Ramble On

Installed Fedora 15

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 09:55:00 +0100

Despite all the efforts to make Fedora 15 easier and more user friendly, making power users kind of unhappy by removing functionality and features, it doesn’t look ready yet (please, remove more features! :D).

I installed Fedora 15 and it’s running in Gnome fall back mode (no hw acceleration here, so it’s OK). First thing I tried was updating my system: Applications > System Tools > Software Update; and it didn’t work. The error about a failing transaction was quite cryptic to me, and I didn’t know how to fix it (I tried to update several times but it didn’t work).

Running yum from a console works as expected, though. Fortunately nobody thought that yum had to be removed because some weird reason!

This is my first experience with Gnome fall back mode, and it feels less crippled than the regular Gnome interface. Too bad the drag-to-maximize thing doesn’t work in fall back mode.

Bring a Box!

Sat, 14 May 2011 20:32:00 +0100

Today we attended to the May Bring a Box meeting of the Surrey Linux User Group, and it was great!

We got a lot of interesting chit-chat and a couple of talks/demos at Nokia Southwood (nice venue, thanks Nokia guys!).

One of the talks was about VoIP alternatives to Skype, I guess because of the recent news of Microsoft acquiring Skype.

I was kind of disappointed by the approach to this topic, because instead of focusing on open protocols and applications using those protocols, the guy pointed to other “free as free beer” closed systems (or open, but they don’t tell you what are they using). Sincerely, I can’t see the benefits of switching from a closed system that actually works to another closed system that does a worse job.

He did a good work looking for SIP providers, but I think the open source clients were poorly represented (he failed to make Ekiga work, and he didn’t mention that Empathy, the Gnome default IM application, has actually a quite decent support thanks to telepathy components).

Then we had a demo of Gnome 3, going through its main features, and I offered myself to do a demo of Unity (I’m using it at work, and Alex has it installed in her netbook).

Hidden feature

The first thing I’ve noted is that most of the users don’t really know how to use the new desktop environments. I mean that there is stuff that you can’t know without actually reading some documentation (I showed how to make the Power off menu appear in Gnome 3, and it was a big surprise to everybody!).

I took my time to learn how to use Unity, because Alex and I wanted to seriously test it before discarding it completely. Alex was happily using Ubuntu before Unity and I got my laptop at work with Ubuntu installed, so both want to stick with Ubuntu in those machines as long as possible.

The second thing is that I would say that nobody likes Gnome 3 or Unity, although sometimes is a tittle bit unfair because users aren’t dealing with the change in the right way. Most of the attendees were happy Gnome 2 users, with Ubuntu mostly (I saw only one guy running Fedora, and there were some Red Hat guys).

Anyway, again that’s a problem of the desktops… if the functionality it’s not evident, they should find a way to show (or teach!) the users how it works, otherwise you’re very likely to refuse to use something that you don’t understand.

It was a nice day, with nice people. Thanks everybody!

Scan With your Deskjet F2400 Series

Tue, 10 May 2011 18:18:00 +0100

I hate when I forget these kind of things, and scanning with my HP Deskjet F2480 is probably my favourite.

Printing with this all in one printer is so easy with Fedora, but today when I tried to use the scanner functionality, Simple Scan application was unable to detect the scanner (actually it was using my webcam!).

I think I always follow the same steps:

Check the dmesg, and the printer is there (of course, as I said it prints).

Then I try scanimage -L and… I can see only the webcam:

device `v4l:/dev/video0' is a Noname Laptop_Integrated_Webcam_1.3M virtual device

Although this time I’m not using the sane frontend, I try sane-find-scanner anyway:

  # sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
  # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
  # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
  # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0 [HP], product=0x7611 [Deskjet F2400 series]) at libusb:002:011
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

  # Not checking for parallel port scanners.

  # Most Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports
  # can't be detected by this program.

  # You may want to run this program as root to find all devices. Once you
  # found the scanner devices, be sure to adjust access permissions as
  # necessary.

Yes, it is there. WTF.

And then I remember… the last time I had to install a library so sane can talk with the HP scanner: libsane-hpaio.

Then the scanimage will show the scanner as expected, and obviously Simple Scan detects the device and everything works like a charm.

I guess I’ll need to go through all of this again in the foreseeable future, so I hope that me from the future will check the blog before going into troubleshooting mode and wasting half an hour with this thing (again).

"PowerStack is a repository that allows you to run the latest LAMP versions in your Enterprise Linux...."

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:08:44 +0000

“PowerStack is a repository that allows you to run the latest LAMP versions in your Enterprise Linux. Currently both CentOS and RHEL are supported (i686 and x86_64).”

- From PowerStack site.

This is a brand new repository providing an up to date LAMP experience in your RHEL and CentOS based servers. Basically you can enjoy the long time support and API/ABI stability provided by Red Hat rock solid operative system, and at the same time have access to the cutting edge of the LAMP platform thanks to a trusted third party repository.

All the magic involved in the package creation is open source (there’s a git repo with patches and specs), and it’s now in my list of essentials for CentOS, read: EPEL, DAG, PGRPMS and Remi.

I must say that Remi is providing some of the LAMP stack components for some time (and I love Remi’s work, I’m enjoying some of his packages for Fedora 14, such as Firefox 4), but this PowerStack repository it’s specifically focused on enterprise server environment (they’re supposed to be very picky with the dependencies, which is good in a server!).

Updating non-Distro Packages

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 17:37:00 +0000

Today I’ve released Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.10, and after 10 releases (since August 2009), I’ve been looking at the package downloads statistics for the last 8 months (I moved hosting in June 2010, and I lost the stats in the process).

Although log parsing is not the most scientific way of tracking this things, I can get some points from this graph:

I have more Ubuntu/Debian downloads than Fedora downloads. Far more, although Fedora is my development platform and deb packages sometims lag behind the source/rpm release.
Version 0.03 is not 0.03, but a symlink to the latest version available. A guy wrote a blog post saying how awesome was Nautilus Flickr Uploader, but he linked directly to the 0.03 deb file. To make things worse, that post was copied and pasted several times, so despite being released on September 2009, there’s people still downloading 0.03 (sic).
Fedora people tend to download the newest version, which is good. About half of the downloads are using the repositories, which is better than good.

I’m not tracking source code downloads, because it’s not the kind of user I want to focus today. Some other guy wrote a blog post pointing to the deb package and saying at the same time that the application was easy to install if you knew Perl (?). I guess that everybody using Firefox has a pretty decent level of C++ programming.

I think that packages are the way to go, and although having your software included in the different distributions is very good for the spreading of your application, it’s not perfect if you’re releasing early and releasing often (I’ve released 0.10 after 7 days of 0.09 release, and I think the changes are worth updating).

Updating software using repositories

The problem installing third party packages in your distribution is that you don’t get updates, because… who bothers to check if there’s a new version available? If the stuff you installed works OK, you probably won’t, and if it’s not working, you’ll move into a different application.

That’s when repositories are the key: if you use a third party repository, you’ll get updates like with the packages supported by your distribution and, at the same time, you’ll get the benefits from the release early, release often.

That’s why the main way to get rpm packages for Nautilus Flickr Uploader is using a repository (I provide F13 and F14 packages, thanks to Koji).

Right now I have both strategies: deb packages without repository, and rpm packages with repository; although I’d like to have more Fedora users to make the comparison more effective ;).

What do you think? Are you using third party packages or repositories? Which strategy do you prefer?

"Migasfree is a very simple, but effective, system management systems. Actually, it is used in..."

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:25:00 +0000

“Migasfree is a very simple, but effective, system management systems. Actually, it is used in ‘Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza’ (Spain) by initial authors in the project ‘migration to open source software for desktops’.”

- From Migasfree Github page.

The feature list is quite impressive, with support for configuration management, software deployment, hardware and software inventory and multiple distributions with multiple versions (yes, Fedora is supported!), so basically almost everything you expect in a centralized systems management system.

It’s powered by Django and Python, which means that the requirements are reasonable (other open source systems like Spacewalk are harder to setup -Spacewalk requires an Oracle database and lots of RAM-).

You can visit the website of the project: Migasfree, although most of the contents are in Spanish (so far).

Better Privacy and Gnome 3 Support

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:37:08 +0000

I’ve just released Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.09, with an important fix and a new feature.

The bug fix was related to privacy settings, or how dumb I can be sometimes, because I got it wrong since the beginning, and although one user commented me the issue through Twitter, until recently (thanks to a proper bug report) I couldn’t manage to understand what the problem was.

Basically my implementation was missing some privacy combinations (public, private, and private with family and/or friends), and I didn’t notice it because I upload public content only.

The only other change in this version is the possibility to open a file chooser as an alternative to add pictures to the upload list. Basically I added this feature after some testing with the upcoming Gnome 3, because drag and drop doesn’t look as easy to do as in Gnome 2, and because one of the UX changes in Gnome Shell is to have less focus in browsing.

So now we have 3 ways to add photos to upload:

Selecting the pictures from Nautilus and then, with right click, open the files with the application. This is the original way I thought when I started developing the tool.
Dragging pictures from Nautilus or one of the picture viewers included in Gnome, with the limitation of Nautilus Flickr Uploader not understanding some of the special URIs (such as gphoto://).
NEW: just click on “Add” button and use the file chooser.

Again, because my use case is mostly drag and drop from one of the picture viewers of Gnome, I didn’t notice that it would be interesting to add pictures using an internal browser in the application.

So far, so good. I’ve updated the Fedora 13 & 14 packages, and if you’re using the repository, the update will be pushed eventually in your system. I’ll try to provide DEB packages as soon as possible.

Btw, remember I’m looking for a package maintainer for Fedora.

Wanted: Packager for Nautilus Flicker Uploader

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:49:18 +0000

Finally I withdrew my review request for Nautilus Flickr Uploader, after 15 months updating the ticket.

The main reason is that currently I don’t have the time and the energy to start reading documentation again and completing the process. It sounds like a poor excuse, but it’s true: I changed job recently and it needs a long commuting every day, and I have to move (again) to a new city in the short term, so I have almost no free time.

I guess that the situation will change around March, and I’ll be ready to try it again, but meanwhile it would be great if someone took over the package (the spec file ).

But is true that my busy life is not the only reason. First, the application is doing it well: it has more users that I would have never expected (Flickr says there are currently 745 registered users), and I’m providing both Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian packages (without being included in the distribution).

Despite that, I think that including the application in Fedora would be good for Fedora and its users.

Second, the process has been very frustrating. I don’t know if the packaging of this application is specially complex or non-conventional, but I feel that it never got the needed attention from a reviewer. I’ve seen other packages approved in a very short time, but it’s true that they were simpler to review.

At the end, when Jason got interested on the request, I realized that it had passed so many time that I almost had forgotten all the stuff I learned when I started the process to become a package maintainer in Fedora. At this point, I don’t deserve to be a package maintainer, because I don’t have the knowledge but to package and maintain a couple of specific application (and I think that a “Fedora packager” is a more wider term).

As I said, I don’t discard the possibility of trying again when my life is less busy, but meanwhile: would you like to take care of Nautilus Flicker Uploader package?

Spot the Difference This particular thing freaks me out every...

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 19:30:33 +0000

Spot the Difference

This particular thing freaks me out every day: left is $HOME, and right is $WORK.

Left is Fedora 14, and right is Ubuntu 10.10, both using Gnome and the same locale: en_GB.UTF-8.

For some reason the translation is different. I’m not sure, but I think I prefer Wastebasket over Rubbish Bin (although the second one sounds more British), but I’m not a native English speaker.

Which one do you prefer?

Playing With Gnome 3.0

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:19:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I started to read documentation about Gnome Shell, that will be the new UI of Gnome 3.0.

The Shell will be an important change in the Gnome desktop, and although it’s said that changes are good, it may not be easy. So I kind of followed the steps to getting involved, and I build and run periodically the development version of the Shell (it builds most of the time!).

The idea behind this is not only getting used to the new environment, but try to find a way to contribute and, at least, do my part to fix the things that I think might be wrong (please notice that’s different of the things I don’t like).

I’m back into web development at work, so I got a copy of JavaScript: The Good Parts, because it won’t hurt me to improve my JavaScript kung-fu, and may be I’ll be able to make an extension for the Shell (yep, it uses JavaScript; no comments).

OK, may be I won’t be able to do anything, because of lack of time or lack of knowledge, but I really think that waiting for the Shell and then complain because is not what we expected (although I really don’t know what to expect) it’s not fair. Let’s see how far I can go.

Building the Shell in Fedora 14 is quite straightforward (and I upgraded my personal laptop to a Intel Core i3, so I have some spare CPU cycles for jhbuild).

First I need to figure out how the shell extensions work, and then I guess I’ll try to do something related to my weather applet.

And you? Are you going to do your part in the Shell?