Yes, finally Linux 2.6.19 has been released. So you wonder why is this something to blog about? -- Because it is the first Linux version that contains my super-cool MSI Laptop driver, one of the most impressing attainments of mankind, only excelled perhaps by KRYPTOCHEF, the only tool in existence which does fullbit encryption.

Everybody should read Roman Kennke's take on Mark Shuttleworth's OpenSUSE spam mail. It's constructive and sensible.

I hope the Ubuntu people find the strength to resist the short-term bliss of desktop bling for long-term software freedom!

Please learn the lession Java teaches us: resist the temptation of closed source software and develop alternatives as free software!

Is anyone who's attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountain View right now heading for San Francisco tomorrow? I plan to stay a few days in the city to do sight seeing and stuff. Please catch me at the conference today if you are interested to join me visiting San Francisco!

So, you thought that only Linux users (and other alternative OS zealots) would benefit from reverse engineered Windows drivers? Ha! Far from the truth, it's the Windows users themselves who are benefitting. (Sorry, that link is in German)

Too bad that this specific Windows port actually infringes my copyrights since it links my GPL'ed code against the non-free inpout32.dll. And the guy who did that port doesn't even think it's necessary to put his email address anywhere.

MSI Laptop Owners! Join us and extend the MegaWiki, the new Wiki for all kinds of information on Linux on MSI MegaBooks! (and all MSI built laptops sold under other brands)

The MegaWiki is still rather empty but we hope that it will soon grow as large as our inspiration, the ThinkWiki which collects information about IBM ThinkPads. For that we need your help!

This site will be the new home of the MSI laptop drivers (backlight control, rfkill) and provide modified ACPI DSDTs to fix a few BIOS errors. And more!

To my surprise I have been invited to the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountain View early next month (as a "ROCKSTAR", to quote Mark), to promote PulseAudio. And that although I am not an Ubuntu developer, nor even much of an Ubuntu user. I'll be available for discussing everything Multimedia/PulseAudio related. While I've not been invited because of my involvement in Avahi/Zeroconf I will, of course, also be available for discussion of these topics. As it appears, Canonical is not resentful, or maybe it's just their way to bribe me into registering with Launchpad? ;-)

After UDS I plan to stay a few more days in San Francisco to visit the city. Can anyone point me to cheap accomodation in SF, or perhaps even lives in SF and has room where I could sleep?

In addition my PulseAudio presentation has been accepted at linux.conf.au 2007. At GNOME.conf.au I hope to give another presentation, together with Trent Lloyd about Avahi, everyone's favourite Zeroconf implementation. And finally I plan to give yet another presentation, again about PulseAudio, at FOMS 2007, the Foundations of Open Media Software conference, which happens shortly before linux.conf.au, also in Sydney. FOMS is still looking for more people to speak at the conference, so, please go to their CFP page and send in your proposal if you have something to talk about!

A while ago I played around with Cairo and created a Python tool fring, similar to KDE's Filelight, however not interactive and very simple. Frédéric Back took my code and gave it a little GUI love, and this is the result:

Frédéric added a nice interactive GTK GUI and a fully asynchronous directory walker based on Gnome-VFS which runs in a background thread and thus doesn't block the UI. This makes the user interface snappier than Filelight's ever was. It's a lot of fun to navigate your directories like this!

I would have liked to post a screencast of the new fring in action here, to show how snappy it is. But unfortunately both Byzanz and Istanbul failed horribly on my 16bpp display.

The current version of fring is not yet polished for a public release. In the meantime, you can get the sources from the SVN:

svn checkout svn://svn.0pointer.de/fring/trunk fring

Yes, I am aware that a future version of Baobab will offer a similar view of the filesystem. However, it just was so much fun to hack on fring, and due to the power of Python it was so easy and quick to develop this tool, that we just couldn't resist to do it.

Various, unrelated news:

Thanks to Marvin Stark my project syrep is now available in Debian. As you might know all the cool kids have written their own distributed revision control systems. This is my contribution on this topic. Although I started to work on it four years ago syrep is still unrivaled and unbeaten in its specific feature set. (Which is admittedly very different from the feature set of most other software in this area.)

Thanks to CJ van den Berg and Sjoerd Simons (and a few others from #pulseaudio) PulseAudio is now available in Debian, the auxiliary GUI tools like pavucontrol seem to be still missing. Nonetheless: it's now easier then ever to try PulseAudio:

sudo aptitude install pulseaudio \
    pulseaudio-module-hal \
    pulseaudio-esound-compat \
    pulseaudio-utils \
    libgstreamer-plugins-pulse0.10-0 \
    pulseaudio-module-gconf \
    pulseaudio-module-x11 \
    pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

For the next months I will focus on my Diplomarbeit (German equivalent of a master thesis). Due to this I passed maintainership of Avahi to Trent Lloyd and of PulseAudio to Pierre Ossman. I hope to resume maintainership of both projects in January.

My first non-trivial kernel patch has been merged into Linus' kernel, although the 2.6.19 merge window was already closed. I take this as birthday present from Linus.

If you have a laptop (such as the MSI S270) with Ricoh SD/MMC interface (not one of the new controllers which are SDHCI compatible, but the old ones where the SD/MMC is a virtual PCMCIA slot identifying itself as Bay1Controller), then please support me in writing a Linux driver for it and request the necessary documentation and datasheets from Ricoh. For more information on this issue see this posting on the s270-linux mailing list, and this followup.

That's all for now.

A few minutes ago I released Avahi 0.6.14 which besides other, minor fixes and cleanups includes a new component avahi-autoipd. This new daemon is an implementation of IPv4LL (aka RFC3927, aka APIPA), a method for acquiring link-local IP addresses (those from the range 169.254/16) without a central server, such as DHCP.

Yes, there are already plenty Free implementations of this protocol available. However, this one tries to do it right and integrates well with the rest of Avahi. For a longer rationale for adding this tool to our distribution instead of relying on externals tools, please read this mailing list thread.

It is my hope that this tool is quickly adopted by the popular distributions, which will allow Linux to finally catch up with technology that has been available in Windows systems since Win98 times. If you're a distributor please follow these notes which describe how to integrate this new tool into your distribution best.

Because avahi-autoipd acts as dhclient plug-in by default, and only activates itself as last resort for acquiring an IP address I hope that it will get much less in the way of the user than previous implementations of this technology for Linux.

State of the Lemur

Almost 22 months after my first SVN commit to the flexmdns (which was the name I chose for my mDNS implementation when I first started to work on it) source code repository, 18 months after Trent and I decided to join our two projects under the name "Avahi" and 12 months after the release of Avahi 0.1, it's time for a little "State of the Lemur" post.

To make it short: Avahi is ubiquitous in the Free Software world. ;-)

All major (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, OpenSUSE) and many minor distributions have it. A quick Google-based poll I did a few weeks ago shows that it is part of at least 19 different distributions, including a range of embedded ones. The list of applications making native use of the Avahi client API is growing, currently bearing 31 items. That list does not include the legacy HOWL applications and the applications that use our Bonjour compatibility API which can run on top of Avahi, hence the real number of applications that can make use of Avahi is slightly higher. The first commercial hardware appliances which include Avahi are slowly appearing on the market. I know of at least three such products, one being Bubba.

If you package Avahi for a distribution, add Avahi support to an application, or build a hardware appliance with Avahi, please make sure to add an item to the respective lists linked above, it's a Wiki. Thank you! (Anonymous registration without Mail address required, though)

Play around with Cairo: Check!

One thing that has been sitting on my TODO list for a very long time was playing around with Cairo. No longer! Yesterday I spent a little time on hacking a Cairo based equivalent of KDE's Filelight (Which BTW is one of the two programs that KDE has but GNOME really lacks, the other being KCacheGrind). The result after two hours is this:

This screenshot shows the development tree of my Syrep tool.

This tool has definitely nicer anti-aliased graphics than Filelight, doesn't it? The source code is here: fring.py. Anyone interested in turning this into a proper GNOME application?