Philippe Gauthier

L'équipe d'Ubuntu Québec était présente au festival montréalais célébrant les divers aspects de la culture geek toute la fin de semaine du 5 et 6 mars. Nous avons été surpris par la très importante proportion des visiteurs qui utilisent déjà Ubuntu, ce qui nous a tout de même permis de faire connaître notre communauté Ubuntu locale. Surnommées les LoCo Teams (de l'anglais Local Cummunity) les groupes d'utilisateurs tels que le nôtre font partie d'un large réseau de soutien. Cette structure communautaire différencie les systèmes d'exploitations tels qu'Ubuntu des systèmes d'exploitation propriétaires et même des distributions qui ont un caractère plus commercial.



Le groupe Ubuntu Québec est représenté par son site web http://www.ubuntu-qc.org/ et fournit une liste de discussion (par courriel, mais aussi accessible sous forme de forum) et une interface de clavardage pour du support en ligne interactif.

Parmi les activités sociales d'Ubuntu Québec, deux événements nous attendent dans les prochains mois. Le premier est une rencontre à caractère plutôt technique qu'on nomme Global Jam. La seconde est la soirée de lancement de la prochaine version d'Ubuntu. Le GeekFest nous a peut-être permis de trouver des hôtes pour tenir ces activités. Pour se tenir au courant du lieu et de la date des événements, il suffit de s'abonner à la liste de discussion.

Lors du dernier Ubuntu Hour à Outremont, Christian « Mobidoy » a apporté des auto-collants qu'il a préparé à partir de l'image du billet précédent. Un pas de plus vers la domination du monde ! Photo par Fabian Rodriguez :

Tout a commencé sur #ubuntu-qc lorsque le groupe cherchait où se procurer des autocollants pour boîtier d'ordinateur qui affichent le logo Ubuntu. Éventuellement, la discussion en arrive à une requête très particulière :

<IdleOne> I want a sticker that says "Powered by Ubuntu, Coffee and Ponies"
<cyphermox> +1 from me for coffee and ponies!
<qwebirc32428> ponies?
<qwebirc32428> haha
<IdleOne> yup ponies
<qwebirc32428> omg
<IdleOne> Coffee is what keeps Ubuntu going and the Ponies make all the automagical stuff work :)

Allez hop ! La magie du pony s'est mise en œuvre et quinze minutes plus tard voici le résultat. Le fichier SVG peut être téléchargé directement ici-même sous la license CC du blogue.

The magic behind free and open source software (or FOSS) comes from a few people who are freely giving to society part of their work. Free software often start as projects fulfilling a personal need, then a community may grow around the project because it seems useful to them. Some of these people may eventually contribute to the project. After the working product is released freely to everyone, it becomes difficult to define the bounds of the community gathered around the software because anyone can be part of it. There is an amplification effect caused by the very low barriers to the distribution of the software to whoever needs it. This amplification is what enables you to get and use this software free of change, and better yet, with almost no restrictions. You can read about the GNU General Public License to get a feel of the idea behind free software.

Find a partner or mentor

You can find by yourself a lot of valuable information from the Web or from books. Still, most people don't want to spend most of their free time on just making the system work, and you may also prefer to make fun and useful things with your computer. Like just said before, the concept of community is crucial to the existence of free software. If you start using free software with some friends or family, you are building a small community that can share ideas, solutions, and useful projects. For example, you could try to set up a remote backup solution for a few people you know, or edit a private web site for the family.

Get a GNU/Linux distribution

You can find an increasing number of free software that can run on non-free operating systems, but if you have the choice I would recommend starting with a complete GNU/Linux distribution. Distributions are large collections of software and the management tools that are necessary to configure a complete system. Every distribution includes the Linux kernel (the core software between the application software and the computer hardware), and the GNU subsystem (a collection of common tools to manage files, programs and data), hence the name GNU/Linux. Distributions come with a default setup (or a choice from a few options) that you can adapt to your needs by using the management tools. A very popular distribution is Ubuntu. You can even try the distribution by starting the computer with an Ubuntu CD-ROM before installing it to your computer.

Real world example

The free software universe is not very different from the academic and scientific communities. There is of course a very broad yet common goal of making the world a better place by understanding it and making small but essential contributions. No scientist is really working alone, and the collaboration with other people and groups is necessary to succeed. The seeming compatibility between the free software and the scientific philosophies results in a large number of important scientific software projects being free. Here is a list of links and example free software projects:

• A list of free software for the Mac (non-free, of course!) with a scientific bias.
• The Python programming language, which is increasingly used for scientific work along with the SciPy software.
• The LaTeX project, ubiquitous in scientific publishing.
• The CERN software libraries.

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More about free software

• Free Software Foundation
• Ubuntu
• Ian Bicking: Toward a new self-definition for open source

The computer running the deuxpi.ca domain had an extra hard disk installed since last November but I did not have a chance to use it because I didn't have a SATA cable for it. The disk was finally connected yesterday. However, the system did not recognize the disk. Also, the kernel was using a driver named "pata_marvell" (thus not, for example, "sata_marvell") for the controller.

After some research on the Internet, I found that the kernel loads the ahci driver which then delegates to the sata_marvell driver in order to support legacy PATA drives on this controller. Alan Cox introducted a kernel option to prevent this default behavior so the ahci driver would be used to drive the SATA ports. In my case, the Marvell controller is used only for SATA. See the thread for some history about SATA support for the Marvell 88SE6121.

To use this kernel option on a Ubuntu system, edit the grub configuration:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Add ahci.marvell_enable=1 to the line of standard kernel options. For example:

# kopt=root=/dev/mapper/vg0-root ro ahci.marvell_enable=1

This line may be slightly different on another system depending on the partitioning scheme. Save the file, run sudo update-grub, and reboot the computer for this option to have effect.

Edit: See the Debian wiki page about enabling support for the Marvell SATA controller using possibly a better method.

L'accusation de diffamation implique certainement un équilibre entre la liberté d'expression et la droit à sa réputation. En général, on s'attend à ce qu'il y ait injustice lorsqu'il y a une volonté de créer du tort.

Dans le cas des Éditions Écosociété, il est très difficile de justifier le bâillon (voilà je l'ai dit) que veut lui imposer Barrick Gold. La volonté de cette dernière est probablement discréditer les auteurs de Noir Canada, puisqu'il lui semble beaucoup plus facile d'écrire une mise en demeure qu'une réponse critique valide. Toute cette mauvaise publicité à été générée par les attaques légales de BG elle-même bien plus que par la publication du livre. Bref, il ne faudrait jamais se gêner de dénoncer ceux qui exploitent les faiblesses des systèmes juridique et économique; je me permets ici de reproduire le plus récent communiqué d'Écosociété :

The computer strategy game Alpha Centauri (SMAC) keeps getting older and is not maintained since the company having the rights -- Loki software -- closed its doors, and the source code to the program is not by any means available to the public. It crashes easily for many reasons, but mostly for incompatibilities with the recent sound and graphic architectures. This is a game that I still enjoy from time to time when I feel very lazy. I get discouraged easily when the program crashes, leaving the screen resolution in a different setting, a few times in a row.

A large number of recent Linux installations have graphic features activated from an extension called Composite. This extension allows to create visual effects that are used in software such as Compiz and Beryl. However, SMAC is completely incompatible with the Composite extension, resulting in a crash shortly after the game starts (when the capsule lands, and the first base is founded). The usual workaround is to disable the Composite extension by adding a configuration option for the Xorg server, but doing this will prevent visual effects to work.

A different option is to use an embedded X server that will be only used for displaying the game. I use Xephyr, which can be launched by using the command

Xephyr :1 -screen 800x600 -extension Composite

Note that we can disable the Composite extension for this X server only. To launch SMAC, I have to specify the display to use. In the current example, Xephyr will create an X server as display :1.

DISPLAY=:1 smacpack



You should now see SMAC running in the Xephyr window.

I checked the current weather on the Web to make sure that the very high humidity was not a product of my imagination. Some clothes from this morning's laundry have been hanged but at this rate they are not even close to be dry until tomorrow. Environment Canada confirms: the air is over 90 % saturated with humidity and humidex is 29.

What really is humidex? I knew that it was supposed to represent the perceived temperature, but I clicked on the link for more information. It finally reveals that the formula does not have a strong physical basis. This empirical formula essentially is H = T + (e − 10), where, T is the temperature in degrees Celsius and e is the vapor pressure in mbar calculated from the dew point.

The site also offers a program named Chilldex to calculate the humidex and relative humidity based on the temperature and the dew point, but only if you run Windows... Ha! Let's use our mad Python skillz and create our own tools! Don't hesitate to modify and share.

humidex.py

While I was trying to synchronize a music library between the Linux host and a Windows machine by using rsync (cwRsync, to be exact), I realized that most of of the directory and file names were scrambled, or displayed long strings of question mark characters. There is a --iconv flag to rsync I though of using so I started to search the Web for the details. Some mailing list from a year ago suggested using a Unicode-aware version of the Cygwin DLL. The site seems to be up-to-date with the current Cygwin thus I downloaded the new library and moved it to the cwRsync bin directory. It works! You can download the patched Cygwin library here.

Now the remaining problems are synchronizing files and directories with characters that the archaic Windows shell does not accept and Cygwin still doesn't process directories with more than 260 characters...

Edit: The limitation of 260 characters exists because Cygwin attempts to support the old non Unicode-aware versions of Windows. One day this may change. Also, there is a branch in rsync code that would allow the characters in the file names to be translated. A patched binary of rsync is available on the receiver side, but I don't have enough motivation to build a patched version on the Linux server side right now. Shame on Windows for bad POSIX support...

What now, dude? history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
200 sudo
182 ls
90 cd
62 vi
52 mv
43 java
38 eyeD3
33 tail
25 javac
21 ~/embedcover

Looks like I spend most of the time at the console organizing the music library (and breaking the computer--look at all those sudo and vi...)