Today, I gave Mandriva 2010 a spin.  You can grab the install media or live media free from their website.  The live versions offer GNOME or KDE  Since I’ve been a steady GNOME user, I decided to review their GNOME live media.

Mandriva 2010 has a lot going for it under the hood with an impressive list of current features.  Perhaps even more impressive is they have accomplished a professional looking distribution that is also very simple and easy to use.  The default look has a very attractive glassy look and feel to it.

The network interface is very simple, and allows one to easily configure advanced options.  Since I am running this in Virtual Box, I didn’t get a chance to play with their wireless setup, but their ethernet setup is very simple.

Many of the administrative tasks can be handled through their Control Panel, which is much easier to navigate and much simpler than SuSE’s Control Panel.  The software management is also simple and easy to use.  Here the user can do things like set up compiz 3d effects and manage hardware.

The Hardware section shows a list of detected hardware, from which the user can easily see information about the hardware, tweak driver options, or configure things like video settings.

Mandriva also include Codeine as a way to manage third party multimedia codecs as a service offered through Fluendo.

Altogether Mandriva seems to have a good interface and a lot going for it beneath the surface.  Perhaps the only annoying part about it is it has a very commercial feel and comes with links on the desktop offering Mandriva products.

I realize that there are many aspects of Mandriva I did not cover in this review (such as the installer) which are important.  But at a quick glance, there is much to like.

I need some input on this one.  I’m wrestling with a Christian worldview on warfare.  There have been two dominant historical positions on Christianity and war (though not all Christians abide by either):

Just War Theory:  Founded by Augustine, sets rules for when it is right to go to war (such as mass genocide), how one should enter a war (public announcement through proper authority), and how a war is to be fought (such as not targeting civilians or torturing)

Pacifism: Avoiding war entirely and seeking peaceful, nonviolent solutions (as championed by Martin Luther King).

(There is an extension to both called Just Peacemaking)

While the above views both ideally seek to make peace and not war, and deal with the question of what exceptions, if any, there are to war and how one should act during war-time, it is hard to find contiguous biblical backing for either.

Pacifists often point to Jesus’ Sermon on the mount, where Jesus says: Blessed are the Peacemakers (Matt. 5:9) and When stricken, turn the other cheek (Matt 5:39) as examples of Jesus emphasizing peace and indeed, much of the lifestyle shown in the Sermon of the Mount is one that deflates unjust situations and dramatically ends conflict.

But does this mean that where Christians are practicing that we should then find peace?  Not necessarily.  In fact, in many cases we find the opposite effect.  Consider that in the same book, a few chapters later in Matthew 10, Jesus is warning the Disciples about the reaction the world will have to them, that they will be hated and persecuted (Blessed are the ones persecuted for righteousness Matt 5:10).  The climax of chapter 10 is where Jesus says: “I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matt 10:34)

What does this mean?  When we are stricken, turn the other cheek, walk an extra mile, give them the shirt off our back, but this is not for peace, but for conflict?  John Wesley comments on this:

“Whosoever shall deny me before men – To which ye will be strongly tempted. For Think not that I am come – That is, think not that universal peace will be the immediate consequence of my coming. Just the contrary. Both public and private divisions will follow, wheresoever my Gospel comes with power. Ye – this is not the design, though it be the event of his coming, through the opposition of devils and men.”

Therefore by being faithful followers, instead of creating peace, it often creates discord.  Should the Christian have to choose between making peace or being faithful to Jesus?  Certainly there have been times where these have been in conflict, and surely it is also inevitable that the polarizing nature of the Gospel, “Brother against brother” (Matt 10:21) will in many cases have the effect of creating relational and even political conflict inside and between nations.

For Just War Theory, the problem seems to be more rooted in the Old Testament.  While we have many examples of such things in many books, nothing in the Old Testament is as damaging to the Just War Theory as the book of Joshua, where after crossing the Jordan, God commands Israel to wipe out the nations of Canaan, and in a brutal way:  Leave no man, woman, child, pet.  How they decided to go to war, how they began war, and how they carried it out were all violations of the Just War Theory.  Now it is our duty to reconcile that God was with Israel in Joshua and yet is the same God as represented by Jesus.

Perhaps the answer is to step back and ponder God’s sovereignty.  God has a right to judgement and perhaps there is much about Canaan we do not know, such that God was using Israel as a means of judgement.  It is also difficult to understand to what extent God intervenes or doesn’t when considering when and what nations go to war.  But we are not called to judgement in such a way. 1st and 2nd Kings shows what happens when man tries to decide such things.

Just War Theory may serve as a tool insofar as it uses criteria that are somewhat objective and seek peaceful ends.  And as far as they can go to prevent another Holocaust as what happened to the Jews in World War II or Rwanda in the 1990s, I should hope to find Christians rising up to condemn injustice everywhere and to calm down existing conflicts.  For even if we take the stance that God declared judgement against other nations in the old testament, it still shows God loves justice, and we should work to halt injustice everywhere we can.  My end point is that perhaps Just War Theory or Pacifism may serve us practically as long as neither become idols in themselves, and as long as neither seeks to discredit the historicity of Scripture to fit its own ideology.

A few months ago, Google rocked our world with its presentation of Google Wave.  The idea of sharing conversations, and integrating with all of the social networking utilities we use, into one web page grabbed a lot of attention.

Now it’s Mozilla’s turn to awe and impress.  Raindrop, appears to attempt what Google Wave is trying to do.  It integrates with your online accounts, such as email, twitter, facebook, Skype, etc, into one web page, and organizes them into conversations.

Granted Raindrop is in heavy development and doesn’t have near the robustness of Wave yet, but setting up a Raindrop server is also much easier than a Wave server, for those of us who are still waiting for a Wave invite.

It’s also, in Mozilla fashion, open source.  Setting it up was a moderate difficulty.  I did it in a VM to be safe, and used the check-raindrop.py –configure option which mostly worked well and considering it basically just adds python modules, seems pretty harmless.

The end result being that you a browser (webkit or mozilla-based recommended) to a local address where all of your accounts get aggregated to.  So you see your email, twitter, skype, etc as a news feed, like conversations.  Pretty cool.

The instructions to set it up are on mozilla’s site.  Because it’s under heavy development, your mileage may vary, but seems to work pretty well here.  The above is a sanitized screenshot I took of it after getting it setup.

In Fedora 10, my HP dv-6 laptop did strange things with headphones.  If I plugged headphones in, the sound would continue to come out the speakers while also out the headphone jack.  In Fedora 11, sound no longer worked at all through the headphone jack.

Every once and a while I would Google search to find that this problem appears to consistently hit HP dv-5, dv-6, and dv-7 and some HP Mini’s that have AMD audio using the snd-hda-intel driver.

Today, I found a workaround, but it is not very fun.  Some have found a series of commands you can do to mute the speakers and unmute them as well as mute and unmute the headphone jack using hda-verb.

It worked, but the syntax is far from user-friendly or easy to remember.  So, I have packaged a fix, based on their source code that puts friendly scripts in /usr/bin.  It’s not a perfect workaround, but it works:

headphone-on   – Mutes the laptop speakers, and unmutes the headphone jacks.
headphone-off   – Mutes the headphone jacks, and unmutes the laptop speakers.

These need to be ran as root.  The next glorious step would be for alsa or hal to do this automagically, but in the meantime, us HP owners can watch HomestarRunner on our laptops in the library again with a single root command.

Get hda-hp RPMs and source here.

If you’re a gamer (or video editor), there are only two manufacturers in the graphics cards business that matter – there’s ATI and nVidia.  If you’re a Linux user in the same, how these companies support their hardware is probably a big factor in your decision to buy one over the other.

For proprietary drivers, nVidia has long been winning that battle.  Their drivers aren’t perfect, but thanks to RPMFusion, they’re easy, and relatively stable.  The open source driver support for nVidia frankly sucks.  With Fedora 11, we now have nouveau, which offers 2d and kernel mode setting, but with no 3d, it means no shiny desktop effects and certainly no good card performance, which is probably why you bought the card to begin with.

ATI is a different story.  Their proprietary drivers have sucked for a long time.  While the performance may be suitable after getting them installed, they come with nasty side effects like not being able to come back from resume and screen freezes.  And even though ATI has all the information to write good drivers for modern systems, they sometimes lag forever in getting working drivers out for recent kernels.  The big difference though is that the open source drivers for ATI are great.  Most ATI cards benefit from excellent out of box support to where ATI’s closed source driver is no longer necessary.

The reason for ATI’s open source drivers being good is that ATI released the specs to their newer cards.  This gave the open source community the opportunity to develop their own drivers for the newer cards.  The results are awesome.

The Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx support finally matures in linux kernel 2.6.32.  These cards get kernel mode support and full 3d support out of box.  Beyond that, Phoronix has now published benchmarks of the upcoming catalyst 9.10 driver against the free open, source drivers with amazing results.

Not only will the linux community get great out of box support and open source stability, but will also get drivers that rival or overwhelmingly scold the closed source ATI released drivers!  If ATI can move the full way into making their drivers open source, it will not only be a performance and stability benefit, but a great marketing tool to a growing demographic of Linux users.

For users with newer ATI cards, particularly the r6xx and r7xx series, we haven’t had much love lately from ATI.

As of kernel 2.6.28, ACPI headers that ATI previously used went private in the kernel.  This meant if you used a recent kernel, you had no way of getting fglrx to work, with the exception of a nasty hack that bombed syslog.

Then Catalyst 9.8 came with support for current kernels, and most distros benefited.  However, Fedora had already moved on to xorg-1.6 and most users experiences back screen freezes or in some cases, X not starting at all.  Catalyst 9.9 saw the same problems.  There are however decent workarounds for these problems that leave the user mostly functional.  Compiz works, dual-display works, and I’m getting consistently over 3200fps in glxgears with my Radeon HD4650 in Fedora 11 with compiz running.  The bad news is, you’ll have to deal with a blinking mouse.

So, here’s how to do it.  I’m assuming that you already have RPMFusion enabled.  If not, do this first.  If you are upgrading from Fedora 10 with fglrx:

1.  yum update
2.  Remove fglrx
-If by ATI’s installer, uninstall it and then: yum reinstall mesa-libGL
-If by RPMFusion, yum remove xorg-x11-drv-fglrx

3.  yum install kmod-catalyst akmod-catalyst
4.  vi /etc/grub.conf and add: nopat to the kernel line
4.  preupgrade to Fedora 11
5.  After preupgrade finishes, reboot
6.  At the login screen, do not log in.  Instead Alt+Ctrl+F2.

7.  Login as root, vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
8.  Find the Section “Device” section and add:  Option      “SWCursor” “on”
9.  Save and exit this file.

7. mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old (if you have one)
8. aticonfig –initial -f
9. aticonfig –set-pcs-str=”DDX,EnableRandR12,FALSE”
10. gdm-safe-restart
11. Alt+Ctrl+F1 and you should be at the log in screen and ready to use Fedora 11!

If you get nothing but a black or distorted screen when X starts, as root:
1.  echo ‘blacklist radeon’ >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
2.  echo ‘blacklist radeonhd’ >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

If you already have Fedora 11, in addition to possibly needing to enable SWCursor and blacklist radeon drivers, you may need the following steps, as root:
1.  mv /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img /boot/initrd-\uname -r\.img.backup
2.  mkinitrd -v /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`
3.  reboot

Most of this information was gathered from gofedora.com and various threads on fedoraforum.org and phoronix.com.

mv /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img.backup

I had the priveledge of spending some quality time with the people of LiLAX recently.  Last Saturday I had the opportunity to present and discuss Fedora 11 and beyond with them.  This was a small, but knowledgeable group that had a lot of great questions about the distribution and the community surrounding it.  There’s a video of the meeting available at their website on the Meetings page.

Thanks again to LiLAX for the invitation!

Berry4all running on Fedora 10

Over the last year and a half I’ve had my blackberry, I have tried numerous times to get it to tether so I can use it for a network connection when traveling.  Usually I would find a few guides of people who claimed to get it working after doing some severe hacking and the use of several hand compiled applications and the comment threads were full of people who didn’t get the same results.  Usually after putting in a heroic effort, I would give up after a few days and not try again for several months.

I can successfully say I have got my Blackberry Pearl to tether in Fedora with Verizon, using berry4all (formerly bbtether).  I have packaged it and have a link below.  Basically, I plugged in my blackberry, ran bbtether (blackberry4all).  I did a scan the first time and it had me reboot my blackberry (only required once) as it enabled the modem mode on it for me.  Then I did a Modem > Connect, as root, and about 10 seconds later I had an IP.

One annoying thing is that Firefox went into offline mode, but unchecking File > Offline Mode worked.  Since I am on Verizon, it redirected me to their tethering service sign up page, which is a pretty good sign.  Altogether though, not nearly all the strife I went through trying to get this going before, and hopefully it will get even easier with time.

You can get the RPMs for Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 at http://vwbusguy.fedorapeople.org/berry4all/

This package is currently in review for Fedora.

UPDATE:  In related news, Microsoft of all companies just submitted several thousands of lines of code to the Linux kernel under GPLv2.

Reading Zed Shaw’s blog post this week brings up several good points and re-iterates the value that the GPL has in both protecting and advancing the open source community.

Zed has personally experienced what GPL-fans (including myself) have long seen as weaknesses of open source licenses that are not copy-lefts.  GPL lays down the common understanding of open source in ways that avoid exploitation, while at the same time allowing the GPL to be used commercially.

The heart of the GPL is about protecting the open source community so it can continue to grow organically where projects build on each other to produce amazing things.  The problem is when $BIG_CORP decides to take the open source code, rebrand it, sell it, and contribute nothing back.  It halts the organic nature of open source at the hands of greedy suits.

I have nothing against companies profiting on open source code.  If someone somewhere makes money on the few petty projects I’ve done, great.  Use my code, learn from it, integrate it.  But please also pass that knowledge on to others to make it better and more useful to the world at large.

We in the open source community are standing on the shoulders of giants, but lets not get bled to death by corporate giants.

NOTE:  Do Not Use these packages anymore. Fedora 12 will ship with the new drivers and include mesa-lib-drm-experimental.  Use the official packages instead!

This may void your warranty!

In Fedora 11, newer Radeon HD cards don’t get a lot of love.  The open source drivers only support 2d on the HD 3000 series and the HD 4000 series are out of luck.  To bring further agony, ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver doesn’t work in Fedora 11 since they haven’t fixed their driver to work with newer kernels.

In April, ATI released the specs of these chipsets to the open source community and X.Org has been hard at work.  The support for these cards remains experimental to date, and this branch has not yet been implemented in Fedora.

This evening, I compiled the source for the experimental branch which offers 3d support for these newer model Radeon HD series cards.  I emphasize experimental, and I make no claims about how awesome the drivers are.

Also, because it overwrites two kernel modules (radeon.ko and drm.ko) it conflicts with the kernel package, so you must use –replacefiles in rpm to install it. (This problem has been fixed).  After this is done, the mesa rpm, compiled against the experimental branch, installs with no problem.  And glxgears worked for me after .

I have the source, specs, and compiled RPMs for i586 and x86_64 at http://vwbusguy.fedorapeople.org/radeon-r6xx-r7xx/f11/.

You will need both the driver and the mesa package to enjoy all the 3d stuffs.  Again, experimental – use at your own risk.

Not quite a month since release.  I wanted to give myself a few weeks to play with it before reviewing it so I could try it out on multiple machines with everyday usage.

To generally sum up Fedora 11 – Wow!  This has been one of the most stable releases of Fedora yet, and it comes with plenty of new features worth upgrading/migrating.

I have three different physical machines (two laptops, one desktop) and one VirtualBox image running Fedora 11.  Between these four, I have used 32 and 64-bit versions on ATi, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards.

Installation

Two of my machines were upgraded from Fedora 10 using preupgrade.  Both of these had several packages in RPMFusion and are also using adobe’s repository.  Preupgrade worked and worked well.  Preupgrade now leaves the 3rd part repos enabled so all of my RPMFusion packages were upgraded during this process.  The only snags I ran into were that my 100MB /boot was not big enough to hold stage2, so this was downloaded by a random mirror on reboot, which is not really a big deal.  The preupgrade process only brings packages up to Fedora 11 release, not the updates, so I had several Fedora 10 lingering packages.  After doing a system update, all was well.  The other limitation was that preupgrade does not migrate to ext4, which is one of the new features of Fedora 11.

The anaconda installer works great.  Fedora 11 can now use btrfs and ext4, which both offer significant performance improvements.  The partitioner has had it’s language simplified as well.  As in the past, the partitioner is capable of handling a very basic setup to very complex with adding software RAIDs and LVM and can also resize your other partitions for you to make space.

Sound

This has been the biggest issue with Fedora in past releases, and I have had all sorts of fun things happen with my Audigy 2 ZS card getting things to work well.  With Fedora 11, I finally see pulseaudio working flawlessly on all of my audio cards, with one exception which I’ll explain later.

Video

More big improvements by way of more video card support.  One of my laptops has a Radeon 7500, and Fedora 11 now supports kernel modesetting and this old-school card runs compiz-fusion like a dream now.  Part of my upgrade process was removing hacks I did used to get stuff to work in Fedora 10 with this card.  The nVidia desktop that uses nVidia’s proprietary driver upgraded without a hitch and hasn’t caused any problems in my system so far.

My new laptop with an ATI RadeonHD 4650 is another story.  While in Fedora 10, X would not start with this card, X now starts with the Vesa driver, but has severe problems, such as the screen going to garbage when you switch to vtty and back and not being able to pick a decent resolution.  ATI has yet to release a driver compatible with the kernel that ships in Fedora 11, but that will likely change in about a month.  The open source ati drivers do not currently support the Radeon HD 3xxx or 4xxx series cards yet, but that is also expected to change very soon.  For now, I have downgraded this laptop to Fedora 10 until ATI or the open source community picks up support for my video card.

Desktop Experience and Performance

Plymouth (shiny boot up) is working on most video cards out of box now.  The 20 second startup really does seem accurate, even on my slower, old laptop.  Plymouth also shows at shutdown now.  Another cool new feature of Fedora 11 is the ability to log in with a fingerprint reader.  however, due to an existing bug at release day my fingerprint reader was not recognized – appears to affect HPs and ThinkPads.  The bug report suggests a fix for this is coming to Fedora 11 soon.  I have KDE and Gnome both installed, but mostly use Gnome.  KDE looks very sexy and very well done.  The Gnome desktop seems to be very stable and quick.  They have also done an amazing job on artwork this time.  PackageKit continues to mature and become more useful as a user-friendly GUI package manager.

Gaming

Unfortunately gaming through wine and Crossover games has problems.  Pulseaudio now works great in Fedora but my Audigy in World of Warcraft is a nasty mess.  The left and right channels are so out of sync it just sounds like chainsaw ripping into a giant ice cream cone.  World of Warcraft also fails to start with DirectX and in OpenGL mode Ctrl keys no longer work.  Other wine apps also seem to be crashing quite a bit more often in Fedora 11 and the same.

Summary

Fedora 11 has been a pretty solid release from release day.  With exception to the few cases mentioned above, Fedora 11 is a pretty fun and exciting user experience.  Onward to Fedora 12!

Fedora 11 was released this Tuesday, and I plan to do a review on that once I’ve spent a little more time on it, but so far I’m impressed with it.  After getting my desktop upgraded, I was eager to see how WoW would do on the new Xorg and new sound fixes.

Unfortunately, not well.  Crossover Games bombed.  While sound is working the best it has on my desktop everywhere else, it is nothing but a terrible fuzz in Crossover Games.  About 75% of the time WoW didn’t fully launch.  Sometimes it would just disappear, other times it would produce a nasty stack trace and then the process would need to be killed.  The few times I did get WoW to load up it was slow and doggy, and the sound was just horrendous.  I tried to WoW repair, but to no avail.

The good news is – wine works great.  I pointed wine to my Crossover Games bottle and launched Wow.exe from there and it fired right up.  Sound works, too.  I haven’t put it through any raids yet to give a full out performance review, but at least it’s playable.

I did try to send my stack trace to Codeweavers, but since I failed to enter my email address on the lame duck challenge, I cannot enter a support ticket and am “out of luck” in terms of support.  I hope Codeweavers can get their fixes in for Fedora 11.  In the meantime, it’s back to wine.

If you haven’t seen the demo for Google Wave yet, I highly recommend spending the hour and twenty minutes to watch it. Google has made an open source collaboration tool that will let you do more in a common browser than imaginable. From one webpage you can handle all of your email, collaboratively edit documents at the same time, share media, instantly update your blog, manage your twitter feeds, and handle bug tracking, all with really wild tools.

Because it is all open source, Google showed how communication would work even when communicating with a competitor that is also using this new protocol. It is based on HTML5 and most of the code has been written with Google’s Webtool Kit.

I also enjoyed the pitch to open source at the end, and their rationale for why they aren’t keeping it prioprietary even though they would have some very good reasons to (not to mention they are stepping on the toes of enterprise and collaborative tools vendors).

When this comes out, we can finally mop the floor with Exchange and Sharepoint for good:

I was able to sees preview showing of this film.  Having not really been excited about the DaVinci Code (the prequel to Angels and Demons), I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Angels and Demons is an all-around better movie than the DaVinci Code was.  It’s more exciting, has a more engaging plot, and plenty of good action scenes.

You absolutely do not need to see the first movie or have read either book to appreciate this movie.  The biggest cultural contrast is that this movie/book to the first is that Angels and Demons generated almost no controversy.  This may be in part because there is no reference to Jesus being married and having a lineage in this story.  While it still plays off a historically inaccurate concept of the Illuminati (they didn’t even exist in the 17th Century), the new film shows much more respect for the Catholic church.  This time Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) joins up with the Catholic church working to stop an imminent terrorist threat at the Vatican after four cardinals likely to replace a recently deceased pope have been kidnapped.

It does show some pattern with the DaVinci Code as each scene provides some cryptic symbolic code that Langdon must figure out in time leading into the next schene.  The movie has plenty of plot twists and turns to keep you wondering who the good guys are.  The action scenes are not over the top with blood and gore, and are generally tastefully done.

In conclusion, simply an entertaining movie.  Whereas the Davinci Code seemed long and dull at times, this one was engaging all the way through.  Go see it.

UPDATE:

This does not work for Fedora 11.  For Fedora 11, I have compiled RPMs for clamz.  Get the here.
————————————————————————————————-

There are many things to love about amazon’s music store: mainstream and lesser well-known artists.  DRM-free.  Super-common mp3 format.  Some of the cheapest prices on the market.  Hundreds of no-cost songs.

But although Amazon.com supports Linux and has RPMs for Fedora, they don’t actually work on Fedora 9 or 10 .  But they do with a few steps.  Here’s how (for i386 and x86_64):

1. Log in as root: su.
2. yum install boost.i386
3. cd /lib
4. ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8g libssl.so.6
5. ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8g libcrypto.so.6
6. Download the rpm from http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html
7. cd <the location of where you just saved that RPM>
8. rpm -ivh –nodeps amazonmp3.rpm

As a note of caution, I would frown on ever using –nodeps in any sort of regular practice, and rpm -qV will show library dep problems (which we actually solved).

Enjoy your new DRM-free tunes!

(Special thanks to FedoraForum.)