Present Perfect

New Year

Had about eighteen people over at our apartment. One of them was our Norwegian friend Uraeus. He had a lot of fun mingling with all the Belgians :) Pictures are online.

Sven shows off multitasking. Jeroen and I start off Silly Snorrekes Season. Norwegian in the mist.

Spanish tradition says you eat 12 grapes at midnight, one on each strike of the clock. Yes, we can party on the balcony.

Anyway, food was excellent, Dave/Dina took care of the party music, I put some speakers outside on the terrace, and with all those people and two barbecues close together, we were more than warm enough in the brisk Barcelona air.

A lot of fun was had by all, and some simple suggestions on my part led to the money shot. Jeroen and I have a great set of gals. And a nice new wallpaper as well.

At around two, we managed to convince everyone to turn off the music and get out and walk around the city.

Friends, thanks for coming over. We'll miss you...

Dave/Dina

I had some silly idea that releasing on the last day of the year would be a good idea since surely everyone would be at home or at work with their mind on partying, and not have time to download and install a distribution ? So I hadn't actually prepared anything for the release in the way of torrenting or mirroring. I submitted the story at noon and just waited a bit.

To my surprise, the story got on SlashDot, and soon after the server was starting to crumble. The bandwidth on that server was high enough, but it quickly got up to a load of over 90.

So there really are people out there who have time to try out stuff on a day like this. So, thanks to all of them, and next time, never underestimate the power of SlashDot.

On the bad side, I spent too much time on New Year's Eve watching in disbelief at what was going on and scrambling to set up mirrors. On the good side, I got some people who tested Dave/Dina, and it seemed to install fine.

It also pointed me on some urgent TODO's. Most of the testers got it running, booted the machine, then looked at Dina, and the panel for two seconds, and then they wondered what to do. Apparently I didn't make it clear that this is meant as an entertainment box, and is meant to be controlled using a remote.

The fact that it's currently not obvious how to configure the remote doesn't help either. So, my next quest, together with DirectFB integration, is to write some sort of GUI for lirc configuration, together with some way of launching it when the remote isn't set up yet.

Work

Hope we can announce Fluendo soon. Our second hire is a lot quicker than me to make up his mind and jump ship. He's arriving in twelve days !

packaging kernel modules

I've tried a few times to make clean kernel modules of external projects. Examples include alsa, lirc, thinkpad stuff, audigy drivers, and quickcam drivers.

Each time it's been very painful, and it always left me with a feeling I didn't really understand the whole process. So today being a holiday here (Epiphany), I decided to spend a lot of time on it so I could figure out a good way of getting reproducable out-of-kernel-source module builds going and package stuff for all possible kernels on Red Hat/Fedora.

ds set me off in the right direction with an .m4 he uses in comedi, his data acquisition framework. (Boy, I wish I had that around when I was in university, but I digress).

He wanted Red Hat supported in anyway, so I set out to add that and figure out stuff along the way, using the builds from my previous attempts at packaging.

I managed to figure out some of the RedHat-isms (like rhconfig.h and /boot/kernel.h) and how to adapt it so that you can specify a config file used for kernel configuration, and autodetect for the current kernel config. Then the .m4 just substitutes a bunch of variables used in kernel building. I tried this on lirc, which I want to repackage for Dave/Dina (since a bunch of users complained they had LIRC but with different drivers), and it worked out fine. I wrote a simple patch for their make stuff, and all I need to do now after using the one macro in configure.in is put this in Makefile.am:

        $(CC) $(LINUX_CFLAGS) $(LINUX_MODFLAGS) $(EXTRA_CFLAGS) -c -o $@ $< 

to generate the module. The proper modflags get stored by the macro, including specific RedHat flags like -D__BOOT_KERNEL_SMP=0 which normally get collected from /boot/kernel.h, and it Just Works.

Now, I'm going to try and pimp these macros to projects mentioned above, and package all those external kernel modules up for fedora.us so stuff like my webcam Just Works and is easily rebuildable.

Some comment by Robert Love somewhere made me curious about what his plans are for kernel modules in the near future. Hopefully he'll obsolete all this malarkey, even though that will decrease the value of my newly learnt knowledge :)

Life

Ordered plane tickets to go back to Belgium for the two Twilight Singers shows, rock !

A week ago a timely slashdot thread made its way to me on the subject of backpacks. I was looking for one to use on the way to work, so that I don't have to worry about my laptop. I ended up going with a booqbag system. Paypal was incredibly annoying since it forced me to CLOSE MY ACCOUNT just to change my country of residence and delivery.

Anyway, with the dollar being very low against the euro, it only turned out at like 150 euro with shipping included. Waiting patiently now ...

Wonder if hadess checks his mail regularly.

Time to go blading again !

New Year Had about eighteen people over at our apartment. One of them was our Norwegian friend Uraeus. He had a lot of fun mingling with all the Belgians :)...