Daily blurbs Jul. 2006

29 Jul 2006 (Sat)

16:17:27 # Life Gave a presentation at TLUG. There were about 30 people. I talked about Debian on MacBook. Finally I have some presentation material written in English. It's available here. I got a WLAN station with TLUG auction, nice. Hopefully that will improve my life at home. For my next action: MacBook needs to sleep, and note that the MacBook notion of having to press C for booting from the CD drive isn't obvious. Well, that's life.

I tried if 915resolution configuration is not required. Someone asked if it was required for VESA only and not for i810. I tried, but it didn't work out; without the setup, the display resolution didn't come out right. Having a configuration for 915resolution is a simple way to fix the problem.

27 Jul 2006 (Thu)

22:23:28 # Life linux-uvc works. I've been working on linux-uvc package in Debian. Apparently, it was one of the more awaited packages, I received quite a lot of feedback. It's sometimes refreshing to get a different kind of user reaction to uploads. However, I'd really like to have some kind of mailing list to discuss this stuff. Maybe Cc'ing debian-user will do.

23 Jul 2006 (Sun)

11:18:41 # Life linux-uvc package on its way. I'm working on a linux-uvc package for Debian. I was hoping that it was going to be easy, but apparently, it's not too easy. Firmware loading seems to work, looking at diff of lsusb -v. Things look as if it's functional, but I can't get any application working. This is kernel 2.6.18-rc1. Could anybody else confirm this? Package is available in deb http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/tmp/20060723 ./, you can build and install the package with module-assistant auto-install linux-uvc. ... after trying, I could get it working with ekiga. The v4l2 driver wasn't installed per default, but after installing it, I can see my silly self.

usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 3
usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
usb 1-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Linux video capture interface: v2.00
uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Built-in iSight (05ac:8501)
usbcore: registered new driver uvcvideo
USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0-b)
	

uvcvideo: Failed to query (130) UVC control 1 (unit 0) : 2 (exp: 26).
	

loading with modprobe uvcvideo trace=1 gives me a bit more message.

uvcvideo: Probing known UVC device 4 (05ac:8501)
uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Built-in iSight (05ac:8501)
uvcvideo: Scanning UVC chain: OT 3 <- Unit 2 <- IT 1
uvcvideo: Found a valid video chain (1 -> 3).
uvcvideo: UVC device initialized.
usbcore: registered new driver uvcvideo
USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0-b)
	

08:20:15 # Life Problem license with EFI and FAT32. FAT32 code has a different license to other parts. In addition to usual BSD clauses, it is restricted from use outside of EFI. This is bad. Fortunately, it seems like Mactels support hfs+ filesystems. Which is good. Source to efi-shell is available.

22 Jul 2006 (Sat)

22:40:25 # Life iSight probably working on MacBook. Since there was a report on MacBook iSight working, I'd like to make it into a Debian package. linux-uvc module with firmware extractor. It should be doable pretty quickly. I've asked the upstream author to add necessary copying statement since it currently has nothing on it. I hope it's resolved soon. Of course, it so happens that this particular gnome developer is also using SORBS to detect SPAM or whatever it is he thinks, and my mail bounces. Ouch. This SORBS thing is very annoying.

20 Jul 2006 (Thu)

00:17:31 # Life Dual monitor setup with radeon driver. Since I got hold of a projector, I wanted dual-display setup. I played around with configuration on dx5150, and I have not managed to get a working setup. This is my current config. I can see the same thing on two screens. I really want two different things displayed.

Actually, I'm swamped by the feedback I got about this blog. I'll try to write up an update later based on the feedback. Not having a comments entry was a design decision on this blog, but that means I need to manually process information :)

and I have debugged a few more with more input. I think this is the problem of 'secondary monitor is detected as the primary monitor, and the primary monitor is not detected' bug; which seems to be reported in the lists without any feasible solution.

(II) RADEON(0): Primary:
 Monitor   -- CRT
 Connector -- Proprietary
 DAC Type  -- Primary
 TMDS Type -- NONE
 DDC Type  -- MONID
(II) RADEON(0): Secondary:
 Monitor   -- NONE
 Connector -- Unsupported
 DAC Type  -- TVDAC/ExtDAC
 TMDS Type -- NONE
 DDC Type  -- NONE
(II) RADEON(0): PLL parameters: rf=1432 rd=6 min=20000 max=47622597418048; xclk=25000
(WW) RADEON(0): Failed to detect secondary monitor, MergedFB/Clone mode disabled
(II) RADEON(0): MergedFB mode forced on.
	

15 Jul 2006 (Sat)

17:18:57 # Life Finished my presentation at OSC-Do. I gave a presentation about installing Debian on MacBook in a dual-boot configuration. I am planning on giving an English presentation at TLUG meeting at the end of this month; that should force me to create an English translation of the resource. Japanese version is accessible from here.

13 Jul 2006 (Thu)

00:35:12 # Life xpdf -fullscreen presentation fix. Apparently there is a long-standing bug on xpdf not being able to support some window managers. Now metacity, the default window manager, is suffering the same problem. I've posted a patch to the bugreport 247602. I have temporarily placed packages here. I need this fix for my presentation this weekend.

23:37:33 # Life I worked on module-assistant today. I posted a workaround for the utsrelease.h problem.377198. Some things I had to prepare for the presentation this weekend...

12 Jul 2006 (Wed)

08:51:36 # Life utsrelease.h breaking quite a few stuff. Linux 2.6.18-rc1 broke quite a few Debian kernel build related applications. m-a problem 377198 and kernel-package patch 377267. This is bad. There should really be a stable interface to obtain version name from the source tree. Please.

9 Jul 2006 (Sun)

10:10:46 # Life Registered in a DNSBL. Apparently, viper2.netfort.gr.jp, which has been a fixed address for the past 4 years or so, is registered in dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net. For those people who are using DNSBL, please fix it. viper2.netfort.gr.jp is 219.75.232.131. And, is it my task or my ISP's task to fix this silly DNSBL? I don't think so. There are so many DNSBL services that contacting each and every such service is quite unreasonable. The users of those services should really be responsible for the maintenance of the blacklist.

7 Jul 2006 (Fri)

07:09:11 # Life Progress on MacBook Debian. I think I've done most of the things I really need to do at moment. sound, sleep/suspend, airmac support, and maybe few other stuff I will need to do, but can wait. The thread in debian-devel is available, and I tend to summarize what I've found so far on this thread. A maintained wiki page might be more helpful. Anyone?

3 Jul 2006 (Mon)

07:23:01 # Life As a result of CodeFest, I now have a working MacBook installation. However, I have not managed to generate a generic method for installation of Debian into MacBook. It's mostly due to the fact that 'bless' not being implemented in Debian. For some reason I decided to use scim/anthy and not canna/kinput on MacBook and that drained a bit of time. I'm a bit worried about the console display, I haven't quite gotten it right. Booting the kernel with video=imacfb:macbook gives a completely broken display. After X, things are functional.

1 Jul 2006 (Sat)

14:16:15 # Life I am now at CodeFestAkihabara. I will be looking at MacBook installation and what's lacking there.