Today, we reformatted the IBM pSeries box at the West Bengal University of Technology, and started a clean install of Gentoo (from stage 1) on it. This time, things were a lot faster, since we already had the sources of most of the required packages – it was simply q question of putting the source tarballs in /usr/portage/distfiles. Things went quite smoothly (well, apart from a couple of kernel panics while running the live CD), and after sometime, I installed yaboot (the bootloader for PowerPC systems), and started a reboot sequence. I wasn’t very confident at this stage, since I had messed up real bad the last time, and finally had to resort to inserting the OpenFirmWare SCSI device name by hand at the boot prompt. …and trust me, a SCSI device name (as OpenFirmWare sees it) does not look very pretty. Anyway, the pSeries takes around 10 minutes to start up (it apparently conducts a lot of internal checks on the system – and a during this 10 minutes, a lot of messages (mostly Hex numbers) are displayed on the small LCD panel attached to the main box). While it did all the verification and checking, I sat there, rubbing my hands and biting off my nails. Finally, the boot prompt came up, and to my delight, I saw that yaboot had managed to probe the disks and detect its configuration file correctly. I hit enter, and saw – “Booting Linux…..” A lot of high-fives, middle-fives, low-fives and what not (general rejoicement – you should get the idea). The system came up smoothly – and soon I faced the login prompt. Then it struck me, I had forgot to set the <expletive> root password. After some attempts to kick myself on the posterior, I again rebooted, and after a couple more kernel panics with the Live CD, and an hour later, I finally managed to mount the disks, chroot into them, and set the root password.

Anyway, the system is running really well now – plan is to run the University’s digital library system (based on Koha), and probably the University’s proposed student/teacher/staff community portal (based on OpenGroupware) will also run on that system. We managed to setup Apache/MySQL/PHP in that system (all of them 64 bit binaries – unlike RHEL/SLES). Setting PHP was slightly painful, since probably no one (except us) has yet tried to compile PHP on the Gentoo pSeries till date (at least that’s what I could gather from looking at the PHP ebuild files and the Gentoo bugzilla), and we only managed to suceed after I did some ugly hackery on the freetype-1 ebuild file. I’ll file a bug at the Gentoo bugzilla tomorrow. Throughout the next week, Koha will be setup on the box, and after that, the existing data will be transferred to the new system. While this happens, we will also be running a few bioinformatics/biotech related software packages on the system ( sequence database handling and other fancy stuff), just to get an idea about how well the box performs under heavy load.

Stumbled upon Nautilus-vcs – a module which adds version control information and operations to the Nautilus list and icon views. This can definitely be very handy at times.

GNOME Nitpickss

Jorge “Whiprush” Castro (of Ars Technica fame) has outlined his top ten GNOME related annoyances. Most of these are definitely valid points – and luckily one of the top annoyances (at least in my own list), the MIME-types mess is going to be fixed in GNOME 2.8 (hopefully).

My Haldia trip

My Haldia trip was largely uneventful, though crossing the Hooghly during this season is definitely a cool experience. Too bad that I don’t have a digital camera .

… and I like it.
Yipeeee .

And this seems to be a really handy tool.

while(1) {
      printf (“Copy Paste is Bad.\n”);
}

Was trying to do extract some data out of an XML file with a C program, and needed to do some reading up on the subject. Finally it turned out that libXML2 is surprisingly easy. Many thanks to John Fleck for his very helpful tutorial.

Waking up problems

Hmm… this sounds familiar. Weird…

Finally, I had to take medicine. I usually avoid medicine as much as I can, but this thing was getting quite unbearable, and so finally I took paracetamol. Feeling somewhat better now, though the throat pain still persists.

The Indic Desktop

So, it’s time to speak about the Grand Unified Indic Desktop again. I have more or less made up my mind about which distros to support – and <drumrolls please> they are –

• Debian
• Fedora/Redhat
• Mandrake
• SuSE

Of course, if I get enough people who are ready to support other distros, I’ll definitely add that/those distro(s) to the list. Currently, I am looking at -

• Debian Sarge (or should I go for Sid??)
• Fedora Core 2 (and guess what – we may see Red Carpet coming pre-installed with Fedora Core 3)
• Redhat 9.0 (seriously – you’ll be amazed to know how many people are using “Linux 9″ in their computers even today)
• Mandrake 10
• SuSE 9.1

However, handling all these distros at the same time would not be an easy task, and we would need a lot of people to help us. Here’s a rough outline of the process we would be following. There would be a “core” developer team (maintainers), who would actually take care of the packaging and the patching. This team would comprise of members from the language teams, as well as people who would just like to help. They would have to use build buddy for the packaging, and the team would be divided into smaller sections, with each section handling different distros. Then we would have the testers team. The testers would consist of people from the language groups, as well as people from the core team. Their task would be to ensure that the desktops actually work on the target distros, and the tester team would also be divided into distro-wise subgroups. So in the end, the picture would be something like this:



So – what do you think? Suggestions, flames, offers for help are welcome at sayamindu randomink org.

In the next post on this subject, I’ll deal with the things that need to be done at the initial stages, and the projected timeline. So stay tuned.

Yesterday, I had to manually resolve the dependancies and install the Xorg, gcc/autotools and cups RPMs on a barebones (minimal install) Fedora Core 2 system. Eeeek!! Anyway, the system seems to be running fine now, so most probably, I was successful.

Distro upgrade

My home system (running a much battered piece of Fedora Core 1) is having weird troubles (I think I have managed to hose the RPM db), and its probably time for an upgrade. The natural choice would probably be Fedora Core 2, but I am also looking at Gentoo as an option. I had to install Gentoo from Stage 1 in the pSeries box, and I was pretty impressed by its “keep it simple policy”.

about:config

In case you are insane and want to change settings that look like “intl.collationOption” in your browser – click here (works only for Gecko based browsers – that includes mozilla, firefox, epiphany, galeon and whatnot).

Down with a cold

And finally, I am feeling really sick today – with a terrible cold and something like an infinite loop of sneeze(VIOLENT); wipe(NOSE); statements, and I think I might have a slight fever. Damn!!

Finally, I downloaded Eclipse 3.0 and CDT 2.0, and it does seem to be quite nice and the interface is quite pretty (though it might look somewhat weird to people accustomed to other GTK based apps). Of course, I felt rather confused, coming from a multiple terminals+VIM+make environment, but this may be the right thing for programmers coming from ‘doze. (disclaimer – I don’t know anything about programming on M$ platforms – my knowledge on that subject is absolutely nil)



In the Indic Desktop department, I have chalked out some preliminary ideas on how things are to be managed – will post them as soon as I can make them a bit more concrete. Meanwhile, I need to finish the slides for Saturday’s iLUG-Cal meet.

Watched Amélie tonight.

Somehow, the cron job which updates Planet FLOSS India got messed up, and as a result, the blogs were not being syndicated properly. It has been fixed now. Sorry about the goof up.

I did some experiments on Ximian Red Carpet, and Open Carpet to find out whether or not they would be able to serve our purpose for the Grand Unified Indic Distro/Desktop (GRIND – as IDG puts it). After a lot of poking around (documentation seems to be a little sparse), I am quite satisfied. All we would require are the RPMs for red-carpet (gui client – text client optional), and the red-carpet daemon (rcd) in the client systems, while on the server end, we would require a dump of the RPMs (and debs if required) and some XML files (which are generated automatically by open carpet). Seems to be quite “doable”. I was somewhat worried about being able to distribute the packages in a CD (for those with no or limted internet connection) – and it turned out that you can actually “mount” the directory containing packages and XML files as a red carpet channel. That should take care of the cd based distribution part.



Now I need to figure out how to handle multiple distros with build buddy – some reading up and some downloading will be required for that.

Yesterday, I set up the preliminary template for the Localised Low Cost Computing web site with Mambo (which, by the way, has some really good quality documentation). While setting up the look and feel of the site (I used the MT_Business template provided with Mambo), I noticed that blue header image needed to be changed (the text said MamboBusiness or something like that – which was not acceptable). Anyway, I hunted around a little, and came across the image in it’s*.psd (Adobe Photoshop stuff) format. To my surprise, GIMP opened it without any problems – the layers were handled perfectly. So within a few minutes, the “MamboBusiness” text had been replaced by “L2C2″. Very nice…

Later, I also noticed that GIMP can also open PDF files as images (though don’t try this on a PDF with a large number of pages, since GIMP opens each page as a seperate image).

…and in case anyone is wondering, I am using GIMP 2.1.0.