Help Wanted: testers for the Geode X.org driver on GX2 "Red Cloud"

A number of small fixes have been committed to the upstream X.org GIT to improve support for the "Red Cloud" Geode variant (called GX2 for late NSC chips and GX for newer rebranded AMD chips) and we desperately need volunteers to test those changes, before we release a new upstream tarball. If you have some Red Cloud hardware on hand and at least basic knowledge of how to compile software on Linux distributions, please contact me to the e-mail address listed in the ChangeLog. Thanks!

PS: if you're on Ubuntu, test packages are available for Lucid via my PPA.

Bad, bad Linux kernel!

Ever since Linux kernel 2.6.31 was released, my AMD Geode LX800-based FIC ION 603 can no longer boot; I get a fatal kernel crash near the end of the initramfs loading phase. At the crux of the issue seems to be a recently added kernel feature for caching filesystem ACL. I don't even use the ACL feature on my hosts, but there you go; it still crashes the kernel. Sigh.

Having filed a bug on Launchpad and reported the issue upstream failed to produce a fix - despite the sustained involvement of two members of the Ubuntu kernel team members to help me narrow down the cause of this fatal kernel crash.

Mentioning the issue to OLPC kernel developer Andres Salomon, he commented how he finds the new ACL caching code in the ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem drivers downright creepy, but added that he currently lacks the time to further investigate the issue.

I'm thus wondering if anyone else is experiencing this issue and might possibly have a fix to propose?

Alternately, help towards debugging and fixing this issue is extremely welcome, as this bug will seriously affect users upgrading from older Debian and Ubuntu releases based on pre-2.6.31 kernels, when Debian/Squeeze and Ubuntu/Lucid are published in spring.

PS: yes, the issue still exists in kernel 2.6.32 also.

Wanted: a coherent, sane Finnish political party

In more than 11 years in Finland, I've been politically involved in a couple of political parties on the Right side of the spectrum - mainly because those parties tend to favor a free market economy and a work-oriented immigration. In one case, I was invited by fellow immigrants to attend the meetings of their favorite party's English section, because of my expertise on Immigration legislation and common practices. In an other case, a member of the Finnish parliament invited me to participate in his party's immigrant workgroup, which resulted in my getting involved in a number of proactive initiatives and eventually joining that party as a card-carrying member.

Simultaneously, I was approached by no less than 4 Finnish political parties to become a candidate in the municipal elections (in Finland, foreigners who have lived at least 2 years on an A-status residence permit can vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections).

Despite this, I've come to the conclusion that none of these Finnish political parties is genuine:

On one hand, there's politicians who claim to know everything about the Immigration question and yet their speeches tell an entirely different story than what immigrants experience. On the other hand, there's politicians who complain about the immigrants' lack of participation in political life, but who quickly add that their personal group of supporters is all they're interested in hearing from.

Correlating these facts, it's been found by many politically-involved immigrants that Finnish political parties don't genuinely want to involve immigrants; all they are interested in is acquiring a few extra votes from the immigrant population and in transferring those votes to their party's star Finnish candidate, who often is someone favored by the party's old-timers but disavowed by the majority of grassroot members. In a few more extreme cases, party brasses will sheepishly admit that all they want is «a couple of niggers in the candidate list» to show a vague sense of adhesion to the multicultural agenda - despite the assurances they have given to often naive immigrant candidates that they "genuinely" hope that they'll be elected.

As it turns out, many immigrants are actively involved at the grassroot level and receiving the praises of their Finnish colleagues for their innovative and proactive initiatives. As a result, genuinely interested Finns have joined forces with active immigrants to launch various initiatives for improving Finland's competitive position in the global economy through a thriving cosmopolitanism and a stronger culture of entrepreneurship. For instance, I am personally involved at several public and private sector initiatives.

Nonetheless, grassroot initiatives can only ever accomplish so much; without the unflinching support of Finland's significant political players, several key elements of these innovative solutions cannot be implemented. However, given the grassroot's frustrating experiences of the political scene, one cannot help but wonder:

Is there any Finnish political party whose actions are coherent with its stated political agenda and in sync with the grassroot initiatives being put forward by the immigrants and their Finnish associates?

modulation wheels on the RIGHT side of the keyboard?

Am I the only one who thinks that a 3-octave synthesizer (low-A to high-C) with the modulation wheels placed on the right side of the keyboard would be the ultimate Funk machine in the hands of people like Bernie Worrell and myself? Something like a NordBass III comes to mind...

Similarly, could synthesizer manufacturers please standardize on keyboard layouts that always start on the low-A and include quick octave transposition buttons? The Roland Rhodes Mk60 included both a 5 octave 64-key layout (low-A to high-C) and two quick octave switch buttons (octave up and octave down), which made it a wonderful MIDI controller. Sadly, this was a one-off and no other keyboard on the market ever adopted this brilliant layout.

How about we go and fix it now? Korg? Nord? Roland? Yamaha? Are you guys listening?

mailx implementation that won't barf on UTF-8 encoded GECOS information?

Dear Lazyweb,

I've been having problems with cron jobs that mail their output, because they always manage to garble non-ASCII characters into some unreadable crap.

Upon closer inspection, the real culprit seems to be mailx: no single mailx implementation out there seems to have come to terms with the fact that most contemporary operating systems have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8, rather than in ASCII.

I had very high hopes for the Heirloom implementation of mailx, except that it, too, fails at encoding mail headers in UTF-8.

I'm thus wondering if there's anything I might have overlooked, perhaps a mailx setting that would enforce encoding of the From, To and Subject lines to UTF-8, or otherwise another mailx implementation that in fact does acknowledge the fact that most operating systems these days have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8?

Q: How to configure /etc/pulse/client.conf for remote audio sink?

I've spent the last couple of months wondering this and could not find an answer on the otherwise excellent PulseAudio wiki, so I thought that I'd ask the Lazy Web:

How can I configure /etc/pulse/client.conf to prefer a specific remote audio sink and to automatically fall back to localhost only when that remote sink is not available via Avahi?

I'm already aware of the paprefs applet, but it requires me to manually select the remote audio sink, every time I get back home, which is not what I want.

Instead, I need the PA daemon on this laptop to always try connecting to audio.lan then to localhost and to dynamically switch back and forth between those two hosts according to info provided by the Avahi PA module: if audio.lan is reachable and an audio sink is found, switch to that; if not, fall back to localhost; if audio.lan re-appears on the Avahi radar, switch back to it.

Surely there must be a way to achieve that, but how?

PS: audio.lan runs PA in System mode with IP-based ACL, if it makes any difference.

wanted: 'lspci -vvv' output for Geode SC1100, SC1200, SC1400

As I'm trying to better document which Geode models bear which PCI vendor and device ID, I'd need volunteers to e-mail me the output of 'lspci -vvv' for their Geode SC1100, SC1200, SC1400 -based hardware. Please send the result to my iki.fi address. Thanks!

PS: the part that interests me is the PCI ID of all Geode CPU and Companion Chips shown by 'lspci'. This requires setting several additional levels of verbosity, because this information is hidden from the normal 'lspci' output.

wanted: Geode "Red Cloud" GX2 hardware

Ever since X server 1.5 was released, various regressions started affecting our GX2 code in xf86-video-geode. We couldn't figure out what went wrong since our GX2 code hadn't changed in ages and we couldn't think of any ABI or API migration that would cause these regressions.

Well, it turns out that someone had quietly rewritten part of the X server core, which broken things from under our feet.

In the end, the change required to restore operation was minimal, but it nonetheless caused problems for several thin client users who complained loudly while the xf86-video-geode team scratched their head wondering what went wrong.

Still, it essentially meant that GX2 users suffered through Intrepid and Jaunty without a solution in sight, which is of course unacceptable. I'm also aware of at least one startup who lost a fairly lucrative LTSP maintenance contract, simply because their customer's GX2-based thin clients could not be made to work on Ubuntu since Hardy. Ouch!

In order to prevent this from ever happening again and to ensure that regressions get noticed before they reach critical mass, I'd like to solicit a hardware donation: something GX2-based with a small hard-disk or CompactFlash socket and 100baseT Ethernet.

My contact info can be found on my homepage. Please make sure that you contact me upfront to agree on the delivery method, before sending me any hardware.

Thanks!

xf86-video-geode 2.11.4 - the GX2 edition - almost done

Over the last few days, several improvements in the documentation and some fixes for GX2 issues were committed to the Geode X.org driver, in addition to routine cleanups in the standard includes and build macros. Integration of GX1 support still hasn't started.

We're especially interested in getting feedback from GX2 users as to whether this release restores basic operation for them or not. We published test packages for Ubuntu/Jaunty at:

https://launchpad.net/~q-funk/+archive/ppa

If we haven't heard anything by Friday, we'll release this as xf86-video-geode 2.11.4 as-is.

RFA: ispell-et, myspell-lv, rus-ispell

As of today, I've decided to Request For Adoption three of the packages I maintain:

• ispell-et (source for: iestonian, myspell-et, aspell-et) - Estonian spell checking tools,
• myspell-lv (source for myspell-lv, aspell-lv) - Latvian spell checking tools and
• rus-ispell (source for irussian, myspell-ru, aspell-ru) - Russian spell checking tools.

In principle, both the Latvian and Russian dictionary packages have a second maintainer, but I've been the only one performing the uploads for a long time which, in absence of any response on their part, suggests that the other maintainers also lack the time to actively maintain these dictionaries.

I'm not worried about the future of the Russian dictionary package, since the number of Debian and Ubuntu users in Russia is huge and constantly increasing. Someone is definitely gonna adopt it and give it all the love and care it deserves.

The Estonian dictionary package has seen a steady increase in the number of users but I never managed to attract a second maintainer for it. Thus, if nobody ever gets around adopting it, it just could be the end of spell checking support for Estonian in Debian and Ubuntu.

As for the Latvian dictionary package, both the low number of users and the unavailability of the other maintainer suggests that it could also be the end of spell checking support for Latvian in Debian and Ubuntu.

Here's to hope that someone reading this will pick up maintenance of these dictionary packages and help provide Debian and Ubuntu users with spell checking aids for Estonian, Latvian and Russian for years to come.

Don't try this at home, kids!

Probably the most deceptively efficient bug finding tool I've come across in a long time:

sudo apt-get --reinstall --ignore-missing install $(dpkg --get-selections | cut -f 1)

That apparently innocent APT recipe has been found to reveal tons of packaging mistakes, such as dependency cycles and broken maintainer scripts, even in packages as essential as bash and libc6. On systems where insserv is installed, even uglier dependency cycles, this time between init scripts, appear in important packages such as ifupdown and netbase.

Warning: usage of this deceptively simple command line recipe can become addictive and result in mass filing of bugs, especially against packages in development releases such as Debian/Squeeze and Ubuntu/Karmic. The author of this blog article makes no guarantee about how bad of a karma someone might accumulate as a result. You have been warned.

Nordic expats living in Finland wanted for survey

I'm interested in meeting with Nordic expats (Danemark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) living in Finland, to hear their experiences of settling down in this country, on two particular topics:

• How accessible is getting service in Swedish, in general?
• Did you experience any difficulty in settling down here?

I'm especially interested in hearing stories from academicians and professionals. The material will be used in my report to two organizations where I'm involved, one Swedish-Finn think tank and one national panel on immigration, both of whom are interested in hearing about the experiences of Nordic expats living in Finland.

As I'm aware that many Free Software developers from other Nordic countries relocated to Finland to work at Nokia or at local technology startups, I figured that blogging this request would bring me the widest possible audience for this survey.

Interested expats should contact me via e-mail with a brief description of their story. Later on, we'll probably gather up somewhere and compare views, before I produce my report. Thanks in advance to everyone who agrees to participate in this survey and to those who courteously passed this request forward to friends or relatives fitting the description!

partial answer to "unexplainable WiFi connection drops"

Previously, I blogged about some unexplainable WiFi connection drops I have been experiencing since a few days. Many thinks to everyone who replied by expressing their ire against Network-Manager. Unfortunately, it seems that the fault might indeed be on the WRT54GL's OpenWRT setup:

See, I have this old ThinkPad that I keep for Debian development purposes and that one runs whatever is on Debian/Testing, connecting to my LAN, using either an RTL8139-based Ethernet or an ATH5K-based WiFi adapter, plugged into the Cardbus slot; these days, more often the Atheros.

Now, this morning, I noticed that my Geode desktop stopped being able to ping both the Dell and the ThinkPad at the same time. Bingo! Now, the question is, how do I track the source of the problem, on this WRT54GL running White Russian?

Lauching Debian-installer from a chroot on a USB stick?

Dear Lazy Deb,

I was wondering if it's possible to launch debian-installer from a USB stick, either by bootstrapping the netinstall ISO image from command line or by launching d-i as as a collection of binaries installed in a USB chroot that already has a basic Debian distribution installed? While launching debootstrap itself from the USB stick would be possible, I'd miss all the d-i magic to partition the laptop's own hard-disk and detect its hardware at installation time, which is why I explicitly need a way to launch a full d-i from USB. NOTE: no, the laptop's BIOS doesn't support booting via USB, otherwise this would have been already attempted.

Illogical logistics industry

Today, I was checking for prices to ship a parcel abroad and found the most appalling situation ever: the logistics industry has gone mad. Trying different courier services' online price quotation service, I found that:

• UPS has an online presence that works reliably, as it always had. Their prices are not cheap, but one can at least get a quote after just a few clicks.
• DHL has an online express service called Ship Now ... which simply doesn't work. After inputing the origin address and moving over to the destination address field, one is left with a "busy" mouse pointer that never returns to allow someone to input the damn address. Repeated attempts at reloading the page did not succeed at improving the situation.
• FedEx has a Flash-based splash screen, meant for selecting the country of origin, that keeps on cycling during loading and never completes. Their "if you're having troubles viewing this page, click here" link at the bottom of the page simply calls a Javascript bit that... reloads the page. Erm... Right.

The result: two companies that lost potential business over a rather huge and costly parcel, simply because their websites prevents me from getting something as basic as a price quote. It really makes someone wonder, how the hell does that industry keeps itself afloat when they make their services so challenging to even access?

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.