Marcin Juszkiewicz

As most of you know I maintain OpenZaurus distribution. We provide few graphical enviroments — OPIE is most popular one. And here comes a problem…

Years ago OPIE forked from Qtopia but it’s still compatible — mostly on source level (any Qtopia application/library can be built for OPIE). Years ago OpenZaurus moved from gcc 2.95.x to more modern compilers — 3.3.x was choosen. This broke binary compatibility and ‘oz-compat’ aka ‘sharp-compat-libs’ package was born — it contain libqte2 and libqpe1 from SharpROM to get possibility to run old binaries under new edition of OZ.

But with OpenZaurus 3.5.1 we started to use ‘soft-float’ toolchain (ARM cpu lack FPU and use FPU emulation on kernel level — soft-float replace FPU instructions with extra code so emulator is not used). This change broke ‘sharp-compat-libs’ — some apps was working, some not but even if something worked then not always correct (for example spreadsheets gave wrong results from calculations).

Newest version of OZ (3.5.4) does not provide ‘sharp-compat-libs’ so users start to request old, dead upstream, not fetchable applications to be added into OpenZaurus. I tried to get one of them working — as usual code required some changes to get it build with gcc 3.4.4 but finally it built. But then new question came: How to manage such dead software… If any problem will arrive no one will fix it rather. So I asked other developers and final version is: no support for such crap at all.

I know that some users will complain more now but sorry — who will maintain such stuff?

Yesterday I took Ania to cinema to watch “The DaVinci Code” movie. The book (my first in English) was interesting and it was hard to make break during reading so I was curious how good the movie will be.

I read few reviews of movie which was saying that most of action is kept. Friend (which did not read a book before) told me that action was quite easy to guess but as a whole it was enjoyable.

So I was ready to watch. The movie was interesting but too long — 2.5h for that kind of movie is definitely too much — we even started to sleep during watching (show started at 19:30 + commercials). Paul Bettany was great as Silas — rest of actors less. Audrey Tautou will be still “Amelia” for me. Movie itself was changed too much (compared to book) — I can understand cutting the scenes (who will watch 4h movie?) but not such drastic rewrites like for example scene in Roslyn where Sophie Neveu meet her grandmather but no word about brother (which was shown few minutes before).

Yesterday I decided to give a new look to my website after I found Barthelme theme. It is minimalistic and it support Wordpress widgets so I’m able to change sidebar content without touching line of code.

Of course like always there had to be some changes done.. I added UTW support, wrote ‘Hrw Pages’ sidebar widget which allow to skip some ‘Pages’ and changed CSS a bit (I like to have preformatted blocks visible).

The result is visible now — what do you think about this look?

During last week I used Athlon64 X2 3800+ to make some OpenEmbedded bug fixing. Building on such machine is pleasure — you start build, talk a bit on IRC and build is finished. After using accounts on that kind of machines I do not even try to run builds on my AthlonXP machines (1700+ and 2200+). Probably it is a moment when I could consider switch to AMD64 platform but there is a usual problem.

Cheapest way is something low budget like Sempron64 2500+ on socket 754 (cheapest amd64 platform) with VIA based mainboard (don’t want to trace does nForce boards work OK under Linux). Or I can choose cheapest Athlon64 on socket 939 — this will allow me to switch to more powerfull CPU in future. Ofcourse there are Semprons64/s939 but only OEM with mATX boards by Gigabyte (I do not like mainboards from that company).

Local shop has also Athlons for AM2 socket so maybe switching to this family will be best… but this require new gfx card as I have only AGP ones (Matrox G400 and GeForce MX440) or buying mainboard with so called GeForce 6100 onboard gfx. Also new memory — DDR2 instead of DDR which I have already in box.

It can be be hard to decide which way to choose but currently I rather will only think about it — have other things to buy, need to think about our wedding in next year etc.

During this summer edition of Google Summer of Code I will work as mentor for “A new database model for unification of OPIE/GPE PIM data using SQLite with import/export features to text and iCal formats” project written by Marcos Hiroshi Umino.

This project will unite GPE and OPIE PIM applications format so it will be easier for users to try both before choosing one. This is my first project which I will (co-)maintain with guys from both enviroments.

During last month I was trying to push one patch into mainline — adding few CF cards into hostap_cs driver.

First attempts was not correct so I started from scratch and created few small patches. Then patch which my changeset required was marked as ‘ignore it’ so I had to recreate my patchset again (and again).

Finally it was accepted and yesterday commited into wireless-2.6 git tree.

Today I generated new OpenGPG key — lost older one. New key has expire date set to 2008-05-15.

Old key info:

pub   1024D/F0E65735 2002-05-31
      Key fingerprint = ED1F 99E1 45B0 ABE9 17E9  0ED1 B31F F326 F0E6 5735
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz (OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus/OPIE work) <openembedded@blog.haerwu.biz>
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz <zaurus@blog.haerwu.biz>
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz <marcin@blog.haerwu.biz>

New key info:

pub   1024D/61FFDAAB 2006-05-15 [expires: 2008-05-14]
      Key fingerprint = CA5C D034 936B B08C 7690  E6C9 790E 8C94 61FF DAAB
uid                  Marcin Juszkiewicz <openembedded@blog.haerwu.biz>

Today I tried to install MediaWiki on one of servers and failed. This monster need memory_limit set to atleast 20M or will fail. Target system has it set to 8M and everything which is hosted there works fine. All I got from MediaWiki installer was memory allocation failed and it died.

There is no way to install this other then this web based something which does not work… Crap