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ROSA 2012 LTS released

13th May 2012
And at last the russians of Rosalabs have announced the final release of ROSA 2012 LTS, codenamed Marathon!

Read more about it HERE.

Download from here:
http://mirror.rosalab.ru/iso/ROSA.Desktop/ROSA.2012.MARATHON/

If you want a modern, good looking, KDE based distro that is supported for the next 5 years then ROSA is for you.
If you're a Mandrake/Mandriva fan, like me, then ROSA is for you, too. :-)
This page explains more about what ROSA brings to the table:
http://www.rosalab.com/products/desktop/

Tags: linux, lts, marathon, rosa. | No comments

PAC

13th May 2012
Still heart-broken after Remmina's desertion to GTK3, I kept looking for a replacement and I think I found it: PAC.
It seems quite a featureful application and we're also promised FreeRDP support in the next version.

PAC wants to be a SecureCRT equivalent in Linux and it does indeed sport quite a number of features. You can read more on the author's homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/davidtv/.

If you're running my Centos remix Stella - or just Centos with my nux-dextop repo installed you should be able to just install the project's RPM and have the dependencies satisfied automatically. Download for 32 and 64 bit here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pacmanager/files/pac-4.0/.

Enjoy!
Tags: freerdp, pac, rdesktop, securecrt. | No comments

Stellar refreshments

11th May 2012
Hello there!
I've made some new builds of Stella. There's nothing dramatic about them, still based on CentOS 6.2 + updates.
The one thing more remarkable is the NONPAE build for people with CPU's that are not PAE capable. This build uses only the NONPAE Elrepo kernel v3.
Notice I replaced the "TEST" suffix - which was putting off some people - with "BUILD".

More info and download links in the forums: http://forums.nux.ro/index.php?t=msg&goto=292.

Tags: linux, stella. | No comments

Ffmpeg static builds

7th May 2012
Thanks to burek on #ffmpeg@freenode for providing static builds of ffmpeg. Sometimes you just need to quickly convert some files and you can't be bothered with installing a whole multimedia suite, especially on a server machine. Find the link below.
http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/

Just download, untar and execute. :)
Tags: ffmpeg, static. | No comments

Rosa Marathon 2012 LTS Review

5th May 2012
Just found out that my friend Florin has written a few words about Rosa 2012 this week, I know Marathon is not yet released officially (he was messing with the dev snapshots), but it's worth a read. If you're following Mandriva related stuff this might be of interest:
http://my.opera.com/symbianflo/blog/2012/05/01/rosa-marathon-2012lts
Tags: 2012, lts, mandriva, marathon, rosa. | No comments

O'Reilly on DRM

4th May 2012
"DRM seems a bit like a Neanderthal dragging its knuckles rather than using its larger brain and brawn to move forward and past stuff that did not help the species evolve. As an industry we need to evolve past the archaic DRM that's retarding growth and innovation in our industry. New DRM technologies are not innovation, they are a Neanderthal-like reaction. We need distribution innovation. We need learning science innovation. We need total immersion with content innovation."

Liked that? More here.
Tags: bittorrent, drm, fail, o'reilly. | No comments

LibreOffice.org RPMs repo updated

3rd May 2012
Hello, yesterday The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.5.3, today - after a quick test - this version is also available in my repo.
Soo.. if you're using it, give it a good yum update :-)

You will notice I also generated delta RPMs, unfortunately the effect is less spectacular than I hoped.. the download size is not reduced much. Oh well, at least I tried.
Tags: libreoffice, libreoffice.org, repo, rpm, yum. | No comments

Generating delta RPMs in EL6

3rd May 2012
man createrepo
Check the "--deltas" switch. :-)
Tags: centos, deltarpm, rpm. | No comments

Please die, SURBL

3rd May 2012
Thank you, SURBL for sending me A ZILLION REPORTS FOR 1 SINGLE ISSUE, thank you very much, you are worse than the spammers.
Also thank you for having no phone number, no contact email address, no functional mailing lists where I can report this shit.

Please either implement some counters so you don't end up ABUSING abuse addresses or just do the world a favour and FSCK OFF AND DIE!
Tags: die, fail, surbl. | 1 comment.

LibreOffice.org RPMs in a yum friendly format

26th April 2012
As a result of my recent work on LibreOffice RPMs for EL6 and several discussions on the CentOS mailing list I decided to set up a yum repository with the RPM packages officially released by The Document Foundation.
Why? Because sometimes the people, even the EL kind, want the latest and greatest[1]. Plus, this one should really be easy to mantain as all the hard work is done by the Document Foundation, I just do some untarring and createrepo.
What I do basically is download all their tarballs, decompress, put all the RPMs in a nice repository for 32 and 64 bit arches then call them all nicely from a "meta-package" I entitled libreoffice.org, after the source web site. I also create meta-packages for the localisation RPMs, so everyone can have LibreOffice in their native language only a "yum install" away.
This should also be great with keeping up to date as newer packages will be installed when "yum update" runs and if we manage to get delta rpms working then updates will also be in the megabytes, not hundred of megabytes.

Trade-offs? Yes, some:
1. No Selinux integration. This doesn't seem a problem just yet, but could become in the future.
2. These packages do not play nicely with the stock ones, so the one from the distribution need to be removed... but this only is needed once.

To use this repo do the following:
- uninstall the stock packages: yum remove openoffice* libreoffice*
- install the repo: rpm -ivh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/libreoffice.org-rpms/el6/x86_64/nux-libreoffice.org-rpms-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpm
- install the software: yum install libreoffice.org

If you need to install additional localised support do it like this:
yum install libreoffice.org-ro
or
yum install libreoffice.org-en-GB ... and so on; you can run "yum info libreoffice.org-*" to see all the packages.


This should work on RHEL, CentOS, ScientificLinux, Fedora and other distros based on those.

If you run into issues or have suggestions get in touch at rpm at li.nux.ro.



[1] - For the more patient of you RHEL 6.3 will bring LibreOffice 3.4.5 which should satisfy many people.
Tags: libreoffice, libreoffice.org, repo, rpm, yum. | 4 comments.