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After having met Marcus Bauer, the author of tangoGPS , at FOSDEM 2009, I decided to package this nice GPS software.

By default, it uses maps from the OpenStreetMap project, and it can work as a map viewer without a GPS device.

The package is now available in Mandriva Cooker, enjoy!



I've finally uploaded a fusion-icon package in Mandriva Cooker and 2008.0 (backports). fusion-icon (wiki) (git) is a panel applet that allows to start/stop compiz on the fly, and to change the window decorator.

It may not play very nicely with all compositing manager setups (Xgl?), because we do not use the same integration methods in Mandriva. But it can be quite useful for now, since I've not yet added the ability to enable/disable compositing desktops on the fly in our drak3d configuration tool...



While syncing our initscripts source code with the RedHat 8.60 version, I experienced a weird unsupported special file type error message with the svn merge command:

$ svn merge \
    svn+ssh://svn.mandriva.com/svn/soft/initscripts/tags/rh_last_merge \
    svn+ssh://svn.mandriva.com/svn/soft/initscripts/branches/RedHat
U    sysconfig.txt
[...]
svn: In directory '.'
svn: '.svn/tmp/tempfile.10.tmp' has unsupported special file type '2007-05-15'
$ head -n 1 .svn/tmp/tempfile.10.tmp
2007-05-15  Bill Nottingham  <notting@redhat.com>

It was actually trying to merge the ChangeLog file from the RedHat branch with the ChangeLog symlink in our checkout, which does not work (upstream bugs 2472 and 2692). Still, the error message could probably be improved, not to specify the file content as file type :-)

As a side note, I have also removed a workaround in our network-up service, which was unconditionally waiting (and blocking boot) at least 6 seconds. This was added because the link beat reported by some network drivers could not be trusted during a short period right after the module loading (#18986 and #31864), but we'd better fix the drivers if possible.



gsynaptics is now available in cooker. It's a GNOME configuration tool for Synaptics touchpads (the KDE equivalent being ksynaptics).

It will be automatically installed with GNOME desktops when Synaptics touchpads are detected.



iotop is a python tool that shows how much I/O happens on the system. It's a lot more interesting than the vmstat 1 command, since it can display per-process I/O, thanks to the per-task storage I/O accounting feature in latest kernels (commit).

I've upload an iotop package in cooker, but our cooker kernels don't have TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING enabled, maybe we could have it in one of our contrib kernel packages.



No, it's not GoogleEarth. It does not even use Google maps (not that it was not tried... ).

It's gaia, an open 3D earth viewer using NASA (World Wind) maps, and you are welcome to try my initial package that is now available in cooker contrib \o/



To lever my hype skills (and to please our marketing team, for that matter), I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails, and to package it for Mandriva.

While it's quite simple to install Rails on Mandriva with gem, it's not easy to build a package, because it requires to install it in a fake root.

Debian installs rails in /usr/share and provides a custom wrapper, but that's quite a huge Debian packaging patch.

openSuse has a patched gem with buildroot support to solve the installation in a fake root.

A crappy solution could be to do something like this:

perl -pe "s,^\s+DESTDIR\s+=.*,  DESTDIR = '$RPM_BUILD_ROOT'," %{ruby_archdir}/rbconfig.rb > rbconfig.rb
ruby -I . /usr/bin/gem install --ignore-dependencies %{SOURCE0}

But finally, a simple gem install --ignore-dependencies --install-dir $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{ruby_gemdir} %{SOURCE0} is enough, it only requires to move the rails binary in the real bindir.

Maybe we could install it directly in sitelibdir and ridir in future releases, but the gem solution is fine for now.

I had to update some ruby packages (version bump, add missing gemspec files if needed, mysql socket path fix):

  • ruby-rake-0.7.1-1mdv2007.0
  • ruby-activesupport-1.3.1-1mdv2007.0
  • ruby-actionmailer-1.2.3-1mdv2007.0
  • ruby-actionwebservice-1.1.4-1mdv2007.0
  • ruby-activerecord-1.14.3-2mdv2007.0
  • ruby-actionpack-1.12.3-1mdv2007.0

So, rails-1.1.4-1mdv2007.0 is now in cooker.

It isn't integrated with apache yet, but the built-in WEBrick server works fine, as well as the connection to a MySQL database. That's basic stuff, but well... I should keep the Mandriva webapps policy under my pillow ;-)

Some useful links:

Let's dive into Web 2.0!



The rpm-mandriva-setup-build package provides a rpm-spec-mode for emacs that allows to build a spec file skeleton in new spec files.

It still used 1mdk as the default package release, which isn't valid anymore. So, it will now use the new standard, which is %mkrel 1.

I've also used the occasion to commit some build fixes (proper svn2cl usage, and make clear automake -a is required in INSTALL docs).



The lsb-build-base package was providing some libraries it shouldn't, and this messed up auto_installs that used a media with this package.

As a side effect, it also prevented our Gtk2 programs to run from xsetup.d, breaking the fun in our live systems.

So, libXi.so and librt.so are now in the provides_exceptions list of this package.



The hplj10xx udev rules in the foo2zjs module had to be updated for latest udev, that needs more strict "==" tests.

Thanks to John Campbell for the help, see #22608



blosxom Optimised for standards.
Olivier Blin (2005)