handyfloss

I use Inkscape to do many of the drawings for my articles and talks, and have come across an irritating problem: I could not include LaTeX formulas on it. I have googled a bit about it, and the first match already led me to a bug report, where a comment by Kees Cook gives a fix that I quote below:

% cd /usr/share/inkscape/extensions
% curl -s 'http://launchpadlibrarian.net/12978623/eqtexsvg.py.patch' | sudo patch -p0

The bug affects (and the patch fixes) Inkscape 0.46 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Debian Lenny (that I know of).

No Comments yet »

As I said in a previous post, I bought a MacBook, and I am making all bits work correctly. Out-of-the-box support from Ubuntu (the only GNU/Linux I tried on the MacBook so far) is excellent, but some things (camera, WiFi…) need proprietary drivers, so some more tweaks are needed.

I have followed the instructions in the Ubuntu community site, as with the procedures detailed in the previous post.

Basically, it all boils down to:

Fetch the Apple drivers for the camera

As root (if, unlike me, you like sudo, then run the following as user, but prepended with sudo), mount the Mac OSX partition (you didn’t delete it, right?) and copy the relevant file somewhere else (the cp command should be all in one line):

# cd
# mkdir /mnt/macosx
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/macosx
# cp /mnt/macosx/System/Library/Extensions/
     IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/
     Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport .
# umount /mnt/macosx

You might have noticed that the Mac OSX partition is not sda1, but sda2. Don’t ask me. It turns out like this after following my own installation instructions. Apple must have decided to install the OS in the second partition for some reason.

Install the required packages

We need a package called isight-firmware-tools. Unfortunately it is not present in the Hardy repos at the moment (it was in the Gutsy ones, I think). You can add a Launchpad repo, editing /etc/apt/sources.list to add:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mactel-support/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mactel-support/ubuntu hardy main

Then, as root:

# aptitude update
# aptitude install isight-firmware-tools

You will be prompted for a path to the driver you copied before. You can press Enter without paying much attention, then execute (assuming you copied the driver to your root home):

# cd
# ift-extract -a ./AppleUSBVideoSupport

To activate the driver, restart HAL:

# /etc/init.d/hal restart

Test it with Ekiga

As explained in the Ubuntu community site, you can run Ekiga as user (after installing the ekiga package). Choose V4L2 as video plugin, and Built-in iSight should appear among the Input device list. If it does, the process worked.

No Comments yet »

Yes, dear reader, I committed the heresy of purchasing an Apple MacBook. I obviously didn’t do it for MacOS X, for which I couldn’t care less, but for the hardware, which is quite good. I was looking for a laptop as small as possible, keeping price low (it cost 799 eur), and screen not too small (this one has a 13″ one. Maybe even 12″ is acceptable. 13″ sure is).

You can see some pictures of it at my MacBook gallery.

If you, like me, are used to PCs, then there are a few things to note:

• It has a different layout in the keyboard. Most prominently, some keys are missing: Del, PgUp, PgDn, Home, End. Some others (Win key, AltGr) have substitutes that can be mapped. Also the equivalent to AltGr and right Ctrl are kind of swapped: the key closest to the SpaceBar is right “cmd” (could be right Ctrl), and the farthest one is left “alt” (could be AltGr)
• The touchpad has a single button, and tapping on it won’t click. There is no zone on it to use as vertical scroll, either. Luckily the latter can be fixed via software, so that in Ubuntu the touchpad does behave correctly: you can tap-click, and you can scroll with a smooth movement of a finger. The single-button issue is not present in USB mice: they work “normally”.

I would like to outline here the process of installing Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) in this machine. For that, I recommend reading (as I did), the following links:

• How to install Ubuntu on a MacBook
• Specifics for Santa Rosa MacBooks (mine is a SR).
• As usual, google the net for “Linux on a MacBook”, and you’ll find a good list of sites

Repartition of the hard disk

My Mac came with 120 GB (109 real) of HD, all of it devoted to OS X. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu installer can not cope with resizing of HFS+ partitions. Fortunately, OS X itself can. You can make use of Boot Camp as follows: go to Go->Utilities->Boot Camp Assistant. There you can (should) reduce the existing HFS+ partition to the bare minimum (in my machine it was 22GB, because OSX already uses 17GB, and it won’t accept less than 5GB of free disk). Leave the rest unassigned, and quit.

Installation of multi-boot system

The first hurdle in our Linux installation is that the Mac machines do not have a “normal” BIOS. The BIOS is important for Linux/Windows installations, so this is a drawback. Macs come with a thingie called Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), instead. However, there is a nice little tool called rEFIt that can help us with it.

To install rEFIt, you can follow the instructions at its Sourceforge site. I followed the Automatic Installation with the Installer Package instructions. Basically I downloaded the Mac disk image from the download page, opened in the Mac OSX file browser, double-clicked it to open it, then double-clicked on the rEFIt.mpkg file inside, and followed the instructions.

This will make the rEFIt menu appear in the next reboot, but only if you hold some key while booting (I think it’s “C”). If you want the menu to always appear, do the following in a terminal, inside Mac OSX:

% cd /efi/refit
% ./enable-always.sh

Installation of Linux OS

After doing the above, you should reboot with an Ubuntu installation CD inserted. If the EFI installation was correct, you will be presented with the rEFIt menu, in which you will have two big icons (OSX and the Linux CD), and five small ones below (”Start EFI Shell”, “Start Partitioning Tool”, “About rEFIt”, “Shut down computer” and “Restart computer”).

Use the left-rigth arrow keys to select the Ubuntu CD, and press Enter. At that moment, or after installing Ubuntu (I don’t recall), the computer could complain saying: “No bootable device — insert boot disk and press any key”. If so, reboot and, in the aforementioned rEFIt menu, choose the second small icon, “Start Partitioning Tool”. This tool will prompt you to update the MBR. Accept, and let it do its magic.

When booting with the CD, you will have the option to make an absolutely normal Ubuntu installation. The Ubuntu MacBook page says that Boot Camp will complain if you make more than two partitions in total. It will, but for me this is ridiculous, since OSX is already eating up one. There’s no way I will install any Linux in a single partition (withouth even swap!). If you do not care about opening Boot Camp ever again (I don’t), do a totally normal install. I created two 8.5GB partitions for / (one for Ubuntu, another one unused for the future), a 750MB swap partition, and the rest (73GB) as /home (potentially shared among the two Linux I could install).

After the installation, reboot and you will find the aforementioned rEFIt menu. Choosing the penguin icon on the right side will take you to the GRUB screen you probably are accustomed to. What this means is that you have to go through two boot menus when booting, but that’s a minor issue, I think. The first menu is an EFI menu, in which you choose OSX or GRUB. The second one is the GRUB menu that lets you choose among different installed kernels.

And I think that’s it…

I will keep on writing when I have time, at least about how to make WiFi work, and also how to configure Compiz Fusion. Yes, the X3100 graphics chip that the MacBooks carry is blacklisted, as not working with CF. But, believe me, it does work!

4 Comments »

This is a (in principle, monthly) update to my “Linux World Domination” project. You can read the intro in this May 2008 post.

The data presented is different from the one in the aforementioned post:

• Mac is dropped from it
• Predictor@home is also dropped
• Two projects have been added: POEM and Spinhenge
• D2D means “days to domination”. The expected time for Windows/Linux shares to cross, counting from Feb 3, 2008.
• DD2D means difference (increase/decrease) in D2D, with respect to last report (a month ago)

Except for QMC@home, all the projects have reduced the D2D. Rosetta and Einstein were expected to never lead to LWD, and now they are.

See you next month!

No Comments yet »

I am really disappointed at the MUA offer I am finding for by Debian box. I have tried KMail, Thunderbird, Evolution and Claws Mail, and all of them fail at some point. All four errors are different, and all of them almost total showstoppers.

Note: I access my e-mail through Gmail IMAP. I don’t really care if these MUAs are good at POP3 or whatever. I want good IMAP.

KMail 1.9.9

The GUI is nice, has all features I want, everything OK… It’s just that browsing the remote folders is hopelessly slow. I can brush my teeth in the time it takes to delete a message, and I don’t want to go into what I can do in the time it takes to move a message from one folder to another one.

Apparently this could be fixed in KMail2, which will come with KDE4. The problem is that I want it fixed now.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.14

This one is also very good in general. Actually, its problem is not due to itself. Its probably due to some bad interaction with X.org or something: everything works fine, but starting up and subsequent rendering/deleting of the window itself is really slow. If I minimize and maximize it back, it takes ages to reappear. I have this problem with TB and Firefox (actually Icedove and Iceweasel in Debian), and with no other program.

Evolution 2.22

Again, almost everything is fine. Almost. The single problem is that if the “To” and/or “From” fields in the message list contain non-ASCII characters, they appear garbled. Nowhere else does this happen. Even other fields, such as “Subject” can contain accents or ñ with no problem, as can the text body.

This would be a cosmetic issue I could live with, but there are two problems I can not tolerate: I do not want these errors to appear in the messages I send when replying to garbled messages, and more importantly, I have sometimes had recipient lists containing non-ASCII characters mangled. I don’t want to click “Reply all” and end up sending the message to only 3 of the 10 recipients.

This problem will supposedly be fixed in version 2.23.

Claws-mail 3.4.0

Again and again, almost everthing is right. Now messages can contain non-ASCII chars anywhere, browsing folders is fast, manipulating/drawing/erasing the program window is fast… BUT, replying to a message, regardless of the settings one chooses, does not include the original message quoted. This seems a minor error. It isn’t.

The thing that bugs me most is that I can not understand how these problems happen with free software packages. If you take KMail, Evolution and Claws, each one has a single error that the other two have already fixed… Couldn’t they just copy each other? That is precisely the whole point of free software.

Couldn’t KMail browse/scan/manipulate the IMAP folders with the efficient method Evolution and/or Claws use?

Couldn’t Evolution display the message fields with the error-free method KMail and Claws use?

Couldn’t Claws quote the original message as anyone else in the Universe does?

If only the three errors where not spread among the three MUAs, there would be one that I could use!

14 Comments »

Pedazo de noticia que he leído vía EmpresaDigitala.net. Según esta, Microsoft apuesta por la seguridad para diferenciarse del software libre.

¡Oh, sorpresa! MS, la empresa que produce el ubícuo sistema operativo Windows, tan conocido por su invulnerabilidad ante ataques de software malicioso y su práctica ausencia de bugs y errores, ha decidido seguir por el camino de la perfección que la caracteriza, para diferenciarse del software libre, que tantos agujeros de seguridad sabemos que tiene, y cuyos bugs sabemos que se tardan tanto en solucionar. ¡Menos mal! Estoy ya harto de los virus y troyanos en mi Debian. Es que cada vez que me mandan un e-mail tengo miedo de abrirlo, no sea que se me infecte el ordenador. Además el antivirus que tengo todo el tiempo corriendo en segundo plano me come muchos recursos, y no puedo trabajar a gusto. ¡Ojalá pueda pasarme a Windows, y olvidarme de todo este rollo del malware!

¡Venga ya!

3 Comments »

I decided to give a try to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and installed the amd64 version of it in my laptop.

My gripe is caused by a really annoying issue with the installation in a multiboot system. I have a laptop with four root partitions (Windows, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu), and obviously GRUB generates the menu that allows me to choose at boot time. The file that GRUB reads is /root/grub/menu.lst, at /dev/sda5 (the Fedora partition, which was the last one).

The annoying issue I mention is that the installation is absolutely smooth but a bootloader is not installer. What this means is that when I reboot the computer after installation, I always get the old GRUB menu, and the new OS does not appear in the list.

The only solution I found is to do the following:

1. Do a normal install of Ubuntu, but do not reboot
2. Open a console (after installation Ubuntu lauches a GNOME live session)
3. Locate the kernel and initrd images I need. They are, respectively: /target/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic and /target/boot/initrd-img-2.6.24-16-generic.bak
4. Mount /dev/sda5 into /mnt/root3
5. Edit /mnt/root3/boot/grub/menu.lst (the old GRUB menu), and add the lines:

title --------- Ubuntu 8.04 TLS Hardy Heron - sda6 ----------
root

title Ubuntu Hardy Heron - kernel 2.6.24
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sda6 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic.bak
boot

6. Reboot

After that, the new Ubuntu appears in the GRUB list.

The procedure is not incredibly difficult, but for a beginner it would be a major showstopper. And, in any case, it is a really sad error.

3 Comments »

Around 1 month ago I said I had made the switch from KMail to Thunderbird for managing e-mail. Well, now I must confess I am making another switch, this time to Evolution, the native e-mail client for GNOME.

The main (sole) reason is that Icedove (Thunderbird) was unreasonably slow lately. Maybe it’s a matter of versions (I’m running the latest in Debian Lenny), but it was driving me crazy. And so is Iceweasel (Firefox), but that’s another story. Evolution seems to be as fast as KMail to start up/minimize/maximize/quit, and as fast as Icedove to manage the IMAP folders (something KMail was seriously lacking).

3 Comments »

Leo en Barrapunto (vale, la noticia tiene 2 semanas, pero es que últimamente leo poco las noticias en Internet), que tanto Eroski como el ayuntamiento de Zornotza han migrado al software libre OpenBravo para sus necesidades de ERP. La noticia tomada de empresadigitala.net.

No Comments yet »

Just when you thought that the world of proprietary software and silly “intellectual property” business couldn’t do it worse, they surprise you!

This weekend I learned about a message from a big boss at Creative Labs to an individual nicknamed daniel_k at some Creative Labs forum. Please follow the link to the message, because it is very interesting. And don’t forget to read some of the responses.

The short story is that Creative Labs produces some sound cards and their drivers. Apparently some of the drivers would not work for Windows Vista, and daniel_k managed to program drivers for Vista (and Linux, I think), and distributed them for free (asking only for voluntary donations). The result: an open message in a forum, asking daniel_k to cease and desist.

The rationale for CL to do that seems to be that they didn’t release Vista drivers for the sound cards on purpose, so that customers would have to buy new cards if they switched to Vista. With daniel_k’s contributions, such customers are not forced to dump the old card for a new one, so this costs CL money!

Another example of absolutely vile acts from vendors of proprietary software (were the drivers free software, this discussion would be moot), and one more reason to say fuck you all!

The good part is that the story is already being spread around the net, and a lot of customers and potential customers are becoming angry customers and potential customers. I wish CL the worst for their vileness and short sightedness on the issue. They should have supported daniel_k, and use the ensuing possitive feedback campaign… but they didn’t. Shame on you, Creative Labs!

1 Comment »