Josh Saddler

SCALE

It's been a coupla weeks now since SCALE 6x, so it's about time for an after-action report.

My wife and I arrived Friday night after suffering a two-hour delay because of heavy traffic. The 405 was the worst. LA traffic always gives me nightmares.

Saturday morning came far too early, but at least we were already registered. We got there the same time as omp, who'd brought a Windows-using friend along as a booth slave--er, volunteer.

Our booth setup included a giant Gentoo poster, omp's desktop rig, and one (occasionally both) of my laptops, displaying Xfce. It was more popular than the extremely minimal openbox desktop, so HAH! We gave out lots of bribes--snacks--and even more LiveCDs. It's too bad we didn't have flyers, business cards, shirts, or other Gentoo swag this year. Lots of folks were asking for them. At least we gave out snacks'n'luv.

Wireless internet sucked throughout the weekend. Apparently it was the same for everyone. Spotty, minuscule bandwidth, and nameservers couldn't be reached. Made it hard to demo things that needed internet access, such as emerging packages, looking up our homepage, or highlighting documentation.

One of our users, calculus, was around much of the time to help out; was nice to see him at SCALE again this year. And wormo made an incognito appearance, too. To all the users and everyone else who stopped by and asked questions, gave feedback, or just chatted -- thank you. You're terrific. I'm always excited to meet a Gentoo user in person. It's like "Really? you use Gentoo? No way!" We were possibly the least-known distro there (tied with Foresight and Damn Small Linux?), certainly the least commercial one. The other distros were all heavyweights: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Fedora, etc.

Still, we had lots of traffic. Several people wanted to know what's up with Gentoo in regards to our recent legal status issues, so I provided the news in-person, and that seemed to go over well. Curiously, none of the enterprise-level folks were much interested in our legal status. They pretty much all said the same thing: "We're not worried. All the technical development is still there; nothing's changing." It was only the individual users who had all kinds of worries and needed the explanation. The corporate sector wasn't worried at all: "As long as it's still being developed."

There are plenty of pictures of our booth around the 'net in reviews and photo sites; you just have to look for 'em.

I had a blast at SCALE. I plan to attend next year, too.

ebuilds

Lately I've been poking random ebuilds from the tree, posting updates to Bugzilla, creating new local ebuilds, asking for keywords/stabling, and so on. It's a lot of fun. A fair amount of edgy experimentation, but that's what my new laptop is for. Things like wicd that I'd like to see in the tree, or the latest version of brasero.

burning apps

Speaking of burning software . . . brasero seems to be the only actively developed gtk+-based application. Everything else hasn't had a release in years. Xfburn, gnomebaker, graveman, xcdroast....you name it. That's not good news. Brasero is a good choice for my Gnome desktop workstation, but I wouldn't even think of putting Gnome on my laptop, which is a pure Xfce machine. And yet I hate the idea of putting K3B on my laptop even more, because of the ugly, ugly Qt and kdelibs dependencies.

I went ahead and installed brasero on my laptop anyway, since it's gtk+, and it can work with DVDs. None of the other apps I mentioned support 'em. That added 33 huge Gnome deps, including (ugh) nautilus. The irony? K3B only wanted 18 total packages. Still, it's uglier. That's what counts, right?

So thinking about this sad state of affairs for gtk+-based burning apps got me thinking . . . what would it take to create a new one? Something fast, with minimal dependencies, and gtk-based.

gtk

I've skimmed the gtk tutorial and the reference manual before, but only as a passing curiosity. Today I really took a shot at figuring 'em out. This is where I ran into the cliff known as "C programming."

I'm not a programmer. I can do markup languages, I can do some bash, some javascript, little things like that. But I've never been trained in OOP. Or any kind of programming, except some BASIC in elementary school and college. My degree is in theatre, not computer science!

Still, I'm determined to make what headway I can with these gtk+ guides. I've started to see what does what, and why. And some of the necessary parts of an app. Now I need to find out how to get that button press to do something, like . . . burn a CD. Copy a disc. Save an iso. And so on. For that, I've been poking at the source code for Xfburn, libburn, and brasero. This is all still just a bit over my head, but I'm trying, at least.

I've already partly answered my own question of "Why aren't there more up-to-date gtk+ burning apps available?" because I created a sample task list.

Writing a graphical app is a huge undertaking. What burning backend will be used? cdrtools, cdrkit, libburn/libisofs, dvd+rwtools are all possibilities. Same goes for the media types used in writing audio discs. The app has to handle notification (possibly via dbus), disc drive status/detection, set/get write speed, and a dozen other critical tasks. Oh, and it needs to be translatable (those pesky .po files that take up space), and it really should make use of autotools. What other libraries will it use? Will any of its features be optional compile-time switches? Got to add those too. Where will the project be hosted? What VCS? And so on.

Lots of stuff to do. No wonder brasero's the only active gtk+ burning app. And that's too bad, too. It has a ton of dependencies that folks using Xfce or just a WM don't care to install. I'd like to see the huge gap between "brasero" and "nothing" filled by a low-dependency, fast, capable application. I just don't think I'm up to the task of creating it all by myself.

Off to SCALE. Gentoo, represent!

See you there.

Right, I'm almost done setting up the Thinkpad.

The keyboard is still taking some getting used to -- I hate having the Fn at the far left, where the Ctrl key should be, and I hate not having the Del/Home/End keys vertically aligned with the right edge of the keyboard. I also keep forgetting I have a working middle mouse button for Firefox. Too used to having to Ctrl-click tabs on the Toshiba. And . . . I love the scroll function on the synaptics touchpad. Love it. The pad itself I don't use much; I'm too used to trackpointers. Plus it's too easy to turn a drag motion into a sudden click. I do like the IBM trackpoint more than my Toshiba; the IBM one is more accurate and has a nicer surface.

Fingerprint use: for the time being, I've uninstalled fprint, and installed thinkfinger instead. Why the switch? Because thinkfinger works out-of-the-box with SLiM, and pam_fprint doesn't work with it at all. If it worked with SLiM, I'd switch back. Also, thinkfinger's enrollment seems to work better. I'm getting far fewer rejected scans. I'd like to file a feature request bug with fprint upstream to get SLiM supported, but its bugtracker mails aren't getting through to my devmail. dsd, you reading this?

I still haven't bothered playing with hdaps yet or finding out why it thinks my disk is unsupported. While on the subject of disks, it occurs to me that I really should have created a /usr/portage partition and formatted it as ReiserFS. ext3 is just too slow for Portage ops.

I at least solved my networking issues by adding a couple of required modules and undoing parallel startup. I also fixed a typo in conf.d/net. I don't plan on using NetworkManager any time soon, as it requires lots of Gnome dependencies. For now, I added a second network block to wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
        key_mgmt=NONE
        priority=-9999999
}

I haven't tested it yet, but I think this should work for unsecured public access points. Actually, I think this was probably in wpa_supplicant.conf before I deleted everything and added my own config.

My desktop and development environment are just about complete; got my keys imported and my firewall setup and everything. Still haven't setup my system for Bluetooth or audio production yet. Or games.

As promised, I've made my working kernel config available. For all you Intel X3100 users, this may be of use in setting up uvesafb. Also, if you've got an IPW3945 ABG network card, this may be useful if you're using the in-kernel iwl driver. I've enabled the appropriate statistics options to use powerTOP, which is a very nice way to monitor power usage. I get about 2.8 hours doing basic wireless internet, docs work, etc. with my screen almost at full brightness. Not bad. I think I waited too long to get an Ultrabay battery; SCALE 6x is less than a week away!

Speaking of SCALE, I'm going. So I should probably get tickets & registration for me and my wife, yeah? Oh, and a hotel reservation. My new laptop has been such a distraction.

I've discovered a really unusual bug/behavior. I removed alsasound from the boot runlevel, in case I'm running on battery. Now, unless you blacklist them, your sound modules will still get loaded regardless, taking that much more power (even with aggressive soundcard power management enabled.) So what I had been doing was starting and stopping the ALSA initscript once my desktop was loaded. Here's the bug:

Starting and stopping ALSA this way actually kills all GTK theming in Xfce. The decorations revert to GTK defaults, the window colors go to their GTK defaults, the panel becomes ugly, you name it. All I have to do to re-apply the default (pretty) Xfce GTK theme is open one of Xfce's configuration utilities. Any of them. Isn't that bizarre? I have no idea why the hell that happens. Every time I stop ALSA. It's a minor nuisance, I guess.

On thinkpad_acpi and hotkeys:

It's a known bug that the brightness hotkeys don't work, but echoing values directly to /proc does. There won't be a fix for this any time soon, either. I've been in contact with upstream, submitting reports to their database, etc. Still have to go through and test the rest of my hardware (Bluetooth, etc.) and submit another report, but the outlook is not favorable for hotkeys. I still need to find a good program that will recognize the Fn-Home/Fn-End key command for brightness adjustments. xbacklight works, but I need keybinds to call it. Xfce has a built in keybind program, but it can't see Fn key combos. I'll have to find a sane xbindkeys setup (or similar app); there's probably something on ThinkWiki or the Gentoo Forums.

Signing off for now . . . maybe I'll see ya'll at SCALE? Come on by the Gentoo booth! Devs, users, groupies, etc. are all welcome.

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. In spite of the rain that's deluging the county. Why? Because my Thinkpad R61i arrived today.

I lucked out in three critical ways:

1) Shipping condition. Not a scratch; it's like it was never used.
2) Trackpad. I booted the x86 2007.0 LiveCD, and it seems to think that it's a real Synaptics device. I mean, scrolling on the pad was enabled and everything. Though it did decide that the top middle button, when pressed, should be an M key.
3) Working fingerprint reader. While lsusb isn't present on the LiveCD, some poking around /proc/bus/usb/devices showed a vendor ID of 0483:2016, which is supported by fprint, and presumably by thinkfinger as well.

I only had time to boot it up and quickly check the hardware specs before heading off to work. Will post more on it later, and I think I'll write up some installation notes and stick 'em in my devspace too.

Happiness is an awesome laptop. This thing is so quiet. Lightweight, too. And it seems to have hardware that actually works in Linux. Sure, the keyboard layout isn't satisfactory, but I can probably work around that with keybinding. It's otherwise a dream machine. Well, mine anyway.

I want to take it to SCALE in a couple of weeks, but now I'm worried about it being stolen. Figures. I'll at least bring along my ancient crappy Toshiba laptop as a booth demo machine. That worked last year.

Back again. Started to really get back to work on Gentoo, with more documentation commits, bugfixes, etc.

Also started using some new gtk+ applications: beandog added my ebuild for brasero-0.7.0 to Portage, and I got drac to keyword asunder-1.0. I've been meaning to ditch k3b for awhile now, so I finally unmerged it, and started cutting down on the number of dependencies. I still need qt for Rosegarden and Hydrogen, bah! In the meantime, I now have a pair of decent disc writing & ripping tools for my CD collection. Still a couple of bugs, though -- brasero doesn't seem to like writing single-layer DVDs (though dual-layer works fine), and asunder's mp3 encoding flat-out doesn't work, at least so far on amd64. Still doing further testing on x86. Also, it's rather slower than most other tools out there. At least FLAC, wav, and Ogg work, though I already have those through sound-juicer. Now that I've got mp3 encoding working in sound-juicer, I'll use it until I can figure out asunder. I'm working actively with upstream to get this worked out; major props to Andrew for being so responsive.

On the laptop front, I've found some possibilities. The hard cost limit is still under $600, but I've found several intriguing models in the $380 to $500 range. Originally, I was set on finding a used Everex StepNote of some kind and installing the developer edition of Zonbu on it, then using that stepping stone to turn it into my usual Gentoo environment. Don't get me wrong; the price on the Zonbu notebook ain't too bad, but for almost $500, I think I could do better. There are still used/refurbished StepNotes out there for only $400. There's also an Acer model or two at that price range, but they're usually out of stock at online merchants, as well as being only 14.1".

Side note: former Gentoo developer plasmaroo (Tim Yamin) works for Zonbu, and has been doing much to get that tricky VIA hardware working & other things, so congrats to him. Perhaps he's one of the reasons why Zonbu went with Gentoo as their base OS?

I've also found a couple of interesting cheap dual-core Gateway laptops such as the ML6720, though no real information can be found on their Linux compatibility.

I've been kind of hoping that my new laptop would be dual-core, but that's just asking for reduced battery life. It'd make compiling faster, but at the cost of power, heat, and definitely price. If I stay closer to $400 I won't need to worry about future-proofing with dual-core; I'd just buy a new laptop at a similar price point sometime in the future. Single-core desktop usage & development ain't that bad on a laptop, right?

Just tonight I found some extremely attractive Lenovo notebooks. Intel X3100 graphics and boast up to 4.5 hours battery life. Now, this last bit is flat-out amazing. I was all gung-ho on getting a cheap VIA-based notebook like this one because of the 3-hour battery life, and it is an alternative to Intel. Hey, I have an AMD workstation. But the Lenovos I'm looking at . . . sure, they're more than $400. And some of them are only Celeron chips (historically underpowered).

But man oh man . . . I found some new & used Thinkpad 61-series models that look good, as well as some Lenovo 3000 N models. And they're 15.4" widescreens. Light. Acceptably thin. They even have CD/DVD drives, which is almost optional for me. One's even dual-core.

So now I have to figure out how much money I really want to spend -- $400 to $600 is really a huge price gap; there are far too many features and choices available for any given manufacturer.

What's really starting to sway me over to Lenovo, despite my earlier post, is whether or not the integrated wifi, pointer, and fingerprint reader are in solid working condition. Specifically for the R/T/X/61 & 3000 N series. And whether the rest of ACPI, hotkeys, power management, HDAPS, and disc drives work correctly. And that I can get CPU/HDD temperatures, remaining battery life, and processor speed reported in a graphical utility. Apparently lm_sensors shouldn't be used on Thinkpads, so I wonder what else would report that info. On the fingerprint reader front, dsd is working on some kinda fingerprint software. Will have to check. Will also have to find some recommended spindown & sleep settings for Thinkpad hard disks.

For features, Thinkpads are looking better and better. It's true, they do look like refugees from 1985. Ugly as sin. Ugly as a dead cow in clown shoes. Splashed with hideous bits of color here and there. But still . . . they're starting to become attractive.

So, it's a new year. With new possibilities. Like laptops. Especially laptops. Now I just have to get my wife to sign off on one in time for SCALE . . .

SCALE 2007 was a blast, as some have already reported. My wife and I arrived late Friday night, whereupon we met a few Gentoo devs, including Pete, Christel, Josh, Dan, and Mike. Hurray for the bar! I proceeded to get loaded with two (2!) Sprites, with ice. Yes, fizzy sweet nonalcoholic beverages are my drink of choice. Mmm, sugar. Diabetics should probably not read this blog. More devs, users, and random folks from other FOSS projects dropped by. And, of course, the merits of double-doubles...Christel ordered a double rum and coke, and I jokingly told the waiter "make it a double-double!" He obliged, and she didn't realize it until 15 minutes into her drink! . We also discussed the merits of paragliding versus paraFALLING, and the (relative) merits of buttplugs -- not for any of those present, but for certain people in other countries.... Anyway, we had a blast until 1AM or so, when it was time to crash.

Saturday came far too early. Seven hours of sleep, ugh. Headed downstairs to face the line for a bit at 9:30, until some kind SCALE organizer pointed out that since I was an exhibitor I could just head right in. Met up with Pete, who was the first on the scene. David showed up a little later I think, and then a general crowd of Gentoo devs showed up. We set up various desktops and laptops on the table in our (all too small) booth, and when I dodged upstairs to get /dev/snacks (as I affectionately labeled them), I came back to discover the mother of all booth attractions...a 28-someodd inch widescreen LCD TV hooked up to a Playstation3 running the Gentoo/PPC64 livecd. This was courtesy Dan (dostrow) -- oh man, it was so sweet, and proved to be quite the draw for the rest of the event. Even had a "Powered by Gentoo" sticker on it. One of those stickers was later slapped on my butt by a mischievous Christel. Actually, that same cheek was repeatedly groped by Josh and by my wife at various opportune (read: someone had a camera) moments, with predictable comic effect.

I caught two talks on Saturday, Jono Bacon's How to Herd Cats and Influence People (aka Heckle Gentoo and Get Heckled Back!), as well as Alex Ionescu's ReactOS talk. I had one question...."Can it run StarCraft?" His answer: "Yes." I'm sold!

Once Saturday was finished, we ended up going out to a nearby Thai restaurant...so good! So yummy! There were about 22 of us once we all got there (turns out that GPS is in fact a bad thing). All of us devs, my wife, some Freenode staff, Gnome developers, and some attendees who'd just arrived from San Diego. I chatted with them for a bit, since they work at the UCSD library (fellow library-types! yay!), so it just goes to show I'm not the only Linux-type who works in a library.

After that, we returned to the hotel and went our separate ways for a bit. A bunch of us headed to the roof of the parking lot to watch the planes land nearby at LAX, but they weren't going for the closer runway, and it started to rain. Back inside, then ... only to discover Christel&co getting friendly with Mr. Vodka and Mr. Laptop. (Licking ensued, the video is on YouTube somewhere). Merriment! Eventually we giggled our way into the hall, and Pete had the great suggestion that we play Tremulous. Oh man, that game is intense. The aliens totally have an advantage over the humans if used right. Eventually, they wouldn't let me play as aliens anymore, even when it was me vs. them (blackace, latexer, calculus and I took turns on 3 machines). Bah. I scared the **** out of them, though. "Where is he?!? Where is he!! AHHHHheATEmyarseoff!" --> this was Pete screaming like a little girl. I stumbled off to bed at 1:30, feeling like I had a cold.

This was justified; I spent all Sunday feeling sick. I think some SCALE attendee gave me a cold, so I manned the booth despite feeling terrible. Met users, other FOSS project members, folks curious about Gentoo, etc. Thanks to James, Pete, and David we had lightscribe CDs to give away that day, not just our handwritten, limited-edition one-of-a-kind Sharpie CDs. The lightscribe discs looked really terrific!

We intermittently ran a networked Tremulous game on Pete's AMD64 and my laptop as part of the demo, and Steve (nerdboy) brought his k'neXBox (as I dubbed it) out. Didn't get that working; it had hardware issues, but it got some attention anyway, since its case was made of K'nex parts. Sunday didn't feel quite as busy as Saturday, but it was still a good time. I finally went swag-hunting with David, and had to deal with some crazy old guy who monopolized our entire booth. Grr. He dragged out a chair, plopped into it, and proceeded to tell stories about everything imaginable, while blocking access, trapping all our devs at once, and drove off attendees all at the same time! > And he ate all our candy! All our other visitors were nice enough, though one guy asked us "What is Gentoo? Who are you guys?", and instead of listening, proceeded to use our PS3 to look up wikipedia's article. Ummm, okay? I'm told Linux events have their share of wacky folks, so I guess this is to be expected.

Anyway, on the last night, we went out for dinner at a craptastic Pizza Hut before going our separate ways. I came away with a better sense of who these people are that I work with. They're a fun, awesome group, and it's too bad we can't hang out in person more. At least we have IRC. Of the devs who were supposed to attend, only Chris, Elfyn, and Steve didn't make it. The rest of us had quite a huge party going at all times.

Looking forward to the next time all (or some) of us can get together in person. FOSSCON is just around the corner...

Still reading? Man, you're focused. Go get yourself a cold drink or something, and remember to blink!

In just an hour or two we'll be off to SCALE 2007, once the traffic from SD to LA dies down. I'll be bringing snacks for us hungry booth staffers, and a laptop and some CDs to burn as well. Note, if you're coming to SCALE and want a CD, we only have 2006.1 CDs to give out. And my laptop takes about 20 minutes to burn 'em, so don't expect me to turn out too many. I'll do my best, though.

So tired....had 5 hours of sleep. And I now have a massive migraine to match. Perhaps I should treat it with a pre-SCALE party tonight? Yes! Just what the doctor ordered.

We'll allegedly have some sort of wired/wireless internet, so if I can I'll post from the booth. Man, too bad my laptop doesn't have any batteries to speak of; it just now occured to me I should take notes during the talks I'll be going to. I plan to catch Jono Bacon's talk on "How to Herd Cats and Influence People" as well as the ReactOS presentation from Alex Ionescu. On the second day I may or may not attend the wireless networking basics talk; doesn't seem to offer me much, but wifi is just so cool I may attend anyway.

Otherwise, I'll be at the booth more or less the whole time, possibly raiding -- er, visiting -- the other exhibitors. And yakking with my fellow devs about any number of things, beginning with world domination (of course).

See you at SCALE!

...to Xfce4 4.4, that is. I've finally heeded the urgings of my fellow Xfce enthusiasts dostrow, nichoj, et al, and moved my laptop over to the latest Xfce 4.4 prerelease. Sometimes as a developer, you have to live somewhat on the bleeding edge, in this case, a couple of dozen entries in package.unmask. Yow! Hot stuff. The new Xfce has changed considerably since 4.2. It more resembles a traditional desktop environment, but it still retains the speed and ease of use that it had from the older days. That said, some configuration changes have been made. Configuring the panel is a little less intuitive; the same control works for both the icon strip at the bottom and the window list at the top. (So don't just kill the panel process entirely!) No more xftaskbar4 to kill.

There are still a few outstanding bugs, such as missing icons from things like the main configuration window, missing panel plugin icons (none for cpu-freq), and missing icons for mail and webbrowser in the terminal Applications menu. Also missing is the old ability to change the icon spacing in thunar. Though a host of other features have been added, folder views take up way too much space. Need the icons to be spaced about half as far apart as they currently are.

Also, the new battery applet is not nearly as helpful as the old one. For example, even though lm_sensors doesn't work on this laptop whatsoever, the basic thermal zone info from ACPI was parsed by the battstatus applet (don't ask me why, I'm just glad it did). It displayed temperature, battery charge, and an indicator whenever the fan turned on. Handy, right? Well, the fan indicator is still there, but there's no provision for temperature display anymore. WEAK. Grr. I'd downgrade, but the stable version blocks the masked version. Anyone know a fix-it for this?

Speaking of WEAK, my back has taken a sudden turn for the worse over the last couple of days. Earlier this week (i.e. before I started my new schedule on Wednesday), I was almost back to normal. I could walk without limping, at least most of the day. And now...now I'm not doing so hot. Some excrutiating twinges, and constant pain every step. It's a little better than it was yesterday, but I for sure need to get to the doctor's office and get that x-ray done. The doc said it'd take a minimum of six weeks to heal, and at the end of that time, I can say that I'm definitely not recovered. %$^&# sciatica. And at my age, too. I'd hoped to be well by my wife's birthday and Christmas, but doesn't look like that will happen.

Maybe I'll be fully healed in time for SCALE in February?