Our user manuals encourage all newcomers to the Free Software community to file bugs when they find incorrections and bugs in a package. Of course, there's always some people who take it too far (!).

Get prepared, DeFuBu challengers!

Following up to madduck's and gwolf's recent horror stories on XFS, last Thursday, my desktop greeted me after the fantastic week around Asturies with a series of I/O errors whenever I tried to execute something. I rebooted, and then the kernel wasn't happy.

I/O error in filesystem ("hda1") meta-data dev hda1 block 0x4a9778  ("xlog_iodone") error 5 buf count 1024

/dev/hda1 is my / partition, and the machine would not boot at all. To make things more interesting, the box refused to boot from any of my old CD and DVD drives.

Yesterday, with my mail piling up already at Sindominio's mailserver, I managed to find a spare CD writer, which would not open its tray, and a DVD reader which managed to boot a Breezy Live CD I had around.

The good guys at #xfs were helpful as always and helped me in the process of not fucking up my valuable root filesystem while trying to fix it. The filesystem ended up having quite some corruption here and there, but after xfs_repair, nubol was able to boot again. Only it was missing libldap.so.2, libX11.so.6, debconf programs and other minor details like those. Some reinstall rounds later, GNOME was able to startup without errors and now the box is up and running.

Does anyone know of some script that compares dpkg's contents database with that the filesystem has, so I can easily find the rest of damaged packages to reinstall them?

So to make a long story short, last night at GUADEC featured a great Fluendo party at one of Vilanova's great beaches. At some point, people had drunk enough to finally consider getting a good swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. David Reveman, from the Novell crowd, was one of them.

I learned from Anna that in the US it is illegal to show your nipples (ie, go top-less) or any “reproductive organs” in public. WTF!? The GNOME Hispano crowd did have no problems at all, and went in completely naked, reminding me of the great nights at Helsinki during Debconf 5.

I thought it was a good opportunity to POP THE TRUNK, if only a little bit, so I swam to the buoy and came back, in complete darkness, and acs watching out for me from the distance. When we were back, most people were getting dressed already, and I managed to lose my micro suimming suit, which is a PITA as I need it to train.

The phone had more sand than silicon, I guess.

Anyway, I wasn't the only one leaving stuff behind. David, if you mind your valuable wallet and mobile phone, find me around the conference. :)

Other GUADEC stories will need to wait for another entry...

Everyone knows IRC is a very useful resource. Today, #gnome-hackers had the basic tips to survive GUADEC moment.

16:23 <@davyd> you can then teach us how to order drinks
16:23 <@davyd> because I can't speak spanish
16:23 < miguel> They dont speak spanish in that down Davyd
16:23 < miguel> They speak Catalan
16:24 < miguel> Which is sort of Spanish - arabic words + a little bit of
                french thrown in
16:24 < jdub> estic cercant els meus pantalons!
16:24 < Ankh> I always thought catalan was a network file access thing
16:24 < hadess> davyd: they seem to prefer somebody speaking english than
                somebody speaking castillan ;)
16:24 < miguel> I know how to order coffee
16:24 < miguel> cafe am llet

And after a long and boring week and a half of ordered Development Platform uploads, today the first few Desktop packages have started to hit unstable. I expect that the entire 2.14 release will be ready for your apt-get'ing in just a few days more.

Of course, that doesn't include Ekiga, as their dependencies seem to be in a debian-legal trap...

The most exciting bit of this round of uploads is the participation of at least 3 new Debian GNOME maintainers, including... new people looking after the evolution packages!

Last night, glib 2.8 and pango 1.12 entered testing, as a first step on the GNOME 2.14 quest. The bad news is that the fixed evolution & friends were not ready to go in as well, so now many etch users will be wondering why their evolution doesn't start up, or doesn't show any mail.

Until we manage to get a fixed evolution in testing, and it looks like it won't be trivial to get this done in the immediate future, Erich's recipe comes handy again:

My personal hero of the day is Gustavo Franco, for this email to debian-devel. He writes how to get your Gnome/Pango/Glib applications that don't work since yesterday's upgrade like evolution (#358071) working again:

$ G_SLICE=always-malloc evolution

And you should be able to read your email again.

Just FYI, and in case you missed it. :)

Jim Gettys wrote about a problem regarding localisation that the OLPC project will face in the future.

The One Laptop Per Child project aims to provide the famous $100 laptop to children in the developing world. They are Free Software based, and as most GNU/Linux distributions, the bundled software will be available in a number of languages. For now, it'll only be ten or so, but as OLPC grows, the number will skyrocket... just think about the number of languages spoken only in Africa.

The $100 laptops don't have a hard drive. Instead, they have a 1 gigabyte of compact flash memory, which is enough to run the software, but it can't store that much extra data.

The most common way of internationalising and localising Free Software is to use GNU gettext, which provides an easy to handle text file format for translations, with a series of sentences and labels that the translators need to fill in in their language.

The applications ship these translations in .mo files, which are the same .PO files, in compiled binary format the gettext enabled programs can read. Each application installs one .mo file per language it is translated into. When the apps are big enough, these files can amount to several megabytes per application, which is a problem for embedded systems or projects like OLPC.

Ubuntu has been trying a different approach to the distribution of translations. Instead of packaging all the translation files with the applications .deb packages, they are stripped off from the packages, and provided by language packs.

Language packs offer the translations for all the applications and libraries of the main component of Ubuntu. This includes GNOME, KDE and many other popular applications. When you install Ubuntu, you select the main language of the interface, and the installer program will download the appropriate language pack, plus a selection of useful localisation-related packages like dictionaries, translated manuals, etc.

These language packs are generated periodically by Rosetta, a web-based translation portal which is sponsored by Canonical, Ubuntu's and Launchpad.net's parent company. Rosetta offers a very easy to use translation infrastructure, and Ubuntu users can start translating the applications they are running with just two clicks on the application's interface.

With Rosetta lowering the barrier for people wanting to translate Free Software, Ubuntu can have, and is now having, lots of people improving the translations of not only the next version of the software, which is what translation groups have traditionally worked on, but also the version you are running at that same moment. There is no need to wait for the next version of Ubuntu to see your translations complete. Help your team translate whatever is missing, and wait for the next language pack update. Voilà!

If the OLPC project adopted the language pack scheme and Rosetta, they could install a raw OLPC laptop without translations, and only install the language packs that are needed in the target country or area. The langpacks are currently split into GNOME, KDE and “the rest”, but any derivative could fine-grain the components they wish to include. Furthermore, the system helps improving the localisation of the system after the laptops have been deployed. Just stick a USB drive to the laptop, and use your usual package manager to install the updated language packs contained in it. Or just use the Internet if it's available.

In environments where network access is completely impossible, making the availability of updated packs from a remote server a no-op, as well as online translation in the Rosetta server, other solutions could come in place. Generating langpacks from a set of local PO files should be pretty easy.

20:52 < fusibou> if jdub gets excited over edge flipping and window matching,
                 he's got a low threshold
20:52 < fusibou> XGL would probably send him into fatal seizures

The observant eyes will have noticed a few interesting uploads hitting unstable or incoming in the last few days. GNOME 2.14 is being uploaded to unstable in small chunks, in an attempt to let the buildd's do the compiling in a given order, so things can get sorted out in all architectures at the same time.

The libraries will take a few days to get in, and once most of them are in place, you can expect more mass uploads of end-user applications of the GNOME 2.14 suite.

As this time no big or complicated dependencies were introduced in the release, and there are no soname changes involved, it was easier to avoid the previous, and sometimes annoying experimental uploads.

GNOME 2.14 was successfully released last night, and the release churning caught me in my hotel room in London, while preparing to go to bed. Knowing that the release notes were done in Catalan, but not uploaded, I decided to work on that for a while and ended up going to bed later than I would have wished. Congratulations to everyone involved in making 2.14 happen, it's exciting to watch GNOME maturing release after release.

As for the Catalan credits, again, I haven't been able to help much with GNOME 2.14 translations other than guidance and some tiny bit of coordination on our list. Thankfully, Josep, Xavi, Gil and Jordi, and not forgetting our new contributors like Maria, are always ready to carry most of the burden of the release. Again, this GNOME release is completely translated to our language, and I think we can highlight the polish of the translations, thanks to the ongoing review process.

Rock on, GNOME!