pterjan's diary

  I love Europe

I'm currently in UK for the week-end and this morning my French mobile phone operator (SFR) sent me a wonderful SMS: WAP sessions within European Union are charged 1.20 euros for the first 50kB and then 5 euros per MB. I was so happy to learn that the prices are still crazy...

Then a friend pointed me to this Europe press release. It tells that starting on July 1st, the maximum price in Europe will be €1/MB, then it will decrease to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011. SFR had not the nice idea to inform me about this price drop (5 times cheaper) which will happen in 34 hours...

This decision also tells that sending SMS in Europe will not be charged more than 0.11€ (before VAT). That explains why SFR was so proud to annouce me one month ago that starting on July 1st they will decrease the price of SMS in Europe from 0.30€ to 0.13 (VAT included).

I hope the 4th mobile license will be given soon and real competition will enter French mobile market, so that we don't need European laws to have reasonable prices (mobile prices in UK are so low compared to France...).

  LiveJournal

I finally got a livejournal account in January to be able to comment, and now I get this email...

Hi pterjan,

pterjan's birthday is coming up on June 21!

You can:

    * Post to wish them a happy birthday
    * Send them a virtual gift
    * Gift them with a paid account

So nice of them... They don't wish me a happy birthday but ask me to do it myself...

  Zarb unavailability

Zarb.org, the server hosting a few projects like PLF, JPackage, EasyUrpmi, Planet Mandriva, ... and this blog was not available during the last week-end. On Friday night a disk of the RAID5 volume containing user homedirs died (the one with projects was not impacted). Unfortunately the RAID controller put the volume offline... (fortunatly I was in Lille, without Internet access so I did not spend too much time on it :) ).

The failed disk was replaced on Monday and we had to restore the daily backup because the ext3 filesystem was highly corrupted (14GB data out of 26 were still available, but all in /lost+found).

Sorry for the 3 days of service interruption and for losing your Friday work that was on the server in your home (between the backup and the crash).

  NKM talks about Mandriva

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, current Secretary of State to the Prime Minister, with responsibility for Forward Planning, Assessment of Public Policies and Development of the Digital Economy in the French government (I stole the English translation from Wikipedia), was recently interviewed by ZDNet.

She talks about various topics regarding what France should/can/will do, like IPv6 migration, optical fiber deployment, ... and near the end talked about Mandriva!

She said:

Je pense au logiciel, on est quand même un des pays qui a la possibilité, avec le Linux français Mandriva, de savoir créer un système d'exploitation grand public, c'est pas donné à tout le monde.

which in English would be something like

I think to the software, we are a country that has the possibility, with the french Linux Mandriva, to create an operating system for end-users, this is not given to everyone.

. That's nice to hear that she knows we exist and even that it's worth mentioning.

This part of the video is here (French).

  Vacation report

I started the month in Prague with toady. This is a nice city, and I did not manage to meet Andre!

After a few days working, I spent two great weeks near London (and UK weather is actually not so bad!). And I will be there again soon!

Now, something that may look more interesting to you. During that time, I could work again on neercs!

Development has been going at very irregular pace since sam had started it 3 years ago as a proof of concept and I was planning to release a 0.1 preview version after the two weeks but some things still need to be done before.

Like GNU screen, neercs allows you to detach a session from a terminal, but provides unique features.

Did you ever forget to start a process inside screen and the have to decide between killing it now or praying to not be disconnected close to the end? With neercs you can grab a running process (detach it from its current terminal and move it into neercs)!

Among other features: several window managers are provided (vertical split, horizontal split, cards, full screen); there is an animated screensaver, and locking; you can see real time thumbnails of your shells; window collapses when you destroy a term.

Unfortunately several things must be done before a first release: fixing some issues in terminal emulation (emacs works fine but not vim), improving performance, and having a 3d rotating cube when moving between terms in fullscreen mode (I hope Jylam will code this one day, he coded many of the features but now prefers watching TV). Sam helped on the performance side by adding a dirty rectangles API to libcaca last week, but more work is needed.

  Travel

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring will be officially available in less than twelve hours, it's time to relax!

After a week-end in London for the marathon (I did not run, I was there as a fan with a march band playing there), I'll fly tomorrow evening to Prague until Monday!

About Prague, I can already give you some advice, do not use hotel.cz. I had booked an hotel more than one month ago through them and never got the confirmation. Ten days ago I sent them an email about it and two days later got an email saying that it's now full, the girl offering to look for another one. I gave my criteria and even suggested one but got no answer. So on Sunday I tried to book the other hotel (it was still listed as available), and got today a negative answer... So, I finally used booking.com and won't sleep in the center of the city...

  Opera is 15

I have actually never used Opera (I have been using Netscape for years and then only free (as in speech) browsers) but I know it has been good inspiration and motivation for competitors, so happy birthday!

For this occasion they created a modern (xhtml1-strict) old looking homepage. I love

  Booting from Hard Drive on EVGA nForce 680i SLI

I spent too much time to be able to boot from harddrive on the test box with this mortherboard so here is the tip.

The BIOS will not try to boot from a hard drive not part of a RAID, so you have to create a Striped RAID (other ones won't accept to have only one disk), and mark that RAID bootable.

  Ubuntu and copyright

Exactly one year ago (well actually there are 4 days left before the aniversary), a bug was reported on launchpad, called Non-free files distributed without license/copyright info.

Basically, it complained that people reported bugs like "I need the firmware available on http://hosting.ru/~bob/" for my DVB card to work, and the said firmware was added into linux-restricted-modules (then linux-firmware) without checking it can be redistributed, and without writing the origin and license in copyright file.

This is not really new as in earlier version they were even included in linux-image package, already without correct license info.

This bug got very few activity, like people closing it for old releases, or asking to attach Xorg.0.log twice...

In January this year, a bit upset about that, I wrote an email to Mark Shuttleworth titled "Copyright violations in Ubuntu, nobody cares" and was happy to get two very positive emails in less than 24 hours.

First one was asking someone, with me in Cc, to have a look at it and either drop or ask the appropriate people to get an agreement for redistribution.

The second one was the forwarded answer from Matt Zimmerman, with Technical Board in Cc, saying:

The kernel team has been doing copyright archeology on this already, with a goal of fixing this for 9.04. I don't think he was aware of this particular bug report, and will get it updated to reflect the current status of that work. We know that there are areas where we don't have proper documentation for the origin and copyright of some of these files, and that we need to either clear them or remove them.

Mark added Pascal, I trust that this resolves the issue, please raise it again if 9.04 beta doesn't reflect this goal.

What happened since ? The bug was not updated to reflect the current status of that work. And I didn't have time last few months to look at the betas, so I was quite pessimistic when I found today time to look at it.

Well, things improved a bit, some licenses where added, and new one was added only after checking the license.

But many with unknown licenses are just still there, none was removed.

Worse, some where the license says it's not redistributable, like dvb-fe-tda10046.fw which states The user may not make additional copies of the software. The documentation may not be reproduced. as pointed in another report , are still there too...

So, hosting an Ubuntu mirror or giving away Ubuntu CDs is still violating copyright, and illegal in most countries.

If several bug reports on Launchpad, Mark and Technical Board have not enough power to make packagers follow the packaging rules and the law, and have Ubuntu legally distributable, who can?

  New fast booting distro concept

Xandros has announced Presto. This is a new concept, not because it would seem to have something technicaly interesting, but because it is the first time I read about a Linux distribution with 7 days trial period.

After that, you can no longer use it more than 10 minutes if you don't pay the license.

That's great innovation from Xandros, isn't it ?

Do you think someone will bother writing a crack or distribute an unprotected version on p2p networks ?

  Pizza

This post only concerns people working in Mandriva's Paris office, or planning to visit us.

We have a very good pizzeria close to the office, and we were very sad when it closed for one full week because they were in Italy to participate in pizza world championship.

The result is there, they are second!