FOSDEM 2010

This weekend I have participated at the FOSDEM 2010 open source event, annually held in Brussels at the ULB (Universite Libre de Bruxelles). It's a free-entrance conference with talks ranging from (Linux) distribution-related stuff and up to new trends in the OSS programming community. The nice part is that one can get a glimpse of the current status of the major projects and also hear about what's new and hot in the OSS domain.

The major themes that the sessions were grouped around were Distributions, Embedded, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Mono, Drupal, GNUstep, NoSQL, MySQL, Openmoko, X.org, Java, BSD. Since my interests revolve around FreeBSD and cross-distribution cooperation I have been attending mostly these two session groups. The general picture that I could gather is that better cooperation and integration (especially when it comes to packaging software) is desired but my feeling is that not too many people are yet ready to commit to such ideals. Things like openSUSE's Build Service and the shared dependency solver (CUDF) bring in nice touches but I believe more standardization and commitment are needed before something viable will be rolling out. Of course, it's hard to set on a commitment when one is not forced to but rather even lured to diverge inside this free (OSS) ecosystem. That's why I think it's worth paying attention to people like Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu's "angel investor") when they are preaching for synchronizing the efforts. Variety has its value, but so does consistency among various OS'es.

The talks were complemented by the booths outside the lecture rooms, most of the big distributions being present there. In the BSD camp I have seen FreeBSD/PC-BSD, NetBSD and, bit of a surprise, MirBSD (MirOS) sharing the desk with FreeBSD. Not too many BSD personalities around, only Brooks Davis that I could count from the FreeBSD core team.

As usual the O'Reilly books booth was pretty busy with interested people (yours included) and outside the halls you could opt for a treat of "frites" (french fries) or you could sample a few Belgian beers (it's quite a pity to miss that being in the famous country of a thousand beers).

All in all, this was an interesting experience, at least to see what the other camps are showing off or working on. You can see here a few pictures I made from the conference and around (also some slides from the presentations here). The organizers have promised the presentations video recordings in about a week.

Installing Linux kernel headers for Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instances

When you play around with Ubuntu EC2 instances on AWS you might, at one point, stumble upon needing to install the Linux kernel headers to build some kernel module(s) from source. However, the standard Ubuntu repositories do not offer the -xen images used to build those AMI's:

# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package linux-headers-2.6.27-23-xen

You should try to use the Ubuntu EC2 PPA packages for the Xen kernels — e.g.  you may use the following:

# echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-on-ec2.list
# apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 9EE6D873
# apt-get update
# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Don't forget to replace "YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE" with your own Ubuntu flavour (hardy/intrepid).

Running oldie VMware Server 1.0.x on latest Ubuntu

If you're like me and hate to get along with the VMware Server 2.x resource hog then you will want to go for the older and more streamlined VMware Server 1.0.x (you will also get a real console client too).
Now if you do that on the modern Ubuntu distros then you will step into some troubles (Server 1.0.x shows its age). Most of them can be solved following the tips here (performance tips included!). However here are some more hidden gems:

• The latest 2.6.27 kernels have some changes which break the building of the VMware kernel modules (stub sources are really old anyway); use the patcher here (yes, it works for Server too).
• At least the MUI component assumes that /bin/sh is Bash, which on Ubuntu is really dash — this in turn will break setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment and apache will complain for missing libraries; correct the shebang magig at the top of the initialisation file /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware.

Good luck. And don't forget that 1.0.x is really old and already obsoleted by VMware in favor of 2.0.x...

Network messup in Ubuntu Jaunty when using VMware

While I was testing a brand new Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10 alpha) installation on my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to checkout whether it better reacts to the suspend issue, I stumbled over another problem: after installing VMware Workstation the network setup would get messed up at every boot requiring manual tweaking.

It turns out that the NetworkManager service, in its great wisdom, was trying to automatically initialize the vmnet1/vmnet8 virtual interfaces created by VMware (it's using them as network injection points for the VM machines and they are managed by the vmware startup script). That means running the DHCP client over them and acquiring some garbage IP settings (these settings are supposed to be acquired by the contained VMware virtual machines, not by the physical box!). Subsequently this was installing a phoney VMware default route and DNS server entries, overriding the expected wireless settings, which in turn renders networking useless.

It seems this new behavior may have been triggered by a change in the [un]managed mode of the NetworkManager service in Ubuntu Jaunty. However, trying to change the managed=true/false statement in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf yielded no results.

Luckily you can easily fix this by adding specific configuration files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ to prevent NetworkManager from touching the VMware network interfaces. You can use the following commands (assuming you kept the default interface numbering):

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet1 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet1
autoconnect=false
EOF

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet8 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet8
autoconnect=false
EOF

RF Kill switch, Suspend and other demons on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li 2735

Some time ago I have bought a cheap Fujitsu-Siemens (AMILO Li 2735 model) laptop on a refurbish sale. I don't know whether it was the smartest idea, it looks like the guys at Fujitsu Siemens had nothing else but Windows Vista in mind when they designed this spartan model :-/ ...

My first problem was the software wireless/RF killswitch which works with Vista after installing Fujitsu-Simenes drivers (you need to press Fn+F1), but not out of the box on Linux/others OS'es. The not-so-obvious solution to this problem was to use the acerhk module.

The second problem was that the CPU (T5450 1.66Ghz): while it's a Core 2 Duo CPU, it lacks the virtualization support needed to run 64bit OS'es under VMware (among the last ones not supporting Intel VT). Well, I guess it's just my bad luck for this one...

Now the third problem that I'm struggling with is that suspending in Ubuntu is broken, and I have tried both 8.10 and 9.04 alpha. The weird thing is that if I boot from the LiveCD suspending works (although not too many times, SquashFS errors keep accumulating), but if I boot from an installation made from the very same LiveCD then I have no chance to correctly resume from suspend — it's doing a weird "powerup/powerdown/powerup/hang" cycle. There is a bug filed for the (similar) Li 2732 model which was at one point closed as fixed in the Jaunty alpha versions when tested from the LiveCD but I had to reopen it since it doesn't work from an HDD install...

If any of you has some ideas for this issue please leave me a comment. Thanks.

Using EPEL repositories in CentOS (and spinoffs alike)

If you are looking for various popular packages to install in CentOS (and for that matter also RHEL) but you do not find them in the default installed yum repositories, then you can add the Fedora EPEL repositories. For CentOS 5.3 you should be running something like this under root:

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

If you were wondering, EPEL stands for "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" and, quoting their FAQ, this is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Ubuntu Heyron: i810 beats intel driver ?

I'm not sure why, but ever since I upgraded my x86-64 installation to Ubuntu 8.04, all applications (but especially Firefox in particular) would spot a dramatical display slowdown, although CPU was not loaded.

Well, ever since switching from the default "intel" video driver to the "i810" driver, things have gone back to normal. This makes me think that the new/official "intel" driver is yet to become
what the old i810 one has still to offer...

Resolving video play issues with Intel video cards in Ubuntu

Yet another hack to take into account when dealing with a laptop having an integrated Intel video card (e.g. Intel 945GM in my case): if you have problems playing video clips with the 3D accelerated desktop (Beryl or Compiz powered), then you may be running with a buggy driver.

There seem to exist a problem (see bug reports here, here and here) with XV support when using AIGLX so all media players using the default "xv" video output will fail or crash (including Totem and VLC). This is a big problem for the Gutsy users since Compiz Fusion is enabled by default.

The easy fix is to change the video driver from "intel" to "i810" — you can do that either manualy changing the "Device" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or, in Gutsy, from System / Administration / Screens and Graphics / Graphics Card / Choose driver by name.

Cisco VPN Client on Ubuntu (Gutsy)

I recently have been endowed with a company laptop and as such I was in a hurry to install Ubuntu Gutsy besides the usual suspect (read Windows). Good news is that everything has gone smoothly (or almost); bad news was that I couldn't install Cisco VPN Client, having the same issue as VMware Workstation — kernel module building was breaking due to changes in the latest Linux 2.6.22 kernels.

So after some googling around I found the solution — a neat patch which allows compiling Cisco VPN Client. Thank god the guys at Cisco were kind smart enough to give object/source code for their IPsec kernel module and not binary modules.

Pidgin 2.0.1 (and Ubuntu repository)

Now that Pidgin 2.0.1 has just been released, the chase was on to grab another .deb for 2.0.1, but was rather enjoyed to find that someone has been thinking about an Ubuntu repository — add the following in /etc/apt/sources.list (for Ubuntu Feisty):

## http://ubuntu.schmidtke-hb.de
# wget ubuntu.schmidtke-hb.de/aptrepository.asc
# sudo apt-key add aptrepository.asc
deb http://apt.schmidtke-hb.de/ feisty main

Source: OShelpdesk.org
Digg this !

Microsoft fonts for Ubuntu Linux (and others)

In his "great" generosity, at the time they were trying hard to win the browsers war, Microsoft had released a pack of core TTF fonts with a lax license to redistribute them, for "interoperability matters". Times have gone, but the files have remained in various places on the web (e.g. project corefonts on SourceForge).

You can quickly install these fonts in Ubuntu with a command like the following:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

Now either re-login or use the following command to refresh the fonts list:

sudo fc-cache -fv

Tip taken from Ubuntu blog.

Chasing the Pidgin

Recently it came into my attention that the GAIM team has chose to rename the project to Pidgin and checking the new site I saw that Pidgin 2.0.0 release is available for download.

Unfortunately among the offered binary builds there was no Debian package for Ubuntu Feisty (that's what I'm running at work) and neither does the Ubuntu repositories offer a package.

So after some googling I found a few .deb packages (from which I chose one from download.ubuntu.pl). Installing the package, however, was a bit of pain due to the fact that I already had gaim 2.0.0 (beta7) installed and that was generating dependency issues: since nautilus-sendto is (wronly) dependent on gaim, uninstalling it would trigger uninstalling the whole ubuntu-desktop package.

Here is what I needed to do in order to remain with a clean package tree:

1. Forcibly uninstall gaim ignoring the nautilus-sendto dependency:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge --ignore-depends=nautilus-sendto gaim

   
   
2. Uninstalled the gaim-data package:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge gaim-data

   
   
3. Edited by hand the /var/lib/dpkg/status to remove the stale gaim dependency in the nautilus-sendto package
   
4. Installed pidgin package:
   

   sudo dpkg -i pidgin_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

   
   
5. Fix the packaging list (and eventually installing unresolved pidgin dependencies):
   

   sudo apt-get -f install

   
   

I must admit that the fact that the package database being a flat text-file saved the day — otherwise it would have been a tough day for me searching for a fix. Kudos to the dpkg guys for doing this the right(TM) way. ;)