November 22, 2022
I did an ad-hoc interview with Eddie Knight over at Sonatype during the Linux Foundation Member Summit, for his podcast ZeroBytesGiven. It was a lot of fun and got to talk about some supply chain concerns and even dig into little-known history of how we did security at Mandriva …
May 9, 2020
Yesterday we had someone at our home to look at replacing the front and back doors. The rep for the company was exceptionally personable and we probably spent more time with him than the simple transaction of selecting and ordering new doors for our home warranted, but my wife …
February 11, 2018
I’m a week behind as the 20th anniversary of “Open Source” was a week ago. Back on February 3, 1998 the term “Open Source” was coined as a result of the decision of Netscape Communications Corp to give away the source code to it’s Netscape …
February 15, 2009
This week’s TechMail is A Mandriva user kicks around Fedora Core 10: How does it compare? (not the title I chose, but I guess my editor figured it needed my “flare”). Basically talks about my first impressions of using Fedora 10, considering I’ve more or …
February 6, 2009
Well, technically speaking, I guess this is a bit of a downgrade. But, since I’m not longer using Mandriva and need to get used to Red Hat products (Fedora, RHEL, etc.), CentOS makes sense for upgrading my internal server to. It was also a long week, so I goofed a bit on it …
January 30, 2009
Well, today is my last day and so without much fanfare I say “adieu” to Mandriva. As the title indicates, never a dull moment. You get spoiled with new stuff, then have to go back and re-setup old stuff. Part of this switch for Oden is that the build system goes with …
December 17, 2008
Some statistics, before I go on holidays until the end of the year. Looking at bugfix updates, we’ve seen a steady increase since I’ve kept track (going back to 1999, although I think in 1999 it was only a half-year of doing updates). For security updates, it’s …
December 5, 2008
I’ve been saying it for a while, but never really put hard evidence to it. Our community has declined and by the numbers I’ll produce, I’m going to say it declined a lot. I just wrote a quick shell script to parse the number of messages posted to each given list …
December 3, 2008
A good friend of mine has over the last little while been feeding me some really great books that have made me re-evaluate a lot of things. The first book is “PresentationZen” (ISBN: 978-0-321-52565-9) which gives some really great ideas regarding presentation design …
December 1, 2008
Some lesser-known urpmi tricks I’ve had to figure out today. The situation is that the machine that had my mirrored files has been moved somewhere else in order to ease up on rsync being an absolute bandwidth pig (great for downloading, bad when it’s throwing nagios …
November 30, 2008
The Mandriva community is small, yes, but tight-knit. This can be evidenced by the comments in my previous blog entry and the many emails I received privately, and the many chats initiated on IRC. It has been my honor and privilege to work with you guys, and I sincerely …
November 27, 2008
Well, I received some horrid news today. As of December 31st, my contract with Mandriva will be terminated and I will no longer be working for Mandriva. We’ve got a new CEO now, and he’s determined there is to be no remote contractors, and as a result I’ve been …
November 6, 2008
Well, after some discussion on cooker and, quite frankly, needing a resource myself to speed up security update testing (particularly looking for regressions), we’ve re-implemented “Testzilla”. Sorta. Instead of integrating with bugzilla, we’ve used the …
October 9, 2008
Today marks the release of Mandriva Linux 2009.0 (the 23rd Mandriva release!) and for the first time in probably 5 years, I was actually involved with it’s development. =) The last few years I’ve stepped away from any sort of a developers role simply due to lack of …
September 9, 2008
I’ve spent the entire day yesterday and another day last week working on migrating the current Mandriva bugzilla 3.0.5 to the new 3.2rc1. You won’t see it anywhere official until 2009.0 is released most likely, but having (some) spare time, I wouldn’t to put it …
July 25, 2008
This week’s TechMail is entitled Installing Mandriva 2008.1 on the ASUS Eee PC, which, as the name implies, discusses Mandriva 2008.1 on the ASUS Eee PC. When I wrote it, I had installed Mandriva onto an SDHC card, but I’ve since replaced Xandros with Mandriva on the …
May 29, 2008
We got a really really nice review of Mandriva 2008.1 over on Linux.com. Good stuff. It’s nice to see the kind words for all the hard work the developers and community have put into this release.
May 16, 2008
At the end of the month Mandriva is celebrating it’s 10 year anniversary. I didn’t think I was going to be able to get to come, but it turns out that I am (thanks Anne!). This is very cool for me because in June I’ll be celebrating two anniversaries of my …
April 20, 2008
Well, I’m no longer a virgin to the Mandriva build system. I’ve been using some tools, like iurt, on the secteam buildbox for a while now, but I’ve not had the need to use repsys or mdvsys. So I started playing with them yesterday. For starters, someone needs to …
April 9, 2008
Well, it’s official: Mandriva 2008.1 is now out and available. Time to start gearing up for the barrage of bugfix updates. =) On a similar note, 2007.0 is almost EOL.. you’ve got a few days left to upgrade to something newer before being left without security updates. …
March 3, 2008
As usual, I take a day or two when a new Mandriva version is in RC status to install and play around with it. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that the machine I throw to the dogs is my Toshiba Libretto. Asus may have a cute thing with the Eee PC, but …
October 9, 2007
I always like the week or two before a release. While the other developers are busting their butts trying to get things finished for the upcoming release, I actually get to take a bit of a breather, largely because I don’t like duplicating effort so any non-essential …
August 28, 2007
New article on TechRepublic from yours truly about Configuring wireless support in Mandriva with ndiswrapper.
July 17, 2007
After a few really long weeks, bugzilla is finally live. It’s about bloody time. Of course, now that it’s live, there are even more requests to do stuff. Oh well. Par for the course I guess. However, I’m seriously considering taking the next two days off to …
June 30, 2007
The bugzilla conversion is almost complete, except for a few minor issues that need to be figured out (such as who will be owning the bugs initiall when they are submitted). And a few minor cosmetics. Head on over to bugzilla.linsec.ca and check it out. Constructive feedback is …
June 28, 2007
Well, someone else was supposed to be working on the new bugzilla, but they got pulled off for an OEM project (completely understandable), so since I really need some functionality and speed out of bugzilla to progress with some work flows I have in mind, I decided to hunker down …
June 2, 2007
Came across this good HOWTO on HowtoForge entitled The Perfect Desktop: Mandriva 2007 Spring Free (Mandriva 2007.1). Pretty good write up, although there’s too many pictures for my liking. I guess that makes a good visual HOWTO tho. Goes into detail on how to setup the PLF …
May 10, 2007
I keep running into this issue everytime I have to run vmware tools so I thought I’d mention it here. vmware-tools insists on rewriting /etc/modprobe.conf and changing “alias sound-slot-0 snd-ens1371” to “alias sound es1371”. I have no idea why, but …