[Mageia-dev] beta 4 installer notes
I tried installing Mageia 3 Beta 4 on an ASUS 64-bit PC, a network install. A couple of problems I noticed: (1) insmoding xen_blkfront failed /lib/libDrakX/modules.pm line 96 (I was not using a virtual machine, this was an install onto a physical PC) (2) During installation sometimes the wifi would go down. I'd get a message, Some files are missing [list of packages] try to continue? If you scroll down the list of packages you see another message, retry? There's a do not ask again button. It's not at all clear - does do not ask again mean do not attempt to download packages a second time in the future? Please reword so it's clear... (3) It might be better if, on a download failure, the installer checked the network was still up. (4) the installer doesn't redraw itself on an expose event, so if you switch to another virtual console and back, the installer is then a blank rectangle with rounded corners, sometimes for quite a long time (minutes) (5) a message, script failed for mailman_2.1.15-3.mga3-x86-64: (there was a blank line underneath but no more text) Overall the install seems OK, although I don't know which packages were missed... Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] beta 4 installer notes
On Wed, 2013-04-10 at 06:38 +0200, Thierry Vignaud wrote: On 10 April 2013 03:44, Liam R E Quin l...@holoweb.net wrote: I tried installing Mageia 3 Beta 4 on an ASUS 64-bit PC, a network install. A couple of problems I noticed: (1) insmoding xen_blkfront failed /lib/libDrakX/modules.pm line 96 (I was not using a virtual machine, this was an install onto a physical PC) already fixed cool (4) the installer doesn't redraw itself on an expose event, so if you switch to another virtual console and back, the installer is then a blank rectangle with rounded corners, sometimes for quite a long time (minutes) there's one single process, so expose event are managed once in a while in rpm callback Just pointing it out :) (5) a message, script failed for mailman_2.1.15-3.mga3-x86-64: (there was a blank line underneath but no more text) the exact error should be in your /root/drakx/install.log (also included in your /root/drakx/report.bug.xz) it is, but the blank message doesn't seem very polished. [[ /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.J7elL9: line 31: crontab: command not found /usr/sbin/postconf: warning: inet_protocols: disabling IPv6 name/address support: Address family not supported by protocol postalias: warning: inet_protocols: disabling IPv6 name/address support: Address family not supported by protocol su: Insufficient credentials to access authentication data su: Insufficient credentials to access authentication data %post(mailman-2.1.15-3.mga3.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 1 mailman-2.1.15-3.mga3.x86_64 ]] Thanks for replying. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml The barefoot programmer
Re: [Mageia-dev] perl-doc need by POD::Usage
On Mon, 2013-02-04 at 21:15 +0100, Olivier Thauvin wrote: If perl must require perl-doc, the split is just useless. Yes, you should be able to install perl without the doc. Having said that, a possible reason for the split is that they are updated in differing cycles. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] freeze push: libroffice
On Mon, 2013-01-28 at 06:37 +0100, Thierry Vignaud wrote: Hi Please let in freeze push: libroffice-4.0.0.2 This is RC2, we have RC1. When to stop? It's not a difference here between a release candidate and a release... -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Grub2 vs. Grub Legacy in M3 [play nice, people]
On Sat, 2013-01-19 at 12:42 +0100, André Salaün wrote: [...] But perhaps I am a stupid linux user since 13 or 14 years and I should have to buy Apple product or W8 ;-) I've been using Unix since V7 days and have been told on this list I shouldn't be using Cauldron because it's for more advanced users. Please people, let's be respectful and also welcoming. A lot of people get heavily involved with computers because they aren't people people or because they feel more comfortable with absolutes and certainty than with the warm fleshly reality of humanity, so we need also to understand people are not necessarily deliberately being offensive or dismissive, especially if English might not be their first language. Regards, Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Feedback on Mageia 3 beta1
On Fri, 2013-01-18 at 02:39 +0100, Davy Defaud wrote: You're right, I forgot that some people don't even know what is SSH... Doesn't matter in any case, as an ssh server won't be reachable by default unless you punch a hole in the firewall, which _is_ set up by a default install... -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] GRUB can't see HD from chroot unless parent /dev is bind-mounted in chroot ?
On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 16:24 +, Colin Guthrie wrote: Personally I've been bind mounting /dev, /proc and /sys for years whenever doing any rescuecd etc. stuff. Partly because I have several LVM volumes where a static /dev/ wouldn't help anyway... But bind mounting /dev has just been part of my chroot routine for as long as I remember. Knowing about this would have saved me several days after trying to install the mageia beta (I now have it running with the 3.6.5-tmb-desktop-3.mga3 kernel as the 3.8 one is broken without a fix to the recursive panic problem, which is fixed upstream). It's not obvious to people who don't do it often :-) Why not add a command to the rescue disk, bind-mount dir - mount /dev, /proc and /sys as /dir/dev etc for chroot Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] GRUB can't see HD from chroot unless parent /dev is bind-mounted in chroot ?
On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 20:48 +0100, AL13N wrote: Op woensdag 16 januari 2013 11:30:27 schreef Liam R E Quin: Why not add a command to the rescue disk, bind-mount dir - mount /dev, /proc and /sys as /dir/dev etc for chroot because in fact, it's not really the correct solution (and there's multiple solutions for this too) Then add some documentation about how to use the mounted partitions with chroot. oh well, rescuing is for advanced users, so i don't really see the need here. rescue should be as small as possible anyway. Let's not be dismissive of people. If we felt that way, we'd tell everyone to use NetBSD :-) Why is there something to install drivers when an advanced user can look at the boot log and use modprobe? Heck, I've seen a live Unix (V7? BSD 4.1? I forget) kernel patched by editing /dev/mem. Since people sometimes do need to use chroot, it's an opportunity to improve the rescue disk. i have no clue how you'd be successfull without binding; i didn't think disk devices were statically made anyway, at least not sdX. I wasn't successful without binding, although there are other ways to get access to sdX devices in the chroot'd partition. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] 3.0 release - some initial notes; failure
On Tue, 2013-01-08 at 13:41 +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote: Hi Liam, let me reply to your E-mail - not necessarily disagreeing. Thanks! On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 02:46:39 -0500 Liam R E Quin l...@holoweb.net wrote: Tried installing 3.0 beta over a Mandriva Cooker system today. Mageia-3-beta1-x86_64-DVD.iso Can Mandriva Cooker be upgraded to Mageia 3? I don't think it can be (due to Mandriva's switch to rpm5). Or do you mean you reformatted the relevant partitions and installed a new system? It's a fresh install, sorry for not being clear. [...] On boot, there was a long delay followed by Loading program and a progress bar appearing and disappearing again almost before I had time to read the message. This didn't seem optimal. I see. What are your system's specifications? I think I usually install from a CD (just to have a working system) and then install more packages using urpmi. I am downloading the DVD .iso now and will try it in a VirtualBox VM later to see if I can reproduce any problems. It's several years old, HP Media Center m7680n with 8G of RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.1GHz, DDR2 533MHz memory. Choice of keyboard - there was a link to wikipedia in the Help text, but it gave me an error that there was no network. There are two entries for US Keyboard with no obvious reason, and a third for US International (which I chose since I'm not in the US :-)) Sounds like a bug or at least a problem in the installer. Can you file a bug for it on https://bugs.mageia.org/ ? I have 2 disk drives. the installer wanted to use the spare space on my Windows drive, when the other drive already had Linux. Yes, I could choose from the drop-down, but it wasn't clear that I was choosing where to put Mageia. Suggest add, Multiple disk drives found. Choose which one you want to use for the main Mageia system. Sounds like a good enhancement. The disk was formatted. That was actually what I wanted, in this case, but please add a warning that data will be lost - most humans on the planet won't know that. Yes, true. Of course, you cannot expect your users to read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog62.html No, but Mageia Linux's installer is obviously primarily intended at the experienced or dedicated hobbyist or the experienced system administrator. Long term, Magiea needs of course to target (1) people new to Linux, whether or not they are new to computers in general, and (2) programmers and packagers, to keep the distribution and community alive, whether or not they are administrators. This double-headed focus was a lot of the success of Mandrake Linux and in fact led to a response from Red Hat - Fedora. There's no indication of how long the formatting will take, [...] Suggest progress bar or at least some quotes from Moliére. Heh. Well, formatting normally did not take too long for me, at least not in its fast formatting mode. But maybe a progress bar will be doable. I said yes to doing a block scan. Oh, bad block scan. :-(. It should be displayed in the graphical installer. Yes. I'm assuming the graphics and ugly font are not final. If they are, the pink stripes look like an error. Maybe caused by running my monitor (1920x1200/deep colour) in 800x600 16-bit mode. I'll see if it happens to me in the installer. The long list of packages being installed - would be nicer to show the name of the current package, and its description, and more slowly to show a more detailed description of just one program. By default the installer does not display the names of the packages installed I think - just a progress bar. I don't think I did anything special to get the list of packages, but maybe. If there was a clear and obvious option to choose the LCD's native resolution, a font like Matthew Carter's Bitstream Charter Italic would look more sophisticated and also get more information on a line. Is it an open font. Not sure, it s distributed with the X Window System and xorg. We could use something from openfontlibrary too, that's a good point. Choosing a desktop - help said broken link Shouldn't the help be included inside the installer's media. Help is there for most other things. Choosing a desktop - please add versions, not just KDE, GNOME, Other. I'm not sure versions are a good idea because they may be confusing. I'm also not sure many users who start with Linux will understand the difference between KDE, GNOME or whatever, so maybe we should pick one or the other by default. Many people know whether they want gnome 2 or 3 right now, and for people who don't know the difference it's no more confusing. Also, I might want both KDE and GNOME installed, so I don't want to choose just one and not the other. If I'll get a chance to install more desktops later in the installer, please say so more clearly, not buried in help (once the link
Re: [Mageia-dev] Kernel Panic after latest Mageia-3-Alpha2 s/w update c
On Tue, 2013-01-08 at 17:41 +, Claire Robinson wrote:
It's actually Cauldron you're running Maurice. This issue is known, see
the ML thread 'Boot borked cause procfs :((' from earlier today.
It's also in the 3.0 beta DVD, as I reported yesterday.
Liam
--
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Booting on GPT + UEFI + Secure Boot...
On Mon, 2013-01-07 at 17:01 +0100, Olivier Thauvin wrote: I found the key of the issue: grub has not install because block number is to big (my /boot is at 1,6TB from the start of the disk). With my HP Elitebook I found that all the partitions were allocated, so I booted in Windows 7 (this was 2 years ago) and used the program that came with Windows to resize the partitions and move them around a bit. -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] df lying?
On Mon, 2013-01-07 at 12:54 -0500, Felix Miata wrote: On 2013-01-07 15:15 (GMT+0200) Anssi Hannula composed: $ df /disks/esata Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 969063752 942471244 26592508 98% /disks/esata Do total space in df du output exclude inode blocks? Yes, and indirect blocks that may be needed, depending on the file system, and also the size of any filesystem journal. Th du command doesn't know about such things, and can't in general (e.g. not all file systems have ways to report it). The df command looks at total available space, which will be reduced by inode blocks; df -i gives some information about inode usage. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
[Mageia-dev] 3.0 release - some initial notes; failure
Tried installing 3.0 beta over a Mandriva Cooker system today. Mageia-3-beta1-x86_64-DVD.iso Some notes. Mostly about problems because I never got to see a working system, so the tone is probably more negative than I'd like. On boot, there was a long delay followed by Loading program and a progress bar appearing and disappearing again almost before I had time to read the message. This didn't seem optimal. Choice of keyboard - there was a link to wikipedia in the Help text, but it gave me an error that there was no network. There are two entries for US Keyboard with no obvious reason, and a third for US International (which I chose since I'm not in the US :-)) I have 2 disk drives. the installer wanted to use the spare space on my Windows drive, when the other drive already had Linux. Yes, I could choose from the drop-down, but it wasn't clear that I was choosing where to put Mageia. Suggest add, Multiple disk drives found. Choose which one you want to use for the main Mageia system. The disk was formatted. That was actually what I wanted, in this case, but please add a warning that data will be lost - most humans on the planet won't know that. There's no indication of how long the formatting will take, or how much has been done. I'll leave it running for an hour or two (it's a 250G SATA hard drive) and see if it finishes, or maybe it crashed. Please add a note that this may take a long time, preferably with an OK/Cancel/Skip since (1) it wasn't needed here, and (2) users may well give it a minute or so and then move on to the next Linux distribution on the magazine, saying Mageia hung my computer, it's crap. Suggest progress bar or at least some quotes from Moliére. Note: eventually the bad block scan started giving a progress percentage on another virtual terminal, but most users won't find that, of course, even if they wait half an hour or more for it to begin. I'm assuming the graphics and ugly font are not final. If they are, the pink stripes look like an error. Maybe caused by running my monitor (1920x1200/deep colour) in 800x600 16-bit mode. The long list of packages being installed - would be nicer to show the name of the current package, and its description, and more slowly to show a more detailed description of just one program. If there was a clear and obvious option to choose the LCD's native resolution, a font like Matthew Carter's Bitstream Charter Italic would look more sophisticated and also get more information on a line. Choosing a desktop - help said broken link Choosing a desktop - please add versions, not just KDE, GNOME, Other. Also, I might want both KDE and GNOME installed, so I don't want to choose just one and not the other. If I'll get a chance to install more desktops later in the installer, please say so more clearly, not buried in help (once the link to help is fixed)... The installer seems much slower than it used to be, but maybe that's changes in rpm? Three hours to install packages is a long time. Although having said that, maybe the estimates were just wrong. At the end, several hours later, the DVD is ejected and the system tries to reboot... PANIC cannot mount proc on /proc! Compile the kernel with CONFIG_PROC_FS! Hmm. Well, I saw something go by about this on the mailing list so maybe I can fix it without another 7-hour download of the DVD image. Overall, though, the installer needs a huge injection of slickness. It's_almost_ there, but in graphic design almost doesn't get you a cigar. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] LastFm going subscription
On Thu, 2012-12-13 at 18:26 -0500, Charles A Edwards wrote: Beginning Tuesday 15 January 2013 radio streaming within the desktop client will only be available to Last.fm subscribers (monthly fee). Due to this should not lastfm-player either be dropped or moved to nonfree now before Mga3 goes final? The player can be free (libre, open source) even if the service is not. Of course, it may well be less useful... Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] [ANN] [RFC] support for deltarpms in urpmi
On Tue, 2012-11-27 at 22:56 +0100, zezinho wrote: Em 27-11-2012 17:10, Thierry Vignaud escreveu: [...] - having urpmi select the right package o either deltarpm if there's one for installed_version - update_version path o or regular update package else Well, we should not provide both, or delta rpm is useless delta rpm would be awesome for those of us with limited bandwidth. Dial-up modems are still common out here. Another possibility might be a service that gets told which package version you have, and which you want, and tries to build a delta rpm, keeping a cache; the cache could be pre-populated with the most common entries. But that would necessitate the ability to run a program on the mirror. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Mageia-dev Digest, Vol 27, Issue 85
On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 22:49 +0800, Joseph Wang wrote: Let me tell you about my day. [...] Most of us have jobs. Almost everyone here is a volunteer. But you are volunteering to be part of a team, and that involves fitting in with the team's larger goals. A set of astronomy-related packages would be fabulous. One way forward might be to set up your own repository so others can test your packages. You can keep cinnamon out of the distribution, but that's up to you. I don't think anyone is saying, we want to prevent people from using... but rather, if it goes in the core distribution it's an extra thing to support, and needs careful packaging in order to avoid users ending up with a broken mix of gnome and cinnamon, as otherwise even in contrib it could make the core distribution break for many people. So this means it needs to be tested. Also, in case someone wants to have a discussion rather than *ordering* me to do something I don't think you're being ordered, although sometimes, because English is a second or third language for some people here, tone of voice doesn't carry very well in email. And yes, communication, whether by email or IRC, is a big part of collaborating. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] couchdb packaging
On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 16:06 +, Colin Guthrie wrote: Hi, Couchdb seems to be split into couchdb and couchdb-bin. This split seems daft to me. couchdb requires couchdb-bin and the only stuff in the couchdb package is config files... Why is there this complicated split? Is it so that couchdb can be noarch and shared across different architectures? With a small package, it might be overkill. -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml The barefoot typographer - http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
Re: [Mageia-dev] Utter frustration
On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 14:01 +, Anne Wilson wrote: Since there's no identification in the message, all I could suggest is a brute-force search of all files on the root or /usr partitons for the string ConsoleKit, which appears in the error message. Then, identify the package which owns the file using rpmdrake. Makes sense. The only problem is I don't know how to do that. I tried to use a combination of cat and grep, but there is no recursive flag, so that won't work. How would you do it? (1) grep -l -r ConsoleKit . this is easiest; -r is recursive But it will cross file system boundaries, so if you do it from / it will go into /use and /media and anywhere else it can find! (2) find / /usr -type f -xdev -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l ConsoleKit This is the usual find approach. -type f means only print names of files, not directories, symbolic links or device files... -xdev means don't stray into other filesystems like /home -print0 is the same as -print (prints each matching name) but prints the filenames with a NUL (character 0, hence the 0 in -print0) after each name, instead of putting each file on a separate line. This is needed because of filenames containing spaces or newlines. xargs reads a list of files, one per line, or, with -0 (again the digit zero) separated by NUL bytes; it runs the command on each of the files The -l option to grep says to print just the filename, needed in case there are binaries that contain the string. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml Co-author, 5th edition of Beginning XML, Wrox, 2012
Re: [Mageia-dev] Draft of a Letter to the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
On Thu, 2012-11-08 at 09:15 +, Donald Stewart wrote: On 8 November 2012 00:45, Johnny A. Solbu coo...@solbu.net wrote: On Tuesday 06 November 2012 23:39, Shlomi Fish wrote: Dear sirs or madams, To me, this sounds a little to generic, a little to unformal [...] No, this is wrong, you *cannot* use just one, it has to be both. You could have Dear Sir/Madam, but the correct usage is as originally stated. This is an official letter, and therefore should have the official address to the recipient. Dear Sir or Madam is appropriate (note the capitalization). You could also be more specific, or, better yet, find out the name of the person or people to whom you are writing. to ask, whether and how we can should of course be to ask whether (and how) we can... with the extra comma removed. There is no such thing as a definitive legal insight in the USA. The way the law works is that judges (formally called courts) _interpret_ the law. You may, however, ask for advice: We would appreciate any advice that you can give to us in this matter. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Draft of a Letter to the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
On Thu, 2012-11-08 at 09:15 +, Donald Stewart wrote: On 8 November 2012 00:45, Johnny A. Solbu coo...@solbu.net wrote: On Tuesday 06 November 2012 23:39, Shlomi Fish wrote: Dear sirs or madams, To me, this sounds a little to generic, a little to unformal [...] No, this is wrong, you *cannot* use just one, it has to be both. You could have Dear Sir/Madam, but the correct usage is as originally stated. This is an official letter, and therefore should have the official address to the recipient. Dear Sir or Madam is appropriate (note the capitalization). You could also be more specific, or, better yet, find out the name of the person or people to whom you are writing. to ask, whether and how we can should of course be to ask whether (and how) we can... with the extra comma removed. There is no such thing as a definitive legal insight in the USA. The way the law works is that judges (formally called courts) _interpret_ the law. You may, however, ask for advice: We would appreciate any advice that you can give to us in this matter. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Adding a new font to the default install
On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 21:21 +0100, Donald Stewart wrote: Hello everyone, I saw this article today and I think that it would be great to add this to the default fonts that we have available as it would allow greater ease of access to people with dyslexia. https://github.com/antijingoist/open-dyslexic http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19734341 The typographic experts I've heard from on this issue say that in general it doesn't help very much - increasing line spacing, for example, will help more, and almost none of the Linux software has that basic and essential feature. On the other hand, being seen to do something is not bad, as it may increase awareness. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] The shiny new Control Center
On Sun, 2012-09-30 at 20:13 +0200, Angelo Naselli wrote: Well to be honest that has been already discussed via irc, and it seems to be as you said a good thing, the real question is how to call it :) The usual choices are 1. an acronym few people will remember e.g. miascm (multi-interface system control module) 2. a cute name with no relation to function e.g. WandWaver 3. a name that suggests purpose, perhaps with an abbreviation for the commandline e.g. Configuration and User Management and, er, conman as a command (not cum, I think). I can review the Perl code a little if it helps - my goal with Perl is always to write something that can be read and changed later, even if it's less Perl-like as a result. E.g. send me a file or two. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml Co-author: 5th edition of Beginning XML, Wrox, July 2012
Re: [Mageia-dev] new fonts?
On Sat, 2012-09-29 at 03:23 +0300, Anssi Hannula wrote: [resending from the right address; I wish evolution would fix that bug!] 3) Fix the issue. Fedora actually has DejaVu fonts as default with higher priority and Liberation fonts with a lower priority. Makes sense. [...] It'd be really nice if someone looked over our font packages and fonts config stuff and compared them to Fedora stuff, we may have yet more WTFs in there... I'm not in a position to do that, sorry. But the Fedora font project has been quite active in the past. I wish we had a more fine-grained way to install/uninstall fonts: $ fc-list|wc -l 2489 but adding 2,000+ packages isn't the way to go. FontMatrix has ways to activate/deactivate fonts, but is not included at least in the Mageia 1 that I have here. Fonts, themes, background images, legal music files :-) and other resources could do with a way to manage them at a per-user and per-project level. This is a more general topic than Mageia is likely to solve I think :) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ - the barefoot typographer -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] new fonts?
On Sat, 2012-09-29 at 03:23 +0300, Anssi Hannula wrote: 3) Fix the issue. Fedora actually has DejaVu fonts as default with higher priority and Liberation fonts with a lower priority. Makes sense. [...] It'd be really nice if someone looked over our font packages and fonts config stuff and compared them to Fedora stuff, we may have yet more WTFs in there... I'm not in a position to do that, sorry. But the Fedora font project has been quite active in the past. I wish we had a more fine-grained way to install/uninstall fonts: $ fc-list|wc -l 2489 but adding 2,000+ packages isn't the way to go. FontMatrix has ways to activate/deactivate fonts, but is not included at least in the Mageia 1 that I have here. Fonts, themes, background images, legal music files :-) and other resources could do with a way to manage them at a per-user and per-project level. This is a more general topic than Mageia is likely to solve I think :) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ - the barefoot typographer
Re: [Mageia-dev] new fonts?
On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 15:57 +0200, EatDirt wrote: I think we should pay attention to the default fonts we will choose for mga3, indeed. That's the very first reflex of any user, either you like, or you don't, that would even deserve a contest may be. Reaction to typefaces depends on several factors - . familiarity (e.g. Europeans are generally more familiar with reading long texts in sans serif faces than Americans); . eyesight, contrast, lighting and viewing distance (this is especially true of whether antialiasing is considered a huge, 10,000 times improvement in readability or is considered an ugly distraction; . rendering quality - irregularities tend to be distracting and cause fatigue but people often say they like them at first; . culture (e.g. Cyrillic / Fraktur / Antiqua); . default font sizes and inter-linear spacing - unfortunately many applications don't give control over inter-linear spacing, showing that the programmers do not have a background in typography :-) There's a whole bunch of research that's been done around each of these factors (and more). You won't find a single set of fonts that works for everyone, and a popular vote probably isn't the best way forward to choose one. On the other foot, a community effort around font packaging and improving themes would likely have a huge benefit. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml The barefoot typographer - http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
Re: [Mageia-dev] new fonts?
On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 18:34 +0100, brian.sm...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote: I assume any default font should have the complete UTF8 Character set? This isn't really meaningful, because of unification - fonts implement glyphs, not characters, and there are a great many Unicode characters that represent multiple glyphs, mostly as a result of CJK (Chinese/Chinese/Japanese/Korean) unification. So the right answer is to have a set of fonts that overall provides the necessary coverage for scripts and languages that Mageia's users actually use. Are the Liberation Font's UTF8 Complete? Strictly speaking UTF-8 is an encoding, a way of representing 32-bit integers in as few bytes (octets) as possible while still working with text tools; those 32-bit integers are Unicode codepoints, indices into a table of characters published by the Unicode Consortium. Currently the table actually only needs I think 18 bits (more than 16 and less than 24 at any rate), but is still growing. Wikipedia says, [[ The Liberation family supports only the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, leaving out many writing systems. Extension to other writing systems is prevented by its unique licensing terms ]] [1] However, asking for a single typeface to have a unified design for Vietnamese, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Czech, Cree, ... is a tall order. You'd also have a rather large font file (probably between 500M and a gigabyte). So, the best approach is to choose smaller fonts that work OK with each other and give the best coverage. Hope this helps. I responded to more than your question to try help others see the issues too :-) Liam [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] halt and shutdown users: Still needed?
On Mon, 2012-09-17 at 14:56 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote: Well according to folklore (which is about all I've got to go on here), before there were proper infrastructures in place to allow users to reboot machines, sysadmins might give trusted workstation users the passwords to these accounts which then let them login to reboot (I guess a forerunner to the Start-Shutdown oxymoron!) Yes - I seem to remember that V7 and also 4.1, 4.2 BSD shipped with several such pseudo-users, although they may've been a local addition at the university where I used them in the early 1980s. They are good for environments with users you don't trust but who have to be able to do specific admin tasks... but they could for sure be added locally in those environments. Of course, if you have a university with 5,000 workstations, it'd be nice not to have to make changes to each of them... but, it's likely that changes are already made, and if one of them is to enable NIS then you can add the pseudo-users globally anyway. Every account is a potential break-in vector, however unlikely, so it seems better not to ship with them. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] Merge MCC and KDE config center
On Sun, 2012-07-22 at 07:54 +0200, Pierre Jarillon wrote: I don't know if this is a safe way but it should be interesting to have a look on it. Speaking as gnome user, sounds awful. MCC is one of the strengths of the distribution, and the fact you can run it outside of kde or gnome is really important. A kde plugin or whatever they call it to let you run the mcc drak programs inside the kde control panel thingy might be OK, but there's a risk the standalone shell would be no longer maintained. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml book year=2012 publisher=Wrox edition=5Beginning XML/book
Re: [Mageia-dev] don't update perl modules yet
On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 15:44 +0200, Jerome Quelin wrote: - perl-Graphics-Magick, from package graphicsmagick (maintainer: stormi) fails with Could not find a typemap for C type 'Graphics::Magick'. related to perl, but don't know exactly what the problem is. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378197 may help. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Re: [Mageia-dev] Strange system stalls - neep a tip
On Mon, 2012-05-21 at 18:11 +0200, Robert Fox wrote: The problem occurs under both KDE and Gnome Basically, the system seems to freeze up (mouse moves) but nothing else - gkrellem freezes and no errors occur - it just seems to hang - but magically wake up again after some time (many seconds at a time) Also check ~/.xsession_errors, and maybe try running without networking for a while, then without sound (e.g. in Sound Properties choose the profile off for each card, and then rmmod the modules). Another possibility is you have power saving enabled for the hard drive, and it's taking a while to wake up. If X or the window manager is partly swapped out then the kernel will need to wake up the disk to service the page fault, and in the mean-time X will likely be frozen. Also check whether caps lock, num lock lights work when it's frozen. I've actually been having something similar with magea 1 on my laptop and not yet tracked it down. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Re: [Mageia-dev] agetty vs. mingetty
On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 17:27 +0100, Michael Scherer wrote: [...] Web hosting companies sometimes provide access to a serial console. Then I guess they can also take the step of installing agetty or mgetty and configure it, since they have to configure it anyway. This is not a good argument. You're more likely to find debian, centos, fedora used by web hosting companies than Mageia, partly because Mageia is new. Putting up obstacles isn't a good way to get adoption. But maybe a wiki page or a forum thread or even this email thread would be enough. -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ The barefoot typographer.
Re: [Mageia-dev] deprecate text installer
On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 04:11 +0100, Johnny A. Solbu wrote: If we deprecate and remove the abillity to use a text installer, we are effectlively blocking blind users from beeing able to install the system. The reason that I first started using Mandrake Linux years ago was that it was the first whose installer ran to completion out of 6 I tried, and which was neither red hat nor debian. There were problems with the default X configuration on that system; I always had to use startx on it, too, for that matter. One place where Linux-based systems do well is in catering to minority needs, not just the 70%. Languages (e.g. Icelandic or Welsh), unusual or older hardware, and people with individual needs, all can be included. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ The barefoot programmer
Re: [Mageia-dev] Problems with systemd and /media.
On Fri, 2012-03-02 at 19:38 -0500, David W. Hodgins wrote: [...] I've since been thinking, it might be better if either systemd, or dracut could parse /etc/fstab, and automatically recreate any mountpoints under /media. +1 Or at worst comment them out, but not remove them - most users will have clue how to create a uuid-based mount for example. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Re: [Mageia-dev] xguest and the display manager
On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 11:59 +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote: No. Configuring a user computer should be left to end-user, not to packagers providing 'just click here' blackbox solutions. One of the reaons I switched, years ago, away from Debian to Mandrake Linux, was exactly this: debian packages tended not to work out of the box, because they said it was the responsibility of the user to configure them. On Mandrake Linux, the corresponding packages had a sensible, working, default configuration you could change if you needed to, and sometimes even GUI tools that worked with the same text-based conf files, so you could mix GUI and text styles. On Red Hat Linux at the time if you used the GUI tools they overwrote text configuration files without reading them first, so just starting the tool was often enough to lose manual changes. Software should just work wherever possible. Where not possible, it's the responsibility of the software provider to make it easy to configure in a safe and secure way without the user undergoing emotional trauma. Don't expect to educate users by forcing them to learn irritating and tedious trivia that stand between them and their job without being part of what they actually want to learn. Of course, this should be balanced by providing paths for people who do want to learn. When a book is translated, the original language, title and author must always be given, so that if the reader wishes to learn Urdu (say) and read the original, they can; however, most people want to read books in languages in which they are already fluent. Best, Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Re: [Mageia-dev] How broken are RPM dependencies allowed to be?
On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 16:31 -0800, Dan Fandrich wrote: I raised a bug ticket on drakxtools (#3731) because the RPM in Cauldron installs without complaints in Mageia 1 but won't work there because it requires a newer version of perl. The perl dependency in the RPM is listed as perl-base when it should really be something like perl-base = 5.14.2 (Mageia 1 ships with version 5.12.3). The response I got was that such an upgrade (from release to Cauldron) wasn't supported and this bug was likely a wontfix. It's really hard to test for dependencies like this, as the person building the package will have working versions of everything. Worse, in two years' time, perl-base of 5.14.3 will be hopelessly outdated (we all expect, at least). So it becomes one more thing to maintain. But it's also a problem worth solving for some of the system-critical components such as perl, urpmi and drak*. I don't think wontfix is a good answer here. My Mandriva Cooker system was unbootable for a while recently because upgrading udev didn't pull in other required packages; the desktop wasn't working for similar reasons. You can say, don't stop mid-upgrade, but a network outage or a power failure can make such things happen. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Re: [Mageia-dev] [RFC] Removing .la files
On Fri, 2011-06-10 at 17:34 +0200, Christiaan Welvaart wrote: If people are using a system with gnome installed to develop gnome, it's not strange they run into problems. This is nonsense, sorry. It's no stranger than a KDE-user wanting to recompile kwrite or krita. And I wonder why they would have gnome related -devel packages installed in the first place, they're not needed to *use* the system software. Because they're developing. For example, I'm involved with the GIMP project (GIMP is an image editor), but I don't want to compile my own gnome, not all of it, so I have enough of the -devel packages to compile just what I need (libbabl, libgegl and gimp, basically). I currently need the .la files so that configure and libtool will find them, since I'm building in a private prefix, not overwriting the system gnome of course... although that need for .la files may change in the future. Successful Linux distributions have communities of developers around them developing applications. It's not only about high priests of Linux and users who don't compile anything... :) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Re: [Mageia-dev] why not disable bytecode interpreter in freetype2 ?
On Thu, 2011-05-12 at 01:56 +0100, Zé wrote: Seams your confused, plf freetype it simply put fonts worst,, thats why i also never used plf freetype, maybe you should read some mandriva discussions in ML. I normally use the plf freetype because it's so much better. And it's generally the answer given to people who don't like the default fonts in Mandriva Linux. Some people will prefer one, some the other. Choice is good ;) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Re: [Mageia-dev] why not disable bytecode interpreter in freetype2 ?
On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 04:57 +0100, Zé wrote: In mandriva sincepatent expiration in freetype, fonts display wasnt smoth anymore and appeared ugly fonts, this used to exist just in plf.. Note that whether fonts are ugly is very subjective, and also varies depending on one's eyes. For example, people who wear glasses will often prefer their text *not* to be antialiased, especially when the screen resolution is under 150 dpi and the viewing distance is under 18 inches / 0.5 metres) or so. But since theres no patents issues pending, why not old rendering algorithms by default (disable bytecode interpreter), that way fonts will have a better rendering and look. For some fonts and for many (most?) people, this will look worse. This is most true for guys that are used to use small fonts, for example im used to use Sans size 8 I can't even see size 8 on my laptop without a magnifying glass. Not because of my vision, but because 8pt text gives letterforms that for lower case x-height is typically 1.4mm -and 8px gives me 0.7mm high letters. You can turn off the bytecode interpreter, e.g. using gnome in preferences/appearance under fonts/details, or in fonts.conf, but you can't turn it back on if it was disabled at compilation time. You can also turn off antialiasing and sub-pixel positioning. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Re: [Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?
On Sat, 2010-10-16 at 23:11 -0400, Marc Paré wrote: [...] I think what this all boils down to is, does the Mageia project want to actively seek out bugs and encourage its users to report bugs? If Mageia is interested in seriously quashing bugs, then the reporting process has to be streamlined in such a way as to encourage the reporting of bug as painlessly as possible for users. It's a good question (although some projects prefer to keep it so that the people reporting bugs tend to be the ones able to give a clear description of the problem and ways to reproduce it)... but... Please do change the subject line if you go this-far off thread. I'm only checking each thread once a week or so and probably others do the same, not trying to read every message, as the volume is too high. But, more people could contribute if the mail-flood was easier. Which is not unlike your point about the bugs :-) Best, Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Re: [Mageia-dev] [Mageia-discuss] About Mandriva tools future : Host Mandriva tools on github
On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 17:53 -0400, Robert Xu wrote: [...] would it be possible to move drakxtools slowly away from perl gtk? Or at least make perl gtk better (and provide a perlQt implementation?) In principle there could be a GDK port to use Qt, so the same *drak code would work with both toolkits. Because as far as I'm concerned, if any of these GUIs freeze up, it's automatically sucky. Which most of them will do (ex rpmdrake) (Even though most aren't, but this affects usability very much) I have not seen rpmdrake freeze up, not like KDE apps :-) but that's probably because I use a gnome desktop by preference. But rpmdrake ported to Qt would probably freeze up in the same places. It needs more asynchronous operations. At one point I thought about using dbxml (a small, fast interface to XML documents, with a btree index and dynamic hashing), which would probably make rpmdrake and urpmi a lot faster, but the dbxml packages didn't even build easily on Mandriva, and the rpm didn't install the perl API. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
