This is the first in hopefully a series of reviews of packages released into Mandriva /Backports. /Backports is a way to get the latest releases of RPMs from Mandriva without waiting for the next official release. Mandriva Club Monkey Adam Williamson suggested that in order to get familiar with the backports system, I should sign up to the Mandriva ChangeLog mailing list and filter the deluge for 2008.1 and backports. I was a little overwhelmed at first when I got over 124 announcements of main and contrib backport packages in just the first day!!! Amost all of these were plug-ins for vdr, a video disk recording program, however, and traffic since then has been quite a bit lighter. In any case, I’ll just be reviewing a few packages at a time.

First up is is something called midori, a GTK-based browser from Germany. Midori was recently rebuilt with WebKitGtk, hence the reason for it showing up in /Backports.

Gmail is the web site I visit the most while at home, so that was the first test. I launch it from a terminal, but after logging into gmail, the following message appears in the terminal and then the screen goes blank. Reloading the page results in the same behavior.


(midori:10490): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkXtBin to a container of type MidoriWebView, but the widget is already inside a container of type MidoriWebView, the GTK+ FAQ at http://www.gtk.org/faq/ explains how to reparent a widget.

Midori has problems with Facebook as well, crashing on the FunWall application. Ok, so it won’t be replacing konqueror on my laptop any time soon, but to be fair, konqueror has trouble with Facebook, too.

Next is mozilla-sunbird, a calendaring application which appears to not have been released in 2008.1. Holy crap, 17MB… and when I launch it, I get a pop-up stating

Sunbird could not install this item because of a failure in Chrome
Registration. Please contact the author about this problem.

This doesn’t seem to be a real problem as sunbird continues to launch, and I’m soon presented with a rather complex-looking calendaring application. I found that it is pretty easy to access remote calendars, and pretty soon I have it displaying my google calendar. I don’t see a way for kontact to do this, so this is kind of cool. So if you’re into calendaring applications (I’m not…), this could be useful.

Next is ntfs-3g, the read-write driver for NTFS systems. I dual boot with Mac OS X, not windows, so this isn’t terribly useful to me personally, but it should be for those who are (ahem) forced to co-exist with windows. About the only thing I did with it was to format my USB thumb drive to the NTFS filesystem (which actually used the ntfs-progs package instead), mount the drive, and save some files to it.

According to the ntfs-3g website, this release has some important bug fixes and the upgrade is strongly recommended. According to the ChangeLog, an update following the official MDV 2008.1 release obsoleted the libntfs-3g package… perhaps this is why its in /Backports rather than updates?

Next is gpodder, a podcast “receiver/catcher” written in Python. This application wasn’t on my PowerPack installation DVD. I test it by subscribing to the podcast of the best show on TV, Battlestar Galactica. Downloading the commentary for the first episode of the 4th season causes totem to launch, but subsequent pop-up informs me that some necessary codecs must be downloaded from one of three repositories, “Fluendo” (which I know nothing about), “Plf,” or “Mandrivalinux”. I choose Mandrivalinux, a couple of gstreamer codecs get installed, and the commentary starts. Not too shabby, but amarok is a tough competitor in this area.

Lastly, backports of KDE 4.0.4 are starting to trickle in. As of the moment, only kdebase4-runtime, kdepimlibs4, and kdelibs4 have come in for the 4.0.4 release, so I’ll wait at least until kde4-konqueror makes its debut. Getting KDE 4.x updates is something that makes /Backports something of enormous interest to me. The KDE 4.0.3 rpms for 2008.1 aren’t quite useable for me yet, and source compiling via SVN takes up about 7-8 GB onto my already-crowded disk. Tune in next week to see what comes of this…