Colin Charles Agenda

On another partition, I popped Ubuntu 5.10 on the Thinkpad R51. I figured I need to eat some of my own dogfood, and give it more use. Here are some notes:

• Installation went smoothly, installing side-by-side with FreeBSD. It however, didn’t write to GRUB that FreeBSD actually exists, and use that as an option for booting. It also, didn’t give me an option (or I missed it?) to say if I didn’t want it to install the bootloader. Anyways, in /boot/grub/menu.lst, add:

title FreeBSD
root (hd0,0,a)
kernel /boot/loader

• My WiFi (ipw2100) actually just works. Ubuntu includes the firmware it’d seem, which explains why RMS doesn’t think Ubuntu is free software.
• 96.9MB of updates were waiting for me the moment I logged into GNOME. The kernel update broke around 50%, but I was amazed to see it resume the download from there. Is this some dpkg/apt cleverness that we could use in rpm/yum?
• I tried to install something (gforge-*), and apt barfed. I presume this is how people mentioned RPM hell and what not… There exists APT hell too, folk.

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups – can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su – shouldn’t be a problem.

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0×48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.

sudo /sbin/losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0/mnt
merrily going on making changes
sudo umount /mnt
sudo /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image – make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.

MySQL running on the OLPC

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of /var/log and /etc/yum.repos.d/ and so on…

From reading the software task list, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips – the simulator debugging did come in handy.

• Some cool Nautilus file manager scripts and GNOME Power User Tools. When time permits, or if someone else is interested, these should really get packaged for Extras. Also, posting to flickr using Nautilus is nifty. A useful resource is the GNOME ISV Guide – with tools like Sabayon, and more gconf customisations, I can see this being a very, very useful resource.
• San Francisco was the usual fun. Oakland was far out, but go BART. We toured the Mission District on Wednesday, and tried to run a tour on Thursday for various sites in San Francisco. Seeing Fisherman’s Wharf after about eleven years, things don’t seem to have changed. Topic is from the fortune cookie that I kept.
• The craze with Harry Potter is out. I pre-ordered the last book, and till today, a year later, still haven’t read it. So I’ll have to marathon the two at some stage. So, its not only churches that don’t like you reading HP, its also rms.
• Finally catching up with mail (thanks to the rain, humidity and heat outside), and there’s some new things in Maemo land. For starters, python 2.4 is now available. And there’s also a MaemoWiki. Also, since Fedora is big on Eclipse, there is a Laika Scratchbox plugin available. While I haven’t tried making a package, I’m unsure if it will work on Fedora or not without a Debian chroot or something.
• At the Desktop Developers Conference 2005 I learnt a few new things – how to use inotify with gamin (its now in rawhide kernels too), Eclipse Trader might be useful for stock trading, Unicode is important, Rasterman believes that “Bling bling is much more important than functionality”, and Hubert has been lied to, many a time :) More to the point, I learnt more about digital imaging, and its something that’s of interest lately (I want my RAW working, and cataloging, backing up, and manipulation via The GIMP, etc.).
• Glad to see its not just dwmw2 or me running FC-4 on the Pegasos II. We clearly need a new yaboot (basically with svenl’s patches), and we don’t have anaconda working (neither does ydl), and I definitely need to update the fedora ppc document.

• So m-commerce must’ve really taken off. Today, I made a purchase from a WAP site on my mobile, using my credit card details, and then having an item I ordered delivered. All without a computer, mind you.
• I started jhbuilding GNOME again. On a fairly standard FC-4 system (workstation install), you need: docbook-utils-pdf, howl-devel. It has a spiffy notification area icon now. audiofile wouldn’t get installed (host not found) – so manual fixing. mozilla wouldn’t build. The jhbuild dependencies is a mighty useful page – if time permits, maybe something like the comprehensive jhbuildonubuntu ought to be written for Fedora.
• Spent some time with the FUDCon II folk, aka, the FESCO meeting #2. SkypeOut seems to have served well for the three hours, because I got to do these things handsfree. And it didn’t cost a bomb. While sitting on it, I decided we needed to communicate (well, this was a goal from FESCO physical meeting #1), so I present Extras Steering Committee. We have meeting minutes that are public there now. And its been announced. Good talk about how package process works (the arch stuff came up, and more stringent ExclusiveArch goodness and Bugzilla tying ins). What we can package/ship also came up, and I’m sure the minutes and stuff that comes out of it will be interesting.
• < |Jef|> he clearly doesnt understand that Red Hat is the catholic church of distributions… every year its congregation splinters in yet another reformation – how true. You can splinter, but you can never leave us.

• Hubert, I don’t know where you’ve heard/seen that Apple will ship the Intel C/C++ compiler, but they’re definitely backing XCode and GCC. In fact, they encourage gcc usage, as it will provide smooth transitions, and one of their new Intel Macs already had gcc -arch compiled to handle ppc and i386. This probably quenches the rumors that Intel will build PowerPC processors.
• Boolean searches in Spotlight enhances it with NOT/OR searches – useful. I haven’t tried Beagle yet, but this shouldn’t be a hidden feature but really pimped up.
• Wah, Delicious Library is seriously being pimped at WWDC. I think they’d be winning some design awards sometime soon. For those of us using Linux, there’s mCatalog (requires Mono). All this uses the exposed Amazon Web Services API.
• Popped Mono on OS X. To use gtk#, I need X11? Eh, it isn’t native, but it works right. Well, here’s news, Mono is not cross-platform, either. Mac users hate X11 apps. Why do you think we have NeoOffice/J being more popular than OpenOffice.org/X11? So besides wxWindows, we may never have a true cross-platform GUI out there (and its not even a pretty solution).
• Been playing with Dashboard widgets a lot. Its highly impressive. CSS, JavaScript, and basic HTML, and you get some really useful features. Also mining Apple’s Web Kit. There’s a lot of potential here, and with some good CSS-fu, lots of cool widgets can happen. XCode is something I’ve used a bit more, and I’m rather impressed – jump around .js file functions too. It even edits HTML! Its very cool.
• Tried Abiword. Its kinda nice. Lightweight, doesn’t require X11, I’m kind of impressed. I wonder if gnumeric is also available on OS X and if it’s as good (I mean, I keep on reading about abiword at planet gnome…).
• Quartz Composer is cool. If this is what the programming future is going to be, we’re going to get a lot of cool, high-end apps. The toy RSS screensaver is completely easy to build! However, it performs shitless on my iBook G3 with the Radeon 7500. Looks like I really need to get some power… erps, PowerBook thing at some stage.

When oh, when, will GAIM support MSN7 better? All those swanky emoticons, and the like… From a few weeks back, this seemed rather appropriate.

01:32 < @nosnilmot> drbyte: cool, that'd be helpful, although I do worry that you have too many MSN7 using friends
01:32 < drbyte> nosnilmot: yes, that is the way people are moving
01:32 < @nosnilmot> why aren't they moving to a decent OS ?
01:33 < drbyte> nosnilmot: well, Windows XP is decent enough for them. and some software has no linux equivalent
01:34 < @nosnilmot> *exclusive* drbyte defends proprietary crap ;-)

Of interesting bits, Nautilus will no longer have Open Terminal when you right click on the desktop any longer. So like OS X behaves, I have to now go searching for it, and then adding a shortcut to it on a convenient place with new installs… But this is also progress – it means that an average end-user will require to not use the command line now, will she? Everything can be done using magical points-n-clicks.

Fedora Core 4 Test 3 was loaded on the Mac Mini today. It seems to be a lot faster than my snapshot of the 20050504 tree, so I’m guessing (because I have had no time to debug) something was very wrong earlier. 256MB of RAM makes GNOME usable again. Installer doesn’t detect X resolution properly, but did earlier – weird.

Retail therapy always helps right? So today, I went out and bought a bike. And a helmet. And a pump. Need to find a water bottle holder thing, and a mount for my GPS (I have one about 8000km away from here!), but took the thing for a spin today for a couple of hours. Came back because of a flat tire… C’est la vie.