Marcin Juszkiewicz

Few months ago I decided that after 2 years of “HaeRWu Marcin Juszkiewicz” company it is good time to drop first part. The reason was simple — “HaeRWu” is hard to pronounce for English speaking people (and not only them). And I think that I am more known as Marcin Juszkiewicz in community then by my company name.

As next step I bought “juszkiewicz.com.pl” domain for all of my private and company things. And today moved this website to new address. Old ones will work of course — they redirect to proper one.

All email addresses will work too.

I already bought tickets for bus to/from Berlin, planes tickets and booked room in Astrid hotel.

The plan starts on Thursday with Berlinia bus from Szczecin to Berlin Schoenefeld (SXF) airport. Then Easyjet flight number 4701 (16:00) to Brussels (BRU) and from there to Astrid hotel. I will do return trip on Sunday — Easyjet flight number 4702 (20:50), then bus to Szczecin.

So if you want to meet me before FOSDEM crazy time you can catch me on Thursday evening or Friday (rather morning as I plan to do walk around a bit to see something other then hotel and conference).

Since few months I have 10/1Mbps network connection (downlink/uplink). Recently it was downgraded to 1/1Mbps and I had no idea why. Finally it appeared that my router was the problem…

Exact reason was QoS which I enabled few days ago. It looks like DD-WRT which I use now can not handle it on WRT54GS without degrading network speed. For now I disabled this but it is not an option because I plan to use VoIP more in next months so I need warranty that it will get all bandwidth it needs never mind what else would be running.

Current plans are to make use of Alix 1.c which I have from PC Engines. Soon I will have nice case for it so the only things to buy will be miniPCI WiFi card (friends suggested getting one of Atheros based ones) and 1GbE network card. I already have 2GB CompactFlash for rootfs and spare 2.5” hdd which will be used for storage.

This configuration should be fast enough to have more functions then just router/AP. I plan to make it also printer/scanner server and probably there will be some more to add.

After 691 days of not using Progear I unpacked it and got it running again. Why “691 days”? It was written by fsck during booting.

Progear support in OpenEmbedded is a bit updated now. New kernel (2.6.27) gives VESA frame buffer which finally utilize XGA resolution (in 2.6.19-rc5 it was VGA centered on screen). It still lack good AC/Battery support anyway. External modules which were used (progear-ac, progear-battery) do not build with current kernels (not strange as they were hacked ACPI modules) so I tried to write driver to get at least AC status. It works more or less.

I currently do not have any plans for this machine. Will use it to learn how to write ugly kernel drivers which probably no one will use (how many Progear users plays with current kernels?) and sooner or later it will go back to basement as other toys will need space on desk.

Month ago I ended work for OpenedHand. Some people asked me what I am doing now, who is my client etc. Now I can write a bit about it.

I am working as contractor with Bug Labs Inc. to help them with their development of BUG Linux (which is based on OpenedHand’s Poky). Target device is BUG device which consists of BUGbase and BUGmodules (more on their website). Hardware is quite interesting (information copied from website):

• ARM1136JF-S-based microprocessor
• 1 USB 2.0 HS host interface/4 hub port connections
• 1 USB OTG HS interface
• 4 UART serial links
• 4 channel SPI interface
• I2C (400 kbits) interface/4 channels
• I2S interface/2 channels
• Smart LCD interface
• Camera sensor interface
• Micro memory card interface
• MPEG4 hardware encoding/decoding
• Hardware graphic acceleration
• 10/100 Ethernet MAC
• Base unit LCD module interface
• Base unit 128MB on-board memory (FLASH/DDR SDRAM)
• JTAG/ICE support
• Serial debug port
• Power system
• AC operation
• Battery operation/up to 4 external batteries
• Fast battery charging/simultaneous of internal and external batteries
• Smart power management support
• Battery-backed real-time clock
• Audio out via on-board piezo speaker

And BUGbase has 4 slots for additional BUGmodules which can be hotplugged during use. Currently there are screen (with touchscreen), GPS, accelerometer + motion detector and 2Mpix camera modules. As i.mx31 cpu, which they use, supports two framebuffers two screens can be used at same time — I hope that will have occasion to play wit such setup ;D

Software side is other thing as it is Java based. Under it is normal GNU/Linux system (Poky based) but access to hardware is now based on Java components. Does it works with normal languages? No idea yet — will check when will get hardware to play with.

Generally it is interesting project and I hope that it will get more popularity as most of informations is open so (in theory) anyone can make own BUGmodule.

Some people asked me which events I plan to attend in next months. Currently there are two of them: OEDEM and FOSDEM.

OEDEM is not yet decided when and where it will be. There was suggestion from OpenBossa conference organizers to make it there but it would costs us too much (travels, hotels). We are considering Berlin (as all previous meetings were there) but we lack place for it. And I suggested Szczecin, Poland. But where and when? Not decided yet.

FOSDEM will be in Brussels, Belgium like it was always. Probably it will be 21-22 February 2009 and I hope that it will get confirmed soon so I will be able to buy cheap plane tickets for BerlinBrussels flights (today it would be EasyJet with 52EUR for total cost). OE developers not decided yet which hotel will get our blessing so I did not yet checked this.

Will I attempt other events? It depends on when and where they will be as this generate costs which I have to care about.

Recently I started merging interesting stuff from OpenedHand’s Poky into OpenEmbedded. Now, with OE using GIT as storage for metadata it is much, much easier then it was in Monotone times.

I have over 3 thousands of revisions exported (using git format-patch) from Poky and I am reviewing them and adapt to add into OE. Useful ones are changed by simple shell script which adapts paths, change authors informations (I use Poky via git-svn so no real names/emails) and adds “(from Poky)” message to end of patch description. Then just git am and patch lands in OpenEmbedded.

For now I added newer APT and DPKG package tools, newer QEMU (not the latest but working with ARMv6/v7 instructions), U-Boot mkimage tool which does not use lot of Openmoko patches (just one is needed), Shared MIME Info which does not need any processing on target device and some tweaks here or there.

Next in queue are Maemo4 cleaned recipes (Diablo ones), binary locales for Angstrom powered ARMv6/7 based machines and miscellaneous tweaks or updates.

One of great things which OpenedHand use to get Poky into working state is buildbot. But it is available only over VPN so recently I started my own buildbot for my projects.

Currently there are few build configurations enabled:

• Poky build from scratch — qemuarm, c7x0, om-gta01, qemux86 images
• Poky incremental (same targets as above)
• Ångström incremental with same machines and base, console and x11 images

Soon more configurations will get added, some will change (probably will drop Poky ones). I am also wondering about providing public access to waterfall display but without rights to stop/start builders.

I hope that this will allow to catch some bad commits.