Tuesday, December 27, 2005

» Lost packages

Some of you might already have noticed, but quite a few of my packages have been lost on the server. The reason is a HD failure, and after setting up my build server I forgot to turn off the remote sync with ftp.gwdg.de, and hence when it synced against my backup, all the packages I made after 2005-12-19 have been removed. Most noticeably, gaim 2.0.0-beta1 is lost as well. After spending quite some time setting up my build box and all my build chroots once again (this time on RAID1), I'm currently playing catch-up to repackage all of those who were lost, which is why you currently don't see any announcements of new packages or releases on my site. I hope to be able to get going with new ones in one or two days' time, so please be patient and sorry for the problems.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

» Gaim 2.0.0-beta1 RPMs

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours building Gaim 2.0.0-beta1 RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.0 and 9.3, both for i686 and x86_64, including backports of the patches included in the Gaim 1.5.0 source package from SUSE Linux 10.0. They are now available, but not from my usual "suser-guru" repository. Because 2.0.0-beta1 is still unstable and I didn't want to push an upgrade to every end-user out there who uses my repository that could break one of his favourite applications, I've setup a small rpm-md repository dubbed "experimental". So you may either download the packages directly or use the rpm-md repository using YaST2 (on SUSE Linux 10.0 only) or smart. For YaST2, do this:
installation_sources -a http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/experimental
yast2 -i gaim
For Smart, do this:
smart channel --add guru-experimental type=rpm-md baseurl=http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/experimental
smart update guru-experimental
smart install gaim

» Forcing network interface names

Since udev had its way into SUSE Linux, network interface names are chosen dynamically by udev and not statically any more, as it was with older versions. In some situations, you'd want to force the network interface name (e.g. eth0, eth1) though, and it's not much of an easy task of finding how to do that. /usr/share/doc/packages/sysconfig/README.Persistent_Interface_Names provides a rather detailed explanation of how it works, but unfortunately doesn't give any examples. So to those who aren't udev wizards (i.e. almost everyone on this planet), here's an example of what to write in /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules:
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:04:23:a7:bf:f4", IMPORT="/sbin/rename_netiface %k eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0b:db:83:84:b0", IMPORT="/sbin/rename_netiface %k eth2"
First, you need to find out the hardware (a.k.a. MAC) address of the network interface you want to name explicitely. You might want to use /sbin/ip address list to help you with that, e.g.:
 1: lo: mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
 2: eth0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:04:23:a7:bf:f4 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 161.90.174.152/23 brd 161.90.175.255 scope global eth0
 3: eth1: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:0b:db:83:84:b0 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
Once you have identified the correct network interface name (which is still the one you'd like to rename), take note of it's hardware address (in the example above, it's 00:04:23:a7:bf:f4 for eth0). Then, go ahead and add a line as above (SUBSYSTEM...) in /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules, obviously putting the proper hardware address behind SYSFS{address}==. The value of IMPORT is what's executed by udev and while the first parameter to /sbin/rename_netiface is a placeholder (%k), the second one is the desired network interface name. Actually, the example above will rename the network interface eth1 into eth2 (for the NIC with the hardware address 00:0b:db:83:84:b0).

Friday, December 09, 2005

» My Milk Desktop

Well, I thought, for once, let's post a screenshot. I really like my current desktop, it's very milk-ish. It's KDE (3.5.0, but same looks possible with 3.4.0), with the following settings: - lipstik widget style - flatKnifty window decoration - nuoveXT icons - my color scheme - "susewall" wallpaper (desaturated a little)

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

» Coolest screensaver ever

Pong screensaver screenshot
IMHO this is the coolest screensaver ever :) Want it ? install xscreensaver and kdeartwork3-kscreensaver, then fire up kcontrol, go to "Appearance & Themes", then "Screensaver" and select "Pong" in the category "Miscellanous".

» smart 0.40-13, don't install

Gosh... one shouldn't make packages at 03:00AM, almost falling asleep on the keyboard, at least not without testing it. Don't upgrade to smart-0.40-13, it has a bug in the channel URLs. I'm building smart-0.40-14 now, which fixes that issue. Sorry for the bug. Guess I should skip "-13" release tags ;)

» The UN in Microsoft's pocket

Once more, a frightening story about the power of money, lobbying, PR and a monopolist over democracy and intelligence. And this one (on Groklaw as well) just fits nicely into that picture. The cat is out of the bag. Microsoft opening it's Office document format... yeah, right... we knew how it smells, and now we see why.

» 17 packages, new smart rpm

Baked 17 packages yesterday, catching up with the various upstream releases that have popped up during the week-end (while I was reinstalling my build host, the chroots, etc...). Most notably, Gustavo Niemeyer has written a patch that fixes the freezes of Smart on SUSE (which is obviously related to the RPM version used on SUSE Linux, not the distro itself). 5min after he sent the patch, at around 3:00AM local time, I've quickly built and published an updated smart RPM. Get it now while it's hot! :) Please test it and provide feedback. That has been one nasty little bugger. Hopefully it's fixed now (thanks Gustavo!) :) Also released an updated mtaskbar RPM that doesn't jail you into your major KDE version (it had Requires: kdelibs3 < %{kde_major_version}.999 in it). Please update to that one if you plan to upgrade to KDE 3.5. Last but not least, a new lftp release by Alexander Lukyanov with a few bugfixes and several enhancements. Alexander, thanks a lot for that awesome FTP/FTPS/HTTP/HTTPS/SFTP/... client, I use it every single day, it's simply some awesome piece of work.

Monday, December 05, 2005

» Hosed my LVM

Unfortunately, while fiddling around with LVM and trying to fix some idiosyncrasies I had with my LVM setup, I hosed my system completely. Fortunately, /home was safe as I have it on a separate VG (volume group). Pfew... Spent part of the week-end installing 10.0 again and setting up build chroots. I still have to write a few scripts to manage them more easily though, but I already have 10.0, 9.3 and 9.2 chroots, still having to set up 9.1, and I'll abandon 9.0 as it's going out of support anyway. I also started to mirror the installation media for 10.0 down to 9.1 to avoid having to fetch from the internet all the time. Played a bit with y2pmbuild as well. Nice, but doesn't fit the way I've built and managed my packages since ages, so I'm probably going to stick with my scripts. If you wonder why I didn't do any new RPM releases this week-end, now you know why (there haven't been all that much upstream releases anyway) ;) Once you know LVM and y2pmsh, those are really, really nice tools to set up such environments.