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!

Moving on: 64bit Linux, PulseAudio, Fedora 10 and so on

With the release of Fedora 10 I took the opportunity to finally switch over to 64bit Linux – including the proprietary stuff like Flash, Skype, and so on. Also, Fedora 10 itself had several rather pleasing surprises for me.

I already used Fedora 10 since it’s Beta release. However, recently I decided to re-install it, this time in 64bit, and check how that would go. Also, since I had some rather strange problems and performance issues I wondered if a re-install would fix them.

64bit in General

Switching from 32bit to 64bit on an operating system is a huge and complicated task involving effectively all larger applications. This can e a real pain – unless you have an operating system where all software usually supports 64bit anyway. This is the case with most open source operating systems and therefore also with Linux. So grabbing the 64bit image and installing it was just like grabbing the 32bit image. In case of Fedora the download link offered by default was 32bit, but 64bit was just a click away. I wonder when that will change.

There are numerous advantages and disadvantages regarding 32bit and 64bit, for a first introduction start with the Wikipedia article.

Flash

The problems regarding 64bit arise when you deal with non-Open Source software: this might only be provided as 32bit. In case it depends on any other library, the system must provide these libraries in 32bit and 64bit. While on RPM systems this is not a problem at all, this can be rather problematic when browser plugins are 32bit only, because then the browser needs to be 32bit only as well, the same is true then for all other plugins, and so on. There are wrappers to deal with that, but these are sub-optimal.

Luckily, Adobe has now released a 64bit Alpha version of their Flash player. While it is still missing several features and is not even provided as a rpm or deb file, in my first tests it worked without problems. As a side note, the 64bit versions for Windows and Mac OS are still not out there – Linux is a clear technology and development pusher here!

For the sake of completion (and since someone would point it out in a comment anyway), there are also free (as in FLOSS) alternatives to the Flash player – which are available in 64bit for quite some time now, of course.

Skype

Another issue is Skype – this is not provided as a 64bit version at all (bug report). For Ubuntu users there is at least a 32bit version modified for easy installation on 64bit systems. Btw., hardly anyone seems to know that, even the German Ubuntu wiki doesn’t mention that at all.

Anyway, that doesn’t help the Fedora community anyway – but since Fedora runs on RPM installing all the compatibility libraries is just a question of hard disk space:

yum --nogpgcheck localinstall skype*rpm
yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.18-1.rc3.fc10.i386

That’s it. In my tests Skpe indeed worked, even a video test image was shown although I haven’t actually made a real video call. Also, I had problems with the microphone, but that might be due to problems with PulseAudio. I appreciate any tips on that issue.

PulseAudio

Well, PulseAudio is a difficult thing. It has a rather strong community and people are making sure it comes up everywhere and works everywhere like it should. However, while I read all the rather long papers and documents why I should need PA, nothing of these papers really stuck, and I always wonder why it is really needed – apart from the more esoteric reasons that Alsa is not suitable for the future. Besides, I do wonder if the Alsa guys would say the same.
Additionally, in my first tests PA worked just fine – under Gnome, but not in KDE. So my first step after installing Fedora since my first contact with PA was always to remove PA.

But I always tend to give things another try, and this time I didn’t remove it. And indeed, almost everything works, and I haven’t even met a delay yet. It all just works, even on KDE with its Phonon!

So it looks like PA finally fits in well. Now what I only need some ideas what to do with it Seriously, what I would appreciate to see is a simple one sheet drawing with all the usual suspects of the Linux audio blob (from Phonon over xine down to Alsa) to see where PA fits in and what it does there.

KDE, Nvidia and performance

Fedora 10 now includes KDE 4.1.3 (included in the updates), and together with RPM Fusion Nvidia drivers are just a

yum install kmod-nvidia

away. While I had trouble with this way with the beta version, and general serious performance problems with the drivers installed manually, it turned out that with Fedora 10 final everything works like a charm – fast and snappy!

I am slightly surprised and wonder what was wrong with my Fedora 10 Beta setup. But on the other hand, my work machine is running Kubuntu 8.10 and there the performance is similar fast. So to me it looks like the days of slow KDE 4.x on Nvidia hardware are finally over, given that the drivers are the newest stable ones and KDE is of version 4.1.3.

Fedora’s encryption

This time I decided to not go with a full hard disk encryption, but rather with a home disk encryption. And while I still dislike Fedora’s disk druid for not letting me chose the disk setup in detail I appreciate that clicking a checkbox was all I had to do to activate the home partition encryption. It is even nicely integrated with the boot process.

Overall impression

The overall impression of Fedora 10 is very good. Most bugs I encountered running the Beta version are fixed – except for a strange coding problem, but I will survive that one.

Also, my first move into the lands of 64bit are also far less complicated than expected. Your mileage may vary, depending on the used proprietary software, but then again kvm might be a solution to work around that problem.

Short Tip: Remove packages on Debian systems with ultimate force

Due to my job I “have to” use Debian based systems. It now happened that a package from a test repository was totally broken beyond repair:

Removing xyz ...
dpkg: error processing xyz (--remove):
subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 10
Errors were encountered while processing:
xyz
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

All workarounds with purge, remove-reinstreq, -P or force-all failed. In the end, this tip showed how to remove the package manually:
First, check all files with dpkg -L xyz. Remove them manually, and afterwards delete the file /var/lib/dpkg/info/xyz.postrm. Last but not least, launch

apt-get remove --purge xyz

Be aware that this method is pretty evil. If you don’t know why that method is evil, don’t use it!

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.

Future of FLOSS password storages: combined solution soon?

In a recent discussion about the future of KDE’s password manager KWalletManager it was mentioned that it is currently discussed to share a common password manager across all important FLOSS projects. While there is no result yet this is indeed a promising – and necessary – development.

It started with a question by Michael on the list kde-core-devel regarding the possibility to switch KWalletManager’s backend to the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) entirely. Robert answered that there was indeed discussion going on during FOSSCamp to merge all existing solutions (KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Firefox) to make it easier for the user to use these applications, but also to have the ability to sing-sign-on (meaning one login as user, and than automatically login everywhere else), which is a need for modern desktops. Afaik Fedora also has this topic on its radar, and it would surprise me if no one at OpenSuse, which constantly tries to bring these two desktops closer, has already put some thought into that.

While there are no visible results currently the need for such a solution is definitely present: At the moment it can happen that there are multiple programs used to store different keys in one single user session: Firefox on KDE introduces for example a second key storage right besides KWalletManager. Since the Open Source world does not want to force any solution on anyone, it should be possible to switch between Konqueror and Firefox without the need to take care of your passwords.
Technically there is no reason against a shared password storage, but it might tricky to convince the application/desktop developers. On the other hand, if KDE would get a pluggable KWalletManager backend it could even become possible to use the native key storages on other platforms if such APIs exist.