unexplainable WiFi connection drops on Dell D430

Dear Lazyweb,

Since a few days, my Dell D430 running Ubuntu Jaunty has started to experience random WiFi connection drops. After a few hours of normal operation, even though the Network Manager applet indicates that the connection is still with me and with a strong signal, doing a ping to my WRT54GL running OpenWRT 0.9 (White Russian) replies with "Destination Unreachable".

My D430 comes with the following WiFi adapter:

0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)

Does this situation sound familiar to anyone? If yes, how did you resolve it?

CUPS-PDF: how my first Debian package briefly became a key component of the Ubuntu desktop strategy

Back in 2003, I packaged my very first piece of software for Debian: CUPS-PDF. The observation came to a German physics researcher, Volker C. Behr, that he constantly needed to generate PDF documents as a daily part of his workflow and that he would rather do this via desktop application's Print menu, so he coded a simple CUPS printer driver that spits out PDF documents instead of paper sheets.

This packaging gig has been one of the best cases of upstream collaboration I've been involved with, simply because Volker himself subscribes to the BTS for CUPS-PDF at various Linux distributions and because he is very proactive at responding to bug reports that concern the upstream code and the philosophy behind its implementation.

Simultaneously, there's been plenty of collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu on this package. For starters, maintaining a CUPS driver meant that I should maintain close collaboration with the CUPS maintainer. Back in 2003, this meant getting to know Kenshi Muto, first on IRC and then in person at Debconf5.

At the same event in 2005, many people had their first real experience of Ubuntu, when Mark Shuttleworth made his first keynote appearance at a Debian event. This later lead me to becoming familiar with the work of Martin Pitt and Till Kamppeter on the Ubuntu version of CUPS and CUPS-PDF packages, because Ubuntu had decided on delivering PDF generation as a standard feature of its desktop and CUPS-PDF was considered as the key solution towards implementing this. However, CUPS-PDF being a mere printer driver, it did not fit well with the GUI-oriented paradigm of the desktop, so pre-configuring the package with sensible default settings only partially worked. This issue was recently solved when GTK2 and QT (the core libraries behind GNOME and KDE applications) were upgraded to include printer management and PDF generation by standard, which resulted in the Ubuntu build of CUPS-PDF being relegated to the Universe repository.

Amusingly, the most interesting part of my collaboration with Martin and Till wasn't how it slowly helped me improve the packaging of CUPS-PDF on Debian, as much as that it introduced me to the wonders of Launchpad (tracking other distributions' bugs on the same package, Personal Package Archive, etc.) and it eventually convinced me to switch to Ubuntu for everything except my old ThinkPad, which I retained as a genuine Debian environment for development purposes.

While CUPS-PDF has mostly been superseded by GTK2 and QT's new printing features on the desktop, it definitely remains a key element of an educational or enterprise network, especially in a situation where desktop computers are in fact thin clients connecting to an LTSP server and where PDF generation is a part of the standard daily workflow.

Speaking of which, I'm currently looking for investors to launch a business venture that leverages and expands upon the ideas I've developed at Linutop and Artec. Please contact me via e-mail if you're interested in financing this venture or if you know someone who would be.

On the accessibility of public services in Swedish in Finland

As confirmed by a comment to my previous article, Nordic workers moving to Finland also encounter problems whenever dealing with the bureaucracy. More specifically, getting service in the Swedish language apparently is becoming more and more difficult, in some Finnish municipalities, despite the fact that Finnish and Swedish both have an official language status in Finland.

This matches the findings of a committee where I was recently nominated. Among our team, we have a Free Software specialist from Åland. While the Åland archipelago legally remains a part of Finland for historical reasons, in practice, its inhabitants have always related more closely to Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia than to Finland. As such, our ålander encountered a much bigger cultural shock when he moved to Helsinki than when he previously moved to Reykjavik to live with his Icelandic wife.

Interestingly, most people think of EU versus non-EU nationals, when they think of immigrant integration issues and yet, EU nationals are not any more Finnish than non-EU nationals. This sort of opinion gets even more laughable, whenever average Finns presume that anyone from a Nordic country moving to Finland would have no difficulty whatsoever in settling down, simply because they relocate from a country that also happens to be of Lutheran protestant background and a political ally of Finland. This simply isn't true. As another comment in the same article suggests, there are integration issues with e.g. Swedes living in Norway and vice-versa. As such, I don't see how anyone could believe that Finland would be free of similar problems. Perhaps this is yet another case of Finns believing a bit too hard that their country is so great that they could not possibly experience the same issues that their neighbors have?

Aftermath of the Magma/Helsinki Times survey on Swedish

While searching the blogosphere for responses to the survey on Swedish culture in Finland, I came across this interesting gem [translated and commented in Finnish on Suomi 24] by Vasa Bladet columnist Kenneth Myntti.

After summarizing the findings of the survey that was conducted by Magma and the Helsinki Times, he moved on to describing my efforts for getting access to Swedish language classes and how it lead me to directly contact the Ministry of Employment on this issue.

Myntti then concludes the article by making a rather astute observation (my own translation; apologies for any inaccuracy):

Racine simply would not give up so easily. He took the initiative to approach the Ministry of Labor with a proposal that any foreigner who already passed level 4 of the National Certification in Finnish Proficiency would be admissible to study Swedish via labor training. It was he who approached the Ministry, not the Ministry who approached him.

Is this really how things are supposed to be? Are immigrants really expected to battle the bureaucracy just to become a part of this country's Swedish-speaking community?

Of course not. It should be up to us to have our own "Finland Swede operatives" inside the bureaucracy and parliament, knocking on doors and driving changes in policy to ensure that immigrants can have the option to integrate with the Swedish-speaking part of the population, if they want to.

The Swedish language has a status that is equal to the Finnish language in this country's constitution and a direct consequence of that ought to be a possibility to take Swedish classes on equal footing with Finnish classes for those who chose to immigrate to our country.

That Swedish is considered easier to learn than Finnish should in fact increase foreigners' interest in choosing Swedish as their primary integration language.

From that perspective, we could even complement Racine's proposal by saying that any foreigner who already achieved a sufficient level of proficiency in Swedish could be offered Finnish classes afterwards.

In my opinion, Myntti is absolutely right. If Swedish's status as an official language of Finland is to have any meaning, then it must be possible to study it via Integration Act measures. However, this country's majority speaks and has always spoken Finnish. As such, I think that it makes perfect sense to put the emphasis on Finnish as the primary integration language.

Still, I'll emphasize that this doesn't dispense this Government from acquitting its constitutional obligations to safeguard the status of both official languages and, as a direct consequence, to ensure that immigrants get equal access to immigrant labor training in both national languages.

Basically, for as long as Swedish retains its official language status, there can be no excuse for preventing immigrants from getting Swedish classes via the Integration Act measures!

On a related matter...

On the issue of whether or not Swedish should be reinstated as a compulsory subject for the high school matriculation exam, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said in Iltasanomat that:

Youths who couldn't give a damn about studying Swedish significantly reduce their opportunities on the job market and they concede a tremendous advantage to others who do speak it.

What's interesting about Vanhanen's opinion is that, while he correctly acknowledges how a Finnish professional who doesn't master Swedish could be seriously disadvantaged on the job market, he clearly doesn't realize how an immigrant who only knows one of the official languages could similarly be affected. I wonder why...

xf86-video-geode 2.11.3

A few days ago, we released version 2.11.3 of the Geode X.org driver. As you'll notice from the version number, this is only a maintenance release, mainly to fix crasher bugs that appeared since X.org server core 1.6 was released.

Meanwhile, Otavio Salvador has been busy cleaning up our GX2 support and, in the process, he also found a few interesting regressions that affect LX support as well.

Unfortunately, our goal to integrate GX1 support into our unified Geode driver still hasn't been reached, due to a lack of resources: most people who knew anything about GX1 and SC Geodes and who had access to development hardware have moved on. As such, help to complete this goal is extremely welcome.

Two truths with one stone

[bash.org repost] DragonflyBlade21: A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Removing cruft that appears as false 'dpkg -L' positives?

Dear lazyweb,

I have one very last Debian host running "testing" that I keep as a development platform. The computer in question is an aging ThinkPad 240x whose LCD cable constantly threatens to make the display content unreadable and whose non-expandable 192MB of RAM is ridiculously small by today's standard. On the plus side, this makes for a very small development host that I can easily tuck away in the closet whenever I don't need it.

However, one problem currently plagues this computer: it has been through literally years of dist-upgrades and it has accumulated TONS of cruft on its filesystem, namely files that, according to packages.debian.org, should not longer ship with the packages "dpkg" claims they belong to but, for unknown reasons, nonetheless remained on the system, probably as the result of botched upgrades whenever package X had broken maintainer scripts during the development phase before "testing" was frozen and moved to "stable".

Making a clean install from Lenny could be a nice solution, but doing so on a laptop that has no CD-ROM, whose BIOS has no support for USB boot and whose only other boot option is an external 3.5" floppy disk drive, might prove more tricky than I'd bargain for (Google "ThinkPad 240x" and you'll see how tricky I mean).

I am thus wondering if anybody would know of any tool capable of comparing files present on the filesystem with those stated as shipping with packages matching versions currently installed, according to files lists found via packages.debian.org, so that I can at least sanitize the filesystem and restore the content to a fresh Lenny install state?

When can we have a balanced and meaningful debate on immigration?

This question keeps on popping up in many recent newspaper articles, on discussion boards and in seminars debating immigration issues in Finland. At the core of the question is a general impression that, between the enthusiastic supporters of multiculturalism and the pessimistic nationalist rednecks, very little constructive discussion is possible in Finland.

At one end, humanitarian help organizations, as well as politicians from the Green Party and the Swedish Folk Party, keep on taking excessively generous initiatives towards refugees and asylum seekers, all while labeling their detractors as racists. At the other end, nationalist candidates in the National Coalition Party and True Finns Party keep on painting every immigrant as a refugee who is abusing social security and label their detractors as turning Finland into the easiest country to abuse social security, at the Finnish taxpayer's expense. In between, candidates from the Christian Democrats and Center Party spread equally among these two camps. Meanwhile, while the Left is currently avoiding discussions on this topic, Social Democrats have previously shown that they tend to side with the nationalists in labeling all immigrants as social security abusing refugees.

One interesting point is that, no matter at which end of the political spectrum one looks, the whole Finnish immigration debate keeps on focusing exclusively on refugees and asylum seekers, despite the fact that migrant workers and foreign spouses of Finnish nationals make up for a good 70% of the foreign population residing on Finnish soil.

This recalcitrance to discuss immigration from any other perspective than refugees is rather painfully noticeable. Some recent examples:

• At the Maailma Kylässä ethnic festival, last month, the podium was given to a number of speakers to discuss immigration issues. In once case, Minister of Immigration Mrs.Astrid Thors made an appearance at the tent of Demo, an NGO promoting active participation in the electoral process. Sure enough, Thors repeatedly brought back the issue of refugees, leaving other aspects of immigration completely out.

  The next day, on the Mekong stage, a panel discussion was introduced by the MC as "discussing issues that affect refugees", despite the fact that the program read "panel discussion on immigration"... In fairness, the organization sponsoring that particular time slot was the Refugee Help Center but, thankfully, issues brought by the panelists clearly discussed a much broader perspective than merely refugees:

  One Estonian-born researcher said that she'd rather avoid putting all immigrants into the same bag, because there's so many different reasons for coming to Finland and few of those have anything to do with seeking asylum and one cannot make any assumption about an immigrant's motives for coming here.

  The other panelist, a professor from the university of Turku, astutely said that, if it was up to him, Maailma Kylässä should not exist, because the actual intent of the event is not to give immigrants a chance to be heard, but rather to entertain Finns with exotic culture and food, which is not the right way to make immigrants feel a part of society, in his opinion.

• Independent member of the Helsinki City Council, Mr.Jussi Halla-Aho, repeatedly makes the headlines because of his blog's rather controversial statements. Probably his most famous stunt was the day he jokingly declared in his blog that, if the women of the Green Party are so keen on getting more immigrants admitted to Finland, they also ought to be enthusiastic at the prospect of becoming rape victims, cynically implying that immigrants all come from 3rd-world countries where women's rights are non-existent and, correspondingly, where the probability of women being raped is greater.

• National Coalition Party candidate at the EU elections, Mr.Kai Pöntinen, used as his campaign slogan a decisively nationalist Sosiaalipummien maahantulolle stoppi! (Stop the immigration of social security abusers). Further reading on his homepage shows a rather misinformed statement, alleging that immigrants are systematically taught Swedish in language trainings offered via the Integration Act:

  Myös kotouttamispolitiikkamme on metsässä, on täysin järjenvastaista että tulijoille opetetaan ensimmäiseksi kotimaiseksi kieleksi ruotsia. Kyllä ensiksi on osattava suomea ja sitten muita kieliä.

  Reality is that, unless an unemployed immigrant lives in the monolingual Swedish municipality of Närpes or on the Åland archipelago, the only language they can learn via integration measures is ... Finnish.

• At a recent "Meet the Immigration Department" seminar at cultural center Caisa, it transpired that the vast majority of the audience and of the employees working for the City of Helsinki's Immigrant Services department came to Finland as refugees. The moderator of the event also came to Finland as a refugee. Can anyone guess what issues were given preference by the moderator during that evening? 12 points go to ... those who answered "refugees and asylum seekers." Was there at least meaningful discussion about any aspect of the immigration process? As the former chairman of a particular Finnish political party's English section used to say:

  I will not tolerate this meeting turning into a Wall of Lamentations or a Complaint Choir! Are we here to discuss real issues or what?

What's remarkable about all these examples is how public opinion is so persistently hardwired into thinking that all foreigners living in Finland came here as refugees from 3rd-world countries whose culture is radically different from Finland's and that they all became perpetually unemployed, forever living off social security, to the point that even politicians who ought to know better go along with it.

When will we be able to have a balanced and meaningful debate on immigration, you ask? The day both multicultural hippies and nationalist rednecks will have been kicked off the podium. Of course, it would also help if the refugees themselves stopped monopolizing the podium, whenever the opinion of immigrants is solicited. Then again, perhaps these 3 groups benefit so much from the current status quo that they'd rather not see the day when others can participate in this debate on equal footing with them, so that a balanced and meaningful debate can finally take place?

Killing the console bell on Jaunty?

Every once in a while, rewrites in ALSA drivers or in desktop audio components (GNOME mixer or Gstreamer) result in an impossibility to completely mute the console bell. Until recently, ALSA offered a separate channel to control this. Since Jaunty (kernel 2.6.28, ALSA 1.0.18r3) came out, not anymore. As such, I was wondering how else could I mute the console bell?

Some people on Ubuntu Forum suggested blacklisting the pc-spkr kernel module, but this is entirely the wrong approach, as it completely kills sound output on this laptop's built-in speakers. I don't wanna completely lose sound support, I just wanna get rid of that annoying console bell!

Others recommended setting set bell-style none in /etc/inputrc but that only works for interactive shells. The console bell still rings e.g. whenever rebooting, probably because bash gets called as a non-interactive shell by init scripts. Actually, since Jaunty, restarting the system makes the bell ring not just once, but twice!

Can anyone think of any more permanent way of disabling the console bell in some global system setting?

Atom feeds per-topic

Just a quick note for those interested in subscribing only to my blog articles pertaining to a specific topic that the following Atom feeds are available:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Estonia
• Finland
• Immigration

Invandringskonsult

In close to 11 years of living in Europe, I've accomplished plenty beyond working in the high-tech sector: I've also been fairly active in Immigration Policy, especially on aspects that affect migrant labor. Because of this, I keep on getting more and more requests to produce statements or to appear on panels to discuss issues pertaining to migrant labor and to immigrants' integration.

The hot topic of last week was Swedish language for immigrants, the crux of the issue being that even though Swedish has an official language status in Finland, in practice, it is pretty much impossibly for immigrants to register their kids at the Swedish language school, to claim public services in Swedish or, even more so, to request labor training in the Swedish language at the Employment Office.

The weekly newspaper Helsinki Times, in collaboration with the media think tank Magma, recently conduced a survey of the immigrant population, to find out how much they know about Swedish culture in Finland and about the Swedish language.

It was in this context that the Helsinki Times and the national television's Swedish programming (FST) asked for an interview with yours truly, because I have recently visited the Ministry of Employment and Economics with a concrete proposal to facilitate the availability of labor training in the Swedish language.

This FST webcast, starting at 16:03 minutes into the show, and the above Helsinki Times article provide more details about the context and about my proposal to the Ministry.

Debian CUPS transition in progress

Since Lenny was the first Debian release to feature CUPS under its new package naming strategy, I started going through 'rdepends' results to see which packages in Squeeze still present dependencies for *cupsys* packages.

Much to my amazement, there's quite many.

If you are the maintainer of a package that still has those dependencies, please fix them ASAP. Alternately, if you're aware of any favorite package that does, please do not hesitate at filing a patch to help the maintainer update their debian/control.

Comes June 2009, transitional CUPS packages will be removed from our debian/control.

Roadmap to a better FreeDesktop: ridding us of the Firefox filth

Lately, I've been pondering how to solve one annoying aspect of the FreeDesktop, namely how to eject the piece of bloat called Firefox from the picture and get myself a fast web browser that I can rely on and that yet offers a similar UI experience based upon native GTK2 widgets rather than XUL components.

Just to investigate possible options, I tested Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror. My conclusions were than a Gecko-based Epiphany or Gaelon is incredibly fast and that Konqueror offers a similarily efficient experience albeit using QT, rather than GTK2 widgets.

Why is Firefox so bloody bloated then, if it uses the same Gecko engine as Epiphany and Galeon? The only possible conclusion I could come up with is that its crappy XUL implementation, rather than leverage existing native GTK2 or QT widgets, tries to reinvent the wheel with its own UI toolkit running as a gigantic RAM blackhole.

One option that I wanted to investigate but found too deficient was a Webkit-based port of Epiphany. Unfortunately, at its current stage, the GTK2 port of Webkit simply isn't mature enough to consider, although the fact that Webkit has been succesfully ported to a number of platforms and constitutes the basis for Safari on Mac OS suggests that the potential is significant.

That only leaves one single aspect on which Firefox wins hands-down: its UI concept; it just works well, whereas Epiphany simply has a UI concept that is utterly inadequate, because it is too crude, lacking basic necessities such as a session saving feature that also works when purposely unloading the application, rather than only as a crash recovery measure. Simply put, Epiphany's premise that a browser should never be closed and thus ought to always remain open in the background of a desktop session is utterly flawed; it doesn't work like that in real life and Firefox acknowledges this, while Epiphany stubbornly doesn't because someone wreaked Havoc in our desktop paradigm.

Anyhow, to me the solution is clear: regardless of which rendering engine it uses, Epiphany's UI concept needs to become more like Firefox, before it can truly gain acceptance as the default browser among Linux distributions.

Here's hoping for the best...

Life sometimes has extreme ways of waking people up and making them realize what matters for them. I'm going through such a phase right now in my romantic life. I won't discuss what happened here, but suffice it to say that I haven't felt so depressed in a long, long, long, long time.

The good news is that life has proven to me once again how having good friends who truly care for me makes a whole world of difference. The big slap in the face that life gave me over these last few days was a harsh lesson, but I think that it was worth it. Of course, it helps that people like Gilles, Jaana, Henni, Pia, Linda, Arno and Sailesh beleived in me enough to support me through this rough spot in my life. Although their advices were vastly different, they all pointed in a very positive direction and gave me the strenght to carry on.

I also must thank my beloved Anastassija; what she did was cruel beyond beleif and yet, if her few SMS from the last 24 hours are any indication, there's still hope after the storm. I'll be seeing her tonight again, after a few days of separation and I prepared her a truly romantic evening. It ain't much, but I hope that it truly succeeds in bringing the point accross that Love is stronger than everything and that even the unforgivable can be forgiven, over time, if everyone involved has enough faith in each other's future as a couple.

Tonight, I truly could use the prayers of a million voices to support me and Anastassija in this difficult time. Life slapped me hard and I got the message... I think... and whatever happens after tonight, I need to know that I gave it my best shot and that, whatever her and I decide, Life can only take a turn for the better from now on.

Uninformed shoppers blaming Ubuntu: a brief TODO list for Canonical

My own perception of the debacle about the end-user who decided to cancel her college enrollment because she could not get Microsoft products to install on Ubuntu is three folds:

• Canonical and Dell evidently need to improve their marketing efforts, because the user didn't realize what she was purchasing. Knowledge of what Ubuntu is and how it can interact with the rest of the world clearly wasn't passed on in the form of a small printed User's Guide that should have come with the newly purchased laptop computer. Additionally Dell most definitely needs to make emphasize the same information in its online shop to help customers make an informed decision (and, no, eschewing the problem by obfuscating or removing non-Microsoft alternatives to the purchasing options isn't the right answer).
• The newspaper that reported on the story really needs to do its homework to more accurately report what is Ubuntu and, perhaps, participate in the efforts to educate the masses about non-Microsoft alternatives in the Operating System market. Educating the Press to enable this might require hiring a dedicated person at Canonical to work with the non-industry Press.
• The girl in question really needs to get a hold of herself, the sooner the better. Her hasty withdrawal from her enrollment was clearly unwarranted and her attitude of crying wolf and blaming everyone else for her own failure at making an informed purchase speaks volumes.

Personally, I think that Canonical needs to hire an individual that understands the above three aspects and, most of all, how to remedy them, as its next OEM channel Manager, if they truly want to increase Ubuntu's market penetration.

Geode X.org driver fix for GX2/CS5535 released

After a rather hectic holiday season, I returned momentarily to pending Geode X.org driver issues. The current status:

• On Debian, 2.10.1 is in Testing and Unstable, while 2.11.0 is in Experimental. For those who need 2.11.0 right away, the experimental package builds as-is using Lenny dependencies. For everyone else, I'll probably get around producing a proper backport once Lenny is released.
• On Ubuntu, 2.9.0-1ubuntu2.5 just entered Hardy-updates with cherry-picked fixes for DCC support on GX2/CS5535 hardware. Meanwhile, Intrepid has 2.10.1 and Jaunty has 2.11.0, with a backport of the later having been requested for Hardy-backports.

I'm especially interested in hearing from users of GX2/CS5535 hardware to see if these recent uploads finally fixed DDC probing for them or not. Just respond to relevant existing bugs or, if necessary, open new bugs to report any regression.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.0: last call!

With yesterday's release of version 2.11.0 of the X.org driver for the Geode GX2/LX, a whole cycle was wrapped up for many of the developers involved:

• Jordan Crouse was among the unlucky ones who recently lost their job at AMD. The same layoff also affected Coreboot developer Marc Jones and other Geode specialists (see Jordan's blog article for details).
• Several members of the OLPC project are also moving on, now that most Linux kernel and X.org patches have been merged upstream.
• People like myself who were working in the thin client industry on Geode-based products are also moving on.

As such, remaining bugs and our milestone goal to merge back support for older GX1 Geodes might never be taken care of. From this perspective, we welcome active participation of new developers with access to a wide variety of Geode hardware to contribute and, eventually, take over upstream maintenance of xf86-video-geode.

Available for a new job

A couple of years ago, I started what has probably been the best job I've held so far, as a Business Development Manager for Artec Group where I focused on marketing and selling the ThinCan LTSP client.

During that time, I used a combination of Guerrilla Marketing techniques to spread the word about this cool Estonian embedded platform in its LTSP client configuration and defined an extremely tight market-oriented focus that saw this relatively obscure electronic design start-up rise to the forefront of the LTSP hardware market and also brought the company commendable notoriety in the Coreboot community, thanks to its Programmable LPC Dongle, a low-cost ROM emulator that can be used to bootstrap various embedded hardware and test firmware images.

Looking back at close to 3 years with Artec (if we include the stint I did at Linutop), I most fondly remember how I managed to bring the Estonian and Turkish nations closer together in collaborating on Innovation. On my first visit to Turkey, I had noticed that very little is know about Estonia in Turkey, even though both countries have a collaboration that dates back to the 1920's, so my tactic was to introduce Estonia's achievements as a whole, to establish confidence in Artec's offering. It worked:

Among other things, my idea to organize an Estonian ICT Conference during the visit of Estonian PM Andrus Ansip in Turkey created a lot of extremely positive buzz that resulted in Estonia being mentioned as a trendy country in a prime time Turkish TV series. During this time, I've also made a lot of contacts among the Estonian and Turkish business communities and, more surprisingly, among the Estonian diplomacy who, much to my amazement, welcomed my ideas for better promoting Estonian interests abroad with great enthusiasm.

Come December 2008, my time at Artec will become a page in my employment history. While the Thincan remains one of Artec's key products, current marketing and sales resources are focused on new markets and new technologies that completely fall outside my core expertise, which is why the company decided to let me go.

I thus welcome offers from interested parties in Coreboot or LTSP markets. Other refreshing offers from outside the box - such as in business diplomacy - are equally welcome, as I've been pondering a career change for a long time.

Still more Old Skool goodies to send to a good home

Debian Developer Peter De Schrijver dropped by tonight and left with the Atari stuff, but there's still more stuff left.

Atari TT030, Atari Stacy, iMac and SCSI devices for sale

As the title of this blog post indicates, I've got some hardware to sell.

SBM that adds USB boot support?

Having recently demoted my old ThinkPad 240x to Debian/Testing testbed, I wanted to re-install Debian from scratch on it, to make sure that I would have a clean reference system to work with.

However, this being a very old ThinkPad model, there is no CD-ROM drive to speak of. The only external means of booting is with an optional floppy disk drive. Sure enough, there exists a nice helper called SBM (included in the utility folder on all Debian CDs since several releases) that adds CD-ROM boot support to any BIOS.

Instead, My idea would be to perform the reinstall using the USB stick version of Debian-Installer, bootstrapped by SBM on the floppy disk. Does anybody know of an SBM release that adds USB boot support? If not, is there any other tool that performs a similar trick?

another Tux bites the dust

At the dayjob, we've been evaluating various OS options for a customer project. Without going into details, it involves installing embedded software on a ThinCan for a special usage case. The basic needs are simple: graphic environment to run a custom application (OS neutral), plus a few drivers for hardware attached to the ThinCan. That's it. Nothing to excited about.

Comparing various team members' proposals to implement the OS base was the real shocker: no matter how optimized the software base and compiler options, no matter which build environment was used (Thin Station, Open Embedded, Gentoo, etc.), we couldn't get a performance that was remotely usable:

• Boot time goes well over a minute, which is way too slow.
• The graphic environment is sluggish, to say the least. True enough, distributions like Thin Station come with rather outdated versions of everything, but still... that slow?!
• Refactoring IceWM to provide clean 95-ish functionalities using current XDG standards would require a fair amount of work. By the time we'd be done, IceWM would probably gain a thick footprint like XFCE progressively did.

Then came the proposal from our team's lone Windows guy: XP Embedded. Booted in less than 10 seconds, has a graphical environment that is usable out of the box and integrating the customer's application was a breeze. Heck, the demo is practically a finished product already and took just a couple of hours to assemble! To make matters worse, the total we'd be paying in licensing fees, for all the Windows components we choose, would amount to far less than what it would cost to polish either of the Free Software -based proposals.

Before anyone goes and puts on their asbestos suit, I'm already aware that the point of Free Software is to keep people employed and to make the community at large benefit from everyone's code improvements by contributing patches to upstream. Please keep in mind that, in contrast, business requirements are to get results at a reasonable cost, reasonably fast and to produce a well-polished product. The Free Software community has finally conquered the challenges of the desktop and was already on the server ages ago, but we ain't quite there yet on embedded devices, I'm afraid.

While I personally refuse to run anything else than Ubuntu on my laptop, let's face it, in the above case, the savings in time=money were obvious and the resulting product quality, even at demo stage, spoke for itself. Thus, another Tux bit the dust.

Québec government sued for buying Microsoft products without any public call for tender

As per the original press release:

In Quebec, access to public markets is the rule while contracts attribution without invitation to tender is the exception. A public market should be transparent, fair and most importantly, open to all. The solutions as well as the propositions must be evaluated objectively on known and accepted criteria. Furthermore, the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies.

From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec.

Much to my surprise, news about this lawsuit have spread as far as Vietnam! Something tells me that this court case might have lasting repercussions...

Dear Lazyweb: constructive homelessness

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm a permanent resident of one country, but I'm representing the interests of another one as a part of my job. Anyhow, I'm constantly traveling, so I cannot consider myself as having a residence anywhere in particular.

Still, the health insurance and taxation offices of the country where I'm registered as a resident are constantly annoying me with requests for additional clarifications about "working abroad" (trying to imply that I might have relocated to the country where my employer has their head office), which is a complete waste of my time, because the previous explanation is never good enough for them and they keep on twisting every word I say.

I was thus wondering if someone ever found a way to not have any official place of residence anywhere and still be able to get visas for the countries they need to visit and also be able to rent apartments in the countries that they visit the most frequently without ending up with residence permits for each of them, so as to avoid the above mess with multiple jurisdictions?

This question is not about evading taxation. It's about finding a solution to avoid wasting time constantly filing paperwork just because the bureaucracy cannot understand a situation where someone's lifestyle doesn't fit the traditional model of living and working in exactly one city.

brainstorm: new LPC dongle design

One of our most popular products at the dayjob has been our Programmable LPC Dongle. It has seen widespread use as an embedded hardware development and debugging tool and is particularly popular among Coreboot developers as a ROM emulator, because of its low price and because we publish the FPGA code under the LGPL.

Unfortunately, our current LPC Dongle product is nearing end of life, because some components are no longer available.

We're currently designing a brand new Programmable LPC Dongle and, noticing the plethora of improvement ideas we already received from the Coreboot community, we decided to widen the scope and invite a larger group of hardware developers to tell us what features they want to see in our next-generation Programmable LPC Dongle.

Anyone interested in participating in this brainstorm is welcome to send me their ideas to first-middle.lastname@artecgroup.com by September 1st 2008. While we cannot guarantee that every idea submitted will be used, we will definitely be reading all the feedback we receive.

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.

O: planner -- project management application

This one had been a long time in the making, but here it goes: I'm orphaning Planner. Why? Because upstream hasn't been too active in ages, save from a few random bug fixes, and because the GCC 4.3 transition at Debian has exposed yet more bugs that make it FTBFS. The package had been marked as RFA for a while, but I decided that I'm not gonna wait any longer; O it is. Hopefully, an experienced GNOME maintainer will take over and revamp the upstream code into a usable shape. If not, then I guess we just found another dead package in the archive. So be it.

HOWTO build a clean LTSP boot image that includes the latest updates

Thanks to Oliver Grawert and Michael Haas for this idea!

1. Check your LTSP server's sources.list

   Ensure that the server has the relevant APT sources to fetch the latest updates:

   deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main
   #deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main

   In this example, the Finnish Ubuntu mirror for the Hardy suite is used. Change this as necessary. Notice that all source package lines are purposely commented out.

2. Build a boot image using that sources.list

   Build the image using the following command:

   ltsp-build-client --copy-sourceslist --accept-unsigned-packages

   This builds the image using the repositories found in the server's sources.list. Accepting unsigned packages is necessary, because the PPA is not digitally signed.

The above method is a good way to check what would happen on a clean install, if any particular package were updated to a newer proposed release that is currently sitting on someone's PPA.

Enjoy!

HOWTO make Geode thin clients work on Ubuntu/Hardy LTSP

As summarized by Ace Suares, to validate my first rough upgrading instructions:

1. Upgrade the packages in the LTSP chroot

   First become root:

   sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386

   Then add the repository, update and upgrade:

   echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

   apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean

   APT will inform you that some packages cannot be authenticated. This is normal, since the PPA is not digitally signed. Simply answer Yes.

2. Purge the transitional AMD driver

   apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-amd

   Then, exit the chroot:

   exit

3. Update the LTSP boot image

   sudo ltsp-update-image

   On a 64-bit server, the correct command is:

   sudo ltsp-update-image --arch=i386

4. Profit?

Happy Midsummer, everyone!

xf86-video-geode: now with full OLPC support!

Freshly uploaded to Debian: xf86-video-geode 2.10.0. Asides from a slouch of bug fixes, this version finally includes complete support for features unique to the OLPX XO-1.

Enjoy!

Kuradne Geode draiveri!

Yes, another post about the Geode drivers. After much head banging, I finally figured out that the sloppy method used to generate the list of supported PCI ID for each driver in Debian and Ubuntu is what wreaked havoc with the GEODE driver:

1. Support for the GX2 chipset was backported into the old NSC driver, which created a PCI ID conflict with the official support that is present in the GEODE driver.
2. To make matters worse, that damn NSC driver also conflicts with the older CYRIX driver that supports earlier versions of the Geode chipset.

To fix both issues, I have produced new NSC and GEODE packages and uploaded them into my Ubuntu PPA for the Hardy series.

Tip: as soon as you have upgraded, purge the -amd transitional package; it only confuses the X server and disrupts operation if you leave it there, especially inside an LTSP chroot. If you were using a static xorg.conf, simply upgrade the Device line to use "geode" rather than "amd" and you're done.

After upgrading to these packages, normal operation should be restored for all Geode variants. As a bonus, X should now even be able to work without an xorg.conf (of course, with the wrong keyboard map, unless you live in USA) and in all known LTSP variants.

Enjoy!

updated ALSA driver for early PowerPC hardware

Risto Suominen contacted me recently, after seeing my Ubuntu wiki page where I try to document what works and what doesn't using ALSA on PowerPC hardware. He has developed a patch against the snd-powermac driver that mainly support 603, 604 and G3 PowerMac hardware, to implement better support for several old Mac models. He was wondering where he could find testers for his work, so I offered to blog about it here. You can find his diff and patching instructions on his website. You can contact Risto to report on your testing's result using firstname.lastname@gmail.com

Estonian ICT conference, March 18th 2008, TOBB Plaza, Istanbul, Türkiye

I previously wrote about my visits to Turkey to develop our export market in the Middle-East and how I ended up representing the whole Estonian business world in bilateral negotiations with Turkey. I'm going there again for two weeks, this time accompanied by a whole business delegation headed by Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip.

Asides from various official events organized by our Turkish hosts to present Turkey to their Estonian guests, the crux of the visit is a conference hosted by DEIK and the Estonian embassy, on Tuesday, March 18th. The goal of this conference is to present Estonia's extremely advanced use of ICT technology in E-Business and E-Governance. Speakers from several private and public sector organizations will explain how they benefited from Estonia's hyper-connected lifestyle and, most of all, how this has made every Estonian's life more pleasant, because it offers a convenient way of performing a broad range of online transactions not just with businesses, but also with governmental organizations.

Yours truly will speak about the advantages Estonia offers to investors and technology freaks alike, from the perspective of an industry insider who, given the opportunity of choosing his first pick for a liberal high-tech nation, dropped the Nokiaesque lands of Suomi to go Eesti.

The morning of conference will end with a business lunch where interested Turks can network with their Estonian counterparts and create lucrative bilateral opportunities.

Space in the TOBB Plaza auditorium is limited so those interested in attending should promptly contact DEIK to get their name added to the guest list.

Turks interested in learning more about Estonia in their own language should visit estonya.net.

Rumor has it...

...that Skype might be willing to port the Linux version of their application to Pulse Audio, as long as they get all the help they need to make this a quick and painless process. Rumor also has it that yours truly will have a visit from a Skype insider tomorrow at 13:00 EET to discuss this issue and, hopefully, be in a position to point the insider to a member of the PulseAudio community willing to guide them through this process. Rumor also has it that volunteers who contact yours truly on time to announce themselves might improve this port's chances of actually happening.

ThinCan + LinuxBIOS = cool LTSP hardware

At the dayjob, we're currently clearing our warehouse of previous hardware to make room for upcoming new models, so here's a shameless plug for those who want cool Linux hardware at a discount:

ThinCan DBE60

Hardware: AMD Geode SC2200, 64MB RAM, 32MB DiskOnChip Flash, 3x USB 1.1 ports, 1/8" audio out, Centronics port, VGA port, 10/100baseT network port.

Firmware: Etherboot or WinCE 4.1 RDP client.

Price: 50 EUR/each - less shipping costs - Minimum order: 10 pieces.

PS: we also have about 50 pieces of DBE60 motherboards (without case) that can be used as embedded controllers. People with good soldering skills can add a CompactFlash socket to the unpopulated pads, as desired.

ThinCan DBE61C

Hardware: AMD Geode LX700 with CS5536 companion chip, 256MB RAM, 4x USB 2.0 ports, 1/8" audio in and out, VGA port, 10/100baseT network port.

Firmware: Etherboot on LinuxBIOS. Supported natively since Ubuntu/Gutsy.

Price: 150 EUR/each - less shipping costs - Minimum order: 2 pieces.

Interested parties can contact us via the request form.

Re: xf86-video-amd: patched xserver-xorg-core available

I previously wrote that:

The next step is to produce patches against the X server 1.4 in Debian/Sid and Ubuntu/Hardy, and then get the fix merged into the upstream X.org tree before X server 1.5 is released.

Good news: Bryce Harrington produced patched X server 1.4 packages for Ubuntu/Hardy!

The LTSP and OLPC communities are hereby invited to test this ASAP. If nothing major is reported, this will be become the standard X server 1.4 for the Ubuntu/Hardy LTS release, following which the patch will also be merged into Debian/Sid.

xf86-video-amd: patched xserver-xorg-core available

Great news: After several weeks of investigating, Bart finally figured out what made the driver for the AMD Geode GX/LX chipset fail on recent X.org servers: it turns out that, starting with X server 1.3, changes under the hood took place that affect a number of products booting off a General Software BIOS, making the whole hardware freeze as soon as a DDC probe is attempted. Bart promptly produced two patches against the x86emu component of X server 1.3 that fix the issue. Hurray!

Ubuntu/Gutsy packages of the patched X server 1.3, plus current AMD 2.7.7.5 drivers, are available in my PPA.

For Debian/Lenny, the same packages compile from Ubuntu sources as-is. Meanwhile, those of you running Debian/Etch only need to compile the Ubuntu sources for the above AMD driver against the X server 1.1 available in Etch.

This should finally allow people developing distributions for LTSP or for the OLPC to use standard Debian packages.

The next step is to produce patches against the X server 1.4 in Debian/Sid and Ubuntu/Hardy, and then get the fix merged into the upstream X.org tree before X server 1.5 is released. We're already working on it, but help is always welcome.

xf86-video-amd from OLPC not for public consumption

Holger reported in his blog that he uploaded a backport of the AMD Geode GX/LX X.org module to Debian. He also points out that what he has backported is from a non-Debian source. In case it wasn't obvious to him, there are good reasons why the official Debian module is not from the OLPC branch: the OLPC branch includes OLPC-only code that breaks operation for non-OLPC hardware. This means that the backport package is completely useless for the vast majority of GX/LX hardware on the market. Well done, Holger!

Hunting for a new laptop (part 2)

Earlier, I had reported on my quest for a new laptop. To recap, I had narrowed down my choice to an LG model whose 12.1" 1280x800 WXGA display and ATI Mobility Radeon X1250 graphic chip failed to be recognized by the Ubuntu CD. Back then, my initial tests were performed using a Feisty CD. Since then, I have returned with a Gutsy CD and got equally disappointing results: E: screen found, but none offers a usable configuration.

Some people suggested buying a laptop with an all-Intel chipset. While Intel chipsets are indeed the best-supported in the business, largely because Intel invests its own resources into coding Linux drivers for all of its products, products based on Intel chipsets tend to be double the price of those based on VIA motherboards with ATI graphic chips. Seeing how quickly hardware devaluates on the market, it feels rather unjustified to pay such a fortune for an Intel-based product, only to see its market value cut in half less than a year later.

Here's a tip for AMD/ATI marketroids: invest as much resources into coding GPL kernel and X.org drivers for all of your products as you did for the OLPC project and always do so a good 12 months before entry to market. Otherwise, prepare for bankruptcy, because companies like Intel who don't shun the Linux market will eat you alive.

Me goes back laptop hunting...

O: planner -- project management application

While looking at outstanding bugs against my Debian packages, I noticed that an RC bug had crept in against Planner. The bug itself isn't new. In fact, Ubuntu had experienced it already and simply decided to build their package without SQL support to resolve the issue.

Planner is a fairly well-matured piece of software, with very few bugs remaining. It remains quite usable in everyday use. However, it has fallen behind in terms of keeping its code up-to-date against the latest versions of some optional dependencies.

Tonight, I was just sitting here pondering what to do and it occurred to me that I'm simply no longer interested in maintaining the package. I have done a fairly good job of overhauling the build scripts and of upgrading them for the Python transition but, at this stage, I feel that I've accomplished as much as I could do. Besides, I no longer have the time to maintain so many packages, so I have decided to focus on maintaining those I actually care for and Planner isn't one of them.

The package already is assigned to Debian's GNOME team, so no need to actually orphan it, since anyone from the team can pick it up. If you're a member of the GNOME team and feel like taking over, perhaps even submitting patches to upstream to close a few more bugs, go right ahead and jump in.

Valga - Valka : 1 linn, 2 riiki - 1 pilsēta, 2 valstis

Thursday evening, I joined the inhabitants of the twin town of Valga-Valka, sitting smack on the Estonian-Latvian border, to celebrate their entry into the Schengen treaty. Ever since I first crossed the border there on a roadtrip from Tallinn to Fallingbostel, in year 2001, I knew I would have to return and, sure enough, I briefly passed through during last summer with an Estonian friend, on our way to an acquaintance's birthday party.

Still, that told me nothing of the town's life and left me wanting for more.

Upon hearing that year 2004 EU accession countries would join Schengen in December 2007, I immediately promised myself to show up and join the crowd. As it turns out, I missed Aleks Tapinš of the All About Latvia blog by very little, having I caught his last-minute e-mail the next afternoon. Aleks blogged a great article depicting the Latvian side of life and providing some background info on the town, if you're curious.

I arrived late-evening on Thursday via the Tallinn-Viljandi-Valga bus and checked into my hotel, then proceeded to checkpoint Valga II around 23:30, with the intention of grabbing a drink on the Latvian side and returning just before midnight for the celebrations. Hardly anyone was in sight, except for Latvian officer Čabana who was completing the inspection of a Russian car with three noisy passengers. Upon presenting her with my passport, officer Čabana cheerfully lead me to the office and slid my passport through a slot to officer Bukss, who was visibly surprised to have any tourist show up on the last day of his job to get their passport stamped. Upon explaining to him the reasons for my presence, he pointed me to a nearby bar where I could have a drink, visibly amused by the situation.

I spent the next few minutes in a local casino in the company of three hilarious Latvian truck drivers, Zintars and Aivars, two Latvians with limited English language skills and Yuri, an ethnic Russian living in Ireland who was born stateless on the Latvian side of the town and who later acquired Estonian citizenship by claiming ancestral land on the Estonian side.

Upon returning to the border, just minutes before midnight, I found myself in the middle of a huge crowd of villagers, police officers, border guards and politicians from both countries - barely getting noticed by anyone. I handed my passport to an Estonian border guard who emotionally commented to a civilian friend of his nearby that, "Wow! That was the last one!", handing me my passport back just as the midnight bells rang and the mayor of the Estonian side started his speech amidst pyrotechnics lining the road.

I then had a chance to chat with the Estonian mayor, who promptly handed me a bilingual certificate, signed by the mayors of both towns, attesting that I was the first to cross the open border, while introducing me to his two young daughters with whom he was about to take a stroll on the Latvian side.

The next morning, an even bigger and more symbolic event took place: the demolition of the fence that had been cutting the Sõprus/Raiņa street in half. You can see a picture of what the street looked like before on Aleks' blog article [edit: or on Jens-Olaf's blog article]. After the fence was removed, it instead looked like this:

The crowd then proceeded to checkpoint Valga III, where a stage had been setup for the politicians to make their speeches. An interesting fact is that, because of the way the border was drawn, along a creek leading to Pedeli river, an Estonian main road was technically on the Latvian border and thus aptly named "Raja" (border) street. The Estonian mayor commented in his speech that the the brand new supermarket standing behind us was also technically on borderland and could not have possibly been built earlier, weren't it for the Schengen treaty matter-of-factedly eliminating borders between participating EU countries. The speeches were closed by a youth group whose choreography featured six break-dancing boys, dressed as Estonian and Latvian border guards and as border posts. The choreography ended with the teenage border guards carrying away the human posts on their shoulders, just as a choir of young girls replaced them with songs in either languages.

Before catching my bus back to Tallinn, I dropped by the Valga tourist info, only to face a nervous-looking Kapo officer in plain clothes. Upon mumbling something about the tourist info and wanting to grab maps, I noticed that a press conference was taking place behind. As he finally let me pass to the tourist info side of the building, a familiar voice said to me, "Hey! Weren't you at our place last summer with Martin Ranna?" Yup, the wife of the acquaintance whose birthday party I had attended last summer is working there and greeted with me refreshments and munchies she had cooked in prevision for the presidential visit! As was my luck, she had one of the commemorative plaques that had been given to the politicians at Valga III on hand:

I was glad to see the town becoming one again, even though it is ethnically divided. There are already signs of people on both sides learning one another's languages and shopping on either side of town, not to mention plans of merging the municipal bus operations of the Estonian and Latvian halves of the town, so I'm sure that they'll get there in due course.

For me, Schengen brought a much more practical and quite welcome change: the end of messy border crossing stamps that were rapidly filling my almost new passport, every time I visited the head office of our company in Tallinn. While Estonian border guards mostly stamp passports in an orderly fashion, being careful to fit exactly 8 stamps in a single page and to put entry and exit stamps side-by-side, Finnish border guards apparently are incapable of doing so, instead systematically wasting pages by either stamping sloppily in a way that makes it impossible for more than 4 stamps to appear on a given page or by flipping to a brand new page, every time I had to cross the border.

In case anyone ever wondered why I'm currently representing Estonian interests abroad, despite living in Finland, this example is one of the many reasons: Finnish authorities routinely display arrogant carelessness towards the population and doubly so towards immigrants. It amounts to an accumulation of idiocy that has costly consequences on people's lives. For some, it's about being denied the public institutions' support when they need it the most and their life forever going downhill thereafter. For me, it has been about countless missed opportunities (jobs, love affairs, travel plans), plus very costly passport and residence permit renewals. Given this, I simply don't see myself ever representing Finnish interests ever again. Faith no more. Besides, the Estonians are fun and easy-going people. Siski ma mõtlen, kas ma peaksen nüüd Eestisse kolima või?

Ubuntu on an LG E200 laptop?

As my aging ThinkPad is starting to show signs of an impeding retirement, I recently began looking for a newer laptop to replace it. My current choice would be for an LG Electronics model E200-A.CPPPV laptop. However, when trying an Ubuntu Feisty live CD on it, X failed to find any usable screen resolution and aborted. Thus I was wondering if anybody had better results using a Gutsy CD? In principle, the hardware should be supported, since it's all Intel and ATI components but, these days, you never know, especially with graphic and wireless chipsets. Comments?

Miscellanea

Things have been rather hectic lately, so I haven't found much time to blog. Here's why:

DBE62

The Gigabit Ethernet version of our thin client took more time to produce than I expected, for a number of reasons mostly related to a few improvements we decided to squeeze into the design at the last minute.

However, today, we finally reached a point where LinuxBIOS runs as well as it did on our previous DBE61 model and where we no longer need any DOS tool to flash the MAC address into the VIA velocity Gigabit chip we selected. Hurray!

Production will only commence in one month, but I'm already excited by the new model's potential, both as a thin client and as an embedded platform.

Another good thing is that, thanks to Ubuntu developer Scott Balneaves, we managed to get all the necessary tools to support thin clients based on LinuxBIOS into LTSP, so our Etherboot model works out of the box on Ubuntu, since Gutsy. Hurray!

There is one remaining issue related to recent changes in X.org core functionalities that make the AMD driver we need unstable but, again, various AMD, Debian and Ubuntu developers are looking into fixing this, so we should soon have spotless Geode support into Debian and Ubuntu again.

Türkiye

I visited Turkey twice over the last few months, because I'm putting together a pilot project to better promote the Estonian high-tech sector abroad, in collaboration with the Estonian government.

I have to say that the more I visit Turkey, the more I like the place and the more understand why these people see themselves as Europeans because, you know what? They are: practically every significant civilization and religion that is at the core of European culture had major events taking place in in Anatolia or Thrace and, also, a devastatingly huge percentage of the consumer goods sold in Europe are designed and manufactured in Turkey.

Learning the rudiments of Turkish has also proven to be a lot of fun. While I'm nowhere near as fluent in Turkish as in Finnish or even in Estonian, the learning curve isn't as steep as I initially expected: Altaic and Ugric languages share a surprising amount of grammatical concepts, while Turkish itself borrowed a lot of vocabulary from French, because the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk, was very fond of the language. I'll venture that proximity with nearby Middle-Eastern countries that were formerly under French influence has something to do with it too.

Identity crisis

To me, the most challenging part of these business missions abroad is to represent a whole economic sector from a country of which I'm not a citizen or even a resident. Case in point:

Being invited to dinner by a Turkish investor, I noticed the waiter asking my host where his foreign guest might be from. A few minutes later, as the waiter put down a gigantic pita bread with the word "Estonia" spelled in roasted sesame seeds, my host asked, reading my business card:

• Actually, your name doesn't sound Estonian. France?
• Québec.
• And your mobile number ... 358 ... is that Finland?
• Yup. I've been living there for the past 10 years.
• Ah! So you don't live in Tallinn?
• Nope. Helsinki.

Looking at the waiter and pointing at the gigantic pita, he continues:

• Actually, make that Canada ... no, Finland ... Ah, sorry, never mind. Just keep it as Estonia.

Honestly, trying to keep a straight face while saying "We" about a country of which I'm not a citizen and where I don't even reside becomes unbearable. At some point, some European bureaucrats will have to admit that I need a new citizenship, to reduce the confusion and to let me find myself a proper national identity again; the sooner, the better.

Besides, the absurdity of the situation keeps on jumping at everyone's face: during the second mission to Turkey, I kept on bumping into Finnish diplomats who took personal offense at me for living in their country and yet representing the interests of a competing, neighboring country. If you ask me, I cannot entirely blame them for it.

However, as far as I'm concerned, I've done my homeworks: I've been here 10 years, I speak the language and I don't have a criminal record. Given this, you'd think that acquiring citizenship would be a mere formality, but the Ulkomaalaisvirasto doesn't see it that way.

If you ask me, this country's very first Minister of Immigration, Mrs.Astrid Thors, ought to unilaterally grant citizenship to anyone who's lived here for at least 5 years, just for the asking, regardless of what circumstances brought them here or of what absurd decisions the Ulkomaalaisvirasto might have previously made on their residence permit status. Doing this would go a long way towards undoing the mess of her predecessors at the Ministry of Interior and it would speak volumes about how much Finnish society has evolved from the days when any foreigner was a commie they had to push over the Eastern border.

Sound editors that work with Gstreamer or PulseAudio?

Today, I wanted to edit a few MP3 files into suitable ring tones for my phone. The idea seemed simple at first: load up a song, chop off a few bars and loop that as a ring tone.

Nice in theory, except that sound editing software on a free desktop is challenging, at best: most of it was designed back in the days of OSS and GTK 1.2, some wants to use JACK for playback, while the most recent crop indeed supports ALSA but insists upon having exclusive access to the ALSA device.

Dammit! My understanding was that, with Gstreamer and PulseAudio, the free desktop had finally acquired a comprehensive, standardized sound framework, but not many applications seem to support it — or is there something I have missed?

Fresh out of NEW university: mkelfimage

I maintain the Debian package of mkelfimage, a tool to produce Etherboot images for use with thin client environments such as LTSP, which recently entered the Debian archive.

The key difference between mkelfimage and the aging mknbi is that mkelfimage does not reply upon any traditional BIOS call to produce the bootable code in the ELF image, which makes it possible to boot thin clients with LinuxBIOS as their firmware, such as the Linuterm and several other products designed by Artec.

mkelfimage accomplishes its BIOS-less operation using a simplified kexec implementation. However, this also means that explicit support for each architecture must be implemented with Assembler code. As it currently stands, the upstream tarball only includes support for i386 and ia64. Since amd64 boots in 32-bit mode, it should also work there, but this is untested.

This leaves support for several architectures completely uncovered for. LinuxBIOS developers have taken over the upstream code and they welcome patches towards improving support for other architectures and towards cleaning up the autoconf implementation currently in use.

GR: Debian Maintainer

Rumor has it that the General Resolution on acknowledging the concept of Debian Maintainers (mere participant who are granted limited upload rights, just enough to freely work on their own packages) has passed. I'm wondering what sort of timeframe we're looking at for deploying the infrastructure needed to manage this and then start accepting requests to be added to the separate GPG keyring. Would anyone know?

Telling Network Manager to prefer home AP?

I'm running Network Manager on my Ubuntu laptop. It's a really neat tool when it comes to selecting an open wireless network when traveling, but it has one major flaw: you cannot tell it to prefer some "homebase" among a swarm of available Access Points; it insists upon using the first AP it finds, regardless. Has anyone figured out a solution to this common situation?

Meanwhile, the OpenVPN front-end that Network Manager offers only covers a fraction of available parameters, which means that I cannot use it to connect to my dayjob's LAN from outside the company, because the few Windows clients we have connecting to it expect a VPN to work in a specific way and cannot adapt to non-Microsoft approaches to VPN concept, which means that we Ubuntu users are the ones who have to adapt. Thus, the OpenVPN front-end would need to be able to configure MTU, MSS and other arbitrary parameters supported by OpenVPN. Looking at various BTS, I notice that I'm not the only one who needs this. Are Network Manager developers listening? :-)

Localisation beyond language packs

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned my K750i Sony-Ericsson mobile phone. I received it as a birthday gift this year, to replace my aging but trustworthy Nokia 3210 and, as with any multifunctional digital device, there was a learning curve during the adoption period. While some features were gladly and swiftly taken into use, some of the handset's usability issues became my pet peeve and, among them, the localization pack wins the jackpot.

First, let's make one thing clear: I fully understand that memory constraints prevent manufacturers from including support for every language known to man, so a handset can only be loaded with a limited set of languages for the User Interface and for T9 predictive text input dictionaries. My issue is with the concept of grouping languages by linguistic families or continental areas, when compiling the localization packs for those handsets.

In this particular case, I had a choice between the Baltic or Nordic packs. The former has UI language support for Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, while the later has support for Finnish and the Scandinavian languages; English is also included in both cases. T9 support is a strangely mixed bag: the Baltic pack only includes predictive input for the Slavic languages, while the Nordic pack supports all the languages of its UI.

What's my problem with the above language combinations? For starters, I'm in Finland. We don't interact with Danes or Icelanders outside very occasional pan-Nordic meetings and that mostly concerns politicians. Meanwhile, average Finns travel for work and play to Estonia and Russia on a fairly regular basis, which makes sense, since they are neighboring countries. However, available language packs don't take this into account.

How should this be resolved?

Either language packs are produced with specific countries in mind, rather than generic geographic areas, or the users should be allowed to freely mix and match among all available languages and get the result flashed into their handset at purchase time.

The K750i language pack for Finland should therefore include: Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, Russian, English and Norwegian (essentially the current Nordic language pack, but with Danish and Icelandic replaced with Estonian and Russian). Then again, this only covers official state languages. Samé dialects, anyone? I guess not, because we'd soon be exceeding the handset's capacity. Hmm...

Thus, the only real solution is to allow people to freely mix and match UI and T9 languages of their choice at purchase time.

As a bonus, this would allow me to drop Norwegian and replace it with Joual... ööö... cålisse, French and finally have a language pack that I can truly find useful. I can easily picture a Transylvanian engineer working in Finland wanting to get Romanian support or a Kurdish immigrant preferring Turkish support instead.

Sony-Ericsson, how about it?

Dear lazy Fluendo

Surely there must be a way of using gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 to produce MP3 files using Sound-Juicer, so that I can listen to my favorite albums on my Sony-Ericsson phone while commuting to work via the Helsinki-Tallinn ferry, but how?

Crazy idea: shipit.debian.org

Over the last few days, I have had to perform a number of clean installations, some using Debian, some using Ubuntu. Whenever handing over freshly OEM'ed hardware, I like to include a copy of the CD media to the customer, as a courtesy.

This works extremely well for Ubuntu, from whom it is possible to order official release CD. Customers always get a nice buzz out of that.

For Debian, though, I always get embarrassed looks over the home-burnt CD, because it projects a lack of professionalism. Enterprise customers want a commercially pressed CD and they want it to be the official one published by Debian; explaining to them that Debian doesn't publish pressed CD media produces an instant lack of trust in Debian. What can I say? It's their perception and, as the old saying goes, the customer is always right.

This got me thinking, why doesn't Debian have its own ShipIt like Ubuntu? Granted, Debian is a non-profit organization, but surely that would not prevent selling official CD media to help cover at least some of its operational expenses, now, would it?

One way to implement this would be to hire the exact same CD pressing plant that Canonical employs to handle their CD ordering and shipping logistics. They already have the procedure and tools in place to handle this; they just need to add a branded version of that ordering site for Debian's needs and to receive official ISO files from Debian's Release Manager every year or so. How about it?

Economics explained with cows

Economics explained with cows is probably one of the best-written example of economic models explained in simple terms. A must-read!

Recommended Listening: Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Today feels something like the ideal to spend a Sunday afternoon: sorting though my Deviation Watch inbox and ... listening to Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. All I can say is WOW! This has got to be the single best compendium of electronic music I've seen in a long time. The explanatory texts are quite spot-on too. Well done, Ishkur!

Thanks to Elver for brightening my day with the URL to this guide!

Dear Skype morons

Dear morons of the Linux development team at Skype:

In case this wasn't obvious to you, beta releases are not to be uploaded to a Stable package repository; they instead go to an Unstable or Experimental repository.

This detail is of critical importance, given how your current 1.4 Beta has totally crappy audio (1.3.0.53 was at least usable, while 1.4.0.74 definitely ain't) and it also misses features that were present in 1.3 Gold.

So, would you have the courtesy of putting 1.3.0.53 back into the Stable repository and of creating a separate Unstable repository for your beta, instead of pushing unpolished crap where people expect rock-solid software?

PS: please be honest and remove that claim about Skype having superior audio quality from the package description. As far as audio quality goes, Ekiga beats you flat out and it already has video support too.

How about a Gaim of talking Pigeon?

Today, getting increasingly tired of the incoherent User Interface in Gaim 2.0 release candidates, I fetched the recently uploaded release 2.0.1 of Pidgin (same software, different name; the result of a trademark dispute) from Debian/unstable and built it against Stable dependencies.

First impressions: excellent harmonization of the behavior between supported protocols, thanks to a new user status handling that is common to all protocols, coupled with unified a icon theme. Overall, this feels much more consistent in everyday use and it serves to blur the distinction between protocols to maintain the focus on the conversation taking place.

However, two major annoyances:

1. The old behavior of stealing focus, every time a tab pops open, is still there. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH!
2. Extremely tiny fonts in the conversation window and trying to make them inherit the default system font size via Pidgin's built-in GTK plug-in simply fails.

Conclusion: libpurple may be technically amazing, but Pidgin really is in desperate need of a complete UI overhaul.

Almost there: granny-friendly PDF writing

One aspect of Ubuntu that I really enjoy is the sheer amount of constructive feedback a maintainer gets about the usability of their packages. In my case, CUPS-PDF [1] [2] has been a landmark example of how beneficial this feedback can be:

See, one long-standing goal at Ubuntu has been to include the capability to generate PDF documents "out of the box" and regardless of which Desktop Environment is used. Many people considered that CUPS-PDF would be an excellent tool, but various technical issues prevented this from working in a security-conscious way. Once that issue was taken care of, someone pondered how the PDF queue could be automatically created at installation time?

It turns out that we're almost there: with the upload of version 2.4.6 into Debian today (which should propagate into Ubuntu within a few days), only one configuration step remains: the selection of a PPD driver. Everything else is automatically detected and configured by CUPS itself. Kudos to our friendly upstream, Volker, for implementing this driver magic in his back-end code! Enjoy!

Bidding farewell to 32-bit computing

A number of recent events reminded me of how much time has passed since I started using Linux. Among these, the retirement of several 32-bit CPU architectures from the list of supported platforms on Debian and Ubuntu.

The first architecture to fall was m68k. Release Managers at Debian proposed to drop support for m68k after Sarge, which indeed happened: Etch was released earlier this month and, for the very first time in Debian history, without m68k support. Granted, a number of dedicated developers are working on porting the GNU toolchain to Coldfire (an embedded platform that supports about 80% of the m68k instruction set) and good chances are that they will succeed but, let's not fool ourselves: m68k is gone.

Around the same time, Ubuntu dropped support for PowerPC, just before releasing Feisty. Granted, there is still some PPC64 hardware being manufactured, but this is on the server side and thus getting farther away from the desktop market that constitutes Ubuntu's core business. Of course, given the plethora of 32-bit PPC hardware in circulation, in the form of second-hand Power Macs, the platform still has some lifespan left but, again, let's not fool ourselves: PowerPC is gone too.

And now, a message sent to Debian mailing lists suggested that, as of Linux kernel 2.6.21, support for 32-bit SPARC was broken and, due to an insufficient developer interest for maintaining the GNU toolchain, 32-bit SPARC was likely to be dropped for the Lenny release. Yup, we really cannot fool ourselves: support for 32-bit architectures really is gone.

Not surprisingly, my own computer collection has followed a similar trend: this morning, my beloved PA-RISC host left for the home of a happy computer hobbyist who had won the online auction on it. My Atari TT030 is likely to follow a similar route fairly soon. Ditto for the exotic Atari Stacy sitting besides it ...and let's not mention the huge stack of Pentium II and K6 desktop hardware sitting in the corner.

Looking back, I'm glad to have shared so many brilliant years with 32-bit hardware. The variety of CPU architectures and hardware designs was quite a learning experience. This being said, life goes on and my current needs are fully covered by my Linutop and by my aging ThinkPad.

Thank you for all those years, 32-bit computers. Enjoy a well-deserved rest in bit heaven.

Adventures in Business Setting

One funny thing about being a foreigner is the linguistic choices people make when communicating with me. Case in point: my new job at Artec.

This being Estonia, there's a plethora of languages to choose from: Estonian, obviously, but also Russian, English and Finnish. Russian is possible because 30% of Estonians are ethnic Russians (or related Belorussians and Ukrainians) whose ancestors were relocated during Soviet times. Russian also remains strong as a language of trade, especially among the older generation, while English tends to replace it for the younger generation. Then, Finnish is widely spoken in Northern Estonia, because of Tallinn's proximity to Helsinki and despite Southern Estonian being linguistically closer to Finnish.

People's choice, whenever discussing work-related matters with me, varies accordingly: some prefer to use English while, for others, Finnish comes naturally. Then there's a handful of older collegues who feel uneasy speaking either English or Finnish, so they address me in Estonian, placing special care on clearly articulating every word and on speaking at a slower pace than normal (to Finnish ears, Estonian essentially sounds like Finnish on fast-forward and with unusual choices of vocabulary).

I have yet to see anyone try Russian with me, although a few people have noticed that I get the overall idea, just as long as they articulate clearly and speak slower than normal. Then again, our ethnic Russians are so well integrated that they speak Estonian all day long, even among themselves, and I have been able to observe the same pattern everywhere I've been in Estonia. From that perspective, I think that Russia's claims about "oppression of ethnic Russians in Estonia" are greatly exaggerated.

Reboot

I guess one could summarize Easter as a certain prophet's big reboot?

Now, make it funky!

Yup, this Easter, I completely rebooted as well: after briefly visiting my relatives in some distant country that some morons insist I should call "homeland", I got back to my real homeland in the HELish land of singing demons for a full reboot: new job, new home, new girlfriend.

Then, my computing resources rebooted too.

Shake it to the Left! Shake it to the Right!

Reboot your life.

I'm Thin, therefore I Can

Life sometimes goes in a funny direction, like a full circle déjà vu: 20 years ago, I was studying Technology of Computerized Systems (a combination of electronics and programming). Now, 20 years later, I'm starting a dream job as the Business Development Manager of Artec Group and their core business is — you guessed it — exactly that. The really cool thing about Artec, from a Free Software advocate's point of view, is that they contribute firmware and drivers for their products to LinuxBIOS and the Linux kernel.

At this point, my initial tasks will focus on marketing and selling Artec's flagship OEM product, the ThinCan. What is the ThinCan? Actually, you're already familiar with one iteration of the product: the Linutop is a branded ThinCan, delivered with a custom hardware configuration, plus custom casing artwork designed by Frédéric Baille of Linutop SARL and loaded with Fred's favorite Xubuntu configuration. In the Linutop's case, their business model is to fill the market niche for a simple Internet surfing platform that fits 80% of average people's daily computing needs, so the hardware configuration they ordered reflects that.

Still, as several readers of this blog noticed, the "Linutop" could make a fantastic thin client and, sure enough, that was the main purpose behind the ThinCan's original design; it sells well in the Fortune-500 market as an RDP client running under Windows CE. However, until recently, there simply wasn't much demand for a contemporary X11 terminal solution based on the ThinCan. That is, until LTSP took off, thanks to the contributions of Edubuntu and similar educational Linux distributions. Sure enough, someone spotted the opportunity and contacted Artec to order a branded ThinCan iteration with Etherboot and PXE support, which they call the Linuterm.

By the way, for those who need a really cheap OEM thin client, I've got a great spring clearance offer for you:

Artec has about 500 pieces left of their older DBE60 ThinCan model, based on the AMD Geode SC2200, and we're selling them at 100 euro / piece, plus VAT and shipping.

The DBE60 is configured with three USB 1.1 ports, one parallel printer port, one 100baseT Ethernet port, one VGA port (up to 1024x768 @ 16bpp 60-85Hz or 1280x1024 @ 8bpp 60-75Hz) and one 1/8" stereo audio output jack. Its BIOS provides Etherboot support and its motherboard is populated with 64MB of RAM and 32MB of Stratoflash. It comes delivered with a European AC adapter. The Geode SC2200 is fully supported by the Linux kernel — with the sole exception of a missing ALSA snd-scx200, but this could easily be ported from AMD's deprecated OSS driver — and X.org support is provided by the "nsc" driver.

Minimum order size is 10 pieces. Contact me via my full name (unaccented, with one hyphen and one dot) at artecgroup.com quoting this special offer.

PS: someone was asking if that DBE60 special is also available in the aforementioned Fortune-500 configuration. It indeed is: add 16 euro / piece for the Windows CE 4.1 license with an RDP client.

Linutop: Order Yours Today!

Fred informs me that we now have our ordering system up and running so, for those of you who had been longing for their very own Linutop, do visit us and fill out the order form.

Please note that, at this stage, we are only able to ship within Europe. However, if anyone is interested in distributing the Linutop on other continents, we definitely want to hear from you.