FOSDEM – here we go

… having finished a hectic period I must say that leaving for FOSDEM tomorrow morning feels great. I will team up with Daniel Stenberg, Magnus Hagander and of course some GNUs, I know that some of the people at last year’s GNU Hackers Meeting (held the days before FSCONS) will come over to FOSDEM as well . Going to be great meeting Brian Gough and Jose E. Marchesi while I am not stressed of work overload, GHM planning and FSCONS planning. Brian and Jose were organising the GNU Hackers Meeting with me.    … and as always I’ll team up with the FSFE folks.

As for the presentations I will surely go and see:

• Sylvain Beucler talk about GNU Savannah: 100% free software mass-hosting

a topic I find interesting for many reasons, more on that later

• Daniel Stenberg talk about Rockbox: open source firmware replacement for music players

since I missed Daniel talk about this at FSCONS. As a FSCONS organiser I can’t just sit

• Mirko Lindner, Jon Phillips talk about Copyleft Hardware and the Ben Nanonote

I missed Mirko’s presentation at FSCONS as well …. always on the move at FSCONS

And, of course I hope I will be able to do some business (Sandklef GNU Labs) down there. During some breaks I will prepare some presentations at “my” University next week and also prepare a Free Software presentation for a company later on in February (more on that later).

This year I’ll be traveling with Andreas Nilsson and Jeremiah Foster.  Same procedure as last year…

see you there

… did you see how I managed to mention FSCONS 6 times (including that very last)

libarduino – hacked it a bit

Found a lib the other day that can be used instead of the Arduino IDE. The library is called libarduino.  Using the lib means I can switch entirely to using C when teaching embedded at Gothenburg University/IT University. Only real problem was that the library really wasn’t prepared for producing a stand alone library or for being installed and will therefor not be that easy to use for the students. So I started hacking the makefiles to solve the problems. And now I have a libarduino that creates a static archive (library) and can be installed for later use by other programs (linking the libarduino library (libarduino.a)).

Cool thing is that the makefile for the new program becomes really small. For a new program, do a Makefile looking something like this:

SRC=test1.c

PROG=test1

include <your path>/libarduino/arduino.mk

… and you can now do (among other things)

make

make install

the last target install the application to your arduino.

Speaking about Free Software at Chalmers

Today, I have been invited to talk about Free Software at Chalmers. I’ll start off at 13.15…. I assume it is in one of the rooms in “Hörsalsvägen”

Anyhow, the presentation is open I think, so if you care to come over, just do so

Preparing for FOSDEM

It seems as if I’ll be going to FOSDEM this year too.

Hopefully the schedules will be published soon. Hmm, as co organiser of FSCONS I know it’s hard to come up with a schedule in the quagmire of planning. But as a guest I want to have it. Will Keith Packard come and enlighten us with Xorg news?

Anyhow, the GNU plans for FOSDEM can be found here: http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/fosdem/

GNU Xnee 3.05 'Merry X11-mas' released

We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.05

GNU Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute
user actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can
imitate the job you just did. GNU Xnee can be used to:
Automate tests
Demonstrate programs
Distribute actions
Record and replay ‘macro’
Retype the content of a file

Getting the Software
====================

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.05.tar.gz

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.05.tar.gz.sig

or one of the mirror sites as found in:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

Checksums
===========

md5sum:
0ba4ea4f6102bcc0b478f4a6fe787b0b  xnee-3.05.tar.gz

cksum:
3878268877 1666788 xnee-3.05.tar.gz

New in this release
===================

* Fixed bugs reported on bug-xnee@gnu.org:
“Bug report: libpanelapplet-2.0″ (12/15/2009 11:07 AM)
“Bug report: No package ‘libgnomeui-2.0′ found”
(12/15/2009 11:03 AM)
“Configure Error” (12/15/2009 11:07 AM)
“Error in configure.” (12/15/2009 11:09 AM)
“Building from CVS” (12/17/2009 07:19 PM)

* Build changes:
configure bails out when building any gui
and no pkg-config installed

Better help during configure if no gtk, gnomeui found

Telling user to run configure with –enable-doc option set,
when building from CVS (make -f Makefile.cvs)

New file (README.cvs) to ease up for users building from CVS

What is futsanaj

Last release of GNU Xnee was called ‘futsanaj’. What does ‘futsanaj’ mean?

It’s the name of a song one of my daughters wanted me to play while driviing the car. She became frustrated and tried to give me hints such as “you know the song Ella likes”… after a while she said something about a Doctor. Then, it stuck me.

Such a night with Dr John

When Signe tried to say Such a night, it became futsanaj.

GNU Xnee 3.04 'futsanaj' released

We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.04

GNU Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute
user actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can
imitate the job you just did. GNU Xnee can be used to:

Automate tests
Demonstrate programs
Distribute actions
Record and replay ‘macro’
Retype the content of a file

Getting the Software
====================

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.04.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.04.tar.gz.sig

or one of the mirror sites as found in:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

Checksums
===========

md5sum:
13f23c2f50685bb394a64a567a2aac22 xnee-3.04.tar.gz

cksum:
2196298073 1647230 xnee-3.04.tar.gz

New in this release
===================
* Bugs fixed:

Bad context / RECORD bug fixed to some extent:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3722
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20500
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21971
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/315456
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/379432

Workaround for RECORD problem in Xorg 1.6.0
recording device events also as delivered

Seg faults on Solaris 10

Bugs reported on savannah.gnu.org
#27850 “Segmentation Fault in print.c”
#27849: “Another Bug in xnee_resource.c”
#27848: “Segmentation fault”

* Doc changes:
Moved Top node outside of ifinfo statment
Falling back to one rule for ps and pdf

* Build changes:
configure looks for libgnomeui
Checking for ps2pdf14 as well as ps2pdf

Help needed for Xnee: Test the "RECORD bug"

Do you have some extra minutes, help us out and test GNU Xnee.

For a while, Xnee has been malfunctioning on some platforms. Hopefully some code committed yesterday will "solve it all on all platforms" (uh oh, sounds like famous last words!!).

More information here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-xnee/2009-12/msg00000.html

RECORD extension seems to be working again, GNU Xnee too

Seems as if I found a solution to a long time very serious bug (see prev. blog post) in GNU Xnee. GNU Xnee can now record (asynch) and use modifier+key to pause/resume/stop recording.

Played around with some XSync, XFlush to make sure we had a record context before firing the enable context call (XRecordEnableContextAsync) call.

Will now clean up the code, test (using swinput) some more (regression) and commit to CVS.

Dare I say we have a 3.04 release coming any day?

List of nominated for Nordic Free Software Award published.

On http://fscons.org/award you can read about the nominated persons/projects for the Nordic Free Software Award.

List of nominated 2009

Qt development team

Simon Josefsson

Daniel Stenberg

Henrik Nordström

Björn Stenberg

Andreas Nilsson

Varnish

Ask Bjørn Hansen

Knut Yrvin

Jari “Rakshasa” Sundell

The award will be presented at FSCONS