Developers' Blogs: IroNiQ

As you can read the previous post, Boobaa "released" "fwlive-0.2-kde-i686".
But!
I was FwLive's maintainer. I have NOT released 0.2 officially by now. And did not want to release it, because i wanted to hack a bit and also there were changes that i wanted to implement. That's the first thing i wanted to tell. The second is a response to boobaa's post: I got only a few comment about what to do, what to change and what to remove from fwlive. I also had no time to work with it and wanted to work with it this week. Boobaa made main changings in fwlive, for example: the default language got hu_HU in his version (this is not a good idea in an international distrib), hardened scrolling mouse driver (imps/2) into xorg.conf (that isn't also a good idea), removed non-X startup handling and so on. This "release" was the last point. I canceled all of the maintainership i was working with (exept server maintanance), so everyone can do with my packages everything.
I'd like to thank the help of my users.

Today i did the upgrade. There was a small database cleanup (fortunately this was more simplier now then the testing was) before the upgrade. That's why the upgrade was faster then i thought. After this i copied the files from the testing BTS and the main things were ok. After small changes the site got its current status. So, the new BTS is ready to work.

Due noone send me bugreport about the new testing BTS, i decided to upgrade the main BTS (http://bugs.frugalware.org). The upgrade will start on Monday (17th July) and will last approx. 2-3 days (i hope so). During this time the BTS will NOT be available, because i have to clean the database and upgrade it.

Please be patient during this time.

Well, maybe some of you have seen the test BTS. Now it's upgraded to the devel version. I also added a small feature into it (and accepted by the author, so that will be available soon in svn). So maybe it will be available soon on the main site.

Helicon downtime:
At this weekend there will be a complete network donwtime at out x86_64 buildserver's network provider. The downtime will be on 8-9th of July (this weekend). Because of this, helicon won't be available from saturday morning till sunday evening (or so). We hope everything will go well and won't be any problem or slippage. Please don't start longer builds that cannot end on Friday. Thanks...

BTS upgrade
I started upgrading our BTS to a newer version. But this is not as easy as i'd like to. I realized that a previous upgrade changed the database structure a bit. I copied to a new one and cleaned it and as i could see, without any problem. But i'm not sure about it, so please test it and report on frugalware-devel mailing list. The test page is available here: bugs.ironiq.hu.

Because of unknown reason the sw raid1 broke up and the OS could not start correctly. With the local sysadmin i started working on the problem, but the buildserver won't be available tomorrow and if the problem cannot be solved, then on weekend, too. Sorry for the long timeout. Also the darcsweb is affected.

As you know, I'm on creating the new webpage for Frugalware. Well, some days ago i've got a big help, AlexExtreme. He created a new layout for the webpage and helped me to port the current fwng code to the new layout. Till he created this, i've made the rss, roadmap, authors, about, screenshot and the news page. Also the news page has a new feature: the news can be shown individually. Now we are working on simplifying the page access with mod_rewrite. Please see the page and comment it here or on #frugalware irc channel.

This week the translation to czech language is started. The webpages is almos ready, now maybe comes the NEWS file or other translations (pacman and so).

AlexExtreme started comtributing to the new webpage. He has got some idea, me too. The base of the new news system is ready, i just have to implement to the webpage. I think next week or so there will be some viewable thing.

Well, maybe you noticed, that bugs.frugalware.org is down. On weekend i wasn't at home, so i noticed the error only on sunday evening. The host was up again at 9pm, so i hoped that this was the last error. After this, slin and i was seeking for a better datacenter. We found a better one and wanted to start the procedure (TTL change in DNS, waiting for spreading, hosting change, dns change and so on) today, but i noticed that the host is down again. So we speed up the procedure and maybe today or tomorrow the machine will be available by IP and will be available by hostname at the end of this week.

Sorry for the long timeout again...

Yes, finally i got finished with fwlive 0.1 stable version. You can read about that here. Well, after releasing i noticed a small problem that will be fixed next week. (The problem is: if you want to switch off the comp, the init system writes out the text and you can't switch off the comp with one push. Most of the computers can be switched off by pushing the power button 5secs, maybe you can use this.)

After a longer testing period, 0.1rc12 is available.
There isn't any official announcement, because it's just a testversion. If everything is ok with this version, after a few small modification the livecd will be released (maybe next week).

It seems that today i finished creating FwLive 0.1pre1. I could keep down the size of the iso below 700MB (590M. I'll try it as i'll get home. If everything will be good, i'll upload it.

Thanks for all for the help.

Yes, it's up and working again. The downtime was a bit longer then i thought, but now the heating is quiet good: 2pcs of 8cm fan and a 12cm fan works now as heating. The HDDs' temperatures are below 40 Celsius (about 104 Fahrenheit). The raid1 arrays were OK after reboot.

Sorry for the "long" timeout...

As some people noticed, bugs.frugalware.org is down (and also mail.frugalware.org is affected). Yesterday we noticed some heating problem, but had no time to examine the machine. Before rebooting the operator said that the fan is not working. But unfortunately i had absolutely no time to solve this problem. Maybe yesterday.

Yesterday evening i decided to search and implement a new anti-spam thing. I didn't know which one should be useful, but i've had idea. I decided previously to implement somehow the captcha security. After some searching i've found a nice plugin to this blog engine. I decided to include this. After some hacking the security is now working. Maybe not so nice, but working and this is the most important for me.

I've been working on Thunderbird language packs for a week. I've tried many things to get working them - without any result. I searched many things with google, i've been looking through Mozilla Wiki, Mozillazine, Mozillazine Forum, but cannot find any usable docs how can man create a usable langpack for any linux distribution. They cannot believe that i'll create separate localized tbird for every language (15MB would be each pkg).
Yesterday I've created a splash engine for xfce4. This is based on "Simple" engine by Benedikt Meurer. This Frugalware Splash Engine is the default splash engine till yesterday (thanks nadfoka for the image).

Today the main server - called "genesis" - was changed to the new one. The downtime lasted about 1hour. This time we did some upgrade. The new server's response time is much better than the old one. Thanks for all of the donators.

The new main server was under a big memtest that ended this morning (i switched off the machine). The result is quiet good: the memtest was running more then 120 hours without error. The contact was informed that we'd like to replace the old genesis to the new one. Currently we are waiting for a contact time when we can do the change.

Today I'll get my "new" dell machine, a p3 1GHz one. This will be my test suite. I'll test and create the fwlive on it, i'll test raid installs and so on.
On this weekend I'll run a whole-weekend memtest on genesis-ng. If everything will be OK, we'll change the current machine. We're thinking about the current machnine's destiny. Maybe it will be a new buildserver, maybe just a spare server.
Finally the maintainer teams are created so I'm back to maintain packages. One of my first things was to ignore some "error" messages in apache's init script (if there's an error, just search for it in the error log. you can't read as fast as the init scripts are running). My next thing was to create the thunderbird 1.5 package. Currently it's ready for x86_64, now i'll create the i686 package.
The coding of the new homepage is a bit "stalled", because i've had lots of other things (such as pkg maintaining, server testing and so on). Maybe next week I can continue it.

As some people know, i started to create the new webpage of Frugalware Linux. The lookup is ready and everything is generated by a php code. Now supports gettext-based locales, so the translation can be much more easy and unified. The site is absolutly table-free, based on divs and css stylesheets. That's why the site looks good from graphical browsers. The site looks like same in almost all of the browsers: firefox, ie, safari and konqueror (that were tested). In opera there's a very small positioning problem, but i cannot create workaround for it. The css is cleaned by boobaa so many thanks for it.

The site is available here: http://www2.frugalware.org.

Please send me comments here or sending a mail to frugalware-users or frugalware-devel mailing list.

Nowadays I was thinking about creating an unofficial server repo.
Yesterday, looking that the v2.6 kernels don't work perfectly with my SiI0680 ata133 raid controller, I decided to put 2.4 kernel on the server. But frugalware currently uses nptl with 2.6, so i have to recompile almos all of the needed pkgs. But only after creating the livecd.

Yesterday I noticed that the php5 doesn't work with apache 2.2 (gives an error on x86_64). I'he tried to recompile it, but haven't worked. I'll try to fix it today, but don't know whether it will be ready.
Please be patient.