Planet GNU

List of nominated for Nordic Free Software Award published.

2009-11-06T22:32:11Z

On http://fscons.org/award you can read about the nominated persons/projects for the Nordic Free Software Award.

List of nominated 2009

Qt development team

Simon Josefsson

Daniel Stenberg

Henrik Nordström

Björn Stenberg

Andreas Nilsson

Varnish

Ask Bjørn Hansen

Knut Yrvin

Jari “Rakshasa” Sundell

The award will be presented at FSCONS

GNU Hackers Meeting and FSCONS

2009-11-06T22:24:49Z

I fell better this year then any of the two previous years. It’s not only that Jonas Öberg is in charge of FSCONS even though that fact surely adds to the feeling. Sooo many people (if I name one I risk forgetting someone so to all of you, love you!) have done an extreme amount of hard work previous years. The work have been awesome and we can now see the results, e. g we don’t need to spend as much energy on promoting the conference as before. We’ve learned a lot from our (mainly my) mistakes. So thanks to everyone ever involved.

I remember talking to one of the FOSDEM organiser on the Beer event at last year’s FOSDEM. He seemed to be very much OK, but a bit confused. I guess that’s where I am heading in a few days. Land of confusion (as if I ever left that land). He gave me some tickets to get me some beers. So all organisers of Free Software conferences if you’re coming to FSCONS, come over to me (skinny, bearded, tall look confused) and you’ll get beers in return. … just starting a conference next year doesn’t count.

Anyhow, the main reason I feel so much better is that I will attend this years GNU Hackers Meeting, which is held the days before FSCONS at the same venue: ITUniv. It’s going to be great to see some “old” faces and some new. …. and finally I can pay back Simon Josefsson the lunch I ‘forced’ him to pay for me at FOSDEM.

… all in all, it’s gonna be great

Release 0.8.10 available now

2009-11-04T19:27:46Z

The new features include:

* Text attached to denemo music: Keep your TODO list/notes on errata in the source etc attached to the relevant place in the music.
* New Bookmark System, integrating Rehearsal Marks
* Augment /Diminish the duration of selected notes.
* Whole Measure rests.
* Anacrusis: the length of the upbeat is determined from the music.
* First and second time Measures in repeats.
* Immediate playback via MIDI - educational games can now output notes on MIDI instruments.
* Custom collections of buttons: any command can be placed, ready to use, on a button bar.
* Changing preferences via script.
* EditObject command (usually right-click or Tab) now gives direct access to any Attributes set on note or chord.
* Cut and Paste fixes: multiple measures across adjacent staffs can now be cut/pasted.
* Better mouse selection of music.
* Many bugs fixed: Import Midi, display after clef changes, crash on dragging mouse off top of display, crash on cancel new staff in initial ...

GNUpod back on ftp.gnu.org

2009-11-03T15:57:08Z

After six years of absence GNUpod is back with a current release on ftp.gnu.org. The latest release up there was 0.29-rc1 :-/

So now our current release 0.99.8 gets mirrored again onto a bazillion ftp sites.

cheers
-henrik

BTW: I have officially been dubbed co-maintainer of GNUpod. So now you can officially blame me :-)

GnuTLS 2.8.5

2009-11-03T10:25:16Z

The announcement is here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.gnutls.general/1836

Theme module for SystemPreferences

2009-11-03T08:08:24Z

I implemented a new preference module for System Preferences. It allows the selection of the preferred theme system-wide for the current user (NSGlobalDefault GSTheme)

This is finally the way an end-user should set his preferred theme, since currently either the command line was needed (defaults write) or only per-application setting was possible.

The module uses themes for GSTheme and they can be created with thematic. It displays a short description, the author, if available the version, the icon and a small theme preview. Since it would be almost impossible to do a preview in a subview, each bundle can carry an image of its preview.

The user can "Apply" the theme which means essentially to set the selected theme to the SystemPreferences application as a sort of preview or to Save, which writes the default permanently.

In the attached screenshot, you can see that the "ThinkDark" theme is applied temporarily and that the user is inspecting the Neos theme. The rest of the system however still runs the standard theme.

Thanks to the dynamic loading capabilities of GSTheme, after saving the theme all application get the new theme immediately.

The Themes module supersedes the Color Schemes control panel which is thus now no longer built and installed by default, although it remains available.

System Preferences 1.1.0 was thus released, combining some other minor code and makefile improvements already present

Up-to-date themes are present in the GAP CVS repository, they will be re-released soon.

2009-10-31

2009-11-02T22:39:00Z

A month of the Hurd: new installation CDs, further Git migration, porting. Details.

This month Philip Charles created a new installation CD, the L series, for the Hurd, which brings us a big step towards installing the Hurd from the Hurd (without the need of a Linux-based installer). If you enjoy testing stuff, please give it a try.

On the same front, Michael Banck uploaded a new version of crosshurd that makes it again possible to use this package for creating a GNU/Hurd system image directly from Debian unstable packages.

Also, Thomas Schwinge migrated Sergiu Ivanov's nsmux, Flávio Cruz' cl-hurd (clisp bindings), and Carl Fredrik Hammar libchannel repositories into our new incubator Git repository, making them easier to access for other contributors.

Our bunch of porters continued to make further Debian packages usable on GNU/Hurd: Pino Toscano worked on a lot of packages, and Wesley W. Terpstra made mlton build -- together with Samuel Thibault, who first had to enhance GNU Mach to support allocating more than 1 GiB of RAM to one user-space process, which mlton needs.

On the go, Samuel also fixed a number of other bugs here and there, for example together with Eric Blake and Roland McGrath hashed out a difficile issue in the filesystem servers regarding POSIX conformance and system stability.

All you should really know about Autoconf and Automake

2009-11-02T17:33:56Z

So, here is the shortest possible tutorial on the autotools.

The problem with autotools is that it is used for complicated things, and people cut-and-paste complicated things even when they ought to be simple. 99% of people just need a way to access .pc files and generate juicy Makefiles; the portability part is taken care by glib, sdl and so on.

You can use then the following basic autotools setup, which is just 9 lines. You can start from here and add more stuff (including libtool).

configure.ac:

AC_INIT([package], [version])
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign subdir-objects])

Spanish translations in gnupdf.org

2009-11-02T13:45:06Z

Thanks to Sonia Garcia Tellez gnupdf.org is now translated into Spanish. The spanish homepage is in http://gnupdf.org/Main_Page/es

Many thanks, Sonia!

XBoard/Winboard 4.4.1 released

2009-10-31T17:51:30Z

This release includes several new features and lots of bugfixes.

You can get the source code for XBoard/Winboard at:

http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/

Windows binaries will be available at:

http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewforum.php?f=19

Thanks for all the bug-reports we got, if you find some new bugs, please report them in the bug tracker at
https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/xboard/ or by email to bug-xboard
(AT) gnu.org.

Arun Persaud (arun@nubati.net)

idutils-4.4 released [beta]

2009-10-31T07:34:23Z

The announcement is here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.idutils.bugs/105

gzip-1.3.14 released [beta]

2009-10-30T19:18:22Z

The announcement is here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.gzip.bugs/280

GNU IceCat 3.5.4 released

2009-10-29T20:50:33Z

This new version includes all the bug fixes present in Firefox 3.5.4 plus some minor changes.

New files are available for download here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/3.5.4/

and on any mirror sites worldwide. You can find a complete mirrors list
here:

http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

live site for FSCONS

2009-10-29T09:19:09Z

FSCONS now has a live site:

live.fscons.org

Use this site (or feed) to get the latest info from all speakers at and team behind FSCONS.

fake DSNs

2009-10-26T12:24:50Z

Dear lazyweb, this morning I got bitten by fake Delivery Status Notifications. You’ve probably seen this a thousand times:

Spammer sends mail to non-existant user in existant domain.
Idiotic mail service accepts mail, even though:
- My domain’s SPF record is telling them not to.
- Destination address doesn’t even exist.
Another component of idiotic mail service (hurray for qmail modularity!) realizes this address is invalid, and generates a DSN for the mail sender, even though they don’t really know who that is.
I receive a gazillon of bounces informing me that some mail I didn’t send couldn’t be delivered.

Do you know of any blacklist containing all hosts and/or domains that do this?

Alternatively, I think a blacklist containing all qmail domains would probably cover most of it.

GRUB 1.97 released

2009-10-25T20:36:22Z

GNU GRUB 1.97 has just been released.

This release of GRUB is a significant breakthrough compared to GRUB 1.96. Among a long list of improvements, GRUB 1.97 includes support for booting the kernels of FreeBSD, OpenBSD
and NetBSD, it detects the Ext4 filesystem which is commonly used with the kernel Linux, and it implements a robust mechanism for booting from GPT drives, by embedding itself in the BIOS Boot partition.

GRUB on Lemote Yeeloong

2009-10-25T00:18:36Z

I read that Vladimir Serbinenko’s effort to bring GRUB to the Lemote Yeeloong laptop has reached a milestone: It is now able to initialize and draw text in the display:

This is quite significant for GNU GRUB as it’s the first time it’s ported to a mipsel platform. In addition, it is planned to support the Yeeloong both as a “disk bootloader” (i.e. the way it is normally used on x86/PC) and as a “firmware bootloader”, thereby offering a more flexible alternative to PMON2000 (the preinstalled firmware).

The Lemote Yeeloong is a legacy-free, mipsel-based laptop that runs using entirely free software, including the firmware and its initialization routines.

Experimental branch of GRUB

2009-10-24T15:14:01Z

We’ve recently made available an experimental branch of GRUB, using GNU Bazaar.

Although it is currently identical to SVN trunk (the codebase that will lead to GRUB 1.97), we plan to use it as staging area for different kinds of experimental work, which would benefit from user testing so that it becomes more mature before it is merged into our main tree.

My appreciation goes to Vladimir who kindly volunteered to be the person in charge of this branch, and I’m confident he will do a great job.

Iliad 0.7.1 is out!

2009-10-23T18:23:32Z

We are happy to announce the release of Iliad 0.7.1.

This version fixes a few bugs introduced in Iliad 0.7.0, especially two bugs from the javascript layer and an annoying bug in the debug mode.

GNU-Smalltalkers can clone the git repository from http://github.com/NicolasPetton/iliad

git clone http://github.com/NicolasPetton/iliad
cd iliad
git checkout 0.7.1
./start.sh -p 8888

Since some people asked for a preconfigured pharo image, we made one available at: ftp://bioskop.fr/iliad-0.7.1_pharo.zip.

FreeIPMI 0.7.14 Released

2009-10-22T22:28:50Z

http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/freeipmi/0.7.14/

0.7.14 - 10/16/09
-----------------
o Fix consolidated-output corner cases.

CVS/SVN/Git/Hg reverted to ~12h ago

2009-10-21T08:23:30Z

We moved these services to a new hardware, but within around 1 hour, there was a filesystem error, making everything read-only.

We moved back these services to their old hardware, and are now investigating.

Further info:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-users/2009-10/msg00011.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-users/2009-10/msg00013.html

"Computer Programming using GNU Smalltalk" is available on Lulu.com

2009-10-20T22:52:00Z

After the release of my small book, quite a few people asked if there is an edition to buy on Lulu.com. So here it is, I hope you’ll enjoy reading it :)

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/computer-programming-using-gn...

You can still get the e-book version as free:

http://www.canol.info/books/computer_programming_using_gnu_smalltalk/com...

DataBasin and deletion of Salesforce records

2009-10-19T22:51:16Z

I implemented delete in the Salesforce.com API Layer (DBSoap) of DataBasin.

The screenshot shows DataBasin running on the Mac, natively built in Xcode.

Delete is capable of deleting an array of records, on top of this I implemented a convenient function: QuickDelete. Just enter a Saleforce.com ID and delete it.

Full handling of the error results is still missing, currently only the verbose message are retrieved. For the QuickDelete an error gets conveniently displayed as if it were an exception in a small scrollable panel.

GNU Toolchain Update, October 2009

2009-10-19T09:49:22Z

Hi Guys,

Well the major news this month is that a big new feature has been
added to gcc: Link-Time Optimization.

When this feature is enabled (via the -flto command line option) gcc
interrupts the processing of a source file after it has converted
it into the GIMPLE format (one of GCC's internal representations).
Then, before carrying on with its optimizations, gcc writes the
GIMPLE out to into special sections in the output object file.
After that gcc carries on as normal to optimize the GIMPLE and then
convert it into machine instructions which go into the normal
sections in the object file.

When object files containing these special GIMPLE sections are
linked together they can be read in and optimized before the final
link actually takes place. This allows for greater optimization
opportunities, especially with inter-procedural optimizations.

To use the link-timer optimizer -flto needs to be specified at both
compile time and during the final link. For example,

    gcc -c -O2 -flto foo.c
    gcc -c -O2 -flto bar.c
    gcc -o myprog -flto -O2 foo.o bar.o

Another (simpler) way to enable link-time optimization is,

    gcc -o myprog -flto -O2 foo.c bar.c

Note that when a file is compiled with -flto, the generated object
file will be larger than a regular object file because it will
contain GIMPLE bytecodes and the usual final code. This means that
object files with LTO information can be linked as a normal object
file. So, in the previous example, if the final link is done with:

    gcc -o myprog foo.o bar.o

The only difference will be that no inter-procedural optimizations
will be applied to produce "myprog". The two object files foo.o and
bar.o will be simply sent to the regular linker.

Additionally, the optimization flags used to compile individual
files are not necessarily related to those used at link-time. For
instance:

    gcc -c -O0 -flto foo.c
    gcc -c -O0 -flto bar.c
    gcc -o myprog -flto -O3 foo.o bar.o

This will produce individual object files with unoptimized assembler
code, but the resulting binary "myprog" will be optimized at -O3.
Now, if the final binary is generated without -flto, then "myprog"
will not be optimized.

When producing the final binary with -flto, GCC will only apply
link-time optimizations to those files that contain bytecodes.
Therefore, you can mix and match object files and libraries with
GIMPLE bytecodes and final object code. GCC will automatically
select which files to optimize in LTO mode and which files to link
without further processing.

There are some code generation flags that GCC will preserve when
generating bytecodes, as they need to be used during the final link
stage. Currently, the following options are saved into the GIMPLE
bytecode files: -fPIC, -fcommon and all the -m target flags.

At link time, these options are read-in and reapplied. Note that
the current implementation makes no attempt at recognizing
conflicting values for these options. If two or more files have a
conflicting value (e.g., one file is compiled with -fPIC and another
isn't), the compiler will simply use the last value read from the
bytecode files. It is recommended, then, that all the files
participating in the same link be compiled with the same options.

Another feature of LTO is that it is possible to apply
interprocedural optimizations on files written in different
languages. This requires some support in the language front end.
Currently, the C, C++ and Fortran front ends are capable of emitting
GIMPLE bytecodes, so something like this should work

    gcc -c -flto foo.c
    g++ -c -flto bar.cc
    gfortran -c -flto baz.f90
    g++ -o myprog -flto -O3 foo.o bar.o baz.o -lgfortran

Notice that the final link is done with g++ to get the C++ runtime
libraries and -lgfortran is added to get the Fortran runtime
libraries. In general, when mixing languages in LTO mode, you
should use the same link command used when mixing languages in a
regular (non-LTO) compilation. This means that if your build
process was mixing languages before, all you need to add is
-flto to all the compile and link commands.

If object files containing GIMPLE bytecode are stored in a library
archive, say libfoo.a, it is possible to extract and use them
in an LTO link if you are using gold as the linker (which, in turn
requires GCC to be configured with --enable-gold). To enable this
feature, use the command line option -use-linker-plugin at
link-time. Eg:

    gcc -o myprog -O2 -flto -use-linker-plugin a.o b.o -lfoo

With the linker plugin enabled, gold will extract the needed GIMPLE
files from libfoo.a and pass them on to the running GCC to make them
part of the aggregated GIMPLE image to be optimized.

If you are not using gold and/or do not specify -use-linker-plugin
then the objects inside libfoo.a will be extracted and linked as
usual, but they will not participate in the LTO optimization
process.

Link time optimizations do not require the presence of the whole
program to operate. If the program does not require any symbols to
be exported, it is possible to combine -flto with -fwhole-program to
allow the interprocedural optimizers to use more aggressive
assumptions which may lead to improved optimization opportunities.

Regarding portability: the current implementation of LTO makes no
attempt at generating bytecode that can be ported between different
types of hosts. The bytecode files are versioned and there is a
strict version check, so bytecode files generated in one version of
GCC will not work with an older/newer version of GCC.

One problem with link time optimization is that it can require a lot
of computer resources (memory and processing time). For large
programs this can be a problem. One solution is to use the new
-fwhopr command line option. This option is identical in
functionality to -flto but it differs in how the final link stage is
executed. Instead of loading all the function bodies in memory, the
callgraph is analyzed and optimization decisions are made (whole
program analysis or WPA). Once optimization decisions are made, the
callgraph is partitioned and the different sections are compiled
separately (local transformations or LTRANS).

Cheers
Nick

Update: FSCONS location moved

2009-10-17T10:15:12Z

Note that the FSCONS venue for Saturday and Sunday has been changed -- it will now be at the same place as the GHM. Details at http://fscons.org.

GHM Gothenburg accommodation reminder

2009-10-17T09:41:01Z

All registered participants for the GNU Hackers Meeting should have received an email from local organiser Henrik Sandklef offering help with accommodation options in Gothenburg. Please contact ghm-discuss AT gnu.org if you didn't receive the email.

GNU Guile 1.9.4 released

2009-10-16T07:36:09Z

We are pleased to announce GNU Guile 1.9.4. It is the fifth pre-release of what will eventually become the 2.0 stable series, featuring a compiler and virtual machine.

This release provides assorted improvements and bug fixes. See the announcement at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2009-10/msg00075.html for details.

The Pirate Bay and Youtube

2009-10-16T06:33:47Z

Like many other people, it used to bother me that The Pirate Bay was being sued for distributing hashes of copyright-restricted material whereas Youtube could distribute the material itself without fear of punishment.

Like many other people, it used to bother me that there was no way to download music from The Pirate Bay (which in the Spanish kingdom is a legal activity) directly into a music player without the hassle of manually browsing the website, launching a bittorrent client, etc.

Then I found rhythmbox-youtube.

Grr: RSS to go on GNUstep

2009-10-14T07:51:44Z

Guenther Noack, the Author of Grr, donated the appreciated RSS Reader and its Framework RSSKit to the GNUstep Application Project some time ago, since he had no time to maintain it anymore. I will not promise anything, but as it is usual for GAP projects we try hard to make our programs compatible.

Thus Grr got a general make up of crash fixes, makefile fixes and warning fixes. Then an extensive work of removing forward declaration of Protocols was done so that compilation on gcc 29.5 is now possible, expanding the list of platforms where to run Grr on.

I compiled and ported Grr to the MIPS based Letux 400 netbook as can be seen in the screenshot. Grr uns perfectly and thus tracking RSS on the small device is now smooth as butter. RSS everywhere with you!

GNU SASL 1.3

2009-10-12T15:55:01Z

The announcement is here:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gsasl/2009-10/msg00000.html