Este blog é alimentado pela comunidade aqui na rede SoftwareLivre.org e pelo feed do Planet Mageia English.
Eugeni's blog : Friday news for the masses
11 de Novembro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaYeah, I know that it is Friday, and it is also 11/11/11 (though I still don’t know if the end of the world was expected on 11/11/11 at 11:11am or 11/11/11 at 11:11pm), but still, the development goes on and on.
But as I said, heck, it is Friday, and we all have a nice binary date on the calendar, so I’ll give you two additional reasons for celebration today:
On Mesa, Eric Anholt and Ian Romanick exposed GLSL 1.30 compatibility for Intel gen6+ cards. Yes, with the latest commit which added gl_VertexID support, everything required by GLSL spec should be supported now. Yet another milestone towards GL 3.0 was passed.
And on xf86-video-intel, patches which add the support for Glamor were sent by Zhigang. Yes, I am talking a lot about Glamor in the past days, as it certainly looks like a very interesting project. Now, with patches which split the device-independent library from the device-dependent part, its support towards upstreaming is getting closer and closer.
Besides those items, as usual, we have had lots of development and news for all the projects. And next week, we’ll have LinuxCon in Brazil, where I’ll give a presentation about Intel Linux Graphics, what it is, how it works, and what are all those scary words like kernel, drm, ddx, vaapi and wayland. And, of course, we’ll have lots of amazing presentations on many Linux-related projects.
So if you’ll be there, I’ll be glad to answer your questions and talk about pretty much everything.
See you!
Mageia Blog (English) : Mageia at the 2011 OpenRheinRuhr (Germany)
9 de Novembro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários ainda
“Deep in the west where the sun is dusty…” is the beginning of a German song about a city in the western coal and steel district of the “Ruhrgebiet”. Times change, blast furnaces and winding towers were abandoned. Today one of those industrial buildings in Oberhausen (Germany) serves as a museum of the industrial history of this district.
This industrial museum is the place where the 2011 OpenRheinRuhr will open doors from November 12 to November 13, an exhibition and conference for Open Source projects, communities and ideas. Invited are experts, beginners, interested visitors and users with all their questions. Being a comparatively young event it has already found its friends, like the German Mageia community.
At their stand prominent members of the German Mageia community will present Mageia 1 and Cauldron, they will answer questions and – if you bring a USB key or an empty DVD – you can get Mageia to take home and enjoy. 
We are looking forward to see you there!
PS: Pictures of last year’s event
Mageia Blog (English) : Translation bug hunting days
9 de Novembro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaIt’s now five months since Mageia 1 was released so it is time to clean up our translations.
The time the i18n teams had before the release was quite short and especially the smaller teams were in quite a hurry. So you might have seen, that not everything is translated to your language or you might have stumbled upon buggy or awkward translations.
So now we call upon you: Search the Mageia tools (the draktools you find in the control center) and the installer for errors in the translations and tell us.
Just go to our Bugzilla and file a report about them.
Please do assign those translation bugs directly to the i18n team (mageia-i18n@mageia.org) and – even better – join the i18n team of your language to help us, straighten those bugs out.
The i18n people will then do their best to fix them so we can have updates for our translations before Christmas.
Please do report translation bugs to us in the next two weeks (until November 20th).
Eugeni's blog : And now, on your favorite Intel Linux Graphics news station…
8 de Novembro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaAfter some period of silence, this blog returns in bringing you the latest and greatest news from the Intel Linux Graphics world.
So if you were sad, depressed and crying in despair without having a chance of reading about what was going on with the Intel Graphics for the past days, rejoice! 
Those past few days were quite busy on all the projects, and with thousands of emails to keep track of it is hard to select the most relevant news – all of them are! But I’ll try to summarize the most interesting stuff that happened for the past few days.
Starting with kernel, as you all already know, we are living in the post-3.1 era now, with the release of Linux 3.2-rc1. It brings lots and lots of fixes and improvements all around, and much more are yet to come.
On Intel Graphics side, the following items caught my attention for the past days:
- Keith Packard sent yet more eDP-related patches, allowing eDP displays connected to the PCH to, well, work . The main issue came from the fact that the driver incorrectly was treating a PCH-connected eDP panel like a CPU-connected one, setting the wrong bits in the wrong places.
- Daniel Vetter has sent out a series of patches for simulating GPU hangs. As you all know, GPU hangs are an (unfortunate) part of a GPU driver life, and there are many factors which could cause them, ranging from incorrect GL instructions to out-of-bounds variables somewhere in the stream of commands and down to hardware failures. Prior to Daniel’s patches, the only way to see a GPU hang was by having a hung GPU, so most of them were not easy to reproduce and investigate. Now, it is possible to stop the GPU at will, and see the effects. This is particularly interesting at least for me, because I was working on some tools for doing heuristics analysis of the root-causes of GPU hangs. Now, I can do this task with much more ease.
- Jesse Barnes sent out a new round of planes support, and support for SNB and IVB video sprites. The video sprites support different video formats natively and can do scaling as well, and their support was added to the DRM overlay code with this patchset.
- Ken and Daniel did a bit of cleanup of code specific to some pre-production SNB systems. Now that Sandy Bridge is out there, those bits are not necessary anymore, so they were wiped out.
- Daniel has sent a 13-patch series of pwrite/pread reworking. This patchset fixes some spurious -EFAULTS issues which could lead to kernel issues, improves the performance of pread/pwrite calls on LLC machines and cleanups unused code, replacing them with faster execution paths.
- Also on kernel, I’ve found an issue which can cause division-by-zero in kernel when accessing power-related registers from userspace, and sent a small patch fixing it. Apparently, the very same issue was already found back in July by Konstantin Belousov. It is a small fix for a potential kernel crashing issue, and let’s hope it will be picked up in one of the next kernel pull requests.
- And Jesse Barnes sent out some documentation and cleanup patches for the drm subsystem.
- Still on kernel, but outside of our team’s area, one big news for Linux Graphics will certainly make some people out there happy. Yes, I am speaking about Alan Cox moving of basic GMA500 driver out of staging. This driver support accelerated console and non-accelerated KMS on Poulsbo, Oaktrail, Cedarview and Medfield hardware. Note that medfield support in this initial patchset is left out on purpose, as it needs considerable rework to be ready to enter main kernel.
One particular issue worth highlighting is that a long-standing issue on GL-based applications (among which Unigine Tropics and Sanctuary are probably the most notable examples, among many others) was finally fixed, thanks to an amazing work by Eric Anholt, Kenneth Graunke and Keith Packard. This issue can be described as ‘small moving ants on top of image edges’ or ‘flickering pixels‘. So if you have had this issue, make sure to check out the patches!
Going to Mesa, out of hundreds of emails and commits, it is hard to choose the most interesting ones. Work on GL 3.0 support proceeds quickly, and new mesa stability release, 7.11.1 is almost out of the door. Our Q&A team did a full testing of this bugfixing release, and haven’t found much issues. So prepare yourself, as in few weeks we’ll have MESA 7.11.1 out there. Stay tuned for Ian’s announcement in nearby future.
But as for mesa master branch, the following patches called my attention the most:
- Eric sent a patch series to add support for GL_EXT_texture_integer on i965 driver.
- More work towards EXT_transform_feedback was done by Dan McCabe and Paul Berry, and Marek from the community side.
- And we had lots of fixes for potential segmentation faults, safety checks, better hardware specification compatibility, piglit-based fixes and other issues from Yuanhan, Eric, Ken, Chad and Ian.
On Wayland side of the force, lots of patches went in those days. Among those, there was an interesting proposal for the screen locking protocol by Pekka Paalanen, and some bugfixing patches from Juan Zhao.
Going to the other components, we had a release of xorg-xserver 1.11.2 RC2, with several crashes and correctness fixes; and new stable pixman 0.24.0 which brings many performance improvements and usage of architecture-specific instructions to improve overall performance over a number of different operations (such as bilinear scaling for example).
And finally, for the intel-gpu-tools, I was working on a new intel_gpu_analyze application, which I was using to tracing and analyzing CPU and GPU performance data during workloads, and also checking on the corresponding power consumption. This is a very experimental code yet, and it lives at my freedesktop.org git for now. But still, I can already do some nice performance analysis like this one.
Liberdade na Fronteira : 15 Years of KDE: KDE and I
2 de Novembro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários ainda
I’m a little late, but always is time to celebrate. 
My history with KDE blends with my story with Linux. The first time that I saw a computer with a Linux distribution was not long ago. In 2005, I had just enroll in computer science in UFPI, and in the laboratory had machines with a Debian-based operating system created by students of the course: the Kuia Linux. The ‘K’ said it all – was a system with KDE.
I was impressed at how that system was beautiful, modern, attractive … and how it was unlike anything he had ever seen.
Time passed and I became familiar with Linux, I learned, rightly and wrongly, as a good beginning in any area. The following year, 2006, bought the first computer for our home. We purchased the machine without operating system. At home, I installed Kurumin, one of more loved Brazilian Linux Distributions, and that was a real milestone for a generation of Linux users. I have a real affection for Kurumin.
I was using Kurumin when I realized, of course, that Linux was something drew attention me, but largely responsible for this feeling in me was KDE.
Time passed, for one reason or another I changed the Linux distribution, but KDE still there, going strong. Sometimes I flirted with other desktop environments, but soon I returned to KDE. It was stronger than me. 
2009 was the decisive year for me to begin to participate actively in the KDE community. We take Sandro Andrade to give a lecture in Teresina about Google Summer of Code and KDE. It was a year in the Brazilian community was regrouping, many groups had emerged in the country and the number of developers was growing.
It was then that, timidly, I began to study libraries and code from some KDE software. Still very lost, groping here and there that huge mass of information on kdelibs, modules, related technologies, Qt, and more.
Over time I approached the educational software, the KDEedu, with special interest in mathematical software. It was a wonder, because in my academic life in computer science I always worked more with the part of combinatorial optimization and less with software engineering.
Today, after a few years since, I have some contributions [1] [2] to KDE code. I’m on track to become, increasingly, a good developer to the community – and I know I still have to work hard for it. I travel on Brazil doing lectures and presentations on KDE. I relate to people around the world who use their knowledge and energy to build an excellent computing environment, which follows the principles of free software and, therefore, can become real the slogan of California hacker movement: computer to the people!
So, I just got even that thank this vibrant community for all that you do. To Matthias Ettrich, by e-mail 15 years ago inviting developers to join the Kool Desktop Enviroment; to all the developers who responded to this call, any time these last 15 years; to the sysadmins, which maintains the structure for nearly 3,000 KDE developers work and communicate; to the designers, that make KDE a nice and pleasant environments; to the translators, who maintains KDE available for more than 65 languages; to the “expansionists”, which are leading to KDE to BSD, Haiku, Windows, Mac, netbooks, mobile, tablets; to non-technical personnel, they do phenomenal work; and also to the various linux distributions packagers, which prepare the KDE with which millions of users will interact and, maybe, not even realize that they’re playing there is KDE, not the “Linux”.
Happy 15 years, KDE! I am very happy to be part of the family!
