As Skype surprised the open source community two months ago, recognizing that they were working in a linux open source version of their client, today I found that on 20th January they released a new version with a lot of bugfixes and new features like desktop sharing, support for UI styles (it includes integration with GTK+!!) and also several PulseAudio bugfixes (I bet I am not the only one who remembers that damn old bug that kept the CPU at 100%)...
Their plans are to release an open source UI to use with a closed source Skype library. I have no complains, open source community win!
It even makes sense to start thinking about skype integrated in empathy through telepathy-skype :)
There was already a project to do more or less the same with pidgin, but you had to have skype running, which is not so beautiful: skype4pidgin.
http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/2010/01/flowers_become_screens.html
domingo, 24 de enero de 2010
sábado, 23 de enero de 2010
freedesktop & XDG
freedesktop.org (abreviado como "fd.o") apareció en el año 2000, aunque también es conocido como XDG ("X Desktop Group").
Es un proyecto que surgió cuando se empezó a "popularizar" el utilizar linux para los ordenadores personales, y con el objetivo de hacer unos estándares para los escritorios que funcionan sobre las X, ya que para entonces no existía ninguno y cada escritorio con su grupo de desarrolladores hacía las cosas de la forma que le parecía más adecuada o simplemente que le parecía.
Actualmente participan en fd.o entre otros, miembros de KDE, GNOME y Xfce, que podríamos decir que son los escritorios más populares a día de hoy.
En su repositorio git se puede ver todo el software que hospeda. Algunos proyectos un poco desconocidos pero otros bastante populares y usados como:
El primero, Portland, se encarga de crear una serie de utilidades (scripts) para hacer una serie de tareas, independientemente de si estás usando en ese momento KDE o GNOME. Todos son comandos que empiezan por "xdg-" y los hay para interactuar con el salvapantallas, abrir archivos con la aplicación por defecto, instalar archivos .desktop...
He sabido de este proyecto por este bug, que me estaba volviendo loco con xdg-mime. Creo que me lo apunto también a la lista de proyectos a seguir y colaborar (me gusta la "estandarización"). Entre ayer por la tarde y hoy por la mañana he puesto un poco de orden en el bugzilla!
Su última release fue en 2007, pero hablando con Fabo (uno de los desarrolladores) me ha dicho que planean hacer otra cuanto antes, y a continuación migrar a Git, ya que es de los pocos proyectos que quedan en fd.o aún usando CVS.
El segundo es un driver open source para las tarjetas nVidia y con aceleración 3D. Tengo la suerte de conocer mi coetáneo Francisco Jerez (curro), quien participó en el Google Summer of Code 2009 y es ahora unos de sus desarrolladores de Nouveau. Su función, tal como se explica aquí era implementar la función de salida de TV previa ingeniería inversa:
La gente sin conocimientos técnicos puede colaborar probando el driver (tester) o donando tarjetas gráficas nvidia.
Estado actual de Nouveau.
Como curiosidades:
Enlaces:
Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market.
freedesktop.org interview in 2003.
Es un proyecto que surgió cuando se empezó a "popularizar" el utilizar linux para los ordenadores personales, y con el objetivo de hacer unos estándares para los escritorios que funcionan sobre las X, ya que para entonces no existía ninguno y cada escritorio con su grupo de desarrolladores hacía las cosas de la forma que le parecía más adecuada o simplemente que le parecía.
Actualmente participan en fd.o entre otros, miembros de KDE, GNOME y Xfce, que podríamos decir que son los escritorios más populares a día de hoy.
En su repositorio git se puede ver todo el software que hospeda. Algunos proyectos un poco desconocidos pero otros bastante populares y usados como:
- avahi
- cairo
- dbus
- gstreamer
- HAL
- PackageKit
- ...
El primero, Portland, se encarga de crear una serie de utilidades (scripts) para hacer una serie de tareas, independientemente de si estás usando en ese momento KDE o GNOME. Todos son comandos que empiezan por "xdg-" y los hay para interactuar con el salvapantallas, abrir archivos con la aplicación por defecto, instalar archivos .desktop...
He sabido de este proyecto por este bug, que me estaba volviendo loco con xdg-mime. Creo que me lo apunto también a la lista de proyectos a seguir y colaborar (me gusta la "estandarización"). Entre ayer por la tarde y hoy por la mañana he puesto un poco de orden en el bugzilla!
Su última release fue en 2007, pero hablando con Fabo (uno de los desarrolladores) me ha dicho que planean hacer otra cuanto antes, y a continuación migrar a Git, ya que es de los pocos proyectos que quedan en fd.o aún usando CVS.
El segundo es un driver open source para las tarjetas nVidia y con aceleración 3D. Tengo la suerte de conocer mi coetáneo Francisco Jerez (curro), quien participó en el Google Summer of Code 2009 y es ahora unos de sus desarrolladores de Nouveau. Su función, tal como se explica aquí era implementar la función de salida de TV previa ingeniería inversa:
| Title: | Reverse engineering of Nvidia TV encoders. |
| Abstract: | The TV output present on several Nvidia graphics cards lacks support from the nv and nouveau open source device drivers. This forces most users wanting to use their TV out to stick with the proprietary Nvidia software. This project will aim to reverse engineer the operation of the TV encoder integrated on some recent Nvidia chips, and provide a RandR1.3 compliant implementation based on the nouveau driver. |
La gente sin conocimientos técnicos puede colaborar probando el driver (tester) o donando tarjetas gráficas nvidia.
Estado actual de Nouveau.
Como curiosidades:
- Curro terminó la tarea en las primeras semanas y siguió con otras labores... :)
- Para asegurarse la plaza se dedicó a buscar tarjetas nVidia con distintos chipsets. También antiguas, no importaba pues la intención es que el driver funcione en todas y sustituya al oficial y privativo de nVidia. Un día quedamos para que probara los últimos avances con la gráfica de mi portátil.
- El proyecto sólo tiene un asalariado por parte de Red Hat, Ben Skeggs, mientras que nVidia paga perfectamente a cientos de desarrolladores para el driver privativo.
- Para modificar su wiki en lugar de captchas hay preguntas sobre tarjetas gráficas al estilo trivial :D
- Tras no pocas discusiones, Nouveau vendrá incluido en el kernel 2.6.33.
Enlaces:
Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market.
freedesktop.org interview in 2003.
viernes, 22 de enero de 2010
martes, 19 de enero de 2010
rt3070
Some days ago I bought a SMCWUSBS-N3 EZ Connect™ N Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter. The reason is that I have installed Ubuntu to my parents and the old ZyXEL ZyAIR B-220 wasn't working with network-manager because of this bug.
I decided to buy this model in particular first because it was only 12,50€ (!!) and second because I saw in the official webpage that they were (unfortunately surprising) providing linux drivers. The chipset it uses is called RT3070USB (ralink).
At first, I imagined that they were providing that cheap link because it was already included in the official linux kernel tree and they just wanted to say "hey, we are cool people and support linux!".
But I was wrong! When I connected the device once I arrived home nothing happened. Nothing interesting in syslog. dmesg neither. So I decided to download their driver and give it a try.
They did a really quick and ugly hack of an already existing RT2870 driver. They didn't even care about renaming the files or changing the constants in the Makefile (this is bad, ralink guys.. we have a family to take care of and we cannot spend how much time we want on it...). And... it didn't work out-of-the-box(tm).
I have to admit that I lost my hope to get it working but fortunately an ubuntuforums.org user made me recover it because he succeeded.
I had a great hacking satisfaction when I got it working :) and I was going to explain my workaround but now I see that it's already very well explained in this post.
Also, the SMC site provides the link to an old release of this driver, which won't compile with 2.6.31. You'll need to get the last one from the ralink site.
Here is the changelog:
Version [V2.1.2.0]
1. Support Linux kernel 2.6.31
2. Add iw support.
Version V2.1.1.0
1. Linux kernel 2.6.29 support.
2. Fix eFuse write from BIN file bug.
Version 2.1.0.0
1. New generation schema for multiple OS porting
2. Fixed Ad-hoc ping failed in noisy environment.
3. Modified iwpriv ra0 get_site_survey:
4. Change FastRoaming in DAT file to AutoRoaming.
5. Support kthread.
6. New IEEE802.11r functionality.
Version 2.0.1.0
1. Finished verifying RT3071 STA support.
2. Fix eFuse bug on big-endian platform
3. Fix WMM problem for RT3071/72
4. Fix bug for ATE TX power handling and ATE frequency offset bug.
5. Fix RT307x AMPDU throughput bug after interface down/up
6. Fix RT307x difficult to enter power save mode issue.
7. Fix bug that is hard to connect with hidden-SSID AP.
8. Update RT307x new firmware.
TODO: When I get some new free time, I will try to give a look at the driver and collaborate to get it merged in the kernel. Or at least provide a working out-of-the-box tarball with the driver ;-)
A similar bug report in bugzilla.kernel.org
I decided to buy this model in particular first because it was only 12,50€ (!!) and second because I saw in the official webpage that they were (unfortunately surprising) providing linux drivers. The chipset it uses is called RT3070USB (ralink).
At first, I imagined that they were providing that cheap link because it was already included in the official linux kernel tree and they just wanted to say "hey, we are cool people and support linux!".
But I was wrong! When I connected the device once I arrived home nothing happened. Nothing interesting in syslog. dmesg neither. So I decided to download their driver and give it a try.
They did a really quick and ugly hack of an already existing RT2870 driver. They didn't even care about renaming the files or changing the constants in the Makefile (this is bad, ralink guys.. we have a family to take care of and we cannot spend how much time we want on it...). And... it didn't work out-of-the-box(tm).
I have to admit that I lost my hope to get it working but fortunately an ubuntuforums.org user made me recover it because he succeeded.
I had a great hacking satisfaction when I got it working :) and I was going to explain my workaround but now I see that it's already very well explained in this post.
Also, the SMC site provides the link to an old release of this driver, which won't compile with 2.6.31. You'll need to get the last one from the ralink site.
Here is the changelog:
Version [V2.1.2.0]
1. Support Linux kernel 2.6.31
2. Add iw support.
Version V2.1.1.0
1. Linux kernel 2.6.29 support.
2. Fix eFuse write from BIN file bug.
Version 2.1.0.0
1. New generation schema for multiple OS porting
2. Fixed Ad-hoc ping failed in noisy environment.
3. Modified iwpriv ra0 get_site_survey:
4. Change FastRoaming in DAT file to AutoRoaming.
5. Support kthread.
6. New IEEE802.11r functionality.
Version 2.0.1.0
1. Finished verifying RT3071 STA support.
2. Fix eFuse bug on big-endian platform
3. Fix WMM problem for RT3071/72
4. Fix bug for ATE TX power handling and ATE frequency offset bug.
5. Fix RT307x AMPDU throughput bug after interface down/up
6. Fix RT307x difficult to enter power save mode issue.
7. Fix bug that is hard to connect with hidden-SSID AP.
8. Update RT307x new firmware.
TODO: When I get some new free time, I will try to give a look at the driver and collaborate to get it merged in the kernel. Or at least provide a working out-of-the-box tarball with the driver ;-)
A similar bug report in bugzilla.kernel.org
miércoles, 13 de enero de 2010
Linux and BSD Funding VISA cards
I have just discovered that if you reside in the US, you can get a BSD or a Linux VISA card, so that every time you buy something BSDFund and LinuxFund organizations will get some money (I guess some cents) that then they will spend on funding some Linux/BSD free software projects.
This Linux Fund webpage, says that they are preparing to revitalize their other cards in North America and launch a card in Europe. Without any doubt, I would get one. Nice idea!
Here are the images:
Cute, aren't they? ;)
This Linux Fund webpage, says that they are preparing to revitalize their other cards in North America and launch a card in Europe. Without any doubt, I would get one. Nice idea!
Here are the images:
Cute, aren't they? ;)
domingo, 3 de enero de 2010
Adding a new git repository
Some time ago I set up a git server (gitosis) in my desktop computer. I use to commit in my laptop and then push the changes to my desktop and I really like it.
Today to add a new repository I did:
In my desktop:
cd /tmp
git clone gitosis@localhost:gitosis-admin.git
cd gitosis-admin
<edit gitosis.conf> (Added Ants_Client to writable, in group developers where I [well, my sshkey] belongs)
git commit -a
git push
In my laptop:
cd ~/workspace/Ants_Client
git init
<I did several commits>
git remote add origin ssh://gitosis@myhomeip/Ants_Client.git
git push origin master:refs/heads/master
Useful files:
/usr/share/doc/gitosis/README.Debian
/usr/share/doc/gitosis/README.rst.gz
Today to add a new repository I did:
In my desktop:
cd /tmp
git clone gitosis@localhost:gitosis-admin.git
cd gitosis-admin
<edit gitosis.conf> (Added Ants_Client to writable, in group developers where I [well, my sshkey] belongs)
git commit -a
git push
In my laptop:
cd ~/workspace/Ants_Client
git init
<I did several commits>
git remote add origin ssh://gitosis@myhomeip/Ants_Client.git
git push origin master:refs/heads/master
Useful files:
/usr/share/doc/gitosis/README.Debian
/usr/share/doc/gitosis/README.rst.gz
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