Marcin Juszkiewicz

Today is 7th day of December so in theory we have winter now.Which should mean snow, below 0°C temperatures etc. But instead of nice winter weather we have rain, 11°C during day and no sign of snow even during night, event in place where my parents live (coldest part of Poland). It is time to end this autumn and start REAL winter.

I miss winter with snow, low temperatures…

Half an hour ago I came back from cinema where I was watching newest Bond movie: “Casino Royale”. There was many posts about this movie so I will not write what it is about but rather what I liked or not.

One of good things was lowering amount of gadgets — previous movies had too many of them, and without Q it is not the same. There was of course car with gadgets but it appeared in few scenes only. I liked how they made Sony Ericsson cellphones — they were similar to normal ones but bumped graphics resolution and functionality. Sony paid a lot for their product placement — Sony Vaio laptop was used in most of scenes where laptops were shown.

Real action scenes existed and were nice made (maybe that sinking house in Venice was a bit not in place). Funny one the one when Bond order vodka with martini and after question ‘shaked or mixed’ he told that he does not care. Famous ‘I am Bond, James Bond’ is only once — at the end of movie, which is something new ;)

What I did not like was romantic part — there was too much romantic — more then in other Bond movies. All those ‘I will quit this job for you’ talks were not in his style. Other thing was mixing past with now — it was first (chronologically) Bond movie but the action was placed after 2001 (many times with reminding 9/11).

Overall: yet another good action movie. It was worth going to cinema to see it.

As desktop environment I use KDE 3.5.x but for developing websites I use Firefox and this force me into evil side of world — GTK one…

Each time when I have to upload file into system I need to think ‘does test17.png is <10K or not’ because GTK developers follow some kind of GNOME way to simplicity in removing anything which can be removed and more. I am not requesting thumbnails and other things from KDE filerequester but possibility to see sizes would be great.

I can not understand why there is no possibility to check file sizes — each other library which I used over years gave it.

Good thing is that Firefox allow to be configured to use own filerequester instead of shitty one.

Today I installed my brand new printer^Wmultifunction device: Epson Stylus DX4000. This is my second printer — few years ago I had Epson Stylus 200 by few weeks.

Device is nicely supported under Linux — printing via CUPS works without problems and there are lot of config parameters if someone want to tweak. Scanner works with SANE — I only had to add one line to /etc/sane.d/epson.conf to get it recognized:

usb 0x04b8 0x082f

To get it working under Debian following stuff needs to be installed:

• cupsys-driver-gutenprint (driver for printer)
• quiteinsane or kooka (scanning application)
• escputil (utility to printer managment)

Thanks goes to LinuxPrinting team for their website — especially for article about suggested printers.

Yesterday new project was born: writing free driver for Marvell 8385 based WLAN cards. Currently there are few persons involved including me and Holger Schurig. Join us if you are interested.

Holger did research and found that driver for 8388 (USB version of chipset) is GPL licensed and contain newer version of WLAN interface then cf8385 driver which we got from company which sent us cards. I diffed both versions and it looks like USB version has some support for 2.6 kernel added already.

We currently does not have any timeline for release — first we need to get it built against 2.6.19-rc kernel.

Year ago I wrote post about my directory structure for all my work with OpenEmbedded. Recently I discovered that some people on #oe IRC channel follow this too. But they had some questions so I decided to write this post.

I use ~/devel/ to keep all things:

• bitbake/ — Subversion tree of BitBake

• build/ — place where I do all OE builds — for example:

• build/native/ — native i686 build for developing OPIE

• build/wrt/ — build for my OpenWRT powered router

• doc/ — misc documentation (QT/E, Qtopia and other)

• oe/ — OpenEmbedded directory

• oe/org.openembedded.dev/ — development repository

• oe/branch.oz354x/ — frozen repository for release

• oe/hrw-packages/ — my misc testing packages

• openwrt/ — copy of OpenWRT build system

• opie/ — development for OPIE

• sources/ — sources for builds:

• cvs_dir/ — cvs checkouts

• svn_dir/ — subversion checkouts
• git_dir/ — git trees
• dl_dir/ — archives

Each build dir contain those entries:

• packages/ — symlink to packages tree of proper branch (for short paths when I play with bitbake -b)

• conf/ — all configuration files:

• site.conf — contain all paths (CVSDIR, SVNDIR, GITDIR, DL_DIR, BBFILES and common variables like BBINCLUDELOGS

• local.conf — DISTRO setting and build related things like SRCDATE
• auto.conf — MACHINE entry

Split into those 3 files give me possibility to start with new build fast. As I use multimachine thing only change to auto.conf is needed to build for other target device (file is generated with echo command). All common settings are in one site.conf file so for new build I only need to create ~/devel/build/newbuild/conf directory, copy site.conf& local.conf, generate auto.conf, edit local.conf and can start new build.

I hope that someone will find that info useful.

My site.conf:

DL_DIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/dl_dir/"
CVSDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/cvs_dir/"
GITDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/git_dir/"
SVNDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/svn_dir/"

PKGDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/oe/org.openembedded.dev/packages/"
BBFILES = "${PKGDIR}/*/*.bb"

BBINCLUDELOGS = "yes"
PARALLEL_MAKE = "-j4"

As I already wrote I switched to amd64 platform and reinstalled Debian on it. Everything works now… except Firefox.

Yes Firefox… I understand that Debian developers decided to not ship it due some licensing problems. But there was discussion about Iceweasel instead of it — too bad that it was only discussion ;( Today I have few possibilities:

• use Firefox 1.5.0.x which is old
• forget about Firefox and stick to Konqueror
• switch to Ubuntu which I do not want to do as I use Debian for years
• build Firefox 2.0 from source
• build Firefox 2.0 from Ubuntu sources

Probably will select one of last ones when will find some free time.

And Opera does not provide amd64 packages too ;(

UPDATE: I have Firefox 2.0 working now. To get it installed and working few steps need to be done:

• add experimental into APT sources
• upgrade libc6 and libgtk2 to ones from experimental
• fetch firefox and libnss3 libnspr4 from Ubuntu
• install fetched packages

Some time ago one company contacted me. They have 802.11g CF card which they want to put on market but first want to get it supported in all Zaurus distributions. Driver is available but only for 2.4 kernel, and OpenZaurus use 2.6 on most of models.

I got driver source (without license information inside) and started hacking on it. During searching for patches I discovered that there are newer versions of Marvell CF8385 driver but due to license (or rather lack of it) you can not get sources..

Weekend will be related to driver hacking — having 54Mbps instead of 11Mbps is something nice ;)

Card info:

Socket 1:
  product info: "Marvell", "802.11 CF", "ID: 04", ""
  manfid: 0x02df, 0x8103
  function: 6 (network)

This is reference card, final version will be branded by one of popular manufacturer (and it is not Linksys or Sparklan).