Activity, and Blackberry tethering article

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Well, today was the first day of the NFL playoffs and also the semi-final round of the hockey world juniors, but I still managed to get quite a bit of stuff done!

I just finished up writing an article on tethering a Blackberry on Linux (using it as a modem, to get an Internet connection). This is the first article in my general plan to write useful and informative content on here to grow traffic and hence make me rich, so if anyone has any comments on it, that'd be great, and if you want to help out by submitting it your favourite news sites, that'd be even better!

This morning I finished up another new package requested on the forums: Aegisub. Package name is aegisub, and it's available in Cooker and 2009 /contrib/backports. It's a program for creating subtitles, mainly aimed at the anime fansubbing community, so I was quite curious about it myself, just to see how such tools worked. It required a few modifications to build correctly: I reported the problems to their IRC channel, but their bug tracking system doesn't appear to be able to send confirmation mails, so I wasn't able to report bugs. I had to add a patch to make it actually possible to disable the ffmpegsource backend (the option doesn't actually disable it, in the upstream code), another to stop it trying to find out what SVN revision it is when building (instead, the package build just feeds in the correct revision), and another to fix underlinking.

After that I did the forums for today, then did some more packages resulting from issues arising there. I backported version 2.4.3 of the intel video driver to 2009, to see if it would help a user who's having trouble with 3D applications. So that's now available in /main/backports for anyone else who wants it. Then I fixed a bug in gadmin-proftpd, a graphical configuration tool for the ProFTPd FTP server, reported by Per Nelvig: it didn't run correctly from the menus because the executable was in the wrong place. I updated it to 0.3.5 for Cooker and /contrib/backports, and fixed a few other issues in the package, and fixed just that issue in 0.3.0 for /contrib/updates. Then I noticed all the other tools we have packaged in the Gadmintools suite (there's a bunch of them) had the same problems, so I fixed all of those too: gadmin-bind, gadmin-dhcpd, gadmin-httpd and gadmin-samba. Finally I saw that there's a few extra apps now available in the suite that we did not have packaged, so I added packages for all of those, to Cooker and 2009 /contrib/backports: gadmin-squid, gadmin-rsync, gadmin-openvpn-client and gadmin-openvpn-server.

I also fixed up a little problem on the site: when you weren't logged in, and viewing a page for which comments would usually be allowed, the sidebar got displayed down at the bottom. Turned out to be a missing div closing tag in the theme's comments.php file. Strange.

In the end, didn't get around to doing any Python 2.6 rebuilds today. Funda Wang looks to be doing a great job on that in any case.

Comments

Brian wrote on 2009-01-05 02:57:
Barry does show great potential, but has a show-stopping bug for me. See my report on SF: Bug # 2480631...
adamw wrote on 2009-01-05 05:36:
I can do you a quick build of current CVS, if you like, to see if that would help. Otherwise, Chris should get back to you on the bug report soon. If not, let me know and I'll poke him by email.
Brian wrote on 2009-01-05 14:07:
I don't need it right away, but thanks for the offer! I was stuck in O'Hare Airport over New Years and had time (and need) to mess with things. I eventually ended up using Windows much to my dismay. I guess there was a benefit to leaving Vista on the laptop after all. I was pleasantly surprised at the speed over TMO on the BB under both OS's. It was a good 256kB up and down. I'll do more testing when the next official Mandriva package hits the mirrors... unless you need me to test a build for you. If so, feel free to email me at the address in my profile here.