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single-sign-on on openSUSE / KDE4, or the three faces of the community

 KDE4, openSUSE, Rants, Tips & Tricks  1 Response »
Nov 142011
 

It seems that “the community” consists of three separate groups of people:

  1. the people who loudly demand features
  2. the developers who loudly debate the ethic, moral, technical religious impacts if the features demanded by 1.) would be implemented
  3. the small group of developers who watch 1. and 2. and at some point say “Oh for crying out loud. What a noise over 5 lines of code.”

As an example, look at the discussion over the feature request in kmail where someone wants kmail to be able to remove attachments from mails.

As another example, look at this one… Some people would like to see single-sign-on in KDE4. The discussion was long and loud.

And… if you google a bit… you find that the wallet daemon has had the required dbus call since KDE 4.4.2, for crying out loud!

Just that noone has bothered to point a finger at the required pam modules and helpers.

I’ve packaged them for openSUSE, get them from my OBS project and configure them as described in the readme files included in the packages… and you have single sign on.

Note: single sign on only happens if you actually enter a password on login. The typical suse setup with an user session starting automatically on boot can’t work with this.

Note: this seems to work only for local useraccounts, but not in a NIS environment.

 Posted by lemmy at 15:03  Tagged with: , , ,

Debian 5, or the joy of working with prehistorical software

 Other, Rants  4 Responses »
Oct 082011
 

For various reasons I had to setup a Debian box. Debian 5.

For building software that would be distributed in binary form and should run on any linux.

The original software that mine derives from is being built on a debian 5 system.

So, I needed one as well.

Enter: VirtualBox for Mac + Debian 5 netinstall.

So far, so good… until I actually cloned my hg repo onto the deb box, and found that the clone had two heads.

… debian uses mercurial 1.0.1 on debian 5.

1.0.1.

seriously.

that is old.

very old.

It’s a miracle that debian has heard of unicode by now.

At least I think they have heard of unicode…

gotta check that.

 Posted by lemmy at 14:52  Tagged with: , , ,

A tale of two internets

 Rants  No Responses »
Aug 032011
 

Lately I’ve come to think that there are two separate Internets out there, existing side by side and with little interaction between them.

One of them is the internet that we all know, populated by people who write their little rants about anything they care enough about.

The other is a scary place where semi-intelligent bots imitate human behaviour by auto-generating streams of gibberish aimed at each other, making it look like strangers talking to strangers.

Case in point: get a twitter account. post any random tweet but add “popular” hashtags. Observe the behaviour of “the net”. Pay special attention to some of the new followers you’ll get… do you really believe that someone follows 25000 people?

Who made up this “You have to be on twitter and facebook to be a successful company” fad, anyways?

Related: If “Search Engine Optimization” worked, none of those self-proclaimed “SEO Experts” would have to spam twitter… they would just be found with google.

 

 Posted by lemmy at 13:01

KDE 4.7 – You didn’t think you would get off that easily, would you?

 KDE4, Rants  4 Responses »
Aug 022011
 

OK, so now I did a clean install on some old work laptop.

openSUSE 11.4, fresh off the DVD, on an empty harddisk.

KDE 4.6 or whichever version comes on the DVD worked fine, using the GSM/UMTS/EDGE card that my company gave me works fine too.

So I’m using that UMTS network to upgrade KDE to 4.7, and after that, plasma crashes every time I try to connect through UMTS… terminating the connection.

So, this time, not even a rollback to 4.6.5.

Yee-haw.

 Posted by lemmy at 14:29  Tagged with: , ,

KDE 4.7 – all your emails are belong to us

 Rants  3 Responses »
Jul 282011
 

ok, so KDE 4.7 is out.

Ye-haw.

After updating to 4.7, kmail complains on startup (which takes ages, btw) that “the server does not support TLS”. It sure would help to know which server. It also would help to be able to get at my mails at all; all my folders are completely empty. Oh, and deleting a mail from one of the folders that are not empty doesn’t work either.

rollback time.

 

 Posted by lemmy at 18:23  Tagged with:

About facebook and KDE…

 KDE4, Rants  No Responses »
Jun 282011
 

Dear friends and family,

I’ve had it with FB. Every single time I read something about facebook, it is something to be annoyed, angry, or concerned about. their permanent policy of introducing new privacy-breaking features without warning and enabled by default, and their almost frightening mis-concern for their user’s data has driven me to the point where I have to say: If you want to stay in touch with me, or tell me something, or whatever:

YOU HAVE MY EMAIL, TWITTER, MSN, ICQ, AND MAYBE EVEN MY CELLPHONE NUMBER. USE IT, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

My FaceBook-account will be deactivated for good on July 1st, 2011.

 

In case You’re wondering what broke the camel’s back:

Read this.

 Posted by lemmy at 09:58  Tagged with:

The nerd is… retiring?

 Rants  No Responses »
Jun 242011
 

Couple of hours ago my kiddo asked me via MSN for advice on a new “gaming computer”.

Not too long ago I’d have dived headfirst into hardware specs, price lists, and comparison results, to make sure he’d get the most bang for his hard-saved pocket money, but what did I do instead?

I assembled one box with the “online configurator” of a hardware retailer, then checked the media markt website and foud that he’d get a very similar box, with more ram even, for about 15% less.

So I told him to keep an eye on that website, and when he’d found something he’d like, poke me to eyeball it for flaws.

What the heck happened to “hand-selected, finetuned components”???

 Posted by lemmy at 16:30

Gnome 3.0 first impressions, or “Is this thing on?”

 Rants  1 Response »
Apr 072011
 

I just gave Gnome 3.0 a very short spin with VirtualBox and a Live CD based on openSUSe 11.4.

Very short. 5 minutes, tops.

I don’t like it.

I can understand the general idea of not showing too many confusing things to the users at once.

I can not understand why the gnome team seems to have decided that any application at all is already confusing.

After starting Gnome 3.0 you look at a practically empty desktop. I really do not like having to search for my apps, files, and folders.

 

 

 Posted by lemmy at 15:01  Tagged with:

The emperor’s new clothes, or “This pair of pants has three legs”

 netbook, Rants  No Responses »
Mar 232011
 

I’ve been trying to find a netbook distribution that works on my slightly ancient Asus eeePC 4G.

[insert howls of frustration here]

So far, not a single one that I’ve tried worked at all, with the exception of Easy Peasy.

Problem is, I wanted to replace Easy Peasy since the latest version (1.6) doesn’t work too well with the ridiculously small screen of the 4G…

So far I’ve tried MeeGo, Ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix and Moblin… any suggestions, anyone?

 

 Posted by lemmy at 11:10

openSUSE 11.3… some of the changes are for the worse.

 openSUSE, Rants  2 Responses »
Jul 302010
 

…actually, one change only, as far as I’ve discovered.

The openSUSE guys decided to drop SCPM from 11.3.

“Instead” there is network manager.

Whoever made that decision has no idea at all about what scpm is, and what you can do with it…

To make it short, NetworkManager does exactly that… it manages network connections, after the user has logged in.

SCPM stands for “System Configuration Profile Manager”… and it does exactly that… it manages system profiles… at boot time. You pick the profile you want right at the grub screen, and based on which of your profiles you choose the system replaces configuration files and runlevels and starts daemons or not.

As an example:

With Network Manager I can set up different configurations for my wireless network card.

With SCPM I can set up different configurations for my whole system… as in “in this configuration start the network card with dhcp, and start NIS, and start the automounter with NIS maps, and the time server is that, and the proxy is this, and the local hostname is whatever, and Oh i want runlevel 5 with kdm4 with that theme and this xorg.conf with 1680×1050 with the nvidia driver” versus “in that configuration, start the network so that the user can configure it with network manager. No NIS, no Automounter, runlevel 5 with a different theme because its the internal display at 1280×800, and automatically log in that user” versus “in this configuration, no network config at all, not even network manager, and text mode (runlevel 3).”

Or in short… replacing SCPM with NetworkManager is like replacing a whole kitchen with all appliances with one single spoon.

 Posted by lemmy at 16:28  Tagged with: , ,
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