SVU's blog

gdm login screen: how to output current IP address

I could not find a way to put some text (for example, current IP address) into background of the gdm login screen. ImageMagic to the rescue:

cd /usr/share/gdm/themes/MyTheme
convert -draw \
  "text 10,50 \"`ifconfig wlan1 | awk '/inet addr/{ print $2 }'`\"" \
  background.jpg background.hacked.jpg

Put that line into some startup script (for example, /etc/gdm/Init/Default). Then, change your theme xml (/usr/share/gdm/themes/MyTheme/mytheme.xml) to refer to background.hacked.jpg (instead of background.jpg). Voila.

Consolidation

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

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

Alt+Shift change layout

or

Alt+Shift changes layout

Maemo-related misc

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.

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.