Advogato blog for sdodji

Garmin playing the GNOME Mobile game

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 09:09:11 GMT

I know Matthew mentionned it already, but I could not resist.

Garmin are launching their Nüvi 8xxx and 5xxx GPS devices and people are talking about it.
What impresses me is that they are using GNU/Linux, GNOME Mobile, and more importantly, are releasing the source code of the modifications they did to the Free Software components they use.

I logically went to look at what they are releasing. They set up a very simple and accessible web site from where you can get the sources. No ads, no bullshit, no nothing. Just the plain simple source tarballs. They even separated the patches they did from the tarballs. Man, sooooo well done.

I dowloaded this archive from their website. Man, they are really using everything from Xorg to Gtkmm, including a lot of other cool Free Software technology bits that are either GPL or GPL compatible.

Okay, I am not a gizmo geek. I have no Ipod, no camera on my cell phone, no gaming device ... But this time, I think I am going to buy one of these Garmin GPS devices. I wonder if I can update the maps on the devices using my GNU/Linux desktop. I don't mind buying the maps. I just don't want to be forced to use a proprietary desktop software system, just to update those maps.

In any case, well done Garmin. You are taking and you are giving back. And that has to be said.

nemiver 0.5.4

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:13:50 GMT

This week end I pushed nemiver 0.5.4 out. The release fixes a couple of annoying bugs like this one, or this one that were preventing me to properly debug some programs.

It is impressive how motivated I can be to fix a set of bugs once I get hit by those bugs myself :-)

Hopefully it should be better now - we always hope so after each release, don't we ?

This new release should hit a package repository mirror near you soonish.

Sorry, but my desktop rocks

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:07:22 GMT

"Why are all the decadent people only talk about what we need to do and not about what they will do themselves? "

Well said, Benjamin.

/me goes back to fixing his bugs.

nemiver 0.5.3

Mon, 26 May 2008 21:17:43 GMT

Following my wish to push Nemiver releases more frequently I have released Nemiver 0.5.3 yesterday. That opus brought quite a number of bugfixes to the light and is the first nemiver release to work on FreeBSD thanks to the awesome work of Romain Tartière.

Just to give an idea of what got fixed, we did remove the libgnome dependency, made the GDB/MI parser be a bit more resiliant, improved the menu items sensitivity state management at the user interface level, and many other things.

Quite a number of people have filed bugs and enhancement requests since the previous released version and I was very happy about that. It is not easy to file a bug about a debugger when you are using it to debug your own code in the first place. So a big thank you those who are taking the time to do that. It is really appreciated.

Now I am back to hacking again, and I hope to be on time for another release next month :-)

upgrading my Thinkpad T42

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:12:51 GMT

I have recently changed the hard drive of my 5 years old T42 Thinkpad laptop. I had a 30 gb hard drive and that was obviously not enough to compile all the things I want to compile. Just to give an idea, I want to have xorg and nemiver jhbuilds as well as OpenEmbedded and OpenMoko builds around. If you add the fact that I use ccache extensively, I really needed more disk space.

So I went to memorysuppliers.com and ordered a hard drive of 160 GB. They did a very a good job in sending the disk very quickly. I backed up my home directory by simply using the excellent rsync program to save stuff on an external hard drive connected to the laptop via USB.

Then I followed the instructions here to remove the old disk and replace it with the new one.
After that, I just reinstalled a brand new GNU/Linux system and recovered my backed up data.

Everything went smoothly and took around 2h. Pretty neat.

I did also upgrade the ram to 2Gig a couple of months ago so compiling C++ programs is quite OK on this 5 years old machine now :-)

DNS problems.

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:12:51 GMT

I have been unreachable at seketeli dot org since yesterday I believe. It should be back soon. So if you sent me an email that did not arrive, please try again shortly.

The reason of that failure is that my hosting provider (online.net) did change his DNS server addresses and I forgot to forward the information to my registrar which is gandi.net. Shame on me. Especially because I was notified about the DNS address change something like a year ago. Everything should be back in order soonish. I am sorry for the annoyance.

A new place to hang my hat

Thu, 1 May 2008 16:10:07 GMT

Yesterday was my last day as an OpenedHand employee. Working at OpenedHand has been a breeze, really. The crew there is an impressive pool of clever geeks. A high density of skills, enthousiasm and willingness to do the right thing. Clearly, there is no doubt that amazing things are going to be popping up from the OpenedHand towers. Ciao fellows, and thank you for the warm and fruitful atmosphere.

Now I have to write the coming pages of my personal history. I have been given the chance and honour to settle at Red Hat, in the tools group. I am really looking forward to working with the bright folks there, and keep on modestly helping to shape the future of Free Software as much as I can.

nemiver debugger article on fosswire

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:19:01 GMT

I have been extremely lazy lately concerning writting about nemiver. Maybe that's because I just prefer writting code rather than articles ? :-)

Fortunately some nice people put together an introduction article about nemiver.

Maybe at some point I should start writting a serie of simple articles presenting interesting features of the debugger.

Xglamo: the X server of the neo GTA02 device

Tue, 5 Feb 2008 10:07:53 GMT

The GTA02 hardware of the OpenMoko project sports amongst other things the Glamo3362 GPU from smedia.

I have been working on an Kdrive based X server, dedicated to that glamo chip: Xglamo.

I basically took over the job done by Chia-I Wu, aka Olv (man, get yourself a blog ;-) ) in putting together an X server for that chip.

I did hack on bringing support of hardware acceleration in areas like blitting, solid fills, RandR support and XVideo so far.

For blitting and solid fills, we did start using the Kaa acceleration architecture. It seems to be pretty robust and did speed up things like scrolling a fair bit.

For RandR acceleration I hacked the kernel framebuffer driver to make it support hardware assisted rotation and fleshed out its resolution setting code. With that setup, I just made the Xglamo RandR extension implementation use that shiny new kernel framebuffer rotation and resolution setting capabilities.

The XVideo extension driver exposes a textured video port that supports clipping and scaling for planar YUV 4:2:0 frames. I am still working on supporting parameters settings like brightness, saturation and so on. For now, I can play videos using mplayer on the device, or even launching totem on my desktop and making it display its output on Xglamo server running on the device. The basics are in the box.

All that code is already integrated in regular OpenMoko builds that you either compile yourself or grab from the daily builds directories.

There should be more to come on this topic in the coming days and weeks. In any case, I try to sent regular updates to the openmoko-devel list.

So stay tuned :-)

CELF Embedded Linux Conference

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 13:11:46 GMT

I am about to leave soon to go to the CELF Embedded Linux Conference in Linz, Austria.

I will be talking about the nice things happening in PokyLinux, and the Gnome Mobile And Embedded Mobile platform.

I am going there along with my OpenedHand mates Samuel Ortiz and Richard Purdie.

So if you are around, please come and say hi :-)