Planet Linux-to-go

Koen Kooi: Lights

koen — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:37:33 +0000

Trying to add some lights into my lego buildings.

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: What does rhyme on eek?

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:43:03 +0000

There is one thing I wanted to do for almost a year. Ever since noha started with toying with seaside I wanted to bring squeak into OpenEmbedded and last week I finally started with compiling the vm. Surprisingly it was more difficult than I thought it was and the result is not as pretty as I would like but the result is this:

The recipe is inside org.openmoko.dev, I have some packages,sources and diff on my people account.

Philip Van Hoof: Comparing mobile development to the music industry

pvanhoof — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:28:09 +0000

I believe it’s important for mobile platforms to specialize on what is important for mobile and embedded. This includes dealing with high latency networks, low amounts of disk space, high I/O costs, slow memory bandwidth. The development tools are often either far more or far less integrated.

There is a lot of overlap with desktop software development. If companies who make mobile technology want to build a developer ecosystem, like the web and the desktop already have, then my advice would be to start integrating with these overlapping areas. This is indeed more expensive and more difficult than doing your own thing. In the long run, this is how you make an ecosystem for mobile software development.

After youtube’s madness, I wouldn’t ever underestimate the creativity of the kids anymore. After wikipedia, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, Webkit and Firefox as browser components, I wouldn’t ever underestimate the energy of volunteer experts anymore.

The music industry usually only allows big corporations to hook-in their music selling. Why aren’t they investing in conferences where they invite both the industry players and the developers who are making tomorrow’s music players? What if they’d involve them in specifying a standardized protocol for buying music? Right now the music industry is making it harder for its customers to buy music than it is to copy and steal music. Right now people who want to buy music are required to own a desktop. How silly is that? With a standardized protocol you’d see mobile software developers writing mobile music players that’ll also be clients communicating over 3G, UMTS or GPRS.

At the Boston GNOME summit I’m meeting Gabriel and Aaron who both developed Banshee. We will discuss a standardized cache for album art and a DBus interface to implement an album art downloader. As a Nokia contractor I will implement this specification on the Maemo platform. This way, all music players that will be made for both desktops and mobile platforms can share the same album art, use the same DBus interface to request album art, and share album art downloaders.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: How much RAM/HDD is enough?

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:51:51 +0000

During recent discussions we got into common developer problem — there is no such thing as enough disk space… Later it also expanded to RAM size.

My current desktop machine has 4GiB of memory and two hard disks with 820GB (763GiB real) of total capacity. And I have only 90GiB of free space on them. So what took most of space? Usual suspects: Poky and OpenEmbedded builds (du -hs took one hour with “160GiB used” result).

Which get us back to the subject — how much disk space is enough today for development? It depends on area — some people will be fine with less then 100GB, some not. Laptop which I will soon send back to Intel has only 80GB hdd and this is really not enough for me for Poky development (if it has to be the only machine). I know that few persons started to look for 320GB (or larger) disks for their laptops ;D

OK, with “rm_work” class I was able to do Poky builds with few gigabytes of free space. But small hard drive forced me to forget about using VirtualBox for testing in other distributions then Debian ’sid’ (which I use on all machines). Currently ~/.Virtualbox on my desktop uses about 70GiB as I have there Fedora 8, Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and few other distributions which I use for testing does Poky works under them.

Other thing is doing strange builds… In past I did lot of them — record one took 270GiB of space (and two weeks of building). And I do not like to be space limited when doing them (”rm_work” is not always good way). I still plan to make such big ones from time to time as they allow to check does everything works (and also show new bugs to fix).

But how much RAM is enough? My previous desktop had 2.1GiB RAM, laptop which I use for x86 builds has only 1GiB. Current desktop has 4GiB of DDR2 (low price made it affordable) and for OpenEmbedded or Poky builds it is more then enough (as no one use BitBake from times when 512MiB ram was not enough to just parse metadata). My machine usually maxx at 2.5-3GiB of used memory during heavy builds. When it will be not enough… I still have 2 slots for RAM free :)

How it is for other people?

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Holger 'zecke' Freyther: License eek!

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:50:51 +0000

So we do have our location/diversity/splinter mapping application. Some of the maps (all?) we provide use data coming from OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic (CC-by-SA). And it was highlighted that we most likely fail on the attribution part. I hope we will resolve this issue soon but it is not really clear how one should properly attribute the OpenStreetMap Project and or its individual contributors.

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: Flying back to Taipei

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:46:31 +0000

Yesterday I spend most my day with watching videos that featured Alan Kay. These included videos about Squeak, Seaside, Croquet, demos of old (1977!) 3d, fully anti-aliased, zooming interfaces of the MIT. This was concluded with reading about self and PEP. When watching these kind of things I wonder why the computing world as it is today and why all these things have not made it into mainstream computing yet.

I will soon enter a train to Frankfurt, will arrive early at the airport, board an airplane and will be back in Taipei for a couple of days. Anyone interested in talking about WebKit, Smalltalk or other things please go ahead and give me a call.

Philip Van Hoof: Thumbnailer specification and prototype

pvanhoof — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:07:40 +0000

Why do we need thumbnailing to be a service?

For user interface applications it makes relatively few sense to run the task of creating a thumbnail in the same context as the mainloop that draws the user interface. On the other hand if each desktop application starts creating either processes or worker threads that will be armed with thumbnailing code, then we will have a lot of threads and processes all running the same code;

Most applications link with a user interface toolkit that will happily deal with the vast majority of pixbuf shaped formats. That doesn’t mean that these toolkits will equally enjoy dealing with PDF, Office and video formats. There’s a lot of code involved here and we should try to avoid requiring everybody to load these complex pieces of code into their processes. I can give a few purely technical reasons like not heaving to map-in code that is not relevant for the application, reducing VmSize (although, admittedly, only things like VmRSS are really important). There are also a few political reasons, like patented formats. In the end I’ll just say it the way it is: it’s a bad architecture;

Application developers are really not very interested in developing LIFO queues and worker threads or processes that will handle the task of creating thumbnails;

Finally, application developers are asking for this (for example F-Spot). Creating thumbnails is not at all an exclusive task for the filemanager.

My proposal

Based on those conclusions I decided to write a DBus specification. I also reimplemented Maemo’s Hildon Thumbnail to be conform this specification. This work has been merged with the TRUNK of the project and will be used on Maemo’s Fremantle release.

While rewriting Hildon Thumbnail I decided to make sure that the software compiles and runs on any normal desktop. This way the software can serve as a proof of concept and working prototype for the DBus specification. Special care was taken to make sure it feels as desktop neutral as possible.

I opened a bug to officially request a freedesktop.org project for this specification. I hope this organization will offer a platform for further development of this DBus specification. Hildon Thumbnailer can serve as a prototype and will be adapted whenever the specification improves.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Links for 2008-09-23 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Wózki dziecięce
Forum na gazeta.pl

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Maemo in QEMU N8×0 emulation presentation

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:44:14 +0000

Today is second day of Maemo Summit 2008. I had the presentation about running Maemo in QEMU’s N8×0 emulation.

From what people told me after it was made fine. I think that this is good as this was my first presentation in English :)

All materials are of course available to download:

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer: St.Augstin, Braunschweig, Berlin, Taipei

mickey — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:45:49 +0000

Although trying (really!) to cut down travelling, it’s still a lot. Here’s a sweeping swipe of what happened during the past couple of months and what’s going to happen soon.

Froscon

FrOSCon took place at its usual place on the last weekend in August and it was a very well organized conference — even better and more streamlined than the previous year was. I had the pleasure to listen to the Minix3 talk from Prof. Tanenbaum, which was very entertaining. Unfortunately my Openmoko talk was right after his one, so I had to take people kind of down to earth

Since I was feeling pretty weak at this weekend I could only attend the first day. Looking forward to next year’s session.

Braunschweig

Been travelling from Frankfurt to Braunschweig (to work with the Openmoko students on the framework) for a couple of times and I have started to actually use my Openmoko FreeRunner as a GPRS-forwarding device for my laptop. Using the freesmartphone.org framework it’s a breeze to do that. I just have to issue the dbus command ActivateContext(”internet.eplus.de”, “”, “”) and wait until the context goes online. Then I use iptables to enable NAT and forwarding for the laptop on the FreeRunner and it’s done.

GPRS is very solid on the FreeRunner — it works for hours without any disconnections or other interruptions. If the data connection is not 100% loaded you even get incoming call signalling and can take phone calls in between

Framework

Talking about the Openmoko / freesmartphone.org framework… we had a successful milestone3 release of it, debuting PDU-mode for SMS and phonebook data as well as lots of bugfixes over the place. We also have some nice reference docs now — i’m still working on introductionary type docs.

Unfortunately despite me trying to educate, lots of people still don’t get the point of the framework releases — I get frequent comments on the testing UI zhone, but rarely anyone is actually contributing to the dbus API specification and implementation discussion I seriously ponder whether to release console images in the future to make this 100% clear. I say it again: FSO is not about user interfaces, it’s about a strong independent dbus service level framework to facilitate 3rd party development.

That said, there are four important contributions in the freesmartphone.org world: pkg-fso, fso-gpsd, frameworkd-glib, downloads.freesmartphone.org:

pkg-fso is a team coordinating the packaging of any software from the FSO initiative (and, widely, any software related to Openmoko).
fso-gspd is a program offering a compatibility layer for the org.freedesktop.gypsy implementation of ogpsd. There are a lot of programs using the gpsd interface and with this compatibility layer, those programs will still work, but benefit from the improved accuracy of the UBX-based ogpsd.
frameworkd-glib is a C library offering bindings to the freesmartphone.org framework APIs. Handling modern dbus APIs can be cumbersome in C (think a{sv} and friends), so this library offers you convenience functions for that.
We now have official feeds hosted by a machine living in the same rack that serves kernel.org. Thanks to our friends at NSLU2-Linux.org and OSUOSL.org.

All software goodies live in our git repository.

Mobile Developer Days ‘08

Last week I had the honor to give an invited talk about OpenEmbedded and Qt-integration into OE for the Mobile Developer Days 08 conference in Berlin. This conference is pretty unique in that it adopts a platform-agnostic approach, i.e. you will find people working on Symbian, Qt, PalmOS, Windows Mobile there. I even spotted iPhone folks. In my opinion, such a holistic approach is important for the future of development on mobile devices. Congrats, folks.

Speaking about the iPhone… true readers of this column may remember that I have been a MacOS user since early this year. To add up on this, lately I acquired an iPhone to gain some experience with this exciting new development platform. I have just been looking into what this system provides. I can already say that there’s a whole lot of stuff where FOSS can learn and I’m glad to be a part of both worlds, so I can try to be a catalysator.

Taipei ‘08

On Sunday I’m going to fly over to Taipei. It’s been a while (12 months to be exact) since I met the folks in person there and there’s lots of stuff to catch up on. Now that the framework approaches its 0.9 release at the end of the year, we need to discuss the plan for the next 6 months. Can’t wait to meet all the engineers again! It’s going to be three interesting weeks. Stay tuned

Philip Van Hoof: They say the grass is greener on the other side,

pvanhoof — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:22:25 +0000

… but maybe it’s the sheep who have been telling me lies

ps. Marked as ‘extremely condescending’, since it is condescending for the sheep on the other side.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Upgraded home network

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:48:46 +0000

Today I unpacked new Ethernet switch — D-Link DSG-1008D “green” edition. It has 8 GbE ports so I hooked my devices:

Linksys WRT54GS
desktop with on-board Realtek 8111/8168 card
Lenovo T61 with Intel 82566M card
Dell D400 with Broadcom BCM5705M card

In theory only router is 100Mbps — rest are 1GbE devices. But not quite… I am unable to get Intel adapter (which use “e1000e” driver) to switch to full speed — it use only 100Mbps speed. Tried ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000 but it refuses :(

What was a reason? Wrong cable… I tested all my Ethernet cables and it looks like I am out of real cat5e cables… This will have to wait then until I will end organizing my workplace as there will be rewiring of everything done.

And the Lenovo T61 working on 100Mbps only is not a problem as this machine soon goes back to it’s owner.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Links for 2008-09-15 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0000

How to share a scanner on your network
Instructions about how to share scanner connected to Linux host with other Linux/Windows machines.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Dissapearing comments

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:05:48 +0000

As some of you probably noticed from time to time comment which you enter is not visible on site. This does not always mean that it got into moderation queue — sometimes it is somewhere but I do not have idea where and why.

Maybe it is because of software setup which I use: WordPress MultiUser + SpamKarma, maybe it has other reason. This does not change a fact that sometimes some comments just do not land.

And the funny part is that I am getting e-mails with those comments contents without problems…

Philip Van Hoof: Moral indulgence

pvanhoof — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:20:11 +0000

In the last few days people seemingly implying a descent from superiority of moral highground to me, have called upon me (in private conversations) to decide for my readers if the content that I write is morally acceptable for planet.gnome.org. Their reasoning is that I should feel an implied responsibility for the content of that website.

If I don’t take the responsibility that readers have themselves already, I’m to be considered a coward. That’s because, according to these people, I avoid the moral responsibility to uphold an imaginary highground reputation of the organization behind said website.

It needs no illustration that this is just the opinion of a group within the GNOME community. Not the entire community. Nonetheless this seemingly moral superiority is not to be mistaken with a condescending circus show.

The moral of respect for other opinions is a meme that for the last decades (and I hope in future too) has been a very successful one. I consider this meme to be the most important one humanity ever got convinced of.

Moral superiors do not need to present empirical proof of correctness in their Sophia. The truth of their moral values are unquestionable.

Let’s assume this to be the case: it’s immoral to only assume that your readers will make up their own minds about ideas that appear on websites like planet.gnome.org. Instead, it’s a necessity that each and every author of a blog, from which planet.gnome.org pulls content, is required to have a “responsibility of content”.

I conclude that it isn’t necessary that the audience of that website gets an honest illustration of who we are: human beings who are sometimes geniuses and sometimes idiots.

Instead it’s necessary that we are portrayed as good role models. Concepts such as good and bad are of course defined by the superiors. Those concepts are unquestionable.

Let me be clear that I disagree with this.

I questioned whether only intent can either be good or bad, but that question was refuted as irrelevant. For it’s the beholder who matters. Not the producer.

The reason for this irrelevance being that an audience doesn’t take the responsibility of trying to understand intent. I disagree with this conclusion. I think the audience does understand intent.

I have decided to tag my future posts as “condescending” in case I feel the content might be interpreted as showing superiority. Don’t be surprised if the majority of posts will be tagged as such.

The freedom to choose is morally more important to me than the necessity to mark responsible content. Therefore I ask my audience, and planet maintainers, to decide for themselves.

Koen Kooi: Beagleboard at IBC2008

koen — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:40:58 +0000

I'm at IBC this weekend, please drop by to see all the cool TI demos :)

Rodrigo 'vivijim' Vivi: Mamona Release 0.2

rodrigo — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:43:44 +0000

It has passed a while since my last post here, but nothing better than great news to get back to write.

I’m so proud to announce the Mamona 0.2 release.

The entire team has been doing a great job spending efforts to make it usable and stable, providing new installer scripts and new packages; supporting new machines; writing a better documentation and many other features.

Please, read the complete feature list at Mamona 0.2 Release Notes.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Two years of HaeRWu

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:10:20 +0000

Two years passed since I started HaeRWu company.

First it was just for being able to provide invoices for companies which needed help with OpenEmbedded. Later it helped me to co-operate with OpenedHand without paying big taxes. What future will bring… will see.

Philip Van Hoof: Pro-vagina voting!

pvanhoof — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:01:22 +0000

The shift of female voters going from Obama to McCain once Palin got appointed as running mate for McCain basically shows that the pro-vaginas voters in the United States want a vagina in power.

Do these voters also care about having people in power who actually know something about foreign policy? I mean, a lipstick pitbull? Seriously … what the fuck? The more I find about this person, the more her no-knowledge about politics makes me cry. This is clearly a “election” running mate: a running mate to steal as much as possible pro-vagina voters away from Obama. Not a “real” running mate.

The sex organs of an individual, and if you are a real feminist you’ll even agree with this, shouldn’t matter when voting for a president and his/her running mate. No matter how pissed you are about Obama having less female-looking sex organs than Hillary.

This is just ridiculous.

Unlike the vast majority of the Hollywood movies doesn’t the real world guarantee a happy ending. I hope McCain realizes this, now that he decided to turn this election into a Soap like Beverly Hills 90210.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Finally moved

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:47:19 +0000

During last weekend we finally moved from Poznań to Szczecin. New flat, new internet connection (10Mbps in, 1Mbps out instead of 3M/0.5M)…

Still lot of boxes to unpack, furniture to buy, paperwork to do but we are here and have much more space to live then we had before :)

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: Happy

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:52:46 +0000

Our Taipei developers work hard, apply patches, create patches, triage bugs.

Our developer/customer base starts scratching itches and provide their fixes.

Things move forward.

Koen Kooi: Quake1 running on AVR32

koen — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:35:27 +0000

After all that boring gdb stuff something more fun was needed:

If you don't see a video above: click here

Philip Van Hoof: Here’s a meme: org.freedesktop.Thumbnailer

pvanhoof — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:25:39 +0000

People who know me probably saw this blog item coming. Here it is!

In Tracker we want to ahead of time create thumbnails for interesting files. Among the use cases is when the user has moved or copied photos from his camera into one of the photo folders. We want to start preparing thumbnails for those files early so that filemanagers and photo applications are fast when needed.

The current infrastructure for this in Tracker is to launch a script for each file that is to be thumbnailed. If you find a lot such files (some people end up with a camera with 1,000ths of photos after a busy weekend), that would mean that we’d do this 1,000 times:

fork();
execv(tracker-thumbnailer);
fork();
execv(bash);
fork();
execv(convert);

Luckily this is not activated by default in current Tracker. :-)

I don’t have to explain most people who read this blog that this is a bad idea on a modest ARM device with a bit more than one hundred MB of RAM. A better idea would be to have a service that queues these requests and that solves the requests with specialized image libraries. Perhaps launching a separate binary for the MIME types that the service has no libraries for?

At first we were planning to make tracker-thumbnailer listen on stdin in a loop. Then I figured: why not do this over DBus instead? Pretty soon after that was Ivan Frade concluding that if we’d do that, other applications on the device could be interested in consuming that service too. We decided that perhaps we should talk with the right people in the two large desktop communities about the idea of specifying a DBus specification for remotely managing the thumbnail cache as specified by the Thumbnail managing standard by Jens Finke and Olivier Sessink.

I don’t know of a official procedure other than filing a bug on freedesktop.org, so at first I tried to get in touch with people like David Faure (KDE), Christian Kellner (Nautilus), Rob Taylor (DBus, Telepathy, Wizbit) and later also a few mass discussions on #kde-devel, #nautilus and #gnome-hackers.

I started a discussion on xdg-list which made me conclude that such a DBus API would indeed make sense for a lot of people. Discussions with individuals on IRC added to that feeling. I started a draft of a first specification for a DBus API.

Meanwhile I had already started adapting the hildon-thumbnail code to become more service-like. Right now that code has a DBus daemon that implements the draft DBus API and on top of that provides the possibility to have dynamically loadable plugins. The specification also allows registering thumbnailers per MIME type. For that reason I made it possible to run those dynamically loadable plugins both standalone and in-process of the generic thumbnailer.

It has been my prototype for testing the DBus API specification that I was writing. People told me that if you want to make a specification that’ll get accepted, the best way is to write a prototype too. Meanwhile Rob Taylor had joined me on fine tuning the specification itself. With his DBus experience he helped me a lot in multiple areas. Thanks for caring, Rob!

The current prototype does not yet make it possible to simply drop-in a thumbnailer binary to add support for a new MIME type. By making a standalone thumbnailer that for being a thumbnailer simply launches external thumbnailers you could of course add that possibility that a lot of current thumbnail-infrastructure has. Although as mentioned above I don’t think this is a good architecture (the fork() + execv() troubles), I plan to make such a standalone plug-in thumbnailer.

I certainly hope that this specification will be approved by the community. I can help with making patches for Konqueror and Nautilus. We’ll most likely use this on the Maemo platform for thumbnailing ourselves.

Koen Kooi: Using gdbserver

koen — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:42:09 +0000

This weekend I encountered a situation where I didn't have access to gdb on the target, but could use gdbserver. Setting it up was fairly easy.

Target:

root@at32stk1000:~# opkg install gdbserver
Installing gdbserver (6.7.1-r0) to root...
Downloading http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/2008/ipk/uclibc/avr32/base/gd...
Configuring gdbserver
root@at32stk1000:~# gdbserver dominion:5000 /usr/bin/fb-gnash   
Process /usr/bin/fb-gnash created; pid = 1236
Listening on port 5000

Host:

koen@dominion:/data/at32stk1002$ export PATH=${PATH}:/OE/angstrom-tmp/cross/bin/
koen@dominion:/data/at32stk1002$ avr32-angstrom-linux-uclibc-gdb usr/bin/fb-gnash 
GNU gdb 6.7.1.atmel.1.0.3
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "--host=x86_64-linux --target=avr32-angstrom-linux-uclibc"...
(no debugging symbols found)
(gdb) target remote 172.20.2.253:5000
Remote debugging using 172.20.2.253:5000
(no debugging symbols found)
0x2aaab884 in _start () at ldso/ldso/avr32/elfinterp.c:191
191	}
(gdb) bt
#0  0x2aaab884 in _start () at ldso/ldso/avr32/elfinterp.c:191
#1  0x00000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) list
186					     unsigned long rel_addr,
187					     unsigned long rel_size)
188	{
189		return _dl_parse(rpnt->dyn, rpnt->dyn->symbol_scope, rel_addr, rel_size,
190				 _dl_do_reloc);
191	}
(gdb)

Usefull other gdb commands include:

set solib-absolute-prefix /nonexistingdir
set solib-search-path /OE/angstrom-tmp/cross/avr32-angstrom-linux-uclibc:/OE/angstrom-tmp/staging/avr32-angstrom-linux-uclibc
symbol-file /data/at32stk1002/usr/bin/.debug/fb-gnash

Happy debugging!

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: Pushing things forward

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:58:43 +0000

There is one thing of Tiny SVG1.2 that I really like. It is the possibility to embed audio and video. For video you can do transformations, filters and the usual stuff of SVG. TinySVG1.2 is popping up in more specs and recently I began to read DIMS again and well and thanks to the support of GMIT I had a go at it.

This shows parts of the TinySVG spec and the video was replaced with Code Rush. It is dog slow and needs some refactoring to SVGSMILElement and parts of the SVG RenderObjects to be merge able. The code should popup in my holger/dims branch soon.

Hacking on the WebKit codebase is so much fun that I seriously wonder if I want more of that...

Philip Van Hoof: New music by Karoliina

pvanhoof — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:42:57 +0000

Karoliina just E-mailed me to tell me that she just finished her new song.

This one sounds more like Vangelis than I have ever done before. It combines some symphonic elements (some (sampled) instruments from symphonic orchestra were used) with synthetic sounds.

– Karoliina Salminen

The song

A video with the song as background showing the cathedral in Mechelen (filmed by Karoliina and Kate during Akademy)

I like it!

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Back from holidays

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:36:46 +0000

We spent previous two weeks on so called holidays. Why “so called”?

They were quite exhausting two weeks — first two days trip from Poznań to my parents which live in Olecko. We did a break in Grudziądz — I recommend “City” hotel if someone will go there.

On Tuesday I had crazy trip to London, UK… First train, then train, then 3rd train… Lunch in “Złote tarasy” shopping centre and then public bus to Warsaw “Okęcie” airport. Few hours later landed on Luton airport and finally after 13h trip I was at hotel. But that trip was worth it — we were informed that there is no OpenedHand anymore, we “are” Intel now (”" because we needs to sign papers etc).

Two days later even more crazy trip back… This time from Heathrow airport to Warsaw and then night public bus to Olecko (I got sitting place after 4h of standing). Nothing strange that I was zombie on my brother’s wedding which took place on same day when I got back…

But finally I was able to make use of free time — walking though Olecko is good thing. There are many green places, no big traffic etc. Great place for holidays. And there are many lakes around… This year (as we do each year) we also walked around “Olecko Duże” lake — this takes few hours as whole path is over 12 km long but it is worth doing.

In meantime we made short trip to Vilnius, Lithuania where we visited some interesting places and on back trip enjoyed visiting Trakai castle.

It was maybe a bit exhausting some times but overall I enjoyed that time.

Florian Boor: IDE with emulator

Florian — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:54:07 +0000

Knowing several SDKs for mobile devices available in the market such as OpenMoko Freerunner, Nokia N810 and several other I decided to take a look at the new MOTODEV Studio for Linux by Motorola. They published the preview release 0.3 a short time ago. Its quite appealing to write applications for all the MOTOMAGX devies out there. But it turned out that it is not really easy and the fun seems to be limited even if the MOTODEV Studio itself looks and feels quite nice.

The MOTODEV Studio preview comes as a 381MB zip archive which contains install instructions (PDF) and an executable binary installer. Even if the website says that it requires RHEL4 it installed without trouble on my Ubunty 8.04 after switching from GCJ to a SUN JRE. It requires ~900MB of disk space (no 3GB like the website says). There is an installer for Windows as well, but trying this is a job for someone else ;-)

The Eclipse (they use 4.0.3) IDE’s developer perspective looks pretty good and is easy to use even for developers who are not used to Eclipse at all. Only the fact that it needs a big screen to become useful is a problem for the users of many laptop computers which do not offer a screen higher than ~800 pixels. Resolutions below 1280×1024 result in a very small editor window.

Developer Perspective

Note the documetation browser at the right side of the window. There is a lot of documentation included already and integrated into the Eclipse help mechanism.

The VMware set-up and creating a configuration for the device emulator is rather trivial with the step-by-step instructions. Make sure to have VMware player 2.0.4 installed - the website still has 2.0.3 as a requirement which did not work for me.

The device emulator starts a VMware instance booting into a Linux system. Once the emulator is running it opens a tab in the IDE with a virtual device. It somewhat reminds me to Xoo :-)

IDE with emulator

With a set of example applications included it is very easy to get an application started. Creating a new project you are offered five application skeletons to choose from which includes a GUI application that shows how to use the contact database API.

So far the whole SDK looks really promising and much more convenient for Linux developers than the Series60 SDKs. But currently there are some bad limitations:

No integration of real devices yet - no binaries for a real handset and no debugging on a device.
They say that current MOTOMAGX devices won’t be supported by the native SDK and support will be limited to the next generation of devices.
Even if Motorola call MOTOMAGX an ‘open’ platform its openness is very limited and does not really compare with an open platform open source developers would like to see. Environmets like OpenMoko or Maemo offer a way higher degree of freedom.
The developer community and therefore the number of applications available is quite likely to be small in near future - compared to established platforms at least.
Some strange limitations in the IDE like the fact that source files are only usable if they have the extension ‘.cpp’ might make it quite hard to port existing software.

All in all its a big step into the right direction, but there is atill a hell of a lot of work to do. I guess it would be a nice idea for some MOTODEV Studio developers to have a chat with us Maemo people at OSiM next month.

Have a nice time…

Cliff 'cbrake' Brake: more fun with git branches

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:06:24 +0000

One thing you learn after using git for awhile is you get used to trying random things, and it will often just work. For example, if I want to know the differences between Linus's kernel tree, and the Wolfson dev branch for a particular directory:cbrake@happy:/build/linux-2.6$ git diff --stat origin/master..wolfson/dev sound/soc/codecs sound/soc/codecs/Kconfig | 125 +++ sound/soc/codecs/Makefile | 34 + sound/soc/codecs/ad1939.c | 690 +++++++++++++++ sound/soc/codecs/ad1939.h | 70 ++ sound/soc/codecs/ad1980.c | 309 +++++++ sound/soc/codecs/ad1980.h | 23 + sound/soc/codecs/cs4251x.c | 771 +++++++++++++++++Another way to get similar information is:git log origin/master..wolfson/dev sound/soc/codecs If I'm working on a topic branch, and I want to see a summary of all the changes in my Topic branch:git log --stat origin/master..origin/my_topic_branch > my_topic_branch_changelog.txtOne of the neat things about git branches is you don't have to be on a branch to interact with it. You can diff, log, and checkout from branches other than the one you are currently in, and it is all very fast. For instance, if I want to grab the latest copy of a file in the Wolfson dev branch, I can do something like:git log checkout wolfson/dev sound/soc/codecs/wm9713.cNot that this is a very good idea, but just to illustrate a point. Git branches are amazing and make development work so much less tedious.

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: Acid3, make QtWebKit catch up

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:27:14 +0000

The Mac, Windows and Gtk+ port get 100/100 and pixel perfection for the acid3 test for quite a while but the Qt port was stuck somewhere else. How can this happen? For QtWebKit we decided to use as much of Qt as possible. So instead of relying on ICU we used the Qt Unicode support, instead of relying on libxml2 we used the QXmlStreamReader, instead of doing font matching and font/glyph caching we solely rely on QFont and QTextLayout to do the job. One had to apply some minor fixes to the Qt version of classes such as XMLTokenizer or TextCodec, or integrate SVGFonts into the Qt port as well...

What is next? We will have to get the rendering to be pixel perfect as well and then can merge the changes chunk by chunk. I'm going to sleep now, enjoy the screenshot.

Koen Kooi: Rainbows

koen — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 10:08:13 +0000

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: Driving a car to Eindhoven

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:43:33 +0000

What an exhausting day. It started nicely with watching "A hitchhiker guide to galaxy" and finally "Brazil" (I wonder how the two Central Services employees map to our admins and if they will have the same faith...). Then a short nap was taken, some breakfast and the journey began.

The mission was to drive a 1984 mexico beetle, with none working flash lights and probably non charging battery, from Berlin to Eindhoven. Surprisingly nothing went wrong with the car, the engine started after each stop, due the heavy rain we managed to miss an exit and took a roundtrip over Arnhem. It was a pleasant drive and it is fun to drive old cars... now back to hacking.

Cliff 'cbrake' Brake: Linux Input Testing and Debugging

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:55:53 +0000

The Linux input layer has made a lot of progress in recent years. When writing a new input driver (such as keyboard, trackball, etc), it is useful to be able to monitor input events using a test application. This article describes two ways to accomplish this using kernel input debugging, and the evtest utility.

Koen Kooi: The Crashed Carrot

koen — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:33:52 +0000

This carrotrocket used to be upright at the entrance of the festival which made it a great meetingpoint. This year it finally took off, but crashed into the backstage area ;)

Philip Van Hoof: Russia

pvanhoof — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:13:44 +0000

My naive opinion on the current strategy for dealing with Russia

Maybe Cold War organizations like NATO don’t see it, as their people are indoctrinated by the need for a unified strategy against a common enemy (keep Russia out, Germany down and the United States in).

But the world has changed since 1989.

Whenever the Soviet Union was stubborn, it was also predictable. Today’s Russia is not predictable. It is and has been pushing its real goals in a rather subtle way (even if you think the Georgian crisis was not subtle, the real Russian goal is). You can no longer just contain Russia. Neither can you easily engage with them. You need to ‘negotiate’ your relationship with it.

By kicking Russia out of treaties and organizations, all you will achieve is that Russia will start doing business with individual European countries rather than with the European Union. Which means different market rules will play. Less control over mutual interests in Europe: more competition among the individual European countries over Russia’s resources and market, sharper differences between Western -and Eastern Europe.

In the long run the result of that will be a split of Europe into Western -and Eastern Europe. This would be followed by a decline of Western power over Eastern European countries. Strategically seen, this would be a perfect outcome for Russia. A dream come true, for them.

Without the wealthy Western Europe, both the economy and industry of many of Eastern Europe’s countries are still underdeveloped and not yet ready to compete, on their own, against three major economic powers. As a result would Eastern Europe become yet another unstable region in the World.

Russia conducting the Orchestra of opposition politics in those countries, and Russian media influence, will for many sound like an answer to their dissatisfactions.

I think it’s for that reason that keeping Eastern Europe within the group called “Europe”, is something you want to strive for. A split with Western Europe would inevitably mean major influence from Russia in these Eastern European countries and regions.

It’s in fact already taking place here and there. If you take off your by propaganda blinded glasses and go look for the facts, you’ll see.

My own naive proposal

Russia’s regime is doomed the moment the Russian elite looses its European legitimacy. Russia’s future wealth depends on Europe’s willingness to continue doing business with them. This business must be in both directions. Just selling gas yet remaining isolated from the World markets means that for example your currency can easily be devaluated outside of your borders. Meaning that you are selling your resources too cheap or that the actual price that you got for it depends on the politics of other nations (like petrodollars). Replace currency with any other valuable resource located within your own borders.

The Russian elite who keep people like Vladimir Putin in power are the same people who are doing business selling Russian gas to Europe. If we want a peaceful world, we can seize the opportunity of doing business with these Russian elites to convince them of at least certain of European’s values. Values like free markets. Especially as we integrate our European businesses into Russia and especially if Russian elites start seeing the benefits of that (wealth), will European values further influence Russian politics.

If we kick them out of our organizations, they’ll just continue doing business with individual European countries. Making it harder to keep Europe united. They very well know that Europe needs energy. They know individual European countries will continue buying gas from Russia.

It would be insane because if we don’t, China will. And then China instead will get a strategic partnership with Russia. Pushing their values and culture. Rising new economies are the circumstances of today. Containment is not an answer to changed circumstances.

Europeans want a multipolar World, right? This is the opportunity to have Russia, China, United States and Europe as different economic powers (I simplified it, I of course know there are more economic centers).

My naive conclusion

A new kind of World is coming towards us. Although the history book on the shelve is always repeating itself, all we can do is learn from the past.

Learning however, is not the same as maintaining a strategy designed for completely different past circumstances. We are called humans because unlike many other species we can intelligently adapt ourselves. Let’s consume that capability.

In order to succeed as a people, as a nation and as a culture you have to synchronize your strategy with today’s circumstances.

It’s our time and our generation, to cope with them.

Philip Van Hoof: Opensource at work!

pvanhoof — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:06:56 +0000

From one of my Summer Of Code students:

Wow, I just got an email from a guy (maybe an Amorak dev?) who’s taken all the parts that I need from Marsyas and re-written them into a lightweight C library I’m really excited to try it out, he says it’s about 5 times faster

– Charlotte Curtis (I’m not going to make the mistake of not mentioning who I’m quoting again)

That’s awesome. Thanks for taking the code of our Summer Of Code students and doing something interesting with it!

Philip Van Hoof: An alien, a legal alien in my room

pvanhoof — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:15:53 +0000

Englishman in New York by Sting was playing in my music player. And as Tinne decided to surprise visit me while I’m working on my Nokia projects, I was thinking …

The lyrics go like “I don’t drink coffee I take tea my dear”, right?

For my Tinne it goes like:

“I don’t drink coffee I take Tequila my dear, I’m a Belgian in Oud-Turnhout”.

Philip Van Hoof: Indoctrinating defenseless people with .. music

pvanhoof — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:02:59 +0000

To make sure I indoctrinate the defenseless Qt and KDE people with my extraordinary ideas for Maemo and GMAE/GNOME related things (like Vala, GObject-Introspection, Tracker, Xesam, Desktop/tablet search, Tinymail, Modest, IMAP + Lemonade and E-mail in general a.k.a. things that interest me) I decided to show up in Mechelen (well, actually Sint-Katelijne Waver) where the guys organizing Akademy had picked a nice and peaceful spot in my warm and fuzzy country to do KDE’s yearly conference.

Always nice to see Nokia doing the same thing at conferences! I decided to have a few chats with the Akonadi guys, watched a few presentations like the one about Decibel (they are using Telepathy! Awesome!). And then I met Kate and Karollina again. Nokians!

Among the things I asked Karoliina was whether or not she was still making music. Guess what, she is! She told me she made this one for her cat and for Kate’s phone as a ring tone. It’s a quite relaxing song that ‘opens the mind in your brains’. I don’t know if that makes any sense in the English language, but nevertheless it’s what I came up with after the second time listening to it.

Anyway. Refreshing and opening my mind (and my airways) is exactly why I also go to saunas. I’m confident that this piece of audio will therefore be a perfect match with a nice sauna experience.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: What do I do for living

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:03:33 +0000

Recently my mother asked me what exactly I do for a living. As she is not type of computer person I had to create definition which would be easy to understand for normal people. And as from time to time people asks me same question here is what I told her.

When hardware vendor builds new hardware and want to sell it to end customers he cames to us to get help on software side. As my part is building whole systems rather then single applications I took her phone as example of device and told:

Your phone is able to do many things:

make, receive and reject calls
send/receive text/voice/video messages
make/show/send photos/videos
has addressbook
has calendar
has menu to choose functions etc…

Each part is handled by separate application and my job is to build them into something what hardware vendor can put on a device before shipping it to end customer.

She was happy with that explanation, even my wife told that it is nice summary of what I do for a living. Of course there are more things which I do at work, but how to tell that I am fixing badly written software or do some testing of new ways to build it…

Philip Van Hoof: Playing poker while the game is Chess

pvanhoof — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:36:11 +0000

Notwithstanding that (it smells like) the United State’s propaganda machine is trying hard to control our European media once more, let’s try to get as much information from both sides of the story this time.

I thought that since U.S. is supporting Georgia there would be some control over the situation in South Ossetia and that there would be a peaceful solution to the conflict. But what is happening there now it’s not just war, but war crimes. George Bush and [Georgian president] Mikhail Saakashvili should answer to the crimes that are being committed – the killing of innocent people, running over by tanks of children and women, throwing grenades into cellars where people are hiding,

– Joe Mestas. A United States citizen in the conflict zone, according to Russia Today [video footage].

As this conflict escalates both sides are as usual trying to politically involve the European Union. I think Europe should restrain from supporting Georgia as it clearly committed war crimes. I’m quite certain we will soon see hard proof of this coming from the Russians. Proof that will be ten times more accurate than an idiot like Colin Powell throwing away his career and credibility a few years ago.

The European population wont support supporting a war criminal. Hanging our European flag in your office while doing a speech on World Television, is ridiculous and didn’t convince serious people in Europe at all.

Militarily seen, it’s a not even a question: You can’t fight Russians a few kilometers from their own border. It would mean a military humiliation.

Europe is not a war continent anymore. If you want lasting peace with Europe, the only way is by doing business with us. Supplying us with what we need (which in case of Russia is energy in the form of gas), buying from us what you need (which in case of Russia are European investments in their country and culture).

What Europe can do about this conflict would be to decrease the amount of European investment in Russia. Just stopping the gas supplies from Russia would probably destroy Germany’s economy in a few months and would that way drastically weaken any kind of power Europe has. This is not the kind of stuff that we want (in Europe), and we are not naive enough (anymore) to be convinced that this is what should be done.

My conclusion is that the rest of the world better stops hoping that Europe will help a Georgian war criminal.

Although I know that I shouldn’t drag the U.S. in this conflict, I’m quite confident that behind the scenes it’s pretty obvious that this is Russia showing its newly gained might to the U.S.

The New World Order line that the Bush administration seems to have tried by falsely promising to support Georgia if Georgia would send troops to Iraq turned out to be a foolish one.Then again, we are getting used to foolish U.S. strategy with Cheney and Bush trying to play poker with the rest of the World.

As a result Russia has a moral ground to do what they are doing (in the end, they had a peacekeeping mandate over the region). The United States can only watch and suffer as Easter European countries will now have learned that all what Bush senior had build up as political trust, is now unveiled as pure U.S. rubbish.

That is likely going to be the end conclusion of the foreign policy of the administration that has ruled the U.S. for the last decade. That all the achievements of Bush senior will have been flushed through the toilet.

Russia is and will keep gaining power. China is and will keep growing its economy and energy consumption. Iran is and will keep gaining more power over the Middle East (the U.S.’s propaganda about their nuclear weapons programs is among the weakest I have ever received). Etcetera.

In a curious way a New World Order is forming indeed. Regretfully for the Neoconservatives they will most likely not play the role of World Leaders. At least not as a coherent group.

I blame their own incompetence for that.

Their “New World Order”-meme was both strategically and diplomatically supported by weak people. They played poker while the game on the table was Chess. And they lost.

The money they did win turned out to be printed by the Federal Reserve as it was needed. That inflated the Dollar and is increasing the gap between rich and poor in their own country. Meanwhile it enriched the super elite involved in the war machine while the sons of poorer patriotic families got sent to the battle ground.

The man in the streets in the United States is paying for all this.

I think this new conflict in Georgia wont be the last thing we’ll see as a result of the poker and Chess games of 200n.

ps. Planet.gnome picks the categories it wants to syndicate from my blog. I don’t send blog items to planet.gnome myself. Instead, planet.gnome picks them. I have a category specifically dedicated to technology. This item is specifically not categorized in a technical category. Don’t blame me for political content on planet.gnome.

Florian Boor: fl0rian

Florian — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:05:13 +0000

One of the most frequently asked questions at the OpenEmbedded booth at LinuxTag was about the devices supported by OE. In fact this is not the most interesting question people could ask because adding a new device description to OE is really easy. What you need is a basic idea about your hardware platform and the sources of a Linux kernel for your device. (Yes so far its Linux only, but I do not see a real reason not to build other operating systems with OE. What you have to do is to set some basic information about your device such as architecture, device features and a provider for your kernel (which is described in an extra bb file). An easy to read example how a device description can look like is h5000.conf (for the HP iPAQ h5000 series devices).

But for the people who want to take a look what is supported currently I have extracted (and edited) the description frome OEs machine configuration files. Since the OE web server including the wiki is down I published the list at LinuxToGo wiki.

Have a lot of fun…

Holger 'zecke' Freyther: Releasing Software to the wild

zecke (noreply@blogger.com) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:42:40 +0000

So what should one do on 08.08.08? Get married? Get divorced? Or the thousands of things in between? Openmoko picked this day to release the 2008.8 software update (code named A(pril|ugust)SU) and I will travel to Mechelen to catch up with some friends from foreign countries.

Let us take a small look at the release. Doing this in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Queen) style. But keep in mind Bad and Ugly are only there to be fixed, so this part is actually there to keep good engineers happy and focus on constantly improving by turning the Ugly into Good for the next release...

The Good
During the last six month I have added features and fixed bugs in our bootloader, kernel, xserver, enlightenment, distro and tried to punch the Qtopia parts we use into shape (Qtopia gave me so much wonderful real world examples for our Software Engineering class at the FU Berlin... *lovely*). So I'm really happy as all of these things I have created during that time are under Free Software licenses from day one! I'm also glad to have worked on all these different areas. It is fun to start in an application bug, go down to the kernel, hardware and back to user space.

Erin, Matt, Olv, Jeremy, John, Julian, Tick of Openmoko wrote code that is shipping in the Om2008.8. So this is the first release where our taiwanese friends at Openmoko started projects or contributed to projects that are used to power our hardware. John is an upstream OE contributor, Matt is our local kernel guy and Linux contributor, Tick is maintaining opkg (that o-hand.com helped to create) and is also maintaining the packagekit backend for opkg. We are slowly breeding Free Software contributors, explaining them the need of asbestos underwear. I'm totally excited as this is just the beginning.

We have started to focus on making our phone usable. This means we will integrate working solutions where they are available, we will improve them where possible, we will create new solutions were required. So we have picked connman and patched it, we have started FSO because there is nothing else.

We have worked towards the goal to make our hardware usable as primary phone. We have established our wonderful QA unit that systematically tests our software, PM and QA sit together and talk about the issues, the state, the way to go, sometimes the QA room is even crowded with engineers trying to pinpoint the issue. A wonderful improvement over what was there before.

Our kernel, u-boot, X is a lot more stable, suspend/resume can be almost trusted (well I know how to kill it...). We started to work on performance glamo waitstates, hardware ECC...

We have a support list and a workflow how to provide upgrades to our users

I use it as my primary phone and work hard for the day that my mom can use it just as she is using kubuntu today.

The Bad (keep in mind this can be changed and will be changed)
I had difficulties following the WebKit development and more difficulties reviewing and writing patches. So the next weeks I will wait for the ASU bugs to queue and focus on reviewing patches, SVG and acid3 for QtWebKit.

There are many reasons why not to use the Freerunner and our software update as primary phone. Our wifi driver has issues, our kernel has issues, Qtopia still has fundamental issues, our modem is giving us a hard time, the battery lifetime could be a lot better, the boot time is incredible long.

We should focus on delivering a good polished product. Currently the bootloader is initializing our graphic chip, the kernel resets, we see a white screen for awhile, init shows an init screen, black as X is starting, e is starting an init screen. So the bootloader, kernel, system level, X, WM guy need to sit together and make that smooth, no mode switching, sane handover...Software and Hardware people will have to work together, hand in hand. Stop thinking of boundaries, approach the people you depend on, also approach the people that depend on your work. Be a universal person and don't be afraid to touch the kernel, it is just a C program anyway. But then again I have high confidence that this will happen.

I love the peopleware book and recommend it to everyone. It is an absolutely must read. Too many of our engineers worked overtime during the creation of this product. We will have to force people to leave the office early.

We have to get our stuff upstream. We have cool u-boot patches, we have s3c244x linux patches, we have kdrive/x patches, we have some OE patches, we have stuff to propose to freedesktop.org for virtual keyboard handling. In the future we should try harder to get our stuff upstream from day one. We should have the resources after the release to do so. It is something that we have to do now.

The Ugly
Oh well, QA asked us to not release due the stability issues they see during their heavy testing. We do not meet the quality standards our QA team has for an ordinary phone (the good thing about hiring someone that didn't know Linux and Free Software). On the other hand they didn't see the OM2007.2 factory image. I think OM2008.8 enables a Freerunner to be used in friendly user trials, maybe OM2008.8.1 will make QA more happy. Until then we will release ealry and release often.

I hope you enjoy the upcoming release, I do, happy hacking

z.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Links for 2008-08-05 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Dell™ Latitude™ D400 Service Manual

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: KDE 4.1? No, thanks

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:03:47 +0000

I am using KDE since switched from Duron 600 to Athlon XP (few years ago). IIRC it was 3.1.something then. It was nice improvement from my desktop built on ROX-Filer + gnome-panel and WindowMaker. Time passed, my machines got faster and faster, 3D hardware acceleration was added with NVidia cards and then KDE 4 started to appear…

I installed KDE 4 on my desktop and tried to use it for few months. First it was 4.0.x but I upgraded to 4.1-svn packages when they started to be available for Debian. Ideas which KDE team has are nice but usability of such desktop is much worse then KDE 3.5.9 one :( Too much bling, too less features so I “upgraded” back to 3.5.9 to get nicely working system.

What did I lose with KDE 4.1 (tried final release yesterday):

fast desktop switching (if there is Konsole open on desktop it will render for long time)
fast Konsole tab switching (I have 2-8 tabs in terminal)
ability to set/move panel at any edge of screen (now I use top panel, used more)
ability to reorder applets/plasmoids in panel (ops - there is a way but not as intuitive as it was in 3.5)
Klipper is not usable (crash on nearly each use, not launching browser)

From what I read on KDE website Konsole problems are related to NVidia cards and workaround is given. I wonder why there is no check in preferences “I have NVidia — do not use ARGB windows then” or other way. I think that it should be easy to check with few function calls which OpenGL libs are in use…

Looks like now I have to wait to 2009 for KDE 4.2 and then check does it behave or not. Or maybe it is time to check XFCE or other environment?

Philip Van Hoof: By the way

pvanhoof — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:58:31 +0000

Vala is awesome

Koen Kooi: New beagleboard demo image available

koen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:00:23 +0000

For people wanting to try Ångström on their beagleboard, you can now download a
demo! It includes e17 as window manager, the abiword word processor, the gnumeric spreadsheet application, a NEON accelerated mplayer and the popular NEON accelerated omapfbplay which gives you fullscreen 720p decoding.

The http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beagleboard directory should contain all the files you need:

See the beagle wiki on how to setup your SD card to use all this goodness.

Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz: Nokia N8×0 emulation part II

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:03:59 +0000

My previous post about Nokia N800 tablet emulation became one of popular ones. On LinuxTag I shown Maemo booting in QEmu and it was met with nice response from community. But the problem remained — how to boot it when config.mtd which I used was not distributable…

Yesterday I solved that part. After studying how Maemo boots and why does QEmu restarts with wrong config.mtd I grabbed that partition from my N810 and tried again. This time OS2008/Chinook booted fine :)

What is needed? Tablet needs to have “no-lifeguard-reset” flag set. IT can be done by using flasher as this is one of R&D flags. I had it set on my N810 because I did experiments with booting from internal SD card in past.

Thanks to Faheem Pervez (more widely known as “qwerty12″) who sent me config.mtd dumps (without R&D and with “no-lifeguard-reset”) from his N800 I was able to confirm that this is all what is needed.

Next step will be updating qemu to more recent revision to get N810 emulation (which is present in HEAD) and getting Diablo booted.

UPDATE: Diablo booted on emulated N800 and N810:

Nokia N810 emulation is more useful as there is a keyboard attached so no need for use of onscreen input methods. There are some things to remember anyway:

Alt(Gr) behave like Fn (with sticky status)
no CapsLock (but Shift works like on N810 so no big loss)
no numeric row — to get “5″ press “Alt+t” like on N810
some of other keys are also in weird places
Right Shift does not work (N810 has 2 Left Shifts)

NOTE: This is QEmu HEAD — no extra patches were needed to boot Chinook on emulated N800. To boot Diablo “hw/nseries.c” file needs to be edited to change partition info (initfs is twice as big compared to Chinook).

Philip Van Hoof: GStrv vs. char**

pvanhoof — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:32:37 +0000

Dear people of the world who are interested in developing with GLib. The type GStrv is a typedef for “char **”. I know C purists will think that it’s stupid to do that. The problem with a “char **” however is that it can mean hundreds of things. That it’s therefore not possible to know for a language binding tool how to deal with it (how get thing things out of it, how to free it and how the content of it will look).

With GStrv all that is known. A language binding generation tool will know that it must use g_strfreev to free it and it will know that your blob of C memory will be an array of strings.

A “char**” can also be a a pointer to the pixbuf of a grayscale image. It can be a binary blob or any kind of array of pointers.

To all our library writers, please do this:

GStrv people_bag_get_names (PeopleBag *people);
GdkPixbuf* people_bag_get_thumbnail_of (PeopleBag *bag, gchar *person);

Don’t do this:

gchar **people_bag_get_names (PeopleBag *people);
gchar **people_bag_get_thumbnail_of (PeopleBag *bag, gchar *person);

Replacing your “gchar**”s with “GStrv”s wont create API nor ABI problems, so please do it now and make a new release of your fixed libraries’s APIs. Then at least the array-of-string glue code of language bindings can be fully automated.

If you are returning an array of object instances, please don’t use GList, GPtrArray nor GHashTable. By using those you loose boxing (your array type is a blob of unknown C memory that contains unknown things that happen to be pointers to GObject instances - but a tool can’t know that -) and (more importantly) you don’t offer a generic collection API for your blob of C memory to other languages.

Consider using a collection API. Some people are trying to get this into GLib just like GIO got accepted as a higher abstraction for a IO and Stream API. Let’s see what happens.

Thanks!

ps. & edit: On IRC jdahlin mentioned that GValueArrays have type information, because the items get boxed onto GValues. If return performance is not an issue, you can also use that instead of GStrv.

Koen Kooi: Reichstag panorama

koen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:10:56 +0000

These pictures were overexposed (3 to 4 stops) because I clicked away without checking the camera settings. Thanks to raw images and lightroom only the sky and part of the building is blownout.

Koen Kooi: Digi-key pressrelease

koen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:58:28 +0000

Another few seconds of fame :) From the pressrelease:

"Having access to a Beagle Board enabled me to implement support for the Cortex-A8 in the OpenEmbedded build system and the Ångström Distribution,” said Koen Kooi, student at Universiteit Twente and core developer of OpenEmbedded. “This gives developers easy access to the tools needed to get the most out of the OMAP3530 device and integrated C64x™ DSP, which makes it a great board for low-power software defined radio projects."

Florian Boor: Neon Board

Florian — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:55:36 +0000

I spend quite some time with Linux on all sorts of interesting devices. There are several ones not yet covered by my blog, so I decided to start a series of postings about devices running Linux. I introduce a new ‘Devices’ category in my blog to cover these hardware related topics.

Currently I am building a GPE filesystem image for the BeagleBoard I won at LinuxTag. They just announced that the board is on sale now.

For the friends of old Geode based web terminals such as the IBM Netvista J320/8365 I have an updated Angstrom based CF card image. It fits on a small 128MB card and comes with GPE and several browsers (gpe-mini-browser, midori and netsurf) to play with. In addition to this external USB touchscreens are supported. The CF image can be found here - if you want to build it yourself you can get kernel and filesystem seperately.

Another new ‘victim’ is the Neon board by Boundary Devices…. but more about these later.

Neon Board

Philip Van Hoof: Sauna!

pvanhoof — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:57:51 +0000

Yesterday we went to a public sauna where it doesn’t matter too much if they’d throw me out (I don’t often go there).

We decided to pick that one because we wanted to tryout our mint crystals!

“Just put them on the stones” I hear all the Finnish sauna people think. Right, indeed! But at most of the Belgian public saunas you are not allowed to bring your own smells.

In Belgium not everybody has his own sauna. And those who do own one usually have a infrared sauna (because those are often smaller in size). I mean, come on, infrared saunas are not real saunas. You can’t put mint crystals on stones, there are no stones involved! I think it’s much more common for Belgian sauna fans to go to a public one instead.

Although not allowed, it’s not uncommon that somebody brings smells. Usually there’s a guy putting smells incognito on stones. After some time all the real sauna fans recognize him of course. Often it’s the same people, so you get to know who’s into that. Usually I’m just an innocent observer who joins the saunas where custom smells are being thrown on the stones. In fact I’m inexperienced with bringing my own smells.

So we waited until there was nobody left in the sauna we picked, it was Sunday evening and stormy, so not a lot of people. Then we emptied a glass, filled it up with some water, put the mint crystals in it, entered the sauna, we threw the glass over the stones, enjoyed, hoped that they wouldn’t throw us out. We didn’t get caught!

Now, don’t get me wrong. At most of the public saunas in Belgium the owner of the place periodically puts a bunch of smells on the stones for an entire half hour. It’s like some sort of a three-hourly event. When that happens a lot of people join that specific sauna of course. They usually give you some oranges and cubes of ice after ten minutes. They circle with a towel to distribute the air. Etc. It’s not that because you are not allowed to bring your own smells, that it sucks. I guess they don’t want you to ruin their saunas with experimental piece of shit smells that some people would bring.

Anyway. The Turkish mint crystals were awesome. After the second time I was so thirsty that I drank a half liter cola and a half liter fresh orange. It was amazingly cold on my body yet I was sweating like mad.

Refreshing!