Fedora People

Yaakov M. Nemoy: Too many irc channels

2009-11-23T13:15:21+00:00

I'm going to be dropping a few IRC channels, since i've realized i rarely pay attention to them, and they are distracting during work hours. If you're looking for me, there's always a million and one ways to reach me. Just letting those people know, in case they wonder why tab completion on my name doesn't work anymore.

Yaakov M. Nemoy: RPM Database Corruption issues

2009-11-23T12:40:28+00:00

Today i noticed that i was having issues with Yum and RPM on my work machine. It's running a fresh install of Fedora 12, so it's most likely something just weird and out of the ordinary happened. It probably had to do with yumex hanging and then killing it by hand. Fixing it was simple for me. I realized that the problem was most likely corruption, one google later, i knew which files to delete (and backup first) and what to do to rebuild the RPM database. Woot, everything back to normal.

This is a big fail whale. It has nothing to do with the coding skills of any of the RPM, Yum, or Yumex maintainers, and i'm pretty sure between them and the PackageKit guys, they've gotten more than a life's share of flames and trolls already. This is a failure, because if i were the average user, say my dad, after smacking the keyboard once or twice to get yumex to continue working, i would have restarted the machine. Then i would be just as stuck.

From where i see it, telling someone to try to rebuild their RPM database on the command line is error prone and coudl just make things worse. Fortunately, the process itself is pretty simple. You backup some files, delete them, and run rpm --rebuilddb. The entire process should just work, so long there aren't bigger failures. From the perspective as a sysadmin, i know that if the RPM database is broken on a server, then chances are other bits, like package headers could be missing or corrupted too. Running such an operation as a knee-jerk reaction would be wrong. On a desktop though, that chance is there, but there's also a better chance that the database got corrupted due to something such as a power outage, or a well placed boot up the computer's sphincter. Such a process, including said backup, would be relatively non destructive if presented in a 'recovery toolkit' of sorts for the end user. Especially, perhaps, if there was a way to verify that the package headers were intact from the last known good configuration.

So in all seriousness, when these things go wrong, how can we offer an option to the user to try and recover the system?

Richard W.M. Jones: Prebuilt distributions part 1

2009-11-23T11:02:23+00:00

Previously I took a look at unpacking Fedora and Ubuntu live CDs to find out what’s inside them and to ask the question can we use the prebuilt filesystem image that these live CDs contain to quickly create a Fedora or Ubuntu “all-defaults” virtual machine?

This is my first attempt, and it’s not successful, but it does demonstrate a large and interesting guestfish script doing a non-trivial amount of work.

This script:

mounts the prebuilt filesystem from either a Fedora or Ubuntu live CD
creates a disk image with a 200 MB /boot partition and a single / (root) logical volume covering the remainder of the disk
uses the cp -a command to recursively copy the prebuilt filesystem to the disk

Where it fails is that “cp” isn’t very fast. On my local machine it took 18 minutes to copy all the files across, which means this isn’t a practical “instant install” method. (I didn’t in the end try to boot the final disk image).

In part 2 this week, I’ll look at the approach that anaconda takes: It dd’s the disk image and then runs resize2fs on it to expand it into the available space.

In part 3 I’ll compare this approach to others: virt-install, manual installation, kickstart, cobbler, debootstrap and ubuntu-vm-builder.

The script itself follows after the cut:

#!/bin/bash -

function usage ()
{
    echo "virt-prebuilt.sh live.iso disk.img size"
    echo "  where 'live.iso' is a Fedora or Ubuntu Live ISO"
    echo "        'disk.img' is the target disk image"
    echo "        'size' is the target size in Gigabytes"
    exit 1
}

if [ $# -lt 3 ]; then
    usage
fi

# Make the commands to unpack the ISO.
# See:
# http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/looking-closer-at-fedora-ubuntu-live-cds
case $(basename $1) in
    ubuntu-*.iso)
	mount_cmds="
mkmountpoint /t1
mount-ro /dev/sda /t1
mkmountpoint /fs
mount-loop /t1/casper/filesystem.squashfs /fs
"
	;;
    Fedora-*Live.iso)
	mount_cmds="
mkmountpoint /t1
mount-ro /dev/sda /t1
mkmountpoint /t2
mount-loop /t1/LiveOS/squashfs.img /t2
mkmountpoint /fs
mount-loop /t2/LiveOS/ext3fs.img /fs
"
	;;
    --help|-help)
	usage
	;;
    *)
	echo "$1: unknown ISO image type (must be Ubuntu or Fedora ISO)"
	usage
esac

# Work out size of target LV.
target_boot_mb=200
target_lv_mb=$(($3 * 1024 - $target_boot_mb - 128))

# Run guestfish.
guestfish -x -a "$1" <<EOF
# The source ISO will be /dev/sda.  The target drive will be /dev/sdb.
alloc "$2" "$3G"
run

# This mounts up the ISO filesystem on /fs
$mount_cmds

echo fstab on target:
cat /fs/etc/fstab

# Make a separate /boot partition on the target disk.
sfdiskM /dev/sdb ",$target_boot_mb ,"
mkmountpoint /target
mkfs ext3 /dev/sdb1

# Make the root LV.
pvcreate /dev/sdb2
vgcreate vg_live /dev/sdb2
lvcreate lv_live vg_live $target_lv_mb
mkfs ext3 /dev/vg_live/lv_live

# Mount up the target disks.
mount /dev/vg_live/lv_live /target
mkdir /target/boot
mount /dev/sdb1 /target/boot

# Copy everything across.
time cp-a /fs /target

unmount /target
-unmount /fs
-unmount /t2
-unmount /t1

echo Done.
EOF

Mirlan Ipasov: Fedora 12.

2009-11-23T10:38:00+00:00

I have installed fresh Fedora12 without problem. Running ,loving . Nice release congratulations.
You can download it here.

Jeroen van Meeuwen: Problems with the Fedora 11 Re-Spins

2009-11-23T10:08:02+00:00

I'm having trouble creating a Re-Spin for Fedora 11, as you might have suspected given the number of Re-Spins released by Fedora Unity for this number 11 release.

This time, it is networking in the installer image that isn't at all functional. I suspect changes to NetworkManager, released as an update for Fedora 11, have caused the dependencies to shift, and those dependencies might not be in the installer image (install.img) nor the initrd.img.

To troubleshoot such things is rather difficult, and takes up a lot of time. Maybe I'm just being inefficient at it (any hints can go to kanarip@fedoraunity.org please!).

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that that's what causing the hold-up.

Luis Villa: multi-computer photo editing workflow?

2009-11-23T08:32:51+00:00

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good workflow for editing a large set of photos using at least two and probably three laptops? It should be able to do f-spot-like tagging and favorit-ing of pictures, as well as cropping, simple color adjustments, etc. Goal is for Krissa and I, working together but often on our own machines, to turn 5,000 unedited honeymoon pictures into a smaller, organized, cropped, etc., set of pictures.

I’d love to just use f-spot, but as best as I can tell there is no way to share an f-spot collection (files+metadata) across multiple machines/user accounts- happy to be wrong on that count if possible.

Salvadesswaran Srinivasan: Upgrading to Fedora 12 in college

2009-11-23T06:18:03+00:00

Well, most of my college department labs run on Fedora but they are passionate followers of the “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” school of thought. They’re still using Fedora Core 5, which feels like eons ago. I myself started using Fedora from the last core version, 6. I was wondering whether they would upgrade any of those labs, which are all now unsupported, of course! I’ve spoken to the person managing one of the labs, and he told that it’d be nice to upgrade if there were no issues.

So, after I’m done with my end semester exams, I’m gonna go try and convince the lab in-charge to install Fedora 12 before students start using the lab for the next semester. Hopefully there won’t be any compatibility issues now. These days, all the problems are with proprietary OSes. I once tried to install the latest version of one, but had to spend the better part of a day searching for drivers. So I just kicked that out of my PC, and it is pure once more.

I’d need to explain him the need to update it asap due to what is a vulnerability on publicly accessible computers: The unrooted installation permission.

And having exams wrapped around the release day sucks, I’ve just downloaded the 32 bit and about to complete the 64-bit DVD. My desktop has been running Fedora 12 since the beta versions, and has never had a problem.

I hope to go one step forward, and start using the SSN-CTS open source lab for something useful to the community. There’s a long way to go, but these first steps are what count,

Diana Martin: Preparing for FUDCon: Toronto

2009-11-23T04:36:20+00:00

As we start upon this holiday week (in the US) I am pulling together my resources in preparation for the Fedora developer conference the first weekend in December.

Part of this process includes making my introduction to the Fedora group, gaining access to several mailing lists, joining IRC channels, and of course updating this blog.

So far this has been an interesting learning process.

On the technical side, I am ashamed to admit I got on IRC for the first time this week, that and I still didn’t figure out the SSH bit for adding myself to the Fedora Planet blogroll and instead had someone do a hack to get me on. I feel like my geek cred went simultaneously up and down - I suppose staying even isn’t so bad.

On the personal side I’ve had two great people step up to help me out both in terms of getting connected and getting a better grasp on the different things going on right now in the Fedora community. So thank you to both Mel and Mairin for that!

For those of you on Livejournal, I’ve syndicated Planet Fedora in order to make it easier for me to keep up with, perhaps you’ll find it helpful as well!

To get more familiar with Fedora as an OS, I am working on taking my Dell Mini 9 (my fieldwork laptop) and figuring out how to install the latest Fedora release on it (it came with Ubuntu). I have yet to even begin research on this! I figure it will be my pet project starting tomorrow. If you have tips or know of any resources that may be helpful, please pass them along!

Lastly, I’m going to put together a loose list of things to discuss while at the conference with everyone interested in this research. It being an explorative study, it is open to any and all ideas the community is interested in exploring about itself.

As a part of my research I’ll be conducting interviews at the conference. If you are interested in being interviewed and you think you’ll have time at the conference for it, please let me know! This way I can start a list prior to the conference and we can be sure to make time while we are there to talk. I’ll be happy to do this individually or in groups. Just let me know your preference.

If you won’t be at the conference, or would like the participate, but don’t think you’ll have time while you are there - don’t fret! I’ll be conducting interviews through the end of January either in person (for those local to Dallas), online (email/IM), or over the phone/skype. So if you’re interested in that let me know as well!

As always, if you have any questions as to what this is all about, who I am, or why I am doing this research feel free to email me at diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.

Jason Dobies: Gobby – Free Collaborative Editor

2009-11-23T03:25:34+00:00

Despite the fact that the team I’m currently on only has around 8 people, we still manage to span three different time zones. Needless to say, it’s not exactly simple for us to gather around a whiteboard and hash things out. With our move to using agile process techniques (more on that in other blog, it’s a beefy topic), we had a monthly need to be able to work on user stories and tasks together. For a while, we tried frequent saving to a single wiki page, but that had a few obvious limitations.

After experimenting with a few different approaches, we found ourselves regularly using gobby. I took the post title directly from their site, but it doesn’t do justice to just how fluidly it all comes together.

Gobby lets everyone logged into a gobby server type at the same time on the same document. Ugh, even that doesn’t showcase how cool it works in practice. The changes are sent in real time to every user, which both provides a very seamless collaboration environment as well as lets my teammates know just how bad I really am at typing (I’m even worse when I realize other people are watching me mistype every third letter).

The screenshots on their site are a little small. And frankly after trying to take one myself, I realize why: text doesn’t shrink well. Anyway, I tried to take one from our last sprint planning meeting to give an example of what I’m talking about (click on it for the full sized version which looks a bit better):

Each person who logs into the gobby server chooses their own background color. Whenever a user types something, those changes are highlighted in that user’s color, which (in our case at least) is less about ownership and more about differentiating changes. Again, realize each user can simultaneously type in the same document, which leads to an incredibly collaborative environment. And yes, seeing a document come together in different colors like that just plain looks cool.

Debarshi Ray: G++ on FreeBSD

2009-11-23T02:20:00+00:00

The following version of GCC shipped with FreeBSD 8.0-RC3 is reportedly unable to compile this C++ code.

g++ (GCC) 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD]Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NOwarranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

It is trying to copy parameters being passed as constant references.

Gerard Braad: Maemo 5 SDK on Fedora 12

2009-11-22T23:41:36+00:00

It is possible to install the Maemo 5 SDK (final) on Fedora 12. It only takes two minor edits to the installer script. You first need to make sure you have installed Xephyr. You can do so with the command:

$ yum install Xephyr

since the installer is not able to do so for other distributions than Ubuntu and debian. You can download the GUI installer script from Forum Nokia: Maemo 5 SDK.

In the file maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py you can change line 129 to

SB_PATH="/opt/scratchbox"

It is just optional. But to me this location feels more appropriate then '/scratchbox'. On my system it is linked to another location with other hardware and software development tools.

The current version of the script seems to fail on Fedora because of not being able to install scratchbox due to a missing path.

Change line 2311 to:

exec_cmd(sb_installer_fn + opt + "-s " + SB_PATH)

Change line 2351 to:

cmd = "%s -d -m %s -s %s" % (sdk_installer_fn, self.__sdk_inst_m_opt_arg, SB_PATH)

This includes the Scratchbox path during the command invocation. You can then install the SDK by running the script. It will handle the download of PyQT and sip itself.

After the install you can start Xephyr. However you can not use the -kb option:

$ Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac &

The first start of af-sb-init.sh failed for me with a coredump and several segmentation faults. try to close the scratchbox environment and try again.

Note: I haven't tried it with SELinux as enforcing since I currently run my workstation as permissive. Discussion is possible on the Maemo developer's forum posting.

Jon Stanley: Lookaside cache improvements

2009-11-22T23:20:10+00:00

First, prior to the meat of this post, I'm going to give some background since not all readers of the planet are packagers :)

For those that might not be familiar with our packaging environment in Fedora, our spec files, patches, and other small type things are stored in CVS. Since CVS is not suited to storing large binary blobs (read: source tarballs), there is something that sits alongside CVS called the lookaside cache, which is used to store these things. When they are required by koji, the buildsystem, it goes to get the source from the lookaside cache, all the applicable patches and spec files from CVS, and builds a SRPM which finally gets built into binary RPM's.

Up until yesterday, this lookaside cache was a big black box to Fedora packagers. There was no notification provided that a file was uploaded to it. This presented a minor, but plausible, security issue for our packaging process whereby a rogue individual could upload a doctored tarball of the next upstream release of a package, with an identical md5sum to the upstream version, and no one would ever know (if an identically named file with an identical md5sum exists in the lookaside cache, no upload is done). With this new enhancement, the package owner will be notified, and can take corrective action if he finds it necessary.

Richard W.M. Jones: The Doomsday Algorithm

2009-11-22T22:59:04+00:00

Work out, in your head, the day of the week corresponding to any date — eg. today is 2009-11-22, a Sunday — using this method. (Wikipedia page, but I recommend the first link). If you stick to just years from 1900 onwards it’s very simple. Could be a geeky ice-breaker at parties to tell people what day they were born on.

I’m fairly certain I remember a TV one-off in the 1980s where some unfortunate autistic man was subjected to a “Mastermind“-style interrogation. The only thing this poor man could do was tell the day of the week for any date. Probably he’d stumbled upon this method …

Eric "Sparks" Christensen: Interactive National Weather Service provides email and SMS weather bullitens for free.

2009-11-22T22:15:00+00:00

Still experimental, the Interactive National Weather Service (iNWS) provides solutions to users who want to receive weather information from their mobile devices. Included in this service is the ability to receive weather bulletins via e-mail or SMS message in real time. The service continues to get better so I thought I'd pass the word around.

Thomas Vander Stichele: desktopcouch on Fedora

2009-11-22T21:24:05+00:00

Time to unravel some tufts of the yak hair lying around from this weekend.

I wanted to work on making my GTD application (using CouchDB) a little more friendly.

I started out by learning GreaseMonkey so I could modify Trac pages to include a link converting the ticket into a thing in my application.

The basics of that were easy, but I need to learn a bunch more Javascript before it will actually work well. So, I switched to finally figuring out if desktopcouch might be a good solution for the general problem for users to set up a couchdb database.

desktopcouch’s tagline describes it nicely ‘A CouchDB for every desktop.’ From what I can tell, it has:

a way to automatically start a per-user couchdb instance
oauth enabled by default for it, so only you can get to it
some gnomekeyring integration
a pairing tool that makes it easy to pair with other desktopcouch instances on your network
a python module on top of python-couchdb that layers a ‘record’ concept over CouchDB documents using record_type and record_revision keys
some pre-defined record types for notes, contacts, and bookmarks
possible integration with the UbuntuOne service

At this point I don’t know how intertwined this record concept is with the rest of desktopcouch. As at the moment I want to use desktopcouch simply as a reliable way to get a secure, per-user, replicated couchdb database, I’d prefer to not deal with records at all at this point.

In the process of getting acquainted with desktopcouch and packaging it for Fedora, I ran into a few little niggles:

First off, bdist_rpm didn’t work for desktopcouch because of the man pages being compressed.
My first run failed. Furthermore, the unhandled exception left my $HOME/.local/share/desktopcouch in a half-done state; I ran it again, and it worked, but it didn’t generate a couchdb.html as it should have because of this.
Some rpmlint warnings

As for the package, if you’re on Fedora 11, just install tao-release for F-11 i386 then type ‘yum -y install desktopcouch’

After that, you can start it by asking it for what port is running:

dbus-send --session --dest=org.desktopcouch.CouchDB --print-reply --type=method_call / org.desktopcouch.CouchDB.getPort

If all goes well that should come back with a number.

You can now access your desktopcouch through Futon with:
firefox $HOME/.local/share/desktop-couch/couchdb.html

Let me know if this worked for you or not !

I have a separate post about packaging ubuntuone stuff, which was much more complicated – and I’m still not sure if I will be able to use it as an online server for my couchdb app.

Now, for some questions to you desktopcouch-savvy people out there:

Looking at the generated couchdb.html, I see that I can now access the user-specific couchdb with a generated username and password. If I want to push my GTD app to this couchdb, I can do so using this username and password. So, obvious questions: a) should I push with couchapp this way to get my app in desktopcouch ? b) is there a better way to get this username/password ? I assume desktopcouch does this in the python modules using gnome-keyring c) is it an intended mode of operation to be able to push my app into the user couchdb ? I am working on the web interface part served by couchdb and I want it to be one of the ways in which to access the data.

Is it possible to pair with a different user on the same machine ? I was on a laptop with no other linux computer around, so I was not able to test the pairing. I did set it up for a different user, but neither account seemed to see the other’s couchdb running.

Will I be able to sync non-record databases to ubuntuone ? If not, what else could I do to have an online couchdb to sync between my various work machines ?

Thomas Vander Stichele: python setup.py bdist_rpm and man pages

2009-11-22T21:10:46+00:00

Today while using bdist_rpm to build a quick package to test desktopcouch, the build failed on man pages. It took a while to figure out what to google for, but it turns out it’s this bug which will turn 7 years old come Friday.

That is a little embarassing. I don’t know if it’s because bdist_rpm hardly ever gets used or because it’s hard to figure out what the bug is or how to report it.

In any case, I attached a patch that worked for me today against python 2.6. I punted on actually rebuilding Python for Fedora for my repo since it’s a little bit overkill (the plan is to build a proper .spec file anyway for the package), but if you need the patch it’s in the bug report.

Karlie Robinson: Stuff We All Get

2009-11-22T20:44:45+00:00

SWAG, as it's also known, is the story for me this week and it's been one of those good news, bad news kind of situations.The good news -- Tuesday morning I received an email from Steve Jacobs saying he's been granted a booth at NYSCATE 2009 and asking for SWAG and Volunteers.It's a big opportunity to show NY State Educators the monstrous amounts of work being done at RIT with OLPC, SugarLabs.org

Diego Búrigo Zacarão: Running Transifex with PostgreSQL on Fedora

2009-11-22T20:02:57+00:00

Steps with sudo command configured to the current user:

$ sudo yum install postgresql-server python-psycopg2

$ sudo service postgresql initdb
Initializing database: [ OK ]

$ sudo service postgresql start
Starting postgresql service: [ OK ]

$ sudo su – postgres

-bash-4.0$ psql

postgres=# CREATE USER transifex WITH PASSWORD ‘transifex’;
CREATE ROLE

postgres=# CREATE DATABASE transifex OWNER transifex;
CREATE DATABASE

postgres=# \q

-bash-4.0$ exit

$ sudo vim /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

# “local” is for Unix domain socket connections only
local transifex transifex password # Add this line
local all all ident

$ sudo service postgresql restart

$ psql transifex transifex
Password for user transifex:
psql (8.4.1)
Type “help” for help.

transifex=>

transifex=> \q

# Bellow it assumes the Tx code is under ~/workspace/mainline/ and
# all the dependencies are installed. http://docs.transifex.org/intro/install.html

$ cd workspace/mainline/transifex/

$ vim settings/21-engines.conf

# Database configuration
DATABASE_ENGINE = ‘postgresql_psycopg2′
DATABASE_NAME = ‘transifex’
DATABASE_USER = ‘transifex’
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ‘transifex’

$ ./manage.py syncdb

$ ./manage.py migrate codebase # It shouldn’t be necessary :/

$ ./manage.py migrate

$ ./manage.py loaddata txcommon/fixtures/*

$ ./manage.py runserver 8080

That’s it!

Richard W.M. Jones: Interview: Virtualization improvements in F12

2009-11-22T19:00:57+00:00

Lots of virt developers, including me, were interviewed for the Fedora 12 release by Mel Chua.

Fedora Venezuela: Fedora 12 – Opinión

2009-11-22T17:02:11+00:00

Anoche me di a la tarea de instalar Fedora12 en mi portátil una Compaq nx6115, me había quedado en ella con Fedora 9 por pereza de actualizar/reinstalar así que opte por hacer una instalación en limpio usando el DVD y no actualizar, ya que además quería tener el nuevo sistema de ficheros ext4.

El instalador se me quedo colgado al intentar seleccionar el idioma de la instalación, sin embargo en esta oportunidad al arrancar me conseguí con una nueva opción que permite realizar la instalación usando un driver de vídeo genérico ( vesa ) lo cual permite realizar la instalación normalmente si se tienen problemas de vídeo, ideal para aquellos que tienen tarjetas nvidia o ATI que no funcionan adecuadamente con drivers libres esta es una opción bastante funcional que permite realizar la instalación para luego configurar su vídeo, mi portátil tiene una ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M.

La instalación a pesar de que se tardo un poco fue sin contratiempo y en unos 20 minutos tenía todo mi sistema instalado con cifrado de disco duro incluido, sorprendiéndome de que mi tarjeta wireless una Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 funciono perfectamente, anteriormente tenía que incluir manualmente el firmware de la tarjeta en /lib/firmware, todo el hardware fue reconocido perfectamente confirmando de que Fedora es una de las distribuciones con mejor reconocimiento y soporte de hardware que existen.

Luego de instalar y arrancar mi nuevo sistema, note que arrancaba mucho más rápido que mi Fedora9, el sistema en si es mucho más liviano en planos generales y el yum está extremadamente rápido, además que el uso de los delta rpms al realizar el primer update me ahorro de 89 MB que debió haber sido a solo 9 MB, los delta rpms son paquetes que contienen solo las diferencias entre ellos y Fedora12 tiene full soporte para drpms, así que yum está mucho más rápido los downloads son menores debido al uso a los drpms.

Una de las cosas que me llamo la atención es que el dvd ya no trae xchat por defecto hay que instalarlo luego desde los repositorios, también ya no trae pidgin que era lo que usaba como cliente de mensajería y en vez de eso ahora trae empathy por defecto, sin embargo empathy esta muy bueno y tiene soporte para audio y vídeo, el firefox nuevo está muchisimo más rápido que mi viejo firefox 2.X .

Luego de configurar el soporte de repositorios para RPMfusion instale los paquetes necesarios para tener soporte para mp3, y algunos programas más que uso mucho como vlc, mplayer-gui, devede y etc… que no son provistos directamente por Fedora por tener problemas de licenciamiento y no ser considerados completamente libres.

Alguna de las novedades más controversiales y que ya es considerada un bug es la que permite instalar software de repositorios oficiales y debidamente firmados con su llave a usuarios comunes usando PolicyKit, a mi me parece una buena decisión para el desktop y cualquier administrador debe saber como desactivarlo si desea Fedora para un servidor ( aunque yo no usaría Fedora para servidores ), sin embargo creo que debieron colocar una opción en el instalador y dejar que esa funcionalidad fuera opcional.

De resto el sistema, está bien estable, el tema de iconos y el tema de gnome está ligero y bonito, les recomiendo está versión de Fedora se ve que trabajaron mucho en traernos todo esto y si deciden actualizar o instalar no olviden dar una lectura a los siguientes enlaces de interes:

http://doc.fbnetwork.org/ | Guía de Fedora tipo libro completamente en Casgtellano.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f12/es-ES/html/ | Las notas de lanzamiento en Castellano.
http://gracca.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/actualizar-de-fedora-11-a-fedora-12-con-preupgrade/ | Para los que usan preupgrade para actualizar desde Fedora11.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs#Preupgrade_free_space_check_on_.2Fboot_not_thorough | Para los que usan preupgrade y tienen un /boot de 100MB

Articulos Relacionados:

Fedora 12 Disponible! Desde ayer está disponible para descarga la nueva versión…
Fedora 7 Liberado! Moonshine Fedora 7, que ya no es core, nombre código…
Fedora 10 Liberado! Cambridge Es para mi un placer anunciarles que ya está disponible…

Kushal Das: Training place

2009-11-22T16:26:52+00:00

A place which brings smile to many faces. Some come with pain though.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8

Ankur Sinha - franciscod: Fedora India meeting minutes

2009-11-22T14:36:13+00:00

From my post to the mailing lists:

hey,

To start with, links :

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-india/2009-11-22/fedora-india.2009-11-22-06.02.html

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-india/2009-11-22/fedora-india.2009-11-22-06.02.log.html

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-india/2009-11-22/fedora-india.2009-11-22-06.02.txt

People present (lines said)
1. franciscod (208)
2. mbuf (141)
3. jdk2588 (37)
4. skbohra (37)
5. Pradipta (31)
6. rakesh (29)
7. kushal (17)
8. sm|CPU (8)
9. sankarshan (7)
10. Acedip (5)
11. kishan_ (3)
12. kishan (2)
13. zodbot (2)
14. kedars_ (1)
15. rajeshr (1)
16. rtnpro (1)
17. yevlempy (1)

==================================================================

There were two topics on the agenda as posted on the mailing list:
- F12 release events
- Tamil team
- During the course of the meeting, we decided to discuss the issue of
“people becoming Fedora Ambassadors and not carrying out their duties as
required” also.

Minutes -
Release events:

- Planned at MIT Manipal, early January (Ankur Sinha)
- Release party, install fests at Bikaner (Jaideep)
- Plans to migrate 100 desktops of Coal India to fedora12 (Pradipta)

Tamil team discussion:
Postponed (next meeting?)

Discussion over fedora ambassadorship

- Making sure that blogs of *every* Ambassador is on
planet.fedoraproject.org

- some sort of system to prevent people from signing up (because its
ultra cool) and then not working.
- make a nice proposal and send it for discussion and whatever be the
result send it to FEMSco for approval
- ideas, such as an Ambassador should be participating in at least one
Fedora subgroup (ie docs/packaging/design/websites…)

- Mentoring to make sure newbies holding release fests know what to say
ie – *correct content* (since they’re short on experience, we don’t want
them saying stuff that is different from the community’s working etc.)
- Setting up a wiki page and supplying people with updated slides and
material to be used at release fests.

- collecting feedback after a Fedora event from the audience (ideas
needed on how to go about doing this).

- regular IRC meets : fortnightly *at least*

- good install fests never turning into sustained activities : why??

==========================================================================

These are only ideas in short. Please go through the meeting logs
provided above.

There’s quite a lot of work to be done.

- I’m in-charge of rounding up all “FAs from India”’s blogs and making
sure they’re on the planet.
- Slides etc? (any hands ??)

There are also agendas that still need more discussion. Future meets or
discussions on the mailing list are needed.

Thank you all for attending

Have a nice evening

regards,
Ankur

PS Also forwarding the the ambassadors list.

Steven Moix: Maemo or Android, N900 versus Hero

2009-11-22T12:46:44+00:00

Until recently, I couldn’t care less about shiny new mobile phones. When mine broke or it was time to change to a new one due to my mobile operator contract ending, I simply went for the “free” phones that were somewhat compatible with Linux. My current phone, a Nokia 5310, can for example serve as a modem in Fedora vie USB connection or Bluetooth thanks to NetworkManager and it perfectly synchronizes with Banshee for my music and podcasts. It’s just slow as hell, but that’s another story.

As I recently moved to another city and switched work, new requirements started to emerge in my life. These new requirements change my general multimedia usage patterns quite a lot, so I’m thinking of reorganizing my whole media distribution methods at home and at work. This may sound quite vague, but let me explain how this is related to mobile phones…My current “multimedia” needs are:

To be able to access the Internet via my mobile phone (work requirement).
To have a centralized way of downloading podcasts (personal requirement).
To have a centralized point to distribute music to my HiFi system (personal requirement).
The system has to be open for tweaking, using open standards (personal/work requirement).
The system has to be able to connect to my Fedora box to transfer files (personal requirement).

Now you probably see where I’m going…these tasks can be handled by modern smartphones. Let’s exclude the iPhone as it’s way too proprietary. This leaves me with two main options: a Goolge Android 2 based phone or a Nokia Maemo 5 based phone. Points 1, 2 and 3 are trivial for both phones, they can serve as modems on Fedora, they have applications to manage your music and download podcasts and they can stream music via Bluetooth (A2DP) or FM radio (for the Maemo device).

The Android story – HTC Hero

At work, almost all of my colleagues have HTC Magic or HTC Hero phones running Android 1.6 (soon to be updated to Android 2.0 for free) and they seem to be very happy about them. Another colleague and friend even develops an application for our company on Android and also seems happy about it. I’m pretty sure that in the long run Android will be the dominant OS on mobile phones other than the ones by Apple; let’s just give the Chinese manufacturers time to swarm the market with cheap smartphones.

What I’m concerned about with Android is Goolge, when I read things like this or this (I agree with the 3rd commentary) it concerns me a little bit; be careful Google, don’t become evil. The “your are not allowed to share your Internet connection” clauses remind me of 1998, when ISPs didn’t like home routers; I pay for a service, let me use it as I want.

HTC Hero

Apart from that, an Android 2.0 phone can fulfill all my requirements at a decent price, around 550 CHF (360€) for a HTC Hero. It has a decent marketplace for applications and will surely benefit from the fact that it’s used by multiple phone brands (mass effect).

The Maemo story – Nokia N900

As a Fedora contributor, Maemo touches me more than Android. It’s Nokia’s “new” OS for their high-end mobile devices. By 2012, it should replace Symbian on all their devices in this category.

Unlike Android, Maemo is a “true” Linux distribution as we know it; it’s a Debian-based distribution with Gnome on it and a custom UI. It has apt to handle software updates and installations, supports software repositories, supports GTK and QT, uses Gnome technologies (gstreamer, telepathy…), PulseAudio, BlueZ a Mozilla browser etc etc…it also has a strong developer community and a planet, like Fedora.

On this device, you have a root access by default and you can find all your usual command-line applications. Their flagship mobile device running Meamo 5 is the new Nokia N900. Oh, and it has a real keyboard too.

The downside of this device is ironically that it’s new. The Nokia application store is not very well populated and the Maemo OS is only used by Nokia. As now, I see it much more like a hacker device than Android and I don’t expect it to have huge market share. An N900 can be bought for around 700 CHF (460€).

Conclusion

You may argue that these smartphones are expensive and I agree, but you rarely buy them without a contract from a mobile operator anyway. In my situation, my company pays for the phone bills so I can also invest some money in hardware now..priorities change.

If you look a the raw technical specifications, the Nokia N900 wins over the HTC Hero, it has more of just everything (Memory, CPU power, I/O capabilities). Having seen a HTC Hero in action, it doesn’t lack any processing power though, so the real difference between the devices has to be made on the software side. Both devices can serve as modems and download + stream music from a centralized point to all the devices in my apartment.

Android is solid, stable, has a big and growing marketplace and is supported by many companies. It just lacks that little bit of openness that would make it the perfect OS for my usage.
Meamo is reported to be stable, very fast, very hackable but it lacks a real marketplace for applications right now. The fact that it’s a “pure” Linux system backed by Nokia, a big Open Source contributor, really appeals to me though.

At the end of the day, I’m probably going to give my preference to the N900, let me a couple of days to think about it and with a little chance, you’ll get a full review in a couple of weeks.

While writing this blog post, it also struck me how important the concept of caring about an operating system on your phone has become during the last years, we can at least thank the iPhone for that. Yes, I feel like a hipster now.

/me looks at the shiny marketing video

Acedip "Anirudh Singh Shekhawat": IBM and the great indian debacle

2009-11-22T12:13:15+00:00

Everyone feared IBM in the good old days, when guys in black suits and tie would either make you go out of business or buy you off the hook. IBM guys were considered evil big brothers, who were ruthless and sung company songs. So anyways IBM seemed to have changed quite a lot in recent years and we all know its open support towards free and open source mentality, and anyways I am here to talk about what is it doing right now which actually violates that very philosophy.

There is a very popular competition which IBM runs in india called TGMC (The great mind challenge) for students. Well that is all good but the tricky part comes here. IBM only accepts projects made using its technology i.e. the tools which only IBM provides to the educational institute you are in and yes, they dont give these tools to individuals, they can only be acquired once your institute is in the program and it so happens that IBM after sending its big boys to your institute and, your college will soon will make it compulsory for everyone in the final year to make their major projects for IBM, and my college is one of them and we are stuck with making our major projects in TGMC if we want or not.

The tools to be used are : Rational Rose/RSA
RAD/Eclipse/WSAD/ WebSphere Portal
WAS/WAS CE
DB2 Express – ‘C’ or DB2 UDB

and as it seems that you cant do this project without IBM’s help. But what is more important are the Terms and Conditions, what it has imposed on all student developers working on it, here is an interesting one :-

“By submitting entries, entrant grants IBM and their agents of the program the right to publish, use, adapt, sell, edit and/or modify such entry in any way, in commerce and in any and all media worldwide, including but not limited to the Internet, without limitation and without compensation to the entrants. Entrant also grants IBM worldwide irrevocable, nonexclusive and royalty-free right and license to use, have used, copy, reproduce, transfer, modify and/or display any information contained in their entry in whole or part and in any form without compensation.” for a complete set of Terms and Conditions

Woah!! So that means you dont own your work, it just does not belong to you. I wonder what is this giant teaching young students on this country. And what is this policy where, on one hand its promoting open source and on the other its doing this.

And this is not limited to my college alone, I know a lot many college in jaipur, rajasthan, india which have fallen for this and have made it mandatory for their students to work on it.

Jeroen van Meeuwen: Profiling Zarafa Usage with Munin

2009-11-22T12:10:21+00:00

I wanted to share with you the way Operator Groep Delft monitors and profiles Zarafa, the best Open Source Groupware available today. We have about a thousand users in LDAP, of which approximately 200 are internal employees (the ones in the branch offices) compared to approximately 800 external users (consultants, part-timers, etc.). We use Nagios for monitoring, and Munin for profiling. Munin integrates with Nagios in that given a set of thresholds, when a profiled resourse is out-of-bounds, it can let Nagios trigger the alerting.

Anyway, let's see some Munin graphs (who doesn't like colored graphs?):

The number of Connections to the Zarafa server

The number of connections to the Zarafa server is a simple `netstat | grep <process-name> | wc -l`. Some users will have more then one connection (Outlook users for example), and so the number of users (see below) is a different number. Also mind that, contrary to the Outlook and/or IMAP (persistent) connections, the webmail connections are polled once per 5 minutes, and thus the number of webmail (non-persistent) connections is probably off by a factor X. We chose to not choose X and instead derive statistics based on the actual numbers in the graph.

You can find our version of the zarafa_connections Munin plugin here.

The number of Unique Source IP addresses

Like I said, the number of actual users is something different then the amount of connections. Some users may have more then one connection so how do we derive the number of users from the number of connections? While Zarafa comes with a neat utility called zarafa-stats, it is not what we were looking for and so we chose to pick unique IP addresses for Outlook, IMAP and webmail users, and pick unique users for ActiveSync connections (also through the webserver, like webmail access, so we parse the webserver logs here). There's one more cheat in the number of webmail and ActiveSync connections I need to tell you about:

Instead of examining the webserver access_log files per hour, we take into account the hour before the current hour too. In a way, we examine the access_log files (of combined format by the way) in a range of 60 to 120 minutes. The reasoning is as follows; If we don't, at the start of every hour the number of users is zero. Then, as the hour passes, the number of users would increase and increase a little more until the hour passes and the next hour starts. This would have caused the graph to look like the teeth of a saw, which would misrepresent the number of users entirely.

You can find our version of the zarafa_users Munin plugin here.

The number of Queries per Second on the dedicated MySQL Database server

These users cause Zarafa to put some load on your database server, of course, and since we have a dedicated MySQL server just for Zarafa, the number of queries per second is interesting as well. This is a standard Munin plugin -or at least it's shipped in the version of Munin for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 as well as Fedora.

Note how the number of queries per second turns out to have > 50% cache hits at average (for the week). Over a longer period of time, I can tell you, the number of cache hits averages about 50% overall, and anywhere between about 30-40% during office hours.

Zoltan Hoppar: Thinking about more collaboration

2009-11-22T11:26:00+00:00

After we had with Robert an very great event at Budapest earlier, many people came over to me to know what's the differences between our Fedora and other distributions. Slowly I see how people are interested, and my mailbox gets mail rush... That's really good sign. But... I know there is everything uploaded between our websites, and we could tell them the answers - but I felt that's not really enough to win new contributors to all teams.

Partially we Ambassadors are in front line, who could directly promote Fedora, and all the teams. But after I saw through our merchandising "weapons" - like docs, presentations, and other tools - something is disturbed me. Everything was written in english, only just a few was in other language. These docs (flyers) are very important for new contributors, for the press, as other pages too - but not just in US, and for english people.
This could be a really huge task for translator teams (especially for the docs team), and the roots of this are could be very deep at all. To turn this all text or just first parts into other language, side by side with translating the new arriving Fedora apps UI.... Well, it's true - not easy.

How about to each group (eg. marketing, ambassadors) have an connection to Transifex, and get easily more collaboration work, marking to them to the important files or so? Giving some priority, and some online collaboration editors in TX, binded locally an GPL document/media manager could revolutionize this. How about to have one common UI what has a capability to know the schedule, RSS from channels, revisions, assignment, calendar, communication... and so on....

I know, the way to this could be very long..... This can be an huge change from what we have now, but I would like to go this way to achieve this. Until these times I will try to make translated flyer templates, small book templates about Fedora, about teams or anything what is needed - and I would like to saw these docs uploaded to transifex....

Mel Chua: Typing in 中文

2009-11-22T07:32:37+00:00

如果你看这份 http://planet.fedora-zh.org, 对不起我的中文不足够的翻译。我会尝试写中文时，我可以。
(For those reading on the Chinese planet, I am sorry my Chinese is not good enough to translate this post. I will try to write in Chinese when I can.)

For those reading on the English-language Planet Fedora, I’m trying to learn how to participate in the Chinese-language Fedora community, and chronicling my adventures (as usual) as I go along.

Kin Chew posted instructions on how to enable Chinese character input in Fedora 11 – I should screencast an F12 version now that the new release is out. But thanks to Kin Chew’s instructions, I’ve finally started typing in Chinese – less than 5 minutes from beginning to read his post to typing 谢谢 (thank you) in a comment, including the reboot. My prior adventures in that language have all involved either dead trees or individual copy-pasting of characters from online dictionaries. Yes, it’s painful; that’s why my prior online output in Chinese probably numbers less than 100 characters.

Ah, the power of documentation. See, it’s not that this was hard – but prior to Kin Chew’s post, Chinese input was (1) something I didn’t need to do, and was interested enough to maybe spend 10 minutes trying to figure out, and (2) something that took me more than 10 minutes to figure out, and therefore something that I didn’t do. And I keep reminding myself that this is what it feels like for new people looking at joining the projects that I care about.

Next steps: figuring out how to make Chinese characters display correctly in GNOME Terminal and Konsole so I can see #fedora-zh without having to fire up xchat separately (I use irssi and screen for IRC), then figuring out how to tweak and run lingobot so I can understand #fedora-zh without having to pile through my dictionary all the time. I have a grasp of enough basic grammar that a word-for-word translation should enable me to begin squeaking by – vocabulary is my main deficiency at the moment.

Sankarshan: Context,subtext and inter-text

2009-11-22T05:50:24+00:00

There are two points with which I’d like to begin:

One, in their Credits to Contributors section, Mozilla (for both Firefox and Thunderbird) state that “We would like to thank our contributors, whose efforts make this software what it is. These people have helped by writing code and documentation, and by testing. They have created and maintained this product, its associated development kits, our build tools and our web sites.” (Open Firefox, go to Help -> About Mozilla Firefox -> Credits, and click on the Contributors hyperlink)
Two, whether with design or, with inadvertent serendipity, projects using Transifex tend to end up defining their portals as “translate.<insert_project_name>.domain_name”. Translation, as an aesthetic requirement is squarely in the forefront. And, in addition to the enmeshed meaning with localization, the mere usage of the word translation provides an elevated meaning to the action and, the end result.

A quick use of the Dictionary applet in GNOME provides the following definition of the word ‘translation’:

The act of rendering into another language; interpretation; as, the translation of idioms is difficult. [1913 Webster]

With each passing day innovative software is released under the umbrella of various Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. For software that is to be consumed as a desktop application, the ability to be localized into various languages makes the difference in wide adoption and usage. Localization (or, translation) projects form important and integral sub-projects of various upstream software development projects.

In somewhat trivial off-the-cuff remarks which make translation appear easier than it actually is, it is often said that translation is the act of rendering into a target language the content available in the source language. However, localization and translation are not merely replacing the appropriate word or phrases from one language (mostly English) to another language. It requires an understanding of the context, the form, the function and most importantly the idiom of the target language ie. the local language. And yet, in addition to this, there is the fine requirement of the localized interface being usable, while being able to appropriate communicate the message to users of the software – technical and non-technical alike.

There are multiple areas that were briefly touched in the above paragraph. The most important of them being the interplay of context-subtext and inter-text. Translation, by all accounts, provides a referential equivalence. This is because languages and, word forms evolve separately. And, in spite of adoption and assimilation of words from languages, the core framework of a language remains remarkably unique. Add to this mix the extent with which various themes (technology, knowledge, education, social studies, religion) organically evolve and, there is a distinct chance that idioms and meta-data of words,phrases which are so commonplace in a source language, may not be relevant or, present at all in the target language.

This brings about two different problems. The first, whether to stay true to the source language or, whether to adapt the form to the target language. And, the second, as to how far would losses in translations be acceptable. The second is somewhat unique – translations, by their very nature have the capacity to add/augment to the content, to take away/subtract from the content thereby creating a ‘loss’ or, they can adjust and hence provide an arbitrary measure of compensation. The amount of improvement or, comprehension a piece of translated term can bring forward is completely dependent on the strength of the local language and, the grasp over the idiomatic usage of the same that the translator brings to the task at hand. More importantly, it becomes a paramount necessity that the translator be very well versed in the idioms of the source language in additional to being colloquially fluent in the target language.

The first problem is somewhat more delicate – it differs when doing translations for content as opposed to when translating strings of the UI. Additionally, it can differ when doing translations for a desktop environment like, for example, Sugar. The known user model of such a desktop provides a reference, a context that can be used easily when thinking through the context of words/strings that need to be translated. A trivial example is the need to stress on terms that are more prevalent or, commonly used. A pit-fall is of course it might make the desktop “colloquial”. And yet, that would perhaps be what makes it more user-friendly. This paradox of whether to be source-centric or, target-friendly is amplified when it comes to terms which are yet to evolve their local equivalents in common usage. For example, terms like “Emulator” or, “Tooltip” or, “Iconify”being some of the trivial and quick examples.

I can pick up the recent example of “Unmove” from PDFMod to illustrate a need to appreciate the evolution of English as a language and, to point to the need for the developers to listen to the translators and localization communities. The currently available tools and, processes do not allow a proper elaboration of the context of the word. In English, within the context of an action word “move” it is fairly easy to take a guess at what “Unmove” would mean. In languages where the usage of the action word “move” in the context of an operation on a computer desktop (here’s a quirk – the desktop is a metaphor that is being adopted to be used within the context of a computation device) is evolving, Unmove itself would not lend itself well to translation. Such “absent contexts” are the ones which create a “loss in translation”.

The singularity here is that the source language strings can evolve beautifully if feedback is obtained from the translated language in terms of what does improve the software. The trick is perhaps how best to document the context of the words and phrases to enable a much richer and useful translated UI. And, work on tooling that can include and incorporate such feedback. For example, there are enormous enhancements that can be trivially (and sometimes non-trivially) made to translation memory or, machine translation software so as to enable a much sharper equivalence.

(The above is a somewhat blog representation of what I planned to talk about at GNOME.Asia had my travel agent not made a major mess of the visa papers.)

Máirín Duffy: I know. I know.

2009-11-22T04:24:00+00:00

I couldn’t help it. I’m a girl. I gotta work on the hair though…

Done in Gimp 2.7.0 with a Wacom tablet on Fedora 12.

Posted in Uncategorized

Ankur Sinha - franciscod: I saw the code of DEATH in action!

2009-11-22T04:09:31+00:00

For those who aren’t aware,

su -

rm -rf *

is referred to as the code of death. Really needless to explain why. Well, I had never thought I’d see it happen, but I did. Not exactly the above mentioned commands, but as another lethal variant:

su -

mv /* /somedir

How and when? I was hanging out on #fedora when this dude said he needed help. A fellow admin to his remote server had typed in the above commands (there was lag and something something). Anyhow, so, you do the math. We tried making a shell script to move everything back. OH! but wait! you can only use built in shell commands. Makes it way more tougher, doesn’t it? I couldn’t fix it, but I did learn some stuff trying to.

Sent the dude to #bash, where an excellent fellow, who REALLY knew his stuff, helped out. He compiled an executable using static linking (so it wouldn’t want the moved libs) and placed it in the dir using tcp or something (This part I know nothing about). Since you couldn’t use chmod anymore, they overwrote an already executable binary (sorry unrar). The file moved everything back to where it was supposed to be. This din’t come about as trivially as it sounds.

Sounds simple eh? Trust me, isn’t. At least wasn’t for me.

So, a close experience of the code of death. Lesson learnt : Root is dangerous !!

Jon Stanley: OLPC Meetup today

2009-11-22T01:17:40+00:00

As promised, I've got the event report for the OLPC meetup that happened today. It started at about 1PM in the meeting room of a church (apparently the same meeting room that AA meetings are held in - are they trying to tell me something? :) ). People from OLPC in Boston, the OLPC Learning Club DC, and virtually, people from San Francisco were there. All in all in the room in NYC we had about 30 people show up, who represented a very broad cross-section of the constituents of OLPC - teachers, marketing people, and techies such as myself. After an update on some deployments, the XO 1.5 (which will have both the Sugar interface as well as a more traditional GNOME desktop, will have 1GB of RAM so a lot of the memory constraints that came with attempting to run a normal desktop on the XO platform are gone), and learning about the people down in DC for about an hour, we split off into three groups - marketing/communication/community development, teachers and educators, and technology people. I obviously went to the technical side of the room :).

We had an interesting conversation on getting involved in Sugar development, and more importantly, the lack of a closed feedback loop from deployments, and the understanding of pain points that real teachers in the field were having. Adam Holt from OLPC mentioned that the Sugar Labs folks had attempted such a thing in the past, and the results of the feedback, while useful and valuable, were not exactly immediately actionable by Sugar Labs (or anyone else really - things like "battery life is too short").

However, we did find something that is immediately actionable for the techies in the crowd, and Adam will be reaching out for help revising and updating the Sugar Almanac and the Activity Handbook which are both currently out of date for current versions of the operating system, and making developer documentation more accessible. I also met and exchanged contact information with George Hunt, who is also a local techie who is heavily involved with OLPC and we're going to get together and work on the documentation side of things.

Adam also mentioned that the support FAQ needs some work, and that's an area that I could really help in. I also met Kevin Mark, who from what I understand is the one man support army on IRC for the XO and Sugar, and I could help there as well.
\
All in all I think it was a good use of a Saturday afternoon (even though it was absolutely beautiful outside today, and that showed in having to get through the hoards of people in Times Square on the way to the meeting.... :) )

Gerard Braad: Using Mono 2.4 on coLinux to ease .NET development

2009-11-21T23:30:39+00:00

Currently I deal a lot with .NET development in my daily work. Most of the development is done on Windows. When you need to develop cross-platform .NET you would like to use Mono. Mono is binary compatible with .NET and allows .NET applications to run on Linux distributions. If you would develop from Visual Studio you want to easily test the binary directly in a mono session on Linux!

To test software both platforms in a convenient way mostly virtualization is chosen. Of course you can use VMware or VirtualBox when you use Windows, but you can also use coLinux. coLinux is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. My choice of distribution to use on top of coLinux is the open version of SUSE, both supported by Novell.

This description does expect you to have understanding of a Linux environment and administrative rights on your Windows system.

Installation (Windows side)
First of all you would need to coLinux installer. This file is available from the coLinux website. The downloads section will point you to the latest stable, as of writing v0.7.3. On the website of Henry Nestler you can also find development and daily builds for 0.8.0. This installation is pretty straightforward, just keep the default settings. When the installer asks you 'Hardware installation' you need to press 'Continue anyways', this will allow the TAP network driver to be installed.

To use a desktop environment from coLinux you need to install a X server. The more difficult way would be to use Cygwin/X... this way you will have a complete GNU system running on top of Windows to provide a Linux-like experience. The fastest and easy way is to use a tool like Xming. The installer you need is the Xming or Xming-portablePuTTY (Mesa is not needed). Also, this installation is quite straightforward. After the installation start the X server from the start menu (Programs → Xming → Xming).

In the posting 'openSUSE 11.1 on coLinux' I described a way to make a base installation of openSUSE for use with the coLinux environment. The file 'colinux-opensuse-111.exe' (113Mb) [VIPeers] [dropbox] contains all you need to run the openSUSE environment. As you can see from the size, it contains only a base system. After you have extracted the file, you will still need to perform some additional installations to make the Mono development work.

Before you start the Mono installation inside the coLinux environment, you need to reserve a directory for your development files or some other shared directory. I choose to use 'D:\Development'. In the run.txt file in the openSUSE directory, you can add a line which says:


cofs1="D:\Development"

This will later be mounted inside the Linux environment.

Installation (Linux side)
Now you can start the environment from the 'runonce.bat'. This one time start is needed to finalize the installation (describe in the 'openSUSE on coLinux' posting as the post-install). You will see something similar to:

Logon using the credentials: 'root' and the password 'password'. Immediately change the password using


passwd

Enable the network using the command:


for i in 0 1
do
cat > /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth$i << END BOOTPROTO='dhcp' STARTMODE='auto' USERCONTROL='no' END done

Add a mount point to your shared directory


mkdir /media/Development
vi /etc/fstab

and add the following line to this file


cofs1    /media/Development  cofs     defaults        0 0

To enable the shared directory you need to mount it


mount /media/Development

You can now shutdown...


shutdown -hn now

... the system will halt and closes the console. From now on you are able to start the environment using the normal 'run.bat'. Do so and log on using your new password.

Your network should now use eth0 as a serial line and eth1 as a bridged network using the device called 'Local Area Connection'. If your Windows network device is called differently, please change it in the 'run.txt' file. IP addresses are assigned using DHCP. The device eth0 will probably be assigned the address 10.0.2.15/24. For device eth1 this will depend on your local network settings. I will just assume that eth1 is configured and provides the Internet connection.

To allow packages to be installed you would need to add the standard repositories to this installation.


zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/ openSUSE111
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/non-oss/ openSUSE111_NonOSS 
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.1/ openSUSE-11.1-Updates

Enabling the User Interface
You can use a full-blown desktop environment as GNOME, but since coLinux does not provide a framebuffer device it is not advisable at the moment. We will use the Xming as the X server for our desktop. The X protocol is a client/server model for user interfaces. To keep the installation small, we use a very lightweight Desktop Environment on top of X, namely LXDE.

Install the LXDE packages using:


OCICLI http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_11.1/LXDE-desktop.ymp

This will start the One-Click-Install. You will need to agree to some questions and lean back... this might take some time.

If this finished, you can test if the installation finished correctly. You will need to set the DISPLAY parameter to specify where the X server is running. Now let's start the appearance settings...


export DISPLAY=10.0.2.2:0.0
lxappearance

and choose a theme that suits your current Windows theme.

This means your desktop environment works.

If you would receive a 'Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:' this means your connection might be blocked for some reason. Check your settings or disable a firewall/virus scanner.

Mono installation
Mono will provide a Linux/Unix system with support to run .NET applications. Originally this description was written to use Mono 2.2 which was provided from the openSUSE repository. To install these packages issue a simple


zypper in -t pattern devel_mono

would be sufficient to install a development environment. To start the Monodevelop you can start this using the command:


export DISPLAY=10.0.2.2:0.0
monodevelop &

Since the 30th of March a newer release of Mono (v2.4) is available. To install you will need to specify the mono repository and upgrade the previous installation.


zypper addrepo http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/download-stable/openSUSE_11.1 mono-stable
zypper refresh --repo mono-stable
zypper dist-upgrade --repo mono-stable

You can now start Monodevelop 2.0 and use managed debugging!

That's it for now... In later posts I will automate the startup and show how to do development using this environment.

Have a lot of fun...

Notes
If you think VMware provides a better solution you can make use of the files that the Mono Project provide in their download section. Either download the generated VMware image of the LiveCD.

If you want to use GNOME as your desktop environment you are advised to remove the gnome-screensaver package and it's dependent, since it can cause issues during use. If you want to experiment with the LXDE environment, you are advised to use the lxpanel and pcmanfm. In a later post these will be explained in more detail.

Gerard Braad: Mono on ARM

2009-11-21T23:30:39+00:00

At the moment I am 'experimenting' with Mono on ARM devices, like the Maemo (Nokia Internet Tablets), BeagleBoard, Linksys NSLU2, etc.

Banshee runs from within a Mojo installation (Ubuntu compiled for ARM) on the provided Mono. The screenshot shows a qemu session with XFCE4 and Banshee. Several other binaries do not work well yet... like IronPython, which aborts with an 'ERROR:inssel.c:3687):mono_burg_emit: code should not be reached'. Hmmm... still trying to find out why.

The Nokia Internet Tablets recently got a new release of Mono, version 2.0.1, from Everaldo. On the device this release runs IronPython 1.1.2. From within the Scratchbox environment it is @*s... it segfaults/aborts. This is related to the Nokia toolchain. At the moment I am trying to get qemu to emulate the Nokia N810 as described by Marcin. for now I only get to see a white Nokia bootloader screen... Marcin provided me his config.mtd to see if it results from a bad mtd.block, but I personally suspect it to be qemu. The build I made, also had issues with running the Mojo distribution :-/...

As you can see, the results are mixed. This is unrelated to Mono. Cross-compiling and emulation environments can always result in unexpected behaviour (as also on actual devices). Mono runs quite well on the N810. This can also be seen in the images posted by Everaldo.

More information will follow...

Links:
Mono:ARM,
Mojo Handhelds,
Qemu, processor emulator,
Mono on Maemo,
Maemo on qemu

Alejandro Pérez: Technology Fair at the Universidad Interamericana de Panama

2009-11-21T22:30:31+00:00

Fedora Panama, were invited to give a presentation on Fedora project and it latest release Fedora 12 at the Technology fair on the Interamericana university, on the stand we had Live CD, DVD, labels, buttons and some notebooks, were people play around with Fedora 12, as we show them the new features and introduce them to Fedora project.

Two days show, the first day we introduce Fedora on a presentation for around 50 people, they were impress with the new features and some of them show interest on becoming part of the project, more important the Dean of computer science, was very interested on students reaction to the possibility to be part of Fedora community and how they can motivate students to be part of the free software. Next day we stay on the stand were some students asked to repeat the presentation, something we could not do as the room was already book with some other presentations. Students and us and start burning CD and DVD as we run out of them. Some of them bring friends to check out Fedora.

It was a good and productive, we believe will be coming back soon there.

Pictures URL: http://picasaweb.google.com/alejandro.perez.torres/InteramericanaFeria

<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Falejandro.perez.torres%2Falbumid%2F5406665463051262993%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26hl%3Den_US" height="192" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="288"></embed>
--------------- Spanish --------------------

El grupo de usuarios de Fedora Panamá, fue invitado a dar una presentación sobre Fedora 12 y el Proyecto Fedora, en la feria de tecnología de la universidad Interamericana de Panamá, para ello dispusimos de algunas computadoras portátiles con Fedora 12, etiquetas, LIVE CD, DVD y botones de Fedora. Los estudiantes y profesores pudieron ver Fedora 12 y sus características, mientras charlamos sobre el proyecto y la comunidad.

El evento fue de dos días, en el primero se realizo una charla sobre el proyecto Fedora y Fedora 12, para un grupo aproximado de 50 personas, muchos alumnos mostraron interés en ser parte de la comunidad, la decana de la facultad también mostró interés sobre como ellos pueden motivar la participación de los alumnos en los proyectos de software libre. Por lo que agotamos los CD y DVD. El segundo día algunos estudiantes mostraron interés en que se repita la charla y con los CD y DVD agotados ellos terminaron ayudándonos a quemar CD y DVD allí mismo. Algunos regresaron al stand con un amigo para mostrarle Fedora.

Fue interesante y productivo creo que vamos a tener algunas presentaciones allí nuevamente.

Fotos: http://picasaweb.google.com/alejandro.perez.torres/InteramericanaFeria

Richard W.M. Jones: Looking closer at Fedora, Ubuntu live CDs

2009-11-21T21:00:55+00:00

Previously I’ve shown you can use guestfish to unpack a Fedora live CD.

I’m interested in whether we can use the contents of these live CDs to mass-install operating systems using libguestfs.

If you imagine that you go through an “all defaults” install of say Fedora or Ubuntu to a new virtual machine, then when you end up with is an identical disk image containing 1-2 GB of default packages and a lot of empty space. Two people asked to go through the same all-defaults install of the same distro would end up with roughly the same content. The details on the disk would be slightly different because some parts of the disk partitioning and ext3 superblocks change slightly depending on the overall disk size. But really those things can be fixed up afterwards using a little repartitioning, lvresize and resize2fs.

Let’s look inside an Ubuntu live CD:

$ guestfish --ro -a ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: 'help' for help with commands
      'quit' to quit the shell

><fs> run
><fs> list-devices
/dev/sda
><fs> file /dev/sda
ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'Ubuntu 9.10 amd64
><fs> mkmountpoint /t1
><fs> mount /dev/sda /t1
><fs> ll /t1/casper
total 691049
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root      2048 Oct 27 14:31 .
dr-xr-xr-x 10 root root      2048 Oct 27 14:31 ..
-r--r--r--  2 root root     37288 Oct 27 14:19 filesystem.manifest
-r--r--r--  2 root root     35354 Oct 27 14:16 filesystem.manifest-desktop
-r--r--r--  2 root root 697778176 Oct 27 14:25 filesystem.squashfs
-r--r--r--  2 root root   5836401 Oct 27 14:20 initrd.lz
-r--r--r--  2 root root   3941696 Oct 16 12:12 vmlinuz
><fs> mkmountpoint /t2
><fs> mount-loop /t1/casper/filesystem.squashfs /t2
><fs> cat /t2/etc/debian_version
squeeze/sid

The file /casper/filesystem.squashfs seems to be a complete Ubuntu installation, and if I’m understanding this correctly the Ubuntu installer will copy this to the newly created filesystem directly. That will be the new Ubuntu installation, plus or minus some config file changes and some extra packages downloaded afterwards from the net.

Here’s the same examination of the Fedora 12 Live CD:

$ guestfish --ro -a Fedora-12-x86_64-Live.iso

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: 'help' for help with commands
      'quit' to quit the shell

><fs> run
><fs> list-devices
/dev/sda
><fs> file /dev/sda
ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'Fedora-12-x86_64-Live
><fs> mkmountpoint /t1
><fs> mount /dev/sda /t1
><fs> ls /t1
EFI
GPL
LiveOS
isolinux
><fs> ll /t1/LiveOS
total 655291
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root      2048 Nov  9 14:45 .
dr-xr-xr-x 5 root root      2048 Nov  9 14:44 ..
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root     23040 Nov  9 14:44 livecd-iso-to-disk
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      8192 Nov  9 14:45 osmin.img
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 670982144 Nov  9 14:48 squashfs.img
><fs> mkmountpoint /t2
><fs> mount-loop /t1/LiveOS/squashfs.img /t2
><fs> ls /t2
LiveOS
><fs> ls /t2/LiveOS/
ext3fs.img
><fs> mkmountpoint /t3
><fs> mount-loop /t2/LiveOS/ext3fs.img /t3
><fs> cat /t3/etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 12 (Constantine)

Again I hope I assume correctly that the installer copies ext3fs.img to the hard disk when installing Fedora 12.

So my vague plan, assuming anything I’ve written above is correct, is to take these pre-made filesystem images and allow people to quickly install specific operating system images from a simple tool:

$ virt-press Fedora-12 F12

which would stamp out a Fedora 12 VM in a few seconds and register it with libvirt as “F12″.

I’m not sure this is possible yet …

Richard W.M. Jones: Half-baked ideas: View source button for Fedora

2009-11-21T18:48:35+00:00

For more half-baked ideas, see my ideas tag.

I’ll mention first that this isn’t my idea, and it’s not new or original. OLPC already implemented a View Source button.

Why can’t we have the same for Fedora? This is how it would work …

The View Source button would hover in your task bar. When pressed it opens up this dialog:

Like xkill and xwininfo, pressing the “point at a window” button changes your mouse so you click on the program you want to view the source of. X sort of makes it possible to find out (with a bit of effort) which binary is behind each program (see for example the xprop command).

You do an rpm -qf on this binary (or use a yum search) to locate the source.

Use yumdownloader --source to download the source. Unpack it into a standard rpmbuild location, and open up the user’s preferred editor.

With experience, and many custom rules and heuristics, you can extend this idea. For example, if they pointed at a dialog box, search the source for strings from the dialog box to try to locate the exact lines of code.

Or have some debuginfo-like metadata packages which are generated when packages are built, to allow very precise file/line locations to be determined.

Combine the whole thing with LXR so we can browse source intuitively.

This is a great way to encourage contributions to Fedora and Free software in general, because I think it would really make code much more accessible to casual programmers, tinkerers and children. Even experienced programmers would find it useful when tracking down bugs in random applications.

"Rafael Gomes": O que faz você ficar vulnerável?

2009-11-21T17:26:25+00:00

Em muitas empresas é comum utilizar produtos prontos em caixas, que têm interface web de fácil manipulação, tudo isso por um preço bem atrativo. Na maioria dessas caixas, os fornecedores apenas criam a interface, sendo que o produto em si é um conjunto de softwares de mercado, na maioria dos casos ...

Adam Williamson: Comment spam counter

2009-11-21T16:51:40+00:00

So, since enabling my whizzy new comment authentication system, I’ve two comments kindly offering information on handjobs, one on pharmaceuticals and one which I’d really rather not describe. Good thing all this sophisticated modern authentication stuff is so spam-proof, eh? Sigh.

Acedip "Anirudh Singh Shekhawat": fedora 12 and my machines

2009-11-21T16:36:29+00:00

So finally the wait is over now, and we have a brand new release of our lovely fedora. Though it took me a few days to download but it was done today morning and I had planned to upgrade my machines in the evening. One of my machines was already running fedora 11 and the other one could never actually see the face of fedora due to this bug (ATI device drivers) but has seen faces of all other linux flavors. But I had high hopes from constantine since there has been considerable work done in the field of ATI video drives.

Machine one (laptop):- Well this was easy and had more chances of success as it already was running fedora 11 and had no issues at all. So I put in the fedora 12 DVD and upgraded fedora 11 to fedora 12, it was running the default i.e. gnome, but my main working installation runs kde so after gnome’s upgrade I upgraded the kde one too. Though the upgrade process is quite long and time consuming but the upgrade was worth the wait.

The login screen is so beautiful.

And so is the plasma desktop, this is why I love kde, it gives you immense functionality to work.

And I have found this application called “digiKam” which I have totally fallen in love with, those I could not install the plugin which lets you export pictures to flickr and facebook as one of the dependencies of that plugin does not even exist on the site , the libkexif-0.2.5.tar.bz2 does not even exist on the download link. fail!!

Machine two (desktop):- Now this is a weird one, and I feel cheated because this machine which has an ATI board and everything else on the chipset by ATI was sold in the market as an intel product as a 3rd party product, but I was stupid enough to understand any of that to not to buy it, so anyways, now I’m stuck with it, and thanks to closed ATI drivers I could never install fedora on it, I’ve been trying fc6 but never, well finally filed a bug and after some work by some people on it, its pending, mainly because of my non-interest, but would now like ot revoke it back and hopefully fix it by f13, though, there have been some improvements and will update the bug report ASAP. So finally I couldn’t install f12 on this machine.

Well even after not a normal boot, I could install fedora on my desktop which is a new milestone in the bug, because I could never even run the install media properly, so this is a very joyful image. My desktop with a kernel option and my laptop being upgraded to f12.yuppy!!

Well, apart from this, there is a f12 install fest lined up in my college on 25th Nov and also another one on 28th in another college in jaipur, seems like lug-jaipur is up for an active week Will report on it soon.

Steven Pritchard: Why developers suck as admins

2009-11-21T16:07:40+00:00

So Fedora 12 allows regular users to install packages as long as a) the user is logged in on the console, and b) they are signed and from a trusted repository.

I think it's great that we can enable this functionality, and I'd even argue that it should be on by default on the Live spins (and installs from the Live spins), but in the general case this is a horrible idea.

I've seen a few arguments why this doesn't matter. For example, anyone with local console access already owns the box, right? Well, console access != physical access. Think, well, anything in a server room (systems in locked cabinets attached to a KVM, or virtual machines). While this gives more ammo to us old-timers for not putting X on our servers (I'm looking at you, skvidal), the reality is that it's not realistic to expect all servers to run without a GUI.

I don't want to re-hash the whole (long) thread linked to above, but I think it is important to point out some of the solid reasons why this change is a bad idea.

The installation of one package shouldn't change the behavior of the system. (This one package changes the behavior of the system, plus allows for other packages to be installed that could do the same.) If you take into account that unintended dependencies tend to pull in random stuff during upgrades, this becomes especially important.
Can we really guarantee that there are no signed packages available that are exploitable, all the time?
This is a major change in behavior from Fedora 11 that did not go through the Feature Process, unless I'm missing something.
Possibly even worse, if this "feature" makes it into RHEL 6, you run the risk of a lot of semi- and non-technical sysadmins having yet another security decision made for them, probably without their knowledge. (How many are aware of ctrl-alt-del, console users being able to shutdown/reboot, grub allowing kernel options ("single", for example) unless you set a password, etc.? Of course I've never understood the logic of all of that being open, but magic sysrq being off by default.)
At the very least, this is a DoS attack vector, although more likely due to somebody screwing up and installing a bunch of packages rather than somebody intentionally trying to fill /, /usr, or /var.

Oh, and about the title... Developers of software get stuck into a mindset of "make my software work, no matter what", and, on a related note, tend to have tunnel vision about the use cases for their software. One of the things I love about Fedora is that we have a lot of sysadmins who happen to be coders, so we tend to find a good balance between "usability" (AKA letting the developers go nuts) and maintenance/security. This one slipped by us, but I hope the decision will be made to push an update with a more sane default. [Update: It was.]

Chitlesh Goorah: [FEL]: DIA for System Design and documentation

2009-11-21T15:22:09+00:00

Dia is known to seduce some system level designers and is used to describe different block levels for embedded design.

Fedora has just received some additional shapes for digital blocks which will improve user documentation experience, through neat functional diagram drawn by dia. They should reach fedora repositories in a day or two.

Installation:

# yum install dia-Digital dia-CMOS dia-electronic dia-electric2

Steven Parrish: Are you planning on presenting at FUDCon Toronto?

2009-11-21T15:21:10+00:00

Yesterday I sent an email out to everyone who had registered to lead a session at FUDCon Toronto. It seems that for some this message may have been trapped by SPAM filters. Since this information would apply not only to those who have already registered to present, but to those who may be considering proposing a session as well, I decided to post it here.

With just over 2 weeks left before the big event I wanted to remind everyone
of a few important points.

[1] All the rooms are equipped with projectors so visual presentations should
be a breeze. To save time it is suggested you test your video out prior to
the event. If your laptop does not have a standard DB-15 VGA connector you
will need an adapter. Each room also has a dual boot Windows/SuSE system that
can be used if you do not have a laptop with video out.

[2] Sessions will be 50 minutes in length so adjust your presentation
accordingly.

[3] We are working to ensure that each session will be represented on IRC and
have someone doing live transcription. If you are doing a visual presentation
it is recommended to post it online that will make it easier for those who
cannot attend in person to follow along.

[4] The venue has unencrypted wifi access, and is working on wired access in
the rooms just in case someone needs the extra bandwidth.

[5] Even though we have over 40 presentations already proposed there will be
last minute pitches done Barcamp style Saturday morning and we will use a grid
to schedule sessions based on popularity. That means we don't have space to
accommodate everyone who wishes to present, so be prepared with a good pitch
for your session.

This is looking to be the best FUDCon yet, and I look forward to seeing you
all there.

Steven

Henrique "LonelySpooky" Junior: Fedora 12: primeiras impressões, multimídia e drivers nvidia

2009-11-21T14:57:19+00:00

Finalmente instalei o Fedora 12 final aqui na minha máquina e, para minha felicidade, quase tudo transcorreu sem grandes malabarismos (especialmente no que diz respeito à instalação de codecs de...

Um blog sobre tecnologia, informática, ironia e desventuras na vida de um geek

Juanjo Martínez: Fedora 12 Release Party, Valencia (ES)

2009-11-21T10:34:00+00:00

Everything went better than expected (seven attendees!).

Most of the people came from the Linux associations and LUGs of the city (there are 2 public universities in the area, plus some private), and I tried to advocate Fedora, but all of them are long time Linux users (even a Gentoo user in the house!). The Linux associations/LUGs in Valencia are quite dormant (one of the attendees used the word dead), so I think the meeting was a big success!

We had a nice time talking about free software, programming languages, and (to some extent) the new features of Fedora (in the photo, because we were local logged users, we didn’t have to identify us to get a signed beer from a licensed repository heh, nice Fedora already fixed this).

The seventh attendee arrived a little late, but we had a big surprise because actually he was a Fedora user! I think we (the two only Fedora users in the party) deserve a photo:

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Richard W.M. Jones: Can we disable Firefox’s stupid self-signed encryption dialog?

2009-11-21T10:12:57+00:00

A lot has been written about how Firefox’s stupid dialog is a big step backwards for the web.

But is there a way to disable it? Ideally I’d like it to work like ssh – give me a simple single-click warning and display the certificate the first time, and after that don’t say anything at all unless the certificate changes unexpectedly.

Update

This paper on phishing [PDF] is excellent.

Paul Mellors: Fedora 12

2009-11-21T09:33:14+00:00

I’ve updated my laptop to Fedora 12 and to be honest it was quite painless however, when i rebooted and logged in, errrr *puke* what the hell has happened to all the icons in the gnome-panels? There is too much spacing, hmm ok not to worry i’ll just move them all, wtf, i can’t move them, is that the default? yup it is.

The panel now adds padding between applets and between icons in the notification area. The padding can be removed with the following commands

gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/panel/applets/systray/prefs/padding 0

Phew back to normal

No related posts.

Liang Suilong: Shutter 0.85 Is Available

2009-11-21T09:32:27+00:00

Thanks for developers’ hard work. Now a new version. shutter-0.85 is available.

Here is a RPM package for shutter-0.85. Later I will build on Koji and push it to bodhi. I plan to do it on next Monday because I have no machine to run Koji client at home. Koji client needs some certifications. I have to go back to school on Monday. So, please wait for me.

RPM: http://liangsuilong.fedorapeople.org/shutter-pkg/shutter-0.85-1.fc12.noarch.rpm

The latest shutter brings a lot of new features to us. Here are some descriptions:

Undo / Redo anywhere
Drag and drop pics into Shutter
Capture menus and tooltips
Many UI improvements
Improved Advanced Selection Tool
Improved Window Selection
Notifications
Shutter registers itself as an app to open images with

"Rafael Gomes": Openvpn novo! Sem renegotiation flaw

2009-11-21T04:06:02+00:00

Com a descoberta da falha de renegociação em tráfego criptografado com SSL, e seus derivados, muitos dos serviços que utilizam esse protocolo ficaram também vulneráveis, pois como é uma falha no processo da comunicação cifrada, não há muito o que ser feito, a não ser corrigir o protocolo utilizado. Para maiores ...

Jon Stanley: OLPC Meetup tomorrow

2009-11-21T03:26:39+00:00

Just figured that I'd drop a quick note here that I'm going to the charter meeting of OLPC NYC. It happens tomorrow, conveniently located a few blocks from my apartment. Apparently we've got people from Boston, DC and San Francisco coming for this event.

Image via Wikipedia

This is an NYC local grassroots effort, and I'll be pimping Fedora obviously :) More to come after the event actually happens.

In the meantime, enjoy a picture of an OLPC deployment in Thailand :)

Ray Chen: Fedora12

2009-11-21T03:07:42+00:00

从Fedora6开始，我一直在我的破电脑上硬盘安装Fedora，因为没有光驱。这回Fedora12发布，当然迫不及
待要用。安装好之后，就迫不及待blog广播。

安装小插曲
等到周末把Fedora12安装上了。还是硬盘安装，第一次安装的时候居然忘记了把DVD拷贝到fat分区的根目录
下。结果安装的时候，分区结束后，满以为要开始安装，突然出现这样的错误:
This installer has tried to mount image #1, ……