Present Perfect

A few weeks ago my root hard drive died on the media machine at home. Time to do the upgrade dance on a new drive. I jumped from Fedora 11 to Fedora 14.

Boy was I in for a surprise display-wise - it felt like it was 2001 all over again.

I connect the media machine with an NVidia GeForce 6200 card and its VGA output to the big screen TV. That worked fine before, albeit with the proprietary NVidia drivers. I don't use the DVI output because I don't have a cable.

So, the monitor preferences only show resolutions up to 1024x768, when in Fedora 11 it had no problem doing 1920x1080. I tried to fiddle with some xrandr stuff adding modelines but didn't find anything that worked well. It was a bit of a pain too; you're supposed to be able to delete modes you added, but I just got

$ xrandr --rmmode "ATSC-1080-60p"
X Error of failed request: BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)
Major opcode of failed request: 149 (RANDR)
Minor opcode of failed request: 17 (RRDestroyMode)
Serial number of failed request: 27
Current serial number in output stream: 28

whenever I tried.

In the end I created a little script that made testing and adjusting mode lines easier for me, like so:

export DISPLAY=:0
export MODE="ATSC-1080-60p-5"

xrandr --newmode "$MODE" 148.5 1920 2000 2056 2200 1080 1082 1088 1125
xrandr --addmode VGA-1 "$MODE"
xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode "$MODE"

I tried to install the nvidia drivers from rpmforge. Sadly the latest kernel oopses on this machine (not sure yet why), and there were no built modules for the original Fedora 14 kernel release. After I realized that all older kernels are removed from updates and can be gotten from Koji, the build system, I was on my way to reboot into a working kernel with nvidia drivers installed.

Except that those only found 640x480 and 320x240 resolutions. And adding modelines using xrandr doesn't even work there.

Remove all nvidia drivers, reboot with a nouveau driver enabled, and tinker some more. None of the lines in this MythTV modeline database for Sonys actually worked. The ones I generated with cvt or gtf where displaced way to the right.

Eventually I stumbled upon this HTPC howto with an ATSC-1080-60p modeline that almost worked - the image was just slightly to the right. So, re-reading ESR's XFree86 modeline howto (after ten years or so ?) helped me do the final adjustments. Now just to make the settings permanent.

Of course, the proper fix would just have been to plug in a DVI to HDMI cable, and rely on EDID (which I assume works). Haven't bought the cable yet though. Neither my Sony TV nor my Sony amplifier have a DVI input, and I don't know of a way to pull in digital sound through a DVI to HDMI converter.

But I do wonder why the system was able to automatically detect and go to 1920x1080 in my previous (but broken) Fedora 11 setup...

A few weeks ago my root hard drive died on the media machine at home. Time to do the upgrade dance on a new drive. I jumped from Fedora 11...

After recording a video at work this week, I needed a way to go through it and identify interesting points. So Andoni suggested I gave LongoMatch a try and package it for Fedora.

LongoMatch is a digital coach, useful to tag and analyze sport matches. We didn't actually play sports, but it was still useful for my purpose. I now have thirty short clips that someone else can now edit into a useful video.

Packages are available for Fedora 13 and 14 in my repo.

After recording a video at work this week, I needed a way to go through it and identify interesting points. So Andoni suggested I gave LongoMatch a try and package...

Turns out that the behaviour changes and problems in redland-bindings I was experiencing were not necessarily bugs, although opinions may differ.

I filed some bugs, and fixed moap to adjust for the behavioural changes, sprinkling comments.

I packaged up redland-bindings and it's available from my package repository.
I'm going to retry to get it into Fedora properly, so here is the package review request.

Turns out that the behaviour changes and problems in redland-bindings I was experiencing were not necessarily bugs, although opinions may differ. I filed some bugs, and fixed moap to adjust...

I finally got off my ass and upgraded my home machine to Fedora 14 (from 11).

Only ran into two bugs so far, one seems to be something annoying in redland causing moap not to break... check later.

In the meantime, I updated mach for Fedora 12/13/14, because yes I still end up using it whenever I build packages. So here is a new service release.

mach allows you to set up clean roots from scratch for any distribution or distribution variation supported.

Get it from the mach project page.

I built packages for F12/13/14 available from my repository, and will start rebuilding some other packages (I did redland-bindings, but be warned, the F14 one version doesn't seem to work for me!)

I finally got off my ass and upgraded my home machine to Fedora 14 (from 11). Only ran into two bugs so far, one seems to be something annoying in...

I hacked some more this evening on getting UbuntuOne running on my Fedora 11 desktop.

Now, obviously, trying to get something with 'Ubuntu' in the name on Fedora was going to be an exercise in masochism, so I pretty much knew what I was in for.

The good thing though is that the desktopcouch and ubuntuone hackers are obviously enthusiastic at someone getting this to run on Fedora, and as I often find the right motivation is 75% of the work. If these guys are going to be receptive to my feedback, then it is worth spending my time getting this to run.

I needed to first figure out order of packages and software. ubuntuone-storage-protocol goes underneath everything. For now I settled on creating a bdist_rpm out of the setup.py, which I should repackage properly later.

On top of that goes the ubuntuone-client stuff.

Here's a bread crumb trail of bugs I ran into with possible patches I made:

• ubuntuone-storage-protocol 1.0 release does not have pem file in MANIFEST
• ubuntuone poking into httplib.HTTPSConnection private variables which weren't there before 2.6.3 (Fedora 11 has 2.6, which I assume is the release right before 2.6.1 :))
• a bug where ssl authentication fails, because the ca-certs.crt of Ubuntu is a completely different path on Fedora - but that took a while to figure out because of the obtuse error message

Now I got it to the point where the client applet actually starts up without errors, and loads a UbuntuOne page into my Firefox window:

And there are no further tracebacks on my console.

Sadly, I get this puzzling notification message straight after:

I'm not sure yet how my client can be newer - I'm sure the ubuntuone guys will tell me what this means. Enough hacking for one day, time to catch some sleep for tomorrow.

UPDATE: apparently I ran into this bug, where apparently due to some bug the ubuntuone guys decided to add a capability to make sure no one would be using the old client. I understand the logic but I think that should be handled better - the message is not obvious, and I don't think it's easy to figure out what's wrong.

In any case, the patch worked for me, and I just synced my first test file to the cloud ! Whee ! Not sure why syncing a 22 byte text file took roughly half a minute to sync, but it's a start.

I hacked some more this evening on getting UbuntuOne running on my Fedora 11 desktop. Now, obviously, trying to get something with 'Ubuntu' in the name on Fedora was going...