I’ve been working on some FM radio support in Rhythmbox in my spare time. Below is screenshot
At the moment, the basic tuning and mute/unmute works fine with my DSB-R100. I don’t have any UI for adding/removing stations at the moment though, so it is necessary to edit ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to add them.
I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM radio tuner had stopped working (or at least, Gnomeradio could no longer tune it).
It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the Video4Linux 1 API to Video4Linux 2. Now the driver nominally supports the V4L1 ioctls through the v4l1_compat, but it doesn’t seem to implement enough V4L2 ioctls to make it usable (the VIDIOCGAUDIO ioctl fails).
To work around this, I ported the tuner code in Gnomeradio over to V4L2. The patch can be found attached to bug 429005. I don’t know if this patch will go in as is though, since it only works for drivers supporting V4L2. Perhaps it’d be worth supporting both APIs, using V4L2 if both are supported.
When at conferences and sprints, I often want to see what someone else is working on, or to let other people see what I am working on. Usually we end up pushing up to a shared server and using that as a way to exchange branches. However, this can be quite frustrating when competing for outside bandwidth when at a conference.
It is possible to share the branch from a local web server, but that still means you need to work out the addressing issues.
To make things easier, I wrote a simple Bazaar/Avahi plugin. It provides a command “bzr share“, which does the following:
For the client side, the plugin implements a “bzr browse” command that will list the Bazaar branches being advertised on the local network (the name and the bzr:// URL). Using the two commands together, it is trivial to share branches locally or find what branches people are sharing.
I am not completely satisfied with how things work, and have a few ideas for how to improve things:
It will be interesting to see how well this works at the next sprint or conference.
I put out a tarball release of gnome-vfs-obexftp here:
This includes a number of fixes since the work I did in October:
As well as the standard Gnome and D-BUS libraries, you will need OpenOBEX >= 1.2 and Bluez-Utils >= 3.7. The hcid daemon must be started with the -x flag to enable the experimental D-BUS interfaces used by the VFS module. You will also need a phone or other device that supports OBEX FTP 🙂
Last but not least, a screenshot:
Update
There was a build issue in the previous release caused by the osso-gwobex headers not being found. I hadn’t noticed it because I had installed the library standalone. An updated tarball is available here:
Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn’t been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125).
One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database. So other places that might need updating include:
All the above rules time zone databases are based on the same source time zone information, but need to be updated individually and in different ways.
In a way, this is similar to the zlib security problems from a few years back: the same problem duplicated in many packages and needing to be fixed over and over again. Perhaps the solution is the same too: get rid of the duplication so that in future only one package needs updating.
As a start, I put together a patch to pytz so that it uses the same format binary time zone files as found in /usr/share/zoneinfo (bug 71227). This still means it has its own time zone database, but it goes a long way towards being able to share the system time zone database. It’d be nice if the other applications and libraries with their own databases could make similar changes.
For people using Windows, there is an update from Microsoft. Apparently you need to install one update now, and then a second update next year — I guess Windows doesn’t support multiple transition rules like Linux does. The page also lists a number of applications that will malfunction and not know about the daylight saving shift, so I guess that they have similar issues of some applications ignoring the system time zone database.