Server migration

Posted on by Frederik

Since two days, I have merged the main servers used by two research laboratories at work. One server was an old Linux server which really needed a hardware upgrade, and the other one was a Mac Pro machine running a flaky OS X Leopard. The new server is of course running Linux: Debian Lenny.

It was a very interesting experience: working out procedures to migrate the mailboxes (from Dovecot on the Linux server and Cyrus on the Mac server to Cyrus on the new server), finding out how to set up one NIC in two different subnets (especially the routing is a little bit tricky), getting all services hooked up to LDAP and managed by GOSA, getting dhcpd to do exactly what we want in a shared-network set up, and much more.

The new server is a HP DL185 G5 with an AMD Opteron quad core CPU and 8 GB of RAM and hosts two KVM virtual machines, one for public services and another one running internal services. You can visit the two websites, which are also hosted on this machine of course, of the concerned research labs:

Maybe in the not too far away future, I should try to move the services hosted on the underpowered desktop machine running this website, also to a virtual machine…

Fight the loudness war: TurnMeUp

Posted on by Frederik

This week-end, I bought The Seldom Seen Kid, the latest album by Elbow. The album is already some time out, but I only started paying attention to it recently when hearing the song Weather To Fly on the radio. I had already heard The Bones Of You and One Day Like this before too.

The album is really awesome. Not only is the music superb, I was also pleasantly surprised to read this in the booklet:

Turn Me Up
To preserve the excitement, emotion and dynamics of the original performances this record is intentionally quieter than some. For full enjoyment simply Turn Me Up! (TurnMeUp.org)

The TurnMeUp initiative battles the notorious loudness war. In the majority of recent commercial compact discs, the dynamics of the sound (which was one of the huge advantages of compact discs when they were introduced) is completely ruined because the sound is remastered as loud as possible in order to try to stand out from other music. This is done by dynamic range processing, where the difference between the loudest part and the most silent part of a song is made smaller, this way destroying the dynamic range of the music.

This is the first album I know of which supports the TurnMeUp initiative. And the music sounds very nice indeed! Let’s hope more and more artists and producer will follow this example. Spread the word!

Two other albums I bought some time ago, are The Best Of – E Ritorno Da Te and Primavero in Anticipo by Laura Pausini. These were again not brand new albums. I knew a few songs of Laura Pausini from when she brought out here first songs which became popular hits here in Belgium in the first half of the nineties, but I rediscovered her music after some recent interviews with her in newspapers. A completely different music style than Elbow, but also great music. However, the difference in sound quality between these two albums is big: if I first listen to E Ritorno Da Te and afterwards to Primavera in Anticipo, I have to turn down the volume a lot. Primavera In Anticipo is clearly a lot louder and Laura Pausini’s voice is standing much less out of the music than in E Ritorno Da Te. It seems like the difference between those two albums is an unfortunate example of how the loudness war reduces sound quality…

Noteworthy Mandriva Cooker changes (18 May – 14 June 2009)

Posted on by Frederik

It’s a long time ago I posted something on my blog, so this is a good moment to break the silence with a Cooker update:

  • GCC 4.4: better code generation and many improvements for developers, such as OpenMP 3 support and support for the upcoming C++0x ISO standard. This new version also improves code optimization thanks to the Graphite framework. Glibc was also updated to the latest version 2.10.
  • Xen kernel 2.6.27: Mandriva now includes a kernel for running on a Xen Dom0 based on the 2.6.27 kernel instead of the outdated 2.6.18 kernel.
  • The standard Mandriva kernel is now at the latest 2.6.30. This brings faster kernel booting, lots of ext3 bug fixes and performance improvements which also affect ext3 and of course it adds or improves the support for new hardware devices.
  • GNOME is now at version 2.27.2: Tomboy now can sync your notes with the Snowy web service
  • Pitivi video editor has been updated to version 0.13.1 which includes a complete core rewrite. Lots of interesting improvements for end users are in the pipeline for next versions.
  • Elisa has now been renamed to Moovida. It includes a brand new graphical user interface.
  • Many KDE updates: KDE itself is now at version 4.2.90 (aka KDE 4.3 beta 1), Koffice 2.0, k3b 2.0 alpha 2, kaffeine 1.0 pre 1, Digikam 1.0 beta 1
  • qemu-kvm 0.10.4: the KVM virtualization tool had its first stable release under the name qemu-kvm. A test package is available in main/testing, under the package name “qemu”. This package merges the qemu and the kvm packages.  The version in contrib/testing removes kqemu support, but it will probably return at some later point.
  • Sagemath, a mathematics software system combining the power of mathematic tools like Maxima, R, GSL and many more, is now available in contrib/testing. Note that this package is still work in progress. Your comments and bug reports are very welcome on the Cooker mailing list.
  • Cups 1.4 RC 1 is available in the main/testing repository. This new version has some performance improvements, supports zeroconf aka Bonjour for automatic discovery of printers and has a totally redesigned web interface.
  • bcd, a new Mandriva tool to build installation ISOs was published
  • The Intel X11 driver is now using pre-release version 2.7.99.901, which will hopefully improve performancet thanks to UXA.
  • Transmission 1.70 now supports DHT (distributed hash table), also known as trackerless bittorrent. Transmission will now still be able to find peers when a public tracker goes down.

And of course much more I forget :-)

Noteworthy Mandriva Cooker changes (4 May – 17 May 2009)

Posted on by Frederik

Here’s a short update of some interesting package updates in Mandriva Cooker since the last update:

  • GNOME 2.27.1 entered cooker: Epiphany is now using Webkitgtk instead of Gecko as its back-end. In Totem support for libxine was dropped (only GStreamer is supported now) and Totem now includes a new BBC iPlayer plug-in and a faster Youtube plug-in (use Edit – Plug-ins to activate these) and it supports DVD navigation menus.
  • KDE is now at version 4.3 beta 1, Amarok has been updated to version 2.1 beta 2 and there is now a snapshot of the KDE 4 port of Konverstation available.
  • Speedcrunch, an advanced calculator, is now available in Mandriva’s software repositories.
  • OpenOffice.org has been updated to 3.1.0 RC 1. Improvements include on screen anti-aliasing, various usability improvements in Calc and better support for importing MS Office 2007 (OpenXML-like) documents.
  • Back In time, a simple GUI back-up application, has been added to the Mandriva repositories.
  • PHP 5.3 RC 2: new features for PHP developers includes namespaces, lambda functions and closures, late static binding and performance improvements.

And of course there were many other changes, totalling to more than 900 package updates. To see the full list, consult the changelog mailing list archives.

Open letter to Adobe

Posted on by Frederik

Dear Adobe,

You are the developers of the successful Flash plug-in. Your plug-in is successful in the sense that it’s almost impossible to browse the web without having your plug-in installed. Flash is widely used for movie clips, web radio, informative animations, navigation menus, stock graphs, ad banners and many more. Some sites are even written completely in Flash.

For that reason, I have been using Flash for many years on my computer systems. First I used it on Windows and later on Linux, which I strongly prefer now. In all those years, I have had many problems with your plug-in.

When I was using Flash (I think it was version 4) on Windows 98 on my trusty Pentium II 350 Mhz, full screen Flash sites would make my computer very unresponsive. It also happend to me and also to a friend that different Flash versions were installed together, probably one we downloaded from Macromedia’s site and another older version which was included in some software, probably Microsoft Encarta. Because of these conflicting versions, we had Flash immediately crashing our browser when visiting certain web sites.

Then when I moved to Linux, there were times that I could not visit certain web sites because they required a newer Flash version which was not yet available for my OS. I also could not use my distribution’s package manager to install your software, because you did not permit others to include your software in my distro’s online repositories.

A few years later, I built a new machine with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor. I installed a 64 bit Linux distribution, but there was no 64 bit Flash plug-in. I contacted your company Macromedia, creator of the Flash plug-in, to request a 64 bits versions of the plug-in, but I did not receive any positive answer, in spite of many other people requesting the same thing. Fortunately, the number of sites which were totally unusable without Flash, were not that high, so I accepted to live without your plug-in. One more year later, nspluginwrapper was born, and finally made it possible to view Flash animations on my 64 bits machine again.

In 2007, I started using an Apple PowerPC machine at work. Because Linux was (and currently is) still my preferred OS, I installed Debian GNU/Linux on this machine. But again, no Flash plug-in was available for this system.

We are now May 2009. Many new Flash versions were released in all those years, and finally you started developping a plug-in for the x86_64 architecture. However, things are not much better yet. When I try to view a Flash animation with your 64 bit development version of the plug-in, my browser often crashes hard. If I try to use your 32 bit plug-in with nspluginwrapper, the plug-in itself is not very stable: often when switching tabs in my browser, Flash animations suddenly die and streaming video clips on some Belgian websites do not work at all: the video applet just shows it is buffering, but the video never comes up. The same thing works fine another machine I own. Maybe your plug-in does not work well together with the NVidia drivers, another piece of proprietary sofware I need on this system? Or maybe your plug-in needs some extra libraries which are missing on this system? Unfortunately, I could not find a complete requirement list for your plug-in. The requirements on your download page are very general; only in a blog posting I found that I also need Curl, but I do have libcurl4 installed in both 32 and 64 bit versions on my Mandriva system.

Today, I can only conclude that I’m fed up with this situation. In all those years, I have had lots of problems with your plug-in and with every new version, new problems were introduced. Not only does your plug-in have many problems, the use of Flash is preventing universal access to information for everyone, no matter what kind of system, OS or browser they use. I uninstalled your plug-in today on this system, and I will continue my quest against your software in full force. I will actively search for non-Flash web sites and promote these as alternatives to Flash based web sites. I will also actively promote alternatives to your technology. Good web sites should be based around real open standard file formats, which Flash most definitely is not.

I hope you, Adobe, will finally see the light some day, and start publishing a really complete specification of your proprietary format under a totally Free license and that you will actively support and promote Free Software implementations. However, until then, I see no other option than boycotting your software.

With kind regards,

Frederik Himpe

Futher reading:

Mandriva Cooker (2010.0) opened

Posted on by Frederik

Since Friday the cooker repositories, which will lead to Mandriva 2010.0 in 6 months, are open again. In only 3 days about 400 new package releases were made, mostly new upstream versions which came out during the last month while the cooker repository was frozen.

Some of the more important or interesting changes in Cooker include:

  • KDE is being updated to a 4.3 development snapshot. Expect lots of new features but also many new bugs. Information about KDE 4.3 can be found in the feature plan. The KDE audio player Amarok was updated to version 2.1 beta 1.
  • Firefox was updated from 3.0.8 to 3.0.10
  • XFCE was updated from version 4.6.0 to 4.6.1
  • WebkitGtk was updated to version 1.1.6 (read Gustavo Noronha’s blog for info on what they are working on) and the Midori web browser was updated to latest version 0.1.6, including download support. Midori is becoming a more and more complete browser for less powerful systems.
  • nspluginwrapper 1.3.0: this should improve performance a bit with the Flash plug-in. Hopefully it might also fix some stability problems, but I’m afraid that’s rather unlikely.
  • Nexuiz 2.5: many improvements in this first person shooter, including new weapons, a new game mode, more eyecandy,..
  • Updates to the Telepathy stack: thanks to the new telepathy-gabble, Empathy now supports file transfer over XMPP/Jabber.
  • GMime updated from 2.2 to 2.4, which has a modified API. Lots of applications will need to be modified.
  • Mono 2.4: this includes many performance improvements
  • Bash 4.0 includes many improvements for shell programmers, such as support of associative arrays

For all changes, you can read the Changelog mailing list archives.

Why prefer Mandriva over another distribution?

Posted on by Frederik

Yesterday someone asked on a Dutch website the same question which comes back on sites like Slashdot every time a new Mandriva release is announced: what is the the advantage of Mandriva above other distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora.

This made me think and so I wrote down a couple of reasons why I use Mandriva on my desktop systems.

10 advantages of Mandriva above other Linux distributions

  • The default graphical theme in Mandriva looks much better than Ubuntu’s brown mess.
  • All graphical configuration tools are centralized in the Mandriva Control Centre.
  • Mandriva has some unique configuration tools, such as msec which permits you to change advanced security settings from the GUI.
  • Mandriva makes it very easy to install 32 bit libraries and applications on the x86_64 version. In Ubuntu some of the more important 32 bit libraries can be found in the ia32-libs packages, but if you need something else which is not in there for whatever reason, things become more complicated and messy: you can for example extract the libraries by hand from the 32 bit deb package and install them in /usr/lib32, or you’ll have to create a complete 32 bit chroot. In Mandriva you can simply install packages from the 32 bit distribution on the x86_64 release by means of the standard console or GUI installation tools.
  • (shameless plug) The program menu is much nicer if you have installed KDE and GNOME together on your system (in Ubuntu and other distributions you will get very long menus containing lots of KDE and GNOME applications mixed together.
  • Mandriva’s booting times is about the fastest possible for a generic distribution thanks to Speedboot
  • KDE as shipped by Mandriva is generally a bit more stable and polished than in Ubuntu
  • Mandriva’s GNOME corresponds more to the default upstream GNOME than for example in OpenSUSE (e.g. by default it does not use that messy Slab menu)
  • Very flexible graphical installer in the Free and Powerpack editions for people who want a more complete and custom installation than the one from a standard live cd
  • Mandriva’s development community is very open and accessible, eg. via IRC and mailing lists. If you do a little bit of effort, it’s pretty easy to become a Mandriva package maintainer yourself and to integrate your contributions yourself in the distribution.

Some disadvantages of Mandriva

  • Security updates are sometimes a bit later than other distributions and for some packages even completely missing. It has to be said that these are mostly not too important security problems and I’m not aware of any problems this has caused for anyone in practice. Also bugfix updates for some reported problems are sometimes late or not done at all.
  • While the graphical themes are much better than Ubuntu’s in my opinion, I still think they cannot beat the upstream KDE and GTK+ themes.
  • The Mandriva configuration tools sometimes have annoying bugs or do not have the best looks possible.

Personally, I consider Mandriva and Debian as the best distributions available. I think Ubuntu is overhyped a lot and does not offer much (if anything?) you cannot do with Debian. I also think Debian’s distribution model consisiting of the Stable, Testing and Unstable distributions is great and makes it possible to have a pretty stable and “rolling” distribution with fairly up to date software at any time. However, the fact that I can directly contribute my own improvements to Mandriva and the fact that installing 32 bits stuff on x86_64 is dead easy, make tthat Mandriva is still my preferred choice on desktop systems.

Anyway, the choice is up to you!

“The Great Firewall of Belgium” active

Posted on by Frederik

Since today, Belgium has got it’s own version of “The Great Firewall of China”. The biggest Belgian ISPs are blocking access to several web sites, often related to child porn.

The idea already existed for several months, but the implementation was probably accelerated after a Dutch guy recently created a website where he posted detailed personal information about child abusers in Belgium. While publishing such detailed private information is forbidden in Belgium, it was very difficult to take real action against the website, because it operated from abroad.

So now this website is not accessible anymore from most Belgian ISPs. People who try to access this website, get redirected to a web page which explains that the web site is not accessible because it is considered illegal in Belgium.

Technically, it’s not really a firewall. The redirection happens on the DNS level. Instead of returning the real IP of the server, the DNS servers now return the address of a server in Belgium containing the warning page.

While I agree (like every sane person) that things like child’s pornography are completely sick and should be severely acted against, I think that creating a blacklist of websites which people cannot visit any more is a very dangerous precedent. It’s not clear at all how it is decided to put a website on the blacklist. Currently this is not based on a judge’s decision after an official juridical procedure. Also how long will it take until someone makes a mistake in the list and blocks half of the Internet by error (which is not unrealistic, it happened to Google recently!), or worse, until sites of political dissidents are blocked? For this reason, I have decided to stop my internal Bind DNS server at home from forwarding its requests to my ISPs DNS and instead I let it do iterative recursion now.  I read that many others are starting to use OpenDNS now, but this seems to have privacy issues by itself too.

Smolt in Mandriva

Posted on by Frederik

Some time ago, I introduced a package for Smolt in Mandriva Cooker. Smolt is a tool developed for Fedora which collects information about all your hardware and submits it to a central database. On the smolts.org website, people can view all hardware entries and indicate which one is working OK for them. The database is also coupled with a wiki, where extra instructions can be written to get the hardware working. Smolt is used by default already for some time in Fedora and also in OpenSUSE.

To install the Smolt package in Mandriva 2009.1, run urpmi smolt or use the graphical software installer to install the smolt package. There is also a smolt-gui package, but unfortunately this graphical front-end has not been updated recently anymore and because of that it’s missing some crucial features. You can use it to submit your hardware profile, but the GUI will fail to communicate you the password you need to indicate which hardware is working on smolts.org. To get this password, you need to use the command line tool smoltSendProfile. smoltSendProfile will show you all information that will be sent, and after your confirmation it will submit this hardware profile to smolts.org and it will give you the URL and password needed to edit the information.

It’s also a good idea to update the information in the database now and then, for example when you change some piece of hardware in your system, update your OS and/or start using a new kernel. The smolt package adds a cron script in /etc/cron.d/smolt which will update your hardware profile once a month. However, it is not activated by default. To activate it, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/smolt and set ENABLE_MONTHLY_UPDATE=1.

Updating to Mandriva 2009.1 (Cooker)

Posted on by Frederik

Today, the server running this website was update from Mandriva 2009.0 to 2009.1 Cooker by running urpmi –auto-select –allow-suggests with the Cooker mandriva-release package installed. All in all, the update went very smoothly. There was one file conflict in some KDE 4 related packages and I had to restart Apache 2 by hand because a httpd reload done when the awstats package was installed, failed because of the changed glibc. After the update I also removed KDE 4 because I don’t use it. Actually, it’s only extremely exceptional that I use X on this system (it’s mostly running headless), but it’s good to still have GNOME in case I have a problem with my laptop. I did not yet reboot the system; actually it is still running a 2.6.24 RC kernel with an uptime of more than one year. In the not too distant future, it’s possible this system will be migrated to a KVM virtual machine, so then it will definitely get a new kernel.

Last week-end, I also updated my parent’s system to 2009.1 Cooker. Actually, this system was still running Mandriva 2008.1 with KDE 3.5. Here I removed KDE too, and I installed GNOME. I consider KDE to be less stable than GNOME in general and I’ve heard all too often “feature X will only be done in next KDE 4.x release”, that it’s becoming annoying (e.g. just today I read that root support for System Settings was once again delayed to a later KDE release). So far, I haven’t received any complaint worth mentioning, so it seems the migration from KDE 3.5 to GNOME went very smoothly.

So if you are thinking of switching to Cooker, now is a great moment to do it. The OS is very stable, and the last little bugs are being ironed out. Personally I am not suffering from any showstopper bug anymore at this moment. The most annoying thing I’m seeing here, is that the second display is not switched off automatically if it’s disconnected while the machine is suspended and I have my serious doubts this will be fixed soon because Xorg’s bugzilla seems like a blackhole to me… Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to switch it off by hand by using GNOME’s screen resolution applet. All in all Mandriva 2009.1 will definitely be a much better release than 2009.0.