Marcin Juszkiewicz

During 20-21 October there was a local conference about Open Source projects. There were interesting talks and also some not so interesting ones as usual.

On first day we had a presentation about Minix — what it is, how it was done, what for etc. Nicely done cause there were many students here and some of them even knew what Minix is.

Arch Linux was described by one of ‘trusted users’ (that’s how they name contributors). We got information what Arch is, what it supports, how development is made and why presenter thinks that packaging is easier then Debian one ;) Have to discuss more about it one day with him.

Talk about Celery was interesting. What it is? Let me quote website:

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Presentation shown it using video conversion as example. First set of ugly workarounds used by people in PHP code and then how to use Celery to make the same in nicer way.

Second day started with presentation about Sonar code analysis tool and it’s role in software development. According to presenter it allowed them to cut code review times by not having to deal with many issues (like code duplication for example).

The most interesting one was about using open source applications in local government. From Novell NetWare with mix of stations running MS DOS, MS Windows 3.11/95/98/Me/2000 with mix of applications to Debian/Mandrake based servers with one additional MS Windows server for Win32 applications. From commercial applications to open ones. Lot of movement was done due to low budget but also to increase security by having systems with good security updates. Also licensing issues with Microsoft Office applications when each year combinations of components were available or not for separate buy (accounting office does not need Powerpoint but require Excel for example).

Education of users was mentioned — teaching users how to convert documents before sending them to outside people/government offices etc. Also dealing with users often used to use pirated software which do not understand that if there is no license available then they will not be able to get what they think they need.

Resulting system got documented and installed in few local public schools. Structure was shown and described how it works from intruder detection/blocking, content filtering, hardware monitoring etc. Why no SSH from outside — VPN as the only way to access internal network. Long list of components was presented with description why each of them was used — nice part which got some comments from people with suggestions of changes and many questions were asked.

Summary of talk: lower costs, less licensing problems, stability, security updates, better control and scalability. Cons? more work on configuration, users need education to use new tools.

There was also talk about using WordPress 3.x as CMS. Interesting for me as I am using it for many years to handle this and few other services. Presenter told that sometimes it is hard to convince people as they are thinking of WP more like on blog platform rather then framework for running websites. He also presented few of his creations. During discussion later I got few nice suggestions on plugins which I use here and replaced few of them with different ones.

In overall conference was good. Some talks resulted in discussions, got some new contacts. Hope that there will be next edition.

Few days ago I went to shop and bought a bike:

My third bike in entire life — previous one was recycled few years ago as I did not lived with my parents and there was no sense in restoring driving condition for it (it was ~20 years old I think).

This bike is cool — especially fitted with extra set for my 3.5y old daughter. Yesterday we (my wife, daughter and I) went for cycling in forest and it was great experience. Lost track where we are once which ended in few kilometres of really ugly road but I learnt from it and next trip will be first consulted with Open Street Maps as it has coverage of Szczecin area.

During Linaro Connect Q3.11 I had occasion to play with few Android tablets. Andy Green pointed me to Hannspree Hannspad at Ebuyer UK (as he has one at home) which looked as nice deal so I bought one. It arrived two days later so I was able to play with it during conference.

Tablet was quite fast and nicely responding but… screen was disaster :( Problems with touch screen, very poor angle views made using it very uncomfortable for browsing web or watching videos. Later I found out that there are two versions of Hannspad tablet: 1633 (which I got) and 1653 (with usable, bright display).

I was able to play with Froyo (was installed by default with some crappy tools), Gingerbread (community build of Cyanogenmod) and also with Honeycomb which is what I used for most of time. The fun of hacking Hannspad is that there are no kernel sources released by vendor so most of custom ‘ROMs’ are made for Viewsonic GTablet. Effect is that soft touch buttons does not work, volume buttons are reversed and some other issues exists while device is usable. But thanks to ab73 from SlateDroid forum most of them was solved and even more — Search button was found below Back one :)

Today I sold it. Was it worth buying? Definitely no, but it was good opportunity to check do I need such device. For day to day use rather no, but it was nice tool to browse web from couch or checking social networks. And Freerunners HD were flying ;)

But I plan to buy next tablet one day. Something with more square screen would be nice as I mostly used it in portrait mode to browse web and screen was too narrow for it. Who knows — maybe Amazon Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble Nook Color 2 (which was expected to be released in September too). 7” sounds better then 10” due to size. But for sure nothing less then 1024x600 resolution (1024x768 or 1024x1024 would be perfect).

Today I upgraded my virtual machine from Ubuntu 10.04 ‘lucid’ to 11.04 ‘natty’ + 3.0 kernel from 11.10 ‘oneiric’. For first time I used official way for upgrades and did that step by step (lucid -> maverick -> natty) with reboot on each step. Each upgrade ended with reboot of vm.

But fun started when I wanted to install 3.0 kernel from 11.10 ‘oneiric’… Installation went fine — mostly due to Alex’s comment to my blog post about it. But after reboot machine did not wanted to boot at all ;(

“xm create NAME” resulted in “Error: Boot loader didn’t return any data!” message… After some googling (as I never was XEN administrator) and experiments I got what was wrong. We use ‘py-grub’ to boot VMs and this tool uses “/boot/grub/menu.lst” to get information which kernel to boot. But Ubuntu systems are using “/boot/grub/grub.cfg” due to grub2 instead of grub-legacy.

Anyway I updated menu.lst by hand and VM booted fine. Need to remember for next kernel update ;)

When I returned from Linaro Connect Q3.11 I noticed that none of my Pandaboards are on. I though that powered them off before leaving but two days later I needed at least one online. Power cycling PSU did not helped so I took 5V/3A one from box and got board running leaving old one for inspection later.

Today I disconnected all cables from PSU and opened it:

This does not look good… So time to buy another 100-200W old pc power supply and adapt for use with developer boards:

This big white connector had 12V, GND, 5V lines which allowed me to charge most of my developer boards and usb hubs.

It served well for 2.5 years — now have to recycle it…

Tried Unity, Unity 2D and GNOME3 today. Removed each after <0.5h of playing with them.

Unity? Lack of visible settings. Tried CCSM — chaotic attempt to keep all Compiz settings in one place done in a way to make user say “WTF?”. Managed to crash Unity panels (left, top) after clicking something. Started Gnome-tweak-tool — this one allows to set theme and decoration. Selected least ugly ones, no way to get rid of orange title bars. Did not manage to get rid of icons from desktop… Ok, maybe it has to be that way (sorry for big pictures):

Launcher always lists my permanently mounted partitions (playing with “keep in launcher” option did not changed anything).

Funny situation happens after pressing Super (aka Meta aka Windows) key — it should open window with all installed recently used, installed, suggested-to-install applications. But what if you did not notice it due to clicking on other window? Panels will switch to transparent:

The whole “let me show you list of apps” looked as strange idea for me — too many clicks required and lot of space wasted. ADW Launcher on 1024x600 screen presents applications list in much better style.

So I logged into Unity 2D — but here I got one box over all windows (I could click though it and it disappeared after re-login):

Clicked few times and decided to avoid — normal Unity had better look.

GNOME3? No comments — I have only FullHD monitor so will not waste screen space for panel which does not even give me usability of older one. Harder to run apps even then under Unity.

So I decided to stay with XFCE. It is not perfect as I have few “sorry, unable to find icon” applets shown (GNOME Bluetooth, NetworkManager, sound) but this bug is known and who knows… maybe will get fixed before release (was fixed before 11.04 and broken again after).

UPDATE: I run Ubuntu 11.10 ‘oneiric’ on all my systems which have some kind of display (other is router which runs 11.04 with 11.10 kernel). I never run stable release cause my systems migrate to next release at start of development cycle as this makes my work easier for me (with 10 years of using Debian ‘sid’ I am able to deal with upgrade problems). Trying other desktops from time to time, usually around Ubuntu beta phase when all features are frozen even if they do not fully work, was fun and allowed me to find new tools for my daily use. But each time I expect some way to configure a look & feel and this is where Unity fails for me.

Some time ago we agreed that not everyone here uses Ubuntu distribution and decided to provide so called ‘generic linux’ cross toolchain. Recently I managed to get it done and now need brave testers to tell is it working or not.

Get it here: http://people.linaro.org/~hrw/generic-linux/ (64bit only)

Needed files are toolchain-11.07.tar.xz and init.sh script. Unpack tarball from / so /opt/linaro/11.07/ will be populated and put init.sh anywhere you want (it will be integrated into tarball later).

How to use:

$ source init.sh

this will add cross toolchain into PATH and also set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to two directories:

• one with binutils libraries
• second with all extra libraries which may be needed

Feel free to experiment with second dir by removing files from there and checking are system provided libs are fine too.

So far I checked this toolchain under few distributions:

• Ubuntu 10.04 ‘lucid’ LTS
• Ubuntu 11.04 ‘natty’
• Fedora 14
• OpenSUSE 11.4
• CentOS 5.6

It failed only under CentOS (which was expected due to it’s age).

How did I checked? So far compilation of ‘gpm’ and ‘zlib’ were tested.

As I did not had a mood to blog during event I decided to write something about after it ended.

First what this Linaro Connect is about… Is it conference or rather an event which has to gather people in one place so they can reach each other easily? From what I saw during last week it is both.

There were several summits which I did not attended so does not have anything to write about them. Inter team meetings during which people were sharing their knowledge about their work and how to use it to improve work of other teams — here the most active were Android and Validation teams (in my opinion). Schedule was full of Android sessions and LAVA was quite often heard word.

For me event started on Sunday as I had taxi at 6:30 in the morning. Then bus, plane and then waiting 2h in terminal 1 of London Heathrow airport waiting for few other guys to appear as we had to share a cab to hotel where I arrived at ~17:00 local time. Yes, my travels sucks.

Went outside with Zygmunt Krynicki to find some place to eat. Found few takeaway only places and small restaurant with India food which was delicious.

Monday started with traditional English breakfast (you know: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, baked beans and mushrooms kind of one) which was quite good and we had it daily. When it comes to food at hotel it was good and someone had great idea serving different cuisine each day.

Starting plenary with informations from each team about what do they plan for this week. Then work, meetings, coding, hacking etc. Attended several meetings like binary toolchain discussion with toolchain working group, Matthias Klose from Ubuntu and several people from ARM Ltd which maintain ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5). Also went for hard float summit with not only Linaro or Ubuntu but also Fedora and Marvell people.

But work is not the only thing we did. There were activities for evenings too.

On Monday we went outside for karting. First we were equipped with proper suit, shoes, helmet and then went for safety instructions.

Racing was fun. Each team were split into two sub teams (as there were two tracks) with 4 people in each. That gave 15 minutes per person, but as one of us decided to not drive second one we had 20 minutes on it.

Was it fun? O yes, it was. Especially outside track where speed was higher and engine more powerful but as steering was tough my right wrist reminded me that RSI problem which I had few years ago (this time pain vanished during night but got back at closing party). Our team took 6th place in total.

Tuesday and Wednesday evenings were “reserved” for team meals. First day we went to Browns and Punter was next one. Food in both was tasty and came in big amounts.

But food was not the only way to spend evening. On Wednesday we went punting on a river in Cambridge. Our punter was presenting us with informations about colleges and bridges we were passing by — things like who created them, when, why etc. Some people took photos but so far I did not traced whom to contact to get a copy.

Thursday we had a dinner in King’s College. Dinning hall looked nice with all those portraits and food was good. Had a nice talk with ST-Ericsson people about their cheap developer board Snowball which I complained about in other post. We got to the point that the CPU on board was created for mobile devices use (that’s why no usb host functionality) and that all those industrial connectors are present because it is more board for prototyping new devices.

Friday was last day. We did some hacking, packed equipment of our room and prepared for closing plenary. At the end we had small party with some activities and food. I left it early — was tired and wanted to discuss with Zygmunt a bit (normally we chat often during company events but this time we got separate rooms).

Return trip was a copy… taxi, plane, bus, taxi. Went home around 22:00 and gave inflated sword (from closing party) to my daughter — she liked it ;)