Hardware

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.

So, ich hab' mich heute hingesetzt und ein wenig Spaß mit meiner neuen USIM gehabt. Heute ist folgendes passiert (Details folgen):

• Vodafone USIM gegen T-Mobile USIM getauscht
• SIM-Lock des UMTS-Modems aufgehoben
• pppd eingerichtet, sodass ich ins Internet komme

Leider macht das Ganze unter Ubuntu irgendwie noch nicht so richtig Spaß, weil mit dem Network Manager die hübsche Einbindung in den Desktop fehlt. Aber das sind Dinge, um die ich mich eventuell noch später kümmern werde.

24 hours after getting the Thinkpad back, I finished installing edgy on it (from a USB pendrive). It was quite tricky, because Casper is broken (Ubuntu Developer on the question whether he could take a look at it today: »no, I'm not at work today« :'( ).

Not even 12 months ago I got a Thinkpad X41 from a company to make sure Ubuntu works well on this machine.

It did. Until Saturday. The Disk died.

It's really frustrating to have a spare weekend you want to use for some FLOSS hacking and then you don't have a computer to work with (I'm at my parents right now).

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

I've spent the spare time of the last weeks hacking on something intersting I found in the net.

Sun Microsystems has been developing a handwriting recognition framework (so you can load recognition engines into your applications) several years ago (14). They even included a sample recognition engine implementation with it (based upon a talk from 1991, GPL source code).

So, after my Powerbooks graphic device started to produce weird things I started to do more of my work on my desktop.

Yesterday I wanted to start the computer and it doesn't do anything anymore. I think it's the AC adapter again (I had this kind of problem 8 months ago, took one whole month to be reparied...).

So, now I contacted the manufacturer and they're going to send a brand new AC adapter (which is more powerful) to me and I only need to pay the difference between the price of the old one and the price of the new one.

Wow, this has been a very successful weekend so far. I started to work on criawips again this week (motivated by the engagement of the other contributors) and see what I did. I have had three local development trees on my machine, so I went ahead, fininshed the new debugging code (#1), checked it in, finished the rendering re-organization (#2), check it in too and I have been looking for a bug in my tree dedicated to the reintroduction of glade for the main window (#3). The bug got squashed, the code checked in and I have only one development tree (aka HEAD).

In the meantime Ezequiel made some progress on the save operation which is pretty cool, though it showed up a bug in libgsf which has been fixed in CVS. Unfortunately Jody just released a new libgsf version some days ago (including the "gsf gnomevfs can follow symlinks" patch), so I will wait for the next release to depend on.

Unfortunately I realized that my gdb on the Powerbook (Ubuntu Hoary) is broken, I should provide a bug report for this. First I thought that it might have been some broken memory stuff, but a reboot (the first one for 24 days) did fix only other issues.

Now it's time to relax because I had a very hard day, hacking to 3am, sleeping to 8am, doing sports, hacking, going to bed now.

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.

Slept until half past one PM. 't was very relaxing. Went into the city to go shopping, ended up with a new fan for my barebone (once I get rid of those old hard drives in there, it should be very quiet).

Downloaded Ubuntu's xfree86 source code, patched it with a patch that I got from Aurelien Gerome. Now I'm building my own server to check whether I get the DVI out of my powerbook running. Just after starting the compile session I got an email from Bernhard Reiter asking whether this one works (side note: I don't believe in happenstances, these things happen too often, see my last blog entry wrt custom ubuntu kernels).

Asked Julius to fix the Admin-C entry of my domain www.blaubeermuffin.de.

Went to the cinema with Julius and his girlfriend, have been watching 7 Zwerge - Männer allein im Wald. It has been very funny.

Catched up with my blogging for this week.

Sent a mail to Ben Herrenschmidt about Mac OS X driver spying. I need to update my Powerbook pages for features and some information to start hacking on an airport extreme driver (if/when I find to for this).