Frederik Himpe

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!