Suppose you’re from Egypt. You’re now back to winter time, but does your OS know about that? If not, and if you “fix” the wrong hour the wrong way, it’s like you’re on the wrong timezone, and this will affect your communication (e.g. e-mail). Heck, we’re in a globalized world!

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided the updated tzdata-2009k on August 17. Scientific Linux provided it the next day and, surprisingly, CentOS was this time even faster!

How about other major names? How about Debian, known for only pushing tzdata updates in debian-volatile? Well… we’re now 3 days after the timezone change in Egypt and the corresponding update, tzdata_2009l, is not in debian-volatile, but only in Debian testing and unstable! So no, Debian Lenny and Etch don’t have it, not even as a “volatile” update.

Slackware missed it too, in both 12.2 and current. Too bad.

Oh, did I mention how Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic got the Egypt timezone change with tzdata_2009i, and they now have even newer timezone files, to incorporate some more fixes?
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You might have noticed that I am so bored by the operating systems topics that I ignored almost everything that happened in the field lately. I am using CentOS 5.3 because I am too lazy and bored to use anything else. And, despite the good price, I don’t feel like using Windows 7 either, at least not in the foreseeable future. Not while I am in this mood.

Still…
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• From RHEA-2009:1214:
  

  Egypt starts winter time on August 21.

  I could say that this is a tzdata update which will be missed by most of the mainstream Linux distros (and Debian will only put it in debian-volatile, whereas Gentoo will ignore it altogether), but apart from that, isn’t it funny? Winter time to start in August!

• There is a thing called xfce4-stopwatch-plugin, just to add Vala to XFCE.

  Hmm. I am personally more interested in xfce4-timer-plugin, which is plain ugly. Nothing can beat KTeaTime!

• Although I hate the PBI technology — because this way you’ll end with dozens and dozens of duplicate libraries, and most of those duplicate libraries are… shared libraries by their format, but they’re not used the way they’re designed to be used —, I noticed that pbiDIR hosts interesting packages — latest or almost latest versions of major applications or utilities.

  Of course, PC-BSD is still FreeBSD — which has committers who called me a moron and it also has a questionable USB support —, but PC-BSD 7.1.1 looks reasonably interesting… for a KDE 4.2.4 thing. And I notice they even have a DVD version.

  Unfortunately, they don’t have a LiveCD/LiveDVD to play with, and… it looks like they include the screwed Intel video driver too! Pfff…

OK, I must be crazy for going back to Jaunty and the official packages, simply because reverting to the 2.4 version of the driver (which is not entirely official! it’s from a Personal Package Archive!) caused me once a fatal X crash that required a full reboot (X refuses to restart in an infinite loop after an Error in I830WaitLpRing()).

Here’s the irony of the “progress”, with glxgears (yeah, not a benchmark, but tell this to a Flash in full-screen, which is also not a benchmark, yet it flickers) and my Intel 945GM:

• Scientific Linux 5.3 (IceWM mini LiveCD), X.Org 7.1.1, Intel 2.2.0: 1085 FPS.
• CentOS 5.3 (LiveCD), X.Org 7.1.1, Intel 2.2.0: 1057 FPS.
• OpenSUSE 11.1 (LiveCD), X.Org 1.5.2, Intel 2.5.0: 1187 FPS.
• OpenSUSE Factory from mid-April (“Build0055”), X.Org 1.6.0, Intel 2.6.99, kernel 2.6.29-6: 179 FPS!
• Ubuntu 9.04 (installed), X.Org 1.6.0, Intel 2.6.3: 177 FPS!
• Jibbed (NetBSD 5.0 LiveCD), X.Org 1.4.2, Intel 2.4.0: 784 FPS.
• Paldo 1.18/stable (LiveCD), X.Org 1.6.1, Intel 2.7.0, kernel 2.6.29.4: 457 FPS.

Cute, eh? (No, I don’t know the equivalences between the X.Org “7.x.y” and “1.a.b” versions, and I will never know them.)

Uptime of this site? (It’s downtime, I know.) Yesterday, between the failures (EDT):

10:30:28 up 23:10, 0 users, load average: 81.07, 56.24, 31.90
10:59:59 up 23:39, 0 users, load average: 151.62, 165.46, 147.01

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