Exploring the Future of Computing
With the pervasiveness of 64-bit architectures, it's more important than ever that your Linux software be 64-bit ready. Learn how to avoid portability pitfalls when making declarations and assignments, bit shifting, typing, formatting strings, and more.
One of the components of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is GCJ, the GNU Compiler for the Java programming language. GCJ is a compiler that can generate both native code and bytecode from Java source files. GCJ includes a runtime library (libgcj) that provides all runtime support, the core class libraries, a garbage collector, and a bytecode interpreter. Programs created by gcj can dynamically load and interpret class files or native shared libraries resulting in pure, or mixed native/interpreted apps.
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Planet KDE - http://planetKDE.org/
The first half of the Developer Road Show 2006 is done. Coming up is the Cambridge event, and then Paris. And in May, Hamburg. I found some pictures on my phone from the US trip that I’d like to share. So here comes a little summary.
I’d like to start off with a picture of some food. I’m always pleased with dinners when I’m in the US. ;-) That’s one thing these people on the other side of the pond actually can do very well. I had steak, ribs, lobster, you name it. It’s funny how when you visit a country where food is a bit cheaper than in Norway, you tend to spend more money on food. Take this Boston lobster, for instance:
Marius and I had one each, and at the end of the event, Volker had one. I even had a lobster at Andy’s Peer II, a wonderful famous restaurant in the Boston docks.
One thing I cannot understand, is the US breakfast thing. Some countries (they do this in GB too) prefer breakfast to be the least healthy meal of the day. You can either get sugar, powdered sugar, pastry, syrup, and butter, soaked through a loaf covered with candy. Or, you get healthy, dry, chewy bagels that taste nothing. Healthy, good-tasting food is quite hard to get. Marius and I just ended up ordering fruit for breakfast some of the days. ;-) Btw, here’s one of my favorite sugarbombs (click the image to get the full-size version):
Anyway. So had one event in Houston, and one in Boston, so far. The Houston event was held in the Westin Galleria. in the top floor. Aaron Seigo and George Staikos showed up, and we had a great time together. On the left side, two pictures from ICS’s training sessions. One the right, well, you know these guys, don’t you? ;-)
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At the Boston event, we started off attending the LinuxWorld Expo, and here are some pictures from that event. On the left hand side, an attempt to capture the whole event in one picture, and on the right hand side, our booth. Notice that Espen’s (release manager in dev in TT) back-side takes up a quarter of the whole booth. ;-)
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The Boston event was held in the Fenway room at the Hilton Boston Back Bay. That room was very nice; I wish we had a room like that in our office premises ;-).
So now, I’m packing my stuff yet again and getting ready for the ACCU conference in Oxford. Hoping to see some KDE’ers at that event. My talk is about Qt’s threading capabilities, and it’ll be a slight rewrite of the Road Show threads content. Then follows the second half of the Road Show. Yeehaw. :-)
lots of big and little things to write about, i suppose, so i'll attempt to provide a summary:
I finally find some time to write on my being at the Printing Linux Summit in Atlanta from 10 to 12 April.
I was kindly invited by Till Kamppeter from linuxprinting.org and kindly financed by OSDL and its partners (this time, Lanier and HP).
It was the occasion to meet Waldo for the first time in all these (8?!) years. It was for me a pleasure and an honor.
I met for the first time Ellen and Celeste and we had very enjoyable
discussions on usability (a very important topic for me) and other ideas.
I met again Kurt too. Always a pleasure and a great occasion to get an energy boost from his passion and efervescence.
I met again my friends from the LWE 2005 in San Francisco : Till Kamppeter, George Liu and Uli Wehner. Always very interesting and pleasant. And I made new acquaintances. Met and discussed with Jan Muehlig (OpenUsability), Michael Sweet (CUPS), John Cherry (my kind host from OSDL) and Larry Ewing (father of the penguin).
Apart from allowing me to meet great people from which to learn and get inspiration and energy, the summit in Atlanta was an essential opportunity to work and make important progressions in my understanding of the Linux printing world (ever so necessary for what I attempt to do in KDE).
And it, most importantly, allowed me to come to or reinforce these conclusions/decisions:
There are then issues that were decided at the summit and on which active involvement will be required from KDE:
Lots of work to be done, lots of development (code and otherwise) to be brought to good term.
Here is the opportunity for an ambitious young developer to get involved in KDE: come help me with all the work required in KDEPrint and glory lies ahead for you. Or, a bit more seriously, I promise you that you will learn great new things and you will get satisfaction from knowing that your efforts help refining the excellent tools written a few years ago by Michael Goffioul and help KDE staying on the top of things.
It looks like the general idea of klik has come to the MS Windows world now too. I mean the idea of klik (or of Apple's AppDirs, if you want) how to handle software programs: namely, as by and large self-contained units that bring along all their direct dependencies within one single entity; units that are easy to relocate to a USB stick or to a CD-RW medium without a need for any installation process; units that maintain the ability to instantly run from any different place they might be saved to.
While I was browsing the Internet on Thursday afternoon (that was on Atlanta Airport, waiting to board the plane taking me back to Stuttgart), I discovered the Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) website. It said this: "The SVS client isolates applications so that they can be turned on and off or removed instantly. It works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003." And: "SVS is a completely new way to use software. By placing applications and data into managed units called virtual software packages (VSP's), SVS allows you to instantly activate, deactivate or reset applications and to completely avoid conflicts between applications, without altering the base Windows installation. Say goodbye to 'DLL Hell' and 'Registry Rot' forever!"
Today, curious about what our Windows competitors may have learned from us (or what they may even have developed in excess to what we have), I tried to boot up my company notebook running Windows XP. But it didn't want to boot right now -- probably the same problem with the battery/powersupply combo that hit me already twice before.
I remember to have read the name of Altiris, the company that created SVS before, even very recently. But I can't remember exactly in which context, and I surely missed the SVS bit then.
Of course, using SVS to create a self-contained "layer" (as they seem to call their bundles) for an existing proprietary application XYZ first requires you to have the appropriate license of named XYZ.
However, www.svndownloads.com seems to be a site that hosts a lot already-bundled, ready to launch software applications were you do not have to bother: from what I remember, there were listed programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, Internet Explorer, WengoPhone, BitTorrent, Azureus, OpenOffice, Abiword, VLC Media Player, Inkscape, Gimp, Blender, Flightgear, NVU, Stellarium... (I missed KDiff3 though). They even had Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 (Bon Echo), like we do. 
These and some other applications are covered by various free-enough licences (ranging from free-as-in-beer to GPL-compatible); so downloading and putting them to work should pose no licensing problem.
So if any one of you occasionally has to use Windows, have a look at it. Feel free to tell me about pros and cons of SVS (before I waste my own time with it...heh).
Planet Debian - http://planet.debian.org/
After long time working together with Martin Pitt, I uploaded CUPS 1.2rc2 to experimental archive. This version introduces and improves many features; IPv6, LDAP, localized PPD, hardware detection, etc.
Plus, it may make an another bunch of bugs :) For example I noticed KDE-control-center complained by ABI incompatibility around IPP.
CUPS 1.2 provides better i18n support. If you're interested in the translation, see upstream's document. (AFAIK Swedish translation is been working by Daniel Nylander.)
Ride the apologue beam под скрантонем.
... I want an open beer. Courtesy of Jonas.
Fifth and last day of TG06! Nine hours till the power and network goes; twelve hours till the doors close.
The power went out in 1/5 of the hall (d04 and a ton of table switches), and when HOA got the power up again, we were in for a surprise; the Zyxels refused to come back up with management. We tried connecting on the serial console, but they kept on just dying after a few minutes.
We basically ended up doing "sys romr" (full reset) on them, as well as turning off multicast on that segment (since the introduction of multicast was the only real change for them after we got them up in the first place); they're back up now, but we've got no idea whether the sys romr or the lack of multicast fixed it. I guess we'll find out next year :-P
On a different note, it's been fun actually having a working network this year -- from what I gather the best TG network ever. As the party is more or less over, I guess I can also end the blogging; I guess I'll be posting if anything particularity interesting shows up, though, and I'll probably be posting the URL to the configuration and NMS once it gets there.
So, thank you for listening, and I hope you've found at least some of it interesting. Signing off for this time :-)
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Tips for a Debian GNU/Linux System Administrator.
I'm configuring a Debian Sarge/Exim4 host to act as an email gateway between the internet and a private LAN email server. The intent is to forward incoming email messages for some users not only to the internal email host, but also back out to their home email addresses.
In many small and medium sized companies there are a number of servers which have organically grown, with no directory management. I'm curious to know how people would handle adding users in this scenario.
The target of this tutorial is to have a successful installation of the ftp-daemon pureftpd working with virtual user accounts. You should already know about installing pureftpd.
I'm writing this article in hopes that it helps someone else, later. I just spent two days configuring my new e-mail server. It would have only been an afternoon if I'd know what I'm about to share.
If you work with the DNS server bind you'll probably be used to updating the serial number for your zone files manually after making changes. If you're an Emacs user there is a simple automatic way of doing the job.
Previously (http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/229) we learned how to use munin to monitor Debian machines. Now - we need to add some Windows boxes to the mix.
Here's a brief tutorial how to connect a single server to 'the Internet' using multiple physical connections and route various services over different interfaces using a mechanism called 'policy routing'.
After going through the article on Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) you've got gpg up and running. But - every time you need to encrypt, decrypt or sign, you need to enter your passphrase.
Debian suits perfectly for use as a gateway for computers on your LAN. However once bandwidth usage grows it could be handy to just add another internet uplink to your gateway. Debian does not cater for this out of the box so this document describes how to setup your debian gateway for multiple uplinks.
This began as a presumed problem with Debian, since the issue showed up when I upgraded from kernel 2.4.x to 2.6.x, resulting in total loss of functionality of my externally connected PS2 mouse. The Synaptic Touchpad on my Dell Latitude continued to work, however.
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