Fred's blog

Some news on the development of http://hardware4linux.info/:

• You can now rate Fingerprint readers, Cameras, Webcams, Scanners and Laptops. The classification of these components is based on heuristics so report any error to me.

• You can now use direct links based on hardware info if you need on your web sites for PCI and USB components. For PCI, you can use the following url: http://hardware4linux.info/pci/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/ and for USB: http://hardware4linux.info/usb/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/.

• An RSS feed for the comments is now available.

Some news on the development of http://hardware4linux.info/ :

• You can now navigate in the association between kernel modules and devices.
• Display the names of OEM manufacturers for PCI devices.
• New version (0.8) of the collector.

And the current stats in term of Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu 7.04 : 36 systems
• Debian lenny/sid : 22 systems
• Mandriva Linux 2007.1 : 17 systems
• Mandriva Linux 2008.0 : 11 systems
• Gentoo Gentoo Base System release 1.12.9 : 10 systems
• Debian 4.0 : 7 systems
• Arch Linux Duke : 6 systems
• Gentoo Gentoo Base System release 1.12.10 : 6 systems
• Mandriva Linux 2007.0 : 6 systems
• Arch Linux (Duke) : 3 systems
• Fedora Core 5 : 2 systems
• Ubuntu 6.10 : 2 systems
• Ubuntu 7.10 : 2 systems
• openSUSE 10.2 : 2 systems
• Arch Linux 0.8 : 1 system
• Debian 3.1 : 1 system
• Fedora Core 6 : 1 system
• Frugalware 0.6 : 1 system
• Gentoo Gentoo Base System release 2.0.0_alpha3 : 1 system
• Mandriva Linux 2012 : 1 system
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 : 1 system
• Scientific Linux SL 4.4 : 1 system
• Slackware 10.2.0 : 1 system
• Slackware 11.0.0 : 1 system
• Ubuntu 6.06.1 : 1 system
• Zenwalk 4.0 : 1 system
• Zenwalk 4.6 : 1 system

Thanks to all that have uploaded systems!

I'm working on a new site to lookup and report hardware compatibility with Linux distributions. I'm in the early development stage. Only the reporting layers are done. I need help to validate that this is working correctly on various hardware and Linux flavors.

If you want to help, just try to report your system. You have to do the following steps:

• create an account on http://hardware4linux.info/accounts/register/
• install an LSB package from http://hardware4linux.info/server/download/
• launch /opt/hardware4linux.info/bin/hwreport /tmp/report
• upload the generated file to http://hardware4linux.info/server/upload/
• report me any problem (crash, upload problem, missing hardware, wrong hardware category, ...)

Any feedback welcome.

While my check isn't integrated in rpmlint, I'm distributing lsbrpmlint as a standalone package to be installed after rpmlint. Feedback welcome.

• tar ball
• binary package

Here is the changes since the last patch:

• check cron files and profile files
• check package name against the list at lanana.org
• load the InitScript and Tags checks

I'm not sure this is a good idea to test against lanana.org names because one can want to register later and there is some delay in the registration. Alternatively I could only check for name coherency between the different files and directories. WDYT ?

I would also need a way to change the level of the report on other checks from warning to error and also from error to warning without changing the source. I need to think more about this.

I have updated unison spec file to fix a buildependency.

Built a python-numpy spec file.

I'm proposing my help to the open source projects that want to distribute their software as binary packages. The idea is to demonstrate that the LSB is a viable way to deliver binaries for the open source projects. The LSB isn't reserved to proprietary ISV! Contact me at flepied at gmail.com and I'll help you with LSB packaging.

I had to setup my free.fr SIP phone to be able to join a phone meeting in 30 mn. Having lost my password and having no SIP client of choice, it was a challenge! Hoppefully I remembered a discussion with one of my co-coworker about twinkle (thanks Paul!). So I downloaded an src.rpm from Cooker (Mandriva Linux development version) to be sure to have a well integrated and up to date package for my Mandriva Linux 2006 system. The package was at version 0.8 so I dowloaded the 0.8.1 version and rebuilt the package (using this spec file for those interested in rebuilding on Mandriva Linux 2006). I requested a new password from my SIP provider (free.fr) and I was just in time for my meeting!

For those interested, I use the cooker.sh script to speed up my download and recompile from Cooker.

Back to my old development ;-) I have created a patch to improve the LSB check in rpmlint.

I'm looking for info about UPnP use under Linux. If you use it, drop me a message. So far I have found the following interesting projects:

• http://www.libupnp.org/
• http://linux-igd.sourceforge.net/

Do you use an upnp device with a Linux server ? Which rdma do you recomend ?

Distribution is now in rpm form and in source form.

The functions that can be used by the pre and post scripts to interact with the user are now in a common file in /usr/share/rpm-bundle/functions. The new check_already_installed function, when called from the pre script, checks if the packages are already installed and generates a list file with the list of rpm files that aren't installed. This file is then used by the install process to decide which files to install.

• support for Xandros (Hubert Figuiere)

Download osinfo

See this article for the complete list of tested distribution and report yours if it's not on the list.

Description

The rpm bundle concept is a way to build and distribute a set of rpm. The idea is to define tools to easily constuct sets and to avoid each software maker to construct its own installer.

There are 2 tools:

1. The rpm bundle builder takes as input an xml description of the bundle, optional shell scripts and the rpm files and produces an rpm bundle file.
2. The rpm bundle installer takes as argument an rpm bundle and allows an interactive installation of the rpm files contained in the rpm bundle.

The installer is designed to display the license associated with the bundle, handle an interactive phasis and then install the rpm. The tool is implemented in 2 parts: the backend which handles all the management of the rpm bundle format and a frontend which handle all the user interface. The frontend is just a proof of concept and it will be replaced by Linux distributors and/or dekstop environment with a new program that is better integrated with the package management tools.

The frontent and the backend discuss with a very simple ascii protocol.

Usage of the tools

Edit the test.xml file to add some real rpm packages.

Then as a user use this command to create the rpm bundle:

$ ./rpmb-create tests.xml b.rpmb

As root, use the following command to install the rpm bundle:

# ./rpmb-install b.rpmb

Status

These tools are just an exploratory work and they are not to be used in real life.

Download the archive here.

All comments welcome!

cpuinfo2html allows to display /proc/cpuinfo as an html table. The table summarizes the entries that are common to all cores and cpus and highlights the differences.

Call it like that:

$ ./cpuinfo2html < /proc/cpuinfo > c.html

This will generate a table like this:

Thanks to my journal entry on linuxfr I have enhanced osinfo. Here are the changes in osinfo 1.4:

• added support for Arch Linux and Slackware
• fixed -k option
• added a -v option to display version
• added support for Gentoo
• moved the test of redhat at the end because it seems to be present on an Ubuntu...

Here is the current list of tested distributions:

• Arch Linux release 0.7.2 on GenuineIntel (2.6.18-ARCH)
• Debian release 3.1 on i386 (2.6.8-2-686)
• Fedora Core release 3 on x86_64
• Fedora Core release 4 on ppc (2.6.16-1.2115_FC4)
• Fedora Core release 5 on i386 (2.6.17-1.2139_FC5)
• Gentoo release 1.12.0_pre19 on i386 (2.6.16-mm1-ubik)
• Gentoo release 1.12.1 on AuthenticAMD (2.6.16-suspend2-r8)
• Gentoo release 1.6.14 on i386 (2.6.16-gentoo-r7)
• Hedinux release 2006.1 on i386 (2.6.15.7-hed)
• lfs release SVN-20050221 on i386 (2.6.16.27)
• Mandriva Linux release 2006.0 on x86_64
• Solaris release 9 on x86
• SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server release 9 on ppc
• SUSE LINUX release 10.0 on i586 (2.6.13-15-default)
• Ubuntu release 5.10 on i386 (2.6.12-10-386)
• Ubuntu release 6.06 on i386 (2.6.15-25-686)
• Xandros Desktop OS 4.0 Home Premium Edition
• Xandros Server 1.0

If you have tested on another distribution, please send me the output of osinfo.

I have created osinfo to report the type, the version, the architecture and the kernel of the Linux distribution you are running.

Currently the following distributions have been tested:

• Mandriva Linux
• RedHat Linux
• SuSE Linux

Please help me by testing on other distributions and on validating that it reports the right thing on your distribution.