Des passionnés des logiciels libres de la région de Québec (Journée porte ouverte Linux)

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Sat, 24 Nov 2007 22:37:55 GMT | no comments

Le samedi 1er décembre prochain, le groupe Linuq organise une journée "Porte ouverte à Linux". Au cours de cette journée, ses membres feront des démonstrations des logiciels libres répondant à presque tous les besoins domestiques et démontreront qu'ils ne demandent pas plus d'expertise que les logiciels propriétaires classiques. Mieux, ils vous montreront que tous ces logiciels peuvent s'installer en quelques instants et gratuitement avec une distribution Linux. Il en existe de nombreuses, mais les plus facilement utilisables sont les distributions Mandriva, OpenSUSE et Ubuntu. Encore mieux, ils se proposent à vous aider à installer une de ces distributions dans votre ordinateur (inscription requise sur www.linuq.org).

Les logiciels libres ont pris un essor extraordinaire depuis 15 ans dans tous les domaines, que ce soit Internet qui n'existerait tout simplement pas sans les logiciels libres (le contrôle du trafic est assuré par des logiciels libres, les centaines de milliers d'ordinateurs de Google fonctionnent avec du logiciel libre, les deux tiers des sites web utilisent essentiellement du logiciel libre, ...), plus près de nous, le plus puissant ordinateur du gouvernement du Québec fonctionne sous Linux.

Les logiciels libres offrent de nombreux avantages: évidemment ils sont gratuits (sans piratage!), mais aussi ils sont très sécuritaires (à l'abri des virus), légers (pas besoin d'un ordinateur dernier cri), compatibles avec les formats de fichier habituels (texte, image ou son), faciles à utiliser, durables (ils ne vous forcent pas à changer quand vous n'en n'avez pas besoin), à la pointe de la technologie. Ils sont à nous tous, que nous ayons ou pas participé à leur écriture.

Pourquoi organisent-ils cette journée? Ils le font pour diverses raisons, certains par fraternité, d'autres parce qu'ils aiment bricoler leurs logiciels et partager leur passion, mais tous parce qu'ils trouvent normal de « redonner un peu à la communauté ». La plupart d'entre eux n'utilisent que des logiciels libres, du moins quand ils ont le choix.

La journée se déroule de 9 heures à 17 heures au locaux 2325 et 2327 du Pavillon Palasis-Prince de l'Université Laval. Il est à noter que le stationnement est gratuit la fin de semaine. Pour faire installer sur son ordinateur, une inscription est requise en remplissant le formulaire sur le site web www.linuq.org.

Posted in ,

reading ext2 and ext3 filesystem under microsoft windows xp

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:18:51 GMT | 1 comment

I just made a small discovery last night. I already knew about ext2fs but it was not really stable, rather incompatible and as far as I remember, read-only. So, rather useless.

Now there is something I would call "new". ext2IFS. IFS for Installable FileSystem. it is simply wonderful. and for anyone using windows who needs access to their ext2/3 partitions, try this one out.

As you already know. your data is the most important part of computing. and with all open source software, I recommend reading all the documentation. in this case, it is all shown during the install process. please read it or don't cry when something happen.

Posted in ,

That is a lot of reading ...

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:15:32 GMT | no comments

To follow my last post. Here is the list of interesting articles I fall upon today. As I already said. Today has been a very rewarding day for finding interesting articles. So, here it comes. I will not place them in order of preference but instead I will try to place them in order of accessibility (less geek to the geekiest)

The police to start analyzing our urine through the sewers. That's the cherry on the sundae. If they bring their sample extraction device all the way to our houses. Not only they will be able to know who use what drugs but also what other consumer products we use. Then use the data for marketing purposes. That's the beginning of real privacy violation. And people worry about computers?

Get Rich Slowly. No comments, excellent reading. And this article really makes me believe again that justbudget is totally appropriate and does help in financial Independence.

Plasma VS LCD HTTV comparison

Computing article ... lots of good points. last page is Linux Kernel stuff only, kinda technical. But the first two pages are interesting to anyone curious about computer history. It brings a fresh point of view on the truth. Linux lovers be careful. I knew XOrg had great optimization needs but this article simply make me wish I had something better than Linux to run my favorite desktop environment.

Call me ignorant but I don't even understand how a project like a free browser might need a CEO. This article explains it all. How is Mozilla Firefox making $US55million a year? (and much more...)

More Linux related articles from apcmag. I think today was the first time I was visiting their site and one of the reason I am blogging about it today is to make sure I will visit them again.

And finally the article that brought me to their site. The Linus Torvalds Interview on Linux 3.0.

Posted in , , ,

How to not being forced to XOrg 7.1 on Gentoo

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:28:42 GMT | no comments

If you are like me, you like system that works and you care much more about the latest version of KDE than the latest version of XOrg. especially when updating KDE is pain-less and bug-free while XOrg means talking with God, backup-ing your Mother and what not.

So I wanted to be able to run 

emerge -avUNt world

like everyone else, while staying on XOrg 6.9 Like you might know, the recent portage are not forcing us to do the update. you cannot run 'emerge world' without upgrading. and upgrading is far from being easy. While preventing portage from forcing is not as easy as it sound. It is not that hard. thanks to /etc/portage system.

here is how to do it.

  • first add the following lines in /etc/portage/package.mask

### I dont want to update X
>=x11-base/xorg-x11-7.0
>=app-doc/doxygen-1.4.5
>=media-gfx/imagemagick-6.2.5.6
>=x11-libs/qt-4.1.4-r1
>=media-gfx/graphviz-1.16-r2
>=app-office/openoffice-bin-2.0.3
>=media-libs/libsdl-1.2.8-r2
x11-libs/libXScrnSaver
### END
  • then add the following line in /etc/portage/package.unmask
<x11-base/xorg-x11-7.0

after that you might get 1 or 2 more problem. I remember I also had to modify an ebuild and remove a useless dependency on a package. if it does not work for you. please comment below. I'm gonna help you to go through it and I'll update this post for a more accurate information.

have a nice day.

Posted in , , ,

Le logiciel libre au gouvernement du quebec

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:10:00 GMT | no comments

Apparemment il y aurait des efforts de la part du Gouvernement du Quebec en regards avec l'OpenSource. C'est dure de dire a qu'elle point ils sont serieux et jusqu'ou il se renderont. Mais deja, cest un debut. Et tres apprecier, du moins en ce qui me concerne. Idealement, nous verrons de plus en plus de projet de ce genre et plus d'aide sera apporter au monde du logiciel libre. Lequel a son tour aidera le monde entier, encore plus que deja.

reference

Posted in , ,

KDE has turned 10, lets celebrate

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Sat, 14 Oct 2006 05:25:00 GMT | no comments

KDE, the world famous open source desktop environment is now 10 years old. WOW.

Matthias Ettrich's 14th October 1996 announcement original post

It's the great moment for KDE right now, KDE 3.5.5 just got released. The most powerful and stable release ever. and KDE 4 is just around the corner. KDE4 Beta Packages already available for Mac OS X and for Linux

I think its a great time to watch screenshots and try it out (Kubuntu, Sabayon) and get involved

KDE Happy 10 years and we wish you another good 10 years.

omedeto & gambatte

Posted in , , ,

Updating E17 on Gentoo

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Sat, 12 Aug 2006 07:35:00 GMT | no comments

Maybe some of you have tried the excellent Enlightenment 17. Although still under heavy development, its definitly worth the look. Luckily for us gentoo user, there is ebuilds already done which makes the compiling task easy. Still, when is time to upgrade, it's a not all automatic. The problem is; all packages keeps de same version (9999 for development). So, if you re-emerge e, it will not re-emerge all the dependencies, because they are already installed and the version number has NOT changed. So You have to check all the dependencies and make sure to re-emerge them all, in order. its a bit of a pain in the butt when you just want to see the latest development the team has made. So I wrote a script to make it even easier. I wrote it few months ago while I was doing it by hand. and Few days ago, I thought I might upgrade E17 again and check it out. so I tried out my script which worked with not too many bug fixes ;) hehe.

click more for the script and to send comments

Read more...

Posted in , , ,

kikkanji

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Wed, 17 May 2006 04:53:00 GMT | no comments

Here is my latest toy. I made myself a Kanji studying tool. It took me only few hours to build using QtRuby. I find it pretty amazing what I built in this short amount of time even though I don't have much experience with this technology. It is a really impressive technology.

I build up a small kexi (sqlite3) database, which I open with ActiveRecord. I could have used Qt's SQL module, but I'm so used to AR that I did not bother.

I named it kikkanji because I first intended to create a kicker panel applet. but, panel applets are not yet possible with QtRuby. so I had to wait. I instead used Qt Designer and created myself a main window.

kikkanji

download now

comments and feature request are definitely welcome.

Posted in , , , , , , , , ,

My new KDE desktop

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Thu, 04 May 2006 16:39:00 GMT | no comments

I changed my KDE desktop feels, I like it so much better :) And feel much more productive since then. it's been about a month now. and I totally love it.

I got rid of everything, make it simpler looking and giving me more screen space.

Read more...

Posted in , , , ,

ALSA we love you

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Sat, 15 Apr 2006 06:59:00 GMT | no comments

Anyone had fun with ALSA before ? Some would say its much better than OSS and much more powerful. Some would simply say the it supports more cards (well of course, development on OSS is kinda stopped for a while already) anyway.

Who need this kinda of configuration ? why there is so many options to this config file ? its like your computer could really have 5 different sound card and reroute them in some weird way. well, buy a mixer. got true use for all the power ALSA offer ? please comment below.

I'm just to a point where, even though you are a geek programmer, if all you want to do is software or web development. You don't really want to understand the fully underlying sound system of your operating system to chat with your girlfriend. There is advantage Linux has I can't live without but there is huge whack of extra time that you have to spend in order to get things working. And some of you who does not have problem, well either you have not used it long enough or you are just as picky as I can be.

anyway, I did not want to troll about anything today. I'm just very tired of rebooting on windows when I have to do my phone calls. And the good news is: I found this little hack that I need to get both my soundcard device and my USB microphone as default device.

somekool@krypton ~ $ cat /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
        type asym
        playback.pcm {
                type plug
                slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
        }
        capture.pcm {
                type plug
                slave.pcm "hw:1,0"
        }
}
somekool@krypton ~ $

that's it. so now I can just use arecord to record my voice without needing any options to specify the proper device.

somekool@krypton ~ $ arecord file.wav

well am I happy ? not really. skype needs OSS or OSS emulation to work. it does not use ALSA directly. but OSS is too old. and I can't really switch my system to it. so I'm not sure if I can get an OSS-emulated device for my USB microphone or If I really need to get arts to see my microphone. arts seems the easiest way to get everything working. but for some reason, it still does not see my microphone.

Hey you out there who knows all about it but are just a little to shy to help. show yourself off it will be highly appreciated.

Posted in , , , ,