Fedora People

Review do Fedora 9, por Rodrigo Menezes

2008-05-14T14:28:04+00:00

O Rodrigo é embaixador do Projeto Fedora Brasil, e publicou um review do Fedora 9 em seu blog. Dêem uma espiada.

Signatures in Email

2008-05-14T14:18:16+00:00

Last week I was blitzed by being cc’d on a lot of email signature related bugs. :-) To remain calm and keep delusions of control active I started on a wiki page for Message Signatures in Thunderbird. Right now the page contains lots of links to relevant areas and ascii art mockups for choosing a default signature for accounts; it’s meant to collect thoughts, research, and define direction.

Managing Signatures

I think a general improvement plan will involve simplifying the signature selection and creation process. Here are a number of points that I think can improve the current aspects of signature management.

Each account is created a default signature (from the person’s name and organization)
Every signature can be edited with a built-in signature editor (created from the compose window)
Signatures can be imported from files, but are saved in the Thunderbird profile or preferences (see bug 324495)
A separate dialog is used for managing all signatures, with import, add, edit, remove actions as well as a link to see the signature extensions available from AMO.

Concept Mockup of Signature Chooser in Account Settings

Using Signatures

In the relevant extensions section of the wiki page I tried to list most of the extensions that are dealing with how to use signatures in the compose window. There are a number of ways of solving this problem and lots of issues surrounding posting style that I am hesitant to battle with.

Several bugs (see bug 219197, bug 73567, and bug 37644) have suggestions that attack the problem from different angles. New comments and suggestions are welcome!

ASCII Art Side Note

I think I’ve started to use Johan’s ASCII Art Mockup post as a reference for my own ascii art; it’s good to see some style written down somewhere.

Faça um TOUR pelo Fedora 9 - Sulphur

2008-05-14T13:23:11+00:00

Se você ainda não teve o prazer de baixar e instalar o Fedora 9 - Sulphur, acesse o link abaixo e dê um passeio na mais nova versão do Fedora.

Fedora 9 Tour

Para efetuar o download do Fedora 9, CLICK AQUI.

Central Ohio Fedora 9 Release Party

2008-05-14T13:09:32+00:00

Quick reminder for folks that we’re having a Central Ohio Fedora 9 Release party tomorrow (Thursday) night at 7pm. For more details, click here.

Fedora 9 is out!

2008-05-14T13:04:46+00:00

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-May/msg00007.html

Get yours today! http://fedoraproject.org

Be sure and digg it too:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fedora_9_Sulphur_Released

Fedora 9 - Distribuição de mídias

2008-05-14T12:42:43+00:00

Com o intuito de agilizar a difusão do Fedora 9, criamos um Fórum dentro de Projetos e Recursos entitulado MIDIA GRATUITA onde quem não possui banda larga poderá solicitar mídias aos amigos da comunidade Fedora.

Se você possui gravador de CD/DVD, ajude na difusão do Fedora 9 - Sulphur gravando e distribuido mídias.

Se você deseja solicitar uma mídia ou ajudar na gravação e distribuição, deixe uma mensagem no Fórum Mídia Gratuita.

Some notes about Fedora 9

2008-05-14T12:41:16+00:00

I have been running Fedora 9 on my work laptop since last Sunday. Other than the irritating im-chooser problem, I am pretty happy with it.

Here are some notes I wrote:

BZ#445129 - im-chooser crashes when attempting to open it. It is fixed in 0.99.6-4.fc10 and -4.fc9.
SCIM setup is missing the hotkeys shortcuts, so add your own, i.e. Trigger - Control+space.
yum-fastestmirror - specify your preferred mirrorlist.
- edit /etc/yum.repos.d/{fedora,fedora-updates}.repo.
- append &country=XX (or tw in my case) at the end of every mirrorlist URL.
- run yum clean all to clean up the cache directory.

Technorati tags: fedora, sulphur, im-chooser, scim, yum-fastestmirror

And helping the elderly across the street is good, too.

2008-05-14T12:27:11+00:00

Spot on, Greg. We want all package maintainers to relate with the upstream providers, because that extends the work we do in Fedora to all Linux providers and consumers equally. Besides the fact that this is just good FOSS citizenship, it also contributes to fixing a huge meta-problem across the Linux landscape — that users can have vastly different experiences using different Linux distributions, beyond the paint jobs. When code works in one place and doesn’t in another, it’s too often due to maintainers either (a) not sharing fixes back with the FOSS ecosystem, or (b) carrying patches that upstream won’t take because they are deficient. Either case is ultimately a lose for both users and developers.

That having been said, the difference in the ramifications of a bad patch to something like a desktop applet that shows you a happy face, and something like glibc or the OpenSSL libraries, is a pretty fair gap. We should protect one — or at least be concerned about one — more than the other. I’m not sure it’s as simple as applying a formula, but it could be that there’s a core of system libraries in which any non-upstreamed patches are going to be subjected to much more rigorous review before they’re used.

And in all cases, we should prefer, by a wide margin, getting those patches upstreamed. Our experience in Fedora over the years shows that carrying these patches only as temporary backports works well, not just in maintaining a strong relationship with upstream providers, but also in gauging the health of the upstream community.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

Thank you sir, may I have another?

2008-05-14T12:25:05+00:00

Francesco graciously points out some glaring omissions from my list of Italian Fedora Ambassadors, including Samuele Storari and Matteo Castellini. I’m overjoyed to hear this team is even bigger than I thought!

I got the full names of everyone on the team from our list on the wiki, since I knew I wouldn’t get names spelled correctly otherwise. I’ve added Samuele and Matteo there, as well as some anchors to make it easier to link to your region.

Are you a Fedora Ambassador? Is your name on the list? If not, add yourself today!

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

Light Painting

2008-05-14T11:55:25+00:00

Hm, it's hard to 'draw' when you can't see what you're drawing when you're drawing it. :)

2008-05-14T11:48:04+00:00

Today I got my second method working, String.hashCode(). Now I have conditional and unconditional branching, field access, array loads, a whole bunch of integer operators, and returning with a result implemented and (somewhat) tested. The bytecode coverage chart says I’m 50% done, but I don’t believe it.

Montpellier vs Toulouse

2008-05-14T11:15:00+00:00

Dimanche soir, j'ai eu la chance d'être présent au stade Yves-du-Manoir pour la victoire de Montpellier sur Toulouse, l'actuel n°2 du Top 14.
Je dois avouer mon étonnement pour le monde du rugby. J'ai le souvenir de matchs au stade de la Mosson à l'époque où le MHSC était encore en ligue 1 :

Au rugby, pas un seul car de CRS alors que pour la Mosson, c'était habituel
Il n'y a pas de section grillagée pour parquer les supportaires comme c'est le cas pour le foot
La buvette sert de la bière alors que, de mémoire, il est interdit de vendre de l'alcool au alentour des stades de foot les jours de match
Supporters de Toulouse et de Montpellier mélangés alors qu'ils sont bien séparés à la Mosson

Bref, il n'y a pas à dire, le rugby malgré la virilité des échanges sur le terrain reste très conviviale dans le stade et je pense donc profiter de ma proximité avec le stade pour y retourner.

Translating Fedora into Romanian with Narro

2008-05-14T10:07:11+00:00

You may remember when I talked is some older posts about how awesome Alexandru Szasz is, now here is the latest cool thing he is up to and which I think deserve recognition: he just added Fedora in his web-based translation tool, Narro, for translation into Romanian:

Just for kicks, I translated about 100 Fedora strings and it was a snap (well, I have already used the tool, translating for Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org). There is an initiative to get the Romanian community involved in this and maybe (just maybe, it is early to say) get something ass-kicking for F10 (not that hard, the translation is currently at 39% from about 15000 stings).

In a somewhat related matter, I dis a "fedora translation" search on Google and got amused by the sponsored link shown at the top of the page (the one on yellow background). I guess that's so-called "friendly competition"...

And jumping to an unrelated matter (is it really unrelated?) that's today's counter:

Fehler in den Versionshinweisen

2008-05-14T10:01:46+00:00

Liebe deutschsprachige Fedora-Benutzer

Wiederum gibt es eine deutsche Variante der Versionshinweisen (Release notes) für die neuste Fedora-Version. Leider wurde mangels personeller Ressourcen die Qualitätssicherung nur im beschränkten Umfang durchgeführt und so sind wir auf die Hilfe der Benutzerinnen und Benutzer angeweisen, um die Qualität zu verbessern.

Die webbasierende Ausgabe : http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/de/

Gerne korrigieren wir Rechtschreibe-, Komma-, Tipp-, und Fall-Fehler und andere Unschönheiten. So können wir dann bei F10 wieder neue Fehler einfliessen lassen ;-)

Fehler bitte in Bugzilla eintragen : http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora%20Localization&component=German%20[de]

Fedora 9 Release Party in Italy

2008-05-14T09:51:18+00:00

Yesterday night I spent about 6 hours (between 9.00 pm to 3.00 am!!!) on Fedora 9 Release Party in Lodi, the first official party in Italy (next will be in Florence and Rome by the end of the month).

It was great!

There were about 30/40 people, interested in new features but also interested in “how to join” Fedora Project, and -of course- interested in beer! I, Luca and Gianluca (North Italy Fedora Ambassadors have being present) helped these guys to make their usb live key bootable, solve their questions about Fedora 9 and open their bottles!

Thanks to FAMSCO budget we could buy a lot of yummy food! And also thanks to moms and grandmothers that cooked cakes and pies with “volunteer” contributions

You can see some shots taken during the party on flickr

Last but not least, thanks to Luca Foppiano. He organized all aspects of event: “spamming” by email, do the shopping, make the slides and so on, and all of these stuffs went really really well!

Keep up the good work Luca!

Beer is not enough!

Yummy food!

Fedora 9 USB Filling Station

duecentodiciassette+iva…QUAAAAAAAAANTO???

2008-05-14T09:19:54+00:00

e’ stata la mia esclamazione alla simpatica signorina del call center di Hp Italia che mi ha comunicato il preventivo per la sostituzione (non li riparano) del mio povero monitor lcd…morto in questi giorni…

Se KCalc non è impazzito…son 260,40 euro!!!!!!!!

Purtroppo non mi conviene proprio pagare questa bella cifrona per il mio vecchio Pavilion F1523…. monitor che mi ha servito in tutti questi anni senza mai deludermi…..

R.I.P.

In attesa di raccogliermi un pò di dindini per acquistare un monitor nuovo, il mio gioiellino equipaggiato con Mandriva 2008.1 (!!!!) mi aiuta a non sentirmi fuori dal mondo informatico…

A proposito.. avete qualche buon consiglio su un monitor lcd abbastanza economico ma di buona qualita’?

How to enable adult content in VLC player

2008-05-14T08:12:47+00:00

14.05.2008
- добавлены иллюстрации
13.05.2008
- изменено введение

Всем известный проигрыватель VLCPlayer поддерживает не только проигрывание локальных mp3 файлов и видео, а так же всего интернет контента публикуемого в интернете как радио каналы или видео подкастов. Один из популярных интернет поставщиков является компания AOL. На чье имя зарегистрирован популярный ресурс shoutcast.com представляющий бесплатный конент различного харарктера, начиная от простого радио заканчивая трансляциями различных фильмов всех жанров. Сам по себе сервис существует за счет рекламмы и поэтому бесплатен. Однако не все фильмы с данного сервиса доступны стандатным образом, некоторые, самые интересные, закрыты под фильтром "только для взрослых" их обычно их не видно. Сам по себе VLCPlayer поддерживает все типы каналов, но для того чтобы получить доступ ко всем сервисам необходимо использовать специальные флаги запуска.

Для начала скачайте программу с сайта.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

После установки вам будут доступны - удобный интерфейс программы, ее исходные коды и отсутствие проблем с кодеками при проигрывании видеофильмов. Для включения контента предназначенного для взрослых достаточно запустить программу со специальным ключем:

--shoutcast-show-adult

Примеры запуска под Windows XP:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --shoutcast-show-adult

После запуска необходимо вызвать окно плейлиста сочетанием Ctrl+P или через View/Playlist. После чего в первом меню Manage/Service Discovery/Shoutcast TV.

В полученном новом списке присутствуют различные каналы среди которых: Orgasms, Teen, Sex, Adult и другие...

Если вы хотите чтобы настройки сохранились: отредактируйте файл %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\vlc\vlcrc изменив строчку

#shoutcast-show-adult=0

на

shoutcast-show-adult=1

Rio and Upstart

2008-05-14T07:35:27+00:00

Seen at Rio's place:

Fedora9のupstart、すごいんですけど...。さすがに組み込みみたいな速さでは無いけれど、これならサスペンドしなくても良いんじゃ...。

Which, in my very approximate translation means:

Upstart of Fedora 9 is great, mostly. As expected it includes no visible speed, so not using suspend is not good.

So, I guess that Rio expected improvements which would allow to stop suspending and they did not materialize... Which makes sense, but why the superlatives then? The title of the post was "upstartすげい！" with the exclamation mark. I would understand if he wrote that Upstart allowed him to end suspends, but no, "速さでない" is simple enough even for me to understand. Oh well, perils of international blogging.

Once I figured out that the control file syntax is documented in events(5) of all places, Upstart became rather tolerable, even welcome. I think that our famously poor bootstrap times (which are not that bad in Fedora when compared to other distros — I've seen real hard benchmarks — but are just bad for me as a user) have more to do with trying to execute too much crap. Upstart allows us to do it more efficiently, but it's a palliative.

Modul webbrowser

2008-05-14T07:10:47+00:00

Wer zu faul ist die Maus zu bewegen, kann sich Webseite auch mit Hilfe von Python in seinem Lieblingsbrowser anzeigen lassen

>>> import webbrowser
>>> webbrowser.open_new("http://fedoraproject.org")

Und schwupps öffnet sich der Browser...

Edit: Kevin Kofler hatte noch eine kürzere Variante zur Hand : xdg-open http://fedoraproject.org

Repositório Livna disponível para o Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

2008-05-14T04:13:35+00:00

Mal saiu o Fedora 9, já recebo um e-mail do Thorsten Leemhuis informando que o repositório Livna está disponível para os usuários. Segundo os mesmos, o repositório está disponível com softwares RPM que não podem ser empacotados no repositório oficial do Fedora por várias razões, e suportam os padrões i386, x86_64 e ppc.

Com o uso dos repositórios Livna, o Fedora 9 tem a capacidade de executar todos os tipos de arquivos de audio como MP3 e rodar todos tipos de DVD. Você pode navegar pelo repositório do livna pelo site http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/9/. Para o tornar disponível no seu novo sistema Fedora 9, execute o seguinte comando:

$ su -c ‘rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm’

Abaixo irei falar um pouco mais sobre os benefícios de se usar um sistema moderno com atualizações do livna. Para início de conversa, os drivers da AMD e Nvidia não estão disponíveis nos repositórios padrões, como muitos sabem que ele não está funcionando com o servidor X 1.4.99 que é embarcado com o Fedora 9. Entretanto os drivers se mantêm no repositorio de teste para o F9 - e esse serviço está disponível somente para usuários experientes que sabem como é complicado e perigoso instalá-los. Os drivers serão movidos para os repositórios corretos uma vez que o X-Server suportá-los (ou for atualizado).

=== Lembrete para usuários que planejam rodar um yum-update para o Fedora 9 ===

Se você possui pacotes do livna instalados no seu sistema e planeja rodar um live-update para o Fedora 9 usando o yum, por favor deixem os repositórios do livna habilitados para que o grande “yum update” rode. Com isso você terá todas atualizações do livna também, o que é importante, assim como suas depend^ências que precisam ser supridas.

=== Exemplos para ter as coisas funcionando no Livna ===

Uma vez que instalar o release-rpm, você pode instalar programas através da ferramenta de interface gráfica chamada pirut, que é parte do Fedora. Com um usuário root você também pode instalar pacotes por linha de comando, por exemplo:

- se quiser instalar o xine como player de vídeo, faça o seguinte:
# yum install xine-lib-extras-nonfree xine
Isso irá habilitar as capacidades do Totem também, o Totem pode ser usado pelo xine como backend no Fedora 9 também.

- se preferir o mplayer:
# yum install mplayer-gui

- se preferir o vlc:
# yum install vlc

- se quiser o suporte ao MP3 nas aplicações do Gnome, rode:
# yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

=== Problemas? ===

Acesse o BugZilla do Livna http://bugzilla.livna.org/

=== Precisa de suporte? ===

Acesse os recursos que o Fedora provê aos seus usuários como os fóruns abaixo e IRC pelo canal #fedora (em inglês) no freenode:

www.fedora.org.br - Comunidade Fedora Brasil
www.projetofedora.org/portal/forum/ - forum do portal do Projeto Fedora Brasil

Mais dúvidas sobre instalação de pacotes podem ser sanadas nos fóruns também, processo recomendado.

Coming soon to a browser near you - a new Fedora wiki!

2008-05-14T03:40:02+00:00

As some of you may know by now (or may not), a new wiki is coming to the Fedora project! Our previous wiki, MoinMoin, has been pretty unreliable due to scalability issues. We were the largest deployment of Moin, and it just didn't scale. You may have noticed this in the form of slow response, frequent timeouts, internal server errors, and other assorted bad things.

Good news being, we‘ve got a replacement now - we're going to the tried and true, battle tested MediaWiki. There is a conversion script for Moin that was available, and was modified by Mike McGrath to fit our needs. Máirín Duffy anad Ian Weller did all the template work, and I just sat back and made sure everything I was interested in rendered correctly :).

Now the time has come for everyone else to see that things have rendered OK. There are a few known issues with this incarnation:

1) The license tag at the bottom says CC-BY-SA, this is not correct, we are not relicensing the content. This will be correct soonish.
2) Where the Art team did banners for various projects, those are replaced by HTML at this point. Those will have to be manual conversions to MediaWiki templates. We can no longer allow embedded HTML in the wiki (it had been on the table for some time to remove the capability, there are inherent security issues in it).

Without further ado, you can testdrive the new wiki here. This is going live soon, like 2-3 weeks soon, so get your feedback in!

Bike Week, Two Days In

2008-05-14T03:07:49+00:00

As previously mentioned, this week is Bike Week and so I'm pushing myself to only travel by bike for the week for going to school/work rather than availing myself of some of the other options. Plus, it's spring and the office isn't that far, so biking in to work gets me some good extra miles.

Yesterday was supposed to be cool and rainy, but the weather forecasters were wrong and the day ended up being just cool and windy. Biked to school per normal, no real oddities. Legs were a little sore from Sunday's ride, but I took it easy and just tried to lightly spin which worked out well.

Today ended up being significantly warmer than I expected, so I ended up peeling off some clothes on my way out to the office. I also happened to be behind a guy on the bike path who had both of the pannier bags that I've been considering (the Arkel Bug and the Arkel Commuter). This was convenient as I was able to get some real opinions and based on that, I think I'm going to go with the Commuter.

My way home ended up being a bit more interesting... I passed a few Quad riders on 225 as I was heading back but only noticed as I was flying past them spinning for all I could (ahhh, the fixie on downhills :). They did eventually catch me with a "don't you hate having to race to catch up to a commuter on a single speed" and I rode with them for a ways. Fell off as they sped down Lowell Rd and I continued on. Happened upon someone on the other side of Concord Center with a mechanical and stopped to try to help them. Finally made it home as it was getting dark and then ended up helping my next door neighbor, who needed to borrow a pump so that he can bike to work tomorrow.

AP switched it up

2008-05-14T02:26:11+00:00

Warning! Warning! New Wiki Coming!

2008-05-14T02:25:36+00:00

I love my job. I do. But sometimes being the infrastructure team lead blows because you get stuck doing the stuff no one in their right mind will volunteer for. It also means getting stuck taking the blame for stuff that goes wrong. This is one of those times. We've come a long way from:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-December/msg00802.html

to:

https://publictest1.fedoraproject.org/wiki/

But I'm still not totally happy with the conversion script. At this point though its putting in a lot of effort for minimal gain. The bottom line is Moin just isn't cutting it for us anymore. We're moving to mediawiki. There's a small SIG of various team leads thats been working on this with me. There's around 12,000 pages and over 4,000 attachments and currently thousands and thousands of users. Combine that with my mediocre python skills and publictest1 is what you're going to get!

So what can you do?

Go through the publictest1 page listed above (no editing yet, expect it soon though with OpenID + FAS support). Find things that don't look right. By that I mean look for things broken on many pages. If its just on your page or a couple, just fix the problem after the migration.

Lots of things are different in Mediawiki then Moin. Some of these differences are at the very core of why Moin is so unscalable. Become familiar with this page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/WikiMigration

If you have a concern contact your team lead listed on that page. If your team is not represented, sorry about that, please add yourself.

We're looking at deploying on the 20th or the 27th. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. This is going to involve pain for at least the couple of weeks after its deployed. If you have a ticket to file please do so here:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ ; PLEASE put the keyword "WIKI" in the ticket.

If you want to be 100% sure your issue will get fixed... submit a patch otherwise you might just be stuck fixing it after the migration.

http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/fedora-infrastruture.git/scripts/moin2mw/

Props goes out to ivazquez for unicode support and ianweller who has helped me become more familiar with mediawiki and continues to be a valuable asset in this conversion.

Fedora 9 发布

2008-05-14T02:08:38+00:00

前几天下载和寄出的，是最终的版本。长吁一口气！

Digg: 请抬举抬举这个链接：http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fedora_9_Sulphur_Released

下载地址除了上次发的几个，还加上 http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ ，一共有 12 种光盘可以下载。记得先前有个 FTP 空间占用统计，Fedora 需要 1 TB 来存放完整的仓库和 iso，而 Ubuntu 只需要一半，cygwin 或是 RFC 之类的只需要 0.1~0.5 GB 了。

http://fedoraproject.org/ 蛮好看的。“Fedora 9，引领潮流” 这句广告词也不错，英文是 Fedora 9, Make Waves.
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora 也蛮好看，分类很清楚。
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/ReleaseSummary “简介”文档终于补全了。

btw, 搜索新闻时发现好多网站不再提供 "Print" 视图，尤其是用了 Wordpress 的时候。Firefox 菜单中可以选择 “无风格”，结果上可接受，就是稍微耗费纸张。是不是有特殊的 URL 参数来得到打印视图？

Fedora 9 release coverage (so far)

2008-05-14T02:03:31+00:00

Comment me if you have more links…

A bit of a Communication Problem

2008-05-14T01:56:51+00:00

I’ve been doing some testing recently with Thunderbird and its offline support; trying to get a handle on what the state of the onion is. One problem that has bothered me is the silent state of online to offline, not to mention the dialogs that happen after that.

Communication

How do you convey that Thunderbird is offline or online? I’m not too sure of the implementation yet but I think we can get some excellent ideas when examining IM clients and how they handle online vs. offline; for email it’s just a little less extreme.

Online

Should have some indication that is available, but not too prominent because this is the state where everything is good. When you’re online, emails will be sent right away and new messages will arrive, we don’t need a large piece of real estate to inform you that the situation is normal.

Simple and obvious green signal that you’re online

Offline

Requires a clear indication that is prominent and obvious. Auto-reconnection should be the default and timeouts created that indicate when the next reconnect will take place; allow people to interrupt and reconnect immediately.

You’re grey and offline, do you want to try going online now? I’ll try in a little bit anyway…

Because for email we can also expect that some people will want to be offline intentionally we need to allow for people to remove the indication and include ways for people to tell Thunderbird to stop trying to auto-reconnect.

Getting Back Online

When you’ve finally reconnected it’s a moment for celebration… Yay! Get back to work!! This kind of notification allows people to understand that you’ve reconnected and things will be back to normal.

Getting back online from an offline state can also incur some syncing and likely heavy network traffic so for those reasons alone it’s good to let people know that Thunderbird has realized the new online state and is going to start doing it’s business again. Hold on to your butts…

Woo Hoo! We’re back online!

Some Caveats

We examined an IM client with a single account. There are some extra things about Thunderbird and email that need to be considered, here’s just one: You could have multiple email accounts and only a few are not connecting. What does it look like to have the account you’re focused on online and another account offline? What does the opposite look like?

Serial problems with Sun xVM Virtual Box

2008-05-14T01:52:26+00:00

A few days ago I posted that I was having problems with getting some Windoze programs to work under Wine. Joel suggested I try Sun xVM Virtual Box to run Windoze on which would fix many of my problems. I had tried other virtualization programs but Sun xVM seemed to work the best I have seen.

I'm having one problem, however. I am not able to map /dev/ttyS0 to Serial 1 on Windoze. I do get an error after a while in the VM but I can't quite figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I guess I'll be working on this tomorrow. If I can't get that to work then I'm going to have to find something else. :(

Avaliação: Fedora 9

2008-05-14T01:44:22+00:00

Hoje foi lançado a versão da distribuição Linux Fedora, o Fedora 9. A última e maior versão do Fedora, que tem o codinome de Sulphur, está disponível para download e oferece excelentes melhorias e incrementos, além de novas funções.

No artigo abaixo falamos sobre as novas funcionalidades, aplicações adicionadas ao sistema e as melhorias aplicadas. Uma avaliação da nova versão da distribuição.

Link!!!

Fun with regular languages

2008-05-14T01:14:30+00:00

For Augeas, I wanted to support subtraction of regular expresions, so that you can say

  let key_re = /[A-Za-z]+/ - /(Allow|Deny)(Groups|Users)/

which would make key_re match all words made up of lower and upper case letters except for AllowGroups, AllowUsers, DenyGroups and DenyUsers --- the reason being, that those four special cases are handled differently from "generic" keys.

Since the - can't be expressed in regular language notation, it needs to be constructed by compiling its two operands into a finite automaton, subtracting the two automata from each other, and then converting the automaton back into a regular expression. All these operations, except for the conversion from automaton to regular expression, were already supported by libfa.

Implementing the conversion was quite a bit of fun, and the implementation follows almost literally the proof [pdf] that every language recognized by a finite automaton is regular. For some reason, these graph algorithms are always fun to implement, especially when they wind up working

Fedora 9 is out! Go get it!

2008-05-14T01:07:26+00:00

What are you waiting for?

Parsing

2008-05-14T00:58:53+00:00

I was reading about PEG recently, and thinking “that is pretty interesting” — and of course it turns out that there is an Emacs implementation.

It is a bit odd how primitive parsing support is in Emacs. It is one of those mysteries, like how window configuration and manipulation support can be so weak. Peculiar.

CEDET includes a parser generator, called wisent. That is long overdue… though even it is a bit odd, apparently preferring a yacc-ish input syntax. I don’t know about you, but when I have a lisp system just sitting there, I reflexively reach for sexp-based formats. Well, ok, it is a port of bison. But still.

I did a little parser hacking in gdb recently. In gdb, if you complete an expression involving a field lookup, it will currently print every matching symbol in your program — when all you really wanted was the completion of a field name. This is what I set out to fix.

My first idea was: hey, the parser knows what tokens are valid. I can just ask it! But, I don’t think there’s a way to do that with bison parsers. At least, no documented way — boo. And anyway, as it turns out, this is not what you want.

For instance, consider the simple case of “p pointer->field“. This is syntactically valid as-is, so the parser would indicate that the desired completions are whatever can come next — say, an operator. But if the cursor is just after the “d”, you want to continue completing on the field name. So, you have to differentiate this case based on whitespace.

I ended up hacking the lexer as well as the parser. The lexer can now return a special COMPLETE token, which it does depending on the previous tokens and the presence or absence of whitespace. I also added some new productions like:

expression: expression '.' name COMPLETE
expression: expression '.' COMPLETE

From here it is pretty simple to solve the rest of the problem.

I don’t remember reading about this anywhere, but I’m sure it has been done before. I thought it was a pretty fun hack - I love problems that start with the user experience and end up someplace much deeper.

links for 2008-05-14

2008-05-14T00:52:34+00:00

Mozilla Stealth Data Project Could Be Just What The Internet Needs

Yes, this is great! What would be really great is for this precious data to be channeled into a non-profit or other .org and allow for other browsers, projects channel this type of anonymized data into a common place for accurate web forecasting/reporting

(tags: data firefox interesting internet mozilla News project software web metrics techcrunch statistics analytics)

Oracle fail.

2008-05-13T23:45:03+00:00

Well, I'm being forced against my will by a customer at $DAYJOB to install Oracle Enterprise Linux for them. So I downloaded it, installed it at home this evening, just to kick the tires a little bit before installing for real. So I installed it. The first thing I notice is that Anaconda looks a tad shoddy compared to the real deal. For instance, when installing packages, there's a 'Status:' line at the bottom that's always blank. What is it supposed to tell me the status OF? That wasn't present in the real deal IIRC.

Next, it installs. I login, and find this:


[jstanley@dhcp-137 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.1 (Carthage)
[jstanley@dhcp-137 ~]$

For something so 'in your face', I'd expect Oracle to be ashamed of themselves. They just seemed to have replaced 'Red Hat' with 'Enterprise Linux' without regard to whether or not it made any sort of sense. Same throughout the installer, really, except they just replaced Red Hat with nothing.

This really seems like quite a shoddy product to me. I've always thought so, and now that I've seen for myself, I KNOW so.

Oh, and by the way - this was the 100th post to this blog. What a pitiful thing to waste it on.

E saiu o Fedora 9…

2008-05-13T23:35:36+00:00

Pois é, o Fedora 9 saiu. Hoje acordei bem cedo porque tinha que revisar uma tradução que fiz ontem, e era para entregar hoje pela manhã. Seis da manhã entrei no site do Fedora achando que já encontraria notícias, e nada. Não sei para que tanto fogo da minha parte: tenho uma tradução grande para entregar na quinta, não posso me arriscar a instalar o Fedora 9 por aqui e atrasar a entrega.

Falaram que o Fedora saía sempre numa determinada hora, mas fiquei em dúvida com o fuso horário, que horas seriam lá nos Estados Unidos? Aliás, o relógio internacional do Gnome 2.22 é um dos principais motivos para eu migrar para o Fedora 9…. depois explico para vocês como esse relógio pode ser útil para um cara como eu.

Bom, por enquanto não tenho muito mais a dizer, afinal, ainda estou baixando a iso do DVD via bittorrent. Não tenho porque congestionar ainda mais os mirrors do Fedora, sem falar que baixando pelo torrent não corro o risco do arquivo vir corrompido.

É isso aí, parabéns ao projeto Fedora por mais um lançamento. Acho que quinta-feira faço a instalação. E como diria o gaguinho, por hoje é só, pe-pessoal.

Mapmaker Mapmaker make me a map.....

2008-05-13T22:46:54+00:00

Man I really wish someone would have told me Fedora 9 was coming out today.....

Because I'm an idiot the maps for the bittorrent activity didn't go online until after the release was out. So no movie of the release lighting up the torrent server this time around. But maps are up now!

You might be most interested in watching the bittorrent seeder activity here
and the mirrorlist activity here

Considering the effort made this time around to produce the multi-cdrom sets, I really hope people are making an effort to download and use them. And I really really hope that such an effort is not represented in the meager torrent seeder numbers currently displayed in the maps.

We need to find a way to get metrics from our mirrors and jidgo setup so we can get a comprehensive view of the relative view of how popular the different images are so we can make appropriate infrastructure allocations.

-jef

Fedora 9 seeding stats

2008-05-13T22:33:00+00:00

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day - at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.

First, the hidayahonline server (seeding the x86_64 DVD ISO file):

And second, the audioislam server (seeding the i386 DVD ISO file):

Although the audioislam server has twice the tubeage of the hidayahonline server, it is also the one more heavily loaded due to AudioIslam.com. So, they both ended-up serving around 32GB of data to the Tubes before I disconnected them for the day.

Fedora 9 is out

2008-05-13T22:27:00+00:00

Fedora 9 is out.

Get it.

Now.

Fedora 9 verfügbar

2008-05-13T21:52:01+00:00

Das Warten hat ein Ende: Seit heute Mittag steht Fedora 9 “Sulphur” zum Download bereit. Selten so sehnsüchtig auf einen Release gewartet.

Release Notes: Deutsch, Englisch, weitere

Ankündigungen: Eine von Paul W. Fields und eine von Jesse Keating

Fedora 9 day 0

2008-05-13T21:12:03+00:00

As everyone probably knows, Fedora 9 was released earlyer today, you can grab a copy on http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

I installed it and overall it’s a much better experience than Fedora 8! All control keys on my laptop work

As for now, I only encountered a very serious bug: I have a swiss-french (fr_CH-latin1) keyboard, and that’s what I chose during the installation process. Later during the install, you have to create an user and enter a password, that’s what I did, and…I couldn’t login to Gnome with that password! I had to Alt-F2, login as root and manually change the password for my user with “passwd”. This is a bug that will affect absolutely all swiss-french users at least…

That’s it for now. Ah, I updated my “software to install” page to get Fedora 9 with mp3/wmv/divx support…

Woo!

2008-05-13T20:58:38+00:00

And with that, a couple of huge weights are lifted off my shoulder. Let's recap or those playing along at home...

My Product Design project was finished up, presented and had a bow tied on it last Friday
Fedora 9 was released this morning
My final paper for Technology Strategy was just submitted

Just one class tomorrow and I have a few weeks of "just" work before summer classes start up. It looks like I'm taking Systems Engineering and System Dynamics over the summer. Hopefully with the two classes, the workload won't be too high so that I can manage to get in plenty of riding ;-) Of course, if I bike on the days I come into the office like I did today, that'll help substantially with my overall mileage.

fedora 9

2008-05-13T20:52:59+00:00

Congratulations to everyone on yet another fantastic release. As I said in my last Fedora State of the Union speech, I am so lucky to have the opportunity to devote my days to Fedora, and I am so proud of what our community continues to achieve.

Paul, I'd like to acknowledge publicly that I think you did a wonderful job with all the press interviews release work. Our senior-level Fedora leadership team has grown tremendously over the past few years, and that is a direct result of the incredible work that happens at all levels of the community, and Red Hat's executive management rewarding the entire Fedora Project for its success with increased investment.

The fact that Daddy Shadowman continues to invest more and more into Fedora is all the proof you need of the incredible value that our community provides.

Fedora 9

2008-05-13T20:35:00+00:00

La grande famille de Fedora est heureuse de vous annoncer la naissance de « Sulphur » (Fedora 9). Cette version majeure dans le développement de la distribution Fedora va vous offrir un grand nombres de nouveautés destinées à vous simplifiez la vie comme vous en avez rêvé.

Plusieurs mots symbolisent cette version :

Énergie, Rayonnement, Futur

Énergie : 7 mois de développement intense

Rayonnement : Unanimité des utilisateurs et journalistes des avancés de Fedora Futur : Perpétuelle avance sur les nouvelles technologies

Quelques nouveautées :

Coté environnement graphique :

KDE 4.0.3

L'arrivée de KDE4 et la constitution du groupe d'intérêt KDE au sein de FedoraProject est l'occasion de faire de KDE un citoyen de première classe dans le projet. Fedora 9 est la première distribution installer par défaut KDE 4..3 et ceci constitue le premier pas vers un meilleur bureau KDE sous Fedora.

Gnome 2.22

Une importante sortie pour FedoraProject avec le développement de gvfs principalement par le développeur Alexander Larsson, Fedora a également réécrit GDM pour une meilleure intégration avec {Console,Policy}Kit.

Coté bureautique :

OpenOffice 2.4

Coté réseau :

NetworkManager

Configuration réseau filaire, Wifi, GSM/CDMA et PPP en une seul interface. Configuration d'accès VPN (OpenVPN & Compatible Cisco VPN Client (VPNC)).

Coté internet :

Firefox 3 (Béta5).
Swfdec
Greffon libre qui vous permet de lire du contenu Flash depuis votre navigateur. Celui-ci s'appuie sur GSTREAM pour la restitution du son.

Coté système :

PreUpgrade

Système de mise a jours automatique de la nouvelle version Fedora sans média (cd/dvd).

Kernel 2.6.25

Upstart

Remplacement du vieillissant init ce qui a pour résultat immédiat un démarrage et une extinction du système très rapide.

Xorg 7.3

Dans la continuité de l'opération "Need For Speed), Fedora a consciencieusement traqué les goulots d'étranglement dans Xorg afin d'accélérer son démarrage. Fedora introduit le support optionnel du modsetting pour les cartes Intel ! La version incluse est une pré-version de Xserver 1.5 qui en combinaison avec le noyau 2.6.25 introduit une meilleure collaboration entre Xorg et le noyau, une meilleure gestion du sous-système PCI et également un meilleur support du hotplug. Désormais, le double-écran ne sera plus aussi douloureux qu'avant avec la super applet de gestion

Gestion centralisée des dictionnaires

Un seul et unique dictionnaire pour chaque langue, mais pour toutes les applications (OpenOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird, Gnome, KDE, ...).

Anaconda (Gestionnaire d'installation amélioré)

Redimensionnement de partition. Support du système de fichier Ext4 (expérimental). Chiffrement de partition. Abandon de Kudzu pour udev/hal pour meilleur reconnaissance des composants matériels.

PackageKit

Implémentation d'un nouveau gestionnaire de paquets alternatif. L'objectif de PackageKit est de fournir un coeur commun à tout les systèmes de paquetage et faciliter la vie des distributions.

RPM Fusion

RPM Fusion ne fait pas à proprement parler partie de FedoraProject, mais c'est une initiative importante au sein de la communauté. Trois des principaux dépôts tiers (Dribble, Freshrpms et Livna) ont décidés de fusionner pour fournir plus de paquets, partager des ressources communes et améliorer la qualité.

K12Linux

Fedora intègre la distribution LTSP K12ltsp en tant que saveur officielle sous le nom de K12Linux. K12Linux est l'intégration de LTSP-5 dans FedoraProject en collaboration avec la communauté LTSP.org. Un grand merci à Eric Harrison (core developer de LTSP et fondateur de K12ltsp) et à Warren Togami (Fondateur du projet Fedora).

FUNC (Fedora Unified Controller)

Module en langage Python afin de facilité la gestion d'un parc informatique. Système utilisant XML-RPC/SSL.

LivePersistence

Vous pourrez distribuer des clés usb Fedora pré-chargées et conserver vos paramètres et données personnelles.

OpenJDK

Remplacement de IceTea.

Coté développeur :

GCC 4.3

Intégration de GCC 4.3 avec le support expérimental de C++ 0x, un mode parallèle de la STL, Fedora 9 fournira à sa sortie.

Eclipse 3.3 (Europa)

Cette version est fournir par défaut mais la mise à jour vers Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymède) est prévue ultérieurement.

Cette version est la première de Paul Frields nouveau Project Leader de Fedora et premier Project Leader issu de la communauté Fedora elle même.

Téléchargez vite la nouvelle version de Fedora 9 en cliquant ici

Concernant le support, l'équipe ainsi que les membres de Fedora-FR seront heureux de vous accueillir.

Les équipes de FedoraProject

Fedora 9 Released

2008-05-13T20:25:46+00:00

Yes, it it true… Fedora 9 has been released. I am downloading via bittorrent as we speak.

digg fedora 9 here!!!

The Fedora bureaucracy, and why it matters

2008-05-13T20:01:57+00:00

It's been a common complaint since the dawn of the Fedora project: the process for getting new software into Fedora is too complex.

We feel everyone's pain, and always have. It's a difficult balance: you want to make sure that you open participation to as many packagers as possible -- but you also want to ensure the quality of those packages. Particularly from a security perspective.

The Debian/Ubuntu OpenSSL bug is scary as hell. It's a tough day for those projects right now, but everyone who's been around the Fedora community knows the uncomfortable truth: there, but for the grace of God, go us. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, indeed.

It may be fashionable among some to paint this as a stupid mistake on the part of some Debian maintainer -- but this Slashdot poster gives details about the what appears to be an honest and understandable mistake. He also quotes Bruce Schneier to devastating effect: "bad crypto looks much the same as good crypto". Which is why it took over a year for folks to notice this bug, with the result that literally millions of Debian-based systems could be exposed to remote exploits.

Fedora dodged this bullet. Will we dodge the next one?

One defense is to make sure that we diverge as little as possible from upstream developers -- and when we do diverge, make sure that everyone, upstream and downstream, knows about any patches, and why they exist. There's a lot of discussion going on right now about how to do that.

Another possible defense is to put certain packages in a different review category -- especially any packages that deal with fundamental system-level encryption. That discussion is also ongoing.

So there may be changes. There may be a bit more bureaucracy in Fedora, and another step or two (or three, or more) in a process that is already very long indeed. But if it cuts down the chance of a catastrophic mistake like this, it's worth it.

A great day for Fedora today -- but also a tough day for Linux.

Lançado o Fedora 9 - Sulphur

2008-05-13T18:58:29+00:00

Hoje é um grande dia para a comunidade Fedora Linux no Brasil e no mundo, pois o lançamento de sua última versão está sendo comemorada por todos os que estão diretamente ou indiretamente envolvidos. Eu particularmente espero muito da versão 9 (vou fazer o upgrade até o fim-de-semana), pois a surpresa que tive na facilidade de instalação e configuração da anterior fez com que eu ficasse fã da distribuição.
A lista de novidades é imensa e os itens que mais se destacam são:

Xorg 1.5
FreeIPA
Anaconda encryption of the root filesystem
Melhorias no NetworkManager
KDE4
Gnome 2.22 - uau!
Live persistence
Novo GDM
Preupgrade
Redimencionamento de partições via anaconda
Upstart
Firefox 3

Quem estiver a fim de conhecer um pouco mais sobre a distribuição e até participar de uma das maiores comunidades de software livre do Brasil, sinta-se a vontade para conhecer o nosso site. Abaixo segue o link direto para quem quiser fazer o download. Bom uso! =)