Consolidation

xkeyboard-config No Comments

The file systems/inet is of relatively low importance these days – now that everyone in linux world is using “evdev”. But still some people are using other OSes, some are using older X, so…

Anyway, yesterday I made a huge commit consolidating a lot of common mappings into nav_common section. As a part of that job some mappings were changed to make the behavior “univorm”. I32 is always mapped to XF86WWW, I02 is mapped to XF86HomePage (in some kbds they were swapped). XF86Refresh is replaced by XF86Reload everywhere (I could not find the real difference – and people used them randomly).

If you are using “kbd” driver with some media keyboard – I kindly ask you to check new version of the file from git and report all the breakages…

English

xkeyboard-config 24 Comments

A question to all native speakers. What is the right way:

Alt+Shift change layout

or

Alt+Shift changes layout

Useful OLPC

hardware, olpc 4 Comments

So far, the “service machine” in my house was Power G5 running Ubuntu. 24*7. The main functions (beside being a desktop) was http proxying (squid + dansguardian) and X10 service (heyu).

Trying to save on my energy bills, and to make something useful of nice green OLPC laptop, I’ve decided to move these services to OLPC – that way, I could afford shutting down the Mac, at least sometimes (it just eats the energy).

So, yesterday I “yum install”ed dansguardian and tinyproxy (instead of squid) – and tried to make a transparent proxy of it. Unfortunately, the transparent proxying is disabled in Fedora’s build of the tinyproxy. So, I had to rebuild it. It was some kind of a challenge – the only machines I got was Mac (Power G5, as I said) and another laptop (Ubuntu x86_64). How would you build 32-bit x86 app in that world? Immediately I found that 64-bit Ubuntu cannot build 32-bit apps. At least I could not find the way. Well, “gcc -m32” works somehow – but some headers (like stub-32.h) and gcc libs and obj files are missing. Installing ia32-libs does not help (and they do not provide -dev package). But I was really lucky to have … some wreckage of (!!!) Maemo SDK (which I did not manage to enable under 64-bit OS BTW). Which includes, among other things, 32-bit gcc with all the necessary stuff. So … chrooting to that environment allowed me to build tinyproxy binary with transparent proxying support (even though I had to patch it a bit – there is an issue with binding). Now, this all is up and running.

Next thing would be to build heyu utility for x86 – I am going to do it the same way, using Maemo SDK. My X10 will be hosted on OLPC as well.

So, a bit of numbers. It is claimed that OLPC consumes about 3W of energy. According to Apple, Power G5 uses 140W (idle) to 604W (fully loaded). Actually, Ubuntu can not control CPU speed (constantly shows 2.0GHz) – so I guess even idle, my Mac eats around 200W. I do not even mention the 24″ monitor…

I want to make proxy work faster, so I guess I’ll get some cheap USB Ethernet adapter – in order not to use humble wireless abilities of OLPC. Recommendations are welcome.

If you participated in G1G1 program last year (or thinking about doing it this year) – you can do something similar with that nice little piece of hardware. It is much more than just a sexy toy.

Maemo-related misc

maemo, xkeyboard-config 5 Comments

First, I would like to thank Nokia for ongoing efforts to develop the maemo platform. But what I do not quite understand is the silence regarding future software updates for maemo for n8x0. Will software “version 5” be available for us (officially or some kind of “hacker edition”)? Will it give us any benefits (all innovations listed so far are related to the new hardware)? May be, that info is already slipped somewhere – but I did not see it.Second, I just made first commit to xkeyboard-config from n810. Big thanks to the people who built git on maemo (well, GUI would be nice to have, but it is not critical). The missing piece in the “xkeyboard-config maintenance on n810” puzzle is the old “patch” utility – I could not find it, searching high and low. Funny enough…  If I do not find it, I’ll have to build it.

Ruby/Maemo

maemo 2 Comments

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

General, maemo 1 Comment

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 3 Comments

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

gnome, hardware No Comments

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

xkeyboard-config 2 Comments

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

xkeyboard-config 3 Comments

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…

« Previous Entries Next Entries »