the Fox did it again, Firefox 3 is out!

Ten years ago, when bugged Internet Explorer was dominating the web browsing area and was not aligning to the web standards and thus hurting everyone, a Mozilla was born.

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers
grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the
fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own
image as promised by the
sacred words, and spoke
of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was
naught but a follower.

from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)

This is taken from Mozilla Manifesto:

The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet. We have worked together since 1998 to ensure that the Internet is developed in a way that benefits everyone. We are best known for creating the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Indeed, Mozilla succeed and brought back the Web Experience it should be. Now they are back with Firefox 3 which brings a lot of new stuff whether it comes ti user experience, performance or security. Just check out the new features.

Plus one more thing, ever attempted to make a world record and always failed? There is another chance today, head over to www.spreadfirefox.com and try to help with setting in new world record of the most downloaded software in one day.

Going to FOSDEM

While reading my favorite planet I noticed FOSDEM'08 is this week. As I am now living in Copenhagen which is relatively close, flights are cheap and I was always sorry I could not attend any real open source conference and meet the real people behind all this exciting stuff, I decided to go. As the conference is really close (this Friday) I have to act fast. Flights are sorted, now I am looking for some couch/sofa to stay at night, couch surfing seems like a great option. Agenda is really long list of exciting events and I spent whole yesterdays night just to try to pick some of them. There are still overlays but I'll try to sort it out as times permits.

So far I picked those:

Saturday:
10:00 - 10:30 Opening: Welcome
10:30 - 11:30 Opening: Tux with Shades, Linux in Hollywood
11:30 - 12:30 Opening: How a large scale opensource project works
12:30 - 13:15 Opening: Status update of Software Patents
13:30 - 14:15 LPI - LPI 2008 - a certification passage
14:00-14:45 Janson Perl6
14:30 - 15:15 Gnome Gnome Developer Kit
15:15 - 16:00 Gnome More Clutter - Animation Kit
16:00 - 17:00 CentOS Introduction to CentOS
16:15 - 16:30 - openSUSE - Builde Service Overview
16:15 - 16:30 - openSUSE - Builde Service Web interface
16:45 - 17:30 Gnome Elisa
18:15 - 18:45 Gnome GUPnP
18:00 - 19:00 CentOS Pluggable real-time monitoring with dstat


Sunday:
10:00 - 11:00 Chavanne Xen
11:30 - 12:00 openSUSE - Kernel, udev, D-Bus, HAL, NetworkManager and Friends
12:00 - 13:00 openSUSE - Suspend
12:00 - 13:00 X.org - Fixing X input
13:00 - 13:45 CrossDesktop - Farsight 2: Video conferencing made easy
13:00 - 14:00 H.1309 CentOS Introduction to CentOS
14:00 - 15:00 Janson Conary
14:30 - 15:00 openSUSE - One Click Install
15:00 - 15:15 talk - IOGrind: locating I/O performance problems
15:15 - 16:00 CrossDesktop - Deb Packaging Introduciton
15:00 - 15:45 Packaging - PackageKit
16:00 - 17:00 CentOS Hosting custom applications on CentOS 5
16:00 - 16:45 CrossDesktop - GEGL
17:15 - 18:30 Janson The Endgame
17:00 - 18:00 CentOS CentOS 5 and Virtualization


Event is happening at the ULB Campus Solbosh, so I can check what the studies looks like in Belgium. And I see LPI certifications are available, time to test my Linux skills. Now if I just manage my phone to sync to Google calendar, both Goosync and Scheduleworld are not working for me now.

Positive review of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04

The latest reincarnation of popular distribution is out for a while and I decided to share my own experience here. Recently there were two machines available for testing. My Mums desktop which we have at home and is used mainly for surfing the web and is Linux powered already for some time and keeps its users happy. As the amount of data is minimal (photos, few documents, settings) complete re-installation is done and user usually wont notice new version of Ubuntu as long as the Firefox icon is at its place. The other machine is company provided new toy (ehm production laptop of course), small, light and beautiful Dell D420.

Installation on both machines went without any problems, wouldn't we have non-standard disk layout setup I believe everybody can install that on empty box. Just few clicks and there you go. Boot process is fast and nice and animated logo is presented. In about 30seconds I was logged into the desktop.

Networking part is done right, there is NetworkManager which works perfectly for both setups. I've managed to connect to several WPA protected networks without any hitch, wired connection is perfect as well. Only problem with NetworkManager I ran into so far is asking for gnome-keyring password to access stored WPA keys. There are few posts on the internet on how to change it, but simple check box to allow NetworkManager to access some parts of Gnome Keyring (password storage) without further user involvement is something that is missing at the moment.

Graphic drivers, for some reasons there is Nvidia graphics card installed on the dekstop machine. After install I was presented with restricted manager pop-up telling me that Nvidia didn't have open sourced its drivers yet (so far only Intel did which I'm so thankful for) and binary drivers might be necessary to install before I'm allowed to take full potential of the system. But the nice thing ends here. I clicked to use proprietary driver and ubuntu installed that and restart was required. After restart I still had open source implementation of the driver in use instead of Nvidia one. This means no 3D Desktop effects and likely show stopper for and unexperienced user. Well few searches on the Internet and manual change of used driver in configuration file and it is working now. I assume this is because the first incarnation of such a manager and things will likely get better with future versions. On laptop I had to install i915resultion to get 1280x800 working by default, another thing if detected automatically would boost the "Wow it really works" effect. In 7.04 there are now Desktop Effects available. By default it provides wobbly windows (really Wow... for few hours), nice Alt-Tab switcher between applications and and quite usable 3D cube with mapped workspaces to each side. Unfortunately after using it, metacity window manager is not used anymore and many of the keyboard shortcuts do not work, so I reverted back to 2D desktop.

Now few things I miss. Ubuntu doesn't come with some nice sets of predefined applications or any other content. There is Examples folder but that is. How about to preload some bookmarks, add more of quality wallpapers, more icons for users so we can have graphical login manager by default. Install some templates for OpenOffice by default (even simple ones like CD covers would make difference). Give users a bunch of internet radios right into the Rhythmbox (which in this version works very well by the way). And I miss Java, it has been open sourced recently so why we do not have it installed by default? Firefox didn't come with any Java plug-in on my machine, the very same for Flash. First thing users usually checks is connection to popular sites like YouTube. How about get democracy on our desktops by default?

Final verdict: Clean, fast and one of the best Linux distributions out there getting better with every release. I think Gutsy Gibon (the next incarnation of Ubuntu) can be a perfect choice for many end users. A I also should not forget about great forums that helps users with almost any problem there. Well done guys.

slashtime - handy and powerful

Due to nature of my work, time to time I need to know the current time in different timezones. I was scared when I saw various applications on my colleagues desktops consuming megabytes of memory, slowing down startup of laptops and the money its costs. Luckily for Unix likers there is simple perl script called slashtime. Get it here, save it to /usr/local/bin and make it executable. Then edit ~/.tzlist (sample file is on the webpage as well) to suit your needs and then anytime you need to know:Small but handy and powerful.

more on gentoo

This is reply to this post by Alexandre Buisse.

Hi, this is really good piece of vision. You are right that there is lack of direction. I have to say I agree to most of what you've written, let me get through a bit other point of view on gentoo.

I love gentoo, but I spend to much of my time just building it. What I miss is some rapid deployment of gentoo. Not everybody enjoys compiling from source especially when you have multiple gentoo boxes deployed and mostly you compile the same stuff all the time. Hence focus on binary packages is important. At the moment with my friend we built some scripts and processes around gentoo that allows us to have two compiling machines and many binary-only deployed machines. But it is not polished and cumbersome in many ways (and I'm sure others have done it better). For example we hit hard problems when we needed different flags per machine. No fun there.

This problem led me back to gentoo mailing lists and the discovery of paludis and all the not so cool status of current gentoo development at the moment. From my point of view, there are some devs that are not behaving accordingly to others view of nice a polite behavior. Ok. But I see they are also trying to do some nice things like write alternative to portage and fix current issues gentoo have. Btw complete rewrite of apps from zero once in a time is a good practice. I couldn't even finish reading the thread based on which Daniel decided to leave again, to me that thread was about arguing about small things. But lets skip this my incomplete picture of things.

Another thing I miss is virtualization in gentoo. Would it be possible to somehow project gentoo that some core system (lets say XEN or KVM enabled) exits and then there are binary stage4s (again XEN or KVM enabled) ready to be deployed with customized setup? This means webserver, intranet server ( apache+wiki+ldap ready), backend server (samba+printing+LDAP+MAIL......), you name it. I guess here it is almost perfectly aligned with overlays.

going loud

Many times I wanted to contribute to community by any means. Recently I spent two days by installing Joomla! and VirtueMart as an multilingual eShop for a friend of mine. By exactly following manuals and guides posted on the internet I only got a mixed results that site had two languages, but switching to eShop component has crippled everything. Then I found this bug and things started to work as expected. So I took the opportunity and shouted loud into Czech Joomla! forum. Now I just hope I didn't make too many grammar typos/mistakes to ashame me.

I'm still playing with N800, it is cool device. Battery life is excellent, much more of what I would expect to get from such a device running full Linux system under hood. For a first day I was having very bad experience with my 2GB mini SD card, uploads to device were constantly failing. Next day I got another one just for 600Czk (30$) and since that everything is smooth. Installing new application is just a breeze, integrated web browser renders most of the web-pages correctly and the screen is brilliant, Canola is looking to be good companion, especially when mixed with UPNP somwhere on the LAN. I was unable to play my locally streamed mp3 and DivX avi files though, but I guess this is just a matter of time until this is fixed.

Eva likes it even more, when I see her quietly surfing the web from sofa, listening to mp3 songs stored on the internal card, listening to radio, I think I'm not going to be the owner anymore pretty soon.

gentoo domination postponed

Gentoo has been my favorite distribution for some time (found my first post on gentoo forums around 18th March 2002). Before that I was switching between RedHat, Suse and Mandrake based on the current level of applications that came with it. Later, I started to compile packages from source (because the most recent version was not in the repository yet). This had led me to the LFS (Linux From Scratch) and I learned a lot there. I'm not sure about current status of LFS, but it was sometimes pain to have it up to date and not break when something basic needed update. Then I saw post from Daniel Robbins (the father of gentoo) and quickly realized Gentoo is all I need.
Great support, innovative, excellent documentation and perfect source of skills and knowledge for all Unix admins. Gentoo brings some BSD ideas (ports) to Linux. User compiles the whole system from scratch with possibility to customize the system on a level that I didn't see in any other distribution yet all that in fully automated form.
Gentoo is great for servers. Through past few years I've learned how to maintain Linux Desktop as well, but there are other distributions that focus on End user and they do their work much better (e.g. Ubuntu Linux). One thing I think is not finished in Gentoo is the handling of binary packages. Binary packages becomes handy when one have to maintain multiple servers. Why to compile the same package on all servers and waste CPU time (lets cool the planet!) on this redundant task? Sometimes (mainly when we talk about security) it is desired to have gcc removed and perform update of machine via pre-compiled packages. Emerge can handle this (sharing the PKGDIR over network) but with flaws.

• metada - when central machine creates new package and store it on the shared drive, there is no way to notify slave machines to update its metada file about packages. I believe we solved this by also installing http server on the core machine and using PORTAGE_BINHOST variable on the slave machines. We still utilize shared drive for /usr/portage and /srv/packages as PKGDIR (eliminating the download of binary packages).
  
• USE flags - this seems to be bigger issue we haven't find solution yet. Generally, packages can use this variable to determine additional functionality provided by the package (i.e. linking to Qt, Kde and not GNOME and vice versa). Sometimes it is handy to compile apache with LDAP USE flag and sometimes not. However both binary packages have very same name (e.g. apache-2.0.58-r2.tbz2) and what USE flags were used is determined after the package was downloaded and unpacked (too late) and then update is failing on machines based on their package.use settings.

I haven't found any clever idea how to solve the issue yet. Perhaps different naming convention for use flags in binary packages is needed and server daemon running on core machine. Client machine would then ask the Core machine for binary package with specific USE flags and Core would either look it up in its repository or compile. This would rock, really. Gentoo domination would be unstoppable, until then it is postponed.

Today when I was surfing the web to see whether paludis (C++ replacement for emerge) is handling things differently I discovered that Daniel Robbins is coming back to gentoo. Congratulations and welcome back, you've made my life a lot easier (maybe not easier, but definitely more enjoyable ). Rock on!

photo Illusions, MP3 stores, Open Source Top Ten Innovators ...

While doing my morning session of my somewhat addiction to surfing the web, I found this link to very clever photo illusions, check it out! Can't wait till I pay off the flat, the furniture, the kids and finally save some money for a decent Digital SLR (like Nikon D80 ;)

In dark ages of DRM (now) I always appreciate to see that others are just not following but coming out with alternative ways of funding our beloved artists so they do not die of starvation. One I know about is Magnatune, as they say they are not Evil. A lot of good stuff to hear, download for free or money. One can even buy CD's. What I like in particularly is the way of buying downloads. The price is completely up to your pocket. Ranging from 4$ to 18$ (marked as "we Love you") for whole Album. What is even better is that this is mp3 free of any DRM, so take it to you friend, make your Mam listen to it or just to spread the Authors fame and glory. Last but not least, this is integrated into very good Rhytmbox music player, I just wish that bug #327042 is fixed soon.

Today I see there is another Indies store integrated into Rhythmbox, it is Jamendo. Another DRM free market out there. Go support it!

Lastly there is great article on slashdot about Top Ten Opensource Innovators. To no surprise it is about SugarCRM, Scalix and virtualization. But ZenOSS is completely new to me. This is OpenSource first class Systems and network management suite. Something our team in work is dealing with every day and have been writing for the last two years. I just finished couple of slides about the next version, time to reevaluate, save some company's money and redo the whole work. I love it. Hope I manage to do some review soon.