SVU’s blog

Ruby/Maemo

It seems Ruby is not available on Maemo any more. maemo.rubyx.co.uk is down for a long while. What a pity - it would be a great language for the platform

Misc

Regarding recent discussions related to (D)VCS for GNOME, I think people might fight interesting results of the voting on highly popular Russian Linux site (analog of Slashdot). The comments is all in Russian, but everyone can read and interpret the results… (Just in case you care to follow the link, “Не использую”=”Do not use”). May be, staying with the current Subversion is not a bad idea, after all?;)

Yesterday, I reformatted internal n810’s flash from FAT32 to ext3. Why? Because root partition is too small and crouded. Now, I have several Megs of canola2 covers, this is too much for my small root…

BTW, I could not find the way to make canola use non-default place for disk covers (and symlinking to FAT32 partitions does not help - there are some issues with Russian dirnames).

Disappointment of the week

Maemo Diablo SDK cannot be installed on Ubuntu/x86_64. But I could install Chinhook, I remember! How has that regression happened?..

I am very enthusiastic regarding Stormy Peters becoming the ED of the Board (being one of those people mentioning by Bastien btw;) I am convinced, there is a lot she can do to make the Board more effective, visible and rocking… My sincere congratulations to GNOME and to Stormy! It is a pity I am not attending GUADEC this year, so I cannot celebrate the event with the crowd.

Last Friday, I got wonderful set-top box ItGate TGM 220. Linux, PowerPC,  cool and sexy. The greatest disappointment was to find that unofficial plugin for VLC AKA “VLC Frontend” (very handy thing, allows streaming anything from VLC to set-top box) seems to be closed source. And it only works with the old version of VLC (I do not even mention it being somewhat unstable). What do these guys think about?… I searched high and low - there are only binaries on the net And the development forum is in German - unpleasant surprise… Second disappointment - lack of support for UPnP and bonjour. It is 2008 after all, people…

xkeyboard-config: now in git

This is now official. After release 1.3 xkeyboard-config is moved to git:

git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xkeyboard-config

ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/xkeyboard-config

I am very new to the wonderful world of git, so it will take some time to get used to it.

xkeyboard-config 1.3

New release was uploaded and announced last night. Despite the hassle with the ssh keys, I made it in time (ok, 30 mins after midnight).

The highlights of the release:

• A lot of information about countries and languages, in a form of ISO codes. Users of unstable GNOME 2.23.x are highly encouraged to try new xk-c and keyboard-configuration applet. I would love to see bugreports about errors in that information (missing/wrong codes). In theory, every layout/variant should be accessible at least 2 ways - per-country and per-language (well, some variants are multilingual and multinational).
• Dropped sun/sgi rulesets. I do not foresee many complains - but if someone is still using them, please come to me and we’ll discuss the upgrade path.
• For Russians: all your base are belong to us howtows regarding specifying “winkeys” variant are now practically obsolete. The default variant is winkeys now - because most of the people are using it (I suspected that for quite a while, voting on linux.org.ru confirmed it).
• For Romanians: the default variant was changed (see this bug if you’re interested in rather hot discussion around that). Now it is “commabelow” (earlier it was “cedillabelow”). It might cause some side effects for users of early versions of Windows - but it is the right thing to do.

Enjoy! And please remember - some open issues with xkeyboard-config still require resolution on xkbcomp/xserver level.

PS It is great to see Nokia hiring people for maemo. I wish I lived in Helsinki - a couple of hundred kilometers from the best city of the world (if you happen not to know yet, it is St. Petersburg, Russia). But for a “family man” mobility is the word in the past tense BTW, I am always available for remote open source work offers…

Keyboard is not configured in GNOME, in some cases

In case your GNOME keyboard configuration is not working at session startup, and you start GNOME session using gdm autologin or startx from console (like in this bug), it was admitted (by Daniel Stone) it is an issue with X server (will be tracked here). Thank for clarification, Daniel (and for enabling my fd.o account as well BTW)!

Release in danger

According to the schedule, the next release of xkeyboard-config has to be made tomorrow. It seems I won’t make it - I still do not have access to CVS (because of the story with the keys in Debian). Sure I filed a bug for site wranglers - but God knows how long it will take to deal with it…

My apologies for the possible delay and all inconvenience it may cause.

So long and thanks for all the fish

There is a lot of legacy, practically unmaintained stuff in xkeyboard-config. I am trying to be very conservative regarding dropping it - there are people using old hardware, you know… The time has come for the sun-specific and sgi-specific rules. They are very old, Sun people do not use them. So, the files rules/sun* and rules/sgi* are gone now in CVS - and they will be missing in the next release (due in May). The layouts and keymaps are still there - that code is too precious to be dropped earlier than … anyway, not today.

GSoC; OLPC

So, the GUI Editor for XKB layouts is finally approved as GSoC project. I am sure, Simos will not screw it!

Walter Bender leaving OLPC - is a bad news itself. But it is a seriously bad news if it indicates that OLPC leaves true Open Source/Free Software way…  That project has been a great promise - and it would be soo sad to see it dying…