I bought a new tower PC (Dell Dimension 5000, with Intel P4 530HT) mostly to take the strain off when doing distchecks. Installing Linux was a bit of a struggle.

I wanted to keep the pre-installed NTFS Windows XP partition, but I did not find any LiveCD that was capable of resizing it. Most did not even recognise the (SATA) drive. The stable Ubuntu LiveCD would not even boot, though the “milestone” unstable Ubuntu LiveCD did. Knoppix 3.7 booted in default mode, but not when using the linux26 option. I gave up and used Partition Magic.

The Debian Sarge preview release was doing well, but then failed to boot after installation. For some reason it installed a k7-smp kernel, which I think is for a multi-processor AMD system, instead of a non-smp Intel x86 one. Stable Ubuntu did better, but hung while synchronizing the system clock. After googling, I reinstalled with the acpi=off option, which fixed everything. I wanted Debian on at least one PC, but Ubuntu won again.

I've been surprisingly successful with the gtkmm porting work that I'm doing for The Written Word. gtkmm,
glibmm, and libsigc++ now build with the SUN Forte CC, AIX xlC, IRIX MipsPro, and Tru64 C++ compilers, as well as g++ and the Intel
compiler. libsigc++ is quite a template test case, so that's a major improvement compared to a couple of years ago. I added a few configure
compiler tests to libsigc++ and glibmm to work around the (rather obscure) differences.

And a Microsoft employee even seems to have fixed a MSVC++ bug that
was causing us problems, though we'll have to wait for the new Visual Studio version to see whether it's really what we need. Back when I was developing on Windows there was no way to even report a bug, let alone expect it to be fixed.

After Hubert Figuiere mentioned it a while ago on Planet Gnome, I found a cheap SMC2835W 802.11g card on ebay, and am relieved to find that it works. It's a lot better than my 802.11b ELSA Vianect MC-11.

The only trick is to copy-and-rename the /Driver/smc2835w.arm file from the supplied CD, to /usr/lib/firmware/isl3890 (on debian linux) or /lib/firmware/isl3890 (That l is an L, not a one) on fedora linux, and then use the Gnome or Fedora networking control panel to create a new wireless connection. Maybe that firmware file is online, but how the hell would you know which file to use? I could not find any way to identify the “version” (1, 2, or 3) of the card.

I really hope that some dbus/hal-type thing could prompt me for the firmware in future. Looking in dmesg, googling for some dubious forum messages, and messing about in the terminal, is not a great user experience.

I'm very pleased that this works, but so far it still seems that no 802.11g card that you can currently buy as new will work in Linux, without recompiling your kernel or using the windows driver via the ndiswrapper hack.

Ubuntu just works

I also finally got around to replacing my debian partition with Ubuntu Linux. I was amazed that the 802.11g card just worked without any setup whatsoever. They seem to ship the firmware for many cards, and I hope they can keep doing that.

However, I can't get my new printer (HP Deskjet 3650) to work in Ubuntu yet, and that worked (almost “just work”ed) in Fedora Core 3, prompting me when I plugged in the USB cable.

Ubuntu is worth the install just for the little drum beat that greets you at the login.

The disabled root / sudo thing feels a little odd, and I think they should make it easier to find out what's going on. I mean, if I do su then it shouldn't just ask me for a password when there's no possible correct answer. As far as I can tell, on Ubuntu the regular user has rights to do some root-like things, but sometimes the user is asked for his own (not the root) password again. And, because su does not work, you need to run commands as “sudo thecommand” instead of doing su and then the command. sudo will ask for your own password again. It doesn't feel quite right, but maybe I'll get used to it, and maybe it'll improve.

This week I am doing some freelance work for The Written Word who are paying me to (try to,
sometimes) port libsigc++, glibmm, and gtkmm to various crufty brands of Unix and their compilers, starting with SUN's Forte C++
compiler.

The Written Word provide pre-built packages of various free/open-source software, with a convenient package-management system. I think there must be a big demand for this, because building from source is a difficult waste of any company's time. I know that anything other than simple is beyond most large companies that I've worked for.

And most of those large companies really want to pay someone for CDs and some kind of contract when they decide to use a certain development platform.

Testing whether planet filters on the category name as well as the title and body.

Hmm, it seems that most blog feeds don't contain the category names of the items anyway.

I had GNOME conference calls last evening and the evening before.

The GNOME Foundation Board's old members handed over to the new members, so we had many people on the call. We have to mute when not talking, but I couldn't unmute after a while, so did my replying on irc. I'm not a fan of conference calls, but dates for meetings are a good way to get people in sync, even if meetings themselves are not.

There was much discussion about how to be more productive, without useless distractions. Hopefully we manage that. A year is a short time, and I'd like to be proud of my year. But I think that the old board are being a little hard on themselves.

The guadec-planning meeting was more practical. There's a capable team with support from the local government, and things seem to be going well, both with the submitted papers (Dave Neary has done a great job) with the infrastructure (Thomas Uhl's local contacts have been very helpful), and with the web site (thanks to Christian Meyer). Tim Ney is organising things well.

I have spent the last week making last minutes additions and changes to the gtkmm API before the GNOME 2.9 API freeze, and now I can relax a bit.

Bryan Forbes has been very helpful, and Daniel Holbach found some missing stuff in the glibmm Option-parsing API. However, I think most gtkmm developers still don't understand that we have a schedule, so it's just me that worries about it.

Now for the rest of my list of tasks that built up during the past few months.

My personal list of wonderful GNOME-and-related progress in 2004. It's been a good year:

• GTK 2.6 added new API that we really wanted, really quickly. Though lots of people worked really hard on this, I believe that Matthias Clasen has been a major organisational and coding factor. Red Hat was very smart to hire him. [1]
• Frederico and friends did lots of little-details work on GtkFileChooser, dealing with the wrath of the typing-the-full-path crowd and adding nautilus-style keyboard navigation, to make the experience even more mac-like.
• Fedora finally merged with fedora.us, to create pre-extras, so people can now get extra stuff like gtkmm from a definitive source, and the way is almost clear for a debian-like community to evolve.
• Ubuntu showed how to fix Debian.
• USB memory sticks just work.
• Fluendo got serious about gstreamer.

[1] Matthias Clasen is still largely a mystery to me. I couldn't say what he looks like, where he lives, or what he cares about outside of GTK . That's probably best though, because I'd fanboy him.

I’m back from a few days in Venice over New Year’s. It’s as wonderful as everybody says, from the first glimpse of the grand canal outside the train station.

It’s big too, and irregular. You can walk across large parts of the city through tall narrow streets that are often only wide enough for one person. Even with a map I got lost for an hour just getting croissants from the bakery one the morning.

Venice is expensive but worth it for the unique experience. We took the train from Munich and stayed in an apartment to save a little money and pretend that we lived there.

I got a Linksys WRT54GS
wireless router/gateway thing so I can get rid of the cables in my apartment. Luckily I was right in thinking that this one can be connected directly to the DSL modem and use the DSL username and password. As far as I can tell, the regular WRT54G (without the S, which means Speedbooster) can not do this, so you'd need a cable from the DSL router to your PC, and a second network card connected to the wireless router, allowing you to get wireless networking only on a second computer. But it's not clear. I'm amazed that they sell anything. Their WAP54G would have worked, but I wanted a WRT54G just because it pleases me to know that Linux is running on it.

There's lots of firmware on the Linksys site, but I wasn't sure what would work on this german (WRT54GS-DE) version. I took a risk and found that the -EU firware works, giving me an English admin interface. Later I might risk the regular US firmware, in the hope that I'll get the ability to increase the signal power. But I'm not sure what happens if you try to flash it with dodgy firmware. Maybe there's no way back after that.

I have a 802.11b wireless card, but this wireless router can do 802.11g. I'd like to take advantage of that, but it doesn't look like there is one single 802.11g PCMCIA card that will just work on any mainstream linux distro. There are ways to make them work, but nothing close to simple. It all seems to involve either using the windows driver on Linux, recompiling your kernel, or hunting some non-distributable firmware, depending on the card.

Update:

So, according to the comments I could have saved money by getting the regular WRT54G
instead of the WRT54GS.

Also, in the PPPoE settings, I had to change the MTU from auto to manual 1492 to be able to use slashdot.org,
dreamhost.com, bahn.de, and ebay.de. I have only the faintest idea what MTU means, and I have no idea why the
WRT54GS can not automatically discover it for me.