Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Linux Plumbers Conf: Linus - Git Tutorial

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.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Linux Plumbers Conf: Keynote

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.

KPowersave Tip of the Day

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

Monday, September 15, 2008

Back from SUSE Labs ... arrived at Portland

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.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Arrived at SUSE Labs Conference

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:

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

TabletPCs: more machines in SaX2 (2)

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: fixes for linuxwacom

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.