Unless X crashes a few more times in less than a week or so, I’ll stay with CentOS 5.3: I am too bored and unmotivated to proceed to any major switch. I am nevertheless trying to overcome my nausea and to «prepare for the (dark) future (of the operating systems)»…

XFCE 4.6.1 is boring (not a surprise, as I am already bored by default). And the daily builds of Xubuntu Karmic are still full of bugs. Nothing major, yet very annoying.

Surprisingly, Kubuntu’s daily builds are better. What I’ve tested had still KDE 4.3.0, not 4.3.1, but I couldn’t see any major breakages—ignoring, of course, the «broken usability by design» of KDE4. I can’t see why the fans of KDE4 say that Kubuntu is the worst incarnation of it. Maybe it was so before Karmic, eh?

I noticed that Karmic offers me to install the Broadcom STA driver which, frankly, works perfectly with BCM 4311… even in Kubuntu!

Here’s a nice idea: to use KDE 3.5.10 from Slackware 12.2 with Slackware 13.0.

How can they say the Linux kernel is mature, when they constantly invent new scheduling algorithms? Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler. Not to mention that you normally have to recompile the kernel with different configuration options (maybe this is why the desktop-optimized sidux kernels are much more responsive than the server-optimized Debian kernels), whereas in Windows this is a runtime-option (to optimize for applications or for services). Anyone knowing the situation in the BSD land?

I took some time to evaluate the usability of… Windows 7 Home Premium. Was it because I’ve enabled the automatic updates, or why was it able to automatically support my PC’s audio card? Windows 7 Ultimate needed me to feed it with a driver. Still, the XP version of the old ATI Radeon 9200 was mandatory.

I still don’t know which one is the least usable: Windows 7, or KDE4? One thing I found annoying in Windows 7 (except for the Vista-style Explorer) was the absence of the Quick Launch toolbar. Yeah, I know you can “pin” applications, but this is sheer idiocy: I don’t need Microsoft to tell me what I want, the same way I don’t expect the KDE team to know better than me my usability preferences. As a matter of fact, I’ve found in no time plenty of complaints on the missing Quick Launch toolbar, some of them with solutions (apparently not all the solutions are working with the RTM): #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, etc.

Ouch, they improved the file search, but… the sales of Advil will increase after October 22, as the MS-DOS style wildcards (*, ?) don’t work anymore as expected! Oh boy, how much happier I was in the times of MS-DOS, when there was no Internet and no glamor-only GUI design…

I’ve discover an official Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day Trial download. Caveat: «The 90-day Trial is the full working version of the Windows 7 Enterprise, the version most of you will be working with in your corporate environment. It will not require a product key (it is embedded with the download). After the 90-day Trial expires, if you wish to continue to use Windows 7 Enterprise, please note that you will be required to purchase and perform a clean installation of Windows 7, including drivers and applications. Please keep this in mind; Windows 7 Enterprise is not available through retail channels.»

P.S.: I forgot to mention that RHEL 5.4 was released.

Have you ever encountered the situation where you open an ISO image with FileRoller (or you mount it with Nautilus), only to see a fake readme file saying this?

This disc contains a “UDF” file system and requires an operating system that supports the ISO-13346 “UDF” file system specification.

Fsck. Not only I encountered this in CentOS 5.3, but it seems that even the latest GNOME from the all-mighty Ubuntu is dumb, so you have to mount the ISO file manually, or to use handcrafted scripts. Unless you mount the file manually, the cretinoids who developed the marvelous open-source stuff thought you must be wanting to mount ISO9660 and nothing else! Duh…

Now, say I mounted the ISO by hand. How the fsck can I edit it in Linux, e.g. to remove, rename or edit a few files? It’s freaking bootable and it must keep being so, I can’t just copy the files elsewhere!

Not even the “powerful” K3b can help: with ISO files, it can only burn, not edit them. And no, the “magical” IsoMaster is of no use: once I open the bloody ISO file…

This disc contains a “UDF” file system and requires an operating system that supports the ISO-13346 “UDF” file system specification.

Fsck. Useless. (Try it yourself.)

Oh, what was that “special” ISO file? A DVD image. Say… umm… err… uh… something like Windows 7, yup. What, can’t I try it? I just wanted to rename the file ei.cfg before burning it, so I could get a menu allowing me to select which version to install (specifically, I wanted Home Premium).

But Linux is too dumb for that.

UPDATE: Oh, it looks like I could use mkisofs to regenerate a modified ISO! Would it work with a Windows 7 boot image too?! Would the DVD work as expected?

REUPDATE: As per here, I tried to recreate an ISO from the mounted directory something like this:

mkisofs -b "boot/etfsboot.com" -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 8 \
-iso-level 4 -allow-lowercase -J -l -D -N -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames \
-V "GRMCULFREO_EN_DVD" -o ../win7.iso .

…but the resulting image was not bootable (”Couldn’t find BOOTMGR”)! Strange thing, the reconstructed image was “not UDF enough”, because ISO Master was able to fully load it!

Anyone aware of the usefulness of GreenSQL, which is «an Open Source database firewall used to protect databases from SQL injection attacks»?

I see they have packages for pretty much everything, including CentOS 5.

Oh, and  someone should have told this guy to use “yum localinstall --nogpgcheck” instead of “rpm -i”.

The first device is used as an Access Point to extend the existing wired home network:

Then a second identical device is used as a wireless adapter connected to a wired Ethernet port (and powered through USB this time):
» Read more…

The most suicidal of all is Yahoo’s decision to use Microsoft’s search engine! This is more than suicide, this is sheer idiocy! Bing sucks hugely, whereas Yahoo’s own search engine is reasonably good. UPDATE: Also on CNN money.

The second decision is less suicidal. In a clumsy attempt to become more appealing, Debian has decided to go for a time-based freeze, but not quite for a time-based release, as some people wrongly understood it! Releasing a new version 6 months after the freezing is not guaranteed. If it’s not guaranteed, then one still can’t do any planning with regards to Debian. But then…
» Read more…

Obviously, it may have a few missing dependencies for those who don’t use any other non-official repository, but don’t worry: the packages are somewhere on my laptop, just let me know and I’ll fix the issues this weekend.

Otherwise, the relaunched Odiecolon.repo is meant to be used as an independent repo, that is without EPEL, without RPMforge, without RPM Fusion. I hope it’s still compatible with EPEL, but I have now stopped using EPEL. Yup.

I am particularly interested in bug/conflict/“RPM hell” or success reports for:

• clean installations of CentOS 5.3, Scientific Linux 5.3, StartCom-AS 5.0.3, with the latest updates applied;
• systems that have used one or more of EPEL, RPMforge, RPM Fusion in the past and that have performed the indicated or other reasonable steps to clean the non-official packages, yet they experience some kind of inconveniencies with Odiecolon.repo v2;
• systems that use other 3rd-party repos (other than ElRepo and Adobe’s).

I lack testing machines, and I don’t use virtual machines, so if you run into trouble, you know why this happens. Don’t shoot the piano player…

…because the bloody gnome-terminal doesn’t seem to have anything close in functionality to Konsole’s “Save History As…”, and I need to make some analysis on the huge output issued by rpmbuild with slightly different SPEC files.

And there is no way I could select all the text in the history. Clearly a case of underdevelopped application. They “needed” to add all kind of crap in GNOME, yet they can’t have a proper terminal application…

Morons. Maybe, after all, KDE is the future. Unfortunately, this means KDE4. Dammit.

Yes, it does. It’s stupid not because it’s impossible to have it built for CentOS 5.3, but for the design decisions that were taken between version 0.9.9a and 1.0.0, in only 3 months (0.9.9a was released on 2009-Apr-04, and 1.0.0 on 2009-Jul-07).

At some unknown point in their history, they decided that the crash of the VLC Mozilla plugin is glibc’s fault, and that glibc versions between 2.5 and 2.7 should be banned from building the plugin. That’s fine with me, because I prefer mplayerplug-in for Firefox, but still… doesn’t this sound like VLC has too arrogant developers?

Then somewhere, out of the blue, they decided to update the Qt requirements from 4.2 to 4.3.0 (EL5 has 4.2.1). Now, no matter you’re building from the Makefile or from the spec file, you can hack this, and you can patch the various files that check for Qt >= 4.3.0. (You should also delete the first line from some UI files, as Qt Designer 4.2.1 isn’t happy to see it.)

But then… ouch, it indeed needs Qt >= 4.3.0, because the morons have decided, somewhere between version 0.9.9a and 1.0.0, to make use of Qt::BlockingQueuedConnection, which is indeed introduced with Qt 4.3!

Morons. So no, VLC 1.0.0 can’t be built for (clones of) EL5, no matter what you try.

Only a complete asshole would introduce such a major incompatibility with such a small version number incrementing, from 0.9.9a to 1.0.0.

P.S.: Of course, this is not the only thing that frustrates me with EL5. Another one is that I can’t build RedNotebook, because it requires pygtk >= 2.12.1, and EL5 only has 2.10.1. Scheiße!

• The bloody moron is now… two morons! Bryce Harrington has used the defective cells of his brain to declare with regards to the infamous Intel bug in Jaunty: “I think we can close this one now.  The issue is largely resolved in Karmic, and the commentary on this bug seems to have degenerated past usefulness.  Other bug reports are tracking kernel patches and other fixes proposed for Jaunty.” The shithead seems to be unable to understand that the bugs keeps being valid in Jaunty as long as there is no official fix for Jaunty, and the current release is Jaunty! “Largely resolved in Karmic” is a supreme arrogance.
• OK, I should really take into consideration ElRepo, once back home. I’m not familiar with the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) concept, and I don’t even want to understand it, but commander Dag has been very persuasive in providing a raison d’être of ElRepo: using kmod instead makes it much more convenient for the end user!
• It looks like Rahul has noticed Odiecolon.repo, and there is a short thread on epel-devel-list. I must find some time to explain them “the whys” and we’ll see then…
• I really tried Sugar on a Stick. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t find anything that could be beneficial to the kids, nor I could consider it as a brilliant design of anything. On the contrary, it only confirmed my preconception that Sugar is 100% shit and a waste of time and resources.
• That was a funny one, although constantly “innovating” (read: moving to some other place) the keyboard’s keys annoys me: Who moved my ‘Delete’ key? Lenovo did. Here’s why. So they made ESC and DEL huge. Now what?

Last night, I enjoyed the nice feeling of using simple, already “obsolete” technology—that is, CentOS 5.3 on my laptop. My antiquated scanner Genius ColorPage Vivid4 still works very well, and I only needed to add a small firmware blob, the same way I was doing it in the past with SuSE and with Debian.

Scanning with Xsane was faster than scanning in Windows. I don’t know why. Small operations on the resulting images were accomplished faster in gThumb than in GIMP. OpenOffice.org 2.3 worked very well, despite being “obsolete”. And it even generated a surprisingly small PDF from the final 100 MB document. Amazing. And fast. Nothing crashed. At all.

And I’ve only used the Web browser to check my Yahoo mail, to read a page on Wikipedia and two blogs, then I used gFTP to SFTP the lazy way.

Was it too much technology?

Urs Beyerle has created an updated and improved version of the Scientific Linux 5.3 “mini” LiveCD. As usual, it features the lightweight IceWM, and a number of SL-specific features, including the non-standard (not Anaconda) LiveCD installer, as livecd-install and livecd-install-gui.
» Read more…

Dear Lazyweb, how can I debug something when the bloody GNOME is so poorly documented? With a particular icon theme, the “trash full” icon is different between the desktop Trash icon and the panel Trash applet, despite the “trash empty” icon being the same! Not only I don’t know how does GNOME fall back to an icon from a different theme when a specific icon is unavailable for a specific size, but I don’t even know what is the icon to look for:

• gnome-fs-trash-full.png (and .svg)
• gnome-stock-trash-full.png (and .svg)
• stock_trash_full.png (and .svg)
• trashcan_full.png (and .svg)
• user-trash-full.png (and .svg)

In Tango, all the previously mentioned icons look the same! How do I sort out this mess? Where to look for “who’s using what icon”?!

I’ve just installed CentOS 5.3 (network install, it took more than an hour), and I still don’t feel like looking around for the missing “desktop packages” I need. After all, RHEL (the Client packages) has fewer packages than SLED, not to mention that SLED11 has much newer packages than RHEL5, and SLED even comes with Brasero 0.8.3…

As I am not in the mood of enabling several 3rd-party repos to search for packages, I’ve made a quick and dirty online tool: I’ve collected a frozen-in-time list of packages available in a number of repos, and a page to grep in the list, here.

This way, I could find quickly where I can find something like: meld, kdiff3, brasero, graveman, vlc, mplayer, gxine, fuse, gtk-qt, murrine, even sudoku.

The results are not very encouraging IMHO.
» Read more…

These are the recent bits of the story on how I couldn’t yet have on my Acer TravelMate a Linux distro (or any other OS) I am satisfied with.

The previous episode ended where I wasn’t happy with the horrendous Intel video performance in Ubuntu Jaunty, nor was the downgrade to the version 2.4 of the driver acceptable — I had a fatal crash once, while version 2.2 of the driver never crashed.

Obviously, the developers of the Intel video drivers should be skinned alive, because they simply ruined newer X.Org distributions:

• They screwed the EXA (and the older XAA) support in newer versions of the driver.
• By moving parts of the driver in the kernel, they made decent performance dependent of the latest commits in the newest kernels, thus severely affecting Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 11, Mandriva 2009.1, openSUSE Factory.
• They don’t intend to fix EXA, instead they discontinue it by moving exclusively to UXA, which is currently as broken as KDE 4.0.0 was.
• In short, the the developers of the Intel video drivers for X.Org are simply ruining people’s confidence in Linux (or everything non-Windows and non-Mac), especially knowing that business laptops don’t need fancy Nvidia chipsets, but rather cheap Intel ones.

As an interim conclusion, relying on LTS/Enterprise distros should fix the issue, as they feature older (and working!) versions of the Intel video driver.

Now, for practical reasons I won’t recount the things in the exact order they happened.
» Read more…

Mon premier sort le 11 juin, mon deuxième se lit plus facilement que votre facture télécom, mon troisième s’adresse à tous, et mon tout est un bouquin qui vous guide dans votre prochaine aventure avec… non, pas avec Ubuntu, mais avec… CentOS 5.3 !

« Linux aux petits oignons », par Niki Kovacs alias Kiki Novak, chez Eyrolles, sur Amazon.fr et dans les bonnes librairies. Plus de 500 de pages pour vous faire comprendre et apprendre qu’il faut cesser de rouler en Trabant (surprise) !

» Read more…

I always forget the mechanism of generating self-signed keys. Therefore, I’ll bookmark again something that could be of help at some point: OpenSUSE Linux: Creating Self-Signed SSL Certificates.

It normally works on other distros too. The important part for me is the second one: “Generate server.key That Won’t Prompt for Password.” I actually needed to generate certificates that don’t prompt for a password upon each reboot of the server, no matter how “unsecure” this might be considered by the paranoids. I have blogged about that mid-Sept. 2007: A Debian unstable horror story.

I have actually found even the cheatsheet I used at the time! Here it is:
» Read more…

Quite some time ago, I wrote The mess in the national keyboard layouts, which mostly complained about the various French and Romanian layouts and the way they evolved in newer GNOME releases (and newer X.Org releases as well, I suppose). French keyboards are undoubtedly a mess, and Romanian ones too, however I would not complain about “why there is a cedilla instead of a comma” or whatnot (see Red Hat Bug #450396), because what I actually use for reasons of maximum compatibility with the rest of the universe (XP boxes) is the “cedilla-comma mix” (şţ).

Now, as I am not a French, nor do I particularly like any of the French layouts, I rather use Compose and/or dead keys and a US International keyboard layout to get the queer characters. Now, things are getting more delicate than the uninformed would expect.

» Read more…

OK, given the ridiculous situation with the Intel video in Jaunty (the owners of some ATI cards complain too); given that they seem to have absolutely no intention to fix it in Jaunty, but only in Karmic (and it’ll take quite some time to reach jaunty-backports); given that Karmic announces disastrous regressions; given that Intel sucks big, and version 2.7 of the driver completely drops EXA and DRI for the sake of the unfinished UXA and DRI2; given that, in order to have something that works for more than a while in Linux, the only reasonable choice seems to be a long-time supported distro (such as a RHEL5 clone, or Debian, or… what? no, not 8.04 LTS!), because the morons who always keep everything to the latest version (this includes the rolling-release shit) only add fresh bugs and keep breaking whatever worked; given all this… where to escape from Ubuntu Jaunty for my Acer TravelMate 5310?

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.)