WebLog Pro Olivier Berger

3/04/2008

Suitable maintained password manager ? hard to find

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Olivier Berger @ 15:20

I’ve been using FPM (Figaro Password Manager) for quite some time with entire satisfaction.

However, it relies on unmaintained technology, (Gnome 1.x I think), and will be removed from lenny, so I envision to switch to another more recent tool for managing the passwords of my various systems, accounts, application setup passwords, etc.

I have reviews revelation which seems to fit some of my needs, but I’m afraid it is unmaintained at the moment. As it is written in Python, I could probably live with that, but I cannot end-up becoming a contributor to any program I use, can I ? ;-)

Other alternatives may be keepassx… but it’s C++, and crossplatform… and I’m not fan of these features anyway (QT or windows look, bah). Also it has less import/export options than revelation.

One of the advantages of FPM was that even if it was a GUI program, the format of password store could also be managed with Kedpm (Ked Password Manager), a command-line tool. I’m afraid I’m losing a feature with the switch to revelation, then (still, command-line interface seems on the TODO list of revelation).

So we’ll see what happens… in the meantime, I’ve filed a couple patches for revelation in Debian’s BTS, just for the fix of the bugs I encountered during the quick import of FPM passwords.

Dear lazyweb, any suggestions on how to find a maintained, python based, Gnome password management tool with a command-line interface ?

6/12/2007

Exemple pris pour “Collaboration avec les projets libres” : 75 jours pour qu’un fix d’une ligne arrive dans Debian testing

Filed under: Contrib2.0,PFTCR,Projects,Publications — Tags: , , , , , — Olivier Berger @ 8:14

Dans les slides de présentation du papier : “Collaboration avec des projets libres – enjeux, difficultés et bonnes pratiques” j’illustrais le fait que dans le libre, il est parfois très facile de corriger un bug (en l’espèce d’1 ligne à corriger), mais que s’assurer que ledit bug soit corrigé dans les distributions, qui vont réellement arriver chez les utilisateurs) c’est plus dur et plus long.

En l’espèce, le bug #444188 a mis 75 jours (entre le 21/09/2007 et le 05/12/2007) pour être intégré dans une release du package sympa dans Debian (testing).

Et oui, c’est pas si simple, ni rapide de faire en sorte qu’un fix, même trivial, se propage rapidement…

Update 07/12/2007 : J’ai détaillé un peu cet exemple précis dans un petit document, screenshots à la clé.

5/12/2007

Papier : “Collaboration avec des projets libres – enjeux, difficultés et bonnes pratiques” (JRES 2007)

Filed under: Publications — Tags: , , , , , — Olivier Berger @ 7:10

Nous avons écrit un article en vue d’une présentation aux JRES 2007 sur le sujet de la collaboration entre les organisations et les projets libres, essayant de dresser un panorama rapide des meilleures pratiques en la matière.

Voici l’abstract :

Collaboration avec des projets libres – enjeux, difficultés et bonnes pratiques
Christian Bac, Vu Dang Quang, Olivier Berger

Résumé

Nous souhaitons proposer quelques pistes permettant d’affiner des stratégies de collaboration avec des projets de développement de logiciels libres, pour les organisations basant le développement de leurs systèmes d’information sur l’intégration et la customisation d’applications libres existantes.

Mots clefs
contribution, logiciel libre, open source, meilleures pratiques, debian, packages, maintenance

Update 2007/11/21 : les slides sont en ligne sur le site des JRES 2007.

Update 2007/12/06 : le papier est aussi en ligne sur le site des JRES 2007.
Update 2007/12/19 : l’enregistrement vidéo de ma conf est maintenant également en ligne sur le site des JRES 2007. (more…)

28/11/2007

Password-less unattended CVS+SSH sessions

Filed under: PFTCR,Projects — Tags: , — Olivier Berger @ 18:36

You may have the need some day to issue CVS commands (same stands for SVN I think) using the SSH connection (such as CVS_RSH=ssh and so on) in a crontab. The problem may be that you need to type a password to get granted the SSH connection. With SSH public keys and ssh-agent it’s easy, but in a crontab, that will no longer work :(

It’s pretty easy… well… doable at least ;)

The trick is to launch the CVS commands with a “ssh” script in the PATH, which will be something like this :

#! /bin/sh

export SSH_ASKPASS=/whereveryouwant/my-ssh-askpass
export DISPLAY=:0
unset TERM
exec setsid /usr/bin/ssh $*

and where the my-ssh-askpass script will simply do :
#! /bin/sh
echo yourpreferredpassword

Hope this helps :)

19/09/2007

Selecting from multiple X configurations (layouts) automatically at GDM startup or at boot

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Olivier Berger @ 15:45

I’m trying to use different configurations on my laptop :

  • standard linux kernel with proprietary nvidia driver
  • and Xen to allow developping/testing in a hosted dom-U Debian distro, in which case I switch back to the libre nv driver

When using the proprietary nvidia driver, I may use two kind of configurations :

  • having several screens in “clone” mode, i.e. replicated view on screen and beamer, for instance (classical use of Fn+F8 clone display)
  • or having both screens assembled into one to use twinview with dualhead, which provides (through Xinerama) and being able to switch windows from one to the other

This means I configured several layouts in the same xorg.conf file, which will describe each a different Xorg configuration.

Update 2008/02/10 : reorganized that post to be able to manage kernel-passed LAYOUT variable
(more…)

5/09/2007

Making A0 posters on GNU/Linux and previewing printout

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Olivier Berger @ 23:03

We’re going to present PicoForge at the JRES 2007 congress, with an A0 poster.

I’ve been trying to make one with GNU/Linux of course, but it’s not been an easy task.

My main concern was to be able to preview the future results in real dimensions, i.e. being able to print various A4 sheets, then assemble them together to see a real size representation of the future poster. This would help notice readability issues that wouldn’t be obvious on the lower scale representation on-screen.

There’s a nice tool called poster which can be used to convert an EPS A0 (for instance) document into a multi-page A4 document (16 pages for A0) which will have cutting marks, and partial overlap of borders so that it’s easy to cut and assemble the sheets to form a full size poster.

I’ve also tries and follow the rules of our institution communication department to keep with their graphic charter. I tried and reuse their PPT example presentations.

The obvious path meant using OpenOffice, then… but the problem is that OpenOffice Impress (at least in the 2.0 version I used on my Debian lenny system) would not produce a EPS result that poster would understand :(

Believe me, these tests on several hundreds of megs (or a couple of gigs) documents were quite long :(

After several hours lost in testing, I changed my mind and tried Scribus. And guess what ? It will export nice PDF or EPS that can be converted with poster to what I need to preview my poster !

Of course, Scribus was designed to create the kinds of documents, more than OpenOffice Impress module ;)

So my advice is :

  • make an A0 document with Scribus
  • export to EPS
  • convert the EPS to PS with poster. Something like : poster -v -iA0 -mA4 -pA0 -o poster-multisheet.ps poster-A0.eps
  • check the results with a little bit of cut and paste, in full size

Now, I have to check the last steps : generate a 600 DPI PDF and try and have it printed on A0 by some printing shop… Hopefully it’s OK. I’ll keep you informed of the results.

Update 2007/11/27 : the poster was printed by the JRES organisers, and renders quite nice. More details here.

16/07/2007

RDF RAP PHP library packaged for Debian

Filed under: PicoForge,Projects — Tags: , , , , — Olivier Berger @ 16:19

I’ve made some Debian packages for the PHP library RAP, which contains RDF tools.

Some testing would be greatly appreciated.

More details on the packages : in the picoforge wiki.

1/06/2007

New laptop : Latitude D820… Debian lenny works quite well

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Olivier Berger @ 12:55

As usual, I’m documenting my installation of GNU/Linux (Debian lenny/testing) on a new laptop.

More details at the dedicated page.

29/05/2007

Scripting mysql database backups on phpMyadmin with CURL

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Olivier Berger @ 17:34

Sometimes, you can only access your MySQL database with phpMyadmin (the previous tool I blogged about won’t be helpful, then). But you may wish to backup the database on a regular way.

PhpMyadmin allows you to backup the database, but you may like to do it in an unattended way.

I’ve written a shell-script which will use CURL to do so.

I couldn’t find any such script… so I hope I didn’t reinvent the wheel ;)

Update 2008/04/15 : I have made some modifications to the script, and it is now in SVN. You may grab a copy from the picoforge project’s websvn.

16/01/2007

PicoForge is in RC state

Filed under: PFTCR,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Olivier Berger @ 17:24

PicoForge on which we’ve been working for the past months, the successor of the PicoLibre forge, has entered RC (Release Candidate) state.

It means that if you follow instructions on PicoForge install instructions on PicoLibre’s wiki, you should be able to install a working PicoForge forge on a debian etch dedicated machine.

Update 2007/03/10 : Corrected link, as PicoForge is now self-hosting. The wiki is now on Picoforge.int-evry.fr ;-)

Powered by WordPress