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.

Getting around Network Manager problems with WPA2

I ran into a problem with some certs some time ago and wanted to write about it for future reference. It was due to some certificate issues and it's formatting or something of the likes.

While the openssl command line utility had no problems with them, network manager refused them to be valid certs.

What was needed to be done was to remake them with openssl
$ openssl pkcs12 -in original.p12 -out temp.pem
$ openssl pkcs12 -in temp.pem -export -name "Repackaged PKCS#12 file" -out new.p12

All this was taken out from a bug report on launchpad.

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.

Truly disabling advertisement (ad) fetching in Firefox

I stumbled upon this upon reading a slashdot comment, yeah, where else?

So I have ad-block installed, which does a pretty good job already. But that doesn't block everything, like javascript code calling sites like google analytics.

So I'm sharing this because it really improves the speed, specially on a notebook which struggles to keep up to speed with all that AJAX crap (pun intended?).

So the addon you would want to install is called BlockSite and can be found exactly here on the Mozilla addons site

Once installed configure your BlockSite preferences to include:

$ cat list
[BlockSite]
*.doubleclick.net
*.polldaddy.com
*.polldaddy.com
*.google-analytics.com
*.scorecardresearch.com
*.gravatar.com
*.247realmedia.com
*.likeme.net

You can also create a file out of that cat output and use BlockSite's import option

Here's to a better browsing experience

Flash replacement to keep an eye on

So flash has always been a problem for me since its inception, in the beginning it was an ignorable plugin which wasn't an actual necessity. Then came portal owners, such as my ISP for example, that began creating their whole content with flash, so it was on a day like that that it ended up on my OS.

Flash was always sub par on anything not MS Windows, and in my case, that is not the OS I choose to use. Everything was tolerable until many sites also started to stream videos with flash, some is utter crap, but every now and then, it's nice to see something and flash is really resource intensive when dealing with things like this.

In addition to that, I've switched over to mostly being on a netbook when not at work, interestingly enough, flash is not friendly.

While doing some random blog reading, a project came to my attention, and it might be a good idea to keep an eye on, that would be lightspark

So there, I'll be checking on it every now and then, luckily, html5 and everything else that's been going on will catch up fast and deem flash unnecessary :-)