HP MyRoom on a 64 bits Linux

Well, HP is now promoting a new solution for webinars called HP MyRoom. And even if they provide rpm (and deb) packages, these are not working out of the box on my Mageia 64 bits distro, of course. That was already the case with HP Virtual Room previsouly.

But nothing you can’t make work, as long as you have the source don’t you ? So here is the receipe:

First install all the required dependencies that are not correctly mentioned in the rpm:

urpmi lib64xtst6 libxtst6 lib64xscrnsaver1 libxscrnsaver1 jpeg-devel lcms-devel lib64pulseaudio0 libpulseaudio0

Then add an additional library which was not even part of Mageia when I started this post ;-)
Get it from Cauldron where I uploaded it:

wget http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/x86_64/media/core/release/libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm
wget http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/i586/media/core/release/libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.i586.rpm
urpmi libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.i586.rpm

Then finally download HP MyRoom for a 64 bits RPM system and install it with:

rpm -ivh --nodeps hpmyroom-10.0.0.0210.amd64.rpm

and launch it !

/usr/bin/hpmyroom

And now enjoy exchanging from Linux as well as from Lynx but without the hassle to use Windows ;-)

First day at LinuxCon NA 2014

Interesting to pass from vacation with family in Croatia to France after 10 hours of drive and then the day after being in a plane, flying to Chicago to attend my 3rd LinuxCon, held this time in the mythic Chicago city.

While I arrived Monday evening, I had time to catch up some mail, make some conf calls on Tuesday before attending the first part of the event, which was the VIP dinner. An opportunity to talk to HP colleagues I met for the first time physically, even if we already interacted electronically previously.

Wednesday the 20th was the first day of the event which started as usual with Jim Zemlin’s Keynote. This time he chose to talk about what the Linux Foundation rules disallow: The Linux Foundation itself ! And more largely about the roles of foundations to support open source development, their key cleaning facility role.

Jim had a quite funny slide exaplining how everybody is seeing him, while what he is really doing is cleaning stuff so Linus, Greg and thouands of others could code and manage Linux.

He also announced the new LF certification program (Certified sysadmin and Engineers). While I understand the need of having more recognized Open Source ad Linux Professionals, unlinked to a company (such as the RHCE one) I wonder whether we were needing a new certification wile we do have LPI. I hope the 2 will cooperate to avoid again proliferation. Not that proliferation is bad per se. But why dedicate multiple times efforts to create training supports, manage registrations, … when someone already works on that, maybe in a different way, but maybe patchable to be adopted by the LF. Hopefully this will be solved somehow.

After that we had the also traditional Linux Kernel panel moderated by Greg Kroah-Hartmann with Andy, S, Andrew Morton and Linus Torvalds of course. Nothing really new came out. Anyway, it’s always refreshing to see our heros on stage full of confidence and hope for what they do.

Linus insisted once more on the fact he wants Linux to be more dominant on the desktop market. As a 21 years linux desktop user myself, I can only be in agreement with that. Where is however the docker of the desktop, that will make everybody want to change and move to it ? When people see my Mageia distro they’re always surprised how many stuff you can do out of the box with a Linux Desktop. Phones have helped people go away from the monopoly interface but Macs do not help bringing back people to Linux. If at least all people attending LinuxCon and developing FLOSS would run Linux, that would be great !

Then it was time for elective sessions. I chose first to know more about devstack.
Sean Dague from HP presented OpenStack in 10 Minutes with devstack
devstack pulls everything from git. As it heavily modifies your system so do rather that in a VM/Container. devstack launches tempest (the OpenStack test suite) at the end for the install. Sean insisted on the flow of requests generated inside OpenStack and demonstrated how you can easily modify the devstack environment and re-run it to test easily your modification.

devstack provides an easy way to support modifications through a conf file. Example given if you add
API_RATE_LIMIT=False
you’ll avoid waiting for an answers from the server in case of devstack exceeding the standard rate of queries.
You can also use localrc.conf to pass specific variables up to the right component.

In order to use it, you’d need 4GB RAM (recommended). It can run in a VM (cirros will work nested). Sean warned that it does not reclone git trees by default and clean.sh should put everything back in order (but cleans stuff !)

Good presentation, easy to follow and having a quick demo part which confirms that devstack is easy to use :-)

Then I attended Joe Brockmeier’s (Red Hat) presentation around Solving the package issue

Joe explained the notion of SW collections (living under /opt). It’s Available for RHEL, CentOS and Fedora. It brings a new scl command. If you type for example
scl enable php54 “app –option”
that app uses now php 5.4 while the rest of the system ignores it.
For that you’ll need new packages: scl-utils and scl-utils-build
There is a tool spec2scl to convert spec files to generate scl compatible packages.
For more info you can look at http://softwarecollections.org

A remark I made to myself and which was later explicitely said during the presentation is that scl is useful for RHEL to provide newer versions of SW onto the enterprise distributions, while it can also help provide older versions of SW into Fedora (which is moving so fast that not all SW can adapt !).
It’s a sort of Debian backports for RHEL.
Joe also presented rpm-ostree (derived from ostree, git-like for system binaries providing an immutable tree). Under development for now, so not completely usable and probably the least interesting solution.
He moved on with docker, but was pretty generic (on purpose) and seeing it as complementary to package management, whether I think docker is another way of deploying software, which is not caring of packages by providing a layered deployment approach. While I have packaged docker for Mageia, I’m not yet familiar eough with it to be sure of that, and I’m currently working on combining it with project-builder.org. So will comment later on on that.

Then it was time to animate the FLOSS Governance roundtable for which I was attending LinuxCon. I had what I think is probably the best panel to cover the vast topic with Eileen Evans from HP, Tom Callaway from Red Hat, Gary O’Neall from Source Auditor Inc., Bradley Kuhn from Software Freedom Conservancy (and of course 45 minutes wasn’t sufficient to talk about all the subjects part of this), but I think the interactions were very interesting and lively and hope the audience enjoyed them and learned new aspects of this capital topic for our ecosystem. Of course we talked about licenses, SPDX and its future new 2.0 version, but also of foundations (echoing Jim Zemlin’s keynote), contribution agreements or tax usage (Thanks Bradley !).

And this is just the first of a series of such round tables I’ll lead in future events, but more on that later on.

After that, I discussed with Bradley Kuhn and Jilayne Lovejoy about licenses, AGPL, and various related topics, and their feedback were as usual very rich.

Was then time to go back to the latest keynote sessions. The first one I followed was from a new company (for me) CEO, Jay Rogers from Local Motors who tries to make open hardware in the automotive sector.Worth looking at and following whether they will be successful.

Then, our own Eileen Evans was on stage to explain her view on the new FLOSS Professional. And I think at her place I’d have been even more impressed as she had a full room so probably some pressure to talk to all these devs and devops. And I think her voice showed that at the begining. But when she entered in the details of the presentation, she did as usual a great job and was particularly convincing. She showed how the FLOSS professional was more than others issued from diverse backgrounds, as she illustrated with her own one. She also showed the variety of activities that each of these people have to cope with everyday, again with an illustration of one of her day of work passing from a contract management or OSRB meeting to an OpenStack foundation board conf call.

And that approach of the new FLOSS professional was a convincing echo to Jim Zemlin’s call for more professionals and the focus on people that many speakers have underlined. The FLOSS ecosystem indeed needs so many various competencies in addition to developers and FLOSS is so ubiquituous that the lack of resources is delaying some projects. And Eileen explained why this notion of FLOSS Professional is arising now. Which is in short because FLOSS usage has moved from hobbist developing for themselves to professional developing during work hours. And she also covered the impact on companies where the work in network/communities, between peers is the rule compared to the siloed classical approach. And so companies need people understanding this way of working to evolve.

It was then time to catch a bus and enjoy discussing with peers at the Museum of Science and Industry during the evening event where we could also explore the museum.

Soon back in the air and on the roads…

There will be possibilities to meet with me in some exotic places (at least for me as I never travelled there before in May !

I’ll first be in Wien, Austria, early May but that’s to celebrate somewhere my 50th birthday (half a century as my kids like to call that ;-)) and during vacations so won’t talk something else than early music or rchitecture and pictures of the nice building over there !!

But after that, I’ll attend the UEFI plugfest in Seatlle again, and be in charge of managing the interface between Linux distributions and HP. So if you plan to attend, and want to test your Linux distribution on nice shiny UEFI hardware platforms, feel free to contact me so we can organize that meeting over there.

The week after that I’ll be in Japan to present again during a LinuxCon event ! I’m very lucky first to be retained as a presenter to talk another time about Mageia. And then to be sponsored by our VP & Deputy General Counsel, Cloud Computing and Open Source Eileen Evans who is leading HP’s Open Source Program Office and allowing me to attend.

So feel free to drop me a mail if you want to chat about any topic I can decently talk about such as Disaster Recovery and Imaging or Continuous Packaging and some other surely HP related !

See you there.

Still working on MondoRescue 3.2 to make it available ASAP

Even if stuff do not progrees at the speed I’d like them to progress (lots of travels on HP side since early 2014 and 4 concerts to perform on the private side) I’ve tried to improve the 3.2 version I published unofficially as beta. Interestingly enough, even when I do not announce that packages are delivered, there are people who do use them !!! Which gave me some feedback (you can guess it wasn’t that positive), so in fact it’s already my second delivery :-) and it contains some interesting new features:

• mindi now uses the new mr-kernel-get-modules perl script which allows now in mindi to just mention end modules names andd not dependencies anymore, which are now computed by the script !! This will help a lot to maintain the list of modules, which was always impacted by low-level dependencies changes at kernel level.
• Support of symlinks for newest distributions based on systemd such as Fedora, Mageia, … is now finally working !! Again this was done exporting the existing wrong code into a separate perl script which now operates correclty. This is part of the global willingness to recode most of mindi and some of mondo in perl. This took quite a long time, as of course, we need to stay compatible (a word systemd team doesn’t care about of course) with other tools, and older distributions. Side note, this is probably one of the reason MondoRescue is still appreciated by its community :-)
• The introduction of a dependency on a perl function was incorrect and people trying to install from packages gave feedback that they had errors dof course ue to that. This is now fixed, as project-builder.org indeed had an issue because a low level function was depending on a higher level function not part of the perl modules provided for MondoRescue. With 0.12.5 of project-builder.org this is completely solved.
• Now I still have regressions with the isolinux menus, NFS on Mageia 4 and systemd not working anymore (change of network NIC name is the root cause). However the ldlinux.c32 issue for syslinux > 5.x is now solved.

Next week is the TES, so won’t have much time to work on it. Expect news the week after.

Mageia 4 on time for Fosdem but …

Anne has announced that Mageia 4 is now available just on time for Fosdem !

But I won’t be at Fosdem this year again (I’m attending an HP event instead)

And while there are good reasons for Mageia to be my distribution of choice, I won’t update my laptop this week, as I’m presenting during this HP event, and want to stay on the safe side. And for my home computer, well, I generally do it after my laptop ;-)

But anyway, great job done by the Mageia team and lots of good apps in this new version, including OpenStack and UEFI ! Enjoy and try it. It’s really worth it !

It starts as a happy new year indeed

Well, would you really be surprised if i say that the begining of 2014 looks as promising (and as busy of course) as the end of 2013 was ?

While travelling to Linux.conf.au in Perth (28 hours door to door but could it be a better start for 2014 !) I had some time to look at Project-Builder.org, subject of my conference on Monday and also to MondoRescue.

For Project-Builder.org, I’ll publish a new version for LCA (0.12.3) which will fix rpmbootstrap for lastest Fedora (18-20), Mageia 3 and also other recent distros. Also as SVK is now broken on Mageia 3, I’m using git-svn to work on my laptop when remote, and thus pb supports it now. Some various fixes since last year release will also be done (better printing with VM/VE name for logs, improved ntp support, pbdistrogetparam command to easy shell interface…), but globally the software is pretty stable for my usage, so now it’s your turn to tell me what would be useful for you in it. I also need to make a newer presentation for Monday with a short demo.

For MondoRescue I’m not ready yet to publish a final version, so I have made for now a first beta for the 3.2.0 version. First this will be a new 3;x version as there are lots of changes in the code that may make it less reliable due to the adoption of dynamic memory allocation instead of static in a lot of functions. If I compare 3.0 and 3.2:

• 3.0
• total mr_asprintf usage : 646
• total sprintf usage : 674
• total strcpy usage : 560
• total fgets usage : 79
• total malloc_string usage : 367
• total MAX_STR_LEN usage : 370
• 3.2
• total mr_asprintf usage : 1223
• total sprintf usage : 166
• total strcpy usage : 388
• total fgets usage : 28
• total malloc_string usage : 129
• total MAX_STR_LEN usage : 221

Which means that a lot has been done in code changes between 3.0 and 3.2. But also a lot remains to do if we want to have no malloc_string nor MAX_STR_LEN at all. And also if I made mistakes in the mr_malloc/mr_asprintf/mr_free usage, the commands will crash. THat’s why I need your tests here ! I’ve made a full bakup restore cycle (which has revealed some issues that I fixed), but I’m far from being confident in the result.

Another consequence is that this version will probably have less fixes than previous ones as most of the time has been passed on code modernization.

And it will require new mindi and mindi-busybox versions. And these versions should finally work for systemd crazyness of removing /bin and /sbin (which broke MondoRescue for a too long time now). And you’ll need new perl modules in order to have it work correctly as I finally rewrote some bash mindi functions into perl to have what I consider better code.
Which means Fedora 18-20, Mageia 3 should work out of the box (at least my Mageia 3 now works correctly).

And expect again more pacthes to MondoRescue durnig the 28+ hours back home at the end of next week ;-)

So I wish to all readers a happy new year 2014 and hope it will start for you as it has for me !

Interview for Mageia’s Blog

In case you’re interested, you can read my interview made by Ennael for The Mageia Blog.

And I’m right now trying to debug an issue with squidGuard for Mageia 3 while upgrading my internal proxy server ! Cf: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11575

First UEFI PlugFest for Linuxers

After the 3 days dedicated to LinuxCon US 2013 in New Orleans, it was time to contribute to the UEFI Plugfest organized for the first time as a co-located event.

So what is a UEFI plugfest ? Well it’s a place where hardware manufacturers and software producers meet to check the compatibility of their implementations with regards to UEFI. So Every hardware manufacturer brings some systems, sometimes early units or prototypes, and try them with the latest operating systems available to find out potential issues, some other bring cards to see whether their UEFI driver works fine on computer manufacturer and operating system producers want to try their latest version on these often brand new systems.

I think it was a brilliant idea to mix the 2 populations for multiple reasons:

• UEFI members were for sure impressed by the technical knowledge floating around, and employed in such an open fashion, which is not the standard way of working of this standard body.
• Linux kernel members could exchange with manufacturer representatives of UEFI systems which definitely helped reducing all the FUD around this technology, in particular Secure Boot. They also had the opportunity to test some not yet available hardware platform to ensure their distributions/drivers/tools were working fine or fix them if that wasn’t the case

So in the HP area, under the lead of Dong Wei who is UEFI Forum Vice President and HP Fellow, we tried with 2 colleagues various Linux distributions (and even Windows, but not me !) on the 4 systems that were around. And some findings were interesting !

• Debian 7.1 had grub issue at boot and we were not able to install it
• Mageia 3 has no UEFI support yet and we were not able to install it easily. However, support is planned for Mageia 4, and some info have been published recently to detail how to perform UEFI based installation.
• Ubuntu 13.10 provides all what is needed to install in a UEFI compliant environment, thanks to their documentation. We were also able to test SecureBoot with success with their version of Matthew Garrett‘s shim bootloader, signed by Microsoft. They are also working on an interesting tool: FWTS aka Firmware Test Suite, which should be adopted by all distributions IMHO in order to have (for once !) a single tool able to perform firmware compliance tests for a Linux environment. Easy to use, pretty comprehensive, reports lots of useful info. Too bad that they are not providing their certification tools online anymore :-(
• OpenSUSE 12.3+ again has what is needed for UEFI support. Same mechanism with a shim bootloader, but this time signed multiple times by Microsoft and SUSE. However, this requires a more recent implementation of the UEFI specification, which wasn’t the case on all our system during this event. SUSE provides in particular an excellent documentation on UEFI support, including the possibility to sign its own kernel with pesign in order to use it with SecureBoot.
• Fedora 19 provides mostly all what is needed. Install worked in UEFI mode without problem. We used the updated version of the shim and shim-unsigned packages from Fedora 20 in order to avoid some issues. However, the multisign issue met with OpenSUSE was also encountered here. More over, Fedora doesn’t provide a good documentation yet for signing your own kernel, which was reported upstream and could benefit from this article. Also the usage of mokutil is broken and should be fixed for Fedora 20.



We also got visited by two Kernel Maintainers Greg Kroah-Hartman and James Bottomley who even tried some of his tools on our systems.


Note that Some USB keys even correctly formated didn’t boot correctly on some platforms so if you encounter this issue, try using another USB key.

Finally I made some tries with MondoRescue on the Last Fedora distribution installed. I thought the work done to support EFI on Itanium would be sufficient, but there are some detection problems for the boot loader in mindi need to be solved and are now tracked upstream as well.

And on top of all what I was able to learn working with my 3 colleagues, I was pointed to a very instructive article from Ken Thomson on Trusting Trust, I hadn’t read before (and I encourage you to read it), following discussions on Secure Boot. And we had a very nice dinner downtown, a walk through Bourbon Street


followed by a real air of New Orleans Jazz.


That was the end of a very rich US week. More to come on other more recent travels later.

LinuxCon North America 2013: an air of Jazz

It was really great to be able to attend LinuxCon in New Orleans in September. I’d like to thank again HP’s OSPO team and in particular Eileen Evans, VP leading it, to sponsor my travel there. HP is also a Platinum sponsor of both the Linux Foundation, CloudOpen & LinuxCon events.
”

As I arrived in the afternoon of Monday, I missed the keynotes and presentations that day, but could join the HP booth where HP was presenting HPcloud:

and also demonstrating the new Moonshot converged system there:

This event is always attracting lots of people from various background and the booths area was crowded

as well as elsewhere in the hotel

Jeanne, who was coodinating the event for HP was even interviewed by the Linux Foundation team

Cocktails (nice hurricane !) and a light dinner were provided to the attendees during the booth crawl session which allowed me to talk with some of my US colleagues to learn the latest news

I started to feel the effects of the jet lag, and went to my hotel room (couldn’t help make some mail !) and rest thinking I was singing Renaissance music just some hours ago !

Speaking of the hotel, this was a very nice venue, with futurists elevators with no button in them ;-)

Second day was more active, and I attended all keynotes and sessions I could.
Among the most interestong for me I was able to see, there was the keynote of Kevin Kelly who talked about the notion of “Technium”, this idea that 7 billions people all connected all together all the time, with the latest technologies available will create a new entity he called the Technium and described. Not entirely convincing, and this is good, as it’s also a bit frightening. I consider and hope people will keep enough independance to watch this type of evolution with distance and won’t become a big brother type of system managing itself.

Then it was time for an OpenStack refresh with Thierry Carrez who did a great job explaining that a release manager is not just working 1 day every 6 months ;-) I can’t agree more with him ! (even if I have much smaller projects to deal with). Thierry also covered the various sub projetc and how to manage coherency in such a project. When you think about it: 3 years ago nobody was talking about OpenStack and now they have as many company and contributors as the Linux Kernel had in roughly 20 years ! Quite amazing.

Then James Blair continued on a related talk explaining the continuous process pushed to the extreme set up in the project with the development of ad-hoc tools such as zuul. I must admit it really gives incitation to look more closely at it, gerrit, jenkins and take what could be relevant, even for a small project.

After the lunch, it was time to go back to keynotes, which were a bit less interesting than usual for me, even if the concepts brought by Candy Chang to revigorate a neighborhood was original. I decided to continue with Cloud and look at what Red Hat had to propose around openshift. In complement to their RDO (sort of Red Hat OpenStack distribution), they have this offering which exists for some time, but seems now to grow in activity. Diane Mueller presented well the offer, the various aspects of the project, but I definitely lack a demo or a more detailed explanation of the technical aspects of this PaaS offering. Worth digging later on with my Red Hat EMEA friends :-)

I attended then the openVswitch presentation from Jesse Gross, but again was a bit disappointed as I was expecting a more concrete presentation of this important tool in todays cloud environments.
Finally, I attended a session on storage management I already attended last year, by Ric Wheeler, which is always interesting, and allowed me to see which progresses were made on their way to storage unification, and principally what remains to be done !! I particularly think to the global architecture they try to put in place, which would be really great to have but is not there yet.

The business day was then over, and it was time to move to the VIP party.

Of course, it was time for my first air of Jazz as well in New Orleans. And even if that’s not my preferred style of music, it was pretty good that night, as well as the buffet !

Lots of VIPs were there of course, which allowed for entertaining discussions

The inside was worth the outside !

The atmosphere was nice, and I stayed there till 10:00PM but wasn’t alone

Some mail, some sleep and I was ready for day 3 ! Which as usual started with a Keynote (the “usual” Dirk Hondel talk)

and the session the most expected by the audience I think, the Kernel Roundtable.

This time, they had invited Sarah Sharp, Intel (I like her clarity) / Tejun Heo, Red Hat (I discovered his enthusiasm which was great)

Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman, both Linux Foundation.

The panel was moderated by Ric Wheeler, Red Hat.

The room was as usual full, and laughed frequently on Linus or Tejun jokes.

The most amusing part was probably when Linus was asked if he had been contacted to introduce backdoor code in the Linux kernel and when he replied “No” doing “Yes” with the head ;-)

After the keynote, Linus passed 20 minutes with fans who wanted to take pictures with him, always nice, even when the camera wasn’t working (and cound’t resist to hack it !). Maybe next time, I’ll also have the courage to ask one picture, even if I diserve none having nearly never worked at the kernel level myself. I will never thank him enough to have created an ecosystem which allows me to earn my life and still have fun at work and at home :-) This is a great man !

As this was the day of my own presentation on Mageia, I didn’t attend as many sessions as the previous day.
The OpenDaylight one was interesting for me, as it was my first exposure to the ecosystem. Mostly it was an overview of the multiple components. The project is young, but deserves to be followed, as it could become as openStack on the SDN side, despite what some people say. Also the UEFI presentation was very interesting, in particular in preparation of the UEFI plugfest which was the 2 following days.

And of course, it was my pleasure to have a 15 people choir to sing “Happy Birthday Mageia” during my session this afternoon ;-)

And the day ended with … Blues, not jazz this time ! At the house of blues of course.

With Voodoo art inside

This event is organized for all LinuxCon participants, so there are multiple threaded buffet to satisfy the appetite ;-)

The blues band was great, really (they even had a pinguin, look closely !)

I think it will be part of the memorable dinners organized during LinuxCon as it gave everybody energy for the rest of the week

I really enjoyed this event again, made new relationships, learned and hopefully transmit to some the fantastic beauty of Open Source. Hope to have the same pleasure end of this month in Edinburgh. But for me the week wasn’t finished as I attended the UEFI plugfest as said earlier, but that’s for another article.

You can see more pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcornec/sets/72157636383786144/with/10184624874/

Happy birthday Mageia !!

The 18th of September 2010, Mageia as announced as a new project. So today is a special day, as its the 3rd birthday of my distribution of choice.

More over, it was for me a special day as I was presenting this distribution during LinuxCon US.

Completely unrelated, some of you may know that I’m directing a vocal ensemble.

So combining all 3 elements today, I was happy to have a choir of some 15 people attending my talk sing “Happy birthday Mageia” ! (It was private so no rights issue ;-)) A great personal pleasure !!

And no, there is no recording available but that was done with a community state of mind:-) What you can get are the slides which won’t of course contain that unique moment of art but should motivate you to at least try Mageia.

No next rehearsal planned for our /tmp/choir today but I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did.