Technical Blog of Richard Hughes

BIOS Update for T61

hughsie — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:57:15 +0000

If you are using a new T61 or T61p please check your bios version. You can do this using:

lshal | grep system.firmware.version

If you are not running 7LETB7WW, then you really need to update your BIOS to v2.17-1.08

Symptoms of an old BIOS version are hard hangs when docking/undocking from the smart dock, or the USB might mysteriously stop working with Disabling IRQ #19 in the logs.

KDE love!

hughsie — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:41:31 +0000

Recently, Daniel and Adrien have been rocking with KPackageKit and QPackageKit.
The library is coming on nicely, and the tools are starting to look very KDE like. They could do with a hand, so if you want to get involved, jump on the mailing list and introduce yourself to those two dudes.

See here for a sneak preview. There’s also a screenshot of the OpenSuse updater, which is also working with a PackageKit backend now.

Next step, world domination. Seriously, rock on.

How about something like this?

hughsie — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:15:38 +0000

Okay, I’ve added the needed stuff in desktop-file-utils for the yum backend to pick up the virtual mime-type provides in rpm with the help of hadess. Now all we need is a new rpm version with support for this, and then for rpm based distros (e.g. Fedora) it should just work. For Ubuntu the data is already present in the ton of desktop files that are shipped in gnome-app-install - and I’m sure it will be easy to get at this data in the apt2 backend. Other distros will have to work out how to do this, although I’m sure one of the existing methods will be easy to adapt.

So, enough of the geeky. What do you all think of this:

Code about to hit master…

Comments?

No application for this file type…

hughsie — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:28:12 +0000

Anyone know how I could hook PackageKit into this UI so that it handles some recognised formats?

For instance, in this case, we could prompt to install Inkscape to view the file. But I don’t want to do lots of waiting if PackageKit can’t find anything that matches the mimetype. Ideas welcome, as I’m really not sure how this code works at all. I’m guessing nautilus, but it could be gio for all I know….

GUADEMY

hughsie — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:26:28 +0000

I’m at GUADEMY 2008. I’m got really bad Internet, and can’t seem to get on IRC using vpnc. If you want me, email me on my personal email. Thanks.

Transifex and PackageKit

hughsie — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:24:44 +0000

I asked for translations a few days ago for the dameon, and got a fantastic response. Thanks go out to Vojtěch Smejkal, Piotr Drąg, Daniele Costarella, Marc-André Lureau, Arnout Lok, Alon Zakai, jcome, Lubomir Kundrak, Stephan Sachse and Javier Castro for all the new .po files.

I’ve also asked Dimitris Glezos to setup Transifex for translators to alternatively use. This is an “upstream” solution, as Transifex syncs with our private development server rather than putting a layer on top such as Launchpad translations. So I can update translations directly, or get people to use Transifex - it’s a win-win situation as far as the uni-lingual maintainer (me) is concerned.

I’ve been very impressed with Transifex so far, and it seems there are over 300 people willing to use it to translate various modules. You don’t need to use Fedora to use it, and seems to make doing translations pretty trivial.

Insanity?

hughsie — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:31:47 +0000

Insanity? Or just clever shit?

Beamer and animations

hughsie — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:56:47 +0000

Has anyone got animations working with beamer and evince? I want to add some bling to my talk at GUADEMY and can’t seem to get ogv videos playing. Thanks!

gpk-log improvements

hughsie — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:43:48 +0000

Compared to the old log viewer, I think this one is much better:

Further feedback appreciated. Does anyone know how to make the text automatically wrap to the next line in the treeview?

Helping to translate PackageKit

hughsie — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:57:20 +0000

Due to the way PolicyKit works, not all the translations can be done in the client tools. The authentication dialogs come from the daemon and thus don’t get translated by the GNOME translation team. The GNOME guys are rocking doing the client stuff, but the daemon remains untranslated.

If you have a spare few minutes (only 88 short strings), please send me a .po file from this pot file. You can see what po files already exist in gitweb. I really appreciate it, thanks.

Richard.