Linux - 8

I'm here at the Linux-Infotag 2007 from the linux user group Augsburg. It's a small and familiar event. Seems that there are a lot of freifunk-people (free wlan networks) in augsburg. On my way to Augsburg, fitting to the topic I had to switch trains in the linux-town Treuchtlingen.

I had a talk about 3D-Desktops (Linux 3D-Slides, OpenDocument). Will stay for some more hours.
It's nice to see more local linux events evolving.

Update: Some pictures from the LIT 2007

Hatte ich vergessen, wollte ich noch posten: Hab vor zwei Wochen bei der LUG Backnang eine Kurzeinführung zu OpenStreetmap gegeben, die Slides dazu gibt's wie üblich hier.

My laptop (Samsung P35) has an internal card reader (SD and MemoryStick) done by Ricoh. Several other laptops have this device. It's internally connected as a pcmcia-device and shows up as RICOH Bay1Controller on pccardctl ident.

For years now there was no way to get this thing running in linux, which stopped me from doing projects like having a crypto-key on a small SD-Card and insert that on boot. Now, finally someone did the job and reverse engineered the device: sdricohcs

In my first small tests, I could already download some photos from my digital camera card. No problems so far. Now, the only thing I'm really missing with linux on my laptop left is TV-Out (works with ati binary drivers, but they are unstable like hell). I heared some Xorg-devs are already working on it, so maybe I'll soon announce the »nearby 100%« support for Linux on Samsung P30/P35.

I wrote a few days ago (only in german) about my requests to the 1und1-support for information about the hardware of our rootserver (to complete the PCI ID database).

Now, after their first reply, I now got another mail with more useful information: They pointed me to the tool dmidecode, which can find lot's of information about the BIOS and the motherboard. Didn't know that before, it's also useful to find out the BIOS version on a running system.

Now, this looks like what I was looking for:
Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: FUJITSU SIEMENS
Product Name: D2030-A1

Wie ich ja gestern schrieb, bin ich gerade bemüht, die Device ID-Datenbanken von Linux zu ergänzen. Unser 1und1-Rootserver antwortet auf ein lspci -v mit mehreren Zeilen der Form:
Subsystem: Fujitsu Siemens Computer GmbH Unknown device 1099

Weswegen ich mich bemühte, durch folgende Nachricht an den Support Auskunft über das verwendete Board zu erhalten:
Ich würde gerne die Hardwaredaten unseres Servers vollständig in der Linux PCI ID Datenbank erfasst haben ( http://pciids.sf.net ).
Dafür benötige ich die genaue Produktbezeichnung des in unserem Server verwendeten Motherboards. Es handelt sich, soweit ich sehen kann, um ein Fujitsu-Siemens-Modell.

Beantwortet wurde dies mit:
wenn Sie den Befehl lspci -v per SSH ausführen, sollten Ihnen dazu weitere Informationen angezeigt werden.

Ich erspare mir glaube ich jeden weiteren Kommentar.

(eine gleichzeitig abgeschickte Anfrage an Hetzner wurde übrigens ohne Probleme beantwortet)

Ich bin ja bekennender KDE und Konqueror-Fan, aber ein zentrales Feature fehlt: Das DHTML-Lemmings läuft hier nicht, weswegen man Firefox bemühen muss.

Escapa! ist auch sehr nett und läuft auch im Konqueror.

A thing that people often ask in the free software world: I can't program but I want to help out somewhere.

Theres one thing that's very simple to do for everyone using Linux. We have two tools called lspci and lsusb that look on the pci/usb-bus for installed devices. Each device has an ID, consisting of a vendor ID and a product ID. Everyone can check the own hardware if everything is detectet. For lspci, first run update-pciids, then lspci -v. Each »Unknown« represents some ID that's not in pci.ids. Report the exact device model name to the interface on http://pciids.sourceforge.net/.
For lsusb, run update-usbids and attach all usb devices you can find. lsusb doesn't show Unknown, if after a device number there's only a vendor name, then the ID is unknown. The usb.ids database is much more incomplete than the pci database. They don't have such a fancy interface as pciids, just send it to the current maintainer (listed in the file usually at /usr/share/misc/usb.ids or /usr/share/usb.ids).

So, die Bilder sind online (von Fabian gibt's auch ein paar).

Sehr nett fand ich heute den Vortrag »Linux und Freie Software richtig bewerben« von Meike Reichle. Einige eigentlich zwar selbstverständliche, aber dennoch sinnig mal auszuführende Anmerkungen zu typischen Fehlern a la »Umlaute brauch ich nicht« (was beim Benutzer als »Linux hat keine Umlaute« ankommt).

Die gerade noch laufende Linux-Nacht fiel etwas unangenehm auf durch eine seltsame "wer auf's Klo will, muss 5 EUR hinterlegen und darf nur 15 min brauchen«-Regelung, aufgrund einer im selben Gebäude stattfindenden Party auf. Im Messegebäude begrüßte einen ein Bücherstand mit einem Windows-System im Hintergrund auf dem Beamer.

Ansonsten isses aber ne gelungene Veranstaltung. Hab heute abend noch eine spontane Kurzvorführung von OpenStreetMap gemacht.

In größerer Gruppe werden wir morgen die Chemnitzer Linux-Tage entern. Wie das so ist, Streß kurz vor dem losfahren, ist auch alles dabei, Navi, Digikam, PGP-Keysigning-Liste etc. Bebilderter Report folgt sicher.

Binary drivers are imho a hughe problem for free software. Nvidia, leading graphics company, has produced binary linux drivers for a long time and there was no way to get free software 3D-support on their cards.
A group of people is working at the moment on a free nvidia driver, the project is called nouveau. I now had a chance to test the nouveau driver on a nvidia card (nv43). It doesn't do much at the moment, but at least it runs glxgears almost smooth.

It's nice to see development on that front. We made a small video of glxgears running on nouveau. Oh, for all those who can't play theora, I put it up on youtube (but seriously, was just curious how youtube works and if it accepts theora).

Some experimental nouveau-ebuilds, maintained by pq from the nouveau-project, are here:
svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/nouveau-overlay

I live in a dormitory where I get cheap and fast internet access, but http only through a proxy. It's a pity to set this up in all apps every time I come here and disable it again when I wanna get online somewhere else, cause there's no centralized point to do so (there are many apps out there that just ignore http_proxy env var).
Now, it wasn't possible to directly forward http requests to the dormitory proxy, because it misses some options required for that. Maybe it's possible with more iptables skills, would require http-header rewriting.

My solution was setting up a local squid, forward requests via iptables to that and configure the dormitory proxy as a parent. I found that there's a lot of documentation out there, but also lot's of outdated stuff (squid configuration options significantly changed) and stuff you won't understand if you are no proxy-guru.

Now, some lines in my squid.conf:
http_port 7777 transparent
visible_hostname 127.0.0.1
acl local src [myip]/255.255.255.255
http_access allow local
cache_peer proxy.mynetwork.com parent 3128 3130 proxy-only

First line enables all Options required to allow transparent http and sets the port to 7777 (can be anything, just shouldn't collide with any service you might run). visible_hostname is required, something that resolves to localhost. The acl and http_access lines will deny any requests from other hosts, and finally, cache_peer sets the upstream proxy (just replace proxy.mynetwork.com with whatever your network proxy is).
Beside, there's some line starting with hierarchy_stoplist, you need to comment that out, else it won't allow you to use urls with GET variables.

Now, for the iptables-part, it's pretty simple:
iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to 127.0.0.1:7777

I've now added squid to my default runlevel, it doesn't take that long to start. My network setup scripts contain above iptables-line for the dormitory and the squid is just ignored elsewhere. One problem though I haven't debugged enough to know the cause is that sometimes it seems to be unable to deliver POST vars, e. g. the function search of php.net doesn't work.

For your info, my system is Gentoo Linux with squid 2.6.9, iptables 1.3.7 and kernel 2.6.20.

Heut gab's mal wieder fröhliches Linux-Installieren bei der LUG Backnang. Zum Schwitzen brachte uns heute ein aufgemotzter Gamerrechner (64bit Dualcore, Radeon X1900 etc.), der unreproduzierbares Fehlverhalten zeigte, sowie eine Fritz! USB WLAN in der Revision 1.1 (anderer Chipsatz wie 1.0, aber das kennt man ja bei WLAN-Karten), die Bernd dank ndiswrapper zum Funktionieren überredete. Meine Kernelpatchversuche schlugen fehl, sahen aber erstmal vielversprechend aus.

Now, if you've been on the internet a bit longer, you may remember those sites at the end of the 90s telling you that they're »best viewed with a resolution of 1024x768 and the Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0". Luckily, most of those pages disappeared with the upcoming success of Mozilla Firefox and others (oh, there are still some, e. g. the cinema in my home town, but ie6 runs on wine).

As you may know, I'm a happy KDE user and have been using Konqueror as my everyday browser for some time now. Recently, I discovered more and more pages I couldn't use any more. I had to start this thing called Firefox. I don't like it, but that is not the point here.
I even noticed today that ebay has a new interface that konqueror doens't like.

This is a result of the more and more upcoming AJAX/JavaScript-stuff, which is often nice, I saw a lot of well designed web applications lately (ok, I saw a lot of crap, too). I'm not enough into JavaScript to know if it's the lack of support by Konqueror or the pages. I just hope that people will come together and find solutions for that. I remember that there was some discussion about using webcore (the khtml-fork used by apples safari) for konqueror, don't know if that would make it better, maybe some users of this drm-crippled system could comment on that.

Read about Metisse just yesterday. A new approach to fancy/3D-Desktops by Mandriva. Unlike compiz, metisse has features that let you actually use windows in transformed status. Mandriva has some videos (Edit 2016: link down, archived version and videos on youtube) that show you some of the features.

As you may already have expected, I couldn't wait to create some ebuilds, so fetch my overlay (which is still called xgl, but don't care about that) for fancy x stuff and run emerge metisse:
svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay

At the moment it requires it's own X-Server (very much like luminocity or xgl in the past), the window and composite manager is a modified variant of fvwm. After installing, run Xmetisse :1 on one console and on another one metisse-start-fvwm -wd :1. You'll get a fancy new desktop inside a window.

At the moment it very much looks like a design study, not really intuitive to use, but it has some interesting approaches. Nice to see that the linux desktop is evolving. For all non-gentooers, Mandriva has a live CD for you.

Wir (Bernd und ich) hielten gestern im Rahmen einer Veranstaltung der LUG Backnang und des CCWN einen Vortrag mit Kritik an Vista, Mac OS und DRM allgemein. Ich erlebe gerade die Arbeit für freie Software allgemein sehr positiv, so meinte etwa ein Zuschauer, im Oktober hatte er Probleme mit seiner XP-Aktivierung, die der Meinung war, er hätte eine illegale Version und seit Dezember nutzt er Linux.

Wie üblich die Vortragsmaterialien (diesmal exklusiv als ODP, ich geh inzwischen davon aus, dass das jeder kann), Teil 1 und 3 waren von mir, Teil 2 von Bernd:

Slides Teil 1 (DRM), Slides Teil 2 (Windows Vista), Slides Teil 3 (Mac OS)
Gezeigtes Filmmaterial: The Corruptibles, A movie about Trusted Computing