Marcin Juszkiewicz

In last Friday I made architecture change — sold AthlonXP 2200+ which I used during last 3 years and bought Athlon64 3200+ with DFI RS482 Infinity mainboard. This is 3rd such change for me. First it was from 6502 (Atari 65XE) to m68k (Amiga), then to x86.

Most of time which I spent with computer during weekend was fighting with machine. I made backup of my previous Debian installation and decided to install Debian ‘sid’ from scratch — of course for AMD64. Then I spend few hours to get fglrx driver working (will write more about it later). Now two problems left to resolve:

• get sound working (I have atiixp: codec read timeout messages which are known bug related to ACPI probably)
• get KDE working properly (Control Center list only one module but I have all of them installed)

But even with those problems I’m satisfied. Machine is fast (can be overclocked by ~25% if needed), I have faster gfx card then before (had Matrox G400 and Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440).

And now I have OE build running — building my own umbaumba distro for spitz.

During discussion with some users on #openzaurus channel I discovered that about 30 months passed since I’m using OpenEmbedded for building software.

First attempts were used to build extra packages for my SL-5500 running OpenZaurus 3.3.6-pre1, then I built OZ “3.5.0” for it and worked on getting OPIE working correctly when compiled with gcc 3.4.x (loading 40MiB large libqte2/libqpe1 inside of gdb to get backtraces). Time passed, new machines appeared: first Zaurus C760, then Linksys WRT54GS.

My wrt54 runs under OpenWRT distribution so I’m able to build additional packages for it with OpenEmbedded (MACHINE=”wrt54” DISTRO=”wrt54oe” combo) and they works. Of course they are unofficial because OpenWRT team use own buildsystem.

One of my common targets is MACHINE=”native” which I used for OPIE development or building needed tools on remote machines where it was easier then pestering administrators to install ‘mc’ or ‘git’.

Recently I used OE to build system for omap5912osk developer board used by CELF in their testlab. Creating new distribution was interesting because I learnt lot about how ‘task-base’ works and why it is good solution for our targets.

Soon I will have new target — this time it will be x86 based webpad. But I will write more about it when it arrive and start working.

During my work on OpenEmbedded project I have access to misc computers used for builds. Mostly they are AMD64 or Intel Pentium D ones running in 32 mode.

One day I got access to build machine inside of company intranet. To get to it I have to login on ‘router’ one which only work is serving few pages and giving access to intranet ones. And man.. its also speed daemon…

Sometimes I feel that my home machine is from other era..

After one month I can write something more about my phone.

Bad things:

• It can not be in one pocket with keys — case is scratched and display got some scratches too.
• FM radio sometimes mute for few seconds — not good when you go to work and there is nice song played.
• Opensync can duplicate addressbook with ‘UnNamed’ entries.
• No possibility to turn off sound on making photos.

Good things:

• When I want to send SMS/MMS I can select from list of last recipients, select from contacts or enter number. None of my previous phones had list of last recipients.
• All those animations on sending, calling are not annoying — they are simple and give proper info.
• Delivery reports are linked to SMS/MMS like it should be done. When I had Nokia phone I had to think to which message I got report.
• Recurrent alarm — I set it to working days at 08:00 so I do not have to use my wrist watch as alarm clock.
• FM radio — it was usefull when I was on OEDEM (do you know that Berlin has 29 FM stations?)

One day I will have to check how newer version of opensync works with this phone.

IN Tuesday Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 2.0 version. Many websites wrote about it so I will not list what is new. There is one more reason to not do it — for me most of those new features are not new — during last 2 years I mostly use nightly builds of Firefox^W Bon Echo — first it was 1.5 nightly when other people used 1.0.x line, then I used 2.0 nightly during 1.5.0.x times.

Many extensions needed a bit of hacking (mostly bumping of MaxVersion), I had to edit my favorite theme (LittleFox) to get proper displaying but it was easy. Some authors were releasing updated (mostly ‘developers’) versions for 2.0-pre/rc versions.

Yesterday I tried Firefox^W Minefield 3.0 and now I have to decide will I use 2.0 or move to 3.0 version. One of nice things is plugin for del.icio.us bookmarks integration, which replace normal bookmarks. But installing it also means user cannot create non-del.icio.us bookmarks so I will rather remove it..

Anyway with release of Firefox 2.0 it is time to switch — from 1.5.0.x to 2.0 for ones and 2.0 -> 3.0 for me.

Wczoraj prowadziłem wykład o OpenEmbedded w ramach cyklu wykładów organizowanych przez PLUG Poznań. Miałem zacząć o 18:00 ale uznaliśmy z organizatorem, że zaczekamy z 10 minut (na sali było 8-10 osób). Ostatecznie było około 20 osób.

Mówiłem około godziny, po czym padło kilka pytań — ogólnie miałem wrażenie, że wiele osób nie wiedziało zbytnio o czym mówię. Nie wiem czy było to spowodowane moim wystąpieniem czy faktem, że projekt OpenEmbedded jest mało znany w Polsce.

Po wykładzie przy kawce kolega z pracy zaskoczył mnie najbardziej mówiąc

Nie miałem pojęcia, że OpenEmbedded jest tak dużym projektem. Myślałem, że to coś do palmtopów…

I created openembedded-essential package for Debian derived distributions which depend on all packages required by OpenEmbedded. It took me about 5 minutes to get first version working and 15 to get it polished. Resulting package depends on needed stuff and contain only own changelog.

Then I tried to create RPM version for all those Red Hat/Fedora/Mandriva derived distros… RPM HowTo is from 1999 year and RPM 4.4.1 refuse to work with spec from this HowTo. So I started to dig for other manuals — found one from 2002, then some others. But still no idea how to build RPM package which DOES NOT have sources and/or patches — just pure dependencies and own changelog.

How does RPM based maintainers do their job? Thats probably a good question…

When I was checking my mailbox (snail one) I met guy from FedEx who wanted to enter building and called my flat via intercom. I asked him does package is for my fiancee or for me and because it was for me I took it from him. At home I discovered that this unexpected package was from Google with black XL T-Shirt from GSoC program.

US sizes are bigger then Europe ones…