Is this supposed to be funny ?
Category : Linux, Quick note, Ubuntu
Last Thursday, Lolut, a club which promote the free and open-source culture and of which I’m the (forced 
) manager, organized an install party at school where we put the latest release of Ubuntu on the students machine.
I must say that, as it’s my first action as a member of Lolut, I’m very happy with the outcome. Indeed, 3 days before the event we had only 4-5 people registered on the website and, suddenly, the last day before the party, this number jumped to 15. That number of persons for a little event like that was already a good achievement but in the end it was something like 20-25 people who came and returned at home at the end of the afternoon with a new shiny Ubuntu box 
. Moreover everybody was cool and Lolut’s members really rocked knowing how bad the organization was 
. The only little bad point is that we didn’t have time to really teach everybody some Linux tips&trick apart from a bare how-to-install-package-with-synaptics.
Surprisingly there were almost no problems at all during each installations and, in a short amount of time, everybody was playing with his wobbly windows. As a matter of fact the tweaking of the apt mirror and the proxy was what took most of the time/problems (thanks nextgens for the hard work on that !).
The first one is about the cooperation between Novell and Microsoft on Mono’s Moonlight (Silverlight implementation on top of Mono). The « announcement » can be read on Miguel’s blog : http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html . Miguel had already given some hints about a big announcement on #mono yesterday but refused to tell more so here it is . On a personal note (and since I don’t use Silverlight) I have mixed feelings about that announcement.
It seems to me that, like OOXML, Microsoft is trying to make partners in order to spread his patented technology with low efforts. I already though that Moonlight was a waste of effort (if Microsoft really wants to make their Silverlight a good and credible product they have to make it portable themselves) and, as I already said there, it proves again the dependency link that Mono is slowly acquiring on Microsoft technologies and, IMHO, it’s a pity. Moreover everybody knows that Novell isn’t really high regarded since the Microsoft-Novell patent deal and I’m pretty sure that this announcement won’t make Novell looks any better for most people who will think it’s yet another betrayal.
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The other big news is about the upcoming, completely revamped, ATI Linux Driver ! Indeed, after boring their users with the « One Bug A Day Keeps AIGLX Away »-type releases, the announced rework of the driver internals is finally included in the main development branch.
To have complete information and coverage on what this driver 8.41 (and the releases after it) brings to Linux (*big* performances improvements, R600 support, AIGLX …) I advise you to read the Phoronix in-depth preview : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=821&num=1 and their benchmarks.
EDIT : AMD even announced that they will release specifications and code skeleton to allow the development of completly free drivers starting from the R500 chipset (which is the chipset that Avivo mostly targets). Really big kudos to AMD for these achievements ! link : http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/
Yay, I finally got the latest git version of the Avivo driver to run on my Dell Inspiron 6400 (Ati X1400 Mobility card). /me and my computer’s battery/fans are happy (because now I can really enjoy the advantage of the latest Linux’s tickless feature).
PS : Just for the record, here is why avivo used to do with my desktop in earlier version (funny but not really usable :’) ) :
Big kudos to Jérome Glisse for his hard work on this !
Category : Capharnaüm, Circ, Linux, Mono.Xna, Monodevelop, School, Ubuntu
(I think I’m starting to like these kind of post)
- Yay today I passed my last written exam for the Baccalauréat. Physics/Chemistry was terrific but I found Math easy (which is good because my final mark will depend mostly on this exam mark). Now it just let some practical and oral tests in the following week but it’s not big deal : meaning I will much more time to work on what I like .
- I found some time to add new features to Circ like a revamped parser infrastructure and now Circ take account of its conf file. I pushed my early work on the mirror but it’s still very buggy so I don’t recommend that you upgrade.
- For all Ubuntu performance tuning fan out of there you should try these set of scripts : http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1397 . Basically they remove whitespaces and such from your Gnome’s XML files which improve speed launch of your app and their memory usage.
- Monodevelop 0.14 is out with all the juicy features I described there and more. Yesterday I just discovered that you can know generate automagically properties from a field via the right-click menu. Terrific
- I’m wondering what are the capabitilities of this Thrust thing and if it would run fine on Mono.Xna. Will test it when I find time.
- Tomorrow I have to go to some sort of meeting to be introduced to the job I will make during this summer. Hu who found the dumb idea to make me wake up for 9am when I just finished my exams and when I’m going to a friend’s party this evening …
… Où on mélange les langues.
- I felt like testing new stuff today and my choice was Openbox ! I’m currently running it in my Gnome session and it’s bother quicker, more responsive than Metacity while keeping Gnome advantage (like native look of my Gnome application). Go on try it, it’s damn easy.
- Dell has started to provide Ubuntu PCs to the masse even if European customers will have to wait this summer to know if they can buy Ubuntu boxes.
- Stumbled open this article of the MoMa programmer that shows of to port Winforms applications to Mono. A good starting point if you want to do this kind of thing.
- A good reflection which extend the sacro-saint principe of « premature optimization is the root of all evil » and the idea of simplicity/readability over performances. That won’t prevent me to write some performance tuning articles for C# this summer though (well if laziness don’t fall to early on me )
- A friend blog post (see below for the blog link) introduced me to the concept of ZUI. It would be interesting to see this concept applied to a IRC client like mine (does it improve usability and productivity ?). So far I poked at the Piccolo toolkit which AFAIK limited to Winforms interop for now.
- C’est génial de pas avoir cours le matin et de dormiiiir . Cet aprem deux heures de cours. L’été approche
. - Dernière épreuve du bac de Sport passé mardi : le volley. A mon humble avis on a bien joué même si mes coéquipiers (et mes deux jokers) ne sont pas tout à fait d’accord .
- Parce que je devais le dire, un nouveau blog qui vient de s’ouvrir avec des gens pas trop mauvais aux commandes (ouais même toi Poulet ). A savoir que j’aime tout particulièrement les articles de lasts
- Je crois que j’avais d’autres trucs à dire mais je sais plus trop , j’éditerai si je m’en rapelle.
(Let’s switch language)
The rumor was started today by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on Desdesktoplinux.com that Dell was going to provide user with computers preloaded with the latest Ubuntu.
As you may know Dell launched some times ago a website to let people express their ideas of what Dell could do in its business. By far the most popular idea quickly became the fact to pre-install Linux on Dell computers.
Due to this success Dell announced later that they were considering the thing and today it’s seems that they have finally decided to provide Ubuntu as an alternative to the classical Windows on some hardware (one portable and 3 desktop PC apparently though no prices have been announced). Maybe it’s because Michael Dell, who is using Ubuntu on his personal notebook at home, found Ubuntu to be a real alternative to Windows. Nonetheless it’s a really great new and IMO a first step to a wider spread « Linux for Everybody ». Because, even if people may argue that using only Ubuntu is enslaving them in an other OS/Distribution, it’s still a fantastic occasion for user to DISCOVER what Linux is and in the better way possible (you can’t say that Ubuntu isn’t user-friendly moreover with the latest 7.04 version). If they find Linux interesting they will try to find out what other distribution provide and ultimately make they choice so no need to start a flamewar.
Category : Ubuntu
Comme j’en avait marre d’utiliser les paquets de Meebey juste pour avoir un Mono fonctionnelle et que de toute façon je m’étais décrété à moi même qu’en ce jour de dernière épreuve du bac blanc j’avais mérité mon après-midi power glandouille j’ai décidé de tenter l’aventure.
Avant tout et première précaution d’usage : SAUVEGARDER. Personnellement j’utilise un disque dur externe qui contient tout mes gros fichiers ainsi que l’ensemble des projets sur lesquels je bosse ainsi qu’une partition séparée sur mon DD interne pour les choses diverses. Je n’avais donc qu’a sauver mon /etc et les fichiers de conf de mon dossier personnel (ceux qui commence par un point).
Ensuite j’ai commenté tous les dépôts qui pouvait poser problème comme celui de Meebey, ceux de Nemerle, de Bazaar … (en gros il faut toujours évité d’avoir des dépôts qui propose des fichiers plus à jour que ceux d’Ubuntu). J’ai réinstallé le paquet virtuel ubuntu-desktop au cas où et il ne me restait plus qu’a modifier mon sources.list pour avoir ça :
## Ubuntu Feisty Fawn
deb http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
Ensuite un petit coup de apt-get update et l’icône de notification m’avertit gentiment que j’ai environ 300 mise à jour à faire (fallait s’en douter). Toujours dans ma précaution douteuse j’installe les paquets les plus critiques lors d’une première phase (Linux, les drivers ATI, un peu de Xorg) et tout le reste ensuite.
Bref je n’ai eu aucun problème a déplorer, globalement Feisty est déjà très stable (Gnome est en phase de Beta donc pas trop de bug de ce côté là) et maintenant au moins j’ai toutes les dernières applications à ma disposition : Mono (ouais ), Banshee & Beagle (finis la compilation à la main) et divers autres trucs. Pour l’instant les deux seuls soucis que j’ai rencontré sont mon imprimante réseau qui ne voulait plus fonctionner (pour régler le problème suffit juste de supprimer et de réajouter l’imprimante dans gnome-cups-manager) et Nautilus qui m’affiche mes disques durs en plus des partitions qu’il y’a dessus dans son panel gauche (ça c’est plus chiant et je sais pas comment le régler) surtout que Dell a apparemment la sale habitude de foutre 2 partitions principales de 30 mo sans qu’on sache vraiment à quoi elles servent (quoique c’est sûrement pour vérifier l’authenticité du portable quand on réinstalle Windows), enfin heureusement que Linux peut s’installer sur une partition étendue .
