Marcin Juszkiewicz

Today I received Sharp CE-170TS serial cable. It was donated by one of OpenZaurus users which does not make any use of it. After some checking which RS232 port on my desktop machine is /dev/tts/0 and which /dev/tts/1 I got the second one working and installed minicom to get usable terminal (I used minicom years ago during studies when text terminals connected to multiport serial cards was something normal).

Few minutes later I got nice prompt in terminal:

OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1-rc1 c7x0 ttyS0

Now I can provide detailed kernel logs so maybe my 256M SD card will get more fixes from RMK :)

From time to time I grab something from TV to watch it later. Each time I had to re-discover proper MEncoder params and finally decided to write about it on site — maybe someone other will find it interesting.

Machine is simple PC desktop powered by AthlonXP 2200+ CPU (1.8GHz) and Pixelview TV tuner (card=70 in bttv) which sound output is connected via loop-cable to Line-In of onboard via82xx soundcard (ALSA driven) — all under control of Debian ‘sid’ running Linux 2.6 (2.6.16-ck1 now). For grabbing I use MEncoder (own CVS build).

First thing to do is to pick a channel — I run tvtime and quit after select proper one. Then mixer (I use KMix) is needed: turn on capturing of Line-In (can mute it too so it will not bother you during grabbing). After this you should be ready to grab videos.

Now MEncoder has to be started (all in one line):

mencoder tv:// -o tv2.avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 \
-tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:alsa=1:immediatemode=0:forceaudio:forcechan=1

This will tell that we want DivX with MP3 Audio — on my machine this encoding takes ~50% CPU. Before I used M-JPEG but was taking too much disc space.

One month ago one user reported bug: Mileage cannot be resized and is to small for tosa. Few days ago I decided to take a look (as a break from OpenZaurus release work). It’s GUI is nightmare — looks like author never ever read how to make UI using normal toolkits.. After some time with QT Designer 2 (which suxx badly) I got something which behave but still need love (and patching application) because it looks OK in VGA modes (landscape/portrait) but does not fit on QVGA landscape..

Gallery:

Now time to think what to do with it…

• Sending patches upstream? Author is not interested in any VGA work.
• Maintaining separate version? I do not have time for such things
• Releasing patches and wait for someone to resolve it?
• Wait for someone desperate enough to work on it?

     mileagebase.ui   | 3832
     mileageimport.ui |  613
     mileagekeypad.ui |  533
     3 files changed, 2385 insertions(+), 2593 deletions(-)

Few days ago one guy on #cacko (Cacko & PdaX distros support channel) told that OPIE cannot do russian (atleast I understand it in this way). So I started checking…

Since few months we use TrueType fonts in OPIE by default — DejaVu Sans is used. This font has very nice glyph coverage so it should be no problem.

Example picture with Greek, Russian, German and few other langs:

During last month I worked on getting OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 released for Zaurus clamshells (c7x0, akita, c3x00). It got many updates to kernel and userspace — one of them was wpa-supplicant which now depend on OpenSSL so it takes ~1 megabyte of storage. What this mean for collie I think that I do not need to say…

I had plans to release OpenZaurus 3.5.4.2 for collie/poodle/tosa (our 2.4.18-crapix powered devices) with all updates which were done since 3.5.4 release. But some of them will make rootfs too big :( So I will have to decide which things to remove from it. Probably will look into recent CoreDump work on splitting task-bootstrap for Ångström.

It’s not first time when collie small rootfs (only 14 megabytes) makes creating distro for it too hard. CoreDump created cardfs for his Hentges distribution and I think that OpenZaurus will follow this soon too.

Today I tried to apply WE19 patch for 2.6.13 kernel on our default 2.4.18-crapix kernel which we use for collie (Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA). It does not apply clean — there was some fuzz and some rejects but I edited it a bit and refreshed patch. Kernel built without problems, so I flashed it and checked:

root@collie:~# iwlist --version
iwlist    Wireless-Tools version 28
          Compatible with Wireless Extension v11 to v19.

Kernel    Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v19.

wifi0     Recommend Wireless Extension v18 or later,
          Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v19.

wlan0     Recommend Wireless Extension v18 or later,
          Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v19.

What WE19 gives over WE18? Improved dBm reporting — now iwconfig raport signal strength in dBm (previous it was in magic numbers). Why I did it? For fun and to check will it work.

BTW — WE20 need more work, WE21 did not even tried — it’s marked as experimental and require both drivers and userspace modification so I do not want to fight with it.

Yesterday I got package from States (donor want to be anonymous) with few extras to my PDA machines:

• Belkin F8U1500-T PDA wireless keyboard (irda)
• Pretec CompactFlash WiFi card (prism2 based)
• Palm Tungsten stylus (which does not fit in any of my palmtops — maybe it’s time for Tungsten?)

Keyboard works nice with my collie (Sharp Zaurus SL-5500) when I use ‘irk-belkin’ package. Currently no luck with kbdd or zkbdd but I hope that sooner or later I will get this keyboard working nice with this Zaurus. Then it will start harder part — getting it working with Sharp Zaurus C760 which run 2.6 kernel — iirc some things in serial-over-irda has changed so it will need adapting of software.

According to this mail everyone can install vim 7.0beta i386 machines — doing it already at work where I have nearly one year old snapshot of vim7.

Great — thx goes to Debian Vim maintainers and Vim authors.

UPDATE: vim7 is now in experimental