After a prolonged bout of laziness, I decided to finally do something about Savannah bug #20327. SFTP support for Wget might be useful. After all some of the cool fellows are already doing it.

I spent much of the extended weekend (Friday was Doljatra & Good Friday) trying to get the camera on my Intel Macbook to work on Fedora. You can find almost all the non-Fedora specific information is available at http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/.

So I went ahead and created a RPM (review request: #438561), spent some time fiddling with udev because I was not getting a /dev/video0 to represent the camera, and then discovered that the USB device ID (obtained from lsusb) had to be explicitly specified to ift-load to get the firmware to actually load on to the device.

As mentioned on http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/ Ekiga was a breeze to set up, but  Cheese was not. Cheese 0.2.4 which ships with Fedora 8 kept crashing with a SIGSEGV somewhere deep inside the GStreamer library. It was a classical case of strcpy(des, NULL). So one has to grab Cheese 2.22.x from Rawhide and update GStreamer accordingly. If you happen to have the gstreamer-plugins-bad packages from Livna then you might be in for a 350MB download. You have been warned. :-)

(Arjun had SMSed me about these.)

/home/user> uname -a
Linux eeepc-xxxxxxxxx 2.6.21.4-eeepc #2 Mon Oct 15 12:49:37 EDT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

/home/user> cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 13
model name      : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor          900MHz
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 900.000
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmovpat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe nx
bogomips        : 1261.26
clflush size    : 64

/home/user> cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       508328 kB
MemFree:        168732 kB
Buffers:         12204 kB
Cached:         151424 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         186812 kB
Inactive:        89584 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:              92 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:      112788 kB
Mapped:          52516 kB
Slab:            14916 kB
SReclaimable:     9076 kB
SUnreclaim:       5840 kB
PageTables:       1460 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:    254164 kB
Committed_AS:   249404 kB
VmallocTotal:   524252 kB
VmallocUsed:      4496 kB
VmallocChunk:   519384 kB

Here is a copy of the /boot/config-2.6.21.4-eeepc: http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/config-2.6.21.4-eeepc.

Spent the entire day fiddling with the ASUS Eee PC at my workplace. It needed a sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade to get the restricted Adobe Flash plugin to work with Firefox.

For the curious:
/home/user> cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701 p701 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/en p701 main

However, this particular passage sounds puzzling to me: (thanks to SM for the link)
The Xandros install uses unionfs for its file system, which is very common for Live CD installations. However, one of its features is that the space used by an application cannot be freed once that application is uninstalled.

What would happen if I do a find ~ -name "*.png" -delete to remove all the PNGs from my home directory? Will I get back some free space on the file-system?

And, yes I had not realized that it had a webcam too. :-)

Here is a short history of the GNU Privacy Guard, on the occasion its 10th birthday. Accompanying that is the release of GnuPG 2.0.8.

GLUG-NITH has created a new GNU mirror. Of all the current mirrors none are in India, except this one. Let us see if we can talk to the authorities and get some bandwidth (at least 1Mbps) reserved.

GNOME Password Generator is now back as a Fedora package.

GNU Gengetopt is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

Last Saturday we had the second episode of the FOSS workshop at Rajabazar Science College, Kolkata. Due to Indranil Das Gupta's unavailability, I took the GNU/Linux pre-tutorial instead of the GCC/Make/GDB workshop, which was again handled by Santanu Sinha.

Before the start of the workshop we ran into some X server related problems on the machines on which the pre-tutorial was to be held. The Rajabazar Science College authorities had some brand new Pentium D machines on standby, which were used to replace most of these problematic systems.

We started with a brief history of the Free Software movement, and then went on to see how to navigate the a basic GNOME desktop. Next we explored some of the Free Software equivalents of common proprietary programs like OpenOffice.org (for MS Office), GIMP (for Adobe Photoshop), Evince (for Adobe Acrobat), GAIM (for GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger), etc..

Next was lunch, which comprised of chicken sand-witches, fish fry, ice-cream, etc..

We started the second half with basic network configuration before going on to explore package management tools and the concept of a 'distribution'. Since all the systems were running Fedora, we limited ourselves to YUM and Pirut as the package management tools. We rounded up the session with a look at the GNU Coreutils and Vi.

Apart from the wonderful teaching experience there were a couple of pluses:
* I managed to learn a bit more about Vi through Vimtutor.
* # yum update pdgin* gnome-* openoffice* ... while showing off package management tools.

I just received a mail from David Cantrell. Among other things he has explained his side of the story, and apologized for his role in the events leading up to this post.

It is nice to be friends with David again, and I am looking forward to continuing to working with him towards making Parted a better program.

...to Rakesh on taking my place on the GNU Project's list of accepted proposals. A hearty thanks to Google to expanding GNU Project's number of slots to 9 from 8, enabling one more student after Rakesh to qualify.

It was hearty to see GNU make these adjustments in the most reasonable and efficient manner with the least amount of noise generated as compared to some other organizations. Who said GNU is ruled by fanatics?

Thank you RMS, Karl Berry, James Youngman, Chris di Bona and Leslie Hawthorne.

I just found out that the GNU Hurd does not provide the 'SA_SIGINFO' constant, although it supplies the 'sigaction' function. There is nothing in the manual of sigaction ($ man sigaction) to indicate this. In fact the manual explains the usage of 'sigaction' with 'SA_SIGINFO'.

Apparently 'SA_SIGINFO' is a POSIX XSI extension and one should check its availability at compile time.

Thanks to the #hurd folks, especially Richard Braun (nick: syn) and Guillem Jover (nick: braindmg) for their help.

I managed to configure Jabberd2 on my laptop in a jiffy this evening. The best part is that my Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) based system succeeded where I have seen Debian stalwarts stumble.

This was mainly due to this amazing documentation.

Varkon is a free CAD system and high level development tool for Engineering, Computer Aided Design and Product Modeling applications originally developed by Microform AB in Sweden.
It is now maintained and further developed by the CAD group at the Department of Technology at Örebro university in Sweden.

The GNU/Linux version is under the GNU GPL and available at no charge, while the current price for a Windows95/NT license is 875 USD. Support is available for all platforms.

Someone is using it on a Cray T3E supercomputer with 256 300Mhz 64 bit Alpha processors.

Check the Varkon home page at http://www.tech.oru.se/cad/varkon/ to know more.

Though I have not yet tried it, the fact that SAAB uses Varkon to design its aeroplanes is enough to earn it a four star rating.

Right now Arjun, Manu, Vivek and me are in the process of migrating our (National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur) computer centre to GNU/Linux. We have chosen Ubuntu as the distribution, since the uninitiated find it easier than the rest. In case you are already hopping about the 'non-freeness' of it, let me tell you that we have removed the multiverse repository from /etc/apt/sources.list.

Till now things have been going on well, except some teething problems with NIS (we will solve it once the installation is over) and some interference from Mr. Rajiv Kumar regarding the need of having GNU/Linux in the centre.

Lets hope this is not a one-off venture.

Here is my modified version of the AC_PYTHON_MODULE GNU Autoconf M4 macro published at http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/ac_python_module.html.

The original version of the macro was unable to take care of multiple versions of Python installed on a system. For example I have Python 2.3.5 and Python 2.4.3 on my system, and if I need to check whether a certain module 'foo' is installed for Python 2.4.3 the macro would not work correctly. This was because of the fact that the macro was ignoring the environment variable PYTHON and directly invoking 'python'. Hence clear demarcation between the two versions was not possible.

Exaile (http://www.exaile.org/) is GNOME's reply to AmaroK. It is based on GTK+ and written in Python. It uses the GStreamer engine as its backend. Exaile boasts of many of the features that has endeared AmaroK to so many people. The artist and album information extraction feature is working nicely and it also downloads guitar tablatures from http://fretplay.com/ and http://lyrc.com.ar/ provides the lyrics.

I tried out version 0.2.7 from the tarball supplied on the Exaile website, and the first thing that struck me was the absense of a polished build system. One has to do:
$ make
# make install
to install the thing, but the absense of the configure script was a real pain. In no time I ran into a dependency quagmire, but my new found knowledge of Python came in handy. After some downloads and yumming from the Fedora repositories and rpmfind.net, I had Exaile running on my Fedora Core 5 GNOME desktop.

Being a relatively new project, it is not yet as polished as it should be. However it is worth giving a try, and if it were not for the incomplete build system it would have surely got a four star rating.

Thanks to Adam Olsen for developing such a nice program, I do not have to gape at AmaroK on a KDE box.

Htop is an interactive, text mode process viewer using the ncurses interface.

A brief comparison of htop and top:
* In 'htop' you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
* In 'top' you are subject to a delay for each unassigned key you press (especially annoying when multi-key escape sequences are triggered by accident).
* 'htop' starts faster ('top' seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
* In 'htop' you don't need to type the process number to kill a process, in 'top' you do.
* In 'htop' you don't need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in 'top' you do.
* 'htop' supports mouse operation, 'top' doesn't
* 'top' is older, hence, more used and tested.

Courtesy: http://htop.sourceforge.net/ and Debian Times.

Here is a nice way to mark a particular C function as deprecated. It might come in handy if you are in the process of developing an API or library and intend to phase out a particular component of it. The Linux kernel developers also use this method.

Here is what you get on compiling and running it:
[rishi@Sunflower devel]$ gcc -ansi -pedantic foo.c -o foo
foo.c: In function ‘main’:
foo.c:8: warning: ‘foo’ is deprecated (declared at foo.c:5)
[rishi@Sunflower devel]$ ./foo
I am foo.
[rishi@Sunflower devel]$

Fencepost, the GNU Project's shell server, got a new lease of life a few days back. The /etc/motd says it all:

==============================================================================
fencepost.gnu.org GNU Project Shell Server

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!! PROBLEMS USING POP - RESET YOUR PASSWORD WITH popauth !!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PLEASE NOTE: fencepost is now an x86_64 Xen system. There has been a large
churn in installed versions of programs. You will almost assuredly need to
recompile any custom binaries you have installed in order for them to work
properly.

You may notice that the amount of disk space has increased by an order of
magnitude. This is not a concomitant request for you to increase your home
directory by the same amount. :) fencepost is now a four-core AMD Opteron
(2xOpteron 2214, 2.2GHz) with 4GB of RAM and over 1.2TB of total disk space.

The FSF and the GNU Project thank Karl Berry for his generous donation
which allowed us to act very quickly in replacing the old fencepost.
==============================================================================