FUDCon Cusco 2013 - Un evento de calidad

Probablemente jamás se haya dado un evento dedicado al software libre tan grande en la ciudad de Cusco ni un FUDCon a nivel mundial con tantos asistentes como lo ha sido este FUDCon que se ha llevado a cabo en el centro de convenciones de la Universidad San Antonio Abad del Cusco. Este evento tuvo una asistencia de alrededor de 900 personas.

El FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) es un evento en el que distintos usuarios dedicados a Fedora y a todas aquellas personas interesadas o activas en la filosofía del Software Libre se reúnen para brindar conocimiento y encontrar nuevas motivadas a convertirse en futuros colaboradores de Fedora y el Software Libre en general. El FUDCon LATAM se realiza cada año en distintas partes de Latinoamérica.

Una de las cosas más gratificantes de este evento es la cantidad de personas que asistieron al evento (alrededor de 900), así como también la cantidad de charlas impartidas (65 charlas las cuales pueden verse aquí ) tanto por contribuyentes a Fedora como de participantes del evento dispuestos a impartir sus conocimientos de manera desinteresada. Esto fue posible gracias a la organización al principio del evento de un BarCamp, un tipo de conferencia (o mejor dicho, "desconferencia") en la que el público tiene un papel más activo.

Sobre las charlas, hubo de todo. Algunas charlas fueron dirigidas al público en general como del uso de Fedora en si, de cómo contribuir a Fedora, del uso básico de Linux, etc. También se dieron charlas de temas más específicos como empaquetado de software, programación, hacking diseño gráfico (impartidas por mi persona y por Rene Lujano), virtualización, desarrollo de páginas web, administración de servidores. etc. Por último pero no menos importante, también hubo algunas charlas dedicadas a la promoción del software libre en distintas áreas como la educación y en el entorno empresarial.

Más allá del rotundo éxito del evento en si mismo y de todas las gratas experiencias vividas y las nuevas amistades y relaciones adquiridas por ello, los frutos de un FUDCon exitoso son los nuevos usuarios y colaboradores adquiridos. En FUDCon Cusco, trés nuevos candidatos para embajadores han sido aprobados, ahora ya han de estar listos para difundir el uso de Fedora y "evangelizar" sobre del Software Libre en el Cusco y en otras partes del Perú. Así como también nuevos usuarios de Fedora los cuales podrían han mostrado mucho interés en convertirse en futuros contribuyentes en el área de empaquetadores de software libre para Fedora.

Todos los que tuvimos la dicha de asistir a este grandioso evento pudimos notar el excelente trabajo de personas como Alex Irmel Oviedo Solis y Cesar Villacorta, muchachos sumamente trabajadores, hospitalarios, dispuestos a apoyar a que el FUDCon tuviera el éxito tan grande que se pudo presenciar, y de mi parte quiero darles públicamente mis más grandes felicitaciones a través de este medio.

Oh NO! No GDM with Fedora 19 July 12th update!

Ok that doesn't sound good... yes, that is what I noticed, I was at 2:00 am doing some work of university, I decided to update fedora while I do my work. Then, I restarted my pc when finished work, everything looked normal in booting process (no errors, no warnings in plymouth informative mode), until I noticed that gdm never showed up...  Ten minutes after nothing changed, there was no pointer, no graphics, only plumouth animation finished. The worst thing is that I couldn't even acces to another virtual terminals (pressing Ctrl + Alt + Fx)... Ok, this wasn't happening before I updated Fedora.

This is my screen... nothing else I could do, not even able to access to virtual terminals

Fortunately, I had an empty USB which I converted to a fedora live usb to enter to my system using chroot (love this command, with this command you can become root of another linux directory in a terminal, see more of what I did here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing#via_ChRoot) and also I created this little script to automatically mount all system devices before executing chroot

modprobe dm-mod

vgchange -ay

mount /dev/virtualvolumename/root /mnt/

mount /dev/bootpartition /mnt/boot/

for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

chroot /mnt

After rooted as normal user the first thing I tried to do is to downgrade to previous update, but I didn't noticed before that I did this update with DNF, and by some reason I couldn't go to any kind of log or history of latest updated packages... not even with yum.

Ok, next thing I tried to do is to review logs, what ever log I could find useful, and I found this on /var/log/messages:

Jul 13 20:34:04 haks gdm[537]: GdmLocalDisplayFactory: maximum number of X display failures reached: check X server log for errors

 When I saw this message, I just remembered that when plymouth finished to load, screen blinked about 6 times and then plymouth got frozen. That means that X was trying to load at first tty (virtual terminal) but something went wrong and then it continued with next tty, also failed, and that way successively until 6 ttys got over... that was confirmed in forum posts like this http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=265558

That took me to /var/log/Xorg.0.log, in that file I noticed this error:

[    29.066] (EE) Failed to load module "nv" (module does not exist, 0)

That means... nvidia???? Ok, my laptop has an nvidia graphic card, but in fedora (or linux in general) I cannot use it because a terrible abomination created by nvidia called Optimus >.< so I never tried to install an nvidia driver before, so why X server is asking this to Fedora?

Nevermind, X Server is not behaving correctly, and that happened after last fedora update, so I tried downgrading only X server, and the right package is xorg-x11-server-Xorg (thanks to potty for finding this) so in my chroot enviroment I tried this

yum downgrade xorg-x11-server-Xorg

I still don't know why but that fixed this issue, I would recomend to to this just as a workarround, as it doesn't happen to all (in fact, potty also updated his computer without having this problem... although  he says it does :D  )

Thanks for reading, if you know something else please comment it.

HakS

Sozi: An extension for inkscape to make presentations

Sozi is an inkscape extension (as JessyInk) that uses Javascript and SVG to make presentations to be viewed in a browser (works better with Firefox). Licensed with GPL 3.0. (that's cool!)

As the Sozi project website describes (http://sozi.baierouge.frinitial initial/wiki/en:welcome), a Sozi document is not organized as a slideshow (as it is in JessyInk or LibreOffice Impress), but as a poster, what gives you a diferent kind of freedom to manage the animations of your presentation. Playing such a presentation consists in a series of translations, zooms and rotations that allow to focus on the elements you want to show.
Requierements for Sozi:

• Inkscape
• PyGTK
• A browser with Javascript and SVG support (on Firefox and Chromium works fine for me)

How to install

Although the instructions for installing Sozi is at their website, I'll explain how did I do this using the noob way :D.

1- Extract the zip in a folder and enter that folder

 (Tutorial in english, pictures in spanish... fail! >.<)

2- Open a terminal and run this command: $ su -c 'dolphin /usr/share/inkscape/extensions' -
("dolphin" is the KDE file browser, in gnome it is "nautillus". I have to advertise executing a graphical file browser is NOT a good practice, be carefull)

3- Now you have 2 file browsers: one with the Sozi files folder and the inkscape extensions folder. Now copy  from the Sozi files folder all files with extensions .inx, .py, .js and .css into the inkscape extensions folder

(the window at the left is the Sozi files folder and the other one is the inkscape extensions folder)

Now you can open inkscape, and you'll see in the Extensions menu the Sozi option.

How to use it:


As soon as there is already a tutorial in their website (http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:tutorial) I'm just show some screenshots

1- The presentation is created

2- The frames on the presentation are defined by those rectangles surrounding each content (including the big one surrounding the whole presentation), those are common rectangles, so to become those rectangles into frames, select each rectangle and go to Extensions -> Sozi. Inkscape will disable and the Sozi window appears, that window is used to give the properties for that frame and the order of frames.

3- After defining the frames and finishing the presentation, save the file and open the svg file with your browser

I'll upload this presentation when I have the chance to do so

How does it work


When you make a rectangle become a frame, in the SVG structure (the XML), a group of <ns1:frame> tags is created and a javascript is nested to the SVG file, that's why a Sozi presentation (basically an SVG) becomes portable to any computer with the right browser (acording to Sozi, those SVGs works better in Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, Safari and Opera support is not completed, and support for Internet Explorer is not mentioned... strange, isn't it? :D)

Well, I like slideshows, but to have the power of how will the presentation be animated is really nice, if you are good using inkscape, you may love this inkscape extension!

Thanks for reading my post

Juan "HakS" Barba

Customizing gnome 3?

A day like today, I was googling, trying to find out how to customize the gnome3 interface, and i found this post: http://joneslee85.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/howto-customize-gnome-shell-theme/

Although this way doesn't work relatively to each session (whatever you modify using this way, you will see all changes in each session), I done it, ah i want to show you how I done it at my way.

This post advertises you that this way of doing is kinda difficult if you don't like to program, so I will try to explain carefully.

All the necesary files are in

• /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/
• /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/

As you see, gnome3 is based on web technology, it uses javascript and css. inside the /theme folder you can find  images and the file gnome-shell.css, you can modify some parameters like:

• alignment
• text witdh
• text font
• text size
• padding
• etc

Exploring the folders:

Graphically (warning: doing this could be harmful to the system, please be careful when manipulating files):

sudo nautilus /usr/share/gnome-shell
OR
su -c 'nautilus /usr/share/gnome-shell' -

Terminal:

su -
cd /usr/share/gnome-shell

 At any of those ways, you can explore what is inside the /theme or /js folders. Inside the /theme folder you'll find some pictures in .svg format (that means you can modify those pictures with a vector-design program like inkscape) and the .css file as I said above. Let's open this file.

Graphically

Terminal

 

Let's modify the font size of the top panel, look for these lines:

You can change all those parameters from the panel with this css, but you'll see the changes when you re-open your session. In this example, I modified the font size, because I like small fonts XD

You can modify almost everything about gnome2 layout with css, and the behaviour with the javascript files. I'll find out later how to work with gnome3 javascript.

I hope you liked this post. :)

Fedora non official wallpaper

Hi!

Yes... I was kinda dead but I'm back xD, I want to share a wallpaper I made for fedora 15 on 2nd day at FUDcon Panama.

This wallpaper is free, however, this cannot be an official wallpaper, because it is using the fedora logo :( but you can use freely it under the CC-BY license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ :)

All what happened just for opening nautilus as root

Hi there! I want to tell my experience about something I always wanted to do : )

First of all, I must tell you that this post was totally modified based on the comments of the people made to me

My situation is this: I don't like to use the terminal to do things like copying, creating or deleting files, when nautilus can do that xD, but Linux does not let yo to do that, you can only modify files inside the user folder. In other words, you cannot modify nothing that is not "yours", not with nautilus (and it has a good reason, opening graphical programs may be dangerous)

But I thought I could give to nautilus superuser permissions executing nautilus as root, so I tried that in Fedora 14 Laughlin :

su -c nautilus

But it didn't work xD, I got this error

(nautilus:14179): EggSMClient-WARNING **: Failed to connect to the session manager: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported

**
GLib-GIO:ERROR:gdbusconnection.c:2270:initable_init: assertion failed: (connection->initialization_error == NULL)

The only solution I could find at that moment was to use SUDO

For those who don't know what's sudo, this is a program which gives to a normal user superuser permissions, but it has to be configured first, we have to add our user to the sudoers list.

I first tried this command

$su -c visudo

Visudo is a tool to modify the sudoers list, but I don't know why it didn't work on me ¬¬ so I decided to do with a "nasty" way xD

$su -c nano /etc/sudoers

With any of those tools we can edit the sudoers list. I added a line here:

.
.
.
## The COMMANDS section may have other options added to it.
##
## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root    ALL=(ALL)     ALL
hakS    ALL=(ALL)    ALL  <---- THIS LINE xD

## Allows members of the 'sys' group to run networking, software,
## service management apps and more.
# %sys ALL = NETWORKING, SOFTWARE, SERVICES, STORAGE, DELEGATING, PROCESSES, LOCATE, DRIVERS
.
.
.

I saved the file and quit. This will add the user to the sudoers list. It was so cool xD I don't like to enter as root all the time and now I don't need to do it . For example, we can do this:

$sudo yum install <whatever>

Sudo will ask for the user password (not the root password, but your password), it will run as if you were a superuser

Using sudo, I could access to nautilus using sudo

$sudo nautilus

And voila! nautilus start to run as a superuser! I can now create, copy, modify and delete files outside the user folder.

But just some minutes after I finished this post, someone (http://adamwill.livejournal.com/) told me the only thing I needed to access to any graphical program is to run thos applications puting a "-" after that command, for example:

su -c nautilus -
su -c gedit -

It was so annoying.. ¬¬ but I learned how to do it : ) so thank you  http://adamwill.livejournal.com/

But after all this, I still have some questions and comments
1- Why is not secure to edit the sudoers file with nano?
2- Maybe running gconf-editor as root is not the best practice xD I just did it for experiments xD

So the things I could learn doing all this is:

1- How to edit the sudoers list

$su -c visudo$su -c nano /etc/sudoers

2- How to open a graphical app just using su

$su -c nautilus -
$sudo nautilus

Thanks for the comments : ) I hope this post can be usefull to begginers like me :P

How to change the login screen wallpaper on Fedora 14 Laighlin?

Honestly, I don't like the Fedora Laughlin wallpaper, but I  just could settle for change the desktop wallpaper, but the login screen is always the same.
But  I found a way to solve that, apparently, the dialog used to change the theme, the background and that stuff can be used to change the login screen, just that we have to make a few settings for it in the terminal
The first thing you have to do is to copy our wallpaper to the /usr/share/backgrounds

 #cp <directorio de la imagen> /usr/share/backgrounds

For example:

#cp /home/HakS/wallpaper.png /usr/share/backgrounds

After doing that, run this command

#cp /usr/share/applications/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow

This command copies a configuration file that represents the dialog used to change wallpapers and themes which can only be executed when the session started. When we copied it to that directory, the same dialog will appear every time we log in, thus allowing us to change the login screen wallpaper as if it was the desktop wallpaper.

In order to prove this, logout. As you can see, the dialog shows up, as same as if we would like to change the desktop wallpaper.

Use the dialog to choose a wallpaper, and that's all, the wallpaper will change. After doing that, just close that dialog and log in.

But  remember that when we copied the file, I tsaid the dialog will be displayed whenever you start session ... That sounds rather uncomfortable right?
We can take the dialog just deleting the file we copied by running the command rm

#rm /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop

And that's all folks! xD we have oue beautiful wallpaper : )