Category: Linux

Since a few days, the bug triaging process is in full force. The purpose is to review all old, unconfirmed bugs, and verify if they are still valid. And of course, making sure those valid bugs are fixed. I have the impression that it’s really a great success. Lots of Bugzilla e-mails are arriving in my mailbox, and looking at changelog mailing list, several old bugs are finally getting fixed.

I started to concentrate on bugs in Kaffeine and KMplayer. I think Kaffeine is now as stable as is possible now. That means: far from perfect, but I think all remaining problems should now be handled by its upstream authors. Already since some time, Kaffeine has XCB support, which should make it a lot more stable when viewing embedded videos in the Konqueror web browser. And since this weekend, Kaffeine correctly disables the screen saver when you are viewing a full screen video, and won’t copy the whole media file you open from media:/ URIs to your home directory. I proposed an update for Mandriva 2007.0 and 2007.1 Spring to fix the last two issues. Fixing the first one, is unfortunately a lot more difficult for older Mandriva versions, because it requires a more recent version of xine, and depends on libxcb, which is in contribs…

KMplayer was actually in a much better state. The only real serious issue, is that KMplayer does not add itself to KDEs service menus which appear when you insert a DVD disk. This is rather serious as KMplayer is Mandriva’s default video player, and thus user’s don’t get an option to actually play the movie when they insert a DVD disk. This should not be too difficult to fix though, so let’s hope we’ll have a fix soon.

I also reviewed Kopete bugs. About all of them are fixed in current Cooker, possibly we’ll also have udpated packages for 2007.0 and 2007.1 Spring implementing a higher framerate for MSN webcam support, fixing decryption of gpg encrypted messages (2007.1 only) and fixing errors when chatting on conference.jabber.org (2007.0 only).

For my own use (and pleasure), I also recompile a lot of Cooker packages for 2007.1. While recompiling a more recent version of libxml, I had problems with python crashing. After a lot of trying to find out what causes it, I found out that python-reportlab as shipped in both 2007.1 and Cooker makes python crash. Python-reportlab is a dependency of the hplip printer drivers, so if you don’t have these installed, you’ll probably never notice this problem. Ia also makes certain hplip utilities crash in 2007.1 and Cooker. Compiling a more recent version of python-reportlab, fixed all problems, so I hope we will see this as an update for 2007.1 soon.

Next on the bug review list, will be cd burning applications. Thanks to the article I wrote on this blog about audio cd burning applications, I already tested some of them, which always helps in reviewing bugs.

If you always wanted to get involved in free software development, this is actually a great opportunity to join the Mandriva bug reviewing effort! You don’t really need to have development skills, just some willingness to compare different bugs, to try to reproduce them, and to look them up in other bug trackers. Often those bugs are really already fixed, it’s just that someone has to confirm they actually are, or provide the good patch or solution which has been created by the upstream developers. If you are interested, do not hesitate to contact us on the bugteam mailing list!

Last weekend, I bough an external USB hard drive to finally start regularly making back-ups of my computers at home. For security reasons, I wanted to store back-ups on an encrypted partition, because one never knows what may happen. Using an encrypted partition was not too hard, but still some bugs prevented it from being newbie proof.

For the encrypted partition, I chose to use LUKS. It seems to be some kind of standard, widely supported (by Hal for example), and it has some graphical utilities available which should make it a no-brainer.

First problem, I’m using x86_64, and apparently luks-tools only exists for i586 in Mandriva. I filed a bug, and a new luks-tools package for x86_64 should already appear very shortly on a Cooker mirror near you. If you have luks-tools installed, it should be as simply as running gnome-luks-format to set up an existing partition.

So I did it at the console. Of course, make sure you have the package cryptsetup installed, otherwise you won’t have the necessary utilities. First we’ll add a header to the partition, indicating that this is a LUKS encrypted partition, and which encryption type we are using:

cryptsetup -c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 luksFormat /dev/sdb1

(as I already mentioned with gnome-luks-format, you should create the partition first, for example with diskdrake or cfdisk).
Once the header is in place, we’ll open the encrypted partition:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 encbackup

Encback is a name you can freely replace by your own choice of course. Once you have done this, your encrypted partition will be mapped to /dev/mapper/encback. You can use this like any normal partition for example to create an ext3 file system on it:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/encback

Then we can mount it:

mount /dev/mapper/encback /media/encrypted-backup

And we’re ready to go. To close the encrypted device after I have umount it, I run

cryptsetup luksClose encback

When you plug in the USB disk, hall will automatically detect you have a LUKS encrypted partition. A dialog will appear, where you can enter your passphrase, and after that it is mounted automatically. At least, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, this was not working, probably because of bug #30015. Let’s hope this gets fixed soon! Also note that KDE does not seem to support this at all, so even then this is Gnome only. For now I have created two small scripts, which will run cryptsetup and mount or umount, so I don’t have to retype these commands by hand each time.

I opened another bug to request LUKS support in diskdrake. Disk encryption is becoming more and more common these days with all those portable storage media, so Mandriva’s default partition tool should have this support built in. I guess it should not be too hard to implement this.

Some nice documentation which helped me a lot during this exploration, can be found in Red Hat Magazine.

Update 22 May 2007: I updated the howto to use aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 instead of aes-cbc-plain. Reader David Crick pointed me to the fact that aes-cbc-plain is vulnerable to a cryptography weakness, which is called the “watermarking attack”. Thanks!

Last Thursday, at least four Mandriva employees received the news that their contract will be stopped next month. All of them are people who are very active in the Mandriva community, and sometimes maintainer of important packages (such as Apache). There has not been much more explanation about this decision. This gives the news last week that Mandriva wants more involvement of the community (read: people who are not payed) another dimension to me… :-(

Oh well, we’ll have to wait to see if this will impact development much. But it’s never a good sign that people have to leave a company.

Update 21 May 2007: It seems that the list referred to in the above posting in not completely correct. Currently a lot of rumours are going around, even on Mandriva’s official IRC channels, and even between current Mandriva employees. Probably more than four people are losing their job, but it seems not even Mandriva employees themselves know exactly who is concerned. The communication clearly has been catastrophic, and this is severely damaging Mandriva’s image :-(

Update 22 May 2007:To get a more complete picture of the problems, please also read Dvalin’s blog post.

Mandriva 2007 Spring was already a very nice distribution with a lots of improvements and changes in style from the previous versions. severely improved graphical themes, the public availability of non-free packages, getting update notifications on the desktop without Mandriva subscription, and a generally more polished system.

For the next version of Mandriva, the bar is again set a lot higher than before. Last week, two interesting announcements were made:

• David Barth announced that some internal re-organization was done at Mandriva, and that the community will be more actively involved in the development of the next Mandriva version. What this means in practice, and how this will work out, remains to be seen, but I have the feeling that this is a confirmation of something we have seen already in 2007.1: Mandriva really cares about the community now, and makes use of the community’s remarks to improve the distribution.
• Anne Nicolas, who will follow-up development of next Mandriva’s versions from now on, announced that an effort will be done to get Mandriva’s bugzilla cleaned up and to improve the workflow of bug reports, which should result in a more bug free distribution. All new bug reports will first be checked by a team, which will verify the validity of the report, and which will collect all necessary information for the developers to be able to analyze and fix the bug. If developers receive more high quality reports, this will hopefully result in quicker and more bug fixing. Statistics about the bug fixing progress will be collected, in order to pinpoint problematic parts of the distribution, so this can be acted upon.

This is all great news. Mandriva shows that it is not wanting to be yet another ordinary nice Linux distribution, but that it has the ambition to be a real leader. Interesting times are coming!

This week I was contacting the mailing lists for various upstream projects to find fixes for some problems.

First there was the problem that F-Spot does not automatically handle the upgrade from sqlite2 to sqlite3. In the past, F-spot used sqlite2 as its database, today it uses sqlite3 by default, but you can still continue to use your sqlite2 database. That is, if sqlite2 libraries are installed on your system. And one can imagine that in the future, distributions will stop shipping sqlite2, because it is not maintained anymore and because sqlite3 is far superior. It is possible to upgrade from sqlite2 to sqlite3 by upgrading the db at the command line, but we really cannot expect normal users to do this, do we?

In Pan, I had the problem that new headers were not appearing in a newsgroup, until I killed the “get new headers”-task by hand. I found out it was caused by a news server I had configured in Pan, which was not reachable. I filed a bug.

I experienced a crash in ogginfo when some wrongly encoded characters are found in the Vorbis tag, for which I found a patch with Google. I filed a bug but I’ll need to investigate if the tag is really invalid: Easytag shows it correctly without any problem.

Another problem I experienced already some time ago, but which I never really investigated, was that Amarok did not add files on a read-only Samba share to its library. Thanks to Debian changelog mailing list, I discovered today that there was a patch for libtag fixing this. This is a real serendipity!

I did again some testing with Kaffeine. I contact its mailing list for the problem that it copied everything to ~/tmp when using system:/ URI in Konqueror. I found a fix now, but I’m still not impressed by Kaffeine’s stability. For now, you’re better of continuing to use kmplayer.

I contacted Mandriva’s web discuss mailing list (which does not seem to be archived unfortunately) for a new structure of the End user documentation on the Mandriva wiki and posted a proposed for some documentation about the tmb kernel. I’m a bit disappointed by the reactions: like this we won’t succeed in creating a very active wiki community with lots of useful user documentation. I’ll try to implement a proposal in my sandbox this weekend: practical work is often better than theoretical discussion

Now that Mandriva 2007 Spring has been released and the corrupted Mandriva Cooker subversion repository has been fixed, development for Mandriva 2008 has started now.

Some things which I have on my wishlist for Mandriva 2008:

• New kernel, Linux 2.6.22 or later which I hope will give us these things: CFQ IO scheduler as default (since Linux 2.6.18), better task scheduler, probably CFS, better wireless drivers (bcm43xx is stable in 2.6.20, but it’s not in Mandriva’s 2.6.17, finally good Ralink drivers: complete documentation exists, but drivers are still not production quality)
• Mandriva still uses OSS drivers for some sound cards which are perfectly supported with Alsa (for example for some Intel ICH2 810 AC97 cards, which was not fixed in 2007.1 as far as I know). This is annoying as OSS does not have sound mixing, and can cause applications complain about occupied /dev/dsp and it also causes missing sound in Flash. Fedora even does not ship OSS anymore for some time already. A maximum of cards should be switched to Alsa now early in Cooker development , so that things get tested.
• slocate is still being installed by default by rpmsrate instead of the much performance friendlier mlocate (already in 2007.1 Main). We should make the switch now in rpmsrate so it’s the default in 2008.
• Almost a year ago, I proposed a new program menu structure for Mandriva. According to Gnome and menu maintainer Frédéric Crozat, it would be implemented for 2008. Let’s hope this becomes true, as it will make the menu at the same time friendly for new users, and more practical for power users. Unfortunately, I lost the complete original document (what a shame!). If somebody still has it somewhere, I would be grateful if you could send it to me!
• Drop esound, and use Pulseaudio instead. Pulseaudio is a more modern and actively maintained sound server. There was some discussion about it some time ago, and I still hope Pulseaudio will not be forced on all users (personally I prefer not to use a sound server, and let all the mixing be done by Alsa. For this reason, I still hope more and more applications will use GStreamer, as GStreamer makes it easy to choose your preferred output method, such as Alsa or Pulseaudio for all applications. But Pulseaudio should certainly replace esound in main.
• Test new Kaffeine: In Mandriva 2007.0, Kaffeine was replaced by kmplayer as the default video player in KDE, because Kaffeine was unstable paying embedded videos in Konqueror. Now that both Xine and Kaffeine support XCB, this problem should be fixed. We should test if it is indeed stable now, and if Kaffeine plays supports all kinds of embedded videos in web pages like kmplayer. If this is the case, we should consider moving back to Kaffeine, as its interface is a bit better than KMplayer’s.
• Mandriva’s net_applet and mdkonline system tray utilities still poll too much, which causes unnecessary CPU usage, and which also eats battery life on laptops. These applications should be scrutinized a bit more, so they are completely idle most of the time.
• Up to date printing support: Unfortunately printing support did not really advance in Mandriva 2007 Spring. The drivers are mostly still the same as in 2007.0, and some newer printer models supported by newer versions of hpijs and other models which appeared on linuxprinting.org, are not support in 2007 Spring. Mandriva 2008 should really have up to date printing support, like was always the case in previous versions.
• Cleaning up the repositories: the Main repository now contains a lot of programs which are not used by a lot of people (things like flphoto, uucp, uw-imapd, xpdf,…). On the other hand, some very interesting packages are in Contribs (Transmission, dovecot,…). The contents of both repositories should be looked at, in order to clean up, and put packages in the appropriate repository.
• We need a simple application installation program: rpmdrake has improved a lot in 2007.0 and now in 2007.1 Spring. Still it is too complex for new users. Suppose a user wanting to search a DTP application. He should easily find Scribus. Well, Scribus does not even appear in the Publishing category in rpmdrake. Instead, these category contains mostly technnical console programs not suitable for beginners. We should have something like Ubuntu’s gnome-app-install which only shows userfriendly graphical applications.
• More and easier to find documentation: Mandriva already comes with a lot of documentation, but the included handbooks are difficult to find (being hidden in More Applications). They should be in a more obvious place. On the other hand, we should make sure more documentation becomes available in different languages on the wiki, and the wiki should be easy to find (include a link on the desktop?). This way, users will know where to look for help.
• Related to the menu structure and the reorganization of the repositories, we should constantly be evaluating which applications should be in the default installation and which not. We had such discussion shortly before 2007.1 Spring went out, but this was a bit too little too late. We should make sure we start with this process before the first beta is released, so we have more time to evaluate and stress test programs.

Currently I already started by taking a quick look at the contents of the main repository. Maybe other people are interested in participating in this effort, so that it can happen a bit more organized?