Ah, the wonders of e-commerce!

After excruciatingly long months of waiting for all pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, I am pleased to announce that the dayjob finally rolled out its very first online shop!

The process of putting this together has been quite an experience: I had to learn about the wonders of payment authorization gateways, different taxation jurisdictions, etc. For instance, we have to deal with 4 taxation jurisdictions:

1. Estonian corporates and individuals: always add 18% VAT.
2. Other EU individuals: always add 18% VAT.
3. Other EU corporates: can be exempted from VAT, if their EU tax registration number is valid. Otherwise, add 18% VAT.
4. Corporates and individuals from outside EU: always exempted from VAT.

As much as we looked around, we could not find any e-commerce site engine that can handle all the intricacies of dealing with EU corporate customers who may or may not have a valid EU taxation exemption number so, for now, our online shop only handles cases 1, 2 and 4 properly.

What can you find on our online shop?

• Our acclaimed LTSP client hardware solution, the ThinCan.
• Our really cool Programmable LPC Dongle, which is an Open Source tool for developing and debugging firmware running on devices attached to an LPC bus. I mentioned Open Source, because we publish the FPGA code and Python scripts needed to access the LPC Dongle under the LGPL.
• Various other products which we happen to sell in the Baltic market.

Anyhow, I'm really happy to finally see this online shop deployed. So many people had wanted to purchase a ThinCan using a credit card or from countries for which shipping costs were difficult to determine and we unfortunately could not easily accommodate them. This is now resolved. Enjoy!

xf86-video-cyrix and xf86-video-nsc: it's dead, Jim

It had to happen sooner or later:

The X.org drivers for the old GX1 variants of the Geode chips formerly made by Cyrix and NSC no longer build against the current X.org release. Given the imminent release of X.org 7.4 (server core 1.5), this essentially means that users of older Geodes will have a nasty surprise, the day they upgrade to Ubuntu/Intrepid, which ships with core 1.5. Soon after, the release immediately following Debian/Lenny will be affected too.

There is a planned milestone to eventually reintegrate support for older GX1 products into the clean and up-to-date xf86-video-geode framework, but this will unfortunately come too late for those upgrading to Ubuntu/Intrepid, unless...

...unless someone volunteers to copy gx_* files inside xf86-video-geode and graft GX1 support into the resulting gx1_* files. If you have access to Cyrix/NSC GX1 + CS5530 or AMD SC hardware and a reasonable knowledge of the X.org codebase, your contribution would be most welcome.