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Ubuntu Traffic #15 For 2004/12/03

By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

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Introduction
Mailing List Stats For This Week

Threads Covered

1.	2004/10/29 - 2004/11/30	(23 posts)	More On UTF-8 in Hoary
2.	2004/11/15 - 2004/11/29	(29 posts)	Ubuntu Games
3.	2004/11/21 - 2004/11/28	(3 posts)	Cooperation with Debian
4.	2004/11/27 - 2004/12/02	(24 posts)	Rescue Mode on Ubuntu CDs
5.	2004/11/26 - 2004/11/30	(6 posts)	ReStructured Text on the Wiki
6.	2004/11/27 - 2004/11/30	(9 posts)	Rolling Out grepmap
7.	2004/11/27 - 2004/11/28	(4 posts)	KDE Issues
8.	2004/11/28	(4 posts)	Mozilla Firefox GNOME Support
9.	2004/11/28 - 2004/11/29	(9 posts)	Control-Alt-Delete in Ubuntu
10.	2004/11/28 - 2004/11/30	(7 posts)	SVGALIB No More
11.	2004/12/01 - 2004/12/02	(4 posts)	GNOME Panel Changes
12.	2004/11/28 - 2004/12/02	(5 posts)	Ubuntu Security Notifications

Introduction

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of November 27 - December 3, 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

You can sign up for any of the mailing lists summarized here at http://lists.ubuntu.com. You can also join the IRC discussion summarized here in #ubuntu and other channels on the Freenode network: irc.freenode.net. Please join in and maybe you will be featured in the next traffic!

First, the following bits and pieces didn't get a full story but are worth mentioning:

Martin-Éric Racine asked, "I'd like to know if anyone is working on the promotion of Ubuntu as an ideal Entreprise Linux solution?" Jeff Waugh answered, "Definitely. Will you be at Mataró? We are going to have a marketing BOF, where we will discuss these kinds of strategies. If not, hopefully it will be streamed (video or audio) for you to see and participate in on IRC, and there will of course be a report on the BOF, too."
Jeff Waugh pointed the team to some great boot optimisation work by David Zeuthen: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-November/msg01374.html
Benjamin Mako Hill started organizing the key-signing at the Ubuntu conference in Mataró and pointed people a website he set up for the event here: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/ksp-mataro/
Pol asked if there were any tools that could automatically or sporadically index the drives and allow for deep searches? where you don't have to specify the folder and runs in a GUI and not terminal? Jeff Waugh replied to say, "Beagle was announced and demonstrated SIX HOURS before Apple's Spotlight: http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/ It may make it into Hoary."

Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 1105 posts in 4834K.

There were 378 different contributors. 179 posted more than once. 172 posted last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

54 posts in 204K by Matt Zimmerman
41 posts in 293K by Oliver Grawert
34 posts in 131K by Jeff Waugh
27 posts in 156K by Trouilliez Vincent
22 posts in 87K by Colin Watson
Full Stats

1. More On UTF-8 in Hoary
2004/10/29 - 2004/11/30 (23 posts) Subject: "UTF-8 in Hoary"
People: Tsjoklat, thtde, Chris Halls, Colin Watson

This thread actually began in last October when Jeff Waugh asked folks to change their locale to UTF-8 in preparation for Hoary. Many people did at the time and discussion continued through this week on the development list.

Tsjoklat had some problems with UTF-8 working well with his Windows system saying, "Then how is it then that when I use UTF-8 all the files in windows looks like ?IO*(O&(* and so forth and vice versa? When I use ISO it looks fine."

Thtde replied saying, "Please use the option nls=utf8 for mounting your windows partition." Matthias Urlichs replied saying that this should probably the default in Hoary.

Chris Halls asked if, "this should be included in http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryUpgradeNotes" Colin Watson replied to say that, "I don't think the upgrade notes should tell you to disable your old locales; that's a stress-test. Otherwise, yes ..."

2. Ubuntu Games
2004/11/15 - 2004/11/29 (29 posts) Subject: "what's up...free games?"
People: Néstor Hernández Cruz

In a long thread on the ubuntu-users list, the group saw a long conversation on free games. Néstor Hernández Cruz started it off asking, "I've read that there are some free games in ubuntu so, where are they?"

The conversation spanned a lot of ground covering a both free games in Ubuntu (and people's recommendation from these games) and tools to get Windows games to run under Ubuntu. The thread may provide a good resource for anybody struggling with either of those problems.

In particular, Trouilliez Vincent recommended the flight simulator "Flightgear." Also recommended was Search and Rescue which is in universe. Others suggested tetrinet and racer.

3. Cooperation with Debian
2004/11/21 - 2004/11/28 (3 posts) Subject: "Cooperation with Debian"
People: Martin Pitt

Jérôme Marant sent a message to the Ubuntu list about enhancing collaboration with Debian and responding to a particular entry in a change log which he thought tends to make Ubuntu users think that Debian silently stole the patch without giving any credits.

Martin Pitt replied saying, "changelogs should be formulated in a more neutral fashion. However, I assure you that this did not happen deliberately and is an exception, not the rule. Please take our excuses for this."

More generally, Martin said that:

We do not have an official guide how to cooperate with Debian, so I can only describe my own way here. In general I submit bug reports with patches for small issues or write to d-devel for bigger architectural changes (like the recent adoption of the Utopia enhancements). In some particular cases I work directly with the maintainer (Sjoerd Simons is an outstanding example here). We basically develop packages together and communicate over IRC, which is more efficient than submitting bugs.

Personally I find this style of cooperation quite satisfactory. Of course I filed many bugs with patches that are not included in the Debian package (yet), but that is the package maintainer's prerogative and I do not want to force any solution.

4. Rescue Mode on Ubuntu CDs
2004/11/27 - 2004/12/02 (24 posts) Subject: "No recovery-function on ubuntu-cd's?"
People: Sascha Morr, Colin Watson

Sascha Morr sent a message to ubuntu-devel saying, "A friend installs windows after ubuntu and windows overwrite his mbr. all right i think ubuntu is based on debian and boot the CD but what this!?! No recovery function there. Haven't i find it or is it not existent?"

Colin Watson replied to say:

You get to boot from the install CD, run through the installer up to the start of the partitioning stage (but not further; up to this point the installer doesn't write anything to the disk), press alt-f2, type 'mkdir -p /target', type 'mount <wherever the Ubuntu root device is> /target', type 'chroot /target', type 'grub-install "(hd0)"'.

Yes, this is unwieldy; I'm part-way through writing a rescue mode for the installer that will eliminate most of these steps.

5. ReStructured Text on the Wiki
2004/11/26 - 2004/11/30 (6 posts) Subject: "reStructuredText"
People: Matt Zimmerman

Matt Zimmerman posted a message to the documentation team with a critique of the use of ReStructured Text as a format for writing text on the wiki saying:

Advantages of reStructuredText:

Approximately WYSIWYG

The renderer produces warnings when it won't do quite what you expect

Disadvantages of reStructuredText:

Unforgiving (I almost never get it right on the first attempt)

Produces warnings even when the user's intent is easily deduced

In pursuit of WYSIWYG, places cosmetic burdens on the user as part of the markup (e.g., enumerated lists are just painful)

In my opinion, the nature of a wiki implies that the most important attributes for the markup language are that it be:

Forgiving

Predictable

Easy to learn

so that nearly anyone can jump in and start contributing immediately. I think that reStructuredText fails on all three accounts.

Some documents which I originally wrote in moin have since been converted to reStructuredText, and I find them difficult to maintain. Has the documentation team standardized on reStructuredText? If so, can I beg you to reconsider, at least for simple wiki documents? :-)

A number of people on the documentation team agreed with him but they didn't come to any firm conclusion this week.

6. Rolling Out grepmap
2004/11/27 - 2004/11/30 (9 posts) Subject: "grepmap"
People: Matt Zimmerman, Scott James Remnant

Matt Zimmerman sent a message to the Ubuntu-devel list reporting his experiences with grepmap so far:

I've tested out grepmap on the systems available to me, and it hasn't caused any problems.

The only difference I noticed in lsmod output was that joydev was no longer loaded. I do not and did not have a joystick attached to any of my systems, so I don't know why it was loaded before, but this was consistently different on more than one system.

If no one has anything negative to report, I think it's time to add it to the base seed and have it installed by default when ubuntu-base is upgraded.

Scott James Remnant replied saying:

Hmm... the inputmap parser is one of the more complicated ones, and the shell code in original hotplug that compares the fields is remarkably dodgy.

I'm pretty sure I got it right in grepmap, could you send me a copy of your /proc/bus/input/devices to look at?

I've also been communicating with hotplug/udev upstream about what we should look at in the future; whether to stick with the current shell hotplug, move to the C-based hotplug-ng or whether udevsend/udevd is the way forwards. I'll let you know what I find out.

Later on in the thread, Matt Zimmerman went ahead and added grepmap to the based seed and announced it on the list. Colin Watson replied that it was now in debootstrap. Matt Zimmerman follow up (yet again) to say that it was also in ubunut-meta.

7. KDE Issues
2004/11/27 - 2004/11/28 (4 posts) Subject: "kdebase FTBFS"
People: Matt Zimmerman, Daniel Stone

Matt Zimmerman sent off a message saying:

In case anyone is interested, kdebase is failing to build from source:

http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~lamont/buildLogs/k/kdebase/4:3.3.1-2/

Something is going wrong in the general vicinity of libXinerama. Seems like there must be a missing dependency somewhere along the chain, but it's not immediately obvious where.

It's possible that it needs re-libtoolizing with a libtool >= 1.5.2-2 so that it doesn't try to link directly with all library dependencies down the chain.

Daniel Stone replied suggesting a fix:

Build-Depends: libxinerama-dev | xlibs-static-pic (<< 6.8.1), libxau-dev | xlibs-static-pic (<< 6.8.1), libxdmcp-dev | xlibs-static-pic (<< 6.8.1).

That's just from my recollection of what kdebase needs; you might need libxxf86misc-dev or libxxf86vm-dev also. But it can be done.

8. Mozilla Firefox GNOME Support
2004/11/28 (4 posts) Subject: "mozilla-firefox-gnome-support"
People: Matt Zimmerman, Thom May

Matt Zimmerman asked the development team a simple question (actually, just pasting the description of a package):

Description: Support for Gnome in Mozilla Firefox This is an extension to Mozilla Firefox that allows it to use protocol handlers from Gnome-VFS, such as smb or sftp, and other Gnome integration features.

Is this something that ought to be seeded for Hoary?

Thom May replied saying, "I added it to the Desktop seed proposals a while back IIRC. Yes, we should definitely have it." Matt Zimmerman checked it out and replied saying:

It displays an evil dialog:

"Firefox is not currently set as your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser?

[X] Always perform this check when starting Firefox"

I think that either the dialog should vanish entirely, or at least the default state of the checkbox should be changed, per the Golden Rule.

Thom replied and said he would be make sure to patch it out (and even vaguely remembered doing so in the past).

9. Control-Alt-Delete in Ubuntu
2004/11/28 - 2004/11/29 (9 posts) Subject: "Suggestion: make control-alt-delete bring up system monitor by default"
People: Martin Alderson, Jeff Waugh, Erik Bågfors, Michael Banck

Martin Alderson posted a suggestion that control-alt-delete should bring up the system monitor by default justifying it by saying that:

It's good for Windows converts who will be used to this behaviour.

It's good for all users because it's a very easy shortcut to get to it. When your mouse has borked up and you are desperately trying to kill an offending process, the last thing you want is to have to tab round all the panels to get to it.

Any chance this could be done?

Jeff Waugh replied saying, "Yeah, either system monitor, or the logout dialog. I believe other distros have a patch to allow for this, which would save us a bit of time. I suspect the patch would be found in packages of control-center. If you can find one, I think we'd be happy to integrate it."

Erik Bågfors disagreed saying that:

I don't think this is a good idea.

I used to have ctrl-alt-delete to lock the screen and while it's very simple to reach it's also very simple to accidentaly get to it. In text-mode this reboots the machine. I happened to reboot it a number of times by mistake. If this is done make ctrl-alt-del to reboot is disabled in text-mode.

Michael Banck replied to Erik saying, "Seriously, I think it is impossible to achieve consistency between text mode and X, and I do not think it is worthwhile to strive for this. Whoever uses text mode these days should be considered somebody who knows what they're doing."

10. SVGALIB No More
2004/11/28 - 2004/11/30 (7 posts) Subject: "Kiss svgalib goodbye?"
People: Matt Zimmerman

Matt Zimmerman proposed removing svgalib saying:

There are only two packages in main which require svgalib: SDL and GGI. I have uploads prepared which would remove svgalib support from both, and allow svgalib to pass into universe.

There are much better solutions than svgalib available on modern systems (X and framebuffer), and svgalib applications must be setuid root, which frequently introduces security vulnerabilities.

Any objections to uploading these packages and demoting svgalib to universe?

The proposal elicited nothing but positive feedback on the list. Let it be done.

11. GNOME Panel Changes
2004/12/01 - 2004/12/02 (4 posts) Subject: "panel layout changes and new upstream gnome-panel ... what to do ?"
People: Sebastien Bacher, Matt Zimmerman, Jeff Waugh

Sebastien Bacher sent a message to the development list with a mix of news and two suggestions:

The GNOME upstreams have just made some big changes to the gnome-panel. They have switched from the crappy vfolder system to the new gnome-menus module (which is an implementation of the freedesktop specifications). In the same time the vfolder code has been dropped from gnomevfs.

The issue now is that the "computer menu" patch was using the vfolder system and need to be rewritten. In the same time some GNOME 2.9.2 modules require the new gnome-vfs2 2.9.1 and are holded (pushing the new gnome-vfs2 = removing the vfolder code = pushing a new panel ...)

So we have basically two options:

go ahead, upload all the new GNOME modules now and switch back to a "standard" panel layout for some time (time to rewrite the panel changes).

hold the GNOME updates the time to get the new patch ready.

BTW If we want to make changes to the gnome-panel layout for hoary (ie: adding a "places" menu) that's probably the right moment ...

Jeff Waugh replied than the later "go ahead and upload" model sounded best at the moment. Matt Zimmerman asked, "Who is working on completing the panel enhancements as Hoary feature goal? Can we extend the scope of that project to include adapting the existing changes to the new model?" Jeff Waugh replied to Matt saying, "That became slightly less clear overnight it seems, I'll have a better answer for that later. But no, these are easily separable tasks, and planned previously to be done separately."

12. Ubuntu Security Notifications
2004/11/28 - 2004/12/02 (5 posts) Subject: "[various]"

Martin Pitt posted another weeks worth of Ubuntu Security Notification to the list notifying folks of another rash of bugs and pointing to their fixes. These included the following: