Danny's Blog

PandaBoard: get persistent MAC address by default

2012-01-20T17:22:00.004+01:00

The PandaBoard/PandaBoard ES, as the BeagleBoard too, don't have a EEPROM on the (USB-) network card to store the MAC address. That's why you get a new MAC and subsequently a new IP address with each boot. You can set the MAC manually via e.g. 'ifconfig eth0 hw ether 01:23:45:67:78:01' or also automatically via the network scripts.

The other solution would be to generate a MAC on OMAP (version > 2) machines by reusing another unique hardware identifier. There is already an old patch written by Mark Crichton for the BeagleBoard. And there was also an patch on the kernel mailing list from Andy Green and some related discussion, but none of them got into the kernel. The problem was that if there are more than one card in the system without EEPROM they all would get the same MAC address. That sounds reasonable to me while I'm not sure that something like this will happen with a high chance out in the field. And since there are objections against exporting the OMAP die ID to the sysfs there is no simple way to handle the MAC generation in userspace (e.g. via udev).

While investigating how u-boot handle the no-EEPROM problem, I've found out that the u-boot code already contain functions to generate a persistent MAC for such devices. The MAC gets also exported to the u-boot environment as usbethaddr. That's why I wrote a patch for the smsc95xx kernel driver (based on a patch from Sebastien Jan) to take a module parameter to set the MAC address via the kernel command line. With this patch the driver takes the following parameter: macaddr=01:23:45:67:89:ab;[tgt-netdevname] and assign the given MAC address to the first device in the system without a MAC on the EEPROM. If there is more than one device without EEPROM you can add the netdevice name to the parameter - separated by a ';' - to assign it to a special device (e.g. for eth0: macaddr=01:23:45:67:89:ab;eth0). If there is no MAC given, the device still gets a random MAC as before.

After patching and installing your kernel, you need to change the u-boot config to pass the $usbethaddr from the environment along to the kernel cmdline. I used a uEnv.txt file (on my boot partition) instead of the legacy/obsolete boot.scr, since you simply can change the file without call mkimage after each change. That's the content of the uEnv.txt file I currently use to set the MAC of my PandaBoard ES:

bootargs=root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext3 console=ttyO2,115200n8 vram=16M omapfb.vram=0:16M

bootcmd=mmc rescan ; setenv bootargs ${bootargs} smsc95xx.macaddr="${usbethaddr}" ; fatload mmc 0 0x82000000 uImage; bootm 0x82000000

uenvcmd=boot

You can find the patch here, I plan to include it into the openSUSE OMAP2+ kernel and to send it upstream as soon as I have some reports back that it also works for others. You can find an kernel RPM for openSUSE Factory here.

How to send patches via git-send-email

2012-01-13T15:25:00.000+01:00

In the past I either directly commited to git or send - if needed - my patches to e.g. mailing list by exporting the patches from my local git repo via 'git format-patch -s origin' and then importing them into my mailer. Yesterday I finally found some time to get git-send-email running to do this for me directly on command line.

First you have to choose if you always use the same email account to send your patches. In this case you need to configure 'git-send-email' this way:

git config --global sendemail.from "YOUR NAME <user@example.org>"
git config --global sendemail.smtpserver imap.example.org
git config --global sendemail.smtpuser USER
# depending on your config you may also set:
git config --global sendemail.smtpencryption tls

If you don't want to enter password for your SMTP server all the time:

git config --global sendemail.smtppass = PASS

If you use different settings/email accounts for different project, you can setup different identities for them. Here one example for btrfs project:

git config --global sendemail.btrfs.to "linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org"
git config --global sendemail.btrfs.from "YOUR NAME <user@example.org>"
git config --global sendemail.btrfs.smtpserver imap.example.org
git config --global sendemail.btrfs.smtpuser USER
git config --global sendemail.btrfs.smtppass = PASS
git config --global sendemail.btrfs.smtpencryption tls

There are some other options you may should use as e.g.:

git config --global sendemail.chainreplyto false

to set the threading format to shallow/flat instead of the deep threading, which is much more readable on a mailing list if you send multiple patches at once.

Now you can send you patches with (you may have to replace origin with the revision you need):

git send-email --annotate origin

If you use an identity e.g.:

git send-email --identity=btrfs --annotate origin

If you didn't commit your changes into your local git branch with the -s option (to get the 'Signed-off-by:' line) you need to add the --signoff option, as I realized after sending my latest patches to the btrfs mailing list. If you send a patch series you may also want to use a cover email to explain something or to write more info. In this case you can use --cover-letter to get git to create and let you edit such an email before sending.

Here the full example command I would use to send my patches:

git send-email --identity=btrfs --annotate --cover-letter --signoff origin

For more info check e.g. the Git Community Book or use your favorite internet search engine.

Some fixes for btrfs-progs ...

2012-01-13T14:04:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I found some time to send some patches for btrfs-progs upstream. Unfortunately the information on the btrfs wiki pages about the source code repositories are completely outdated, either the repo didn't exist or the branch wasn't there as in case of the 'for-chris' branch of the 'Integration repository'. Finally I send them against the repo of Chris Mason listed at git.kernel.org.

The patches fix some possible segfaults and some compiler warnings, you can find them at the mailing list.

CHERRY STRAIT Exclusive Testa Motari Edition

2012-01-03T14:42:00.001+01:00

I got a 'CHERRY STRAIT Exclusive Testa Motari Edition' keyboard at Christmas from my girlfriend. It's a really exclusive keyboard. The top of the board is made out of wood veneer. Since each wood is unique as a fingerprint, no keyboard looks like the other. My keyboard was made with satin walnut, but you can get them also with vavona burl or macassar ebony. The veneer used is certified for sustainable forestry and no tropical wood was used.

The keyboard was derived from the 'CHERRY STRAIT Corded'. The wood was glued to a aluminium plate. Thanks to that detail the 'Testa Motari Edition' is much more torsion-resistant and not that wibbly-wobbly as the original keyboard was reported in some tests (e.g. here).

It's a really cool keyboard with a nice to touch surface. As you can see in the following pictures, the device is very flat. From the ergonomical point of view I miss a way to change the inclination, but it's comfortable to use anyway. I guess you have always to wash your hands before using it, since the wood isn't sealed or varnished.

The key layout needs getting used to: four of the five multimedia keys are on the top of the numeric pad but the 'Play'-key is located between the Print/SysRq key and F12. Also the block between the main keys and the numeric pad is modified and the 'fn' keys are not grouped compared to a standard keyboard.

Résumé: It's an expensive but really nice keyboard! Thanks for the present!

Here some pictures (see more here):

Pandaboard ES: How to get 1 GByte RAM

2011-12-16T14:07:00.000+01:00

Some colleagues told me they have only ~750 MByte RAM available on their PandaBoards. So I checked my PandaBoard ES and it was the same there. As first I tried to set mem=1024M in boot.scr, but this didn't help. After some research I found that our kernel from the openSUSE:Factory:ARM repository wasn't build with HIGHMEM support. But the kernel need HIGHMEM-support to access the memory above 768MB on ARM/OMAP.

I changed the kernel config for the omap2plus package and build a new kernel RPM locally.

As soon as I installed the new kernel and rebooted, I got this:

root@pandboardES:/ # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1010680 54604 956076 0 3516 29384
-/+ buffers/cache: 21704 988976
Swap: 0 0 0

I'll submit a new kernel package, but for now you can get the RPMs here.

PandaBoard ES ... got it up and running openSUSE

2011-12-13T20:21:00.000+01:00

I finally found some time the last days to play with my new PandaBoard ES. As first Dirk Müller helped me by providing an image for my SD-card with an image that worked with the normal PandaBord. Thanks! Unfortunately we couldn't get the machine running with this image.

Later I tried a Linaro Android build and the machine booted. As I copied some of the files from the boot partition to the SD-card with the openSUSE installation it booted into openSUSE. After a hint from Alexander Graf (to change the console in u-boot to ttyO2) I could also access the serial console.

I could now play around and build on the board to find a fix for the openSUSE image Dirk provided to me: Since it didn't boot with the latest u-boot/x-loader git code from mainline, I tired the u-boot git from Linaro. This step finally solved the issue. I created a new u-boot package for openSUSE: u-boot-linaro-omap4panda. While the upstream u-boot package deletes the MLO file at the end of make, the Linaro u-boot doesn't. Therefore the new RPM should obsolete x-loader-omap4panda at openSUSE.

You can get the Factory RPM (temporary) here. I already made a submit request for Base:System ... we will see if and when it gets in.

New PandaBoard ES arrived

2011-12-12T12:05:00.001+01:00

Today finally my new PandaBoard ES arrived from Digi-Key. Here the new features compared to the former PandaBoard:

Dual-core 1.2 GHz ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ (OMAP4460) with SMP from Texas Instruments

provides 25% increase in graphics performance over OMAP4430 (but use a Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR™ SGX540 graphics core as the PandaBoard)

DSI Support

Bluetooth Low Energy Capable

Sysboot switch available on board

The rest of the board should be the same as on the OMAP4430 based PandaBoard. Here some pictures:

Let's start to get an openSUSE running on the machine ... I'll post updates as soon as I found the time to play around with this tiny thing.

Git trouble shooting: none-bare repository

2011-10-31T16:16:00.002+01:00

I had some trouble with my git repositories at freedesktop.org in the past, as you may remember [1,2]. Last week I run in some trouble again. As it looks, they updated the git server to a new version, since the update I got the following error message on push:

[...]
error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master
error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository
error: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent
error: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match
error: the work tree to HEAD.
error:
error: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to
error: 'ignore' or 'warn' in the remote repository to allow pushing into
error: its current branch; however, this is not recommended unless you
error: arranged to update its work tree to match what you pushed in some
error: other way.
error:
error: To squelch this message and still keep the default behaviour, set
error: 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to 'refuse'.
To ssh://dkukawka@people.freedesktop.org/~dkukawka/hal.git
! [remote rejected] master -> master (branch is currently checked out)
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://dkukawka@people.freedesktop.org/~dkukawka/hal.git'

Unfortunately the instructions from the error didn't help me to make push work again. I tried 'git reset --hard'and also to clone the repo again from the server, apply the new patches etc. but it didn't work. Here is what I had to do to get it work again:

go to the repository directory

call 'git config --bool core.bare true'

I don't know how it happened in the first place to be non-bare, but this should set the remote repository again to a bare repo and you are able to push again.

How to get your full disc space back on ext filesystems

2011-08-19T17:09:00.000+02:00

You may have already wondered why you can't use the full disc space on an ext2/3/4 partition? You already seen something like this, where the used and available blocks don't fit the number of blocks on the device/partition:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1 15391664 38184 14571608 1% /mnt

The reason is: if you create an ext filesystem (no matter if with mkfs or YaST), 5 % of the filesystem get reserved for the super-user to allow e.g. root daemons to continue to write to the partition after unprivileged processes stopped because the partition is full.

While this perfectly make sense on system partitions as '/', it makes no sense on data partitions or external media (in the most cases). By this you get e.g. on an external 2TB/1.8TiB drive 100GByte/~92GiB, which you can't use as normal user. But you can get this space back. Either you set the number of reserved blocks to zero when you create the file system:

mkfs -t ext4 -m 0 /dev/sdc1

or you do it later:

# make sure partition is unmounted
umount /mnt
tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdc1

On a LUKS encrypted you have to do this:

# on a LUKS device
umount /media/disk
tune2fs -m 0 /dev/mapper/udisks-luks-uuid-X

You should see this output:

tune2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
Setting reserved blocks percentage to 0% (0 blocks)

And if you mount the device again, you can see with df that you have the full space available:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1 15391664 38184 15353480 1% /mnt

Update for extundelete

2011-08-17T18:50:00.000+02:00

Today I've submitted a new extundelete package to my repo with following fixes:

added man(8) page to the package
fixed --help output to print also info about --restore-directory
added --dump-names option to search for - and print the full name of - deleted and (potentially fully) recoverable files on a given partition

Feel free to test and report problems back. The package is now also part of the filesystems project.

How to undelete files from ext3/ext4

2011-08-09T13:28:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, especially on the command line, it happens that you delete a file or directory you didn't really plan to delete. A second after hit enter you realize what you have done, maybe you are fast enough to stop the deletion process and save some files, but in the most cases it's already to late, at least for some files. If you have no or a too old backup you're screwed.

If you use ext3/ext4 you may be able to recover the file with ext3grep or extundelete with information from the file system journal if the content of the file wasn't already overwritten by new data.

The first step should be to stop all writing processes on the related partition and unmount that partition as soon as possible. Now you have the choice: if your partition uses ext4 you have to use extundelete, if it's ext3 you can use also ext3grep. Personally, I prefer extundelete, since it supports both file systems and seems on one hand much faster to me than ext3grep and it's also easier to use on the other hand. Due to that, the following examples are for extundelete (you can find a ext3grep How-To here).

If you know the path and the name of the file (let's assume it's /home/tux/cv.tex and /dev/sda4 is mounted to /home) you deleted, switch to root and go to a partition with enough free space to store the deleted files. Then:

# extundelete need the relative file path
me:/tmp # extundelete --restore-file tux/cv.tex /dev/sda4

As soon as extundelete finished, you'll find the recovered file in /tmp/RECOVERED_FILES/tux/ .

If you deleted more than one file in a directory or a directory itself, you can use --restore-directory :

# extundelete need the relative dir path
me:/tmp # extundelete --restore-directory tux/Documents/tex/ /dev/sda4

There are some more useful options as --restore-all , --restore-files, --after 'dtime' or --before 'dtime', but in the most cases the two examples above should be enough. You can find both tools in my buildservice repository.

Updated xinput_calibrator packages

2011-08-09T12:20:00.001+02:00

Today I found some time to update the xinput_calibrator packages in my buildservice repository. The new version is 0.7.5. And since someone asked in my last post for 11.4 rpms, I've activated the build also for openSUSE 11.4.

Feel free to test and report back if you have any trouble with the updated version.

How to calibrate your TabletPC

2010-08-30T17:20:00.003+02:00

Since a while e.g. the X11 driver for Wacom tablets should work out of the box, no calibration needed. I didn't test other tablet/touchscreen drivers in the last time, but I assume also some other should work out of the box. But sometimes you still need to calibrate your device.

But how do you calibrate e.g. your wacom tablet on a openSUSE 11.3 or Factory, since there is no wacomcpl anymore in the package, which was used in the past? And how about a evdev based device? Simply use xinput_calibrator. You can get the package for openSUSE from my openSUSE buildservice repo.

After installation follow these steps on shell:

# check if xinput_calibrator found any device
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator --list
Device "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen" id=10

# start calib.: for multiple devices use --device option
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator

You get this screen, follow the instructions:

You get some output with some instructions as soon as you finished the procedure. The preferred way to setup the tablet/touchscreen with the calibration data is coping a snippet from the output into '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf' (as root). Here an example for such a snippet:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "calibration"
        MatchProduct    "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen"
        Option "MinX" "0"
        Option "MaxX" "28606"
        Option "MinY" "0"
        Option "MaxY" "17876"
EndSection

You may need to restart your X-server after setting up the file. If it doesn't work checkout the instructions in the output for other ways to setup the changes.

Tech Tags: TabletPC

Hacking osc (4)

2010-08-19T15:15:00.000+02:00

Here's what some of the major stuff I did on osc in the last weeks:

changed 'osc request revoke' (and also reopen, accept, decline, wipe, revoke) to check the actual state and ask the user to prevent set the same state twice [1]
added new command 'osc requestmaintainership' as shortcut for 'osc creq -a add_role USER maintainer PROJECT PACKAGE' since this command is hard to find for (new) users [2]
changed 'osc request show' to show add_role request info more verbose including requested person/group and the requested role [3]
fix output of 'osc buildinfo' if parameters are missing, show only the available repos (and not the arch) if called from a checked out package [4]
updated osc.complete, added all existing commands to list [5]
added new command 'osc distributions' to get info about active distributions [6]
some changes to respect 'osc -A' and to reuse apiurl instead of reading it again and again from config [7][8]
changed 'osc repos' to filter out disabled repos of a package [9]

Tech Tags: Patches SUSE

[Update] openSUSE: new wiki, and now ...

2010-07-21T17:23:00.000+02:00

Some updates about the new openSUSE wiki issues:

The User:* pages are now finally protected (see bnc#409520 for history).
Looks as if the Special:Import is now finally working also for normal users.

That are good news, but there are some other issues with the wikki:

As already pointed out by some other (e.g. in the 5th comment on this post): older external links to wikipages don't work anymore and there is no hint on the 'empty' page that there is a new wiki with a new structure and where you can find the old wiki. That's really annoying! But there is a info one some pages in the old wiki where to find the new pages (as e.g. here), we need something like that in the new wiki with info where the page was moved. At least as long as this page is empty.
Also the 'google index' is destroyed. If you e.g. search at google.com for 'opensuse nvidia' you find this result on the second place, but the page doesn't exist. Sorry, but it was really a stupid idea to do this change and breaking the google index (and external links) with it.
I know the intention was to cleanup the old wiki and give it a new structure, but the way it was done makes it really hard for the users. If a user look for the replacement of the old Nvidia page in the new wiki, there is no result with the default search, since it was moved to SDB:NVIDIA. You have to enable the search for the SDB namespace manually. IMO this should be activated by default.
Not sure about the plans for the new structure of the wiki atm, have to search for some information about it. But there are some pages missing which are used in the URL-field of old and new (openSUSE 11.3/Factory) rpms. One example is the patterns page (e.g. from the patterns-openSUSE* rpms) and I assume there are others.

Tech Tags: SUSE

openSUSE: new wiki, and now ...

2010-07-13T16:11:00.000+02:00

... a lot of work and some trouble. Since yesterday is the new openSUSE wiki online, as I discovered today as I checked my last week updated user page. The page was gone ... I had to create a new version of the page. Thanks!

I really appreciate the time the openSUSE wiki-team spend on the update, but unfortunately the new wiki don't always work as exprected:

You can export any page via Special:Export (from the old wiki, which you can reach via http://old-en.opensuse.org) and you should be able to import the page via Special:Import. But the import page don't work, you get "Permission error: The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators.". No way to migrate a page from the old to the new wiki for now!
If you 'Log out', you end in a old-style wiki page, which is oddly enough part of the new wiki:

The User:* pages are still not protected. Any user can change the content of your userpage. That's inacceptable! If you don't monitor your page very closely other ppl. may write there whatever they want. Btw. I opened a bug ages ago (2008-07-16) for this problem, but it's still not fixed even though there is already a proposal how to fix it included (bnc#409520).
Due to this post you should recreate to User:* page with a template. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to load/import the template if you already created and saved the content of your page. That's why my page will stay in the old style.

So far so good about the technical part. There is another issue I don't like on the new wiki: the corporate design (CD). Except for the little lizard at the top left corner, there is not that much that differs the openSUSE wiki from other MediaWikis. I miss the distinguishing characteristics to other wikis and the associations to e.g. the design of the current openSUSE installer as you can see if you compare both side-by-side:

Even the sponsor logo is much bigger than the openSUSE lizard. There is no big recognition effect. While it's may not such an issue if you use a prosaic design for a developer service like build.opensuse.org, it's IMO important to have a design with a higher recognition effect for direct user services.

Tech Tags: SUSE

Hacking osc (3)

2010-07-01T15:35:00.005+02:00

Here my latest changes/commits on osc:

extended 'osc wipebinaries' to read package/project from checked out directories [1]
fixed 'osc diff' function which left tempfiles in /tmp after finished [2]
changed 'osc getbinaries' to work also in project dirs. If 'osc getbinaries' get called in a checked out directory all packages of the project get downloaded [3]

Tech Tags: Patches SUSE

ModemManager vs. modems

2010-06-30T11:52:00.003+02:00

The last days I worked on porting newer versions of ModemManager (MM) and NetworkManager (NM) to SLE11-SP1. Basically, the NM version from openSUSE 11.2 plus some patches and the latest MM release v0.4 are working now, but that's not the point of this posting.

It was the first time I touched the code of these tools. My expectation was that ModemManager should contain all modem related code and provide a DBus interface for NM to handle all the networking. The first issue I tested was using a mobile (GSM) via USB. It worked. Also UMTS/CDMA devices should work. But to my surprise ModemManager don't support plain modems (simple old and slow modems like a serial 56k modem) at all. Or did I miss something?

So why is this daemon called ModemManager if there is no modem support? It's all about WWAN devices and not modems. Not that this project is completely new, the first git commit is from July 2008.

If this should be a manager for modems, it should IMO support all kinds of modems like e.g. serial or PCMCIA modems, cable or (A)DSL modems and WWAN devices. Otherwise rename it to WwanManager (or should it be WWANManager?) for example!

Another point that's absurd to me: All the PPPoE handling (as e.g. used for DSL modems) is still part of NetworkManager. And AFAICS the modem dialup support is still covered by pppd and under GNOME by gnome-ppp. It would make much more sense to do all the PPP handling in one place. Until now I assumed NM to be the central place to handle network, but the last days disabused me. The current situation is far far away from being reasonable.

Tech Tags: ModemManager Network

Hacking osc (2)

2010-06-24T15:49:00.005+02:00

The last days I fixed again some issues in osc. This time it was about the 'osc results' options:

fixed 'osc results -a/-r' if you call it from a package directory [1]
fixed and enabled 'osc results -a/-r' also for project directories to be able to filter the output for architecture(s) and/or repo(s) (especially since it can be a long list) [2]

Since I have now commit rights at the osc git repo: it should be in the next release.

Tech Tags: Patches SUSE

Hacking osc

2010-06-12T11:09:00.003+02:00

Last month I found some time to take a look at osc to fix issues and add some stuff I was missing since I have to work with build.opensuse.org and the SUSE internal buildservice (e.g. for updates and maintenance of our enterprise products).

Yes, I know it's some weeks old and now integrated, but anyway. Here is what I've done:

added new 'osc getbinaries REPOSITORY' to checkout the RPMs for all architectures, including the source RPMs, into subdirectories [here]
fix 'osc my' to get the apiurl from checked out packages if possible [here]
make sure that global option -A always works too in a directory with a checked out package [here]
add run_pager() and make osc log/diff work like git log/diff (call less by default to display the result of diff) [here]
fixed some close() statements and some other warnings [here]

Tech Tags: Patches SUSE

How to move local git repo with branches to a server

2010-02-27T11:03:00.011+01:00

As my HAL/hal-info git repos were lost last year at people.freedesktop.org, I restored them from my last existing local checkouts. I simply copied the local checkout/repo to the server and created a new git repository as proposed in the git user manual:

git clone --bare ~/hal hal.git
touch hal.git/git-daemon-export-ok

But as I, some months later, tried to switch to my hal-0_5_12-SUSE_CODE11 branch, there was no such branch. To be exact: there was neither this branch nor any of the upstream branches. I couldn't find any information on the web how to solve this problem. Everything I tried didn't work. When I cloned the new repo from the upstream repo, all branches where available.

At the end I found my own solution once I compared the .git/refs/ directories of the cloned repo from the upstream and the local repo. Looks as if the clone command don't copy the branches under .git/refs/remotes/origin/ to .git/refs/heads/ if you use a local repo/checkout as source. Here is what I did to get my branches available again:

cd hal
find refs/remotes/origin/ -type f | grep -v -E 'HEAD|master' | xargs  cp --target=../hal.git/refs/heads/

I don't know if there is an other, more standard, way to do this. I couldn't find anything else and at least it solved the problem for me.

Tech Tags: git Tutorial HAL

My freedesktop.org stuff is online again

2009-11-12T11:25:00.002+01:00

It's a while since the last post on my blog, so here the latest news:

Two weeks ago, after some weeks of absence, I tried to commit some patches to my hal/hal-info git repo at freedesktop.org, but there was no git repo anymore. In fact my complete home at people.freedesktop.org was empty.

After wonder around about the reason, I found out that the freedesktop admins lost the complete /home filesystem during a power outage (see the announcement). Unfortunately there was obviously no backup (whyever!) and also no email announcement to the affected users after all . That's why my repos weren't reachable for nearly a month. Thanks for the service at people.freedesktop.org in general (really!), but this was a lousy incident handling.

Anyway! You can find now again:

my HAL git repo: here
my hal-info git repo: here
several different versions of the HAL specification: here

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: new keys to match kernel version

2009-03-03T11:43:00.004+01:00

Since a while there is the problem that e.g. suspend quirks or key mappings differ between kernel versions. While machines with newer kernel versions may need no longer to map scancodes (as in case of ThinkPads) or need no special suspend handling anymore, systems with older kernels may need other handling.

With current HAL versions it's not possible to match the kernel versions (e.g. > 2.6.28), except for a special version, because system.kernel.version is a string. This is especially a problem with data from the hal-info package, since the package depends on no special kernel version.

I added a patch to HAL to provide now these new comparable (using e.g. compare_*) keys:

system.kernel.version.major (int)
system.kernel.version.minor (int)
system.kernel.version.micro (int)

This change will be part of the upcomming 0.5.12 release. For openSUSE 11.1 you can get the latest HAL snapshot from my OSBS repo.

Tech Tags: HAL Patches

TabletPCs: fix eraser detection in xournal

2009-03-03T09:52:00.004+01:00

Some weeks ago I got a bugreport for SUSE about problems with automatic eraser detection of Wacom tablets/TabletPCs in xournal. After taking a deeper look into the problem, I discovered that it's again a problem with the naming of the wacom input devices in the xorg.conf.

To find out if the eraser is used, xournal checks for GDK_SOURCE_ERASER. And as it looks GDK can only identify an input device as GDK_SOURCE_ERASER if the devicename starts with eraser. But this is not the case at SUSE products since we use SaX2 which use Mouse[*] as device name.

I wrote a patch for xournal to use xsetwacom to find out if the currently used input device is a eraser, so that the automatic detection is working again and you can use the eraser without selecting the eraser tool again and again. You can find updated xournal packages for openSUSE/SLED in my OSBS repo.

In my opinion the real problem is, that there is (AFAIK) currently no way do mark and identify input devices in X.org as e.g. stylus/eraser/touch. It would make it much easier for applications if there would be a device name independent solution in X in the future.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches

HAL: support for linux leds kernel subsystem

2008-12-11T12:20:00.003+01:00

I've implemented HAL support for the linux kernel leds (light-emitting diode) subsystem some days ago. The new namespace provides these information for leds devices:

leds.device_name: The name of the related led device.
leds.colour: The colour of the LED. (e.g. green, orange)
leds.function: The function of the LED. (e.g. radio, power, standby, batt)

The new leds devices offer via a singleton addon also a DBus interface to set the brightness of the LED. It works the same way as e.g. the org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.LaptopPanel interface by providing a GetBrightness() and a SetBrightness() method. The values for the brightness depends on the kernel driver and should be normally between 0 and 255 (0 normally deactivates the LED, any other value > 0 activates the LED again).

You can get the patches from my git repo [1] [2] [3].

Tech Tags: HAL Patches

HAL: v0.5.12-RC1 released

2008-11-27T16:23:00.004+01:00

I've released today the first release candidate of HAL v0.5.12 and a snapshot of hal-info (20081127). You can get the sources here:

More information about the changes since the last HAL version (v0.5.11, released 2008-05-08) and the last official released hal-info package (released 2008-05-08) can you find here.

For openSUSE 11.1/Factory you can find packages in my openSUSE Buildservice Repository.

Please test the packages heavily and carefully. Please report bugs (no features get included until the final version, as already announced) to the HAL mailing list or via the freedesktop bugzilla.

Tech Tags: HAL

Linux Plumbers Conf: Follow-up

2008-10-30T17:43:00.003+01:00

Six weeks ago the Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 ended in Portland (OR). Yesterday I found the time to fill the "Plumbers Conference Attendee Survey". The survey enable all attendees to address their commendation, but also constructive criticism for a better conference in 2009.

Here some of my points:

It would be really nice to have a official IRC-channel for the conference next year. It would make it easy to get in touch with other attendees or to announce something.
As I already criticised about the Akademy 2008: I missed a list of the attendees, available while the conference, with some information about them (What are they working on? Email address, IRC nickname ...). It would make it much more easier to find the people you are interested in to e.g. discuss a issue/topic. Especially on a new conference with many new people.
I hope the room situation for the microconfs can get improved. In some rooms it was really hard to see the slides because you couldn't even see the screen from the half of the seats if the room was full.
But one of the much important points is: Also six weeks after the conference only a minority, 14 out of48 , of the presentations slides are online available. Is it that hard for a speaker to upload the slides in time? Normally it should be possible for the majority to upload them directly while the conference or shortly after. So please, if you were a speaker: please upload your slide now!

To prevent the impression that I have only to criticise: I've met a lot of new people, but also people I already work with on different projects. It was a great, interesting and enlightening conference. Thanks to the conference team. I hope I can attend again next year ...

Tech Tags: Linux Plumbers Conference

Pictures from Linux Plumbers Conf and BlueZ Dev Meeting

2008-10-09T10:31:00.003+02:00

Back from Portland I found now some time to put some pictures from Portland, the Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 and the BlueZ Developer Meeting 2008 (both took place in Portland (OR), USA) online:

Linux Plumbers Conference (or as slideshow)
BlueZ Developer Meeting (or as slideshow)

Tech Tags: Linux Plumbers Conference BlueZ Dev Meeting Portland Pictures

Linux Plumbers Conf: Linus - Git Tutorial

2008-09-23T01:52:00.002+02:00

Linus Torvalds gave a 'Git Tutorial' at the first day of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2008. Now I found the time to edit the pictures I took while the tutorial. They are almost complete. You should be able to follow the basic content of the tutorial to learn something more about git (if you are not already a git expert). You can find the single screenshots of what Linus did here (and as slideshow here).

It was a really interesting, enlightening and amusing. I don't know if someone recorded the session but would be cool, since it's be much more interesting with all the live comments from Linus.

Tech Tags: Linux Plumbers Conference Portland Linus Torvalds Git Tutorial

Linux Plumbers Conf: Keynote

2008-09-18T18:13:00.009+02:00

Yesterday the contentwise part of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 - with all the talks, BOFs and discussions - started with the keynote of Greg Kroah-Hartman. The topic was "The Linux Ecosystem - What it is - Where you are in it". It was basically about the area of Linux the Plumbers Conf is about: kernel, gcc, X.org, glibc, ALSA, HAL/DBUS ...

In fact the keynote was about the role of Canonical/Ubuntu in this area of Linux. It was about how much Canonical (developers) contributed in the last years to the ecosystem. And as it turned out (not the first time) it wasn't that much. It was maybe hard to hear for the Canonical guys because Greg brought up a painful subject, but I think he was right.

It was a really interesting, cool and amusing keynote. You can find the slides of the talk at Greg's blog. The keynote was recorded, as soon as the video is available you can find a link at Greg's blog.

There is already a reaction from the CTO of Canonical. After reading the blog post methinks thou dost protest too much. And some of the complaining isn't correct at all. He complains for example that the slides don't contain the Novell logo, but IMO this wasn't needed at all since the first slide contained Greg's mail address, which was a @suse.de address. After this slide everyone knows that he is working for SUSE/Novell. But read the post yourself.

Tech Tags: Linux Plumbers Conference Portland Keynote

KPowersave Tip of the Day

2008-09-18T18:13:00.003+02:00

I've seen at SUSE Labs Conference and now at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), that people have trouble to disable Screensaver and Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) on KDE while a presentation/talk.

Here now the "KPowersave Tip of the Day" for Linus Torvalds (which had some problems to find out how to disable the screensaver at the LPC) and all the other KDE users out there:

KPowersave has a 'Presentation' scheme which do everything for you (disable: screensaver, DPMS, autosuspend, autodimm). Simply activate it before starting your presentation:
right click at the KPowersave icon
select 'Set Active Scheme'
select the 'Presentation' scheme

Tech Tags: KPowersave KDE Conference

Back from SUSE Labs ... arrived at Portland

2008-09-15T21:56:00.005+02:00

Friday we traveled back from Liberec (Czech Republic) to Nuremberg after an interesting week at the SUSE Labs Conference. Right now I arrived at Portland International Airport (OR/USA) for the Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 this week (17th-19th. September 2008). I will stay also for the BlueZ Developer Meeting next week (22th - 24th September 2008). This means nearly two interesting and fascinating weeks in Portland full with conferences and the chance to meet some interesting people and listen to also interesting talks.

Tech Tags: Linux Plumbers Conference Portland BlueZ SUSE

Arrived at SUSE Labs Conference

2008-09-08T14:46:00.003+02:00

I arrived today at Liberic (Czech Republic) for the SUSE Labs Conference 2008 from 08.-12. September. It was a really relaxed car-trip from Nuremberg this time.

There are many interesting talks, discussions and hacking planed about different topics as e.g. powermanagement, different kernel topics (Real-Time, filesystems, testing, OOM-killer ...) or network.

Tech Tags: SUSE Conference

TabletPCs: more machines in SaX2 (2)

2008-09-03T21:32:00.005+02:00

I've added again some more TabletPCs (or UMPCs) to SaX2. These machines are now also supported:

Asus R2H (should also cover R2Hv, extended udev rules for this machine to create the /dev/input/evtouch_event link)
Gateway CX2724
HP Compaq TC1100 (I'm not sure if this will work out of the box. There are only some years old reports for the machine and I'm not sure if the special initialization of the wacom device is still needed or if it now may will work out of the box with a recent kernel. If there is a user with such a machine (and may a openSUSE 11.0) please contact me.)
Samsung Q1
OQO 02

Packages (x11-input-evtouch and SaX2) for openSUSE as always from here.

Tech Tags: TabletPCs Patches SaX2

TabletPCs: fixes for linuxwacom

2008-09-03T12:59:00.003+02:00

After updating the linuxwacom package in my openSUSE Build Service repo to 0.8.1-4 I run some test to check if everything is working. It wasn't. The detection of X wacom input devices, which aren't strictly named stylus/cursor/pad/touch, was broken again. As my last patch for this issue was included to the linuxwacom package upstream, there was the problem, that only some distributions package the xf86config lib (why ever). To solve this the package was changed to use the new code only if xf86config is available, but as I now noticed the code was wrongly ifdef'ed. This patch fixes it.

I've send my udev patch for the wacom input devices upstream. Unfortunately the patch isn't included yet. I added fixed/updated udev packages to my repo, but now I decided to remove these RPMs from my repo. I extended the udev rule file of the wacom package instead, since this is easier to maintain. You can find the new udev file here.

You can download/install the updated wacom packages (wacom-kmp and x11-input-wacom*) for openSUSE as always from here.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches Wacom udev

TabletPCs: new machines and fixes for SaX2

2008-08-29T21:29:00.006+02:00

I decided to put the TabletPC related stuff I did the last days into a openSUSE Hackweek project. You can find the whole description of the idea/project at idea.opensuse.org.

So what did I on the last day of Hackweek?

Fixed the x11-input-evtouch package to install also the udev rules, which create for the touchscreen devices /dev/input/evtouch_event. Added another machine (IDEACO IDC 6680) to the list of rules (see patch).
Fixed SaX2 to handle also the ports/device paths of touchscreens correctly. Now SaX2 can also set /dev/ttyS{2,3} correctly and accepts /dev/input/{elo,evtouch_event,touchscreen} as paths.
Moved some existing TabletPC with touchscreens from the Tablet section to the Touchscreen section of SaX2.
Changed SaX2 to set now for all Wacom based TabletPCs the option "Button 2" "3". This enable the right mouse button for the Pen/Stylus button, which is much more practical than the default setting of the wacom driver.

And I added again some more machines:

Clevo TN120R (a.k.a Nexoc Osiris S621) (evtouch)
Gateway C-120X (should be identical to E-155C)
Gateway C-140X/E-295C
Gateway C210X (should be identical to M280E)
HP Compaq 2710p (which should also work for the upcoming 2730p)
Samsung Q1-Ultra (evtouch)

You can find the updated packages (evtouch and SaX2) in my Build Service repo and the patches here.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches SaX2 openSUSE evtouch

TabletPCs: more machines in SaX2

2008-08-28T21:15:00.002+02:00

Today I added again some more TabletPCs to SaX2. With my patches SaX2 and openSUSE now supports also these machines:

Gateway E-155C (thanks Ping Cheng for the data)
HP TC4400
LG C1
LG LT20 Tablet PC
Panasonic Toughbook CF-18
Toshiba Portégé M series Tablet PC
Toshiba Satellite R15/R20
Toshiba Tecra M series Tablet PC

You can get the update SaX2 package as always from here. Let me know if you have a machine which isn't listed yet (send your xorg.conf, lshal output and if needed also calibration data/info) and I add your device to the database.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches SaX2 openSUSE

TabletPCs: HP Pavilion tx2000/tx2100/tx2500 support

2008-08-27T15:35:00.004+02:00

Today I've extended SaX2 to support also the Touch devices of the Wacom USB TabletPCs since the touch input devices have now persistent /dev/input/by-id links (see my last post). My SaX2 version supports now these new machines:

HP Pavilion tx2000 series [2]
HP Pavilion tx2100 series [2]
HP Pavilion tx2500 series [1]
generic Wacom USB TabletPC (added touch device to existing entry) [3]

You can get my SaX2 package for openSUSE 10.2/10.3/11.0/Factory from my Build Service repo (be sure that you also update udev from my repo). As soon as the patches for udev are gone upstream also the SaX2 patches go into the upstream repo.

Let me know if you have any problems with the new entries on these machines. If you e.g. still need to calibrate the input devices manually tell me the BottomX/Y and TopX/Y values and I update SaX2.

Tech Tags: TabletPCs Patches Wacom HP SaX2

Wacom USB TabletPCs: persistent by-id links

2008-08-26T17:17:00.007+02:00

Since the linuxwacom package supports TabletPCs with USB tablets we have the problem to find the correct devices under /dev/input/* for the xorg.conf settings. While the input device of the stylus was easy to find (/dev/input/by-id/usb-Tablet_ISD-V4-event-mouse) but strange named, the input device file for the touch device needed to be searched by the user since there was no persistent link under /dev/input/by-id/ that would allow to use the same link for all USB based Wacom TabletPCs.

Now I've found a way to change udev to set also a persistent by-id link for the touch device. I also change the naming of the link to the stylus device. With my patch you get now these links under /dev/input/by-id/ :

tux@linux:/ # ls /dev/input/by-id/
usb-Tablet_ISD-V4-event-stylus
usb-Tablet_ISD-V4-event-touch
usb-Tablet_ISD-V4-stylus
usb-Tablet_ISD-V4-touch

The input devices you needed for you xorg.conf are the *-event-* links.

If you use openSUSE you can get patched udev versions from my buildservice repo. I've patched also SaX2 to handle the new link names (packages see here). Note: you need SaX2/udev to get everything working correctly and you may need to run SaX2 to update your actual X configuration.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches Wacom udev

How to activate your HP UMTS card

2008-08-22T18:14:00.003+02:00

After starting last week (only) one time Windows on my HP Compaq 2710p the internal UMTS card (HP HS2300 HSDPA Broadband Wireless module) stopped working under Linux again. And as Seife already pointed out: there is no way to activate the card from Linux (at least with kernel version 2.6.26) or the bios. I found today some time to search for a solution since several people asked me how to reactivate the card and since there are also bugreports with this problem.

Seife gave me the hint that may the hp-wmi kernel module, which will be part of 2.6.27, could provide a way to enable/disable the card. And it does. Currently the module don't get loaded automatically, you have to load it manually (modprobe hp-wmi). As soon as you load the module the UMTS card gets enabled, also if deactivated under windows before. Since the module handle the card as WWAN I assume also CDMA cards from HP would be handled the same way.

With hp-wmi the killswitch now enable/disable the WLAN, Bluetooth and the WWAN module automatically. But the user can switch the state also via sysfs. To disable for example the WWAN device you have to do this:

go to /sys/class/rf-kill
find the rfkill device of the WWAN module (grep wwan */name)
use 'echo 1 > rfkill3/state' to activate or 'echo 0 > rfkill3/state' to deactivate the device

I've added a kmp package (hp-wmi-kmp) for openSUSE 11.0 to my buildservice repo. Currently there is no kmp for factory but I guess a 2.6.27 kernel will be available soon (or use the kernel from here).

Tech Tags: Packaging UMTS hs2300

Akademy 2008 ended

2008-08-18T18:13:00.003+02:00

Last Friday (15.08.2008) the Akademy 2008 officially ended. Thursday was the day of the 'Boat Trip on the rivers Dijle, Ruppel and Schelde'. It was a really nice trip with drinks, finger food and a delicious barbecue. The right event/place to discuss KDE and opensource topics with different people.

The conference was really a great event. Many interesting talks, discussions and new information. Thanks to all attendees and the organization team.

What I really missed (again) was a list of all attendees. With some of the information we filled out on registration as e.g. Name, E-mail address, IRC nickname. But also information about: how long (and on which days) a person will be at the conference, what a attendee contributes to KDE or on what he/she is working and maybe also the 'Remaining information' field if there are usefull information. All this would make it much easier to find and contact the correct people. There were so many new attendees this year that it was really hard to find what they do and if it would be important do speak to one of them. There is room for improvement.

Next year the Akademy is planed on the same place as the GUADEC: Gran Canaria. The content of both conferences will be independently, but there will be a number of cross-over sessions for all attendees.

Tech Tags: Akademy KDE

HAL: fixed device locking

2008-08-12T14:30:00.003+02:00

Some days ago I had a discussion with Matthias Kretz at the Akademy 2008 about HAL, the handling of audio devices in HAL and the needs/requirements from the perspective of phonon.

One aspect was that phonon needs to find out of some other tool already uses a audio device. The HAL device locking would be a solution to detect this. I took a look at the HAL code for device locking and while playing around with the interfaces I wondered why it didn't work as it should. The lock information (info.locked* keys) where never removed if the lock owner died or exited without unlock the interface again. The handling was also broken if someone requested more than one lock (e.g. two or more different devices).

I really wonder why there was only one bugreport about problems with device locking (if the lock owner dies). Did nobody ever used these interfaces?

I've wrote a quik patch to solve these problems. As first I changed the hashtable which contains the lock info from key={lockowner}/value={device} to key={lockowner}/value={list of devices} so that locking multiple devices is now possible. And the other part of this patch is to remove the lock based on the old_service_name (and not the new_service_name) on NameOwnerChanged events from DBus to solve the 'lock owner died' problem.

Tech Tags: KDE Akademy HAL

Akademy 2008: Literacy Bridge

2008-08-11T14:27:00.004+02:00

Yesterday the 'KDE Contributors Conference' of the Akademy 2008 ended. And there where of course again several really interesting talks as e.g. 'Location-aware applications with GeoClue' or 'Gallium3D - Graphics Done Right'. But for me the most interesting and impressive talk was the keynote from Cliff Schmidt: 'Digital Audio to Reduce Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease'.

He spoken about the Literacy Bridge, a nonprofit organization which try to fight against illiteracy, poverty and disease by empowering people in the developing world with affordable tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning. The goal is advancing education, health, economic development, democracy, and human rights.

Currently they are building the 'Talking Book Device', a robust/rugged low cost audio player and recorder. The plan is to produce the device for 5 Dollar, so that the people can buy the device themselves. It would allow local organizations and users to produce the content themselves as e.g. to help people to learn reading. An other example: it would enable a doctor to speak instructions on the device for taking pharmaceutical to prevent misusage.

The really impressing on the project and the organization is that they really understand the audience.They cooperate with local groups e.g. in Africa, they understand the people and their needs. And this is in my opinion why the project will success. Compared to the OLPC project this device fits into the existing infrastructure of wide parts of the developing world, it's no high-tech tool, it's easy and intuitively to use and it's really affordable.

You can find more information on the website and the blog of the organization.

Tech Tags: KDE Akademy literacybridge.org

aKademy 2008 started

2008-08-09T16:11:00.003+02:00

I (or we, since there are 8 SUSE developer here) arrived yesterday at Mechelen (Belgium) for the Akademy 2008 (from 9. to 15. August in Sint-Katelijne-Waver). Today the Akademy was opened and there where already some really interesting talks as the keynote ('KDE Community websites: The past, the present and a vision for the future'), 'Future of the KDE Development Model', 'Akonadi Unleashed', 'Deepening KDE and Qt collaboration' or 'Qt on Maemo'.

Thuesday is the 'Embedded and Mobile Day' with interesting talks about QT and KDE on Maemo. I have to ask there the Nokia/maemo people about the handwrite recongnition (HWR) on the N810. I couldn't find yet any usefull information about the backend which do the recognition. Currently there is no good free HWR for Linux TabletPCs available (except maybe Cellwriter, which support grid-entry based input, but no natural writing). It would be really cool if Nokia would share the HWR so that TabletPCs under Linux could get more usable than currently.

Tech Tags: KDE TabletPC

TabletPC: ASUS R1E/R1F support

2008-08-01T12:40:00.003+02:00

I added support for two USB Wacom based TabletPCs from ASUS, the R1E and the R1F, to SaX2 ([1]). Unfortunately SaX2 wasn't able to handle the "Device" correctly, neither /dev/input/wacom nor /dev/input/by-{id,path}/* was excepted by SaX2 also if it was correctly set in the config database entry. The input device path was always set back to /dev/input/event0 and not only TabletPC where affected. I fixed it with a patch ([2]) to extend the existing path checks.

While fixing the USB device paths I also discovered a problem with the serial (/dev/ttyS*) device paths while testing the existing entry for the HP tc4200 which needs to use COM-3 (/dev/ttyS2). The device was always set to /dev/ttyS1. Fixed also this problem with a patch ([3]) for SaX2.

Additionally I've extended the existing generic 'Wacom ISDV4 TABLET PC (SERIAL)' entry to support also Touch devices and added a new generic entry for TabletPCs with USB Wacom devices [4].

You can find an updated SaX2 version (including all patches) for openSUSE 10.2-Factory in my repo.

Tech Tags: TabletPC SaX2 openSUSE

TabletPCs: support for WACOM USB Tablets

2008-07-31T15:22:00.002+02:00

Great news: the linuxwacom package supports now also TabletPCs with internal USB WACOM tablet devices. This means there is now support for e.g. the ASUS R1F or the Hewlett-Packard tx2000z/tx2130ea/tx2500z.

To get the tablet supported you need a new version of the wacom kernel module. I've added a new wacom-kmp package to my openSUSE Build Service project with an updated version of the module including a working version for kernel 2.6.26. The package is available for openSUSE 10.2/10.3/11.0 and factory. You should also update x11-input-wacom to the latest version from the same repo.

Currently I'm working on an updated and extended version of SaX2 to easily configure also these TabletPCs. As soon as I've a new SaX2 package available I'll announce it here.

Tech Tags: TabletPC

Lenovo ThinkPad X61t Touch support

2008-07-25T18:11:00.003+02:00

As I already wrote in the last post the linuxwacom driver now works with Touch devices as used in the Lenovo ThinkPad X61t. Today I tried to use the touch device, but unfortunately it's not full working with default settings as the other wacom input devices on TabletPCs. By default you can only use a part of the screen, the cursor never reaches the last 2-3 cm to the border of the screen.

I tried to calibrate the device with wacomcpl but I got alway an error. The reason was that wacomcpl wrongly detected all wacom input devices as core devices. I had to fix wacomcpl first, you can find the patch here.

Sadly also the fixed version of wacomcpl wasn't able to calibrate the touch device correctly. The touch device get active as soon as you hit the display with you finger or a non-EMR pen. This get interpreted by wacomcpl as click, you don't have a chance to put the cursor on the cross to get a value for calibration. Because of this I played around with xsetwacom and the ButtomX/Y and TopX/Y options on the X61t. Here the values I added to my SaX2 version to get the device usable:

Option "BottomX" "915"
Option "BottomY" "950"
Option "TopX" "48"
Option "TopY" "79"

I hope this make the X61t now usable. You can get updated SaX2 and x11-input-wacom packages here. But it would be nice if the autocalibration in the driver could get fixed including wacomcpl.

Tech Tags: TabletPC SaX2 openSUSE

openSUSE: Better TabletPC support

2008-07-24T17:33:00.009+02:00

Since a while some newer TabletPCs uses Wacom Tablets with Multitouch support which allows to use the Tablet with the pen but also with your fingers as a Touchscreen. One example is the Lenovo ThinkPad X61t.

The linuxwacom X11 driver now also provides touch support. It's realised as a new input device with option "Type" "touch". These devices work only on TabletPCs and with the option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4".

Since SaX2 currently only supports the configuration of the Stylus (Pen) and the Eraser devices I had to extend Sax2 to allow also the configuration of Touch devices. You can find my patch here and an updated SaX2 package (for openSUSE >= 10.2) in my openSUSE Build Service home repo (you need also the latest x11-input-wacom packages from there to get the full support).

Here a screenshot of the new 'Electronic Pens' tab of SaX2 from a Lenovo X61t:

If you have an other TabletPC with Wacom Multitouch support feel free to send me an email with your xorg.conf and some information about the machine and I add the machine to SaX2, so that you be able to configure your machine very easily.

Tech Tags: TabletPC SaX2 openSUSE

Fixing UMTSmon Sierra Wireless port detection

2008-07-19T01:10:00.004+02:00

Yesterday I tried the first time to run UMTSmon on a HP Compaq 2710p TabletPC with a HP HS2300 HSDPA Broadband Wireless module (which is a Sierra Wireless). Unfortunately I couldn't unlock the SIM card with the correct PIN, while it worked under Windows and on a HP Compaq 2510p which has the same UMTS card.

With some hints/help from Seife I found out that the ttyUSB* ports for PPP and AT are twisted (compared to the 2510p). Since the cards in both machines have the same USB vendor and product id UMTSmon can't differ between both cases.

To solve this problem I added some code to UMTSmon to identify the PPP port from the output of the ATI command. The answer of the PPP port contains 'APP1\n'. This allows for Sierra Wireless cards with two ttyUSB ports to find always the correct port. You can find the patch on the UMTSmon mailing list or here.

Tech Tags: Patches UMTSmon

HAL patch collection (5)

2008-07-10T18:25:00.003+02:00

Here my actual HAL patch collection. I didn't send them to the HAL ML yet, but I try as soon as I find the time.

a patch to fix handling of PMU battery and AC if the devices are available via the power_supply kernel interface to fix problems with duplicated devices from the proc interface (should also fix fd.o#15482)
patch for fd.o#16427 to fix the PropertyModified signal in SPEC to do what the code already do
small memory leak fix
a patch to remove the storage.model property from all volume devices (it's always empty and should be only part of devices which use the storage namespace)
a bigger patch to cleanup the code of some addons, removed check_priv() from the addons and added it to a new file to be able to simply reuse it for all addons if needed
a patch to prevent get truncated model strings for some IDE devices (I think it's atm not the final version of the patch, this need some more testing)
a patch to fix the FDI match directive for the uint64 type (fd.o#16575)

I wrote also two patches to improve the performance of HAL. These patches move some often used stuff from the scripts to addons to prevent multiple (at least 2-3) forks for each DBus method call. The patches are:

one for the generic kernel backlight interface
and another for the Intel WLAN (ipw) killswitch interface

These patches are against current HAL git or against the v0.5.11 sources. If a link to a patch doesn't work, the patch was maybe moved to this directory. The patches are already part of the HAL package in my openSUSE Factory buildservice repo.

Tech Tags: HAL Patches

Hunting for a job as linux developer?

2008-06-16T17:40:00.004+02:00

Are you seeking for a job as a open source software developer? Do you have experience with Linux and are you interested in develop software for Linux? You have knowledge of technologies related to laptops/mobile devices as e.g. WLAN, ACPI, Bluetooth, HAL, power management, device drivers or data synchronisation? You are a good C/C++ developer?

Then the SUSE/Novell Mobile Devices Team has probably a interesting job offer for you. We are looking for a talented, energetic Software Developer to increase our team. You can find the full job description here. SUSE offer competitive salaries and benefits. As far as I know the job location is not necessarily Prague.

If this sound interesting to you, mail us your application documents (for contact see here) and feel free to let me know.

Tech Tags: SUSE

TabletPCs: fix for xsetwacom

2008-06-13T12:32:00.003+02:00

We had some trouble with rotation of wacom input devices on openSUSE 10.3/11.0 (see bugs #387127, #399016 and #391466) if the screen content get rotated via the XRandR extension.

The source of the problem was the way 'xsetwacom --list' try to identify the configured wacom input devices. The tool try to find them based on the device name (Identifier in xorg.conf) which don't work if you set other names than cursor, stylus, eraser or pad. But this is what SaX2 do if you configure a Tablet, they get named 'Mouse[x]'. Because of this (the patched version of) krandrtray (KDE) and resapplet (GNOME) were no longer able to find the devices which need to get rotated with xsetwacom.

To solve the problem I ported and extended an old patch from Stefan Dirsch from 2005 to the current package/source. With this patch xsetwacom now check the xorg.conf for devices which uses the wacom driver and check then the Type field/option for the device type.

The upcoming openSUSE 11.0 contains the patch already. For older openSUSE releases you can find updated packages in my openSUSE build service repository. All other people can get the patch for v0.7.9 and v0.8.0 of linuxwacom here.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches

KPowersave Test Cases

2008-06-13T02:31:00.003+02:00

To improve the quality of KPowersave I've wrote some test cases for the most important functionality and features of KPowersave and added them to a test plan in the internal Novell Testopia system.

Since Testopia isn't available for external people I've added the same test cases to the SVN repository of KPowersave (see here) so that every interested person can follow the instructions and report bugs and regressions. You can get the test case also as a tar.bz2 package from ftp or as plain text files here.

All cases are about KPowersave running under KDE3. Every test run, against the latest KPowersave (SVN) version, and bugreport (with the number or name of the failed test case) would be appreciated.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

HAL 0.5.11 released

2008-06-05T18:55:00.005+02:00

Yes, it's a delayed blog entry ... I forgot to blog as I officially announced HAL v0.5.11 and a hal-info package (20080805) last month.

You can download the source packages here:

A list with all changes since the last release can you find here or in the announcement email on the HAL mailing list.

Thanks to all contributors, testers and bugreporters which helped during the (too) long release cycle. I hope we see the next release faster (than the 8 months between 0.5.10 and the actual version).

Small note for openSUSE user: this HAL/hal-info version is already part of the upcoming openSUSE 11.0.

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: v0.5.11-RC2 released

2008-03-17T23:27:00.004+01:00

Due to problems with the 'parallel event processing'-patches I've opened a branch for hal v0.5.11. We reverted the relevant changes in this branch and added some patches from the list.
I've decided to stretch the announced release plan with a RC2 to get some time or testing. At the moment I plan to release the final 0.5.11 until Friday (2008-03-21) if there are no new critical bugs.

You can download the snapshots here:

For openSUSE (Factory/11.0) you can find packages in my hal-beta openSUSE Buildservice Repository as soon as they get build.

For more information about the changes since the last release check this email. Please test the packages carefully and report bugs to the HAL mailing list or via freedesktop bugzilla. Special thanks to Rob Taylor and Sjoerd Simons for testing and patches.

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: v0.5.11-RC1 released

2008-03-14T01:24:00.003+01:00

I've released some hours ago the first release candidate of HAL v0.5.11 and a snapshot of hal-info (20080313). You can get the sources here:

For more about the changes since the last HAL version (released 2007-10-12) and the last offical released hal-info package (released 2007-12-12) can you find here.

For openSUSE you can find packages in my hal-beta openSUSE Buildservice Repository (named as git snaphot to prevent problems with update packages later).

Please test the packages heavily and carefully. Please report bugs (no features get included until the final version, as already announced) to the HAL mailing list or via the freedesktop bugzilla.

Tech Tags: HAL

HAL: release schedule for v0.5.11

2008-03-11T00:51:00.005+01:00

The next HAL version is on the way and since I manage this time the release, here the current release schedule for hal v0.5.11:

feature and major changes go into until Wednesday (2008-03-12)
HAL 0.5.11 RC1 get announced and offered as source package (2008-03-13)
bugfixes and hal-info related changes until Friday (2008-03-14)
release of new version on the weekend (2008-03-16), or depending on open critical bugs by Monday (2008-03-17) at the latest.

I would like to see atm these (major) patches go into the release:

optimization patches (Rob Taylor) [1] ff.
TabletPC support (Danny Kukawka) [2]

So please review and test them carefully. Let me know, if there are other patches left, that need to go into the release.

Tech Tags: HAL

Hacking umtsmon

2008-03-10T13:42:00.002+01:00

After I had a beer with Klaas van Gend (the UMTSmon developer) and some members of the UUGN (that's from Seife: "umtsmon user group Nuremberg") two weeks ago, I hacked a little on UMTSmon.

Here what I did:

added support to sort the content of QTable objects of the info dialog (bug #1616485) [1]
fixed tabstop order for some widgets [2][3]
reduce the really annoying flickering of the LCD widget in the main window, by use QWidget::setPaletteBackgroundPixmap() instead of QLabel::setPixmap() to draw the background image [4]

There are some ideas left to improve UMTSmon, some really nice features, we will see if and when I find the time to implement them ...

Tech Tags: Patches

HAL: some deprecated keys ...

2008-02-27T15:38:00.003+01:00

... will be removed from HAL with end of this month, because they are deprecated since 12 months now and already replaced by other keys/properties. The affected keys (old --> new/replacement) are:

2008-02-28:

smbios.system.manufacturer --> system.hardware.vendor
smbios.system.product --> system.hardware.product
smbios.system.version --> system.hardware.version
smbios.system.serial --> system.hardware.serial
smbios.system.uuid --> system.hardware.uuid
smbios.bios.vendor --> system.firmware.vendor
smbios.bios.version --> system.firmware.version
smbios.bios.release_date --> system.firmware.release_date
smbios.chassis.manufacturer --> system.chassis.manufacturer
smbios.chassis.type --> system.chassis.type
system.vendor --> system.hardware.vendor

2008-03-01:

info.bus --> info.subsystem
*.physical_device --> *.orginating_device

Please note, that there are some other (IMO rarely used) keys which are planed to be removed end of March:

2008-03-21:

usb_device.speed_bcd (int) --> usb_device.speed (double)
usb_device.version_bcd (int) --> usb_device.version (double)

Please check your packages for these keys (code and shipped fdi-files) and prepare them for the next HAL package. If you use openSUSE or you package RPMs for openSUSE: the next HAL version for openSUSE 11.0 (Beta) will be shipped without support for these keys.

Tech Tags: HAL Packaging SUSE

New/updated packages ...

2008-02-02T20:13:00.000+01:00

... I have added new packages to my openSUSE Build Service homeproject for SLE-10 and openSUSE 10.2 - Factory. Some of them already existed in some other projects in the buildservice or in other places, but not up-to-date.

The new packages are:

KBlogger v1.0 Alpha 2 for KDE4
QSvn v0.6.1 for QT4
QGit v1.5.8 for QT3
QGit v2.1.1 for QT4
SVK v2.0.99_991

Some other packages get updated:

CellWriter to v1.3.3
kvkbd to v0.4.8
Jarnal to v9.20

HAL: sysfs ACPI batteries fixed

2008-01-31T11:31:00.002+01:00

With the recently released linux kernel v2.6.24 and if configured with ACPI_PROCFS_POWER and ACPI_SYSFS_POWER, you get now two ACPI battery interfaces in the system. One, as before, under /proc/acpi/battery/ and a new in the power_supply subsystem in the sysfs under /sys/class/power_supply/ . HAL listed both batteries, which was fixed by show the proc batteries only if there is no power_supply battery in the system [1]. Unfortunatly the sysfs battery was never updated (except on add/remove events of the AC adapter). This could lead, besides missing information updates, to a system crash on empty batteries if the userspace tools as e.g. KPowersave trusted these information. They never reached critical battery levels in this case.

I have now fixed this problem in HAL git master with several patches (last one was this), which also fix the power_supply battery handling in general (since it were several bug in the code). HAL poll now the power_supply ACPI batteries every 30 seconds as HAL already does for proc batteries. The code should work basicly, but I assume there are some corner cases left. Need to check the existing ACPI code for the proc batteries to find and port them. Maybe it make sense to split up the ACPI sysfs battery part from the existing power_supply handling to merge it into the existing ACPI code ... we will see.

I have added an updated HAL version for openSUSE factory (and for openSUSE 10.3 as testing package) to my OSBS HAL project repo and to the next Alpha2 of openSUSE 11.0. Fell free to test and report problems.

Tech Tags: HAL ACPI battery sysfs

Fixed KDBus

2008-01-11T14:45:00.000+01:00

I commited today two fixes to the KDE SVN to make KDBus usable again on DBus method calls:

fixed show the input widgets for input/output method parameters, show in the 'Output:' section only the output and not again also the input parameter widgets [1]
fixed handling of boolean method parameters, now you should be able to call e.g. SetPowerSave(bool) on the org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement interface again without errors [2]

Updated RPM packages are already available for openSUSE 10.2 - openSUSE Factory and SUSE Linux Enterprise (Desktop) 10 as always in my openSUSE Build Service project.

Tech Tags: KDE Patches Packaging

New hal-info package released

2007-12-13T13:47:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I released a new package of hal-info. The new version (20071212) contains now also most of the suspend quirks from the s2ram whitelist. For more information about the changes see the release mail on hal@lists.freedesktop.org.

For openSUSE you can get an up-to-date hal package (which contains the latest hal-info) for Factory and 10.3 here.

Tech Tags: HAL hal-info

HAL patch collection (4)

2007-11-26T10:09:00.000+01:00

Here my actual HAL patch collection. I send them already to the HAL mailing list, but they are not aproved yet (also because David isn't active/present on the list).

a patch to remove the Eject() methode from dm-devices. The eject command is a ioctl and not supported by dm-devices (at least on Linux). On crypto volumes you should use Teardown() instead, which do the same.
a patch to fix calculation of the remaining time of ACPI batteries, if they report the wrong charging state (e.g. if they report 'charged' if the battery is charging). With this patch HAL try to guess the correct state depending on the AC state and the state of the other primary ACPI batteries in the system.
a small fix to prevent endless loops on fdi-files with a empty rule (only a match, but nothing merged etc.).
two patches for the Dell brightness [1] and killswitch [2] (against hal-info) devices. With kernel 2.4.24 (or this patch) there is now a uevent if the platform device of the dcdbas module get added/removed. Attach the Dell devices now to this platform device in the HAL device tree. This should fix the problem that HAL provide the Dell devices and methodes also if the needed kernel module isn't loaded.
extend HAL try to get the smbios information from sysfs on startup instead of call a prober (which call dmidecode, parse the output and set the properties to HAL). If /sys/class/dmi/id isn't present it falls back to the prober.
small fix to ignore module and drivers uevents in HAL, since they aren't events for devices
a patch, needed also for the Dell devices, to remove also via fdi-files spawned devices if the parent device get removed. Currently the devices get not removed, also if they are not visible in lshal (because the parent was removed), which mean also the may started addons get not stopped.
two patches to add more checks: to the partutil code [3] which should prevent possible crashes and to libhal [4] to check e.g. if a given UDI is valid (should start with: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/)
extend HAL to add also drm (Direct Rendering Manager) devices to the device tree.
a fix to stop HAL from flood syslog with warnings if the remaining time get over 60 hours (which can happen on broken batteries)
small patch to fix possible segfaults if HAL get compiled without IDs (PCI/PnP/USB) support

These patches are against current HAL git. As always: you can find all my current HAL patches here, if a link to a patch doesn't work, the patch was maybe moved to this directory. The patches are already part of the HAL beta package in my openSUSE buildservice repo.

Tech Tags: HAL Patches

TabletPCs: Cellwriter

2007-11-06T16:31:00.000+01:00

Recently I found a new cool tool for TabletPCs: Cellwriter. The developer describe it as 'a grid-entry natural handwriting input panel' and it reminds me to the input panel on the Windows XP TabletPC Edition.

It provides a way to enter text by write characters with a pen to a grid. The big advantage in comparison with e.g. tools like xstroke is: there are no limitation for the way you write a character. You can take off the pen for one character and write points or an other line. This allows to write all characters of Unicode (e.g. German umlauts or chinese). As first you have to train the tool to correctly recognize your input. For this you can use the 'Train'-dialog where you should write each char five times into the related grid.

After the user trained CellWriter, he can use it to simple input text, commands or whatever to any desktop application that has the focus. Cellwriter show as applet e.g. in the KDE Panel and can get hide/shown via click on the applet icon. You can place the window free on the desktop or dock it to Top or Bottom of the screen. The input dialog allows also to correct wrong recognized input or to simply delete input. If you finished, simply press enter to send the text to the application with the input focus.

If you prefer to enter text via a virtual keyboard, CellWriter has also a solution for this. Simply press on the Keys icon and you get a virtual keyboard. Unfortunately this works for me only if the window is docked to the screen, but I assume it is a bug. There is also some more room for improvement: I could not find a way to configure the layout of the virtual keyboard, it was always US.

Cellwriter is a relative young project. The Changelog show the initial package is from end of August 2007. But it is a great tool and work well, also if there is some room for improvements:

The user need to train the tool before use the first time. It would be useful to have a basic pre-trained mode, which would allow the user to simply use it from the first start (at least for basic Latin characters).
The keyboard need to get fixed (see above) and should support configurable key maps.
If CellWriter is docked it should simply roll itself up if the focus get lost (like yakuake). If Cellwriter is in not docked the window is unfortunately always on top, thats annoying.
It would be cool if Cellwriter would detect input areas automatically and would show a icon besides this area to pop-up the input window. Not sure if this is that simple or if this need some changes in the desktop environments, but it should be IMO possible.

Conclusion: Cellwriter is a great tool, I like it. It allows TabletPC users to get basic, but natural handwrite recognition. Simply forget xstroke, this tool is very much powerful. I have already packaged it for openSUSE 10.2, 10.3 and Factory. You can get the packages from my repository. Feel free to install and use it. We plan to add the package to the next openSUSE release.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Packaging SUSE

KPowersave 0.7.3 released

2007-11-04T00:28:00.000+01:00

Some days ago I released the next version of KPowersave (v0.7.3). Also if this is a package is marked on sf.net as 'unstable', which mean it's from the development tree, this is a really stable version.

Here a list of the major changes since the last release:

new feature autodimm, which allow to reduce the brightness of the display automatically if the user get inactive (after a defined time) and dimm up if the user get active again
new dialog shown up 30 seconds before autosuspend call the suspend, to warn the user and allow chancel the suspend
new dialog to show logfiles if a suspend/resume fail and allow the user to save the log (need to get enabled per distribution, depending on the suspend solution)
added code to check if the current desktop session is active and handle usecases if the session get inactive (via ConsoleKit)
KPowersave work with new PolicyKit/ConsoleKit/HAL combination and checks if the user is privileged (for HAL >= 0.5.10 and related PolicyKit versions)
prepared to work also with HAL >= 0.5.10 (handle renamed policy names in HAL)
release/aquire org.freedesktop.Policy.Power if the session get inactive/active to allow powersaved or other active KPowersave instances to handle powermanagement
use now kdebug functions instead of own macros, added --dbg-trace option to allow trace function entry and leave points

The release contains also many smaller changes and lots of bugfixes and translation updates. For a complete list of changes, take a look at the package Changelog or the commit log which is part of the source.

You can download the source and rpms as always via kde-apps.org or directly via the sourceforge project page. On sf.net are besides the source tar.bz2 already packages for these distributions (for ix86 and x86_64) available: Mandriva 2007.1/2008, openSUSE 10.2 (also for ppc) and Fedora Core 6/7/8. The package is already part of the released openSUSE 10.3.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

Novell is now Patron of KDE

2007-07-06T11:30:00.001+02:00

Great news: Novell became as first Linux distributor an official patron of KDE. I don't understand why this wasn't announced by Novell yet. I could only find Novell now listed on a webpage of KDE e.V.: 'Supporting Members', but I think this is a good step of Novell/SUSE to give some back to the (KDE) community.

Tech Tags: KDE Patron Novell

FujitsuSiemens TabletPC button module

2007-06-19T10:39:00.000+02:00

There is, since some months, a new project to support the buttons of Fujitsu Siemens TabletPCs (T- and P-series machines with FUJ02bf pnp devices) including the 'Application Panel'. The project called fjbtndrv provide a kernel module to get the tablet button and the brightness key events via the input layer (/dev/input/event*).

Additionally, and this is IMO the best, the module catch the tablet rotation event from convertible FSC TabletPCs. This allow us now to detect the state of the tablet (open/rotated-closed) and react on the event e.g. in KDE via KRandRTray and rotate the screen. Together with IBM/Lenovo we have now a way for machines of two major manufacturers to go a step forward with TabletPCs.

I packaged a KMP rpm for openSUSE 10.3/factory. You can download the rpm (fsc_btns-kmp) as always from my home project in the openSUSE build service. The package get later included into the SUSE distribution.

What are my next planed steps to improve TabletPC support?

extend the wacom X.org driver to rotate automatically with XRandR extension
extend KRandRTray to:

get rotation events
get events from rotate hotkeys
allow the user to configure if and how to rotate the screen on these events

Tech Tags: Packaging TabletPC

Fujitsu P-Series tablet driver

2007-05-21T12:30:00.000+02:00

Since SLE10/SUSE 10.1 SaX2 supports to configure the touchscreen of the Fujitsu Siemens P-Series Tablet PCs. Unfortunately the needed driver for the X server wasn't free available at this time IIRC.

Some weeks ago I added a repackaged version (merged libtouch code from the evtouch driver and added the code to a working autotool package) of the fujitouch driver (v0.6.3) for openSUSE 10.2/10.3 to my home project at the openSUSE build service which work with Xorg 7.2. Unfortunately I had no access to a p-series machine, but I got contact to a user with a P1610 which helped with testing to get the package basically working (only rotation via tools like KRandRTray didn't work).

Now there is a new version 0.6.4 which support automatically rotation via the XRandR extension and which use the same package structure as my version of 0.6.3. You can find RPMs (including some patches to build correct) for SUSE here, feel free to install and report problems via the Novell Bugzilla. The package get merged into the SUSE distributions as soon as the driver work as expected.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Packaging

KPowersave in openSUSE build service

2007-05-16T14:30:00.000+02:00

Since some weeks I provide SVN snapshots of KPowersave via the openSUSE build service for openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3/factory. You can get the packages from my home project. Feel free to test and report bugs via openSUSE bugzilla (assign to: dkukawka_at_novell_dot_com).
If I find the time and muse I add also packages for other distributions (patches for the spec-file are welcome) sometime.

SUSE Tablet PC support

2007-03-13T19:51:00.000+01:00

In the last week I worked on better Tablet PC support for SUSE Products. Her now some infos about the progress:

I packaged a special 'SaX2 Tablet PC Edition' (available for SLE10/10.2/10.3) which fix the existing Tablet PC support and provides now more support in for Tablet PCs in the Tablet section than the normal sax version (IBM X41, ACER TM C300/C301/C302 series, Fujitsu Lifebook T series (T3010/T4010), HP Compaq TC4200, Motion M1200 and M1400 and general Wacom Tablet PCs). Feel free to download and install, but also to report your special settings for other machines to me.
Added a updated version of the wacom input driver (for SLE10/10.2/10.3), Jarnal and Xournal to my home project.
Getting a Gateway M280e Tablet PC running. This machine use a Finepoint tablet instead of a Wacom device. You need the x11-input-fpit driver to be able to use the tablet. I added a package for openSUSE 10.2 to my home project at the openSUSE Buildservice, for openSUSE Factory/10.3 the x11-input-driver package should be up-to-date and contain a working version of the fpit-driver. To setup the device on 10.2 you need to install setserial and call this as root on command line:
setserial /dev/ttyS0 port 0x03F8 irq 4 baud_base 38400
For factory/10.3 this should happen automatically via HAL (a updated HAL version for 10.2 will follow the next days). To configure your X-Server you should download and install my 'SaX2 Tablet PC Edition' where you can simply select the Finepoint device in the Tablet section.

Tech Tags: TabletPC, Packaging

KPowersave Debian / (K)Ubuntu packages

2007-03-07T17:23:00.000+01:00

Now are also updated packages (v0.7.2) of KPowersave for Debian via experimental available (see here). Thanks to Michael Biebl for packaging and maintain the package for Debian.

Also thanks to Luka Renko for update the Ubuntu/Kubuntu KPowersave package to v0.7.2. As it looks also many people would like to see KPowersave as default (see e.g. this discussion) on Kubuntu. Maybe Kubuntu can switch from the guidance-power-manager to KPowersave (since we use now HAL instead of powersave) as default under KDE ?!

Feel free to test the packages and report bugs to your distribution.

Tech Tags: KPowersave Packaging

KPowersave Mandriva/FC 6 packages

2007-02-23T13:12:00.000+01:00

Today/yesterday I released new packages of KPowersave v0.7.2 for Mandriva 2007.1 and Fedora Core 6 on SourceForge.net. You can download the RPMs and SRPMS for ix86 and x86_64 from the project home page. Report bugs for these distributions as always via sf.net bugzilla or the powersave-users mailing list.

Tech Tags: KPowersave, Mandriva, Fedora

KPowersave 0.7.2 released

2007-02-19T15:16:00.000+01:00

This weekend I release the new KPowersave version 0.7.2. from the development tree. This release is really a major step to the next stable version/tree 0.8.x. As first: forget the tutorial I wrote for v0.7.1 to manually change the settings of KPowersave - you don't need it anymore. You can now change all settings via the new updated configure dialog.

Here a list of the major changes since the last release:

extended/updated configure dialog to provide this functionality:

schemes settings:

add new and delete existing (no default) schemes
define a CPU Frequency policy for each scheme

general settings:

define battery warning levels and actions if a level reached as e.g. Suspend to disk, Shutdown or change the brightness
configure actions for button events (Power/Lid/Suspend/Sleep)
define the default AC and battery schemes

show now the power consumption of the battery in the detailed info dialog if discharging
umount external media before suspend (need a patch of the KDE media manager) to avoid data loss and remount on resume
reset the CPU Freq settings on resume to avoid different CPU governors on multicore /CPU machines
call now SetCPUFreqConsiderNice(), SetCPUFreqPerformance() on dynamic CPU Freq policy (as poweruser setting only changeable via config file) and also SetPowerSave() with true on battery and false otherwise
support also conservative governor as DYNAMIC fallback
fixed brightness handling in the configure dialog if not activated
removed accelerator tags from i18n() strings. KDE handle this by itself.
Improved config GUI to be better accessible via keyboard.
code and code documentation cleanups and updates

I also fixed many bugs since the last version for more information read the release news. Due to the changes in the config GUI and the removed accelerator tags the most translations are currently not up-to-date (full translated: de, da, tr, zh_CN and zh_TW). Thanks to the following people for sending updates for their languages: Stefan Skotte (danish), S.Çağlar Onur (turkish) and Zhengpeng Hou (chinese). Any help on update translations would be really appreciated.

You can download the source and rpms as always via kde-apps.org or directly via the sourceforge project page. Currently are only rpms for openSUSE 10.2 available, other distributions will follows in the next days.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

Linus vs. GNOME

2007-02-19T14:32:00.000+01:00

Do you remember the little flamewar between Linus Torvalds and GNOME December 2005 as he "encouraged people to switch to KDE" and called GNOME developer "interface nazis"?

Now the continuation: Linus wrote and submitted some patches for GNOME to change the behavior as he like it. You can follow the discussion on the Desktop Architects mailing list and get information about the patches here.

Here two quotes from one of Linus mails:

So let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code (not just add a feature). I also guarantee that they actually make things *more* logical rather than less (with my patches, double-clicking on the title bar isn't a special event: it's configurable along with right- and middle-clicking, and with the exact same syntax for all).

Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.

IMO he is battlesome as always, but by sending patches also more constructive ;-)

Tech Tags: GNOME Linus

KPowersave outlook to 0.7.2

2007-01-30T14:12:00.000+01:00

Currently I work on the next KPowersave version 0.7.2. The most work is already done and the new configure GUI get finished for this version. Here two screenshots of the new dialog.

The first show the new schemes section which now allow to create new and delete existing schemes. I also included a new tab to config the CPU frequency policy for each scheme:

The second show the new 'General Settings' section which now include the already in 0.7.1 via the config file changeable options: battery levels and actions, button events and the default AC/battery scheme (click on the picture to show the animated gif and all new tabs).

I plan to release the new package (including many bugfixes) within the next days. A complete translation is currently only available in german. Feel free to checkout the translation files from here, to translate to your language and to send me the updated file. Any help would be really appreciated.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

KDE Tablet PC support

2007-01-19T01:28:00.000+01:00

One of problems with Tablet PCs under Linux is lacking support for small, but very essential features as the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition provide. There are already drivers for machines with e.g. Wacom tablets or some Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) devices and also some applications as Xournal, Jarnal or xstroke which provide useful features.

On SUSE there is also support in SAX to configure Wacom and FSC devices and I already wrote a patch for HAL (v0.5.8/git) to detect Tablet PCs and set the needed Ports correct and automatically. There is also a patch for XDM to show xvkbd on login and a patch for KDE to show xvkbd on the unlock dialog from Lubos Lunak.

But until now one feature was missing: The user could rotate the screen via KRandr and also the Wacom driver support already rotation but there was no way to do this together because the Wacom driver did not support the XRandR extension. The user had to call xsetwacom to rotate also the input devices to use rotation. Thanks to Stephan Binner the user can now rotate the screen and the input devices together via KRandr and it work like a charm. You can find the patch here.

Tech Tags: KDE TabletPC

HAL patch collection (3)

2007-01-19T00:50:00.000+01:00

Some time since I posted the last blog entry. So now the first message of the new year.

Here some new patches I send to the HAL mailing list which aren't included in the git repository because they are not approved (I think David Zeuthen is currently in Australia, so he is maybe not that often online.):

two patches to cleanup the Linux LUKS scripts [1] and fix the password handling to prevent the bash from word splitting and path expanding [2]
a patch to add support for IBM ACPI hotkey events, which allow HAL to send e.g. the sleep and s2disk/hibernate button event as currently already for other machines: here
a patch which fixes the detection of libsmbios for the Dell backlight addon - the code of the addon need libsmbios >= 0.11.6 - by proof the library version: here
a fix for set/get brightness on machines which supported by sonypi kernel module: here
a fix support the old and the newer version of the omnibook kernel module, which try to find the max. supported levels of brightness: here

These patches are against current HAL git. As always: you can find all my current HAL patches here.

Tech Tags: HAL Patches

KPowersave config tutorial

2006-11-24T12:40:00.000+01:00

As wrote in my last post about the current KPowersave release 0.7.1 there are some settings which the user can't change at the moment via the configure dialog. Here now a small tutorial how to control this settings via the KPowersave config file.

You can control the settings for these options:

battery warning levels
actions for battery warning levels and lidclose
default AC and battery scheme
CPU frequency policy for each scheme

To change the config keys for these options you need to open in your home with a editor of your choise this file (if the file is not present, create the file): ~/.kde/share/config/kpowersaverc

KPowersave provide three different battery warning levels: warning, low and critical. To define the percentage (between 0 and 100) of battery fill for these levels you need to edit config keys in the section [General]. If the section is not there, simply add a line with [General] at top of the file and add/edit these keys there :

batteryWarning=12
batteryLow=7
batteryCritical=2

You can also define a action (currently only one per level) which is called if one of the battery warning levels reached. The available actions are:

shutdown the machine (SHUTDOWN)
suspend to disk (SUSPEND2DISK)
suspend to ram (SUSPEND2RAM)
change the CPU freqency policy to 'performance' (CPUFREQ_POWERSAVE) or 'dynamic' (CPUFREQ_DYNAMIC)
change the brightness if supported by your hardware (BRIGHTNESS)

To define the actions for the battery warning levels you have to change this keys (also in the section [General]):

batteryWarningAction=
batteryLowAction=BRIGHTNESS
batteryCriticalAction=SHUTDOWN

The values in this example are the already defined defaults, so you don't need to add/change the keys if this is what you want. For the action BRIGHTNESS you need an additional key for each level to define the level (in percentage) of brightness to set:

batteryWarningActionValue=
batteryLowActionValue=
batteryCriticalActionValue=

You can use the same actions and values as for battery warning levels also for the event if the lid of your laptop get closed. To control the behavior you need to change these keys:

ActionOnLidClose=
ActionOnLidCloseValue=

To control which scheme KPowersave should use on battery or on AC you need to know the names of the available schemes. You can find them in this file: /opt/kde3/share/config/kpowersaverc . Currently there are (excluding the [default-scheme]) these schemes per default: Performance, Powersave, Presentation and Acoustic. To set the schemes you have to change these keys:

ac_scheme=Performance
battery_scheme=Powersave

At least you can change the CPU frequency for each scheme. For this you need, if not already there, for each a own section in the config file (a section starts with the name of the scheme withing '[ ]'). The available CPU frequency policies are: PERFORMANCE, POWERSAVE and DYNAMIC. Here a example for the performance scheme:

[Performance]
cpuFreqPolicy=DYNAMIC

If you canged all you want, you need to restart KPowersave to apply the changes.

Tags: KPowersave Tutorial

KPowersave 0.7.1 released

2006-11-23T15:31:00.000+01:00

Monday I released the first offical (v0.7.0 was only for openSUSE 10.2) release from the new development tree of KPowersave. With this release KPowersave depends no longer on the powersave daemon (sadly!) and use HAL (>= 0.5.8.1) instead to get hardware information and to trigger suspend or set brightness and the CPU frequency policies.

Also if KPowersave depend no longer on powersave, I would recommend to use the new powersave daemon furthermore. The daemon can, if there is no program that claim org.freedesktop.Policy.Power on the D-Bus system bus, handle system powermanagement without do crazy things like start a applet in KDM or GDM. If KPowersave start up the daemon stop automatically to handle powermanagement policy and KPowersave applet can force (if allowed) the user specific settings.

With this release KPowersave handle the different schemes and battery/lid actions independently. This include this parts:

definable battery warning levels (warning, low, critical)
definable actions for each battery warning level (e.g. suspend, change brightness, set a special CPU frequency policy or shutdown the machine)
definable actions if the lid get closed (same as for batteries)
set CPU frequency policy for each scheme
define AC and battery schemes

Currently the user can't change these settings via the config dialog in KPowersave, I concentrated for this release on reproduce the former functionality of KPowersave together with the old powersave daemon. A tutorial to change the settings in the config file follow as soon as possible. Extend the config dialog is one of the todos for the next releases.

I also fixed the KDE screensaver and DPMS handling to reduce/avoid interfer with the KDE user settings (e.g. if KPowersave exit). There is a KDE patch, from Dirk Müller (Thanks!), available to check if KPowersave already handle DPMS settings and call the KPowersave config dialog instead of the KControl dialog.

You can download KPowersave from kde-apps.org or directly from the sourceforge project page. This version is included in openSUSE 10.2. Feel free to test the package. Bugreports (for openSUSE to the Novell bugzilla, for other distros to the powersave-devel mailinglist) are really appreciated!

Tags: KPowersave

Why waste GNOME/GConf /etc ?

2006-11-21T17:29:00.000+01:00

I was always wonder why /etc need on a fresh installed system so much space, if there are only config files. On a fresh installed openSUSE 10.2Beta2 with KDE and some development pattern /etc need ~39 MByte on my harddisk. The question is: Which config files need all this space?

After some investigate: /etc/opt need 28 MByte and /etc/opt/gnome need 96 % of this. So why the hell need GNOME 27 MByte for config files in /etc ? I was wondering how many config keys they could have there and what they could configure within 27 MByte, but after taking a look at the files in e.g. /etc/gnome/gconf/schemas/ it become more clear. GConf store in this directory on my machine 1630 config keys, but need ~12MByte for them because they also have translations (and hints for the translators) for the key descriptions within the files.

Why store GConf translations/localisation information of key descriptions within the config files and not in seperate files e.g. under /opt/gnome ? The current behavior waste /etc with (for configuration) bootless information, make it painful to change the keys e.g. with vim and is IMO potentially incompatible with FHS 2.3 because this files are more translation than config files.

So my proposal: separate the translations from the config data and hold only a generic english description in the files under /etc (as already e.g. in firefox.schemas). This would: reduce the needed space under /etc/gnome/gconf/schemas/ significantly (e.g. for gfloppy.schemas from 64KByte to 1.5 KByte which means -97.5 %), make it easier to find the keys and values and should make it easier to update the translation part without touch the config files.

Let see what the discussion in this bug bring ...

Tags: GNOME GConf

HAL patch collection (2)

2006-11-08T16:28:00.000+01:00

Today again some new patches I send to the HAL mailing list which aren't included in the git repository because they are not approved so far :

fix detection of wireless network capability for devices which use drivers with dscape stack as e.g. rt2500pci: here
fix to add hardware specific/dependent sound devices to HAL (as e.g. /dev/snd/hwC0D0): here
fix of libhal related to changed behavior of dbus_error_is_set(error) if error == NULL in the new D-Bus. Now the check would crash the realated application which use libhal. Download: here

These patches are against current HAL git. As always: you can find all my current HAL patches here.

Tags: HAL Patches

Novell bring some light in the dark ...

2006-11-08T10:31:00.000+01:00

It was about time. So many questions from the community about the Novell/Microsoft deal and the details. All this (justified) spec and rumours about Novell violoate the GPL section 7 with this arrangement and the other issues like Novell and the Open Invention Network (OIN) or Mono. Now we have some answers to the questions. Take a look at: Novell Answers Questions from the Community.

Here some parts (for more read the FAQ):

How is this agreement compatible with Novell's obligations under Section 7 of the GPL?

Our agreement with Microsoft is focused on our customers, and does not include a patent license or covenant not to sue from Microsoft to Novell (or, for that matter, from Novell to Microsoft). Novell's customers receive a covenant not to sue directly from Microsoft. We have not agreed with Microsoft to any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL and we are in full compliance.

Novell's end user customers receive a covenant not to sue directly from Microsoft for their use of Novell products and services, but these activities are outside the scope of the GPL.

Will Novell's involvement with the Open Invention Network (OIN) change due to this agreement with Microsoft?

[...] Novell is a founding member of the OIN and remains strongly committed to its mission. We have contributed valuable resources to OIN and will continue to participate in OIN in the future. Novell remains firmly in support of the goal of creating an environment of open innovation in the Linux world, without worry about the threat of patent lawsuits.

The value of OIN's patents as a deterrent remains critical to the entire Linux industry, including Novell, and is not affected by our agreement with Microsoft.

There is now also an new Novell announcement with more details of the deal. This also include a statement about GPL Section 7 and (very interesting) about the financial parts:

As part of the business cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an upfront payment to Novell of $240 million for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates. [...] Microsoft will dedicate $60 million total over the five year period for marketing Linux and Windows virtualized scenarios and will also spend $34 million over the five year term of the agreement for a Microsoft sales force devoted primarily to marketing the combined offering.

[...] Under the patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an up-front net payment to Novell of $108 million, and Novell will make ongoing payments of at least $40 million over five years to Microsoft, based on percentages of Novell's Open Platform Solutions and Open Enterprise Server revenues.

I think this should bring finally some light in the dark ...

Tags: Novell Microsoft GPL

Novell, Microsoft ... and what think RedHat?

2006-11-07T02:46:00.000+01:00

Today I read a article about a interview with Mark Webbink from RedHat. There is no denying that they feel inadequate:

... In the end, Red Hat's high customer satisfaction ratings will allow his company to ride the tide. In one year's time [...] Red Hat will be the only Linux commercial vendor left standing ...

I've rarely laughed so hard! We will see if this come true, next November and if SUSE, Ubuntu and e.g. Mandriva still standing ... or Oracle bought you. ;-)

Tags: Novell Microsoft RedHat Linux

KPowersave on the way to 0.7.0

2006-11-05T20:57:00.000+01:00

Only some hours until deadline for openSUSE Beta2 and a new version of KPowersave, which no longer depends on the powersave daemon and use HAL instead.

In the last days I removed the complete powersave related code and replaced it with new classes and hardware abstraction. Today I finished the basic part and we have now a powersave independend version in SVN which runs. But this does not mean the new version work as planed ... there is enough work left.

Yesterday I added an pre-annoucement for the new 0.7.x development version at kde-apps.org planed for this week. And as you can see in the comments there are people which are not so happy about switch from powersave to HAL (as you can see in this post I'm not that happy too):

... going HAL is a real downer and ( at least to me ) it turns Kpowersave into just "another" solution, stripping it from what made it different ..

powersave was EXACTLY the way to go .. and to tell you the truth, knowing why Kpowersave is going HAL is what makes everything even worse. It makes me feel like mediocrity and disdain won once again.

And there is also this question in the comments here:

What are the benefits of changing from powersaved to HAL?

So, what are the reasons for change from powersave to HAL? As first: Since the powersave developer decided to kill the powersave daemon and integrate (the most of) the functions of the daemon into HAL and pm-utils, we have no choise. We have to use the new infrastructure or KPowersave die with the daemon. This was the main reason to rewrite KPowersave.

So what are the benefits?

No dependency to the powersave daemon (the package is not in every distribution default).
We can move the most of the scheme management from the daemon to KPowersave. This make KPowersave anymore flexible than before.
We have now the chance to get KPowersave into the KDE SVN and maybe KPowersave could replace KLaptop as default KDE powermanagement solution.

And the disadvantages?

We lose the great powersave daemon, but for more read this post.

Tags: KPowersave KDE Linux

How to cheat distrowatch ranking

2006-11-05T17:51:00.000+01:00

You always wanted to know how to promote the ranking of your Linux distribution at distrowatch? Simply do the same as in the english version of the Fedora wiki start page and link against the page of your distribution at distrowatch.com instead of provide your own package list (as e.g. Debian or openSUSE do). And don't forget to name the link 'Packages' ;-) :

And whoso want to know which packages are available push the level of popularity for your Linux distribution in the 'Page Hit Ranking' with each click (checked google's cache and this link in the fedora wiki is new):

Tags: linux distrowatch

Novell and Microsoft ?

2006-11-02T22:46:00.000+01:00

I'm not quite sure what to make of this news/rumors:

The best would be to wait for the offical annoucements from Novell and Microsoft (webcast), but sounds a littlebit like sup with the devil ;-) . We will see.

Update: Annoucement "Joint letter to the Open Source Community"

Tags: Novell SUSE Linux Microsoft

KPowersave status

2006-10-29T18:31:00.000+01:00

Today a short update about the current status of the KPowersave development for the next stable version running with HAL instead of the powersave daemon:

We have a new deadline for the first running base version on KPowersave. It's openSUSE 10.2 Beta2, which means I need to checkin the new package at least Monday the 06.11.2006 to get a running version into the release. In Beta1 KPowersave is not in the default selection because of problems with the connection to D-Bus. I had no time to take a look at this issue, so thanks to Timo Hoenig for the patch to fix the problem in the old and new upcomming versions.

Unfortunately I could not commit the fix (and work on KPowersave) because of problems with the SVN server of Novell Forge. The server is down since Friday (27.10.) without any previous announcement from the admins. This is very annoying for the users and really unprofessional from the admins of Novell Forge, also because the service is down the complete weekend. Very good for the deadline for Beta2 if you host a project there.

Nevertheless we finished the most of the work on the hardware information and abstraction part of KPowersave. Now we can start with integrate the new base classes into the applet/GUI.

Tags: KPowersave development

HAL patch collection

2006-10-26T17:31:00.000+02:00

There a currently some patches I send to the HAL mailing list which aren't included in the git repository so far. They should be included in the new HAL package for openSUSE 10.2 Beta2. Here a list of these patches (feel free to use them on your own distribution):

fix build (hald-addon-macbookpro-backlight) against newer versions of libpci: here
add support for Standby (S1) to HAL: here
remove backend postfix from script filenames (need maybe rename files by hand, for more see this mail thread): here
A performance fix for search in pci.ids for vendor and product information of PCI devices. This patch is a reworked version of a inital patch from Ihno Krumreich. I extended the patch to fix bug in the search algorithm and to stop search if found everything we looking for. This patch speed up the search in the list by factor ~8-15 if HAL starts up: here
A new version of my patch to detect Tablet PCs (as e.g. with Wacom tablet devices and some Fujitsu Siemens machines) and to set the needed serial ports on boot: here

These patches are against current HAL git. You can find all my current HAL patches here.

Tags: HAL patches

KPowersave development for next stable (0.8.x)

2006-10-17T20:57:00.000+02:00

Today a (short) brief/information about the current planed and already started development for the new KPowersave development tree (0.7.x) and the next stable version (0.8.x):

Preamble

Since Powersave starts to die and the powermanagement tasks going into HAL we need to change KPowersave to use HAL instead of Powersave.

Only for the log: I don't like this step and for me is the concept to put _all_ (hardware information, powermanagement, mounting, partition, format ...) stuff into one daemon, (into this crappy HAL and only because some desktop developer are not able to write a UNIX like daemon for special tasks) a really stupid idea.

I liked the old powersave. This was a great piece of code which contains several man-years of knowledge about ACPI/APM and powermanagement and did a great job over the years. I'm not happy about losing it.

This changes mean at least also more trouble in KPowersave.

Table of contents:

HAL/Powersave basics
Replace Powersave
GUI
Testing
Documentation/Translation
Timeframe

(1) HAL/Powersave basics

Currently KPowersave use Powersave and libpower from powersave to get hardware information, to switch schemes, to set CPU Freq and to trigger suspend2*/standby.

In general we need to connect now directly to HAL to get a signal if something on hardware changed, if we want to avoid permanent polling e.g. for battery information via libpower. There are two possible ways: listen to HAL for changes and call libpower to fresh up device information or listen to HAL and collect all device information directly in KPowersave.

I would go the second way. This should reduce the overhead of the library (libpower currently (old version KPowersave currently depends on) provide several info we never need and miss some other info we need now). If we implement this directly in KPowersave we can cache the information and need only to update the changed values (e.g. we need only call hal for current battery percentage and only for this key and only for this special battery) which should reduce the overhead on DBUS and allow KPowersave a finer grained signal and information pool.

Needed work:

implement a new class to:

hold connection to the HAL interface via DBUS (done)
to provide a layer to libhal to get device info (done)
add methods to find devices by capability and property (done)
to provide a layer to call DBUS methodes on HAL/DBUS interface (done)

implement a class to collect and abstract:

battery, ac, lid information (75% done, need to think about the battery stuff)
info about suspend, brightness, CPU Freq (done, TODO: add support for PolicyKit information)
add function to update the related info if something changed. (in progress, Danny/Frank)

(2) replace Powersave

To replace currently by powersave provided functionality we need to change several issues in KPowersave:

suspend2*/standby:

Old Powersave provided a interface to trigger suspend2*/standby and to check if the user is allowed to call this methodes. HAL provide currently only a abstraction of the kernel interface, which mean we can only say if the machine/kernel can suspend in general, but we can't say if:

the user is allowed to call these methodes
the machine is really suspendable (or if the machine is e.g. not able to suspend2ram and is blacklisted e.g. in s2ram).

Problems:

I have currently no idea how we can fix this. Maybe via PolicyKit, but this is not sure because we don't know if this go really in SUSE 10.2 or if PolicyKit is mandatory for HAL upstrean in the future. This situation is really bad and the sideeffects are annoying for the user.
HAL only support suspend2* and not standby atm upstream (on SUSE we have a patch for this).

battery alarm states:

Powersave currently provide the battery alarm states and the config at which point which state is reached. We need to move this to KPowersave and make it configurable only in general and not per scheme. We need to configure the three states and the related actions (e.g. warn user, suspend, shutdown)

Problems:

Several different users can be connected to the system and every user can define different states and different actions which results in a chaos. This is at least again the same problem as with CPU freq via HAL and fighting clients. Maybe we add this to a admin mode dialog as e.g. in KControl and allow only a systemwide config, but this is only a solution for KDE. (evaluate: discussion started by Holger at: g-p-m Mailing list)

CPU Frequency Policy:

Since CPUFreq settings are moved from powersave to HAL, we need also to replace the current settings in KPowersave. There are two issues:

make the currently existing different CPUFreq Policies configurable
make them configurable per scheme

Problems:

Fighting Clients and other tools (see above).

Schemes:

Powersave currently provide some schemes (powersave, performance, presentation and acoustic), two of them are automatically switched if the AC plug is removed/inserted. We need to implement _real_ schemes in KPowersave. We have currently schemes in KPowersave (with brightness, screensaver, DPMS, autosuspend settings and so on), but we need to make them configurable. This mean we need this stuff:

create new/remove/edit for current schemes
make configurable default schemes for AC online/offline (and maybe other events as e.g. lidclose or if detectable adding a beamer to the machine for presentation scheme)
per scheme CPU Frequency settings (see above)
per scheme disk settings

Problems:

There is currently no way to set the harddisk settings, but we need this on some machines which change the settings e.g. via the BIOS on suspend or if the AC plug is removed (which maybe increase Load_Cycle_Count and reduce lifetime of the disk).
Fighting clients with different settings.

(3) GUI:

Based on the changes from (2) we need to update the configuration dialog to make all the settings configureable for the user. As a first step we don't need to implement this (first finish the basic stuff), we can do the config via the config file. Tasks to do:

create/remove schemes, as first new schemes with a default config (first steps done). Later we can maybe add a wizard for inexperienced users
CPU Freq stuff (per scheme, and per policy)
AC state and actions (global settings)
Battery states (global settings)

(4) Testing

Provide first working version as always on sf.net/freshmeat and kde-apps.org, send a mail to opensuse ML.

(5) Documentation/Translation

Need to extend, update and translate the documentation. We need also some new translations.

(6) Timeframe

A first stable running version - without not needed stuff from (3) - until openSUSE Beta1/2/final. With the new stable and without dependecy to powersave we can think about push KPowersave into KDE SVN as default KDE powermanagement applet.

You can find all already done changes in the KPowersave SVN at trunk.

Tags: kpowersave

Logitech DiNovo Keyboard

2006-09-03T23:45:00.000+02:00

Since some weeks I use this really nice Logitech DiNovo Bluetooth ultra-flat keyboard. But the keyboard is unfortunately not listed in the KDE Control Center (under Regional & Accessibility --> Keyboard Layout). Hence I patched the keyboard layout into the X files.

I must say it's really a pain to do this. As first you need to run /usr/X11R6/bin/xev to get the keycodes of the extra (multimedia) keys, but unfortunately the keycodes are not the same codes as X use in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/inet. You need to search each code in /etc/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86 to find the correspondent XFree86 code. Why the hell can't xev display also the matching XFree86 codes?

As next you need to patch 4 files to get the keyboard running. Why 4 different files? This should be also possible with only one file! If you have this keyboard you can download the diff of my changes from here (simply download the file and do this as root user in '/': "patch -p0 < /tmp/keyboard_Logitech_DiNovo.diff" ) .

Hacking KMailCVT

2006-08-30T18:16:00.000+02:00

Since a long time ... Yesterday I did some maintanance work for KMailCVT . In the last months I couldn't find the time to fix some known problems in the mail import tool of KMail but now I taked a look at this issues (for the KDE 3.5 branch):

I could not move imported mails from mailinglist archives to a Cyrus IMAP account because of not allowed line starting with "From " (not to mistaken with "From: ") in the header. I fixed this by removing the line while import (see commit).
If you import mails from a mbox file the state of the emails is not set back to KMail. All mails are marked as new (see e.g. kde.org bug #114923). I added detection of the X-Status flag to set the correct state the imported mails (see commit). I tried also to add the same to the kmail-maildir import filter (which worked), but unfortunately there are some problems in KMail with set the X-Status flag correct to the mail files (bug #133210).

As next I plan to check also the other mailfilter to read and set the state of the mail. There are also some problems with the interactivty of the filters if you chancel the import process which need some work. And at least: I need to port the changes to the KDE4 tree ...

KPowersave update v0.6.2 released

2006-07-04T13:52:00.000+02:00

Sunday I released the a new update for the stable tree of KPowersave with version number 0.6.2 and also a new powersave version (v0.12.20) to sf.net. This release fixes more than eight bugs. Here the most important changes:

KPowersave depends now on powersave >= 0.12.18
fixed bugs:

sf.net #1483392/ SUSE #177792: set changes for autosuspend state via DCOP back to the applet menu, added DCOP functions to set the current scheme, the current CPUFreq policy and to open/close the detailed dialog
sf.net #1483392/ SUSE #177788,180000: added workaround to fix two bugs in the DPMS- and Screensaver extension of X, related to autosuspend and detect user inactivity (DPMS timeouts are abstracted from current idle time, but shouldn't / DPMS timeouts are currently additive but shouldn't). This fix problems with autosuspend if the timeout is longer than the DPMS timeouts.
SUSE #168619: changed errorhandling if HAL, DBUS or the powersave daemon is not running or if the user has not the needed rights to access the powersave daemon via DBUS. Added new errormessages and translations.
SUSE #182515: Changed configure dialog to respect rules for DPMS timeouts
SUSE #176782: patch from Timo Hönig to allow (if supported and enabled in the scheme) change brighness via mousewheel over the applet icon.
SUSE (SLED) #183745: fixed detection of SUSE Linux/SLES/SLED and added Fixed bugzilla link for SLED/SLES configure option to force SLES/SLED as distro with --enable-suse-sles.
SUSE #184076: fixed wrong command to start dbus daemon in errormessage.
added additional check before autosuspend if this was disabled via applet

added new configure check to detect Ubuntu/Kubuntu
changed link to Ubuntu bugzilla to launchpad.net and use now the same link for applet menu entry "Report a bug ..." if compiled for Ubuntu/Kubuntu
updated default blacklist for autosuspend with gmplayer,kaffeine,xine,mencoder
updated translation: cs,de,es,fi,fr,hu,it,km,pl,pt_BR,zh_CN,zh_TW
updated (cs) and fixed translation of eventsrc for KNotify
fixed and updated code documentation

Packages are, as always, available on the sourceforge project page for SUSE Linux 10.0, FC4/5, Mandriva and Slackware and via links on kde-apps.org for other distributions (note: the new version is maybe not available for all of them at the moment) including Debian, K/Ubuntu, Arch Linx, Gentoo or ALT Linux.

And again ... more distributions

2006-06-15T18:38:00.000+02:00

KPowersave is now among SUSE Linux, Debian, K/Ubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware, ALT Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora Core 4/5 and Gentoo available on two additional distributions.

On FoX Desktop 1.0 Professional (a Fedora based KDE distribution) KPowersave and powersave are the default powermanagement solution (see Release Notes).

KPowersave (and also powersave) is now available in the development tree of PLD Linux. You can download the package from the 3.0 tree of the ftp server. PLD Linux is also a former RedHat based polish distribution.

KPowersave stable update v0.6.1 released

2006-05-15T17:57:00.000+02:00

Yesterday (5/25/2006) I released the first update for the current stable tree of KPowersave. Packages are, as always, available on the sourceforge project page for SUSE Linux 10.0, FC4/5, Mandriva and Slackware and via links on kde-apps.org for other distributions including Debian, K/Ubuntu, Arch Linx, Gentoo or ALT Linux.

This release fixes some UTF-8 [bug #165462] and translation [bug #168838] issues in the KNotify dialog and fixes the applet tooltip and displayed remaining battery time on APM machines (incl. code cleanup) [bug #167296]. This version also fix the detailed dialog for multiprocessor/-core machines without CPUFreq or throttling support and offline CPUs/Cores. Other updates: translation updates (fi, km, pl) including desktop files and eventsrc (ru from Anton Farygin ), updated README and an additional configure check for needed dbus-qt3-devel.

For Fedora, it is strongly recommended to update powersave to 0.12.17 (powersave is added automatically to boot). For all other distributions, updating powersave is also recommended.

New packages ... more distributions

2006-04-23T23:40:00.000+02:00

Some new messages about powersave and KPowersave: I added packages for Fedora Core 5 to the sourceforge project website. It was again a pain to create the new rpms. I don't know if really someone develop KDE applications on FC5, but if I need to compile a own dbus-qt3 and dbus-qt3-devel package - only because there is no rpm available and the related section in the specfile is out-commented - something is wrong with this distribution. Btw. Because of this I added also the needed dbus-qt3 rpms here. If you try to install and use KPowersave on FC5 you need at least the dbus-qt3 package. Unfortunately if have no experiences with SELinux and also the guys on the fedora selinux irc-channel were not very helpful. Hence you need to disable selinux support or at least the rule for acpi(d) on FC5. Patches for powersave are welcome.

Since powersave supports s2ram, I also added a suspend package (which include s2ram) for SUSE Linux 10.0 to sf.net. You also need to update pciutils to version 2.2.1, packages are available on the same download page.

Finally: powersave and KPowersave are now also available for Arch Linux. You can find the PKGBUILD powersave packages in the unstable tree and the KPowersave PKGBUILD here.

KPowersave 0.6.0 (stable) released

2006-04-13T18:43:00.000+02:00

Monday I released the new stable KPowersave, version 0.6.0. The release contains several fixes for the processor information in the detailed dialog (e.g. for multiprocessor machines with throttling support), fixes for the battery infos in the tooltip, a fix from Michael Biebl for events after autosuspend, fixed errorhandling for call YaST power-management module and fixed the timeout for connection to powersave on startup to avoid problems with slow machines and autosuspend. I reduced the size of the package by optimize the included png-files and added a german version of the handbook. Also included: translation updates, changed links for report bugs from the applet menu if the installation is a SUSE/SLES/SLED, added support for lock screen with gnome-screensaver and added fake a key event after resume if the screen was locked to get the unlock dialog automatically. For all changes since the last stable version and the release news, read here.

Thanks to all people which helped to develop KPowersave and make the hole project successful with code, patches, testing all the unstable versions, reported bugs, their ideas and all the spend time. Special thanks to Holger Macht, Stefan Seyfried, Michael Biebl and Daniel Gollub.

You can download KPowersave for SUSE 10.0 (for 10.1 from factory repository or from the CD/DVD), Fedora Core 4 and Mandriva from the sourceforge project page. You can find links to download packages for e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo and Alt Linux on the kde-apps.org KPowersave page.

kernel module packages

2006-04-12T20:09:00.000+02:00

Last week , while testing KPowersave on Kubuntu to force UpstreamVersionFreeze Exception process, I tested a LG M1 Express Dual as first with SUSE 10.1 Beta9, but it was a pain to install on this machine. I couldn't start installation via SLP: the kernel doesn't support the network card, USB and cardbus tulip network card also not worked. At the end I used a DVD to install the laptop.

After installation, in the running system the network worked via the usb docking station (also if KNetworkManager alway try to use COM1 instead of the correct networkinterface and I need to switch this always manually) but not correct via a Tulip cardbus card. I need pci=assigned_busses as kernel parameter and the card must be inserted before the yenta_socket kernel module is loaded. But also in this case the tulip module is not loaded automatically.

Btw. the onboard networkcard is not supported by the kernel. It's a Agere Systems ET1310 ethernet card. There was a patch (from a Agere developer as it looks) available e.g. on dadams1969.googlepages.com to add kernel support. I tested the module on the machine and it worked. But I needed to add some little fixes to get the patch compile. While testing I recognised that the module generate random mac addresses. Looks as if the first read from the EEPROM, to get the mac of the hardware, fail and instead of try again it generates a random address. With a little workaround (read directly two times from the EEPROM) I get the correct address.

Because it's not really a good idea to compile each time while BETA testing, after each kernel update or new installaation I made a et131-KMP package. Thanks to Andreas Gruenbacher for the help to get the package build. It's not available via factory tree at the moment. But If you need this package you can download it (without any support or guaranty) here. I hope Agere fix the module and try to get this in the linux kernel.

I also added a omnibook-KMP package to the factory tree. I should allow a lot of machines e.g. to get support for brightness change. For more information about the supported Laptops (HP Omnibook and Pavilion, Toshiba Satellite and some FSC, Compal, Acer and Compaq) and the features see the sf.net omke project page. I already added support for the module to powersave. The package should be on the media of RC1 and SUSE Linux 10.1/SLES 10/SLED 10.

Testing (K)powersave on Kubuntu

2006-04-05T03:35:00.000+02:00

The Kubuntu LaptopTestingTeam announced a help request for testing KPowersave/powersave on the current Kubuntu Dapper test release (Dapper Flight 5/6). The tester should test if KPowersave work better than the current default solution klaptop and document the results on a wiki page.

As I taked a look at the page some days ago, I could only found three reports. Hence I started testing Kubuntu here on several laptops from the Mobile Devices team at SUSE and reported the results back to the wiki. After eleven machines I can say two different things:

klaptop sucks! (it's not really maintained anymore, it hangs up in the most cases if you try to trigger suspend to ram ... )
on all tested laptops it works better with KPowersave/powersave than with klaptop

I hope the tests help to get KPowersave on the upcomming Kubuntu release - it's definitely the better solution. And if they maybe also integrate the s2ram tool, as we do on SUSE, more laptops should work out of the box.

Feel free to install Kubuntu Dapper Flight 6 on a small partition on your latop and run the requested tests to support the powersave project. All test reports would be really appreciated!

KPowersave 0.5.11 - last RC before stable v0.6

2006-03-23T23:46:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I released the next KPowersave version on sourceforge.net and added a announcement on kde-apps.org (and today on freshmeat and forge.novell). This release (v0.5.11-rc5) is planed as the last release candidate before the next stable release since September 2005.

I fixed the handling of set brightness. In the previous version KPowersave allowed to use all available brightness level to be set. But e.g. on machines with PMU brightness interface the lowest level off the display. From now only the last usable brightness level, defined by powersave, can be set. With powersave >= 0.12.7 you can now also change the brighness on machines supported by pmu and omnibook module.

On a request I added a function to check if the machine is a laptop, by asking HAL. Now KPowersave display laptop specific widgets and functionality only on laptops. I think this is now less confusing for the user of workstations which not expect to be able to configure lidclose handling.

The new version also include: handbook, translation and documentation updates and fixes; a Slackware specific fix again; some code cleanups and a little fix to prepare for QT4. I added furthermore a patch from Holger Macht to allow the root user always all kind of suspend/standby independent from the powersave settings for the other users.

Fell free to download the current version (available for SUSE, Fedora Core 4, Mandriva and I think in the next days also for Debian and U/Kubuntu). All bugreports are welcome for the stable release.