Areca: Linux desktop backups made easy

There are some desktop backup tools available for Linux, but most of them are not developed anymore. Areca however is under constant development and also provides a user friendly GUI.

Backups and Linux are a twofold thing: if you have hundreds or thousands of computers backups are not a problem at all: Amanda, Bacula, Restore and others are your friends. Also, if you want to create backups on single machines, there are many tools available: rsync, tar, and many, many more.
However, all these solutions are not suitable for the average user.

In the last years several projects were started to provide user friendly solutions for the backup of Linux desktop machines. A year ago I already reported about SBackup. Also, the Ubuntu team developed the solution TimeVault and last but not least there is flyback which I used for several months to keep a backup of my thesis. But despite their advantages they all suffer from stalled development: all mentioned projects are effectively dead at the moment.

There is only one exception: the little known Areca. This in Java programmed backup solution provides a user friendly GUI and is even suited for desktop users who have a quite complex idea of backup systems.

Despite some current bugs (it chokes on large numbers of files, you have to use several backup rules in such cases) and some shortcomings (the file choose dialog only allows to mark one single file each time) the program has matured over the time and can easily be used in a productive environment. Besides the usual backup/restore it also features statistics, the ability of merging backups, different backup profiles, encryption and other gimmicks. But be sure to quickly read through the documentation so that you understand what backup groups and backup targets are before you start!

The only problem I now have is that it is not packed for Fedora - or any other bigger distribution besides Ubuntu. The download section provides pre-compiled tar.gz packages, however I would prefer a rpm I could automatically fetch with yum.

VirtualBox 1.6: new features

VirtualBox has released the newest version of its virtual machine software. Among the features is seamless window support for Linux guests and MacOS and Solaris host support.

The new version is the first majoer release of VirtualBox since the company behind, Innotek, was acquired by SUN. And this release comes along with a set of new features:

• Solaris and Mac OS X host support
• Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
• Guest Additions for Solaris
• A webservice API
• SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
• Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support
• GUI: added accessibility support (50
• VMM: many fixes for VT-x/SVM hardware-supported virtualization
• Linux installer: support DKMS for compiling the kernel module
• Linux additions: several fixes, experimental support for RandR 1.2
• Linux host: compatibility fixes with Linux 2.6.25

The changelog lists numerous additional changes. Among them are notes that the general system has been improved speed and power wise. This is reflected by a new file format: after the update VirtualBox asks to update the file system from linux-1.2 to linux-1.3.
Additionally the download section now has precompiled binaries for more distribution versions. There are even rpms available for the fugure Fedora 9.

The new release is again an evolutionary improvement which again introduces a set of new supported machines. The new ownvership of SUN can only be seen by numerous improvements in the Solaris support. Otherwise, the development of VirtualBox seems to be just like usual: evolving, stable but always with a set of new features.

Fedora packages update: Ktorrent, Speedcrunch

The package speedcrunch was updated to its newest version 0.10 for all current Fedora versions including several new features. At the same time, ktorrent for KDE 4 got a bugfix update.

I’ve got some free time and used it to update two of the packages I currently maintain for the Fedora project:
Ktorrent got a bugfix update to 3.0.1. However, this version will not be shipped with Fedora 9 since the feature freeze is already there. Instead, the new package will be provided as an update. Btw., I’m really looking forward to see how well Fedora 9 will perform, and how well it will work with KDE 4.

The more interesting update is the one of speedcrunch from version 0.9 to 0.10. The new version features, among other things:

• several new functions like MOD, GAMMA, etc.
• a new math book browser to view information about common math objects like a cone, a circle or similar things; i hope to see more information about important functions there in the future
• coloured syntax highlighting
• RTL support
• session support
• tray icon context menu

This small calculator is powerful and useful - and simply to use. If you want to give it a try, download the packages for Fedora 7 or Fedora 8. If you test them please also leave a note at the update pages so that they can be pushed to updates faster.

In case you wonder why it took so long to update the packages: I had only limited time due to real life. And since the speedcrunch update is an enhancement anyway and the ktorrent package only affects rawhide, there was no real need to update them.

RealPlayer/HelixPlayer 11.0 released

More than half a year after the targeted release date the RealPlayer/HelixPlayer for Linux was released in version 11.0. The new release delivers long expected features like full ALSA integrateion and Flash and WMA support.

The release is definitely surprising - because it was already announced almost a year ago. But besides the date the release complies with the expectations:

• WMA support
• Flash support
• ALSA integration
• Playlist support
• Surround support
• LSB compliance

As usual the program can be downloaded as bin or as RPM either with proprietary (WMA/Flash/Real) codecs - called RealPlayer - or without - called HelixPlayer. In case you are working on a RPM system you can even see the LSB compliance working in case you haven’t installed the LSB dependency package:

# rpm -Uvh RealPlayer11GOLD.rpm
Error: Missing dependecy:
        lsb >= 3.1 is needed by package RealPlayer-11.0.0.4028-20080225.i586

Of course this can easily be solved on Fedora by

# yum --nogpgcheck localinstall RealPlayer11GOLD.rpm
Setting up Local Package Process
Excluding Packages from Livna for Fedora Core 8 - i386 - Base
Finished
Examining RealPlayer11GOLD.rpm: RealPlayer - 11.0.0.4028-20080225.i586
Marking RealPlayer11GOLD.rpm to be installed
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
[...]
Installed: RealPlayer.i586 0:11.0.0.4028-20080225
Dependency Installed: pax.i386 0:3.4-4.fc8 redhat-lsb.i386 0:3.1-19.fc8
Complete!

Anyway, the question remains where HelixPlayer fits into today’s Linux desktop: first of all while there is now a new release the future of the program is yet again very uncertain. The current development progress plan has its last entry in the middle of 2007, and the the next roadmap isn’t set up yet, only release goals are set. But these are already quite old.
But the even larger problem is anyway that there are already several audio/video engines available for Linux: Xine, VLC, mplayer and GStreamer. Years ago the situation was different and HelixPlayer would have been able to close a gap. But that never happened.

Nevertheless, if the HelixPlayer guys do it right in the future they will provide a Phonon backend for KDE 4 so that the users could choose HelixPlayer/RealPlayer. That would give them the possibility to get back into the game quickly.
But if this also takes a couple of years that the developers should first ask themselves what they currently aim for on the Linux desktop.

Experimental Qt 4.4-rc1 packages for Fedora 8 [2. Update]

I’ve built highly experimental Qt 4.4-rc1 packages for Fedora 8. They are for testing purposes and not meant for any kind of real usage. The packages have been built with the OpenSuse Build Service.

Thanks to the original qt-4.3 rpm spec file (hi than, rex) for Fedora 8 I was able to derive a spec file for Qt 4.4-rc1. I had to make some changes, and as a result the quality of the spec file is rather poor - but in the end the spec worked.

The bigger problem was however to have the power to make so many rebuilds until I figured out how the spec should look like. Here the OpenSuse Build Service came to the rescue. It supports various Fedora versions and also allows package builders to experiment in their local directory - and that was exactly what I did. Besides, the OBS has more than a hundred machines to build the packages, so it never takes too long until some host starts building. And the hosts are quite powerfull.
Yes, I do like the OBS pretty much

The result is available here (only i586 right now). There is even a repo-file, but you shouldn’t use it: I’m not planning to improve these packages on my own or to deliver updates. Actually you should not use the packages on any serious system: they are experimental and not meant to be used to really replace anything. Btw., since Qt 4.4 comes with the WebKit engine you might want to remove WebKit-qt-devel before updating the system with my packages.

Anyway, after you’ve installed the new packages you can have a look at the new Qt 4.4 demos: start /usr/bin/qtdemo-qt4 and explore all the new Qt 4.4 goodies.

There you will also find the main reason I wanted to have a look at the current Qt 4.4: the Qt-WebKit demo browser which was recently mentioned by Benjamin Meyer (go to Demos -> Browser).

Of course this is just a technical demonstration - the browser does not incorporate flash support, does not support all the ususal key shortcuts, kwallet support, etc. But the idea is not to provide a full blown browser but to show that the engine is actually working and can easily be used inside a browser.
And to be honest the browser is already working quite nice considering it is just a technical demo: I wrote the article from within the demo browser. It even supports the rich text editing field in WordPress’ text input field which is a quite important issue for many users.

The next step I would appreciate is a stand-alone browser on top of it. Not to replace Konqueror/KHTML but to provide an alternative (for further information read the article “Browser Wars - Reloaded”). Let’s see what happens when Qt 4.4 will be shipped to all KDE desktops out there.

Update:
The x86_64 packages are now available as well.

2. Update:
I’ve updated the package spec file to the one found in the current Fedora rawhide repo. This means that the packages are much saner now.