Marcin Juszkiewicz

Now when mainline kernel boots fine on Samsung ARM Chromebook I think that it is a time for me to end my work on Ubuntu support for this device.

Those few who use Ubuntu 13.04 or later: nothing will change for you probably. Kernel from repository is old and should be refreshed to at least same as Chrome OS is using. But during last few months no one tried to get it working so for me it looks like lack of interest.

Anyway I will need development machine for my work at Red Hat. So soon Ubuntu 13.10 gets replaced with Fedora 19 “remix” with 3.4 or 3.8 kernel first probably (for USB 3.0 and audio) and then sooner or later switch to mainline.

On behalf of Gary Lamb and Tyler Šiprová, I would like to welcome you to Red Hat. We are thrilled to have you as part of the team!

Starting from 1st September ;D

Yesterday was my birthday. I would not write about it but something happened…

It was just kind of normal day. I went to the city centre to gain some AP in Ingress, met with courier to pick up my new power bank (10000mAh Anker), played again and then got back home to prepare for evening meeting.

It had to be just yet another beer meeting with some geek discussions as we had some changes in local Unix/Linux user group. But then (after 3rd bottle of beer) waitress brought us something:

The team started signing etc. I was surprised as I did not expected anything like this. And it was delicious! Kudos to Kruszynka for making it.

Olof Johannson wrote on Google+ how to get mainline kernel booting on Samsung ARM Chromebook. As mine returned from repair with new speakers and bottom cover I decided to take a look.

With chainloaded U-Boot and just standard “exynos_defconfig” build of 3.11-rc2 I got my machine booting to Ubuntu right away:

00:06 hrw@krolik:~$ cat /proc/device-tree/model ;echo
Google Snow
00:06 hrw@krolik:~$ uname -snrp
Linux krolik 3.11.0-rc2 armv7l

There are some things missing (audio, usb 3.0, backlight and more) but even with what is available we can boot and use Chromebook with mainline kernel instead of ChromeOS one.

I will revert to 3.4-chromeos for now and try 3.8-chromeos one but that’s because I use Chromebook as developer machine for some builds where storage speed matters.

Months ago a new game started: Ingress. There is a story behind it but not that I care about it.

In short: there are two teams: green (Enlightenment) and blue (Resistance) trying to take over the world by “hacking portals”. Sure, someone could say that there are many MMORPG games on a market already and they would be right. But there are few things which made me play Ingress.

1. To play you have to get your ass moved as game takes place in so-called “real world”. You know — streets with people, cars etc.
2. Gives possibility to learn many more or less interesting places around.
3. Another opportunity to meet other people and have something common to talk about.

For me it started 4 weeks ago when I had three spare hours during Sunday evening. Joined the Enlightenment and hacked some portals in Warsaw, made few links and ended with a bit above 10k AP which gave me 2nd level. Next evening (in Szczecin) I met some local players and they helped me to get to 3rd one.

Then time went… I convinced a friend to play and helped him to do L3 in one evening :D And during last weekend I was in Warsaw again and made 7th level (with help from local people who told me where to go to get some AP in quick and easy way).

But what I like most is a need to grab a bike (or take a walk) and go to city centre to spend some time in active way ;)

As I left Linaro I am not at Linaro Connect in Dublin, Ireland. But decided to access at least keynotes (which were always interesting) and probably also some sessions.

George Grey introduction speech was fine. Number, standard Linaro information (what it is, how many people etc). Worth watching if you want some updates but may be skipped.

Then James Bottomley from Parallels spoke about server side of computing. Unix, Windows NT, Linux, Itanium, AMD64/x86-64, Atom, 64-bit ARM are good keywords for his presentation. I liked few things:

• Itanium iceberg description (why IA64 was disaster without IA32 compatibility)
• Atom contra ARM “power fight” (hard to tell which one will be better for servers when it comes to energy use)
• mentioning of Blackadder (I know what it is but never watched more then one episode)

There were some issues with bandwidth so there are few moments in video where audio/video stops and you get group photo from previous Linaro Connect instead. But this is “normal” on first day and I hope that will get fixed by network team.

There are few sessions today which I plan to take a look. ARMv8 Status one and the one about Linux scheduler.

After 3 years at Linaro I have decided to not continue my trip with Canonical. So now I am back to be on my own again.

I will not write why I made such decision but also want to mention that time at Canonical/Linaro was good. I learnt some new tools and added some of them to “avoid if possible” list. From products created and developed at Canonical there are Bazaar and Unity. Both have replacements which I like more.

What next? Will see — I had some meetings and discussions. But I am open for job offers of course ;) It can be Debian or OpenEmbedded or Ubuntu or other ARM Linux related as long I do not have to move.

During weekend I was in Warsaw at Pixel Heaven 2013 retrocomputing event. It was interesting but I had no idea which machines I will see there as normally on such events in Poland you can see some Atari, Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. But here we got far, far more.

All computers were provided by Stowarzyszenie Miłośników Zabytków Informatyki with few exceptions. I have to visit them in Katowice one day and look at rest of their machines.

Main room was filled with Commodore machines on one side:

As you see from PET line though VIC-20 to C64 (in nearly whole range of cases) and it’s portable SX64 version. Then C16/116/+4 line. There was also C128D but crowded for most of time so I did not took a photo.

I always though that C16/116/+4 line was disaster one. But one of guys doing C64 pixel graphics told me that they had 121 colours (compared to 16 on C64) so it gave him more possibilities.

Next set was from Atari:

There were also 130XE, 800XE for which I do not have photos. Too bad that Atari 400 got wrong monitor — picture was snowing due to NTSC output instead of PAL (this was description from owner of same model). And each time I see TOS on Atari ST I want to run away screaming…

Wide line of ZX Spectrum compatibles:

The green one was bought by my friend V0yager. It had names like “Basic 2000” or “Lambda 8300” and probably many others…

Speaking of ZX Spectrum… We got Polish computers based on Z80 as well:

First one (Meritum) was compatible with TRS-80. The second one was closer to ZX Spectrum (there was some compatibility iirc) but was extended with networking and was supposed to be used under CP/J (version of CP/M with networking and shared drives). That piano in the middle was a toy produced earlier by same company so they reused a case (including note holder).

Of course such event should have Commodore Amiga computers as well:

Amiga 500/1200 were present as well as another Amiga 4000 desktop.

600 was my first own computer (had Atari 65XE before) so I took a photo. Then we have revision 3 of Amiga 500 mainboard. Lot of things done different then in later ones — such as expansion connector. Amiga 4000D was property of my friend. It had PCI daughterboard inside (with network, usb 2.0 and VooDoo3 cards) and was powered by Cyberstorm PPC card. You can see cards on the last picture.

Some selection of strange IBM PC and compatibles:

Second one had touch screen, phone, fax and printer…

Other ones:

Vectrex (the first photo) is machine with vector graphics only, then Sharp MZ-700 with tape recorder and printer, Spectravideo SVI-738 X’Press and then German clone of Atari Pong.

But none of them gave me such joy as line of products from other British company:

I spent some time playing with RISC OS on A3010. It had some crazy ideas like AppDir but was fun to play with. Managed to drop down to text mode but it’s shell was too strange for me. Same with ARM BASIC. But it was great fun being able to play with one of first ARM based computers. Too bad that later someone change graphics mode to one incompatible with monitor ;(

It was great selection of old computers. I want to thank David Alan Gilbert for his comments on my Google+ posts related to British computers.