Lenz Grimmer's blog

JFYI: as discussed on the opensuse-buildservice mailing list today, I now moved my mercurial packages to the devel:tools:scm Project on the openSUSE build service now. Updated packages will be available from there instead of my home project.

Yes, I am an eyecandy and screensaver fan. I now added an RPM of the "Electric Sheep" screensaver to my RPM repository on the fabolous SUSE build service. Have fun!

On September 18th-21st, the second EuroOSCON will take place in Brussels, Belgium. I probably won't make it to this year's conference, but I really enjoyed the event in Amsterdam last year.

The session grid contains a number of talks related to MySQL:

• John Paul Ashenfelter: Data Warehousing with MySQL
• Peter Zaitsev: High Performance Full Text search for Database Content
• Lars Thalmann: Being a MySQL Developer

In addition to these sessions which are directly related to MySQL, here is a selection of talks that most likely cover it as well:

• Marcel Molina: Ruby on Rails
• Martin von Haller Groenbaek: Workshop on Open Source Licensing for Businesses
• Open Source @ openBC: How, Why, and Where To?
• Jim Purbrick: Open Source And Second Life
• Mårten Mickos: From Europe to USA - Culture's Consequences on Open Source Communities and Businesses

All in all, the conference program looks very promising. I wish I could be there...

Encouraged by this flattering comment, I went through my full collection of SUSE RPMs, picked the ones worth updating to the latest versions and submitted them to my package repository at the openSUSE build service now:

• bchunk 1.2.0 - A CD image format converter from .bin/.cue to .iso/.cdr/.wav.
• kvdr 0.64 - A KDE Front-End for VDR (Video Disk Recorder)
• samefile 2.12 - Find identical files on your file system
• rss-glx 0.8.1 - Really Slick Screensavers
• rzip 2.1 - A large-file compression program

I hope none of these are already maintained somewhere else, this is something I still haven't figured out - how can I search the existing projects for certain packages?

The Build Service totally rocks, especially since it can be conveniently used from the command line as well. I submitted my first two packages via the web frontend, but have now switched to using the osc command line tool exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE Build Service Team, building packages on other platforms has never been that easy!

Thanks to Duncan Mac-Vicar for the friendly reminder: I finally bit the bullet and started using the openSUSE Build Service for building and hosting the RPMs that I build for SUSE Linux by myself. I've now moved the KeyJnote and mercurial RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 to my own repository there. Future RPMs will also be provided from there exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE team for providing this service!

FWIW, I just published RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 of KeyJnote 0.8.2 and mercurial 0.9.1 to the 10.1 RPM section. Have fun!

Yesterday I received a sample copy of the "SUSE Linux 10.1 OSS - vorkon" DVD, which was assembled by Nicolaus Millin. While I have not installed it yet (as I by now have a very well running installation of SUSE Linux 10.1 on my laptop), the content of the DVD sounds very promising. In addition to incorporating all the updates that have been published since SUSE Linux 10.1 was released (around 100), this version also includes additional drivers like the 3D graphics drivers from ATI and nVidia, network card drivers like ndiswrapper, madwifi and rt2500 as well as drivers for AVM products and Logitech QuickCams. So the base system should already run very smooth and provides a lot of stuff that one usually has to download and install after the initial installation of SUSE Linux OSS.

But the fun doesn't stop here! Nicolaus also added a number of interesting applications, usually not included in SUSE Linux OSS, such as Adobe Reader 7.0, moneyplex, RealPlayer, FlashPlayer, Cinepaint, FlightGear and several extensions for Mozilla Firefox. He also included many LAMP applications (based on the famous Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack), that have already been preconfigured and are ready to use right after installing the packages! This is where the name "vorkon" comes from - "vorkonfiguriert" means "preconfigured" in German. Some of the LAMP apps included are eGroupware, Gallery2, Joomla!, MediaWiki, nagios, phpBB, Serendipity, Typo3 and several others.

All in all this looks like a well-rounded package - it reminds me a lot of how SUSE Linux used to be when people referred to it as the "everything but the kitchen sink" distribution. Unfortunately it seems as if the legal restrictions of being owned by a US company have caused a lot of the former SUSE benefits to vanish - nowadays one has to hunt for a lot of stuff like drivers and uncrippled applications after the initial installation just as with any other Linux distribution. Thanks to Nicolaus for scratching that itch!

You can purchase SUSE Linux 10.1 "vorkon" via amazon.de - for just 19,95 EUR this is a very attractive product, especially for Linux Newcomers. Give it a try!

In case you use Mercurial as your preferred distributed revision control system, an RPM of version 0.9 for SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available from my RPM section. Have fun!

Last week I was notified that my article about how to install and configure MySQL and the MySQL Connector/J was published in the Java Starter Magazine, a special edition of the german Java Magazin. It covers the basic installation of MySQL and Connector/J on Windows and Linux and how to write a small example program to connect to to MySQL with Java using the Eclipse framework. They were kind enough to send me a number of copies that I plan to give away at tonight's Hamburg MySQL User Group Meeting.

A while back I blogged about my experiences in convincing OpenOffice Impress to display text bullets on a slide one after another instead of showing them all at once. Back then, I also toyed around with how to softly fade between two presentation slides, as OOo provided a lot of different effects for this (yes, I succumb to eyecandy but I know you should not overload your slides with too many of it). While I got it working in the end, I found it quite time consuming to apply the effect for each and every slide and the transitions were not as smooth as I would have hoped (I am not sure if it's OOo or the X server itself that is so slow in rendering full screen updates).

While listening Sebastian Kügler's FrOSCon presentation about KDE World Domination, I was quite stunned by the very soft transitions between his slides and what kind of effects were used. After he also quickly switched between an overview mode and individual slides by quickly zooming out and into another slide, I was quite convinced that he had to be using Keynote on a Mac. Which I personally would have found confusing, given that he was there to talk about how to promote the KDE desktop

I was delighted to learn that he was actually using KeyJnote, which is a little Python script that takes any PDF as an input file to generate the slide show. Alternatively, you can point it to a directory with pictures, that will then be used for the slide show. It uses OpenGL for the rendering, so it requires a proper DRI setup. Fortunately SUSE Linux 10.1 already ships with all the required components to get the script working (In addition to Python and Ghostscript, it requires the following RPMs to be installed: pdftk, python-imaging, python-opengpython-pygame). As I can finally use the ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility GPU in my IBM Thinkpad T42 Laptop with the free r300 3D-driver, I of course had to give it a try and am quite happy with it!

To ease the installation of the script, I've now built an RPM for SUSE Linux 10.1, which you can now download from my RPM download section. It might work on older SUSE releases as well, as long as the RPM dependencies are fulfilled. Have fun!

If you happen to use MySQL and live around Hamburg, Germany, here's your chance to meet with other MySQL users, developers and DBAs: I am happy to announce the second Hamburg MySQL Usergroup Meeting, which will take place on Monday, 3rd of July, 19:00. The location will be the same one as last time, the chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.  The food there is quite excellent and they will provide us with a separate room and video projector again. I'll try to arrange a presentation about MySQL and there will be plenty of time for chatting and discussing. If you'd like to join us, please RSVP via our event page on meetup.com and join the mailing list for further details! Looking forward to meeting you! Some pictures of our last meeting are available in my gallery.

Long time no post! Last Sunday I spotted the following email in my junk mailfolder:

Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:08:39 +0200
From: root <root@metis.lenznet>
To:  <lenz@localhost.metis.lenznet>
Subject: SMART error (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: metis

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

   host name: metis
  DNS domain: lenznet
  NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

Which did not sound too good. In addition to that, the system had failed to resume from a suspend to disk earlier that day - the kernel experienced disk read errors while trying to load the suspended image from the swap partition. Fortunately a fresh reboot still worked and I ran a more thorough analysis of the disk drive by using smartctl -t long /dev/hda. Using various Open Source tools from a SUSE Linux 10.1 rescue system (which boots off the first installation CD) helped me to backup and restore my data without losing anything (except for some time, of course). Continue reading "All hail S.M.A.R.T. and external USB hard disk drives!"

 On June 24th/25th, the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) will be held in Sankt Augustin, Germany. I have submitted two talks (in english), which both got accepted: "MySQL Administration: Backup and Security Strategies on Linux" and "The MySQL Business Model: Where and how we thrive". The sessions will take place on Saturday, but I will be around on Sunday, too. In addition to my sessions, there will be two more MySQL-related talks: "MySQL Cluster: an Introduction - A journey into High Availability" by Geert Vanderkelen (one of our MySQL Cluster Support experts) and "Pivot tables in MySQL 5 - creating cross-tabulation with MySQL 5 stored routines" by fellow PlanetMySQL blogger and MySQL Guilds Member Giuseppe Maxia. All in all the conference program sounds very interesting and offers a lot of diverse topics. See you there!

With all the recent buzz on Planet MySQL about using LVM to perform "semi-hot" backups of MySQL on Linux, I remembered that we once created such a Perl script for a server project that we worked on in cooperation with a hardware vendor. As this particular backup method was also mentioned and recommended in my talk about MySQL backup and security on Linux and the script hasn't actually been publicly available so far, I offered to take over the ownership and release it under the GPL. The first tarball release (0.1) is now available from this web page (still work in progress), the files are available via SVN from here as well. Make sure to see the README and TODO files for the current status. A man page is included, too. I hope you will find it useful - feedback is very welcome!