From Mandriva Community Wiki

Various notes about new features and updates tips for 2005.

Contents 1 General Notes 1.1 Deltarpm 1.2 Removed package 2 Installation 3 Tools 3.1 MCC 4 Hardware 4.1 initrd 4.2 Standard kernel does not work on Centrino but i586-1GB or i686-4GB kernels do 4.3 speedstep-centrino does not support Dothan processors 4.4 OV511 based webcam 5 Desktop 5.1 KDE 5.1.1 Changes to the Kmenu Button 5.1.2 New Look Login Manager 5.2 GNOME 5.3 Sound 5.3.1 Sound multiplexing with ALSA 5.3.2 TiMidity MIDI synthesizer 5.4 X.org 5.5 Multimedia keyboards 5.6 XDG Menu 5.7 Spell checking 5.8 Mozilla and Firefox 6 Networking 7 System 7.1 Dynamic File System Monitoring 7.2 New urpmi features 7.3 Magicdev is replaced by gnome-volume-manager and HAL. 8 Server 8.1 Postgresql 8.2 MySQL 8.3 Cfengine 8.4 Samba 8.5 OpenLDAP 9 Development 9.1 Packaging 9.1.1 %mkrel macro 9.1.2 multiarch 9.2 Compilers 9.3 Perl 9.4 VFlib

Note that these notes are here to assist the end user in setting up the new OS by warning them of major changes from prior versions in the features and functionality of the system and not a place to report bugs or errata. There are separate places for that.

This page was developed because many people complained that major changes were not explained properly, so users either didn't know how to use the new feature, or didn't understand the rationale behind it, so they got mad (and close-minded) about it. Please fully explain the rationale behind the change as well how to configure the machine with the change (or the difference between the old way and the new way). It would be helpful also to point out where more info can be found. more info = better.

[edit] General Notes

[edit] Deltarpm

In order to provide smaller updates to the stable release, deltarpm from suse has been added. This enables to have incremental updates of rpm, reducing bandwidth needed. (see http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2005-01/msg01996.php).

[edit] Removed package

These packages were removed from the archives, as they are either deprecated or not working ( this list is not complete ) :

• boa-constructor: ( not working with newer wxpython )
• ispell: replaced by aspell
• opale: does not compile
• acid: replaced by base
• bayonne: unmaintained

[edit] Installation

The installer was improved and now uses a different technology (compressed loopback) as found in MandrakeMove.

You can also use iso on the disk, as quickly explained on Development/Howto/Stage_One_Install.

This section should mention the feature: "Internet sources configuration during installation." However this option didn't appear when I just tried the 10.2rc1 installer. I was booting from The Supplemental Drivers CD.

[edit] Tools

[edit] MCC

MCC has now an expert option to display advanced tools.

[edit] Hardware

[edit] initrd

Warning : If you have initrd's created before 10.2 they must be regenerated (using mkinitrd) to have large enough room, otherwise /sys might get full and prevent hal to work properly (not detecting the entire hardware installed on the system).

[edit] Standard kernel does not work on Centrino but i586-1GB or i686-4GB kernels do

The standard kernel now has NX (no-execute) support enabled by default. NX requires PAE (Physical Address Extension) support, which should be available on all i686 processors, and is required for accessing memory above 4GB. Unfortunately PAE support is broken on the Dothan (Centrino) CPU (See the errata part of http://download.intel.com/design/mobile/SPECUPDT/30220907.pdf) and no fix nor workaround is planned by Intel. If you have a Centrino CPU, you should use a kernel which doesn't require PAE support, thus you have to use i686-4GB or i586-1GB kernels. This also means that Centrino users cannot have the advantages of NX (on any operating system). The installer has been updated, and should install a suitable kernel (ie i686-up-4GB) by default.

[edit] speedstep-centrino does not support Dothan processors

The kernel module speedstep-centrino does not support Dothan processors. This is native cpufreq driver for Centrino based systems. Despite of this there is support via generic acpi-cpufreq module. Using acpi-cpufreq instead of speedstep-centrino caused higher power consumption.

At this time there is still no support for Dothan in the main linux tree but there is an unofficial patch which adds support for these processors: http://localhost.ruhr.de/~stefan/acerTM292/patches/cpufreq-speedstep-dothan-3.patch

Also this problem is discussed in bugzilla: Bug #10988 Bug #14950

[edit] OV511 based webcam

Two different releases of the ov511 driver are included in the shipped kernel. If your webcam doesn't work correctly, it is probably using the ov511-alt module instead of ov511. Add ov511-alt to /etc/hotplug/blacklist and ov511 will be loaded instead.

[edit] Desktop

[edit] KDE

KDE 3.3.2 has been chosen over kde 3.4 for its maturity. However many bugfixes and some important new features (kpdf, GDM theme support for KDM) were backported by the Mandriva Linux KDE team into the packages included.

KDE has been compiled with the flag -fvisibility, in order to improve loading times (http://www.nedprod.com/programs/gccvisibility.html).

[edit] Changes to the Kmenu Button

In order to highlight the Kmenu button in a more obvious fashion, a text label has been added that says "menu". Depending on the size of your kicker panel and your personal preferences, you may want to disable this. To do so, open .kde/share/config/kickerrc with your favorite text editor and add kmenutext=false in the Kmenu section (you may have to add the section) so it looks like this:

[KMenu]
kmenutext=false 

There is more information and discussion in this Cooker ML thread (http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2005-03/msg03163.php)

[edit] New Look Login Manager

There is a new feature in the default login manager (KDM) for this release which allows it to be themed like GDM. When themed, the user must know his/her username and type it in, which may be undesirable in certain circumstances.

If you want to revert to the previous behavior, you simply must configure KDM to not use a theme. To do this, open /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc with your favorite text editor and change UseTheme=true to UseTheme=false.

There is more information and discussion in this Cooker ML thread (http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2005-03/msg04931.php)

[edit] GNOME

For stability reasons the version of GNOME included is 2.8.3, which is the latest stable release before the jump to 2.10. See the release announcement for more information on features and capabilities ( http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2005-February/msg00071.html )

[edit] Sound

ALSA support was greatly enhanced in XMMS and Beep Media Player.

[edit] Sound multiplexing with ALSA

Now, applications that use the ALSA api for playing sound will automatically use the dmix plugin by default on sound cards that do not support hardware mixing. Thus, such applications will always be able to play sound simultaneously.

Note that if an application uses the OSS emulation for playing sound with an ALSA driver, it'll get exclusive access to the sound card, thus excluding all other apps.

What's more, the dnsoop plugin is also set up, thus allowing several applications to record simultaneously from the same sound card.

Last but not least, the softvol plugin is used for codecs without volume controls (eg: Azalia/intel HD audio) so that one can alter sound volume on cards that do not support it.

[edit] TiMidity MIDI synthesizer

Now TiMidity, a MIDI playback engine, can be executed as a ALSA sequencer client. This means it can act as a software synthesizer, which is very useful when machine has no decent soundcard (such as most laptop). Install timidity-init if this feature is desired.

The old patch set included in versions prior to 10.2 was found to be plagued with copyright problem, so this situation is rectified by uploading new patch set called freepats: http://freepats.opensrc.org, which is rigorously reviewed and confirmed to be free of copyright problems.

[edit] X.org

X.org version 6.8.x is now shipping with an experimental extension called Composite (disabled by default). To enable, please read this page: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/CvsPage

If it is enabled, some applications might crash (like Flash plugin, GTK1 applications like xmms). To workaround this problem, you need to set the environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 before starting those applications.

The configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf is no longer a symbolic link to /etc/X11/XF86config.

[edit] Multimedia keyboards

Newer multimedia keyboards can now be configured via the keyboarddrake applet in the Mandriva Control Center. GNOME and KDE have already been configured with certain default actions for common multimedia keys.

[edit] XDG Menu

The XDG menu specification from freedesktop.org has been used to generate the menus in the new release, and to generate the default Mandriva Linux menus, the menu package is still used. You can change some of the default menu attributes by modifying the file /etc/menu-methods/menu-attribute.

Several attributes can be used:

• inline: true or false example: inline="true" (allow inlining menu, a directory will not be created for only one item )
• inline_header: true or false (allow to make a menu header)
• inline_alias: true or false (allow to replace menu item by alias)
• inline_limit: a number (example inline_limit="12") define how menu item we can inlined.

See http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-0.9.html for more information on the XDG menu specification.

Although not the default, if you wish, you have the ability to have your menus sorted in alphabetic order. To do this, just create an empty file named /etc/menu-methods/xdg-not-sorted.

[edit] Spell checking

ispell is no longer supported, it has been replaced with aspell (which is actively supported and provides the same functionality and extra features, like UTF-8 support, and many more supported languages).

See the aspell documentation, and in particular the file /usr/share/doc/aspell-0.60.2/manual/aspell.html/Using-Aspell-as-a-Replacement-for-Ispell.html for the differences in the command line parameters and how you can switch to use aspell as your spell checker. You can also see the file /usr/share/doc/aspell-0.60.2/manual/aspell.html/Introduction.html for the differences and advantages of aspell over ispell.

ispell dictionaries have been removed, only the ispell program is still available (as a contrib package) in case you have a home-made dictionary in ispell format. The ispell program itself will however be removed in the future, so if you have a personal dictionary in ispell format you should start to convert it to aspell format.

[edit] Mozilla and Firefox

Mozilla suite has been replaced by Firefox, Thunderbird and nvu in main (http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2005-01/msg00355.php). Firefox is shipped with three different themes (Firefox theme, CrystalSVG theme for KDE and GNOME theme which will use icon theme configured in GNOME). Firefox will autodetect running environment and choose the correct theme accordingly. If you choose another theme, this autoswitch feature will be disabled. To enable it back, you need to go to "about:config" with Firefox and choose "general.skins.selectedSkin" and select 'reset'. You'll need to restart Firefox to get it back

[edit] Networking

Network interfaces are now initiated in the background to speed up the boot process.

[edit] System

[edit] Dynamic File System Monitoring

The fam daemon, which was the default tool for providing notification to userspace about modifications to the filesystem, was plagued with problems, primarily related to locking of devices. For Mandriva Linux 2005, famd is being replaced by gamin which eliminates many of these problems. The usage is the same, so the user should not need to do anything, but the result will be a better working system. If you are using home over NFS, you might see gamin taking more %CPU than needed (this is an issue caused by dnotify kernel feature). See this page to configure gamin to use polling in that case.

[edit] New urpmi features

• gurpmi has been rewritten as a native gtk2 app, meaning that urpmi --X no longer exist.
• a new option --retry was added, to specify how often a mirror should be retried.
• urpmi can now use iso image as a removable media.
• you can now use variable in media url, for more flexibility. ( http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2005-02/msg02853.php ).

[edit] Magicdev is replaced by gnome-volume-manager and HAL.

Magicdev, the software that used to be in charge of mounting usb key on the desktop, is replaced by gnome-volume-manager and HAL. If you are upgrading from an older release and still using an old kernel, make sure to see initrd section to make sure devices add/removal is working properly (df /dev should never returns 100% space used).

[edit] Server

[edit] Postgresql

Postgresql Procedural languages support has been split in one rpm package for each language (postgresql-pl*), you may need to install a new package if you upgrade.

[edit] MySQL

As a security measure, networking in the MySQL server has been disabled per default, only localhost connections will work. This is because the MySQL root user has no password in a default install and that leaves the MySQL server open for anyone to use.

To enable networking the user has to edit or delete the /etc/sysconfig/mysqld file.

[edit] Cfengine

Now cfengine is split among several package, and use the new version 2.0, which changed major thinkg, like no more binary (/usr/bin/cfengine). See cfengine changelog for more details.

[edit] Samba

Samba can now automatically share new CUPS printers. To allow this to work out-the-box, the default samba configuration now sets "printcap cache time" to 60 seconds (by default it is 0 which disables rescanning of printers). In order for shared printers to be browseable by default, printerdrake should now also generate printer names of no more than 13 characters, don't use longer names if you want the printers to be visible on your samba server (although they will still be useable, they won't be shown when browsing the samba server).

In order to allow use of the kernel's cifs driver without installing a few MB of samba packages, the mount.cifs binary has been split off into the subpackage mount-cifs (but it is required by samba-client). This should have no impact besides allowing users to have a minimal system that can mount CIFS shares.

Of interest to users with LDAP-based domain controllers, Samba-3.0.13 has a newer version of smbldap-tools than before, which is much more similar to the stand-alone smbldap-tools. Thus, the smbldap-tools are no longer bundled in the samba-server package. Users who were previously using the smbldap-tools provided by samba-server should install the samba-smbldap-tools package, which will install smbldap-tools, provide compatability symbolic links, and migrate a previous smbldap-tools configuration (from /etc/samba/smbldap_conf.pm) to the new configuration files (/etc/smbldap-tools/smbldap.conf and /etc/smbldap-tools/smbldap_bind.conf). After migration is complete, and your /etc/samba/smb.conf has been updated to reflect the location of the real smbldap-tools (which you should do manually, to the versions in /usr/sbin), the samba-smbldap-tools package may be removed.

[edit] OpenLDAP

The database format used by the bdb backend in OpenLDAP 2.2 is incompatible with the format in OpenLDAP 2.1. An automatic export/import is done during upgrade to allow a seemless upgrade, however it is possible that the import may fail (some reasons are covered below). In this case, the LDIF files from the export are left in the database directory with the name rpm-migrate-to-2.2.ldif-import-failed, and may be imported with slapadd after the problem has been corrected.

Some users may prefer to not have their databases migrated automatically, automatic migration may be prevented by setting "AUTOMIGRATE=no" in /etc/sysconfig/ldap, but of course alternative arrangements should be made to ensure the availability of the data after the upgrade. As a last fallback, openldap2.1 packages are available in contrib which may be used to recover the data (via slapcat2.1), but use of the packages for production is discouraged.

Some changes have been made to the way ACLs are defined in slapd.conf (and included files), for example the ACL target specifier dn now uses the subtype "exact" by default instead of "regex" as before, and submatches no longer automatically expand. ACLs with regex-based targets that use "access to dn=" should be changed to use "access to dn.regex=", and the associated "by" clause should be changed from "by dn=" to "by dn.exact,expand" instead. If you have made changes to the default provided slapd.access.conf, you may wish to review the changes (which you should be able to see in the file slapd.acces.conf.rpmnew). To prevent this issue in the future, the file slapd.access.conf is no longer "noreplace", so if you with to make changes, you should copy the file and modify the copied file (and change the include directive in slapd.conf to point to your copy).

Since samba-2.x is now obsolete, the samba.schema provided with OpenLDAP no longer has the obsolete samba2 definitions uncommented as before, and any reference to those attributes or objectclasses in access control or indexing directives should be removed (or, if you still need them, make a copy of samba.schema and uncomment the necessary sections).

Since OpenLDAP 2.2 utilises an in-memory cache, which will be emptied by database recovery, automatic database recovery for all bdb/hdb databases during startup (ie 'service ldap start', but not 'service ldap restart') of the "ldap" service is now optional (but enabled by default). If you don't want your in-memory cache emptied and you are sure your server will never shut down unexpectedly, you may disable automatic database recovery by setting "AUTORECOVER=no" in /etc/sysconfig/ldap

[edit] Development

[edit] Packaging

[edit] %mkrel macro

In an attempt to provide easy backport naming, a %mkrel macro was added. This will lead to a versioned (i.e. distribution specific) release tag if you rebuild an rpm from cooker on your stable release. Packages which implemented %mkrel without defining the macro may not rebuild cleanly on older releases without a local macro definition. See Distro Specific Release Tag.

[edit] multiarch

In order to enhance support of 32 bit developpement on a 64 bit architecture, a new system has been added to sort arch dependent files. Therefore, it requires the backport of multiarch-utils in order to build newer rpm on old releases ( see http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2005-01/msg01999.php ).

[edit] Compilers

[edit] Perl

Perl has been built without thread support (http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2004-11/msg01206.php). This means that all the binary packages need to be rebuilt, and you can no longer use interpreter level thread. More info on http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2004-10/msg01160.php.

[edit] VFlib

Support for VFlib (a library to access different font formats through a unique API) is dropped, as that library is not used anymore by any standard program, the functionality of accessing fonts is now being done through fontconfig.