This weekend, I go to Berlin to the LinuxTag, a fair where geeks meet geeks and/or IT professionals

It will be a great opportunity to meet the people of Ubuntu-de again and of other open-source communities, to discover new projects and to attend interesting conferences. Moreover, I will write there the second exam (LPI102) of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) to obtain the first level of the Linux certification. Last but not least, I come right for the OpenSolaris love day!

I also have been in Wiesbaden last year for the LinuxTag 2006 and I hope this event will be at least as good as the previous one !

This meeting, which slogan is “where .org meets .com”, is traditionally put under the patronage of the… German minister of Interior Department, Wolfgang Schäuble ! (see my last article). I wonder how he will be accommodated by the open-source and Free software supporters, who do not seem to appreciate his will of supervising people’s computers…

Since Internet has become a huge communication platform for million of people, some badly disposed-people have discovered, that they can take advantage of it. The motives for such activities are very different : from the hacker, who wants to help companies to enhance their IT-security, to people who download mp3’s, from terrorists, to people who counterfeit Vuitton bags and sell it on eBay, these people all break laws daily and are seen as a threat.

In order to fight them, some governments try to catch the authors, not by investigating only them, but by controlling the whole Internet traffic on their soil.

Chinese authorities forbid access to some websites made by opponents to the regime or Tibetan activists. You cannot reach them if you are connected through a Chinese official Internet provider (you can see if your website is available from China). Nonetheless, much nearer from us, in Europe, both French and German governments – both surprisingly democratic countries - plan to introduce new laws, in order to reduce considerably the privacy of their citizens.
In Germany, the Minister of Interior Department, Wolfgang Schäuble, proposed to install a Trojan horse on every personal computer in Germany, so that authorities can exactly know what is going on on it and have access to the hard disks.

In France, according to the newspapers “Le Monde“, a new law project has been proposed, in which the whole Internet data traffic (i.e. all data, credit card numbers, passwords, contents, logins. etc…) must be saved, either by the Internet providers, or by those who offer services on the web. Not only judges and policemen of the judiciary police will have the right to check it, but any administration ( the RG -the intelligence department of the French police- for instance ) and that, without any legal control.

Both projects are a real nightmare for anyone. who cares for his privacy and liberties. People who think, they have nothing to hide, are wrong. Because if you give up freedom in the name of fighting criminality, you take the risk of giving up much more freedoms, for the same reasons.
The postal secrecy is guaranteed in most democratic countries, why would this right not apply for emails ?
Democracy and civil rights are not just a matter of some activists in the third world ! It is an issue, people must daily fight for. Nothing is acquired and we are all concerned about it.
These initiatives remind me the book of George Orwell “1984”, in which all citizen are supervised. As soon as they express any opinion against the regime, they disappear. Of course, this book is primarily a criticism against the communism and it cannot be transposed directly to our western societies, but it is an interesting introduction in how you can direct people and control what they are doing.

The Internet is known to be one of the greatest factors of economical growth during the last five years. If all data were stored, a lot of citizens would mistrust the actors of the new economy. Moreover, most of the companies would have to pay a lot of money in order to improve their storage capacity and this could reduce their competitiveness.

In the end, this freedom-killing policy will not be a serious obstacle for terrorists who plan an attack. When I see, how easy it is to buy a cell phone (My name is officially Jaqes Macy for Vodafone in Germany), I think this is really not a problem to obtain one with forged identity papers. All those measures will not just be inefficient, but they also will create mistrust and, in the end, limit the economic growth of the whole country.

Of course, terrorists sites and, in general, illegal content must be forbidden, but this must be done without treating the privacy and the freedoms of the Internet users so badly.

Because Internet is also a place where you can learn things and enjoy culture, here are some sites, where you can find the greatest literature works.

Google Books (English)
Gutenberg (German)
Ebooks gratuits (French)

The copyrights for these books are over, only where the sites are located, but it may not be the case in the country you are living in, so be careful and have fun !

Since Sun decided to move toward Open Source (by releasing a free version of the Java Development Kit, or hiring Ian Murdoch, the founder of the Debian Project), my interest for this company’s products is growing (even though I write some programs in Java for about two years). Moreover, Solaris is installed on most of the computers of my University and my teachers seemed to enjoy working with it.
So when Sun announced to ship DVD-kits of the free version of Solaris, I ordered a kit and tried it on my machine.

The distro I chose is Belenix and, well the result is not bad, but it is not very good either !

First of all I must admit that my hardware is a little exotic. I have a Shuttle SK22G2 which is very practical, but almost all components are integrated on the mainboard and I can add no other one (except graphic cards), so that when my computer does not detect some chips (such as my sound chip or my network interface) I can do anything but searching some drivers on the web…

OpenSolaris detected almost all my hardware, except my my webcam, sound chip and my network card which did not work out of the box, but I fortunately found some drivers for the two latter. Nvidia propretary drivers allowed me to have a decent graphical interface and as soon as I get an Internet connection, I will even install Compiz on it !

Fact is, that I enjoy discovering a new environment (even if it is not a radical change as a switch from Windows to a *NIX system) and I learn a lot of things about this operating system, which is pretty popular in a professional environment.

I created a OpenSolaris category, so, I will probably write other articles about it

This is a short script which allows an automatic update of a subversion repository on Linux :

Create a log-directory into your Subversion repository

$mkdir logs

and save the following script into the repository as svn_cron.sh


#!/bin/bash
#
# Variable REPOS is the path to the repository on the server

REPOS=.

echo ""
date +"%B %d %Y"

test $# = 0 || ( echo "Please enter the path to the local copy"; exit 1 )

cd $1 2>&1 >/dev/null || ( echo "$1 does not exist"; exit 2 )

/usr/local/bin/svn info 2>&1 >/dev/null|| ( echo "$1 is not a working copy"; exit 3 )

if [ `/usr/local/bin/svn update $1 | sed -n "/^C/p" | wc -l` -ne 0 ]
then

# Collects all files and directorys which are to add on the repository
/usr/local/bin/svn status | sed -n "/^\??*/p" | sed "s/^\? *//g" > $REPOS/logs/toadd

# Collects all files and directorys which are to delete on the repository
/usr/local/bin/svn status | sed -n "/^\!?*/p" | sed "s/^\! *//g" > $REPOS/logs/todelete*//g" > $REPOS/logs/todelete

# Add and delete Subversion actions
cat $REPOS/logs/todelete | while read line; do /usr/local/bin/svn delete "${line}"; done
cat $REPOS/logs/toadd | while read line; do /usr/local/bin/svn add "${line}"; done

# SVN commit in order to save the changes with a log message
if !(/usr/local/bin/svn commit -m "Daily commit for changes done directly on the server")
then echo "A problem has occured during the commit"
exit 3
fi

else
echo "Problem with the daily update, there may be a conflict within the following files \! "

# Displays the files which are currently in conflict
svn status $1
exit 4
fi
exit 0

Then edit the crontab

$crontab -e

or if you want the uploads to be done by another user

$crontab -e -u username

Of course, the user must have enough rights to write on the logs-file

when using vi, put the following lines at the end of te file

##Automatic update of the Subversion repository every day at 0:00
0 0 * * * /path_to_your_repository/svn_cron.sh /path_to_your_local_copy >> /path_to_your_repository/logs/script_cron