Marcin Juszkiewicz

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

Today is big day. Today is a day when I released Linux distribution for first time.

I work on Linux distributions for last few years. First it was packaging stuff for Debian (mostly for own usage), then I took over packaging of ROX-Filer (now in Debian). But rox was not my first package which is in official Debian — first was tex-skak. I made that package for my friend. Since “The ROX-in-Debian Project Team” took rox-filer I do not have public APT repositories available.

When I bought my first Zaurus I started to build software for this platform. Quickly discovered OpenEmbedded, tried it and joined team. Now I’m one of core team members. I also joined OpenZaurus developer team — first as collie (Sharp Zaurus SL-5500) maintainer, then became one of core team member and finally I’m Release Manager for it.

What means being Release Manager at all? I had to deal with RC bugs (some left), catch some developers to get their packages fixed, fix some other packages by own etc. I also made OpenZaurus 3.5.4 test program which get over one hundred of Zaurus users. This was big help as they found many different bugs and provided fixes for many of them. Thx guys!

Mickeyl just gave me info that all packages were built and uploaded to EWI (our primary mirror). Whole OpenZaurus 3.5.4 takes 1.9 GiB of storage space (packages + images).

Today I will create feeds, check does they are OK and will prepare some kind of changelog.

Tomorrow release!

Few days ago kados on #openzaurus asked me about support for CF-XGA card under OpenZaurus. I googled and found kernel driver for card and source of few tools. Card API is simple (few ioctl() calls), card itself is simple too — few resolutions available, VGA/Composite/S-Video output and 800x600 in 16bits.

Kernel module needed patching (as usual) but finally I got it built and it works on device (Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 ‘tosa’). Small utils which I built also works.

But yesterday I started own tool for that card. It is simple but now it has functionality of few other tools and will improve when I will find some free time.

UPDATE: got display ;) 480x480 for now instead of 480x640 but thats some kind of display ;)

Today I tried to change website look a bit — those Technorati tags, related posts things… Looks like sooner or later I will probably work on totally new theme which will take care of some parts.

Things to consider: how to show Technorati tags, my own categories, related posts, post meta infos… It need checking blogs of other people, open designs etc…

I just pushed all things which I wanted to get in OpenZaurus 3.5.4 release. Some things left unfixed but I really, really want to get this released — we could fix bugs later via upgrades.

It is first release which I maintain and I hope that it will be our best release — nearly one year passed since we released 3.5.3… We added WPA support to all kernels, many updates to most of packages, fixed some long standing bugs. Whole list of changes is so long that I will not provide it.

Time for celebrating :)