Random stuff

I got my new notebook, and installed Linux on it. It is
mostly working. The only real problem I have had is with
resuming from a hibernate when I was in X. With X in 32-bit
mode, the display gets garbled. With 16-bit mode, the whole
machine locks up. Changing to another VT before hibernation
avoids the problem. I wonder if XFree86 4.0 would fix the
problem? It is probably caused by the Compaq bios not
saving enough of the state on the graphics card (enough for
the windows drivers but not enough for XF86_Mach64)

I was also upgrading another Linux box, and the installer
caused an exception just after installing all the packages,
so I had to set up the last few things by hand. A bit
annoying but not too difficult to fix.

Heard from another guy who has a Sony NEWS workstation
who gave some interesting info about the problem we were
having with our machine (it doesn’t boot). We had left the
machine off for a while, and then it stopped booting. I had
thought that the BIOS was dead or something, but it sounds
like a NEWS box won’t boot if the battery is dead also. Now
I just have to find where the battery is in the system.
There is no information about these machines on any of the
sony web sites (they seem to be denying all knowledge of the
machines). Now all I need to do is find where the battery
is in the system — they are built very solidly.

Been thinking about what I need to do about setting up
Linux on the notebook I ordered. I think I should be able
to get most things up and running without trouble, but I am
a bit unsure about hibernation. I guess I will wait and see
what happens when I get the notebook.

I saw the xmen movie on thursday (it was released a day
earlier here, compared to the us). It was pretty good,
and the ending looked like they are expecting a sequel or
something.

I finally got round to ordering the my laptop, so it
should be in on monday. It is a Compaq Armarda M300 (with
the 1024×768 screen). With the introduction of the GST,
computer hardware suddenly dropped by about 10% (and
software went up 10%). It is annoying that the wholesale
prices on most hardware are about the same as US street
prices though.

I haven’t written anything here for a while. I went to a
friend’s 21st birthday on friday, which was pretty good.
The day after we went to a climbing gym. It was the first
time I had gone this year, so I was a bit out of shape.

I started working on the gtk+-2.0 based pygtk. I wrote a
simple module gobject that encapsulates the base GObject
stuff. This also encapsulates the evil reference counting
stuff away from the rest of the pygtk stuff. I have done
wrappers for most of the Gdk types that have been converted
to GObjects, and generated the wrappers for GtkWindow and
GtkLabel to test out a few features. Interfacing with the
python-2.0 unicode strings didn’t require any extra code, as
using the “s” format character for PyArg_ParseTuple causes
the unicode string to be encoded in UTF8, which is what GTK
wants. So you can do GtkLabel(u’\u03A0\u03B1\u03BD\u8A9E’)
and have it do exactly what you would expect. Lets see you
do that in Tkinter 🙂

Did a lot of work on the extension class based pygtk. It
now does most of what the non extension class based one
did. With a simple skeleton generator, adding support for
new libraries is very easy. I added libglade and gtkglarea
support in just a few hours (gtkglarea was easier, as it
required less override code). I also tightened up the type
checking a bit, so you get a python exception if you try to
pass a non widget to gtk_container_add for instance (rather
than a Gtk-WARNING and the function failing without telling
the python program). For those interested, you can get it
here.

I have been wondering about whether it is worth releasing
this version at all, as it breaks compatibility and would be
followed by another compatibility breaking release when
gtk+-1.4 comes out. Even if I don’t release it, a lot of
the work done on it. Now that Havoc’s gdk object branch
has been merged into the head of gtk+, my code generator
should be able to generate even more of the bindings.

I set up the gtk-1.3 libraries on my system, but there is
a few problems with rendering (ie. none of the widgets
render). I might start looking at porting pygtk accross to
it soon.