I have moved!

I have finally moved my blog to Drupal. Nothing in this site will be deleted but it won't be updated anymore.

Please, update your bookmarks.
The new URL is:
http://www.lainconscienciadepablo.net

See you there!
pablog.

TP-LINK TL-WN722N (o cualquier ath9k_htc) en Ubuntu 10.04

El adaptador wifi usb TP-LINK TL-WN722N usa un chipset llamado AR9271 y requiere un nuevo controlador de Atheros llamado ath9k_htc. Dicho controlador ha sido incluído en la reciente versión del kernel 2.6.35.

Si tenemos un adaptador que trabaje con este módulo podemos hacer que funcione en Ubuntu con los siguientes pasos.

1. Descarga un kernel 2.6.35.
   1. En el caso de Ubuntu, aún no está en el repositorio oficial. Puedes usar el repositorio kernel-ppa o descargarlo directamente desde aquí (aquí para amd64)
   2. Otra opción es bajártelo desde kernel.org y compilarlo tú mismo...
2. Instálalo (doble click en el archivo .deb o sudo dpkg -i nombre)
3. Descarga el firmware de tu adaptador (ar9271.fw aquí)
4. Copia el archivo ar9271.fw a /lib/firmware
5. Reinicia
   
   

Para otras distribuciones, ajustar simplemente los pasos 1 y 2 con sus respectivos métodos para descargar e instalar el kernel 2.6.35.

Desactivar el contestador

Para desactivar el contestador que seguramente no hemos pedido que nos activen, cada compañía tiene su método:

• Llamar a un número donde te atiende una máquina e ir marcando otros.
• Marcar un número de servicio (no sé si se llama realmente así).
• Etc...

Hay varios tipos de contestadores:

• El que salta cuando estás comunicando.
• El que salta cuando no coges el teléfono.
• El que salta si estás con el móvil apagado o fuera de cobertura.

Si quieres desactivar todos los tipos de contestador al parecer existe un número estándar:

##002#

Al menos vale para Movistar, Orange, Vodafone y Yoigo.

Vista de mensajes en Evolution

Desde que me pasé a leer el correo con Evolution echaba de menos una cosa de Thunderbird que me parecía un bug en Evolution. Y por lo visto no era el único

Cuando ordenaba los correos de una lista de correo por threads, me salían mal ordenados. Evolution me los ordenaba usando la fecha del primer mensaje enviado en ese hilo en vez del último mensaje. De esta manera, la gente en los hilos continuaba escribiendo pero como también había recibido más mensajes, la barra de desplazamiento se había movido y al final me perdía entre los mensajes intentando ver si habían contestado a los hilos de hace 3 días.

No es un bug, es que simplemente lo había configurado mal.

En Evolution puedes definir varias formas de ver y ordenar los correos. En el menú View -> Current View hay unas cuantas predefinidas, y luego también puedes hacerte las tuyas personalizadas.

Los cambios que he hecho han sido:
1. Cambiar la posición de la columna Subject por la columna From.
2. Pinchar en Date hasta que sale la flechita hacia abajo para que queden ordenados (esto es lo que me faltaba, ¡EL BOTÓN TIENE 3 ESTADOS!).
3. Con Ctrl+T los agrupas en threads (hilos).

Para que sea la predeterminada he borrado la carpeta ~/.evolution/mail/views y ahora te vas a View->Current View->Save Custom View y reemplazas "Messages" que es la que abre por defecto.

Certificados SSL gratuitos para proyectos Open Source

Me acabo de enterar que la empresa de hosting GoDaddy ofrece certificados SSL gratuitos para proyectos Open Source.

Me ha parecido un acto de muy buena fé.
Más información en su página.

5 questions for GUADEC participants

As requested here, here there are my 5 answers.

1) Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Pablo. I'm a geek and hacktivist Spanish guy born in 1989 and I'm in the linux atmosphere since I was 13, when I installed my first linux distribution. A lot has rained since that. I have collaborated to several free software projects. I just love coding and KILLING every bug I find in my way. I also like editing Wikipedia about themes I consider that are needed to spread.

2) How did you get into GNOME?
I have always felt like being in everywhere and nowhere at the same time. "Jack of all trades, master of none" and I decided that I had to join some well-known project or that at least I was using everytime (e.g. GNOME). I started contributing to seahorse last summer (2009) and after some a few months, Stef Walter from the seahorse project proposed me to request for an account and he would vouch me. And so, I did it and I'm a GNOME developer since November 2009.

3) Why are you coming to GUADEC?
I feel excited about meeting the GNOME crew and it will be nice to sit down with some of them and be able to discuss about GNOME, using bugzilla but face to face this time!
We [seahorse maintainers and developers] have organized a BoF called DesktopCrypto.
I also want to meet some people involved in freedesktop.org and talk about the status of Portland. I am willing to maintain it.

4) In 1 sentence, describe what your most favorite recent GNOME project has been. (Doesn't have to be yours!)
Vala is a really cool project but I still have to investigate about it.

5) Will this be your first time visiting the Netherlands?
No! I was in The Netherlands 3 months ago, in April, with some friends. But it will be my first time in Den Haag :). Last time I spent the days in Groningen and Amsterdam.

See you soon!

¡Un político defendiendo el software libre!

Genial intervención del político Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra (o ibarra.net), del PSOE, en el Senado el día 17 de mayo de 2010 (Día Mundial de Internet). Fue presidente de la Junta de Extremadura hasta 2007, durando así 24 años.


El vídeo en youtube:

"En segundo lugar, la ex-propiedad siempre ha sido una cosa sospechosa para la Izquierda, y no entiendo que ahora la Izquierda esté defendiendo con tanto ahínco la Propiedad Intelectual, porque nadie lo va a entender." Rodríguez Ibarra, minuto 6:52.

Así da gusto :-)
En wikipedia lo he añadido a la categoría de activistas del copyright.

Problem with my laptop battery and gnome-power-manager

My laptop battery is faulty, when I connect my laptop to the AC adapter, the battery starts to get charged but after some minutes (random) the battery LED light becomes orange and that means that, even if the computer is being supplied by the AC adapter, the battery is not getting recharged.
The solution is unplug and plug again the AC adapter.

But I had also a very annoying issue.
When I was disconnecting the AC adapter, the battery value read wasn't correct and gnome-power-manager detected immediately that the battery was critical, showing me the next message and my laptop got suspended without any choice. But in the meantime, I could see that the applet said something that the battery still had charge to remain 30 minutes. O_o!? And it was truth.

Today, touching gconf I have discovered that there is a workaround and it is disabling the gconf key /apps/gnome-power-manager/general/use_time_for_policy which by default is enabled. It makes gnome-power-manager (since now g-p-m) to have really into account the battery percentage instead of the time that SHOULD remain, according to your previous battery statistics.
Run gconf-editor:

You can tune up a bit more this behaviour with the keys located in /apps/gnome-power-manager/thresholds/.

The screenshots are in Spanish but there's not to much to understand.

G-P-M has migrated from GConf to GSettings recently, I'm not used to gsettings but there should be a similar editor to gconf-editor.

I'm attending to GUADEC

Yes, I'm finally attending to GUADEC.
I was in doubt due my financial status but I got some responses (more than expected :)) from people through CouchSurfing that offered to host me during those days and I have finally decided to buy my flights. I'm very excited about meeting GNOME people :)

El Gobierno nos la quiere jugar con las becas

¡¡ATENCIÓN BECARIOS!!

He visto un mensaje en el foro de mi universidad que me parece de vital importancia que lo difundamos. Con esto de la crisis, el gobierno español nos la quiere jugar y ahorrarse unas cuantas miles de becas. A continuación, copio el mensaje de Rubén Ruíz:

Hola a todos,

El Ministerio de Educación está enviando un correo a algunos compañeros que fueron becarios otros años:

Estimado/a estudiante:


Como sabrás, el Gobierno español impulsa desde hace tiempo el acceso electrónico de los ciudadanos a los servicios públicos. El objetivo es lograr una mayor eficacia, eficiencia y agilidad de la Administración garantizando además la protección de los datos personales en la realización de todos los trámites.

De acuerdo con la normativa vigente, para poder SOLICITAR UNA BECA DEL MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN este año DEBERÁS REGISTRARTE previamente en la Sede Electrónica del Ministerio ( sede.educacion.gob.es ). Recuerda los siguientes pasos:

•REGISTRARTE en la Sede Electrónica del Ministerio de Educación durante los meses de MAYO y JUNIO de 2010.
•CONSERVAR EL USUARIO Y LA CONTRASEÑA que te serán solicitados para cualquier relación electrónica posterior con la Sede y, en particular, para la solicitud de la beca.
•CUMPLIMENTAR EL FORMULARIO correspondiente a la solicitud de beca cuando se encuentre abierto el período de presentación de acuerdo con la publicación en el Boletín Oficial del Estado.

En caso de duda, puedes acceder al manual “COMO USAR LA SECCIÓN DE TRÁMITES Y SERVICIOS DE LA SEDE ELECTRÓNICA” (disponible en la dirección electrónica sede.educacion.gob.es/tablon-anuncios/uso-tramites.html) o llamar al teléfono 915505957.

Atentamente,

Ministerio de Educación 

En resumen, SI NO TE REGISTRAS AHORA EN SEPTIEMBRE NO PUEDES SOLICITAR LA BECA.

Ríete ahora de Ryanair y sus artimañas...

Debugging flash in firefox

Install Adobe Flash Player Debugging Version:
(first I recommend you to uninstall any flash version you have installed)
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/10/flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
tar zxvf flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
cd flash_player_10_linux_dev/plugin/debugger
tar zxvf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
cd install_flash_player_10_linux/
./flashplayer-installer
Follow instructions.

Install the Firebug and Flashbug extensions.

I couldn't install extensions... it seems an Ubuntu 10.04 well-known issue. Workaround here: disabling ipv6 dns in firefox.
Restart firefox.

Now in the Firebug panel, enable "Flash Console".
Enter a page with flash and you will start to see the debug information :)

What is it useful to?
I know that there are extensions like FlashGot to do it, but I wanted to download the video embedded in a flash player that you can watch here: Erasmus Paradiso (Repor).

And in fact, the url pointing to the flv file was there! ;-)

IDEAS:
This mechanism saves a lot of time that you could have spent dissambling the flash player.

One of my ideas is creating a plugin to be able to watch in Totem last news as shown in RTVE (spanish radio television). Being able search videos in their archives or e.g. sorting last news videos by category.
To sum up, the same that the current youtube plugin does in Totem.

Updated 2/Jun/2010:
I've found in a blog how to download RTVE videos using RTMDump.
Actually it seems that there're some people working to get rtmp support in GStreamer, that would be the optimum solution :)

Bugzilla: How to receive email notifications with your own changes

One thing that was disturbing me is that by default, in gnome bugzilla you won't receive an email notification if you, e.g. add a comment in a bugreport, or change the priority of a bugreport, because it's YOU who have done it.
Instead, in freedesktop bugzilla you will receive it by default.

I find it useful, because you can follow in your mailbox all the changes and contributions you have done in one evening and because it eases reading bugreports from email. Otherwise, if someone mentions you, you will have to go to the bugreport webpage to know what you said, because in the message thread for that bug, your comment won't appear.

Fortunately it was easy. It's enough going to "Preferences" and then "Email Preferences" and then uncheck all the checkboxes in the last row, which says "The change was made by me".

Starting repository migration of portland to Git

Using CVS is a pain for me and nowadays it's pointless using it. Actually there are enough open source alternatives, distribuited or not.
Unfortunately the portland project hasn't still migrated to cgit.freedesktop.org. It's one of the few that is still stuck.

Today I have imported the repository as Git and then I have uploaded it to GitHub. I will try to keep it updated and synchronized with CVS. For it, I have opened a bug report to notify it and to ask what to do about the rewriting names task. Git has a field in every commit to specify who was the author of the patch and who has committed it and their email addresses. This is very useful to keep authorship even if the author hasn't an account to commit. As CVS lacked it, we have to "rewrite" the past. Also, CVS used a nickname to identify the author of a commit. With Git it's usual to specify your full name and your email address.

By the way, as I say in the bugreport, the new git repository can be found here:
http://github.com/PabloCastellano/portland

Let's go for the 1.0.3 release! (1.0.2 release was in June 2007 :-/)




And we are not the only ones who rewrite the past! See:
Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns (what a shame)
Nineteen Eighty-Four

GUADEC Hispana ya tiene página en Wikipedia

Me he enterado esta misma tarde de que la VII GUADEC Hispana se hará en La Coruña durante los días 22 y 23 de julio. Aunque casi seguro que para esa fecha haya ya vuelto a España, no sé si iré porque no sé cómo andaré de liquidez. Ya había también mirado la GUADEC en (La Haya, Holanda del 26 al 30 de julio), pero también se me salía un poco de presupuesto. Así que de momento me conformaré con haber ido este año a la FOSDEM y a la RootedCon, de las que aún tengo pendiente hacer unos resumencillos :)

De paso, he creado en la Wikipedia la página para la GUADEC Hispana, ya que desde GUADEC se enlazaba varias veces y nadie la había creado aún. De momento no tiene mucho, más o menos lo mismo que la de GUADEC, pero es informativa y espero que más gente cuando pase por la página se eche un commit. También le he dado una pequeña pincelada a la de GNOME Hispano, (que por cierto tendría que mirar para hacerme socio) y he hecho que GUADEC-ES también redirija a GUADEC Hispana.

Maybe your HP Pavillion tx2000 is not dead at all...

(End of March 2010...)
This morning when I woke up, I found that again I had fallen asleep in the bed reading in the computer.
I tried to switch it on but I couldn't.

Everytime I pressed the button, all the LED lights became blue as usual but then less than one second later  the computer switched off suddenly.

I was afraid. Maybe the battery was faulty, but it was plugged to the electricity.
I went to lessons thinking that I would have to find a place to repair it.

During the lessons I found in the HP website that the symtomps pointed that it needed to be repaired but with other symptoms you could do a 'Hard Reset' and it would be working again.

When the lesson finished I came back home quickly and I did it. And it worked!! :)

'Hard Reset' consists on:
1. Take out the battery
2. Unplug the AC cable.
3. Press and hold the power button at least 6 seconds.

I'm posting it because it was not so easy to find the procedure. Now I'm happy again :) and I wonder how many laptops that have been shipped to be repaired could have been fixed doing that... And how much did it cost to the owners :-(

BTW, I started some time ago a page in the ubuntu wiki to get everything working in this HP Pavillion model. It's still in construction and some bugs need to be fixed before in the kernel. I'm working on it.. :)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Laptop/Reports/HPPavilionTx2000es

Update 10/Apr/10: hard reset is not working anymore, my laptop seems dead :(

Update 4/May/10: I just saw my laptop inside its cover under my desktop and with a bit of sadness decided to try to turn it on. Luckily and enigmatically IT WORKS AGAIN :)))

Hypothesis:
It seems that some internal capacitors had kept charged. In fact, what Hard Reset did, was trying to uncharge them. One month later it seems that they got finally uncharged.

Getting your OS spanish event sponsored

I have just discovered that the CENATIC foundation (Centro Nacional de Referencia de Aplicación de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (y olé)) is sponsoring spanish free software related events in Spain.
In 2010 there are two deadlines to send your applications, one in February and another one in July.

Isn't it awesome?? :)

Convocatoria de patrocinios de CENATIC para eventos SFA.

Recovering files from a pendrive with scalpel

I have no idea how it happened but I had to give today a housework in the university and it wasn't in the pendrive. At the moment I have recovered 1 of 2 files with scalpel (I just love the name of foresnic tools :D).

From the website:

Scalpel is a fast file carver that reads a database of header and footer definitions and extracts matching files from a set of image files or raw device files. Scalpel is filesystem-independent and will carve files from FATx, NTFS, ext2/3, or raw partitions. It is useful for both digital forensics investigation and file recovery. Scalpel resulted from a complete rewrite of foremost 0.69, a popular open source file carver, to enhance performance and decrease memory usage.

Steps:
Create an iso image from your pendrive:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=pendrive.iso
Have a look to the example configuration file (required) or copy it to $PWD:
cp /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf .
As I had to recover a C file I added to the end of the config file this line:
echo "c     y       11000     /**" >> scalpel.conf
Which means "find files with 'c' extension, but not 'C' (case sensitive) and read 11000 bytes from the header.
I played with a bit of advantage as I knew for sure the file started with comments as the professor gave us a skeleton file. The length field is not so important but I knew that I had not written 10K of code.

Run scalpel:
scalpel -c scalpel.conf -o recovered pendrive.iso

After that, in the recovered folder I had a log file named "audit.txt" and a folder named "c-0-0". Inside the folder there were a lot of ".c" files, all with length 11000 and that started with "/**" and manually I have found the one that I searched and removed the trailing 11000-true_bytes bytes.


Appart from this manual usage I did, it has preconfigured headers for a lot of filetypes like jpg, avi, doc, pdf, pgp, zip... so that you only need to uncomment the line in scalpel.conf of the files that you are searching.

My pendrive was formatted with FAT32 but it's filesystem-independent.

Kudos to Scalpel!

rtl8187se, realtek and ndiswrapper

My new netbook uses the rtl8187se wireless driver and this is another post complaining about Realtek support to linux users.

It would be a nice piece of news that it works out-of-the-box if the driver wasn't so unstable in WPA protected networks. I suffer from drops in throughput every 5-10 minutes, sometimes even less, that make the connection unusable.

In this ubuntu bugreport there are also users that claims that they have the same issue (2 years ago).

Unfortunately, I lost all my hopes with Realtek in things related to fixing drivers. My experience (in this post) is that I wrote them 5 months ago about the sound driver issue in my HP Pavilion Tx2000 and they haven't even replied a "Thanks for the report. We will have a look at this issue". It's also worth to mention the shoddy piece of work that they did with the rt3070 driver (see this other post).

At the moment, I'm using ndiswrapper with the winXP drivers. It works like a charm and I recommend it to everyone having this issue.

You can download the Windows drivers here:
http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=21&PFid=40&Level=5&Conn=4&ProdID=172&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true
Direct link:

ftp://WebUser:Ds8MtJ3@202.134.71.22/cn/wlan/8187SE_WindowsDriver_5_6.9109.1029.2009.zip

I also discovered that there's a pyGTK GUI for ndiswrapper very suitable for your granma who wants to connect to her WPA wireless at home, but she can't do it out-of-the-box because Realtek didn't care about providing a decent driver. It's called ndisgtk and looks like this:

Email to Realtek about issues in their sound driver

This is the email I sent to Realtek related email addresses on 3/December/2009.
I sent it to: kailang@realtek.com.tw, shou@realtek.com.tw, and from their Contact section in their webpage.
I hope that posting it here in public, they feel a bit more ashamed.
I haven't received a minimal answer 5 months later. I wonder how important are users for them once that they have bought their product. Do they care a minimum?

Fill in the blank

What's the missing number in this sequence?
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 30, 33, 102, ? , 10010

Partido de Internet

Nunca pensé que fuese a hablar de política en un blog, pero merece la pena como poco conocerlo, sobre todo si vas de demócrata.

Había leído ya sobre términos como la "democracia líquida", "democracia electrónica", "democracia directa" o "votaciones proxy" en internet y me parecían ideas realmente buenas para la sociedad pero a la vez difíciles de llevar a cabo.

Hace 3 días me enteré de una iniciativa, plataforma, o como queramos llamarlo llamada el "Partido de Internet" (PdI), que tengo que reconocer que nada más leer el nombre me llevó a pensar que era otro Partido Pirata. Para nada, es lo que han denominado un partido "proxy", o más bien partido de la democracia del siglo XXI.
La noticia también es que desde el pasado mes de enero se han constituido como partido político y piensan presentarse a las elecciones generales de 2012 y a las europeas de 2013.

No voy a explicar de nuevo cómo funciona el partido porque ya lo explican ellos muy bien en las Preguntas Frecuentes de su página.
Tengo que reconocer que me ha emocionado mucho una iniciativa así, y por eso me he puesto en contacto con ellos para ayudar en todo lo que pueda y de momento hace falta crear una buena infraestructura, así que echaré una mano con todo el tema informático-telemático y cuando vuelva a España me afiliaré si sigo con las mismas ilusiones :).

Trataremos de usar todo el software libre posible y hacer el partido lo más transparente posible.
De momento puedes seguir el desarrollo de la parte del registro web (la idea es integrar OpenID con el wiki, la página principal y el foro) y hacer un fork del repositorio público en github. Chulo, ¿eh? ;-)


git clone git://github.com/voodoorai2000/pdi_registro.git

Las cuentas del partido se llevan en el wiki:
http://partidodeinternet.es/wiki/Finanzas

De momento, estamos liados con una discusión que nos ha surgido recientemente en Wikipedia porque un bibliotecario nos ha tachado de irrelevantes y quiere borrar la página. El que quiera puede pasarse por la discusión y dejar un comentario, que se agradece. ¡Cuanta más gente opine positivamente mejor!

Queda mucho trabajo por delante. En el partido hay varias áreas para que la gente se dedique a lo que mejor se le de y cunda más. Así hay grupos de gente encargados de la publicidad y la comunicación, de temas legales, de la financiación, de la infraestructura...
La idea a largo plazo es desarrollar nuestro propio software para las votaciones, que ya han bautizado como agora y tiene página en launchpad, pero de momento estamos viendo proyectos y tesis que ha hecho la gente sobre el tema (que no es nuevo, para nada) y la apuesta ganadora parecer ser Civitas, un software para votaciones desarrollado por la Universidad Cornell, de Nueva York.

La gente con la que he hablado ya y he intercambiado correos me han dado muy buenas impresiones de ser gente comprometida.
Estamos todos ilusionados, es una mezcla entre esperanza de algo que lleva la gente pidiendo hace mucho tiempo y la cosilla de... ¿saldrá bien? ya que es una iniciativa totalmente experimental :-)

Los medios y la tecnología están ahí, así que aprovechémoslos!

¿Qué? ¿Te apuntas?

Actualización: los partidos mayoritarios no aceptan el juego de la democracia.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partido_de_Internet
http://servicio.mir.es/registro-partidos/loadDetallesFormacion.htm?protocolo=3966

Skype 2.1 Beta 2 for Linux

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

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:

• avahi
• cairo
• dbus
• gstreamer
• HAL
• PackageKit
• ...
  

Entre ellos se encuentran también Portland y Nouveau.

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:

1. Curro terminó la tarea en las primeras semanas y siguió con otras labores... :)
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Para modificar su wiki en lugar de captchas hay preguntas sobre tarjetas gráficas al estilo trivial :D
   
5. 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.

FOSDEM 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

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? ;)

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