Mandriva

Well, I’ve decided to move the blog to wordpress instead of serendipity. I liked serendipity a lot, but… well, wordpress is more popular and I wouldn’t to see if I could make trackbacks actually work. Seems a little simpler and straightforward, once you get used to the different layouts, etc. Anyways, have to do [...]

finally, it’s done (and I greatly resemble a zombie right now) - 2008 is out. really happy with this release, it’s going to be a stonker, I hope. also up, you will note, is the new mandriva.com . Still a bit rough around the edges, but it now has big green download buttons. I hope you’re all happy!

2008 release story is here. Please, Digg it, Slashdot it, spread it all over the known universe if possible.

I am going to go buy some milk. Milk is good.

First of all, i'm working in a Linux company, i use Linux for almost everything in my life except gaming.
Second, my company sold like hundred thousand of linux machines all over the world.
Third, it's obvious for any smart person that actually read regular information about computer world see that linux is growing A LOT.
Then, suddenly, the bank that i use ( and many of my fellows co-workers ) decide the very smart move to include an security applet that simply makes mandatory the use of Microsoft Windows. And they tell this explicitely.
They provide a telephone to users of "other operational systems" to inform then that they're not using MS ( maybe to tell then to use telephone operations ). Ok, would be barely ok if..
..i'm outside my country. The only way i have to pay my accounts is by internet banking, as my family lives away from my city. And will not back until the terminal date od back change, 19 October. So, if some issue happens during my stay out my home, like pay the credit card debts, that i'm using here, to avoid lock, i'll be helpless, or use some non-personal computer with Microsoft Windows to deal with my money.
Nice, huh ? To have security, i just need abandon my current security in favor of a use unsecure computer that i can't assure if is reliable.
Maybe can i ask ABN to give me R$ 500,00 in my account to buy a copy of some non portuguese Microsoft Windows here to solve my issue

Of course, who cares about Linux users ? Not ABN Amro. Should we include Santander in this too ?

Hi All…

I’m not having much time to work on my personal projects ( pychord by example ) cause I’m having a lot of tasks to do ( and to learn ) on my college and on my new job.

But I’m here to talk about pychord, so let me do it! =)

Tim wrote a lot of good suggestions on garage’s foruns. So, I’m working on their ideas now. I need to say “thanks” to Tim cause he gave me a lot of good suggestions to make pychord better. Thank you Tim!

On this last weekend I worked in “Zoom IN/OUT ” feature and change the font of the chord’s screen. I think that pychord is a little better now.

You can get it here, or do a “upgrade” on your device.

That is all!

Have a nice week!

We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public mirror servers.

The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards and wireless chips). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We’re proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications.

Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included.

Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

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I always like the week or two before a release. While the other developers are busting their butts trying to get things finished for the upcoming release, I actually get to take a bit of a breather, largely because I don’t like duplicating effort so any non-essential updates get to take a bit of [...]

This week’s TechRepublic tip is Synchronize computers with Unison which introduces the multi-computer synchronization tool known as Unison.

I downloaded the OpenSUSE 10.3 DVD to test it out and compare it with Mandriva 2008.0. I was interested in reviewing the current state of this distribution and maybe also get some inspiration for improvements I can propose for Mandriva 2008.1.

The artwork in OpenSUSE is very nice. There are some interesting ideas we should really consider in Mandriva: possibility to read the release notes during the installation of packages, some interesting yast modules (the firwall module is way better than Mandriva's),... But I discovered already a lot of problems by just quickly testing it out in Virtualbox: the installer (actually yast) just crashes completely when detecting the network configuration, there was no possibility to use a 1024x768 resolution in Virtualbox, some strange choices of default applications (especially in GNOME: Brasero is currently still a bit too buggy, and Skencil is extremely ugly),...

So currently I have a strong feeling that Mandriva 2008.0 will be a better and especially more stable distribution than OpenSUSE 10.3. I'll continue testing out OpenSUSE a bit and noting my remarks, and I'll probably install it on an old laptop I have here, to see how it works on real hardware. I'll do the same with Mandriva 2008.0 and I'll maybe post a review comparing Mandriva 2008.0 and OpenSUSE 10.3 (and maybe Ubuntu Gutsy too?). Well, time will tell.

By the time you read this, there is much chance that Mandriva 2008.0 final is out and downloadable. Go check the Mandriva download page now to check it out!

Following the port of xmp to QNX6 I wiped out Neutrino from the test machine and installed BeOS Max Edition. A new BeOS sound driver was written, based on the OSX CoreAudio driver and documentation found in the Internet. Some tweaking was required to build the driver since the SoundPlayer API is in C++ and the rest of application is C.

Sound quality is fine, terminal settings work correctly and latency is decent. Should we try Plan9 now?

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Well, I called the idiots AGAIN today. And they suddenly found out “hmm, we can’t get parts for it”. So, they’re sending back the box without a working mainboard. How fun. So I’m still without a proper laptop, and it seems like it’s going to stay that way.

So, they can’t get parts for a laptop bought 22/08-05. Wonderful.
So I’m pretty much screwed. Yay.

And now for something completely different…

if Lewis Hamilton doesn’t win the Formula 1 world title this year there’s no justice, as the man is some kind of saint. He had to leave the Chinese Grand Prix while in a position to clinch the title after ditching his car in a gravel trap while trying to drive into the pits on a set of tyres that barely existed any more, they were so worn down. Not twenty minutes later - at a point where just about any other driver, and indeed any other person you could name with the possible exception of Buddha, would still have been breaking things in the garage and throwing a full-blown hissy fit for not being called in for a pit stop sooner - he’s doing the rounds of his engineers shaking hands and slapping backs, and giving an interview to the BBC in which he took full responsibility for missing the corner and said he was looking forward to winning the next race. The man’s incomparable.

Found another site running a ‘what’s your favourite distribution’ poll - ReviewLinux. You know what to do!

We got 2008 (mostly) finalized today. Well, tomorrow morning, Paris time. Lots of very tired people on the internal IRC channel juggling final-final-final ISO generation, torrent organization, and watching France beat New Zealand in the rugby World Cup quarter finals. The Powerpack and Free editions are done, and just One needs finishing up. The early seeders are now getting access to the torrents, so we’ll be able to do the public release early next week.

I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks - 2008 is shaping up to be a really killer release, and we have some really nice news about the Club changes to go with it. The reduction in the range of products for 2008 is also a great positive thing, and the effective reduction in prices that comes along with it. I’m hoping we’ll be able to make some significant advances in mind- and market-share with this release, it certainly deserves it! It’ll be an interesting ride for sure.

Well, I just found out about another site running a ‘what’s your distribution’ poll - ReviewLinux. You know what to do!

For those of you who are impatient to get started with Mandriva Linux 2008, good news: the Free and Powerpack ISOs are finalized and are being made available to the early seeders program right now. We need a few days for the early seeders to get downloaded and set up to seed, so the official public release will happen at the start of next week. Watch this space! The One ISO is taking a little longer to complete, but will be available for the official release at the same time as the others.

Et maintenant, pour les francophones (traduction par Damien) :
Bien, je viens juste de découvrir un autre site proposant un sondage sur le thème “Quelle distribution utilisez vous ?“. Vous savez que faire !

Pour ceux d’entre vous impatients de plonger dans l’univers de Mandriva Linux 2008, voici de bonne nouvelles : la Free et la Powerpack sont terminées ; en effet les ISOs sont validées et mises à disposition pour le programme “early seeders”. Il suffit de quelques jours pour que les “seeders” téléchargent les ISOs et soient prêts à commencer la diffusion, l’ouverture des téléchargements publiques se fera donc en début de semaine. Surveillez le blog pour en être informés ! La One nécessite encore quelques tests afin d’obtenir sa validation finale mais sera disponible en même temps que les autres ISOs, lors de l’annonce officielle de Mandriva Linux 2008.

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I received this today :

From: tezz hurt Reply to: [email protected] Subject: i must kill you Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 16:09:00 +0000 (18:09 CEST)
I am clifford avrus the murderer who lives in united kingdom. but i was paid 100.000.000 to eliminate you,but i decided to let you know where exactly your death is coming from.
Did you ever offend your friend who planned now as i am mailing you to kill you.Anytime from now i will be at your family home first to kill number of your family,and thereafter you and so close to you.
All your contacts and families contacts are with me now,i just felt that i should let you know before coming after you.
E-mail to contact me:[email protected]

Google does not know this message, and that's the first time I see it. It was sent from an IP in Nigeria...

What do they expect with such message ? Just getting a reply ? Did any of you get this too ?

www.hardware4linux.info website has now reached 1500 reported Linux systems. It can now be considered as a serious user database which grows everyday and allows everyone to compare objectively support of its various peripherals with the other users.

All components of the system are inserted into the database and can both be ranked and commented so that you’re even able to give little tips like “my SD card reader isn’t working about of the box, but by using X or Y, it’s working perfectly”.

So don’t hesitate to :

• Report your system if you have not done so already
• Update your hardware4linux collector if you have an older version (less than 0.9.4)
• Update your configuration if you have reported it before and has changed it. In order to do that, you just have to give your machine the same name than for the previous report.

For those interested, here’s my laptop configuration.

It’s possible as well to subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Ah, one last word : try to be fair. Reporting something is working perfectly out-of-the-box (rank “5″) and then indicating in the comments that it doesn’t work, it’s giving wrong input to the database and it won’t help anyone…

Le site www.hardware4linux.info dépasse à présent les 1500 systèmes linux rapportés. Cela commence à faire une bonne petite base d’utilisateurs qui grandit de jour en jour et qui permet de réellement, objectivement comparer le support de ses divers périphériques avec les autres.

Les différents composants du systèmes sont entrés dans la base et l’on peut les noter et les commenter et donc donner des petites astuces du style “mon lecteur de carte SD ne marche pas directement, mais en utilisant X ou Y, il marche”.

N’hésitez donc pas à :

• Rapporter votre système si vous ne l’avez pas déjà fait
• Mettre à jour votre hardware4linux collector si vous avez une version plus ancienne que 0.9.4
• Mettre à jour la configuration que vous avez rapporté si vous y avez effectué un changement. Pour cela, il suffit d’utiliser le même nom pour votre machine que précédemment.

Pour ceux que ça intéresse, voici la configuration de mon laptop.

Il est aussi possible de souscrire au flux RSS des commentaires.

Ah, et un dernier petit mot : essayez de jouer le jeu. Rapporter qu’une fonctionnalité marche parfaitement (note “5″) et indiquer dans les commentaires que ça plante, c’est fausser la base et ça n’aidera personne…

…avant le grand saut vers la Mandriva Linux 2008 en fin de semaine.

En effet, il s’est déclaré dans ces derniers jours un certain nombre de bogues (sans doûte du au nombre de testeurs qui a énormément augmenté) et la sortie de la Mandriva 2008 a donc été décalée pour réparer tout cela. Je dois dire que j’étais sceptique la semaine dernière car pas mal de bogues graves avaient été détectés (et certains me concernaient), mais ils sont tous résolus désormais. Il reste encore à peaufiner certaines applications ou certains patchs et la finale devrait donc être prête pour la fin de cette semaine.

Durant cette semaine, l’accent a été mis sur :

• L’assistant de migration transfugdrake qui transfère les paramètres et les documents depuis un utilisateur windows vers un utilisateur linux. Ça marche impec pour moi : fond d’écran, documents, bookmarks : tout y est. Il y a possibilité, aussi de partager ces paramètres entre linux et windows plutôt que de les copier.
• KDE4 qui, même s’il est en version bêta et que certaines applis ne sont même pas alpha, semble fonctionner basiquement. On a même le luxe de pouvoir lancer des applis KDE4 sous KDE3 moyennant la commande “k4″ qui va s’occuper de mettre tous l’environnement en ordre pour l’application KDE4.
• krandrtray qui est une application qui permet d’exploiter les extensions randr 1.2 donc de redimensionner à chaud l’écran (ça existait déjà, mais maintenant, c’est directement géré par Xorg) ainsi que brancher la sortie TV sans redémarrer Xorg.
• dkms, le système de mise à jour des pilotes, a été repensé de manière à ne plus nécessiter les outils de compilation et les sources du noyau. J’ai mis à jour la page à ce propos dans le wiki. Si vous avez toujours voulu tout savoir sur dkms, c’est par ici.
• D’autres applications diverses mais que j’utilisais ont été déboguées : kmobiletools et klipper, par exemple.
  

Reste quand même quelques bugs marqués “release_critical” qui bloquent la sortie de la 2008 mais certains d’entre eux sont résolus, d’autres sont en cours, d’autres enfin ne sont pas si “release_critical” que ça et risquent de perdre un gallon en passant en priorité “élevée” (et ils seront mentionnés dans l’errata et résolus, bien sûr, après la sortie).

Si vous voulez aider à tester Mandriva et Linux en général, que vous êtes relativement expérimenté, n’hésitez pas à installer Cooker et à rapporter les bogues avant la fin de cette semaine !

En complément de ce billet, j’invite le lecteur à aussi regarder le dernier “Jus de cuisson” qui fait un résumé de la liste de développement de Mandriva (Cooker) pour le mois de Septembre.

C’est la dernière ligne droite pour l’une des distributions les plus appréciées du moment !

Just a very small note about one website I’ve just discovered and one I already knew.

• Want to know the latest web 2.0 websites on the internet ? Go to http://www.killerstartups.com/
• Want to have the latest news about Mandriva ? Go to http://www.wikio.com/search/Mandriva

So, we want to have a better dkms support in 2008.0, to make kernel updates happen smoothly regarding external kernel modules (mainly proprietary video drivers), as detailled in #30907.

A part of this long endeavor is to make dkms packages (both source dkms and prebuilt dkms) have kmod(<modname>) rpm Provides, so that other packages, install and configuration tools can request a specific module.

I patched rpm-mandriva-setup some weeks ago to automatically generate these kmod provides (heavily based on Danny's work). But this requires all dkms packages to be resubmitted, since a part of this automatic provides scripts acts on the dkms.conf files, which are part of the dkms source packages.

I used the new mdvsys features to do that:

mdvsys update --message "rebuild for kmod provides" <package list>

It mostly worked, but a perl operator priority bug prevented my message argument to be used, and will make me a fool in the changelogs (they read "update to new version").

I (dearly) hate guillomovitch for that.

After some usual build system troubles, I finally got most of the source dkms package rebuilt, only a few don't build, as my (clearly not optimized) scriptlet shows:

$ for p in /RPMS/{main,contrib,non-free}/release/dkms-*; do \ rpm -qp --provides $p | grep -q kmod || rpm -qp --qf '%{SOURCERPM}\n' $p \ | perl -ne '/^(.*)-[^-]+-[^-]+/ and print "$1\n"'; \ done | sort -u | grep -v '^dkms$' cluster openc

At this point, it only means that the packages containing the module source code are fine, and not that the source code inside will build fine...

For example, while testing some 56k modems, I noticed that hsfmodem/hcfpcimodem did not build anymore. An upgrade to the upstream versions was not enough, it fixed some build issues, but not the weirdest one... The kernelcompiler.sh scripts that tried to detect the gcc version what running gcc -v and tried to make it match some pattern. But well, it didn't work very well with french locale :-p (using LC_ALL=C fixed it).

On the next laptop I tried, there was a modem on top of HDA (High Definition Audio) bus, with a Si3054 codec. It does not work with the proprietary slamr modules, and may work with the ALSA snd-hda-intel one. While looking for user reports, I stumbled upon a patch from Claudio: Slmodem: period size 48 not supported. It was worth being committed in the distro, I wonder why Claudio didn't :-/

Still, no luck with this particular modem, we'd need to investigate more.

The scanModem utility (from Linmodems support) proved to be very useful for these tests, it detects a lot of modem chipsets, which helps to find the correct dirver. But unfortunately, its license is unclear, I can't package it in the distro right now.

Anyway, I'm not done with my quest yet (and it's only the "rebuild packages" part of it...). Our source dkms packages have to be rebuilt for each of our kernel packages, so that users can install prebuilt dkms packages, without requiring the whole toolchain to build kernel modules.

To accomplish that, I still need to baby-sit Warly's powerful Iurt (the rebuild bot), and probably fight against the build system some more times /o\

I've been recently playing a bit with VirtualBox to debug my One live systems, and got a bit involved in VirtualBox packaging in the meantime. Our Mandriva package was missing the guest additions, so I added them recently (the packages are x11-driver-input-vboxmouse, x11-driver-video-vboxvideo, dkms-vboxadd, dkms-vboxvfs and virtualbox-guest-additions). They basically allow a better integration of mouse and X11 (clipboard) with the host, and to share files more easily, thanks to a vboxvfs module and a vboxfs mount helper.

But the vboxadd kernel module required some integration, since /dev/vboxadd was not created automatically. Upstream has an initscript to create it, but it's quite a weird trick to parse /proc/devices to get the major and create the device "a la main" with mknod.

A better solution is to make the kernel module send an uevent (with kobject_uevent()) when the device is registered in the kernel module, so that udev creates the device node automatically.

This can be done through the device_create() function (from drivers/base/core.c), but it requires a kernel class as argument, and we don't necessarily need to create one for vboxadd.

A simpler solution is to replace the original char device creation, register_chrdev() (from fs/char_dev.c), by using a misc character device. misc_register() (from drivers/char/misc.c) takes care of the character device registration and of sending the uevent to userspace.

#include <linux/miscdevice.h> ... static struct miscdevice vbox_dev = { .minor = MISC_DYNAMIC_MINOR, .name = "vboxadd", .fops = &vbox_fops, }; ... if (vbox_major > 0) { err = register_chrdev(vbox_major, "vboxadd", &vbox_fops); } else { err = misc_register(&vbox_dev); } ... if (vbox_major > 0) { unregister_chrdev(vbox_major, "vboxadd"); } else { misc_deregister(&vbox_dev); }

The final touch is to make the device node reachable by end-users, which is made easy since Mandriva uses pam_console. pam_console_apply is called for every device node created by udev, so we just need to add a rule to make vboxadd devices owned by the console user (i.e. the user physically logged on the system).

$ cat /etc/security/console.perms.d/60-vboxadd.perms <vboxadd>=/dev/vboxadd* <console> 0600 <vboxadd> 0600 root