Mandriva Linux

now that kde team have finished the big break, kde3 is completly  moved to /opt and kde4 on / . The next steps are to finish to fix all conflicts ( for the migration 2008.0/2008.1 -> 2009.0 ) and to personalize a little our kde4 .

Testers you can now update your cooker and report bugs ( bugs = migration bugs because missing functionnality must go on upstream bugzilla ).

I spent 5 great days in Saint Petersburg this week!

This was my first visa and I was worried about the needed paperwork (insurance, hosting certificate, ...), and then the registration after arriving. Getting the visa was not easy as you need to go to the embassy on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday between 9:00 and 12:00 and spend some time there (queuing 3 times...). Then you can chose to get the visa as soon as it is ready (the same day) for 70 euros, or wait 7 days before picking it up and only pay 35 euros...

At the airport I was welcomed with huge queues for passport checks (I think I spent about 30 minutes there) and then by Ирнина which was better :)

Apart from usual buildings and museums (I admit I haven't visited some major ones), I visited a great bar/club on the first evening, which I enjoyed even if I had not slept the night before (We went there again the next day and it was much better :) ).

I can now pronounce most letters (not all) and often understand the word when it sounds like French or English (or other, like CYШИ for sushi) but reading letter by letter is so slow... And I can't manage to read anything hand written :(

I hope I'll have the opportunity to go there again!

Photos are already online!

This week’s TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, runit: Use runit to supervise Linux services. I can’t recommend runit highly enough, but ever since I started with qmail years ago and djb’s daemontools, supervised services have been a bit of a thing for me. Can’t live without them.

As a result, I’ve been putting a few packages into current contrib so that with Mandriva 2009 you’ll be able to (easily) run supervised services with my Annvix run scripts (using execline so there is an extremely small memory footprint).

Too bad Mandriva’s dietlibc is so broken that runit has to be built static with glibc, making it far larger than it should have to be. =(

Last week’s TechMail tip was Learn to use the openssl command-line program which goes into the use of… openssl… on the command-line. Stuff like generating hashes, doing general file encryption, etc.

Today I was upgrading my HTPC, which turned into a predictably painful experience. I’m upgrading from an Athlon XP 2500+ to a Pentium D 2180, adding a spiffy GeForce 9600GT, and three 500GB hard disks to form a RAID5 array.

So I get all the stuff home and realize the motherboard I bought only has two SATA ports, but I need four. D’oh. Back to the store (different one, actually) to pick up a PCI SATA controller card. SATA controller card doesn’t work. Double d’oh. Back to the original store to buy a DIFFERENT card. About to break screen when boot up with new card and find it reporting a PCI ID that does not exist. Fortunately, switching PCI slots makes it behave. Finally, all hardware is working. Frankly I think this combination of hardware is also teetering on the brink of my 380W power supply’s capabilities, but it seems to be holding up so far. So now the system is checking for bad blocks on the newly created RAID array. 1.5TB of bad block checks takes…a while. I’m estimating five hours at the moment…

Voilà une intéressante nouvelle : la Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring pourrait bénéficier prochainement du support de l’UDF 2.50 (aussi appelé format universel de disque). L’UDF est censé être le successeur du fameux ISO 9660, format tant utilisé pour graver les CD, mais comportant tant de limitations (qui sont partiellement comblées par les extensions : Joliet, El Torito et RockRidge).

L’UDF 2.5 permet notamment l’accès aux disques Blu-ray, impossible autrement. Il permet aussi la gravure au format UDF, qui offre un mécanisme de contrôle des erreurs et est plus économique en terme de place lorsque l’on effectue des sauvegardes.

Ce support sera disponible dans une prochaine version du noyau Mandriva-Turbolinux (et oui, maintenant, il est commun à ces deux distributions) : il s’appelera probablement “2.6.24.5-1mnb”, après avoir été testé par la communauté. D’ailleurs, si vous désirez le tester, on peut le trouver sur le site de Thomas Backlund (mais attention, ce noyau n’est pas supporté pour l’instant ! à vos risques et péril !).

L’excellentissime gestionnaire de bureau Xfce auquel je donnerais volontiers le surnom de “bureau qui a ce qu’il faut là où il faut” a le vent en poupe. Tant et si bien qu’une réelle communauté Xfce sévit désormais au sein de Mandriva et de Cooker. Et son travail est généralement apprécié, voire beaucoup apprécié.

Bon, tout cela pour déclarer que vous pouvez désormais télécharger une version One de Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring comprenant Xfce comme bureau. Il faut pour cela, aller dans le sous-répertoire correspondant à votre architecture, puis votre groupe de langue (pour le français, c’est “int”, pour les autres, la liste des langues est disponible sur la page wiki de la Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring).

Went with noah to see that Euro Disney thing and he seems to really enjoyed it. I am not a big fan of Eurodisney personally but the kid was so enjoying it. Last time i was there was like 11 years ago, things got way more expensive now  as well.