Marcin Juszkiewicz

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

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.