Colin Charles Agenda

When I last blogged about the 2005 iBooks with 1.5GB of RAM losing Airport Extreme connectivity, I didn’t realise this was something in regards to the software provided with the iBook itself (10.4.2 afaik). I just popped 10.4 on it (from the ADC seed) and it seemed to work well – doing the massive 10.4.3 update now. Funnily enough, 10.4 itself doesn’t support the trackpad driver *grin*.

Hey, look at /var/log/windowserver.log. There goes my apple+tabbing actions. Thats ok, Fedora will have none of that rubbish. Rawhide on the iBook g4 (ginny) is going well. It installed fine, but I did notice a quirk: the trackpad starts working when firstboot hits, but it doesn’t work at all during the install – so for that I used the Mighty Mouse. Multiple file contexts bug should be fixed with the next SELinux update.

Plague (our Fedora Extras buildsystem) now not only supports postgres/sqlite, it also does MySQL.

I tried using Mail.app for IMAP today. Its a massive failure, though from the folk that use it, they seem to love it. Long live Evolution or Thunderbird, right? Why did it fail in my eyes? It listed everything in ~/ by default – so it started indexing a lot of things I didn’t want it to. That didn’t please me at all.

Livna (rpm.livna.org) is down. It’ll probably only be back up this weekend. Machine was to be fsck’ed, but it never came back up alive again. AFAIK, mpackage should be down to. I know there’s a lot of folk asking questions about that, and its coming… If we set build system to be that of livna, that takes away a lot of our problems.

However, all’s not lost. As root, do:

rpm -Uvh livna-release.rpm

Well, you can also use sudo (what I’d recommend, but isn’t setup by default). If you want, backup /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo first. Download it from: http://livna.org/~anvil/livna-release.rpm.

In other interesting news, Alex Maier is clearly good at what she does, and she’s now Marketing lead. I’ve dropped down to co-Lead. The Community Marketing Contact theme from OpenOffice.org has been relaunched as the Fedora Ambassadors. This is greatly good news for me, as attending meetings regularly, and giving good amounts of time for the success of this project, as a lead, I think I was holding the project back. I hope to do the tasks I’m assigned to, and feel at ease (well, more at ease) by being a co-Lead.

I’ve been so behind on lists, that when I finally did catch up, I found some amazingly bad news. Terry Teague, longtime OpenOffice.org Mac OS X contributor, has passed on. I met him at WWDC’04, and it was great talking to him. Little did I know he worked for Apple but kept it quiet online, till I met him, doing all sorts of amazing hardware related testing (he tends to write the Apple Hardware Test stuff you see on Disc 1 of some of your Macs). Showed me some cool things you could do, all on a floor! Didn’t get a chance to catch him at WWDC’05 this year, as he didn’t rock up, but in passing, we’re going to miss you mate.

Update: There’s a great eulogy to Terry. And his brother left a comment on this blog, mentioning if there were nice words, etc. it could be forwarded along to his e-mail address.

Proprietary software always sucks. This time its the Cisco VPN client. It refuses to compile on FC-4 with all updates applied (I even tried on the newer acpi-is-busted kernel). It probably won’t work on rawhide, but that’s not what my laptop has. Monash’s VPN doesn’t work with vpnc from Extras either, so no NetworkManager-vpnc goodness for me.

Then I try the OS X version. And lo and behold, I read that it destroys /opt where DarwinPorts tends to live. In fact, thats not the only damage that it does: it symlinks var to private/var and tmp to private/tmp. Don’t even think of moving var, as err, you’ll slowly realise your sudo options don’t work. Apple+S into single user mode, then mount -uw /, to recreate the var symlink. Bad cisco, bad 4.7.00.0510 release.

Anyone think the following is hazardous?

lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  11 Sep 26 21:28 /tmp@ -> private/tmp
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  11 Sep 28 01:29 /var@ -> private/var

And should I be changing it (in single user mode, none the less)?

I refuse to have my Xorg run at 16-bit depth, so, here’s a better way of running Maemo, rather than the prescribed Xnest method. Install vncviewer and vnc-server, then:

1. Xvnc -geometry 800x480 -dpi 72 -ac :2 -depth 16 -rfbauth ~/.vnc/passwd & – this creates an Xvnc server with size 800×480 (to fit Maemo), with a DPI of 72 (you may want 96, but it seems rather large). This creates it on display :2 with a 16-bit depth, and the password file to be read is in ~/.vnc/passwd.
2. Create a VNC password, by using vncpasswd
3. Then, type vncviewer :2, enter the password, and you’ll have a window appear. Now in scratchbox, just type af-sb-init.sh start. Make sure you already ran export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:2 in scratchbox as well.

On Fedora Core 4, remember, you want to echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/vdso as well, to ensure scratchbox will even start. The tutorial is incorrect in terms of telling you where to get maemopad – grab it from http://repository.maemo.org/stable/1.0/applications/maemopad/.

Maemo on FC-4; changing the input method

Interesting reading is the interview with Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. Debian’s packaging format was the only thing chosen, as the kernels come from upstream kernel.org. Last little Maemo tip is that if you don’t want to use the keyboard, better switch input methods to the X input method, and this will allow you to actually type text in (rather than tapping on the online keyboard).

• So m-commerce must’ve really taken off. Today, I made a purchase from a WAP site on my mobile, using my credit card details, and then having an item I ordered delivered. All without a computer, mind you.
• I started jhbuilding GNOME again. On a fairly standard FC-4 system (workstation install), you need: docbook-utils-pdf, howl-devel. It has a spiffy notification area icon now. audiofile wouldn’t get installed (host not found) – so manual fixing. mozilla wouldn’t build. The jhbuild dependencies is a mighty useful page – if time permits, maybe something like the comprehensive jhbuildonubuntu ought to be written for Fedora.
• Spent some time with the FUDCon II folk, aka, the FESCO meeting #2. SkypeOut seems to have served well for the three hours, because I got to do these things handsfree. And it didn’t cost a bomb. While sitting on it, I decided we needed to communicate (well, this was a goal from FESCO physical meeting #1), so I present Extras Steering Committee. We have meeting minutes that are public there now. And its been announced. Good talk about how package process works (the arch stuff came up, and more stringent ExclusiveArch goodness and Bugzilla tying ins). What we can package/ship also came up, and I’m sure the minutes and stuff that comes out of it will be interesting.
• < |Jef|> he clearly doesnt understand that Red Hat is the catholic church of distributions… every year its congregation splinters in yet another reformation – how true. You can splinter, but you can never leave us.