Tag: Linux

Mandriva’s future (2)

Posted on by Frederik

Now a few weeks after my first article about Mandriva’s future things have even more moved in a negative direction. The new management has decided to close down Edge-IT, a company which was bought by Mandriva several years ago. Apparently lots of the employees working on the distribution, were in fact Edge-IT employees and so they now have to leave the sinking ship. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

As is summarized by a mailing list post, Mandriva as being a distribution developed by a company and paid employees, is now an empty box. There is no more head in charge of the future direction of the distribution, who can take the necessary decisions for new releases. It looks like no more paid employees are working on GNOME and KDE packaging, and most people working on the installer and Mandriva’s configuration tools are gone. Looking at the SVN commit history it seems like the members of the security team are almost the only paid employees still working on the distribution. One can safely say that Mandriva is now de facto already a community developed distribution.

In the meantime, the CEO has reacted on a bug report. He says that Mandriva will concentrate on the server market in Europe and on the desktop market in countries like Brazil. Because European developers would have refused to be part of that future direction, they have been fired, according to the CEO. Of course this does not make any sense. There no reason why developers in Europe could not be working on the desktop if the target market for the desktop is mostly Brazil. The real reason why people are being fired, is of course that there is simply no more money to pay them anymore. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that Mandriva can never be a real competitor for distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server, which are much more popular in large companies. Already even 5 years ago Mandriva was often not taken seriously anymore in corporate environments, according to my experience when working for an IT company specializing in free software. Even free distributions like CentOS and Debian have a much higher reputation in the server market than Mandriva.

Tomorrow there will be a shareholder’s meeting. After that, we might have a clear view on the future of Mandriva as a company. But there should not be much doubt: Mandriva as a distribution developed by the company, has already died now.

And Mandriva as being a communtiy developed distribution? It might work if some solution is found for things like the build system and other infrastructure, now being provided by Mandriva. Maybe there will be a merger with one of these Mandriva forks like PCLinuxOS and Unity Linux. But I am convinced that these distributions currently only exist thanks to Mandriva and will definitely suffer a lot if there is no more upstream where they can copy packages from. So a merger with such a distribution will not magically fix all problems caused by Mandriva’s death. People who are looking for a distribution to install on their system, should rather remove Mandriva from their shortlist, because there are too much doubts about its future…

Migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL

Posted on by Frederik

One of the servers I manage at work is still running Microsoft Windows 2000. This system is hosting a few old forgotten web sites and it runs Microsoft SQL Server containing a few databases still in use. This server was already there when I started working at the university. Fortunately I never had to do much work on it and there never was a serious crash: it would have been a serious headache for me restoring this system because I do not have much knowledge about Windows and SQL Server.

During some spare time at work I decided taking a look at migrating the MS SQL Server databases to PostgreSQL. And all in all it was not very complicated. Fortunately, the databases itself are not very large and have a rather simple structure. The first thing I did, was recreating the structure of the database in PostgreSQL. With a tool like pgAdmin3 this is pretty straightforward. An alternative is to export the database structure in SQL format and adapt the resulting file so that it contains valid PostgreSQL table creation statements. The latter method is explained on the PostgreSQL wiki.

To migrate the data itself, I wrote a little Perl script. Actually I do not have much knowledge about Perl but it is a fairly straightforward language, so this did not prove to be too difficult. I connect to the MS SQL Server database using DBI, the Perl Database Interface, with the ODBC and FreeTDS drivers. The script gets all records from the tables you define, and inserts them in the PostgreSQL database using the PostgreSQL DBI driver.

These are the required packages on a Debian Squeeze system:

libdbd-odbc-perl
libdbd-pg-perl
tdsodbc
unixodbc
tdsodbc

Define the FreeTDS ODBC driver in /etc/odbcinst.ini:

[FreeTDS]
Description	= TDS driver (Sybase/MS SQL)
Driver		= /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsodbc.so
Setup		= /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsS.so
UsageCount	= 2

Then define the database in odbc.ini:

[database]
Driver = FreeTDS
Trace = No
Server = hostname
Port = 1433
Database = databasename

The script assumes that all field names in the PostgreSQL database are using lowercase names and that the MS SQL database is using ISO8859-15 encoding and the PostgreSQL database is using UTF-8 encoding. For every table, I make a migrateTable call with 3 arguments: the table name, an array containing all field names and the name of the primary key field for which you created a sequence (named fieldname_seq).

Once the database itself was migrated, the applications using the database had to be modified to use PostgreSQL. This was not too difficult, because the applications were PHP scripts using ODBC. These additional packages were needed:

odbc-postgresql
php5-odbc

To configure the PostgreSQL ODBC driver, add this in /etc/odbcinst.ini:

[PostgreSQL Unicode]
Description	= PostgreSQL ODBC driver (Unicode version)
Driver		= /usr/lib/odbc/psqlodbcw.so
Setup		= /usr/lib/odbc/libodbcpsqlS.so
Debug		= 0
CommLog		= 0
UsageCount	= 0

Then define the databse in odbc.ini:

[database]
Driver              = PostgreSQL Unicode
ServerName          = localhost
Database            = dbname
Username            = username
sslmode             = require

Then be sure not to call odbc_connect with the SQL_CUR_USE_ODBC option (which was actually needed with FreeTDS to fix some weird errors), because it causes segfaults.

The result? WISE’s publications pages is now using PostgreSQL as a back-end!

Migrating mail from KMail to Evolution

Posted on by Frederik

At work I am busy migrating some Linux desktop users from an old Slackware 12.0 system with KDE 3.5 to Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2.30. So I had to migrate the e-mails from KMail to Evolution, a task which was not that trivial as you would hope at first.

On these systems, the mails were saved in ~/Mail. This directory did not contain a standard maildir structure or mbox files, but some weird mix of those two. I do not know whether this is typical for KMail or whether this was a peculiarity on these systems because the e-mails have been migrated from even other e-mail clients and versions in the past already.

The first step was to make a standard maildir out of this structure. I created ~/Maildir and searched for all directories called “cur” in ~/Mail. All parents of these directories are standard maildir folders, so I copied these to ~/Maildir. One of them was called inbox. In maildir, the inbox is just the parent directory and not some folder called inbox. So I moved the cur new and tmp subdirectories of ~/Maildir/inbox to ~/Maildir itself. Then I renamed all other subfolders in ~/Maildir so that they contained a dot before the actual folder name, as this is how subfolders are named in maildir.

Now I was still left with a few mbox mail folders. These are single files which contain a whole mailbox. In order to convert them, I used the mb2md script. I ran mb2md -s ~/Mail -R ~/Maildir/ to convert all remaining mbox folders to the maildir structure.

Then I had a nice maildir structure, but Evolution cannot directly import Maildir folders. However it should be possible to create a local Maildir account in Evolution, pointing to the ~/Maildir directory and then copying over all folders. I did not try this. Instead, I installed the Dovecot IMAP server and edited /etc/dovecot.conf. I set these options:

protocols = imap
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

and restarted dovecot. Then I configured an IMAP+ account on localhost in Evolution, and dragged and dropped all IMAP folders to the local folders.

KMail’s address book is stored in ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc. Double clicking on the most recent vcf file there, should be enough to open and import it in Evolution.

Mandriva’s future?

Posted on by Frederik

Now that my blog is not aggregated anymore on Planet Mandriva, I can safely express my opinion about Mandriva’s future without offending too many people.

Recently it became clear that Mandriva was once again in serious financial trouble. Mandriva 2010.1 was even delayed because of that, although not much explanation was given. In the end the company was saved by a new investor, but how things will involve in the more long-term, remains unclear.

Probably because of the financial crisis and the uncertainty of the future of the company, more and more employees started leaving the company, among them some people who played a very important role in the development of the distribution and who have been working for Mandriva for a very long time. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Employees seem to be unhappy because of their doubts of the future of the company and once even the most faithful employees have the impression that the ship starts sinking, everyone leaves as fast as possible. Because nobody wants to be the last one and go down with the ship… Some of them clearly expressed their frustration with the management of the company in their goodbye message sent to the public mailing lists. There have not been any indications that these employees are being replaced.

The last few years Mandriva had always trouble keeping up with the other big distributions because of lack of staff and that will only become worse now that the company faces more cost cuttings. Does this distribution still have a future? I am not sure whether the company will still continue investing in the distribution. Actually I think it is a waste of money investing in something which will always lag behind the competition. Maybe the company could drop the distribution and specialize in Linux services. On the other hand, I am not sure what is the chance of succeeding if you throw away the main product for which you are best known. Anyway, I can believe that the Mandriva distribution would survive even if the company stopped working on it because right now a lot of work is already being done by external contributors.

Now I have the feeling that Mandriva is not much more anymore than any of those smaller alternative distributions, like PCLinuxOS or Slackware. Those distributions will always have their share of fans but they do not play a significant role in the development of Linux. Already for several years most real innovations happen under the impulse of companies like Red Hat and Novell. Mandriva’s reputation has been very problematic for a long time already and this will definitely not improve after all what is happening now.

I have used Mandriva with pleasure on all my machines for about 10 years and I have always strongly defended the distribution in the past when people criticized it. But now I can only conclude that for me Mandriva does not have any future anymore and that it is time to move on.

So thank you to all the people who made Mandriva such a great distribution in the past and thanks to whom I learned a lot about Linux in those 10 years. I wish them all the best now and in the future!

Why prefer Debian GNU/Linux over another distribution

Posted on by Frederik

Quite some time ago I wrote a blog post explaining why I preferred Mandriva over other distributions. But I have now switched to Debian GNU/Linux, so it is time for an update. I will mostly compare with Mandriva because that is where I come from and what I know the best, although most points are rather universal.

So, these are some reasons why I prefer Debian GNU/Linux over other distributions:

  • All officially released Debian GNU/Linux stable versions are supported for a long time. Where most other free distributions are supported for about 1,5 year, this is much longer for Debian stable. For example, security updates for Debian Etch were published up to about 3 years after its release.
  • Debian is more stable than most other distributions. This is due to the large amount of testers and due to Debian’s unique development model: the “unstable” branch contains only software which is considered stable upstream (with a few generally accepted exceptions). When a package is in “unstable” for 10 days without new release critical bugs it gets moved to the “testing” distribution. The stable releases are a snapshot of the testing distribution after a freeze during which all release critical bugs are fixed. Releases of the stable distribution are not time driven: the stable distribution is only released when it is really ready.
  • By using apt pinning it is possible to easily mix and match packages from different repositories so that you can run the latest version of specific applications. Apt pinning can be used to pick packages from the extensive backports repository or to install packages from the testing, unstable and even the experimental repositories without having to update your whole system to the same release (unlike Mandriva for example, and as far as I know the same is true for other distributions like Fedora). Instead, carefully defined dependencies will make sure that all packages which need to be updated together are pulled in, resulting in a working system.
  • Due to Debian’s development model it is possible to run a pretty up to date system at any time without sacrificing stability by using the testing distribution. I am now running Debian Lenny testing different systems for more than a month, with software which is often more up to date than in Mandriva 2010.1, yet the system is much more stable in general than my systems which were running Mandriva 2010.1.
  • Debian is fast. Debian Squeeze boots up very fast without hacks like Mandriva’s speedboot, readahead or preload. Also application start up is very fast. I am not really sure why this is the case, but my guess is that this is due to Debian’s simplicity: it does not install too much daemons and boot up scripts by default. Also Debian uses dash instead of bash for /bin/sh, which also results in faster boot times. Shutdown also feels faster than what I was used to in Mandriva.
  • Debian is secure. Because stable versions are supported for about 3 years and because security updates get released very fast. Debian also plays a rather active role in fixing security problems. For example, Debian’s webkitgtk maintainer searched for all webkit security patches and ported them to the webkitgtk 1.2 branch. The fixes were included in Debian’s webkitgtk and then were also included upstream in webkitgtk 1.2.3.
  • Debian is available for lots of platforms. You have an old PowerPC based laptop, a GuruPlug or OpenRD system with ARM processor or a SUN UltraSPARC server? Debian will run on all these systems.
  • Debian values freedom. Debian allows me to use my GNOME system without PulseAudio without loosing my volume applet in the panel (like was the case in Mandriva). But of course, if you want PulseAudio it is available and you can install it. Debian is not exclusively tied to the Linux kernel: there exist versions with a FreeBSD or even HURD kernels. The choice is up to you. Debian uses the Exim MTA by default but if you do not like this, other MTA’s are available and are equally well maintained and integrated into the distribution. Debian does not include non-free software by default, so that you can safely use distribute and even modify the software in all possible situations without having to worry about the license. But if you want to use non-free software, it is available in the non-free repository.
  • Debian is very “standard“. It does not replace standard components by its own implementations like especially Ubuntu is doing. That means that Debian does not use non-standard things like Upstart, notify-osd or indicator-applet by default or does not move the window decoration buttons to the left side. Of course if you do want to use these csutomizations, they are all available (Debian values freedom!), but by default Debian prefers to use the standard upstream software. This ensures the best compatibility with upstream now and in the future, because all these non-standard Ubuntu things might cause conflicts later on with new upstream design decisions.
  • Debian is not owned by a commercial organization. The free distribution is not some kind of crippled version of a commercial product which has all features and software available. It ensures also that decisions are not taken based on commercial interests, but only in the interest of the community. If you do want commercial support, there are many companies supporting Debian all over the world.

Related to that: today is Debian’s 17th anniversary and Debian Appreciation Day. If you use Debian, let the Debian community know you appreciate their work http://thank.debian.net.

Debian on desktop systems

Posted on by Frederik

What I expected to happen some time ago, is finally becoming reality: Debian is now my favourite distribution for desktop systems.

First I installed Debian on my new Samsung N210 netbook and I was very pleased with the result. Shortly after that, my father experienced a bug while trying to print in Firefox on Mandriva 2010.1. It would fail to print and there were errors related to ps2ps (if I remember correctly) in the Cups log, hinting at some bug in Ghostscript. Actually it was not the first time this bug hit us, I had seen the same problem some weeks ago.

As analysing and having this bug fixed would likely take a lot of time and I needed a rather quick solution, I though it was the right time to reinstall this system with Debian Squeeze (testing). Debian has many additional bug fixes in its GhostScript package so there was a fair chance that printing would be working better. So I did the same as with my netbook last week: I set up PXE booting to start the Debian installer (easier than digging up a CD-R, downloading an ISO and burning it), and then I installed Debian on the disk, leaving the old /home logical volume intact.

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