Funkyware: ITCetera

xf86-video-geode 2.11.13

2012-01-03T17:49:00.003+02:00

A few days ago, I pushed out version 2.11.13 of the Geode X driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1, by a plethora of thin clients such as the ThinCan, by low-power desktops such as the Linutop and by a few notebooks such as the eCafé EC800.

While this release indeed features a few bugfixes (mainly to keep this driver compilable on the latest X server), the lion's share of the changes involve a complete overhaul of the build scripts, courtesy of Gaetan Nadon. The key motivation for this overhaul was to acknowledge the efforts made by third-party contributors to make the driver compile on BSD variants. Sure enough, this release finally compiles on FreeBSD and, low and behold, on Hurd.

However, the hybrid nature of Debian's FreeBSD kernel-based GNU operating system variant posed an additional challenge, because it provides usable support for Video for Linux version 2 (V4L2), but without the full complement of Linux definitions. This resulted in one post-release commit (included in Debian and Ubuntu package 2.11.13-2), following which my assertion that we could now safely define this package as Architecture: any-i386 finally proved to be a safe one for Debian-based operating systems.

At this point, I'm curious as to how many more operating systems, especialy BSD variants, can finally use this driver. Patches to further improve support of non-Linux systems are welcome.

Proposed updates for CUPS-PDF packages at Ubuntu

2011-09-24T18:50:00.002+03:00

For those who use CUPS-PDF on Ubuntu, I have pushed some updated packages into Lucid-proposed, Maverick-proposed and Natty-proposed, mainly to make the package's post-install actions bulletproof, so that automated installs and PPD updates take place in a flawless way. Comments from anyone who tested these package updates are welcome on Launchpad bug #805947. Once these updates have been approved, I'll go through the daunting task of reducing the debdiff down to its utmost essential components and attempt to submit a stable-update to Debian as well.

Configuring GNOME themes for both gconf and dconf?

2011-08-13T20:28:00.003+03:00

For a number of years, I've been making myself metapackages that pull favorite packages and pre-configure the desktop environment to use my favorite global default settings. This currently means configuring the gconf keys for the GTK theme, icon theme and background image for GDM. Until now, I implemented this by calling gconftool-2 directly in postinst as user gdm but Lintian recently started warning me that the correct way to do this would be by calling gconf-schemas or update-gconf-defaults instead. I was thus wondering, would anyone have any sample code that accomplishes this? To further complicate things, GNOME 3 has transitioned from gconf to dconf, which suggests that a slightly different method needs to be used to perform the same. Would anyone have any sample code to implement this? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with this!

X.org video driver Geode 2.11.12

2011-02-13T21:46:00.005+02:00

Today we published version 2.11.12 of the X.org Geode driver, code-named "Squeezing the Wheezy out of Debian" in honor of the recent Debian stable release. 2.11.12 is yet another minor bug-fixing release, this time featuring yet another EXA fix for the LX component, courtesy of the OLPC team, plus the removal of an obsolete V4L1 include that was preventing the building of the ztv video input component of our driver since Linux kernel 2.6.38 - thanks to the Fedora and Ubuntu teams for spotting this!

Adding default support for Airport remote sinks in PulseAudio

2010-12-11T20:08:00.003+02:00

In another case of "what were they thinking?" it has been my displeasure to find that support to discover remote Apple Airport audio sinks is not enabled by default in PulseAudio and, in practice, enabling this requires the user to install paprefs just to enable the loading of two modules (module-raop-discover and module-zeroconf-discover) that really should have been loaded via the global /etc/pulse/default.pa by standard. The question is, why? I perfectly understand not enabling the publishing of local audio sinks by default, but why prevent the discovery of remote audio sinks by default? More to the point, why force the end-user to jump through hoops and Google for hours just to enable something that really should have worked out of the box?

New GPG key released - signatures welcome

2010-11-29T19:11:00.003+02:00

Having rediscovered the wonders of GPG, I finally got around generating myself a 4096R key, signing it with my old key and issuing a transition statement. Given this, if

You happen to have signed my old 1E0CB9CD key at DebConf5 in 2005, at Solutions Linux 2008 or at some Free Software event in Finland or in the Baltic countries over the past 7 years and
You're satisfied with the content of the transitions statement,

your signature would be appreciated on my new C4B4D7B6 key.

Ubuntu kernel at 1000Hz with PREEMPT enabled?

2010-11-10T16:27:00.003+02:00

Back when Linux kernel 2.6 was released, one of the immediate benefits that I noticed was how beautifully responsive my desktop had suddenly become. As it turned out, Linus figured out that he would create a buzz to accompany kernel 2.6's release by having a default clock rate of 1000Hz. However, the excitement was short-lived and kernel defaults were soon brought back down to a more conservative rate of 250Hz, allegedly because some peripheral chips could not handle such a high frequency bump without producing an increased amount of processing errors.

Adding insult to injury, Ubuntu defaults eventually dropped another responsiveness enhancement, kernel preemption, allegedly because the goal was to have a one-size-fits-all kernel shipping with Ubuntu and preemption was detrimental to the kernel performance when the host is used as a server, which was a problem because Ubuntu had somehow decided to shift its focus from the desktop market towards the more lucrative server market.

While there is nothing wrong with universally-safe kernel defaults or with a corporate decision to shift a distribution's focus towards more lucrative markets, it nonetheless left me pondering what would be the best way to get a 1000Hz kernel with preemption on my desktops, without constantly having to crank out my own kernel packages. As such, I was wondering if there would be enough traction from desktop users to justify producing such a kernel and to make it available as a post-install option from the Ubuntu repository?

PS: I'm already aware that a specialized Ubuntu kernel is available to cater for the needs of audio production, but my understanding is that it has power management disabled, because it can interfere with the real-time operation of MIDI devices, while normal desktop users would definitely want to have power management enabled.

Ubuntu no longer ships debian/changelog since Natty?

2010-11-07T12:55:00.003+02:00

Since a few days, I have started to notice that the "Debian" changelog that normally ships with packages no longer appears with a number of recent package updates. Is this intentional?

An old GRSec feature I miss in stock Linux 2.6 kernels

2010-10-14T16:01:00.003+03:00

Ages ago, when building my own kernel packages was my main hobby, I used to apply the GRsecurity patch to my kernels. One of the main benefits I found in this patch was that it would make the kernel terminate or, if that failed to have any immediate effect, downright kill any application that suddenly requests an unreasonable amount of system resources. I was wondering if stock Debian and Ubuntu kernels offered any similar feature that could be enabled e.g. via some /sys register?

Batch-editing EXIF data to add copyrights?

2010-08-27T19:18:00.006+03:00

I've recently become more serious about my photographic hobby and it dawned onto me that manually editing each JPEG to add my copyright was entirely the wrong approach. Thus, I was wondering if anybody would know of a Free Software tool that can batch edit the EXIF data in JPEG images? What I'd like to accomplish is simple:

Add the string Copyright ©$YEAR Martin-Éric Racine where $YEAR is directly extracted from the original EXIF data's day when the picture was taken.
Optionally, produce smaller versions of the source images to an output folder as TFCD samples for my models to take home.

Preferences go for a tool that is already packaged for Debian or Ubuntu but, worst comes, I could package the software myself.

X.org video driver Geode 2.11.9

2010-08-23T14:27:00.002+03:00

Released just a few hours ago:

We are pleased to announce this maintenance release of xf86-video-geode. It features a plethora of bug fixes, a few documentation updates and one performance enhancement. This release also marks the return of Advanced Micro Devices to the development team. Please read the content of NEWS for more details.

In practice, this Geode 2.11.9 release mostly fixes the growing number of rendering issues that were exposed with each successive release of the X.org server core. Among other things, it restores the ability to correctly view video streams on Totem and other media players, it fixes icon rendering bugs that affected various desktop environments and web browsers, it removes all remaining compiler warnings and, as a byproduct of fixing one rendering issue, the speed of our driver improved dramatically.

This is one release that will definitely please users of the OLPC XO-1 and of thin client hardware running on LTSP!

Hell just froze over a.k.a. Squeeze is frozen

2010-08-06T18:39:00.004+03:00

Just noticed about an hour ago on debian-announce: Squeeze entered into freeze tonight. Hurray! What this means in practice is that, unless a new version of something fixes a serious bug, it will not be allowed to trickle down from Sid into Squeeze on time for the actual release.

Still, I cannot help but feel sad that it happened just a few days short of upstream releasing the Geode 2.11.9 driver for X.org, because AMD recently committed a lot of resources towards fixing all outstanding issues on this driver and yet one major Linux distribution is about to release without those fixes, unless the Release Manager agrees to let us squeeze 2.11.9 into, well, Squeeze. Doable? Possibly, if enough people calmly ask the Release Manager for it.

A small death, a big birth.

2010-08-03T13:13:00.005+03:00

I dunno why, but hearing bagpipes always gives me the creeps, probably because their melodies sound like a whole country was just brutally slaughtered and is being mourned.

Sure enough, this morning, on my way to pick up my new national ID card matching my new citizenship, I ran into a Scottish regiment warming their bagpipes in preparation for the Police marching band festival of Helsinki and instantly had goosebumps, to the point of running a mental list of everyone among my relatives who might have crossed the Styx during the last few hours. While my mother's recent ailments have indeed been a source of concern, I simply couldn't think of any reason for them to degenerate to a fatal extent, so I mentally crossed that possibility out.

Still, even after marching a few blocks further downtown towards the central police station, I simply couldn't shake the deep sadness that got onto me upon hearing the bagpipes rehearsal.

By the time I reached my destination, an answer came: before I could get my new ID card, I'd have to surrender my old Foreigner's ID card. As odd as it might sound, I felt sad to let go of that pink-tinted little bugger. See, as much as I've hated being a foreigner all these years, that pinkish ID card was my only legal tie to this country and the photo of me it bears represented an important phase of struggles in my life, a phase that I would have loved to document in any possible way. Alas, it was not possible, so I gave one last look at my old card, handed it over and took my new blue-tinted citizen's ID card in exchange.

Walking back across downtown towards my home, all I could do was stare at my new ID card in disbelief: the Citizenship line indeed said FIN. I suppose that was the real message: C'était la fin d'une citoyenneté et le début d'une autre. Une petite mort, une grande (re)naissance. Sehän on hyvä vaihtokauppa, miun puolesta.

Firefox is a CPU killer!

2010-07-18T10:45:00.005+03:00

Since a couple of days, the mere act of launching Firefox is sufficient to get my Dell D430's CPU to overheat to the point of shutting itself down, within a few seconds of launching the application. Two questions:

Who the heck are the bastards that designed a laptop with such poor ventilation?
Who the heck are the bastards that coded such a hideous piece of bloated browser?

I know that I've previously vented out frustration over Firefox's shortcomings, but now this application-specific CPU overheating crap is just too much. Dammit!

On pohjantähden alla, Tää koti mulla mainen, Mä elämästä laulan...

2010-07-06T09:27:00.013+03:00

My girlfriend and I were out picking up a cake at the bakery last week, when my phone rang:

Hello, I'm calling about your application. I just spent the last hour discussing your case with my boss and there's just one thing that bothers us: do you ever intend on paying your residual taxes?
I received those payment slips right after I became unemployed and, as you know, living off unemployment benefits in this country's most expensive city doesn't exactly leave anyone with money to spare...
Say no more! Moving to the capital for this job was a real shocker. The rents are so bloody expensive here! Anyhow, do you intend on taking care of those residual taxes as soon as you get a job?
Yup, just like I said in my application.
Alright, then I guess that everything is in order. We can start processing your application today. We obviously cannot make any promise about how long that's gonna take, but I would think that the decision should come fairly soon.
Wow! That's excellent news! Thanks again for your help!
You're welcome, sir. Have a nice day!

Without knowing, at that moment, I had just become a citizen of the country in which I have been living for the past 12 years. It was only yesterday, upon receiving the decision in the mail and looking at the date on the certificate that I realized that, when I got the phone call, the decision had already been made and the bureaucracy was only looking for reassurances that I fully intend upon acquitting my civic obligations as soon as humanely possible.

To say that reading the decision was a highly emotional moment is an understatement. Trying to explain the intensity of this moment to my girlfriend, I compared it to the day when a teenager reaches adulthood. This instant brought a similar feeling: suddenly, the whole EU opens its doors to me and I'm free to decide how to best use the opportunities it offers.

What next?

For now, completing this government training to become a bureaucrat. Funnily enough, becoming a citizen resolved the whole issue of background checks, which also suddenly triples the number of possible venues for the on-job part of the training. In my case, it looks like I'll be spending the next few months at the Ministry of Employment and Entrepreneurship, working on EU projects that fund R&D efforts and export sales ventures in each member state.

After that, I'm not sure.

On one hand, I'd like to apply for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' KAVAKU recruitment program for future diplomats. On the other hand, that ministry is extremely picky about whom it accepts and it's not particularly known for favoring naturalized individuals. This being said, our current Minister recently published rather ambitious plans to completely reform the Ministry by bringing in seasoned professionals from the private sector who could efficiently promote Finnish know-how and products abroad, rather than hiring more of the same Public Administration graduates, so, who knows? Maybe the time is right for someone like me to join the ranks of the Finnish diplomacy?

An other option that I'm considering is to permanently move to Estonia. When my last job there ended, I was left with the feeling that I could have accomplished a lot more, if only I were in a legal position to move there, rather than commute a couple of times a week. Beyond the pioneering work that myself and my diplomat friends at the Estonian embassy did in Turkey, there was a demand for us to perform the same magic in other countries of interest to Estonia. Unfortunately, not being in a position to be on-site and no longer having a job that paid for me to be there often enough meant that I had to pass on that opportunity. Now, seeing how one of my friends recently left the diplomacy and is open to new challenges, I'm wondering if now might be a good time to resume our operation and prepare our next campaign?

Wow... So much to think about, now that a whole continent opened its doors to me. Hienoa! Olen suomalainen.

How much does Free Software influence my career prospects?

2010-06-27T20:36:00.008+03:00

Funny how life brings those A-HA moments in the least probable of circumstances. Take my career's development, for instance. I'm currently taking a training to become a government bureaucrat. During this training, each student goes through a thorough skill assessment to help the trainer select an appropriate training place in some government office. Asides from covering the obvious aspects of formal education and employment history, we also reviewed achievements and accumulated skills. My A-HA moment came as a result of our trainer asking me to completely rewrite my CV to match some known template. Additionally, she requested that I emphasize my technology background more. I countered by pointing out that the word "technology" tends to mean "engineer" to the average employer and yet I've have always been in Product Management or Business Development, which are more Sales-oriented roles than anything else, hence why I emphasize the Sales aspect and deflate the technology aspect in my CV. Still, while she conceded that difference in emphasis, she insisted that having worked in technology probably influenced my skills or my preferred workflow in one way or another. At the moment, I simply could not think of how it might have.

Boy, was I wrong! Where do I begin?

First of all, it dawned onto me that I simply cannot claim to know Microsoft Office anymore. Until recently, my Open Office skills were easily applicable to Microsoft Office, because Open Office borrowed a lot of concepts from its Microsoft counterpart. However, following the recent redesign of Microsoft Office, I found that I cannot navigate my way around Microsoft Word's menus anymore. While this new user interface paradigm indeed removes a lot of clutter, it also hides too many features in less than obvious places, which resulted in me concluding that I simply have to downgrade my Microsoft Office skills to medium. Given the progressive conversion of several Finnish agencies and ministries to Open Office, I'm not in such an uncomfortable position but, then again, other agencies and ministries fiercely cling on to their Microsoft licenses and have recently upgraded them. As such, should my practical training take place in one of those offices, I would essentially be unable to perform at my job. Redeeming factor: a friend who only knows Microsoft products faced similar frustrations last year when she got back from her summer vacations, after she realized that their network administrator had upgraded her workstation. It took her the whole autumn before she felt comfortable using Word again.

Another aspect of working in Free Software that influences my workflow: telecommuting and teleworking. As anyone working on Free Software projects knows, teams tend to be distributed around the globe, which means that there's always someone somewhere pushing a commit or answering bug reports, at any given time of the day. Simultaneously, work quickly becomes location-independent and flexible schedules are the norm; whatever and wherever works for a given developer, as long as the work gets done. Without anyone really noticing, this work methodology has permeated the whole technology ecosystem, even at fortune-500 companies. Employees come in and out of the office at whichever time suits them, while others choose to work from home and only show up whenever face-to-face meetings are called. Others even adopt a nomad lifestyle, constantly roaming the globe for adventures and connecting to the office network via VPN, from the comfort of their hotel room or from a friend's couch, on the other side of the globe.

In my case, having twice worked for Estonian companies while living in Finland, it meant taking the ferry twice a week to visit the office. This brought in more benefits than one might initially think: first of all, the quick walk between the metro station and the harbor in Helsinki meant that I arrived on the ferry with blood pumping adrenaline and fully alert. Being on the ferry gave me 2 hours of quiet time to grab my first coffee and plan my day. Getting out of the ferry in Tallinn meant another quick walk, this time between the harbor and the tramway. By the time I arrived at the office, I had exercised twice and planned all my workday. It's probably the most productive that I've ever been in my whole career. Additionally, I was frequently on the road, meeting customers and following on sales leads, which meant that I got to close many deals using my laptop in my hotel room. As our CEO used to joke, "I have no idea where in the world Martin-Éric is today but, just as long as the purchase orders keep on pouring in, it's all the same to me."

As a result of this reflexion, I had to explain to our trainer why I am extremely well-suited to government jobs that require a lot of traveling and where Free Software is used on the desktop and, vice-versa, extremely unsuited to back-office jobs where whatever Microsoft products of the day are the norm. I've had to put particular emphasis on what Open Office is all about, because many homeworks were supposed to be submitted in Microsoft Word format. While Writer indeed offers the option to import and export Microsoft formats, it doesn't come with any WYSIWYG guarantee, which is why I took on the habit of sending her PDF documents. Sadly, this did not always work out so well, especially in cases where the intention was to forward selected parts of a document to third-parties.

Conclusion: working in the Free Software industry, even in non-engineering roles, indeed has a strong influence on someone's choice of methodology, tools and workflow. In some cases, it can even disqualify someone from making certain career choices.

Who would have thought?

xf86-video-geode: new contributors shake off the dust

2010-06-13T14:10:00.005+03:00

A couple of years ago, the Geode X.org driver lost its main contributor, due to random attrition at AMD after the company experienced severe losses at the end of a quarter. Since then, yours truly and a few random contributors have been trying to keep this driver at least remotely usable, with mixed results.

Over the past few weeks, the driver has seen new contributions, thanks to the addition of two engineers from AMD Taiwan who have been going through the list of outstanding bugs and learning the ropes of collaborating with the Free Software community. This, in turn, had a snowball effect and motivated old contributors from the OLPC project and from the thin client community to return to the driver. Hurray!

Let's give a warm welcome to Frank Huang and Hunk Cui from AMD and, if you notice any issue with the driver that is not already reported, please file a report to help us become aware it.

Cheers!

Correct gLabels template for VistaPrint custom business cards?

2010-06-04T20:22:00.011+03:00

I'm currently designing myself a new business card and noticing how VistaPrint has finally established a drop point in Finland and is present in a growing number of countries, I was thinking of using their services this time. However, since they only publish ready-to-use templates for Adobe software and they won't disclose which printing products they use, I'm somewhat confused as to which of the templates offered by gLabels I ought to select. Would anybody reading this happen to know?

Ubuntu building its i386 libc6 with -m686 ?

2010-05-29T18:17:00.002+03:00

This is something that makes me deeply worried about the future of Ubuntu.

xf86-video-geode: EXA Composite support broken on X server 1.7

2010-04-11T16:43:00.005+03:00

Just a quick note to everyone who recently upgraded their X server to 1.7 on Geode hardware to report that changes in X server since 1.6 have exposed and escalated bugs in our Geode driver that make EXA Compositing fail, resulting in broken image support on GTK2+ applications. As a temporary work-around, add this line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the Devices section:

Option "EXANoComposite" "true"

On my Lucid host, this gives me the following minimalistic xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
 Identifier "Geode Video"
 Driver "geode"
 Option "EXANoComposite" "true"
EndSection

We're currently working to produce new upstream packages that default to EXANoComposite as a temporary work-around, so that the driver at least produces useful results by default, and push this to distributions ASAP, especially keeping in mind pending Squeeze and Lucid releases.

Meanwhile, AMD recently assigned new engineers to contribute to the driver's development and to eventually pick up maintenance, so we should soon have a permanent solution to these recent breakages in acceleration support for both GX2 and LX chipsets.

gThumb: thank you for breaking my workflow!

2010-03-09T13:05:00.004+02:00

Just a kind thank you note to the gThumb authors for completely breaking my workflow by re-inventing the paradigm used to save imported pictures. Until now, all my pictures landed in a predictable location, using a predictable filename pattern that was easily searchable. Not anymore. Now, files land into my home directory, according to some recursive folder pattern that further complicates searching for files and requires a few more clicks to accomplish. Dammit! Couldn't you at least make this configurable, so that those of us who prefer to retain the old paradigm can?!

Note: re-inventing an application's paradigms is always a very bad idea. If you're a software developer who is reading this, please keep it in mind and go scratch your itch to change the world somewhere else. Thank you.

Post Scriptum

Many thanks to Damon Lynch for pointing me to his own professional picture importer called Rapid. This is an extremely configurable importing tool and, lo and behold, Damon even offers builds for Ubuntu via his PPA!

Still, the consequence of this mess is that migrating to Rapid means that I'll be loosing gThumb's simple but extremely efficient editing tools. To me, one strength of gTthumb was this unique combination of picture importing with basic editing tools. Now, I'm forced to split these interconnected tasks, simply because someone chose to completely rethink gThumb's paradigms. I'm of course aware of Gimp's existence, but repeated attempts at mastering it made me conclude that it's entirely the wrong software for my needs and essentially overkill. By contrast, gThumb offers just enough tools to enable someone to crop images to useful sizes and to adjust color balances in easy steps; it does the job without hassle, which is not the case with Gimp.

Thinking out loud, it is precisely on days like these that the urge to create my own Linux distribution keeps on coming to mind. Retaining consistent paradigms in the desktop environment and applications that I use, not to mention maintaining the number of duplicate libraries to a bare minimal, has been a constant struggle and, noticing how some developers' urge to re-invent the wheel every other day, using whatever new programming language of the day, persistently takes precedence over keeping system resource consumption to a bare minimum and over preserving user sanity, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Free Software has veered way too far into the bazaar and urgently needs a copious amount of cathedral to make it usable for mere mortals again.

Some dpkg-based distribution where the only scripting language allowed is Bourne shell and the only programming languages C or C++ comes to mind. Of course, this would also require porting popular application from e.g. Java, Python, etc. which would be a colossal amount of work. Still, I think that the time has come for this to happen. As an added bonus, this would make applications usable again on embedded devices with spartan CPU, RAM and storage resources, so this project could generate huge benefits to the embedded Linux industry. Based on my experience at my previous jobs, I have a rather clear picture (pun intended) of what needs to be done and of who I would hire to make it happen. What I'm missing are investors. Who's with me?

Wanted: unsyndicated web mail service - say Google Mail and you're dead

2010-02-15T10:40:00.004+02:00

A few days ago, I woke up to the fact that Google has become yet another MSN. The stupid opt-out policy of their latest gadget, Google Buzz, means that I can no longer entrust Google with anything.

In case it wasn't obvious to the idiots at Google, no, I do not want every single person that ever sent me a random e-mail to suddenly get automated access to whatever on-line content I'm producing; I want to choose who will get access to what and be able to change my mind about what any particular individual will get access to at any given time. Most of all, I want this to be opt-in by default. That is, unless I explicitly enabled access to some specific content to a specific individual, the assumption shall be that nobody has access to anything that I produce. Alas, it seems too much to ask from Google.

So now I'm looking for a reliable no-frills webmail service that is too boring to ever get under the radar of any media content giant. First, it was Hotmail no more, now it's Google no more. I also have another simple request: that the selected e-mail address can include hyphens and periods. If anybody knows of any such simple and reliable on-line webmail service, please drop me a line via this blog article's comments. Thanks!

Ubuntu/Lucid: recovering from yesterday's messy update

2010-02-11T17:06:00.005+02:00

Yesterday a silly oversight in the packaging of udev in Ubuntu/Lucid produced a breakage that consistently makes dpkg barf. Here's a simple command line recipe to recover from it. In your terminal application, type:

sudo sed -i 's#copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware.sh#copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware#' /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/udev && sudo dpkg -a --configure && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

...then press enter. You should be able to resume normal operation right after.

PS: as suggested by others, I revised the above snippet to use sed locally, since not everyone has patch installed.

OpenOffice's style editing dialogs suck!

2010-02-09T20:35:00.003+02:00

Working on some document today, it occurred to me, once again, that OpenOffice's method for designing and applying documents styling totally sucks!

Granted, this was not the first time that I cam to this conclusion but, today, I've come to realize that OpenOffice's paradigms constantly make me waste time trying to form a mental image of how every style element is suppose to relate to the other one, yet without having the full picture available within a single, easy-to-read document. Also, there is a complete lack of consistency in how style elements work. Some want to be defined in millimeters, while others want to be defined in points, while other still in number of lines. What a mess!

In short: to become remotely usable, OpenOffice needs to approach document styling via the "HTML document with a separate CSS style sheet" paradigm. In other words, I need to be able to edit styles globally, as a group and separately from the document content itself, rather than having to click my way through a multitude of dialogs, for each and every type of text elements.

To compare this with web design, there, I can focus on the actual content, formatted around semantic text elements (headers, paragraphs, block quotes, etc.) and then decide on the presentation styling as a separate global process by attaching a CSS style sheet, in which the relation between each type of text element and how it will be displayed is crystal clear, because it's handled as a unified style editing process.

I think that this is one area in which Free Software could innovate in a positive way, by distancing itself from the Redmondesque practices of Microsoft Word, from which OpenOffice borrows too much. How about having a proper Style Editor application (similar to a CSS editor), within the OpenOffice suite, while Open Writer itself would only be allowed to load the style sheets produced by it and to apply them to semantic text text elements?

Help Wanted: testers for the Geode X.org driver on GX2 "Red Cloud"

2010-01-27T18:31:00.005+02:00

A number of small fixes have been committed to the upstream X.org GIT to improve support for the "Red Cloud" Geode variant (called GX2 for late NSC chips and GX for newer rebranded AMD chips) and we desperately need volunteers to test those changes, before we release a new upstream tarball. If you have some Red Cloud hardware on hand and at least basic knowledge of how to compile software on Linux distributions, please contact me to the e-mail address listed in the ChangeLog. Thanks!

PS: if you're on Ubuntu, test packages are available for Lucid via my PPA.

Bad, bad Linux kernel!

2009-12-21T13:37:00.007+02:00

Ever since Linux kernel 2.6.31 was released, my AMD Geode LX800-based FIC ION 603 can no longer boot; I get a fatal kernel crash near the end of the initramfs loading phase. At the crux of the issue seems to be a recently added kernel feature for caching filesystem ACL. I don't even use the ACL feature on my hosts, but there you go; it still crashes the kernel. Sigh.

Having filed a bug on Launchpad and reported the issue upstream failed to produce a fix - despite the sustained involvement of two members of the Ubuntu kernel team members to help me narrow down the cause of this fatal kernel crash.

Mentioning the issue to OLPC kernel developer Andres Salomon, he commented how he finds the new ACL caching code in the ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem drivers downright creepy, but added that he currently lacks the time to further investigate the issue.

I'm thus wondering if anyone else is experiencing this issue and might possibly have a fix to propose?

Alternately, help towards debugging and fixing this issue is extremely welcome, as this bug will seriously affect users upgrading from older Debian and Ubuntu releases based on pre-2.6.31 kernels, when Debian/Squeeze and Ubuntu/Lucid are published in spring.

PS: yes, the issue still exists in kernel 2.6.32 also.

Wanted: a coherent, sane Finnish political party

2009-12-21T11:10:00.012+02:00

In more than 11 years in Finland, I've been politically involved in a couple of political parties on the Right side of the spectrum - mainly because those parties tend to favor a free market economy and a work-oriented immigration. In one case, I was invited by fellow immigrants to attend the meetings of their favorite party's English section, because of my expertise on Immigration legislation and common practices. In an other case, a member of the Finnish parliament invited me to participate in his party's immigrant workgroup, which resulted in my getting involved in a number of proactive initiatives and eventually joining that party as a card-carrying member.

Simultaneously, I was approached by no less than 4 Finnish political parties to become a candidate in the municipal elections (in Finland, foreigners who have lived at least 2 years on an A-status residence permit can vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections).

Despite this, I've come to the conclusion that none of these Finnish political parties is genuine:

On one hand, there's politicians who claim to know everything about the Immigration question and yet their speeches tell an entirely different story than what immigrants experience. On the other hand, there's politicians who complain about the immigrants' lack of participation in political life, but who quickly add that their personal group of supporters is all they're interested in hearing from.

Correlating these facts, it's been found by many politically-involved immigrants that Finnish political parties don't genuinely want to involve immigrants; all they are interested in is acquiring a few extra votes from the immigrant population and in transferring those votes to their party's star Finnish candidate, who often is someone favored by the party's old-timers but disavowed by the majority of grassroot members. In a few more extreme cases, party brasses will sheepishly admit that all they want is «a couple of niggers in the candidate list» to show a vague sense of adhesion to the multicultural agenda - despite the assurances they have given to often naive immigrant candidates that they "genuinely" hope that they'll be elected.

As it turns out, many immigrants are actively involved at the grassroot level and receiving the praises of their Finnish colleagues for their innovative and proactive initiatives. As a result, genuinely interested Finns have joined forces with active immigrants to launch various initiatives for improving Finland's competitive position in the global economy through a thriving cosmopolitanism and a stronger culture of entrepreneurship. For instance, I am personally involved at several public and private sector initiatives.

Nonetheless, grassroot initiatives can only ever accomplish so much; without the unflinching support of Finland's significant political players, several key elements of these innovative solutions cannot be implemented. However, given the grassroot's frustrating experiences of the political scene, one cannot help but wonder:

Is there any Finnish political party whose actions are coherent with its stated political agenda and in sync with the grassroot initiatives being put forward by the immigrants and their Finnish associates?

modulation wheels on the RIGHT side of the keyboard?

2009-11-01T22:05:00.003+02:00

Am I the only one who thinks that a 3-octave synthesizer (low-A to high-C) with the modulation wheels placed on the right side of the keyboard would be the ultimate Funk machine in the hands of people like Bernie Worrell and myself? Something like a NordBass III comes to mind...

Similarly, could synthesizer manufacturers please standardize on keyboard layouts that always start on the low-A and include quick octave transposition buttons? The Roland Rhodes Mk60 included both a 5 octave 64-key layout (low-A to high-C) and two quick octave switch buttons (octave up and octave down), which made it a wonderful MIDI controller. Sadly, this was a one-off and no other keyboard on the market ever adopted this brilliant layout.

How about we go and fix it now? Korg? Nord? Roland? Yamaha? Are you guys listening?

mailx implementation that won't barf on UTF-8 encoded GECOS information?

2009-09-22T17:43:00.003+03:00

Dear Lazyweb,

I've been having problems with cron jobs that mail their output, because they always manage to garble non-ASCII characters into some unreadable crap.

Upon closer inspection, the real culprit seems to be mailx: no single mailx implementation out there seems to have come to terms with the fact that most contemporary operating systems have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8, rather than in ASCII.

I had very high hopes for the Heirloom implementation of mailx, except that it, too, fails at encoding mail headers in UTF-8.

I'm thus wondering if there's anything I might have overlooked, perhaps a mailx setting that would enforce encoding of the From, To and Subject lines to UTF-8, or otherwise another mailx implementation that in fact does acknowledge the fact that most operating systems these days have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8?

Q: How to configure /etc/pulse/client.conf for remote audio sink?

2009-09-18T20:31:00.003+03:00

I've spent the last couple of months wondering this and could not find an answer on the otherwise excellent PulseAudio wiki, so I thought that I'd ask the Lazy Web:

How can I configure /etc/pulse/client.conf to prefer a specific remote audio sink and to automatically fall back to localhost only when that remote sink is not available via Avahi?

I'm already aware of the paprefs applet, but it requires me to manually select the remote audio sink, every time I get back home, which is not what I want.

Instead, I need the PA daemon on this laptop to always try connecting to audio.lan then to localhost and to dynamically switch back and forth between those two hosts according to info provided by the Avahi PA module: if audio.lan is reachable and an audio sink is found, switch to that; if not, fall back to localhost; if audio.lan re-appears on the Avahi radar, switch back to it.

Surely there must be a way to achieve that, but how?

PS: audio.lan runs PA in System mode with IP-based ACL, if it makes any difference.

wanted: 'lspci -vvv' output for Geode SC1100, SC1200, SC1400

2009-09-09T13:23:00.004+03:00

As I'm trying to better document which Geode models bear which PCI vendor and device ID, I'd need volunteers to e-mail me the output of 'lspci -vvv' for their Geode SC1100, SC1200, SC1400 -based hardware. Please send the result to my iki.fi address. Thanks!

PS: the part that interests me is the PCI ID of all Geode CPU and Companion Chips shown by 'lspci'. This requires setting several additional levels of verbosity, because this information is hidden from the normal 'lspci' output.

wanted: Geode "Red Cloud" GX2 hardware

2009-09-03T16:46:00.003+03:00

Ever since X server 1.5 was released, various regressions started affecting our GX2 code in xf86-video-geode. We couldn't figure out what went wrong since our GX2 code hadn't changed in ages and we couldn't think of any ABI or API migration that would cause these regressions.

Well, it turns out that someone had quietly rewritten part of the X server core, which broken things from under our feet.

In the end, the change required to restore operation was minimal, but it nonetheless caused problems for several thin client users who complained loudly while the xf86-video-geode team scratched their head wondering what went wrong.

Still, it essentially meant that GX2 users suffered through Intrepid and Jaunty without a solution in sight, which is of course unacceptable. I'm also aware of at least one startup who lost a fairly lucrative LTSP maintenance contract, simply because their customer's GX2-based thin clients could not be made to work on Ubuntu since Hardy. Ouch!

In order to prevent this from ever happening again and to ensure that regressions get noticed before they reach critical mass, I'd like to solicit a hardware donation: something GX2-based with a small hard-disk or CompactFlash socket and 100baseT Ethernet.

My contact info can be found on my homepage. Please make sure that you contact me upfront to agree on the delivery method, before sending me any hardware.

Thanks!

xf86-video-geode 2.11.4 - the GX2 edition - almost done

2009-08-18T14:35:00.004+03:00

Over the last few days, several improvements in the documentation and some fixes for GX2 issues were committed to the Geode X.org driver, in addition to routine cleanups in the standard includes and build macros. Integration of GX1 support still hasn't started.

We're especially interested in getting feedback from GX2 users as to whether this release restores basic operation for them or not. We published test packages for Ubuntu/Jaunty at:

https://launchpad.net/~q-funk/+archive/ppa

If we haven't heard anything by Friday, we'll release this as xf86-video-geode 2.11.4 as-is.

RFA: ispell-et, myspell-lv, rus-ispell

2009-08-17T14:35:00.004+03:00

As of today, I've decided to Request For Adoption three of the packages I maintain:

ispell-et (source for: iestonian, myspell-et, aspell-et) - Estonian spell checking tools,
myspell-lv (source for myspell-lv, aspell-lv) - Latvian spell checking tools and
rus-ispell (source for irussian, myspell-ru, aspell-ru) - Russian spell checking tools.

In principle, both the Latvian and Russian dictionary packages have a second maintainer, but I've been the only one performing the uploads for a long time which, in absence of any response on their part, suggests that the other maintainers also lack the time to actively maintain these dictionaries.

I'm not worried about the future of the Russian dictionary package, since the number of Debian and Ubuntu users in Russia is huge and constantly increasing. Someone is definitely gonna adopt it and give it all the love and care it deserves.

The Estonian dictionary package has seen a steady increase in the number of users but I never managed to attract a second maintainer for it. Thus, if nobody ever gets around adopting it, it just could be the end of spell checking support for Estonian in Debian and Ubuntu.

As for the Latvian dictionary package, both the low number of users and the unavailability of the other maintainer suggests that it could also be the end of spell checking support for Latvian in Debian and Ubuntu.

Here's to hope that someone reading this will pick up maintenance of these dictionary packages and help provide Debian and Ubuntu users with spell checking aids for Estonian, Latvian and Russian for years to come.

Don't try this at home, kids!

2009-08-13T02:20:00.003+03:00

Probably the most deceptively efficient bug finding tool I've come across in a long time:

sudo apt-get --reinstall --ignore-missing install $(dpkg --get-selections | cut -f 1)

That apparently innocent APT recipe has been found to reveal tons of packaging mistakes, such as dependency cycles and broken maintainer scripts, even in packages as essential as bash and libc6. On systems where insserv is installed, even uglier dependency cycles, this time between init scripts, appear in important packages such as ifupdown and netbase.

Warning: usage of this deceptively simple command line recipe can become addictive and result in mass filing of bugs, especially against packages in development releases such as Debian/Squeeze and Ubuntu/Karmic. The author of this blog article makes no guarantee about how bad of a karma someone might accumulate as a result. You have been warned.

Nordic expats living in Finland wanted for survey

2009-08-12T19:16:00.004+03:00

I'm interested in meeting with Nordic expats (Danemark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) living in Finland, to hear their experiences of settling down in this country, on two particular topics:

How accessible is getting service in Swedish, in general?
Did you experience any difficulty in settling down here?

I'm especially interested in hearing stories from academicians and professionals. The material will be used in my report to two organizations where I'm involved, one Swedish-Finn think tank and one national panel on immigration, both of whom are interested in hearing about the experiences of Nordic expats living in Finland.

As I'm aware that many Free Software developers from other Nordic countries relocated to Finland to work at Nokia or at local technology startups, I figured that blogging this request would bring me the widest possible audience for this survey.

Interested expats should contact me via e-mail with a brief description of their story. Later on, we'll probably gather up somewhere and compare views, before I produce my report. Thanks in advance to everyone who agrees to participate in this survey and to those who courteously passed this request forward to friends or relatives fitting the description!

partial answer to "unexplainable WiFi connection drops"

2009-08-09T15:46:00.006+03:00

Previously, I blogged about some unexplainable WiFi connection drops I have been experiencing since a few days. Many thinks to everyone who replied by expressing their ire against Network-Manager. Unfortunately, it seems that the fault might indeed be on the WRT54GL's OpenWRT setup:

See, I have this old ThinkPad that I keep for Debian development purposes and that one runs whatever is on Debian/Testing, connecting to my LAN, using either an RTL8139-based Ethernet or an ATH5K-based WiFi adapter, plugged into the Cardbus slot; these days, more often the Atheros.

Now, this morning, I noticed that my Geode desktop stopped being able to ping both the Dell and the ThinkPad at the same time. Bingo! Now, the question is, how do I track the source of the problem, on this WRT54GL running White Russian?

Lauching Debian-installer from a chroot on a USB stick?

2009-08-07T13:01:00.004+03:00

Dear Lazy Deb,

I was wondering if it's possible to launch debian-installer from a USB stick, either by bootstrapping the netinstall ISO image from command line or by launching d-i as as a collection of binaries installed in a USB chroot that already has a basic Debian distribution installed? While launching debootstrap itself from the USB stick would be possible, I'd miss all the d-i magic to partition the laptop's own hard-disk and detect its hardware at installation time, which is why I explicitly need a way to launch a full d-i from USB. NOTE: no, the laptop's BIOS doesn't support booting via USB, otherwise this would have been already attempted.

Illogical logistics industry

2009-08-07T11:31:00.003+03:00

Today, I was checking for prices to ship a parcel abroad and found the most appalling situation ever: the logistics industry has gone mad. Trying different courier services' online price quotation service, I found that:

UPS has an online presence that works reliably, as it always had. Their prices are not cheap, but one can at least get a quote after just a few clicks.
DHL has an online express service called Ship Now ... which simply doesn't work. After inputing the origin address and moving over to the destination address field, one is left with a "busy" mouse pointer that never returns to allow someone to input the damn address. Repeated attempts at reloading the page did not succeed at improving the situation.
FedEx has a Flash-based splash screen, meant for selecting the country of origin, that keeps on cycling during loading and never completes. Their "if you're having troubles viewing this page, click here" link at the bottom of the page simply calls a Javascript bit that... reloads the page. Erm... Right.

The result: two companies that lost potential business over a rather huge and costly parcel, simply because their websites prevents me from getting something as basic as a price quote. It really makes someone wonder, how the hell does that industry keeps itself afloat when they make their services so challenging to even access?

unexplainable WiFi connection drops on Dell D430

2009-08-04T13:17:00.004+03:00

Dear Lazyweb,

Since a few days, my Dell D430 running Ubuntu Jaunty has started to experience random WiFi connection drops. After a few hours of normal operation, even though the Network Manager applet indicates that the connection is still with me and with a strong signal, doing a ping to my WRT54GL running OpenWRT 0.9 (White Russian) replies with "Destination Unreachable".

My D430 comes with the following WiFi adapter:

0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)

Does this situation sound familiar to anyone? If yes, how did you resolve it?

CUPS-PDF: how my first Debian package briefly became a key component of the Ubuntu desktop strategy

2009-07-27T12:55:00.006+03:00

Back in 2003, I packaged my very first piece of software for Debian: CUPS-PDF. The observation came to a German physics researcher, Volker C. Behr, that he constantly needed to generate PDF documents as a daily part of his workflow and that he would rather do this via desktop application's Print menu, so he coded a simple CUPS printer driver that spits out PDF documents instead of paper sheets.

This packaging gig has been one of the best cases of upstream collaboration I've been involved with, simply because Volker himself subscribes to the BTS for CUPS-PDF at various Linux distributions and because he is very proactive at responding to bug reports that concern the upstream code and the philosophy behind its implementation.

Simultaneously, there's been plenty of collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu on this package. For starters, maintaining a CUPS driver meant that I should maintain close collaboration with the CUPS maintainer. Back in 2003, this meant getting to know Kenshi Muto, first on IRC and then in person at Debconf5.

At the same event in 2005, many people had their first real experience of Ubuntu, when Mark Shuttleworth made his first keynote appearance at a Debian event. This later lead me to becoming familiar with the work of Martin Pitt and Till Kamppeter on the Ubuntu version of CUPS and CUPS-PDF packages, because Ubuntu had decided on delivering PDF generation as a standard feature of its desktop and CUPS-PDF was considered as the key solution towards implementing this. However, CUPS-PDF being a mere printer driver, it did not fit well with the GUI-oriented paradigm of the desktop, so pre-configuring the package with sensible default settings only partially worked. This issue was recently solved when GTK2 and QT (the core libraries behind GNOME and KDE applications) were upgraded to include printer management and PDF generation by standard, which resulted in the Ubuntu build of CUPS-PDF being relegated to the Universe repository.

Amusingly, the most interesting part of my collaboration with Martin and Till wasn't how it slowly helped me improve the packaging of CUPS-PDF on Debian, as much as that it introduced me to the wonders of Launchpad (tracking other distributions' bugs on the same package, Personal Package Archive, etc.) and it eventually convinced me to switch to Ubuntu for everything except my old ThinkPad, which I retained as a genuine Debian environment for development purposes.

While CUPS-PDF has mostly been superseded by GTK2 and QT's new printing features on the desktop, it definitely remains a key element of an educational or enterprise network, especially in a situation where desktop computers are in fact thin clients connecting to an LTSP server and where PDF generation is a part of the standard daily workflow.

Speaking of which, I'm currently looking for investors to launch a business venture that leverages and expands upon the ideas I've developed at Linutop and Artec. Please contact me via e-mail if you're interested in financing this venture or if you know someone who would be.

On the accessibility of public services in Swedish in Finland

2009-07-09T14:28:00.003+03:00

As confirmed by a comment to my previous article, Nordic workers moving to Finland also encounter problems whenever dealing with the bureaucracy. More specifically, getting service in the Swedish language apparently is becoming more and more difficult, in some Finnish municipalities, despite the fact that Finnish and Swedish both have an official language status in Finland.

This matches the findings of a committee where I was recently nominated. Among our team, we have a Free Software specialist from Åland. While the Åland archipelago legally remains a part of Finland for historical reasons, in practice, its inhabitants have always related more closely to Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia than to Finland. As such, our ålander encountered a much bigger cultural shock when he moved to Helsinki than when he previously moved to Reykjavik to live with his Icelandic wife.

Interestingly, most people think of EU versus non-EU nationals, when they think of immigrant integration issues and yet, EU nationals are not any more Finnish than non-EU nationals. This sort of opinion gets even more laughable, whenever average Finns presume that anyone from a Nordic country moving to Finland would have no difficulty whatsoever in settling down, simply because they relocate from a country that also happens to be of Lutheran protestant background and a political ally of Finland. This simply isn't true. As another comment in the same article suggests, there are integration issues with e.g. Swedes living in Norway and vice-versa. As such, I don't see how anyone could believe that Finland would be free of similar problems. Perhaps this is yet another case of Finns believing a bit too hard that their country is so great that they could not possibly experience the same issues that their neighbors have?

Aftermath of the Magma/Helsinki Times survey on Swedish

2009-06-29T15:27:00.011+03:00

While searching the blogosphere for responses to the survey on Swedish culture in Finland, I came across this interesting gem [translated and commented in Finnish on Suomi 24] by Vasa Bladet columnist Kenneth Myntti.

After summarizing the findings of the survey that was conducted by Magma and the Helsinki Times, he moved on to describing my efforts for getting access to Swedish language classes and how it lead me to directly contact the Ministry of Employment on this issue.

Myntti then concludes the article by making a rather astute observation (my own translation; apologies for any inaccuracy):

Racine simply would not give up so easily. He took the initiative to approach the Ministry of Labor with a proposal that any foreigner who already passed level 4 of the National Certification in Finnish Proficiency would be admissible to study Swedish via labor training. It was he who approached the Ministry, not the Ministry who approached him.

Is this really how things are supposed to be? Are immigrants really expected to battle the bureaucracy just to become a part of this country's Swedish-speaking community?

Of course not. It should be up to us to have our own "Finland Swede operatives" inside the bureaucracy and parliament, knocking on doors and driving changes in policy to ensure that immigrants can have the option to integrate with the Swedish-speaking part of the population, if they want to.

The Swedish language has a status that is equal to the Finnish language in this country's constitution and a direct consequence of that ought to be a possibility to take Swedish classes on equal footing with Finnish classes for those who chose to immigrate to our country.

That Swedish is considered easier to learn than Finnish should in fact increase foreigners' interest in choosing Swedish as their primary integration language.

From that perspective, we could even complement Racine's proposal by saying that any foreigner who already achieved a sufficient level of proficiency in Swedish could be offered Finnish classes afterwards.

In my opinion, Myntti is absolutely right. If Swedish's status as an official language of Finland is to have any meaning, then it must be possible to study it via Integration Act measures. However, this country's majority speaks and has always spoken Finnish. As such, I think that it makes perfect sense to put the emphasis on Finnish as the primary integration language.

Still, I'll emphasize that this doesn't dispense this Government from acquitting its constitutional obligations to safeguard the status of both official languages and, as a direct consequence, to ensure that immigrants get equal access to immigrant labor training in both national languages.

Basically, for as long as Swedish retains its official language status, there can be no excuse for preventing immigrants from getting Swedish classes via the Integration Act measures!

On a related matter...

On the issue of whether or not Swedish should be reinstated as a compulsory subject for the high school matriculation exam, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said in Iltasanomat that:

Youths who couldn't give a damn about studying Swedish significantly reduce their opportunities on the job market and they concede a tremendous advantage to others who do speak it.

What's interesting about Vanhanen's opinion is that, while he correctly acknowledges how a Finnish professional who doesn't master Swedish could be seriously disadvantaged on the job market, he clearly doesn't realize how an immigrant who only knows one of the official languages could similarly be affected. I wonder why...

xf86-video-geode 2.11.3

2009-06-22T11:57:00.003+03:00

A few days ago, we released version 2.11.3 of the Geode X.org driver. As you'll notice from the version number, this is only a maintenance release, mainly to fix crasher bugs that appeared since X.org server core 1.6 was released.

Meanwhile, Otavio Salvador has been busy cleaning up our GX2 support and, in the process, he also found a few interesting regressions that affect LX support as well.

Unfortunately, our goal to integrate GX1 support into our unified Geode driver still hasn't been reached, due to a lack of resources: most people who knew anything about GX1 and SC Geodes and who had access to development hardware have moved on. As such, help to complete this goal is extremely welcome.

Two truths with one stone

2009-06-11T09:45:00.001+03:00

[bash.org repost] DragonflyBlade21: A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Removing cruft that appears as false 'dpkg -L' positives?

2009-06-09T00:53:00.004+03:00

Dear lazyweb,

I have one very last Debian host running "testing" that I keep as a development platform. The computer in question is an aging ThinkPad 240x whose LCD cable constantly threatens to make the display content unreadable and whose non-expandable 192MB of RAM is ridiculously small by today's standard. On the plus side, this makes for a very small development host that I can easily tuck away in the closet whenever I don't need it.

However, one problem currently plagues this computer: it has been through literally years of dist-upgrades and it has accumulated TONS of cruft on its filesystem, namely files that, according to packages.debian.org, should not longer ship with the packages "dpkg" claims they belong to but, for unknown reasons, nonetheless remained on the system, probably as the result of botched upgrades whenever package X had broken maintainer scripts during the development phase before "testing" was frozen and moved to "stable".

Making a clean install from Lenny could be a nice solution, but doing so on a laptop that has no CD-ROM, whose BIOS has no support for USB boot and whose only other boot option is an external 3.5" floppy disk drive, might prove more tricky than I'd bargain for (Google "ThinkPad 240x" and you'll see how tricky I mean).

I am thus wondering if anybody would know of any tool capable of comparing files present on the filesystem with those stated as shipping with packages matching versions currently installed, according to files lists found via packages.debian.org, so that I can at least sanitize the filesystem and restore the content to a fresh Lenny install state?

When can we have a balanced and meaningful debate on immigration?

2009-06-06T17:47:00.014+03:00

This question keeps on popping up in many recent newspaper articles, on discussion boards and in seminars debating immigration issues in Finland. At the core of the question is a general impression that, between the enthusiastic supporters of multiculturalism and the pessimistic nationalist rednecks, very little constructive discussion is possible in Finland.

At one end, humanitarian help organizations, as well as politicians from the Green Party and the Swedish Folk Party, keep on taking excessively generous initiatives towards refugees and asylum seekers, all while labeling their detractors as racists. At the other end, nationalist candidates in the National Coalition Party and True Finns Party keep on painting every immigrant as a refugee who is abusing social security and label their detractors as turning Finland into the easiest country to abuse social security, at the Finnish taxpayer's expense. In between, candidates from the Christian Democrats and Center Party spread equally among these two camps. Meanwhile, while the Left is currently avoiding discussions on this topic, Social Democrats have previously shown that they tend to side with the nationalists in labeling all immigrants as social security abusing refugees.

One interesting point is that, no matter at which end of the political spectrum one looks, the whole Finnish immigration debate keeps on focusing exclusively on refugees and asylum seekers, despite the fact that migrant workers and foreign spouses of Finnish nationals make up for a good 70% of the foreign population residing on Finnish soil.

This recalcitrance to discuss immigration from any other perspective than refugees is rather painfully noticeable. Some recent examples:

At the Maailma Kylässä ethnic festival, last month, the podium was given to a number of speakers to discuss immigration issues. In once case, Minister of Immigration Mrs.Astrid Thors made an appearance at the tent of Demo, an NGO promoting active participation in the electoral process. Sure enough, Thors repeatedly brought back the issue of refugees, leaving other aspects of immigration completely out.

The next day, on the Mekong stage, a panel discussion was introduced by the MC as "discussing issues that affect refugees", despite the fact that the program read "panel discussion on immigration"... In fairness, the organization sponsoring that particular time slot was the Refugee Help Center but, thankfully, issues brought by the panelists clearly discussed a much broader perspective than merely refugees:

One Estonian-born researcher said that she'd rather avoid putting all immigrants into the same bag, because there's so many different reasons for coming to Finland and few of those have anything to do with seeking asylum and one cannot make any assumption about an immigrant's motives for coming here.

The other panelist, a professor from the university of Turku, astutely said that, if it was up to him, Maailma Kylässä should not exist, because the actual intent of the event is not to give immigrants a chance to be heard, but rather to entertain Finns with exotic culture and food, which is not the right way to make immigrants feel a part of society, in his opinion.
Independent member of the Helsinki City Council, Mr.Jussi Halla-Aho, repeatedly makes the headlines because of his blog's rather controversial statements. Probably his most famous stunt was the day he jokingly declared in his blog that, if the women of the Green Party are so keen on getting more immigrants admitted to Finland, they also ought to be enthusiastic at the prospect of becoming rape victims, cynically implying that immigrants all come from 3rd-world countries where women's rights are non-existent and, correspondingly, where the probability of women being raped is greater.
National Coalition Party candidate at the EU elections, Mr.Kai Pöntinen, used as his campaign slogan a decisively nationalist Sosiaalipummien maahantulolle stoppi! (Stop the immigration of social security abusers). Further reading on his homepage shows a rather misinformed statement, alleging that immigrants are systematically taught Swedish in language trainings offered via the Integration Act:

Myös kotouttamispolitiikkamme on metsässä, on täysin järjenvastaista että tulijoille opetetaan ensimmäiseksi kotimaiseksi kieleksi ruotsia. Kyllä ensiksi on osattava suomea ja sitten muita kieliä.

Reality is that, unless an unemployed immigrant lives in the monolingual Swedish municipality of Närpes or on the Åland archipelago, the only language they can learn via integration measures is ... Finnish.
At a recent "Meet the Immigration Department" seminar at cultural center Caisa, it transpired that the vast majority of the audience and of the employees working for the City of Helsinki's Immigrant Services department came to Finland as refugees. The moderator of the event also came to Finland as a refugee. Can anyone guess what issues were given preference by the moderator during that evening? 12 points go to ... those who answered "refugees and asylum seekers." Was there at least meaningful discussion about any aspect of the immigration process? As the former chairman of a particular Finnish political party's English section used to say:

I will not tolerate this meeting turning into a Wall of Lamentations or a Complaint Choir! Are we here to discuss real issues or what?

What's remarkable about all these examples is how public opinion is so persistently hardwired into thinking that all foreigners living in Finland came here as refugees from 3rd-world countries whose culture is radically different from Finland's and that they all became perpetually unemployed, forever living off social security, to the point that even politicians who ought to know better go along with it.

When will we be able to have a balanced and meaningful debate on immigration, you ask? The day both multicultural hippies and nationalist rednecks will have been kicked off the podium. Of course, it would also help if the refugees themselves stopped monopolizing the podium, whenever the opinion of immigrants is solicited. Then again, perhaps these 3 groups benefit so much from the current status quo that they'd rather not see the day when others can participate in this debate on equal footing with them, so that a balanced and meaningful debate can finally take place?

Killing the console bell on Jaunty?

2009-06-06T11:02:00.003+03:00

Every once in a while, rewrites in ALSA drivers or in desktop audio components (GNOME mixer or Gstreamer) result in an impossibility to completely mute the console bell. Until recently, ALSA offered a separate channel to control this. Since Jaunty (kernel 2.6.28, ALSA 1.0.18r3) came out, not anymore. As such, I was wondering how else could I mute the console bell?

Some people on Ubuntu Forum suggested blacklisting the pc-spkr kernel module, but this is entirely the wrong approach, as it completely kills sound output on this laptop's built-in speakers. I don't wanna completely lose sound support, I just wanna get rid of that annoying console bell!

Others recommended setting set bell-style none in /etc/inputrc but that only works for interactive shells. The console bell still rings e.g. whenever rebooting, probably because bash gets called as a non-interactive shell by init scripts. Actually, since Jaunty, restarting the system makes the bell ring not just once, but twice!

Can anyone think of any more permanent way of disabling the console bell in some global system setting?

Atom feeds per-topic

2009-05-24T15:53:00.002+03:00

Just a quick note for those interested in subscribing only to my blog articles pertaining to a specific topic that the following Atom feeds are available:

Invandringskonsult

2009-05-18T13:00:00.010+03:00

In close to 11 years of living in Europe, I've accomplished plenty beyond working in the high-tech sector: I've also been fairly active in Immigration Policy, especially on aspects that affect migrant labor. Because of this, I keep on getting more and more requests to produce statements or to appear on panels to discuss issues pertaining to migrant labor and to immigrants' integration.

The hot topic of last week was Swedish language for immigrants, the crux of the issue being that even though Swedish has an official language status in Finland, in practice, it is pretty much impossibly for immigrants to register their kids at the Swedish language school, to claim public services in Swedish or, even more so, to request labor training in the Swedish language at the Employment Office.

The weekly newspaper Helsinki Times, in collaboration with the media think tank Magma, recently conduced a survey of the immigrant population, to find out how much they know about Swedish culture in Finland and about the Swedish language.

It was in this context that the Helsinki Times and the national television's Swedish programming (FST) asked for an interview with yours truly, because I have recently visited the Ministry of Employment and Economics with a concrete proposal to facilitate the availability of labor training in the Swedish language.

This FST webcast, starting at 16:03 minutes into the show, and the above Helsinki Times article provide more details about the context and about my proposal to the Ministry.

Debian CUPS transition in progress

2009-05-05T19:26:00.002+03:00

Since Lenny was the first Debian release to feature CUPS under its new package naming strategy, I started going through 'rdepends' results to see which packages in Squeeze still present dependencies for *cupsys* packages.

Much to my amazement, there's quite many.

If you are the maintainer of a package that still has those dependencies, please fix them ASAP. Alternately, if you're aware of any favorite package that does, please do not hesitate at filing a patch to help the maintainer update their debian/control.

Comes June 2009, transitional CUPS packages will be removed from our debian/control.

Roadmap to a better FreeDesktop: ridding us of the Firefox filth

2009-02-16T07:54:00.003+02:00

Lately, I've been pondering how to solve one annoying aspect of the FreeDesktop, namely how to eject the piece of bloat called Firefox from the picture and get myself a fast web browser that I can rely on and that yet offers a similar UI experience based upon native GTK2 widgets rather than XUL components.

Just to investigate possible options, I tested Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror. My conclusions were than a Gecko-based Epiphany or Gaelon is incredibly fast and that Konqueror offers a similarily efficient experience albeit using QT, rather than GTK2 widgets.

Why is Firefox so bloody bloated then, if it uses the same Gecko engine as Epiphany and Galeon? The only possible conclusion I could come up with is that its crappy XUL implementation, rather than leverage existing native GTK2 or QT widgets, tries to reinvent the wheel with its own UI toolkit running as a gigantic RAM blackhole.

One option that I wanted to investigate but found too deficient was a Webkit-based port of Epiphany. Unfortunately, at its current stage, the GTK2 port of Webkit simply isn't mature enough to consider, although the fact that Webkit has been succesfully ported to a number of platforms and constitutes the basis for Safari on Mac OS suggests that the potential is significant.

That only leaves one single aspect on which Firefox wins hands-down: its UI concept; it just works well, whereas Epiphany simply has a UI concept that is utterly inadequate, because it is too crude, lacking basic necessities such as a session saving feature that also works when purposely unloading the application, rather than only as a crash recovery measure. Simply put, Epiphany's premise that a browser should never be closed and thus ought to always remain open in the background of a desktop session is utterly flawed; it doesn't work like that in real life and Firefox acknowledges this, while Epiphany stubbornly doesn't because someone wreaked Havoc in our desktop paradigm.

Anyhow, to me the solution is clear: regardless of which rendering engine it uses, Epiphany's UI concept needs to become more like Firefox, before it can truly gain acceptance as the default browser among Linux distributions.

Here's hoping for the best...

2009-02-12T15:32:00.004+02:00

Life sometimes has extreme ways of waking people up and making them realize what matters for them. I'm going through such a phase right now in my romantic life. I won't discuss what happened here, but suffice it to say that I haven't felt so depressed in a long, long, long, long time.

The good news is that life has proven to me once again how having good friends who truly care for me makes a whole world of difference. The big slap in the face that life gave me over these last few days was a harsh lesson, but I think that it was worth it. Of course, it helps that people like Gilles, Jaana, Henni, Pia, Linda, Arno and Sailesh beleived in me enough to support me through this rough spot in my life. Although their advices were vastly different, they all pointed in a very positive direction and gave me the strenght to carry on.

I also must thank my beloved Anastassija; what she did was cruel beyond beleif and yet, if her few SMS from the last 24 hours are any indication, there's still hope after the storm. I'll be seeing her tonight again, after a few days of separation and I prepared her a truly romantic evening. It ain't much, but I hope that it truly succeeds in bringing the point accross that Love is stronger than everything and that even the unforgivable can be forgiven, over time, if everyone involved has enough faith in each other's future as a couple.

Tonight, I truly could use the prayers of a million voices to support me and Anastassija in this difficult time. Life slapped me hard and I got the message... I think... and whatever happens after tonight, I need to know that I gave it my best shot and that, whatever her and I decide, Life can only take a turn for the better from now on.

Uninformed shoppers blaming Ubuntu: a brief TODO list for Canonical

2009-01-21T09:46:00.002+02:00

My own perception of the debacle about the end-user who decided to cancel her college enrollment because she could not get Microsoft products to install on Ubuntu is three folds:

Canonical and Dell evidently need to improve their marketing efforts, because the user didn't realize what she was purchasing. Knowledge of what Ubuntu is and how it can interact with the rest of the world clearly wasn't passed on in the form of a small printed User's Guide that should have come with the newly purchased laptop computer. Additionally Dell most definitely needs to make emphasize the same information in its online shop to help customers make an informed decision (and, no, eschewing the problem by obfuscating or removing non-Microsoft alternatives to the purchasing options isn't the right answer).
The newspaper that reported on the story really needs to do its homework to more accurately report what is Ubuntu and, perhaps, participate in the efforts to educate the masses about non-Microsoft alternatives in the Operating System market. Educating the Press to enable this might require hiring a dedicated person at Canonical to work with the non-industry Press.
The girl in question really needs to get a hold of herself, the sooner the better. Her hasty withdrawal from her enrollment was clearly unwarranted and her attitude of crying wolf and blaming everyone else for her own failure at making an informed purchase speaks volumes.

Personally, I think that Canonical needs to hire an individual that understands the above three aspects and, most of all, how to remedy them, as its next OEM channel Manager, if they truly want to increase Ubuntu's market penetration.

Geode X.org driver fix for GX2/CS5535 released

2009-01-03T19:52:00.004+02:00

After a rather hectic holiday season, I returned momentarily to pending Geode X.org driver issues. The current status:

On Debian, 2.10.1 is in Testing and Unstable, while 2.11.0 is in Experimental. For those who need 2.11.0 right away, the experimental package builds as-is using Lenny dependencies. For everyone else, I'll probably get around producing a proper backport once Lenny is released.
On Ubuntu, 2.9.0-1ubuntu2.5 just entered Hardy-updates with cherry-picked fixes for DCC support on GX2/CS5535 hardware. Meanwhile, Intrepid has 2.10.1 and Jaunty has 2.11.0, with a backport of the later having been requested for Hardy-backports.

I'm especially interested in hearing from users of GX2/CS5535 hardware to see if these recent uploads finally fixed DDC probing for them or not. Just respond to relevant existing bugs or, if necessary, open new bugs to report any regression.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.0: last call!

2008-12-11T13:42:00.002+02:00

With yesterday's release of version 2.11.0 of the X.org driver for the Geode GX2/LX, a whole cycle was wrapped up for many of the developers involved:

Jordan Crouse was among the unlucky ones who recently lost their job at AMD. The same layoff also affected Coreboot developer Marc Jones and other Geode specialists (see Jordan's blog article for details).
Several members of the OLPC project are also moving on, now that most Linux kernel and X.org patches have been merged upstream.
People like myself who were working in the thin client industry on Geode-based products are also moving on.

As such, remaining bugs and our milestone goal to merge back support for older GX1 Geodes might never be taken care of. From this perspective, we welcome active participation of new developers with access to a wide variety of Geode hardware to contribute and, eventually, take over upstream maintenance of xf86-video-geode.

Available for a new job

2008-11-06T17:42:00.005+02:00

A couple of years ago, I started what has probably been the best job I've held so far, as a Business Development Manager for Artec Group where I focused on marketing and selling the ThinCan LTSP client.

During that time, I used a combination of Guerrilla Marketing techniques to spread the word about this cool Estonian embedded platform in its LTSP client configuration and defined an extremely tight market-oriented focus that saw this relatively obscure electronic design start-up rise to the forefront of the LTSP hardware market and also brought the company commendable notoriety in the Coreboot community, thanks to its Programmable LPC Dongle, a low-cost ROM emulator that can be used to bootstrap various embedded hardware and test firmware images.

Looking back at close to 3 years with Artec (if we include the stint I did at Linutop), I most fondly remember how I managed to bring the Estonian and Turkish nations closer together in collaborating on Innovation. On my first visit to Turkey, I had noticed that very little is know about Estonia in Turkey, even though both countries have a collaboration that dates back to the 1920's, so my tactic was to introduce Estonia's achievements as a whole, to establish confidence in Artec's offering. It worked:

Among other things, my idea to organize an Estonian ICT Conference during the visit of Estonian PM Andrus Ansip in Turkey created a lot of extremely positive buzz that resulted in Estonia being mentioned as a trendy country in a prime time Turkish TV series. During this time, I've also made a lot of contacts among the Estonian and Turkish business communities and, more surprisingly, among the Estonian diplomacy who, much to my amazement, welcomed my ideas for better promoting Estonian interests abroad with great enthusiasm.

Come December 2008, my time at Artec will become a page in my employment history. While the Thincan remains one of Artec's key products, current marketing and sales resources are focused on new markets and new technologies that completely fall outside my core expertise, which is why the company decided to let me go.

I thus welcome offers from interested parties in Coreboot or LTSP markets. Other refreshing offers from outside the box - such as in business diplomacy - are equally welcome, as I've been pondering a career change for a long time.

Still more Old Skool goodies to send to a good home

2008-10-26T18:15:00.002+02:00

Debian Developer Peter De Schrijver dropped by tonight and left with the Atari stuff, but there's still more stuff left.

Atari TT030, Atari Stacy, iMac and SCSI devices for sale

2008-10-25T23:06:00.002+03:00

As the title of this blog post indicates, I've got some hardware to sell.

SBM that adds USB boot support?

2008-10-24T20:07:00.002+03:00

Having recently demoted my old ThinkPad 240x to Debian/Testing testbed, I wanted to re-install Debian from scratch on it, to make sure that I would have a clean reference system to work with.

However, this being a very old ThinkPad model, there is no CD-ROM drive to speak of. The only external means of booting is with an optional floppy disk drive. Sure enough, there exists a nice helper called SBM (included in the utility folder on all Debian CDs since several releases) that adds CD-ROM boot support to any BIOS.

Instead, My idea would be to perform the reinstall using the USB stick version of Debian-Installer, bootstrapped by SBM on the floppy disk. Does anybody know of an SBM release that adds USB boot support? If not, is there any other tool that performs a similar trick?

another Tux bites the dust

2008-09-03T08:15:00.003+03:00

At the dayjob, we've been evaluating various OS options for a customer project. Without going into details, it involves installing embedded software on a ThinCan for a special usage case. The basic needs are simple: graphic environment to run a custom application (OS neutral), plus a few drivers for hardware attached to the ThinCan. That's it. Nothing to excited about.

Comparing various team members' proposals to implement the OS base was the real shocker: no matter how optimized the software base and compiler options, no matter which build environment was used (Thin Station, Open Embedded, Gentoo, etc.), we couldn't get a performance that was remotely usable:

Boot time goes well over a minute, which is way too slow.
The graphic environment is sluggish, to say the least. True enough, distributions like Thin Station come with rather outdated versions of everything, but still... that slow?!
Refactoring IceWM to provide clean 95-ish functionalities using current XDG standards would require a fair amount of work. By the time we'd be done, IceWM would probably gain a thick footprint like XFCE progressively did.

Then came the proposal from our team's lone Windows guy: XP Embedded. Booted in less than 10 seconds, has a graphical environment that is usable out of the box and integrating the customer's application was a breeze. Heck, the demo is practically a finished product already and took just a couple of hours to assemble! To make matters worse, the total we'd be paying in licensing fees, for all the Windows components we choose, would amount to far less than what it would cost to polish either of the Free Software -based proposals.

Before anyone goes and puts on their asbestos suit, I'm already aware that the point of Free Software is to keep people employed and to make the community at large benefit from everyone's code improvements by contributing patches to upstream. Please keep in mind that, in contrast, business requirements are to get results at a reasonable cost, reasonably fast and to produce a well-polished product. The Free Software community has finally conquered the challenges of the desktop and was already on the server ages ago, but we ain't quite there yet on embedded devices, I'm afraid.

While I personally refuse to run anything else than Ubuntu on my laptop, let's face it, in the above case, the savings in time=money were obvious and the resulting product quality, even at demo stage, spoke for itself. Thus, another Tux bit the dust.

Québec government sued for buying Microsoft products without any public call for tender

2008-08-29T14:56:00.002+03:00

As per the original press release:

In Quebec, access to public markets is the rule while contracts attribution without invitation to tender is the exception. A public market should be transparent, fair and most importantly, open to all. The solutions as well as the propositions must be evaluated objectively on known and accepted criteria. Furthermore, the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies.

From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec.

Much to my surprise, news about this lawsuit have spread as far as Vietnam! Something tells me that this court case might have lasting repercussions...

Dear Lazyweb: constructive homelessness

2008-08-15T19:34:00.005+03:00

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm a permanent resident of one country, but I'm representing the interests of another one as a part of my job. Anyhow, I'm constantly traveling, so I cannot consider myself as having a residence anywhere in particular.

Still, the health insurance and taxation offices of the country where I'm registered as a resident are constantly annoying me with requests for additional clarifications about "working abroad" (trying to imply that I might have relocated to the country where my employer has their head office), which is a complete waste of my time, because the previous explanation is never good enough for them and they keep on twisting every word I say.

I was thus wondering if someone ever found a way to not have any official place of residence anywhere and still be able to get visas for the countries they need to visit and also be able to rent apartments in the countries that they visit the most frequently without ending up with residence permits for each of them, so as to avoid the above mess with multiple jurisdictions?

This question is not about evading taxation. It's about finding a solution to avoid wasting time constantly filing paperwork just because the bureaucracy cannot understand a situation where someone's lifestyle doesn't fit the traditional model of living and working in exactly one city.

brainstorm: new LPC dongle design

2008-08-08T14:09:00.003+03:00

One of our most popular products at the dayjob has been our Programmable LPC Dongle. It has seen widespread use as an embedded hardware development and debugging tool and is particularly popular among Coreboot developers as a ROM emulator, because of its low price and because we publish the FPGA code under the LGPL.

Unfortunately, our current LPC Dongle product is nearing end of life, because some components are no longer available.

We're currently designing a brand new Programmable LPC Dongle and, noticing the plethora of improvement ideas we already received from the Coreboot community, we decided to widen the scope and invite a larger group of hardware developers to tell us what features they want to see in our next-generation Programmable LPC Dongle.

Anyone interested in participating in this brainstorm is welcome to send me their ideas to first-middle.lastname@artecgroup.com by September 1st 2008. While we cannot guarantee that every idea submitted will be used, we will definitely be reading all the feedback we receive.

Ah, the wonders of e-commerce!

2008-07-11T13:53:00.004+03:00

After excruciatingly long months of waiting for all pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, I am pleased to announce that the dayjob finally rolled out its very first online shop!

The process of putting this together has been quite an experience: I had to learn about the wonders of payment authorization gateways, different taxation jurisdictions, etc. For instance, we have to deal with 4 taxation jurisdictions:

Estonian corporates and individuals: always add 18% VAT.
Other EU individuals: always add 18% VAT.
Other EU corporates: can be exempted from VAT, if their EU tax registration number is valid. Otherwise, add 18% VAT.
Corporates and individuals from outside EU: always exempted from VAT.

As much as we looked around, we could not find any e-commerce site engine that can handle all the intricacies of dealing with EU corporate customers who may or may not have a valid EU taxation exemption number so, for now, our online shop only handles cases 1, 2 and 4 properly.

What can you find on our online shop?

Our acclaimed LTSP client hardware solution, the ThinCan.
Our really cool Programmable LPC Dongle, which is an Open Source tool for developing and debugging firmware running on devices attached to an LPC bus. I mentioned Open Source, because we publish the FPGA code and Python scripts needed to access the LPC Dongle under the LGPL.
Various other products which we happen to sell in the Baltic market.

Anyhow, I'm really happy to finally see this online shop deployed. So many people had wanted to purchase a ThinCan using a credit card or from countries for which shipping costs were difficult to determine and we unfortunately could not easily accommodate them. This is now resolved. Enjoy!

xf86-video-cyrix and xf86-video-nsc: it's dead, Jim

2008-07-08T11:41:00.003+03:00

It had to happen sooner or later:

The X.org drivers for the old GX1 variants of the Geode chips formerly made by Cyrix and NSC no longer build against the current X.org release. Given the imminent release of X.org 7.4 (server core 1.5), this essentially means that users of older Geodes will have a nasty surprise, the day they upgrade to Ubuntu/Intrepid, which ships with core 1.5. Soon after, the release immediately following Debian/Lenny will be affected too.

There is a planned milestone to eventually reintegrate support for older GX1 products into the clean and up-to-date xf86-video-geode framework, but this will unfortunately come too late for those upgrading to Ubuntu/Intrepid, unless...

...unless someone volunteers to copy gx_* files inside xf86-video-geode and graft GX1 support into the resulting gx1_* files. If you have access to Cyrix/NSC GX1 + CS5530 or AMD SC hardware and a reasonable knowledge of the X.org codebase, your contribution would be most welcome.

O: planner -- project management application

2008-06-25T12:59:00.002+03:00

This one had been a long time in the making, but here it goes: I'm orphaning Planner. Why? Because upstream hasn't been too active in ages, save from a few random bug fixes, and because the GCC 4.3 transition at Debian has exposed yet more bugs that make it FTBFS. The package had been marked as RFA for a while, but I decided that I'm not gonna wait any longer; O it is. Hopefully, an experienced GNOME maintainer will take over and revamp the upstream code into a usable shape. If not, then I guess we just found another dead package in the archive. So be it.

HOWTO build a clean LTSP boot image that includes the latest updates

2008-06-20T17:09:00.007+03:00

Thanks to Oliver Grawert and Michael Haas for this idea!

Check your LTSP server's `sources.list`

Ensure that the server has the relevant APT sources to fetch the latest updates:

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
#deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse

deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
#deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse

deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
#deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main
#deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main

In this example, the Finnish Ubuntu mirror for the Hardy suite is used. Change this as necessary. Notice that all source package lines are purposely commented out.

Build a boot image using that sources.list

Build the image using the following command:
```
ltsp-build-client --copy-sourceslist --accept-unsigned-packages
```
This builds the image using the repositories found in the server's sources.list. Accepting unsigned packages is necessary, because the PPA is not digitally signed.

The above method is a good way to check what would happen on a clean install, if any particular package were updated to a newer proposed release that is currently sitting on someone's PPA.

Enjoy!

HOWTO make Geode thin clients work on Ubuntu/Hardy LTSP

2008-06-20T15:09:00.010+03:00

As summarized by Ace Suares, to validate my first rough upgrading instructions:

Upgrade the packages in the LTSP chroot

First become root:
sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386
Then add the repository, update and upgrade:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean

APT will inform you that some packages cannot be authenticated. This is normal, since the PPA is not digitally signed. Simply answer Yes.
Purge the transitional AMD driver
apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-amd
Then, exit the chroot:
```
exit
```
Update the LTSP boot image
```
sudo ltsp-update-image
```
On a 64-bit server, the correct command is:
```
sudo ltsp-update-image --arch=i386
```
Profit?

Happy Midsummer, everyone!

xf86-video-geode: now with full OLPC support!

2008-06-16T14:34:00.003+03:00

Freshly uploaded to Debian: xf86-video-geode 2.10.0. Asides from a slouch of bug fixes, this version finally includes complete support for features unique to the OLPX XO-1.

Enjoy!

Kuradne Geode draiveri!

2008-06-06T18:31:00.004+03:00

Yes, another post about the Geode drivers. After much head banging, I finally figured out that the sloppy method used to generate the list of supported PCI ID for each driver in Debian and Ubuntu is what wreaked havoc with the GEODE driver:

Support for the GX2 chipset was backported into the old NSC driver, which created a PCI ID conflict with the official support that is present in the GEODE driver.
To make matters worse, that damn NSC driver also conflicts with the older CYRIX driver that supports earlier versions of the Geode chipset.

To fix both issues, I have produced new NSC and GEODE packages and uploaded them into my Ubuntu PPA for the Hardy series.

Tip: as soon as you have upgraded, purge the -amd transitional package; it only confuses the X server and disrupts operation if you leave it there, especially inside an LTSP chroot. If you were using a static xorg.conf, simply upgrade the Device line to use "geode" rather than "amd" and you're done.

After upgrading to these packages, normal operation should be restored for all Geode variants. As a bonus, X should now even be able to work without an xorg.conf (of course, with the wrong keyboard map, unless you live in USA) and in all known LTSP variants.

Enjoy!

updated ALSA driver for early PowerPC hardware

2008-04-08T14:16:00.004+03:00

Risto Suominen contacted me recently, after seeing my Ubuntu wiki page where I try to document what works and what doesn't using ALSA on PowerPC hardware. He has developed a patch against the snd-powermac driver that mainly support 603, 604 and G3 PowerMac hardware, to implement better support for several old Mac models. He was wondering where he could find testers for his work, so I offered to blog about it here. You can find his diff and patching instructions on his website. You can contact Risto to report on your testing's result using firstname.lastname@gmail.com

Estonian ICT conference, March 18th 2008, TOBB Plaza, Istanbul, Türkiye

2008-03-09T12:30:00.007+02:00

I previously wrote about my visits to Turkey to develop our export market in the Middle-East and how I ended up representing the whole Estonian business world in bilateral negotiations with Turkey. I'm going there again for two weeks, this time accompanied by a whole business delegation headed by Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip.

Asides from various official events organized by our Turkish hosts to present Turkey to their Estonian guests, the crux of the visit is a conference hosted by DEIK and the Estonian embassy, on Tuesday, March 18th. The goal of this conference is to present Estonia's extremely advanced use of ICT technology in E-Business and E-Governance. Speakers from several private and public sector organizations will explain how they benefited from Estonia's hyper-connected lifestyle and, most of all, how this has made every Estonian's life more pleasant, because it offers a convenient way of performing a broad range of online transactions not just with businesses, but also with governmental organizations.

Yours truly will speak about the advantages Estonia offers to investors and technology freaks alike, from the perspective of an industry insider who, given the opportunity of choosing his first pick for a liberal high-tech nation, dropped the Nokiaesque lands of Suomi to go Eesti.

The morning of conference will end with a business lunch where interested Turks can network with their Estonian counterparts and create lucrative bilateral opportunities.

Space in the TOBB Plaza auditorium is limited so those interested in attending should promptly contact DEIK to get their name added to the guest list.

Turks interested in learning more about Estonia in their own language should visit estonya.net.

Rumor has it...

2008-02-05T19:50:00.002+02:00

...that Skype might be willing to port the Linux version of their application to Pulse Audio, as long as they get all the help they need to make this a quick and painless process. Rumor also has it that yours truly will have a visit from a Skype insider tomorrow at 13:00 EET to discuss this issue and, hopefully, be in a position to point the insider to a member of the PulseAudio community willing to guide them through this process. Rumor also has it that volunteers who contact yours truly on time to announce themselves might improve this port's chances of actually happening.

ThinCan + LinuxBIOS = cool LTSP hardware

2008-01-24T14:47:00.000+02:00

At the dayjob, we're currently clearing our warehouse of previous hardware to make room for upcoming new models, so here's a shameless plug for those who want cool Linux hardware at a discount:

ThinCan DBE60

Hardware: AMD Geode SC2200, 64MB RAM, 32MB DiskOnChip Flash, 3x USB 1.1 ports, 1/8" audio out, Centronics port, VGA port, 10/100baseT network port.

Firmware: Etherboot or WinCE 4.1 RDP client.

Price: 50 EUR/each - less shipping costs - Minimum order: 10 pieces.

PS: we also have about 50 pieces of DBE60 motherboards (without case) that can be used as embedded controllers. People with good soldering skills can add a CompactFlash socket to the unpopulated pads, as desired.

ThinCan DBE61C

Hardware: AMD Geode LX700 with CS5536 companion chip, 256MB RAM, 4x USB 2.0 ports, 1/8" audio in and out, VGA port, 10/100baseT network port.

Firmware: Etherboot on LinuxBIOS. Supported natively since Ubuntu/Gutsy.

Price: 150 EUR/each - less shipping costs - Minimum order: 2 pieces.

Interested parties can contact us via the request form.

Re: xf86-video-amd: patched xserver-xorg-core available

2008-01-24T14:31:00.000+02:00

I previously wrote that:

The next step is to produce patches against the X server 1.4 in Debian/Sid and Ubuntu/Hardy, and then get the fix merged into the upstream X.org tree before X server 1.5 is released.

Good news: Bryce Harrington produced patched X server 1.4 packages for Ubuntu/Hardy!

The LTSP and OLPC communities are hereby invited to test this ASAP. If nothing major is reported, this will be become the standard X server 1.4 for the Ubuntu/Hardy LTS release, following which the patch will also be merged into Debian/Sid.

xf86-video-amd: patched xserver-xorg-core available

2008-01-21T01:03:00.000+02:00

Great news: After several weeks of investigating, Bart finally figured out what made the driver for the AMD Geode GX/LX chipset fail on recent X.org servers: it turns out that, starting with X server 1.3, changes under the hood took place that affect a number of products booting off a General Software BIOS, making the whole hardware freeze as soon as a DDC probe is attempted. Bart promptly produced two patches against the x86emu component of X server 1.3 that fix the issue. Hurray!

Ubuntu/Gutsy packages of the patched X server 1.3, plus current AMD 2.7.7.5 drivers, are available in my PPA.

For Debian/Lenny, the same packages compile from Ubuntu sources as-is. Meanwhile, those of you running Debian/Etch only need to compile the Ubuntu sources for the above AMD driver against the X server 1.1 available in Etch.

This should finally allow people developing distributions for LTSP or for the OLPC to use standard Debian packages.

The next step is to produce patches against the X server 1.4 in Debian/Sid and Ubuntu/Hardy, and then get the fix merged into the upstream X.org tree before X server 1.5 is released. We're already working on it, but help is always welcome.

xf86-video-amd from OLPC not for public consumption

2008-01-13T10:01:00.000+02:00

Holger reported in his blog that he uploaded a backport of the AMD Geode GX/LX X.org module to Debian. He also points out that what he has backported is from a non-Debian source. In case it wasn't obvious to him, there are good reasons why the official Debian module is not from the OLPC branch: the OLPC branch includes OLPC-only code that breaks operation for non-OLPC hardware. This means that the backport package is completely useless for the vast majority of GX/LX hardware on the market. Well done, Holger!

Hunting for a new laptop (part 2)

2008-01-03T16:13:00.000+02:00

Earlier, I had reported on my quest for a new laptop. To recap, I had narrowed down my choice to an LG model whose 12.1" 1280x800 WXGA display and ATI Mobility Radeon X1250 graphic chip failed to be recognized by the Ubuntu CD. Back then, my initial tests were performed using a Feisty CD. Since then, I have returned with a Gutsy CD and got equally disappointing results: E: screen found, but none offers a usable configuration.

Some people suggested buying a laptop with an all-Intel chipset. While Intel chipsets are indeed the best-supported in the business, largely because Intel invests its own resources into coding Linux drivers for all of its products, products based on Intel chipsets tend to be double the price of those based on VIA motherboards with ATI graphic chips. Seeing how quickly hardware devaluates on the market, it feels rather unjustified to pay such a fortune for an Intel-based product, only to see its market value cut in half less than a year later.

Here's a tip for AMD/ATI marketroids: invest as much resources into coding GPL kernel and X.org drivers for all of your products as you did for the OLPC project and always do so a good 12 months before entry to market. Otherwise, prepare for bankruptcy, because companies like Intel who don't shun the Linux market will eat you alive.

Me goes back laptop hunting...

O: planner -- project management application

2007-12-28T20:50:00.000+02:00

While looking at outstanding bugs against my Debian packages, I noticed that an RC bug had crept in against Planner. The bug itself isn't new. In fact, Ubuntu had experienced it already and simply decided to build their package without SQL support to resolve the issue.

Planner is a fairly well-matured piece of software, with very few bugs remaining. It remains quite usable in everyday use. However, it has fallen behind in terms of keeping its code up-to-date against the latest versions of some optional dependencies.

Tonight, I was just sitting here pondering what to do and it occurred to me that I'm simply no longer interested in maintaining the package. I have done a fairly good job of overhauling the build scripts and of upgrading them for the Python transition but, at this stage, I feel that I've accomplished as much as I could do. Besides, I no longer have the time to maintain so many packages, so I have decided to focus on maintaining those I actually care for and Planner isn't one of them.

The package already is assigned to Debian's GNOME team, so no need to actually orphan it, since anyone from the team can pick it up. If you're a member of the GNOME team and feel like taking over, perhaps even submitting patches to upstream to close a few more bugs, go right ahead and jump in.

Valga - Valka : 1 linn, 2 riiki - 1 pilsēta, 2 valstis

2007-12-22T20:49:00.001+02:00

Thursday evening, I joined the inhabitants of the twin town of Valga-Valka, sitting smack on the Estonian-Latvian border, to celebrate their entry into the Schengen treaty. Ever since I first crossed the border there on a roadtrip from Tallinn to Fallingbostel, in year 2001, I knew I would have to return and, sure enough, I briefly passed through during last summer with an Estonian friend, on our way to an acquaintance's birthday party.

Still, that told me nothing of the town's life and left me wanting for more.

Upon hearing that year 2004 EU accession countries would join Schengen in December 2007, I immediately promised myself to show up and join the crowd. As it turns out, I missed Aleks Tapinš of the All About Latvia blog by very little, having I caught his last-minute e-mail the next afternoon. Aleks blogged a great article depicting the Latvian side of life and providing some background info on the town, if you're curious.

I arrived late-evening on Thursday via the Tallinn-Viljandi-Valga bus and checked into my hotel, then proceeded to checkpoint Valga II around 23:30, with the intention of grabbing a drink on the Latvian side and returning just before midnight for the celebrations. Hardly anyone was in sight, except for Latvian officer Čabana who was completing the inspection of a Russian car with three noisy passengers. Upon presenting her with my passport, officer Čabana cheerfully lead me to the office and slid my passport through a slot to officer Bukss, who was visibly surprised to have any tourist show up on the last day of his job to get their passport stamped. Upon explaining to him the reasons for my presence, he pointed me to a nearby bar where I could have a drink, visibly amused by the situation.

I spent the next few minutes in a local casino in the company of three hilarious Latvian truck drivers, Zintars and Aivars, two Latvians with limited English language skills and Yuri, an ethnic Russian living in Ireland who was born stateless on the Latvian side of the town and who later acquired Estonian citizenship by claiming ancestral land on the Estonian side.

Upon returning to the border, just minutes before midnight, I found myself in the middle of a huge crowd of villagers, police officers, border guards and politicians from both countries - barely getting noticed by anyone. I handed my passport to an Estonian border guard who emotionally commented to a civilian friend of his nearby that, "Wow! That was the last one!", handing me my passport back just as the midnight bells rang and the mayor of the Estonian side started his speech amidst pyrotechnics lining the road.

I then had a chance to chat with the Estonian mayor, who promptly handed me a bilingual certificate, signed by the mayors of both towns, attesting that I was the first to cross the open border, while introducing me to his two young daughters with whom he was about to take a stroll on the Latvian side.

The next morning, an even bigger and more symbolic event took place: the demolition of the fence that had been cutting the Sõprus/Raiņa street in half. You can see a picture of what the street looked like before on Aleks' blog article [edit: or on Jens-Olaf's blog article]. After the fence was removed, it instead looked like this:

The crowd then proceeded to checkpoint Valga III, where a stage had been setup for the politicians to make their speeches. An interesting fact is that, because of the way the border was drawn, along a creek leading to Pedeli river, an Estonian main road was technically on the Latvian border and thus aptly named "Raja" (border) street. The Estonian mayor commented in his speech that the the brand new supermarket standing behind us was also technically on borderland and could not have possibly been built earlier, weren't it for the Schengen treaty matter-of-factedly eliminating borders between participating EU countries. The speeches were closed by a youth group whose choreography featured six break-dancing boys, dressed as Estonian and Latvian border guards and as border posts. The choreography ended with the teenage border guards carrying away the human posts on their shoulders, just as a choir of young girls replaced them with songs in either languages.

Before catching my bus back to Tallinn, I dropped by the Valga tourist info, only to face a nervous-looking Kapo officer in plain clothes. Upon mumbling something about the tourist info and wanting to grab maps, I noticed that a press conference was taking place behind. As he finally let me pass to the tourist info side of the building, a familiar voice said to me, "Hey! Weren't you at our place last summer with Martin Ranna?" Yup, the wife of the acquaintance whose birthday party I had attended last summer is working there and greeted with me refreshments and munchies she had cooked in prevision for the presidential visit! As was my luck, she had one of the commemorative plaques that had been given to the politicians at Valga III on hand:

I was glad to see the town becoming one again, even though it is ethnically divided. There are already signs of people on both sides learning one another's languages and shopping on either side of town, not to mention plans of merging the municipal bus operations of the Estonian and Latvian halves of the town, so I'm sure that they'll get there in due course.

For me, Schengen brought a much more practical and quite welcome change: the end of messy border crossing stamps that were rapidly filling my almost new passport, every time I visited the head office of our company in Tallinn. While Estonian border guards mostly stamp passports in an orderly fashion, being careful to fit exactly 8 stamps in a single page and to put entry and exit stamps side-by-side, Finnish border guards apparently are incapable of doing so, instead systematically wasting pages by either stamping sloppily in a way that makes it impossible for more than 4 stamps to appear on a given page or by flipping to a brand new page, every time I had to cross the border.

In case anyone ever wondered why I'm currently representing Estonian interests abroad, despite living in Finland, this example is one of the many reasons: Finnish authorities routinely display arrogant carelessness towards the population and doubly so towards immigrants. It amounts to an accumulation of idiocy that has costly consequences on people's lives. For some, it's about being denied the public institutions' support when they need it the most and their life forever going downhill thereafter. For me, it has been about countless missed opportunities (jobs, love affairs, travel plans), plus very costly passport and residence permit renewals. Given this, I simply don't see myself ever representing Finnish interests ever again. Faith no more. Besides, the Estonians are fun and easy-going people. Siski ma mõtlen, kas ma peaksen nüüd Eestisse kolima või?

Ubuntu on an LG E200 laptop?

2007-12-12T17:49:00.000+02:00

As my aging ThinkPad is starting to show signs of an impeding retirement, I recently began looking for a newer laptop to replace it. My current choice would be for an LG Electronics model E200-A.CPPPV laptop. However, when trying an Ubuntu Feisty live CD on it, X failed to find any usable screen resolution and aborted. Thus I was wondering if anybody had better results using a Gutsy CD? In principle, the hardware should be supported, since it's all Intel and ATI components but, these days, you never know, especially with graphic and wireless chipsets. Comments?

Miscellanea

2007-11-16T22:26:00.001+02:00

Things have been rather hectic lately, so I haven't found much time to blog. Here's why:

DBE62

The Gigabit Ethernet version of our thin client took more time to produce than I expected, for a number of reasons mostly related to a few improvements we decided to squeeze into the design at the last minute.

However, today, we finally reached a point where LinuxBIOS runs as well as it did on our previous DBE61 model and where we no longer need any DOS tool to flash the MAC address into the VIA velocity Gigabit chip we selected. Hurray!

Production will only commence in one month, but I'm already excited by the new model's potential, both as a thin client and as an embedded platform.

Another good thing is that, thanks to Ubuntu developer Scott Balneaves, we managed to get all the necessary tools to support thin clients based on LinuxBIOS into LTSP, so our Etherboot model works out of the box on Ubuntu, since Gutsy. Hurray!

There is one remaining issue related to recent changes in X.org core functionalities that make the AMD driver we need unstable but, again, various AMD, Debian and Ubuntu developers are looking into fixing this, so we should soon have spotless Geode support into Debian and Ubuntu again.

Türkiye

I visited Turkey twice over the last few months, because I'm putting together a pilot project to better promote the Estonian high-tech sector abroad, in collaboration with the Estonian government.

I have to say that the more I visit Turkey, the more I like the place and the more understand why these people see themselves as Europeans because, you know what? They are: practically every significant civilization and religion that is at the core of European culture had major events taking place in in Anatolia or Thrace and, also, a devastatingly huge percentage of the consumer goods sold in Europe are designed and manufactured in Turkey.

Learning the rudiments of Turkish has also proven to be a lot of fun. While I'm nowhere near as fluent in Turkish as in Finnish or even in Estonian, the learning curve isn't as steep as I initially expected: Altaic and Ugric languages share a surprising amount of grammatical concepts, while Turkish itself borrowed a lot of vocabulary from French, because the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk, was very fond of the language. I'll venture that proximity with nearby Middle-Eastern countries that were formerly under French influence has something to do with it too.

Identity crisis

To me, the most challenging part of these business missions abroad is to represent a whole economic sector from a country of which I'm not a citizen or even a resident. Case in point:

Being invited to dinner by a Turkish investor, I noticed the waiter asking my host where his foreign guest might be from. A few minutes later, as the waiter put down a gigantic pita bread with the word "Estonia" spelled in roasted sesame seeds, my host asked, reading my business card:

Actually, your name doesn't sound Estonian. France?
Québec.
And your mobile number ... 358 ... is that Finland?
Yup. I've been living there for the past 10 years.
Ah! So you don't live in Tallinn?
Nope. Helsinki.

Looking at the waiter and pointing at the gigantic pita, he continues:

Actually, make that Canada ... no, Finland ... Ah, sorry, never mind. Just keep it as Estonia.

Honestly, trying to keep a straight face while saying "We" about a country of which I'm not a citizen and where I don't even reside becomes unbearable. At some point, some European bureaucrats will have to admit that I need a new citizenship, to reduce the confusion and to let me find myself a proper national identity again; the sooner, the better.

Besides, the absurdity of the situation keeps on jumping at everyone's face: during the second mission to Turkey, I kept on bumping into Finnish diplomats who took personal offense at me for living in their country and yet representing the interests of a competing, neighboring country. If you ask me, I cannot entirely blame them for it.

However, as far as I'm concerned, I've done my homeworks: I've been here 10 years, I speak the language and I don't have a criminal record. Given this, you'd think that acquiring citizenship would be a mere formality, but the Ulkomaalaisvirasto doesn't see it that way.

If you ask me, this country's very first Minister of Immigration, Mrs.Astrid Thors, ought to unilaterally grant citizenship to anyone who's lived here for at least 5 years, just for the asking, regardless of what circumstances brought them here or of what absurd decisions the Ulkomaalaisvirasto might have previously made on their residence permit status. Doing this would go a long way towards undoing the mess of her predecessors at the Ministry of Interior and it would speak volumes about how much Finnish society has evolved from the days when any foreigner was a commie they had to push over the Eastern border.

Sound editors that work with Gstreamer or PulseAudio?

2007-08-14T13:15:00.000+03:00

Today, I wanted to edit a few MP3 files into suitable ring tones for my phone. The idea seemed simple at first: load up a song, chop off a few bars and loop that as a ring tone.

Nice in theory, except that sound editing software on a free desktop is challenging, at best: most of it was designed back in the days of OSS and GTK 1.2, some wants to use JACK for playback, while the most recent crop indeed supports ALSA but insists upon having exclusive access to the ALSA device.

Dammit! My understanding was that, with Gstreamer and PulseAudio, the free desktop had finally acquired a comprehensive, standardized sound framework, but not many applications seem to support it — or is there something I have missed?

Fresh out of NEW university: mkelfimage

2007-08-12T11:49:00.000+03:00

I maintain the Debian package of mkelfimage, a tool to produce Etherboot images for use with thin client environments such as LTSP, which recently entered the Debian archive.

The key difference between mkelfimage and the aging mknbi is that mkelfimage does not reply upon any traditional BIOS call to produce the bootable code in the ELF image, which makes it possible to boot thin clients with LinuxBIOS as their firmware, such as the Linuterm and several other products designed by Artec.

mkelfimage accomplishes its BIOS-less operation using a simplified kexec implementation. However, this also means that explicit support for each architecture must be implemented with Assembler code. As it currently stands, the upstream tarball only includes support for i386 and ia64. Since amd64 boots in 32-bit mode, it should also work there, but this is untested.

This leaves support for several architectures completely uncovered for. LinuxBIOS developers have taken over the upstream code and they welcome patches towards improving support for other architectures and towards cleaning up the autoconf implementation currently in use.

GR: Debian Maintainer

2007-08-12T09:10:00.000+03:00

Rumor has it that the General Resolution on acknowledging the concept of Debian Maintainers (mere participant who are granted limited upload rights, just enough to freely work on their own packages) has passed. I'm wondering what sort of timeframe we're looking at for deploying the infrastructure needed to manage this and then start accepting requests to be added to the separate GPG keyring. Would anyone know?

Telling Network Manager to prefer home AP?

2007-08-12T08:16:00.000+03:00

I'm running Network Manager on my Ubuntu laptop. It's a really neat tool when it comes to selecting an open wireless network when traveling, but it has one major flaw: you cannot tell it to prefer some "homebase" among a swarm of available Access Points; it insists upon using the first AP it finds, regardless. Has anyone figured out a solution to this common situation?

Meanwhile, the OpenVPN front-end that Network Manager offers only covers a fraction of available parameters, which means that I cannot use it to connect to my dayjob's LAN from outside the company, because the few Windows clients we have connecting to it expect a VPN to work in a specific way and cannot adapt to non-Microsoft approaches to VPN concept, which means that we Ubuntu users are the ones who have to adapt. Thus, the OpenVPN front-end would need to be able to configure MTU, MSS and other arbitrary parameters supported by OpenVPN. Looking at various BTS, I notice that I'm not the only one who needs this. Are Network Manager developers listening? :-)

Localisation beyond language packs

2007-07-28T15:57:00.001+03:00

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned my K750i Sony-Ericsson mobile phone. I received it as a birthday gift this year, to replace my aging but trustworthy Nokia 3210 and, as with any multifunctional digital device, there was a learning curve during the adoption period. While some features were gladly and swiftly taken into use, some of the handset's usability issues became my pet peeve and, among them, the localization pack wins the jackpot.

First, let's make one thing clear: I fully understand that memory constraints prevent manufacturers from including support for every language known to man, so a handset can only be loaded with a limited set of languages for the User Interface and for T9 predictive text input dictionaries. My issue is with the concept of grouping languages by linguistic families or continental areas, when compiling the localization packs for those handsets.

In this particular case, I had a choice between the Baltic or Nordic packs. The former has UI language support for Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, while the later has support for Finnish and the Scandinavian languages; English is also included in both cases. T9 support is a strangely mixed bag: the Baltic pack only includes predictive input for the Slavic languages, while the Nordic pack supports all the languages of its UI.

What's my problem with the above language combinations? For starters, I'm in Finland. We don't interact with Danes or Icelanders outside very occasional pan-Nordic meetings and that mostly concerns politicians. Meanwhile, average Finns travel for work and play to Estonia and Russia on a fairly regular basis, which makes sense, since they are neighboring countries. However, available language packs don't take this into account.

How should this be resolved?

Either language packs are produced with specific countries in mind, rather than generic geographic areas, or the users should be allowed to freely mix and match among all available languages and get the result flashed into their handset at purchase time.

The K750i language pack for Finland should therefore include: Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, Russian, English and Norwegian (essentially the current Nordic language pack, but with Danish and Icelandic replaced with Estonian and Russian). Then again, this only covers official state languages. Samé dialects, anyone? I guess not, because we'd soon be exceeding the handset's capacity. Hmm...

Thus, the only real solution is to allow people to freely mix and match UI and T9 languages of their choice at purchase time.

As a bonus, this would allow me to drop Norwegian and replace it with Joual... ööö... cålisse, French and finally have a language pack that I can truly find useful. I can easily picture a Transylvanian engineer working in Finland wanting to get Romanian support or a Kurdish immigrant preferring Turkish support instead.

Sony-Ericsson, how about it?

Dear lazy Fluendo

2007-07-28T15:07:00.000+03:00

Surely there must be a way of using gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 to produce MP3 files using Sound-Juicer, so that I can listen to my favorite albums on my Sony-Ericsson phone while commuting to work via the Helsinki-Tallinn ferry, but how?

Crazy idea: shipit.debian.org

2007-06-25T16:12:00.000+03:00

Over the last few days, I have had to perform a number of clean installations, some using Debian, some using Ubuntu. Whenever handing over freshly OEM'ed hardware, I like to include a copy of the CD media to the customer, as a courtesy.

This works extremely well for Ubuntu, from whom it is possible to order official release CD. Customers always get a nice buzz out of that.

For Debian, though, I always get embarrassed looks over the home-burnt CD, because it projects a lack of professionalism. Enterprise customers want a commercially pressed CD and they want it to be the official one published by Debian; explaining to them that Debian doesn't publish pressed CD media produces an instant lack of trust in Debian. What can I say? It's their perception and, as the old saying goes, the customer is always right.

This got me thinking, why doesn't Debian have its own ShipIt like Ubuntu? Granted, Debian is a non-profit organization, but surely that would not prevent selling official CD media to help cover at least some of its operational expenses, now, would it?

One way to implement this would be to hire the exact same CD pressing plant that Canonical employs to handle their CD ordering and shipping logistics. They already have the procedure and tools in place to handle this; they just need to add a branded version of that ordering site for Debian's needs and to receive official ISO files from Debian's Release Manager every year or so. How about it?

Economics explained with cows

2007-06-17T16:11:00.000+03:00

Economics explained with cows is probably one of the best-written example of economic models explained in simple terms. A must-read!

Recommended Listening: Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

2007-06-17T13:27:00.000+03:00

Today feels something like the ideal to spend a Sunday afternoon: sorting though my Deviation Watch inbox and ... listening to Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. All I can say is WOW! This has got to be the single best compendium of electronic music I've seen in a long time. The explanatory texts are quite spot-on too. Well done, Ishkur!

Thanks to Elver for brightening my day with the URL to this guide!

Dear Skype morons

2007-06-15T19:21:00.000+03:00

Dear morons of the Linux development team at Skype:

In case this wasn't obvious to you, beta releases are not to be uploaded to a Stable package repository; they instead go to an Unstable or Experimental repository.

This detail is of critical importance, given how your current 1.4 Beta has totally crappy audio (1.3.0.53 was at least usable, while 1.4.0.74 definitely ain't) and it also misses features that were present in 1.3 Gold.

So, would you have the courtesy of putting 1.3.0.53 back into the Stable repository and of creating a separate Unstable repository for your beta, instead of pushing unpolished crap where people expect rock-solid software?

PS: please be honest and remove that claim about Skype having superior audio quality from the package description. As far as audio quality goes, Ekiga beats you flat out and it already has video support too.

How about a Gaim of talking Pigeon?

2007-05-27T18:34:00.000+03:00

Today, getting increasingly tired of the incoherent User Interface in Gaim 2.0 release candidates, I fetched the recently uploaded release 2.0.1 of Pidgin (same software, different name; the result of a trademark dispute) from Debian/unstable and built it against Stable dependencies.

First impressions: excellent harmonization of the behavior between supported protocols, thanks to a new user status handling that is common to all protocols, coupled with unified a icon theme. Overall, this feels much more consistent in everyday use and it serves to blur the distinction between protocols to maintain the focus on the conversation taking place.

However, two major annoyances:

The old behavior of stealing focus, every time a tab pops open, is still there. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH!
Extremely tiny fonts in the conversation window and trying to make them inherit the default system font size via Pidgin's built-in GTK plug-in simply fails.

Conclusion: libpurple may be technically amazing, but Pidgin really is in desperate need of a complete UI overhaul.

Almost there: granny-friendly PDF writing

2007-05-24T17:46:00.000+03:00

One aspect of Ubuntu that I really enjoy is the sheer amount of constructive feedback a maintainer gets about the usability of their packages. In my case, CUPS-PDF [1] [2] has been a landmark example of how beneficial this feedback can be:

See, one long-standing goal at Ubuntu has been to include the capability to generate PDF documents "out of the box" and regardless of which Desktop Environment is used. Many people considered that CUPS-PDF would be an excellent tool, but various technical issues prevented this from working in a security-conscious way. Once that issue was taken care of, someone pondered how the PDF queue could be automatically created at installation time?

It turns out that we're almost there: with the upload of version 2.4.6 into Debian today (which should propagate into Ubuntu within a few days), only one configuration step remains: the selection of a PPD driver. Everything else is automatically detected and configured by CUPS itself. Kudos to our friendly upstream, Volker, for implementing this driver magic in his back-end code! Enjoy!

Bidding farewell to 32-bit computing

2007-05-23T14:35:00.000+03:00

A number of recent events reminded me of how much time has passed since I started using Linux. Among these, the retirement of several 32-bit CPU architectures from the list of supported platforms on Debian and Ubuntu.

The first architecture to fall was m68k. Release Managers at Debian proposed to drop support for m68k after Sarge, which indeed happened: Etch was released earlier this month and, for the very first time in Debian history, without m68k support. Granted, a number of dedicated developers are working on porting the GNU toolchain to Coldfire (an embedded platform that supports about 80% of the m68k instruction set) and good chances are that they will succeed but, let's not fool ourselves: m68k is gone.

Around the same time, Ubuntu dropped support for PowerPC, just before releasing Feisty. Granted, there is still some PPC64 hardware being manufactured, but this is on the server side and thus getting farther away from the desktop market that constitutes Ubuntu's core business. Of course, given the plethora of 32-bit PPC hardware in circulation, in the form of second-hand Power Macs, the platform still has some lifespan left but, again, let's not fool ourselves: PowerPC is gone too.

And now, a message sent to Debian mailing lists suggested that, as of Linux kernel 2.6.21, support for 32-bit SPARC was broken and, due to an insufficient developer interest for maintaining the GNU toolchain, 32-bit SPARC was likely to be dropped for the Lenny release. Yup, we really cannot fool ourselves: support for 32-bit architectures really is gone.

Not surprisingly, my own computer collection has followed a similar trend: this morning, my beloved PA-RISC host left for the home of a happy computer hobbyist who had won the online auction on it. My Atari TT030 is likely to follow a similar route fairly soon. Ditto for the exotic Atari Stacy sitting besides it ...and let's not mention the huge stack of Pentium II and K6 desktop hardware sitting in the corner.

Looking back, I'm glad to have shared so many brilliant years with 32-bit hardware. The variety of CPU architectures and hardware designs was quite a learning experience. This being said, life goes on and my current needs are fully covered by my Linutop and by my aging ThinkPad.

Thank you for all those years, 32-bit computers. Enjoy a well-deserved rest in bit heaven.

Adventures in Business Setting

2007-05-21T13:25:00.001+03:00

One funny thing about being a foreigner is the linguistic choices people make when communicating with me. Case in point: my new job at Artec.

This being Estonia, there's a plethora of languages to choose from: Estonian, obviously, but also Russian, English and Finnish. Russian is possible because 30% of Estonians are ethnic Russians (or related Belorussians and Ukrainians) whose ancestors were relocated during Soviet times. Russian also remains strong as a language of trade, especially among the older generation, while English tends to replace it for the younger generation. Then, Finnish is widely spoken in Northern Estonia, because of Tallinn's proximity to Helsinki and despite Southern Estonian being linguistically closer to Finnish.

People's choice, whenever discussing work-related matters with me, varies accordingly: some prefer to use English while, for others, Finnish comes naturally. Then there's a handful of older collegues who feel uneasy speaking either English or Finnish, so they address me in Estonian, placing special care on clearly articulating every word and on speaking at a slower pace than normal (to Finnish ears, Estonian essentially sounds like Finnish on fast-forward and with unusual choices of vocabulary).

I have yet to see anyone try Russian with me, although a few people have noticed that I get the overall idea, just as long as they articulate clearly and speak slower than normal. Then again, our ethnic Russians are so well integrated that they speak Estonian all day long, even among themselves, and I have been able to observe the same pattern everywhere I've been in Estonia. From that perspective, I think that Russia's claims about "oppression of ethnic Russians in Estonia" are greatly exaggerated.

Reboot

2007-04-09T20:36:00.000+03:00

I guess one could summarize Easter as a certain prophet's big reboot?

Now, make it funky!

Yup, this Easter, I completely rebooted as well: after briefly visiting my relatives in some distant country that some morons insist I should call "homeland", I got back to my real homeland in the HELish land of singing demons for a full reboot: new job, new home, new girlfriend.

Then, my computing resources rebooted too.

Shake it to the Left! Shake it to the Right!

Reboot your life.

I'm Thin, therefore I Can

2007-03-23T11:59:00.000+02:00

Life sometimes goes in a funny direction, like a full circle déjà vu: 20 years ago, I was studying Technology of Computerized Systems (a combination of electronics and programming). Now, 20 years later, I'm starting a dream job as the Business Development Manager of Artec Group and their core business is — you guessed it — exactly that. The really cool thing about Artec, from a Free Software advocate's point of view, is that they contribute firmware and drivers for their products to LinuxBIOS and the Linux kernel.

At this point, my initial tasks will focus on marketing and selling Artec's flagship OEM product, the ThinCan. What is the ThinCan? Actually, you're already familiar with one iteration of the product: the Linutop is a branded ThinCan, delivered with a custom hardware configuration, plus custom casing artwork designed by Frédéric Baille of Linutop SARL and loaded with Fred's favorite Xubuntu configuration. In the Linutop's case, their business model is to fill the market niche for a simple Internet surfing platform that fits 80% of average people's daily computing needs, so the hardware configuration they ordered reflects that.

Still, as several readers of this blog noticed, the "Linutop" could make a fantastic thin client and, sure enough, that was the main purpose behind the ThinCan's original design; it sells well in the Fortune-500 market as an RDP client running under Windows CE. However, until recently, there simply wasn't much demand for a contemporary X11 terminal solution based on the ThinCan. That is, until LTSP took off, thanks to the contributions of Edubuntu and similar educational Linux distributions. Sure enough, someone spotted the opportunity and contacted Artec to order a branded ThinCan iteration with Etherboot and PXE support, which they call the Linuterm.

By the way, for those who need a really cheap OEM thin client, I've got a great spring clearance offer for you:

Artec has about 500 pieces left of their older DBE60 ThinCan model, based on the AMD Geode SC2200, and we're selling them at 100 euro / piece, plus VAT and shipping.

The DBE60 is configured with three USB 1.1 ports, one parallel printer port, one 100baseT Ethernet port, one VGA port (up to 1024x768 @ 16bpp 60-85Hz or 1280x1024 @ 8bpp 60-75Hz) and one 1/8" stereo audio output jack. Its BIOS provides Etherboot support and its motherboard is populated with 64MB of RAM and 32MB of Stratoflash. It comes delivered with a European AC adapter. The Geode SC2200 is fully supported by the Linux kernel — with the sole exception of a missing ALSA snd-scx200, but this could easily be ported from AMD's deprecated OSS driver — and X.org support is provided by the "nsc" driver.

Minimum order size is 10 pieces. Contact me via my full name (unaccented, with one hyphen and one dot) at artecgroup.com quoting this special offer.

PS: someone was asking if that DBE60 special is also available in the aforementioned Fortune-500 configuration. It indeed is: add 16 euro / piece for the Windows CE 4.1 license with an RDP client.

Linutop: Order Yours Today!

2007-03-20T09:44:00.000+02:00

Fred informs me that we now have our ordering system up and running so, for those of you who had been longing for their very own Linutop, do visit us and fill out the order form.

Please note that, at this stage, we are only able to ship within Europe. However, if anyone is interested in distributing the Linutop on other continents, we definitely want to hear from you.

Funkyware: ITCetera

xf86-video-geode 2.11.13

Proposed updates for CUPS-PDF packages at Ubuntu

Configuring GNOME themes for both gconf and dconf?

X.org video driver Geode 2.11.12

Adding default support for Airport remote sinks in PulseAudio

New GPG key released - signatures welcome

Ubuntu kernel at 1000Hz with PREEMPT enabled?

Ubuntu no longer ships debian/changelog since Natty?

An old GRSec feature I miss in stock Linux 2.6 kernels

Batch-editing EXIF data to add copyrights?

X.org video driver Geode 2.11.9

Hell just froze over a.k.a. Squeeze is frozen

A small death, a big birth.

Firefox is a CPU killer!

On pohjantähden alla, Tää koti mulla mainen, Mä elämästä laulan...

How much does Free Software influence my career prospects?

xf86-video-geode: new contributors shake off the dust

Correct gLabels template for VistaPrint custom business cards?

Ubuntu building its i386 libc6 with -m686 ?

xf86-video-geode: EXA Composite support broken on X server 1.7

gThumb: thank you for breaking my workflow!

Post Scriptum

Wanted: unsyndicated web mail service - say Google Mail and you're dead

Ubuntu/Lucid: recovering from yesterday's messy update

OpenOffice's style editing dialogs suck!

Help Wanted: testers for the Geode X.org driver on GX2 "Red Cloud"

Bad, bad Linux kernel!

Wanted: a coherent, sane Finnish political party

modulation wheels on the RIGHT side of the keyboard?

mailx implementation that won't barf on UTF-8 encoded GECOS information?

Q: How to configure /etc/pulse/client.conf for remote audio sink?

wanted: 'lspci -vvv' output for Geode SC1100, SC1200, SC1400

wanted: Geode "Red Cloud" GX2 hardware

xf86-video-geode 2.11.4 - the GX2 edition - almost done

RFA: ispell-et, myspell-lv, rus-ispell

Don't try this at home, kids!

Nordic expats living in Finland wanted for survey

partial answer to "unexplainable WiFi connection drops"

Lauching Debian-installer from a chroot on a USB stick?

Illogical logistics industry

unexplainable WiFi connection drops on Dell D430

CUPS-PDF: how my first Debian package briefly became a key component of the Ubuntu desktop strategy

On the accessibility of public services in Swedish in Finland

Aftermath of the Magma/Helsinki Times survey on Swedish

On a related matter...

xf86-video-geode 2.11.3

Two truths with one stone

Removing cruft that appears as false 'dpkg -L' positives?

When can we have a balanced and meaningful debate on immigration?

Killing the console bell on Jaunty?

Atom feeds per-topic

Invandringskonsult

Debian CUPS transition in progress

Roadmap to a better FreeDesktop: ridding us of the Firefox filth

Here's hoping for the best...

Uninformed shoppers blaming Ubuntu: a brief TODO list for Canonical

Geode X.org driver fix for GX2/CS5535 released

xf86-video-geode 2.11.0: last call!

Available for a new job

Still more Old Skool goodies to send to a good home

Atari TT030, Atari Stacy, iMac and SCSI devices for sale

SBM that adds USB boot support?

another Tux bites the dust

Québec government sued for buying Microsoft products without any public call for tender

Dear Lazyweb: constructive homelessness

brainstorm: new LPC dongle design

Ah, the wonders of e-commerce!

xf86-video-cyrix and xf86-video-nsc: it's dead, Jim

O: planner -- project management application

HOWTO build a clean LTSP boot image that includes the latest updates

Check your LTSP server's sources.list

Build a boot image using that sources.list

HOWTO make Geode thin clients work on Ubuntu/Hardy LTSP

Upgrade the packages in the LTSP chroot

Purge the transitional AMD driver

Update the LTSP boot image

Profit?

xf86-video-geode: now with full OLPC support!

Kuradne Geode draiveri!

Check your LTSP server's `sources.list`

Build a boot image using that `sources.list`