Slaya Chronicles

Screen Lock in LXDE

2011-12-04T19:55:00.001-08:00

After using LXDE on my work computer for over a month now, I can only say, wow! But some things I took for granted like locking the screen using keystrokes when I was on GNOME doesn't work out of the box.

To enable screen lock using keystrokes on LXDE, edit the ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml file and put in the following:

<keybind key="C-A-l">
     <action name="Execute">
           <command>xscreensaver-command -lock</command>
     </action>      

Log off and on and you will be able to lock the screen with Ctrl-Alt-L

Of XFCE and HDMI

2011-12-01T08:41:00.001-08:00

Of late I have been a great enthusiast and user of lighter DEs such as LXDE and XFCE. On the computers that I work on, it's either LXDE (work computers) or XFCE (home and personal machines). While the sexy GNOME 3 or KDE 4x gets all the attention, I generally find that the newer DEs seem to have "lost it" i.e. too much fluff rather than substance.

Somehow, the GNOME and UNITY folks are dead set on making everything a tablet UI and the KDE people are just too happy to have more things to click on.

Pretty is good, but it just gets in the way. When was the last time flying and wobbly windows made anyone type faster?

Perhaps my choice is a sign of age; to me a desktop should be like a desktop with its panels, toolbars etc. Besides, on my Lenovo notebook, XFCE or LXDE actually gives me more battery time, a quieter and cooler notebook to work on. And I can still get all my usual GTK or Qt apps with a yum or zypper away.

HDMI output is crucial for me as I often watch the latest episodes of American Guy or Supernatural on the big TV. The wife is a great fan of the latter and with a computer, it's always easier to have support for Chinese subs.

XFCE on openSUSE 12.1 doesn't do HDMI audio by default sadly. The video comes out a little "stretched" and can be solved easily via the XFCE Setting Manager's Display Applet. To enable sound output, install the PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol), select the Configuration Tab and choose HDMI output.

And now back to Peter Griffin....

SUSE Studio updated to include openSUSE 12.1

2011-11-16T17:58:00.001-08:00

Concurrent with the launch of openSUSE 12.1, SUSE Studio has included an option to include openSUSE 12.1 as a base OS.

The one click upgrade of existing images/appliances are not there yet at this time. An awesome achievement.

Check it out at http://blog.susestudio.com/2011/11/opensuse-121-in-suse-studio.html

openSUSE Map

2011-11-05T23:48:00.000-07:00

Geeko lovers, add yourself to the openSUSE Map (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Map)

You will need a Novell (registration is free) and if you already have a Novell account and have not validated your email address, you will need to edit your profile, enter your email address and then validate it.

extundelete

2011-08-10T20:52:00.000-07:00

An interesting tool that can be used to to undelete files/dirs in ext3/ext4 filesystems. For its website :

extundelete is a utility that can recover deleted files from an ext3 or ext4 partition. The ext3 file system is the most common file system when using Linux, and ext4 is its successor. extundelete uses the information stored in the partition's journal to attempt to recover a file that has been deleted from the partition. There is no guarantee that any particular file will be able to be undeleted, so always try to have a good backup system in place, or at least put one in place after recovering your files!

Get it at http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/

Or for openSUSE users you can add this repo:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dkukawka/openSUSE_Factory/

Java Plugin for Firefox in Fedora 15 64-bit

2011-07-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

Due to a personal preference, I still feel that the Oracle/SUN JRE is superior to OpenJDK.

It is a pain to enable Oracle/Sun JRE plugin for Firefox in Fedora 15; they just force you to do their OpenJDK and IcedTea for browser. For some sites, unfortunately, these FOSS variants just won't work .

To enable the "real" JRE support for FF, just create a symbolic link of the plugin lib from $JAVA_HOME to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins e.g. :

ln -s $JAVA_HOME/lib/amd64/default/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

Ensure that your JAVA_HOME variable is defined.

Samba issue in openSUSE 11.4 - Failed to open /etc/samba/secrets.tdb

2011-06-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

If you ever encounter this issue where you get errors like:

primus:/etc/samba # rcsmb restart

Shutting down Samba SMB daemon Warning: daemon not running.

And from your /var/log/messages you get:

Failed to open /etc/samba/secrets.tdb

Just disable AppArmor.

Google Chrome incognito

2011-06-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

It just occurred to me that I cannot automatically clear all private data from Google Chrome when I exit unlike in Firefox.

Well if I launch Chrome in incognito mode (or porn mode) it doesn't retain any private data.

Just do a chromium --incognito

Configuring pure-ftpd with Authorised User access on SUSE Linux

2011-06-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Install the pure-ftpd package
zypper in pure-ftpd
Edit the /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf file and modify and save the following directives with the values stated:
ChrootEveryone YES
Demonize YES
AnonymousOnly NO
NoAnonymos YES
PureDB /etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb #(This line needs to be uncommented)
Create a UNIX dummy user account and a home directory for an authorised user
- Create a UNIX dummy account
  useradd -s /dev/null ftpduser
- Create a chrooted ftp home directory for the authorised user (it can be anywhere on the system - just get the UNIX file permission/ownership correct)
  mkdir /srv/ftp/ftpduser
  chown -R ftpduser /srv/ftp/ftpduser
Creating and associating pure-ftpd virtual user account (we call it jim) to UNIX system account
pure-pw useradd jim -u ftpduser -d /srv/ftp/ftpduser
- Then update the /etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.pdb database
  pure-pw mkdb (required for each time user added/removed/modified)
* You may associate multiple virtual user accounts to one UNIX user account. All virtual user accounts will use the local permissions permissible to the UNIX user account.

* You may also do a one-to-one matching i.e. one virtual account to one UNIX account - but you may need to create multiple home directories.
Restart the pure-ftpd daemon and you are good to go. Ensure that the appropriate firewall port is opened.

Configure Apache with OpenSSL in SUSE

2011-05-31T14:27:00.000-07:00

Create a random data file
cat /dev/random > randomfile
Create key pair
openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key -rand randomfile
Sign the created Public Key and create a digital certificate
openssl req -new -x509 -key server.key -out server.crt
Answer the questions posed and then copy the Public Key and digital certificate into appropriate directories:
server.key --> /etc/apache2/ssl.key/
server.crt --> /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/
Configure Apache to use OpenSSL
Edit the /etc/sysconfig/apache2 file
APACHE_START_TIMEOUT="10" - the httpd start time out
APACHE_SERVER_FLAGS="SSL"
Configure the main site to use HTTPS
Edit the /etc/apache2/default-server.conf file and add the following directives from the /etc/apache2/vhost.d/vhost-ssl.template file
SSLEngine on
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key/server.key
Configure a Virtual Host to use HTTPS
- Follow steps 1 to 3 to create the key and digital certificate
- Edit the /etc/apaches2/vhost.d/.conf file
- Change VirtualHost :80 to VirtualHost *:443
- Append the ServerName directive with 443 e.g. vhost.mydomain.lan to vhost.mydomain.lan:443

How to upgrade openSUSE 11.4 to use GNOME 3

2011-05-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Just managed to get GNOME 3 running on my openSUSE 11.4 desktop. GNOME 3 is pretty and does need getting used to but so far I have been pretty happy with it on Fedora 15. I have an old Pentium D with 2GB of RAM and an ancient NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT. To upgrade to GNOME 3 you need to add the repo.

Adding the repo:
zypper ar -f obs://GNOME:STABLE:3.0/openSUSE_11.4 GNOME_STABLE_3.0

The do a distribution upgrade:
zypper dup

Before you reboot the system to enjoy the GNOME 3 goodness, install the gnome-shell and theme packages:
zypper in gnome-shell metatheme-adwaita-common

The GNOME tweak tool is a must to modify the GNOME 3 desktop:
zypper in gnome-tweak-tool

Enjoy!!

KVM on openSUSE 11.4

2011-05-03T03:20:00.000-07:00

KVM hasn't been as popular as the XEN hypervisor on the SUSE/openSUSE platform. However, Red Hat has been instrumental in drumming up interest and support for KVM in the past couple of years. I still feel that XEN has a greater support (as in official support that is!) for "Enterprise" apps like SAP and such, but the inner geek in me is absolutely trembling with joy for KVM support since openSUSE 11.3 and in SLES/SLED 11 SP1.

For those who want to get KVM on openSUSE 11.4, have a look at the excellent article at http://howtoforge.com/virtualization-with-kvm-on-an-opensuse-11.4-server

Enjoy....now back to work....and happy hacking!!

Getting GNOME3 on openSUSE 11.4

2011-04-25T18:21:00.001-07:00

openSUSE is currently the only major Linux distro that has worked to offer the latest GNOME 3 Desktop Environment to its current branch.

openSUSE 11.4 users can navigate to this page http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME3 to get some GNOME 3 goodness.

Font Smoothing in openSUSE

2011-04-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

I have heard people commenting on how "ugly" openSUSE looks compared to the smoothness of Ubuntu. It's all relative one may argue, but having a pleasant UI matters to us who stare at the screen for long periods of time.

OOTB openSUSE doesn't do font smoothing or subpixel hinting due to freetype2's subpixel hinting implementation may infringe Microsoft's ClearType patents. This is why it is disabled both upstream (by the freetype2 authors) and in the freetype2 RPM packages that ship with openSUSE.

To solve this, we need to replace the default freetype2 RPM with a copy from the OBS.

Navigate to http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting

Follow the instructions to either do it from the CLI or 1-Click install.

openSUSE users may also click on this link to execute the YMP (YaST Meta Package) to kickstart the process.

Installing Ubuntu Fonts in openSUSE 11.4

2011-04-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

Although I do not use Ubuntu and its derivatives extensively in my daily computing, the short sojourn I had with Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) impressed upon me the Ubuntu font.

While openSUSE 11.4 has a large amount of font types to choose from, I still find that the Ubuntu font is pretty awesome; I especially like it on my HP Mini 2140 netbook running openSUSE 11.4.

To install the Ubuntu font type on openSUSE 11.4 :

Download the latest Ubuntu font type from http://font.ubuntu.com/
Unzip the zip archive - unzip ubuntu-font-family-0.71.2.zip
Move the unzipped directory to /usr/share/fonts - mv ubuntu-font-family-0.71.2/ /usr/share/fonts
Run SuSEconfig and you are good to go.

Note that the font archive version may differ from the above example.

Banshee 2.0 is out!

2011-04-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

Banshee is an open source media player that is based on Gtk# and Mono and uses the Gstreamer framework for multimedia file playback. It can also be used for managing podcasts and listening to online radio.

The new 2.0 version introduces a Windows build.

Go get it at http://banshee.fm/download/

Banshee is a project sponsored by Novell SUSE.

LibreOffice on openSUSE 11.3

2011-02-26T09:28:00.000-08:00

To get the LibreOffice goodness in openSUSE 11.3, just add the following repo:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Stable/openSUSE_11.3/

There are also versions for openSUSE 11.2 and 11.4. Just change the end part to the desired version number.

Installing KDE 4.6 in openSUSE 11.3

2011-02-26T09:26:00.001-08:00

Just add the following repos into openSUSE 11.3 to get KDE 4.6 goodness:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/46/openSUSE_11.3/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/KDE_Release_46_openSUSE_11.3/

LibreOffice is released

2011-01-26T02:45:00.000-08:00

Yay LibreOffice is released...

Go get it at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

openSUSE FUD

2010-12-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

I am really sick and tired of people spreading FUD on the future of openSUSE and SUSE Linux in light of the Attachmate/Novell merger.

Point One - Attachmate is not Oracle and openSUSE is not OpenSolaris.
Point Two - Jeff Hawn, CEO of Attachmate has already said that SUSE and openSUSE are important components of the merger and will remain.
Point Three - Goto Point One

Novell has contributed much to the FOSS universe (think OpenOffice.org, Banshee, Mono, GNOME, KDE, Linux Kernel, Moonlight etc) and on behalf of the community, bore the brunt of the SCO assault on Linux and later on UNIX. Funny some trolls just conveniently forgot that Novell literally squashed the baseless SCO litigation and scored one for the good guys.

People will always say what they want and there will always be trolls. Get your facts right before you speak mate. You obviously have an axe to grind or something. We work hard to make openSUSE successful and hey by all means help us out if you think you can do a better job than us; we'll be glad to have you on board. Otherwise just STFU.

Sniping on the side and lying and spreading your poison around is just sad and counter-productive. What do you hope to achieve? Is it another case of my distro will bitch-slap your distro? Get real and grow up or get laid, watch some pr0n or whichever pleases you mate.

If you have a commercial motive behind your poison, well that only means whatever you are dealing is just crap.

I am an openSUSE guy and as much as I love the Geeko, I have long realised that it's part of the FOSS Universe. I am just as happy to see BSD, Ubuntu or Fedora successful. Deep down I really don't give a damn about distros. I am more interested in seeing FOSS make it.

So if you think that FOSS is all about how awesome <$DISTRO_NAME> is, then you are sadly mistaken. In the mean time if you need to comment on things you are not sure of, show some humility and respect, otherwise just STFU. You don't have the right to insult and belittle the efforts of others.

SUSE Linux Administration Guide

2010-12-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

This useful guide is slightly dated but is still relevant for the modern SUSE/openSUSE system.

Read it here.

19 hours of battery life

2010-12-03T01:04:00.001-08:00

Heheh...sweet!!! If only it was true.

Ah well it just means that my notebook is newer than openSUSE 11.3's Power Management can work with.

Gotta see if Fedora 14 or Ubuntu 10.10 will have the same weirdness.

Firefox Pegging CPU cycles in SLED

2010-11-24T23:54:00.000-08:00

Some users of SLED 11 SP1 have complained about Firefox consuming an inordinate amount of RAM.

From URL bar of Firefox, type about:config

Change 'browser.cache.memory.enable' from true to false
Add ‘browser.cache.memory.capacity’ as an integer, and set it to 4096.
Close and restart Firefox.

I have not tested the above on other distros so your mileage may vary.

Also check out this site.

Canon PIXMA MP258 with openSUSE 11.3 and Ubuntu

2010-11-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

I bought one of those fancy all-in-one printer/scanner for my father recently. As a dyed to the core Geeko acolyte, naturally I installed openSUSE 11.3 on his new Dell Inspiron.

Goggling yielded no definitive results for openSUSE and MP258. Instead I found an excellent how-to for Ubuntu, RPM-based distros and Arch Linux (32-bit) here. I tried the excellent but lengthy instructions on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and it worked fabulously. Note, you gotta have good and stable Internet connection for Ubuntu 10.04 as it will require getting some additional packages and accessing a git repo.

For openSUSE 11.3:

Install libpng12 (zypper in libpng12)
Download and install the RPMs for both the scanner and printer functions. Note that each tarball has 4 files, two each for 32 and 64 bits; choose the correct one for your platform.
Goto Yast -> Hardware -> Printers to check for correct printer installed
Goto Yast -> Hardware -> Scanner to select the one with the word PIXMA.
Good to go!

Next stop, trying it on my SLED 11 SP1 64-bit.

Eric

Speeding up/Tuning Ext3

2010-10-14T21:24:00.000-07:00

A nice tutorial on how to tune your ext3. Though it was written with openSUSE in mind, the principles are the same across distros.

Zypper Cheat sheet

2010-09-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

Zypper the CLI to the Zypp package manager in the openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise distros has a downloadable cheat sheet.

You can download wither the US Letter or A4 sized PDFs at http://old-en.opensuse.org/Zypper/Usage#Cheat_sheet

Packman Repo for SLE 11 SP1

2010-09-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

Finally Packman has an "essential" (i.e. restricted stuff) repo for SLED/SLES 11 SP1.

For the SUSE world Packman has always been the repo for the sweet restricted codecs.

To add the repo:

zypper ar -f http://packman.inode.at/suse/sle_11_sp1/ Packman_SLE

Firefox Panorama

2010-08-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

Firefox new Panorama feature is just simply awesome. Makes tab management really fun and useful. Check it out here

Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa the Movie

2010-08-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I saw a trailer of the coming Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa movie produced by KRU Studios. Being one of the very small majority who actually read the Hikayat when I was in my teens and as a history buff I was of course elated that piece of local history (and legend) is being made into a movie.

Until I saw the part they portrayed the Romans (or Rum as in the annals). I could already screamed at that moment! They actually portrayed the Romans (or Rhomaioi as the Greeks called themselves then) like something that came out from the comics; bright brass cuirass, Trojan headress and blue-eyed blonds. Note to costume director, the Romans seldom wear brass cuirasses except if you are a noble or higher ranked. Mostly wear chain-mail over tunic or a leather cuirass and are usually armed with the throwning spear septum and short sword gladius. In fact towards the end of the Western Roman Empire, much of their army consisted of Germanic "barbarians" like the Goths.

I really don't know which joker they hired as a history/literary consultant, but Rum actually referred to the area of what was the Byzantium or Eastern Roman Empire and so was more Greek than Latin. Rum was also what the Seljuk Turks called their domain when they conquered the Anatolian Plains from the Byzantines.

Also by the time the Hikayat was written the Western Roman Empire has fallen for over 600 years.

I am very disappointed to also see Mano Maniam portraying as what seems to be an Indian trader with a stereotypical Indian accent . To see one of Malaysia's finest actors reduced to such a role is heart breaking.

This shows that the jokers at KRU Studios are not serious at all in bringing a local epic to the silver screen. While I am aware that the Hikayat is a mix of the historical and fanciful, a cursory Wikipedia search will yield much information.

Do they even know that Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa is also known as Sejarah Kedah?

I cannot speak for others but to see a Thai movie (Queens of Langkasuka) that chose to portray the early Malay kingdoms (in this case Pattani) closer historically is quite sobering. Why can foreigners to tell our stories and history in an unbiased way and closer to the fact?

Will I watch it? Possibly. I may not like it. But I always make it a point to support local productions whenever I can.

End of Rant....

Changing the background in GDM

2010-07-25T00:25:00.000-07:00

Run this command as root:

gconftool-2 --direct --config-source=xml::/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.vendor --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename --type=string "/path/to/picture"
gconftool-2 --direct --config-source=xml::/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.vendor --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options --type=string "stretched"

Sourced from http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/07/25/how-to-change-gdm-backgroundwallpaper/

VLC on SLED 11 SP1 Part Deux

2010-06-23T02:47:00.000-07:00

I have received some comments for my previous post on VLC on SLED 11 SP1 that it doesn't seem to work according to what was stated.

Well if all else fail, revert to using the openSUSE 11.1 repos:

zypper ar -f http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/11.1/ Packman && zypper refresh Packman

zypper ar -f http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/11.1 vlc && zypper refresh vlc && zypper in vlc

If it still won't install try adding these two repos and try installing vlc again:

zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/libs/SLE_11/ multimedia-libs && zypper refresh multimedia-libs

zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/xine/SLE_11 multimedia-xine && zypper refresh multimedia-xine

On my T61 with newly installed SLED 11 SP1, the above methods work flawlessly.

VLC on SLED 11 SP1

2010-06-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

Out of the box, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) has no good video playback capabilities. In past (and now) I needed to add the Packman repos for openSUSE 11.1 and get those gstreamer plugins installed. Video playback for me is absolutely crucial as I use my lappy for entertainment as well; by that I meant playing my many downloaded AVIs, RMVBs and MPEGs.

VLC has always been the Swiss Army Knife of media players and VLC has always been sucky on openSUSE 11.1 (which SLED 11 was based on). With VLC 1.10 launched, I decided to give it a go on my SLED 11 SP1. I added the repo, refreshed it and installed vlc:

zypper ar -f http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/11.2 vlc

zypper refresh vlc

zypper in vlc

I decided to add the 11.2 repo on a hunch, since there are numerous upgrades and additions to SP1.

So far it has been working well and I have no problems with any video or audio playbacks.

Hacker's Code

2010-05-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

# Hackers come and go, but a great hack is forever.

# Public goods belong to the public.*

# Software hoarding is evil. Software does the greatest good given to the greatest number.

# Don't be evil.

# Sourceless software sucks.

# People have rights. Organizations live on sufferance.

# Governments are organizations.

# If it is wrong when citizens do it, it is wrong when governments do it.

# Information wants to be free. Information deserves to be free.

# Being legal doesn't make it right.

# Being illegal doesn't make it wrong.

# Subverting tyranny is the highest duty.

# Trust your technolust!

* Definition: A good is public if the marginal production cost is lower than the marginal billing cost.

Thanks to Ditesh.

Good Intro to SUSE Studio

2010-05-04T02:31:00.000-07:00

Linux Journal has an awesome intro article on SUSE Studio. You can read it for free at the following location:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/working-suse-studio-exercise-online-virtual-appliance-creation

Installing Software Pattern/Groups in SUSE/openSUSE

2010-04-22T01:33:00.001-07:00

I often use the yum groupinstall feature when running Fedora/CentOS to get the bunch of software install without fuss, especially when it comes to development tools (gcc, bison, flex etc.)

In SUSE/openSUSE you can also do so:

To search for available software pattern (ala Group in RH-based distros):

zypper se -t pattern

To install a pattern

zypper in -t pattern xxx

Patent Absurdity

2010-04-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

For those of us who are still struggling with the whole stupidity around Software Patents, please proceed to download (legally) a nice video from http://patentabsurdity.com/download.html

Enough of mega corps dictating on how we do our computing.

Fixing Packman Repository error for openSUSE 11.2

2010-01-27T01:45:00.000-08:00

For a couple of days now, when ever I do a zypper operation (and the resulting repo refresh) I get the following error message:

Repository 'Packman Repository' is invalid.
Can't provide /repodata/repomd.xml : Can't hardlink/copy /var/adm/mount/AP_0x00000001/repodata/repomd.xml to /var/cache/zypp/raw/ftp.skynet.be-suseMUwvKg
Please check if the URIs defined for this repository are pointing to a valid repository.
Warning: Disabling repository 'Packman Repository' because of the above error.

Since I added the Packman repo via Yast (Yast -> Software -> Software Repositories -> Add -> Community Repositories) I was scratching my head trying to find out why. Then it hit me that Packman does not use a redirector URL like download.opensuse.org.

To resolve it I added another location for Packman (with autorefresh enabled):

zypper ar -f http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/packman/suse/11.2/ Packman

Then refresh the repo

zypper refresh Packman

For a list of additional repos you can add to openSUSE 11.2, do refer to http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories

OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 Build 9319 Available for openSUSE

2010-01-10T16:58:00.000-08:00

OO.o 3.2 is now available via the OpenOffice.org Unstable repo for openSUSE.

Just add the below repo using zypper:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/OpenOffice.org:/UNSTABLE/openSUSE_11.2/ openSUSE\ 11.2\ OpenOffice\ Unstable

Change 11.2 to 11.1 or 11.0 if you are not running 11.2.

One of the coolest things of running openSUSE is the availability of the latest OO.o from the devels themselves, since Novell sponsors the excellent Go-oo variant of OpenOffice.org. Go-oo has better support for OOXML and VBA macros, GStreamer integration and 3D transition for Impress. Go-oo is the default OpenOffice.org bundled with other distros such as Ubuntu and Mandriva. Go-oo also has a version for MS Windows.

Another example of Microsft's Evil

2009-12-15T16:55:00.000-08:00

I was trawling through Planet SUSE and came across this interesting post on Microsoft's plagiarising some small startup's microblogging service.

Microsoft is innovative...yeah right...

Bash script...

2009-12-15T00:06:00.000-08:00

Well was playing around with Inkscape and decided to copy all SVG opencliparts to another dir:

find /opt/openclipart-0.19/ -name *.svg -exec cp {} /home/eyeoh/svg \

Ahh...the simple elegance of the bash script.

Scientists Create Artifical Meat

2009-12-01T06:20:00.000-08:00

It seems a bunch of Dutch scientists have managed to create pork meat from a petri dish.

This means that meat can one day be potentially "vegetarian" as it is not obtained from slaughter.

To me the easiest problem to solve are the scientific ones; it's the theological ones that are the deal breakers.

openSUSE 11.2 Release Party.

2009-11-26T22:39:00.000-08:00

The myopensuse Community will be holding an openSUSE 11.2 Release Party on December 5th 2009 at UCTI (formerly known as APIIT) at Technology Park Malaysia, Bukit Jalil.

Admission is free and all are welcomed. Lunch will be provided.

More info please refer here : http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.2_Launch_Party_Locations#Malaysia

Installing additional Apache modules in SLES 11

2009-11-25T01:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you need to install additional Apache HTTPD modules that are not in the main repos (maybe mad_proxy). Rather than rebuilding from source just add the following:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Apache:/Modules/SLE_11/Apache:Modules.repo Apache-Modules

In fact there are numerous extra repos you can add to your SLE or even openSUSE installs. Just navigate to http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/ and add the relevant repo.

Checking your openSUSE / SUSE Linux version

2009-11-25T01:19:00.000-08:00

A simple :

$ cat /etc/SuSE-release
openSUSE 11.2 (i586)
VERSION = 11.2

Windows AppLocker in R2

2009-11-19T14:49:00.001-08:00

I was reading an article in SearchWindowsServer.com about the latest "breakthrough" in Windows security named AppLocker.

It sounds a lot like AppArmor. Not surprising since the founder of Immunix Linux, Crispin Cowan has joined Microsoft. AppArmor was first used in Immunix Linux, which was acquired by Novell in 2005. For some unknown reason, Novell axed the entire AppArmor team in September 2007.

AppArmor is an alternative to SELinux and is available in SUSE Linux, openSUSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu.

Tomboy and openSUSE 11.2

2009-11-18T01:32:00.000-08:00

Well, one of the things I absolutely can't live without is Tomboy. Since I upgraded to openSUSE 11.2, everything was restored except for my Tomboy notes.

Lo and behold1 There is no ~/.tomboy directory. It seems that since openSUSE 11.2 is bundled with Tomboy 1.0 they have decided to lose the ~/.tomboy directory and put notes in ~/.local/share/tomboy.

Extracted my previous tomboy notes and dump them in there, restarted Tomboy (or logoff then login again) and I have my notes back!

Sweet!

Health is wealth

2009-11-17T00:51:00.000-08:00

Year 2009 has so far turned out to be my worse year as far as healthis concerned. I have never taken so many sick leaves in my entire career!

Flu is getting the best of me this year.

Maybe it's time to hit the gym again.

openSUSE 11.2 is out!!

2009-11-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

The newest incarnation of the Geeko is upon us. openSUSE 11.2 is can be downloaded from http://software.opensuse.org/112/en

First 10 minute impressions, the latest KDE seems to have seriously kicked some GNOME butt. As a die-hard GNOME user I am impressed.

A better to install Google Chromium browser on openSUSE

2009-10-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

I noticed that I forgot to install Google Chromium on my netbook. Unforgiveable.

Off to http://software.opensuse.org/search

Key in Chromium in the search box and hit Search.

You will see the 1-Click install button a little lower. Click on it, sit back and enjoy your ride.

Note if you have missed it, this is for openSUSE only.

And they say GNU/Linux is hard...sheesh

Credits to http://ariya.blogspot.com/2009/10/chromium-on-opensuse.html

Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books

2009-10-15T02:49:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I turn to nowadays it's always cloud this and that. To those clueless people, IT IS NOT NEW!

What is called cloud computing has been around for ages. If you have ever used an online FTP/File server to up/download stuff, used Gmail as your primary office and email suite, then you have been a cloud head all these time.

And now Canonical in all their effort to take a piece of the cloud action decides to sync all address books and Tomboy notes to the one.ubuntu.com. An excerpt from Elliot Murphy's mailing post :

This release was uploaded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) a few hours ago, narrowly beating the final release freeze, so it will have a LOT of new users. We're putting the final touches on the server side of https://one.ubuntu.com and by the time Ubuntu 9.10 is released on October 29th every single Ubuntu user will have an address book stored in CouchDB that replicates with one.ubuntu.com, and Tomboy notes that are replicated via a web API at the application but then stored in CouchDB and carried along in the CouchDB replication that we have set up. Optionally they can also store all their Firefox bookmarks in CouchDB and have those replicated as well. We'll be doing our best to help teach application developers to use CouchDB in order to "cloud-enable" their apps. A couch on every desktop!

You can read the full post here.

What are they smoking? Ubuntu so far has done much good to the FOSS world. Is this a sign they want to be evil? I certainly hope not.

Malaysian Government FOSS Conference - MyGOSSCON 2009

2009-09-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

OSCC MAMPU will organise MyGOSSCON 2009 from November 5th to 6th at PICC (Putrajaya International Convention Centre).

This this the Government of Malaysia's premier FOSS event that bring together government organisations, OSS community and the industry to share on how OSS is being used to transform the public service delivery and create unprecedented value proposition for the business organisation.

The conference theme for this year, “Leveraging OSS To Ride The Economic Wave” focus on information technology implementation in the current global economic scenario where governments and business organisations are continuously seeking innovative, practical and viable solutions. It is especially in times such as these where the value proposition and case for OSS can be demonstrated.

The call for papers is now open.

For further information please go to the conference portal http://mygosscon.oscc.org.my/2009

Of being sick and the timing

2009-07-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Great, just woke up about an hour and a half ago. Now what? Responded to some mailing list post, in retrospect may not have been the best decision for someone who is still hazy.

The medication for my fever indeed worked so well that I found myself sleeping most of the time the last couple of days; if only it was continuous sleep and not waking up every few hours or so and feeling gloomy. Seriously, why can't the doctor just gave me something that will knock me out for say 6 hours at a stretch or something?

My fever came about at the worst possible time of the month, I missed two workshops back-to-back. Why can't I get sick over a long weekend or something?

Ok now I am mostly cured of my fever and am wide awake at 230am in the morning. Simply marvelous. Got a text message from the boss reminding me of an important meeting at 9am (any meeting that is ever unimportant?).

Maybe popping another em pills will do the trick? Great, chemically induced slumber. Ah well, time to get some water and perchance to sleep.

Some Stuff for Nasir

2009-07-26T05:06:00.001-07:00

An excellent guide here for enabling your Broadcom wifi:

http://www.susegeek.com/networking/fix-bcm4311431243214322-wireless-in-opensuse-111-and-earlier/

Just gotta watch out on the kernel version. If you are unsure check it out by typing :

uname -a

For us HP Mini 2140 users, it is usually the pae kernel.

For multimedia stuff :

you can easily turn it into a rocking multimedia machine....Just navigate to :

http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats/11.1

And then choose you desktop environment click on the the codecs-gnome.ymp or codecs-kde.ymp files.

By default GNOME is the selected at installation time for openSUSE 11.1.

Select open with and just follow the prompts.

One-click install is an extremely cool feature for the openSUSE platform. There are many one-click installs available for instance:

Broadcom Wireless
http://www.susegeek.com/networking/fix-bcm4311431243214322-wireless-in-opensuse-111-and-earlier/

NVIDIA Drivers
http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA

ATI Drivers
http://en.opensuse.org/ATI

There are lots more one-click installs on the Net. Google is your friend.

Cheers...

SLED 11 on my HP 2140 - Part Deux

2009-07-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

I finally removed SLED 11 from my HP 2140 Mininote. What happened was a case of itchy fingers. I added openSUSE OSS and Non-OSS repos and accidentally did a "zypper up" without looking.

Urggh, it updated alright just that after a shutdown it refused to boot cited some issues with the / (root) partition. Ah well, it worked well while it lasted.

No noticeable performance issue when I was doing SLED 11. It was getting kinda boring coz it just worked! But I was pleasantly surprised that it was bundled with OpenOffice.org 3.1; IIRC, OO.o 3.1 was not even released when SLED 11 was launched back in March.

Yeah I know it's quite sad to be so darn excited over a boring old office suite....

On the other hand, the same firewall issues from its openSUSE upstream is still present in SLED 11. It seems that when the firewall is up you can't connect to a SMB share or a CUPS server (though port 631 is explicitly opened for incoming, just like in Fedora).

I just pulled down the firewall and downloaded and installed Shorewall. Ahh..at last some sanity.

The multimedia support in SLED 11 is quite spotty at times. Well, the playback was superb with no issues of lagging or video artifacts but the available codecs available are just very limited.

While Moonshine was installed to allow playback of WMA and WMV files, I found that more esoteric file formats such as MKVs and RMVBs simply wont play nice with Totem or Xine. Heck even some xvid (or divx AVIs) files won't play. I have tons of AVIs and RMVBs, that won't do.

So I added Packman's repo:

#zypper ar http://ftp.skynet.be//pub/packman/suse/11.1 Packman

Added the "restricted bits" like gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad and libxine1-codecs.

And back to multimedia goodness.

But then a thought sank in; since each openSUSE version only has support for 24 months and SLED 11 could potentially be used for far longer than that, what will happen when Packman decides to dump the 11.1 repo?

I mean if I never format the netbook then perhaps I could live with it. But never is a big word and the techie in me will never hear of it, never formatting my Linux installation means I hardly do stuff to it. I cannot say for others but sometimes my frack ups are so huge it requires nothing less than a rebuild.

At least with a RHEL Desktop there is the RPMFusion repo. Hmm..unsure about going all Shadowman for my netbook since Fedora 11 absolutely hates the on-board Marvell LAN and decides to ignore my Broadcom wifi. At least with only one connection I can do a yum for wl-broadcom.

Ah well, back to the green embrace of the Geeko.

Well, bye bye SLED 11, it was a joy.

If only it was a joke.....

2009-07-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

Today's lunch was an elightening affair. A good friend of mine shared with me an interesting story relating to his beloved's job interview for a science officer in an un-named Government agency.

Well, this lady have years of experience in her line and was not all bothered by a pre-interview test. So off she went to book up on the impending test. Seems all are normal.

Until she saw the questions. Instead of questions to test her technical competency or some of those mind-twisting IQ questions supposingly to see how smart or sane you are, she was presented with retarded questions like, "What was the motto of the PM's first 100 days", "Which country did the PM went to last?".

WTF? Seems like it's more of a loyalty test than anything else.

I really hope it is a joke. I really do. But then again the ruling regime no longer surprises me with its foot in mouth policy.

SLED 11 on my HP 2140 - making it work!

2009-07-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

I decided to install SLED 11 (once again) onto my HP 2140 last night. I was watching an interesting documentary on WW1 and was replying to some tweets. Suddenly the machine froze and just wouldn't work and the screen started to flicker (totally like a blinking idiot!).

A hard reboot and a couple of more times of doing various things and the same freeze and flickering....urgghh.

I knew I shouldn't have mucked around with openSUSE Build Service repos...aiya. I searched the whole apartment and couldn't find a working openSUSE 11.1 DVD (the Live CD won't do due to some weird X issues).

Found the SLED 11 DVD, should I? No Fedora 11 DVD as well; ah what the heck, took the plunge, registered with my previous key and updated the netbook via Ethernet cable to the WiMAX router.

Some one hour later, added the Packman repo for openSUSE 11.1 and walla, got the broadcom-wl and codec packages. Sweet....

Although the packages are a little "dated" in comparison to openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 11; SLED 11 seems to work better than when I was running openSUSE 11.1. SLED 11 picked up all my hardware and does hibernation as well. The video playback is smoother and has lesser artifacts when I move my cursor over the playback screen. Though the boot-up seems slower in comparison. Impressive nevertheless.

Should I take the plunge and fork out some serious dough for a Linux distro? Hmm...let me just run it for a couple of weeks and then I'll decide.

My HP Mini 2140

2009-07-18T01:54:00.000-07:00

I am still gaga over this cutesy little performer. As a true to God 933k, I knew we were meant to be together when I saw it during MSC OSCONF and it came without Windows! Sweet! While many of my fellow brethren were busy checking out the attractive ladies selling the netbook, I was more intrigued by the gadget then with the cleavage.

Also later when I found out my wife was expecting our first kid, it was a good, me thinks, to let her use the netbook for computing (and catching up on her serials) rather than that beast HP gave her for a notebook during her confinement period/maternity leave.

It arrived a little more than 2 months later with SLED 10 pre-installed. SLED 10 is a fine OS but it's dated and it doesn't work with the latest Wireless HSDPA dongles.

The 2140 runs excellent with openSUSE 11.1, but sadly it came with pre-built with a Broadcom 43xx wireless card. No deal with cajoling it working out of the box, heck even SLED 11 couldn't deal with it. This was unfortunate as I really wanted to support Novell with buying SLED 11, seems like it was a no go. Put in a search and all I got was some feedback on how to do it via compiling the driver tarball....no challenge for me but hey, it's the 21st Century now man, and since compiling drivers into the kernel requires a recompile after each kernel upgrade, that is a hassle I do not need. Where's the freaking RPM man?

openSUSE has better community support and a short detour later to http://www.susegeek.com/networking/fix-bcm4311431243214322-wireless-in-opensuse-111-and-earlier got my Broadcom issue resolved effortlessly.

The keyboard for the HP 2140 was what got my attention in the first place. I mean a netbook is a netbook is a netbook. I don't expect to run jaw-dropping 3D stuff on it. But at least I can type comfortably and in that aspect, the HP 2140 does not disappoint. The literature says 2140's keyboard is 92% of a full keyboard, I did not measure or anything but the keyboard does have a nice feeling to it (and it's silent) and big enough for me to do my stuff comfortably.

The LCD is 10.1" wide-screen type and is somewhat is "shorter" that other 10-inch screen netbooks like the Asus 1000h. openSUSE 11.1 and SLED 11 had no problem configuring it "automagically" and compiz works! Graphics is powered by Intel 945GME.

The openSUSE 11.1 Live CD didn't work however (it could not load X) and that was an extra hassle when I needed to connect my netbook to an external DVD drive to get the DVD version installed.

It's not a openSUSE only issue as I tried making a Fedora 11 Live USB and it didn't load as well. Odd. Must be the xorg drivers.

The on-board webcam worked liked a charm and the capture was pretty clear and crisp. Cheese worked like it should.

The on-board speakers performed well enough for me to view some AVIs and listen to my MP3s without resorting to my earphones. Not Dolby 3D or anything fancy but hey, those who expect to get real 3D effects on a netbook are unrealistic to begin with.

In all, it is an excellent device, light enough (1.1kg) to tote around and powerful enough to do most stuff. And mine has 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD. Sweet!

The extra RAM me thinks is part of the promotion at OSCONF.

Bon Odori

2009-07-17T23:38:00.000-07:00

To my many Japanese culture fan-boys/girls friends, today's bon odori celebrations at the Matsushita Stadium in Shah Alam is a must attend bash. While I am not a huge fan of Japanese culture, I can certainly understand their enthusiasm for an ancient and colourful culture as well as the modern flashy J-POP culture of music, animes and manga.

Many of my Ah Beng mates are also crazy over anything Japanese. The Japanese and Chinese culture are very similar, heck even the katana and kimono had their roots in Spring & Autumn period of Chinese history (8th BC to 5thBC); and much of the "modern" Japanese culture is essentially a different branch of same ancient one. Many even in mainland China admire Japan of what China could have been, notwithstanding the bloody history between the two nations during WW2.

Now back home in Malaysia, I am delighted that many of my Muslim friends are flocking to bon odori. It shows maturity and sophistication to accept and join in the celebration of another people's culture.

Sadly while there is such a ready acceptance of a foreign culture, I often wonder if they would be so accommodating if I were to invite them for a Chinese do, say the Mid Autumn Festival (also erroneous referred to as the Moooncake Festival).

Always the first question, will the food be Halal? WTF? Do I look so bloody ignorant as to serve non-Halal food and drinks to my Muslim friends? Mooncakes sold nowadays are already Halal. In practically all of the previous places I have worked at, some of my Muslim brothers get so upset if I ever were to eat non-Halal (even if it's just chicken rice with zero pork) in the office, citing a lack of respect; but the same people will NEVER think twice gulping down a Big Mac in front of Hindus and beef-abstaining Buddhists.

As a mark of respect, I will usually excuse myself from the presence of my Muslim brothers if I was to eat or drink during Ramadhan.

The 1-Malaysia concept looks good on paper. If some of my Muslim brothers cannot even stand their non-Muslim brethren eating non-Halal food in thier presence, then all will be just a pipe dream.

To those who considers what goes in a man is more imprtant that what comes out, I ask this, when was the last time any of your Hindu co-workers complained you ate beef in their presence?

End of rant.

Running Google Chrome on openSUSE 11.1

2009-06-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

Download and install the RPM here:

http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.190.2-1.i386.rpm

or for 64-bit

http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.190.2-1.x86_64.rpm

Then as root do the following :

ln -s /usr/lib/libnss3.so /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libsmime3.so /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libssl3.so /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libplds4.so /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/libplc4.so /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/libnspr4.so /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

And you will have Google Chrome running. It doesn't show up on my menu, but you can launch google-chrome from CLI. Note that this an experimental software, so it may be unstable.

Culled from Nubae Hubari's blog.

Killing the sound server

2009-06-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

I was finishing watching another excellent episode of Category 5 TV when I did a normal Alt-F4 to kill Totem. That's when the sound system decided to continue running ala Max Headroom.

As root:

/etc/init.d/alsasound unload

and a later

/etc/init.d/alsasound reload

did the trick.

I use OpenSUSE and am unsure whether it will work on other distros.

D-Day in a few hours

2009-05-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

It's 0235 now. I am sitting at the sofa trying my best to finish up my slides for tomorrow's SELinux in a Nutshell talk. Maybe I shouldn't agreed to do it in the first place. Ah well....so a moment of temporary insanity will cost me another sleepless night; nothing new there.

The MSC Open Source Conference will begin in a few hours. I will be manning the OpenSUSE install desk on the first day and will generally be doing everything OpenSUSE for the rest of the conference. Exiciting indeed. And man what a rush! So much effort has been made by MDEC for us community people. We are not exactly the easiest people to get along with; or perhaps we tick and dance to a different rhythm than what they are used to. The fact that MDEC, a "Windows-soaked" organisation is willing to engage us is nothing short of a worthy standing ovation.

Open source has always been unfairly made out to be a fringe movement, populated by narcissists and anti-social types. Somehow, there are many who feel that if you are not using Windows there must be something seriously wrong with you. A rebel without a cause.

Well, come tomorrow we are gonna knock their socks off with the sheer power of what the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world has to offer. For perhaps the very first time, a Malaysian FOSS event was given a slot in a televised breakfast show and a radio interview. That's mainstream exposure. With MDEC spearheading the task of organising the conference, it adds "legitimacy" to FOSS. Suddenly if MDEC is looking at FOSS, then to the rest of the Windows dependent people, there must be something FOSS than meets the eye. They will begin to see it in a more deserving positive light.

And now back to my slides.

Maybank2u.com a phishing site?

2009-05-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

This is really rich. I got this warning message from Opera when I tried accessing Maybank2u.com.

So Malayisa's largest bank's web portal is registered as a potential phising site.

Hmm..Malaysia Boleh!

Resolving Display Driver issues with Ubuntu Jaunty with Envy

2009-05-01T13:54:00.001-07:00

Alberto Milone's wonderful tool, Envy, makes installation of ATI and NVIDIA display drivers a breeze. I had a shock when I installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jakalope (9.04) and there was no prompt for me to install the NVIDIA drivers for my PC's 7800 card.

Got me wondering for a while, remembering kaeru's and GunbladeIV's issue with ATI cards; could Jaunty be broken for non-Intel videos? I mean, it installed well on my lappy's Intel 915.

An hour and numerous searches later yielded nothing. Then Envy popped up in one of the forum replies.

sudo apt-get -y install envy && sudo envy -t got my drivers installed correctly.

Remember to install the recommended driver.

According to RH we are on par with India

2009-04-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

Red Hat published a world map of the Open Source Activity. From the map we see that OSS adoption in Malaysia is on par with India and surpasses Russia. Pretty good for a country of 28 million.

The map is here

Oracle's buying of Sun

2009-04-21T22:44:00.001-07:00

Well, the long odyssey of Jonathan Schwartz's cap-in-hand with a "please buy me" sign is over. Now Larry Ellison will own Sun. Yeah there will be paperworks (lest the lawyers and bureacrats be out of jobs) and it will only be finalised by summer, but it's more or less a done deal at US$7.6 billion.

Sun and IBM would have been a better fit. IBM does Java better than Sun and has been one of the first companies to invest more than US$100 million into open source. IBM has a good relationship working with open source (except for IBM Malaysia; mention open source they'll run helter skelter) and doing great works on ODF.

Now Ellison is known to be hard to play nice with. It's always his way or the highway or he'll just bully or brow-beat you into submission. So I do not see it will auger well for open source world.

He does not care for freedom (other than his own); only for dollars and cents. Since he can't own Linux he'll just make a copy of RHEL and slap an Oracle label (Oracle Unbreakable Linux) on it.

First thing that crossed my mind, what will happen to MySQL? It's free in both sense of freedom and cost and it works well enough for most but the most demanding users, and even then there is MySQL Enterprise.

So it be a "rechristened" a lower-end Oracle database or will it be left to wither? I do hope not. Perhaps it will be good time now to take a peek what MariaDB and PostgreSQL have to offer.

OpenOffice.org - no direct competition to any of Oracle's stuff but will Oracle continue with OpenOffice.org's community commitments? Will Oracle still be willing to pump in money for its developers to freely offer OpenOffice.org? OpenOffice.org is practically the standard bearer for the Free/Open Source desktop, while nobody can kill it with the code available and all, but the fact is, with Sun behind OpenOffice.org it gave the latter credibility, meaning many non techies were at least willing to give it shot. If it is purely a community effort it may not be that easy to convince 'em muggles otherwise. People are still more trusting of brick and mortar companies.

Java - easily the most versatile language around. Runs everything from portals to games on my cellphone. Evidently Oracle runs many of their stuff with Java. So that's a great buy for them. While it is not hard to make it freely available, but will they will work with the JCP (Java Community Process)?

What the root of my concern is that, will Oracle close source stuff? Will it make existing projects harder to grow? While that maybe premature but seeing what Larry Ellison does to his competitors and the general playground bully persona he has, I think that is justifiable.

Just another long rant.

EOF

Queens of Langkasuka - great movie!

2009-04-18T08:59:00.001-07:00

Well I am still high two hours after the movie ended. One word....cool. The trailer here

First of all I am a history buff and am a sucker for movies that depicts historical events. During my schooling days, I studied about the early Malay kingdoms, Srivijaya, Majapahit, Kedah Tua (Ancient/Old Kedah) and Langkasuka. Nothing much was discussed about these kingdoms other that they were Malay and they were either Hindus or Buddhists.

To me then, it was just another bunch of place names and dates with names of dead guys to memorise for the exam. Nothing spectacular.

How wrong I was. After moving from home to KL, one of the first things I sought out were libraries. A history buff who also happens to be a book worm; betcha didn't see that coming!

It was one of the things I could afford during my college student days. That was during the days you can seriously use a hand phone crack someone's skull. The Internet was then well...still far away from these neck of the woods. And after reading through the many books, I began to see the splendour and the importance of the seemingly useless names I studied. I began to fully understand and connect the dots. Finally Hikayat Raja Pasai, Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa made sense.

And yeah I do read classical Malay!

What was sad was, I learned about my country's history through the writings of foreigners. The local authors, often presented the "official" version of history; not by choice mostly.

Well, seems like nothing has changed. I watched Puteri Gunung Ledang and it was basically a chick flick with righteous warriors and a Sultan who believed in the "right" God and such. Never mind the Malaccan Sultan in that time line was rumoured to be Hindu. Nevertheless it was a good production. Too proper I would say. But I am sure the local authorities loved it that way.

Queens of Langkasuka is a Thai production, stated to have a US$20 million budget. Since Langkasuka was a Malay kingdom, one thing that struck me was how the Thais, a Buddhist people and have been unfairly accused to be genocidal towards its southern Malay populace, were so detailed in the costumes (very similar to the dresses of the northern Malay states even to this day), the court protocols and even the fighting sequences have a hint of of Pattani Silat. The characters even have Malay names, Bintang, Pari, Ungu, Biru etc.

Again, foreigners outdid us in making a movie of our heritage. It is embarrassing to say the least but boy, the Thais really really know how to spin a tale.

Queens of Langkasuka is a fantasy historical epic. Sorcery, court intrigues and a love story...cool. So don't take it too seriously, everyone looked so pretty and nice, no matter how much cannon fire they take, everyone looked so good with scarsely a hair out of place!

Sadly some time back, in their infinite wisdom, the Government wanted to ban all fantasy and ghost stories from all TV programmes, rationalising that Malaysians should not be held back by such superstitions.

There were as are now, the self-professed and self-appointed religious defenders hold that the Malays have always been Muslims and nothing else (Don't know what they have been smoking but many daily used Malay words are Sanskrit in origin). To question that line of reasoning will somehow destabilise the country and they will lock you up in ISA and throw away the key!

Sounded like crap from Stalinist Russia.

Fact is, all cultures of this world have their own stories and legends; it's the stuff that gives each culture its unique identity its unique flavour and colours.

Even the Iranian never disowned their Zoroastrian Persian Emperors, the Arabs have their fables with the Jinn and even the Germanic people have stories like Nibelungenlied that formed the basis of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. But somehow the local firebrands are so ashamed of their glorious ancestors.

To deny your own legends and fables is to deny your culture and people!

Watch Queens of Langkasuka. See the splendour (as interpreted by the producers) of the Malay civilisation, cool fighting scenes and hey they even have a very Hindi movie-like plot, the poor guy-rich girl angle, minus the dancing and running around meadows.

I passed Novell's CLP

2009-04-17T03:47:00.000-07:00

I am now a proud bearer of the Novell Certified Linux Professional title. A three-hour hands on exam that will seriously test your Linux skills. Though the exam is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise, the commands, approaches are applicable to any distro.

I prefer this approach rather that the dour (but excellent) LPIC papers; maybe it's just me but writting down Linux commands on a piece of paper feels kinda weird as compared to actually working on a terminal. LPIC somehow feels like a test on memory skills and technical English.

Finally, I can sleep soundly tonight. But first, a celebratory dinner.

Dumb cops and Linux

2009-04-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I was reading through Planet Ubuntu and a post by Matt Zimmerman of Canonical caught my eye. Read it here.

This brings back good old memories of Sheriff Lobo and Deputy Perkins.

I do not envy the taxpayers of Boston!

Formatting a Thumb/Flash Drive in Linux CLI

2009-04-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

The ubiquitous flash/thumb drives, once a luxury among the geeks and techies is now staple among any self respecting computer user. Most Linux users are adept to use something like gparted or the Yast partitioner (in SLE/OpenSUSE) to format and/or rename the drive, but how to do it in CLI?

Insert the drive in the computer. It should automatically mount. To check which location and device assignment, from CLI use the mount command and it should display something like below:

/dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw,acl,user_xattr)
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5)
/dev/sda1 on /windows/c type fuseblk (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/eyeoh/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=eyeoh)
/dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=lower,flush,utf8,uid=1000)

So the thumb drive is mounted to /media/disk and the drive assignment is /dev/sdb1. The VFAT filetype is usually a dead give away as practically all thumb drives are formatted with VFAT (or FAT32).

Switch to root and unmount the drive:

#umount /media/disk

To format the drive to FAT32:

#mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

Rename the Flash/Thumb drive, ensure that mtools are installed:

#rpm -qa | grep mtools (in Fedora/OpenSUSE/RHEL/Centos/Mandriva)

#dpkg -l | grep mtools (in Debian/Ubuntu/Mepis)

Renaming the drive:

#mlabel -i /dev/sdb1 ::Thumbdrv

Where Thumbdrv is the name.

Burning ISOs in CLI using OpenSUSE 11.1

2009-04-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

Graphical tools are nice, just point and click. Makes life easier for most. But what if the damn button just won't play ball? Windows users will be sweating copious amount right about now.

Well, GNU/Linux users, take heart; there is always more than one way to do stuff.

In this case, what if Brasero or K3B both tell you there is not writable media in the writer in the drive and you know that ain't true? CLI to the rescue!!!

Check for the device your writer is connected to:

#wodim -scanbus

scsibus1:
1,0,0 100) 'HL-DT-ST' 'DVD+-RW GSA-H31L' 'W616' Removable CD-ROM
1,1,0 101) *
1,2,0 102) *
1,3,0 103) *
1,4,0 104) *
1,5,0 105) *
1,6,0 106) *
1,7,0 107) *

Burn the ISO image to DVD-R at 4 speed:

#cdrecord -v -pad speed=4 dev=1,0,0 CentOS-5.3-i386-bin-DVD.iso

If you didn't catch on already you need to have root privileges to do it.

WTF has Exchange mail routing gotta do with us?

2009-03-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

Note : The following is an inside joke with copious amount of disrespect. However, memebers of MY's OSS Community might understand its insinuations and innuendo.

Well, a member of mucky-muck capable agency kept on biatching about its email system not being able to send to someone.

Note to reduced intelligence person, we do Free/Open Source software and thus MS Exchange does not fall under our care.

After all, taxpayers like me have been funding your mail admins for trainings and such. Perhaps it is high time to live up to expectations.

Being someone who made his living managing (baby-sitting is more like it!)MS Exchange, this Ah Beng already know what's wrong but your admins are as thick as 3-inch concrete. I told them once before.

Guess they are just over zealous in locking down the mail server.

OO.o 3x has over 50 million downloads

2009-03-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

As of February 2009, there are more than 50 million downloads of the OpenOffice.org 3.x suite. This number does not include OpenOffice.org that are bundled with Linux distros nor does it include downloads from non-official mirrors.

Truly astonishing stuff. Have a look at http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_bouncer.html

OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 SVG clipart import bug

2009-03-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

The much vaunted SVG import feature of OO.o 3.0.1 seem to be broken, for Linux systems at least as I don't do Windows.

I frequently use cliparts in my documentations and slides, (downloaded from Openclipart.org). I usually download the full tarball weighing in at about 111MB.

After extracting it, I do my clipart import as usual from the Gallery (create a new theme -> Find all files -> Add all) and lo and behold OO.o took >98% of my CPU resources! After over numerous retries, I finally narrowed it down to issues importing svg cliparts.

So I I just delete all 'em svg's:

# find /opt/openclipart-0.18-full/ -name *.svg -exec rm -rf {} \;

And managed to import all my other cliparts fine i.e. png's, wmf's etc.

The stock OO.o 3.0.1 from Sun's site may seem fine at first glance by importing all of the downloaded cliparts including the svgs's; however, closer inspection will reveal that it simply ignores the svg's.

Sneaky!

Red Hat and Microsoft to partner on virtualisation

2009-02-16T10:03:00.001-08:00

An interesting post by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports on the partnership between Red Hat and Microsoft. Yup, after much scorn has been poured on Novell's decision to be on friendly terms with "the Great Satan", it will be interesting to see over the next few days what the community has to say on this.

Granted there was not agreements on patents, but to the more zealous members of the Free/Open Source world, any good feelings towards Microsoft is deemed a capital crime.

On a saner note, this agreement aptly demonstrates that Linux is no longer merely a hobbyist's plaything and it's mainstream now.

Fedora 10 SELinux User Guide in PDF

2009-02-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

Finally, the SELinux guide in a single easily printable format. From the blurb in the intro it seems it was written for those without prior SELinux know-how. Yay!

You can get it from here

Thanks to a post by Murray McAllister via Planet Fedora.

Death of Democracy in Perak

2009-02-09T16:40:00.000-08:00

What would you call an MP who decided to defect to the other side mainly because of a car? Sounds too crazy to be true right? A former office clerk who made it good and became a MP and the Assistant Speaker of the State Assembly because of the faith of the rakyat placed on her. And so that seems pales in comparison with a Camry. This only shows the shallowness of the person. Note - I do not mean to sound demeaning to the many hardworking folks out there, it is just that a promotion from one who is a mere cubicle dweller (like me) to the powers that be is a huge step however you see it.

Also we have the official son-in-law who calls for the stripping of Datuk Nizar's citizenship. Well he can call for anything (teh-tariks, roti-telur tambah bawang etc.) but at least Datuk Nizar did not get to become the Chief Minister via the bedroom.

Also, the said bedroom to boardroom individual incited his less-than-intelligent "pak-turuts" (yes-men or women or anything in between) to use violence (because in the good old days of yore, they can just lob off your head if you go against the Ruler) against the duly elected representative of the State Assembly should they attempt to ignore the orders of the said official son-in-law that the duly elected State representatives attempt to report in.

By the way, what is all this about Hidup Melayu? Aren't my Malay brethrens flourishing? Or are they insinuating that us non-Malays are prosecuting the Malays? Since when it is only a Malay issue? Democracy is everyone's issue. Does Perak belongs only to these self proclaimed defenders of the Malay rights? Since when does this has anything to do with race? Sheesh. Talk more, do help yourselves to dig a deeper grave. This Ah Beng will tell with his vote. Nationalists/racists sentiments are so last century. It is however pleasing to see, from a scientific perspective, living fossils in action.

It seems now that the official son-in-law has also roped in the state police to do his bidding. While true the police are just enforcing the edict of the Sultan, the fact that the official son-in-law has timed his rally or pow-wows to make it look as if they are "ordering" the police chief around.

Lamers!

However, although I do not agree with Tuanku's decision, as a Perakian I will not derhaka to my Sultan, no matter what His decision is. Datuk Nizar perhaps had miscalculated this when he said "Patik mohon derhaka".

One of the things perhaps the Pakatan Rakyat people must learn is this, get some PR gurus for the love of God! Or at least stay quiet and act like adults and stop playground arguments. Doing what seems to be the right thing may not be the best. This "derhaka" fiasco is one.

You guys are just giving the ruling regime ammunation. Sheesh.

Thoughts of late

2009-02-07T06:18:00.000-08:00

Politics
Of late I have been troubled by the political turmoil in my home state of Perak. Sadder still is the obvious underhanded tactics of the ruling regime deployed to gain a slight majority in order to launch a coup of the State Assembly.

Whatever little respect I might have for BN is now gone. Poof! I may not be a bigshot. Just a Joe in the street. But I am a Joe who can vote. And with my limited clairvoyant skills, I predict that currency induced defections will not stop in Perak.

Linux and Free Software
RHEL 5.3 promises to bring a lot of goodies. Centos 5.3 is still in active development, but for those who cannot wait to see what are new, download Startcom Linux. Startcom Linux is a rebuild of the Source RPMs of RHEL with enabled multimedia features. I tried Startcom sometime back and it was rock solid. Unfortunately as it is based on RHEL (and Fedora Core 6), there were issues with my wifi dongle (a Zydas 1211 chipset) and while it perfomed admirably it was just no good for me.

Ardour, the venerable Free/Open Source audio workstation suite is closing its doors. Its project lead Paul Davis is now looking for a job after Ardour's longtime sponsor SAE decided to suspend its support indefinitely. Although I am not into AV stuff, I have read enough about it to know that it is a damn shame to lose such a valuable asset of the Free/Open Source universe.

Also the Free Software Magazine has just published its last issue.

And of course Microsoft is up to its tricks again in scaring another dumb company into paying into its protection racket.

And also, apparently Microsoft is afraid of Ubuntu Linux.

Zionism and such
The Gazan invasion by Israel was tragedy. Thousands of people lost their homes and many hundreds lost their lives. Who among us hasn't been touched by the Palestinians' plight? Sadly thugs who professed solidarity with the noble Palestinians chanted anti-Jewish slogans and performed many disgraceful acts against the Jewish people.

However, Zionism and the Jewish people are different. Zionism is a nationalistic political ideology that hides behind the facade of Judaism. It is like calling all Chinese communists or all Germans Nazis. How lame is that?

Also not all Palestinians are Muslims. No less than 10% are of the Christian faith. But lo, from the press one gets the feeling that it is a purely Jews vs Muslims conflict.

An interesting article (in Malay) is written by Hishamuddin Rais here detailing the differences between the ideology Zionism and the Jewish people. Now for those who read Malay, I will advice an open minded attitude if you should want to read it.

When I was in college, most of my teachers were from the Middle East. One of them, is from Palestine. I have heard much about the bad blood between the Jews and Palestinians from the local media and was intrigued enough to ask about that. I was as thick and politically insensitive as that!

What he told me was this; he has nothing against the Jews, fact was he has a few Jewish friends. What he and his brethren hate are the Zionists. Note the differences. Nobody likes an army that, whether it's a foreign one or one of our own; when they throw their weight around with fully loaded guns.

I am not pro-Jewish or anything. Heck I don't even know anyone's Jewish. We now live in the 21st century, but yet the ugly spectre of racism still haunts us. We have thousands of years of arts, philosophy and even the belief in a divine deity that love all humans, but yet there are many among us who would judge others based on their skin colour, religious beliefs or just look different.

Perhaps even with all the progress we humans have achieved and all the clever inventions we prided ourselves with, we are no different than the first ignorant peasant who decided to hate the guy in front of him just because he looked different.

MS struggling with free

2009-01-26T00:48:00.000-08:00

Read an interesting article by Matt Asay on why MS will try anything to destroy and distort Linux, including using its lackeys IDC to "educate" users on the "true" cost of using Linux.

Cost is of course an interesting aspect of going Linux but it is not the only concern.

Well let the propaganda wars begin.

Downup, Conficker, Kido or whatever

2009-01-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

Hmm, all the major news portals have had their piece on the current "viral epidemic" that is sweeping all the computers of the world.

Ehh...I don't run Windows so how does this news affect me? Heck, sad to say I only knew of its name like 15 minutes or so ago.

Since running Linux full-time, I never had to actually bothered to check the latest and the greatest from the wonderful world of Windows worms and viruses. Such bliss!

Sometimes I wonder whether the "security" industry is solely based on the premise of how bad Windows is. I mean if Windows one day releases a super patch that fixes all its vulnerabilities (ok, stop giggling and let's play pretend ok?), I wonder do companies like Trend Micro or Symantec will be relevant.

Symantec tried to be relevant in buying Veritas, well, all they did is to make Veritas even crappier than before. And God help the user who bought into Symantec's marketing campaign. I don't need AVs anymore, but Symantec's NAV has got to be the worst in the market. I would draw a parallel to Maxis' 3G service.

Of course back in the good old days of being a penniless and starving freelancer, Windows was my favourite platform. I mean, I used to pray that all my customers' computers will somehow be so badly infected or messed up that they will call me. Alas, there is a God because he blessed me with Microsoft Windows.

Now back to my blissful existence.

RHEL 5.3 is released.

2009-01-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

Three weeks or so from now the Centos project will follow suit. The full list of improvements are here.

Boycott of US goods?

2009-01-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

Of late there are many calls to boycott US made goods. While I can understand the anger towards the on-going atrocities in Palestine, fact is practically everything we use or eat everyday has something that comes from the US of A.

An ex premier started the call for boycott, starting with all things, the venerable Coke. While I have for all intents and purposes have stopped drinking sugar water, perhaps he should start by do a live demo of ripping out his US-made pacemaker! C'mon man talk is cheap. Be a man and not a KJ!

Hmm, perhaps we should stop buying and start ripping out MS Windows or MS Office (good idea!), burn all our US artistes' CDs and DVDs (after all most are bought from the neighbourhood Ah Beng anyhow, right?), tell our bosses to stop buying Dells, HPs or IBM because if they do,they are supporting a terrorist state!

Since we are at it, fellow freedom loving OSS people, remove all Fedora/RHEL, Novell SLE/OpenSUSE installations, and perhaps get yourself some Ubuntu love!

Smash all your Thinkpads, Inspirons, HP notebooks. Buy Acers or the many Cap Kapaks or Chinese knock-offs instead. Stop supporting a terrorist regime by buying an American brand!

Excuse me now for a moment now, I need to get the fire axe and my IBM server farm real acquianted now. Hey I am not mad just doing my part answering the call to not use US stuff.

Security add-ons for Firefox

2009-01-06T11:20:00.000-08:00

Firefox is currently the fastest growing web browser in the world and at last count commands over 20% of the browser market share. Firefox is popular not only because it costs us nothing to download/use/distribute but it also seem to have an inexhaustible array of add-ons/extensions to enhance its looks and funtionality.

What many may not know is that, Firefox can also be used as a pen-test/auditing tool. The Hackbar add-on contains several tools to test XSS, SQL Injection etc, pretty nifty toolset especially for programmers who want to audit their apps before going live.

A smaller set of utilities for just auditing SQL Injection is also available.

There is also Firekeeper an IDS for Firefox that works with definable rules that are Snort-like.

There is an interesting paper entitled Turning Firefox Into an Ethical Hacking Platform that showcases FireCAT (Firefox Collection of Auditing Extensions), a collection of add-ons/extensions that will turn Firefox into a security toolset. FireCAT 1.4 is the latest release and can be downloaded here

The entire tarball is about 9.4 MB.

For GPG users like me, I rely on FireGPG to allow me to sign/encrypt when I use my Gmail account.

Note that while most Firefox extensions are generally workable across computing platforms (Win/NIX), I have tried them on my GNU/Linux machine running Firefox 3.x only.

Happy Hacking!!!

Goodbye 2008

2008-12-31T11:12:00.000-08:00

Hmm...another year gone by. Year 2008 will be forever precious to me, it is the year that I :

Got married finally, as I was considered an "old" man by most local standards.
Joined OSCC and got to know a bunch of talented people and have learn a great deal from them, thanks guys.
Got more involved in the local OSS activities - although I have yet to contribute code, I am very much for the richer to learn from the many local community members via the meetups and IRC sessions.
Got to attend the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing - I am forever indebted to my Manager, Haris for his support in nominating and the Management in approving my participation. Being there I had the good fortune to meet and exchange ideas with so many talented and diverse people; it was as if a mortal has somehow been granted the privilege to walk among the Titans. I learned so much about OO.o (and the wider FOSS world) in that short few days than the 6 years I have been a user. Also, I felt snow for the 1st time in my life! It was awesome and I think went overboard a bit by runing around like some nutjob sticking out my tongue to catch snow flakes!
Bought the very nice E71 cell phone (after my old SE W850i had an unfortunate accident with the washing machine), my very first smartphone.
Finally managed to move into my very own apartment, it's nothing grand but it's mine and it feels good.

Generally I do not have any high aspirations for a new year. But I do look forward to more Linux being bundled with netbooks and computers on the whole.

Resolutions? Same as last year, to have the strength to accept and make changes, serenity to accept things I cannot change and wisdom to know the difference.

Happy New Year to all and have a blessed year ahead.

Some thoughts on OpenSUSE 11.1 GNOME edition

2008-12-22T18:39:00.000-08:00

A couple of posts back I was ranting about OpenSUSE 11.1 KDE edition. Well, I refuse to think that OpenSUSE is all that bad. I was using SUSE exclusively before it became "Open" and bought the 10.0 and SLED 10 box sets. Yeah, I was a real SUSE fanboy then.

After that I sort off drifted towards MEPIS (cool, but solely Anglo-Saxon; to enable CJK font rendering on files/dir was an exercise in futility) and then back to SUSE and then finally to Ubuntu, while flirting with Fedora all these while.

Yeah, I am what some would call a distro whore. I get a kick with installing and playing with the newest distros; to stay sane I loosely limit myself to xbuntus, OpenSUSE, Fedora and an occasion Debian-derived work.

Installation and Desktop
Well, pretty, very pretty and slick. Went on without a problem and surprise oh surprise, this GNOME edition detected my lappy's Intel 915 resolution correctly; compared to the KDE edition when I needed to reconfigure the setting AFTER the installation is over and needed to use SAX2. I smell a conspiracy here....

The cool thing I noticed in KDE edition was that, right after I logged in from KDM, I get this nice splash screen and it slowly fades into the desktop. Really cool. For the GNOME edition, it was the normal, GDM -> Splash Screen -> Blank for a couple or so seconds -> Desktop. Nothing fancy but at least I know it works.

The KDE edition was also quite finicky with most display adapters, i.e. I also tried on this workstation of mine that uses an integrated Intel Video (from lspci, Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller) and the screen blanks out to white with fuzzy horizontal lines after the login and prior the cool fade in to the Desktop.

The conspiracist within me is really working up a frenzy now.

The GNOME edition uses the same GDM version as Fedora 10 (2.24) and thus look alike except with the SUSE greenish hues and better resolution and fit with the rest of the system. The Fedora one for some reason seems to like "larger" fonts for its GDM and I don't see any options to change it.

More green goodness on the desktop and the love it or hate it slab menu. OpenSUSE is I think the only mainstream distro that seems to make the two major desktop environments, GNOME and KDE to be as similar as possible.

The default Gilouche theme is kinda ok I guess but I would prefer something along the lines of Oxygen and it can be added easily via the Appearance applet.

However one major peeve I have with OpenSUSE's slab menu is that there is simply no way you can clear the recently accessed document list. The only sure fire way seems to add the traditional GNOME menu (with the single launcher and not with the three menus one) and clear it from there.

This issue has been around since they went slab menu and only under SLED 10 they managed to include that feature in. This poses some privacy issues and it is indeed surprising that the OpenSUSE people did not see fit to fix it.

The "tabbed" browsing feature in Nautilus is nothing to shout about, since it already made its debut in Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10, but it is noteworthy that the rendering of the tab fonts seems better.

The stock GNOME software list like xchat, pidgin etc are included, sans GNUMeric and Abiword. There is a BitTorrent client named Monsson that is included but I have been using Deluge for some time now and I grabbed it from the repos easily.

Yast and Package Management
Yast under GNOME is better integrated compared to the KDE edition. Well I expected it as there is an issue with the Qt libraries. However, if like me who has not seen Yast for some time since its non-Open days, the Package Management is a little funkier than before, needs getting used to but nevertheless usable.

Zypper is truly awesome and after using for the third day now, I will say in many cases it is superior to yum, especially I find it easier to search through installed and available packages.

Again, even with a 8Mbit/sec line here in the office, updating OpenSUSE requires the patience of a saint. Note to self, disable auto-refresh.

Networking
Switching network media connection seems to work better under GNOME than KDE. I was running under Wifi, then I connected the cable and I can easily switch to it.

My Digi EDGE connection could only be done using Kinternet. Sadly, with all announcements on how good OpenSUSE will support mobile (GSM) Internet, it seems that Fedora and Ubuntu has the edge (no pun intended) here over OpenSUSE when it comes to mobile Internet.

Conclusion
OpenSUSE is nice but seems flaky at times. The slab menu file list issue is something that should have been resolved. Multimedia wise, OpenSUSE is simply top notch; I could basically play back any format I have without hiccups and the Pulse Audio system actually works for the first time for me. Even under the "mother distro" of Pulse Audio, Fedora, the controls to Pulse Audio were grayed out. Possibly explains why the audio output for both Ubuntu and Fedora is so crappy on my lappy without ear phones.

I get the feeling that the Novell folks seem to be more interested with GNOME than KDE. I cannot prove this but from purely a user's perspective, GNOME works a lot better than the KDE 4.x they bundled. KDE apologists might say that it is still considered beta or there exists issues with the Qt libs etc etc but the fact is, KDE has been relegated to the status of the proverbial "step child".

Since I am an unabashed OpenOffice.org fanboy, one of the main reasons I am willing to overlook someof the faults of the distro is that Novell does OpenOffice.org extremely well. They after all have a small army of developers behind the OpenOffice.org effort; more specifically the go-oo project.

Go OpenSUSE if you are interested in a good office suite, excellent multimedia playback and good networking stack. Overall a good distro but feels half-baked in some aspects.

Changing hostname under OpenSUSE

2008-12-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

One of the quirkiest feature of OpenSUSE is that, there seem to be no way to change or add hostname during the installation. For instance, I ended up with the hostname linux1-woj.

To change the hostname edit the /etc/HOSTNAME (yes, it's upper-caps) file and modify the hostname there. No reboot necessary, but GNOME or your UI might need so.

Source of the tip : http://www.jprl.com/Blog/archive/development/2008/Dec-21.html

Some thoughts on OpenSUSE 11.1 KDE version

2008-12-21T18:36:00.001-08:00

Yay! Another OpenSUSE release. And like some dewy-eyed and shameless groupie, I used (or misused?!) the company's fast Internet line to download the latest KDE Live CD.

So far, I have been quite critical of KDE 4.x. Most of its incarnation in other distros were, shall we say, less than usable? Things like moving icons around on the panel were made necessarily difficult and what's with the right justification all the time when adding icons to the panel?

Since Mandriva and SUSE are "KDE Kings" I was really looking forward to running it on my spare lappy, an "ancient" Centrino 1.6GHz with 1GB RAM and Intel 915 display.

For any distro, I always look for the following:

Package Repository - how complete and extensive it is.
Package Management - dependency resolution, how easy to update, patch install new software
Multimedia - I use my lappy and home PCs to work and listen to MP3s, watch movies, trailers and Youtube.
Networking - I am a heavy Internet user, in the office and at home I use Wifi extensively and when on the move, I use Digi's EDGE; thus, if any distro has problem working with them, it will never be considered. NetworkManager 0.7 and above should have that covered well.

Installation
I installed via the KDE Live CD. I usually prefer the Live CD method just to check everything is working before committing it to the hard drive.

Installation was just an icon click away and it took me about 20 minutes or so.

After the initial reboot, the screen flashed a few times with a message telling me that I shouldn't worry too much about it as the OpenSUSE was trying to properly configure my display. As always, it NEVER works and I needed to get to the Graphics Card and Monitor applet in Yast to get it done properly.

The KDE panel was "automagically" shortened to like 3/4 of its original length and I had to right click to configure the panel and lengthen the panel back to its original full length.

This "shortened" KDE panel is not something that happened only on my spare lappy, it also happened on some other machines I tried on as well. I do hope it is a bug and not some "feature" the KDE or OpenSUSE guys thought were cute.

Bootup
OpenSUSE's splash screen is simply awesome. Very elegant. Instant bragging material when showing off to Windows fanboys; and it only took me about 35 seconds from startup to a usable desktop (including keying username and password fairly quickly). Very nice!

Also I could hit the ESC key any time during the splash screen to look at the boot up messages, something I miss sorely when running Ubuntu.

Desktop
Well, it's very green; I was expecting the "normal" KDE 4.x blackness and blue swirl wallpaper, but still better than the orange/brown default of Ubuntu. KDE 4.1.3 is provided as the default. Staple KDE apps, Konqueror, KDE-PIM, Koffice with OO.o 3.0.

Novell's OO.o is known to be really good and in this aspect it doesn't disappoint. It seems snappier and works well even in KDE. Also it comes with extra templates.

I was looking forward to KOffice 2.0, but I guess it's better to iron out the kinks rather than rushing out an unfinished and buggy suite. Koffice is functional but it is simple horrible when working with MS Office docs and it doesn't fully support (or OO.o generated) ODF yet. On a brighter note, Firefox doesn't suck that much as was in Kubuntu or Fedora.

Konversation is not included by default, pity; I like that. Well it's just an installation away. So far Kopete in OpenSUSE seems to give me the least issues. I just can't explain it, maybe there is some special tweak or hidden check box somewhere.

Yast is still as always, dependable and good but looks dated as it is using Qt3 rather than Qt4; but still very usable.

Dolphin is looks like a step backwards. While it looks good, where is the tabbed browsing? Even Nautilus has it now and Dolphin looks so dated compared to the former.

Package Management
Zypper is a very cool tool. While I will not say it is comparable to the venerable apt-get; zypper is at least at the level of yum. Want to install nmap? Just fire away zypper in nmap.

Very nice indeed.

Or you can just launch Software Management applet via Yast. It's just me, I have a soft spot to doing stuff on the CLI sometimes.

Well, a package manager is only as good as the repos that support it. Sadly, the OpenSUSE and 3rd party repos like Packman (with all the multimedia goodies) are simply dreadful to work with. Firstly, to really get stuff configured well, you need to essentially configure the updates via Yast (not a bad thing actually, as it attempts to locate the nearest repo mirror to you) that timed out more times that I can count and in the office I have a dedicated 8Mb line. I finally decided to manually add the nearest mirror (Japan) to via the Software Repository applet. Not very noob friendly at all.

Adding to its issues, is OpenSUSE's insistence of refreshing all the repos every time you launch the Package Management applet or zypper to add/remove stuff. Although you can easily turn the refresh off, it is still annoying, especially so since the repos are so slow and time out so often.

I suggest turning off auto refresh to gain any sanity in working with package management utilities in OpenSUSE.

Multimedia
I watch a lot of AVIs for entertainement and listen to MP3s when I work and/or surf the web. So having a relatively good multimedia playback capability is a pre-requisite for me.

So far even the trouble-some RMVB files that I have seems to play seemlessly via kmplayer and kaffeine. I realy don't care much for Dragon Media player and Amarok seems bloated. For simple MP3 playback I prefer to use Audacious or XMMP.

Networking
NetworkManager is one of those gems that just work. While the GNOME version of NetworkManager is just one dialog box and a field to enter the key by comparison KNetworkManager is simply bad. Too many dialog boxes for something as trivial associating to a hotspot. And by default KNetworkManager doesn't even connect to a previously associated hotspot automatically, you'll have to start it automatically by ticking a check box. While some might call Wifi auto connection bad, I feel that I should not be bothered with so many details just to get work done; after all, would you like to re-tune all your favourite channels whenever you fire up your radio?

Not necessarily a feature stopper but begs the question, "WTF"?

As mentioned I am a heavy Internet user. Even when I am on the move I often bring along my trusty nc2400, especially when out for shopping with the wife. So connecting to Digi's EDGE service is important for me.

Well, when I attach my E71 (via a USB cable) to the lappy, I see an option to connect via /dev/ttyACM0 (I can almost hear a noob screaming WTF?!). Okay, bad label but should work right? When I clicked on it, it was dead in the water. A tail -f /var/log/messages said it had connecting /dev/ttyACM0 and error message 15.

Urgghh.....WTF!?

It worked with Fedora and Ubuntu and they were released before OpenSUSE 11.1. Well, I finally got connected by configuring a connection via kinternet. On the other hand, when I tried using my wife's Maxis 3G USB dongle (Huawei E220), it got connected KNetworkManager and without resorting to kinternet.

I had the same issue with OpenSUSE 11.0, and so I was looking forward to some sort of improvement.

Overall
I would say that OpenSUSE 11.1 is a solid distro. KDE 4.1.3 still feels like unfinished but the OpenSUSE guys managed to tame it to the point it is somewhat usable.

I still think having a single pane only view for Dolphin is a bad choice. Konqueror is doing a wonderful job and sometimes I feel that some stuff are just "upgraded" and "improved" for its own sake.

Also, KNetworkManager simply has one too many dialog boxes. While I understand that KDE != GNOME, there are some cool features in GNOME that perhaps the KDE hackers can use and vice-versa.

I might just make OpenSUSE permanent on my home PC on the account of its excellent multimedia capabilities.

Reading Comics (cbr) files with OpenSUSE and Ubuntu

2008-12-20T09:42:00.001-08:00

I downloaded Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now comic and was faced with the problem of trying to read cbr files (comic book file, essentially rar'ed file of JPEGs and stuff) on my OpenSUSE notebook.

Unfortunately OpenSUSE does not seem to have Comix in its OSS, NON-OSS and Packman repos.

Oh well, no biggie, I'll head over to Comix's web site and download the tar ball.

From its web site, Comix is a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It reads images in ZIP, RAR or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed) as well as plain image files. It is written in Python and uses GTK+ through the PyGTK bindings.

It needs Python 2.4 and above, PyGTK (python-gtk for OpenSUSE) and Python Imaging Library (python-imaging for OpenSUSE), and then it's just a matter of #python install.py install.

For Ubuntu, all it took was the simple $sudo apt-get install comix

Digi EDGE on Backtrack 3 USB Edition

2008-12-13T07:54:00.000-08:00

I installed Backtrack 3 (BT3) on to my USB stick, booted into the Fluxbox desktop and from there I can get to the Internet via Internet Dial-Up tool (essentially KPPP) using my trusty Nokia E71.

If you are planning to use BT3 to connect to Internet via Digi EDGE using a cellphone as modem, as I do, usually the modem is connected to /dev/ttyACM0 instead of the default /dev/modem. To be sure check your /var/log/messages. Number to dial is *99# and the username is "digi", password is "wap" (sans quotes and they are case sensitive).

I use the bundled USB data cable to connect to my lappy (nc2400).

Speed wise, ain't nothing to shout about but since BT3 doesn't like my wireless NIC (iwl3495), being able to get online via EDGE is sweet.

Accessing the Internet via Nokia E71 and DIGI EDGE

2008-12-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

I switched mobile provider from Maxis to Digi today. It was just a matter of getting to the Digi Specialised Store, filled in a form and that was that. I was given a new Digi SIM card and was told that my voice and unlimited EDGE data subscription would should take effect within two days.

At 2030, I got an SMS from Digi informing me of my subscription is a online. Talk about fast. I filled in the form at about 1700 and it only took about 3.5 hours to switch over. Now that's what I call service!

Well, I was totally engrossed with Life on Mars then and could not be bothered to put in my new Digi card until about an hour ago. All I did was just put in the card and walla! I could surf the Internet via Opera Mini and the speed was so much better than the crappy Maxis 3G. EDGE was supposed to be slower than 3G but it didn't feel like it.

Next was the acid test. Making it as a modem for my Fedora 10 notebook. As always, Linux is never supported by our friendly local ISPs. I plugged in my E71 and the phone gave me some options for connection. After a couple of times of cancelling the options and got my notebook hung after unsuccessful dialups using NetworkManager's Auto Mobile Broadband (GSM) option; I finally chose the PC Suite option on my phone.

No hangig this time but yet it would not connect, I got the following from /var/log/messages:

Dec 8 00:40:37 localhost NetworkManager: Marking connection 'Auto Mobile Broadband (GSM) connection' invalid.
Dec 8 00:40:37 localhost NetworkManager: Activation (ttyACM0) failed.
Dec 8 00:40:37 localhost NetworkManager: (ttyACM0): device state change: 9 -> 3
Dec 8 00:40:37 localhost NetworkManager: (ttyACM0): deactivating device (reason: 0).
Dec 8 00:40:37 localhost NetworkManager: nm_system_device_flush_ip4_routes_with_iface: assertion `iface_idx >= 0' failed
Dec 8 00:40:37 localhost NetworkManager: nm_system_device_flush_ip4_addresses_with_iface: assertion `iface_idx >= 0' failed
Dec 8 00:40:38 localhost pppd[3269]: Terminating on signal 15
Dec 8 00:40:38 localhost pppd[3269]: Modem hangup
Dec 8 00:40:38 localhost pppd[3269]: Exit.

Argghh! WTF @#!&*<>!#

So I decided to go old skool bit and got the following :

--> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.60
--> Cannot get information for serial port.
--> Initializing modem.
--> Sending: ATZ
ATZ
OK
--> Modem initialized.
--> Sending: ATDT*99#
--> Waiting for carrier.
ATDT*99#
CONNECT
~[7f]}#@!}!} } }2}#}$@#}!}$}%\}"}&} }*} } g}%~
--> Carrier detected. Starting PPP immediately.
--> Starting pppd at Mon Dec 8 00:37:19 2008
--> Pid of pppd: 3156
--> Using interface ppp0
--> pppd: ��[08]
--> pppd: ��[08]
--> pppd: ��[08]
--> pppd: ��[08]
--> pppd: ��[08]
--> pppd: ��[08]
--> Disconnecting at Mon Dec 8 00:37:23 2008
--> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16)
--> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail.
--> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information.

Oddly my notebook actually found my phone:

Dec 8 00:43:17 localhost kernel: usb 4-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0421, idProduct=00ab
Dec 8 00:43:17 localhost kernel: usb 4-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Dec 8 00:43:17 localhost kernel: usb 4-1: Product: Nokia E71
Dec 8 00:43:17 localhost kernel: usb 4-1: Manufacturer: Nokia
Dec 8 00:43:17 localhost NetworkManager: ttyACM0: driver is 'cdc_acm'.
Dec 8 00:43:17 localhost NetworkManager: Found new Modem device 'ttyACM0'.

Running out of ideas, I was beginning to think that it E71 was just "too new" for Fedora 10. Maybe better luck with Fedora 11 or OpenSUSE 11.1?

And then my lovely, adorable blessed be wife discovered from the web (using that crappy Maxis 3G) that I actually needed to do some stuff on my phone via Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Packet Data -> Access point; and change the name from None to the connection name of my Digi EDGE connection, Diginet.

And well, here I am, happily blogging via Digi's EDGE connection.

Thanks to kaeru, ditesh and angch for their feedback on Digi EDGE.

OO.o 3x Document compatibility with OO.o 2x

2008-12-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

For those who are already running OpenOffice.org 3.x, you might run into issues if you send the documents generated to users running OpenOffice.org 2.x.

The reason is that OpenOffice.org 3.x uses ODF version 1.2 for its documents while 2.x uses ODF.1.1.

To enable a downgrade of ODF generated, open any OpenOffice.org 3 application, Tools --> Options --> Load/Save --> General --> ODF File Format drop-down menu and choose 1.0/1.1 (OpenOffice.org 2.x) and click OK.

Problems with installing Go-oo and Java installation How-to

2008-12-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

I received some feedback saying installing go-oo on their respective Fedora machines did not work as expected as outlined in my earlier post

By the way, the method also works on Centos and RHEL machines.

Well it seems that after a re-installation of Fedora, and added the YUM repo, I ran into an issue where only 2.4.1 version of go-oo was available. I resolved the issue by changing the "baseurl = " parameneter in /etc/yum.repos.d/GoOo.repo file with baseurl = http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/Linux/distributions/ftp.suse.com/projects/go-oo/stable/linux-x86/

The yum repo rpm points to a metalink i.e. it will redirect the downloader to one of its closest mirror. The repo I am using is in Japan, closest to Malaysia.

Also, if you intend to install Base, do install at least a JRE. I usually go for Sun's Java for maximum compatibility but the free and open Icedtea and OpenJDK seems to work as well.

To enable Java Runtime in a RHEL/Centos/Fedora/BLAG machine:

Download JRE or JDK from http://java.sun.com
Download the BIN file and not the RPM one (e.g. jdk-6u10-linux-i586.bin)
su and then copy the downloaded file to /opt
Change the file to executable by issuing chmod a+x jdk-6u10-linux-i586.bin
Extract the file by ./jdk-6u10-linux-i586.bin, you see the extracted directory as jdk1.6.0_10
Create the file /etc/profile.d/java.sh
Put in the following java.sh file

export JAVA_HOME= /opt/jdk1.6.0_10
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
Exit and save the file
Change the file attribute to executable by chmod a+x /etc/profile.d/java.sh
Load it source /etc/profile.d/java.sh
To test it, type java -version and you should see something like:

java version "1.6.0_10"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-b33)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode)
To enable Jav plugin for FIrefox :
ln -s /opt/jdk_1.6.0_10/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

Fedora 10 KDE

2008-12-01T19:22:00.000-08:00

When one thinks of Fedora, the GNOME desktop comes to mind. Well, RH/Fedora is known as a "GNOME distro". I was piqued by the many talks of the improvements of the KDE version of Fedora 10. I was an exclusively KDE user until I switched to Ubuntu about 2 years back.

I downloaded the KDE version three days after F10 was released from a mirror in Japan. Initially I installed the GNOME version on my trusty Compaq nc2400 lappy (Intel Core Duo 1200, 2GB RAM, 945i Graphics etc) and everything was ok.....until I wanted to burn CDs. No matter what what burner (Brasero, XCDRoast, Gnomebaker) I used, they all reported that there was some issue with my SCSI connector. Got me panic a bit. Has my driver finally gave up its ghost?

Fedora is known to be a stickler to upstream code, meaning they will either not or add VERY little stuff to upstream binaries or code (unless it is a bug and then they will contribute upstream). So you basically get the stock binaries, with bugs and worts and all.

So, I burned a copy of the KDE version, installed it and used the venerable k3b to burn a copy of a DVD iso. It worked! Yay saved me RM350!

The KDE version came with version 4.1.3. Since I do a lot of media files, next I downloaded the RPM Fusion repo rpm. RPM Fusion combined the livna, Freshrpms and Dribble repositories. Now the number of packages made available for Fedora is increased. Interoperability and usability issues of using mixed repos of the past are now gone.

Next I removed the useless Abiword (to me at least), KDE PIM and Transmission BitTorrent client. I added and installed the go-oo variant of OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird and all "restricted" codecs. All worked well.

KDE 4.1.3 is in a word beautiful. The Folder View widgets are just cool. I no longer need to go to the File Manager just to look at my directory contents. I created two just to make things easier for me.

Amarok is one of the things I sorely missed when I was using GNOME. I did install it but somehow it looked out of place with all the other GNOME apps. Amarok 1.94 is included, there is a nice facelift to it and it somehow feels smoother on the eyes.

Firefox is still as ugly as ever running on KDE 4x. The much talked about scrollbar fix did nothing much to beautify it. I use a lot of Gmail and it is just bad. The left screen shot shows that the check boxes are just rendered wrong on Firefox. I get much better rendering on Opera. But since I use Firegpg to sign my mails, I still have to use Firefox. Ditto for Thunderbird in the ugliness department.

Konqueror, installed as the default web browser, is pretty much useless on most websites I care about (e.g. Gmail).

I did install the qt-gtk libraries thingy and there was an option in KDE Systems Settings for setting up GTK apps to run on KDE, but it did not help.

While I can understand the issues involved in beautifying a GTK app in KDE 4.x a beginner will sneer at this and dump it cussing that Linux is just plain ugly.

The slab start menu will get some getting used to. It is not necessary a bad design, it's kinda nice once you get the hang of it.

One of the promises of the KDE 4.x desktop is that you can add tons of cute widgets on the desktop. I communicate with many people from different time zones and in GNOME I can add world time easily via the time and date applet. Appreciating that KDE IS NOT GNOME, well I just thought I add a few more digital time widgets on the desktop, each reflecting different time zones. Sadly, it seems that crashes the desktop everytime I log off and/or restart the computer. I always get a SIGNINT error. When I re-login all the digital timers seem to like each other so much that they decided to group together and go on top of each other on the upper left hand corner. So much for the usability of the KDE 4.x desktop.

On the other hand it seems to work if I add the digital clock widgets on the Task Bar.

Kopete was for a long time a favourite IM client of mine. Of late however it just refuses to work i.e. I keyed in the right username and password but kept getting rejected by the remote server. I use YM a lot and it seems to work intermittently. That was an issue when I tried KDE 4.0x Beta. I thought they would have solved it by now. My co-workers running Pidgin have no such issues.

The Konversation IRC client is nice. In fact it seems to work better than my trusty xchat. It seems to be faster than xchat as well. This is definitely the bright light of my whole experience with KDE 4x.

In a nutshell, KDE 4 is definitely not ready for use. There are just too many issues with it. I recommend to ignore any iterations of KDE until it hits version 4.2.

However, if you do want to use KDE I will recommend OpenSUSE and Mandriva, both "kings of KDE" or so to speak.

I understand and appreciate the work the Fedora KDE SIGers put in but at this point, it is just simply "half-cooked"; it won't kill you but will give you some discomfort if you decide to eat it.

Installing the go-oo variant of OpenOffice.org into Fedora 9 and 10

2008-11-27T00:31:00.000-08:00

Go-oo is an "enhanced" version of the stock Openoffice.org suite from Sun Microsystems. I blogged about the differences a little while back.

To install go-oo on Fedora 9 and 10, as root do the following:

Make sure your current version of OO.o is removed, to avoid any conflicts.
Download and install this RPM http://go-oo.mirrorbrain.org/stable/linux-i586/GoOo-release-0.0.3-0.noarch.rpm
For Fedora 9, edit your /etc/yum.repo.d/fedora.repo and /etc/yum.repo.d/fedora-updates-newkey.repo files, then add this statement exclude= openoffice* at the bottom of [fedora] and [updates-newkey] sections repectively.
For Fedora 10, edit your /etc/yum.repo.d/fedora.repo and /etc/yum.repo.d/fedora-updates.repo files, then add the statement exclude= openoffice* at the bottom of [fedora] and [updates] sections repectively.
yum install openoffice.org3 openoffice.org3.0-redhat-menus* openoffice.org3-writer* openoffice.org3-calc* openoffice.org3-impress* openoffice.org3-base* openoffice.org3-base* openoffice.org3-en-US*

Note : Due to some reason openoffice.org3-en-US* is required for starting up go-oo. A patch is in the works. If you are like me uses British English, you may add openoffice.org3-en-GB* to the list. Also I tested this on a 32-bit machine, so I am unsure whether the procedure for 64-bit is exactly the same as above.

Log off and on. And the items should appear in the menu, else reboot.

The most evil distro in the world?

2008-11-20T22:15:00.000-08:00

I love Ubuntu. There I have said it. So excuse me while I put on a flame-retardant suit...ok...bring it on!!!

It puzzles me that there is so much hate and disgust towards arguably the most popular and visible Linux distro of the last few years. Dell in the US and Europe has started to bundle Ubuntu into selected ranges of desktops and portable and the Inspiron Mini 9 will be preloaded with Ubuntu as well. So isn't that great? Linux has finally gotten the recognition it deserves from "mainstream" vendors.

Alas, there are those who seem to be less than enthusiastic about this. Adam Williamson of Mandriva in his piece on why he hates Canonical accuses Canonical of dive-bombing the Linux industry and insinuating that Ubuntu seems to be nothing more than a rich man's whim; interestingly he refers to Red Hat rather than Mandriva when making a point of a "real" Linux company. Jono Bacon, The Ubuntu Community Manager offers his take on this.

Yes, Ubuntu is not perfect. Then again which distro is? Fedora is a great platform for testers, developers and those who like living on the edge. OpenSUSE is just simply, smooth and slick and strikes a good balance between bleeding edge and stability. Mandriva is a great distro too; I started with Mandrake and even joined their Club so it will always be special.

Each distro has it pluses and minuses, one that is "perfect" for Joe 31337 might be toxic to a noob like Bob.

I happen to like Ubuntu so what? It's not like if you don't use Distro X you are a total nutjob or something.

I often hear other Linux users calling Ubuntu developers merely a bunch of packager and the forums are just full of "normal" users, sponsored by a billionaire who has too much money to spare. Yeah guess what? This bunch of packagers and "normal" users kicked the butt of the more established distros for the past few years. So, one man's US$10 million contribution somehow makes it a super popular? How much did Novell or Red Hat made last year?

You think Windows got to where it is now because of its technical merit? It's because Microsoft made it easy for people to use and manage their systems and that's empowering and made people feel good about themselves. Ubuntu makes it simple for users. Suddenly people find a usable alternative to Windows. "Hey this Linux thing isn't so bad!" Of course, giving free CDs away won't hurt its popularity as well!

So the next time someone says Ubuntu users and devels are just lame cause they package stuff from other projects. Well, remind them that their distro developers do not write every single package. So every distro essentially packages stuff from other distros and projects. Doesn't ppen source allows the using of other open source stuff with proper credits due and fulfilment of certain licensing criteria?

Get over it. If you think your distro is so leet and package A, B, C is developed by your project should not be used by other distros or other distros are just lame coz they took them and integrate those, perhaps you should consider a career with Microsoft.

What is go-oo?

2008-11-19T23:49:00.000-08:00

Go-oo is a free (as in cost and freedom) variant (some might call it a fork) of the popular cross-platform open source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.

Is go-oo any different from the stock OpenOffice.org from Sun?

Not really. They are essentially the one and same, with the slight difference that the go-oo variant has some additional patches applied and feature-sets added. For instance, better VBA interoperability, built-in Quickstarter etc, a bunch of stuff that Sun did not want to integrate into the stock OpenOffice.org

In fact there are those who accuse Sun of intentionally ignoring contributions from the community or breaking OpenOffice.org because Sun wants to preserve the right to offer those extra goodies via StarOffice and even sell the development to the proprietary software market, like Lotus Symphony, from IBM.

There are improvements to the latest OpenOffice.org 3.0 from Sun that addresses some of the lack of features in 2.x i.e. faster startup, multi-page views etc, but it is odd that while the Windows version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 has the Quickstarter feature, the Linux versions do not have that option.

StarOffice is essentially souped-up OpenOffice.org with some of the extensions installed and a "proper" escalation point. In a way, go-oo is more similar to the paid-for StarOffice than the stock OpenOffice.org is.

Michael Meeks of Novell offers his opinion between go-oo and Sun OpenOffice.org here.

In short, try out go-oo. I am running it on my Fedora machines and have it installed on my wife's XP notebook. So far, everything is good. If you are running Ubuntu, your version of OpenOffice.org is already of the go-oo variant.

Personal note - Sun is not the big bad. In fact Sun is one of the biggest contributors to the Open Source world. Though there seem to be some friction between the community and the suits at Sun about OpenOffice.org, it is nevertheless noteworthy that if Sun did not release OpenOffice.org, the adoption of Linux or any Free OS will be severely reduced. OpenOffice.org is indeed one of the killer apps of the Open Source desktop.

Boycot Novell?

2008-11-17T07:47:00.000-08:00

Seriously why do people spend so much time and energy on boycotting and hating a company? Just because they struck some deal with Microsoft? People who consider Microsoft to be the Great Satan must realise that in the real world, deals are made between companies all the time. Also in the real world people need to make money so that they can buy food and pay bills.

I believe in software freedom. I hold sacred the idea that there must be a choice. So if you don't agree with what Novell is doing, don't use their stuff. Don't buy SLED/SLES or use OpenSUSE, but don't prevent others from doing so. If you do then you are just infringing on their rights and freedom. And yeah by the way, if you are using Ubuntu or Gentoo, you can stop using the bundled OO.o as it is sourced from the go-oo project and the majority of developers for that project are from Novell.

I don't think what Microsoft is ever going to be benevolent towards OSS companies. However, I do believe that Novell is not evil either. Well known hackers like Greg Kroah-Hartman and Michael Meeks work for Novell. These people would have left Novell in droves if there was something seriously wrong.

Has Novell suddenly stopped contributing to the OSS ecosystem? Yeah they support OOXML but so what? Don't OO.o 2x and 3x support MS Office 2003 documents as well? Doesn't in some way Abiword supports MS Word 2000 documents and Gnumeric supports Excel files as well? Should we boycott Abiword and Gnumeric as well?

Microsoft owns the desktop space. And in Malaysia especially, on the server stacks as well. So, if any platform who would even want to see the light of day should have better interoperability with stuff like Active Directory, SMB and MS Office. Novell has an obligation to its shareholders. How many of those who criticised Novell actually bought themselves a box of SUSE Linux or OpenSUSE?

Oh no, it should remain Free of Charge because if they try to make a buck means they are evil right?

I do not work for Novell nor have I received any payments or rewards from them. I just happen to feel sorry for us in the OSS world. We rather be tearing ourselves to bits rather than adopt a united front against stuff like patents and proprietary formats.

German Foreign Ministry Moving to OSS

2008-11-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

The German Foreign Ministry is moving all its desktops to Linux and OSS. Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry said that this migration will cost the Ministry about 1000 Euros per PC annually to maintain as opposed to 3000 Euros in other ministries.

Full report here.

Using a US$10 Billion OS for free

2008-10-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

I was just surfing around when I stumbled across this Slashdot article that said Fedora 9 is estimated to worth about US$10 billion if built from scratch.

Wow! And all these while I have been using it mainly for writing papers and preparing slides. Somehow, now I feel like have been driving a Rolls like a Kelisa.

Goes to show that OSS can command some serious dough.

The next version of this wonderful multi-billion dollar distro will launch on 25th Nov 2008.

MS Web Application Installer

2008-10-20T22:57:00.000-07:00

Well linuxmalaysia passed me this link and I was like, WTF! Man, MS doing what us OSS people been doing all this while? Installing apps from the web? Wasn't Steve "The Chair Thrower" Ballmer who said that OSS was a cancer?

Hehe...now even funnier the apps they offer are all OSS apps. Hmm, if MS is all about quality and all that is good and sweet why don't just offer one of their bloatware? So, if Ballmer was correct, then MS has got to be the dumbest company in the world; they just gave themselves cancer willingly.

And to MS, "Submit ye to the power of the Source!".

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out!

2008-10-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

OO.o 3.0 is finally out. From the RCs, not much in terms of UI but the support for MS Office docs seems to better. Gonna download it in a little while. Come to think of it, it's kinda sad when I am so excited over an office productivity suite.