My place to share some bits and bytes

Over the last week, directly after LinuxTag, I was in Vachdorf. If you like to know more about this small village take a look at OSM. Of course we mapped the whole village while being there.

The reason for being there was the TechWeek from Pengutronix, a company from my area doing a lot linux embedded projects for the industry. I already known some of the people working there privately. While being there I got known to the other ones. I must admit that it is a nice bunch of smart people loving what they are doing. What I actually appreciate a lot is their work to get their patches into mainline, even if it costs a lot of time and money. This is a not-so-common practice in the industry linux embedded world.

While hanging out there and having good talks about git, patch handling and submission workflows I spend most of my time working on geting some of the EZX patches mainline ready. We now have a svn branch that contains patches sitting directly on top of the arm git tree pxa branch. While working on this I also started to submit three one-line fixes upstream to get used to the arm-linux workflow. 2 Are already in the git tree, one is acked and waiting in incoming.

I enjoyed the week. Smart people, good food and hacking on stuff you like. Life could be that easy...

While giving a talk and help to manning the OpenMoko booth at the LinuxTag I also got some interesting hardware to play with.

The great guys from the OLPC Deutschland e.V. long-term borrowed up to 70 XO laptops for people which have interesting projects with them.

I asked for one to work on OpenEmbedded integration for it. This divides into two parts:

1. Machine support. This one should not be to hard as it is a x86 device and the first rootfs it ever booted in the AMD labs was build with OE. :) Still it will help me to understand the deeper internals from OpenEmbedded better.

2. Writing recipes for the sugar applications and libraries. Having recipes for them in the OE metadata will make it easy for other distros using OE as their buildsystem to use them and put them in their feeds.

I will be busy with EZX the next two weeks. I plan to work on this afterwards.

Next tuesday I'll be on my way to Berlin for the LinuxTag. It will be some busy days between giving a talk, an interview for Radio Tux and hanging out at the booth of my ex-employer.

Still I'm looking forward to it. This time I hopefully have some time to attend the technically talks. I look at you kernel track. And let Harald de-mystify the security of the micro waves around us.

Over the last days I did some changes to the SCMs for my private projects. Some got migrated from svn to git. Also some git repos changed the location. Please refer to the overview websites if you run into trouble:

http://svn.datenfreihafen.org/$PROJECT_NAME

http://git.datenfreihafen.org/

Since I left OpenMoko I have found some time to work on OpenEZX again. There are two nice things that happened since then.

The first one was that I got an 18bpp patch for all the second generation devices working. At least pxafb and fbcon are working fine now. I still need to test X more. :) The patch was from the gumstix patchset. Thank you guys.

The second was the boot_usb 0.2.0 release. We use this little tool a lot and SVN is stable most of the time. Especially after Daniel Ribeiro added support for initrd, commandline and setting the machine ID a release was needed.

Window mangers were always something I needed to switch after some time. I started with E16, had a short period with windowmaker, afterwards a long time with fluxbox and then gnome.

I switched to gnome because I liked to have a more integrated desktop. Having this smooth experience that all stuff just works. It turned out that it did not helped as much as I wanted it.

I don't use Evolution, I use mutt. I don't use the gnome-terminal, I use xterms. I think you get the picture. After looking more closely what stuff I really use from my gnome desktop there was not much left. Some app starter in the panel, 2-3 applets, well I think that's it.

As I have worked with the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries lately and I liked what I found I decided to give E17 a go. Fresh from CVS.

I now have just a small shelf, panel thingy, with 6 app starters, volume, time, date and battery gadgets / applets. Next to it a small stalonetray for systray icons. That's all.

I've won faster startup times, some small but nice eye-candy stuff. Not to much to distract me from work but enough to keep the joy of use.

Another big plus is the brand new tiling module. It makes window placement more efficient as it allows you to define how windows are placed on different virtual desktops. No more overlapping windows you have to place right yourself with a mice or similar. The whole space is used, nothing wasted. I use this for my hacking workspaces. Open more and more xterms and don't worry about a sane placement. Great. I wanted something like that since Harald showed me something similar with his ion3 setup on his laptop. :)

Mickey already blogged about it. This is something we talked about a lot lately. Sometimes frustrated sometimes with hope. It is something we never got right since the beginning.

Ease the development of new applications and services. Build your kick ass stuff on top of a good fundament. And if it does not give you what you need, extend it. It's not like other commercial frameworks where you have to deal with what you get. It's open, take it, extend it, send patches. :)

Let's hope the framework team get the resources they need for getting it done. I also have some private ideas how to contribute here. Once I have something ready I let you know.

As code is better then words, take a look at their git repos.

It's over 13 months now since I started to work for OpenMoko. Wednesday was my last day.

I'm not leaving with bad feelings. Still over the last months I disagreed with decisions and directions, got frustrated with the work I had to do. Not the best conditions for a productive work environment.

However I still like to see OpenMoko success. As open as possible mobile phone hardware on which I can flash all kind of software I like. Not fighting against vendor policies but having almost all options I like. Still sounds great to me.

Over the last 13 months I learned a lot. For both, coding and business. Working with some great people from the FOSS community from all over the world and with great taiwanese engineers. (Watch out for these guys, they are awesome but shy) Made new friends and had to deal with an interesting different culture.

It was an awesome but exhausting trip. It's over for now.

I plan to do no paid work for the next 1-2 months, perhaps even longer. In this time-frame I need to come back to the study life I had before and take some rest. Read some good books, hang out with friends and don't worry about deadlines.

After that we will see what kind of work will come in. At least it must be not as much time consuming as OpenMoko was. Need to focus on my studies.

I spent 4,5 nice days in the german capital attending the 24C3. It was the second time i tried my new just-be-relaxed-strategy (First time was at the camp). Mickeyl would say I was throttling again, but I enjoyed it a lot. :)

The relax-strategy also, or better mostly, included to hang out with friends and fellow hackers, chatting, sharing ideas and just having a nice time. The goal was reached.

Some more words about the congress itself. With 4013 it was almost as crowed as last year with 4200 people. Luckily most of the time only the conferences halls were crowed and you were able to get a nice place with power, network and club mate in the rest of the building. That brings me to my last point. The organization of the annual congress has made a huge step forward over the last years. This was my 5th one and I see improvements all over the time.

Only 3% of the talk needed to be cancled. Talks were on time. Streaming of the talks was often working. Places to hang out were nicely prepared. A wide scope of not only programmers, but eletronic geeks, artist, spies, you name it.

Also nice to see is that people engage itself political again.

Thanks for all the fish and hopefully see you next year.

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm interested in SDIO wifi cards that could be supported within a 2.6 linux kernel. Using them to add wifi connectivity to my EZX devices would be nice. EZX devices are based on PXA270 with full SD or microSD slots.

It would now be interesting to know if the Spectec SDIO cards are based on the Atheros 6000 SDIO chip. OpenMoko is working on a GPL driver for this chip. That would hopefully reduce the amount of work to get it running on other devices.

So anybody knows more about the chip Spectec use?

regards

Stefan Schmidt