Linux Wizard

Prcsys is used by Mandriva to do easy and hassle-free LSB-compliant parallel boot. This tool have been developped by Couriousous and is used in the Pinit project. Pinit support several features :

• LSB dependency tags compatibility
• Bootsplash/splashy support
• Maximum 255 steps are supported
• Stop mode
• Debug mode
• Logging facility
• Lazy requires which means that prcsys is just ordering the services but is not enforcing dependencies
• Parallel boot

Note : If for whatever reasons you have issues when booting with Pinit, you can disable it at boot time with the nopinit option

To debug prcsys boot, you can start it from CLI with the --test, and it will allow to see in which order services are going to be started. You need to defined the mode ( S for start mode, K for kill mode ) and the directory where are located the service init scripts ( most of the time /etc/rc5.d or /etc/rc3.d ). For example to test service startup in runlevel 5, you may use the following command : prcsys --test S /etc/rc5.d/
If you want to do a complete debug report, and ahve everything logged in a debug file named for example /tmp/prcsys.log, you can use the following command : prcsys --test --debug --logfile /tmp/prcsys.log S /etc/rc5.d/

Links :

• http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Howto/Pinit : Project page on Mandriva wiki
• http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_2.1.0/LSB-generic/LSB-generic/initscrcomconv.html : LSB specs
• http://www.linux-wizard.net/index.php?id_blog=47 : First introduction to Pinit ( FR )
• https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/prcsys : Fedora package page

Marcello Anni announced on Cooker ML the release of the MIB Live Games 2008.1. MIB ( Mandriva Italian Backports ) is a derived distribution of Mandriva Linux done by the Italian Mandriva community.

MIB live Games DVD is a revised version of Mandriva 2008.1 One edition, but it is more bigger (about 2 GB) and contains a lot of the best games availables for the Linux world. We distribute it in 2 different DVDs, that contain different games (MIB Live games DVD1: supertux, freecive, globulation2, supertuxkart, warzone2100, flightgear and many others - MIB Live games DVD2: kdegames4, torcs, wesnoth, opencity, openarena, wormux, gnome-games, nexuiz and so on..). You can play to all of these games in Live mode, and if you prefer, you can install the distro to the hard disk using the "Live install" option.
Announcement on Mandriva Italian backports blog

In April, I test Linux Vservers under Mandriva 2008.1 Spring. However there were severals issues and bugs in the Mandriva support. So I provide patch to fix some of them, notably in the urpmi support. Because of this, and some others issues, I was unable to configure Vservers under Mandriva with the default Mandriva packages. This month Olivier Blin applied my patch and fixed all the issues reported by me : really he made my day :) I will be able to give another try to Vservers and I do hope that I will be able to have an easy way to setup Vservers under Mandriva Linux :). I will have eventually to contact upstream in order to have theses patches integrated directly upstream. Here is the list of bugs reported by me :

• bug #40192 : vserver build -m urpmi will failed because of a typo in util-vserver-vars
• bug #40193 : Ordering issue when installing basesystem package
• bug #40194 : mandriva/pkgs/rpmlist.list should contains basesystem-minimal instead of basesystem

Today I had a crash of my computer while updating Mandriva Cooker and writing email with Firefox. After a reboot, when I launched Firefox 3, I noticed that I had lost nearly all of my prefs ( bookmarks, start page ). At least the website passwords were safe. As I have some issues with Firefox 3, maybe due to my old Firefox 2 profile, I decide to remove my profil. However I want to save some of my profiles elements like bookmarks or web password ( the 2 most important things in a web browser IMHO ). So here are the different ways to backup some of your Firefox settings :

• Manual Backup of your passwords : To backup your web password, you need to backup the signons.txt, signons2.txt, signons3.txt and key3.db files. For example to backup them in a ff-web-passwd.tar.gz file : tar -czf ff-web-passwd.tar.gz ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/signons* .mozilla/firefox/*/key*.db
  Once done done, to restore your web password, you just need to copy back theses files in your new Firefox profile directory while Firefox is not runnning. For example to directly restore in your new Firefox profile : tar --strip-components=3 -zxvf ff-web-passwd.tar.gz -C ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/
• Backup of your passwords with Password Exporter addon : There're some third party applications which allow to backup Firefox 3 preferences and notably passwords. Fore example you have the extension Password Exporter which allows you to export your passwords using XML or CSV files. This extension is compatible with Firefox 3 and Thunderbird. You have the possibility to encrypt the username and password while exporting your passwords.
• Backup your profiles ( bookmarks, history, cache ) with Mozbackup : This is a Windows program. It allows to backup most of your profile settings. This program can be download at http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/download.php.
• Manually Backups your bookmarks : If like me you have already lost your bookmarks, you may think that it's impossible to backup your lost bookmarks ? In fact this is wrong. Fortunately there are some backup copies of your bookmarks ! To locate them, you just need to go in your Firefox profile and look for a folder named bookmarkbackups. In this folder you will see backups of your bookmarks in JSON format. As you may noticed, you have the date of the backup. It seems that each time you make 5 changes to your bookmarks, a backup is done. So to backup theses ... backups in ff-bookmarks.tar.gz, you just need to do the following command : tar -czf ff-bookmarks.tar.gz ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/bookmarkbackups/*.json
  Once done, to restore your bookmarks, extract them from the tar.gz archive, and in Firefox 3, go to "Bookmarks" -> "Organize Bookmarks" -> "Import and Backup" -> "Restore" -> "From a file". Then you just need to pick with the fileselector the right .json file in the extraction directory and all your previous bookmarks will be restored.
• Backup of your history with Backup Restore History addon : If you want to backup and/or restore your Firefox history, you can use the Backup Restore History addon. This addon works only with Firefox 3 it seems.
• Firefox Environment Backup Extension : Firefox Environment Backup Extension is an extension which allow to backup nearly everything from Firefox ( cache, history, passwords, bookmarks, extensions, complete profiles, ... ). To install this extension, you just need to go on the FEBE addon page on AMO. If you want to have furthers informations, don't hesitate to visite the extension project page where you will be able to find for example a Quick start guide to FEBE. Firefox 2 users should use FEBE 5.x, whereas Firefox 3 should use latest FEBE versions.
• Clearing your Firefox profile : Once you have backup all of your most important settings, you may want to clear your Firefox profile, before restoring your settings. To do this, you just need to remove the ~/.mozilla/firefox directory while Firefox is not running : rm -fr ~/.mozilla/firefox/*
  Now don't forget to start Firefox at least one time in order to have a new profile created before beginning to restore your settings.

Note : be aware fo the fact that with Firefox 3, bookmarks and history are written in a SQLite file named places.sqlite located in the Firefox profile directory. Cookies are save also in a SQLite file named cookies.sqlite. You may try to backup and restore theses settings by copying and restoring directly theses .sqlite files while Firefox is not running.

I found the upstream bug report about my issues with NFS shares visibility in Nautilus : bgo #536292. Whereas I thought it was a bug, it seems instead this is an intended behavior ... Indeed, if you look at bgo #520736, you will noticed that gvfs will silently ignore all entries in fstab where the mountpoint is not in /media. I don't know what to think about that ... This is so far away from the spirit of Unix/Linux ! Guys, If I put the user and the noauto option in the fstab entry, maybe it's because I want users to be able to mount it ! Why should I have to mount everything in /media ? I may want to do it in /opt, or for NFS home workstations in /home ! Really we should stop deciding for the users ! On top of that this behavior have been documented ... nowhere ( except in the bug report ) ! Now it seems that the only solution for me is to :

• edit /etc/fstab on all of my computers to mount the NFS share in /media or using autofs
• if former, create a symlink between the mountpoint in /media and the correct location where I want the share to appear ...

Wanna laugh more ? So GVFS is looking for mountpoints in /media from fstab and is using HAL ? but what will happen when we will have DeviceKit which will replace most parts of HAL ? Can you believed it ! HAL is not even a 1.0 release and 3 years after, when only most applications were using it correctly, HAL is already obsolete. Please note that it's David Zeuthen, the one who do HAL, who is trowing his own baby in the water. Are we going to have another behavior change in 1 year ?