nemiver 0.5.3

Following my wish to push Nemiver releases more frequently I have released Nemiver 0.5.3 yesterday. That opus brought quite a number of bugfixes to the light and is the first nemiver release to work on FreeBSD thanks to the awesome work of Romain Tartière.

Just to give an idea of what got fixed, we did remove the libgnome dependency, made the GDB/MI parser be a bit more resiliant, improved the menu items sensitivity state management at the user interface level, and many other things.

Quite a number of people have filed bugs and enhancement requests since the previous released version and I was very happy about that. It is not easy to file a bug about a debugger when you are using it to debug your own code in the first place. So a big thank you those who are taking the time to do that. It is really appreciated.

Now I am back to hacking again, and I hope to be on time for another release next month :-)

upgrading my Thinkpad T42

I have recently changed the hard drive of my 5 years old T42 Thinkpad laptop. I had a 30 gb hard drive and that was obviously not enough to compile all the things I want to compile. Just to give an idea, I want to have xorg and nemiver jhbuilds as well as OpenEmbedded and OpenMoko builds around. If you add the fact that I use ccache extensively, I really needed more disk space.

So I went to memorysuppliers.com and ordered a hard drive of 160 GB. They did a very a good job in sending the disk very quickly. I backed up my home directory by simply using the excellent rsync program to save stuff on an external hard drive connected to the laptop via USB.

Then I followed the instructions here to remove the old disk and replace it with the new one.
After that, I just reinstalled a brand new GNU/Linux system and recovered my backed up data.

Everything went smoothly and took around 2h. Pretty neat.

I did also upgrade the ram to 2Gig a couple of months ago so compiling C++ programs is quite OK on this 5 years old machine now :-)

DNS problems.

I have been unreachable at seketeli dot org since yesterday I believe. It should be back soon. So if you sent me an email that did not arrive, please try again shortly.

The reason of that failure is that my hosting provider (online.net) did change his DNS server addresses and I forgot to forward the information to my registrar which is gandi.net. Shame on me. Especially because I was notified about the DNS address change something like a year ago. Everything should be back in order soonish. I am sorry for the annoyance.

A new place to hang my hat

Yesterday was my last day as an OpenedHand employee. Working at OpenedHand has been a breeze, really. The crew there is an impressive pool of clever geeks. A high density of skills, enthousiasm and willingness to do the right thing. Clearly, there is no doubt that amazing things are going to be popping up from the OpenedHand towers. Ciao fellows, and thank you for the warm and fruitful atmosphere.

Now I have to write the coming pages of my personal history. I have been given the chance and honour to settle at Red Hat, in the tools group. I am really looking forward to working with the bright folks there, and keep on modestly helping to shape the future of Free Software as much as I can.

Alpha blondy, un grand monsieur

Aujourd'hui, je me suis remis à écouter l'album "Jah Victory" de Alpha Blondy.

Clairement, j'avais oublié à quel point ce monsieur était fort. Cet homme à le sens du texte et du rythme . J'apprécie particulièrement la sobriété de ses rythmes. Au lieu de simplement se faire plaisir "techniquement", ses rythmes et ses mélodies restent simples, portant ainsi ses textes au plus haut de leur sens. Bien sûr, souvent, il faut comprendre le Dioula pour saisir toute l'essence de ses textes. Sur ce point la, j'ai la chance d'être un peu dans sa cible :-)

A mon sens, Alpha est dans la tradition des griots ouest africains qui racontaient des histoires et véhiculaient leurs réflexions sur leurs sociétés. Véritables colonnes vertébrales de ces sociétés à fortes traditions orales ou le verbe conté était roi. Les mélodies Reggae de ses morceaux, souvent associées à des rythmes africains, aident par ailleurs à ne pas les cantonner à des cercles élitistes. Il reste très populaire.

Alpha Blondy est un grand monsieur de l'Afrique.

Pour ceux qui sont intéressés, des morceaux qui roxent et qu'on peut écouter dans des soirées sont: Ranita, I wish you were here, Bahia, Le bal des pompiers, Les Salauds, Cameroun, Tampiri ...

nemiver debugger article on fosswire

I have been extremely lazy lately concerning writting about nemiver. Maybe that's because I just prefer writting code rather than articles ? :-)

Fortunately some nice people put together an introduction article about nemiver.

Maybe at some point I should start writting a serie of simple articles presenting interesting features of the debugger.

Xglamo: the X server of the neo GTA02 device

The GTA02 hardware of the OpenMoko project sports amongst other things the Glamo3362 GPU from smedia.

I have been working on an Kdrive based X server, dedicated to that glamo chip: Xglamo.

I basically took over the job done by Chia-I Wu, aka Olv (man, get yourself a blog ;-) ) in putting together an X server for that chip.

I did hack on bringing support of hardware acceleration in areas like blitting, solid fills, RandR support and XVideo so far.

For blitting and solid fills, we did start using the Kaa acceleration architecture. It seems to be pretty robust and did speed up things like scrolling a fair bit.

For RandR acceleration I hacked the kernel framebuffer driver to make it support hardware assisted rotation and fleshed out its resolution setting code. With that setup, I just made the Xglamo RandR extension implementation use that shiny new kernel framebuffer rotation and resolution setting capabilities.

The XVideo extension driver exposes a textured video port that supports clipping and scaling for planar YUV 4:2:0 frames. I am still working on supporting parameters settings like brightness, saturation and so on. For now, I can play videos using mplayer on the device, or even launching totem on my desktop and making it display its output on Xglamo server running on the device. The basics are in the box.

All that code is already integrated in regular OpenMoko builds that you either compile yourself or grab from the daily builds directories.

There should be more to come on this topic in the coming days and weeks. In any case, I try to sent regular updates to the openmoko-devel list.

So stay tuned :-)