Now on linux-planet !

I’m really happy to be now aggregated on linux-planet !

I own two blogs : this one and one in french. My french blog is aggregated on planet-libre which is a quite known planet website, at least for the french-speaking linux community.

Planet-libre is a blog aggregator mostly oriented toward advanced users : technical tips, posts about distribution evolution, software installation and configuration tutorials… and there was no equivalent to planet-libre in english (or at least, planet-libre administrators have not found any).

That’s why linux-planet has just been launched ! There’s not many aggregated blogs currently, but I’m pretty sure it will grow very fast : planet-libre is already aggregating 235 blogs with more than 6000 articles (which are only french speaking !).

If you own or know someone owning a technical blog, think about aggregating it on linux-planet !

How to make 6 months of your life vanish

I own a mobile 500GB USB disk manufactured by Lacie and use it to put all my photos, so that I can both save disk space on my laptop and can easily share photos with someone else. A few months ago, my girlfriend bought a new laptop with Microsoft Vista included and yesterday, while I was busy with mine, she asked me if she could have a look at our photos.

Of course I said yes.

Lacie 500G mobile disks are pre-formated as FAT32. A nice filesystem as any OS can use it read/write, and it’s rather fast if you don’t need to manage access rights. But the vendor has decided to ship its drive with an auto-launch first-time wizard reformatting your disk as NTFS in order to, in their own words, optimize the drive. Linux don’t care about auto-launch things but Vista just does.

Of course, my girlfriend knows nothing about FAT32, NTFS and what’s behind the words “drive optimization”.

Hit next… hit next… hit next…

The good thing is that I’ve made two backup DVDs of the photos I’ve made during the first 2 years of my son. But I’ve lost all the photos since then (he’s now 2 years and a half). I’ve also tried to recover photos from the disk (thanks to photorec), but only recovered a very minor part of all my photos.

In essence, I’ve lost 6 months of photos, including birth photos of my little girl (now 3 months old).

I’m happy I’ve made some backups, but should make them more often and especially after exceptional situations like… your child birth. A good rule of thumb for managing personal photos is “have two copies of your photos anytime”.

KDE 4.3.1 !

"About" dialog

Helio striked once again We now have official KDE versions before they are even announced (yes this link is broken at the time I’m writing, but it’s my guess for the announcement page) on kde website.

Many many thanks !

My biggest problem being now that I can’t tell (because I don’t know) the new features/bugfixes on this blog…

My first bug

Yes ! I’m not a maintainer, but yesterday was the first time I got a bug assigned to me for the stable 2008 Spring ! I still don’t understand why as I didn’t upload the package to Mandriva and was not the last one to make a modification in this package, according to the changelog.

Whatever, I’m glad it has been solved in less than a day and this is thanks to the reporter which actually gave the solution in the bug report and Adam which uploaded the package and made some clever modifications to the SPEC.

The only thing needed was a rebuilt from the svn repository which fixed the compilation problem. The package is now in the official update repository.

Enabling metacity compositing manager

I’ve just switched for a few days to GNOME and I remembered a discussion about activating metacity compositing manager. I haven’t found the information I was looking for on the Internet, but Olivier told me his “Jus de cuisson” mentioned a discussion thread back in January.

I eventually found the discussion thread, but what was stated was wrong (well, it was probably true when the message was sent, but not anymore) : the compositing manager is not enabled by default.

The compositing manager doesn’t give you as much effects and eye-candies as compiz, but it’s enough for a daily and professional usage. Here’s the list of things enabled with the compositing manager of metacity (quote from Frederic Crozat):

-Composited managed desktop (some applications might use it, like transparent applications such as gnome-terminal and probably others)
-brand new alt-TAB with screenshot of applications and highlight of to-be-focused app
-nice shadow around windows (now, you can have an idea on the initial design of Ia Ora window theme
-NO openGL required !!

So, here’s how you can enable it (should work with any distro using a recent enough metacity) :
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true
To disable compositor :
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager false

Some nice server installation howtos

I recently discovered a very nice site hosting a lot of interesting Howtos (mostly for servers configuration) : HowtoForge. You’ll even find a dedicated Mandriva section and a forum. Have a nice browsing…

Everything you always wanted to know about your IP address

Want to know if you’re blacklisted somewhere ? Want to know what could people find out, just by knowing your IP address ? Just curious ?

Check out www.robtex.com ! (and for a good laugh, read the disclaimer)