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Archive for June, 2010

Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Review from PostgreSQL (openSUSE Flavor)

June 11th, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Rares Aioanei

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s Weekly PostgreSQL News, served openSUSE-style!

-As usual, we start with some insight of this week’s mailing list events, then we will focus on the Planet PostgreSQL posts and news.

-Jon Schewe posted on perform@ an interesting comparison of various filesystems under Linux (OpenSUSE64) , how do they perform and under what circumstances. I ain’t gonna spoil
it for you, so go grab a read.

-Peter Eisentraut, on hackers@, posted a quite interesting idea titled Functional dependencies and GROUP BY : “I have developed a patch that partially implements the “functional dependency” feature that allows some columns to be omitted from the GROUP BY clause if it can be shown that the columns are functionally dependent on the columns in the group by clause and therefore guaranteed to be unique per group.  The full functional dependency deduction rules are pretty big and arcane, so I concentrated on getting a useful subset working.  In particular:

* When grouping by primary key, the other columns can be omitted, e.g.,

* CREATE TABLE tab1 (a int PRIMARY KEY, b int);

* SELECT a, b FROM tab1 GROUP BY a;

This is frequently requested by MySQL converts (and possibly others).

Also, when a column is compared with a constant, it can appear ungrouped:

SELECT x, y FROM tab2 WHERE y = 5 GROUP BY x;

For lack of a better idea, I have made it so that merge-joinable operators qualify as equality operators.  Better ideas welcome.

Other rules could be added over time (but I’m current not planning to work on that myself).

At this point, this patch could use some review and testing with unusual queries that break my implementation. 😉 ”

-This week, The San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group will have a meeting on June the 15th; here are the details : http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/13675701/

-In Planet-related news, Leo Hsu and Regina Obe write about what’s new in PostgreSQL 9.0, since the 2nd beta was released this week :  “PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 2 just got released this week. We may see another beta before 9.0 is finally released, but it looks like PostgreSQL 9.0 will be here probably sometime this month. Robert Treat has a great slide presentation showcasing all the new features. The slide share for those on Robert Treat’s slide share page.  We’ll list the key ones with our favorites at the top:
Our favorites
The window function functionality has been enhanced to support ROWS PRECEDING and FOLLOWING. Recall we discussed this in Running totals and sums using PostgreSQL 8.4 a hack for getting around the lack of ROWS x PRECEDING and FOLLOWING.
No more need for that. This changes our comparison we did Window Functions Comparison Between PostgreSQL 8.4, SQL Server 2008, Oracle, IBM DB2. Now the syntax is inching even closer to Oracle’s window functionality, far superior to SQL Server 2005/2008, and about on par with IBM DB2. We’ll do updated compare late this month or early next month. Depesz has an example of this in Waiting for 9.0 – extended frames for window functions Ordered Aggregates.
This is extremely useful for spatial aggregates and ARRAY_AGG, STRING_AGG, and medians where you care about the order of the aggregation. Will have to give it a try. For example if you are building a linestring using ST_MakeLine, a hack you normally do would be to order your dataset a certain way and then run ST_MakeLine. This will allow you to do ST_MakeLine(pt_geom ORDER BY track_time) or ARRAY_AGG(student ORDER BY score) This is very very cool. Depesz has some examples of ordered aggregates. Join removal — this is a feature that will remove joins from the execution plans where they are not needed. For example
* where you have a left join that doesn’t appear in a where or as a column in select. This is important for people like us that rely on views to allow less skilled users to be able to write meaningful queries without knowing too much about
* joins or creating ad-hoc query tools that allow users to pick from multiple tables. Check out Robert Haas why join removal is cool for more use cases. GRANT/REVOKE ON ALL object IN SCHEMA and ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES. This is just a much simpler user-friendly way of applying permissions. I can’t tell you how many times we get beat up by MySQL users who find the PostgreSQL security management tricky and tedious to get right. Of course you can count on Depesz to have an example of this too Waiting  for 9.0 – GRANT ALL”

-From the PostgreSQL Weekly News from the 6th of June we find out some local news, such as the Italian Conference for Free Software (Cagliari, Sardinia) and the talks, sessions and workshops related to our fav database, we also find news about the release of ChronicDB v2.2.2, plus the usual patchlist.

There you go, that’s all for this week. Enjoy. 🙂

Road to 11.3 : when pattern are not your friend, pre selection can be a trap

June 10th, 2010 by

So it’s time to take some hours to test our future version.

Today I start a fresh M7/Factory install : booting from pxe. The test case is build quickly a minimal server text mode.

Just uncheck the auto configuration, we are after all linux admin. Choose your partition keyboard, language (en recommanded for server) etc … normal.

Just before starting the install check software :  click on installation resume . You will discover that base-system-pattern would like to install a kernel-desktop, wtf why we want a server !

So there’s a new ticket about that : https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=613216

I express the fact that it would be nice to have a new pattern selected when we choose minimal install server text mode.

And you what about your opinion about pre-selection or having a base-system-server pattern … Please comment, & vote on bugzilla

A pattern guru wanted to build a patch for that.

Happy 15th PhP

June 9th, 2010 by

Did you remember the June 8th 1995 ?
There was a annonce here

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi/msg/cc7d43454d64d133

Announcing the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0.

These tools are a set of small tight cgi binaries written in C.
They perform a number of functions including:

. Logging accesses to your pages in your own private log files
. Real-time viewing of log information
. Providing a nice interface to this log information
. Displaying last access information right on your pages
. Full daily and total access counters
. Banning access to users based on their domain
. Password protecting pages based on users’ domains
. Tracking accesses ** based on users’ e-mail addresses **
. Tracking referring URL’s – HTTP_REFERER support
. Performing server-side includes without needing server support for it
. Ability to not log accesses from certain domains (ie. your own)
. Easily create and display forms
. Ability to use form information in following documents

Here is what you don’t need to use these tools:

. You do not need root access – install in your ~/public_html dir
. You do not need server-side includes enabled in your server
. You do not need access to Perl or Tcl or any other script interpreter
. You do not need access to the httpd log files

The only requirement for these tools to work is that you have
the ability to execute your own cgi programs. Ask your system
administrator if you are not sure what this means.

The tools also allow you to implement a guestbook or any other
form that needs to write information and display it to users
later in about 2 minutes.

The tools are in the public domain distributed under the GNU
Public License. Yes, that means they are free!

For a complete demonstration of these tools, point your browser
at: http://www.io.org/~rasmus


Rasmus Lerdorf
ras… @io.org
http://www.io.org/~rasmus

Now 15 years after, great way. And daily basis work with it. Thanks Rasmus, Thanks PhP dev’s, thanks openSUSE packagers … For those who need php applications, framework, lib and so just have a look at this long list of what is ready to use on your favorite distribution

http://packages.opensuse-community.org/index.jsp?searchTerm=php&distro=openSUSE_112

Hackweek 5 – LXDE

June 8th, 2010 by

Hi,

as hackweek continue I want to present my contribution for this year event. My plan is to support our the youngest supported desktop environment LXDE. So I contact our LXDE guy Andrea Florio and he ask lxde developers. Then we communicate directly and I found as the most intersting idea to replace gnome gvfs which is needed to have usable gio interface in glib ( geek-deserialization: allow easy access remote systems, zip archives in file manager like it is part of filesystem). Motivation for replacement is quite big gvfs dependency and system resource requirements. It choose it because I can learn something new, can return to programming in C from Ruby on Rails which is used for webyast and last not least I think it is usable also for another lightweight environment xfce4.

Code can be located in pcman git repository. Idea of implementation is quite simple. Don’t use daemons and special code to handle different backends. Instead use fuse and its already written fs based on fuse. As first I start with ftps and its sshfs implementation. Code for single fs is simple and short. Today I finish first working proof of concept of gvfs extension and its gfile extension. It can query and copy file on gvfs as you can see in file gfusevfs.c where is testing program. Main problem which I still see is that fs is not umounted so it takes some sources, but umount it after file operation can lead to annoying behavior like passing password on each file operation.

I welcome any comments and ideas about this project.

Hacking for Freedom

June 7th, 2010 by

Hi developers!

These are first hours of hackweek. A lot of people in Novell and in the community are starting to work on different projects. What can I give for free software in this week? Sure, my favorite project is NetworkManagement.

As you can see, NetworkManagement don’t work well. For example, it can’t see WiFi connection and don’t show wired connetcion. Yes, right now we have one bug with module “networkmanagement”.

This module must be loaded after start NetworkManagement, but this is not happening 🙁

If you check it, you will see:

anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus --system org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings
Service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings' does not exist.

Why it’s happening? Problem is in connection between plasmoid and deamon NM (via DBus).

anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement
true
anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement> qdbus --system org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings
/
/org
/org/freedesktop
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/0
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/1
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/2
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/3
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/4
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/5
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/6
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/7
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/8
anaumov@pizza:~/plasma/networkmanagement>

So, now we can see WiFi interface:

And WiFi interface can see WiFi connections:

Good, but this works not automaticly. It’s first what I want to hack on this week.

And what do you want to do on this week? 😉

Qt Developer Days 2010

June 4th, 2010 by

Today I got a email about registration for “Qt Developer Days 2010”. This conference will be in Munich (October 11-13) and in San Francisco (November 1-3). I think this is the biggest and best Qt-event. Last time there was more than 700 people. It’s very interesting for me as the KDE developer, but it’s not free like FOSDEM or openSUSE Conference 🙁

For example, 3 days in Munich cost 499€ (if you pay befor 15th september and 699€ if you pay after). Ok, I know that Qt/Nokia makes very good coffee, but anyway this event is very costly for students like me 😉

I will wait for the openSUSE Conference and meet the Qt/KDE hackers there.

Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Review of the PostgreSQL Project with openSUSE flavor

June 4th, 2010 by

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News, openSUSE-style!

As accustomed, we’ll start with news picked from the mailing lists, then we’ll move on with news from the PostgreSQL Planet. Here we go…

-We start off this week with Mark Hills’ announcement of the release of pgnotifyd, which,  if we listen to Mark, ” connects to a PostgreSQL database, listening for the named  asynchronous notification. When notification is received it executes the given command.

It is typically a cleaner and more efficent alternative to polling a PostgreSQL database for changes (using a crontab(5) or similar.)

I’ve been using it successfully to synchronise passwords and mailing lists. This is an initial release in the hope others can benefit from it.”
You can find out more here : http://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/pgnotifyd/ .

-Oleg Bartunov announced he posted pictures from PgCon 2010; you can watch here : http://www.flickr.com/photos/obartunov/sets/72157624042768831/ .

-Giuseppe Maxia announced OpenSQL camp 2010; I will try to copy the most relevant stuff from his announcement, in order not to make this article too big :
“OpenSQL Camp is a free conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The OpenSQLCamp 2010, European Edition (http://opensqlcamp.org/) will take part in parallel to the Free and Open Source Conference 2010 (http://froscon.org/) on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd August in St. Augustin, Germany, which is located close to Bonn and Cologne.[…] We would like to invite your project to participate in this event.

We’ve set up a call for participation (http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/2010/Call_for_Participation) – the deadline for submitting your proposal is July 11th.

We are seeking talks related to Open Source Databases of all kind, not just relational databases! Submission about tools and technologies related to OSS databases (e.g. connectors/APIs) are also welcome.

Some ideas and for submissions:

* A how to presentation, showing how to solve a common problem in the database field.
* An introduction/overview about a certain database project/product or related tool
* Providing “best practices” information for administrators
* A deeply technical and developer-centric session about some project’s internals or an API used to connect to a database.

We look forward to your contribution! Please don’t hesitate to contact us via IRC (#opensqlcamp on FreeNode) or our Discussion Group (http://groups.google.com/group/opensqlcamp) ”

-Bruce Momijan announced the timetable for the release of 9.0, which would be as  follows : “Assuming we want a release Postgres 9.0 by mid-August, here is how the timetable would look:

Need RC release to be stable for 1-2 weeks before final
RC must be released by August 1
Beta must be stable for 2-3 weeks before RC
Stable beta must be released by early July

So, we have 5-6 weeks to get a stable beta.  Looking at the open issues: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.0_Open_Items#Resolved_Issues

it looks like we are doing OK, but we must continue progressing.”

-The ChronicDB release team announced version 2.2.2 ; ChronicDB is a live DB schema update system, allowing DBAs to minimize the downtime of their servers. More on their website, http://chronicdb.com/

-On the Planet , we have Christophe Pettus posting his slides from the Open Bridge 2010 conference, called Introduction to PostgreSQL, here : http://thebuild.com/presentations/intro-to-postgresql-osb2010.pdf.

-The PostgreSQL Weekly News this week offers some local events info, as well as, as usual, the submitted patches list. Check out the news here : http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20100531.

There you go, this was the news this week. Enjoy your weekend.

Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel review with openSUSE Flavor

June 4th, 2010 by

Hello, everyone, and welcome!

This week sees the release of 2.6.35-rc1,  plus other kernel-related news, so let’s start.

-Along with tree updates/patches/fixes for the usually/most updated trees,  such as perf, x86, tracing or infiniband, for example, Linus Torvalds announced the release of 2.6.35-rc1 : “It’s been two weeks, and so the merge window is closed. There may be a few trees I haven’t pulled yet, but the bulk should all be there. And please, let’s try to make the merge window mean something this time – don’t send  me any new pull request unless they are for real regressions or for major bugs, ok?

This time, there are no new filesystems (surprise surprise), but there’s certainly been filesystem work both on an individual FS layer (btrfs, cept, cifs, ext4, nfs, ocfs2 and xfs) and at the VFS layer (superblock
and quota cleanups in particular).

But as usual, the bulk of the changes are in drivers. About two thirds of all the changes, to be exact. infiniband, networking and staging drivers are the bulk of it, but there’s changes all over (drm, sound, media, usb,
input layer, you name it).

And what’s good to see is that we continue to have very healthy statistics. About 8500 commits (of which 400+ are merges), with about a thousand individual developers involved (git counts 1047, but some of them are bound to be duplicates due to people mis-spelling their names etc).
It’s skewed, of course – with the median number of commits per person being just three – but I think that’s what we want to see in a healthy development environment.

Linus

-Greg Kroah-Hartman announced 2.6.32.15, and his description says much in very few words : “It reverts two patches that were previously applied that shouldn’t have been in the .32 kernel series.  If you don’t have any problems with the 2.6.34.14 kernel, there’s no need to upgrade to this release.”

-The H Online has an interesting article named “Kernel Log: Linux 2.6.35 taking shape”. In a few words, the article is about “Linux 2.6.35 will deliver better network throughput,  support the Turbo Core functionality offered by the latest AMD processors and de-fragment memory as required. On LKML, a discussion on merging several patches developed by Google for Android is  generating large volumes of email.” Have a read here : http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Linux-2-6-35-taking-shape-1012850.html if you’re interested.

-Eric Anholt came up with improvements and fixes in the drm-intel tree destined for -rc1, including h264 acceleration for Ironlake hardware, Benjamin Herrenschmidt updated the powerpc tree, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk added some features to the iBFT tree for -rc1, Jeff Garzik had some minor fixes for the libata-dev tree and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo posted a series of improvements for the perf tree targeted at 2.6.36.

-Jeffrey Merkey announced the Cworthy libraries for Linux kernel utils : “I created a cworthy library under ncurses for xterm and linux terminals (also works on DOS and Windows too) years back and have ported it to .so an .a formats.  Looks like the old NetWare inderface and runs on Linux terminals.  Wrote a sample IFCONFIG lookalike with the cworthy look alike portal manager that displays the same info as IFCONFIG.  May be of use and looks a lot better than the command line. It is not the actual cworthy but recreates the same look and feel and supports all the colors you would want with all the fancy menu and screen functions.  I donate it to make the kernel utils look better and make me feel more at home since NetWare is no more.  I use this lib in most of my projects and it was included in the old NWFS but was not cleaned up and broken out.  I pthread enabled it and also added support for most of the terminals our there (ANSI and dumb not supported but the rest are).”

-Speaking of the perf tree, Frederic Weisbecker and Ingo Molnar also posted fixes in this area, while Paul Mundt updated the sh tree for -rc2; Steven Rostedt posted a fix related to tracing, Dmitry Torokhov updated the input tree for -rc1 and Robert Richter fixed crashes and other improvements in the oprofile tree.

This concludes this week’s Weekly Kernel News. Have a lot of fun.

OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 final available for openSUSE

June 4th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 final packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo improvements and fixes. Please, check the wiki page for more details about the openSUSE OOo build.

The openSUSE OOo team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report them, so that we could fixed them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

We are already working on the 3.3 release. I would like to put the first alpha build into the OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project within next couple of weeks.

openGarrobito 0.4.5

June 4th, 2010 by

Greetings!

This time I come to announce the departure of openGarrobito FULL 0.4.5 and openGarobito LITE edition 04.3

That brings improvements:

1. Support for Broadcom wireless card brand (now supports more wireless cards because of the new module broadcom-sta)
2. The LITE version is made from scratch to weigh less and reached a 4 GB USB)
3. Update to KDE 4.4.3
4. All software has been updated to May 11, 2010
5. With driver for ATI graphics cards, osea brings fglrx, nvidia cards are still in process, I hope soon;)

There are few things that were corrected, but making major changes jejeje

http://ecentro.uca.edu.ni/~novell/