Colin Charles Agenda

Today, I completed my migration of my personal machine to one that runs OS X. For those not following Twitter, I picked up a MacBook Air last week, and have slowly been moving my stuff off from the Dell. The Dell can now serve as a full development machine, and I can start running “unstable” Linuxes on it now (“unstable” like Rawhide).

But I digress. This is about how I moved Thunderbird and Firefox over to my new box.

Thunderbird:
Copy ~/.thunderbird over, and place it in ~/Library/Thunderbird on OS X. Only problem I found was with the Lightning plugin, which managed to grab itself an update, and all was dandy.

Firefox:
Copy ~/.mozilla/firefox over, and place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. All the plugins I had, just ran fine.

Only snag? I couldn’t find a copy of Firefox 2 online. Good thing I had a copy on another Mac… Why did I need Firefox 2? Google Browser Sync. Though I suspect that in the very near future, I’ll move over to Mozilla Weave, and get all my systems up to speed with Firefox 3.

Next up, lets see how long I run OS X on the Air… or do I replace it with Linux if it annoys me significantly enough?

First up, I want to say, I’m truly impressed with Brazil. One day I will visit this amazing place, and spread the good word of open source with projects that are close to my heart: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and in due time, a lot more. This is a live-blog, from a most interesting talk, at JavaOne 2008. As I wrote on Twitter, “Brazil, simply impresses me. Their use of open source in government, makes me think that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them”.

Free and Open Source Software: Use and Production by the Brazilian Government
Rogerio Santana <rogerio.santanna@planejamento.gov.br> +55 61 313 1400, Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat
Planning, Budget and Management Ministry
Brazilian Government

Households with Internet access: 70% in the US4k household income range. 70% of households have mobile phones (even when total revenue is USD$2k). Middle and upper class are all, generally on the Internet.

In 2007, 98% of Income Tax has been sent by the Internet. By 2009, there’s only going to be use of a Java application for this. About 17.5 million people filed via the Internet. Impressive.

Brazil has 142k public schools – 26k are connected to the Internet now (18%), and 92% are connected at low speed, while 8% have 512kbps connections.

Plan? Free Internet for schools, from 2008-2025. 1mbps for each connection, growth plans in the next 3 years.

There exists Computer Reconditioning Centres (CRCs) for recycling PCs.

www.eping.e.gov.br (e-PING: e-Government Interoperability Standards)
www.governoelectronico.gov.br (e-MAG: e-Government Accessibility Model)

Brazil has been using electronic voting since 1995. 136.8 million people voted in 2006 election. Next version of vote machines will use GNU/Linux!

Open Standards. Interoperability. Free Software. Free License. Community.

e-PING: uses XML, browser compliant, they have metadata standards

Many organisations of the Brazilian Government use Java as a primary development platform. Remember, Java is important because its the first that allowed even Linux users to interact with government applications.

Brazilian Digital Television? Middle-ware responsible for the interactive process of digital TV also developed in Java. (Ginga is the name of the application).

In education? Enrolment is done via the Internet for universities. e-Proinfo is an e-learning project that has already trained 50k students.

Developing clusters and grids, with focus on high availability, load balancing, database replication, distributed mass storage, and virtualization. The government is backing this, since 2006.

In an interesting twist (interesting for Microsoft and their OOXML apologists), about a month ago, MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008. This made its round around news sites, and everyone was naturally talking about it.

Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!

As a current Malaysian tax payer, I wouldn’t want the government misappropriating money, on proprietary software.

One interesting bit from that? OpenOffice.org being taught in matriculation colleges (11 currently), as lecturers are trained to deliver it to their students. It all starts in schools, though, but this is much better than what was previously around.

Go OpenOffice.org! Go ODF!

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, odf, mampu, migration

I took the opportunity today evening to get myself upgraded (from 4.5.3_GA_733) to the latest (5.0.0_GA_1869) open source version of Zimbra – ZCS 5.0 GA. The database migration took about the longest, mainly due to some schema changes. Lots of starts and stops to the database. Its now running MySQL 5.0.45 Community.

What prompted the upgrade? A few days ago, I got a bunch of new packages, and rebooted the server (new kernel). To my dismay, Zimbra started to have issues – amavisd wouldn’t start. This meant that there was a large amount of mail, sitting in the queue, not being delivered. Things you don’t normally check for, immediately, anyway.

Turns out Compress::Zlib was too old. Well, not the system provided Compress::Zlib, but the Zimbra provided Compress::Zlib. Kind of annoying when there are two packages of software, sitting on your system, right? However, the benefits of having an easy-to-administer and use mail system, somehow I think outstrips all the pain associated.

I found the web interface in ZCS 4.5.3 to be a bit limited, even when logged in as an administrator. There was absolutely no way to restart, failed services. For this, I actually needed to login via SSH, and use zmcontrol. Running SSH on a non-standard port, and not having your laptop nearby (or remembering the non-standard port) can allow you to have some fun :)

So after fixing ZCS 4.5.3, and realising that it had some gaping holes, I decided to upgrade. The upgrade process went on pretty smoothly, till I saw:
Updating from 5.0.0_RC3
5 is only avaliable with the XS version at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/IO/Socket/SSL.pm line 30
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/IO/Socket/SSL.pm line 30, <DBCONFIG> line 21.
Compilation failed in require at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/Net/LDAP.pm line 970, <DBCONFIG> line 21.

This has largely got to do with the RHEL4 supplied Perl, as referenced by zimbra bug #22466. However, it seems that it was fixed in 5.0.0_GA_1809. Problem still seems to be around in 5.0.0_GA_1869. Verified that it existed – /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm (and was newer than the version on the system). Verified that Zimbra saw it too – check out .bashrc in /opt/zimbra (the home directory for the zimbra user) for the various PATHs that Zimbra sees/requires. However, I was running this install, not as the zimbra user, so the Perl PATHs had to be specified.

Specifying the Perl PATH, also didn’t help. The forums mentioned just installing from cpan, Scalar::Util and letting the install progress. It still failed.

I thought I’d try a clean install. By golly, it failed on RHEL4. An upgrade of a clean install from ZCS 4.5.10 also failed. I’m almost convinced that Zimbra spent very little time QA’ing ZCS on RHEL4. Sure, RHEL5 probably works a charm, but the drive of enterprise software is not upgrading the OS too often. This is where I can so see, FreeBSD succeeding – pity there isn’t an official Zimbra/FreeBSD port.

For fun reading, check out their forums: [SOLVED] Big Fubar on 5 FOSS GA Upgrade (how was it solved?), Upgrade 4.5.7 -> 5.0 GA Failed, centos4 upgrade to 5.0 errors. I’m sure this magical list can go on and on. All purported solutions generally, do not work.

Moral of the story? Even with backups, don’t try upgrading Zimbra on a production box. Be prepared to cry, a lot.

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, zcs5, qa, ga, upgrades

Today, I had a problem. I’d been used to doing rpm -q --changelog <packagename> and generally piping that through less. I sat at a Ubuntu terminal, and wondered how to do this. Poring through the man pages for apt-get or even dpkg, proved worthless. So, I hopped on to #ubuntu on Freenode, to have a rather enlightening conversation:

Oct 11 10:11:37 <ccharles>      hi! does anyone here know the dpkg/apt equivalent to rpm -q --changelog ?
Oct 11 10:12:10 <Pelo>  ccharles, man apt and man dpkg see what it says
Oct 11 10:12:46 <ccharles>      Pelo: you'd think i had already tried that, and failed, which is why i came here

At which point, I’m wondering what the clue-level of the channel is. So I hop onto #luv, the channel for my local LUG, and ask there. Not long after, I post this back on #ubuntu:

Oct 11 10:34:19 <ccharles>      pelo: the correct answer next time, is apt-listchanges, or even zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz or if you have internet access, aptitude changelog <packagename> (with thanks to cafuego for telling me)

I remember in my active Fedora days, we used to refer to #fedora as a bit of a wasteland, largely populated by meat-heads. However, it was also the primary contact point for non-meat-heads, for a non-development question. And a lot of folk on #fedora-devel never ever joined #fedora. This is probably largely the same with #ubuntu/#ubuntu-devel. This creates a disconnect within the community.

rpm -q –changelog equivalents on Debian

• apt-listchanges is written by an Ubuntite (is that what they’re called?), and requires installing. It also requires access to the package .deb, which seemed counter-intuitive.
• aptitude changelog <packagename> – useful, but seems redundant. It connects to the Internet to fetch this data for you, chewing up your bandwidth, and requiring you to have Internet access
• zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz – the winner, quite clearly. No Internet access required, it pulls directly off your disk, and its all in less

However, RPM still seems to shine quite this bit more, in comparison. Maybe someone wants to update the Switching to Ubuntu From Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora guide.

Technorati Tags: fedora, ubuntu, rpm, dpkg, apt, changelog, apt-listchanges, aptitude, irc, community

An Ubuntu-on-my-main-desktop virgin. Or more accurately, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 on a Dell Inspiron 640m laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB RAM, 120GB disk). hermione is no longer a Fedora Core machine, its all Ubuntu now.

Getting The Software
A few weeks ago, I’m pretty sure they offered PowerPC downloads that failed if you tried it for Feisty, but succeeded for Dapper. This week, they’ve cleaned up the download site, and I obviously chose 64-bit AMD and Intel computers (hello, thats what a Core 2 Duo is, right?).

The Ubuntu Download Page

First Impressions
Everything just works. Right out of the box, from the time the Live CD was inserted, to the install process, and the after-install process. It warned me of using Restricted Drivers for my wireless card (ipw3945), and that’s the only real violation I’ve got. Volume control buttons just work, as do brightness control.

After installation however, I got a 1024×768 screen, which displayed on 1440×900 looks kind of ugly. Solved easily via: sudo apt-get install 915resolution. Thats it, I didn’t have to do any more magic, beyond that.

Suspend/resume work just fine. The external display works (so far, I’ve only just used mirrored mode but there’s no reason to think stretching the desktop will not work – how GNOME copes is another matter).

Applications
I like that Firefox 2 is shipped by default. My configuration moved from Firefox 1.5 with no apparent problems. Ubuntu however has decided to disable the backspace key for going back in the history, which seemed to be quite annoying. This is apparently an upstream bug, however for tracking purposes its #60995. This is easily fix-able by opening a browser window, entering about:config and in the search bar looking for browser.backspace_action. Change the value from 1, to 0, and all will be well. Read more about browser.backspace_action if you’d like.

I think the mirror selection based on your country for apt is actually the most sensible solution, as opposed to yum’s mirrorlist. Why? Because contacting various mirrors is silly, some stop working, some don’t feed you correctly, and so forth. Worse, you might get assigned to a bogged down mirror. Ironically, au.archive.ubuntu.com is really mirror.optus.net (i.e. really fast for me) – yum has never once picked this for me automatically.

Playing DVDs? Need MP3 support so the Rhythmbox playlists load up? Their Restricted Formats page on the wiki is amazing. I never expect support out of the box (I wonder why some people rant that Ubuntu is evil as it ships these things by default) but I do expect support to be relatively easy to get. Go Medibuntu (this is the Livna of Ubuntu).

Thoughts For Improvement
Definitely, the migration assistant shouldn’t only attempt to migrate you from Windows. Its much easier doing a migration from /home/username on an existing Linux or Unix install. Sure, its probably not the mass market doing migrations from one distribution to another, but I see it as quite possible that more and more folk move to Ubuntu for ease of use, and the “just works” mentality.

A personal preference is that I don’t like the Human theme. The color scheme seems to be all wrong. Clearlooks is much nicer on the eyes, and I’ve found a Flickr photo that I took to be more interesting on my background (first time I’ve used the image, might I add). Fedora’s backgrounds are really, so much nicer. Canonical is hiring a UI Developer.

Note: This was supposed to be posted a couple of weeks back… It for some reason sat in my ScribeFire (formerly Performancing) notes pile.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, feisty fawn, migration, ui, medibuntu