Planet Mandriva

Now, not to blow my own horn – I don’t need to, because I’m awesome – but I’m often approached by awestruck fans at conferences and my various public appearances, asking me how I can possibly achieve so much QA work in so little time. Of course, I usually don’t tell them my secret. I tell them it’s just down to good old fashioned hard work and intern exploitation. But that’s not really the key. Today, just because I’m feeling generous, I’m going to pass along the secret, heretofore known only to the chosen few superstars of QA…

…we delegate it all to the snuffler.

Chère communauté,

comme promis, voici une petite mise à jour de la situation, qui fait état de ce qui a été atteint de ce que nous comptons faire.
Les retours de la communauté sont impressionnants. Mandriva Linux a toujours, envers et contre tous ses soutiens et inconditionnels, mais j’ai très clairement ressenti sa déception au fil des ans. Le manque de communication de ces derniers mois n’a certainement pas arrangé les choses, et beaucoup d’entre-vous ont sûrement eu l’impression d’un bateau sans personne à la barre. Cela n’a jamais été le cas. Nous avons très certainement vécu les heures les plus difficiles de notre existence et je suis heureux que cela soit terminé. Il ne m’a pas été possible de communiquer durant cette période, car cela aurait compromis notre futur; les efforts que nous avons dû faire avec moult précautions auraient été irrémédiablement annihilés par des annonces qui comme vous le savez sont sujettes à interprétation et / ou récupération par l’une ou l’autre des parties ayant pris part aux différentes négociations.

La situation difficile dont nous sommes sortis a un certain nombre de raisons que je ne peux ni ne veux évoquer par le détail ici. Certaines sont couvertes par des accords de non-divulgation, certaines sont liées à notre passé et comme vous pouvez l’imaginer, ressasser le passé ne saurait nous mener vers l’avenir. Je souhaite toutefois en tirer les leçons qui s’imposent afin de ne pas commettre les mêmes erreurs à l’avenir. Il s’agit-là d’un exercice difficile, tenant compte du fait que nous sommes aussi et surtout une entreprise et notre première responsabilité est d’assurer la pérennité pour l’emploi de nos salariés et justifier la confiance de notre actionnariat qui finance nos opérations mois après mois. La raison principale des difficultés auxquelles Mandriva SA a régulièrement dû faire face est que la règle élémentaire faisant que les coûts doivent être couverts par des revenus suffisants n’a pas toujours été respectée. Ceci doit être changé; des possibilités existent, mais cela exige que nous nous adaptions, trouvions des manières différentes de travailler et nous concentrions d’abord sur les produits ayant une réelle chance de succès à court terme sur le marché.

Dans ce cadre, le projet Mandriva Linux a le droit à un espace déterminé où il sera à même d’évoluer et se développer, une plateforme où les contributeurs et utilisateurs passionnés pourront donner libre cours à leur talent. Nous travaillons précisément à la définition d’une telle plateforme maintenant et durant les deux prochaines semaines. Nous annoncerons la direction que nous souhaitons donner au projet durant la troisième semaine de mai. Il ne fait aucun doute que, quelque soit la décision prise, nous risquons de faire quelques malheureux et il sera difficile de contenter chacun, les attentes étant multiples et parfois contradictoires. Nous viserons toutefois à contenter le plus grand nombre et donner l’horizon le plus large à la communauté, à vous et par vous, au projet Mandriva Linux. Restez donc à l’écoute et n’hésitez pas à utiliser l’adresse community@mandriva.com pour vous faire entendre. Chaque courriel reçu fait l’objet d’une attention particulière et il a été et sera répondu à chacun.

Dear Community,

as promised, here is a short update on what has been reached and where we’re going.
The echo from the Community is very impressive. Mandriva Linux still has its supporters and fans, but I also felt your disappointment over the years and the lack of information during the past months certainly is a key to explain why many of you felt left alone with nobody holding the steering wheel. This was never the case. We have had probably the most turbulent times that Mandriva SA ever experienced and I’m happy that this is over for now. I could unfortunately not communicate accordingly as this may have compromised our future. The moves to solve the difficulties were really like walking on eggs, with every announcement potentially being fatal for the issue of the negotiations.

The difficult situation we have experienced has many different reasons which I can’t and will not disclose here, as some are covered by non-disclosure agreements and some other related to the past and we all know that the past cannot be changed. My duty is to take the past into account and try not to make the same mistakes. This is far from easy, considering that we are a commercial company with paid employees who rely on the operations to live and shareholders who finance the company every month and want to see the results. The main reason why Mandriva SA regulary had difficulties is that, in the past, the elementary rule of revenue covering costs has not been respected. This has to be changed, there are ways to achieve this goal, but it means that we must find alternative ways to work and promote the products that have a chance right now on the market.

The Mandriva Linux project has the right to be given a space in which it may expand and the contributors and afficionados a place where they can express their talents. We are precisely working on this right now and during the next two weeks. We will announce the direction we intend to give to the project during the third week of May. It makes no doubt that it’ll be difficult to satisfy each an every expectation and wish, as they’re many of them and some are not compatible with the other, but we’ll try to achieve what can be useful and most promising for the community and, with it, the Mandriva Linux project. Stay tuned and do not hesitate to use the community@mandriva.com email address in the meantime. We’re still listening and also answer to the numerous emails received!

L’assemblée générale des actionnaires s’est déroulée aujourd’hui. Plutôt bien d’ailleurs, les propositions soumises au vote ayant rencontré l’écho attendu.

C’est ainsi que la recapitalisation de la société a été approuvée et sera effective sous 10 jours. La révision de la stratégie, entamée il y a deux semaines, est dès lors activement en phase de finalisation et les décisions correspondantes seront prises d’ici à la mi-mai.

The general assembly of the shareholders of Mandriva went well today.

Among others, a recapitalization has been approved and will be fulfilled in 10 days. The strategy review started two weeks ago will now actively be finalized and the corresponding decisions taken mid of May.

After a little silence during which I was occupied with Eastern and OpenLink related work I bring you news about the second Nepomuk task: the KActivityManager crash.

Ivan Cukic already “fixed” the bug by simply not using Nepomuk but an SQLite backend (at least that is how I understood it, correct me if I am wrong). However, I wanted to fix the root of the original problem.

Soprano provides the communication channel between Nepomuk and its clients. It is based on a very simple custom protocol going through a local socket. So far QLocalSocket, ie. Qt’s implementation was used. The problem with QLocalSocket is that it is a QObject. Thus, it cannot live in two threads at the same time. The hacky solution was to maintain one socket per thread. Sadly that resulted in complicated maintenance code which was impossible to get right. Hence crashes like #269573 or #283451 (basically any crash involving The Soprano::ClientConnection) were never fixed.

A few days ago I finally gave up and decided to get rid of QLocalSocket and replace it with my own implementation. The only problem is that in order to keep Windows compatibility I had to keep the old implementation around by adding quite a lot of #ifdefs.

And now I could use some testers for a Soprano client library that does only create a single connection to the server instead of one per thread. I already pushed the new code into Soprano’s git master. So all you need to do is run KDE on top of that.

Oh, and while at it I finally fixed the problem with re-connecting of clients. So now a restart of Nepomuk will no longer leave the clients with dangling connections, unable to perform queries. That fix, however, is in kdelibs.

Well, the day was long, I am tired, and this blog post feels a little boring. So before in addition to that it gets too long I will stop.

This version will fix again some problem met by customers or community users. Among these, as detailed earlier, the crash at restore time that was affecting users of MD software raid volumes, and the fact that we are now supporting UUID for their designation such as on RHEL 6.

Also for RHEL 5 users, there was an error on “no space left on device” at restore time, due to a modification in the way we are including more tools in the initrd, leading to the inclusion of the MAKEDEV program which was creating issue on device creation leading to that error message. It turns out this is also triggered by the busybox shell, so as we need anyway bash in the initrd, we will now use bash by default as the shell to launch all our scripts at restore time.

Mindi log files included in mondoarchive.log will also now be the expected one, not the one from an intermediate run.

2 contributors also provided fixes for issues: one for correct keyboard support by SLES by Victor Gattegno (who also helped around other bug fixes in this version), another one around the support of multiple PVs by bzium.

Even if 19 bugs were closed, I still have 2 issues that I’d like to fix before releasing 3.0.2: one around SLES grub install issue, and one around duplicate hpsa driver. And there are some others that may find their way in it. But that will be difficult, as I have a training in UK from the 2nd of May to the 4th of May, so I’ll publish the new version before in order to have it available at the training time !

So please test the beta version I made available at ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/test and let me know if you find it stable for your case, and what other remaining issues you’d like me to work on next.

Filed under: FLOSS Tagged: Linux, Mondorescue, ProLiant, RHEL, SLES

During the development for OpenStack Essex a lot of work has been done to make Swift working well with the other OpenStack components, this is a list of the work that has been done.

MIDDLEWARE

To make Swift behaving well in the ‘stack’ we had to get a rock solid keystone middleware and make sure most of the features provided by Swift would be supported by the middleware.

The middleware is currently located in the keystone essex repository and was entirely rewritten from the Diablo release to allow support these Swift features :

• ACL via keystone roles :

Allow you to map keystone roles as ACL, for example to allow a user with the keystone role ‘Reader’ to read a container the user in swift_operator_role can set this ACL :

-r:Reader container

• Anonymous access via ACL referrer.

If a swift_operator wants to give anonymous access to a container in reading they can set this ACL :

-r:*

It basically mean you are enabling public access to the container.

• Container syncing :

This allow to have two different container in sync, see the documentation here.

• Different reseller prefix :

You will be able to mix different auth server on your Swift cluster, like swauth and keystone.

• Special reseller admin account :

This is a special account whose allowed to access all account. It i used by nova for example to upload images to different accounts.

• S3 emulation :

Allows you to connect with S3 API to Swift using swift3 and new s3_token middleware. The S3 token will simply take a S3 token to validate it in keystone and get the proper tenant/user information to Swift.

One thing missing in the middleware is to allow auth overriding, basically it means that when an another middleware wants to take care of the authentication for some request the auth middleware will just let it go and allow the request to continue. Such feature is used for example in the temp_url middleware to allow temporary access/upload to an object. This is projected to be supported in the future.

An important thing to keep in mind when you configure your roles is to have a user in a tenant (or account like called in Swift world) acting as an operator. This is controlled by the setting :

swift_operator_roles

and by default have the roles swiftoperator and admin. A user needs to have this role to be able to do something in a tenant.

GLANCE

Glance has been updated as well to be able to store images in swift which have a auth server using the 2.0 identity auth.

NOVA

Nova have the ability to access an objectstore to store images in a store which has been uploaded with the euca-upload-bundle command. Historically nova have shipped with a service called nova-objectstore but the service was buggy and had some security issues. Swift combined with keystone’s s3_token and swift3 middleware now can act as a more reliable and secure objectstore for Nova.

DEVSTACK

support Swift if you add the swift service to the ENABLED_SERVICE variable in your localrc. This is where you want to poke around to see how the configuration is made to have everything playing well together. The only bit that didn’t made for the devstack essex release is to have glance storing images directly in Swift.

CLI / Client Library

Swift CLI and client library (called swift.common.client) has been updated to support auth v2.0 the CLI support now the common OpenStack CLI arguments and environment to operate against auth server that has 2.0 identity auth.

We unfortunately were not in time to add the support for OS_AUTH_TENANT and use the Swift auth v1 syntax where if the user has the form of tenant:user OS_AUTH_TENANT will become tenant and OS_AUTH_USER the user.

Aside of a couple of bit missing we believe Swift should be rock solid to use with your other OpenStack components. There is no excuse to not use Swift as your central object storage component in OpenStack .

 

I’ve released a new plugin for the Vim text editor, called "add-to-word-search" ( GitHub repository, Vim Scripts page), and I’d like to introduce it here. If you like Vim, please let me know what you think by commenting below.

In order to properly introduce the plugin, one first should introduce the different (and useful) commands of Vim of * and #. What they do is search forward or backward for the complete word under the cursor (or somewhat before it or after it). Bram Moolenaar (the creator of Vim) covers them in his “Seven habits of effective text editing” document (there’s also a video available), and I think I covered them in a previous Vim tip.

Now, here is the use case that often bugged me: sometimes I searched for a certain function, found it in the text and then found a function that called this function (or often in the case of C code, a preprocessor macro that wrapped it), and wanted to look for its occurrences as well as those of the previous term. I wasn't aware of any good way to do it, so I ended up writing the “add-to-word-search” plugin.

After installing it, and after having searched for a word using * or #, one can press \** to search forward for an additional word under the cursor (or \## to search backward), and then use it more times to add additional words.

After publishing this plugin and mentioning it on #vim, “ironcamel” reported an issue that it gives an error if you have set nowrapscan. I fixed it, but was only able to do so by temporarily disabling nowrapscan, and then enabling it if it was previously enabled. (Apparently, vimscript’s exception-handling cannot handle some of the built-in errors.)

I also demonstrated it to my (now former) co-worker, who had been trying to get used to Vim, and he said it looked useful, but asked if there was an easy way to remove terms from the search query (which there is not at the moment), and I noted it may be a good idea.

Anyway, this Vim plugin is open-source and available under the MIT/X11 licence. Enjoy!

(The Hebrew text will be followed by an English one). שימו לב: הפגישה נדחתה בעקבות יום הזכרון ותתקיים ב-2 במאי ב-2 במאי 2012 (יום רביעי) נערוך את מפגש הפרל החודשי שלנו, על אודות שני קצוות מנוגדים של עולם הפרל....

La prochaine assemblée générale annuelle des actionnaires de Mandriva SA aura lieu le lundi 30 avril 2012 à notre adresse du 32, rue de Trévise, Paris, à 14h00. Les actionnaires enregistrés ont été informés personnellement par courrier ces derniers jours.

The next annual general assembly of shareholders will be held on April, 30th, 2012 at our office address, 32, rue de Trévise in Paris at 14h00. All details regarding this assembly have been communicated to each registered shareholder per mail a few days ago.

Seen at Orange Portails, Mougins #car #lotus #forsale

Suppose that you want to add a surrogate key to a table in PostgreSQL to help you quickly identify each rows in a unique way. You can do this easily and quickly by just adding a SERIAL type column. When adding a SERIAL type column to an already filled table, PostgreSQL will automatically fill the column with some values.
To ensure your surrogate key uniqueness, don’t forget to add the UNIQUE constraint : on top of that this will create an index, thus speeding up your join queries on this column.

ALTER TABLE mytable ADD COLUMN id SERIAL UNIQUE;

test=# \d films
               Table « public.films »
  Colonne  |          Type           | Modificateurs
-----------+-------------------------+---------------
 code      | character(5)            | non NULL
 title     | character varying(40)   | non NULL
 did       | integer                 | non NULL
 date_prod | date                    |
 kind      | character varying(10)   |
 len       | interval hour to minute |
Index :
    "firstkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (code)
test=# SELECT COUNT(*) FROM films;
 count
-------
   990
(1 ligne)
test=# ALTER TABLE films ADD COLUMN id SERIAL UNIQUE;
NOTICE:  ALTER TABLE créera des séquences implicites « films_id_seq » pour la colonne serial « films.id »
NOTICE:  ALTER TABLE / ADD UNIQUE créera un index implicite « films_id_key » pour la table « films »
ALTER TABLE
test=# \d films
                                    Table « public.films »
  Colonne  |          Type           |                     Modificateurs
-----------+-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------
 code      | character(5)            | non NULL
 title     | character varying(40)   | non NULL
 did       | integer                 | non NULL
 date_prod | date                    |
 kind      | character varying(10)   |
 len       | interval hour to minute |
 id        | integer                 | non NULL Par défaut, nextval('films_id_seq'::regclass)
Index :
    "firstkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (code)
    "films_id_key" UNIQUE, btree (id)
test=# SELECT id FROM films LIMIT 5;
 id
----
  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
(5 lignes)
test=# SELECT id FROM films ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5;
 id
-----
 990
 989
 988
 987
 986
(5 lignes)

Sightseeing in Nice

votez pour Babason !!!

To whom it may concern,

libmikmod is a portable and open-source (LGPLed) library for playing various common formats of Module files, including MOD, S3M, XM, and IT. mikmod is a Curses-based front-end for it, freely available under the GPL. Shlomi Fish would like to announce that he resumed maintenance of libmikmod and mikmod, after many years of lack of maintenance, after getting approval from Raphaël Assénat (raphnet), the previous maintainer.

So far, libmikmod-3.2.0-beta3 has been released with some older changes that lingered in the old version control repository, as well as several important fixes for security bugs taken from the downstream Mageia Linux package. The version control repository was converted from CVS to Mercurial, and more development is expected.

Plans for the future include releasing a stable libmikmod-3.2.0 and afterwards converting the build system from GNU Autotools to CMake, and then looking into fixing more bugs as they are encountered and implementing new features.

The old MikMod homepage ( http://mikmod.raphnet.net/ ) now redirects to the new one at http://mikmod.shlomifish.org/ where new development will take place (some parts of it still need to be updated, but it should already be usable).

Any contribution including testing, reporting bug fixes, contributing changes (as patches or as clones of the repository), or suggesting new features, will be appreciated.

For more information about module files see the wikipedia entry for “Module file”, and the FAQ for alt.binaries.sounds.mods (which was last updated in 1999). </a>

I’ve just released wwine 0.2. It adds support for the new Crossover 11.0 release, which changes some of the paths and needs a bit of additional magic to use. It also has some improvements to the wrapper scripts it generates, primarily through a new and more robust metadata header.

The most interesting new feature however, is the addition of the –env and –tricks parameters. –env causes wwine to set the WINE and WINEPREFIX variables to the syntax used by vanilla wine, this allows various wine scripts that use those to be able to run using wwine’s bottles, as well as with crossover. The most interesting use of this is the ability to use winetricks with Crossover. This effectively lets you use Crossover as any other wine release, while still using Crossover’s bottles. So if you have winetricks and Crossover installed, you need only run ‘wwine -w cx -b BOTTLE –tricks ACTION’ to use winetricks with Crossover.

Après candidats.fr (et les réponses de J.L. Mélanchon et N. Dupont-Aignan), c’est le CNLL qui publie un document sur la position respective de N. Sarkozy et F. Hollande quant aux logiciels libres que vous trouverez sur http://www.cnll.fr/sites/default/files/cp-positions-floss-ump-ps-3d.pdf. Cela comble en partie un manque qui m’inquiétait précédemment.

Dommage que des candidats qui représentent plus de 10% des électeurs selon les sondages, n’aient pas le temps (je n’ose penser que ce serait le désintérêt) de se positionner sur ce sujet important à l’heure des économies budgétaires, du produire français/européen, de notre implication dans la mondialisation (un fait pour le logiciel libre), des considérations sur la liberté en général et les libertés numériques en particulier.

Néanmoins il est intéressant de voir que ceux crédités du plus de chance de l’emporter ont répondu, avec parfois de nombreux détails qui méritent la lecture du document, et que hormis sur le sujet du brevet logiciel (ou pour moi la position de F. Hollande, qui plus est, clairement argumentée, est celle que devrait tenir la France tant au niveau européen, au parlement, au conseil et à l’OEB, qu’au niveau mondial à l’OMPI) il est réconfortant de voir que notre domain de prédilection est (enfin) soutenu par les politiques.

Maintenant il y a loin de la déclaration d’intentions aux actes, et malheureusement, sous le présent quinquenat, les LOPSI, DAVDSI et autres lois similaires n’ont pas clairement démontré qu’il y avait une bonne compréhension des valeurs que nous défendons et que nous avion encore besoin de l’APRIL, de l’AFUL, de la Quadrature du Net pour défendre nos positions et les faire entendre, et éviter que des lois défavorables aux logiciels libres et aux formats ouverts ne passent.

Donc, adhérez à ces associations pour les soutenir, les aider par des moyens financiers à défendre les positions auxquelles vous croyez, et votez, surtout votez pour pouvoir après demander des comptes si cela n’évolue pas favorablement. Celui qui ne vote pas n’a pas voix au chapitre.

Pour moi toute personne intéressée par les logiciels libres, doit s’intéresser au fondement que représentent les licences qui les régissent, et par voix de conséquence aux aspect de gouvernance que cela recouvre, et encore par conséquence aux aspects politiques au sens étymologique (vie de la cité) du mot. Donc aux votes qui se préparent. La législative étant de ce point de vue extrêmement importante, car ce sont nos députés que nous pouvons contacter pour leur demander d’infléchir telle ou telle loi.

Réservez lors des 22 Avril, 6 Mai, 10 et 17 juin prochains les 15 minutes qui suffisent à vous exprimer. Et le vote par correspondance n’a jamais été aussi simple (ma femme a accouchée prématurément en cherchant à avoir une procuration il y a 15 ans, mais maintenant c’est bien plus facile). Bon vote

Filed under: FLOSS, Société Tagged: français, Gouvernance, Internet, liberté

Deutsch siehe unten

Chère communauté,

Le titre de ce post vous paraîtra certainement amusant. Tout d’abord, je m’adresse à vous depuis un blog d’entreprise. Je ne dispose pas d’autre moyen pour communiquer officiellement pour l’instant, excusez-donc ce demi mélange des genres. Ensuite, Mandriva demande à la communauté de s’exprimer, quand bien même nous avons été très discrets ces derniers mois. Cette absence de communication a des raisons précises que je ne peux dévoiler pour l’instant, mais je le ferai dès que possible. Pour l’instant, de manière raccourcie: faites-nous confiance.

Le but de ce post est de recueillir les idées et opinions de la communauté, et de prendre son pouls. La distribution desktop est notre produit historique, elle a évolué depuis les prémices et elle a vécu les hauts et bas de Mandriva. Je ne souhaite pas porter de jugement sur les orientations prises dans le passé, essentiellement parce que je suis relativement nouveau dans l’entreprise. Par contre, je suis persuadé que la communauté est nécessaire et que notre société ne saurait être sans elle. C’est pourquoi je suis convaincu qu’il faut que Mandriva prenne soin de vous.

Le 30 avril prochain, Mandriva tiendra son assemblée générale des actionnaires. Suite à cette assemblée, nous définirons la stratégie et fixerons nos priorités pour les douze mois à venir.

Le moment est donc venu pour nous de nous adresser à vous, nos utilisateurs, soutiens, contributeurs et fans. Je suis intéressé à entendre et lire votre parcours, vos motivations, souhaits et besoins. Je ne peux promettre de répondre à chacune de vos attentes, mais je suis prêt à vous lire, entendre votre voix et les prendre en compte pour le futur.

Nous avons créé l’adresse community@mandriva.com que vous pouvez utiliser pour nous contacter. Vos idées, vues et critiques constructives y sont les bienvenues. Nous sommes particulièrement intéressés par les aspects suivants:

- qui forme la communauté et est intéressé à (ré-)investir son temps dans le futur, en particulier dans la distribution?
- qu’est-ce qui vous attire particulièrement dans la distribution Mandriva Linux, d’un point de vue technique ou humain?
- de quelle manière voulez-vous être impliqué dans le développement de la distribution, sous quelle forme?

Le but n’est pas de spéculer ou commenter en détail sur la situation actuelle ou le passé de Mandriva, ni de vous engager formellement. Il s’agit de préparer le futur, évaluer notre communauté, qu’elle soit active ou potentielle, autour de Mandriva Linux, afin de nous aider à en faire un inventaire aussi fidèle que possible. Nous voulons également éviter de manquer des opportunités et nous retrouver dans une impasse ayant négligé certains aspects. Vos contributions influencerons les décisions prises dans le futur.

Je vous invite donc à vous faire entendre si vous êtes intéressés par la distribution, de près ou de loin, à l’adresse mentionnée.

Merci de votre soutien. Dans le passé, actuellement et pour le futur. Votre aide est appréciée!

Jean-Manuel Croset
Directeur des opérations

***

Hallo Community. Wir möchten von Dir hören!

Werte Community,

Der Titel dieses Postes wird wahrscheinlich etwas verwirrend wirken. Erstens, weil ich dabei einen Untenehmensblog verwende; ich habe zurzeit nur diesen Mittel zur Verfügung, also bitte entschuldigen Sie, wenn es etwas komisch wirkt. Zweitens, ich rufe Sie auf, sich hörbar zu machen. Ausgerechnet Mandriva macht das, und wir waren ganz leise während die letzten Paar Monaten. Diese Stille hat bestimmte Gründe, welche ich zurzeit nicht nennen kann, aber ich werde es tun, sobald es möglich ist. Bis dann kann ich nur kurz sagen: bitte vertrauen Sie uns.

Das Ziel diese Mitteilung ist es, Ideen und Meinungen über die Community zu sammeln, Ihr Puls zu spüren. Die Desktop-Distribution ist unser historische Produkt, sie hat sich entwickelt, hat alle Hochs und Tiefs der Firma miterlebt. Ich möchte hier nicht beurteilen, ob die vergangenen Entscheidungen richtig oder falsch waren, hauptsächlich, weil ich relativ jung im Unternhemen bin. Hingegen bin ich überzeugt, dass die Community nötig ist und dass die Mandriva AG ohne sie nicht sein kann. Deswegen glaube ich, dass Mandriva die Community pflegen muss.

Am 30. April wird die nächste Generalversammlung der Aktionäre stattfinden. Im Anschluss werden wir die Strategie festlegen und unsere Prioritäten für die nächsten 12 Monate setzen.

Die Zeit ist also gekommen, mit Ihnen zu sprechen, unsere Users, Beitragende, Unterstützende und Fans. Ich bin sehr daran interessiert, über Ihre Erfahrungen, Motivationen, Wünsche und Bedürfnisse zu lesen. Ich kann nicht garantieren, dass ich sämtliche Bedürfnisse stillen können werde, aber ich bin bereit Ihre Stimme zu hören sowie Ihre Meinung für die Zukunft zu berücksichtigen.

Wir haben die Email-Adresse community@mandriva.com kreeirt; Sie können diese benutzen um Ihre Ideen, Ansichten und konstruktive Anregungen mitzuteilen. Wir sind besonders an folgendes interessiert:

- wer ist Teil der Community und daran interessiert, seine Zeit (wieder) zu investieren, insbesondere in die Distribution?
- was zieht Sie besonders in die Mandriva Linux Distribution an (sei es technisch oder menschlich)?
- wie möchten Sie in die Zukunft involviert werden (in welcher Form)?

Das Ziel ist nicht zu spekulieren oder über die jetzige oder vergangene Situation in Detail zu kommentieren. Es geht auch nicht darum, sich sofort formell für die Zukunft zu involvieren. Es geht uns hauptsächlich darum die Zukunft rund um Mandriva Linux zu vorbereiten und unsere Community – die jetzige und die potenzielle – zu verstehen und « vermessen ». Wir möchten hiermit auch verhindern, gewisse Aspekte zu vernachlässigen oder Chancen zu verpassen. Ihre Beiträge werden die Zukunft massgäblich beeinflussen.

Ich bitte Sie also, sich hörbar zu machen, falls Sie an die Distribution interessiert sind; sei es von weit oder nah. Dazu benützen Sie bitte die obengenannte Email-Adresse.

Danke für Ihre Unterstützung. Gestern, heute und morgen. Ihre Hilfe ist sehr geschätzt!

Jean-Manuel Croset
COO

Dear community,

The title of this post may sound funny. First, I’m addressing the community in a corporate blog. I’ve no other mean to communicate officially than that for the moment, this may change in the future, so sorry about that. Second, I’m asking to make yourself heard. Sounds great from a company which didn’t communicate during the last few months… This has some very specific reasons and I unfortunately cannot disclose more than that at the moment, but will as soon as possible. For the time being and in short: trust us.

The purpose of this post is to get the opinion and ideas of the community, as well as to feel how strong you are. The desktop distribution is our historical product, it has evolved from the early times and have experienced all the ups and downs of Mandriva. I would not like to judge whether the orientations taken in the past were right or not, as I am myself relatively new in the company. However, I’m sure that a community is necessary and that our company can’t be without one. I’m also convinced that, considering this fact, we need to take care of you.

On April, 30th, Mandriva will hold his long-awaited general assembly of the shareholders. Shortly after that, we’ll define the strategy and set our priorities for the next twelve months.

So, time has arrived to talk to our supporters, users, contributors and fans. I’m very interested  to hear about your background, motivations, expectations and needs. I can’t promise to fulfill every of them, but I’m ready to read and listen and will certainly take them into account for the future.

We’ve setup the community@mandriva.com address which you may use to contact us. Your constructive inputs, ideas and visions are very welcome. We’re especially interested in:

- who is in the community and want to (re)invest his time in the future and especially the distribution?
- what interests you in the Mandriva Linux distribution, from a technical and human point of view?
- how would you like to get involved in the development of the distribution, in which form?

This should not be about making comments or speculations on the current situation or history of Mandriva, or about committing yourself to anything right now. This is about preparing the future, seeing whether there is a community now, active or potential, around Mandriva Linux, to help us have an inventory of the community, in order not to spoil any more opportunities, but also not to commit on a dead end. Your inputs will influence the decisions taken in the future.

I invite all of you interested from near of far away in our distribution to write to the above mentioned address.

Thank you for your past, present and future support. Your help is appreciated!

Jean-Manuel Croset
COO

so true

It’s just incredible how the Open Source wolrd works. You could never believe it before being yourself part of it.

It started with a simple poor small script I wrote for myself to support the migration of my kids to Thunderbird from KMail. And I blogged about it, as I thought it could be interesting as I didn’t found myself a working tool to do it.

It turned out it was the most read article of this blog ! Grumph ! I thought people could be interested by MondoRecue or Continuous Packaging, my bad

Of course, when I have something to do, I prefer to write a script. Because old guy like me know perfectly you’ll have to do the stuff twice, and thus a script is useful !! And it was prooved again when I migrated my last kid with it again. And the script was improved at the same time. But I knew there were still some flaws, as one colleague found it as well, and had an issue with it (some mails not seen correctly even if imported in subfolders) !

So last month I received feedback from another user, who took that script and improved it greatly, fixing btw the above mentioned problem. And so that small script has now as many contributors as Mondorescue and twice as many as project-builder.org.
Edward Baudrez did a great job to improve the script, adding lots of CLI options capabilities to make it more versatile, fixing mail import in subfolders, error message handling, adding POD doc, …

I still have one or two improvements I’ll discuss with him to try making it even better, but that’s already quite an interesting piece of code !

So as it’s now even more useful than before, those interested by that migration should download and test it in their environment, and continue to send patches and make me more mazaed by the power of our community, for large as well as small stuff !

Filed under: FLOSS Tagged: Linux, Open Source, perl, script, Thunderbird

On my last entry, I told you that I have had an idea for a Perl-related April Fools' day gag, and that I would possibly reveal it on 2-April with a big disclaimer on top, just for kicks. Well,...

I had the opportunity to work for a customer whose infrastructure is using massively software RAID via md on a SAN storage. Their install base is made of RHEL6 VMs and they wanted to use MondoRescue for their imaging. What else as some could say

Recent versions of RHEL do use UUIDs everywhere, including to address MD devices in grub configuration, or mdadm ones. That doesn’t make the disaster recovery easier, if you recreate the device from scrtch with a new UUID. So the best approach is to store the information at backup and recreate them with the same UUID they had at restore time. But even if UUIDs on filesystems are supported since quite a long time now, it wasn’t the case for MD devices up to recent SVN revisions. In fact multiple issues were found, trying to make this support work correctly, which were gathered in some existing (and old) MondoRescue trac bugs (#73, #473, #500) or some especially raised at this occasion (#595 and #596).

I have now extended one of my test program to add MD tests as well, and it allowed me to finally solve all the remaining issues linked to this support. Hopefully ! In particular, we now also restore correctly the metadata format of the MD device, in order to be compliant with the boot loaders, as not all of them, or their versions, support all metadata versions. Not clear ? Well try to boot on a md device with the 1.2 version of metadata (created by default with latest mdadm create command) and you’ll rapidly understand

So as you could have guessed, the next step is now to produce a new set of packages in order for you to test As usual they will be available under ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/test/ where you can pick probably your distribution of choice.

But that’s not all what I’d like to fix for the upcoming 3.0.2. I need to look closely at the bug #600 as we have an issue with the latest MondoRescue version on RHEL 5.x where x is recent as well. After I’ve fixed this one, I think we’ll be good to publish 3.0.2 officially, and start chasing other bugs for the next one

Filed under: FLOSS Tagged: Linux, Mondorescue, Open Source, RHEL

S’il est un domaine étrangement absent du débat public et des discours des présidentiables, c’est bien le domaine de l’informatique Et pourtant, c’est un domaine touchant de nombreux français, tant dans leur travail quotidien, de par l’utilisation toujours plus prégnante des technologies du numérique, que dans leurs activités privées (gestion de photos, de musiques, de films, d’associations, navigation Internet, courrier électronique, bureautique, gestion de comptes, …).

Et s’il est un domaine où des économies drastiques peuvent être effectuées, c’est bien celui du logiciel dans le secteur informatique. Bien sûr en tant qu’utilisateur de technologies libres, et de distributions Linux depuis 1993, je suis particulièrement conscient de ces aspects, et du reste, c’est un des facteurs, avec la maîtrise technologique, qui poussent les clients avec lesquels j’interagis pour HP à adopter de plus en plus massivement ces technologies (et de façon plus importante que ce que les chiffres ne montrent, en raison du mode de diffusion du logiciel libre).

De plus en plus de résultat montre également que le secteur public bénéficie fortement de son adoption: Notre gendarmerie nationale, comme la ville de Munich sont deux exemples chiffrés et parfaitement analysés.

Et cela n’est pas difficile, ni pour un politique, ni pour un citoyen de comprendre la raisonnement: la réduction des coûts importants sur les licences (réduits à 0), la mise en concurrence sur les aspects support et prestation intellectuelle (amenant un prix de marché raisonnable et une qualité obligatoire), la meilleure maîtrise de l’environnement informatique par les équipes en charge (ou en infogérance si préféré), la meilleure sécurité apportée par la transparence du code, l’interopératbilité par le respect des standards et normes, tout contribue naturellement à ce que tous les partis et citoyens analysant honnêtement la situation tirent la même conclusion: il faut adopter massivement ces technologies, pour améliorer tant notre indépendance nationale, produire localement en bénéficiant de la production des autres, créer des emplois à forte valeur ajoutée, réduire les bugdets de l’état comme celui des entreprises (même en comptant les investissement dûs à la formation complémentaire), remettre le facteur humain au coeur des choix et replacer les technologistes qui ont permis ces avancées à leur juste niveau dans les chaînes de décision.

Pourtant, personne n’en parle. Ou si peu. ni de l’importance des données et formats ouverts !

Avec le si faible nombre de réponses obtenues au texte de candidats.fr (et aucun des 6 candidats que les sondages annoncent comme majeurs), comment se déterminer ? J’engage donc les candidats à la présidentielle, mais aussi ceux pour les législatives qui suivront à faire non seulement part de leurs intentions dans l’adoption de standards ouverts et des logiciels libres, mais aussi à les promouvoir dans les discours, comme l’un des moyens de réduire la dette de notre pays, d’améliorer l’emploi ainsi que notre indépendance technologique.

En 2012, votez FLOSS !

Filed under: FLOSS, Société Tagged: français, Gouvernance, HP, HPLinux, liberté, Open Source, standards

Only four days ago I started the experiment to fund specific Nepomuk tasks through donations. Like with last year’s fundraiser I was uncertain if it was a good idea. That, however, changed when only a few hours later two tasks had already reached their donation goal. Again it became obvious that the work done here is appreciated and that the “open” in Open-Source is understood for what it actually is.

So despite my wife not being overly happy about it I used the weekend to work on one of the tasks: Virtuoso inferencing.

Inference?

As a quick reminder: the inferencer automatically infers information from the data in the database. While Virtuoso can handle pretty much any inference rule you throw at it we stick to the basics for now: if resource R1 is of type B and B derives from A then R1 is also of type A. And: if R1 has property P1 with value “foobar” and P1 is derived from P2 then R1 also has property P2 with value “foobar“.

Crappy Inference

This is already very useful and even mandatory in many cases. Until now we used what we called “crappy inferencing 1 & 2″. The Crappy inferencer 1 was based on work done in the original Nepomuk project and it simply inserted triples for all sub-class and sub-property relations. That way we could simulate real inference by querying for something like

select * where {
  ?r ?p "foobar" . 
  ?p rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:label .
}

and catch all sub-properties of rdfs:label like nao:prefLabel or nie:title. While this works it means bad performance, additional storage and additional maintenance.

The Crappy Inferencer 2 was even worse. It inserted rdf:type triples for all super-classes. This means that it would look at every added and removed triple to check if it was a rdf:type triple. If so it would add or remove the appropriate rdf:type triples for the super-types. That way we could do fast type queries without relying on the crappy inferencer 1 which relies on the rdfs:subClassOf method. But this meant even more maintenance and even more storage space wasted.

Introducing: Virtuoso Inference

So now we simply rely on Virtuoso to do all that and it does such a wonderful job. Thanks to Virtuoso graph groups we can keep our clean ontology separation (each ontology has its own graph) and still stick to a very simple extension of the queries:

DEFINE input:inference <nepomuk:/ontographgroup>
select * where {
  ?r rdfs:label "foobar" .
}

Brilliant. Of course there are still situations in which you do not want to use the inferencer. Imagine for example the listing of resource properties in the UI. This is what it would look like with inference:

We do not want that. Inference is intended for machine, not for the human, at least not like this. So since back in the day I did not think of adding query flags to Soprano I simply introduced a new virtual query language: SparqlNoInference.

Resource Visibility

While at it I also improved the resource visibility support by simplifying it. We do not need any additional processing anymore. This again means less work on startup and with every triple manipulation command. Again we save space and increase performance. But this also means that resource visibility filtering will not work as before anymore. Nepoogle for example will need adjustment to the new way of filtering. Instead of

?r nao:userVisible 1 .

we now need

FILTER EXISTS { ?r a [ nao:userVisible "true"^^xsd:boolean ] }

Testing

The implementation is done. All that rests are the tests. I am already running all the patches but I still need to adjust some unit tests and maybe write new ones.

You can also test it. The code changes are, as always, spread over Soprano, kdelibs and kde-runtime. Both kdelibs and kde-runtime now contain a branch “nepomuk/virtuosoInference”. For Soprano you need git master.

Look for regressions of any kind so we can merge this as soon as possible. The goal is KDE 4.9.

One Bug has been driving people crazy. This is more than understandable seeing that the bug was an endless high CPU usage by Virtuoso, the database used in Nepomuk. Kolab Systems, the Free Software groupware company behind Kolab, a driving force behind Akonadi, sponsored me to look into that issue.

Finding the issue turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, coming up with a fix even more so. In the process I ended up improving the Akonadi Nepomuk Email indexer/feeder in several places. This, however useful and worthwhile, turned out to be unrelated to the high CPU usage. Virtuoso was not to blame either. In the end the real issue was solved by a little SPARQL query optimization.

Application developers against Akonadi and Nepomuk might want to keep that in mind: The way you build your queries will have dramatic impact on the performance of the whole system. So this is also where opimizations are likely to have a lot of impact in case people want to help improve things further. Discussing query design with the Nepomuk team or on the Virtuoso mailing list can go a long way here.

So thanks to the support from Kolab Systems, Virtuoso is no longer chewing so much CPU, and Akonadi Email indexing will work a lot smoother with KDE 4.8.2.

Thanks to a very successful fundraiser in 2011 I was able to continue working on Nepomuk and searching for new enterprise sponsoring. Sadly that search was not fruitful and in 2012 Nepomuk has become a hobby. Several people proposed to start another fundraiser or try to raise money on a monthly basis. I, however, will try to get sponsoring for specific bugs or features. Depending on their size the sponsoring goal will differ. This would allow me to keep working on Nepomuk as more than a hobby.

The Nepomuk Tasks page lists the current tasks that can be sponsored. Of course you can propose new tasks but I will try to keep the list of current tasks small. Donate to the tasks you would like to see finished, ignore the ones you do not deem important. I will simply remove tasks if there is no activity within a certain period of time. So please have a look at

The Nepomuk Tasks Page

Well, I've got a lot of stuff I'd like to blog about in the various blogs of mine, and so I'm starting with this report on the Israeli Perl Workshop of 2012, which had taken place in 28 February,...

Suite à la lecture de l’article de François Élie, Bernard Lang et Franck Macrez sur la gestion des droits d’auteur sur les oeuvres orphelines, j’ai décidé de signer la pétition contre la loi qui renforce une fois de plus le droit des éditeurs (et on des auteurs) au détriment du public, et même des auteurs.

En tant qu’auteur de logiciel libre, musicien amateur, auteur d’articles de blog ou quoi que ce soit d’autre issu de mon esprit et représentant ainsi ma propriété intellectuelle, je trouve navrant le tour que prennent les événements. Après tout, pourquoi les créations d’un auteur devraient-elles être protégées au delà de sa mort ? On peut comprendre que l’on souhaite léguer des biens matériels aux siens, pour les protéger en partie des aléas de la vie, mais il faut aussi les laisser l’affronter et créer leur propre sillon.

En cela, s’ils peuvent en partie souhaiter défendre le droit d’auteur de leurs ascendants, pour qu’il n’y soit pas fait outrage, je ne vois pas pour quelle raison ils devraient bénéficier des droits financiers s’y rattachant de façon aussi excessive. Les bénéfices de la réputation de l’auteur initial sont bien suffisants non ? Et s’ils veulent en tirer profit, ils ont eux-même à faire preuve de leur talent pour reprendre le flambeau et mener leur barque.

Qu’en tant qu’auteur, on me protège du plagiat honteux, oui. Mais pas du pastiche ou de l’hommage non ! (La 8è symphonie de Chostakovitch pour le premier ou Les variations de Rachmaninov sur un thème de Corelli pour le second sont un des multiples exemples que la musique nous donne en ces domaines). Et à sa mort, que ses oeuvres puissent éternellement (tant que l’on sera en mesure de les conserver du moins) bénéficier au plus grand nombre me semble logique. C’est le principe même d’artiste qui invite au partage de l’émotion artistique par le plus grand nombre.

De quoi vit un musicien classique de nos jours. Pas Jordi Savall, ou Maurizio Pollini. Le musicien de rang, celui qui joue dans un quatuor, un orchestre baroque. De ses activités de musique vivante: concerts, animations, enseignement. Le disque en général ne leur rapporte guère (si ce n’est au forfait), et seul une poignée pourrait imaginer en vivre. Du reste, le disque a été originellement conçu pour conserver une trace d’interprètes majeurs pour qui cela valait la peine de d’investir (genre Caruso ! pas la soupe actuellement mise en boite). Ceci est aussi une des raisons de la désaffection pour ce medium, les éditeurs ne jouant plus leur rôle de sélection, mais enregistrant non pour conserver mais pour faire de l’argent (il y a aussi des exceptions en classique, comme le label de Jordi Savall, Alia Vox, qui fait oeuvre de mémoire, ou nombre de petits labels courageux comme les Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi, Alpha, Zig Zag, … qui le font aussi).

Le fait que je ne souhaite pas interpréter de la musique contemporaine tient certes de mon goût pour la musique ancienne, mais aussi par la complexité légale mise en place pour protéger les éditeurs (et prétendument les auteurs) et qui aboutit à l’impossibilité pour les interprètes de jouer les oeuvres de leur temps (et pas qu’en raison de leur complexité, car il reste du répertoire accessible).

Il est temps que les auteurs, les interprètes fassent preuve, de par leur vote pour des gens qui ne soient pas tous avocats de formation (et ne veulent tout résoudre que par une nouvelle loi), de leur souci de léguer d’eux la même image de générosité dont ils témoignent dans leur jeu musical. Qu’ils se prononcent en majorité pour la mise dans le domaine public de leurs oeuvres après leur mort. Que l’on change ces lois iniques pour favoriser l’échange culturel, comme les auteurs de logiciels libres ont su le faire dans leur domaine, quitte à adopter de nouvelles licences de diffusion. Leur talent est aujourd’hui leur gagne pain.

Quant on voit comment les “ayant-droits” de Charles Trénet se battent pour son héritage, ils sont bien loin de la joie de vivre transmise par le fou chantant, mais très proches de sa chanson l’héritage infernal. Ah l’héritage des droits d’auteur, vaste fumisterie en fait !! Idem avec le changement des dates de péremption des droits d’auteur pour continuer à couvrir le Boléro de Ravel, vache à lait de la Sacem (souhaitons bon courage à l’anti-sacem au passage).

Souhaitons que dans tous les sujets abordés lors de ces campagnes présidentielle et législative, les points précedemment évoqués fassent l’objet d’un large débat et que d’autre vision de notre société puissent émerger pour le partage de la culture, comme pour celui de la connaissance.

Filed under: Société Tagged: droit d'auteur, français, Gouvernance, Open Source

This is a quick tip: after forking a repository on GitHub sadly there is no button to easily fetch new commits from the original repository. So we have to do it manually. Luckily this is easy enough:

1. Add the original repository as a remote to your local clone:

$ git remote add openlink git://github.com/openlink/virtuoso-opensource.git

2. Now you can simply pull the changes from the original:

$ git checkout develop/6
$ git pull openlink develop/6

However, make sure you do not do a rebase pull with the pull as that would destroy any merges you did on your own fork.

3. Finally push them to your own fork:

$ git push origin develop/6

I am sure that for most git users this is trivial. I just wanted to clearly state that there is no difference when using GitHub. It does not provide us with any magic when it comes to fork updates.

The presentation I made at Fosdem this year has been video taped by the great video team during that event. It’s now available online for you to replay (as well as on the project’s ftp server). If you want the associated slideset, just download it !

The latest development have been around fixing the bug on file names, improving test versions build. And we now have new requests on the devel mailing list and, even more interesting, patches proposals to improve pb work with Git and other bug fixes, that should make their way before I issue 0.12.1.

Filed under: FLOSS Tagged: Open Source, packaging, perl, project-builder.org

Ever since 2006 OpenLink Software has provided its Open-Source version of Virtuoso (VOS), the high-performance SQL server with a powerful RDF/SPARQL data management layer on top.

So far the sources have been developed in an internal cvs repository which was published through the Virtuoso sourceforge pages.

As of March 21. OpenLink took the next step towards Open Development by moving to git as its version management system. The sources are now hosted in the VOS GitHub repository.

Like mentioned on the VOS git usage pages OpenLink now accepts GitHub pull requests and patches. Be sure to read the notes on git branching policy in VOS which are based on the git-flow approach by Vincent Driessen - which by the way is an interesting read independent of VOS.

Most importantly it is now a lot simpler to follow the development of Virtuoso Open-Source. Simply clone the git repository and switch to the appropriate develop branch:

$ git clone git://github.com/openlink/virtuoso-opensource.git
$ cd virtuoso-opensource
$ git checkout -t remotes/origin/develop/6

For details on the used branches see the already mentioned VOS git usage guide.

Refer to the VOS building instructions if the following is not enough for you:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-layout=<LAYOUT>
$ make
$ make install

where <LAYOUT> is one of Gnu, Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, Freebsd, opt, Openlink. The latter two force the prefix.

After going into way too much detail about FOAF and how to create your own WebID manually the last time, today I will show you how easy it is when you have a system that supports WebID properly.

The system I am talking about is ODS – The OpenLink Data Spaces. Please do not be scared away by the UI which does not offer all the fanciness of today’s Web interfaces. The point with ODS is its backend (which BTW is entirely based on Virtuoso, including the serving of the web pages).

Getting your own WebID through ODS contains of only two steps: 1. create an ODS account, and 2. let ODS create the X.509 certificate for you. Now as mentioned before you need to trust OpenLink with your private key in this case. If you are not willing to do that you can setup your own instance of ODS – more about that another time.

Creating an ODS account

So start by navigating to the public instance of ODS in order to create an account. In the upper right corner you will find a little “Sign Up” button which will get you here:

As you can see there are several ways to sign up for an ODS account, one of which is of course WebID. Since you want to use ODS to create your WebID you need to use another means: plain old username+password or something OAuth-powered like LinkedIn.

Generating your X.509 certificate

Once you created the account and are logged into ODS, navigate to the profile manager via the little “edit” button right next to “Profile” in the upper left. You are now presented with lots of tabs allowing to change all details of your ODS account. In this case you are interested in the “Security->Certificate Generator” section.

Normally all required fields should already be filled. Now you only need to click the “submit certificate request” button and let ODS and your browser do the rest. If the certificate generation was successful you get a notice that it has been imported into your borwser’s key chain. This is what it looks like in Chrome:

To verify that your new certificate has been registered successfully check the “X.509 Certificates” tab which lists all certificates installed in ODS (the ones which include the private key):

Testing your shiny new WebID

Finally you can try your new WebID by logging out (“Logout” in the upper right corner) and signing in again, this time with your WebID:

Notice how your browser takes care of the login by itself as it has the certificate installed in its own key chain.

That is already it. You now have a fully functional and valid WebID without every worrying about RDF or FOAF or anything else besides clicking some buttons.

Apache Subversion version 1.7.x broke some backwards compatible and some stuff got broken, including hgsubversion, which provides a way to use subversion remotes with Mercurial.

In order to fix it, just install subvertpy, which provides alternative python bindings for subversion, which hgsubversion prefers by default, and with which it works fine under subversion-1.7.x.

I discovered all that after I attempted to fix it the hard way by installing subversion-1.6.x under /opt/svn-1.6.x, which required building an old version of SWIG, and then setting PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PYTHONPATH and then having to remove the global python-svn bindings from under /usr/lib (as root!) because hgsubversion did not like them, a process which took me an entire evening and was frustrating and was ridden with a lot of trial and error, so I would not recommend it.

Hope it helps. Also see this hgsubversion bug report.

Clueless – that is what I was a while ago regarding WebID. Since then I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that apparently there is no easy hands-on guide to get started with WebID. This is what I will try to remedy here. So let us start with the basics:

What is WebID?

WebID is essentially two things: 1. a way to identify yourself and others in the semantic web of things, and 2. a unified password-less alternative to classical login credentials.

A WebID is essentially a URL pointing to a description of yourself (this is typically a FOAF file) combined with a self-signed X.509 certificate. X.509 certificates are those things used to verify the identity of web servers via SSL. Typically they are signed by big brother authorities like Verisign whose root certificates are hard-coded into all web browsers.

How Does WebID Work?

As mentioned before the WebID is a URL which points to a FOAF file. Now if you want to log into some site you simply provide the WebID which means to select a certificate from a list in your web browser. The server will then fetch the FOAF, extract the certificate’s public key from it (more about that later), and then ask you to prove your identity. Since you are the only one having the private key of the certificate that is easily done. And that’s already it. From a high level point of view it is very simple.

Of course this does not differ much from other private/public key systems yet. However, it gets really interesting when you use WebIDs to share information. Imagine your social platform allows you to setup fine grained ACLs based on WebIDs. This person can read that photo, this person can write to that document, and so on. These people do not even need to have accounts on the service in question. Using their WebIDs they will have access to exactly that information.

Is It Safe?

In order to ensure security only two things need to be made sure: 1. The FOAF file your WebID is pointing to should be under your control or that of a trustworthy entity, and 2. as it always has been: make sure nobody steals your private key.

And even if you loose your private key, disabling the WebID is as easy as removing the public key from your FOAF profile (more details following later). Even replacing the certificate with a new one will never invalidate your WebID since it stays an identifier for yourself in the semantic web, independent of the certificate.

Where Can I Learn More?

If you like to read specs check out the latest WebID specs by the W3C WebID community group. Join the mailing list, chat on IRC #foaf, and watch the video showing how simple WebID is for the end user.

How Can I Try Myself?

I will present two ways to play with WebID. The first way is as simple as creating an account at id.myopenlink.net and clicking a few buttons. However, I will leave that for the next blog entry. The second way is the one that leads to a better understanding of WebID and is the result of my struggle with the matter. Be aware, however, that the following howto does show how we can do manually what tools will eventually do for us.

Step 1: Create Your Very Own FOAF Profile

FOAF – Friend Of A Friend – is essentially an RDF vocabulary which allows you to describe your social web. Your WebID will eventually resolve to a foaf:Person representing yourself. So the first thing to do is to decide what your WebID looks like. For simplicity I will use my own as an example: http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian#me. While Turtle would be a much more readable representation of your FOAF profile I will use RDF+XML instead to increase the probability of server support. Let us start with the basics: the foaf:Person.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
  <foaf:Person rdf:about="http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian#me">
    <foaf:name>Sebastian Trueg</foaf:name>
  </foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

This is a simple RDF document describing a resource of type foaf:Person with one property: foaf:name. It should be fairly self-explanatory. To this you may add all sorts of information like blogs, email addresses, nick names, personal details, whatever you want. Just be sure to remember that all of this will be public.

There is one very important distinction I want to stress since I missed that for a long time: the document is not the person, ie. the URL of the document needs to differ from the WebID URL (hence the ‘#me’ fragment). To stress this fact lets use some more FOAF:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
  <foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian">
    <dc:title>Sebastian Trueg's FOAF Profile</dc:title>
    <foaf:maker rdf:resource="http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian#me" />
    <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian#me" />
  </foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>

  <foaf:Person rdf:about="http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian#me">
    <foaf:name>Sebastian Trueg</foaf:name>
  </foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

As you can see the document itself only describes the person but it is not the same resource. Failing the make this distinction will result in an invalid WebID.

Create The X.509 Certificate

Once your FOAF file is done you need to get your certificate. This could be done via OpenSSL manually but it is tedious and error-prone. Thus, we fire up our web-browser and let it do the work for us by relying on a certificate generator like webid.fcns.eu/certgen.php and the browser’s own key generator.

All you need is the WebID and your name. The rest is optional. The nice thing here is that the web service will generate the certificate but your browser will generate the key locally and never send the private key to the service. It is safe.

Once the certificate has been generated it is saved to the browser’s own certificate storage thingy.

Copy The Certificate Public Key Into Your FOAF Profile

Now that your certificate has been created you can look at it in the browser’s preferences. In Firefox it can be found via Advanced->View Certificates->Your Certificates. Find the “Subject’s Public Key’ in the details and copy it into your FOAF profile (remove any whitespace in the process):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
 xmlns:cert="http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/cert#">
[...]
  <foaf:Person rdf:about="http://www.trueg.de/people/sebastian#me">
    <foaf:name>Sebastian Trueg</foaf:name>
    <cert:key>
      <cert:RSAPublicKey>
        <cert:modulus rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#hexBinary">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</cert:modulus>
        <cert:exponent rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer">65537</cert:exponent>
      </cert:RSAPublicKey>
    </cert:key>
  </foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

Having the public key in the FOAF profile is essential since that is where the servers you want to identify yourself to will read it from.

Upload The FOAF File to Your Server

Finally you need to upload the FOAF file to your web server and make it accessible. Since we are using a fancy WebID this requires some very basic Apaching through .htaccess in the ‘people’ folder which sets up some redirects:

# Turn off MultiViews
Options -MultiViews

# Directive to ensure *.rdf files served as appropriate content type,
# if not present in main apache config
AddType application/rdf+xml .rdf

# Rewrite engine setup
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /people

# Rewrite rule to serve HTML content from the vocabulary URI if requested
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/rdf\+xml.*(text/html|application/xhtml\+xml)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} text/html [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/xhtml\+xml [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/.*
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ $1/index.html [R=303]

# Rewrite rule to serve RDF/XML content from the vocabulary URI if requested
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/rdf\+xml
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ $1/foaf.rdf [R=303]

# Rewrite rule to serve the RDF+XML content from the vocabulary URI by default
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ $1/foaf.rdf [R=303]

Now your shiny new WebID is accessible by web services. Go ahead and verify your WebID on my-profile.eu and use it to sign into id.myopenlink.net.

Next up: more on id.myopenlink.net and possible usage of WebID for social capabilities in Nepomuk.

So as many followers may know already, most of the technical infrastructure we use for PulseAudio has been moved over to FreeDesktop.org. We already moved the mailing lists and git hosting some time ago, and one of the main bits left was the wiki.

We had previously used the FreeDesktop wiki for a couple, isolated pages (mainly because the pulseaudio.org wiki was just too frustrating to use), but the vast majority of content was still on the old servers.

So I finally got around to looking at migrating the content. Now a lot of it is out of date (again see the "too frustrating to use" comment above!), but there is still a lot of data and history there that we'd like to preserve.

Fortunately, FreeDesktop use MoinMoin which is very easy to manipulate, squeeze and mould into the right shape. No complicated databases, just a relatively isolated file system layout. This very much eased the migration process.

We used Trac over at pulseaudio.org and I've done a fair bit of hacking on Trac before so this was also quite convenient as the only two scripts I found for migrating wiki content from Trac to Moin were very basic and limited in their features.

So I set about writing a script to do the conversion. trac2moin supports full wiki conversion including history and attachments. It can rename pages (and fix up links) with a simple map file and also rename users with another map file. It can even fixup some of the syntax differences and even translate a few basic macros. All in all, the conversion process was pretty good.

There will, of course, still be a requirement for a big refresh of the data and content, but now that the bulk of the heavy lifting is done that task can be planned, organised and undertaken without any barriers!

Many thanks to Arun Raghavan and to Tollef Fog Heen for their help in this conversion process.

So get updating!

…at least partially. With the introduction of the Data Management Service we got a very powerful way to put your data into Nepomuk: storeResources (thank you Vishesh). I will not go into the details here but the important fact is that the file indexer, the Akonadi indexer, the TV namer, the movie integration, and maybe some more rely on this method.

Thus, it is obvious that improving its performance means improving the performance of the overall system in general.

Now like I said it is a very powerful method. Sadly this results in very complex code that is not easy to wrap your head around. So optimizing it is not trivial. I tried anyway and tackled one of the main parts of it: the resource identification. After playing around a little, trying different ways to break up the main query I got to a point where I am satisfied. And here is why:

Finally some nice bar graphs! So what does this tell us? Well, the most important bit is that with my patch we save roughly 3 hours when indexing the 196692 Akonadi items I used for testing. But maybe more importantly: if the identification is faster the whole indexing is smoother and eats less CPU since it is throttled and, thus, has shorter phases of high CPU usage.

I took the Akonadi indexing as an example since the difference here is impressive. The file indexing is also slightly improved but by far not as significant as the Akonadi indexing. I suppose this is due to the very simply identification that is required during file indexing (some very basic nco:Contact merging is all that is required most of the time).

So, this is what you will get with KDE 4.8.2. One of several going away presents…

Filed under: Famille Tagged: Personnel

The search for continuous Nepomuk sponsorship has been going on a while now, the fundraiser I ran to help me with that was very successful. I can not thank everyone involved enough. Sadly I was not that successful in securing the funding. This essentially  means that I will not continue to work on Nepomuk as my day-to-day job.

While I am sad about that I am also very excited about the new direction my work life is taking. As of mid February I am working for OpenLInk Software – the very smart company behind Virtuoso, the very core of Nepomuk itself.

I will not go into the details of what I will be doing at OpenLink just yet except that it is not working on Virtuoso itself and that structured data is still the topic. There will be much more on this later.

Now what does that mean for Nepomuk? Besides the fact that Nepomuk has some other great developers who will hopefully keep up their good work, I will stay as the maintainer of the core components – at least for the time being. At this point I am unable to say how much I will be involved in Nepomuk in the next years. But seeing that the project means a lot to me I am sure that I will manage to find some time every now and then.

So, this is not really a goodbye. But something like it…

Attention, cet article ne concerne en rien Linux ou les Logiciels Libres !!!

Il est assez intéressant d’observer le ballet politique en cette période électorale en France, notamment concernant la politique européenne. Le nouveau traité de stabilité étant relativement contesté, les candidats de l’opposition redoublent de propositions et se proposent d’amender voire d’annuler ce que le gouvernement actuel va valider avec ses partenaires européens.
Bien sûr cette attitude est « logique » de la part de candidats à la recherche de voix, mais est elle réaliste ? Là est toute la question … Les candidats de gauche proposent de réformer l’Europe, mais le peuvent-ils si la majorité des gouvernements européens sont conservateurs ? J’en doute.

On parle beaucoup d’harmonisation des politiques fiscale, budgétaires, des politiques économiques voire même au niveau social. Mais qu’en est il de l’harmonisation des calendriers politiques ? En effet, bien que les élections européennes qui permettent l’élection des députés se déroule au même moment dans l’union européenne; le Parlement européen ne détient pas tous les pouvoirs : celui ci est partagé avec la Commission Européenne, mais aussi le Conseil Européen  qui réunit les chefs d’État et de gouvernement. On a vu notamment tout le poids et l’influence de ce dernier dans les différentes mesures prises durant la crise de la dette.
Or, l’attitude et les exigences d’un chef d’État ne sont pas les mêmes selon qu’il soit en période électorale ou pas. Les candidats feront des promesses concernant l’Europe chacun de leurs côtés dans leur pays sans forcément se concerter avec les candidats du même bord politique dans les autres pays car notamment leurs calendriers et donc leurs priorités ne seront pas les mêmes.

Et si on faisait se dérouler les élections des gouvernements ( ou des chefs d’État selon le type de régime ) en même temps partout en Europe ? Cela pourrait permettre aux candidats de faire de vrais propositions qui seraient concertées concernant l’Europe : tant qu’à harmoniser, autant aller jusqu’au bout !
Malheureusement ce sera très compliqué voire impossible à mettre en place car il y aura des changements de Constitution à faire de dans nombreux pays notamment pour avoir les mêmes durées de législature et de mandat, des chefs d’états devront accepter d’écourter leur mandat, et bien sûr cela renforce le côté fédéraliste … Un rêve pieu en somme. Que les candidats continuent à brasser du vent alors …

Despite the various criticisms of the Ubuntu PPA system, I’ve found it to be rather handy. It has made it quite simple to provide specialized backports and packages, though only for Ubuntu. While many PPA’s will just work(tm) on Debian, proper support would be nice. As then Debian could benifit from the work that is put into these. Perhaps it could be made optional, ie. «Check this box to disable Debian building of your PPA», for those that actually do have Ubuntu-specialized packages.

I run several Debian systems with Ubuntu PPAs added, primarily the wine PPA as there’s no up-to-date apt source for that available (there are packages available, but no apt repo, and I’m too lazy to update manually). It works quite well, the only thing I’ve noticed is that the init script isn’t quite compatible, but that’s a non-issue as I don’t use its functionality anyway.

My point is that they’re already rather close, and by adding Debian as a build target we could gain a useful service for the odd extra package one might need. Since canonical wouldn’t gain anything directly from this, it’s probably unlikely to happen - still, I’m allowed to dream.

A propos of nothing in particular, I just wanted to echo Jono in giving it up to LibreOffice. Ever since the fork everyone involved with LO has done fantastic work on both the coding and community building side; I’d say they’re a great model for how such a large F/OSS project should work. The substantial improvements they’ve made to the project in such a short time are impressive. Kudos to the LO team!

As commented previously, MondoRescue 3.0.1 has been officially announced today.

I’ve also pushed that version which I hope should be a good stable one to Mageia and Mandriva as well.
Iv’e also added support for openSuSE 12.1 to rpmbootstrap so now VE works fine with it.

Time to go back to project-builder.org for its own next version !

Filed under: FLOSS Tagged: Linux, Mageia, Mandriva, Mondorescue, Open Source, project-builder.org, rpmbootstrap

I have finally gotten around to migrating my blog from wordpress to octopress.

Octopress is “A blogging framework for hackers”. It’s based on jekyll, a ruby framework for generating static websites. What sold me on it is the ability to use the best blog-writing client available, a normal shell along with vim. Blog posts are written in markdown (by default), the source is in git, and it comes with rake targets for creating new posts, building it and deploying it.

As this should make it a lot easier to write posts, I’m hoping that it just might make me post more often.

The MondoRescue project has made quite some progresses again recently. So it”s time to publish mondo 3.0.1 and mindi 2.1.1. Those are bug fix versions mainly. Especially there is a fix for bad LVM i-want-my-lvm setup file, where sometimes duplicated lines were generated which was annoying, as well as an error again in some cases to compute the multiplier factor used when disk size changed.

Among the major improvements, we are now supporting kernel 3.2 new usb_common module, btrfs, grub2 and the launch of rpcbind at restore time to improve NFS restore support for at least RHEL 6.2 (on which I made my tests) and hopefully Debian 6 as well (feedback welcome !). All details are available in trac.

I have had multiple reports that this version was indeed better than 3.0.0 with regards to the issues mentionned upper, so I think it’s time to make it official now, so a larger audience can test it. This is the version I’ll push to Mageia tomorrow, once the build is done, and to Mandriva when time permits. What I find nice, is that latest releases receive more feedback, and also more pathces from contributors and users. A good sign !

The next task on my TODO list is to publish a newer version of project-builder.org as well, that is still helping me dramatically in building the 100+ tuples as well as indices for urpmi/yum/apt/… in the public repository.

Filed under: FLOSS Tagged: Linux, Mageia, Mandriva, Mondorescue, Open Source, project-builder.org

Here are some Vim tips I ran into recently. First of all, when opening scp:// URLs, one should use two slashes after the hostname instead of 1, like scp://hostname//home/myuser/foo.txt instead of scp://hostname/home/myuser/foo.txt. I don’t know why that is the case, but it does not work properly without it. It also seems that netrw is buggy as it displays an irritating grey line on the cursor, the syntax highlighting tends to be off and saving a file displays several lines at the bottom.

Another tip is that gvim limits the number of tabs it opens when doing gvim -p [file1] [file2] [file3]. As a result, it is possible that not all files will be opened. If you want to change it you can set set tabpagemax in your .vimrc.

Finally, I noticed that Vim c-indentation tends to indent parameters to functions on subsequent lines using 8 spaces instead of 4 by default. I was able to change it to 4, which is my preference by adding set cinoptions+='(0,W4' to my .vimrc. There is plenty of other nifty stuff available in the cinoptions parameter.

Enjoy!

UPDATE (15/02/2012): Warsow was updated to 0.62 and World of Padman to 1.6.

In the past months I have been working on many things for Mageia, like mentoring some novice packagers, fixing bugs, preparing updates for Mageia 1, and the usual packaging of new applications and updating existing ones. On this last activity I've been working really hard to get the biggest amount of games packaged for Mageia. I always have loved FPS games, so that kind of games have been my main objective.

Of course, all are open source games, but unfortunately, for some of them the data files have non-free licenses, so those have been put on the non-free repository, or are using a nifty feature to autodownload the data files at first run of the game. How this autodownload feature works ? using a program developed by Fedora called autodownloader. Here is how it works:

The user install one of the games that has non-free licensed data files using urpmi, Mageia Control Center or drakrpm as usual. Then, when the user runs the game for the first time, he/she will be prompted with the following screen describing the game and the space requirements for the download that is about to be done:


If the user accepts, then another screen with the game license will be displayed so the user can agree to it or refuse it:


Upon the user agreeing the game license, the download of the data files will begin from the first configured mirror:


You can have multiple mirrors configured in case that the first mirror is down, or the files aren't available anymore on that server. After the files finish downloading, they will be verified against a md5 hash to be sure that download was ok. Then, the user will see a screen telling him that the download completed successfully and asks the user if he wants to launch the game !! :D :


And voila ! the game starts running :D

The autodownloader program uses a very simple configuration file where you specify the text of all of these screens and the mirror list from where to download the files with it's corresponding md5 hash. What I like the most of this autodownload technique is that we can use it for other programs that can't be included on the distro, not even on the non-free repository, like skype or flash plugin perhaps ?

Well enough about technicalities !! lets see which new games we will have in the upcoming Mageia 2 in May :D

The following games are all based on ioquake3 engine, thus they use it as their game engine, which has been patched to better support these games. Also most of these (autodownloader) packages have been taken from Fedora and adapted for Mageia. I'll start with my preferred one :D



Urban Terror

Version: 4.1.1
Media: core/release (uses autodownloader)
Description from the game's website:
Urban Terror is a free multiplayer first person shooter developed by FrozenSand, that (thanks to the ioquake3-code) does not require Quake III Arena anymore. It is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. Urban Terror can be described as a Hollywood tactical shooter; somewhat realism based, but the motto is "fun over realism". This results in a very unique, enjoyable and addictive game.


There's an excellent video that shows the gameplay of the game on youtube. You can find more screenshots here.

Santa Claus uploaded them during the night :-). Among the one of the previous years, you will find the videos of FOSDEM 2012. Many thanks to the GNOME and Mageia guys I met there, I really enjoyed that week-end in a snowy Brussels :-)