Luca Botti

see this site !

The following is an excerpt from the IRC Packaging Lesson ; in red instructions for root (please use sudo - never use a system as root):

• yum groupinstall development-tools
• yum install rpm-build rpmdevtools
• rpmdev-setuptree

The last command will setup the following directories:

rpmbuild directory tree

BUILD

This directory will contain the build of the source code you want to package. Roughly equivalent to the directory where you tar xjf source.tarball.bz2 ; cd source.tarball ; .configure ; make

BUILDROOT

The directory where the package will be built.

RPMS

The rpm produced will end in this directory. This is the binary rpm, the one you want to install in the system to use that cute application of yours.

SOURCES

Tarballs will end up here. These are the .gz or bz2 downloaded to build the application; usually contains source files, in the common autotools format.

SPECS

Spec files are the files which define how to package software, which dependencies to look for, and some more stuff. It’s the only file you need (apart from source code) to really build a package.

SRPMS

SRPMS files are RPMS which contain source and SPEC file to rebuild packages with rpm.

OK, right now I will close the entry. A new one in a few days.

At Byte-code meetup I just launched the idea for a new projet to support the Prince2 project management methodology.

Right now, I just registered at sourceforge and nothing else. But the plan is clear (and will be managed in a Prince2 manner, by the way):

• Django / Python powered
• GPL v2
• Integration with external tools ( trac comes to mind, but also taskjuggler )

Django is a little hazard - never programmed seriously in Python, and the Django world is a new one for me. Anyway, I am just willing to move away from the Java world for a while.

Now comes the best - I will try to do it using Fedora way . This means that every additional package (Python or Django) will be rpm’ed.

Django by itself it’s a no-brainer - just yum install Django (observe the capital ‘D’ here), but I was looking at Pinax and some more Django extensions, mostly hosted at google code.

Benefits of this plan:

• Enhance package building knowledge
• Easy installation
• Really join fedora community

So I will create a new category, starting today, where I will summarize my steps. Stay tuned.

Well, a six month release cycle make me wonder, so instead of keeping my home server up to date with fedora, I decided to give Centos 5.3 a try.

It went…well, apart from a known issue with my motherboard network card. CentOS 5.3 installs all right without complaining, but every few seconds the network card delays the response.

Given that I use the little beast for dhcp, DNS and iscsi, this is not what i was looking for. Luckily enough, after searching for a while, I found the issue (module r8169) and built the r8168 with dkms rpovided by rpmforge.

Now all is going well. Another addition to the setup, I bought a Western Digital MyBook Studio II for backup and safety purposes. Two disks, one terabyte each, raid 1 setting.

Exported part of it through iscsi for the mac (storage of all digital photos through iPhoto, thanks) and the rest is for me. Connection is fast (esata2), and, anyway, I am using it mostly through WiFi, so anything could be fast enough (except USB 1.1, i think).

Happy? Yes, now I am confident my backups will survive a disk failure. I did not find iscsi-target (IET implementation) in a CentOS 64 bit package, through.

…is a Samsung NC10, quite an interesting machine, lighter than my laptop (Dell D630).

I was trying to stay clear of these netbooks, but I did not resist. The little one (”atomino“) is currently running with Fedora 11 Preview + updates. Installed without a hitch (not the same with the beta…), only video performance is sub-par and actually under investigation.

I will post my findings. Stay tuned.

Last week the nice guys at Fedora released the tenth (X in roman numerals) version of Fedora.

In the previous weekend, I already had installed the preview release on my notebook, as a clean install. It all worked perfectly, marking this version of Fedora the most interesting Linux Distribution release I ever tried.

Fast, beautiful (thanks to Byte-Code colleague Samuele Storari and his Solar theme), this version, while looking similar to older 9 release, feels definitely more polished and performing.

After the release, I yum-upgraded my home server (the Atom 330 I mentioned in the past), and it worked out really fine, with no issues at all. It’s a simpler environment (no gnome, and a initlevel at 3), but everything (iscsi, samba, DNS, DHCP) continued working as before.

On a side note, my iscsi disk is one of two USB disks attached to the server, so I was wondering how to ensure the block device naming and availability. After contemplating custom udev rules, all that was necessary was a look at /dev/disk. I discovered I can access block devices (like disks) through the /dev/disk/by-id, for example.

Really interesting.

So now I have this lan only home server in place.
What I provide is a bunch of services for my internal network, allowing me to have incremental backups (BackupPC), DNS services, iSCSI disk to the Mac (see the previous post).

With all this setup, next in the list in Media Serving. The difficult part here will be the XBox360…perhaps I’ll buy a PS3….who knows

Advanced Card Systems ltd is the manufacturer of the smart card reader I bought last tuesday. They have an RPM for Fedora 7 (bit old, isn’t it?) which, when queried, says:


rpm -q -i -p ACR38UDriver-1.8.0-1.i386.rpm
Name : ACR38UDriver Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version : 1.8.0 Vendor: (none)
Release : 1 Build Date: Sat 15 Sep 2007 06:25:45 AM CEST
Install Date: (not installed) Build Host: localhost.localdomain
Group : Smartcards/Driver Source RPM: ACR38UDriver-1.8.0-1.src.rpm
Size : 105333 License: GPL
Signature : (none)
URL : http://www.acs.com.hk
Summary : Driver for ACR38 PCSC in Fedora Core 7
Description :
ACR38 PSSC Driver for Fedora Core 7. Compatible with MUSCLE API version 3.0.

So my understanding is that the driver is still GPL licensed. When asked about providing the source code, I received the following answer:

Hello Luca Botti,

Thanks for your email.
We do not release the source code for Linux version 1.8.0.
Please use those of version 1.7.9 for development.
Tks & B. Rgds,
xxxx
Account Manager

Mmh, smells like a licensing violation. I sent an email to FSF which properly directed me to GNU. I sent a recap to GNU organization, along with a polite mail to ACS. Hope to sort it out easily and friendly.
We’ll see…

On a side note, i re-checked and the smart-card reader in my Dell is rightly working with Fedora. Anyway, I am still interested in packaging the thing for F9.

I have found that a partially, x86 only package exist for the ACR38 smart card reader. Also, looking on DAG repository, there is some packaging for RH5. So here start my first shot at packaging for Fedora….stay tuned.

Regione Lombardia and Corriere della Sera are distributing a smart card reader at a low price (around 7,5 euro).

Although I already have an integrated smart card reader in my Latitude D630 (which does not work with Linux, at last try) I bought one to check for alternative OS compatibility. Well, to my surprise, the thing is an ACR38 smart card reader, which, manufactured by ACS offer here drivers also for Linux.
So first step is good, hardware. I’ll check later with software and services.