Archive for the ‘Nerd’ Category

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Trying Conduit on N810 & N800

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Sorry, no screenshots. Took a picture with my cameraphone, but it didn’t turn out very well.

If you want to give it a spin for yourself, the details are:

  • Catalogue: Unrouted
  • Web Address: http://apt.unrouted.co.uk
  • Distribution: chinook
  • Components: user

You will also need the Extras and Extras-devel repository.

Refresh your application list and install the conduit package. Among other things, you will get python2.5 and avahi. Its quite a big set of dependencies for now, it will get better when things stable up and we can split the conduit package into conduit-plugin-google etc.

There is a big bug screwing with a lot of dataproviders right now relating to icons. I’ll try to push a patch soon.

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Conduit on N810 (I achieved something today)

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

So after a recent flurry of packaging, I turned my attention to Conduit on the N810. Most of the work is done, just a case of figuring out what bits are needed and pulling it together.

Most of the dependencies are taken care of. I needed to add the Extras and Extras-devel repositories to get python 2.5 and goocanvas. Right now python2.5-goocanvas doesn’t depend on libgoocanvas3, which IMO is a bug.

In the repositories I looked in, vobject and dateutil don’t seem to be available. These are needed for Conduit to go near VCard and iCal data. So I planned to grab the ubuntu/debian package and rebuild it for maemo. Not that easy, as I couldn’t find python-support or python-central. Damn. I’ve rolled my own python2.5-dateutil and python2.5-vobject and hope to get theses into extras or extras-devel shortly.

The Conduit package was relatively easy to fork from the Ubuntu PPA. I added a patch to set the default UI to Hildon instead of GTK, and then removed and tweaked dependencies. There are quite a few bugs to work out though:

  • Need to reboot N810 to see Conduit in menu (Packaging bug; presume there is a macro to refresh this?)
  • Conduit menu icon doesn’t work (Conduit bug; conduit/conduit script assumes bash.. which is bad).
  • At the moment, I’m installing manually via ssh/apt/dpkg.. Need a one click install file (Packaging bug)
  • Too big – remove manual and gtkui from package. (This needs changes in Conduit and Packaging, I think)
  • Too many dataproviders are showing that won’t work on N810. Shouldn’t really show Tomboy unless tomboy is installed.

I hope to address all the important problems in the morning and send something out to the Conduit mailing list so we can get some proper testing done. A second post with screenshots and quick install link will follow.

Looks shiny. Thanks very much to the hard work of thomasvm for making this possible :-)

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It’s been too long…

Friday, April 25th, 2008

It’s been far too long since I last blogged. I’d always think of what I wanted to say when I couldn’t get to my blog, and then forget. Bah. So here is a catchup post.

Upgrades. I moved servers! Everything has been moved over to a dedicated server from RapidSwitch. After 1 year of excellent service, my VPS will soon get switched off for good. I’m still a big fan of RimuHosting, but I needed a bit more power (OK, I needed lots more power..). Isotoma use RapidSwitch a lot, and we get an excellent service from them so I figured i’d try them out. I now have 2.2Ghz Core2 Duo, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive and 4,000GB traffic. Really pleased with it so far.

WordPress also got upgraded, and i’m really loving the new control panel. Good work guys!

BuildBot. I’ve joined the Build Brigade on their quest to bring continuous integration to GNOME. My own efforts can be found here. The current solution needs to open up a port for each project, and we are trying to get it down to a single shared connection for all projects. When this is working I hope to set up continuous integration of the Debian/Ubuntu GNOME packages too.

I’m hopeful we can bring the same solution to the KDE and XFCE teams too.

Summer of Code. I will be mentoring 2 students for GNOME in this years summer of code:

  • John will be implementing SyncML support in Conduit. His deliverables include python bindings of libsyncml, conduit support of SyncML clients and servers, simplified discovery and configuration of those devices and a demo of sync between EDS and a SyncML device.
  • Alexandre will be implementing full support for the iPod in Conduit, and also improving integration with Rhythmbox. His deliverables include improved media transcoding, using GStreamer were possible, full dataproviders for audio and video support and work to provide a smooth, rounded “plugin and sync” experience for the user.

This is my first time mentoring in the summer of code, and i’m really looking forward to it.

Hardy. GNOME 2.22. I’ve just upgraded my work machine to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, after running the alphas since nearly the beginning on my main development laptop. Very pleased with both so far. The upgrade on my laptop was smoother as it has Intel graphics.

Conduit. We are proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.24. Exciting times. It seems clear so far that the biggest problem we have in acceptance will be a UI that really “works”. I’ve become quite fond of our current UI, but new users just can’t understand it at all. Anyone got any suggestions?

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XFCE4 in JHBuild

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Not one to discriminate against the major Linux desktop suites, I’ve created a very basic XFCE 4.4 moduleset. As with the KDE4 moduleset, the dependencies aren’t perfect – I just added them until “jhbuild build xfce4″ worked. I’ll probably correct the dependencies some more and set it up to “recommend” that you build against the same GTK as GNOME 2.22 at some point.

The big thing XFCE has over KDE in JHBuild? If i just want to do some work with orage, I can “jhbuild build orage” and only get the bits of XFCE i need to use orage. With KDE, their module layout may render this impossible without some ugly hackery :-(

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KDE4 in JHBuild

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

A while ago I added CMake support to JHBuild. The main reason for that was so that I could have a JHBuild moduleset for SynCE and Conduit that pulled in OpenSync if needed. A bonus was that, potentially, I could build KDE4, or parts of it, inside a JHBuild instance.

That day has come… Last night I hacked on a moduleset for KDE 4.0.1 and successfully built everything and then ran KHangman and Kopete with jhbuild run. You can get the moduleset for yourself here. The JHBuild config I use is here.When you have both of these you can just:

jhbuild -f ~/.kbuildrc build kde4

And everything will be built for you. (Don’t forget to checkout the KDE4 instructions for dependencies…)

Now i’m going to look at making a KDE4 SVN moduleset, with the power to do jhbuild build khangman instead of having to build the whole of kdegames… From the layout of their SVN, this looks like it will be easier said than done and will probably involve evil hacks :-(

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Keep your hands off!

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Just doing my bit for the cause. A new voice for Flickr users has emerged, hoping to keep Flickr/Yahoo away from Microsoft. Microsoft, keep your evil grubby hands off of our flickr!

THlS GROUP WILL STOP MICROSOFT FROM BUYING YAHOO! AND DESTROYING THE FLICKR WE KNOW AND LOVE OR WE WILL DIE TRYING.

FACT.

Good luck!

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Synchronisation mit Unison und Conduit

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

I don’t speak German, but we might be getting some German speaking visitors to Conduit shortly :-)

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In Linux Magazine, Conduit Is

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

So for the rest of the month, a slight mention of Conduit will be on the front page of Linux Magazine, in its “this month” blurb. Yay, if only they linked to our site! I think the current issue is out now, so i’m going to pop in WH Smiths at dinner and see if I can pick up a copy :-)

In other news, i’ve upgraded a few things on this box. Will be a miracle if I haven’t broken it :-(

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Wii Guitar

Monday, December 31st, 2007

I’ve just gotten Guitar Hero 3 for Wii (despite not having a Wii). The Guitar controller connects to my wiimote, and then I can use the bluetooth built in to my laptop to play Frets on Fire with a guitar-like thing. Awesome fun, and very Linux friendly. Debian and Ubuntu users can just apt-get the cwiid driver (you need the wminput package) and use the configuration from here:

# wiiguitar profile for FOF
Classic.Down=KEY_ENTER #Strum
Classic.Dpad.X = ABS_X
Classic.Dpad.Y = ABS_Y
Classic.LStick.X = ABS_HAT0X
Classic.LStick.Y = ABS_HAT0Y
Classic.RStick.X = ABS_HAT1X
Classic.RStick.Y = ABS_HAT1Y
Classic.A = KEY_F1 #First Fret starting at top of wiiguitar
Classic.B = KEY_F2 #Second Fret
Classic.X = KEY_F3 #Third Fret
Classic.Y = KEY_F4 #Forth Fret
Classic.Minus = BTN_SELECT
Classic.Plus = BTN_START
Classic.Home = BTN_MODE
Classic.L = BTN_TL
Classic.R = BTN_TR
Classic.ZL = KEY_F5 #Fifth Fret
Classic.ZR = BTN_TR2

I have that saved as ~/.fof and just run sudo wminput -c ~/.fof before i start frets on fire. Fun!

Back to practicing!

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Me? Lucky?

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

I don’t know why, but I seem to be good at buying hardware that works well with Linux. My friends have (brand spanking new) PC’s that won’t even load an Ubuntu live CD, yet I have two laptops that work great, straight out of the box. Yesterday I went to Tesco and purchased myself a Philips SNU 5600. Just found it all alone on a shelf and a quick phone google showed it had a native driver (zd1211rw).. And there I was thinking i’d never find a USB Wifi adaptor that would just work.

So I went home, dug out my NSLU2 and booted it up. I run Debian on it with a 2.6.21 kernel, so all I had to do was install the firmware (apt-get install zd1211-firmware) and plug it in.

I had a slight moment of fear though:
SoftMAC: Open Authentication with XX:XX:Xx:XX:XX:XX failed, error code: 12

A bit of kernel grepping later: Turns out that error 12 is WLAN_STATUS_ASSOC_DENIED_UNSPEC, and my router was set to only let known MAC addresses connect! Doh!

So now I have a wireless linux box tucked away in the wardrobe, serving my OGGs to anyone of my devices thats interested… Now to setup streaming to my smartphone!

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