Debian

Thomas wollte, dass ich nochmal was zum Thema UMTS blogge, damit er dann meine Erkenntnisse nurnoch umsetzen muss. Seit ich mit der Spielerei angefangen habe, hat sich in der Linux-Welt auch schon wieder einiges getan: das eingebaute UMTS-Modem muss mittlerweile nicht mehr über das Modul usbserial angesteuert werden, sondern kann jetzt durch das Modul sierra betrieben werden, das dann bei den meisten Distributionen auch automatisch geladen wird.

Jay Bertrand hat es getan. Coole Sache. Das Paket muss dann demnächst mal auf meinem Server installiert werden (mal schauen wie gut das Ding mit Multisite-Installationen zurecht kommt).

I did it. It didn't go smoothly (just because I forgot the boot smylink on my boot partition) but it went very well.

So here's your way to install a fresh Ubuntu on the Pegasos2:

I don't know about the mkvmlinuz status of Ubuntu Dapper and the Pegasos2, but I managed to skip this issue (for me).

Preparing your partitions

Got my Pegasos 2 today. Played around with it a bit, unfortunately the front cover (from the AOpen H360A) doesn't automatically open when I push the CD tray button (obviously the resistance of the front cover is too big for the CD drive).

Had some email conversation with Sven Luther afterwards, he told me that there a Ubuntu people working on support for the Pegasos 2. So I have one more reason to wait for the Hoary Release.

A very busy day on LWE. Met some people to talk about the AlBooks of Apple when Mark Shuttleworth came up to the GNOME booth to talk about Ubuntu. I was talking about my XFS issues (should have been the perfect solution to address my problems) and that I'd like to have a Custom-Ubuntu-Kernel-HOWTO.

Had my talk about GNOME, I was quite happy with it as I didn't finish the talk and had almost half an hour of my time left :-). When taking back my hardware Debian's Alexander Wirth came up to me and told me that Ben Herrenschmidt released a test patch for suspend to ram (funny, haven't I been talking about a custom-kernel-howto for Ubuntu some hours before?).

Created a new custon kernel for my powerbook (which is still runnning Ubuntu). I used the standard Debian way of kernel compilation, removed the initrd stuff from yaboot.conf (this will break future Ubuntu kernels, but I don't care about them). At least suspend to ram works (including the "breathing" LED).

Well, I think Ubuntu has trashed my systems. I was getting random IO errors and file system problems (have you ever been forced to use xfs_repair in a week more than 7 times?).

The day before yesterday I bought a new disk (IBM/Hitachi, 2.5", 80GB). I set up Ubuntu once more (hoping that the Warty RC fould fix my problems), but it didn't (I wonder whether any of the Ubuntu developers is using XFS). So I still have to trashed systems (my Athlon XP1500+ based Shuttle and my Powerbook) and a friend of mine told me that he needed to fix his XFS file system too. Guys, there's something definitely going wrong there.

So, while my systems have been trashed, I was working to get the TV out of the Geforce4 MX/440 running. I recall that this built-in device has been a very strong enemy when setting up this machine in march. I was able to see 2 movies yesterday without crashes, but the system is still very unstable, I haven't even been able to boot a Gnoppix CD and get into GNOME before X crashes with this device.

Debian Sarge just got installed on the Barebone, so it's on me to set it up now... (anything I should be aware of when downgrading from GNOME 2.8 to 2.6?)

criawips:

Release a first preview version of criawips after a night of hacking. Criawips is now a cute slide viewer that basically supports stretched background images and text in front of it.

Sadly, I haven't been able to create more than my private test file. But as I'm going to use criawips this weekend in Wilhelmshaven for 3 GNOME related talks, there going to be some examples in the next version, ask me directly (per mail) for a sample if you're interested.

GNOME:

Though I met David Malcom on GUADEC last year I just tested conglomerate to write a docbook file and I was really amazed. Really cool piece of software for text editing.

Life:

Had some stress this night (I was only hacking), but I really need the app to get off until the weekend for the GNOME presentations mentioned above. The weekend's promising to become a lot of fun, meeting lots of new Free Software folks, getting closer to Debian people (I still need one Debian dev to sign my gpg key...), presenting GNOME, talking to the KDE guys in front of us, (cool stuff, so much info and still no beer), and -- of course -- beeeeer. I still don't know how to fix up a slide viewer, write 3 presentations AND set up a routing machine for the weekend, but I think I'm going to figure out...