Here’s Your News, Everything Synergy and Unity Linux related.
It’s been a crazy week in Synergy Linux Land, but we are very close (hopefully few days) away from a Beta 1 Release. Here’s how we got there and of course it’s very much related to Unity.
Updated some core packages
This week I decided to update some core packages. This actually started last week with the Nouveau driver support. I had originally thought it was a ldetect issue but it wasn’t it was actually an issue (as Steve pointed out) with drakxtools disabling dri for Nvidia cards. We had an older version of drakxtools we were running that was pre nouveau. So I thought a simple update would fix the issue. With drakxtools for some reason it doesn’t like to be built on our build server so I have to build packages the old way, not using a 64Bit host and a 32Bit chroot. In this case A 32Bit package must be built on a 32Bit host. This is annoying. So after the drakxtools upgrade some function calls in drakxtools and draklive-install where broke, I got around some of those by doing system calls and thought it was a Perl version issue. However Paul pointed out too me that Mandriva has there own Perl calls in perl-MDK-common and looking at that package I realize that ours was over a year old. So when I updated it, it seemed to solve a lot of the issues, but one. After using draklive-install the system installed on the HD will not boot. It locks up at creating the dev system. Tearing apart the initrd and comparing it too a working initrd I found that ‘ln’ and a few needed binaries were missing. Being initrd is created by mkinitrd, I turned my attention too it. After nurmerous attempts upgrading etc.. I found that the reason I was having issues was because my version of mkinitrd was compiled in a chroot and like drakxtools it needed to be compile on a host system of the same architecture as the package that’s building.
So to make a long story a little bit shorter. Synergy Linux has an updated drakxtools and better Nvidia support through the Nouveau driver. Along with I am a lot more familiar with Perl and drakxtools than I ever wanted to be.
Further development with drakxtools
Speaking of drakxtools, I noticed that the remove unused hardware packages feature in draklive-install was broke. This actually calls the pkgs.pm module in drakxtools. I have been able to do some changes to drakxtools and I created a program (Perl script) to call removal of unused hardware packages using the drakxtools module from outside draklive-install. I need to clean this up some however before I can do anything with it. It’s all in Perl and I am not a Perl developer.
TODO: mklivecd work
With my new found interest in Perl (not really but it seems it’s a must) I have been looking at mklivecd. there’s a few options that I think need to be added.
1. Screen detection for the framebuffer setting and a fall back if you have some strange setting (like dual screens). I’m not entirely sure if this is still a good idea but it’s worth a try.
2. The ability to set the name in the isolinux menu with a –distroname / –branch name or something similar
If someone beats me too this I will be more than happy to stop thinking about it and take it off the list 
KDE 4 in Unity and KDE 4 in Synergy
KDE 4.5.0 has been synced over to the Unity KDE 4 mirrors for quite some time and I have had no real complaints with upgrades etc.. so I’ve started work on the KDE 4.5.1 release and KDE PIM 4.4.6 (when it’s released). I have also updated Qt 4.7 to RC 1 from our Beta 1.
Next Unity Linux Release
Is it too early to be talking about this? Most likely the developers will be a buzz about this soon. There’s also a pretty good chance I will be more involved in this next Unity Linux release more than ever. One area of involvement that I have some what already started on and mentally am getting ready for is a CLI release of Unity. No Xorg, no GUI just you and the command line interface. If you want to start out and build something from the ground up, this will be the closest you can come without building an ISO straight from rpms. Right now the main issue with this is we have no command line installer. This actually shouldn’t be too hard. The hardest part I see is disk management, ie. partitioning etc.. However if you’re a CLI junky than that shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. After using parted or fdisk, then you can just run the installer script point it to where it needs to install and be off.
Unity interesting package news
Right now in testing we have the drakxtools that I talked about before with the better Nouveau support.
We also have a new Smart version 1.4 that has gotten moved to main (it’s still a prerelease though) someone must have thought it was stable enough to move though. The real big deal about this new smart release is the Qt4 gui that it comes with. In the prelease though it’s quite unstable.
Vaughn has released a new Kernel 2.6.35.4 I do believe though the dkms modules need to be updated to build on it.
Matt has been working on Network Manager to replace our kinda clunky Net_Applet (basically network connection application) from Mandriva. Most likely we should see a working version of that in testing soon.
So in closing that’s the week. I’m sure there’s a whole lot more Unity Linux news from the other developers but I’ll let you guys talk about it in IRC on the ML or the Forums. Hope you all have a great weekend. 