Linux - 10

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.

In den nächsten Tagen bin ich zweimal als Referent unterwegs.

Zum ersten morgen (Samstag), 13:00 Uhr beim come2linux in Essen über 3D-Desktops unter Linux (XGL/AIGLX/Compiz). Hab vor, das noch etwas auszubauen und insbesondere auf die Situation mit freien Grafiktreibern ausführlicher einzugehen.

Am Dienstag, 19:30 Uhr, wiederhole ich meinen Vortrag »Passwörter taugen nichts« in etwas ausführlicherer Form beim Computerclub Waiblingen (Gaststätte Söhrenberg, Waiblingen-Neustadt am Hallenbad).
Slides ODP, Slides PDF

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/

Die Chaosdays in Darmstadt sind vorbei, zum Bloggen bin ich nicht viel gekommen.

Ein paar spannende Vorträge warn dabei, Samstag einmal Pylon zu UTF-8, was mir evtl. vermitteln konnte, warum das bei mir immer noch weit entfernt von optimal funktioniert und an welchen Konfigurationsschrauben ich da noch drehen könnte. Anschließend ein sehr interessanter Vortrag zum Absichern von Linux-Servern, zwar hatte der Autor an einigen Stellen Ansätze, die ich nicht wirklich nachvollziehen konnte (http-traffic nach außem sperren - mein Einwand zwecks Trackbacks und XML-RPC erzeugte dann etwas komische Vorschläge a la bestimmte IPs zulassen), aber durchaus eine größere Menge von möglichen Maßnahmen, die ich noch nicht kannte und mal genauer unter die Lupe nehmen werde, ob sie für den schokokeks praktikabel sind.
Samstag abend gab es einen extrem coolen Liveact mit Akkustikgitarre und Gameboy.

Heute blieb ich noch bis zum Vortrag von Rüdiger Weis über Hashes, bei dem ich leider etwas das Gefühl hatte, »Rüdi, leg mal ne neue Platte auf«. Den fast identischen Vortrag hatte ich bereits auf dem Kongress und der whatthehack gehört, mich hätte insb. eine etwas genauere Beleuchtung der jüngsten Ergebnisse der Crypto-Konferenz interessiert.

Desweiteren hab ich 4 Laptops anderer Besucher mit compiz/aiglx versorgt, sowie einen Lightningtalk dazu gehalten (Slides OpenDocument, Slides PDF). Hatte das erste Mal das Vergnügen, mir einen Macbook näher anzuschauen (also, ein nettes Spielzeug isses ja, aber kann man damit eigentlich auch arbeiten? Dem fehlen ja nicht nur Maustasten sondern auch ganz viele Tasten auf der Tastatur), desweiteren sponnen wir einige Ideen, wie man die Bewegungs- und Schocksensoren in Apple- und IBM-Hardware kreativ nutzen kann, vielleicht später mehr dazu.

Heute (naja, gestern) wieder Webmontag in Karlsruhe im Kubik. Es gab drei Vorträge, einer davon von mir (ich hab das Gefühl, dass meine Vortragsroutine langsam besser wird), Slides wie immer als OpenDocument und als PDF. Die Leute waren heute sehr diskutierfreudig, weswegen es deutlich länger als geplant ging. Zwar musste natürlich irgendwann der Einwand »Businessmodel« kommen (ich glaub da schreib ich mal was längeres zu), aber insgesamt war's ganz in Ordnung.

Anschließend MNT über Simple Sharing Extensions, scheint ne interessante Sache zu sein, die evtl. einige der Probleme lösen könnte, über die ich mir auch schon Gedanken gemacht hab (wie verknüpf ich indizierte RSS-Elemente wieder mit ihrem Ursprung). Achja: Es ist zwar von Microsoft, aber die Dokumente als CC veröffentlicht.
Problem scheint im Moment zu sein, dass es keine Software dafür gibt.

Dritter und letzter Oliver Gassner, der sich am Begriff (oder, wie er meinte, nicht-Begriff) Web 2.0 störte, weil dieser völlig undefinierbar und unbrauchbar sei. Ich würde jetzt mal wagen, dem vorsichtig zu widersprechen, dass man schon grob einkreisen kann, worum es sich bei Web 2.0 dreht: Im weitesten Sinne offene Kommunikation mit Interaktionsmöglichkeiten, die die Möglichkeit zum reinen Lesen/Konsumieren bietet, aber dem Nutzer auf Wunsch irgendeine Art von Interaktion ermöglicht. Zwar hat Oliver einige Dinge mehr noch erwähnt, die angeblich Web 2.0 seien (Pay per click, kontextsensitive Werbung) und damit nix zu tun haben, ich fand aber unklar, wieso er die jetzt zu Web 2.0 mitzählen will. Alles, was ich allgemein drunter verstehen würde, hat schon dieses Interaktionsmerkmal zu eigen.

Im Anschluss beim Socialing hatten wir noch ne kleine Runde über CAcert (nächstes Mal gibt's glaub von mir dazu n ausführlichen Vortrag, scheint ja doch großes Interesse zu wecken) und eine etwas hitzigere Diskussion über Linux auf dem Desktop. Dabei hab ich gemerkt, dass ich mir in jüngerer Zeit angewöhnt hab, auch die Linux 9.0-Fraktion freundlich zu behandeln.

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.

From time to time I recently thought that the day I need to think about a new laptop might not be that far away. It's probably still a year or so I'll use my current one, but I already have my eye a bit on current models and spent some thoughts on it. As always, I think it'll not be a »take the model fitting all my needs, it'll be a »take the lesser evil«.
Some things I'd love to have in my new laptop, if you're working for a laptop-company, maybe you could tell your hardware designers about this post ;-)

1. Make it lightweight.
I carry it around very often. < 2 kg would be fine, 1 kg would be great.

2. No internal CD/DVD.
Recently someone said to me: »Why don't they build laptops without optical drives?« I thought a bit about it and think he was totally right. The CD/DVD-drive is probably one of the most heavy parts of a laptop that could be removed. I (and I think many others) use it very rarely and would have no problem to use an external one when I'm at home. Just deliver a »get external USB-drive cheap«-coupon with it.

3. Ergonomics and usability of keyboard and touchpad.
Okay, I've seen things like putting the </>-Key on the right side much too often. Hey, have you ever thought that people search their keys where they're used to be? I know you can't place a common keyboard on a laptop, but who the hell says that you can place keys whereever you want? I'd like to have the basic part (that is all letters, numbers and char-keys around them) not crippled.
Mouse/touchpad: Just if someone dares to suggest me buying something from that company with the fruit-logo. As I said above, I'm carrying my laptop around very often (that's why I have a laptop). And I want to use it when driving in a train, sitting at some hackers-event I hitchhiked to or things like that. That means I want to use it at places I don't have an external mouse with me. Thus the touchpad should be usable. I'm usually used to have a middle-mouse-button. Now, why have they vanished from most of todays laptops? There were mouse-wheels on laptops some years ago, but today they're very rare (my current one, Samsung P30 has none, although the earlier model, X10, had one).

4. Linux and drivers.
Make a fully Linux-compatible laptop. Hell, is that so hard? I asked around at the linuxtag once, where many laptop-vendors had booths. None could advertise me a model which they claimed »fully linux-supported«.
And with »fully linux-supported« I mean all features and free drivers. No »yeah, the graphics are supported, but 3D is a bit slow and no TV-Out«, no internal »WinModem« that has a free-of-charge-driver supporting 14.4k and a xx €-driver for full-speed, no »we once had a driver for 2.4-kernels, but stopped developing it«. I want to be able to use every device built into that thing I've payed for.

5. Sell it cheaper without windows.
I don't want to pay for things I don't use.

5. Many USB-Ports.
Hey, everything today is USB. USB-sticks, USB-bluetooth-adapter, USB-mouse, USB-keyboard, USB-tabled, USB-camera, USB-joypad, USB-HD. My current model has only 2. I'd need at least 6, better 8.

6. Put some quality speakers in it.
I've heard laptops that were completely unusable for watching movies because their speakers were so bad (my current ones are quite okay).

7. I hope I can still buy something without TPM then.

Could probably think of much more.

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)

Das PC Magazin LINUX 4/2006 gibt's seit kurzem an jedem gut sortierten Kiosk.

Das ist insofern hier erwähnenswert, weil einige der enthaltenen Artikel mein Werk sind, darunter einer über AIGLX und ein Bericht über den Linuxtag, außerdem Teile der Tipps und Tricks zu Multimedia & Office, sowie System & Konfiguration.

Wie bereits angekündigt, treibe ich mich gerade auf den Metarheinmain Chaosdays in Wiesbaden rum. Location ist sehr ansprechend in einem Umfeld von grafittiverzierten, teilweise baufälligen Gebäuden und Kunstinstallationen (leider hat sich das Wetter gerade entschlossen, nicht sehr Foto-freundlich zu agieren und es sieht grad auch nicht so aus, als ob's heut nochmal Sonne gibt).

Aufgrund eines Vortragsausfalls habe ich spontan noch meine von der GPN übrigen Folien über XGL/AIGLX wiederverwertet und somit zwei Vorträge präsentiert.

Xgl-Vortrag das übliche staunende aah und ooh, die leidige Frage, was das bringt etc.

Der Vortrag über Passwörter brachte den gewünschten Widerspruch, insbesonder Fukami hielt heftig dagegen und konnte auch einige Dinge anbringen, die ich so noch nicht bedacht hatte, etwa die Frage, was es für Identitätsdiebstahl bedeuten würde, wenn man alle Zugänge per Chipkarten regelt.
Folien: OpenDocument, PDF

Anschließend hatte ich eine kurzweilige einstündige Unterhaltung mit einem Menschen einer wiesbadener Lokalzeitung, der schwer beeindruckt war, was ich ihm alles so erzählte. Insbesondere das »Ich kann deine eMails lesen« schien ihm nachzugehen (mit Live-Präsentation via Wireshark).

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.