Last call for ….

I haven’t posted anything in a while on this blog, and now I made the decision that this will not change: it is unlikely that this blog will be updated anytime soon. The reason is actually twofold:

Job

I’m working full time as an Open Source/Linux consultant these days – and after work I do not really have the time nor the energy to invest even more time into Open Source (besides the Fedora packaging).

Company’s Blog

I was successful in convincing enough people in our company to start a blog – and I blog there since then, so when I get home I usually already have blogged about whatever comes to my mind.

That means effectively that you will not receive any more new posts here. It hurts my heart and kills kittens, but you can remove the blogfeed. @planets where I might still be listed at: please remove this blog feed as well.

However, if you *do* want to keep up with my thoughts: credativ’s company blog is working quite nice these days. Btw., in case you don’t know, credativ is an Open Source/Linux company and the one behind the Open Source Support Center (OSSC) and the Open Source Support Card (yeah, “catchy” names, I know). They are focussed on Open Source support (Linux-Support, PostgreSQL-Support, etc.) and have offices in DE, UK, US, etc. So the general topics are pretty close to this blog. If you look close you will recognize my style: short italic introduction, eye catcher on the upper right side, special headline markings for Howtos and Short Tips, and so on. Also, the categories are quite the same, and it is actually available in German and English. Also, I am not the only person writing there – one very active PostgreSQL developer keeps blogging there, if I want it or not.

However – it is a company blog, so you will (!) find information regarding the company itself, or newest marketing things. You are warned!

So this is it: the last post. Thanks everyone for wonderful years full of blogging, discussions, news, Howtos and good tips. So long, and thanks for the fish!

Short Tip: Managing system services on the command line

On Fedora systems the run level configuration of system services can easily be done via the gui tool system-config-services. However, in case there is no X installed this can also be done by the command line tool chkconfig:

# chkconfig --list|grep httpd
httpd           0:Aus   1:Aus   2:Aus   3:Aus   4:Aus   5:Aus   6:Aus
# chkconfig --level 345 httpd on
# chkconfig --list|grep httpd
httpd           0:Aus   1:Aus   2:Aus   3:Ein   4:Ein   5:Ein   6:Aus
# chkconfig --level 345 httpd off
# chkconfig --list|grep httpd
httpd           0:Aus   1:Aus   2:Aus   3:Aus   4:Aus   5:Aus   6:Aus

This works also on Mandriva and Opensuse. On Ubuntu, which is Debian based, there is a similar tool available, sysv-rc-conf:

# sysv-rc-conf --list|grep cups
cupsys           1:off   2:off   3:off   4:off   5:off
# sysv-rc-conf --level 345 cupsys on
# sysv-rc-conf --list|grep cups
cupsys           1:off   2:off   3:on   4:on   5:on

Of course on all systems you can still manually create symlinks to control the start and stop times of the services.

Howto: Updating Dell Firmware on Linux

A recent hardware bug in NVIDIA cards made it necessary to update the firmware on quite some laptop models. Usually firmware updates are only provided for Windows machines, but Dell provides all tool needed for firmware updates on Linux.

NVIDIA has a tough time right now: there are unresolved driver issues on Linux, and now a serious hardware problem came up: many graphic cards are broken, and some might even be fried in the machine.

There is a workaround available making sure to not overheat the card, though. This workaround however often requires a firmware update on the used machine. Firmware updates are most often difficult on Linux and require some work. However, Dell is one of the pleasant exceptions: Dell provides the technique, the software and even precompiled binaries in distribution specific repositories to easily update the firmware.

The only disadvantage is that you have to search quite some pages until you get the information needed. Once you get there, the rest is quite easy and straight forward. The following shows an example for Fedora, but there are howtos for other distributions as well.

# wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/bootstrap.cgi | bash
# wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
# yum -y install firmware-addon-dell
# yum -y install $(bootstrap_firmware)
# update_firmware

The first two commands install the necessary repositories with the help of perl scripts. These check the distribution and download the appropriate repo information, keys, etc. The third command installs the binary needed to identify the firmware, the fourth downloads the right firmware, and the last command updates the firmware.

Afterwards, the firmware will be updated on the next soft reboot. If you want to be sure to make a soft reboot, call shutdown -r 0 as root. It worked for me definitely. A big THANKS to Dell for their excellent Linux support!

It would of course be even better when there would be some generic way to update the firmware on any machine. This could then be implemented in Linux generically and could make the live of users easier – not only on Linux, but also on Windows, where the average user does not even now what a firmware is, left alone how to update it.

Forth and back again – having a look at Fedora 9 and KDE 4.1beta

Recently my distribution of choice, Fedora, published a new version, Fedora 9. This one featured KDE 4.0, and there were also KDE 4.0.80 packages available, and I decided to take a look at them. Unfortunately, I had to return to Fedora 8 and KDE 3.5.9 – but not for long, that’s for sure.

The background

Recently I wanted to try two new “tools” – Fedora 9 and KDE 4.1dev. The reason behind was that both came along with a whole bunch of new features. Fedora 9 promised full disk encryption, a new X-server, PackageKit, a new NetworkManger, Upstart and so on, while KDE 4.1dev promised me first and foremost KDE 4.x. I was still in KDE 3.5.9 because I had to write a thesis during the upcoming of KDE 4.0 and wasn’t able to switch. Therefore I decided to install Fedora 9 and afterwards update the system to KDE 4.80 with packages from kdeforge. KDE 4.0.x wasn’t an option because I wanted to have the KDE 4 PIM suite.

The bad experiences

However, the journey did not went as well as hoped. First of all Fedora itself did not boot up any faster. Of course I know that switching the init system itself doesn’t make the scripts go faster, but somehow I expected it to go at least a bit faster than maybe a minute. But the problems with the new KDE were more pressing: KDE froze X several times (Gnome didn’t), most often when the kerneloops popup tried to tell me something. This happened regularly after only a few minutes, and made the system unusable. I deactivated kerneloops, selinux and other usual suspects, but X still froze after some minutes most of the times.
Additionally, Plasma is not able to enlarge to a new size when for example an external monitor with a higher resolution is plugged in. That is however my daily setup, and must work before I can switch to KDE 4.x.
Last but not least I had two issues with Dolphin: first of all, the Ctrl key doesn’t work as expected. Seems to be a bug in Qt 4.4, but nevertheless, I rely heavily on that feature. Second, Dolphin is quite slow when scrolling through large folders. I deactivated the information panel and it was quicker, but still not as fast as I am used to from KDE 3.5.

I did suspect that these problems could be related with Fedora or were fixed with newer devel versions of KDE, and therefore I switched my system to OpenSuse 11RC with the unstable KDE 4.1dev packages. But all mentioned problems were still present except for the X freezes (not entirely sure about that one).

So, in the end I had to switch back to KDE 3.5.9. There are only few things, mostly corner cases, which keep me there, but these are, unfortunately, existential to me.

The positive outlook

However: the impression I got from just playing around and testing the system was the same I already got from testing it only for minutes in virtual machines or demoing the system at LinuxTag: KDE 4 is awesome.
One of the best examples work-flow wise is probably the new menu. I newer was a fan of menus (Alt+F2 does the job quicker) and wasn’t really interesting in the change introduced with KDE 4. However, just using it for minutes already changed the way I worked. The ability to search through the menu is a nice and helpful add-on and just makes sense today. But the main advantage is the easy and intuitive way of setting favorites. It is a blast once you get the idea behind it and actually try to use it. I got accustomed to it after minutes, that was almost scary.
Also, I’m someone who never uses icons or links to clutter the wallpaper – but the folder view might be a good solution when I have to work with a bunch of files (think of TeX here, or of merging different images or text files). It still has some rough edges and could use a way to have no background at all, but it is definitely on a very promising way.

Besides these work-flow improvements there are of course the improvements within the apps, and the new apps in general: just some days ago I was chatting with a friend about city distances, and right in the discussion she said “so just check it with Marble”. Well, I would like to!
Another application I’m really looking forward to is Gwenview – the KDE 4 version is very, very neat. Also, KDE3′s KHTML engine is a bit notchy at the edges, holey in the middle and has a crack at one side. But KDE 4′s KHTML engine is much improved and is therefore a reason on its own to switch. And I haven’t even tested yet (that means: used in daily live) apps like Okular or the improved Kopete.

So I am very eager to see the above mentioned bugs fixed and will afterwards give it yet another try. I’m already sure that my work flow will be more efficient, and that’s in the end what really counts!

Closing words

Besides KDE 4.1 there is also Qt 4.4: some new apps I would like to test are based on Qt 4.4: Screenie and Arora/Foxkit are just the most prominent examples.
There are also bew 3rd party KDE 4.x applications: while the “usual” programs like Ktorrent, Krusader, digikam, Amarok or Konversation already have KDE 4.x versions or are working at it, there are also some new interesting programs around, like Audex or KGrubeditor.

Having said that all that, I’m still very happy with KDE 3.5 right now. It is still a supported platform which just works as I expect it, as I am used to. It even gets bugfix updates if necessary, for example KDE 3.5.9 was released after KDE 4.0, and I’m very thankful for it.
So I’m totally free to choose what I want – and that’s the most important point!

Short Tip: Searching files and packages

In case you ever compiled anything by hand you might have gotten an error message like this:

make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/lib/libacl.so', needed by `lib/kstyle_qtcurve_config.so'.  Stop.
make[1]: *** [config/CMakeFiles/kstyle_qtcurve_config.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

There is obviously a file missing, in this case to compile a specific KDE 4 theme. There are now two ways of searching for the package which contains the file: either through the command line, or through an online package database.

The command line of course depends on the used package manager, here are some examples:

apt-file -x search libacl.so*
urpmf libacl.so
yum whatprovides libacl.so*
zypper wp libacl.so

The -x in case of apt-file makes it possible to use regular expressions. Except for zypper all commands above can be used with regular expressions or show matches if the searched expression is only part of a result (like libacl.so.1)

The package databases depend again on the distribution, but at least for the rpm based distributions there is one common place: rpm.pbone.net. Especially the advanced link is of interest since the results can be filtered by distribution and distribution version.
For Ubuntu based distributions there is the Ubuntu package database, but make sure you use the second entry field. Unfortunately, the database only supports the right file names. Searching for libacl will bring you zero results – which is, to be honest, quite stupid. Gentoo users can try portagefilelist.de.

I am well aware that each distribution has again its own database – but that’s not handy if you deal with different distributions each day. If you now more commands for other distribution tools or other central databases for file/package searches, please leave a comment and I will add them.