Following up the previous post on this topic, the issue with missing pubkey files leading to NOKEY errors is now resolved on the majority of mirror servers. The following servers from the list used by the Mandriva tools have been tested and found to be GOOD:

ftp://ftp.mandrake.ikoula.com/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/ftp.mandrake.com/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.mandriva.com/MandrivaLinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ramses.wh2.tu-dresden.de/pub/mirrors/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.uwsg.indiana.edu/linux/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/MandrivaLinux/official/2008.0 http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrivalinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 http://mandriva.dcc.fc.up.pt/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.pbone.net/pub/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.esat.net/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://mirrors.secsup.org/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.ps.pl/mirrors/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.tuniv.szczecin.pl/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0

The following servers have been tested and found to be BAD:

http://www.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.rhnet.is/pub/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.cica.es/pub/Linux/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/mandrake/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.nara.wide.ad.jp/pub/Linux/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0

The following servers could not be tested as they were full:

ftp://ftp.u-strasbg.fr/pub/linux/distributions/Mandriva/official/2008.0 ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0

If you are using one of the servers listed as GOOD, you may be able to resolve the problem by running this command:

urpmi.update --force-key

If you are using one of the servers listed as BAD, or if the --force-key command does not work to resolve the problem, you can resolve the problem by removing your repositories and re-adding them using one of the servers listed as GOOD.

Tomorrow we will test all servers again, and remove those that have still not properly synchronized the fix from the official server list.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

This is for anyone getting NOKEY errors trying to install packages from the online repositories for Mandriva Linux 2008.

The problem was that the pubkey files, which contain the keys used to sign packages in each repository, were missing from the media_info directories in the 2008 tree, so when it was adding the repositories, Mandriva could not get the key for each repository. Since the repository seemed to have no key associated with it, but the packages were signed, when you tried to install any package, Mandriva would give you the NOKEY warning.

This has been fixed on our master mirror around two hours before this post. I have checked several mirrors and found that at the time of writing this post, a couple of mirrors have synced up with the fix already, but most have not.

Once all the mirrors sync up with the fix, the problem will not occur again for anyone adding repositories. However, if you have already set up your repositories, the problem will not be fixed automatically. You must remove your repositories using the repository configuration tool, which can be found in the Mandriva Control Center, or the urpmi.removemedia command line tool. You can then set the repositories up again (using the repository configuration tool, or urpmi.addmedia) and you should no longer see the errors.

I will post a follow-up message when my checks indicate that most mirrors are synced up with the fix.

We're sorry for the inconvenience.

finally, it's done (and I greatly resemble a zombie right now) - 2008 is out. really happy with this release, it's going to be a stonker, I hope. also up, you will note, is the new www.mandriva.com . Still a bit rough around the edges, but it now has big green download buttons. I hope you're all happy!

2008 release story is here. Please, Digg it, Slashdot it, spread it all over the known universe if possible.

I am going to go buy some milk. Milk is good.

And now for something completely different...

if Lewis Hamilton doesn't win the Formula 1 world title this year there's no justice, as the man is some kind of saint. He had to leave the Chinese Grand Prix while in a position to clinch the title after ditching his car in a gravel trap while trying to drive into the pits on a set of tyres that barely existed any more, they were so worn down. Not twenty minutes later - at a point where just about any other driver, and indeed any other person you could name with the possible exception of Buddha, would still have been breaking things in the garage and throwing a full-blown hissy fit for not being called in for a pit stop sooner - he's doing the rounds of his engineers shaking hands and slapping backs, and giving an interview to the BBC in which he took full responsibility for missing the corner and said he was looking forward to winning the next race. The man's incomparable.

Found another site running a 'what's your favourite distribution' poll - ReviewLinux. You know what to do!

We got 2008 (mostly) finalized today. Well, tomorrow morning, Paris time. Lots of very tired people on the internal IRC channel juggling final-final-final ISO generation, torrent organization, and watching France beat New Zealand in the rugby World Cup quarter finals. The Powerpack and Free editions are done, and just One needs finishing up. The early seeders are now getting access to the torrents, so we'll be able to do the public release early next week.

I'm really looking forward to the next few weeks - 2008 is shaping up to be a really killer release, and we have some really nice news about the Club changes to go with it. The reduction in the range of products for 2008 is also a great positive thing, and the effective reduction in prices that comes along with it. I'm hoping we'll be able to make some significant advances in mind- and market-share with this release, it certainly deserves it! It'll be an interesting ride for sure.

I find it a wonderfully surreal experience to spend a morning bug fixing and then sit down on my deck here in Vancouver to read my old college gazette. When I was at college, and on the couple of times since that I've been back, it feels perfectly natural to have dinner with people who have more letters after their name than you could fit on a full page of the Times, and to toast the Queen - with absolutely no irony, and a distinct sense that it would be Noticed if one didn't - at the start of each meal. When you're several thousand miles away, reading paragraphs such as:

"With the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor, the role of Visitor has returned to the Crown. However, in anticipation of this change, the Society has been, and continues to be, engaged in a major exercise to revise and update our Statutes, including new arrangements for the appointment of the Visitor. The approach we have adopted provides for layered Statutes, Ordinances and Regulations with the Statutes subject to revision only by recourse to the Privy Council, whilst Ordinances and Regulations might be altered more easily by differently weighted votes of our own College Meeting. There is still much work to be done on the detail before our Governing Body agrees to propose the new Statutes to the University for eventual approval by the Privy Council."

feels wonderfully bizarre.

I suppose to some (particularly, I expect, Americans) this level of association between a university and the government of the realm seems strange and rather worrying, but I quite like it. I just like the feel of a system that evolved in an utterly different time and which has been preserved by weight of momentum more than anything else. In a strange way, the fact that it is clearly an utterly inappropriate system that would never be designed in the present day makes everyone involved in it act rather impeccably. I suspect there's rather less actual conflict of interest, patronage and so on going on between Oxbridge and the U.K. government than there is between the Ivy League universities and the U.S. government, though it does happen.

So 2008 RC2 was pushed overnight, fortunately I got the Wiki pages up and ready in advance this time :). Quite a lot of changes since RC1, actually: we've included the latest ATI proprietary driver only for Radeon HD cards, it should be auto-detected and configured just like the older ATI driver and the NVIDIA drivers, but we haven't really tested this very much. We've also added the new free driver, named radeonhd, though this isn't automatically used for any cards as it's still too new and I didn't want to mess about with that stuff any more. You can enable it from drakx11 though, and see if it works (on Radeon X1xxx and HD 2xxx cards). Also some important kernel changes and a big pile of bug fixes and stuff. Of course, over 500 bug fixes and 2,000 package uploads since RC1 makes the 'Release Candidate' moniker look slightly comical, but it has ever been thus with MDV :)

I haven't quite managed to finish the package rebuild project in the end - I'm about halfway through the 2007.1 packages. But we got pretty close, which is nice.

RC2 is rather more worthy of the RC description than RC1, though there'll probably still be quite a few changes between now and final. But it should work pretty well and represent the final product accurately in 99% of cases, so please do give it a shot. The One edition, again, isn't out yet, but Anne has super-double-200% guaranteed me that it's coming in a few hours, so I hope it does. One is easily the best way to test pre-releases, it's really annoying we didn't have One editions of the other pre-releases.

Lenovo is running a poll to see which distribution people would prefer to see pre-installed on future Lenovo systems. A few days back we were languishing in 8th place or so with under 1,000 votes. Guillaume (who's in charge of the press department now) suggested we post about the poll in a few places and try and get the vote out. In my infinite wisdom I said nah, it'll never work, too much trouble. Fortunately Guillaume and Francois over-ruled me, so we posted little articles to the Club, the company blog, and via email to our subscriber list. Of course, I was completely wrong, and the response has been great: we're now running a clear third behind Ubuntu and Debian (whose strong showing surprises me a bit, but is fairly irrelevant, as there's no chance in hell Lenovo would go with Debian anyway) but ahead of SUSE (even if you tot up the votes for SLED, SUSE and OpenSUSE) and Fedora, with over 2,800 votes. So thanks to everyone, it's great to see the Mandriva community out in force once more :)

Work on 2008 continues at a relentless pace. We've zapped probably a couple hundred bugs since RC1 came out, including some pretty big ones, and the release_critical bug list is starting to look pretty small and manageable. Olivier seems to be on top of the new system for ensuring we don't have problems with DKMS modules (like NVIDIA and ATI) after kernel updates any more, which is great. There've been some really nice improvements to urpmi and rpmdrake, including some noticeable speedups in rpmdrake in particular. There's been a lot of fixes for the new menu system, which is starting to look far more organized than in RC1.

Personally I finished rebuilding 2007.0 packages in main and started on 2007.1. Mostly just straight rebuilds, but had to do some significant work on xcdroast - with much thanks to the Fedora maintainers, from whom I took a large amount of patches to make it buildable and functional with modern GTK+ and cdrkit - and chromium, for which I thank the Debian maintainer equally for much the same reasons. So if you are for some reason struck with a desire to indulge in nostalgia for 2001 and try to write a disc with xcdroast's hilariously counter-intuitive interface rather than with modern k3b or nautilus, you'll be able to do so fine in 2008, but I recommend you check into the nearest asylum straight afterwards. ;)

Interesting stuff in progress at the moment - we're getting a lot of reports of sound issues with the seven zillion slightly different variants of Intel's high definition audio chipsets, many of which are fixed in ALSA 1.0.15rc1 or latest hg (the revision control system ALSA uses). We're considering whether to just do safe backports to 1.0.14 or whether it would be overall better to upgrade to 1.0.15rc1 or hg. It's a bit of a tough judgment call.

We're also looking at the ATI driver situation. Anssi (who is now maintaining the ATI and NVIDIA proprietary drivers) is trying to package the new proprietary driver using /etc/alternatives , as we do for NVIDIA, which would allow us to use the new version of the driver for HD 2xxx cards only, and the old version for older cards. I'm keeping an eye on the work taking place on the new open source driver, to see whether it may be better than avivo early enough to include in 2008, though I don't expect it will be. We will also be shipping two alternate packages of the old free driver in 2008 - the stable 6.6 release and the current 6.7 development series. Each one has advantages and drawbacks. 6.6 will be the default, but you'll be able to switch to 6.7 just by swapping packages.

We pushed 2008 RC1 today - linky. There's been a ton of bug fixing since Beta 2, so this should be quite a lot better. Unfortunately we're still having problems with unionfs so we didn't get the One edition out yet, but there will be a One RC1, it'll just take a day or two to get out.

Cooker has been very busy lately: a couple of major changes have happened - a new menu structure, based on Frederik Himpe's old proposal, and the official kernel adopting the -tmb spec. There's been a ton of work on fixing up menu entries for the new structure, and a lot of just general bug fixing, particularly in the Mandriva tools. There've been some changes to rpmdrake that quite a lot of users will enjoy, I think - the bug where packages on skip.list could never be installed by rpmdrake is (finally) fixed (and there's a candidate update for 2007 Spring), and I finally succeeded in persuading Thierry to have MandrivaUpdate respect the 'updates' flag, so it will now only consider packages from repositories flagged as 'updates' repositories, rather than packages from any and all repositories.

The new draknetcenter consolidated network configuration tool also landed recently, and Boiko's krandr tool for configuring RandR 1.2 stuff in KDE. So lots of nice new toys!

Speaking of new toys - I decided it was time for a living room upgrade here at home, so I now have a new TV (42" LCD, 1080p) and a Playstation 3. You haven't really seen the Mandriva 2008 login screen till you've seen it on a 42" screen at 1920x1080 :) It's a lot of fun.

And of course my HTPC runs Mandriva and you can install Linux on the PS3, so it's TOTALLY work-related. Hmm, I wonder if I can claim a tax exemption...:)

Having a very yak shaving kind of a day. I figured I'd package Conduit, as it looks like it's pretty useful already and only going to get more so. Thought it'd be quite simple - ah, how wrong one can be :)

Firstly, I had to package a couple of Python modules it depends on that weren't already in the distro. That wasn't too hard.

Then it started getting trickier. It's really arch-independent - everything is pure Python. However, the buildsystem installs some files to %(libdir)/conduit , which is /usr/lib/conduit on i586 but /usr/lib64/conduit on x86-64. This is obviously no good for a noarch package, so I had to come up with a patch to fix that.

Once I'd done that, I stuck BuildArch: noarch into the spec, and watched as the build suddenly stopped working entirely with a "Invalid configuration noarch-mandriva-linux-gnu': machinenoarch-mandriva' not recognized"" error. Initial investigation suggested the culprit was a check for AC_CANONICAL_HOST in aclocal.m4 - this prevents 'noarch' build targets from working. So I patched that out of aclocal.m4, tried the build again, and it still failed.

Then I remembered that the fix for the first problem requires a call to autoreconf during the build process, which regenerates aclocal.m4. I then found that the AC_CANONICAL_HOST call doesn't come from any of conduit's aclocal precursor files, so I was a bit stuck. Fortunately, Google came to the rescue:

PLD Linux thread

and hence:

GNOME bug

so it turns out that a bad fix for a Solaris problem in glib introduces a regression which prevents me building Conduit with a noarch build target. Fun stuff. I've just added the PLD patch into our glib and submitted the updated build...maybe once that hits the mirrors I'll finally be able to get this package done!