Mandriva

So many of them ….

What should I do?

Kill them all!

Kill them all!

On peut remarquer que dans le dernier mois, 3 nouveaux groupes se sont formés au sein de la communauté Mandriva. J’ai un pied dans chacun d’eux (ah bon ? trois pieds ?) et ai donc un aperçu de leurs activités. Je n’irais pas beaucoup plus dans le détail car certains groupes n’ont pas encore de but clair, d’autres sont restreints, etc…

Mais il faut savoir que ces mouvements se sont formés sur la base d’un même constat : Il existe un grand fossé, une abysse entre la grande qualité technique de la distribution et le manque d’engouement général à l’égard de Mandriva dans la communauté Linux. Chacun y trouvera ses propres raisons (historique, communautaire, marketing, …), mais le fait est là.

Non seulement ces groupes se sont créés sur la même base, mais ils se sont créés quasi-simultanément et à un moment où l’actualité de Mandriva n’était pas particulièrement vibrante (la dernière version étant sortie depuis plusieurs mois). Coïncidence, peut-être.

En tout cas, partant de ce constat, ces groupes d’activité ont différents objectifs et différentes missions pour soutenir à la fois la distribution et la compagnie Mandriva. Les deux sont en effet relativement indépendants sur le plan technique mais sont liés économiquement : Mandriva peut difficilement se passer de la distribution. Vice-versa, Mandriva Linux est une distribution dont les contributions viennent en bonne partie de part les employés de la société. Le soutien apporté à l’un revient immédiatement à l’autre.

L’un de ces groupes est le MAGNUM (trouvez vous même votre acronyme) dont l’ambition est de vouloir combler les manques de la part de la société Mandriva. Mais je vais vous laisser découvrir ce qu’est exactement MAGNUM grâce au numéro 00 de leur magazine. Il est aussi indiqué comment participer au développement de ce groupe. Bonne lecture …

Ok, 22 days after, the bag is back !
All stuff inside, no damage at all, just the bag itself with some scratches.
Interesting thing in that clearly luggage was open and all things changed position, even things that was inside a necessaire, like a deodorant, was drop on bag, and necessaire was still closed
I will not complain about the scratches on the bag, i had enough stress about whole thing last weeks, i'm happy enough to have all things back with me.
Case closed !!

Aujourd’hui, kdm a refusé de me laisser rentrer dans ma session et revenait constamment avec l’écran de démarrage bien que j’entrais le bon nom d’utilisateur et le bon mot de passe. J’ai déjà eu ce genre de problème et il est généralement dû à un fichier de configuration corrompu dans mon répertoire personnel, mais je dois encore regarder cela de plus près.

Mais en attendant, étant donné que j’étais un petit peu pressé, j’ai seulement basculé mon gestionnaire de démarrage de kdm vers gdm en indiquant simplement la variable DISPLAYMANAGER=gdm dans /etc/sysconfig/desktop. J’ai aussi recherché des personnes qui ont le même problème que moi sur le forum Mandriva, mais je n’ai trouvé quasiment personne (enfin, deux personnes mais c’était de très vieux messages).

Mais j’ai trouvé un thème gdm pour 2007 Spring très intéressant. Je me suis toujours demandé quel était le but de désigner des avatars ou des visages aux utilisateurs de mon système parcequ’ils n’étaient utilisé nulle part. Mais grâce à ce thème, je peux maintenant mettre un visage à TOUS mes utilisateurs locaux (bon, d’accord, TOUS = 2 ).

Today, kdm refused to let me log into my session and was constantly back with the login screen although I entered the correct username and password. I already had this kind of problem and is generally due to a corrupt configuration file in my home directory, but I have to have a closer look at it.

But in the meantime, as I was a bit in a hurry, I just switched my display manager from kdm to gdm by simply setting the variable DISPLAYMANAGER=gdm in /etc/sysconfig/desktop. I also looked for people having the same issue on the Mandriva forum, but found almost no one (well, two people but it was very old posts).

But I found an very interesting gdm theme for 2007 Spring. I’ve always wondered what was the point of assigning an avatar/face to users of my system because they were not in use anywhere, but thanks to this theme I can now give pretty faces to ALL my local users (well ok, ALL = 2 ).

If you like me you have a big screen with your laptop and wants to automate when your X session start to get the best resolution, you can use that script :

Bash [Show Styled Code]: #!/bin/bash function get_resolutions() { xrandr|while read -a line;do RES="${line[1]}x${line[3]} " [[ ${RES} != [0-9]* ]] && continue echo ${RES} done } _BEST_RES=0 BEST_RES= for res in $(get_resolutions);do _res=${res/x/} [[ $_res -ge ${_BEST_RES} ]] && { BEST_RES=${res} _BEST_RES=${_res} } done xrandr -s ${BEST_RES} Bash [Show Plain Code]: #!/bin/bash

function get_resolutions() {
xrandr|while read -a line;do
RES="${line[1]}x${line[3]} "
[[ ${RES} != [0-9]* ]] && continue
echo ${RES}
done
}

_BEST_RES=0
BEST_RES=
for res in $(get_resolutions);do
_res=${res/x/}
[[ $_res -ge ${_BEST_RES} ]] && {
BEST_RES=${res}
_BEST_RES=${_res}
}
done
xrandr -s ${BEST_RES}

Do you have a Wistron laptop? What about Compal? If you have a notebook computer, the chances that it was made by those or another one of the top 5 ODM/OEM manufacturers, which also include Quanta, Inventec and Asus, is pretty high. A quick survey among the notebooks in the near vicinity revealed that many of them were actually Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Uniwill, Mitac or Clevo machines. Some ways to find out where yours came from is, in Linux:

• Check system, base board or chassis manufacturer DMI data with dmidecode. For instance, a Positivo V44 shows “Manufacturer: CLEVO Co.” and “Product Name: M550SE/M660SE”. But Compal-made HPs can have this marked as “Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard”.
• See PCI subsystem vendor IDs with lspci -vv. The aforementioned Positivo machine shows “CLEVO/KAPOK Computer”. A Positivo D35 shows “Uniwill Computer Corp”. The HPs and Acers I examined list subdevices as their own.
• See the vendor ID in the first three octets of the ethernet interface MAC address. Some HP machines have “00:16:D4″ which means Compal Communications. An Acer Aspire 3620 has a Wistron ID in its ethernet interface.

So far my LG LW20 seems to be designed and manufactured by LG itself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes from somewhere else (notebooks and hot dog sausages, nobody really knows what they’re made of).

Permalink | 12 comments | Filed under toomuchfreetime, en

Like a lot of people, I use the free anti-virus program Clamav on my mail server. Last week, I was seriously impressed with its performance.

It started last wednesday, 25 July. At about noon, I received a mail by amavisd-new that it had blocked an e-mail containing a virus, Trojan.Downloader-11827. What was strange, is that I received this message on an e-mail account which is protected by my ISPs proprietary anti-virus solution. So it had not caught this virus, while Clamav did. Then I submitted the file to virustotal.com, and apparently only a few (about five) anti-virus programs detected the virus. Amongst others, Kaspersky, F-Secure, NOD32, Bitdefender, Symantec and of course Clamav. In the clamav-virusdb mailing list archives, I found that Clamav had detection for this virus since 7h21 CEST, so it was really amongs the first to detect this virus.

Then friday evening, I was looking at the blocked spam messages (I use spamassassin too on this server), and noticed that it had blocked an e-mail message containing an exe file. A spam message with an exe file, that sounded suspicious, but Clamav could not detect a virus. Again I submitted the file to virustotal, and there was one positive result: Ikarus detected it as a trojan horse. I submitted the file via clamav's website at around 19h CEST. About half an hour later, I received a message that detection for this virus had been added. I updated Clamav, and indeed, it was recognized. I checked the file again on virustotal, around 20h, and then there were 4 anti-virus programs recognizing it: Clamav, F-Prot Ikarus and Virusbuster. 1.5h later, Antivir, AVG and Kaspersky had also added detection. Other well-known anti-virus vendors, still did not detect it at that moment such as Bitdefender, F-Secure, NOD32, Panda, Sophos and Symantec.

In the meantime, F-Secure blogged about these two virus outbreaks: funny.zip and fungame.zip

Two conclusions:

• Clamav has an excellent response time, which is comparable to the best proprietary anti-virus solutions. If you have an e-mail server, you definitely want to integrate Clamav in it, even if you already have a proprietary solution (Clamav is particulary good in detecting phishing mails too!)
• No anti-virus program is perfect. If you receive an e-mail message at the start of a virus outbreak, it's quite possible that your anti-virus solution will not detect it yet, no matter which anti-virus you have.

After finding a bug in xserver, and fixing it, I got a bit late on my development works, both in KRandR, and in Kopete.

For krandr, it already manages unified screens (unified meaning it will try to enforce the same resolution on all connected outputs), and is able to individually configure outputs, including configuring the refresh rate as asked by Fabrice Facorat
All the code I’m writing for krandr is on kde svn, but if you do not have a KDE4 build setup there, or if you don’t have the KDE4 packages (Mandriva is providing very up-to-date KDE4 snapshots, and I guess other distros do too), you can still try it on your KDE3 installation. I’m trying to maintain a KDE3 backport for everything done in the KDE4 version, and I put it in a separate tarball (better than patching kdebase all the time) available here.
If you happen to find bugs, have suggestions or even patches, please mail me about them. The KDE3 backport is going soon to enter in Mandriva Cooker for cookers to test, and I hope I get more feedback by allowing them to test it sooner.

The GUI for configuring RandR setups is a work in progress, and I still haven’t decided what to do for KDE3 (as it doesn’t have the fabulous QGraphicsView), but I will write a new post about that in some days. Now it is time to catch up the work.

Kopete identity support is getting better too, it is already possible to assign accounts to identities, create new identities, and so. I have still many work to do on protocol levels (making sure they are using properties from the identity and not from their own storage), but no hot news for now.

No, Ross, you’re not the last one

I wanted to blog only when I finished processing all photos I took at GUADEC (since this time, I tried using RAW) but my Gimp-fu and Ufraw-fu is still a little low so I’m still not finished (but the first photos are online here). And next UFRaw release is scheduled today, with noise reduction and full color management, so I’ll probably need to re-process my old photos.

Anyway, it has been a great week in Birmingham, very instructive (I was able to attend 33 talks !) with wonderful people all around (a special thanks to organization team).

It seems Mandriva / GUADEC USB key was well received, even if we found some bugs (like no boot on two laptops, including Frederic one or incorrect informative message reported by Hub). Another information regarding startup on the key : you can disable the “welcome” webpage after logging by GNOME editing session property.

But I want more feedback !! So, if you haven’t formated your USB key yet (or even if you did , tell us if you like it or not, bugs you found, features you miss, everything. Either comment on my post or blog yourself and add a trackback here.