Le blog de Olivier Crête

Students! There are only a few days left (until Monday) for you to submit your Google summer of code applications. This year, I’m hoping to mentor students working on Farsight 2 or on integrating Farsight in various applications. The most interesting project I’m proposing this year is adding plugins for the various non-free protocols to Farsight (see details), MSN is particularly easy since most of the reverse-engineering has already been done, its just a matter of coding it. GStreamer has a page on how to write a good application (hint hint, Farsight’s project are part of GStreamer this year!). I’m also a mentor on Gnome & Gentoo in case anything interesting is proposed there, so if you have good idea, go submit them now, time is running out!
Update: Google has extended the application period for one more week, so there’s still time… And we already have a good applicant for MSN, but please do apply for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, etc!

Last week was GUADEC in Birmingham, it was really fun, I got to see some old friends and also meet many people that I only knew from IRC, including many Collaborans, they really are a nice bunch. And even some Gentoo developers! There were lots of interesting talks, great Ale (and Pimm’s!).

Nokia also released a Developer Preview of the new RTCOM software which includes the latest version of Farsight. So you can now do calls to SIP services on your Nokia N800. We hope many people try it and find the interoperability problems before the next release. Many SIP implementations are at best barely standard and we’ve end up finding subtle problems with many services with tested.

See you all next year in Istanbul!!

I just added the net-im/pidgin-2.0.0beta7 package to the portage tree. Its the continuation of net-im/gaim. Only two of the plugins that we have in portage (pidgin-rhythmbox and pidgin-extprefs) have released versions that are compatible with the new name. When most of them (at least the most popular ones) are released, I will add a gaim-9999 ebuild that depends on net-im/pidgin to help the transition. Then, some time after the final version of pidgin 2 is released, I will add gaim and all non ported packages to package.mask then remove them from the tree. That will also allow us to cleanse the tree of unsupported packages.

Collabora has provided me with a new computer: a ThinkPad x60s. Its really nice, extremely light and the battery lasts for a very long time (enough to fly to Europe!). On the inside, it’s almost all Intel, which means that there are Free drivers for everything (now that iwlwifi has been released). Well actually, not everything, one small chip resists, the modem. But it seems to be supported by Linuxant’s hsfmodem (not that I would use it). Did I say that suspending, both to RAM and to disk works like a charm? Hot-plugging an external display also works great with Xrandr 1.2 (again, thanks Intel!). And everything I needed to make it work is right there, in our Portage tree.

I was tired of having my Firefox not match the theme of the rest of my desktop since in GTK+ 2.10, they changed the theme format. My original plan was to have someone else make the newer package.. But well, I waited and waited and no one else did it.. So I decided to take the plunge. But I could not find a nice script to build them, all I could find was the content of each package on herbs’ devspace. So I decided to try to automate the process as much as I could, in a 32bit chroot with this make.conf and using this script, you it should be possible to rebuild the next generation of packages with minimal effort. Just one tweak, there needs to be a lib32->lib symlink for every lib directory in the 32bit chroot. And it requires quite a bit of patience… The emul-linux-x86-gtklibs-2.10.6 package is now in the tree. I’ll try to see if I can fix the other bugs, it seems that we need a new version of openssl and libasound at least.

I also fix more GnomeICU bugs, I guess I’ll have to make another bugfix release this weekend.

Since I upgraded to Gnome 2.16, I had to enter my password three times on login (gdm, ssh-askpass and evolution/gnome-keyring). and there are limits to everything. Recent blog posts on Planet Gnome inspired me. So I tried to do the same thing on Gentoo. After a lot of wrangling, I ended up finding/fixing two bugs in pam_keyring and getting a working configuration. If you want to do the same thing, emerge sys-auth/pam_ssh and sys-auth/pam_keyring and look at the gdm example in the pam_keyring doc.

Since everyone else is doing it on Planet Gentoo, I did it too.. I hoped I wouldnt be that nerdish, but I guess knowing my ip address didn’t help. Go Universe Gentoo (ie not having only boring gentoo related stuff on the planet 😉

Today, there was a meeting of the Gentoo/AMD64 team to discuss the blubb/dang proposal to support support multilib, but the meeting didn’t get much resolved since eradicator (our multilib man) could not there. I find funny that this proposal has quite a few things in common with my June 2003 proposal: allowing every lib to be built for both API’s, maintaining dep trees for both. Its also funny that killing multilib and chroots are also proposed/rejected. But we’ve had progress since 2003, we have get_libdir() and all of eradicator’s great work. Its nice that we are now discussing minor details like the -config files (like gtk-config, etc)

I find blubb proposal too complicated. Instead of modifying every -config (that’s crazy) or putting both 32bit and64bit -config files in special directories and replacing them in bin/ with special wrappers. Or having a special portage wrapper for each of them.. which would anyway break when they are called inside configure script, etc.. Or would be hard to implement for non-portage builds. We could leave the 64bit ones where they belong (in /usr/bin) and put the 32bit ones somewhere else (lets say /usr/bin/32bitconfigfiles/), with the same name. And then when we want to build a 32bit application, we can just put that directory in the PATH before the /usr/bin.. and there you go, problem solved. We should probably even provide some kind of non-portage script (lets call it build32) that would set PKG_CONFIG_PATH, PATH, a gcc=i686-gcc alias, etc to make building 32bit easy.

After getting my new Athlon64 box, the first thing that I did was to install Gentoo/AMD64. And it has really improved since I left the project.. I was surprised to see that I did not have too many packages to keyword myself, although I did keyword at least a dozen in a last week..

I also started a new job at Maximum Throughput, its my first “real” job (not an internship). I will be working mostly on the next generation of InfinARRAY, their high performance distributed filesystem.

I’ve decided to replace my homemade Blogus software. After looking at various blogging platforms, I’ve chosen WordPress. The templating stuff is well done, it only took me a few hours to move my blogus templates over. One of the main objectives of this change is to start blogging in English, as well as in French depending on the topic. The English entries will be syndicatable by others.. including Planet Gentoo. Btw, I’m already on Planet Ensimag (in French).