Upgrading Fedora

Imagine you have computer running Fedora 19 and you use it for daily tasks. Imagine you are happy with it, especially when you do run yum update (sic). Now imagine you decided to upgrade your bellowed, happily running system to the next major version.

Sure, you head directly to FedUp site, assuring you are running the latest version (because they messed up previous versions which could render your system unbootable), and with the fingers crossed, you fired it up.

Now imagine, after a half an hour, you get this message:

WARNING: problems were encountered during transaction test:
  broken dependencies
    libvpx-devel-1.2.0-2.fc20.i686 requires libvpx-devel-1.2.0-2.fc20.i686
Continue with the upgrade at your own risk.

More than fifty years of computing and research in IT field, with all sorts of methods, algorithms, object oriented, dynamic, functional and what else languages, and resolver figured THAT out?

How to shutdown computer under Linux?

You can't!

Maybe this sounds very ignorant, as you will immediately go and try it, or remember the last time you shut down it without problems. Well guys, today shutting down Linux powered desktop is a rocket science...

Let we see how it all started.

In the beginning we had shutdown -h now; people were happy, developers were happy. You knew exactly how it behaved: you (as ordinary user) had to be a super user or user with elevated privileges to call it; developers also had their method: check your id and simply system() that command.

The best of all, this was portable way even between BSD's, Solaris and (presumably) other Unix flavors popular in that time.

But, someone at some point decided this approach is too complicated, so not cool and so stone aged and decided to give ordinary user privileges to put down the computer without asking password. Who was it, I don't know; most likely those guys with idea that mouse and keyboard with a single button are enough for all your problems...

And we got HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer); resemblance with more famous HAL is probably just coincident, but both had one thing in common: they started as cool thing and ended up as pretty uncool crap.

So, our Linux HAL was also cool: DBus powered, supported all sort of things like receiving events for newly plugged in or off devices, restarting and shutting down computer, giving user privileges and so on.

It was so cool that distros started to ship it and we (users and developers) thought we had a golden egg: no more /proc parsing, no more ask-a-password-to-restart and so on...

But, those guys decided it was (again) too complicated; if you see all sort of things it supported, even on portable way, it was complicated; just they needed time to figure it out. So we got a bunch of *Kit stuff: ConsoleKit, DeviceKit...

If you ever had any touch with API from Apple, you will notice *Kit naming inspiration origin... Doesn't this sounds too biased? Now, if I'm going to add some of LPCTSTR-ed HWORD-like call (MS Windows lowlevel API) over standard Linux calls, people will probably call me nuts because Windows API is a big NO NO; and it happens to be not cool.

Like somene on Slashdot said once: if they like Apple so much, why don't they simple develop apps for it, instead ruining Linux desktop? Sure, they would like it, but Apple would not a give a fuck about their 'cool ideas': those guys are serious and they know you don't wanna fuck with user who pays you a bunch of $$$ for your OS, hardware and devices.

Let we back to our beloved Linux: again, desktop evolved and they decided those *Kit stuff is deprecated (whatever it means today) and we got UPower (for 'power' support and all things they considers had to do with powering your computer), 'policy' and 'console' went to systemd and I'm not sure what crap they think again; but don't be fooled: shutting down or restarting your computer has nothing to do with 'power' so UPower only support suspending and hibernating your PC.

Now, if you are developer and you just want to restart or shutdown your computer, you have 4 (yes four) different way to do it and all depends on distribution: on Fedora you can still use ConsoleKit (although it has systemd); Slackware does not come with systemd and has ConsoleKit by default up, but you have to manualy start UPower, Arch recenly deprecated ConsoleKit in favor of systemd-logind...

Are you getting confused?

But, on other more serious OS-es like FreeBSD, developers don't have time to think about Kits, systemd and all that crap someone came up during toilet session; they are, from Linux developer perspective, stuck on stone age: they are still using HAL.

Sure, those guys are serious and have much better things to do, like improving SMP support, adding support for new hardware, fixing freaking bugs in kernel and userland apps instead of thinking the way how to power of your machine.

One famous Gnome developer said how Linux desktop is dead: yes, guys like him messed things up and flew away saying how nothing could be done... Linux desktop is slowly becoming a corporation led by small number of developers with influence and powerful companies, where even a single damn thing like turning of computer was made so complicated you wish to puke.

Do you know what is the main irony? Solaris, AIX, BSD's in some features are more portable than Linux distros. Go figure out why.

Dash search results

Do you know what is Dash on Ubuntu? I just get it after few search attempts on Google...

The main reason for this post is hilarious comment on Hacker News. Honestly, I'm still amazed (and amused) how they never fixed this thing.

I tried it couple of times; when the first Unity version came, then later after few updates and always would getting the same thing this guy or girl did: nothing ;)

Bad bad vim

New post after so long of inactivity. And negatively oriented, toward bashing my favorite editor: vim.

I'm not sure why people are calling emacs a kitchen sink of editors when vim is on a good path to became, even a bigger one.

From time to time I fire up emacs (recently a little bit more often than before after I discovered Evil, vim uber emulation mode for emacs, making emacs usable to us, poor vi/vim users) to see what progress is made in editor world and how vim is keeping up with it.

Sometimes I am happy why I'm still using vim (speed, integrated spell check) and sometimes I'm jealous for some features vim probably will never have (external processes inside editor, dbus support, extension language) or are implemented badly (syntax coloring, extension language, own spell check instead already existing, like aspell, ispell or else).


Well, see, for emacs we have Babel and I'm very happy with it. Install emacs and install Babel and things works.

Vim has also nice one, called VimTranslator, except it supports only Google Translate. This is not an issue, except you have to have installed ruby to use it.

No matter I'm not using ruby at all, to use full vim version I must install ruby. Probably because to write vim extensions you can use 10 different languages, forcing your users to install them and everything those languages requires. Yuck!

Emacs is not perfect either, but to extend it I need to learn single language (elisp) and I can be productive. For vim, I can choose between half baked junk called vimscript or something better in form of heavyweight alternatives like python, perl, ruby... What to expect in the future; java maybe?

Updated build nodes certificates

I just updated certificates on buildbot nodes, that failed to do anything useful last three days.

Looks like SF guys has idea how updating repository certificates is not important at all, so they expects you understaind it without yelling why you didn't get any kind of dammit notification.

Thank you SF!

Charting library

Sometimes you need to draw charts on more pragmatically way than is usually done. Unfortuately, most of the things out there pretty sucks or are in the good way to do so.

For some time I used PyChart, but due it's complexity and really odd api, I dumped it and get back to OpenOffice. Yes, I went back to stone age, from nice comfort of favorite editor to clicking on eat-all-available-memory OpenOffice.

From time to time, I stumble upon some library, but nothing I would be satisfied with. Until I found guile-charting.

Honestly, Guile is not my favorite package and I install it mostly to play with differences on Scheme implementations, but from no on, guile-charting will be probably the main reason why I will keep Guile package installed.

Here is the sample code (also on pastebin):

(use-modules (charting))

(make-bar-chart "Monthly status for Foo project"
'(("January"
   (232 "Download")
   (20 "Upload"))
 ("February"
   (80 "Download")
   (320 "Upload"))
 ("March"
   (130 "Download")
   (150 "Upload"))
 )

 #:write-to-png "usage.png"
 #:chart-height 200
)

and will produce this:


You will also need guile-cairo for guile-charting.

pkg-config on OpenSolaris

You want pkg-config on OpenSolaris? No problem, just install 4.20 MB gnome-common-devel package. Now, that's reeeeaaaaalllllyyyy smart!

Linux Kongress Summa Summarum

Altough I get back a week ago, a shoulder issue prevented me to do anything useful here and on the repo. Probably due carrying those bags with laptop. Now I'm definitely starting to prefer some lighter variants :)

Linux Kongress was excelent. Organization, people, everything. I should mention OSDevCon happening in the same time at the same place, but due daily schedule in LK rooms, haven't catch anything from OpenSolaris guys, except a few t-shirts :)

And Dresden... a beautiful city. Definitely should be visited again :)

I finally met Michael "STIBS" Stibane (remember STX distro?); he is, guess, from Dresden. We had a great dinner and talk about almost anything. A great guy!

At the end, a trip worth every penny, pardon, euro :)

Hooked on Isis

I really got hooked on Isis and their Oceanic and Panopticon albums. Still didn't listen the rest of their discography until I study these two as much as possible.

Heck, I even installed good ol' xmms because audacious equalizer makes absolutely pathetic sound on anything better than ordinary speakers.

How to kill remaining C++ programmers?

Just show them upcomming C++Ox stuff. After seeing this stuff, I'm sure how Haskell will be very logic and natural to you.

Btw. reddit pointed me to Alexandrescu's talk about iterator alternatives, where he showed some snippets how file should be copied via "modern" C++. Now, if someone tells me how lisp is unreadable... :)

NetworkManager sux (or not)

Last night I installed Fedora 10 (actually, I had it on my VirtualBox, but this time I wanted it on the disk), so that was a perfect time to test NetworkManager. I like when they said: "The most important pieces of NetworkManager are desktop-environment and distribution agnostic": gives me some neat ideas :D

Anyway, in my case, I have a wireless card that needed to be connected via xDSL. Nothing complicated, but...

I'm not sure was it fault due NetworkManager or GNOME's fronted, but I couldn't make it to see wireless card in "Hardware Device" tab; strange, since the card was regularly recognized in main hardware section.

So, after some searching (and more searching), I found out how NetworkManager is still a young project, with a plenty of time for improvements :). That send me to the good old terminal and "pppoe-setup".

slacky.eu

Totally by accident, searching for Valgrind package for one of my (still not yet up to date) Slackwares 12.0 (yes, I'm lazy to compile it), I stumbled on this site by the Italian Slackware Community.

They have a large package repository (everything you won't find on official CDs/DVD), and guess, there is EDE package too. Awesome!

Go slacky.eu, go :)

Bad time for SkyOS

Looks like SkyOS is having some development issues and author is stipulating further development paths.

On one hand, I'm finding SkyOS project pretty amazing with great respect for it's creator; everything is done by one man, from kernel to GUI and apps and these news are sad. On other hand, if author makes it open source, I'm thinking it will be a great win (for author and users), not to say how I will finaly get a chance to try it without paying for it ;)

Stop Software Patents Petition

I just gave a little contribution against software patents in Europe by signing a petition at stopsoftwarepatents.eu and placing a banner at equinox-project.org page.

Go and vote for patent-free Europe!

Scheming things

During some spare time in last month, instead putting some efforts in EDE, I played a bit with some scheme implementations, notably Gauche and Clojure (ok, ok, Clojure is not scheme, just don't yell :P).

I will omit Clojure here since there is a lot of buzz about it over the net currently (which is good), and even a book is comming soon. Yes, it deserves all that buzz :)

Gauche is, on other hand, pure scheme aiming for scripting stuff and if you are interested, for embedding too. Important thing, at least for me, is a fast startup (a thing where Guile sucks badly) and ready network-xml-opengl-clos-etc libraries. Also, you don't have to wait eternity to compile it (like PLT or Ypsilon) :P

Curious thing is that Gauche author merge in it experience earned in Final Fantasy movie (yep, there was a lot of scheme code in that movie), and he nicely put all of it in some of his essays (reading advised, even if you don't like scheme language).

Since this is not a review but mostly a few words finding excuses for recent little bit rare commits in ede2 module, I will end here. I'll have to play with Gauche more for a final impressions :).

Cute icon theme

Vedran just pointed me to very nice icon theme named OpenWorld. Too bad SVG files are not available yet since there is a very high level of interest for them (as I can see from the comments).

For now, we'll have to be happy with 48x48 size only.