Marcin Juszkiewicz

USB scanners are quite popular today, many ‘all-in-one’ devices contains them. But if you use distribution where permissions are done ‘per group’ like it is in Debian you can get hit by lack of access to your scanner.

Solution is: write own udev rule. It may sounds scary but in reality it is quite simple.

• Run udevmonitor (it needs root access so sudo udevmonitor).

• Unplug and plug scanner. You will get lot of output from udev monitor — only one line is needed:

  UDEV [1194523774.343853] add /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb1/1-1/usb_endpoint/usbdev1.7_ep00 (usb_endpoint)

• Now it is time to gather more information about our device. Run udevinfo -a -p LINE_FROM_PREVIOUS_POINT and look at output. For my Epson Stylus DX4000 it shows:

  [….] looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb1/1-1’: [….] SUBSYSTEMS==”usb” [….] ATTRS{manufacturer}==”EPSON” ATTRS{product}==”USB MFP” [….]

• Edit (as root) one of files in /etc/udev/rules.d/ directory (best way is creating own one — scanner.rules for example) and add there something like that (of course set “manufacturer” and “product” to value shown in previous step)

  SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{manufacturer}==”EPSON”, ATTRS{product}==”USB MFP”, GROUP=”scanner”

• Add youself into “scanner” group: sudo addgroup YOURACCOUNTNAME scanner.

• Unplug and plug scanner — now it should be in proper group.
• Logout and login so system will notice that you are now also in “scanner” group.
• Launch your favourite scanning utility — I use Kooka from KDE.

As you see whole procedure can be done in few minutes without problems.

As you probably noticed I upgraded CPU in my desktop machine. But cpu cooler was same as before — stock Athlon64 BOX one which was included with previous A64 3200+ processor.

During idle cpu was running on 1GHz speed (thanks to cpufreq governor “ondemand”) and had 37-39°C temperature. Under load (such as OE/Poky builds) it was up to 65°C and after some time overheating check switched frequency to 1GHz…

Now with Akasa AK-876 heatsink this machine has 30-32°C when idle and 46-50°C under load. And fan speed is much lower — keeps under 2000 RPM under load (previous one goes up to 4000 RPM) so machine is usable without listening music.

There was some problems with fitting such big heatsink into case but it sits properly in place and air flow is in proper way — from CPU fan -> CPU heatsink -> case fan -> out. It also shows that my next machine will get new case — Codegen 9002 which I use now starts to be too small to keep all drives, fans and cables in good order.

Recently my wife decided that her next cellphone needs to have a mirror. This was after her last trip when she forgot to pack mirror into her purse…

Why such requirement? Currently Ania use SonyEricsson k510i cellphone. It has Bluetooth, Irda, camera, J2ME games/applications, possibility to use own themes and many many more functions. But to tell the truth — how many people really use such things? During phone numbers exchange they just manually create new entry in addressbook because even if they have BT or Irda they do not know how to use it or are afraid of catching viruses (really!). She sometimes play pre-installed J2ME games or use one application: public communication timetable (which I installed and take care of updates).

Will Neo1973 running OpenMoko be good for such users? I asked my wife and she told:

Yes, if I would do jogging — it fits nicely to tracksuit.

My brother-in-law is more interested, but he like technical things. Not like my wife — she just wants to call, message and use a mirror when to comes to using a cellphone. And of course it has to good look and fit her style ;)

I usually did big computer upgrades (AMD Duron with SDRAM -> AMD Athlon with DDR, then to AMD Athlon64 with DDR) but this time it was only CPU. From Athlon64 3200+ (2GHz) I switched to Athlon64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz). Operation was quite simple — take one CPU, insert another but old one glued to radiator so I had to use some force :(

Then first boot and question… will BIOS recognize new CPU or not. It properly displayed information and then Linux started — just to show me 1 CPU. Quick installation of already prepared SMP kernel and /proc/cpuinfo had more informations.

Machine is quite loud when operating on full speed but most of time CPUFreq is able to lower frequency (1.0/1.8/2.0/2.2GHz steps are available) so it is noiseless. It is nice to see how CPU usage is split into two cores — now I do not have to wait when two builds are progressing and I want to run some applications.

Now doing builds will be more comfortable :)

One month ended, another started so it is time to prepare invoice. As always value is in Euro even if it is not ‘native’ currency for me or client. But what to choose in today’s times…

USD is useless — value goes down faster then leaves from trees, yesterday it had lowest value compared to Euro or British Pound.

PLN is strong but I prefer to use more universal currency in payments.

Euro is strong — many countries use it so it will not drop too much compared to other currencies. But it lost few percents to PLN during last months.

GBP… it is currency of current client so probably we can even discuss about switching to it but exchange rate GBP/PLN changes are bigger then EUR/PLN.

So I want to live in Euro part of world but without having to move from Poland. All hope in new government that we will switch to Euro during next few years (without too big price changes)… It would simplify many things — transactions between companies, no need to exchange PLN to Euro when going to visit friends, conferences or vacations…

Some time ago I upgraded to one of Release Candidate of Wordpress MU. It was working but only partially (tag links get broken on my setup). Today I fetched fresh 1.3 release (based on WordPress 2.3.1) and installed on my website.

New thing which got added is native tags support — no more UltimateTagWarrior usage but instead WP tags. Some hints for those who will also upgrade:

1. Importing tags from UTW is in Manage -> Import and works great (require enabled UTW).
2. After import UTW can be disabled and removed
3. Tag cloud is not so nice as it was with UTW tag cloud widget and is not configurable :(
4. Install Recommended Tags plugin to get help on tagging during writing (very configurable plugin). If you have lot of tags then disable “Display all tags” option (Options-> Recommended Tags).
5. If you use theme not ready for WordPress 2.3 then you have to edit it and use the_tags function to list tags.

Then — happy tagging and using WordPress 2.3.x or WPMU 1.3.x :)

When last time we were in Szczecin to visit her family one of my brothers-in-law told me that he would like to get Neo1973 phone as replacement for his current Nokia one. So this time I took GTA01Bv4 (plus additional battery and external battery charger) to give him for playing during weekend.

He likes overall look of phone and started playing with software. After some time he managed to enter data into Contacts and Tasks, also tried to play few games. We found few small bugs and I entered them into bugtracker:

• ApplicationManager: list of packages lack kinematic scrolling
• ApplicationManager: scrolling of packages list produce unreadable content
• Mediaplayer SHOULD depend on gst-plugin-pulse
• Neod cannot close application when menu is open
• Neod menus are wrongly placed after screen rotate

Last one is probably hard to fix as I do not know is there a way to get notification on screen rotation. I suggested to Mickeyl that ‘on Power hold’ menu should be rather replaced by fullscreen window with status of GPS/Bluetooth/WiFi/GSM and options to disable/enable each of them. Also possibility to switch on “Flight Mode” and change profile should be there. If it would be made in proper way then there would be no problem on screen rotation.

Today I wanted to check status support of TC6393XB companion chip (used in Zaurus SL-6000 for USB Host and few other things) in Linux kernel as the last working version which we (OpenEmbedded kernel hacking team) have is 2.6.17 (a bit old). Most of Google search results pointed to our patches so I tried to search also for “Toshiba Mobile I/O Controller” which also gave me pointer to handhelds.org fork of Linux kernel.

I fetched CVS HEAD (had to remind how to use it since most of projects which I use switched to Subversion or Git). After browsing their repository it looked like they have driver but marked as non functional so no use for me rather.

By curiousity I diffed handhelds.org fork against vanilla 2.6.21 (as hh.org kernel is still 2.6.21). Result was 10 megabytes file (with -X dontdiff -x CVS switches) — I wonder did they ever considered merging with upstream…