Welcome updates

Updates:

The updates are rolling again welcome, i updated a couple of my systems and it went very smooth. Thanks for the hard work of the infrastructure team, they did a lot of work to make smooth ride for the users.

Artwork:

I have just installed the background packages with Fedora 10 backgrounds, Martin blogged about, i must say they look so damm good, so i can’t choose the one i like most, great works from the Art team, Thanks.

PackageKit:

The PackageKit yum backed have been hunting me for a while, not because the code is bad, but because of the way a spawned PackageKit backend work, it works by having one small python script for each api call that PackageKit supports ’search-name, search-file, update-system, install-packages etc’. what the scripts does is to import a shared yumBackend module and call the method that is doing the action. The problem with this approch is that, every time PackageKit does a single action, yum has to be initialized, it don’t take long because of most stuff is loaded from the yum cache, but some features i PackageKit does a lot of calls and then perfomance really hurts.

The way to fix it, was to find a way to not initialize yum on every call,  Then i got the idea what if we could start some kind of dispatcher that listen to stdin for commands and parameters and then call the right methods to do the actions. then we could do multiple actions without initializing yum every time. I did the basics to the backend code so it supported a dispatcher taking multiple commands until it got an exit command. For this stuff to work, some changes needed to be done in the PackageKit C backend, to not just spawn a new script everytime, but keep it alive and just push commands into stdin.
I pinged Richard Hughes one friday afternoon and he liked the idea, so after a couple of hours of hacking, we had the basic pieces kicked into shape. One of the mayor issues was that we don’t what to lock yum for a longer period of time, because it use memory and locks out other application from using the yum API.
So it was made so that the C backend, keep the dispatcher alive until it has been idle for 5s, and then close it time.

The new way of doing thing has been released in PackageKit 0.3.2 currently in rawhide and it will hopefully give the user a better expericens for PackageKit i Fedora 10.yum –enablerepo=rawhide update PackageKit
It is easy to test in Fedora 9 too, just do a

yum –enablerepo=rawhide update PackageKit

It will only pull the updated PackageKit packages, not any other rawhide stuff.

bad taste

I think M$ got a bad taste over this

I suck big time

PackageKit Sucks !
Yumex Sucks !
Yum Sucks !
Fedora Sucks !

I work on all these projects, so i must really suck, but opions is like assholes, everybody got one.
In the Linux world there is a lot of battles and flamewars, were peoples thinks X rules and Y sucks.
If all that energy was used on something constructive like trying to make things better, instead of just
complaining about it, what a boost that would be.
Last night i read that Richard Hughes was banned from Fedora Forum for making comments on an “PackageKit Sucks” thread and asking people to submit patches and report bug and defend himself on some very personal attacks.
People have a right to have an opion and to think that something sucks, but to lock out a main developer from an
end user forum, because of he takes time to respond to some users comments, it is very bad IMO.
We want to have close relations with users and developers, that is what makes the free software community strong.
Of cause there is some trolls out there just looking for a fight and throw some dirt at something, they can just be ignored, but if a big end user support forum starts to ban people they dont agree with that really sucks
And that will hurt Fedora and scare away new contributors, and that make my heart blead.
So lets be constructive and have some fun and make Fedora rule the world.

New notebook for my wife

Today is was looking for a new laptop for my wife, the old one is not working to good any more. She use it for reading mails, browsing the web and to store our photos.

I was looking for one that could fullfil the following:

• Should work out of the box in Fedora 9 (gfx,wireless etc)
• No M$ Taxes, dont want to pay for something i dont use.
• No close source drivers needed.
• Looking good, a nice girl need a good looking laptop.
• not to big and heavy, so no 19″ widescreen

I found this one

It almost only intel parts and they are well supported out of the box in Fedora, it is tested on Linux and can be bought without any OS and it looks good and is made in Denmark.

Thanks to the Fedora Infrastructure Team

The Fedora Infrastructure has been hit by something, no details are available yet, but one thing i know and that is that the Fedora Infrastructure team is working 24/7 behind the scene to solve this issue. People often forget the hard work, going on behind the scene by the infrastructure team, so i am glad that the Fedora Project has such a dedicated team of infrastructure guys, to make the wheels go around.

So thanks for the hard work !!!

Tour de France

I am not much of a sports fan, but i have on weak spot, Tour de France, i followed the race in 20 years, sitting glued to the TV, 3 weeks every summer, this year it was better than it have been i a lot of years, an my favourite team CSC Saxo bank won the yellow jersey, the white jersey,  the team competition and 2 stages. I twas nice to see that Carlos ended up winning the race, i can’t think of any body deserve it as much as he does.

Dr. Horrible (Act III)

I missed the Dr. Horrible Act III on the official site this weekend, and iTunes store is not an option for me,  because the is there is no linux version and i really hate all the DRM protection stuff.

But lucky me, I found this this site.

FESCo election

Congratulation to people elected to FESCo.

I am a little disappointed when i read the only 150 out of 1866 has used the possibility to vote.

it is only 8%, we must be able do better then that.

Mobile Broadband

Mobile broadband is very hyped at the moment in Denmark, You can’t turn on the TV, without seeing a commercial with somebody getting on-line in the bus, on the beach on somewhere else, by inserting a little USB key into a laptop.

At work a got such a mobile broadband USB device, so i can be on-line everywhere

And off cause i would like to use this device on Fedora 9. As usual the is no Linux support from the supplier, in Windows, you just plug in the device and it contains a little USB storage CD-ROM image with the Windows drivers.

After a little search on the web, i found this howto

Before i started i placed the supplied SIM card in my mobile phone enter the PUK code and enter a new PIN code and changed the security setting, so that a PIN code is not needed.

After playing around for a while i got it to work, but i really hate to do all that installation from source and i got multiple installation where i want to use the device, so i started to work on making some RPM’s.

I was time to give all the stuff i have learned from reading spot’s great presentation on making rpms.

here is the result:

http://timlau.fedorapeople.org/files/packages/hso/

Now it is much easier to get it up and running

get the dkms-hso, hso-udev & hsolink rpm’s and do:

yum install –nogpgcheck dkms-hso*.rpm hso-udev*.rpm hsolink*.rpm

usermod -a -G uucp youruserid

Download the hsoconnect-py2.5-1.1.83-2.noarch.rpm from here and do:

yum install –nogpgcheck hsoconnect*.rpm

plug in your usb device and use ‘Application -> Internet -> HSOConnect’ to start the dialer.

Click on ‘Connect’ and i was online.

It look like the need for dkms-hso package is only needed for a while, because there is work in progress to get the hso driver into the upstream kernel.

More “I voted too” Spam

You are probably tired of reading this kind of “I did that too” post, but here is one more.

I voted too, of cause i did, i always do