Bobulate

There’s a few things I learned today: One is that FreeBSD with UFS2 is a little slow when dealing with directories with over a million files in them. The KDE SVN — created way back in the SVN 1.4 or earlier days — is set up like that, with one flat directory structure. As a consequence, copying a SVN repo mirror from one place on the disk to another is rather slow. Moving it (within the same filesystem) would be a lot faster, but I wanted a copy. Second is that the EBN machine has grown SVN mirrors and experiments and KDE checkouts (of the whole thing) like mushrooms after rain. I’ll have to clean some of that up, not so much for the diskspace, but for tidyness. Third is that while copying three distinct million-file trees in parallel, your disk array will have a power hiccup, panicking the machine and leading to another two days of fsck. So more waiting for the EBN to come back — particularly annoying since I had the other virtual machines on the system back up and running, so that Sebas had his website back, the KDE4-Solaris packages were available again, and Claudia could share documents with the rest of the board.

Fourth is that Mystic Kriek is really quite tasty, in a pink-and-foamy-cherry-coke-with-alcohol kind of way.

Speaking of pink, I got word that my talk for Akademy has been accepted, with the condition that I must bring my pink whip. Paul Adams has nothing to do with that, I’m sure. However, I need to point out that I got a new whip in Kano last month, made of rolled up goat hide. White, plumed, a little bit more floppy than the nylon-core things we’re used to at Akademy. We’ll see how that turns out as a speaker motivational tool.

After a week in Kano, Nigeria — where I picked up my awesome cold again, the same one that has been keeping me low since January — I spent a few days on the Dutch island of Terschelling with the family, to get back into the swing of things. Let me tell you, trading 40 degrees and dust for 12 degrees and rain doesn’t help much. Not much actual KDE coding planned this week, partly because of the NLUUG spring conference on Systems Administration (where I’ll meet up with Rainer from the FSFE and Donna from the Amsterdam Girl Geeks).

Brian Gough (a gentleman with whom I’ve stood in a room at one point, but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken) points out that KDE (that is, the release team for KDE) doesn’t GPG sign the source packages that it releases. Hm, interesting, as it’s true that the recent KDE SC 4.4 source tarballs don’t come with an MD5SUMS file or anything else. Going back in history, I find Attic/3.5.9/src which has an MD5SUMS file or the older Attic/3.5/src directory which has an MD5SUMS and an .asc file. Hunh, come to think of it I don’t even know how to check if the .asc file matches the MD5SUMS.

So clearly the source-signing and integrity-checking has decreased over the years. Not sure why — are we (KDE) relying on the packagers to (re-)host the sources and sign them themselves? Have we realized that no-one except the core of the gpg web of trust is checking these things and that it’s not worth spending release team time on? I don’t know.

I do know that the last time I posted a KPilot source tarball — we’re talking five years ago here, at least — I did gpg sign it with the KPilot key. Goodness knows where that thing has gotten to.

And on a related note, I wandered off to look at the OpenSolaris packages to see if they are signed in a meaningful way. The manifests include hashes of all the files in a package, but I don’t see the manifest itself protected or signed in any way. That leads to the same issues that Brian points out again — but it’ll be an interesting day wrt. porcine aviation when Oracle starts using a well-connected gpg key, methinks.

As far as KDE goes: I’ll ask the sysadmins; it might just be an oversight.

[ade] — bridging planetkde and planet.fsfe since 2009.

With highs below 40 degrees it’s hard to know if it’s Minnesota in November or Kano this week. Scale is the thing here, and I do hope to be hotting it up in Kano for the second annual FOSS Nigeria conference this week. Akademy 2008 in Mechelen brought us Mustapha Abubakar and he went back home and set up a conference for Free Software in the north of Nigeria. I’m pleased and honoured to be going back for a second round. As in previous years, talks will include Free Software background, some legal stuff, C++, python, and whatever else strikes the fancy of the speakers (some of whom are me and Frederik). I think this year I’m better prepared for the destination — although I’m still looking for my Hausa hat, it’s gotta be in the house somewhere. Sinasiri, here I come! Also, I’m looking forward to seeing how the guys from Hutsoft are doing, which way IT in Kano is growing, meeting up with Mr. Tata again and once again contemplating Free Software under a breadfruit tree.

In spring I tend to write sentimental bits, like this one. I’ve spent the past two weeks mostly in the vegetable garden, fostering new life — potatoes, carrots and beans — and tearing out unwanted plants — stinging nettles and crab grass. There must be a metaphor for software development there somewhere. It’s a matter of out with the old and in with the new.

This spring brings renewed determination to do something with the garden; that’s both on my part and on the part of the other people with whom I keep it. I think there’s a realization that the discipline of maintaining the vegetable plots does us (nerd, philosopher, teachers of dutch and mathematics) all good. It gets me away from the computer, anyway, and hoeing is one way of cleansing the spirit.

Related, I am happy to see that Henrik Sandklef has regained his footing: Restarting life sounds pretty drastic. Catching up on the todo list is sometimes good — and sometimes you have to throw out the list and start over. I’m glad FSCONS is still on Henrik’s list, because that was probably the event that made the biggest impression on me last year, for being eclectic and social and technical and drunken and excellent all at once.

So, stay balanced. Create Free Software.

For some of the things I would like to do with the EBN code-quality checking machine — things outside the immediate realm of quality checking — I need some VMs beyond what FreeBSD’s jails give me.

In particular, I need Solaris running on the machine as well as FreeBSD, so I looked into VirtualBox. I’ve used it on Solaris for various purposes (including running FreeBSD) so it seemed appropriate. There’s no binary version of VirtualBox for FreeBSD, but you can compile the Open Source Edition from ports, so that’s what I did. The results — missing USB passthrough and no RDP — are things I can live with, as it just means I’ll do most of my work on the VMs through ssh.

Installation (of VirtualBox OSE 3.1.6) is pretty non-eventful, the remember-to-load-the-kernel-driver reminder at the end of installation useful, and it just works.

For testing purposes and to satisfy some curiosity on my part I decided to install the Maemo development environment provided by Nokia (hey, maybe I’ll write my first GTK+ program like that). This turns out to be a VMDK (VMWare) file, not a OVF file, so a little bit of fiddling about was necessary. There are installer scripts available with lots of disclaimers for VBox 2, but none for version 3. So I tweaked and twiddled a little, and ended up with this installer script that calls VBoxManage a bunch of times to set up the machine. This is largely cribbed from Nokia’s script, adapted for new syntax in version 3.

One thing to note here is the invocation with –usb on. That could be combined with other calls to VBoxManage, but since the OSE has no USB passthrough, this will fail. For those using the non-OSE version, the call will succeed. Run the script with either –add or –remove from the directory containing the .vmdk file and it’ll set things up or tear them down.

In the resulting VM I haven’t gotten any further than starting esbox and quitting it again — but it shows that the VM works, that the apps work. I can ssh in for whatever command-line work I need to do.

The upshot — after all, the Maemo dev environment is just an experiment — is that a Solaris VM will happen real soon now. I was hoping for something jeos-like, but I hear that the people responsible for that have left Oracle now (this looks like a common theme: all the nifty Open Source but non-revenue projects are bailing out). So I’ll have to find another means of installing a fairly-minimal OpenSolaris version into the VM (which, thanks to Jignesh, is a matter of VBoxManage import). For my purposes no X is needed, so that saves us at least one (if not two) desktop environments in the disk image.

Credits where credit is due: to Jignesh Shah for the OSOL image and to Miwi for not only porting KDE4 to FreeBSD but also acting as source of information for VirtualBox.

The revival of my FreeBSD system meant that I was once again confronted with Xorg driver issues. The on-board GeForce 7050 isn’t recognized by the nv(4x) driver, and the proprietary nvidia one is a no-go because I’m running FreeBSD amd64 (and the Linux driver only works on FreeBSD i386). So, time to shop around a little.

This is one of those cases where I wish the Internet would forget sometimes. Wading through the reports of video card compatibility from 2006 just isn’t useful. I had one (I thought) simple question: will an ATI Radeon 4350 work with Xorg 1.6.5 under FreeBSD 8-STABLE?

Perhaps it’s just my search-fu letting me down, but in the end I went and just bought one (as it’s the cheapest video card available in town across the river right now).

And the answer seems to be: yes, the Radeon 4350 is supported under FreeBSD 8-STABLE with Xorg 1.6.5_1,1 and the xf86-video-ati 6.12.4_1 driver. At least I can get twm up and running and exit that same twm and restart X multiple times. As usual it took longest for me to remember which ports to install to get a workable X locally (xorg-minimal + xorg-apps + dbus and hal seems to do the trick).

Excerpt lines from Xorg.0.log:

(--) PCI:*(0:2:0:0) 1002:954f:1043:02a8 ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] rev 0, Mem @ 0xc0000000/268435456, 0xdfff0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000e800/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/65536
(II) RADEON(0): [dri] Found DRI library version 1.3.0 and kernel module version 1.31.0
(II) RADEON(0): Detected total video RAM=524288K, accessible=262144K (PCI BAR=262144K)
(II) RADEON(0): Output VGA-0 connected
(II) RADEON(0): Output HDMI-0 disconnected
(II) RADEON(0): Output DVI-0 disconnected


So, aside from the oddness of having 512MB present and only half of that accessible, it looks OK. KDE4 from ports is still compiling, so I can’t comment on any 3D or compositing features.

One little bit of coolness I hadn’t expected is this, from dmesg:

hdac1: mem 0xdffec000-0xdffeffff irq 19 at device 0.1 on pci2

So presumably the audio via HDMI will work as well. No way to test, as I don’t have anything to plug into that.

I should note, too, that running twm and xterm and Qt4 VirtualBox and then running Ubuntu 8.10 with GNOME inside that looks .. decidedly strange. Time traveling desktops.

With the FSFE’s Amsterdam Legal Workshop 2010 behind us and Akademy-BR evidently a great (if rainy) success, it’s time to look forward again. Spring, new life, birds a-cheepin’, etc.

Let’s look at the beginning of may: Linux Audio Conference in Utrecht, for sound junkies of all shapes. Phonon? Nope. But Reinhold Kainhofer — once of KPilot and KDE PIM — is speaking on music notation standards. I should drop by — I still owe him 20 EUR for domain registrations. Lots of other things that make me think “gosh, people do that on computers too?”

Right after the LAC you could move to Ede (about 24 minutes by train) for the NLUUG Spring Conference on System Administration with the LHC on tap. Yes, it needs system administration as well if it’s ever going to blow up the world.

There’s a gap then — fill me in, folks — and end of May will see the Ubuntu 10.04 release party on the 29th. That should keep everyone busy and I’ve got some Ubuntu Thinking Putty to inflict on various people there.

It’s a tale any parent would recognize: now that my sniffles are nearly dried up and I no longer sound like Tom Waits and can speak several sentences without a coughing fit, my daughter Mira has come down with something and is in bed with a fever. Not only that, but the left mouse button on my trackpad has stopped working (what, you think I’m not attached to my machines?) and the EIFv2 has come back with a weakened constitution and atrophied muscles.

Continuing drought of tech, KDE or legal related posts from me. At the advent of spring, though, our little dead-end-street organized a Guys/Dads Day Out. The six of us (it’s a dead end street with six houses in a row) went shooting, then BBQ, beer. We cancelled the “chop down a tree” bit because the sequence “beer before chainsaws” didn’t quite seem safe. In any case, lots of stereotypical guy stuff. First time I’d handled a shotgun, too (the same applies to the other guys, although some had shooting experience from national service in the army).

Skeet shooting is surprisingly fun, even if you shoot only 40%.