Fedora People

Matthew Daniels: Playlist for the Supercilious

2009-07-03T01:29:55+00:00

I know some music elitists think that I only listen to the songs I posted before, so I’ve posted a 100% variant playlist of songs which I also listen to frequently, thereby augmenting (hopefully) the variety of music which everyone thinks I listen to.

Tan Dun: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma)
Bon Voyage (Fantastic Plastic Machine)
First Class ‘77 (Fantastic Plastic Machine)
Techno Syndrome [Mortal Combat] (The Immortals)
Still Alive (GLaDOS & Jonathan Coulton)
Son of a Preacher Man (Dusty Springfield)
Sister Golden Hair (America)
Norwegian Wood [This Bird Has Flown] (The Beatles)
Nightingale (Norah Jones)
Paris (Yael Naïm)
Conquest (The White Stripes)

“Paris” is a particularly interesting song. It’s by the same artist that you may remember singing “New Soul” from the original MacBook Air commercials (where they pull the laptop from the manilla envelope). The song is mixed English/Hebrew.

“Still Alive” is also a fun song that many people know from Portal, with some classic lines like:

Aperture Science: we do what we must, because… we can. For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead.
There’s no sense crying over every mistake; you just keep on trying, till you run out of cake. And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun for the people who are still alive. And,
Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you… maybe Black Mesa! That was a joke – ha ha – fat chance. Anyway, this cake is great; it’s delicious, and moist!

The song is sung by GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence from Valve’s Portal. It gave me a neat idea, too, to write a little program that can make several text-to-speech engines “sing” in unison. More on that later.

Posted in Personal, Reviews Tagged: Fedora, Lifestyle, Reviews

Chitlesh Goorah: New webcam drivers tested : D-Link DSB-C310 Webcam

2009-07-02T22:03:51+00:00

Hans De Goede mentioned earlier on his blog post about his work behind the new webcam drivers. Release after release, Fedora is getting better webcam support.

Mirjam got a macbook and now when we skype she got her webcam on. While I’m running Fedora and my D-link DSB-C310 webcam which I bought during FC-1/FC-2 timeframe, I was unable to get the webcam running, since it required the ov518 module. Hence I volunteered as beta-tester for Hans’s enhancements to libv4l and gspca. Below are the specifications of my webcam:

$ lsusb

Bus 003 Device 004: ID 05a9:a518 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. D-Link DSB-C310 Webcam

$ dmesg

usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=05a9, idProduct=a518
usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 3-2: Product: USB Camera
usb 3-2: Manufacturer: OmniVision Technologies, Inc.
usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
ov511 3-2:1.0: USB OV518+ video device found
usb 3-2: Device revision 2
usb 3-2: Compression required with OV518…enabling
usb 3-2: Sensor is an OV7620
ov511 3-2:1.0: Device at usb-0000:00:1d.1-2 registered to minor 0
ov511: No decompressor available

Since this is still in the early stages, there are currently no rpms, unless you build a package out of that using the spec file from fedora package cvs, or follow Hans’s libv4l compilation howto.

Then, install the latest v4l subsystem. Compile gspca as described on this blog post. Reboot, plug in the webcam, it should work and it did work for me .

Usage (skype/cheese):

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

I just love being in the cutting-edge environment Credits to Hans de Goede.

Luya Tshimbalanga: Stupidity

2009-07-02T21:23:00+00:00

While reinstalling Fedora 11 (network stopped without warning), I accidently deleted ext2 storage containing all works on other hard drive from desktop. I am trying to recover with the use of testdisk. Let see how that turned out

Aurélien Bompard: On est tous Pascuans

2009-07-02T20:50:00+00:00

Je me souviens, étant petit, avoir été particulièrement marqué par l’histoire de l’Île de Pâques.

Je me souviens avoir été choqué par la quasi-extinction de ce peuple : « Quand on vit sur une île, comment peut-on être assez bête pour couper tous ses arbres juste pour faire des statues ! » me demandais-je. « Il faut vraiment être un peuple de barbares préhistoriques pour ne pas comprendre que ça va tuer tout le monde, ou alors avoir une religion si puissante qu’elle pousse au suicide collectif ! »

En effet, c’est difficile à comprendre.

Mais que dire alors de ceux qui, avec l’erreur de leurs prédécesseurs sous les yeux, refont exactement la même bêtise ?

Et dire que nous pensons avoir évolué depuis. Avons-nous seulement appris les leçons les plus essentielles de l’Histoire ?

Nous sommes tous des habitants de l’Île de Pâques. Notre île est juste un peu plus grande, et notre océan un peu plus froid.

Komaragiri Satya: DocBook Editor 2

2009-07-02T20:34:14+00:00

Just completed a tiny DTD for DocBook corresponding to the small set of tags for which I had written the XSLs. I am so glad it works! (http://dev.gentooexperimental.org/~n9986/beacon/editor/ works best with firefox)

Now on it is just a matter of adding more elements to get a richer tag-set for DocBook till the mid-term evals. The basic infra is all set up (will try to keep improving usability though).

Also added a brand new and better CSS.

On the other side I think I should try and get more community involvement into developing the editor as the number of DocBook elements is *huge*.

I'll start by explaining what beacon is and how it works.

Beacon is a What you see is what you mean editor which relies heavily on XSL for XML to HTML conversions and vice-versa.

Most of the work involved in making a plugin is writing the two XSLs. One is required for converting the XML to HTML so that it can be displayed in the browser. And the other for converting the HTML back to XML. All these operations are done on the server side using PHP (or Python).

One may wonder, why rewrite XSLs if they already exists, like for Docbook for example. The reason is that Beacon needs some 'hooks' in the generated HTML so it can pick up the nodes using Javascript. This is required to do multitude of tasks like rendering inline editors, maintaining structural sanity, addition/deletion of new nodes, etc. Since HTML and Docbook XML tags are very different, there needs to be some way to map the XML tags over to HTML. These hooks are done using title attribute on tags. So for example, the tag will be rendered in HTML as:

< p title = "docbookPara"> Somethings are best with a title < /p >

Title tags tend to be most unobtrusive here and works well for DOM manipulation which is made even easier thanks to jQuery.

Once the HTML has been rendered, some Javascript magic makes it editable via inline editors of various types. We are still working on the node adding/deleting feature. Once that is done we will have a more or less a complete editor.

The validation of the generated HTML is kept in check via a Javascript based DTD.

So the user cycle of Beacon is:

new document -> XML -> HTML -> XML

All ajax-y communication is handled by JSON (except for file upload which uses an iframe of course).

Since its a web based it relies completely on Ajax for any post first page load. The UI is pretty much like a desktop Application with Tabs, sidebar etc.

To sum it up, a plugin now requires:

Couple of XSLs
Javascript based DTD
Some trivial PHP code
CSS + some template XMLs

I will write a tutorial on how to make a plugin for docbook next. Will be nice if folks chip in to get in as many tags supported as possible.

Gino Alania: Ordenar desde los ultimos a primeros registros en mysql

2009-07-02T20:04:58+00:00

Gracias a mi amigo mack paul .. un genio en db que me ayudo en un tema que la gente de #mysql en freenode no podian
para ordenar desde los ultimos a primeros registros en mysql cuando no se tiene el campo id y no se puede tocar la db
la sentencia seria :

select anidada.* from ( SELECT @rownum:=@rownum+1 AS rownum, tabla.* FROM (SELECT @rownum:=0) r, tabla ) anidada order by anidada.rownum desc;

y listo el pollo !

Chitlesh Goorah: EDA: Dare to copy Cadence source code ?

2009-07-02T20:02:45+00:00

Paul Mclellan wrote a blog post about a true story of Cadence’s source code theft and multiple lawsuits.

Any movie director here ?

Guillaume Kulakowski: RPMs d'eZ Components 2009.1

2009-07-02T19:37:00+00:00

Ce lundi, la version 2009.1 de la librairie eZ Components a été publiée. J'ai donc mis à jour les différentes briques qui ont évolué et que je maintiens sous Fedora, à savoir :

Pour le moment je n'ai pas eu de problème avec la mise à jour si ce n'est un changement de comportement un peu énervant dans PersistentObject qui m'a obligé à reprendre un peu de code :

Note: This release changes the indexing of arrays returns by ezcPersistentSession and its decorators. These arrays are now indexed by object IDs

Pour les utilisateurs de Fedora, vous pouvez mettre à jour eZ Components via le dépôts update-testing, pour ceux de RHEL5, les mises à jour vous sont proposées directement depuis le dépots llaumgui.

A noter que pour des besoins liés à Fedora-Fr, je devrais bientôt packager :

Josh Boyer: virt-manager and guest serial console

2009-07-02T19:17:21+00:00

So maybe this is already well known, but I always have a heck of a time getting a serial console to one of my KVM guests managed by virt-manager. I don't know why this is, but I do. The UI doesn't seem to present an interface for it, and the hardware wizard doesn't present an option for adding a serial port to the guest hardware. So I sat down and figured out how to get it working today, at least with F11.

Most of my guests have a serial port configured in the guest.xml file already. Whether I added this long ago, or virt-install creates it, I can't tell. If your guests don't have this, the syntax seems to be:

<serial type='pty'>
<target port='0'/>
</serial>

I opened up the guest details GUI in virt-manager, went to the serial port entry and saw that Serial 0 was directed to /dev/pts/10. I started the guest up, edited the kernel command line boot parameters to include 'console=ttyS0', and booted.

Then I did what I would do normally for any real machine hooked up to a serial port and fired up the tried and true 'minicom' like this: sudo minicom -p /dev/pts/10

Amazingly enough, there was the serial output. A few quick configuration changes later, and I could even login to the guest via that.

This may be really really simple. Some of you may even be laughing that I bothered to write this up. I don't care. My googling skills either suck, or this isn't very widely known. If nothing else, I wrote it up so I could remind my tiny brain how I did it before. Maybe someone else will find it helpful too.

Yaakov M. Nemoy: Green Computing?

2009-07-02T19:14:49+00:00

The computer i have at work is haunted. The person who had it before me was frequently getting blue screens of doom. We tried to fix that by putting Fedora on it, but today, after loading up the latest updates, i get regular crashes trying to run 3d screen savers. (Seriously, who doesn't run Molecule while working for a genetics laboratory?).

I was given the choice, to run memtest tonight and let it run all the way through or to try with random sticks of RAM tomorrow. I opted for the latter because it means not keeping the machine on all night long. But is it really more green? Those sticks of RAM have a certain environmental load too. Is it better to run energy using tests on the currently existing hardware or check every point of failure with a backup known working set? Which is more green? Should we even worry about such decisions at all?

Remi Collet: mysql-5.1.36-1

2009-07-02T17:48:00+00:00

RPM of the MySQL Community Server 5.1.36 are available in remi repository for EL 4 & 5 and for Fedora ≥ 6. This version is tag as Generally Available see Changelog.

This version comes with the manual in CHM format, in mysql-manual sub-package.

Various new features in this 5.1 version seems really interesting (to me): Table partitioning Event scheduler Replication formats Statement based ou Row based Load emulation client This build use a spec file close to the one from Fedora 11 updated to enable the "storage engines": Federated : access data from a remote MySQL database... Lire mysql-5.1.36-1

Frederic Hornain: Benefits to be Greener.

2009-07-02T17:46:22+00:00

Well, Can’t be more explicit !
Thanks for your time.
www.greenopensource.org

Fedora Mexico: Presto es genial !!!

2009-07-02T17:19:01+00:00

A solo unos días de que salió Firefox 3.5, hoy lo actualicé desde los repositorios de Fedora.

Eso por si solo es genial, pero lo verdaderamente magnífico es que al tener instalado Presto, me ahorré el 81% del tamaño del paquete, y por consiguiente, en tiempo y ancho de banda al descargarlo. Presto es un plugin para yum que permite bajar únicamente las diferencias entre las versiones de los paquetes sin necesidad de bajar todo el paquete completo. Esto se logra mediante una base de datos de repositorios Delta que mantiene la información de las versiones.

Inmediatamente después de que instales ó actualices a Fedora 11, te sugiero que instales Presto. Esto te ahorrará mucho tiempo en el futuro.

yum install yum-presto

Posteriormente solamente tienes que instalar ó actualizar tus paquetes de la manera que regularmente lo haces y -that’s it- empieza la magia. Igual de lindo es que las dependencias de los paquetes que instales se actualizan con Presto

yum update firefox

Size of all updates downloaded from Presto-enabled repositories: 4.9M Size of updates that would have been downloaded if Presto wasn't enabled: 25M This is a savings of 81 percent

Amo a Firefox y amo Presto !!!

Articulos Similares:

Presto es genial !!!

Danishka Navin: ලංකාවේ ICT සඳහා හොඳම කාලය

2009-07-02T17:04:00+00:00

ඇත්තටම මේක දිගට ලියන්න නෙමේ යන්නේ..

මීට සුලු මොහොතකට පෙර දසුන් සමීරත් මමත් පොඩි වැඩක යෙදි සිටින විට සිදුවු දෙබසක් දෙයක්...

[22:20:16] Dasun:මගේ නෙට් අලම වෙලානේ
[22:20:29] Danishka: නැ.. හැමතැනම එහෙමයි
[22:20:37] Dasun: එහෙමද
[22:20:39] … ඇයි ඒ
[22:20:44] Danishka: ලංකාවේ මචං ICT හරියන්නේ පායන කාලෙට
[22:20:44] Dasun: මේක දැන් ලොඩ් වෙන්නේම නෑ
[22:20:46] … :(
[22:20:52] … ථෘ
[22:20:54] … :D
[22:20:58] … (rofl)
[22:21:00] Danishka: වහිද්දි වයර් අස්සේ වතුර (rofl)
[22:21:14] Dasun: (rofl) පට්ට ආතල්
[22:21:29] … හිටු මේකට මලින්තට අලවන්න
[22:21:29] … :D
[22:21:42] Danishka: නැද්ද මම අහන්නේ

ඇත්තටම පායන කාලෙටත් විදුලිය නැ... :(

Frederic Hornain: How to get DHCP IP from DHCP Client on Fedora 11 ?

2009-07-02T16:39:43+00:00

As I did know this hint before I share it with you.

Define what is you Network interface Card – NIC – with ifconfig ( For my part it is eth0).
[fhornain@localhost ~]$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:192.168.xxx.xxx Bcast:192.168.XXX.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::223:8bff:fea0:e8ee/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:270269 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:136038 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:281403168 (268.3 MiB) TX bytes:33294001 (31.7 MiB)
Interrupt:31

Then do a cat of the /var/lib/dhclient/dhclient-*-eth0.lease and look for the stanza associated to the NIC card here eth0 :

[fhornain@localhost dhcp]$ cat /var/lib/dhclient/dhclient-*-eth0.lease

lease {
interface “eth0″;
fixed-address 192.168.xxx.xxx;
filename “/boot/pxelinux.0″;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option routers 192.168.xxx.1;
option dhcp-lease-time 172800;
option dhcp-message-type 5;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.xxx.xxx,192.168.xxx.xxx;
option dhcp-server-identifier 192.168.xxx.xxx;
option domain-name “mydomain.com”;
renew 5 2009/07/03 03:47:38;
rebind 6 2009/07/04 01:10:17;
expire 6 2009/07/04 07:10:17;
}

Here is the answers : option dhcp-server-identifier 192.168.xxx.xxx;

Have Fun with F11

Alejandro Acosta: Hoy actualicé mi Firefox con Presto

2009-07-02T16:33:42+00:00

A solo unos días de que salió Firefox 3.5, hoy lo actualicé desde los repositorios de Fedora.

Inmediatamente después de que instales ó actualices a Fedora 11, te sugiero que instales Presto. Esto te ahorrará mucho tiempo en el futuro.

yum install yum-presto

yum update firefox

Size of all updates downloaded from Presto-enabled repositories: 4.9M Size of updates that would have been downloaded if Presto wasn't enabled: 25M This is a savings of 81 percent

Amo a Firefox y amo Presto !!

Adrian Alonso: Altera Quartus 2 on Fedora 11

2009-07-02T16:22:32+00:00

On the past months I was enrolled in a “Hardware Description Languages” course where we work with FPGAs implementing several hardware designs, the class cover VHDL and Verilog and I feel quite comfortable working with Verilog. As target platform I use an Altera DE2 devboard and Quartus II IDE; Installing Quartus II is quite trivial on [...]

Michael Tiemann: Open Source Incentives

2009-07-02T15:34:10+00:00

My recent visit to Brazil was a wonderful validation of the belief that I've held for more than 20 years: if you give people a better way to do things, they'll do better things. The Brazilian government continues to expand its adoption of open source, both across more and more ministries and deeper within each ministry. I had the pleasure of talking with one of Brazil's top IT strategists, and she told me some very interesting things, both encouraging and alarming.

Francesco Ugolini: Here I am

2009-07-02T14:00:38+00:00

pfew… I finally finished two of the hardest months since a year (sure, they will be overwhelmed by the ones that have to come next year).

During these months I’ve tried to use most of my (few) free time for Ambassadors stuffs, trying to follow most of the activities we have covered.

Now, I have set some priorities for the next six months.

Personal ones:

- Improve leadership (sure this is one of my top priorities)

- Try to join most of the events around me and find time/resources for the European ones

- Work with the other Italian ambassadors building a strength Italian community

From a FAmSCo point of view:

- Check all the open tasks and review all the amazing work done (especially regarding mentoring/membership thanks to Joerg, Fabian, Susmit and all the guys behind this job)

- Read Release Events reports and prepare for the Release Events Contest results (just wait for all REs)

- Working on the communication: I have an idea that I’ll bring you soon (see the list for further information)

- Bring weekly meetings back (we hold only M-L discussions during the last month)

I think the agenda seems full enough.

Now I’ll use today and tomorrow to take some rest and say: “OK, now I can breath!”.

Thomas Vander Stichele: wordpress I hate you

2009-07-02T12:52:15+00:00

After seeing that I possibly might have had some exploits run on my site again, I upgraded to wordpress 2.8

After reading up on hardening wordpress, the official site mentions AskApache, some plugin that helps hardening. I’m not too sure about it yet, because it wants to be writing .htaccess files in my directories and for that I have to open up more than I would want. But hey, let’s give it a go.

At some point it creates a username and password that you choose. I go on and configure stuff, not knowing very well which of its many modules I’m supposed to activate, or why.

I forget about it, and ten minutes later I check my mail. I have a mail from AskApache. With my login details. And the password in plaintext.

…

Is the WordPress security model just fundamentally broken ?

John Babich: Transparency - Live Today at Five (1700 UTC, that is)

2009-07-02T12:32:16+00:00

One of the things I love about the Fedora Project is that its members, especially the leadership, really try to conduct all activities in the harsh light of public scrutiny.

In that spirit of openness, be sure to check out the upcoming Fedora Board meeting. To quote our fearless leader, Paul Frields:

"The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, July 2, 2009, at 1700 UTC on IRC Freenode. Note this is the first meeting of the newly constituted Board following the post-F11 elections. For this meeting, the public is invited to do the following:

* Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.

* Join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

The moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the #fedora-board-meeting channel. We'll limit time per voice as needed to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard. The Board may reserve some time at the top of the hour to cover any agenda items as appropriate. We look forward to seeing you at the meeting!"

Transparency is a very popular concept these days - it's nice to see when it's actually put into practice.

Openness is also about participation, so I urge you to attend and make your voice heard.

Kushal Das: Fedora 11 and artwork by Shreyank

2009-07-02T12:11:50+00:00

The artwork by Shreyank:

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.5

Richard Hughes: Dell Mini 10v and the touchpad of death

2009-07-02T11:32:17+00:00

The Dell Mini 10v does have a very nice keyboard. But then it also has a very bad mousepad. The buttons are actually on the trackpad, so if you click you end up moving, or if you’re dragging you end up shooting across the screen. Pain.

Anyway, there’s a fairly nice workaround by setting the System->Preferences->Mouse values to “Scrolling: disabled” and enabling “Mouse clicks with the touchpad“. All you have to do then is remember not to click the physical buttons, but tap instead. Not perfect, but saves you wanting to hurt someone. Bug for a proper fix is filed here.

Harald Hoyer: [ANNOUNCEMENT] dracut-0.3

2009-07-02T11:06:36+00:00

Here it is, dracut-0.3!

Featuring booting from all kind of block devices, NFS, iSCSI and NBD.

Dracut is a new initramfs infrastructure. It should replace nash/mkinitrd.
Dracut is a feauture for Fedora 12 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Dracut

How to get started, if you want to test.

On Fedora 11 or Fedora rawhide (you might have to wait until the mirrors catch up):

# yum install dracut-0.3

or download the tarball: http://harald.fedorapeople.org/downloads/dracut/dracut-0.3.tar.bz2

# tar xzf dracut-0.3.tar.bz2
# cd dracut-0.3
# make install sbindir=/sbin sysconfdir=/etc

To generate a initramfs image, run:

# dracut <imagename> <kernel version>

to overwrite an existing image:

# dracut -f <imagename> <kernel version>

Update:
Ok, it seems the debug dracut module wants to be installed automatically, due to a bug.
You either have all binaries which are needed by the dracut debug module, or create the images with:

# dracut --omit debug <imagename> <kernel version>

Try to boot from that image by modifying /etc/grub.conf. Be sure to have a fallback entry.

If you want to boot from network have a look at the manpage. Basically everything can be specified on the kernel command line.

Bug reports can be send directly to me (harald@redhat.com) until dracut appears in the bugzilla component list.

Further information about dracut: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/dracut/wiki

Till Maas: preupgrade security fail

2009-07-02T11:00:13+00:00

I just wanted to try out preupgrade to update to Fedora 11, but then I was disappointed that it does not verify securely what it is downloading and installing onto my system. And even worse, this is not even announced by preupgrade. It is so strange, on the one hand all rpm packages are signed and even the algorithms used are updated, but on the other hand the signatures are not used. So please be aware that if you use preupgrade, it will not verify that the installed content came from Fedora.

Kushal Das: The developer of Pem

2009-07-02T11:00:03+00:00

pem is the expense manager.

The developer behind this magic

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.5

Komaragiri Satya: DocBook Editor 1

2009-07-02T10:01:18+00:00

It's been very quiet in here. This month has been a marathon of coding and a lot of other events on the home front.

First off, a few non-GSoC related developments:

I finished college. (Phew!)
I got placed in Red Hat as an Associate Software Engineer. (gleee!)
I won the Sun India Code For Freedom contest for my B. Tech Project. (ZOMG!! yes that was COMPLETELY unexpected!)
I went out for a small trip this weekend after almost 2 years.

Now to the DocBook Editor...

I started off by learning XSLT (tough!) and making an initial RPM for Beacon and submitted it for review. I created a Feature page and worked on deciding on an initial subset with the help of the Fedora-docs list.

Here are a few links to complement the above:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocBook_Editor_Documentation
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DocBookEditor
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocBook_Editor

Then, I constructed an initial XSL by referring to the example DocBook file in the Fedora Documentation repository and based on the initial tag set that was selected after a community review.

Initially, I fixed a few bugs in Beacon to learn the source code and worked on making it more convenient to add plug-ins by changing the implementation so that beacon needs only a DTD from the plug-in makers (which is us) rather than having us code the whole Javascript. A successful implementation of this would save a lot of time in feature addition and creation of plugins.

Apart from the DTD, I was learning the tools more from implementation perspective like JavaScript and jQuery library used in Beacon.

The last week has been the most exciting. Working with Nandeep Mali, the lead Beacon dev and my point of contact for the Beacon upstream, we got the DTD feature implemented to some extent and its working like a charm. The WYSIWYM is also working and just few more additions need to be done to make this a solid XML editor.

The DTD is actually a giant Javascript object which contains details about every node and its structure (like child, parent, siblings). One may think that why not use an existing WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE. This is not very feasible because WYSIWYG editors are notorious for
the output they produce. This is what Beacon is trying to avoid by adding a different type of editor. The user will be places with a fill-in-the-blanks type of editor so the generated XML will retain its sanity and conform to Docbook DTD. Makes it easy for the Docs team as well.

Now for the treat: http://dev.gentooexperimental.org/~n9986/beacon/editor/

The above URL is a demo of what we have been working with (I hope the Gentoo URL is not a problem. Beacon was a Gentoo SoC project and I cannot get PHP with JSON and XSLs on my fedora account).

The work till now mainly consisted of writing the XSLs for DocBook and making changes to the beacon core. One final enhancement in the usability of beacon would be a drag and drop feature that has not been committed so far as it is very slow at the moment. Once that is ready it will be very easy to add nodes at any point and still not mess up the corresponding XML.

I have been writing the DTD for DocBook since yesterday and will be able to commit it by very soon. So we can expect another blog post about it very soon.

Has been a fun journey so far. More to come in the next post.

Bastien Nocera: GCDS: Discrimination by accent

2009-07-02T10:01:09+00:00

My level of Spanish being what it is, and my accent being what it is, my cab ride to Las Palmas cost me some €60 from the airport, and that's after the cabbie switched off the meter...

Apparently, the «Catalina Park» apartments booked by the nice people at the GNOME Foundation, have a namesake near Playa de Inglés.

From top to bottom: where I wanted to go, where I was, where I ended up (locations provided «by ear», do not try to replicate at home). Yippee!

FreeFA

In other news the FreeFA tournament is going to happen next Thursday, from 15:00 to 17:00. I'll put the details onto the Wiki when I can remember my password.

Sankarshan: Fedora 11 Release Party at Pune on 04-July-2009

2009-07-02T09:48:06+00:00

This weekend we are organizing a small gathering at Pune for the Fedora faithful. Details about the Release Party are here. Besides getting the Fedora folks to hang out together and share notes, we hope to have some fun, get some show-n-tell going. Photographs and event reports would eventually follow as well.

As an aside, I am posting this using gscribble – a yet another offline client for Wordpress blogs being developed by Roshan. I had to rebuild it to get it working for F11 and, the truly bleeding rpms are here

Thomas Vander Stichele: 5luendo birthday party

2009-07-02T09:37:28+00:00

Yesterday was cause for celebration. We got together to celebrate five years of the Fluendo Group!

The picture quality is bad, and not everyone is in it, but I just took it on a whim after marveling how many people were there. I didn’t even know all of them – yes it’s gotten to that point. 67 months ago I arrived in Barcelona without the company even being created…

We celebrated with mountains of cheese and rivers of wine which in the first year would have lasted us a few weeks and now only lasted an hour.

As magical accidents sometimes happen, today is also the day Fluendo received the certification confirmation from Dolby for our DVD player. It didn’t take long to land in the webshop, so finally our DVD player is up for sale! So you know what to get us for our birthday – a shop checkout with the dvd player in your cart.

Good timing – that means that at this year’s GUADEC/Desktop Summit I know what the answer will be to one of the most asked questions I get.

This is the first GUADEC I’m going to with Kristien in tow, I hope she can manage. I’ll be there from Monday through Friday, because the week is bookended by two weddings. Looking forward to a GStreamer summit on Thursday discussing 1.0…

Russell John: Microsoft Joins Twitter!

2009-07-02T09:09:50+00:00

Microsoft finally made it to Twitter. Big shots like Google and Yahoo are already on Twitter, but it took Microsoft quite some time to decide whether they really want to join or not! (Come on, we all know that they are slow!)

Anyway I found it really interesting, and thought like to welcome them via my account @Linux. I did, and it was awesome to see that people found it hilarious! They started retweeting right away, and as I’m writing right now after an hour, people are still making fun of it.

Here they are, @Microsoft on Twitter. Give them a follow if you like to!

If you liked this post, then you also might like...

Ingvar Hagelund: Using an US iPhone/iPod power adapter in Europe

2009-07-02T08:14:13+00:00

I bought my iPhone from the US before it got available in Norway. The power adapter was of course US type, and did not fit into our European style wall sockets. So I bought a third party made-in-China power adapter, and was content. Now, the other day, being a little too rough with it, I pulled out the contact pins!

In no position to get them back, my eyes fell on the originial US power adapter, and wondered if I could buy something that could make it fit in the wall socket, as the adapter supports the whole 100-240 Volt range without modifications.

At this time my oldest son (8) enters and, being the son of his father, start fiddling with the parts. -What happens if I pull here? *Click*

Aha! The wall socket connector is an opt in replacement, and rejoice! The common connector is matching a standard accessory cable. Finally, Apple did something right.

Problem solved.

Hans de Goede: FAQ: Why did my sensors stop working in F-11 / with kernel 2.6.30 ?

2009-07-02T08:08:15+00:00

Hi all,

In the 2.6.29 kernel in F-11 and in the mainline 2.6.30 kernel, there is a change which causes hardware monitoring (also called sensors) to no longer work on some motherboards. If this is happening for your motherboard, then when the lm_sensors service is starting you are probably getting an error like this:

FATAL: Error inserting it87
(/lib/modules/2.6.29-15.fc11.x86_64/kernel/drivers/hwmon/it87.ko): Device or
resource busy

And if you look at the kernel messages (using the dmesg command in a terminal for example) you will probably see something like this:

ACPI: I/O resource it87 [0x295-0x296] conflicts with ACPI region IP__
[0x295-0x296]
ACPI: Device needs an ACPI driver

With previous kernels hwmon drivers used to drive IO ranges which were potentially used by the ACPI code in your BIOS (which is active not only during but also after boot), we now explicitly check for this and if the ACPI code claims the IO-ports used by the hwmon chip, we no longer allow the hwmon driver to load.

Banging IO-ports of a chip from 2 different drivers, the Linux hwmon driver and the ACPI code is a *really* bad idea and can cause all sort of issues (including things like changing CPU / RAM voltage or clock speed). So the old behaviour was a really bad idea.

So even though this change in behaviour makes some people unhappy as to old behaviour happened to work without problems in their case (by sheer luck really), this change is really for the best!

If you want to restore the old behaviour (which might be dangerous) add: "acpi_enforce_resources=lax" to the kernel cmdline when booting (or add it in grub.conf to make this permanent).

Dave Airlie: radeon DDX has initial KMS support

2009-07-02T06:09:20+00:00

So we've had an -ati DDX with KMS support in a branch for quite a while, but it was starting to grow into a very big mess, and some of the hacks in it were quite unmaintainable.

So started cleaning it up and pushing the bits to master.

Step 1 was adding macros in all the places in the accel code to abstract away the different command submission methods, and
add some ifs to do KMS specific things. Once this was done in theory the accel code wouldn't functionally regress and wouldn't require any more changes.

Step 2 was bringing over the kms and DRI2 support files from the branch.

Step 3 was making the decision between if (kms) if (!kms) blocks all over radeon_driver.c in all the various functions or having a nearly completely separate KMS/DRI2 driver file. The original code has the if approach and it was an unmaintainable nightmare, so I opted for approach 2 and it definitely is the best. At driver probe time in radeon_probe.c, I now do the KMS check if the pciaccess probe is called (kms without pciaccess is probably not going to matter). If I get KMS supported the driver picks a nearly completely different set of functions for PreInit/ScreenInit etc. I now have a separate radeon_kms.c file which has all the DDX interface in it. Of course if we have any changes they may need to be done in two places, but its a lot cleaner than it was in the other codebase.

I also ported the KMS code to use the libdrm_radeon buffer management code which is shared with mesa, instead of the DDX having its own buffer manager code base. This code is well tested via mesa, however it hasn't got all the features/optimisations that I've added to the DDX bufmgr over the last while.

So what's left:
Missing optimisation from old buffer manager:
1. buffer in VRAM? has the buffer ever explicitly been validated to VRAM, this allow for an optimisation on download from screen.
2. Download from screen, with driver pixmaps we don't know if the buffer is in VRAM or GTT, with (1) we can either blit if in VRAM, or just memcpy if in GART.
3. force a buffer to validate in GTT or force a buffer to stay in fast CPU access space - this was really useful some sw fallbacks where a buffer would end up in VRAM and then get used by the CPU from there. It probably only really takes the place of fixing EXA properly so the pixmap scoring is separate from the offscreen memory, and having a XA that works with driver pixmaps a lot better.
4. bugs and crashes I appear to be hitting a realloc crash at some point where glibc reenters itself and fails.

Remi Collet: Firefox 3.5

2009-07-02T05:43:00+00:00

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

Start by reading : Firefox 3.5 Release Notes As always : yum --enablerepo=remi update firefox No xulrunner update, this RPM provides his bundled Gecko engine. For now, RPM are available for Fedora ≥ 9. Others should follow (they are in the pending build queue)... Lire Firefox 3.5

Andrew Vermilya Jamison: Fedora 11 vs. Ubuntu 9.04

2009-07-02T03:29:05+00:00

I have been using Fedora since Fedora 4 and I am very happy with it and its many changes through the years however one distribution I have been watching closely is Ubuntu. With the release of 9.04 it seems Ubuntu has made huge strides to make Ubuntu idiot proof.

Do not be mislead I do not think of Ubuntu as a distribution for idiots, no I think the opposite. Ubuntu has made it a easy way for windows users to make an almost seamless transition to Linux with little down time in terms of Windows counterparts. I did run into a nagging issue with Ubuntu that used to be present with Fedora 7 however for some reason Fedora figured it out and 8-11 it has not existed Ubuntu however has pained me with this issue for several versions.

The issue summed up is this. I have a blue-tooth keyboard and mouse combo, when Ubuntu loads its bluez service it disables my keyboard and mouse due to not being paired (i am guessing) however thanks to Logitech”””’’s lovely proprietary Blue-tooth dongle Linux can not pair devices to it properly so I am left with no keyboard and no mouse forcing me to hook up a corded set.. Fedora some however accounted for users like me and ignores the blue-tooth dongle if it is one of the proprietary one and thus Linux uses the keyboard and mouse as though they were just a plain old wireless set.. Ubuntu will do this upon disabling bluez and to prevent it from reactivating on an update removing it all together. Solution find a way to disable blue-tooth at boot long enough to remove it.

Aside from the above issue Ubuntu has run very smooth for me and I found myself using it for a week and forgetting I was on a Linux machine. This is the jack pot when it comes to the new Linux User however Fedora 11 is not without its advantages either.

Some things I love about Fedora that may not be in Ubuntu for a while if at all are.

1) Presto – Allows for repositories to host delta rpms or drpms which are basicaly only the changes of an installed package meaning say a Open Office update that only changed a few lines would be 400kb instead of 100mb
2) Verbose booting – can be turned on in Ubuntu through a kernel argument at boot but not well known
3) More sane user control panel – Does not require adding users to groups only through the group you can add a user to a group while editing the user
4) It is less restricted out of the box – This is not a good thing for the new user however for people like me who like to mess around with stuff (and often break things) it works
5) Better community forum – Sorry Ubuntu users but to me the Fedora forum is more problem solving centric
6) NO BLUE TOOTH ISSUE!!

Some Ubuntu features I like

1) It just works
2) Stable and fast – Sadly faster then Fedora for some tasks others they are even
3) More developers seem to favor having apt based repos as apposed to yum based
4) Adobe AIR works 100% faster on Ubuntu (powers my new favorite app Seesmic Desktop)
5) Category5.tv – Granted this is not a feature of Ubuntu per say but the host Robbie Ferguson is your average Ubuntu guru. Thus giving this distro an extra point.

If I had to pick one of these distros to use as my main OS it would be a hard choice. I am so used to Fedora and how it works that I just love it but Ubuntu has definate advantages as well such as for 90% of the stuff just working.

I would have to pick Fedora just because i am a creature of habit. It does not hurt that I am also a Fedora Ambassador so I might be a little bias.

Bottom Line here and this is my honest opinion Fedora gets a 8 out of ten because it does what I like and seems very solid Ubuntu gets a 7.5 would get an 8 also if the damn Blue-tooth issue did not exist

I would love to read your comments let me know what u think and please just briefly mention how u found me I.E twitter, google etcetera this will help me to find out which channels my active commenters are coming from

The post is bought to you by lekhonee v0.4

Ding-Yi Chen: Will yum-complete-transaction wipe out my system?

2009-07-02T02:38:44+00:00

Frankly speaking, I was also pondering this question as well.
After I read: yum-complete-transaction should be run??? Many apps to be erased...., I tried it myself.

Conclusion: yum-complete-transaction can wipe out your system, but you got a chance say no.
It just do some check an revert some transaction, but it will ask you to confirm, just like the normal yum without argument '-y'. Say 'n' to reject the transaction and it will clean up the completed transaction file.

In case it encounters "OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ", just create an empty file yum-complete-transaction asked and rerun it.

Projeto Fedora Brasil: Guia Duli do Fedora 11 já está pronto!

2009-07-02T01:33:06+00:00

Pessoal,

Acabei o Guia de Configuração para o Fedora 11. Diversas atualizações estão presentes relativamente ao guia para o Fedora anterior.

Espero que seja útil. Clique aqui para ver o guia e participe!

Abraços, Duli.

Chitlesh Goorah: FEL download metrics

2009-07-01T23:34:47+00:00

Fedora Electronic Lab made its 4th consecutive release last month. It was first release along side Fedora 8 and was well accepted by the community, universities and small companies. There were a lot of challenges on the road and below are some metrics accompanied by my analysis.

Number of FEL Livedvd downloaded

When FEL8 was released, many people thought of it as a fork or independent of the Fedora Project. At that time, only the 32 bit architecture was supported as a livecd. It is however very surprising to see the number of downloads for FEL8, as this first release mostly included tools to satisfy user ‘ME’. It seems that this became the backbone of the following development.

6 months later, FEL9 came out, its development cycle was affected by lack of time to promote it,due to the fact I was working on an exciting project for ON Semiconductor. The number of additional packages included was roughly 10%. FEL9 was provided for both 32 bit and 64 bit architectures. It was also that period I had to justify my choice for a KDE desktop environment, since KDE4 was still one-month baby. Many users emailed me requesting for Gnome desktop environment instead, and many switched to Gnome to take full advantage of what Fedora developers are providing (power management, bluetooth, virtualisation,..). At the same time, users understood the FEL Livedvd is nothing more than Fedora, and not a fork.

When FEL10 was released, FEL8 reached End-Of-Life. Those who didn’t upgraded to FEL9, went straight to FEL10 by making full use of “yum” to install FEL apps. Many users (especially those from universities) requested http downloads for FEL10 Livedvd. Thibault North provided the Livedvd on his personal website, for which I am very grateful. However I don’t have his metrics, so it was not accountable on this histogram. As per Thibault North’s comment, we now have download metrics from march09 to june09. These values are now listed on the histogram. Since FEL provides multiple design flows which may not be useful if someone is interested into one design flow, FEL users seem to have customized their Fedora install to satisfy their needs. This is very promising as it seems they have understood that it is all about design methodologies rather than random packages. Again, I was confronted with the KDE versus Gnome for desktop environments and users were eager to #yum groupinstall’ all the FEL apps. LiveUSB was another cool feature that users preferred over the livedvd as their data can be stored on the media.

The metrics I have for FEL11 are for the following timeframe:

torrent: 9th June to 1st July
http download (data from mmcgrath) : 23rd June to 1st July – for both 32 bit and 64 bit

FEL11 now has a http download from alt.fedoraproject.org, together with a groupinstall from yum. In accordance to Mike McGrath, there were ~160 downloads from the alt.fedoraproject.org from ~110 different IPs. The boot time and power resources of KDE were severely criticized by FEL users, since Fedora claims a boot time of 20 seconds and better power management. I have to thank RexDieter who worked hard to improve the KDE launch time when FEL11 Beta was released. FEL11 was released 3 weeks ago.

Number of gigabytes of FEL Livedvd downloaded

The above histogram reflects the number of gigabytes transferred via torrent only.

I am very happy of the results. You might interpret it as you like. However from my point of view, if FEL users are using it per design flow requirements, our goals are being met and FEL users are not blindly installing everything. The metrics reflect the minimum threshold of downloads for Fedora Electronic Lab. Those universities and small companies who are deploying more that 1 FEL node are also not accountable in those histograms. The support of EPEL repositories was greatly appreciated as well. Some people are even rebuilding the SRPMs for ScientificLinux. For more details about Fedora downloads, visit the Statistic wikipage.

References:

Metrics : Torrent files
Metrics : http download via alt.fedoraproject.org: Mike McGrath
Thibault North’s comment on this post.

Max Spevack: tour de france 2009

2009-07-01T21:54:14+00:00

I've been a big fan of the Tour de France ever since I watched the American Greg LeMond win by 8 seconds in 1989. I was 9 years old. For some reason, that sports moment really captured my imagination, and I've been an avid fan ever since.

I remember when it was reduced to a 30 minute highlight show on ESPN, half of which was spent on filler and only 10 minutes of racing was shown. Then Lance Amstrong blew up, and the TV coverage in the USA improved. Lance's comeback from cancer was a phenomenal story, especially for someone like me who had been a fan of the sport before it became cool to walk around with those yellow bracelets.

For years, I'd watch every mountain stage holding my breath, hoping that Lance would never crack, and continue to win. I'd record them during the day, avoid the internet at work, and watch when I got home. I'd skip classes in college to sit in my dorm room and watch the most important stages. Year after year, Lance never cracked -- 7 times in a row he won the race, and it was great.

I had my Red Hat interview during the climactic mountain stages of the 2004 Tour, and I remember being motivated by Lance winning 3 stages in a row to also do my best under pressure and get the job that I wanted. I know that sounds silly, but it demonstrates that I was inspired by his athletic feats in my own life.

The years since then have seen him continue to be dogged by performance-enhancing-drugs questions, and also seen him make some questionable decisions in his personal life. Now he's un-retired, and riding in the Tour again this year, and I can't get excited about it. I think it's a terrible mistake. I don't think he'll be able to win, and he has nothing to gain and only his legacy to tarnish. He's not riding as the leader of his team, and he altered his training regimen this year compared to all the years that he won, and he missed training time due to a broken collerbone.

I hope I'm wrong, and that he pulls off a miracle, shocks the world, and wins one last time. But I'm skeptical. The whole thing is just setting up poorly. If he wins, and if he never fails a drug test, then it's a great story, I suppose. But if he loses, I'd rather that he just stayed retired.

It's hard to put a finger on it, but I liked Lance Armstrong a lot better 6 years ago than I do today. I'm not rooting against him -- I still hope he wins -- but leading up to the start of the Tour, my main thought is "I wish he simply wasn't in it."

Jakub Hrozek: The rumors of FreeIPA's death have been greatly exaggerated

2009-07-01T21:13:20+00:00

I'm not sure where this rumor came from but it keeps popping up on various message boards, mailing lists and IRC..people would ask why Red Hat stopped supporting the FreeIPA project.

But it never did. Version 2 is still under heavy development (look at the volume of patches on freeipa-devel mailing list). That said, we had expected to have released v2 sooner and probably with more features, it just became evident that in order to release the project in time, we had to make changes. Dmitri explained them all nicely in his post on freeipa-users

To make it short, FreeIPA rocks on :-) Hang on on #freeipa at irc.freenode.net, join our mailing lists to watch the progress we make and provide feedback.

(Full disclosure: I am a Red Hat employee working on IPA full time)

Michael DeHaan: Another F-11 Upgrade And Misc Bugs

2009-07-01T21:11:20+00:00

Looks like I need to file a few bugs, though I’m not sure which are causing the others and don’t have great notes except for a few.

Initially some very minor display problems — text at the top part of the installer saying “F11″ was accompanied by some random text. I should review that as that is probably a known problem.

From there the Anaconda install via preupgrade mostly went fine, but Anaconda gets locked up with “/usr/lib/anaconda/gui.py: 538 ….”, basically an assertion that it was trying to set the progress bar to something that was not 0…100. I assumed it was greater than 100 and had to restart my machine.

Numerous kernel oopses — one involving SELinux and another involving gem_set_tiling. Not sure if it’s the video card’s fault or the monitor but that one is way up in the kerneloops reports.

Numerous F10 RPMs left installed, which I manually removed — and also yum thinks my releasever is still 10 which made installing packages somewhat confusing because the instructions indicate to run cleanup commands, when it really should be saying “whoa, horsie, these packages aren’t for your OS”. Finally figured that out after the cleanup commands didn’t do anything. I would have expected the installer to bump the release version. Perhaps this is stuff that was supposed to happen after the install bar got past 100% and didn’t happen. Attempting to fix this caused some nice RPM PANIC messages… not sure what happened there. Perhaps a result of PackageKit coming in and trying to do updates while I was running yum and had to clobber some locks. I think by default PackageKit should be /off/ and only lock up things if you want it to, but that’s just me. (If Fedora is a developer distribution, people probably use the CLI).

In order to get the laptop to work I had to add “xrandr -s 1440×900″ to the GNOME startup sequence, which mostly does the trick. Perhaps there is a better way to force that, though the X.Org detection seems a little whack. Perhaps it was the gem thing and it was related.

(My home machine which I posted about a long while ago went through a lot cleaner — only hitting the problem of not having a good way to recover from not having enough space — which is a sign the preupgrade space detection was not sufficient prior to jumping into the reboot.)

Yay, desktop and upgrade funness. Given this is almost always a little painful (and always different between machines), perhaps this is a good reason for a longer updates cycle and more testing on upgrades versus clean installs? I don’t know.

Another minor annoyance — if you don’t use GDM, you have to re-enter your password to unlock NetworkManager’s access to your keychain once you do “startx” (which I switched to when testing graphics problems) — how to do you turn that off?

Thankfully no LVM-like errors though, which is good — those are some hard ones to get around.

Haven’t tried anything else yet so far.

Yaakov M. Nemoy: In Berlin You Can't Have a Pony

2009-07-01T21:10:09+00:00

We discovered that in Berlin, you can't have a pony. There was a sign on the subway warning us about this unfortunateness.

Flickr Link Here

Literally it means the seat is not a garbage dump, but Berlin is quite a liberal city, so i'm going to use quite a liberal translation.

Máirín Duffy: Thanks for FUDcon Berlin!

2009-07-01T20:32:37+00:00

I just wanted to write a quick post to thank everyone involved with FUDcon Berlin. It was definitely an extremely well-organized trip (it really showed), and a wonderful experience. I travelled to the conference by myself, so you can imagine I had quite a bit of anxiety about finding my way around and getting settled in, but things like the Attendee Survival Kit and travel info on the wiki made it a very comfortable trip. Folks went out of their way to be helpful and I really appreciate that. I was also very happy to finally meet in person many of the European folks I’ve worked with over the years and never had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face! I was able to get quite a few things done while there, including:

Met with Joel Granados and coming up with some ideas for improving the anaconda storage UI;
Met with Thomas Woerner about the system-config-firewall UI and brainstormed some improvements for it;
Gave a talk to talk about Fedora Community, and got a lot of *great* ideas for future features from folks in the session;
Gave a UI design clinic talk where we went through Bacula’s interface and hopefully effectively demonstrated at least part of the UI design process (I’ve gotten a few emails afterwards about it so I think the demonstration of the design process worked );
Gave some demos of Fedora at the LinuxTag booth, including a demo of Fedora’s tablet capabilities showing off handwriting recognition;
Took a ton of photos; hopefully some can be useful for the Fedora picture book;
Took a photo survey of the event signage, in hopes that the Design Team can create an event signage kit with templates for future events;
Made a cool poster of event participants and a video showing how the poster was made in Inkscape with Nicu.

Overall, a very productive and enjoyable trip, so thanks again!

Posted in Uncategorized

Iarly selbir | ski0s: I learning Python – Random strings

2009-07-01T19:47:27+00:00

[ptBR]
Simples script que gera strings com valores randômicos

#!/usr/bin/env python # Script to generate random strings - iarly selbir | ski0s

import random

def strgen():
string = ''
rand_str = random.sample('abcdefghijklqmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789',8)
for i in rand_str:
string+=i
return string

print strgen()

Copie, cole e salve-o como strgen.py e execute-o para ver o resultado:
# python strgen.py

Exemplo:

[iarlyy@ski0s py]$ python strgen.py
wgrklj8m

[enUS]

Simple script that generate strings with random values

#!/usr/bin/env python # Script to generate random strings - iarly selbir | ski0s

import random

def strgen():
string = ''
rand_str = random.sample('abcdefghijklqmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789',8)
for i in rand_str:
string+=i
return string

print strgen()

Copy it, paste and save them as strgen.py and execute them to see the result:
# python strgen.py

Example:

[iarlyy@ski0s py]$ python strgen.py
wgrklj8m

Yaakov M. Nemoy: BOFH

2009-07-01T19:20:53+00:00

Today i began my new job in Utrecht as a Systeembeheerder, which is just Dutch for Bastard Operator From Hell. I've been told that while we are in charge of a very wide variety of duties, the problems we have to solve tend to fall under two categories.

1) "Halp! I can't read my email!" - I'm clearly not responsible because that's handled by a central agency.

2) "The printer is broken." - I'm not a janitor, clean up your own mess.

I'm already loving this job.

Fedora Venezuela: Wallpapers – 4 fundaciones

2009-07-01T18:58:01+00:00

En el transcurso del FISL10 en Brasil tuve algunas ideas en cuanto al artwork, aqui esta la primera de ellas. Unos wallpapers bien sencillos y minimalistas (obrigada por me ensinar minimalismo Jayme)

Con sombra solida: With solid shadow:
Spanish: tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-span…
English: tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-engl…
Portuguese: tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-port…

Con sombra difuminada – With blur shadow:
Spanish: tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-span…
English: tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-engl…
Portuguese: tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-port…

Fuente SVG:
tatica.fedorapeople.org/Fedora-LATAM/wallpaper-4f/4f-set.svg

Till Maas: BruCON Security Conference in Brussels

2009-07-01T18:40:28+00:00

I just registered for BruCON, because the early bird tickets are only available for two more days. Will you come, too? It would be nice to meet some Fedorians there, but I guess I would have more luck at some generic FOSS conference.

Henrik Heigl: Fedora Weekly News - FWN182

2009-07-01T18:36:22+00:00

Fedoraproject: LinuxTag 2009 (24.-27.6.) und FUDCon (26.-28.6.) in Berlin am Messegelände. Wer nicht da war hat was verpasst!

die aktuelle Ausgabe der Fedora Weekly News, Ausgabe 182 (FWN 182) ist unter http://blog.radiotux.de/2009/06/29/fedora-weekly-news-fwn-182/ zum reinhören abgelegt.

Ich hoffe das Sie euch gefällt.

Die FWN werden bei der wöchentlich ausgestrahlten Sendung von Radiotux (siehe http://www.radiotux.de) Donnerstags gesendet und sind auch über den dortigen RSS Feed abrufbar.

Bei Fragen, Anregungen, Meinungen, Kritik zur FWN in deutsch einfach eine Mail an mich.

/edit: Ja, ich habe den kleinen Patzer bemerkt, lasse Ihn aber aus Authentischen Gründen mal drin

Michael DeHaan: Evil Robot Conference has a Blog

2009-07-01T18:36:16+00:00

The September “Evil Robot Conference” now has a blog:

http://evilrobotconference.wordpress.com/

There is not much info there just yet, but if you are interested in a Free Software conference in Raleigh, NC this September (most likely 9/12/2009), go ahead and subscribe to the Feed.

We’ll post more about scheduled topics and other details as time goes on.

Also — please go ahead and post on the blog if you have something you’d like to talk about (and haven’t talked to us already), so we can keep you in mind and add you to the list.