Wesley Clark has got a new official blog called Generally Speaking. There was some shake-up last week regarding WesleyClarkWeblog.com as it was originally listed as the official Clark Blog. Looks like they came to their senses and created something they could control ... officially.

Though, I'd prefer if they posted their entries under real people names as opposed to "Blog Team". I'd be interested to see how much Clark has raised in Q3 in these 2 short weeks.

DMKS 0.39.17 is available (tarball or RPM):

* Modified mktarball format to remove dependency on $source_tree and $dkms_tree. This means that regardless of these values between systems, you can now count on the tarball to properly load on another system with ldtarball. Note that because of this, any tarball made with mktarball before this version will not load properly anymore.

* Modified ldtarball to handle the new mktarball format. As well, ldtarball can now be used on any tar archive which contains a dkms.conf within it. It first checks to see if the tarball is made by mktarball. If not, it then finds the dkms.conf within the archive and then adds that archive to the dkms tree. This is very handy and can serve as an unpack routine as discussed in this thread.

* Ldtarball now uses the --archive option instead of the --config option. --archive is new and was created to alleviate any confusion over options.

* Added --kernelsourcedir option as well as $kernel_source_dir DKMS variable to allow specification of an alternate kernel source directory if it is not found as expected in /lib/modules/$kernelver/build

* Driver disk files for Red Hat driver disks are now looked for within the ./redhat_driver_disk directory within your sources

* Added $tmp_location variable available in /etc/dkms_framework.conf to specify an alternate location for your systems /tmp directory. The default is /tmp.

* Added diff checking in status command. Now, when a module is in the installed state, dkms checks to make sure that the module in the /lib/modules tree matches the one saved within the DKMS tree. This will help alleviate confusion if other packages start overwriting things that DKMS has put into place.

* Changed the build-arch of the RPM to noarch as my beautiful shell scripts are arch independent.

* Other miscellaneous changes which are available within the SRPM spec file changelog.

Here's a good Dell Linux read with the above title. You can find it here.

Also, there's an interview with a Dell exec about Dell's Linux strategy for the Sky Radio Network (the one for the airlines). Hear it here.

DKMS 0.38.03 is available (tarball or RPM):

* Fixed mkdriverdisk to correctly create kernel/driver tree within the driver disk modules.cgz

* Added support in mkdriverdisk to put modules for more than one kernel within the disk image. With Red Hat installs, this will allow the RH installer to place these extra modules directly into the various kernels it installs on your system (smp, etc).

* Moved driver_disk directory location to underneath the $module_version directory. This is more fitting since driver disks can now contain modules from various kernels.

* Fixed a temp_dir_name typo in ldtarball.

Over on domsch.com, Matt has uploaded a DKMS enabled megaraid2 RPM which we put together today.

You can download it here.

DKMS 0.37.10 is available (tarball or RPM):

* Don't allow installs of modules onto kernels which don't exist

* Suppressed stderr on the output of some commands

* Fixed brain dead bug for REMAKE_INITRD

* During uninstall, don't remake initrd if it was never installed

* Fixed ldtarball to first unload into a unique temp directory and then clean up after itself.

Over the last week, I have observed a large amount of anti-Clark story postings on the Drudge Report. This is, of course, to be expected-- not only from someone like Drudge, but just in general given the prominence of Clark's rapid rise.

However, this evening, Drudge added the following red headline: "General Clark's Campaign Website 'Issues Area' -- Is Empty!"

The link pointed here. This, I cannot understand. Drudge has pointed his site to a temp page on Clark's site which in no way indicates that it is an issues page. In fact, there is no link to an issues section on Clark's site. Regardless, I find this to be shamefully unprofessional of Matt Drudge. In effect, he has invented a headline to Clark's detriment. Muck-raker!

DKMS 0.37.04 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* Changed PATCH directives to an array based system. All patch filenames should be given in the PATCH[#] array. If the patch should only be applied when building for certain kernels, then a corresponding regular expression should now be placed in the PATCH_MATCH[#] array which matches against those kernels. This new array system is not only cleaner, but allows matching against regular expressions (ala egrep) whereas the old system was limited to substring matches. If no corresponding entry is found in PATCH_MATCH, then the patch will automatically be applied.

* Changed MAKE directives to an array based system. The default make command should now be specified in MAKE[0]. All other MAKE directives should fill out this array and will only be used if their corresponding regular expression in the MAKE_MATCH[#] array matches against the kernel being built for.

* Changed the MODULES_CONF directive to an array based system.

* Fixed known-filename exploit issues in invoke_command (thanks to Oron Peled: oron () mail ! artcom ! co ! il ).

* Changed autoinstaller bootup priority from 08 to 04.

DKMS version 0.36.05 is now availabel (tarball or RPM):

* In dkms.conf, when specifying the name of your module, you should no longer append the .o or .ko to the end. Instead, based on what kernel you are building a module for, DKMS will figure out the suffix (if <2.5 then .o, otherwise .ko) and will work appropriately. The example below shows this change from the old format to the new.

* Removed the DKMS directives LOCATION and MODULE_NAME. Replaced them with the arrays BUILT_MODULE_NAME[#], BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION[#], DEST_MODULE_NAME[#] and DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[#]. This allows much more flexibility in finding and renaming modules and placing them in various locations of your /lib/modules tree. Whereas, before you would specify something like:

MODULE_NAME="qla2200.o:qla2200_6x.o qla2300.o:qla2300_6x.o"
LOCATION="/kernel/drivers/addon/qla2200"

you would now specify it as:

BUILT_MODULE_NAME[0]="qla2200"
DEST_MODULE_NAME[0]="qla2200_6x"
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/kernel/drivers/addon/qla2200"

BUILT_MODULE_NAME[1]="qla2300"
DEST_MODULE_NAME[1]="qla2300_6x"
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[1]="/kernel/drivers/addon/qla2200"

This above example doesn't show usage of BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION which is optional. This is used if your built modules are spread out within your source tree, and you need dkms to find them. It should be given relative to the root directory of your module source (eg. relative to the directory which holds your dkms.conf file).

If you do not intend to rename the modules after they have been built, then DEST_MODULE_NAME is optional. As stated above, with DEST_MODULE_LOCATION, you can now install each module to different locations in your /lib/modules tree.

Wesley Clark today officially announced that he is seeking the democratic nomination for President. His official site is at http://www.americansforclark.com. If you don't want to see Bush re-elected, put your money where your mouth is and donate. I was contribution #523.

Devlabel 0.42.05 is available (tarball or RPM):

* Added a work-around for devices with bad partition tables. For example, on USB floppy devices containing floppy disks marked as bootable, linux currently errantly reports that the device has 4 partitions even though it does not. Devlabel was probing these bad partitions for UUIDs and this was causing kernel I/O errors. The work-around tells devlabel to ignore partitions which come from devices with messed up partition tables.

There's actually a little bit of irony surrounding this, as I had been tasked to root cause I/O errors in Red Hat's latest beta, only to find out it was my own software which was exacerbating this problem. Of course, if the kernel reported partitions correctly, this would never have reared its face. Still humorous though.

Looks like Dell has a couple new commercials which make reference to Linux. I believe this might be a first, so be sure to keep your eyes open during prime time and football games. Here's a link to the commercials. The ones of interest are "Cold Call" and "Let's Do Lunch".

This has been reported everywhere, including slashdot, but its just that cool that I'll bother posting about it too. New smart solar windows which point their energy intake mechanism directly at the direction the sun is angled into the window. Not only does this maximize the amount of energy generated by your (what appear to be) cheap-to-manufacture windows, it also means no glare without restricting any ambiant light.

The story is here and also there are some cool pictures.

DKMS version 0.35.01 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* Added PACKAGE_VERSION and PACKAGE_NAME as directives available in dkms.conf. These are strict requirements and DKMS will not function without these present (because these are strict requirements, I also revved the example QLogic DKMS driver which you may need to now download).

This feature was added at the request of Cyril Bortolato who is the creator of gmodconfig. Gmodconfig is a GUI which is intended as a simplified module management system for inexperienced (and experienced) Linux users. It uses dkms as a back-end to install modules and you can read more about it from its kernel-traffic nod.

As well, you can read the thread on the dkms-devel mailing list which spurred these additions.

Just got home from the Wesley Clark Meetup at Opal Devine's on 6th Street. While the gist of the meeting was organizational, the whole thing was pretty fascinating. There were roughly 75 people crammed onto the deck, and this all for a candidate that has yet to announce that he is indeed running. Ages ranged across the board from 20 - 70 and not only were there at least a handful of people that switched over from the Dean Meetup, a couple people actually raised their hands as Republicans.

The word at the Meetup was that Clark was going to announce between September 15th and September 19th. As more proof that his entrance is imminent, this statement was released by Clark today to his volunteers thanking them for coming to their last "draft" Clark meetup.

So now I'm pumped to move onto the elect meetup. While Texas is a shoe-in for Bush in the national election, Clark still needs to win the democrat nomination first -- and Texas has some 243 primary votes to decide who that democrat will be. Personally, I'd prefer they go to Clark instead of Dean.

DKMS 0.34.10 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* Added the dkms_autoinstaller service (/etc/rc.d/init.d/dkms_autoinstaller). Its purpose is to automatically install modules during bootup onto kernels which do not already have that module installed for it. It only does the install, though, if AUTOINSTALL="yes" is set in that module's dkms.conf. If multiple versions of the same module exist in DKMS, the autoinstaller does not install that module and warns appropriately.

* Added the AUTOINSTALL="yes" option available in dkms.conf. See above.

* Added the --no-prepare-kernel and --no-clean-kernel cli options. These were needed to create the autoinstaller service but might be applicable in other areas. --no-prepare-kernel skips any kernel preparation before building a module whereas --no-clean-kernel does not clean the kernel after building a module.

Wesley Clark today announced on CNN that if he runs for president, it will be as a democrat. This makes me wonder whether he really will run or whether he is just posturing for the VP slot. Why not just announce already?

My article on DKMS is now web-accessible to the public. You can read it here.