29January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
Not much tech news seems to breach the mighty Jericho-like walls of BBC News 24 however the announcement that company was within days of launching a service that would offer unlimited music downloads free-of-charge was one that did.
“Whats the catch?” everyone asked.
Qtrax touted a no-DRM service supported by ads. They even boasted they had found a way around the Apple FairPlay DRM system, all with the consent of the labels.
Today the labels responded with a fairly firm “No Dice”.
Possible reasons for this:
1) Qtrax don’t have a legal department - unlikely
2) Someone high up in the corporate music machine got wind of it and put the kibosh on the deal - possible
3) The whole thing is a publicity stunt - now we’re getting somewhere
Looking more closely into the actual Qtrax app itself, all it appears to be is a laughably simple modification of Songbird, a xulrunner-based mozilla app that has Web 2.0 written all over it. I ran screaming from the website a few months back when I couldn’t get past the phrase “mash-up” which fills me with horror and a nasty sense of dotcom-bubble-pre-millenium-tension.
For a laugh I tried to run it in Wine which sort of didn’t work.
25January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
So after some discussion (I’d love to think I prompted this but since I’m very low-input on fedora-devel I can’t) gdb has been updated to prompt which debuginfo package is missing. Be careful what you wish for… :)
22January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
One of the main fedora bug reporters (these people are like gold - they actually report problems and document them pretty well) recently CC’d me in on a firefox bug. Running it through gdb I got the following ridiculously unhelpful bunch of errors:
warning: Missing the separate debug info file: /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/3b/fcf3e37731d5058d14badc687008e09c95cb1b.debug
warning: Missing the separate debug info file: /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/de/0ca77c03cd1166b5a2d34920ec10b1a6fb7a0f.debug
warning: Missing the separate debug info file: /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/ed/528e880f58d0466b0984f63be465b67e4dddaa.debug
Ahhh, _those_ debug info files. Long and the short of it, here’s the resolution (on Fedora or EL >= 5):
# yum install yum-utils
# debuginfo-install firefox (or $WHATEVER_APP_YOU_ARE_DEBUGGING)
… this may take a while @ circa 200MB d/l
$ gdb firefox (or, due to the way it runs in Fedora, /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.10/firefox-bin)
and you’re away…
17January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
Its always interesting to hear about things bubbling to the surface in the software world. Sun Microsystems yesterday bought MySQL which everyone to a name missed. Oracle bought BEA at about the same time.
On the slightly smaller side of things, createrepo, a utility to create a local repository which other machines can then access for updates is coming to fruition. The theory is that only the machine holding the updates needs to download them from the internet, the rest get them across the intranet. This lowers bandwidth costs for everyone concerned - all good news.
Its also good, on a separate note, that a company like Red Hat doesn’t get hot under the collar about an organisation like CentOS. The latter takes the former’s source and create’s their own distribution. This allows people to use what is essentially an almost identical clone of an enterprise operating system and use it without the subscriptions costs - they do have to support it themselves of course but this has always been a given in using open source software.
16January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Music.
Whilst the U.K. has the best television in the world, it doesn’t have the best radio station. That honour goes to the dudes at Triple J in Australia. It is one of the last remaining stations where the music is more important than the person playing it. It has three separate streams on its website so goes out of its way to make its content accessible. Check it out if you get a moment.
16January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
I’ve just tallied up the fedora kernel bug count for release 7, 8 and devel - 759. Then I looked back to mid-november - 756. Still, things are improving. There has been a resurgence in the fedora triage effort with some debate on fedora-devel as to how best tackle the issue of a growing bug count in Fedora. Jon Stanley and John Poelstra in particular have been getting active and thrashed out some ideas at FUDCON, which I was unable to attend but have made it a priority to get to next year.
Anyway, I digress. As Linux becomes more popular, more people file bugs. Soon maintainers of large packages such as the kernel, openoffice.org or firefox get lost under the crashing weight. So here’s how the process works.
Someone files a bug - it comes in under category NEW.
The triager (or a maintainer if they are able) reviews and either requests more info (sets bug to NEEDINFO) or accepts the problem and sets to ASSIGNED.
The triagers work is then done. Other states such as ON_DEV exist where the maintainer can acknowledge he is working on a solution. There is also:
MODIFIED - fix is available for testing
ON_QA - fix is being tested
NEXTRELEASE - fix has been confirmed as working and will arrive in next release
Ultimately bugs end up as INSUFFICIENT_DATA where the original reporter could not provide the information or has since lost interest - I consider this the least favourable resolution. CURRENTRELEASE is the golden goose where the fix has been approved and all parties are happy. About 25% of F7 kernel bugs have ended up in this state. See diagram below - the current state of F7 kernel bugs.
Bug triaging is an excellent way for those who know the basics to get further into Linux and start learning about various parts of the system and teaches more than a year of system administration ever could. I commend it to the house!
11January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
For the past few months and now in the run-up to the re-launch of Fedora Triage Project, I have been going back through Fedora 7 kernel bugs and closing out those which are obviously dead. As in, the report was made and for a variety of reasons, never got resolved. Its frustrating as I know how much time and effort goes into filing a report and this goodwill goes in vain.
Nevertheless, although I should be applying myself to the task of finding gainful employment, I find myself awake at 2am, running a scratch build in Koji in the hope that this bug can be closed. At the same time, my laptop is building a kernel with backported Qlogic SCSI drivers to try and resolve this bug and my main desktop machine is chuntering away to produce a kernel with the patch from this bug that might help resolve that particular issue.
Its all good fun, though the inexorable increase of bugs has led to exasperation on the fedora-devel-list and a bit of soul-searching as how to best tackle the problem of so many bugs and so many bug reporters feeling a little, well, un-loved…
10January2008
Posted by Christopher under: White Noise.
Does anyone actually offer it any more? It seems to have been reduced to the bargain bin. Why for example to Virgin Media offer Medium, Large and Extra Large? I think the same trend occurs in shops and restaurants, particularly fast food joints. Starbucks gets round it by offering Tall (that’s the small one) Grande (Medium) and Venti (TM) - yep, they’ve trademarked a size.
5January2008
Posted by Christopher under: Linux & Open Source.
So for reasons various I was looking at the latest smolt stats and saw that only a tiny percentage of folks were using the GB language pack with Fedora. Which is when I noticed I was still on en_US as well. Here’s the funky bit - I go to change language and it offers to download and install the en_GB language pack all by itself, which it does. All it needs is an X restart. Not sure if this is a new F8 feature but nicely done all the same!
