Progress in dd

So copying those images with dd sometimes just makes me anxious. Good thing you can get it to print some progress by sending dd the USR1 signal.

sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep '^dd')

That former command will let me know something is happening when copying stuff to those sd cards that don't even blink ;-)

Tweaking the find-provides and find-requires when building RPMs

Suppose for a second you want to not list all the dependencies for an RPM, they might be contained within your package and might disrupt the rest of the system. To solve that issue and to also keep some automation for the Provides and Requires tags in rpm one would tune them a bit.

Per default, these days at least, this is handled by two scripts

• /usr/lib/rpm/find-requires
• /usr/lib/rpm/find-provides

The easiest way to tune these would be to copy them and edit or in the end completely replace so it suits your needs. To reference them in your spec file, these definitions need to exist:

%define __find_provides [find-provides]

%define __find_requires [find-requires]

Where [find-provides] and [find-requires] are the relative or absolute paths to the scripts you are replacing. Doing only this would not work. This statement is also needed in the spec file:

%define _use_internal_dependency_generator 0

Once that's done everything would work as expected. To make sure this is still the case when reading this, just make sure those are the macro/script combination called upon to check for dependencies:

grep __find /usr/lib/rpm/macros

#%__find_provides %{_rpmconfigdir}/rpmdeps --provides

#%__find_requires %{_rpmconfigdir}/rpmdeps --requires

%__find_provides %{_rpmconfigdir}/find-provides

%__find_requires %{_rpmconfigdir}/find-requires

#%__find_conflicts ???

#%__find_obsoletes ???

This wouldn't affect the redefinition though.

Presenting Meego in Salta

This year I had the pleasure to attend the V Jornadas de Software Libre in Salta (http://5jsl.saltalug.org.ar). My participation involved the presentation of Meego to the local community.

As the events of the day to day life transcended due to the timing of my involvement and the pile of work I had coming along, I was unable to attend day 1 of the event, making myself available to travel and arrive for day 2 that Saturday morning.

The event was organised in such a way to have all the talks go one after the other in a single auditorium and have an outside area with some activities such as quizzes and first person shooters.

My talk about Meego was one of the last ones to go on stand, the attendance was rather good and people seemed keen to listen to what I had to say.

The talk was a run through of how Meego came to be, how it will evolve, the importance of a common base ground to work from, how the common base ensures applications will be able to cross over through the Meego verticals and most importantly, how to activate the local community in order for it to be involved. Many things could be done with Meego in its current state, ranging from creating local customisations from it adapting it to work best with the tools local to us, all the way to application development or translations.

As an addendum I gave a really quick introduction in how AppUp Center could facilitate distributing a developer's applications if they came to be with the added benefit of having them being validated by a team dedicated to do so.

My talk was preceded by one talk regarding Tuquito, named after how they call fireflies in Tucuman. The presenter was the current project leader. He also gave a walk through of the history and what Tuquito aims to be. Commenting the Tuquito Urbano movement which basically enables the local community with technology needed for today.

Tuquito is a distribution, spinned off from Ubuntu with many customisations made for universities, low powered machines and our local culture. They have enabled the ExoMate's in all their iterations to work well with Tuquito and have come in contact with many educational institutions for its distribution.

My comment regarding Tuquito comes with a stance, the leader, Mario, was rather interested in Moblin at the moment and some talks came later to be about making a Tuquito distribution using the Meego base (core). We came to agreement to get some talks going closer to the end of the year.

The community in the region (SaltaLug) was mostly interested in Meego, and wanted to start seeing some talks or workshops to develop for Meego, I commented on the possibility of doing that during next years event.

Afterwards, during the after event, which was basically a barbecue with all the organizers and presenters, we had a fair share on how to enable Meego in the local community.

The full list of talks can be found here.

Setting up a new kernel for meego

Meego has changed a bit from moblin, moblin used to use grub; meego has gone with extlinux, some sort of syslinux. Te configuration items are all in /boot/extlinux and can be easily configured from there.

This is what the default file upon install has:

$ sudo cat /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
# extlinux.conf generated by anaconda

prompt 0
timeout 1

default vesamenu.c32
menu autoboot Starting MeeGo...
menu hidden

menu resolution 800 600
menu background splash.jpg
menu title Welcome to MeeGo!
menu color border 0 #ffffffff #00000000
menu color sel 7 #ffffffff #ff000000
menu color title 0 #ffffffff #00000000
menu color tabmsg 0 #ffffffff #00000000
menu color unsel 0 #ffffffff #00000000
menu color hotsel 0 #ff000000 #ffffffff
menu color hotkey 7 #ffffffff #ff000000
menu color timeout_msg 0 #ffffffff #00000000
menu color timeout 0 #ffffffff #00000000
menu color cmdline 0 #ffffffff #00000000
label meego
menu label MeeGo (2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook)
kernel vmlinuz-2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook
append ro root=/dev/sda2 vga=normal
menu default

So it was my intention to add a custom kernel by setting up a new label with
label meego-nfs
menu label MeeGo-NFS (2.6.33.3)
kernel vmlinuz-2.6.33.3
append ro root=/dev/sda2 vga=normal

And since we are making changes, I'm changing the timeout value to something larger and removing the menu hidden menu attribute.