Colin.Guthr.ie Illegitimi non carborundum

Upgrading to Mandriva 2009.1

Well it's that time of the bi-year again. The twice annual Mandriva upgrade! Well in fairness, I actually skipped 2009.0 at work, so it's been a year since I last fiddled there. There was no particular reason for me skipping this release, I just think we were quite busy and a convenient time to do the upgrades didn't really pop up.

So, what happened I hear you cry? Well, surprisingly little drama thankfully! There were a few issues, but they were mostly minor so I only mention them here in case they trip up the less ninja skilled out there :p

Migrating your old IMAP to Google Mail

Some years ago, my mum needed email access from several locations but didn't wand to use a webmail system as her primary interface. Well using an IMAP system made sense. It could provide a webmail frontend when it was needed, but use a proper email client when at her workstation. At the time her ISP didn't offer an IMAP account, so I setup a simple box at her house to handle her incoming mail and give her a Horde IMP webmail interface. Her broadband connection was fast enough that she could connect to it when she was away from home and do the essential tasks.

Over the years, maintaining this box has become more and more hassle, not to mention that the box is an ugly biege thing that makes a lot of noise!

Thankfully, Google now offer IMAP access to their email system and also allow you to register with your own domain name. Perfect!! But with over 2.5gigs worth of data in several hundred thousand emails, migrating to the new system and still keeping the messages looked like it could be a challenge. Well it was! But it wasn't all that bad thanks to imapsync, although there were still some problems I encountered that I'm documenting here so that others will hopefully benefit!

Desktop Notifications and User Interaction

For many years now I've been following the work done over at Galago Project with regards to the Desktop Notifications Specification.

I've never been a massive fan of the design of these popups and have followed work done in AWN and other systems to produce more attractive alternatives, but these always turned out to be a little less than satisfactory. I have toyed with the idea of writing my own implementation (or just a style for notification-daemon itself as it is pluggable), but never really had time to focus on this.

So it was with considerable delight that I noticed MacSlow's latest blog post about the work he was doing on notify-osd. Once I remembered that he's now working for Canonical and I recalled an article on Mark Shuttleworth's blog a while back on which I commented, I realised that I actually had a bit of beef with the approach being taken by Ubuntu...

Gone Fishin’

Well, I'm back now from the KDE coding sprint in Genoa. It was an awesome trip and I met a lot of nice people as well as seeing some of the beautiful city of Genoa.

The trip started well, but sadly my connecting flight from CDG to Genoa was cancelled.... due to "Fish on the Runway"!!! Fish???? Turns out the airport is very close to the sea and large waves carried some fish as they broke over the runway. This in turn attracted some birds. Now birds and jet engines do not get on very well, so closing the airport seemed sensible! The wind probably played some part in this decision too! Anyway both myself and K

Sound in Mandriva 2009.0

As some people know, I seem to have managed to get myself into the situation where I am responsible for the sound system in Mandriva.... I'm not quite sure how this happened but it was probably a result of me opening my big mouth and spouting my opinion and someone else basically daring me to live up to my talk.... Anyway, 2008.1 went well and the decision to default to using PulseAudio turned out to be pretty good all in all. I made it my mission to ensure that we had as smooth as possible an integration and have continued to follow up as many bug reports as my time permits. I've actually been pretty surprised that there were not more issues and it all seemed to go surprisingly smoothly! Mandriva were given specific mention when the PulseAudio author, Lennart Pottering, talked about distro roll out of pulseaudio: "Some distributions did a better job adopting PulseAudio than others. On the good side I certainly have to list Mandriva, Debian, and Fedora. OTOH Ubuntu didn't exactly do a stellar job.". I'm very glad to say that Ubuntu has learned from this mistake and I've spoken several times to the guy who is now looking after pulse integration and things will definitely be better for them!

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Champagne Receptions and Free Software

Well I've just returned from a very enjoyable trip to Paris. I hopped on a cheap flight from Prestwick to the "Paris" airport of Beauvais. It was actually all fairly painless and the bus from Beauvais is pretty well organised and drops you in a handy spot fairly central. Michael Scherer (a fellow Mandriva contributor) was kind enough to meet me at the bus station and guide me through the rabbit warren that is the Paris Metro to meet a few other folk including Nanar (Olivier Thauvin) and Thomas "TMB" Backlund (all four of us were staying at Nanar's place). A few other familiar faces where there to! It was great to begin putting faces to the names of the people I've been talking to and working with for the last few years!

Network booting + NFS root with Mandriva

I've been running a version of Mandriva on my VIA EPIA machine for a number of years but recently the question came up on the Cooker mailing list so I thought I'd pull my finger out and actually document this a little!