Gentoo - 8

Okay, just arrived at What the Hack, after a more-than-12-hour-trip.
I managed to hitchhike till a place near Duisburg when I gave up and switched to the train.

I noticed that while I was on a lot of computer-events in the past, I never was on an event like this. The mood is very nice, lot's of colored lights around, deep in a forest and tents all over. You can see a first impression here, more will follow.

Tomorrow I'll travel to the Netherlands for the What the Hack, I'll try to get there by hitchhiking. As always, you can expect live-reports from the event in my blog.
What the Hack is a international conference in the tradition of HIP, HAL and others. I sadly never managed to be there in the past years.

About two weeks ago, I had some problems with my wrist, probably due to PC usage. Although the pain in my wrist disappeared a few days later, I decided that I need to improve the epgonomics at my workspace. I bought a seperate keyboard, a gel pad for my wrist and a wacom graphics tablet.

I'm now starting to learn Dvorak. Dvorak is an optimized keyboard layout, because the default querty/quertz layout was created for technical reasons in the age of typewriters. There are a couple of german dvorak layouts out there, but no standard at all, drivers are usually not available for different systems and thus useless, so I'm using english dvorak with the Umlauts mapped on AltGr-combinations (like Pylon also did).
I changed the keys to comply dvorak as good as possible to learn it. I added two icons to my Kicker to be able to switch if I need to write something fast. I'll try to use this rarely.

This was my first blog entry completely written with dvorak.

Tomorrow there will be the (probably) last discussion about the EU directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions in the EU parliament in Straßbourg, the decision will be on wednesday. This is a very important decision for the future of the free software movement and software development at all.

I'll be at the protest actions in front of the parliament on both days. If you live nearby Straßbourg, consider to join us as well at 8h on both days.

noepatents.eu.org
Weblog of attac

Update: There is also a web-demo for webmasters to replace their frontpage.

Another Update: Pictures from the demo in my gallery.

Yesterday I forgot to take my laptop-powerplug from linuxtag with me and as my battery was quite empty, I couldn't blog yesterday. So here are some more impressions from Linuxtag.

Luminocity - Eyecandy for X

After I saw it at the X.org-booth on Linuxtag, I had to try out the nifty features the xorg-devs are working on. One really nice thing is luminocity. You have waving windows, which looks really cool. I found a HOWTO in the Gentoo Forum, which worked right away. I was really impressed by the performance of waving, half transparent windows. I also made a small video of it (it's ogg theora).

While many people may think this is just playing around, imho eyecandy is quite important. That's one of the reasons why MacOS X is so successful. I'm really looking forward when those features will be available on usual desktops.

Reverse engineering Microsoft cubes

At the Microsoft-booth on Linuxtag, you could get some nice white cubes with colored lights in it. Sadly, they had no open interface for it, so we tried to reverse engineer them. We weren't able to install Gentoo on them yet.

Geekish art

A project at the Linuxtag was creative geeks, a group of people creating creative commons licensed art with linux stuff (e. g. tux-pictures).
Another very nice thing were the konqi-videos from kde, they are made with blender. I didn't know that blender is that good (though I'll probably never learn how to use it).

Today, the Linuxtag in Karlsruhe started. I'm present at the gentoo booth.
Impressions from the first day: According to the Linuxtag blog, Ute Vogt from the german government helt a speech and spoke against software patents, which is opposed to the politics of the german ministry of justice.

As I already told yesterday, a couple of software patent lobbyists are present, especially Sun, HP, Intel, IBM and Nokia. I asked at the Sun booth for an opinion and the answer was basically that nobody is there who can give a statement. I plan to ask the others as well, it might be a good idea if others would do this as well.
I also plan to ask other companies about there opinion and if they are opposed to software patents, if they would support the economic majority campaign.

Mirabile of MirOS asked me to create an ebuild for mksh, which I did, and he promised to spend me a beer for it ;-)
I'm currently at the AKK, but didn't see him to get it.

Pictures are here

I've written a longer article about free software and the demoscene, I hope it'll be published in the hugi discmag.

Update: Changed some parts of the article by the feedback of Adok/Hugi.

This picture looks really nice, and it's getting better every day. You can also add your picture to it and join the online demonstration against the EU software patent directive.
The software patent decision is really important for the future of free software. While I doubt that free software can be stopped by competition products for the long term, legal threats are and will be a real problem for all of us foss-developers.
Join the online demonstration here.

Today, several news-pages reported about a new working draft of the CSS 2.1 specification. CSS 2.1 removes some features from CSS 2.0.

One example is text-shadow, which is really a nice thing. If your browser supports it, you can see it here.
Why did they remove it? Because none of the mainstream browsers supports it. The one and only exception is Konqueror (and Safari, which is a fork of Konqueror). This feature may come back in CSS 3, which won't be released until the cows come home. This is imho really a bad decicion, it shows how browser vendors stop innovation in the world wide web. CSS 2.0 was released 1998, seven years ago and just NO SINGLE BROWSER implements it completely. If you don't believe me, just check text-shadow and empty-cells in all browsers available.

Because of the lack of modern standards, crappy, proprietary alternatives like Flash evolve. There are alternatives. SVG? Not really used at all. Do you know VRML and X3D? Really nice things. Do you know how many browsers support it out of the box? Not a single one.

It's really a pity that in these days, nice web-standards are available, but you can't use them. No doubt that the Internet Explorer is the main problem here. But Mozilla isn't much better. While Firefox brings a lot of innovation in user interfaces, the development of the gecko-engine lacks a lot of things. The only innovative force on the browser market at the moment is konqueror (which is probably the project with the smallest number of developers).

Yesterday, there was that message on pro-linx that several projects using bitkeeper for managing their sourcecode now have problems because bitkeeper will no longer be available for free. The most important project using bitkeeper was the linux-kernel. Luckily, the kernel developers developed an alternative called git and seem to be happy with it.
The bitkeeper-issue was one issue showing how using proprietary software on free systems can lead into problems. But at all, it was not that big issue. The source was still free and the projects could switch to other software like git, svn or monotone.

Now, another issue has been brought up recently: Current OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta versions need the proprietary Sun Java Runtime Environment to work. This is imho a much more grave issue. Imagine Sun does the same as BitMoover and says from one day to the other that they won't provide java for free any more. Or, even worse, if sun decides not to support future linux-versions. At the moment, this might not be that big issue, because most parts of OOo are still written in C. But imageine larger parts of it are java-based, this could mean OOo would be suddenly unavailable on Linux (or other free/alternative Systems).
Luchily, the FSF is working on getting OOo to work with the free GCJ (GNU Java Compiler).
(Beside that, although it's always claimed, sun java is limited to a very small number of architectures and thus not very portable)

Another very dangerous threat to free software are binary drivers. Some days ago, NVidia released a new, proprietary linux-driver.
They removed support for some older graphics chips.
What does that mean? If you own such a card, your opportunities are very limited:

• You can continue using the old drivers as long as they work with current kernels and xorg-versions. If they fail with a kernel-update, you can stick to that kernel. If security-hole appear in that kernel, you have a problem.
• You can switch to the free drivers in xorg and use your card, originally probably an expensive, state-of-the-art 3d-gaming-card, without any 3d-functions.
• You can buy another graphics-card.

That's the consequence of binary drivers. If a vendor stops supporting your device, there's just nothing you can do.
The bad thing with graphics-cards is that currently there is no real alternative. ATI is releasing binary drivers, which are very unstable and lacking a lot of features (Jon Lech Johansen wrote about that recently). As I read in the changelog of xorg, they are working on supporting newer ATI-chips (probably by reverse engineering). For the future, maybe the OpenGraphics-Project will be an alternative.

Beside that, there's another problem with binary drivers. Did you ever tell people "Open Source is good, because many people can look at the code and find bugs, security holes and backdoors"? Well, if you load binary drivers in your kernel space, you can just forget this argument.

Another good text I found about that issue is Freedom 0, here is the german version Freiheit 0.

I often read in forums and hear from people "don't be so ideologic, not everything can be free", "RMS and the FSF are stupid, they are too ideologic", "I'm happy that nvidia releases drivers at all" etc. I hope I brought some arguments why in my opinion, free software is important and why I try to avoid the use of non-free software whereever possible.

I just arrived at the GPN4, an event organized by Entropia, the local group of the chaos computer club in Karlsruhe.
The lectures sound very interesting and most are about subjects like Open Source/Free Software, DRM and alternatives, Open Content and Society etc.

If you live nearby Karlsruhe you might consider to join the event for the short term.

While cleaning up my room, I found the ELSA Microlink ISDN USB you can see on the picture here.
I hate this device! It stopped me from using Linux for about half a year. I even set up a homepage about that issue. As far as I know, it's still impossible to use it in Linux. I don't care as I don't use ISDN any more.
I want to get rid of it. If there's anyone out there who seriously wants to write a linux-driver for it (by reverse engineering or contacting ELSA for specs or whatever), write me a note and I'll send you the device for free. Please add some information why you think you are able to do it (e.g. did you write linux/isdn-drivers before?).

As I always like to be on the bleeding edge, I recently rebuilt my complete Gentoo system with the new gcc 4.0.0.

The good news is that it's getting better every day, but you still need a lot of fixes, so if you decide to try it, please be prepared that you'll have to play around, apply patches etc.

• To bootstrap your system with gcc 4, you need to add sys-devel/gcc and sys-libs/glibc to your package.unmask and package.keywords, because they are hard-masked in package.mask and have KEYWORDS="-*". I always have ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" set in make.conf to get the latest testing-packages, this is probably advisable if you want to try out such bleeding edge stuff.
• xorg-x11 fails, but a patch is in the masked xorg-x11-6.8.2-r2 ebuild, so add that to package.unmask, too.
• A number of packages failed to compile that are now fixed in portage, so you don't have to care about (xfsprogs, mod_php-5, probably some more I forgot).
• libsdl needs to be compiled with -O0, see this bug for details.
• Konqueror compiles, but segfaults, a fix/patch is here.
• Mozilla / Firefox don't compile, see here, but I didn't try/need, as Konqueror is my browser of choice.
• A bigger problem was the kernel, as 2.6.11.8 fails to compile and 2.6.12-rc3/rc4 brought a kernel panic while booting. I'm now running 2.6.12-rc3-mm3, it boots and mostly works, but acpi4asus seems to be broken (don't know if this is due to gcc4 or mm-kernel).
• Packages that still fail for me: gstreamer-ffmpeg, fte, tcpdump, dosemu, wine, openoffice-ximian. All upstream devs are informed, so I think patches will appear soon.

So finally, no really important packages are missing, my system works quite stable so far.

Feel free to try out yourself. If packages fail to build, try searching the gentoo-bugzilla and the upstream-webpage for fixes.
If you have patches/fixes for the packages above, feel free to add a link to the comments. If you wrote patches yourself, make sure to send them to the upstream-devs and to the gentoo bugzilla.

Today I looked if Samsung provides a BIOS-update for my laptop (P30 XVM 1500). There was a new version (09NK), but it was only a windows-executable-file. You can get it here.
Older versions (e.g. the 06nk) were available as boot-cd-images (nero-files, but that doesn't matter, you can easily convert them to isos), but not the new version.

Ok, next thing I tried was extracting the files from the exe. Not that easy though. Usually, you can just unzip exe-installers, but this didn't contain a zip-archive.
With a dos-tool called gettyp (runs in dosemu) I could find out the position of the exe-overlay and could extract it with dd. It started with LPCKLPCK. Nice, looks like a signature.
But file didn't recognize it, googling for LPCKLPCK just brought NOTHING. After some more investigation, I found that the format was quite easy to read, it had always a filename with .gz and a fixed number of zero-bytes later a gzip-header. As I only needed one file, I dd'ed it so it started with the .gz-header of that file (09NK.WPH.gz). gunzip said that it ignoes the trailing garbage after the data.
Nice, so I had my 09nk.wph-file I needed (the BIOS-image).

Ok, the rest was simple, creating a freedos-bootdisk with dosemu, copying the 09nk.wph and phlash16.exe (from the old bios-update 06nk) on it, creating a boot-cd with k3b.

For all of you that don't want to repeat this adventure, I've provided an ISO-image. Just boot it, run phlash16 09nk.wph and you're done.
WARRANTY: This worked for me, but I am not responsible if it destroys your BIOS, if your laptop starts burning or if anything else happens.

After the News about the SHA1 hash-function definitely being broken (see this article from Bruce Schneier for details), I was looking around how to use the alternatives SHA256/SHA512.
While for example GnuPG supports SHA256 out of the box, it's a problem in a lot of situations.

Command line
While the GNU Coreutils have md5sum/sha1sum for the broken, insecure algorithms, they contain no similar tools for SHA256. The hashsum package provides some tools equivalent to the usual md5sum/sha1sum tools.
Another Option is shash, which provides a wide variety of hashing-algorithms, but it's not syntax-compatible to the GNU tools.

Programming library
The above mentioned shash is based on the mhash-library, which supports a wide variety of hashing algorithms.

PHP
While PHP has md5/sha1-functions built-in, there are no such functions for sha256. But it's possible to use the mhash-library if PHP was configured with --with-mhash.
For Gentoo-Users: USE="mhash"
Then you can use mhash(MHASH_SHA256,$s) to get binary hashes. To get hexadecimal encoded hashes (like the md5/sha1-functions do), use bin2hex(mhash(MHASH_SHA256,$s)).