Colin Charles Agenda

Fedora gcc-isms
Decided that it might be fun to start taking a stab at failed packages in Extras/ppc that didn’t build, and figured out why the x86/x86_64 builds are way ahead of us. No mass rebuild! And yes, GCC4 is to blame. Example is very linux_logo centric: No using (char *) (casts) if the type of new_logo is a pointer for example. Earlier on I remember, for ppc kernels to compile it was typedef related magic. Some quick google’s later, here are some pointers on what might need changing (I’ve not really found a good gcc4 document that people can enjoy): fix invalid lvalue assignment, use of cast values as lvalue is deprecated (more), and getting op -> foo (a,b,c) changed to (op->foo) (a,b,c). Read the long object size checking post too, its rather useful.

Expressions
So today we had a discussion about “capitol” and “capital”. Greg assured us it was “capital” (I always thought it was a American vs. British English thing). The following shows how expressions differ for Australian vs. American English. Just interesting to note, its so common to say “mate” in Australia, I’d never have thought someone would take offence to it.

<wmealing> oh, i called a yank ive been talking to for about 3 years, "mate" the other day
<wmealing> he went OFF
<wmealing> "im not gay, etc etc etc"

Life
So to add to my collection of phones, which I completely don’t use and disgust, I now own an LG U8138, and have a new Three line. Free calls are abound now it seems. And I can do video, and get on the Internet via a USB cable or even IR - now to see if it all works with Linux will be the fun part. Hats off to Francine, she’s a good sales lady, and I just bought a unit without thinking a little more than twice. Good to note that my credit check is still nice and positive :P

Also forgot how fun it was to just go and hang out. Met up with Andy, someone from Asia Source to talk about video distribution stuff. Took Darren along, and it was just some aimless coffee, talk, walking, and juice drinking. Probably really needed all that. Good conversation till the wee hours of the morning with my best friend, and my morale has definitely been boosted to some degree.

And if you think I had a happy Easter, I didn’t. It sucked. In short, I’m a free man now. Really, really free. I guess its supposedly nice to have just a female best friend around. I finished Season One of One Tree Hill as well. Guess I now know what it feels like to be despondent. And after the few days of fasting, celibacy is looking brighter and brighter.

Fedora/ppc
Seth has always been a good man, and now there are even more PPC packages available. Please look at the build logs of failures. So this has really been an exercise in expanding my BASH shell scripting skills… Come test2, I’ll do a mass rebuild with mach and the “actual buildsystem”, so that we can wade thru possibly weird issues. Also wanting to do things over NFS, as the build box needs more space… (bigmac not so big after all!).

OOo
OOo2 and its java dependencies seem to be a hot topic at newsforge. Where he got the idea that I lead, I don’t know. A more useful article is on the reinvention of Progeny - an OSS company, startup even, that survived the .com crash. Nice read, with common business sense information sitting there. And rather unrelated, but How to start a start up is a great read.

Firefox search plugins
Mozilla search plugins are cool. I’ve always just used the Google one, but I guess I felt the need to change it to use Google Australia by default now. The eBay one works well for eBay Australia too. Added the IMDB, CDDB, Wikipedia (somewhat broken), and the Bible (NIV). On Fedora Core, you’ll run into add engines not working (RHBZ#134701).

Anyways, I tried to access the search rhbz via google and it didn’t work (site not accessible), so I ended up writing my own. RHBZ Firefox search plugin is now available for download, as is the source. It was only later that thl pointed me to this - all the RH Bugzilla stuff you need. Gah.

/etc/motd
“When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.” –Maurice Maeterlinck
Does anyone know of an intelligent random signature generator that will pipe well for Evolution to use? Or is writing one my only hope?

So it was nice to see Coastguard from Cybersource. Using IceWM, Knoppix, and Firefox for all its functionality, which involves Internet banking. FWIW, I bank with several banks (ING, ANZ, Commonwealth), and they all seem to work well on my Linux box running Firefox. Granted I have the Java plugin, I’ll have to try it at some stage with the Java integrated stuff in Fedora to see if it’ll just work.

Fedora/ppc
So, more things are entering Extras. Take a look at what Repoview has to show you. General slow-down is that packages with dependencies need to have their dependencies met, so that takes some manual massaging. We’re down to about 70 unbuilt packages because of dependencies, and about 93 failing builds on ppc (which is the reason we have unbuilt packages, mostly).

Package maintainers, take a look at the failed build-logs, fix your packages, and lets get ‘em rebuilding (might be worthwhile to check and see if i386 fails as well first before beating your head).

For all Mac Mini fans, the Installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Mac Mini guide is a pretty good one. IIRC, sound still doesn’t work, so play OFPong instead :)

Stuff
Otherwise, while surfing the web, I noticed the Clemson Linux Initiative. Its got nice howto’s for laptop’s, and getting them to work with FC3. The Fedora HCL could definitely get a boost with links to interesting things like this, IMHO.

Now, to go get debauched for the weekend.

I’ve been sick with splitting, massive headaches, for the past couple of days. So I spent most of yesterday in bed. And today, I’ve taken on watching One Tree Hill, and am down 6 16 episodes. Sorry Warren, I haven’t started on Battlestar Galactica. I finally also finished reading Cryptonomicon, after several months of carrying it around with me. Yesterday, we caught Hating Alison Ashely; it was quite bad, so do skip it.

Malaysia
In Microsoft’s monthly offering of “Why Windows is better than Linux for the enterprise”, they’ve got more FUD about Milinux Networks expanding their market reach by using commercial software. So, it seems that commercial success can only be gotten with Microsoft, and they even cite Red Hat changing its business model. And they say that RHL has no more bugfixes, security updates, etc… that they need to provide it - well, howdy ho, lots of RHL users migrated to RHEL, wasn’t that good enough? Read the thread at myoss.

IBM sees Malaysia as the fastest growing Linux adopter in the ASEAN region.

And for a little bit more alarming news, it seems the government of Malaysia might only be standardising on Novell SuSE Linux now. pclow explains a bit about it, and I’d like to chase it up with folks at Bytecraft, Asix (c’mon Ditesh!), and the rest of the companies…. that were once standing behind RH, but now ditched it for Novell/SLES.

Fedora Extras/ppc
With great help from Seth on IRC, and his useful post, mach now runs on ppc, and Extras ppc32 is building now for FC4 test1 (albeit with dwmw2’s scripts). I haven’t gotten around to getting the build scripts that Seth has working well and automated for me just yet. To set mach up, follow Seth’s instructions (rebuild mach on your arch), then add your user to the mach group. And the history dump should be all you need to see if mach works. Don’t forget to have fedora-development-ppc in /etc/mach/dist.d as well.

So I present to you, extras/development/ppc. They are unsigned, because I lack a signing key, they’re semi-incomplete, because of packages that have deps that didn’t build, but the aims are to get them fixed soon. I’m now your ppc human buildsystem (or should that be bigmac, which goes on chugging away).

ICDL
I proposed getting the International Computer Driving License Linux-ified a while back. Linux-aus, education officer and what not. It seems that Canonical finally came through, and the Learn Linux people should be getting such work done. Nice.

I just registered for linux.conf.au 2005. Also submitted my key for signing. And booked flights. And accomodation. Thank you! See you all there, even during the miniconfs - I’m speaking at the OpenOffice.org one, and will definitely be around the GNOME and Embedded ones too.

LUV Committee meeting today. It ended rather quick, with pizza, and a general idea of how we’re defining the way LUV works, come the next SGM on the 5th of April. Some memberdb coolness will be around for online voting, thanks to Stewart. I also ended up with a full boxed set of Red Hat Linux 7.0, with the famous gcc 2.96. The CDs haven’t even been opened! Will go nicely with my RHL8 boxed set.

Now, some !@#$ stole 3 pairs of my shoes. Mind you, I only have a total of 4 pairs. So no more leather shoes, no more gym shoe. Just my one set of runners and my one pair of sandals.

So, it was the girl’s birthday. Yum cha breakfast, 21 roses, iPod mini, almost-life-size Eeyore and just a long day of fun. Been a busy weekend, so I’m glad its mostly over and its time to get back to the real world. Let’s hope my 21-st isn’t going to be as hectic.

UNDP/IOSN LiveCD
Spent some time customising a LiveCD based on Ubuntu. This is for the UNDP/IOSN project. Some good customisation guides include: LiveCDCustomizationHowTo on the Ubuntu wiki page, and the GnomeLiveCD howto. Sure the LiveCD could ask less questions during setup (a more Knoppix styled “just works” thing). And no matter how much I wanted to use Fedora, I’d have to do some more infrastructure work that won’t make deadlines.

So what did I do differently? I installed flashplugin-nonfree, brought in the ruby dependency, and popped a lot of content into /srv/content (>98MB). Customised Firefox - /etc/mozilla-firefox/pref/firefox.js with pref(”browser.startup.homepage”, “file:///srv/content/html/index.html”); What still needs to be done?

• Add UNDP/IOSN logos appropriately
• Probably beef up the way the index page looks like
• Priority 1 - Update the content to Ubuntu/Hoary style where appropriate (just the end-user-guide basically)
• Fill in the holes that still exist in content (or types); add more primers possibly
• More extensive testing with hardware out there - its not been tested as much as I’d like it
• Release early, release often. And resync with a newer upstream Hoary
• Fix bug where Firefox still doesn’t notice that its supposed to load the index page. So now start Firefox and type: /srv/content/html/index.html in the Location toolbar
• Test Flash. All of you, test the Flash stuff thoroughly. Seems to work for me, but its in beta at the website itself anyways, so go give it a go (try it online - requires Flash 7)

Yes, casper is actually a very nice system to use. It was completely well thought out, I’m glad jdub told me to hang in there back when Warty was released, saying the LiveCD stuff was in the works.

Fedora LiveCD
So, is Stateless Linux without a state at the moment? With Xen around, and possibly soon installer (anaconda) support alongside Xen, the only thing left from stateless seems to be the LiveCD. While developers themselves don’t find LiveCD’s incredibly useful, its a great marketing tool, to say the least. There’s Basilisk, with an installer almost along the way, and then there’s Rookery. The Rookery looks pretty interesting and possibly only requires some namespace merging before it starts churning out LiveCDs. Both are written in shell, so merging/integrating them would make for a better integrated system overall.

Fedora’s success
Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines is headline news today. Generally circling around web server usage, is probably unfair, as RH do have quite the number of paying customers for RHEL. Its nice to see Fedora gain ground, at such a timely occassion that FC4 test1 is out today as well.

Update: Since it didn’t make it online at the UNDP website, its http://www.arenatechniques.com/undp/iosn-hoary-live-i386.iso there now. Be gentle to the server, thanks.

FC4/ppc test1
Waah. Fedora Core 4 test1 has been baked on PPC, and will be installable for all of you. *grin* I should update the notes, because the boot.iso method is still required, but this time iirc, the eject stuff should work (ala you don’t require a pin). And there’s no more breaking into a console and running stuff. X generally works, but if you see issues with anaconda not detecting the proper X config during startup, try the resolution=1024×768 for example to see if things magically work.

RHEL 4 launch
Thursday was the RHEL4 launch in Melbourne. I don’t know why I go, but I can say the breakfast at least, was good. Oh wait, I remember, I go there as the Fedora spy. I like the way RHEL4 has been described: “Shared base technology, all open source, matured by the Fedora Project”. That was on the official RH slides, afaik. However, what was said is always another question.

“The 2.6 kernel was chosen some 6 months ago by competitors, and in my view it was a grave mistake because we didn’t think the 2.6 line was ready - 2.6.9 was what worked for us,” stated the chief of engineering in Brisbane. Really? I don’t think a lot of the kernel people would agree; I always thought that you couldn’t push a 2.6 kernel to RHEL3, and by default, you waited to launch RHEL4 (and you didn’t want to do that before FC-3 came out).

“Fedora is a testing bed for RHEL,” he continues. Next he goes on to mention that ever 3-4 months there’s a release (I think we’ve been pretty consistient at a 6-month release, awaiting gnome/ooo/other-major-apps releases), its a roll-forward project that guarantees to break backward compatibility (really?), and is good for R&D only, never for deployment.

I know I’ve got the fedora traffic stuff on my plate for the week, but if there’s one thing I’ll try to do before the next FESCO meeting (i.e. throughout the week), I am going to kickstart Fedora Marketing. I’ve said this before, but was travelling and too drained of energy, but its going to happen. Really.

Life
Bought a pink-colored iPod Mini. With its sweet 18-hour battery life, its an amazing little toy. Plugged it in, loaded songs to it, and then realised that it was a hfs-based partition. *groan* Normally I’d have no problem with that (my iPod is hfs based), but this is for the girl, so vfat seemed more appropriate; so a format and conversion later, its time to re-load songs on. Why doesn’t Apple just ship these things with vfat?

For future knowledge, if making a milk bath, and google’ing for recipes, don’t bother. 1KG of full cream milk powder, running hot water, and about 4 cans of whipped cream is all you need. Though if you spread the cream on the water, it tends to look a little dirty - so make sure its on the sides of the tub or something. Caught Saved! which I could recommend if you weren’t too overwhelmed by the entire religion thing.

Oh and if you ever get to see Paul singing karaoke, its really good. That song is one he does really, really, really, well! Though I always thought it went, “oh pretty dears” when he sang it, but I could’ve heard wrongly.

• Touched a bit of MorphOS and finding it rather amazing, speed-wise. Very unlike Linux, there’s no terminal, etc.. But its fast. Pity there are around 2,000 users or so.
• Kicked off a Fedora/ppc install. Graphical display still doesn’t come up on the iMac, so its still linux text for me. Think I fixed some gtk warnings in anaconda (we’ll see if pjones commits them). Yesterday’s install failed since it lacked libgcc-4. Today’s install went a lot better - everything got installed, it took the iMac some hours to get there. No requirement to run the magic mkofboot at the end, or even yabootconfig - the installation is pretty much plug & play. And there’s pretty Eclipse and OOo 1.9 in Rawhide now as well, so I’d encourage you all to give it a go. Interested OOo testers should find Fedora/rawhide or even Core 4 test1 something viable to poke around with - very upstream OOo style, hasn’t been Bluecurve’d yet.
• Had a good dinner two nights ago at an amazing Chinese restaurant - lobster noodles, pork, fish, scallops, prawns. Yeah. Studies have started, and thats normal classes and so on - of interest is Computer Graphics where I’m doing some OpenGL stuff, and another where I’d be writing lots of parsers. There’s also going to be financial modelling, which has always fascinated me. Looks like a heavy C-based semester.