Mandriva and EEE PC, 2009.0 specs

EEE PC
Maybe people are not aware of this fact but we, at Mandriva, really love EEE PC. We love them so much that Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (released on April 9th 2008) is fully compatible with EEE PC 700/701, out of the box (no patch needed), with all features working. And as a bonus, we give you about half an hour more of battery autonomy, compared to the distribution bundled with EEE PC. For EEE PC 900, you need to upgrade kernel and hal-info packages from security / bugfix update media (if you are installing from Mandriva Free or Mandriva Powerpack installer, just accept security updates at the end of install). We haven't got a EEE PC 901 in our hands yet, but we will make sure to fix any incompatibilities found, if any.

Even better : if you have Mandriva Flash 2008 Spring edition (released last week), you can use the new "install from flash key" feature to install Mandriva on your EEE PC (no USB CD/DVD drive nor network install required) and it will work on 700/701/900 EEE PC (no changed needed).

Hint : if you are coming to GUADEC at Istanbul, you should be happy with GUADEC USB key this year ;)

Mandriva Linux 2009
We have just posted technical specifications for Mandriva 2009.0 (scheduled for early October), based on both internal and community feedbacks. Now, we just need to implement as much as possible of them ;)

Guadec, Gstreamer, Sigur Ros

GUADEC
\o/ flights and hotel for GUADEC are booked. For people who planned to go Golden Horn hotels recommended by GUADEC organisation, I suggest using Go Voyages (or Go Volo in english) to book : their price is even lower than GUADEC group rate. And you can even use some coupons to lower the bill ( Thanks to Wikio ).

Gstreamer
I really like being able to use gstreamer to do simple file conversion ; for instance, if you want to convert a FLV file (containing a mp3 stream) to a mp3 file, just run :
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="file.flv" ! flvdemux ! filesink location="file.mp3"

Sigur Ros
Sigur Ros next album will be released on June 23. In the mean time, you can download the first track of the album, see the clip for the first track (quite nice), listen to the full album in stream (too bad, it is in flash) and you can pre-order the album either in a physical copy or a digital copy, with no DRM (MP3, 320Kbps), for a reasonable price.. I like intelligent marketing like this.

Geotag photography with n810

In preparation to my trip to Nepal, I'd like to share with you experiments I've conducted in the previous weeks regarding GPS in n810 (thanks Nokia for selecting me in Maemo developer program, BTW) and geotagging photos.

First, some comments about GPS in n810 :

• it is a good way to learn some things about GPS technology (thanks to Wikipedia) when you want to understand why it is taking so long to get a position fix. And then, you start to speak about sky search (take about 12 minutes to download satellites constellation rough positions for your position, called almanac, valid for several weeks), cold fix (take about 6 minutes to download satellite precise position, called ephemeris, only valid 4 hours) and warm fix (take about 30s, when ephemeris is still valid in the device).
• Of course, there is no way to easy way to guess what kind of search n810 is doing when starting GPS. For the first time you use it in a geographical area, you can expect to wait for about 20 minutes. If you didn't get a GPS fix in the last 4 hours, you can expect a fix between 5 to 10 minutes. If you got a fix in the last 4 hours, you can get a fix in 30s to 1 minute (it is not impossible, I've been able to get such fast hotfix in a moving bus in Paris ;)
  
• You should really install Maemo-Mapper. Preinstalled software (called Maps) is a stripped version of Navicore. Unfortunately, it is barely usable, since its main goal is to see license for full version. Its main feature is using vectoral maps (so you get France maps for about 300MB) and being able to do address search offline. It is quite funny to discover it uses ogg vorbis audio files, despite no "official" support for Ogg Vorbis in IT2008 from Nokia. OTOH, Maemo Mapper, after preloading maps from either OpenStreetmap, Google, Yahoo or Virtual Earth, is way more powerful : you can easily record tracks, way points, import POI (with help of gpsbabel, you get virtually import any GPS data into Maemo Mapper).
  

My first experiment was done in Brussels during FOSDEM in February. I spent an entire day walking and photographing in Brussels, with GPS tracking enabled (with Maemo-Mapper) on my n810. It worked fine with a full charge (about 7h of tracking) but the initial fix was quite slow to get (it was my first real experience with GPS, I learned a lot about it after FOSDEM). You take a photo of n810 displaying GPS time (to record time offset between camera and GPS) and then, you can start shooting and keep Maemo-Mapper in tracking mode. A nice addition to Maemo-Mapper would add a "low consumption" mode (ie no maps nor tracks drawing) but if you disable "auto-center","display track" and "show GPS details", you can get something decent.

Then, back at home, after developing Raw photos (using Ufraw), I geotagged them, using gpscorrelate and gpx track from Maemo-Mapper and pushed photos to Flickr. Et voilà : they are available on Flickr, with geo data. I've noticed a Geotag extension for F-Spot is being developed so I hope to be able to use it for my next batch of photos.

Crazy April

I'm feeling a crazy month of April coming :

• we are in the final rush for Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (RC2 was released some days ago) and it should be out in the first days of April.
• I've accepted new responsabilities at Mandriva : in addition of being GNOME / HAL / Freedesktop.org guy, I'm now Manager of France Engineering team (located in Paris), whose main task is to work on Mandriva Linux distribution (as well with our Brazilian colleagues).
• As part of those new responsibilities, I'll be flying to Linux Foundation Collaboration Submit to attend Desktop Architect Meeting (I'll be part of the Distributions panel) in Austin, TX from April 8 to April 10 (but I'll be in Austin from April 5).
  
• just one week after this meeting, I'll be flying to Nepal for two weeks holidays (part visit, part trekking). I'll share my photo setup soon.
  

A side note for French readers : I've started back to blog in french on subjects only relevant to French people (or French speakers). Those posts won't be visible in Planet GNOME and Planet Mandriva.

Recovering photos from a damaged card

4 years ago, I visited Vietnam but I had a big problem with my digicam at that time. Just before the trip, I bought a microdrive 2GB (second hand) and changed my camera from an old Powershot A20 to Powershot S50 (only Canon compact camera to handle microdrives at that time). And I did a newbie mistake :"ok, with one 2GB card, I'll have plenty of space for the entire trip". And of course, the card died on the 4th day of my 2-week trip (and I was fortunate to travel with other people who lend me additional cards I unload quite often to CD-R in various Internet shops across Vietnam).

When I came back, I tried to access the card with my card reader but kernel was not seeing anything. But I never dumped the card, thinking "one day, I'll send it to a recovery company if it doesn't cost too much".

And today, I thought : why not try again, since I heard good opinions about PhotoRec (I quickly met its author at Solutions Linux last month). And guess what : it worked !!

I started PhotoRec in "scan the entire drive" mode and it found 159 files. Then I tried to mount the drive as a FAT partition and it also worked (maybe kernel code for vfat or for usb retry became more robust since last time I checked) and recovered 155 files.

For now, I've been able to confirm 139 files as valid (retrieved by both PhotoRec and direct mount access, with identical md5sum). I have 16 files from "mount method" which have different md5sum as their PhotoRec counterparts. According to file naming, I'm still missing 54 files but I think I have removed them during my trip.

So, I had to dig a little into Photorec recoved files ; some files contains additional padding or even start of next file on disk, after last JPEG end mark (FFD9), which is changing file md5sum. I confirmed 15 files from "mount method" had similar md5sum than PhotoRec files, truncated with help of Hexedit. The last one has only a partial recovery version from counterpart from PhotoRec recovery

Fortunately, I found interesting informations on PhotoRec website, such as file numbering being included in Canon EXIF JPEG file (Canon maker tag 0008, see here or use exiv2 and check image number field), which helped me to fill gaps in the PhotoRec recovered files.

According to file naming/numbering, 54 files are missing but I think I have removed them during my trip, when I discovered photos were bad.

In short, I've been able to recover all files from my damaged microdrive (I don't know yet if I'll dump it in the trash or keep it as a souvenir), thanks to PhotoRec. For people interested, I've uploaded those pictures to my Flickr account (I haven't sorted them, despite my recent decision to try to only upload selected photos Flickr, but I want to be sure those specific pictures are hosted in several physical locations ;), and I've tagged them with photorec tag.

Mandriva Linux is NOT a purely "KDE distribution"

No, Michael, Mandriva Linux is NOT a purely "KDE distribution" and it hasn't been for the last 7 years !

• All our tools, including our installer, are developed using GTK2 (mostly using Perl bindings for Gtk)
• our theme (Ia Ora) is available in both GNOME (ie Gtk2) and KDE (Qt) flavor, to make sure applications have a similar look, even if they are not run under their "native" environment
• we favor default applications to "native" ones for each desktop (ie using KDE applications under KDE and GNOME apps under GNOME)
• we try to develop features and graphics design in both environments at the same time
  
• we ship our live CDs (called Mandriva One) in two flavors (KDE and GNOME)
• people using our classic installer products (either Powerpack or Free) are asked if they want to install GNOME or KDE (or any other environments we ship, like XFCE)
• we even offered a GNOME based Mandriva Flash to all attendee to GUADEC last year in Birmingham.
• for Firefox, we even split the gnome specific modules in a separate package which is installed by defaut only for GNOME install
• we developped a XSettings server for KDE which tries to ensure GTK2 applications looks decent under KDE, following KDE settings (unfortunately, it is not possible to do the same for Qt/KDE apps under GNOME)

So, I repeat, Mandriva Linux is NOT a purely KDE distribution. It might have been 8 or 9 years ago, when it was originally created, but it is no longer the case for more than half a decade now.

Migrated

For quite some time, I planned to shutdown my personal server at home but finding reliable services which provide exactly can be tricky. So, as always, I'm doing this in several phases.

For my blog, I migrated my own personal Wordpress to blogger, thanks to wptoblogger.py. You can now found it at http://blog.crozat.net/. For those using RSS feeds, please update your feed subscription (Planet GNOME is already updated).

For mail, I've been using a custom setup, with mail forwarding from my registrar (Gandi) to my ISP then using fetchmail + procmail + courier-imap and either Evolution or SquirrelMail to be able to access my email from anywhere. I've evaluated GMail (since it features IMAP) and it worked nicely (except for Evolution 2.20 which had issues with some strangely mime encoded titles but it has been fixed in 2.21.x release). And I must confess I've been using Gmail web interface for some months and they have almost converted me.. So, I decided to switch my domain mail directly to Google Apps, which is now effective for one week now.

For instant messaging, I was using my own jabber server. I've switched to Google Apps for that too. I still need to migration my transport for other IM services but this is not a big issue.

Monitor calibration (epilogue)

So far, so good :

• argyllcms 0.70 beta7 is now packaged on Mandriva contrib. I had to fight with Jam (because argyllcms insists on shipping a copy of libtiff and libusb and I didn't want those in our package) and with FORTIFY_SOURCE (causing buffer overflow in most tools, because of strange usage of printf, so I disabled FORTIFY_SOURCE).
• I've updated lprof package in Mandriva contrib to CVS snapshot and I got it to work nicely with Huey colorimeter. There are still some build issues to workaround (calreports.html is missing from CVS, preventing build, embedded copy of argyllcms has the same FORTIFY_SOURCE issue, build being not lib64 aware) and application bugs, such as not disabling screensaver when running calibration (unlike argyllcms), calibration windows badly interacting with Ia Ora QT theme, causing misrendering) but nothing not really serious.
• Until kernel is fixed to ignore Huey device for HID, you can unbind it from usbhid module, using echo -n "usb_id" > /sys/bus/drivers/usbhid/unbin. I'v created udev rule to handle this workaround until fix is merged in our kernel and put it in both argyllcms and lprof packages.

PulseAudio, calibration (end of story), Ogg support on Maemo

PulseAudio

I guess most people already know about it but after two weeks of tests, we (Mandriva engineering team) have decided to switch next Mandriva Linux release (2008 Spring, scheduled in April 2008) to PulseAudio. We are hoping it will help to fill the gap and fixes the issues our users have sometime, some may be caused by the cross desktop nature of our distribution (we don't want to favor one desktop environment over another). Switch has started on cooker, we will still need to fix some issues, but things are progressing nicely, thanks to Colin Guthrie hard work.

Display calibration

Thanks to everybody who commented on my post about choosing a display calibration device. Unfortunately, nobody reported test for Huey Pantone calibrator. So I decided to go ahead and buy one (in a shop where I could return it for any reason, I'm not completely crazy).

First, a funny fact : there was a sticker translating in french product description and you could read "For Windows 2000 and XP, Mac OS X 10.3 or OS more efficient (in English, real text is "or higher operating system". I guess we can say Linux is more efficient ;)

Second, I tried to build lprof from CVS but I could get it to recognize the device (since Lprof maintainers commented on my previous post, it would be nice to do a new development snapshot, guys ;) but I didn't spend too much time on it (I'll investigate later this week). So, I switched to Argyllcms 0.70 beta 7 (no Mandriva package yet, I'll create one soon). It recognized the device (nice) but couldn't talk with it.. After a little debugging, Huey device is a "false" HID device so kernel decided to handle it with usbhid module. Unloading usbhid module fixed this issue and Argyllcms was able to communicate with calibrator and I was able to tune my monitor !!

I'll have to ask Pascal to add Huey to HID ignore list, just like the fix he did two weeks ago to fix Wacom tablets (this fix was originally done by Frederic Lepied, XFree86 wacom initial driver author and who used to be Mandriva CTO sometime ago) years ago in kernel 2.4 and it was forgotten in Linux usb 2.6 stack and nobody noticed until today :(

So, if you are looking for a cheap display calibration device which doesn't require any additional firmware, I suggest Pantone Huey.

Ogg on Maemo

Hub, check Tuomas work, he has reported good progress on Ogg support in built-in media player on IT2008. Still some issues but it is really encouraging.

Choosing a monitor color calibration device

Christmas is coming, so I'm looking into buying a monitor calibration device. Requirements are simple :

• must be supported under Linux by Free Software ie must be supported by Argyllcms
• must be cheap (since it appears most of the features are implemented in software and not in hardware).

Version 0.70beta7 have added support for two cheap calibrators, Spyder2 Express and Huey. I know Ross has been successful with Spyder2 Express but I'm not a big fan of requiring firmware extraction from Windows driver and moreover ColorVision (maker of Spyder2) don't plan to support Free Software in future version of their product.

Huey doesn't seem to need firmware to work, but it is hacking around USB HID protocol, which requires some udev hackery to prevent kernel usbhid driver to handle the device, just like Wacom tablets (well, thanks to Pascal, this Wacom problem will be fixed in future kernel driver). So it would be better to "support" this device, over Spyder2, if possible.
I'm looking for reports of success use of Huey with Argyllcms on Linux (but if I don't get some, I'll probably buy a Spyder2 Express).

My (almost) perfect portable audio player

For almost 3 years, I've been enjoying my iAudio M3 player. But it seems its life is coming to a end slowly : power adapter died two months ago so I switched to USB recharge but an entire night is needed to refill battery. Moreover, it forces full internal harddrive rescan when booting the device (which scans for new tracks) and battery is also showing signs of age (It lasts for about 1 or 2 hours and the full rescan at startup doesn't help). It is still a great device, with Ogg/Vorbis support but I was hoping to change it with iAudio X7 (when/if it ever announced), because I want a portable USB OnTheGo drive as additional storage for my camera.

So, until there are news about X7, I decided to try to use my n800 as my portable audio player. And I must confess I kind of like it, even if it isn't perfect :

• I've tested the various alternative media players available and I've switched back to Nokia default media player. Why ? I've been hit by Canola battery eating background process with my 770 and I don't think installing a webserver to configure it is a good idea for a mobile device. Kagu is playlist based (I'm a "shuffle all my tracks" person) and way too long to startup. UKMP was nice until I discovered it was issuing poll on the device (thanks strace) when not playing and minimized, which is bad for autonomy.
• I'd like to have native Ogg/Vorbis playback but even with additional gstreamer tremor packages ; there are even two different versions available and none is working properly with default media player, so it might be a bug in Nokia media player. But it would be nice if both "ogg support gstreamer" packages could be merged (I've already sent some fixes to one of the packages author). So, for now, I'm back to encoding to MP3 when copying music to the device. Not perfect but it has the pro to increase battery life since decoding is handled by internal DSP.
• Audioscrobbler support : that is THE missing feature from M3. I enabled it in UKMP (thanks to maemoscrobbler), which was nice but since I reverted to Nokia player, I missed it. I guess somebody needs to write a small daemon listening to Media player D-Bus event (to notice when a file playback is finished) and kicked a maemoscrobbler D-Bus event.
• LastFM support : it isn't that important (since I can't use it in bus/metro) but it would be nice. For a long time, I was waiting for this and it is now over, thanks to Alberto Garcia and Vagalume. It is only missing lastfm: uri support in browser and love/ban buttons in the main UI. I guess I should fill bug reports :)
• Podcast support : I listen to a small list of podcasts but getting them automatically would be nice. Unfortunately, RSS internal client is horrible in that regard. But thankfully, Nokia VideoCenter can be used as a Podcast client and it isn't that bad (even if it does use a non standard UI). Now, the only problems remaining are missing bookmarking in a playback file (audiobook for instance) and podcasts being listed as available tracks in Media player main shuffle list :)
• Screen protection : I think every n800 user agrees the shipped case "protection" is awful, moreover if you compare with 770 screen casing. For some time, I've been using my DS case protection which is nice but too big. So, I ordered the official Nokia case for n800 (which is exactly what I want) but it is still in out of stock for one month now ; I even got a call from Nokia Store explaining they were expecting a shipment for October 15.. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting.

Overall, using n800 as a audio player is a nice experience which could be improved somehow (let's hope IT2008 will be better in that regard). It might even fill my need for next iAudio audio player...

MandrivaLinux 2008.0 One GNOME edition available

Like all stars who are always a little late, Mdv 2008.0 One GNOME CD (ie installable LiveCD) is now available for download either on ftp mirror (for instance on Proxad or through Bittorrent). If you never tried MandrivaLinux and you like GNOME, this version is for you.

At last GUADEC, I discussed with many people who told me they went to Linux thanks to Linux-Mandrake and later switched to other distributions, feeling we lost our connection with the community. I can assure you we didn't (but maybe, seen from outside the company, it might have feel that way) and with this new release, I'd like people who used to be Mandrivians or people who tried our distribution years ago and were disappointed (and think it didn't change since) to try our new release. Just do it ;) And now, with Free Software virtualization solution available like VirtualBox, it has never been easier to test a new distro (and you will discover MandrivaLinux 2008.0 installs and configures VirtualBox addons automatically for even better experience, thanks to Blino hard work).

GNOME 2.20 is out

Excellent news (but I'm guessing most people know now) : GNOME 2.20 is out and it seems I didn't screw the release (I'm always a little anxious when I'm cooking a new GNOME release as part of GNOME release team). Thanks you for everybody who helped this release, including developpers, translators, bug reports, documentation writers and I forgetting people, as always.

As a side note, GNOME 2.20 is already in Mandriva Cooker and will be available in Mandriva Linux 2008.0 RC2 which should be released next week.

Done with GUADEC photos

I've finally finished to select, sort and "develop" my GUADEC photos (available on this flickr set). It took me too much time to complete it for various reasons :

• sort my photos and only publish relevant ones (until then, I was just pushing all photos on my flickr account to let people sort my mess ;) ),
• experiment with RAW photography (which is extremely time consuming when you aren't sure which settings you should tweak),
• tune results with GIMP (Cropping, Levels, Curve and Tone Mapping),
• make sure all photos are titled correctly and geopositionned too (I don't have a GPS received yet).

My next photos to take care of are those I took in Thaïland in June. Hopefully, they aren't in RAW format (I have 830 to sort) and I did a lot of try & errors for some monuments, so maybe it will be done for end of September ;)

Improving patches management at distro level

Federico, your remarks about patch management for distributions are quite similar to a mail I sent two years on Mandriva maintainers list, about my dream process for patch management. At that time, Git wasn't really on the radar but I thought it could be interesting to share it with everybody, now we might have tools to help :

Here are some ideas I've been having on how we could improve maintainer workflow concerning patches integration (which is quite critical for GNOME or KDE, for instance). I've been influenced by Mark Shuttleworth keynote about some stuff Ubuntu is working on (I was refering to Mark keynote at GUADEC 2005, about Launchpad).

Most of the time, maintainers are applying various patches on upstream source to generate its packages. For a good part, patches are extracted from CVS/SVN/whatever versioning system is used by upstream software maintainers, either in HEAD branch or other branches. Other potential patch sources are other distributions packages, upstream bugzilla or maintainers own brain.

Extracting patches from various CVS can be quite time consuming (this has improved with SVN since the original writing) and keeping history of patches, when upstream partially merged them is very time consuming.

When patches are written by maintainers, upstream integration is usually slow because it requires either submitting bugs upstream with patches or committing patches on upstream CVS once review process has approved it.

In order to improve this, maintainers could use a versioning system and/or magic scripts doing the following :

• upstream revisions and branches would be accessible in the repository just like using upstream repository

• Mandriva patched source would be using a separate branch containing source with all patches applied. Each patch could be done applied in a separate sub-branch, Mandriva top branch would merge all those sub-branches (this last point might not be that useful, since we are already using "Repository System" for building packages.

• When Mandriva patches are supposed to be merged upstream, branch relevant for each patch could be published for upstream integration or committed directly on upstream repository if approved by upstream maintainer.

• When fixes are needed for Mandriva package and are already available upstream, merging from upstream branch to a Mandriva sub-branch would ease package maintainer job, while keeping history and origin of the fix.

• When new upstream release is made available, it is merged into Mandriva branches and if some patches were merged upstream, they are removed automatically, since revision history is kept in each branch and the versioning system is supposed to be smart enough to deal with that.

In order to integrate easily when new Repository Build system, there might be some scripts magic to convert Mandriva patches sub-branches into subversion Build Repository (I'm refering here to Mandriva build system which is SVN based).

In an ideal world, each distribution could have their own branches and maintainers from each distribution would be able to access another distribution published branches, to easily find patches. And we would have a free (as speech) way to have a complete view of bug reports and available patches :) And I'm not even talking about migrations of bug between bugzilla (but at least, with Mandriva switch to Bugzilla 3, we will be ready for the future).

(end of mail, italic are comments I added today)

Comments welcome ;)

Gastronomie moléculaire

This morning, while reading my daily RSS feed, I was delighted to read a great article on Wired about Hervé This (and I guess it is not by chance it hitted Slashdot too). As a lot of geeks (no need to hide, J5), I enjoy cooking and knowing and understanding how those things work it really interesting both intellectually and to improve your cooking technique. I've known about Hervé This for a long time (I have almost all his books at home and I was able to attend one of his sessions some years ago) and it is always a pleasure to read about his research. After all, everbody should know how is composed a mayonnaise and how you can recover it, when you think you screwed it :)

Anyway, I highly recommend his first french book Les Secrets de la Casserole or this english book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (I can't comment on this one, I only checked his french books).

(PS: I swear this post was written before I saw J5 announce of GNOME cookbook project opening :)

GUADEC post-op

No, Ross, you're not the last one :)

I wanted to blog only when I finished processing all photos I took at GUADEC (since this time, I tried using RAW) but my Gimp-fu and Ufraw-fu is still a little low so I'm still not finished (but the first photos are online here). And next UFRaw release is scheduled today, with noise reduction and full color management, so I'll probably need to re-process my old photos.

Anyway, it has been a great week in Birmingham, very instructive (I was able to attend 33 talks !) with wonderful people all around (a special thanks to organization team).

It seems Mandriva / GUADEC USB key was well received, even if we found some bugs (like no boot on two laptops, including Frederic one or incorrect informative message reported by Hub). Another information regarding startup on the key : you can disable the "welcome" webpage after logging by GNOME editing session property.

But I want more feedback !! So, if you haven't formated your USB key yet (or even if you did ;) , tell us if you like it or not, bugs you found, features you miss, everything. Either comment on my post or blog yourself and add a trackback here.

Flying to GUADEC

• luggage : check


• laptop borrowed from work : check


• n800 : check


• camera : check

Ok, I'm ready to go to GUADEC : I'll be arriving at BHX airport on Sunday morning.

As a sidenode, all GUADEC registered participants will receive a USB Flash key with a collector GNOME version of Mandriva Flash (it is our first GNOME Flash, with Metisse / Compiz and Beryl for anybody to test) with informations from GUADEC sponsors and GUADEC booklet too. There was a slight delay in the manufacturing so we are expecting them to be delivered on Tuesday (or maybe earlier if we are lucky) so don't blame GUADEC folks for this delay. Of course, if you have questions or issues with the distributions, feel free to ask me. And if you like it, you are free to let other people know too :)

PDF and cairo/gtk love, Metisse job and funny UI

PDF and cairo/gtk love
While investigating why Beagle wasn't finding some PDF files in my Download directory, I tried to create a PDF file from scratch to check if PDF indexing was working properly. So, I launched gedit and write a small test file and printed it to PDF. Unfortunately, I discovered its text output was garbage. I thought : it might be a cairo problem, did more tests and I saw my mistake : gedit (in fact, gtksourceview, see bug 375886) is still using the old libgnomeprint(ui) library, which is not generating text-readable PDF, unlike cairo PDF backend. Same think for gnome-dictionnary (fortunately, evolution has been ported). So, this is a call for maintainers : please, please, try to port your applications to GtkPrint from gtk+ 2.10.x, it give better consistency to GNOME and moreover, your application will generate text parseable PDF files !

And for those wondering if I find out about my beagle bug, not yet.. It is probably caused by using a non-UTF8 locale (I'm old school), with directory using non ASCII / locale-encoded filename. Epiphany has also a similar problem (not reported yet, I'd like to cook a patch) as well as Baobab (see bug 437478).

Metisse
Good news on Metisse front : Insitu got funding (through INRIA) for a Metisse job position. Sorry for non french people, it is more for young graduated folks, located near Paris. More informations are available (in french) on Inria website here (job position) and here (more general informations about this kind of job). Hurry up, application must be sent before May 23, 2007.

Funny UI
Thanks to Martin, I hear last Wednesday about Reactable. This is very interesting and moreover, it is free software. Too bad they didn't come last year to do a demo at GUADEC, since this team is located in Barcelona :(

Honey, I've DSLed my mom

After about 18 months of additional delay (over initial estimate), ADSL is, at last, available for my mom house, in Lozère. And I was able to guide her to install her new DSL box (Freebox, which is running Linux internaly) using my GSM tonight. It tooks about 1/2h to get DSL Box up and running with phone over IP, mostly to tell her where to plug each type of cable, check twice the phone cable (both RJ11 and French plugs are mixed) and an additional 1/4h to get her to configure IP connectivity on her Mandriva box :

• first you plug the usb cable from Freebox to PC (I didn't install a ethernet card on her PC, it will be done later)
• then, you log in as usual, you go to "System / Administration and Configure your Computer"
• you type your administrator password
• you choose Internet, then "Configure a new Internet connexion", you choose Ethernet (since it is usbnet) and you click on the Next button until you are done.
• You insert requested CD to get dhcp client installed
• et voilà

Oh, maybe I forgot to tell you my mom didn't knew how to use a mouse three years ago (or a GUI system) and has been using Google quite often for about 6 months now (over old analogic modem). And she is running Mandriva Linux with GNOME ! Isn't it wonderful ?