Mandriva

Baseball fans probably already know about MLB.tv - it’s a streaming video service, run by MLB, which gives you access to streaming video of most Major League games, for an annual subscription (actually I notice they reduced their prices a lot this year, which is cool).

I used to use it a couple of seasons ago. It kinda worked on Linux in the browser with RealPlayer for a while, but then it stopped. I figured out a way to find the stream URL and play it manually with mplayer, which was a big pain. In the end I kinda gave up.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to come across mlbviewer, a simple console tool which automates the whole process in a really nice way. Basically, you install mlbviewer, run it once, and it’ll create a config file in ~/.mlb/config . You edit this, put in your MLB.tv username and password, then run mlbviewer again. It gives you a simple, console list of all the available games, you select the one you want to watch and hit enter, and it opens it up with mplayer.

It’s extremely simple, and it works brilliantly. It’s actually a much nicer and more convenient interface than the browser-based one MLB.tv uses officially; reminds me of much, much older single-purpose apps before everything was done via the browser.

I packaged it up for Mandriva: it’s in /contrib/release for Cooker and /contrib/backports for 2008 Spring and 2008. I haven’t tested it on 2008 but it should work fine there. It definitely works fine on 2008 Spring and Cooker. All you have to do to use it is what I wrote above.

It’s also available for other distros, of course, and there’s a great thread on the LinuxQuestions forums for discussions and problems, where you can probably get help with installing and using it if you use a distro other than Mandriva.

I got hundreds of spam with subject starting with "Britney Spears" during the last few days, some are quite funny.

• Britney Spears' vagina attacks warder and escapes rehab
• Britney Spears Shoots Down American Spy Satellite With Her Vagina
• Britney Spears Stashed Guns in her Vagina - Papparazzi Duck for Cover
• Britney Spears Leaves Earth, Humanity Breathes Sigh of Relief
• Britney Spears to Study Theoretical Quantum Mechanics at MIT

A nice joke in Engadget today:

Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None, they just define darkness as an industry standard.

They also offered the slightly lamer:

Q: How many Apple engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: 13, 1 to do the screwing and a dozen lawyer-types to prepare for the recall.

Hey, there’s something missing from the above, so I hereby offer:

Q: How many Linux developers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Just one. Three weeks later, he comes back and screws in Lightbulb 2.0, which casts thirty percent more light but flickers on and off every two seconds. Two weeks later you get Lightbulb 2.1a, which works beautifully for five months and then explodes without warning, slightly injuring your cat. After a quick emergency callout your friendly Linux engineer screws in Lightbulb 3.0, which casts nearly as much light as Lightbulb 2.0, plays the latest hipster tunes, and reports your Light Status to the Web 2.0 LightR service, but uses seventy three thousand watts of electricity and takes thirty seconds to turn on.

A while later you receive the long-awaited Lightbulb2 1.0, which turns out to be perfect in almost all respects, but is green.

In April, I test Linux Vservers under Mandriva 2008.1 Spring. However there were severals issues and bugs in the Mandriva support. So I provide patch to fix some of them, notably in the urpmi support. Because of this, and some others issues, I was unable to configure Vservers under Mandriva with the default Mandriva packages. This month Olivier Blin applied my patch and fixed all the issues reported by me : really he made my day :) I will be able to give another try to Vservers and I do hope that I will be able to have an easy way to setup Vservers under Mandriva Linux :). I will have eventually to contact upstream in order to have theses patches integrated directly upstream. Here is the list of bugs reported by me :

• bug #40192 : vserver build -m urpmi will failed because of a typo in util-vserver-vars
• bug #40193 : Ordering issue when installing basesystem package
• bug #40194 : mandriva/pkgs/rpmlist.list should contains basesystem-minimal instead of basesystem

Bientôt la délivrance ? Pas sûr. Il y a eu pas mal de complications depuis que j'ai signé le compromis de vente de l'achat de mon appartement. Surtout les petites lignes qu'on se demande si on les a vraiment lues avant de signer... J'ai pu me rendre compte (trop tard) que j'ai effectivement signé une clause de non garantie des vices cachés. Et en plus, c'est légal. J'espère donc que beau papa se fait du souci à tort en se demandant si le plancher n'est pas pourri.

C'est à ajouter aux petites surprises qui se sont accumulées:

• électricité pas aux normes (alors qu'on m'avait affirmé le contraire bien que j'ai demandé à plusieurs reprises) et apparemment pour ma pomme.
• travaux dans l'appartement sans demande de permis de construire ni déclaration (alors qu'on m'avait affirmé que cela avait été déclaré)

Bref, plein de bonnes choses qui, pour la seconde fois, ne font que confirmer ma conviction que tout bon agent immobilier est un agent immobilier sur l'échafaud :-( . Signature prévue pour le 22 ou le 25, les recommandés pour mettre les choses au clair partent demain, histoire de se couvrir un minimum... Advienne que pourra, souhaitez moi bonne chance.

I'm flying to San Francisco today to attend the Intel Developer Forum. I'll do demonstrations about a new virtualization use case: delivering the promises of grid using virtualization on workstations. So if you happen to be in the area and want to have a drink, just drop me an email.

Today I had a crash of my computer while updating Mandriva Cooker and writing email with Firefox. After a reboot, when I launched Firefox 3, I noticed that I had lost nearly all of my prefs ( bookmarks, start page ). At least the website passwords were safe. As I have some issues with Firefox 3, maybe due to my old Firefox 2 profile, I decide to remove my profil. However I want to save some of my profiles elements like bookmarks or web password ( the 2 most important things in a web browser IMHO ). So here are the different ways to backup some of your Firefox settings :

• Manual Backup of your passwords : To backup your web password, you need to backup the signons.txt, signons2.txt, signons3.txt and key3.db files. For example to backup them in a ff-web-passwd.tar.gz file : tar -czf ff-web-passwd.tar.gz ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/signons* .mozilla/firefox/*/key*.db
  Once done done, to restore your web password, you just need to copy back theses files in your new Firefox profile directory while Firefox is not runnning. For example to directly restore in your new Firefox profile : tar --strip-components=3 -zxvf ff-web-passwd.tar.gz -C ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/
• Backup of your passwords with Password Exporter addon : There're some third party applications which allow to backup Firefox 3 preferences and notably passwords. Fore example you have the extension Password Exporter which allows you to export your passwords using XML or CSV files. This extension is compatible with Firefox 3 and Thunderbird. You have the possibility to encrypt the username and password while exporting your passwords.
• Backup your profiles ( bookmarks, history, cache ) with Mozbackup : This is a Windows program. It allows to backup most of your profile settings. This program can be download at http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/download.php.
• Manually Backups your bookmarks : If like me you have already lost your bookmarks, you may think that it's impossible to backup your lost bookmarks ? In fact this is wrong. Fortunately there are some backup copies of your bookmarks ! To locate them, you just need to go in your Firefox profile and look for a folder named bookmarkbackups. In this folder you will see backups of your bookmarks in JSON format. As you may noticed, you have the date of the backup. It seems that each time you make 5 changes to your bookmarks, a backup is done. So to backup theses ... backups in ff-bookmarks.tar.gz, you just need to do the following command : tar -czf ff-bookmarks.tar.gz ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/bookmarkbackups/*.json
  Once done, to restore your bookmarks, extract them from the tar.gz archive, and in Firefox 3, go to "Bookmarks" -> "Organize Bookmarks" -> "Import and Backup" -> "Restore" -> "From a file". Then you just need to pick with the fileselector the right .json file in the extraction directory and all your previous bookmarks will be restored.
• Backup of your history with Backup Restore History addon : If you want to backup and/or restore your Firefox history, you can use the Backup Restore History addon. This addon works only with Firefox 3 it seems.
• Firefox Environment Backup Extension : Firefox Environment Backup Extension is an extension which allow to backup nearly everything from Firefox ( cache, history, passwords, bookmarks, extensions, complete profiles, ... ). To install this extension, you just need to go on the FEBE addon page on AMO. If you want to have furthers informations, don't hesitate to visite the extension project page where you will be able to find for example a Quick start guide to FEBE. Firefox 2 users should use FEBE 5.x, whereas Firefox 3 should use latest FEBE versions.
• Clearing your Firefox profile : Once you have backup all of your most important settings, you may want to clear your Firefox profile, before restoring your settings. To do this, you just need to remove the ~/.mozilla/firefox directory while Firefox is not running : rm -fr ~/.mozilla/firefox/*
  Now don't forget to start Firefox at least one time in order to have a new profile created before beginning to restore your settings.

Note : be aware fo the fact that with Firefox 3, bookmarks and history are written in a SQLite file named places.sqlite located in the Firefox profile directory. Cookies are save also in a SQLite file named cookies.sqlite. You may try to backup and restore theses settings by copying and restoring directly theses .sqlite files while Firefox is not running.

When I read this, or this, I think that interesting things may happen soon!

Okay, most importantly: if you’ve visited this blog using Windows in the last few months, check your system for malware.

A couple of people let me know Google was tagging my site as possibly containing malware. It turns out when it got compromised a few weeks back (which I blogged about), the attacker inserted hidden iframes into a few posts which linked to malware sites. These were preserved when I restored the site from a backup after reinstalling the host server. This is a possible infection vector for Windows systems (I don’t believe the attacks would have affected any other OS), so get any Windows systems checked out. I’m really sorry about that. The Google tools were very helpful in identifying the offending bits, so I’ve torn them out of the database now, and the site is now clean. Lesson: when Google tells you a site is dangerous, it’s probably right. Don’t go there, and if you know the admin of the site, let them know.

Other business - ‘Real’Crypt 6.0a is now in the /contrib/backports repositories for 2008 and 2008 Spring. Also, the problem with backport building which was holding up some of my other backports is fixed, so Elisa 0.5.5 is in 2008 Spring /backports now, and all of synce 0.12 will be there shortly, which will enable support for Windows Mobile 2003 devices. I’ll complete that backport tomorrow and update the Wiki page on synchronization with new information.

Anyone running Transmission from /backports who noticed an annoying bug where when you opened a torrent from an external application it would suddenly disappear from the Torrent Options page a split second after it opened - update to 1.32-2mdv2008.1 . I talked this over with the upstream developers and they came up with a patch to fix it, which is now applied to that version of the package.

I found the upstream bug report about my issues with NFS shares visibility in Nautilus : bgo #536292. Whereas I thought it was a bug, it seems instead this is an intended behavior ... Indeed, if you look at bgo #520736, you will noticed that gvfs will silently ignore all entries in fstab where the mountpoint is not in /media. I don't know what to think about that ... This is so far away from the spirit of Unix/Linux ! Guys, If I put the user and the noauto option in the fstab entry, maybe it's because I want users to be able to mount it ! Why should I have to mount everything in /media ? I may want to do it in /opt, or for NFS home workstations in /home ! Really we should stop deciding for the users ! On top of that this behavior have been documented ... nowhere ( except in the bug report ) ! Now it seems that the only solution for me is to :

• edit /etc/fstab on all of my computers to mount the NFS share in /media or using autofs
• if former, create a symlink between the mountpoint in /media and the correct location where I want the share to appear ...

Wanna laugh more ? So GVFS is looking for mountpoints in /media from fstab and is using HAL ? but what will happen when we will have DeviceKit which will replace most parts of HAL ? Can you believed it ! HAL is not even a 1.0 release and 3 years after, when only most applications were using it correctly, HAL is already obsolete. Please note that it's David Zeuthen, the one who do HAL, who is trowing his own baby in the water. Are we going to have another behavior change in 1 year ?

Some of us will remember the Foxconn controversy about bugs in their BIOS when Linux was detected. Today, I visite Ryan blog ( the report who report first the issue ), and I found a very interesting post about Vista vs Linux ( Ubuntu ) : Why Vista is not ready for Linux or Mac users.
Even funnier is the latest ad from Apple concerning Vista UAC : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKM1cAtAdtQ

A SVN version of OpenOffice.org 3 have just been released in Cooker. This version allow to fix at the same time an issue introduced since latest cairo update ( bug #42735 ). OpenOffice.org 3 brings many new features like : multiple pages view in Writer, prettier notes in the margin, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, solver in Calc, new theme in Calc with improved selection, native tables in Impress, official support for Mac, performance improvements, PDF import ( not yet implemented ) and much improved icon theme ( Galaxy icon theme ). For furthers informations about theses features, please have a look at OOoninja website : OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features, an early look

As usual under mandriva, users have the choice to install whenever icon theme they want ( tango, crystal old KDE3 style, Andromeda/Galaxy, Industrial old Ximian theme ) with the openoffice.org-style-* packages. Each OpenOffice.org components can be installed separately, and Gnome support is available in openoffice.org-gnome.

Today my bluetooth adapter turned up today, after ordering it from trademe. With much anticipation, I plugged in into my Mandriva 2008.1 laptop, and after installing the bluetooth tools and kbluetooth, could see other computers and

phones, and connected to my phone by obex and downloaded the photo’s from it. However, what I purchased it for was to use the internet over my phone, via GPRS. I first tried this on my Eee PC, as that’s the first computer I wanted to use it with. I friend at work had got it going a few days ago, so I figured it can’t be too hard.. although it did take him quite some time.

Tonight must have been my lucky night, because I ended up fixing my sisters Eee PC, and while I was looking around, bumped into a script from 3eportal for the Eee PC that automatically configure it for GPRS. It consisted of a deb, which didn’t work. But, it worked enough, that I could make it work. It put an icon on the desktop, and ran a config script. The script had some issues, as it didn’t actually work in places, but I could see what it was trying to do. What it did was startup bluetooth, find my phone, ask me for a passkey for pairing, then configure /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf. It then asked for an APN and configured a GPRS dialup script that came with it. It asked me to pair my phone with the laptop, and tried to add the services to be started, in the Eee PC’s /usr/sbin/services.sh script.

The item it added on the menu was a simple toggle icon, that would run pon 3egprs or, if it was running, would run poff 3egprs. It also added the config script to the menu, which is not that brilliant, because if you run the config script again, it makes the same changes twice to some files, which will cause breakage. If I get time, I’ll submit a patch for it.

After getting this all configured, it worked! I was pretty surprised, but it just started working very well. The tricky bit was getting my phone to bond with the laptop, which I found was just me not driving the phone correctly.

Tomorrows task. Make it work with Mandriva.. which should be easy now I know what files to edit. Does anyone know of an automatic script to configure GPRS over bluetooth with Mandriva? Maybe I should port this deb to an RPM.

UPDATE: I've found the Mandriva way, via drakconnect, and it works.. with some effort.. next post will cover what I found. Thanks for the comments.

Yesterday one of my user was having a problem since a long time with OpenOffice.org under GNOME. When he was opening an attachment in evolution with OpenOffice.org, changing the directory will erase the attachment filename. As the user was using 2008.0, I decide to upgrade his notebook from Mandriva 2008.0 to Mandriva 2008.1 Spring. I'm pretty sure that I could solve the issue by telling OpenOffice.org to use its native dialogs instead, but I was willing to begin the transition of all of my workstations and notebook to Mandriva 2008.1 Spring.

So I upgrade the computer by using urpmi, and everything went well. However even after the upgrade, my openoffice.org bug was not solved ( bug #42794 ) : in short, I use a hammer to kill a bug ... for nothing. Even worst, I have to face another bug, but this time with Nautilus. This is a regression since the move to gvfs : Nautilus will no longer show NFS shares from fstab in computer:// ( bug #42792 ) :(

I've been able somewhat to solve the issue by using autofs to mount the share, and by putting a symlink from the mountpoint to the Desktop of the user. However I must admit that this regression will be an issue for me as I don't know how the system will react if the NFS share is not available. Wait & See ...

One of the new feature in Mandriva 2009.0 will be PackageKit support. As of today, PackageKit now have support for an urpmi backend ! This backend have been developped by Mandriva, and is already one of the backend supporting the most features. Except yum ( and eventually zypp ), urpmi is the backend which have the most features support as seen on PackageKit backend feature matrix and thus even compared to apt !

People willing to test PackageKit under Mandriva just need to use Cooker, or waiting for the next Mandriva 2009.0 release. Then they will just have to install the packagekit package, and kpackagekit ( KDE frontend ) or gnome-packagekit ( Gnome/GTK frontend ). Presently theses packages are in the contrib repository, but they should be moved shortly in the main repository. Once done, you need to check that the default backend in /etc/PackageKit/PackageKit.conf is urpmi as follow :
DefaultBackend=urpmi As Mandriva is not using NetworkManager, please be sure to activate also manual network connectivity detection :
UseNetworkHeuristic=true

Now you may want to test if PackageKit is working. For example, you can start a search from CLI with the pkcon utility. For example to search by name all the packages having mandriva-theme in their name, you can do : pkcon search name mandriva-theme
This will give you the following output :
[admin@info1 Ecoutes]$ pkcon search name mandriva-theme installed mandriva-theme-Powerpack-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 installed mandriva-theme-common-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 installed mandriva-theme-Powerpack-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Free-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-One-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-One-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Flash-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Flash-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Free-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Free-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-One-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-One-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Flash-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Flash-screensaver-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0 available mandriva-theme-Free-1.3.0-3mdv2009.0
As you can see, we can quickly see which packages are installed, and which ones are not installed. Here is a quick command matrix between urpmi and PackageKit CLI utility :

URPMIpkconDescription urpmi "foo"pkcon install "foo"Install package "foo" urpme "foo"pkcon remove "foo"Remove package "foo" urpmq --auto-selectpkcon get-updatesReturn list of updates availables urpmi --auto-selectpkcon updateInstall updates urpmf --name "foo"pkcon search name "foo"Search for packages containing "foo" in the name urpmq -r --list | grep "foo"pkcon search name "foo"Search for packages containing "foo" in the name urpmq -r --listpkcon get-packagesList all availables packages urpmq -i "foo"pkcon get-details "foo"Print details about package "foo" urpmq -l "foo"pkcon get-files "foo"Return list of files for package "foo"
Presently PackageKit is very slow ( remember, this is a python program talking to a Perl one ), and some command are not working ( like "pkcon update" ), but remember this is a work in progress. Last but not least, the manpages are useless, and there're no complete documentation on PackageKit website. However don't hesitate to use --help option to discover the availables commands.

If you want to use a GUI, please be sure to have installed gnome-packagekit package, and start gpk-application

For further screenshots of PackageKit, please go on project homepage

I currently enjoy watching the Olympic Games very much. Too bad for us Europeans, lots of competitions happen during night, or during the day in the morning and part of the afternoon, when I'm at at work. Luckily, there are great Olympic Games reports on television during the evening too here.

I'm afraid we don't have to expect much Belgian medals. Mabye our biggest chance is Evi Van Acker in the sailing races. In swimming, we had already several national records, but no-one reached the finals up to now. In equestrian, Belgium got a ninth place (after being 2nd after the first test...). Tomorrow some Belgians participate to the semi-finals in rowing. In tennis we have Olivier Rochus and Rochus & Darcis in the tennis doubles still in competition. The football team will probably also make it to the quarter finals (tomorrow last match in the heats) and we hope to see some great results in athletics of Tia Hellebaut (high jump) and Kim Gevaert (100 and 200m sprint and 4x100m relay). Last Olympic Games, Belgium won 3 medals. As we failed to win any medal in judo now (although we were not far from it), it will be difficult to reach even that number this year...

Oh, and too bad this all happens in a country where people are not always "free"...

PS: for us computer scientists, this is nice: Windows XP crashed during the opening ceremony and produced a nice Blue Screen of Death on the roof of the Olympic Stadium

This week’s techmail is Get a complete security toolkit with BackTrack 3. I was approached a month or so ago by an individual who does forensic work, mostly on Windows and Mac computers and he was in need of something to do forensics with Linux, and wanted a tool that could do forensics work on Windows, but using Linux. After some poking around for him (I’ve always meant to look into a good security LiveCD but have never really given myself the opportunity), I found BackTrack and must admit I found it impressive, so this tip gives my initial impressions and installation help with BackTrack.

Last week’s techmail was Customizing the Joe text editor which goes into some detail regarding customizing Joe, specifically about how you can change key bindings to make shortcuts or other modifications. Joe is one of the first text editors I’ve ever used with Linux, and I still use it today. I try to use vim more often just because I don’t know it as well as I would like (I use it remotely all the time, and I use it with mutt to write emails… I even have the keybindings in zsh to vim mode rather than emacs mode), but for quick edits and look-see’s, I still use joe the most (the keybindings are burned in my skull I think).

I recently downloaded the Mandriva 2009.0 beta 2 KDE 4.1 live cd.

I kept of list of things I found as I had a look around it.  I only focused on the desktop.

• Cacert.org certificate not installed on live CD :(
• Konquror missing
• Seems to have a beta Nvidia driver. Worked fine.
• 3D performance was mixed, with it not feeling as smooth as compiz fusion with KDE 3.5 does.
• Same old compiz oddities, like resizing a window when wobbly windows turned on is slow / does not redraw as it’s being resized.
• Firefox and Firefox 3 both on live CD, except, on menu, one shows as “Mozilla firefox” and one as “Firefox web browser”. It would be better to have the version number to tell the difference
• KDE4 compositing working. I selected compiz on startup, but it seems to be ignored.
• Firefox theme ugly. This really looks bad with KDE4 looking so good. I suggest that Mandriva consider installing the “kde4″ firefox theme by default, this fits the look and feel of KDE better.
• The La ora theme not on live CD, this is a pity, as the default KDE window theme, is ok, but not that nice. It can be made a lot nicer, by turning off the “Show stripes next to title”. although maybe this is just me complaining. Getting the title bar colours to be anything other than fairly boring seems to be a bit of a trick, but possible with some playing around.
• System settings not on the menu, only available from “Favorites” on the menu.
• No power management applet on in KDE
• Excellent wifi support, Wifi LED started to work, plus without any configuration, wifi just worked when I accessed the network center.
• Dolphin not my preferred tool.. So I’ll be sticking with Konqurer, however, I notice that dolphin can display icons like I prefer, what used to be called multicolumn in konqurer.
• Run command interface is nice: Noteworthy shortcuts. Ctrl - F12 to show dashboard, and Ctrl - Esc to show system activity. Also of course, the alt-f2 which is greatly improved krunner.
• sftp kio slave works well. Excellent
• man kio slave displayes manuals, but tried to open in firefox.
• fish kio slave crashed dolphin, but worked on second attempt..
• “Up” icon missing in dolphin
• Ogg not associated with amarok.
• Both the “Programs” and “Applications” kioslave’s do not show applications at second level.
• Desktop plasmoid “picture frame” does not support kio slaves. :(

Now, enough of the bullets, and a visual tour.

“Up” icon missing in dolphin.  I added this back in, as it’s one of the most useful things.

Also on show in this screenshot is the ability to put application start links on the desktop at any size, which will be good for some people,

Another comment about firefox2 and fiefox3. If they are both of the menu, name them with a version number. Ideally, just have Firefox 3.

After Mandriva 2009.0 Beta 1 release, here are some news on the Cooker front :

• Improving mdkapplet behaviour : Many users have noticed in the past that sometimes rpmdrake or urpmi ( or any Mandriva tools willing to install a package ) may be blocked sometimes with the criptic "urpmi database locked" message. This message was due most of the time to mdkapplet. Indeed, mdkapplet will check regularly the updates medias, and if they have been updated, it will update the urpmi database. During this phase, the urpmi DB will be locked, and so others applications won't be able to install packages. A long thread start on Cooker ML to discuss this issue and see how things could be improved. During the discussion, Thierry Vignaud provide some clarifications about mdkapplet behaviour. cf mdv bug #38817
• Xmetisse and Xgl in contrib : Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade ( Mandriva Xorg maintainer ) asked to move move x11-server-xgl and x11-server-xmetisse to contrib. Please note that upstream Xgl is no longer supported and thus even for ATI/AMD graphic cards users, whereas Metisse is somewhat in sleep mode.
• Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver : Buchan Milne have packaged for Mandriva the "Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux" which allow to easily set up new 3g connections (with hardware detection, hardware-specific settings, network-specific settings etc.), and support for reading SMS's from the modem.
• Refreshed installer UI landing in cooker : Fred Crozat announced on Cooker ML that the new UI for the installer has been put on the mirrors. Beta 2 users will be able to see the DrakX UI. Please feel free to report bugs or issues.
• Improved xulrunner integration in Mandriva : Look at the possibilities to improve xulrunner integration in Mandriva. Götz Waschk make Epiphany use xulrunner, and discussion is ongoing about xulrunner usage for Firefox 3.
• Choice of Video player for KDE4 : Presently no decision have been done about the default video player to use for KDE 4.1 in Mandriva 2009.0. Indeed Kaffeine have not be ported yet to KDE4, and Dragon Player is a very simple video player. Some users proposed to use smplayer ( Qt4 frontend to mplayer ), however there're integrations issues. cf mdv bug #42216.
• Mandriva hardware database : Romain d'Alverny announced that the beta version of the new Mandriva Hardware Compatibility List was online for testing at http://hcl.mandriva.com/. Don't hesitate to submit your hardware. hclcollector or hclGUI can be used to do the report.
• system-config-printer about to replace printerdrake : Tests are being done currently to make system-config-printer replace printerdrake. Whereas printerdrake is the best printer configuration tool IMHO, Mandriva was alone for its maintenance. So Tiago Salem Herrmann announced on Cooker ML that system-config-printer was being evaluated as replacement for printerdrake.