial compact discs, the dynamics of the sound (which was one of the huge advantages of compact discs when they were introduced) is completely ruined because the sound is remastered as loud as possible in order to try to stand out from other music. This is done by dynamic range processing, where the difference between the loudest part and the most silent part of a song is made smaller, this way destroying the dynamic range of the music.

This is the first album I know of which supports the TurnMeUp initiative. And the music sounds very nice indeed! Let’s hope more and more artists and producer will follow this example. Spread the word!

Two other albums I bought some time ago, are The Best Of - E Ritorno Da Te and Primavero in Anticipo by Laura Pausini. These were again not brand new albums. I knew a few songs of Laura Pausini from when she brought out here first songs which became popular hits here in Belgium in the first half of the nineties, but I rediscovered her music after some recent interviews with her in newspapers. A completely different music style than Elbow, but also great music. However, the difference in sound quality between these two albums is big: if I first listen to E Ritorno Da Te and afterwards to Primavera in Anticipo, I have to turn down the volume a lot. Primavera In Anticipo is clearly a lot louder and Laura Pausini’s voice is standing much less out of the music than in E Ritorno Da Te. It seems like the difference between those two albums is an unfortunate example of how the loudness war reduces sound quality…

following autarch's advice on yesterday's post, i just uploaded dist-zilla-plugin-prepender 0.2.0 that accepts a copyright option to automatically add a boilerplate copyright at the top of the files.

yet another things that ease an author's life.

i'm still unsure with the strict and warnings options. not because of the test argument, but because of the editing argument. indeed, with padre (the perl ide) doing live syntax check, i want the syntax check to be done with all due stricture...

Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1 is now available on public mirrors.  This first alpha is available only through Free version, 32 and 64 bits DVDs.This development release is the first one realized without mkcd, our historical build tool, but using bcd available also on Mandriva svn. This new tool should improve global quality of our release and make tests much easier and efficient.

You will find more information about Alpha 1 on Mandriva wiki. This first release comes also with  specifications document available on wiki (pdf) . This document is composed by specifications that was not finalized in 2009 Spring, internal Mandriva proposals but also Community proposals through Mandriva Ideas web site. This web site is available now since beginning of 2010 development cycle in order to collect any kind of proposals to be included in coming releases. Feel free to comment or add any new ideas! Among many items you will find:

• improve boot time
• clean and complete grub and install menu (failsafe, init3 entry, recovery entry, check tool for istallation media)
• use of Plymouth and fallback on Splashy for non supported chipsets
• switch to Tomoyo as security framework, provide GUI for common setup, integrated also in msec tool
• guest account created on the fly when needed
• packaging of Moblin, use it as default environment if stable enough  when light hardware configuration is detected
• manage end of life distribution through mdkonline applet
• autodetection of local urpmi repositories
• improve hybrid isos use

and many other things…

Final release of 2010 version is due to 21st of october. You will find here complete planning.

Again quality of final release wil depend on how large tests will be. Do not hesitate to download and tests this first alpha and report any bugs.

Finally please not that this is a development release, you should not use this version to upgrade an existing Mandriva Linux installation.

when i first heard of dist::zilla, its concepts definitely appealed to me. it took me quite some time (never the good time, plus i needed to create the rpms for mandriva), but i finally managed to try it...

and although i still need to get used to it, i'm already really happy with it. on the new project that i recently started (more on that later on), i'm letting dist::zilla deal with all those pesky copyright, version, pod, etc. stuff.

however, i'm used to add some boilerplate at the top of my files, as the fsf recommends. and i found nothing in dist::zilla to do that... so i just wrote a new plugin for it: dist::zilla::plugin::prepender.

just add the following in your dist.ini file:

[Prepender]
line = #
line = # This file is part of Foo::Bar
line = #
line = # Foo::Bar is copyright...

but it can also be used to enforce some common pragma: since it will be inserted at the top of the file, the pragma will be applied to its lexical scope - the whole file itself in this case:

[Prepender]
line = use strict;
line = use warnings;

since those usages are quite common, i might as well in a future version propose them as options:

[Prepender]
copyright = 1
strict    = 1
warnings  = 1

but i'm not really sure... wdyt?

Well, it’s hard to kick the habit of a lifetime, and I still watch the happily meaningless charts on the Distrowatch front page.

Fedora has just gone past Mint into third place. As I recall, that’s the first time in really rather a long time it’s been up there.

Mandriva’s in sixth, now, which is around where it’s been (6th or 7th) for a while.

I’ve been keeping busy working on our Grand Plans for the Fedora 12 cycle, and also working on congruity and navit. I’m now chasing up a bug with navit/freetype which is preventing recent builds of Navit from SVN from working on Fedora 11. It’s not yet entirely clear if it’s freetype or GCC at fault. Read all about it here if you’re morbidly curious, or happen to be a code / compiler / optimization / valgrind whiz and feel a strange urge to help.

I shall be in England for three weeks or so from this Sunday. Probably won’t be much difference observed, but I just thought I’d note the fact.

I’m planning to throw a Rawhide survey up on the forums soon, as part of our ongoing ‘get more people running Rawhide’ plan. Other plans in this area are afoot. Oh, yes, we have plans a-plenty. Muahahah!

I finally got a livejournal account in January to be able to comment, and now I get this email...

Hi pterjan,

pterjan's birthday is coming up on June 21!

You can:

    * Post to wish them a happy birthday
    * Send them a virtual gift
    * Gift them with a paid account

So nice of them... They don't wish me a happy birthday but ask me to do it myself...

after some lengthy discussions finding the final versioning scheme for parrot, allison finally decided that parrot will use the following version numbers:

• 1.0 (March, deprecation point)
• 1.1 (April)
• 1.2 (May)
• 1.3 (June)
• 1.4 (July, deprecation point)
• 1.5 (August)
• 1.6 (September)
• 1.7 (October)
• 1.8 (November)
• 1.9 (December)
• 2.0 (January, deprecation point)
• 2.1 (February)
• 2.2 (March)
• 2.3 (April)
• 2.4 (May)
• 2.5 (June)
• 2.6 (July, deprecation point)
• 2.7 (August)
• 2.8 (September)
• 2.9 (October)
• 2.10 (November)
• 2.11 (December)
• 3.0 (January, deprecation point)

the stable versions will be the deprecation points - that is, 1.0.0, 1.4.0, 2.0.0, 2.6.0 and 3.0.0. this means that those versions may have some bugfix releases during their support lifetime (1 year), but only for very limited stuff (security or other critical problems). everything is described in parrot's support policy.

as parrot packager for mandriva, this is good to know. however, i don't really know what to do: should i package the stable versions? or should i update the package for each new devel version?

since parrot is quite in flux those times, version 1.0.0 (which is 3 monthes old) is really useless... if you add that almost nothing production-ready relies on it currently, i have decided to update the package on a monthly basis. which means that rpm for parrot 1.3.0 is available on cooker right now.

but let's think forward a bit... when rakudo will be able to use an existing parrot, when perl 6 will be in production, i won't continue like that: i'll just stick (of course) with the production releases... but when will this point happen? when will i switch from devel to stable versions? this remains to be seen...

1 week ago, I submitted to http://ideas.mandriva.com/en/ my proposals/ideas for Mandriva 2010.0. In order to let people comment on them, I will post the list of my submissions. I was planning to add more, but unfortunately, I'm presently in holidays ( at La Baule ), and so don't have time to do this :-). So here are my proposals :UXA and KMS support in drakx11">UXA and KMS support in drakx11">UXA...

Zarb.org, the server hosting a few projects like PLF, JPackage, EasyUrpmi, Planet Mandriva, ... and this blog was not available during the last week-end. On Friday night a disk of the RAID5 volume containing user homedirs died (the one with projects was not impacted). Unfortunately the RAID controller put the volume offline... (fortunatly I was in Lille, without Internet access so I did not spend too much time on it :) ).

The failed disk was replaced on Monday and we had to restore the daily backup because the ext3 filesystem was highly corrupted (14GB data out of 26 were still available, but all in /lost+found).

Sorry for the 3 days of service interruption and for losing your Friday work that was on the server in your home (between the backup and the crash).

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, current Minister of State to the Prime Minister, with responsibility for Forward Planning, Assessment of Public Policies and Development of the Digital Economy in the French government (I stole the English translation from Wikipedia), was recently interviewed by ZDNet.

She talks about various topics regarding what France should/can/will do, like IPv6 migration, optical fiber deployment, ... and near the end talked about Mandriva!

She said:

Je pense au logiciel, on est quand même un des pays qui a la possibilité, avec le Linux français Mandriva, de savoir créer un système d'exploitation grand public, c'est pas donné à tout le monde.

which in English would be something like

I think to the software, we are a country that has the possibility, with the french Linux Mandriva, to create an operating system for end-users, this is not given to everyone.

. That's nice to hear that she knows we exist and even that it's worth mentioning.

This part of the video is here (French).

So, time for a Poulsbo update!

I have updated my P to Fedora 11, and I have psb running on it. I’m using all the stuff from my F10 post, except I’m using the Mandriva dkms-psb package for the kernel module instead of my psb-kmod. I haven’t actually tried using my psb-kmod package instead, yet, to see if that would make any difference - I’ll try that tomorrow.

There was one gotcha; this is one that caught at least one other person who contacted me out (hadess), and may have been what others who said ‘it don’t work!’ were seeing. If X fails to start and the logs seem to show an awful lot of stuff about it trying to find an SDVO display, but precious little about LVDS, add this line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option “IgnoreACPI”

and that should shift it. (It goes in the driver section). The X logs actually give you this hint, it’s just a bit buried. Alternatively, you can hook up an external display and not use your internal panel. That’d make it happy too.

It also seems that if I boot to runlevel 3 and then do startx it hangs after displaying a pointer for a bit, which frustrated me for quite a while. Eventually I just thought ‘what the hell, I’ll just boot straight to runlevel 5 and see what happens’ and it worked.

I still intend to tidy the packages up a bit to make this easier, it’s just I never seem to find the time for it!

I am also indebted to Pierre-Henri Beguin for an intriguing hint. He found a repository - it’s here - which is part of Moblin 2’s source, it seems. Split across the psb-headers, xf86-video-psb and kernel packages is what appears to be a complete, freely-licensed Poulsbo driver. Looks can be deceptive, though - it might still require the Xpsb and psb-firmware stuff. I did try to build it, but couldn’t get far; I transferred the kernel patches to a Fedora kernel .src.rpm and tried to build it, but it failed. Then I tried just running that X driver with the other psb kernel module, and that doesn’t work either (falls over on DRM stuff). So that one’s stuck for now. Might be interesting to those with more chops than myself, though.

Mandriva users should note that Mandriva now has packages for the kernel module (dkms-psb), custom libdrm (libdrm-psb2 and libdrm-psb-devel) and the X driver (x11-driver-video-psb). I’m not sure whether these actually work, though, or if the Xpsb and firmware stuff is packaged (it may be in non-free, I didn’t look yet). Those packages are available for 2009, 2009 Spring and current Cooker, according to the changelog mailing list. Olivier Blin’s been building them. I’m sure he’d just love you to get in touch if you can’t get them to work.

So if you get that shiny new Dell desktop and ACPI spit bunch of message at the install time and the network driver does not get detected you can follow these steps to have it working.

- Continue the install without the network until you reboot to grub.

- Add hpet=disable at the end of the boot kernel parameter and get into the system.

- Download the latest kernel for your architecture on :

http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel/pool/main/l/linux-2.6/

- Transfer it on a USB key and dpkg -i it.

- Make sure you add the hpet=disable at the kopt option of /boot/grub/menu.lst and launch a update-grub.

- On reboot you should now have the network you can do the standard tasksel to install a Desktop etc….

Hello planet mandriva !

Hello

I want to remember everybody that Triage Team is always needed of manpower. Currently, we are only 8 members. Most are volunteers that have other tasks to do in real life, then, you will see that we cannot triage your bugs as fast depending on our real life and available free time.

For example, some months ago, roudoudou and Skeletch did a really great job but, like me, we don't have enough time always, then, currently most of the work is being done by Ahmad because the remaining members are too busy for doing more. What would occur if Ahmad or anybody else is unable to dedicate as much time for triaging in the future?

This is the reason for suggesting you to join to BugSquad: if we are more people, everybody will have to do less work, having more free time and, also, being able to dedicate a bit more time to every report for triaging them better.

We don't expect you triaging 200 bugs, we welcome small contributions also ;-), as they will help all Triage Team.

The way for joining is really simple: if you have a certain level of familiarity with Linux in general, Mandriva Linux in particular, and the Bugzilla bug tracking system... simply subscribe to our mailing list and send us a message volunteering.

We will guide and help you to get enough knowledge about Bug Policy, triaging and bugzilla management and, then, give our aproval to you appliance.

As a start point, I suggest you to read the following links (if you detect any problem with them like inconsistencoes, outdated info or anything else, please contact me for fixing them):
Triage Team - How to triage bugs
Bug Policy
Triage Guide

Thanks a lot

It’s a long time ago I posted something on my blog, so this is a good moment to break the silence with a Cooker update:

• GCC 4.4: better code generation and many improvements for developers, such as OpenMP 3 support and support for the upcoming C++0x ISO standard. This new version also improves code optimization thanks to the Graphite framework. Glibc was also updated to the latest version 2.10.
• Xen kernel 2.6.27: Mandriva now includes a kernel for running on a Xen Dom0 based on the 2.6.27 kernel instead of the outdated 2.6.18 kernel.
• The standard Mandriva kernel is now at the latest 2.6.30. This brings faster kernel booting, lots of ext3 bug fixes and performance improvements which also affect ext3 and of course it adds or improves the support for new hardware devices.
• GNOME is now at version 2.27.2: Tomboy now can sync your notes with the Snowy web service
• Pitivi video editor has been updated to version 0.13.1 which includes a complete core rewrite. Lots of interesting improvements for end users are in the pipeline for next versions.
• Elisa has now been renamed to Moovida. It includes a brand new graphical user interface.
• Many KDE updates: KDE itself is now at version 4.2.90 (aka KDE 4.3 beta 1), Koffice 2.0, k3b 2.0 alpha 2, kaffeine 1.0 pre 1, Digikam 1.0 beta 1
• qemu-kvm 0.10.4: the KVM virtualization tool had its first stable release under the name qemu-kvm. A test package is available in main/testing, under the package name “qemu”. This package merges the qemu and the kvm packages.  The version in contrib/testing removes kqemu support, but it will probably return at some later point.
• Sagemath, a mathematics software system combining the power of mathematic tools like Maxima, R, GSL and many more, is now available in contrib/testing. Note that this package is still work in progress. Your comments and bug reports are very welcome on the Cooker mailing list.
• Cups 1.4 RC 1 is available in the main/testing repository. This new version has some performance improvements, supports zeroconf aka Bonjour for automatic discovery of printers and has a totally redesigned web interface.
• bcd, a new Mandriva tool to build installation ISOs was published
• The Intel X11 driver is now using pre-release version 2.7.99.901, which will hopefully improve performancet thanks to UXA.
• Transmission 1.70 now supports DHT (distributed hash table), also known as trackerless bittorrent. Transmission will now still be able to find peers when a public tracker goes down.

And of course much more I forget :-)

Just tried the about.me firefox extension with some quite fun results:

that’s all the hard work..

I noticed that this graph does not counts everything – more likely, the top-10 sites are the ones accessed using direct links, or by typing the site address manually. I access a lot of news from google reader, so they count as google.com domain. But still a nice statistics.

Finally, 4 years and 5 months after my first contibution to GNOME (the JoinGnome page of the wiki), I did my first commit in the GNOME repositories. It's been quite a nice trip since these old days. I finally applied to an account, so you won't hear me again telling you "no, I can't commit my patch, I don't have commit rights". I hope I won't f*ck things up, especially with my little git knowledge. Now let me grow these stats !

So, I had some grand plans for this week, which I haven’t yet managed to work on as I’ve been busy following up the F11 release around the news sites, IRC and forums, as I used to do for Mandriva. This probably isn’t strictly part of my job description, but it does ‘feel’ right. I want to have a good idea of what the heck is broken.

Some neat developments this week: well, yes, we released Fedora 11. You may have heard about this. Go download it, it’s awesome. I’ve been busy warping everything into the shape I’m most comfortable with, so here’s the good old pair of documentation links I like to have for releases:

Release Notes
Common Bugs (what we called Errata, at Mandriva)

Aside from that - there was a Fedora Activity Day to discuss potential changes to the Fedora 12 development cycle. It seems to have gone off really well. Unfortunately I couldn’t really attend as I had Ekiga issues (something strange between Ekiga and my headset…the Ekiga guy said “I don’t like ALSA. It makes my head ache. I can’t help you.”), which was probably a blessing in disguise as otherwise I’d be even more behind than I already am.

Fedora Community was released. It looks, well, incredibly awesome. It’s a sort of centralised front end to a lot of other tools, intended to provide a useful ‘launch control’ for Fedora contributors - seemingly mostly for packagers at the moment, but hopefully it’ll become more generalized over time. It’s sort-of-but-not-really a bit like Launchpad, only it’s 100% open source. There’s a great introductory blog post on it here, by Máirín Duffy. Go read it.

Carl Worth wrote a really great post on Intel driver development. It explains very clearly why the Intel driver seems to have gone backwards in some ways lately, why that’s not exactly the case, why you shouldn’t worry about it too much, and how to help get things fixed quickly if you’re still having problems with it. If you’re a suffering Intel user, go read it.

Myself and others have continued to develop the Common Bugs page for F11, which is reaching a pleasing length now. Of course, the length of Errata-type pages should never be considered a measure of the quality of a release, only the commitment level of those contributing to it. I’m pretty happy with it now. My experience with Mandriva showed that this kind of page is a valuable resource.

We had a great discussion in the QA group about how those in QA and those doing support in IRC or forums could help contribute to the documentation process, and why we should try to keep reference material centralized in one or two well-known and properly maintained locations. On the back of that discussion, I’ve joined the documentation team, and I’m hoping to provide some more input (and earlier input) into the release notes process for Fedora 12. Hopefully we can get to the point where we don’t have little FAQs and references split across many different sites, often with duplicate content, being used in different contexts (mailing lists, IRC support, forums etc).

And this morning I wrote a little Wiki page on how to create an xorg.conf file if you don’t have one already. This is unfortunately still required in several situations, and it’s bugged me that there was no clear reference on how to create one -