Marcin Juszkiewicz

2007 is ending. It was very good year for me. I am now married man, waiting for daughter birth. Have own company, working as contractor for one of biggest companies in OpenEmbedded world.

January

• Signed contract with OpenedHand — starting from February.
• Became one of 50 selected developers for OpenMoko Phase0 program. Each of us got offer to get Neo1973 GTA01 for free. First it was GTA01Bv3 with battery problem, then GTA01Bv4.
• I ended working for Conecto. Finally end of PHP programming.
• There was information that Sharp ended production of Zaurus palmtops. During next months they were still manufacturing them.

February

• FOSDEM — my first one. It was very nice event and good occasion to meet all those hackers from miscellaneous projects. I spoke with more people that was able to remember.
• Got Nokia 770 tablet donated. Interesting device but underpowered. It also became unsupported few months later.
• My first code entered Linux kernel. It was LCD backlight driver for Frontpath ProGear tablet.
• OpenMoko project released RoadMap.

March

• Vernier LabQuest got released. I was one of members of OpenedHand development team working on Poky for this device.
• Pingwinaria 2007 — I was there with one talk about OpenEmbedded. Then decided that it is time to buy laptop to be able to read mail, do some hacking etc.
• My Neo1973 GTA01Bv3 arrived. Added was Debug board, 128MB MicroSD card, pen/stylus and few other things.
• Three years of using OpenEmbedded.

April

• OpenZaurus project halted — all work is now done for Ångström distribution.
• My oldest Zaurus got SD/MMC driver for 2.6 kernel. Thanks goes to Thomas Kunze. I hope that he will update it to current kernels one day.
• Moved blog to current domain.
• Bought Dell D400 laptop. It is nice and fast machine — I use it as 32bit build machine.
• Nokia 770 which I got two months before became unsupported device.
• Bought 3rdparty Nokia charger to be able to charge Neo1973 battery.

May

• I got Neo1973 GTA01Bv4. As this was “developer update” only battery was added. I also got gllin in rootfs :)
• Bought Linksys NSLU2 — it was working as NFS server for my build machines.
• Played a bit with Vista on my friend 17” laptop. It is not a system for me.

June

• After reading about trademark wars started by handhelds.org I decided to end using their services. It also means that I am no longer OPIE developer.
• With few friends took StarWars marathon. We were exhausted after five episodes so “Return Of The Jedi” was not displayed.
• Due to big amount of visits from Google search I wrote small information about how to buy Neo1973 phone.

July

• GUADEC — I was going there with thinking “what I would do at GNOME conference” but it was also occasion to meet OpenedHand gang and people from other projects. I still remember how badly I lost on first day… and I did it twice ;(

August

• I married my beloved Ania — it was big event with lot of people from our families, our friends…
• Poky Linux 3.0 released — after release we pushed all upgrades which came to our minds and it was still working.
• Got Alix.1c board which PC Engines company donated to OpenEmbedded project. It replaces NSLU2 as NFS server. It still lack case and other services are still not moved to it.

September

• Ania and I were on Zakynthos island (Greece) on honeymoon — nice place if you want to rest.
• I wrote post about my testing of OpenMoko 2007.2 system. It was most popular post ever.
• My blog got new theme.

October

• OEDEM 2007 took place. Nice event, lot of OpenEmbedded developers.
• Maemo started developer program for Nokia N810 tablet. Due to limitations I was unable to take part of it. ARGHH!

November

• Upgraded my desktop system a bit — new CPU and cooler.
• OpenMoko released Gllin with script which starts it using OABI libraries on EABI system.
• Thanks to work done by Dmitry Baryshkov 2.6.23 kernel works nice on Tosa. It pushed new life into this device.

December

• OpenedHand X-mas took place — lot of fun and occasion to meet new guys from OH. Also played with few interesting devices.
• Due to lack of ARMv6 hardware I was working on getting current QEmu working. Now I am using it to test my recent Poky changes.
• Due to flu (which I catch during OH X-mas) we had to spend Christmas at home. It was our first x-mas at home without family.

Few days ago Ångström distribution was released. Currently machine mentors tests images and release them so their devices will be also supported and ready for users.

Users often have CompactFlash cards which we (developers) do not have. Some of them will be hit by miscellaneous problems. For example their WiFi card which was nicely working with HostAP driver now works only with Orinoco one so they can not connect to WPA encrypted access points.

How to solve that? Such users should report those cards. What report needs to contain:

• pccardctl ident output
• information does card was working with other distribution (it can be any Linux distribution — I test cards under Debian on my laptop)

What developer has to do then? Creation of patch to in-kernel driver is simple — there is one table per driver in source and few simple macros. Examples can be found in my submissions to kernel tree.

During last months I did few attempts to unify kernel configuration for all PXA Zaurus models (so no collie). As last one did not generate working ones and I do not have time to fix it (or devices for testing) I decided to release last version so maybe someone will look at it and try to get it fixed.

To generate configuration files run make.

Sharp Zaurus palmtops have separate flash ‘partition’ for keeping kernel. The problem is that it is only ~1.2 megabyte… It was good enough for 2.4.18 kernel which was used by vendor but with 2.6 kernel maintained by OE community it is really hard to fit there.

We started to remove some features from kernel. With 2.6.23 release we were forced to choose: SD/MMC support or PCMCIA/CF support goes into kernel. As many people keep rootfs on SD cards we moved CF into modules. To get 2.6.24 fit I had to choose another parts…

In near future we will probably end with a kernel which will be stripped from everything possible. This will leave only framebuffer and rootfs access support — Everything other moved to modules.

Other solution is to change a way of booting device. There are few solutions:

1. Use kernel space for really minimal kernel + initramfs which will use “kexec” functionality to boot kernel stored in rootfs.
2. Change Sharp bootloader into something more sane — like U-Boot, Apex or RedBoot.

First one require some patching to get rid of everything other then MTD + JFFS2 or CF + ext2 (for spitz). Then adding simple initramfs which will contain tool which will check rootfs for kernel and parameters. Then load/execute new kernel with “kexec”.

Second way… this one is more tricky as it also change a way of updating device to newer kernel/rootfs. We can get more space as Sharp “rescue” system used for updating can be replaced with much smaller one but this also require work. There is a patch from pdaXrom which adds c7x0 and akita/spitz support for 1.1.4 U-Boot. After few tweaks it applies to current version but need updating configuration and also adding some code for Flash operations. But this does not help for Tosa/Poodle devices as they would need more work.

Which way to choose… For now we will rather stick with removing all what can be removed. All other options require more work which require developers. But our Zaurus hackers usually moves to newer platforms now…

Today is 24 December — a day when some people celebrate Christmas. Some will celebrate it tomorrow as it depends where you live and how your culture handle it.

I want to wish Merry Christmas to all my blog readers — spend them with the ones you love.

Due to flu I will spend this year Christmas at home only with my wife. It was not planned to be this way but I hope that we will not die from boredom ;)

I use tags on my blog for years. First it was done with UTW and when WordPress MU 1.3 got released I switched to native WP tags.

The first thing which I missed was nice Tag Cloud widget. Default WP one just printed all tags without giving any control to user about how it have to look. So I looked at source and wrote own version.

How to use it?

Fetch archive, unpack into wp-content/plugins/ directory and enable “Hrw Tag cloud widget” in “Plugins list”. Then go to “Presentation/Widgets” and replace “Tag cloud” widget with mine. You will see configuration options.

Download archive is no longer available.

Today I got email from nokia care Europe:

Uprzejmie informujemy, że na dzień dzisiejszy nie posiadamy szczegółowych informacji na temat planowanych premier produktów. W przedstawionej przez Pana sprawie uprzejmie prosimy więc śledzić na bieżąco informacje, pojawiające się na naszych stronach internetowych.

W celu uzyskania szczegółów dotyczących możliwości zakupu telefonów lub akcesoriów oraz cen należy skontaktować się bezpośrednio z autoryzowanymi punktami sprzedaży Nokia. Podajemy link do adresów owych punktów: http://www.nokia.com.pl/A446706

For those which do not understand Polish:

Currently we do not have information about planned première. Please track our website.

If you want to get details about how to buy our phones or accessories or to know price please contact our authorized shops.

In other words — no plans to sell N800/N810 tablets in Poland :(

UPDATE: Matthew Allum told that N810 is available in UK online store. I know that but it is too insane to buy hardware there as if something break costs of sending/receiving device will be too high. Not to mention that I would have to learn how English law handle such things.

During last summer I was at GUADEC in Birmingham, UK and enjoyed that. Then I was at OpenedHand X-mas party. Both trips gave me some time to observe other culture and this is what I want to write about.

I will not write about cars on wrong side of road because this is already known and it is easy to get used to it. Did not have problems with it even when I was sitting in front left seat during car trip.

The thing which annoys me is “double taps”. At GUADEC place it was OK as hot water was only warm so I did not needed cold one but during my recent trip they were everywhere… I wonder how they use as hot water is too hot usually and cold one is rather not warm enough. One of solutions is plugging washbasin and wash hands in mixed water — but this is not too hygienic rather…

What was nice to see is mix of people on streets — in Poland we basically have only one type of people — white, Slovian, usually catolics. There were too many of them to count.

Next thing — all those informations everywhere… “Garage in constant use — parking not allowed”, “Fire doors — keep open”, “Private parking — you will be towed”, “No parking here — £75 penalty”, “Keep this place clean — use ashtrays”, “It is against the law to smoke at those premises” etc… Those kind of messages were in nearly each place which I visited.

During walk through GUADEC building I saw few nice places. First was a bunch of shelves — each one signed and it looked as place to use if you want to give something to “owner” of shelf as there were many books, compact discs and other stuff there. Another thing was message table with many informations for lonely people, for victims of sexual molestation or voluntary offers.

It is other type of country then Poland. I am not yet ready to move there I think… Never mind that Matthew asks me each time (nearly - last time he forgot) we meet when I will move to London.