Hacking on Linux, Updates and perspectives
December 11, 2007
Hi,
So, the past few days, i worked to get my iMac G5 iSight to work properly. I wrote a linux windfarm platform driver (thanks to Benjamin Herrenschmidt for mentoring), i ported iSight driver and produces iSight firmware tools. I also helped Alex Deuscher to add support for X600 Pro in radeon.
I commited some fixes and added processing infrastructure and preliminary rotation. Gegl is so helpful. flegita-gimp is now useable (requires latest Gegl SVN). I’m uploading babl 0.0.16 and Gegl 0.0.15 to my PPA. I have to fix some bugs and add rotation button in preview area. I’m not that happy with the relation between UI and core; between params and widgets. It’s not smart enough. I my have to restructure a bit that part to get things right for march. I should add print or at least PDF output support and then debug for march. I have a huge collection of photo to scan, this mean i’ll need a rocking software to get things done without headaches. This will help me debugging behaviour and provide a well designed software. Hope so.
Hacking on linux helps me to dream of a SANE 1 successor. Whatever it’s SANE 2 or another project in freedesktop. The goal would be to provide consistent but extensible drivers, sensor and hotplug smoothness. This could be done nicely providing a library for writing driver. Drivers will be standalone apps that must be launched for each device detected. Those driver will feed HAL, publish through DBus/mDNS/UPnP, etc. transparently through the library. Provides also an external library to query drivers (through DBus/mDNS/UPnP). Once udev/whatever launch the driver, it uses uevent to handle sensor. The hotplug is handled by udev/HAL/whatever. I need to investigate this deeper. I’ll begin some work on that after gnome-scan 0.6 since i’ll have to write a driver for my business card reader.
So, i have work for the next year : Gnome OCR, SANE replacement and all that back in Gnome Scan ! Thanks to gnome-scan 0.5 module support, this will be so easy to add another backend 🙂
Regards,
Étienne.
Delaying Gnome Scan Development
November 28, 2007
Hi,
That’s bad news, but i’m busy on other projects. I wrote cifrado, a french scouting software. Then i developped the website of my scouting group : suf1520.free.fr. Finally, i’m developping Linux PowerMac 12,1 windfarm driver. I own an iMac G5 rev C for two years and Linux still does not run smoothly on it. I should have finished this driver for chrismas.
Gnome Scan is not that far from 0.6. It needs some refactorization of area plugin in order to watch other options, then a better handling of orientation and then processing with rotation. Contribution are very welcome. I’m glad to leave PHP and redevelop in C for Linux, this will help dive into Gnome Scan development. I wish i could have written Gnome Scan using Vala. I promised i will use Vala for libgnocr.
Regards,
Étienne