Tag: Linux

5 a day – Ubuntu bug triaging fortsat

Som opfølgning på min tidligere blog post om bug arbejde i Ubuntu følger her lidt mere uddybende info. Både flere (og lidt mere avancerede) bug opgaver og nogle flere ressourcer, der forhåbentligt kan gøre bug arbejdet lettere og sjovere.

Duplikats
Hvis flere forskellige bugs egentlig handler om det samme problem er der tale om duplikater, og det er praktisk at samle alt information et sted. Oftest foregår det sådan at den ældste bug forbliver åben, mens de andre bliver markerede som duplikater. Til at starte med kan det godt være svært at vide om en bug man sidder med er en duplikat, men hvis man har brugt lidt tid på bug arbejdet vil man nogle gange have en følelse af at have set den beskrevne problemstilling før – så er der nok tale om en duplikat.

duplicat

Markering som duplikat foregår i menuen ude til højre.

Link upstream
Meget få af programmerne i Ubuntu er skrevet direkte til Ubuntu. Så hvis der f.eks. er en fejl i Firefox i Ubuntu, så er den samme fejl måske også tilstede i den originale Firefox kildekode og Firefox pakken i Fedora. I disse tilfælde er det praktisk at få en bug registreret upstream og hvis den allerede er registreret så få de to bugs som beskriver det samme problem kædet sammen.
Dette foregår ved at klikke Also affects project eller Also affects distribution.

Bug squad og Bug Control
Der findes rigtig meget information på Bugs wikisiden. Her kan du finde kontaktinfo til Bug Squad, der er både en mail liste, irc kanal og Launchpad gruppe hvor man kan få hjælp og svar på spørgsmål angående bug arbejde. Alle kan være medlem af Bug Squad. Du kan også ansøge om en mentor, som altså er et erfarent medlem af Bug Squad som kan hjælpe med at sætte dig ind i en fornuftig arbejdsgang.

Hvis du føler at du har godt styr på bug arbejdet kan det være at det skulle ansøge om medlemskab af Ubuntu Bug Control.

5 a day
Hvis du har arbejdet lidt med at finde de rette pakker til bugs, der mangler en tilknyttet pakke (eller har fået tilknyttet en forkert pakke) vil du hurtigt finde ud af at det bliver lettere med tiden. Så hvorfor ikke afsætte et par minutter hver dag til lige at gøre noget godt for 5 forskellige bugs?
Dette er filosofien bag 5 a day. Hvis vi alle gør lidt hver dag burde det være muligt at holdet styr på den meget store mængde fejlrapporter som bliver indberettet mod Ubuntu distributionen.
Det handler selvfølgelig bare om at komme i gang! Hvis man er lidt glad for stats, eller måske har det lidt godt med et konkurrence aspekt, så kan man blive medlem af 5-a-day-participants/ gruppen på Launchpad. Når man har tilmeldt sig Launchpad gruppen sker registreringen om man har nået sine fem daglige automatisk. Man behøver ikke at foretage sig andet.
… men husk nu at det i sidste ende handler om at gøre Ubuntu bedre. Hvis du kun når tre bugs en dag har du stadig hjulpet – og du kan sagtens fortsætte til bug nr. 6 og 7 efter du har nået den daglige 5.

Det er nu muligt at følge med her fra dag til dag for at se om man selv har nået sine fem om dagen. Samtidig kan man, hvis man kan holde dampen oppe over flere uger, komme på nogle af de fine lister over dem der har holdt ud længst tid i træk.

Det er vigtigt at bemærke at 5 a day er blevet udtænkt for at gøre det lidt sjovere at triage bugs. Det er ikke ideen at man skal gøre noget ved bugs som egentligt ikke var behøvet, bare for at kunne tælle det med i en af sine fem om dagen. På sammen måde som der ingen ide er i at lave unødigt bug-arbejde bare for at få karma.

Working webcam

Finally my webcam is working! Up until recently there was no working Linux driver for my webcam, but that seems to have changed.

Reports indicate that the driver is included in the Linux kernel from version 2.6.28. Until that version hits your system (should ship with Ubuntu Jaunty) installing the driver is still possible. See this guide:

http://m560x-driver.wiki.sourceforge.net/testing_m5602

The webcam (or the chip to be more accurate) is located in a lot of laptops. The Launchpad Bug report mentions Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Zepto. I have a Zepto 6615WD myself.

To find out if your webcam is a m560x model, open up a terminal and type

lsusb

if you see a line like this:

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 0402:5602 ALi Corp. Video Camera Controller

you are in business. You may have to activate your webcam somehow. On my system there is a button with a camera icon on it that I have to press before the camera turns on.

The quality is a bit grainy and far from the best – hopefully this can be solved as the driver matures.
hue-lille

However me being (and looking) tired in the morning is properly beyond the scope of some webcam driver. (Yes I cheated and used a regular camera for the Get to know a LoCo post a few weeks back.)

Ubuntu on a USB stick

I finally had the chance to play with the usb-creator feature on the Ibex live CD a few days ago. In short the Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD comes with the option to create a USB startup disk or burn the Live CD iso file to a USB stick, to put it differently.

The usb-creator program can be launched from the System -> Administration -> Create a USB starup disk on the Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD

usb-creator

This is a great way to carry around a Ubuntu Linux install, without having to bring my Laptop everywhere. I just need a spare pc with USB boot enabled and I’m good to go, whether I’m trying to show others what Ubuntu can provide or just trying to get some work done. The boot time is of course a bit longer than usual, since everything happens over USB, but once the boot is over you have access to all the fabulous tools that comes with Linux. And if you want you can also install Ubuntu Linux onto the machine you are working on (but don’t do this on other peoples machines without their consent!).

The size of your USB key does limit the fun, both how many extra programs you can install and how many files you can carry around. But with a 4 GB key like mine there is room for the programs I need and can’t seem to find on the Windows machines at work.

It is not all roses though. During install and upgrades I quickly ran into this bug which seems to prevent upgrades of the kernel. Security also seems to be an issue. There is no password needed to log into the system or to use sudo. There is also the risk of forgetting the USB stick – somehow forgetting an entire laptop seems less likely than forgetting a USB key in the USB drive as you get up to leave.
I haven’t yet looked into the possibility of using the private encrypt directory to protect files on the key, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t work on the Live CD.

So, what other uses have you put your Live USB keys to?

Ubuntu og de andre distributioner

Jeg så Stefano‘s blog indlæg hvor han vha. Google. trends undersøger forskellige Linux distributioners popularitet over tid (ud fra frekvensen af søgninger på Google).

Jeg tænkte jeg ville gøre det samme, bare for Danmark. Lad mig med det samme gøre klart at jeg godt ved at dette på ingen måde er videnskabeligt og der er en masse fejlkilder. Men så længe man ikke glemmer det kan man jo godt lege lidt alligevel…

Her er resultatet man får når man søger på de fire distributioner som Stefano også har brugt i sit indlæg:

Her i Danmark ser det også ud som om Ubuntu er den mest populære distribution ud fra denne Google trend. Det bemærkes dog at Ubuntu først har slået igennem senere herhjemme – først i starten af 2005 – i modsætning til 3. kvartal af 2004 for den internationale søgning. Det ses også at Gentoo er nærmest lige så populær som Fedora og SUSE i Danmark – i modsætning til den internationale søgning, hvor Gentoo ligger lidt under de andre.

Jeg tror ikke man kan tale om at Ubuntu har skadet de andre distributioner, men der er nok ikke tvivl om at Ubuntu er blevet den mest populære distribution og det har sikkert også resulteret i nogle brugere der er skiftet fra f.eks. SUSE til Ubuntu. Men det er der jo heller ikke noget galt i og så længe flere bruger open source software mener jeg at indbyrdes ‘religions krige’ er spild af tid… Så længe folk bruger Emacs som deres editor er jeg fuldstændig ligeglad med om de kører Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, SUSE, BSD eller noget helt syvende :)

World of Warcraft on Ubuntu Edgy Eft (a howto)

Last time I tried to install World of Warcraft under Ubuntu was probably more than six months ago. And a lot has changed since then. I installed it yesterday on my new laptop and the install process was really easy! The hardest part turned out getting the patches for WoW. After a fresh install you need to download approximately 1 GB of patches! And as Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/ has so artistically pointed out, this is not always a trivial task.

I followed the steps mentioned here
http://wiki.kaspersandberg.com/doku.php?id=howtos:wine:worldofwarcraft
and after successfully install also found this guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft.
Of course you need a pc capable of actually running World of Warcraft, and you need to have the right drivers installed (usually the 3D drivers for graphics cards are the hard part – this guide does however not cover installing right graphics drivers).

So my advice is to google for the patches you need as the first thing you do, start to download these, and then complete the setup of wine and base install of World of Warcraft while you get the patches.

The files you’re looking fore are

WoW-1.12.0-XXXX-patch.exe
WoW-1.12.x-to-2.0.1-XXXX-patch

where XXXX depends on your preferred language and what servers you play on. For me that would be enGB, as my WoW client is in English, and I play on the European English language servers. Just do a google search for these file names, and some mirrors or torrents should pop up.

So, while you’re downloading the patches you can start installing and configuring Wine. You need a newer version than the one in Edgy Eft. Luckily Wine provides us with a APT repository for the latest wine.

The line you really need is

deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main

For details on setting up Synaptic (or by using the console) see http://winehq.com/site/download-deb.

You should now have Wine 0.9.27 or newer installed. From a console run

winecfg

and set under the Applications tab

  • Windows Version: Windows XP

under the Graphics tab

  • Allow the window manager to control the windows
  • Vertex Shader Support: Hardware
  • Allow Pixel Shader (if supported by hardware)

and under the Audio tab set

  • OSS Driver

Although you can get by without it, WoW likes it if you have a html render installed. So installing Mozilla (for Windows) under Wine is recommended. As of this writing it can be done by issuing the following in a terminal:

wget http://download.mozilla.org/?product=suite-1.7.13&os=win&lang=en-US
wine mozilla-win32-1.7.13-installer.exe

But the Mozilla version might change. See http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ for details on the current version.

Now you should be ready to start actually installing World of Warcraft. Copy the content of the four install cd’s into one directory, overwriting where need be, and run the installer:

wine Install.exe

Now, the installer should run without trouble and you should almost be able to run WoW now. However, you might want to do the following for better performance.

Edit the file ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf

As one of the top lines you will see SET gxResolution followed by a screen resolution. Here you can tell WoW your preferred (higher) resolution than the standard.

Also add the following at the end of the file

SET gxApi “opengl”
SET SoundOutputSystem “1”
SET SoundBufferSize “100”

Next, in a console run

wine regedit

And in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareWine make a new key called OpenGL and in this key make a new String Value with the name DisabledExtensions and the data Value GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object. (If you have trouble figuring out how to add/change these things, just right click until you get it right.)

By now, hopefully the patches you started downloading have finished. So, copy the patches to the World of Warcraft directory

~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft

and now you should be good to go.
The installer might have left a shortcut for you on your Desktop and in the Applications -> wine -> Programs -> World of Warcraft menu. But if you can’t find those or the installer didn’t create them, just running

~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft$ wine WoW.exe

should do the job.

Hope to see you in Ironforge…

(Of course there are a lot of tweaking possibilities, optimizations etc. regarding graphics, sound etc. but this should get you started and show that Linux is in fact ready for (some) games!)