$ su -c "yum install https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85466874/skype-2.2.0.35-fedora.i586.rpm"

$ su -c "
yum install libXScrnSaver.i?86 libX11.i?86 libXv.i?86 libv4l.i?86 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i?86 qt-x11.i?86" 

$ skype

• Dropbox

I have been playing for the past couple of days with this AMAZING app and let me tell you… I never tough I would be able to record a video with my cheap Canon EOS 1000D. eos_movrec is a linux app that lets you record a video directly from your EOS and create some awesome (but huge) avi files. Thx to this app, you can get some new and awesome features in the development version of Darktable.

I’m not a master on videos or photography, but I took the afternoon to make a test and do a short video. I hope you enjoy it and give it a try if you have an EOS :)

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZOBKt1Rc2Y

I will update the download link shortly… blame vimeo u_U

• Use it. Don't dual-boot. MAKE it do what you need it to do. Don't give up.
• Install a hard (ahem...less automatic) distro. Slackware, Arch, Debian, even Gentoo (if you have the patience for emerges).
• Make that hard distro work. MAKE it do what you need it to. Don't give up.
• Either stick with the hard distro, or move back to an easy distro.
• Break stuff, then FIX it.
• Ask for help. Join Mailing-lists, IRC channels and Internet Forums. You'll meet some cool people..and some jerks...just like 'real-life'. Learn from the cool people and ignore the jerks (unless they have good info).
• TEACH back to others what you learn.
• Become a part of the Open Source community.
• Learn the difference between Open Source, Free Software and 'Freeware'. 
• Use what distro/desktop environment/text editor/insert some other app here that makes you happy; Not what makes some anonymous internet person happy.
• Argue with those anonymous internet people about what you think is best.
• Change your mind. Try different things. You would've never known you liked Chocolate Ice Cream if you never tried it.

Have Fun!

Ben Roser hat auf der Entwickler-Mailingliste vorgeschlagen, bei der Installation von Kernel-Paketen grubby durch grub2-mkconfig zu ersetzen.

Er begründet seinen Vorschlag damit, das grub2-mkconfig nur einen Eintrag für Fedora erstellt und sämtliche installierten Kernel in einem Untermenü verbirgt, was seiner Ansicht nach deutlich übersichtlicher ist. Grubby hingegen fügt alle installierten Kernel direkt ins Hauptmenü ein, was auf Dauer und vor allem bei Multiboot-Systemen zu Lasten der Übersichtlichkeit geht.

Dem momentanen Verlauf der Diskussion nach zu urteilen, stehen die Chancen für eine Umsetzung des Vorschlags nicht schlecht, da die übrigen Teilnehmer der Diskussion mit der momentanen Situation ebenfalls nicht zufrieden sind. So merkt Andre Robatino in seinem Beitrag zu der Diskussion beispielsweise an, das er momentan dazu tendiert, grub2-mkconfig nach jedem Kernel-Update manuell auszuführen, um das Grub-Menü übersichtlich zu halten.

Seien wir doch mal ehrlich: entgegen aller guten Ratschläge recyclen wir unsere Passwörter und verwenden es an mehreren Stellen gleichzeitig.

Eine gute Möglichkeit, festzustellen, ob das eigene Passwort noch sicher ist, ist folgender Tipp, den Jean-Marc Liotier auf Google+ gepostet hat:

Zuerst bildet man mittels

echo -n $passwort | sha1sum

eine Sha1 Prüfsumme seines Passwortes und sucht mit Google nach dieser Prüfsumme. Sofern Google mindestens einen Treffer listet, sollte man sich überlegen, ob man das Passwort nicht besser wechseln sollte.

Im nächsten Schritt wird mittels

echo -n $passwort | md5sum

eine MD5-Prüfsumme erzeugt und ebenfalls mit Google nach dieser Prüfsumme gesucht. Falls Google auch hier mindestens einen Treffer liefert, darf man davon ausgehen, das es das Passwort in mindestens eine Regenbogentabelle geschafft hat.

In beiden Fällen muss $passwort natürlich durch das zu überprüfende Passwort ersetzt werden.

This blog post was created on 2012-06-17 at 23:13 by Andreas Haerter. It is tagged with planet-fedora, planet-puppet, puppet.

Our son (and first child) arrived on Thursday! Phineas Charles Ball was a bit early (although not early enough to be technically premature) at 37 weeks 3 days. He's healthy and on the large side for his gestational age (the size of a 38.5 week baby). More photos in this Flickr set.

T+2 minutes


Birth weigh-in


Happy new parents


Swaddled


Getting ready for car ride home from hospital


Home at last!

This is the fourth weekly installment of my GSOC blog series. More info on the progress of the Fedora JBoss Spin can be found on the Fedora wiki.

This week I don’t have a detailed day-by-day breakdown of when I did everything, mainly because I can’t remember all of that!

As I mentioned last week, I finished by getting a subset of eclipse-wtp-jeetools working, but I was having trouble with one plugin of the org.eclipse.jst.enterprise_core.feature. At the time I wasn’t sure if I would need it immediately, but I didn’t want to submit for review until checking to see if it could be fixed. I sent a message to the java-devel mailing list to see if anyone could explain the problem. As I dug deeper back into jbosstools, I realised that I would need a lot more from both eclipse-wtp-webservices and eclipse-wtp-jeetools! Even though all of this webtools stuff may not be needed by Eclipse for the AS tools subset of jbosstools; to build the AS tools, other parts of jbosstools need to be built. It’s a similar process for almost all of the jbosstools: first build the target platform and the parent, the build the common component, then build any other components that your component depends upon (such as archives, tests, jmx, and usage; in the case of the AS component). This means that all of the heavier dependencies that are being packaged now, although they aren’t all necessarily going to be used by the AS component directly, they will hopefully pay of in the end, allowing us to package more of the other components more easily after.

Although I’d had a review request ready for eclipse-wtp-webservices for a while at this stage, it still relied on a few other bugs that I’ve mentioned before, being fixed. I had submitted patches for those, but then I forgot to follow up and make sure they were looked at. With the help of Stanislav Ochotnicky, Aleksandar Kurtakov and Mikolaj Izdebski, these got sorted out, and Mikolaj then helped me again by doing the review request. Thanks guys!

After I got eclipse-wtp-webservices into rawhide, I started looking back at that problematic eclipse-wtp-jeetools plugin that I mentioned above. It drove me to despair for quite a while, as there were no obvious tell-tale signs like before. It turns out that it was a problem with the OSGI manifest again! Even though eclipse-pdebuild seemed satisfied with the versions of the particular versions of the bundles that were being provided by the eclipse-wtp-webservices, they were failing silently, until the compiler couldn’t import them.

Once I figured that out, I tried to see if I could get more of the other features to build, starting with org.eclipse.jst.enterprise_ui.feature, since I would need it for the jbosstools common ui feature. This however would require the org.eclipse.wst.ws_ui.feature from webservices, so I got working on that first. At the moment, that’s now in the eclipse-wtp-webservices that’s in rawhide, and eclipse-wtp-jeetools will be ready for review tomorrow!

Next will be eclipse-wtp-dali, which I’ve also got a draft specfile for, but it needs some work yet!

Also, I wrote an additional blog post during the week, on how to create the Fedora JBoss Spin from the kickstart file that I created last week. I probably should have created the disk image and hosted it online somewhere, but unfortunately I don’t always have access to an internet connection where I can upload such a large file and still do other stuff at the same time! For the next milestone release, I’ll aim to get an image up!

Ein Posting von Jean-Marc Liotier auf Google+, welches bereits an anderer Stelle verarbeitet wurde, sagt, dass man seine Passwörter testen indem man die Prüfsumme von Google suchen lässt.

echo -n your_password | sha1sum

und

echo -n your_password | md5sum

dann bei Google suchen und Treffer auswerten. Der Hintergedanke ist lobenswert, aber es hat ein bisschen einen faden Beigeschmack. Passwörter und auch deren Prüfsummen sollten nicht veröffentlicht werden. Weder auf Zetteln am Arbeitsplatz, noch in Suchmaschinen...gespeichert wird alles und Gppgle würde sich sicher sehr freuen.

"Bitte geben Sie Ihre E-Mail-Adresse und Ihr Passwort an." und wir testen die Sicherheit. Jaja, oder wieviele Leute haben in der Zwischenzeit ihre Facebook-Benutzerdaten bekanntgegeben, weil sie glaubten, dass sie dann Zugriff die Accounts ihrer "Freunde" gekommen...

Wer sich kein Passwort ausdenken will, sollte eine PasswordCard benutzen.

I have been maintaining Bugzilla C/C++ library for a while. Project link for library is here. There hasn’t been much activity on it since 2 years, but recently I tested it against 4.X.X Bugzilla and everything seems to be working fine. Detailed release notes for 0.6.0 are here.

* Fix bugzc_bug.h header file and small correction in bugzc_list.h.
* Renamed __xmlrpc2bug to xmlrpc2bug and marked it as static. It is an
internal function and is not supposed to be used by DSO consumers.
* Changed rpc_* related internal function visibility as “hidden” so
that they are automatically marked as LOCAL in output DSO.
* Added code bits to disable ssl peer/host verification. These would
be useful for development till no_ssl_verifypeer/host are extended
to our library.
* Added curl parameter variable from xmlrpc-c client.h to initialize
function. It would be useful for extending no_ssl_verifypeer etc
options from xmlrpc library here. Increased response limit to
2*512k. Print fault string for all failures which happen when
example initialization fails. Useful for debugging.
* Remove unused description array from get_bugs.c (example).
* Chased and fixed a few memory leaks (mostly during bug information
retrieval)
* Added initial support for runtime server versioning support
(Identify and enable/disable methods available in newer versions of
Bugzilla or even disable deprecated ones based on server’s
installation versions.
* Implemented a method for retrieval of just one bug definition from
server (instead of multiple bug reports) on C and C++ libraries.
* Added one more example program for C++, it demonstrates how to query
information for just one bug.
* Added and opaque member to the bugzc_bug_s structure so we can
handle more bug fields added in the future.

In case people are interested in patches and collaborating drop a mail at rakesh AT fedoraproject DOT org. I have few plans regarding the library. Will update in couple of weeks.

Have you ever had the problem with “No more mirrors to try” when behind a caching proxy? Especially with rpmfusion? You tried yum clean all, and still you are not able to download the xml or sqlite db?

To fix this you have to activate the http-option Pragma: no-cache of yum. To do this add:

http_caching=none

into the yum.conf file. At least for me it now works all the time todo a yum update.

Another SCAP feature has landed in Spacewalk-nightly. It is a web page that allows users to search scan results. User can search xccdf:rules(-s), by their text fields (fulltext), by the results of evaluation, by the time, and/or by the systems.

Let's take a look how a complex query could look like. For example, I want to search systems that recently reported that they don't have boot loader locked by password. For this purpose I need the content, which checks for such configuration option and the systems my Spacewalk has scanned.

From the contents I have learned, that XCCDF rule for boot loader passwords are regarded by CCE-1818-2 identifier, so I put this down to the text field of the search form. Next, I want to see systems which are not compliant with this rule, so from the drop-down box I choose the fail result.

The third selection determines whether to search scans on all the systems, or on a subset only. Concept for managing subset of systems is called System Set Manager (SSM). And since I actually do want to search only a few systems which I've selected afore, I choose to search within the SSM. Bellow, I specify date range: since the beggining of the month up to now. And finally the last choise I leave unchanged.

The search shows that my Spacewalk keeps track of two evaluations (rule-results) of CCE-1818-2 which match given criteria and differs in the idref field (XCCDF Rule Identifier). So far so good, but I get a list of rule-results, while I would much rather get a list of systems. Hence, I change the last search choise to List of XCCDF Scans, which will search XCCDF TestResults instead. Only those TestResults are returned which contain rule-results returned by previous query.

Now, I can see that two different machines fails to have the boot loader locked. I'll fix them right after I'll have coffee.

The bug-fix release BoxGrinder Build 0.10.2 is available. It contains a couple of important fixes which have been breaking people's S3 AMI appliances on Amazon EC2. You can refer to our previous blog post about it, but put tersely, you should be able to successfully run appliances on any EC2 instance size without issue now!

We've managed to sneak in an extra feature however...

Fedora 17 support

Huzzah, Fedora 17 support is here and working well. You can build an appliance in the usual manner, simply write your appliance definition specifying fedora 17 as your OS name and version:

name: my-super-cool-fedora-17-appliance
os:
  name: fedora
  version: 17

If you have any issues with the new OS, please open a ticket in our bug-tracker.

Release notes

Bug

• [BGBUILD-361] - CentOS 5 ec2 platform plugin issues, yum runs before having a proper /etc/resolv.conf and fails to resolve mirrors (Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: base)
• [BGBUILD-353] - Images not bootable on new type of AWS instances
• [BGBUILD-347] - Add support for Fedora 17

I set a pretty hard goal for myself this year – to organize three Fedora 17 release parties in three different cities. The last release party in Brno was really crowded, close to limits of our office rooms. So I decided to try other cities, too. Prague was an obvious option because it’s far the biggest city in the Czech Republic with a big Linux community. So it was already two. And then guys from Košice asked me to do one there. Košice is quite far away from Brno, but we had such a great experience there in March that I said “yes”.

All three release parties had different programs, different talks, and different speakers. I was the only one who attended all three and the traveling was exhausting. We traveled by trains carrying all things we needed for the parties. However, it absolutely paid off. We saw a lot of new faces that looked enthusiastic about Fedora (mainly in Košice), we also saw a lot of “old” faces that came to the party to meet each other (mainly in Prague). And I also saw that those events matter. When we were in Košice in March there were almost no users of Fedora in the audience, it was just a typical forest of hands when I asked who was using Ubuntu. This time, the number of Fedora users was much higher and many of them have become Fedora users after our first event in Košice.

So… another round of three release parties for Fedora 18? Maybe, a bunch of Fedora enthusiasts here in Red Hat Brno office is crazy enough to go even higher

 Hot dogs with many flavours. That was Fedora 17 release party in Brno.

Well it seems I was re-elected to the board for a second term. I’m looking forward to driving forward some of the issues I was dealing with and continuing with the projects I was working on. Of course the board is just a small proportion of what I do within the Fedora Project. I believe it’s important to represent the areas of the project I work in such as ARM as well as other wide projects such as OLPC and Sugar Labs that use Fedora as a core base to their projects as well as contributing back to some of the non technical parts of the project.

Of the three board seats that were up for election the third seat was a dead heat so don’t forget there is run off election between the two candidates that ends tomorrow.

Don’t forget to VOTE once again. It literally takes less than a minute to follow the link and make your vote heard. I personally think that this is as important as the first vote to ensure we get the best candidate.

I look forward to working with you all over the next 12 months.

We (b8e5n and I) have been fighting for too long for this, so there it is dear lazy web.

Using the eclipse JPA (Java Persistence API) to connect to a MySQL database you might experienced some troubles.

Using the following piece of code:

transaction = manager.getTransaction();
transaction.begin();
try {
     // Add here your logic
     transaction.commit();
} finally {
     if (transaction.isActive()) {
           transaction.rollback();
     }
}

We kept running into the fact that the rollback never happened. The commit was performed or at least started and if something was going wrong at the database level (like an already existing primary key), the data already commited to the database would remain in there.

So yay for the half-commited data :-s

It took us a while but we finally ended up finding the solution on a lost corner of the web:

** Please take special note for MySQL database users: do make sure that your tables are InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM. If not, rollback will not occur.

Switching from MyISAM to InnoDB solved the problem for us, the transaction is either fully commited or not at all.

Hope this can help.

If you’ve followed my blog for long, you probably know that I tend to blog a lot about my favorite distribution (and community), Fedora.  And, as you probably well know, in Fedora we have elections for many things such as seats on the leadership committees and release names. In the most recent round of Fedora elections, we had a tie vote in the elections for a seat on the Fedora Board, so we’re now in the middle of a run-off election.  If you have a Fedora account and haven’t yet voted, please do your civic duty and vote in the run-off election.  The voting ends Tuesday at the end of the day UTC time, so you have roughly twenty-four hours to get your votes in.  As always, I encourage you to vote for the candidate that you think will best represent Fedora and its values.

More details on the run-off election can be found at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2012-June/003085.html.  To vote, login to the Fedora Accounts System and place your votes at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting.

Let me also add a quick thank you to everyone who has already voted or who has stood up and run for public office.  Leadership in Fedora takes time and effort, and I’m always grateful to those who are willing to put their time and energy and passion into doing a fantastic job.