Gentoo - 5

My favorite talk yesterday was done by Werner Pieper, which was mainly a collection of anecdotes about him being a former drug-dealer. He presented some interesting thoughts and experiences about trust in the illegal world. He also had some interesting stories about piracy-prints.

Today, I watched a talk about TPM and MacOS, which led to a very angry reply at the end by Rüdiger Weiss (who did a lot of work and interesting talks about trusted computing in the past years), sadly there wasn't any time left. Also about DRM, later this day there was a sadly very rarely visited talk by Seth Schoen from the EFF about television standards and the DRM-discussion in the DVB-group (DVB is the european digital video standard). Very detailed information, also many things I didn't know, for example that the industry plans to implement devices that only work in certain areas (by GPS-modules) or in a specific household. Most people seemed to have attended the talk by their »popstar« (Lawrence Lessig), who was placed in the same time slot.

Beside that, I sat some time at the CAcert-booth, helping them assuring visitors. Had some nice talks there and had the feeling that CAcert is really getting forward these days. For example I didn't know till now that Indymedia is using CAcert for their open posting.

Beside that, some people asked me about my desktop-background, it's from an anti-drm/itunes-campagne by the free software foundation and you can find it here.

Still here at the 23C3, I'll try to summarize some things about the talks I've visited yesterday.

First was a presentation about the Trust model of GPG/PGP and an alternative approach. I wasn't so impressed, because I think the main lack from the web-of-trust-infrastructure is that it's too complex to understand for the masses.

The Lightning-Talks were quite nice, some guy presented some live-hacks to a poorly designed travel agency, which was very funny. I personally presented compiz and told some short things about the situation of 3D-graphics and desktops.
I saw about the last 10 minutes of a talk about Drones, camera-supplied small devices flying around, and thoughts what these devices could mean for the society. A group is working on creating such devices on quite small costs. I'll have to fully view that on video after the congress.

Another very interesting Talk: »The gift of sharing«, the referent presented thoughts what kind of »economy-structure« the free software development should be called. It was a bit difficult to follow the talk, as it was in english and I'm no native english speaker. There's a paper from the guy which is probably worth reading.

The last talk was about wiki knowledge and citing that in science. The referents plan to create an RFC for citing-URLs in Wikis.
What irritated me was a computer science professor telling that she wouldn't allow her students to cite wikis, with the stupid argument they should cite their sources from books, completely igonring that science can happen in wikis and it may be the original source of the knowledge, not just something that has been explored elsewhere. Ruediger Weiss gave good arguments against that and mentioned that he thinks wiki is really a new kind of doing science and should be handled as such.

To be continued.

Google has the reputation to be free software-friendly. Without doubt they did a lot in the past, especially many Summer of Code-Projects, that developed essential features for free software projects.

That google is also willing to put legal threat on free software projects if they compete in their are, they recently showed against the project gaia. It was a project to have a replacement client for google earth (google's own client is proprietary). It was done by pure reverse engineering. The author took the project down after he received a letter from google.

It's quite questionable if gaia is doing anything illegal. They didn't use any data from google, they just provided another client for the service. In my opinion it's very important to fight for the right to reverse engineer. Many essential free software projects wouldn't exist if we couldn't reverse engineer. Just think of many hardware drivers, filesystem support, samba, many multimedia codecs, support for proprietary document formats (e. g. doc in OOo) and lot's more.

By the way, I took the freedom to host a copy of the latest gaia-version (and, as requested by some comments, the win32-patch for gaia). It's GPL, so everyone is free to continue the development.

My laptop has an internal modem I rarely use. Currently it's one of those moments. It is a so-called winmodem that is no real modem, but just a sound device with a splittet driver: An in-kernel alsa one (free) and a proprietary daemon emulating a modem.

I wondered why some tasks that have nothing to do with network were slow as hell. Now, I knew that it just emulates, but I never thought of that:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

30458 root      RT  -6  4384 4384 3588 S 17.3  0.9   8:37.33 slmodemd

Today was the 10th birthday of the K Desktop Environment, the famous Linux Desktop. It's birthday party was in Esslingen, so I attended it.

We heared two interesting talks, one about the upcoming KDE 4, and one from a guy from Treuchtlingen, a small town who's government has converted to Linux solutions in 2002.

After that we had some champagne and cake. Sadly I didn't get the Qtopia Greenphone that one could win.

Others:
Gentle: Champagner, Torent und Usability
tackat: Happy Birthday KDE! (with pictures)

After the release of mesa 6.5.1 and some patches added to xorg-server, I was able to add compiz to the portage tree. So we now have a running aiglx/compiz-setup in Gentoo.

It comes along with a script compiz-aiglx that runs the neccessary options and loads all default-plugins. If you're using ~x86 and have a card supported by free dri drivers, you should be fine. If you're using stable, a package.keywords suitable is in my overlay.

If you were using my overlay in the past, make sure you emerge rsync and svn up in the overlay, after that update mesa, xorg-server and compiz from portage. If you relied on the autodetection-hack I previously had, this is removed in the portage-ebuild, so you need to set LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 and add option --strict-binding (or just use the above mentioned compiz-aiglx script).

Further stuff (configuration tools, quinnstorm stuff) will follow. Submit problems to the Gentoo bugzilla.

Thanks to all the testers and helpers, especially thanks to David Reveman and Kristian Høgsberg for their great coding work.

The weekend I was at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. I was so engaged that I didn't find time to blog from there (and the »freifunk« wasn't very stable, but they told me it's the fault of the Deutsche Telekom).

It was a very interesting conference, met a lot of cool people. I spent most of the time with the people of the Free Software Foundation at their booth.
I met people from the »Bayrischer Rundfunk« (german public television station) and discussed about abolishing the GEZ and free content licensing of public television materials. I talked to a free radio activist about historical copyright issues and we ended up in discussing the kyoto protocol and uranium mining in Kongo. Had some discussions about politics in latin america with one guy coming from argentinia. That may give you a short impression about the variety of interesting people I met there.

On the conference topics, it had the theme »Free Software, free culture, free infrastructure«. An interesting panel I want to mention was the discussion about open frequencies. It was basically that only a small number of the frequency spectrum are available to the public at the moment, but wireless lan is already creating some interesting things (freifunk), so the conclusion was that more open frequencies might lead to much more interesting technology. There was a guy from colt telecom talking about the political issues of this subject and the old telecommunication lobby (for example the ITU). Another guy was from Indonesia and talked about projects they did with public wireless technology and their efforts to build own antennas.

Lawrence Lessig helt the keynote, he is definitely a good speaker, while it was far to much »popstar«-like to me (book-signing session afterwarts). His topic was the «Read-Write-Society«, and for one thing I can fully agree with him: It's time to fight DRM.

On Saturday, I was on the come2linux event in Essen, organized by the local linux user group.

Slides from my talk (3D-Desktop with Linux) can be downloaded as ODP and as PDF. It's a bit longer than my previous slides to that topic, because it was a »real« talk, not just a lightning one.

I had the strong impression that things are moving forward with linux on the desktop. One impression I had on my trip when I went into the magazine store in Düsseldorf mainstation, where the first thing I saw was a bunch of linux magazines. The GameStar (quite popular german computer game magazine) has a topic »Linux für Spieler« (which means Linux for Gamers).
The gaming-issue could be interesting, on the come2linux there was a quite big booth about linux gaming. Wine (the free/original one) is improving much in this area (although most people still refer to cedega when talking about games on linux).

Another thing I often notice is a growing interest in CAcert. The guys at the CAcert-booth were quite happy that I stayed there a while as I am able to give out 35 points (just like Pylon on Sunday). I had a CAcert sign and some cravat guys asked me to assure them when I walked around.

I just did some large updates to my »fun with x«-overlay after some experiences from the weekend where I installed it on various other people's machines, so I thought it's time to post some up-to-date information.
A few days ago I got a bunch of new patches from Kristian Høgsberg that should be much less hacky than the previous ones. You need to re-compile xorg-server and compiz together to use aiglx with compiz.
The compiz-ebuild has no longer a gnome and kde useflag, because the kde-window-decorator is not working at the moment and it doesn't make much sense to build compiz without any window decorations. Also, compiz now comes with two startscripts (compiz-aiglx and compiz-xgl) that basically just run the decorator and compiz with all default plugins. I noticed that the autodetection hack (whether it's running xgl or aiglx) doesn't really work, so the script also has all neccessary parameters. The patch is still in, but I'd like to have some better solution for that in the future.
In the main dir, I placed a sample package.keywords for people using the stable (no ~arch) tree of gentoo.

I've -*-keyworded the metacity-ebuild (because upstream isn't working at the moment on the libcm/metacity-stuff and compared to compiz it's boring anyway) and the compiz-quinnstorm-ebuild (because I don't work on it currently). You can still use them though if you add them to your package.keywords.

Probably one of the more interesting news: I have now commit-access to coffee's overlay, which means we work together to merge improvements forth and back. For the common question which overlay to take, I could say that mine is more polished, just contains the basic things to run xgl/aiglx and compiz and nothing more and is probably more stable, while coffee's contains more stuff (e. g. the now split up quinnstorm stuff).

Beside that, mesa is going to have a new release within days, which will make things much easier (and probably let us merge some stuff into main portage soon).

To get the fun, just
svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay/

This friday, there were two driver releases for linux graphics hardware. A new proprietary driver from nvidia and a new free driver for ati cards.

The release of the new nvidia driver was spread over all major news-pages. It's main new feature was the support of Xorg 7.1 just three months after it's release and about five months after the first release candidate. It still doesn't support the main new feature of Xorg 7.1, which is AIGLX. I couldn't find the release of the new free ati driver mentioned anywhere (even on linux news-pages) and probably even wouldn't have noticed if I wouldn't read the xorg-mailinglist. The new ati driver has much improved support for r300 and above chips, which is very important for the future development of 3D-desktops like compiz.

Now, the reason why this happens is probably that nvidia put out a colorful press release when they update their drivers. One could say that it's bad journalism from those news pages (especially if they are linux related) that if they get press releases from companies, they always post news, but they don't do so for rarely announced free releases. But news writers are lazy, if they get some ready-to-publish press release, they'll more likely take it than grabbing some announcement from some developers mailinglist. The problem from many free software projects is that their publicity sucks.

The work done by the xorg-developers to the ati-drivers is great. But I still meet people that even don't know the free drivers support anything above 9200. I never read big announcements on news pages about »free ati driver now supporting new card xy«. Now, if you have a look at the xorg-page, it doesn't even have release announcements. It looks boring. We know that xorg is cool, that it has wobbly windows and such, that development is happening. But looking at the webpage, it much more looks like xfree86.

This problem is not just related to xorg, it's just that I noticed this fact the last days (two driver-releases, only one noted). Same thing was e. g. with ffmpeg supporting h264 for a long time and then I read that some »I-forgot-their-name«-company said they'll bring a commercial h264-codec to linux. Or that about a week after ffmpeg supported wmv9 (also rarely noted by the public), real software said they want to bring wmv-support to linux. There's so much great stuff going on in free software development that would deserve more publicity.

Oh, and for a last note, Lars also has a nice example how not to do it.

If you've been surfing around the internet lately, you probably noticed that videos are often provided via some strange flash-players. That's ugly, because a) you can't download them and b) you need the proprietary flash-plugin. If you have a deeper look into how those flash-stuff works, it's basically just a small applet getting a flv-file (Flash Video) via http. Now, in theory you can use some sniffer like wireshark to get the url or directly the full video. But you'd still need to run the applet in some way.

But there are better solutions, at least for the most common service youtube (google video has recently added download links, so that's fine for now). The URLs are standardized and can be extracted from the page source.

Konqueror users can get this small extension, which will add a context menu for youtube under right click -> actions. Firefox-users can get VideoDownloader (which supports much more video platforms).
As Eiferer noted in the comments, VideoDownloader is SpyWare, so I'd suggest you don't use that. There's another one, based on greasemonkey, here, and, a platform independent bookmarklet here.

Now, playing flv is supported by ffmpeg, so all common linux-players should be able to play them. Thus you can get those videos and play them without using any proprietary software.

Thanks to Kostya, ffmpeg now supports the VC-1 codec, which is also used in Microsofts WMV9-format.

In the past, for Linux-users it was only possible to play those videos with win32codecs, which use proprietary windows-dlls and don't work on non-x86-platforms. With this improvement, one of the most common multimedia-formats unsupported by free software can now be played with all major free players (as ffmpeg is used by vlc, xine, mplayer, totem and many others).

Congrats to the ffmpeg-guys. The easiest way to get stuff playing is getting mplayer from svn (I used the mplayer-svn-ebuild from this Multimedia Overlay with some small modifications).

(via Breaking Eggs and making Omelettes)

I've committed some updates to my xgl/aiglx-overlay. First of all, it now uses a git-ebuild for the xserver, because there have been some improvements (implementation of GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer) I wasn't able to backport easily. Then I've added an experimental patch to compiz autodetecting AIGLX, which removes the need for indirect and strict-binding parameters. Some other no longer needed patches removed. Get it with:
svn co http://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay

Or, if you already have it, cd to it and
svn update

To use it properly, you'll need some entries in your /etc/portage/package.unmask (I've put a package.unmask.sample in the overlay root dir) for proper operation of the overlay:
x11-base/xorg-server
media-libs/glitz
x11-libs/cairo
dev-python/pycairo
(no longer needed)

Enjoy!

The last hours on the RMLL, booths are being shut down. It was quite interesting to see how the french free software movement is organized.

The event was very french oriented, not many talks in english, so there wasn't much for me to visit. I noticed that it was much more political than similar events in germany, many booths about issues like the DADVSI law, DRM/TCPA, voting machines, filesharing, free music, ecological footprint of computer hardware, software patents and things like that.

I tool the chance to stay one more day to see some more of the city.

Short note for my english visitors (and planet gentoo readers), I'm here at the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, RMLL) in Nancy, a french free software event.
There's a gentoo booth with kernelsense and dams.

First set of rmll-pictures