The same way as 4 months ago, we’re in the freeze state.
Dear translators, please find some time to update your POs. Thanks!
Bug reporters, if you think your bug is worth fixing in 1.7, please remind me (you can do it here in comments). Unfortunately, these days the mail service of the xkb maillist is somewhat problematic, so I might have overlooked some updates…
Some while ago I said farewell to Ruby on Maemo. Now, Ruby is really there on Maemo! Great thanks to Faheem Pervez who made it (and he’s a very responsive guy, I must admit)! Ruby, along with hildon/gtk/… bindings are now in extras repo, available to everyone! I could finally build my little toy prefcalc and upload it to extras too.
Faheem, I really owe you a pint!
Just got my Irish passport! It took slightly less than 9 years…
TWIMC. If you want to hear Russian “text to speach”, you need the package maintained by Nickolay Shmyrev (really high quality). It was already packaged for Debian. I made nearly identical deb for ubuntu 9.04, in my PPA. Feel free to check and download.
But actually I would love to see that from the box in 9.10 repos. If you share that idea, please raise your voice in that “needs-packaging” bug.
It would also be cool to apply Russian voice to flite, so maemo-mapper/n810 would give directions in Russian…
PS A bit of annoyance. festival has funny effect: last ~0.3s of the sound sequence is doubled, which sounds like a person with some lexical defect. Is it between festival and alsa or what? It does not depend on the chosen voice, English or Russian
(Ranting and mourning…)
I like that language. I like that open platform dearly (reserving some comments regarding Fremantle availability on n8x0). And some while ago I was happy to find that I could do some ruby hacking for maemo. Hurray. There were some incomplete implementations for n800, finally the version from rubyx.co.uk got ported to n810. And … the process stopped. Paused, I thought… The debs are still there, in their little repository. Sources (for ruby-hildon binding) … well, for some while you can live without them.
I wanted to put my little app into now-standard extras repo. Nokia offers documented workflow for doing that. But … there is no ruby in extras, so my debs simply could not be build. At that point I started looking for a contact with the lad who was cool enough to do ruby-hildon – in order to ask him for making a final step, publishing sources and putting the code to extras. Thanks to the colleagues, I quickly found that I have to talk to Tom Swindell AKA alterego (#maemo, freenode.net). He turned to be a sensible guy, he agreed with all my proposals. It was March 27, he was going to do things within a week. And … nothing happened so far. The only result I got is that he seems to be ignoring me now (that I discovered about a week after our initial chat)…
I could think it is about me being overly annoying and pushing (which sometimes I truly am). But I got hints from other people, telling me I am not the first one trapped in that scenario. Other people tried before, same sequence, same result.
So, I think all I can do is give up at this point (as other people did). If anyone (not ignored by alterego yet) would have time and interest to continue chasing that rainbow – I can only wish him all the luck in the world… Or, even better, if someone has time and skills (which I do not have so far) to redo ruby-hildon binding and build all the necessary packages – I would be soooo grateful.
Heh…
Some people are already aware that both Ubuntu and Fedora disable Ctrl-Alt-Bksp shortcut. There are hot discussions around that decision. Now, xkeyboard-config is a part of the battlefield. See this bug. At least, when that change is committed, users will be able to enable this shortcut back easily (for example, using gnome-keyboard-properties), by using proper XkbOption. But the default behavior would be as it is now in Ubuntu and Fedora – i.e. without that deadly feature.
PS Totally unrelated matter. If you’re Ukranian or Ukranian-speaking, you are very welcome to comment on that bug. Guys are asking to do the same thing as I did with Russian layout – make winkeys the default variant.
One cannot say that ruby is a popular language for maemo platform. Nevertheless, I spent some time on prefcalc. This is basically calculator for quite popular (at least in ex-USSR) card board game. It is just a calculator, not a way play the game (no AI…)
Version 0.3 should be generally usable on your average desktop linux (if you install .gem) But on maemo… It seems ruby port still has some way to go till becoming stable. Every now and then I keep getting error messages (+crashes) regarding “object allocation during garbage collection phase”. Dear lazyweb, is there any bugzilla to report these things? At least bugs.maemo.org does not have anything about ruby 🙁
PS Well, if you still want to test it on your tablet, take the code from SVN
PPS I know, there is Java-based program for the same purpose: prefcount.
Today I committed into xkeyboard-config one important change: removal of national specific models: jp106, kr106, abnt2. These models consisted of 2 parts: keycodes and geometries.
Keycodes, as I found, could be safely merged into the default xfree86 and evdev keycode sets. So I just did that.
About geometries… Since they are just “visibility”, functionally useless – there is no point to keep models just for geometries sake.
So, these models are gone (of course, layouts should be working as they always did!). The geometry definitions I will keep for some while, just in case – but I guess I’ll remove them soon too.
If any Brazilian/Japanese/Korean user feels offended – please raise your voice, explain your concerns. I appreciate any reasonable feedback.
PS On a side note, me and my better half got approval for Irish citizenship. After 8.5 years in the country, I am going to get the second passport and be able to travel the world easily!
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.