Hanno's blog

If you didn't know it, today is Software Freedom Day.

Just noticed that, when you surf to http://cgi.softwarefreedomday.org/map.shtml to look if there's something happening around you on SFD, you'll get a proprietary google map.

It seems that the organizers of the SFD can't look beyond one's own nose. I often saw this behaviour in parts of the free software movement (being ignorant about proprietary stuff if it's not software), but found this example especially frightening, as we have a well working alternative.

Recently I was asked by a friend for a linux tool to extract ressources from windows exe files, especially icons. He used a windows tool in wine till then.

I said that this shouldn't be so hard and already started writing my own parser (I came to the point where I could extract headers and content separately), when I found that there already is an appropriate tool called wrestool. It's part of the icoutils package.

wrestool -o . -x filename.exe
will extract all ressources (icons, cursors etc.) to the current directory.

Today I played around a bit with the stuff done by the Wii homebrew/hacking community, which is far more advanced than I had expected.

I had the game Twilight Princess borrowed by a friend. For those who don't know, using this game you can run homebrew software on the Wii without the need of a modchip.

The way this works is that first you install a modified savegame for Twilight Princess, afterwards you can install the Homebrew Channel. The Homebrew Channel will stay in the main Wii Menu and you'll be able to run various stuff from there. While looking around the various webpages covering the topic, I found that wiibrew.org is a good place to find documentation and links to the appropriate projects. So look there for the details.

The gc-linux project (originally porting linux to the gamecube) has a simple Linux image available.

A warning: Nintendo released a new firmware that stops this method to work, so if you wanna have fun, don't update your Wii. And the obvious warning: Everything you do is at your own risk.

Update: Seems the Firmware update is no longer a problem.

Phoronix has just published an article about the development of xorg and they have a statistics of contributors from Distributions.

I'm listed there on the Gentoo part with 0.01 % contributions to Xorg. Yay!

Zum Thema Rapid Prototyping und dessen möglicherweise gravierenden gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen las ich das erste mal in einen Text der Zukunftswerkstatt Jena, der im sehr lesenswerten Büchlein »Herrschaftsfrei Wirtschaften« veröffentlicht wurde (welches es auch komplett zum Download gibt).

Aber der Reihe nach: In der Debatte um freie Software, speziell in eher politisierten Kreisen (Stichworte sind hier etwa Ökonux oder das Keimform-Blog), wird des öfteren die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die Art und Weise, wie freie Software produziert wird, nicht als Modell für gesellschaftliches Wirtschaften insgesamt herhalten kann. Dabei wird oft der Begriff »Keimform« aus der Wertkritik gebraucht, der etwas bezeichnet, was zwar im bestehenden Kapitalismus und dessen Kontext stattfindet, aber erste Züge anderer Strukturen aufweist.

Nun stellt sich naiverweise erstmal die Herausforderung, dass immaterielle Güter (Software, Musik, Text) mit vernachlässigbarem Aufwand kopiert werden können, insofern die Adaption der Prinzipien freier Software hier nahe liegt (bestes Beispiel die Wikipedia), im Gegensatz dazu natürlich materielle Güter hier herausfallen, weil sie immer noch einen vergleichsweise großen Produktionsaufwand pro Stück besitzen.

Die Science-Fiction-lastig anmutende Frage »Lässt sich das ändern?« bringt uns nun zurück zum Thema Rapid Prototyping. Damit werden Verfahren bezeichnet, komplett automatisiert Gegenstände zu erschaffen, im einfachsten Beispiel etwa die (schon länger technisch machbaren) 3D-Drucker, die Kunststoffgebilde nach Computervorbild erschaffen können. Weiter gedacht könnten derartige Gerätschaften, wenn sie mit unterschiedlichen Materialien arbeiten, auch zur Produktion komplexerer Geräte genutzt werden.

Das Ziel, was sich vor einigen Jahren der Wissenschaftler Adrian Bowyer setzte, lautet nun: Eine Maschine, welche in der Lage ist, sich selbst neu zu erschaffen. Sozusagen vergleichbar mit dem Schritt, als der erste Compiler lernte, sich selbst zu übersetzen.

Heute vermeldet Golem, dass es erstmals gelungen ist, einen sogenannten RepRap dazu zu bringen, sich selbst zu reproduzieren. Von der Gesellschaft freier Güter mögen wir sicher noch ein Stück entfernt sein, sollte der RepRap allerdings tatsächlich das leisten, was seine Erfinder vermeldeten, sind wir ihr möglicherweise ein gutes Stück näher.

Achja: Der RepRap steht mit der GPL selbstverständlich unter einer freien Lizenz.

Ein schönes Spielzeug habe ich heute geschenkt bekommen.

Sometimes in the past I had the wish to produce some simple videos, e. g. from political actions. Though I was looking for some free software solutions for video editing.

I asked around but it seemed that most people didn't use free solutions. I never did any video editing before, so I had no comparison on what proprietary tools are able to do. My requirements where not that advanced, basically I wanted to be able to cut some videos together, fade them in and out, add some text over them. Beside, I wanted to be able to display images for some seconds.

I knew of three free video editing tools for linux, Kino, PiTiVi and Cinelerra. Kino and PiTiVi are quite simple to use, they have an intuitive interface. But I soon came to the conclusion that they are far too limited in features. So Cinelerra is left.

Cinelerra is not a simple tool, it's interface is not intuitive. So this was keeping me away from using it for a long time. But the good news is, Cinelerra has all the features I wanted and can do much more. As I said above, I don't have any experience with commercial tools, but I think Cinelerra can do pretty much everything one will need when doing professional video editing.

To learn how to use Cinelerra, there are some great video tutorials at the_source. It's a (CC-by licensed) video show about free software and video stuff and they did four Cinelerra tutorials in their show. You should at least watch the first three and try the stuff out between the tutorials, but that will give you the basic knowledge to get started with Cinelerra.

So, the first Cinelerra-produced video by me should be available here within the next days.

Beside, I just bumped the Cinelerra package in Gentoo, so emerge it and have fun.

Today and tomorrow, we're presenting the OpenStreetMap-project at the Open Source Expo (or OpenExpo) in Karlsruhe.

I made some pictures, more will follow. Sadly, we didn't get a talk slot for OpenStreetMap.

I own this Canon IXUS 50 camera for more than two years now. It's a fine device, but it has some small lacking features where I often asked myself if this could be enhanced with a new firmware.

Until recently, when I read about the CHDK project: It's a kind of firmware enhancements for Canon cameras. It doesn't fully replace the real firmware, but adds additional stuff (I must say I don't fully understand what they do). And now they have an experimental port for the SD400, which is built into my cam.

The first big killerfeature one will notice is that the cam now has a battery monitor, which is the most obvious lacking feature of the original firmware.

One more thing I always would've liked for my cam is a better video compression. The video quality is quite good, but the cam just can do mjpeg, which leads to big files and limits your maximum video size to about 20 minutes. It seems CHDK has some better compression video mode, but I'll have to dig deeper into it. Beside, I can now record raw images. So there's lot's of cool stuff to play with.

nouveau, the project for creating a free 3D linux driver for nvidia cards, recently got first support for real 3D applications with gallium on some NV4X cards (see Nouveau Companion 36). Today I got it working on a friends machine.

Here you can see an openarena benchmark (also uploaded on youtube). It got 55 fps, which is far away from the nvidia binary driver yet (178 fps), but at least more than my r200 setup (32 fps).

For the brave ones, here's a quick and dirty howto for Gentoo:
a) Get the nouveau overlay with svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/nouveau-overlay and add it to PORTDIR_OVERLAY in make.conf.
b) The nouveau-overlay won't install the nouveau/gallium-branch of mesa. Get my overlay with svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/overlay and also add that to your PORTDIR_OVERLAY (I'll try to contact the nouveau-overlay developer if we can merge this).
b) Add media-libs/mesa, x11-base/x11-drm, x11-libs/libdrm and x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau to /etc/portage/package.keywords and merge them.
c) If you've been running the nvidia binary driver, eselect opengl set xorg-x11, change the graphics driver in xorg.conf to nouveau, rmmod nvidia (if you've been running the binary driver), modprobe nouveau and start X.
d) Have fun!

Note: The nouveau developers consider gallium completely unsupported at the moment and don't want to get end-user bugs. If it runs, fine, if not, don't nag them with it.

Habe dieses Jahr wieder die Chemnitzer Linux-Tage besucht, die sich inzwischen zu einem der wichtigsten Events der Linux-Community hierzulande entwickelt haben.

Ich habe tendenziell wenige, dafür aber gute Vorträge besucht (einen zum Hackerparagraphen und einen über Spam). Videos gibt's wohl leider keine, aber Audioaufnahmen sollten demnächst kommen. Desweiteren war ich aktiv am OpenStreetMap-Stand beteiligt, wir bekamen freundlicherweise bei der Wikipedia ein bißchen Platz. Für die Zukunft sind aber dann eher eigenen OpenStreetMap-Stände angesagt (beispielsweise beim Linux-Infotag in Augsburg).
Auch den Organisatoren sollten wir OpenStreetMap noch näher bringen, so war auf der Seite für die Wegbeschreibung lediglich map24 verlinkt. Zumindest ein alternativer OSM-Link sollte doch obligatorisch sein.

Over two years ago, it was announced that the security scanner nessus will no longer be free software starting with version 3.0. Soon after that, several forks were announced. For a long time, none of these fork-projekts produced any output.

openvas was one of that forks and from my knowledge the only one that ever produced any releases. It recently had 1.0-releases for all packages, I just added ebuilds to gentoo.

While openvas isn't perfect yet (many of the old plugins fail, because some files had to be removed due to unclear licensing), it's nice to see that we have a free, maintained security scanner again that will fill the gap left by nessus.

The One Laptop per Child project will soon release a free software version of the classic SimCity game. The company agreed to publish the code under a GPL-license. It'll however contain a clause that modified versions are not allowed to be named SimCity, else it's completely free software.

I think that's great news and would welcome it if more classic games could be freed. Computer games are their own form of culture and we need more projects to protect this kind of culture.

SimCity at the OLPCWiki

I know you've been waiting far too long for that. Now that Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.6 are out, I've added them to portage.

The background: Compiz and Beryl, the two famous 3D-composite/windowmanagers for Linux, have merged forces. Main Compiz still resides in the package x11-wm/compiz, many additional plugins and tools are fetched in by the x11-wm/compiz-fusion metapackage.

The ebuilds are all based on the xeffects overlay, with some cleanup by me.

Happy window-wobbling!

One of the biggest threats in computer security today are web applications. There's a vast number of issues found in popular web apps, mostly cross site scripting, cross site request forgery and sql injection. For a long time I had the idea of a tool scanning through webroots and looking for popular web applications, comparing them with a database of their latest security issues. In the past weeks, I finaly managed to get some code done.

It's a quite simple python-script (don't cry about the source quality, I haven't done real coding for ages), together with a database of some popular applications. I'm looking forward to hear feedback. The usage is simple, just do something like this:
freewvs /home/joe/websites/foo /home/guest/websites/bar
Typical output looks like this:
WebsiteBaker 2.4.3 (2.6.5) CVE-2007-0527 /home/hanno/freewvs/test/websitebaker
Drupal 5.1 (5.3) CVE-2007-5416 /home/hanno/freewvs/test/drupal
PhpWebGallery 1.5.1 () CVE-2007-5012 /home/hanno/freewvs/test/phpwebgallery
Mostly self explaining. The found app at the beginning, the version where the issue was fixed in brackets, the CVE-ID (or some other vulnerability id, in doubt an URL) and the path.

The biggest work to do is probably to get more applications added to the database and to keep the database updated. It's format is pretty self-explaining, so I'm waiting for your patches.

Get it here: https://freewvs.schokokeks.org/