Planet Fedora

November 08, 2009

Eric "Sparks" Christensen

Tonight I was able to get the KDE information into the Accessibility Guide. While it isn't finished it at least addresses the new pieces of software that are available in KDE (new since the last update of the Accessibility Guide). I need to get back to GNOME to finish pulling that information into the guide. GNOME seems to have more information on their tools, compared with KDE, but they also spread it around a lot more meaning I'm having problems finding a lot of it.

Another problem I'm having on both GNOME and KDE web sites. It is nearly impossible to find the license information. On the Fedora wiki it clearly shows the license right in the footer but not in the GNOME or KDE sites. This makes it extremely difficult for us documentation folks to know how we can use what we find.

Anyway, I've updated the temporary hosting page for the Accessibility Guide so the latest and greatest is there. Please feel free to take a read and file a bug if you find anything that isn't right or could be better. Mind you this hasn't seen an editor yet...

November 08, 2009 05:21 AM

Trever Fischer

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador and KDE hacker

Name: Trever Fischer

IRC Nick: tdfischer

IRC Channels: #plasma #kde #fedora-ambassadors #fedora-kde, lots more on freenode, and #uakroncs on slashnet.

Fedora Ambassador: At the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA

Dancing on top of an igloo last winter.

One of the few pictures of me that actually shows my face.

November 08, 2009 04:54 AM

Fedora Venezuela

Indefero

Indefero es una herramienta que facilita el versionamiento de tu código fuente y la gestión de un proyecto de software, simple y sencilla de usar, con full integración con los servicios de control de versiones más populares como por ejemplo subversion, git y Mercurial, entre sus principales caracteristicas tenemos:

Tracking de incidentes o bugs completamente restfull y con un API, para que por ejemplo tu aplicación reporte los bugs directamente al sistema de bugs de tu proyecto.
Wiki para mantener la documentación.
Una funcionalidad que facilita la distribución del archivo descargable de la versión funcional de tu proyecto ( área de downloads ).
Navegación completamente vía web del código, con numeración de lineas, coloreado del código.
Permite visualizar las diferencias entre los commits.
Feeds.
Sistema de búsqueda bien poderoso.
Permite crear múltiples proyectos públicos o privados.

Esta aplicación es GNU/GPL y está hecha en php lo cual permite instalarla en cualquier hosting comercial que tenga soporte de control de versiones, en el post siguiente colocaré una guía para instalarlo en Fedora.

Pantallazo de Indefero

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November 08, 2009 04:25 AM

Chris Tyler

Kids vs. Students

Last week, at both FSOSS and the Teaching Open Source Summit, I heard a word that jarred me slightly, because I had dropped it from my professional vocabulary a number of years ago: "Kids".

I stopped using the word "kids" to refer to students for several reasons -- including the fact that I had a student twenty years my senior, and another who was a fully accredited Civil Engineer in his home country -- but the main reason that I dropped it was that it is simply incompatible with the way open source communities work. In open source, roles are defined by contribution, not age or formal training. Some of the youngest members of the community are the most active, and make crucial and valuable contributions.

If we're teaching inside open source communities, then it's important that we value students as full members of those communities -- and I think that the term "kids" is dismissive of their abilities.

November 08, 2009 03:57 AM

Vincent Danen

Time to catch up

I’m in crunch mode right now… wrote 2400 words today, another 4300 to get back on target (need to write 1167 words per day to make the 50k target at the end of the month).

Not an excuse, really, but this was a stupid work week with stupid little things going on that totally distracted me and by the time I had some downtime, trying to be creative and imaginative were the last things I wanted (vegetative state, here I come!)

Anyways, aside from having to fix some electrical issues (lose wires in breaker box are _not_ a good thing as my melted wires will attest to!), I’ve been able to write more today than anytime this week. And since there’s nothing decent on tonight, I hope to crank out those 4300 words tonight and then I can be sane and try to keep up.

Oh, for anyone interested in seeing some stats, my profile page on nanowrimo.org has my word counts as I update them.

November 08, 2009 03:55 AM

Chris Tyler

Seneca Wiki - Admonition Notes Available

Just a quick note to users of the CDOT OpenSource@Seneca wiki -- I've added a version of the Admonition templates from the Fedora wiki. This lets you easily format warning, information, prohibition, and tip boxes into wiki pages:

You can see the markup at the bottom of the current Sandbox page.

November 08, 2009 03:40 AM

Maria "tatica" Leandro

Finalizada 1ra jornada de SL de LUGMA en MCY

Termina el día y una jornada que nos une nuevamente. El software libre se ha convertido en un punto de convergencia de amistad, conocimiento y profesionalismo que se libera para todos los asistentes. El evento realmente estuvo bastante bien y hay que hacer una mención especial al excelente resultado de la logistica de los muchachos, quienes lograron dar almuerzo a TODOS los asistentes.

Por mi parte mi charla de blender se convirtió en responder preguntas sobre mi preferencia hacia fedora, como lograr una migración más fácil hacia las herramientas gráficas libres y otras preguntas básicas regulares. Se regalaron unos dvd de fedora, stickers y tattoos que esperemos sepan aprovechar.

Gracias a los chicos de lugma w1zz4rd, [comanche], grunch (que aun tenemos una pendiente) y Yamelis (que me dió un excelente regalo de cumpleaños FEMENINO) por realizar un evento tan bueno; con buena logística y como siempre, con una presencia intachable.

Gracias a los muchachæs de lugma por siempre recibirnos con los brazos abiertos y atendernos siempre como unos reyes… y gracias a w1zz4rd por mi nueva gorra de lugma que está simplemente espectacular!!!

Por cierto… hay una mención especial a las 2 fotos más locas del día… Comanche Hutch y w1zz4rd dentro de la cava

Enlace al album completo de fotos AQUI en http://www.flickr.com/photos/tatadbb/sets/72157622756721138/

November 08, 2009 02:57 AM

FergatROn

A Simple Facebook Addon to Empathy, NOT!

Pidgin vs Facebook vs Telepathy

Wow, I am totally blown away by this task of getting the Facebook protocol to work on the instant messenger client, Empathy. I used to have it working on Pidgin, but lately it’s been a crapshoot. I went to IRC to get some help and low-and-behold, someone gave me a RTFM response. Just lovely, how helpful IRC. From the podcast world, I’ve heard that GNOME is shipping with Empathy as default instead of Pidgin. So; I thought I’d start using it… these desktop guys MUST know what they’re talking about.

Well; so far, I’m not impressed with Empathy at all! Pidgin looks a lot better and my SOUND actually works. Damn! I really wish SOUND wasn’t such an issue in Linux. We’re making heads spin with the amount of computing we can do, the available apps in x86_64 architecture, and the overall desktop stability… yet SOUND has ALWAYS been an issue since I started with Fedora 8.

Attempting to Install Facebook Plugin

So; I thought I’d really give it a go and install the Facebook plugin. I downloaded the same file that’s being used for Pidgin (at Google Code) and tried looking for an “Empathy” folder. After running a “locate” command, I noticed that Empathy really didn’t have a lib64 or some other home folder. It has a folder, but it’s only holding xml data nothing really concrete to the actual program. I saw some .so files but that wasn’t helpful to me. After researching some more, I realized that Empathy is really a client to Telepathy. Oh great, down that rabbit hole we go! So; I then did a “locate” for it and saw the same structure. “OK, this doesn’t make any sense to me! Where am I supposed to install this facebook plugin!?”

So; after some more research, I find myself at this really dated bug report. It’s basically saying I need to edit two files and put in the Facebook protocol. “Really!? Are we really in the early 2000s and I need to MANUALLY input protocols in Linux? Damn!” I did it anyway and after restarting Empathy, I got Network error. “OK, I’m done! I don’t need this kind of stress for a stupid IM protocol.”

So; in the end… I’m trying out ugly Empathy and we’ll see if it grows on me… Like a fungus! I posted something to an existing forum topic, let’s hope that gives me the salvation I’m looking for.

November 08, 2009 02:34 AM

Trever Fischer

ACM at UA Part 2

Like I said, here’s some pictures:

Click it to go to the flickr set.

This week we had at least 10 people say they’ll be at our install fest next Tuesday “for sure”. Combined with what we had two weeks ago, I think our installation day is going to be rather busy.

As far as how exactly we’re doing our installs we’ll be having people either bring in their own computer, where we can then do the install and tweaking for them (including getting icky broadcom drivers to work, proprietary graphics, and setting up a connection to UA’s wireless). When they show up we’ll ask a few questions such as “Do you play games on windows?” or “Is there any software you use a lot [that wouldn't be available on fedora]“. Then we customize the system for them (dual boot, setting up wine, showing cedega, etc) and send them home with a copy of the install CD we built with Revisor for their system. The CDs get labeled nice Fedora/ACM logos with the disk printer the CS department bought us just last week.

If you’re a fedora user or a UA student, drop on by the 3rd floor of the student center. We won’t be too busy to say hello!

November 08, 2009 01:33 AM

November 07, 2009

Chitlesh Goorah

[FEL]: PCB snapshot 20091103 as updates

Release Notes for PCB snapshot 20091103
This release represents almost 200 commits and as such this summary clearly is not complete. See the ChangeLog file for the complete list of changes. This release was pushed to Fedora repositories. Users are advised to update their pcb installation to benefit those bugfixes and stability.

[feature] Add attributes to layers
[bugfix] Remove memory leak in attributes
[bugfix] Avoid layer buttons getting confused (GTK)

[bugfix] Fix dereference bug in hid_find_action()
[feature] Speed up some polygon operations
[bugfix] Don’t let DRC change the grid setting
[bugfix] Correct URL’s in some dialogs and output
[feature] Add filters to load file chooser dialog (GTK)
[bugfix] Avoid segfaults with png HID with newer versions of libgd
[bugfix] Don’t disperse locked elements
[feature] Added experimental topological autorouter
[feature] Added the beginning of a testsuite.
[docs] Document FreeRotateBuffer()
[docs] Add some additional notes on the usage of the existing autorouter
[feature] Add –png-bloat option
[bugfix] Fix several bugs found with valgrind
[bugfix] Improve the pre-install wrapper script
[bugfix] Several fixes to the autorouter
[feature] Allow quoted strings and escaped characters in action arguments
[footprints] Add missing INDC3216M, remove duplicated RESC3216M
[feature] Added the ability to customize mouse events via gpcb-menu.res in the GTK HID.
[feature] Added the ability to use mod1 (alt)(option) in HIDs. Useful on OSX.
[bugfix] Fix compilation issues on centos
[bugfix] Make the detection of tools and build system around building the documentation be more robust. Users should not be worrying about –disable-doc or –enable-maintainer-mode anymore
[footprints] Add T018, T039, fix pinout of T092 to match JEDEC
[bugfix] Speed up rendering of DRC violation previews under GTK
[bugfix] Fix some crashing bugs related to polygons and thindraw mode
[feature] Added a DRC refresh button
[bugfix] Fix some pango markup in the GTK DRC dialog
[bugfix] Fix cursor warping on flipped boards (GTK)
[feature] Added preview images in the DRC violations window (GTK)
[feature] Add a DrcViolationType structure and add hooks to allow HID’s to use this
[bugfix] Fix some polygon memory leaks
[feature] Add an API for registering actions with a context to support scripting languages like GPMI.
[bugfix] Fix a bug with the Report(NetLength) action and NULL pin/pad names
[bugfix] Allow exporters to work with hairlines (width of 0)
[tools] Increase autoconf version to 2.60 since we were using some features of it
[bugfix] Fix a number of polygon related issues
[bugfix] Fix a number of gcc warnings
[feature] Don’t display undocumented options in help output. This helps the transition when deprecating an option.
[feature] Add outline mode for photo-mode exporting
[footprints] Put the mark on pin 1 for axial footprints to make them more likely to fall on grid
[bugfix] Fix flipping of arcs
[bugfix] Fix parsing of old-syntax arcs
[bugfix] Include explicit text/lines on silk layers in the assembly drawing output
[feature] ‘–ben-mode’ has been renamed to ‘–photo-mode’
[bugfix] Fix some crashing bugs on boards with a large number of rats
[bugfix] Fix an off-by-one bug in the GTK netlist window
[docs] Add getting started guide
[feature] Add support for parsing suffixes on numbers (“um”, “mm”,”in”, “mil”)
[bugfix] Fix some configure/build issues when cross compiling
[bugfix] Fix some improperly used automake conditionals
[feature] Add additional crosshair shapes
[fedora] Sub package -doc entails documentation in different file formats.

November 07, 2009 08:48 PM

Remi Collet

ocsinventory-agent-1.1-1

The RPM of the new version of the unix unified agent for Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation is available on Fedora, EPEL (updates-testing) and remi repo for Fedora, RHEL and CentOS.

This RPM is available in official Fedora >= 10 and EPEL >= 4 repositories. It's available here for older Fedora versions (from Core 6) and for RHEL / CentOS >= 4.. To discover all the new features, read the Changes file. Installation : yum --enablerepo=remi install ocsinventory-agentDownload : the repository Available help:... Lire ocsinventory-agent-1.1-1

November 07, 2009 04:53 PM

Radek Vokál

LinuxAlt 2009 - Fedora 12 presentation

After insisting that I won't attend the LinuxAlt conference this year I was asked to give a Fedora talk as substitute for one of the scheduled talks. Why not, fortunately my Red Hat colleague and good friend drove me to the conference, thanks Ondrej!

I was surprised (in a good way of course) that the conference has a very good attendance. Both rooms (for apx 150 and little bit more than 80 people) were full up! I've watched talk from Michal Schmidt about Trusted Computing, which I found really interesting and I hope Michal will publish his slides somewhere.

My talk was right after Ubuntu Karmic Koala presentation. Well, I thought that I won't get that many people for my talk, but the room was crowded. It took full hour to go thru all the highlights of Fedora 12 and I even get some questions at the end and few positive comments :-) .. Here are my slides (in czech).

LinuxAlt continues tmrw. Dan Horak will be giving a talk about Open Source development and also Milan Broz and his presentation about LVM will be interesting, as he's one of the key developers and always shares some insights from the project :-)

November 07, 2009 03:20 PM

Gerard Braad

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

Name: Gerard Braad
IRC-Nick: gbraad
IRC-Channels: #fedora-ambassadors, #maemo, #beijinglug on freenode (seldom)
Location: Apeldoorn, NL / Beijing, CHN
Fedora Ambassador: Netherlands
FAS username: gbraad

November 07, 2009 03:14 PM

Fedora Videos

The Enumeration Podcast: Episode 2 - Routine Daily Activities and Yearly Events

Alexander Green and Benjamin Pfeifer enumerate on a variety of themes mysteriously dictated to them by slips of paper drawn from a stylish fedora. Join them weekly to find which list item will prevail over its competition for the coveted top spot....

This item belongs to: audio/opensource_audio.

This item has files of the following types: Metadata, Ogg Vorbis, VBR M3U, VBR MP3, VBR ZIP

November 07, 2009 02:25 PM

Peter Lemenkov

Северная Нигерия

Вот, совсем вопиющее.

http://beekjuffer.livejournal.com/60885<wbr></wbr>6.html

Все хуже и хуже.
Путинские уже совсем перестали чего-либо стесняться. В общем, прощай Нигерия, здравствуй Гаити.

Comments

November 07, 2009 02:22 PM

Tim Waugh

80s computer games I remember

When I think about it, I can remember more games I used to play on my Commodore 64 than I expect to. Here’s what I’ve managed to recall.

Monty On The Run
Crazy Comets
Attack of the Mutant Camels (weird!)
Hovver Bovver (brilliantly English)
Outrun
Pod — I’m sure that’s what it was called but can’t find any reference to it anywhere. Little man with big feet who had to jump across streams and walls and things. If he fell in he would turn white, grow angel wings, and fly up to heaven while music played. And I think maybe there a Welsh connection?
Paperboy
Nebulus
International Karate+
Little Computer People
Winter Games
Toy Bizarre
Ghostbusters
Falcon Patrol
Blade Runner
There was some kind of football game, don’t remember what it was called. Actually I think the copy I had was translated into German… looking around it must have been a version of Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
Cauldron
Booty was the first one I had, a pirate treasure platform game with colour-coded keys and doors. At the time I had it plugged into a black and white TV set so that made it a bit more challenging!
Haunted Mansion or something with a similar name. Don’t remember a lot about it except that it was quite a simple game, but enjoyable.
Orpheus and the Underworld (but don’t remember much about it)

November 07, 2009 02:08 PM

Alexander "dreamer" C.

Museum N8

And another awesome collaboration between Puik. and Dyne.org!

This weekend we are working on an interactive installation for the yearly Museum N8 festival at the Dutch Institute for Media Art (NIMK).

There will be an 8bit/acid themed VJ set that can be interfaced with 3 gamepad-controllers including force-feedback! All implemented through javascript using the FreeJ software.

See n8.nl for more info.

Very cool stuff. We are rounding up the scripting now and will setup the installation this afternoon.

November 07, 2009 11:17 AM

JoergSimon

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

MooDoo nice idea! I can not resist ;)

Name: Joerg Simon
IRC-Nick: kital
IRC-Channels: #fedora-de, #fedora-india, #fedora-mktg, #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-admin, #fedora-website on freenode
Location: Hemmingen/BW, Germany

November 07, 2009 10:45 AM

Sankarshan

Looking forward to some improvements

I have been using Transifex based systems for a couple of days/weeks now. And, in line with what I did mention on my micro-blog, Transifex and Lotte make things really easy. The coolest devel crew makes that happen. And, since they lurk online and engage with their users, every little tweak or, improvement that is suggested and considered makes the consumers feel part of the good work they are doing. Good karma and awesome excitement all around.

At some point in time during the week, I’d put them in the tickets as feature enhancements. However, for the time being, here’s a couple:

Lotte should allow me to click on a file that is not yet translated for my language and, add it to the collection. If I recall correctly, the current way to add it is to download the .pot, convert to the appropriate .po and, upload it with comments etc
Lotte needs to allow “Copy from Source”. This should accelerate translation by removing the extra step of having to actually select, copy and paste. This comes in handy when translating strings within tags or, brands/trademarks and so forth
Handling and using translation memory could be built into Lotte. For a particular file in a specific language within a project, it could perhaps provide suggestions of translated words. In the future, allowing teams to add their glossaries would make it a more powerful tool too. Having said that, I’ve always wondered what happens when team glossaries are created from files across various projects – is there a license compatibility soup problem that could crop up ?
A Transifex installation could provide notifications of new files or, updated files for the language. This could be limited to the files for which the last translator is the person receiving the notices or, ideally, could be for the language itself.
Statistics – providing each language a visual representation of commits over time or, per contributor commits would also be a nice addition

So much for Transifex, in fact, I need to write out all of that in a nicer way so as to allow the possibility of these turning into GSoC projects within Transifex.

Coming to Virtaal. With lokalize being unbearably useless for me (it adds garbled text or whitespaces into files when using the stock F11 supplied one) and, before it is commented, no I haven’t filed a bug yet, getting the files done was a bit more important at that specific point. So, mea culpa. But I do check with every yum update and, it is still the same. The specific issue with Virtaal is that each time one gets a new string loaded for translation, the text input area loses the input method details. Which means that it is a constant game of switch back and forth between the inputs. Sadly enough, this is the only software that currently works for me (I don’t want to set up a local pootle/transifex instance and, do web based translation)

November 07, 2009 04:06 AM

Jesus Rodriguez (zeus)

Netflix PS3 disc cover

Netflix PS3 disc cover, originally uploaded by jmrodri.

I got my Netflix for PS3 streaming disc in the mail today. It’s pretty cool (except when using the PS3 with wireless). Check out the unveiling here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmrodri/sets/72157622625857805/

November 07, 2009 01:31 AM

Alexander "dreamer" C.

Bachelor of Science

I barely made it, but finally it’s done \o/

You are looking at a new Molecular Scientist. Bsc

November 07, 2009 12:53 AM

Shakthi Kannan

Perl and SQL placeholders

A useful document on writing SQL placeholders for Perl.

November 07, 2009 12:23 AM

November 06, 2009

Bert "biertie" Desmet

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

boink boink boink boink boink

Name: Bert “bret” Desmet
IRC nickname: biertie
IRC channels: #fedora, #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-social, #fedora-nl, #fedora-devel on freenode; #cfk, #ict on Quakenet
Location: Ghent, Belgium

November 06, 2009 10:38 PM

Máirín Duffy

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

We’ve got a meme!

Name:	Máirín “Mo” Duffy
IRC nickname:	mizmo
IRC channels:	#fedora-design, #fedora-art, #fedora-admin, #fedora-mktg, #fedora-devel on freenode; #fedora-desktop on GIMPnet
Location:	Boston, Massachusetts USA

Posted in Uncategorized

November 06, 2009 10:20 PM

Eric "Sparks" Christensen

Amateur Radio in next month's Linux Journal

I just pulled down the December version of Linux Journal a couple of minutes ago. I made it all the way to page 4 and read that next month's issue would be on Amateur Radio (or at least some portion there of). I'm excited to see that Amateur Radio and Open Source has been written about together because they do share so many similarities. Amateur radio operators used to build all their equipment and help mentor each other on developing better communications stations. Open source software is very similar to that. While I might not build my transceivers, I do still build many of my antennas which is something I enjoy. Amateur radio operators, also like OSS developers, are in it to help people and have some fun in the mean time. Yep, Amateur Radio and OSS... a match made in heaven.

November 06, 2009 10:20 PM

Seth vidal

playing with another yum-util

This morning I was annoyed by a perl module which took the output from yumdownloader –resolve –urls, screenscraped it, downloaded the pkgs then passed them to rpm -Uvh. Let’s ignore all the things which could break there – just the ugliness of it.

So I hashed this together:

http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/yumpipes.py

I’m not sure I like it yet, but it is a start.

You can pass multiple items on the command line doing multiple things like:

yumpipes –install=foo –install=baz –update=quux –remove=sendmail

and you can pass –dry-run which runs the transaction in test mode

and you can pass –report-only which only spits out what the transaction would do.

and the output from the transaction and from the –list option is pipe-delimited so people using awk or cut can easily parse it.

finally. the error codes, while not great, are somewhat consistent.

flames welcome.

November 06, 2009 10:18 PM

Remi Collet

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1

RPM of the first Beta of next major version of Mozilla Foundation browser is available in remi repository for Fedora 11 and 12.

The firefox36-3.6-0.1.beta1 package install this new version besides the version 3.5. So you will have 2 entries in the Internet menu. WARNING : a backup of your profile (.mozilla/firefox directory) seems mandatory. Start by reading : Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta Release Notes As always : yum --enablerepo=remi install firefox36 No xulrunner... Lire Firefox 3.6 Beta 1

November 06, 2009 08:57 PM

JoergSimon

Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010

Since years we are present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage - CLT and always had a great and successfull time - Max wrote a great report about the 2009 event!

You can see Max's talk "Innovations in the Fedora Project"

On FAD EMEA 2009 a decision was made, to make CLT one of the big events for EMEA in 2010.
Today, the CfP is out and i will take care for our "Call for Presentations" which means to have a booth, dev-room etc. ...
If you are interested to give a talk, you are invited to follow the "Call for Lectures"
We will try to get a separate Dev/Project Room - then we can give our own Talking Track independent from the official "Call for Lectures". Update on that soon!
More Details on Fedora CLT 2010 Event - expect more updates soon.

The German CfP from the CLT Team:

Neues Jahr – neues Outfit
=========================

Mit neuem Outfit stellt sich die Webseite der 12. Chemnitzer Linux-Tage
vor. 2010 wird es also wieder eine Menge interessanter Vorträge, Workshops
und Projekte im Hörsaalgebäude an der Reichenhainer Straße geben. Die
Themenschwerpunkte lauten dieses Mal:

* Dienste und Dämonen
* Neue Desktops
* Embedded
* Privatsphäre trotz Netz

Ab sofort ist es möglich, sich mit einem Vortrag, Stand oder Workshop
anzumelden, um im März 2010 das Programm mitzugestalten. Natürlich werden
wie immer auch Beiträge für das Einsteigerforum gesucht.

* Call for Lectures [0]
* Call for Presentations [1]

Neu in diesem Jahr ist die Möglichkeit, ein eingereichtes Paper im
CLT-Tagungsband veröffentlichen zu lassen.

Immer auf dem Laufenden
=======================

Damit Fans und Interessierte nicht nur am Veranstaltungswochenende die
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage live erleben, kann sich ab sofort jeder über den
aktuellen Stand der Vorbereitungen, Nachbereitungen und sonstigen
Aktivitäten per Identi.ca[2], Twitter[3] oder Facebook[4] informieren.

Vorfreude
=========

Schon jetzt kann sich jeder mit den Aufzeichnungen der CLT 2009 ein
bisschen Vortragsfeeling nach Hause holen. Die Videos aus den
Vortragsräumen V1 und V4 stehen ab sofort zum Download und zum direkten
Anschauen bereit.

[0] http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2010/vortraege/call_form.html
[1] http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2010/live/call_form.html
[2] http://identi.ca/clt/
[3] http://twitter.com/clt_news
[4] http://www.facebook.com/chemnitzer.linuxtage

November 06, 2009 08:16 PM

Jonathan Dieter

On binary delta algorithms

Yesterday I was reading this update (warning: still subscriber-only) on the Courgette delta algorithm that will be used by Google to push Chrome updates.

The article focused on potential patent problems with the Courgette method, but also described how the Courgette method works and also suggested that deltarpm (which I maintain in Fedora) could learn from it.

While not wanting to argue that particular point (I would love to get a hold of the code and see how much it would actually help our deltarpms), I do want to correct a couple of misconceptions about deltarpm.

Courgette, deltarpm and bsdiff (the tool) are all based on the bsdiff algorithm, which is very efficient. The problem comes when dealing with binaries. One small change in the source code will normally result in many small changes through the binary as the locations of pointers change.

(In the graphs provided, location two is a byte of data that has changed, while locations 3-6 and 21-24 represent two relative jump pointers to the same location. In the new binary, the location has changed by 74 bytes.)

The first graph is that of a naive delta using the bsdiff algorithm.
A graph showing naive delta using bsdiff algorithm

Note that the delta is four bytes of not-very-compressible data (out of 12). Not so great.

The second graph is roughly what courgette does with the same data. It does some disassembly to convert the relative pointers into labels. When applying the delta, courgette will disassemble the old file, apply the delta, and then reassemble the resulting not-quite-machine code into machine code.

A graph of the bsdiff algorithm using courgette for assembly/disassembly

Note that we’re down to a one-byte delta! Wonderful!

Now, the final example is how both the bsdiff tool and deltarpm work. They use the algorithm Colin Percival describes here which has an interesting twist when dealing with binaries.

When the locations change in a binary, they tend to do so in a consistent way. As deltarpm is doing its comparison, it adds an extra step. If less than half of the bytes in a segment have changed, deltarpm will do a byte-wise subtraction of the old binary’s bytes from the new binary’s bytes. This is then stored in an “add block”, which will mostly contain zeros.

This graph shows a bsdiff using the add block algorithm

While this does give us a block the size of the old binary, this block is very highly compressible (especially using bzip2).

While we may not be getting the compression levels that we might using courgette, we are doing far better than we would be using a naive bsdiff algorithm.

While courgette obviously has the advantage of size, it’s primary disadvantage is that it is very archicture-specific. The algorithm must know how to both assemble and disassemble binaries for each architecture it’s built for.

The advantage of the “add block” method is that it is generic to all architectures, but its disadvantage is that it won’t reach the same delta levels as courgette.

Having said that, I still haven’t had a chance to do any direct comparisons, which may tell us how much better courgette is than deltarpm.

(Updated: Tried to make it clear that bsdiff (the tool) doesn’t just use a naive bsdiff algorithm)

November 06, 2009 06:49 PM

Ben Williams

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or user.

More to blame on MooDoo

Name: Ben Williams

IRC Nickname: Southern_Gentlem, VileGent

IRC Channels : #fedora, #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-ops, #fedora-unity, #fedora-social on irc.freenode.net

$SG$

November 06, 2009 06:42 PM

Sayamindu Dasgupta

Making Books Available

Its all over the web now – the Internet Archive has opened up over 1.6 million books for the OLPC XO laptops and in general, any machine running Sugar. Before going into anything else, it makes sense to provide a more specific meaning of “opening up” here – it involves two main objectives completed at the Internet Archive end:

Making sure that the books are readable in the XO, keeping in mind its relative low-end hardware specs and disk-space limitations
Ensuring that the books are available via a standardized catalog format, so that one can find, browse and download books easily using a tool more tuned for the purpose (think of feed-readers versus blog-entries in a web-page)

Now that the books are available (not just from the Internet Archive, but from a number of other sources as well), the next step is to figure out the best possible ways to actually make these books available to the XO and Sugar users. The major constraining factor is bandwidth, we do have deployments with zero, or very limited Internet connectivity, and perhaps these are the deployments which need access to these books the most. I spent most of this week working on implementing a feature in the Get Books activity which would allow books to be distributed via what has been jokingly called a sneaker-net (or sandalnet/chappalnet, if you prefer those forms of footwear). The idea is very simple – at a centralized location with Internet access, choose a few thousand books (size of a typical book is usually a few hundred KB or less), put them in a USB pen-drive and add a OPDS catalog to the mix. Make copies of the drive, and send them to the schools without connectivity. The latest version of Get Books would recognize the drive, and let the student browse through the collection, search for books, and add whatever she wants to the Sugar Journal. Once a book is in the Journal, it can be shared among all the students using the Journal object transfer support in Sugar, or via the Read Activity directly. So essentially, you get a Library on a Stick, with thousands of books, something which, till now, in its physical form, has been largely restricted to better equipped (and usually richer) schools.
Of course, even larger collections can be distributed if a School Server (XS) is present in the mix (due to the fact that the school server can have a larger disk in it), and support for this type of distribution method involving the XS would hopefully appear within the next few releases of Get Books.

November 06, 2009 06:35 PM

"Kulbir Saini"

News : Memepress (Yahoo! Meme) Wordpress Plugin Version 0.3 is available

Memepress is a wordpress plugin which provides wordpress widgets for displaying public posts from Yahoo! Meme. Memepress is SEO ready and provides options to noindex/nofollow your Meme posts. New version fixes a few bugs and provides enhanced style control for the widget.

You can download memepress version 0.3 from wordpress plugin page.

For details on usage/installation instructions, please check plugin homepage.

Fedora Tutorials and Videocache by Kulbir Saini.

November 06, 2009 05:30 PM

Paul W. Frields

Upside down.

I’m getting on a plane in a few hours that’s going to take me from Washington DC to Los Angeles, and then just a couple hours after landing, another one from LAX to Brisbane in Australia. Thanks to the timezones crossed, plus the international date line, I leave LAX late Friday night, and arrive in Brisbane near dawn on Sunday morning.

I’ll be there (along with Spot) until next Friday, when we fly back to the USA. With the timezones the other way around, I think I get back around last Tuesday, meaning plenty of time to work on more Fedora bits before the release!

Well, I think that my numbers may be a bit off there, but in any case, I’ll be on Down Under time for the next week or so. I’ll definitely have access to email but obviously it will be a bit harder to catch everyone during the day on IRC.

Let’s all be focused on getting out the best Fedora release yet. I want to give my most sincere and awe-struck thanks to everyone in our community who’s contributed to the upcoming Fedora 12. I’m using the pre-release now, and it’s been fantastic! With new virtualization features, desktop polish, and developer goodies, I think many people are going to like what they see.

OK, off to check weather in Brisbane, and then pack.

November 06, 2009 05:20 PM

Sankarshan

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

Since Paul Mellors (MooDoo) started this off, here’s what it is:

Name: sankarshan
IRC Nick: sankarshan (or, sm|CPU)
IRC Channel : #fedora-india … #fedora-ambassadors
Fedora Ambassador: India

The mandatory mugshot is here.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8

November 06, 2009 03:59 PM

Hedayat Vatankhah

New Fonts in Fedora Supporting Persian

As I said before, after exploring some Persian fonts for legal issues and finding that most of them cannot be included in Fedora, I decided to package SIL Arabic script fonts. So I packaged SIL Scheherazadeh and Lateef fonts, and they are available in Fedora repositories now. SIL Scheherazadeh font should be included in Fedora 12 and later versions, as a font required by Persian locale by default. I hope to be able to find some other fonts to include in Fedora. However, almost any Persian user will need the common fonts mentioned earlier, so I’ll create a package of those fonts an put it somewhere for interested people. Those fonts have unclear legal status, but they are expected to be free to distribute and use.

Fedora 12 is coming and I’m waiting for it! I’ve installed Beta version already, but do not use it much, and waiting to completely replace my Fedora 11 with it. It contains many interesting features, and is generally “better”! There are lots of small changes which are not listed, but improves the final experience.

I am going to create a rpmfusion based Fedora remix containing some other interesting software specially considering Persian people. Hopefully, with the help of others like people in fedoraproject.ir, we will create an interesting Fedora remix for Persian people.

I’ll talk about my Yum related plans later!

November 06, 2009 03:27 PM

Eric "Sparks" Christensen

freenode 2009/2010 fundraiser

Just wanted to pass along that freenode is holding their 2009/2010 fund raising. They aren't asking for much and if you use freenode IRC as often as many of us do handing them a small donation is probably worth it (tax deductible in the US).

November 06, 2009 03:23 PM

Paul Mellors

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

There are a large number of Fedora Ambassadors out there all around the world, and to be honest you probably won’t speak to a large number of them, however why not get to know a few [well anyone that responds to this post to be honest ]

I’ve found it’s always better to put a face to a name so let’s get to know each other, i’ll begin

Name : Paul Mellors
IRC Nick : MooDoo
IRC Channel : #fedora-ambassadors on irc.freenode.net
Fedora Ambassador : United Kingom

Who’s Next?

Me! :)

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7

November 06, 2009 02:53 PM

Carlos (casep) Sepulveda

Drivers ATI Catalyst 9.10 funcionando en kernels 2.6.30+

Una buena noticia para los que quieran sacarle el máximo provecho a sus ATI.
AMD ha liberado la más reciente versión de su driver de video ATI Catalyst (9.10). Estos drivers (propietarios) pueden ser descargados desde la página de drivers de AMD/ATI
Lo mejor de esta versión es que es posible integrarlos en máquinas con kernels 2.6.30+, por ejemplo, máquinas con Fedora 11. Estos drivers aún no solucionan el problema de la corrupción del cursor mientras se está viendo videos o cuando compiz está activo, sin embargo igual vale la pena darle una vuelta! Aunque claro, lo mejor que pueden hacer es comprarse algo que tenga video Intel...
El proceso de instalación es el mismo utilizado para la versión 9.8 y está disponible en el HowTo
Si te interesa tratar de configurar 2 monitores utiliza el siguiente HowTo

Carlos (casep) Sepulveda

November 06, 2009 02:40 PM

Chris Tyler

Fedora 12 Toronto Release Party Alternative

Fedora 12 is almost here!

For the past several releases, we've held a release party in Toronto, complete with freshly-burned discs and origami disc covers. This time around, we'd like to invite all Toronto-area Fedora users to instead come out to FUDCon Toronto 2009 (where, in addition to great presentations, discussions, and hack sessions, I'm sure there will be real pressed discs with printed labels and real sleeves!).

Please help us get the word out! Point your friends, colleagues, and neighbours to http://tinyurl.com/fudcon

November 06, 2009 02:30 PM

Ryan Rix "PhrkOnLsh"

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador News Writer and KDE SIG member

WRT: < http://www.paulmellors.net/2009/11/get-to-know-a-fedora-ambassador-or-user >

Name : Ryan Rix

IRC Nick : PhrkOnLsh

IRC Channel : #fedora-ambassadors #fedora-kde and a ton of others on irc.freenode.net

Fedora Ambassador : Phoenix Arizona USA

That kid. Old-ish picture, but it’s the only vaguely serious one I have

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

November 06, 2009 02:00 PM

Ankur Sinha - franciscod

Codechef Campus SnackDown

Okay, this post is to do with my life out of the Fedora community.

Here’s a mail I got from CodeChef . The contest is only for Indian students this time, and weirdly enough falls right in between my end sem exams.

Hi Ankur,
I’m writing to let you know about the CodeChef Campus SnackDown, our biggest contest ever, specifically for Indian college students.

<snip>

The details of the contest are included below:

· ACM ICPC style contest with two rounds

o Round 1: Online Programming Contest on 21st Nov. 2009, Saturday 4pm-9pm

o Round 2: In Person programming contest on 10th Jan. 2010, Saturday

· Students can form teams of three

· The team which performs best in your college will be recognized on CodeChef

· The top teams from all over India will be flown down to Mumbai for the in person round

· Prizes of Rs 3 lakhs in cash to be won!!

So go ahead and ask your members to register their teams here: http://www.codechef.com/teams/register/SNACKDWN

We have given the details about the contest on our blog: http://blog.codechef.com/2009/10/27/the-super-gigantic-mega-announcement/

Cheers,

Basil Skariah

The poster can be found here:

http://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/cc_snackdown_poster_1_final.jpg

November 06, 2009 01:26 PM

Caolán McNamara

my first sub hour build

So, i7 920 + 10k SATA, full vanilla OOo DEV300_m64, no ccache, no nodep, no NOHIDS, straight build from a stock “./configure” (i.e. includes building seamonkey from source and binfilter) through and including packaging with (date && VERBOSE=FALSE build –all –dlv_switch -link -P8 — -P8 -s && date) > /tmp/build.log 2>&1 took 58 minutes.

November 06, 2009 12:32 PM

Frederic Hornain

JBoss Tools Installation on Fedora 11

As I am currently working with JBoss seam, I had to install JBoss Tools on my Fedora Eclipse 3.4.2 – Fedora 11 -.

So in order to share the procedure to every one and mostly to avoid to forget or lose it I decided to write it on this blog.

In addition, it permit to avoid eclipse/JBoss Tools problems dependence such as :

Screenshot-Install

And Errors such as :

Cannot complete the request. See the details.
Unsatisfied dependency: [org.hibernate.eclipse.feature.feature.group 3.2.4.v200909151014R-H192-GA] requiredCapability: org.eclipse.equinox.p2.iu/org.eclipse.wst.xml.core/1.1.0

So these are the steps :

I] Install Eclispe on your Fedora.

I.I] Open a terminal as standard user – here mine “fhornain” – and be root.

[fhornain@localhost ~]$ su -

[root@localhost ~]# yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel

[root@localhost ~]# yum install eclipse-platform

II ] Launch eclipse.

II.I] Indeed you should select in you Fedora main menu bar Applications > Programming > Eclipse

If not, launch a terminal and run the following command :

[fhornain@localhost ~]$ eclipse -vm /usr/bin/java

Rem: Change the path /usr/bin/java if it is not your java default location

Then you should see the eclipse starting banner – see below -

Screenshot-Eclipse

II.II] Then eclipse should ask you where you would like to save your projects – see image below -

Screenshot-Workspace Launcher

The default location should be fine – well, for me -

II.III] Then Welcome screen appears – see below -. Close it with a click on the top left cross.

Screenshot-Resource - Fedora Eclipse

III ] Install JBoss Tools

III.I] When Eclipse starts, go to Help > Software Updates. The following window should appears :

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons

III.II] Then click on the tab named “Available Software” – see below -

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons

III.III] Then click on button “Add Site” on the right of the window – see above – :

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons -1

III.IV] You see appear a new window where you are going to past the following URL : http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/ which is the offcial JBoss Tools URL – see below -

Screenshot-Add Site

Then click the OK button.

III.V] Then do the same with http://download.eclipse.org/releases/ganymede/ and http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.3/ as mentioned for JBoss Tools in points III.III] and III.IV]

III.VI] You should see appear a new line in the “Software updates and add-ons” window – see below -

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons

III.VII] Then click on the link “Ganymade Update Site” as show in the above picture :

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons -1

III.VIII] Then go down and choose “Web and Java EE Development”

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons

And click on the install button – see above -.

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons -1

Then the installation start – see above – :

Screenshot-Install

Then click on next button, accept the term of the licence and click on the finish button.

Screenshot-Install -2

The packages installation starts – see above – :

Screenshot-Install -3

Finally the installation finish and the following window appear in order to reboot the eclipse IDE application – see below -

Screenshot-Software Updates

Click on the Yes button

III.IX ] Now we’ll do the same steps for JBoss Tools and Bitr as we did for Ganymed “Web and Java EE Development”.

You should see the entered JBoss Tools links done during III.III] and III.IV] steps then click on the JBoss Tools arrow and select JBoss Tools line – see above -

Screenshot-Software Updates and Add-ons -2

And do the same procedure as we did for Ganymed “Web and Java EE Development” at step III.VIII].

Let’s hope it clear.

Now you can play with seam and other JBoss projects…

IV] Launch Seam project with Eclipse and Jboss Tools.

IV.I] Indeed you should select in you Fedora main menu bar Applications > Programming > Eclipse

If not, launch a terminal and run the following command :

[fhornain@localhost ~]$ eclipse -vm /usr/bin/java

Rem: Change the path /usr/bin/java if it is not your java default location

You should see appear the following window :

Screenshot-Resource - Fedora Eclipse

IV.II] Then click on the main menu bar File > New > Project and the following window appears – see below -

Screenshot-New Project

Then Choose your new JBoss Seam Project and name it.

BTW, do not forget BIRT otherwise you will not have JDBC Connectors

Enjoy !

November 06, 2009 11:02 AM

Lennart Poettering

Public Service Announcement

Folks! Since quite some time now the kernel exports the DMI machine information below /sys/class/dmi/id/. You may stop now parsing the output of dmidecode thus depending on external tools and privileged code.

For example, to read your BIOS vendor string all you need to do is this:

$ read bv < /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_vendor
$ echo $bv

Which is of course much simpler, and cleaner, and safer than anything involving dmidecode.

Thank you for your time!

November 06, 2009 10:14 AM

Thomas Vander Stichele

Dedicated separate Firefox windows

Dear intarweb,

here’s what I’d like to be able to do. I would like to start a completely separate Firefox window, in a separate process, with a given webpage. This process should be completely separate from my regular browsing, not take new links in its window when I click links somewhere else (usually they go to the most recently opened window), not crash when the regular firefox process crashes, and not bog down because my regular firefox goes to 100% CPU and beyond.

It seems to be hard to google for this idea; is it possible ?

November 06, 2009 09:59 AM

Thomas Vander Stichele

Best post-sale screen ever

Just gave in to the geeky side of the force this morning and bought a DVD documentary about BBS’s. (the version I bought comes with a DVD full with BBS text files, ANSI art, and random crap.)

After buying, this is the screen I got:

I don’t think I ever got a chuckle out of what happened right *after* I forked over cash. Here’s to you, Bob!

November 06, 2009 09:24 AM

Abhishek Singh

How to setup Key based SSH authentication?

Introduction: SSH (SSH client) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands on a remote machine. It is intended to replace rlogin and rsh, and provide secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections and arbitrary TCP ports can also be forwarded over the secure channel.

November 06, 2009 09:20 AM

Chitlesh Goorah

SystemC License again ! Communicating with OSCI Board

This is no secret for everyone that for a while I wish to see SystemC in Fedora repositories. However, a small glitch within the license in terms of redistribution prevents us from shipping it.

Jeremy Bennett is very kind to introduce me to some members of the OSCI board. I have already contacted two weeks them ago. Till yesterday, I haven’t got any reply. So I’ve resent a reminded to those board members in hope to understand the reason behind this glitch.

In the meantime, David Cabanis, the SCLive maintainer as well is wishing to see this licensing issue resolved.

November 06, 2009 08:42 AM

Chitlesh Goorah

choose EL or FEL — FEL package list

It was asked several times to publish a list of FEL packages. Maintenance of that list is a blocker. We don’t want to publish obsolete data since Fedora’s development cycle is 6 months. 6 months fly back very quickly. Hence an automated mechanism is advised to solve this issue.

We also receive some requests from users for additional data exposure :

A friend of mine wants concrete data which he can analyse before choosing whether CentOS or Fedora is appropriate for his analog and characterisation team. The choice of Fedora or CentOS depends on the features and bug fixes on the EDA tools. A tradeoff which the user has to make.
Some metrics to reflect the critical path in packaging for a particular design flow and which packages really need to be updated or rebuilt.
Some metrics which are useful for the Spin maintainer to track the major changes done by multiple packagers. These metrics will eventually help to allocate required time for proper testing and integration before release.
A list of FEL packages which Fedora Ambassadors can quick go through to help someone during an event.

Every two weeks, I ‘m auto-generating a basic html page listing all FEL packages and their versions with respect to Fedora and EPEL.

November 06, 2009 08:24 AM

Remi Collet

firefox-3.5.5-1

RPM of new version of Mozilla Foundation browser is available in remi repository for Fedora ≤ 10.

Start by reading : Firefox 3.5.5 Release Notes As always : yum --enablerepo=remi update firefox No xulrunner update, this RPM provides his bundled Gecko engine. RPM are currently available for Fedora ≥ 8.... Lire firefox-3.5.5-1

November 06, 2009 06:34 AM

Fedora

Feeds

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Other Aggregates

People

Add your blog

November 08, 2009

Attempting to Install Facebook Plugin

November 07, 2009

November 06, 2009

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