KDE 4.0 Beta 1 is available for Mandriva 2007.1

Warning : Beta1 isn’t as stable as you might expect and beta2 will probably give a better overview of KDE4. So you’d better install it on a test/virtual machine. (Thanks to Daniel Beck)

Yes !

• urpmi.addmedia kde4 <KDE_MIRROR>/pub/kde/unstable/3.92.0/Mandriva/2007.1/i586/media/4.0
• Update Mandriva Linux your favorite way
• You’re done

I can’t test it because I first need to clean my drive and get a lot of free space But If I manage to install it, be sure it’s gonna be on this blog !

(For you information, KDE 4.0 Beta 1 = KDE 3.92.0)

Using kernel 2.6.22 with Mandriva 2007.1 – part 1

I’ve just installed kernel-2.6.22.3mdv-1-1mdv2008.0 (coming from cooker) on my faithful system running Mandriva 2007.1.

To install it, I had to use the --nodeps switch and install it with rpm (using urpmi and –allow-nodeps may have lead to the same result) because of a conflict with drakxtools-backend < 10.4.140. The conflict is probably here due to MCC not handling something (modular ide ?), but I won’t use MCC to handle the kernel anyway.

I wanted to try the coretemp module included with 2.6.22 and well, it works but actually isn’t very useful to me at the moment.

I also hope 2.6.22 will solve the scheduler problem I have with virtualbox and my previous -tmb kernel, but I haven’t tested it yet.

Now comes the difficult part : wireless. I know the module name for my card is now iwl3945 (this module now uses the new wireless kernel stack and doesn’t require the ipw3945d daemon anymore) and 2007.1 doesn’t detect nor know anything about this module. So back to the old way of configuring the wireless network : no more GUI I first had to install another cooker RPM : iwlwifi-3945-ucode-2.14.4-1mdv2008.0 containing the microcode for the wireless card which gets loaded by the module when it gets loaded itself. The driver loaded successfully but I ended up with two interfaces : eth2 and wlan0_rename… udev is responsible for this but the last time I modified udev network configuration I ended up with a completely unusable system, so I’ll have a look when I know more about udev and its scripts.

So this last difficulty brought me back to my old -tmb kernel (well, not so old : 2.6.21) because I need a wireless connection at home and at work. I’ll make a new post once my wireless network card has been configured successfully !

The good side of a crash

Today, kdm refused to let me log into my session and was constantly back with the login screen although I entered the correct username and password. I already had this kind of problem and is generally due to a corrupt configuration file in my home directory, but I have to have a closer look at it.

But in the meantime, as I was a bit in a hurry, I just switched my display manager from kdm to gdm by simply setting the variable DISPLAYMANAGER=gdm in /etc/sysconfig/desktop. I also looked for people having the same issue on the Mandriva forum, but found almost no one (well, two people but it was very old posts).

But I found an very interesting gdm theme for 2007 Spring. I’ve always wondered what was the point of assigning an avatar/face to users of my system because they were not in use anywhere, but thanks to this theme I can now give pretty faces to ALL my local users (well ok, ALL = 2 ).

My new french blog

I’ve completed the creation of my new blog in french (which was rather easy thanks to wordpress import/export functions and the unlimited number of blogs). The link is http://yohofr.wordpress.com.

From now on, I’ll post only english articles in this blog and only french ones in the new one. I still don’t know if I’m gonna translate all articles I’m gonna write, so both blogs may look slightly different in terms of content.

The benefit of doing this is I’m still referenced on planetmandriva while I can now be referenced in http://www.planet-libre.org and various french-only aggregations (like there may be on the mandriva wikik one day…). Moreover, my posts get more readable as french-speaking persons don’t have to scroll all the way down to access the french content.

It’s pity wordpress doesn’t support multi-lingual posts as other blog websites do, but it can easily be workarounded doing what I’ve just done.

Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring CDs nearly out

2007 Spring CDs are now available to club members (a bit late, but Adam already explained the complexity of building a CD set compared to a single DVD). It means Mandriva Linux Free CDs are probably on the verge of being released.

So if you’re not a club member and don’t own a DVD drive, just hold on !

I wonder if this CD version contains official updates as well… If someone can tell me in the comments, it would be appreciated.

(On a sidenote, I’ve decided to create a new blog for my french posts, so this blog will now be pure english. I’ll write a new article about it when I’ve moved all my french posts to this new blog)

What’s new in Mandriva 2008.0 ?

Adam has just wrote an excellent description of what could become the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2008.0 (planned for October, this year). Go read it !

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Adam vient just d’écrire une excellente description (en anglais) de ce que pourrait devenir la prochaine version de Mandriva Linux : 2008.0 (prévue pour octobre, cette année). À lire de toute urgence !

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Pay to get bugfixes ?

Yes, you’ve heard it : now you have to pay to get bugfixes… What I’m talking about ? Not Mandriva, of course, nor even linux ! I’m talking about Award, AMI and Phoenix, famous BIOS makers.
Most people know BIOS are generally buggy crappy pieces of code (even if I admit the job isn’t easy given space constrainst). So like in any piece of software, there are bugs.
If you seek help to update your BIOS, MOST pages on the internet will lead you to this page (who talked about google poisonning ?). Look at those smiling people on the upper right hand corner of the homepage : they’re all happy to have paid approx. 30$ to get a BIOS with less bugs and be able to run their shiny brand new version of MS Vista (why do people love to install crappy softs ? is it some kind of masochism for geeks ?)…
If you don’t believe it, you’ll probably end up like me : on google desperately seeking for free BIOS updates and reading this ton of posts from people selling BIOS updates themselves (they’ve bought it from the previously mentionned website…) I’m pretty sure people will start selling their second-hand BIOS updates on ebay sooner or later.
I was about to install linuxbios but remembered the computer I just wanted to upgrade was my girfriend’s and I wasn’t 100% sure about what problems I could have run into…
Finally, after googling around, I found some support from the motheboard vendor, but it was already late and I abandonned my quest for the bugfree BIOS. I’ll do it when I’ve more free time.

Powertop and pm-utils

Just a little post to say that thanks to Thomas’ kernel “2.6.21.3-tmb-desktop-1mdvsmp”, I’m now able to suspend to ram successfully and use powertop ! I tried suspend to disk and it didn’t work “out-of-the-box”, but I need to investigate further.

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Juste un petit article pour annoncer que grâce au noyau “2.6.21.3-tmb-desktop-1mdvsmp” de Thomas, je suis maintenant capable de mettre en veille (en mémoire) mon ordinateur et d’utiliser powertop ! J’ai essayer d’hiberner (mettre en veille sur disque) et cela n’a pas marché d’emblée, mais je dois encore enquêter sur ce problème.

Interesting

So let’s blog and use my new little kblogger applet I’ve just built on my system (by the way, the package is outdated on cooker, I should tell them)
I’ve just found two interesting features for konqueror in less than 2 seconds… Both of them are really trivial and may be implemented in other browsers as well, but it shows how you can discover features using your brain (well my neuron, should I say)
Feature #1
You can split your display, you probably already know. But you can use this split display to navigate both on a download site (http) and on your disk and copy/paste files from the first one to the second one… I’ve never realized I could have used konqueror like this…
Feature #2
You can right click on a link and ask it to open in a new tab. But it’s the first time I use it the other way around : you can force a window which should open in a new tab or a new window to stay in your current window and tab.

Konqueror and Gmail

Very often, I notice gmail compatibility with konqueror is broken, so I have to use firefox once again… and I like konqueror, I don’t want to change ! The usual trick was to set konqueror User-Agent to “Firefox” (konqueror settings), but it doesn’t work anymore. But a fix has been released, but didn’t get into KDE 3.5.7 in time… I’ve open a bug for Mandriva, let’s see if we can apply the patch.

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Très souvent, la compatibilité entre gmail et konqueror est cassée, alors je dois utiliser firefox à nouveau… et j’aime konqueror, je ne veux pas changer ! L’astuce habituelle consistaient à régler le User-Agent à “Firefox” (dans les paramètres de konqueror), mais cela ne fonctionne plus. Un correctif existe, mais il n’est pas passé dans KDE 3.5.7 à temps… J’ai ouvert un rapport de bug pour Mandriva et on verra bien si l’on peut appliquer ce patch.