Parinux, the parisian Free Software User Group, invites you to a Drupal traduction party on Saturday 19th September. Together, we'll be translationg Drupal 6 and some of its modules into french.

This event is an occasion to discover how simple it could be to contribute to a Free Software Project as Drupal

It will be held in Paris at Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, avenue Corentin Cariou, form 02:00pm to 18:00pm

More information and inscription on Parinux website (in french)

Tonight, I've uploaded a couple of Gdium RPM's. You can get them at http://gdium.vincentxavier.lautre.net/rpm/

Saturday, Parinux, the parisian Free Software User Group, will have a 4-hours lesson on shell usage. We will cover things from basic shell usage, such as listing, copying or moving files, then going forward to some more advanced features, such pipes and redirection. We shall even speak a bit of sed and awk scripting to improve your shell usage experience. You can still register the last few place on Parinux website.

This is mainly the same lesson which took place in May, at our regular Ubuntu Party, where our host, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (a parisian dedidacted place to science and industry), counted 4000+ visitors.

Saturday, Mandriva is having its Spring install party, with conferences about various subject, such as KDE4 and GNOME Desktop, contributor life, and more.

I'm backporting some applications from Cooker, Mandriva's developing version, on Gdium and I run into some problems. Some applications fails at compilation time, due to dumbness in original specfiles, but some others fails about some Gdium specific issue. For instance, libxml2-config --libs returns null, whereas linux32 libxl2-config --libs returns -lxml2 -lm -lz. In fact, it appears that some apps must be compiled with a linux32 prefix !

I've also installed ccache on my development environnement, which allows caching for .o files before linking. rpmbuild always starts by removing the precdent BUILD tree, so if rpm packaging failed about a missing man page, you must re-compile the whole package. ccache is then great for speeding-up the re-compilation process. To enable ccache, just install it and then change a bit your path, to be sure, ccache is used :


urpmi ccache
export PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/bin:/usr/lib/ccache/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/root/bin:/usr/lib/qt4/bin
ccache -M 2G

Since I got an access on a remote computer without root access, I was wondering how to build rpm and test it. Some time, I need to install packages, -devel packages as dependencies or my own packages to test them. It seems to me unfair to notiy this computer administrator each time I want a package installed. Since root access isnot a good method, I thinks the best one is to set up a chroot enviromment.

chroot envirionnement have plenty of avantage for building. You may build packages in a fresh environnement each time you want to build one, install packages or remove it, etc.

To create it, I've just created a chroot directory in my home directory. I copied /bin, /usr, /sbin, /var, /opt, /srv. You must then create dev, proc and sys, and mount the corresponding pseudo-filesystems.  Then you canchange root. You may ask to your admin to mount e pseudo-filesystems and to give you access to chroot() syscall via sudo. You just need to ask for %user ALL NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/chroot

In a nutshell, commands are :

mkdir $HOME/chroot

cp -r /bin /sbin /root /usr /opt /var /srv $HOME/chroot

mkdir $HOME/chroot/{proc,dev,sys}

As root (or ask your admin)

mount -t proc none /home/user/chroot/proc

mount -t sysfs none /home/user/chroot/sys

mount -t debugfs none /home/user/chroot/sys/kernel/debug

mount -o bind /dev /home/user/chroot/dev

Then you just have to do chroot $HOME/chroot /bin/bash

If you plan to share the chroot with other users, you should be carefull, as everyone may be root at the same time.

Parinux (http://www.parinux.org), the parisian Free Software User Group held a Gdium hackathon last week end in Paris.We were hosted by Bellinux (http://bellinux.org), an other parisian organisation which promotes Free Software.

The 8 attendees met on late Saturday morning and Patrick gave us an insight on the Gdium project, why do they choose MIPS processor etc. Three of the participant had never built a rpm, so they also discovered RPM format in the details. After a bit of trolling about RPM spec files, most of us where looking to scores of lines on the 10" Gdium screen.

baud123 made some commentaries on Gdium : http://cookerspot.tuxfamily.org/wikka.php?wakka=Blog20090508GdiumDiscovery http://cookerspot.tuxfamily.org/wikka.php?wakka=CompileGdium

We left around 09:00 pm, most of the machine compiling huge projects, such as qt4.5, Battle for Wesnoth or WebKit.

On Sunday, we came back around 11:00 am to see that most of the compilations failed, so we where bound to respawn them, loosing precious time. Most of us didn't achieve the compilation for 18:00 pm end of the Hackathon. We uploaded packages on http://gdium.vincentxavier.lautre.net/.

By 5:00pm, participants voted to elected the two proeminent packagers. Every one first described the packages he tried to build, and how he succeed or failed.

Natacha Porté (http://instinctive.eu) ported TuxTyping, a software designed to learn typing with Tux and Collatinus, a software to translate Latin.Collatinus where a bit tricky, since there wre no rpm to start with and the soft was initially designed for Windows. Collatinus wanted some text files to live in /usr/bin/ so, some patching was to be done. She won a Gdium

Emmanuel Seyman won the second Gdium for his efforts in porting some Perl::Modules, Guten, a software to download and read books from http://gutenberg.org and a software to pronounce words.

Since I'm a Gentoo fan, I was wondering how to install Gentoo on my Gdium. The main problem is the mass storage medium used by the Gdium, i.e. a USB stick. In fact, this kind of problem would have arosen with any SSD based laptop, where you are limited on writing times by the medium.

This howto is purely informative and I'm not responsible for any mistake that can append in the process.

Debian GNU/Linux is a complete GNU/Linux distribution that run on 14 different architectures, including MIPS. Emtec have choosen Mandriva, a well established french GNU/Linux distributor, to ship a GLinux os for their Gdium. You may want to switch to Debian GNU/Linux on this netbook, for wathever reasons. Just follow me.