Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 31 Saturday, May 31 2008

It’s been a hectic week, so I’m reviewing just one package this time around, ipython. It’s an interactive shell alternative to the regular python shell. I had heard of it, but never really tried it out until now. It seems to be just as functional as the regular shell, but it also has a few extra features that one might find appealing. For me, tab-completion alone is reason enough to use it exclusively from now on for interactive work.

This backports release is just a minor rev to version 0.8.3, more evolutionary than revolutionary. The ipython homepage has the details, but said details just make me think I just don’t follow python developments as closely as I should (“twisted reactors???”).

Update: Just one day after posting this, the 0.8.4 update appeared in /Backports. The ipython homepage hasn’t been updated yet to show what’s in the new version, though.

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Cape Breton Wednesday, May 28 2008

Memorial Day always finds me in the most beautiful place on the planet, Cape Breton NS. I’m usually running the Cabot Trail Relay with the Maine-iacs (one of four teams based in Central Maine), but once again I was injured and couldn’t run. See Ouch for the reason… Once again the Maine-iacs dominated the event and won easily, but the Maine Road Hags (yes that is their team name) did pretty well, too.

After the last relay leg got underway, I took off for Halifax to visit some friends of mine, some fellow New Jersey ex-patriots. I have to say, I love living in Boston, but Halifax is enticing.

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 24 Tuesday, May 20 2008

Short /Backports article this time, I’m in Nova Scotia for the weekend.

pydb is a python debugger whose purpose seems to be to just look a lot more like gdb than the usual python debugger, pdb. I’m ok with my pdb skills, although it’s never been something I’ve been entirely comfortable with. But, I just so happen to have a python script in need of debugging, and since I’m fairly proficient with gdb, it was no problem at all to use pydb to get at the root of the problem.   The is something I can use.

Next up is a little gem called kde4-kgeography. I had never looked at this before, but I can tell you that I would have dearly loved to have this way back (W-A-A-A-Y back) when I was a kid. I used to spend hours pouring over maps, memorizing capitals and provinces and such, and this package would have been ideal for that.  I didn’t see a map for Russia, but a quick jaunt over to http://kgeography.berlios.de reveals that this is in SVN (along with a LOT of other maps in progress), so I think we can expect to see continued good things from the many contributers of kgeography. 

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 17 Saturday, May 17 2008

Since KDE 4.0.4 was announced on May 7, RPMs have been coming in fast and furious in /Backports. With over 100 installed already, I’ve decided to take the plunge and not go back to KDE 3.5.9 (the default KDE install in Mandrive 2008.1) unless there’s an absolute show stopper of some sort. And just to put this into context, pretty much my whole KDE point of view centers on how well konqueror performs.

The Mandriva changelog for the kde4-konqueror RPM only reveals the mere fact of the 4.0.4 update; the official KDE changelog shows one bugfix involving plugins and plenty of changes to khtml. That made me a little uneasy, because there’s no reference to the issue that stopped me from jumping into KDE 4.0.3, which was that when I fired up konqueror and tried to read Gmail, I got something like a “cookies are not enabled” message. Attempts to start the cookie handler service via Settings ==> Configure Konqueror failed.

Unfortunately, the issue persists in KDE 4.0.4, and I’m about ready to call it quits, as this is kind of a big deal. I know from past experience that this is an issue related to the KDE daemon kded, and eventually it occurred to me to just try to start it manually. Huh… kded is already running… I happened to look thru /opt/kde4/bin for some reason (/opt is where KDE4 RPMs get installed so they don’t trip over your KDE3 installation), and lo-and-behold-what-do-my-eyes-see but something called kded4. Could it be as simple as just starting that? … It is!!! Gmail and Facebook both load just fine now, and KDE4 passes it’s first big test. Kind of an odd thing, though, that konqueror cannot start kded4 by itself? It seems that kded4 is actually running when I first log in, but it dies sometime between then and when I try to point konqueror towards gmail. And why is the KDE 3.5.9 daemon running under KDE4 anyway?

For the rest of the roundup, I’m turning things over to Donald Stewart, with whom I’m tag-teaming the Mandriva /Backports Roundup. Take it away, Donald.

Xfce has got a picture app, which fits in with the lightweight nature of the
Ristretto is a fast and lightweight picture-viewer for the Xfce desktop environment. This is /contrib/backports.

Also for Xfce, Xfce-utils 4.4.2-18 is now availble for 2008.1 in /contrib/backports.

As for video, there is this useful application to add to the list:
themonospot is a simple application that can be used to scan an avi
file and extract some informations about audio and video data flow:

– Video codec used
– Frame size
– Average video bitrate
– File size
– Total time
– Frame rate
– Total frames
– Info data
– Packet Bitstream
– User data (in MOVI chunk)
– Audio codec used
– Average audio bitrate
– Audio channels

Using themonospot it is also possible to modify FourCC informations (FourCC code in video chunk and FourCC description in stream header) and also change some problematic UserData values for table players (it set the value to DivX999b000p). This is in /contrib/backports.

For the gamers amongst us, the much awaited 1.0.0 version of wine is coming ever closer. It has just made a large leap towards completion with the release of wine 1.0.0 rc1. This is now in /main/backports for 2008.0 and 2008.1. Happy gaming.

Also Nexuiz has been backported to /contrib/backports, Nexuiz is a multiplayer 3D first-person shooter based upon a
heavily modified Quake 1 engine. The packager warns that this game contains violence and is not suitable for children.

Both 2008.0 and 2008.1 have received two releases nfoview, nfoview-1.1.2 and 1.1.1, an app for viewing nfo files, which are “ASCII” art in the CP437 codepage. The advantages of using NFO Viewer instead of a text editor are pre-set font and encoding settings, automatic window size and clickable hyperlinks. This can be found in /contrib/backports.

For me, the most important thing to be added is Amarok, the default KDE music player. While it is too heavy for some, I find the extra features to be very useful, there is an automatic look up for album covers off Amazon, and Wikipedia is tied in so that the artists page there can be viewed from within the player. Also, there is a way to look up the lyrics to the song that you are listening to, so a sing along is always accurate.
This can be found in /main/backports.

The dual booters with windows also have something to be interested in, ntfs-3g-1.2506 has been back ported to 2008.0 and 2008.1. This is in /main/backports.

As for web browsers, and to carry of from the light weight picture application earlier, there is Midori, Midori is a lightweight GTK+ 2 web browser based on WebKitGtk. It features tabs, windows and session management, bookmarks stored with XBEL, searchbox based on OpenSearch, and user scripts support.

This is available for both 2008.0 and 2008.1 in /contrib/backorts.

Version 0.3.10 of Conduit has been backported as well.
Conduit is a synchronization solution for GNOME which allows the user to take their emails, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.

Conduit manages the synchronization and conversion of data into other formats. For example, conduit allows you to synchronize your tomboy notes to a file on a remote computer, synchronize your emails to your mobile phone, synchronize your bookmarks to delicious, gmail, or even your own webserver, and more. This is in /contrib/backports.

Blender has also been backported, release 0.20080502.1 of version 2.46 of the popular animation application is now available for the 2007.1 in /main/backports.

With cooker starting to move at its usual rapid pace, and more importantly with the switch to KDE4, it is hardly surprising that some of use are tearing our hair out at the current state at which cooker is in as the new features are added and the the process of getting it ready for realise as 2009.0 begins. However, this is very good for /backports, as now there are lots of apps coming into the 2008.1 repo that are from this development. The most notable being the continued development of KDE4, this has led to a number of KDE4 bits coming to 2008.1, including kdebase4-runtime-4.04, kdepimlibs4-4.04 and kdelibs4-4.04. Hopefully these willstart to bring KDE4 to the stage where it will hopefully be at when 2009.0 is released.

Also for KDE, there is ktorrent, the popular torrent application, ktorrent-2.2.6 is now in /main/backports for both 2008.0 and 2008.1.

Other updates include Mozilla’s Sunbird to version 0.8, The X.org driver for AMD / ATI r5xx/r6xx chipsets (Radeon X1xxx and HD 2xxx cards), The Mandriva Management Console by Linbox, which has various modules including one for mail, samba and network.

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Battlestar Galactica Saturday, May 17 2008

I love this show. 59 minutes and 30 second of “pretty good”, and then 30 seconds of “I SO-O-O-O did NOT see that coming!”

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 10 Saturday, May 10 2008

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…

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Ouch Thursday, May 8 2008

Painful biking accident last night. I was coming back from Natick into Boston down Beacon Street during rush hour, and after having sailed thru several green traffic lights, I came into Audubon Circle with a fair amount of speed. The light was green here as well, so I didn’t slow down much. I was in the center of the right lane, had a bright orange jersey on, plenty of daylight, and an oncoming driver still didn’t see me. She tried to turn left across the intersection in front of me, and in the split second I had to make a decision, I believed that I could not have navigated safely either to the left or right around the car, so I slammed on my brakes. I stopped in time, but my forward momentum was so great that I still up-ended, vaulted over the handlebars, and went crashing to the pavement (in the intersection). My bike flipped on top of me, seemingly just to add insult to injury… Fortunately I was still outside the car’s turn radius.

No broken bones, but I left some skin on the pavement and expect to be walking funny for a few days. I think I did just about everything right from a legal point of view, but that counts for nothing if drivers don’t see you. I’ll be going thru that intersection a bit more carefully next time.

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