Lenz Grimmer's blog

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe conferences, which all take place in parallel on May 8th-12th in Wiesbaden, Germany.

End of last week SUSE announced the release 10.1 Beta9 and that they decided to postpone the release candidate to iron out the last outstanding issues. I have high respect for this move and would like to congratulate them for making this undoubtedly hard and unpopular decision. I've been running Beta8 on my laptop since last week and things are looking very promising. I reported a number of bugs which almost all have been resolved in the meanwhile - from my perspective I would be happy if at least the following two bugs could be resolved before the release candidate is made:

• BUG#159595 - Can't change CDs when using YaST2 in KDE (it surprises me that nobody else seems to be stumbling over this one)
• BUG#159667 - Postfix SASL authentication fails with "no mechanism available" (this one was actually a problem with AppArmor preventing Postfix from accessing the required libraries)

For a change, I decided to not download the full ISO images but rather just got the delta-iso files via BitTorrent. These deltas are all one needs to create the full ISOs - the download was blazingly fast, too. I had already deleted the Beta8 ISO images from my hard disk, but still had the previously burned Beta8 CDs. To generate functional Beta9 ISOs, I just needed to install the package deltarpm. After inserting CD1 of Beta8 in the CD-ROM drive I used the following command to generate CD1 of the Beta9 CD set:

applydeltaiso /dev/hdc SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta8_beta9-i386-CD1.delta.iso SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta9-i386-CD1.iso

The process is a bit CPU-intensive, but resulted in a functional ISO image - even the MD5 checksum matched the one from the full ISOs available for download. I repeated this process for all 5 CDs and burned them over the Beta8 CDs (I have a set of 5 CD-RWs just for SUSE beta-testing). Let's see when I find a moment to perform another test installation... So far, the list of most annoying bugs mostly mentions issues related to the package installer - this seems to be one of the sore spots of SUSE Linux 10.1... I hope they manage to beat it into shape in time.

Arjen asked me, if I could provide an updated RPM of the Mercurial revision control system for SUSE Linux 10.0 (0.8 is the current version SUSE Linux 10.0 shipped with 0.6c). Here it is! Enjoy.

A few days ago I received a neat little gadget: a Yakumo QuickStick DVB-T, which allows me to watch TV via the USB-2 port on my Thinkpad. Amazon sold it for 52 EUR, so I could not resist, after making sure that it was listed in the list of supported devices on the very informative LinuxTV Wiki pages. All what was left to be done for me was to download the firmware and putting it into /lib/firmware. The driver and firmware were loaded automatically when I plugged in the device:

Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-01.fw' to the 'Cypress FX2'
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones) successfully initialized and connected.
Mar 20 19:44:07 metis kernel: usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 8
Mar 20 19:44:07 metis kernel: dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)' in warm state.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)).
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 300 msecs.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones) successfully initialized and connected.

Now I fired up the KDE video player Kaffeine 0.7.1 and configured it to scan for available channels. That's all there was to it! I am positively surprised.

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

The Call for Papers ends on March 15th - so you better hurry if you want to give a presentation there! I proposed two MySQL-related talks and also asked some other colleagues to file a few submissions. There is enough stuff happening here to talk about

By the way, their registration frontend is very slick - it's called pentabarf (which I personally think is a weird name) and is powered by Ruby on Rails.

Alfredo announced the availability of version 1.0.5 beta of the MySQL Workbench, the latest product in the MySQL GUI tools family (also check out the Administrator, Query Browser and the Migration Toolkit).

I downloaded the RPM for SUSE Linux 9.3, which installed flawlessly on my SUSE 10.0 system. To test the reverse engineering capabilities, I installed the latest version of the Sakila sample database, which also worked very well. Kudos to our GUI team for the good work!

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will speak about this topic in more detail at our MySQL Users Conference.

Later today I will be heading off to the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to the various sessions and meeting with the members of other Open Source projects, especially the folks from the openSUSE team. I hope this meeting allows me to build closer relations to other OSS projects that use or support MySQL in any way.

See you there! After having checked into my hotel tonight, I'll try to find my way to Le Roy d'Espagne to meet with others that arrived today.

Despite the quite scary-looking list of known bugs in this version, I decided to give 10.1b4 a try and downloaded the 5 CD ISO images.

Unfortunately my installation attempt fizzled out quite quickly after the the first reboot - the bootup procedure aborted while trying to initialize the LVM, which I run on top of a Software-RAID. Some research on the Novell Bugzilla revealed that this had been reported already (BUG#152237) - I hope it will be resolved for the next beta version.

I've added this one to the Most Annoying Bugs list now and hope to find a workaround so I can continue the installation. Otherwise I will have to wait for the next beta, as I can't change the disk layout on this system...

Congratulations to Justin and Roger for getting the book out and published! I helped tech editing a few chapters (which looked very promising) and I am looking forward to the complete works. Good job, guys!

I noticed that twinkle has been under heavy developement since the last time I looked at it. To test it, I created an RPM for my local SUSE Linux 10.0 installation, which I have now placed into my RPM download section.

Unfortunately it's still unusable for me, as the sound is very choppy when using my Bluetooth headset, no matter which sound setting I choose. Which is sad, as twinkle is one of the very few OSS SIP phones that has native ALSA sound support

A few days ago, the MySQL GUI team announced new maintenance releases of both the MySQL Administrator (1.1.6) and Query Browser (1.1.18).

I now built RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.0/x86 - you can get them from my RPM Download section. Have fun!