Marcin Juszkiewicz

Long time no post — I wonder does someone wondered what happened :)

Job situation change

15th October was my last day of work for OpenedHand (which was acquired by Intel two months earlier). Since then I am free to work for anyone and I have few offers of cooperation in discussion. I will still have my own company (HaeRWu) but probably will change name of it as this is very hard to pronounce for English speakers.

I have to admit that I will miss atmosphere of OpenedHand. That company had great people with many ideas, there was lot of interesting projects (sane and insane ones), interesting hardware which no one had idea of existence etc. I hope that our future roads will cross one day and we will meet on some conferences or in some projects.

OpenEmbedded switched to GIT from Monotone

After long time of git trail we finally switched to GIT. I hope that Monotone guys will not be sad (we were one of biggest projects according to their wiki) but this system was too slow to handle our metadata.

I was using GIT during my work with Poky (by git-svn). It really change a way how does people work. Ok, Monotone also has local branches support but it is too slow compared to git.

During near time I plan to merge some interesting stuff from Poky to OpenEmbedded — for example updates to Maemo libraries and applications.

Other websites

My profile on LinkedIn is updated. Got connected to companies which I was working with during my OpenedHand times, got some recommendations etc. BTW - I am in “Szczecin Area, Poland” not “Lublin Area, Poland” (as listed in LI profile) but due to the bug in the system I can not fix it ;(

After long time Ohloh service managed to handle aliases in OpenEmbedded project so I can claim all my commits in OE repository as mine. The result can be seen in my profile there.

During recent discussions we got into common developer problem — there is no such thing as enough disk space… Later it also expanded to RAM size.

My current desktop machine has 4GiB of memory and two hard disks with 820GB (763GiB real) of total capacity. And I have only 90GiB of free space on them. So what took most of space? Usual suspects: Poky and OpenEmbedded builds (du -hs took one hour with “160GiB used” result).

Which get us back to the subject — how much disk space is enough today for development? It depends on area — some people will be fine with less then 100GB, some not. Laptop which I will soon send back to Intel has only 80GB hdd and this is really not enough for me for Poky development (if it has to be the only machine). I know that few persons started to look for 320GB (or larger) disks for their laptops ;D

OK, with “rm_work” class I was able to do Poky builds with few gigabytes of free space. But small hard drive forced me to forget about using VirtualBox for testing in other distributions then Debian ‘sid’ (which I use on all machines). Currently ~/.Virtualbox on my desktop uses about 70GiB as I have there Fedora 8, Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and few other distributions which I use for testing does Poky works under them.

Other thing is doing strange builds… In past I did lot of them — record one took 270GiB of space (and two weeks of building). And I do not like to be space limited when doing them (“rm_work” is not always good way). I still plan to make such big ones from time to time as they allow to check does everything works (and also show new bugs to fix).

But how much RAM is enough? My previous desktop had 2.1GiB RAM, laptop which I use for x86 builds has only 1GiB. Current desktop has 4GiB of DDR2 (low price made it affordable) and for OpenEmbedded or Poky builds it is more then enough (as no one use BitBake from times when 512MiB ram was not enough to just parse metadata). My machine usually maxx at 2.5-3GiB of used memory during heavy builds. When it will be not enough… I still have 2 slots for RAM free :)

How it is for other people?

Today is second day of Maemo Summit 2008. I had the presentation about running Maemo in QEMU’s N8x0 emulation.

From what people told me after it was made fine. I think that this is good as this was my first presentation in English :)

All materials are of course available to download:

• presentation itself
• patch to get Diablo booting in N810 emulation
• kill debugs patch

Today I unpacked new Ethernet switch — D-Link DSG-1008D “green” edition. It has 8 GbE ports so I hooked my devices:

• Linksys WRT54GS
• desktop with on-board Realtek 8111/8168 card
• Lenovo T61 with Intel 82566M card
• Dell D400 with Broadcom BCM5705M card

In theory only router is 100Mbps — rest are 1GbE devices. But not quite… I was unable to get Intel adapter (which use “e1000e” driver) to switch to full speed — it used only 100Mbps speed. Tried ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000 but it refuses :(

What was a reason? Wrong cable… I tested all my Ethernet cables and it looks like I am out of real cat5e cables… This will have to wait then until I will end organizing my workplace as there will be rewiring of everything done.

And the Lenovo T61 working on 100Mbps only is not a problem as this machine soon goes back to it’s owner.

As some of you probably noticed from time to time comment which you enter is not visible on site. This does not always mean that it got into moderation queue — sometimes it is somewhere but I do not have idea where and why.

Maybe it is because of software setup which I use: WordPress MultiUser + SpamKarma, maybe it has other reason. This does not change a fact that sometimes some comments just do not land.

And the funny part is that I am getting e-mails with those comments contents without problems…

Two years passed since I started HaeRWu company.

First it was just for being able to provide invoices for companies which needed help with OpenEmbedded. Later it helped me to co-operate with OpenedHand without paying big taxes. What future will bring… will see.

During last weekend we finally moved from Poznań to Szczecin. New flat, new internet connection (10Mbps in, 1Mbps out instead of 3M/0.5M)…

Still lot of boxes to unpack, furniture to buy, paperwork to do but we are here and have much more space to live then we had before :)

We spent previous two weeks on so called holidays. Why “so called”?

They were quite exhausting two weeks — first two days trip from Poznań to my parents which live in Olecko. We did a break in Grudziądz — I recommend “City” hotel if someone will go there.

On Tuesday I had crazy trip to London, UK… First train, then train, then 3rd train… Lunch in “Złote tarasy” shopping centre and then public bus to Warsaw “Okęcie” airport. Few hours later landed on Luton airport and finally after 13h trip I was at hotel. But that trip was worth it — we were informed that there is no OpenedHand anymore, we “are” Intel now (“” because we needs to sign papers etc).

Two days later even more crazy trip back… This time from Heathrow airport to Warsaw and then night public bus to Olecko (I got sitting place after 4h of standing). Nothing strange that I was zombie on my brother’s wedding which took place on same day when I got back…

But finally I was able to make use of free time — walking though Olecko is good thing. There are many green places, no big traffic etc. Great place for holidays. And there are many lakes around… This year (as we do each year) we also walked around “Olecko Duże” lake — this takes few hours as whole path is over 12 km long but it is worth doing.

In meantime we made short trip to Vilnius, Lithuania where we visited some interesting places and on back trip enjoyed visiting Trakai castle.

It was maybe a bit exhausting some times but overall I enjoyed that time.