fidzu : BSD

Got up early (I'm still jet lagged so this is not difficult at all) and went running to Central Park. What a nice jogging track around the lake! Also surprising was the amount of people running at that hour of the day (7.30). Then I headed to Google early enough to have breakfast there and started to do some work. I'm starting to understand stuff, and it looks like that my work will be exciting! Can't wait until tomorrow to get there again and continue learning. I really wanted to experience this feeling again.&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Then the typical stuff: had lunch, worked some more and even had dinner there. Having dinner early was good because then I went on foot up to Times Square. Just WOW. This place is small but amazing; it seems a completely different city on its own. Will need to go back again with my camera, which I wasn't carrying today. At last, done some shopping at CVS and went home. Now it's time for blogging and watching yet another episode of Dexter while enjoying a beer. (Well, how do I dare to call it a beer? It's alcohol-free. I picked it up incorrectly at the super market.)&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;So, finally today, I think I'm starting to really understand the subway system. A colleague at work, Patrick, explained me the rationale behind the local and express trains, which in fact seems a pretty good idea. I'll try tomorrow to pick the 4th or 5th to get to Google to see how long it takes. Let's hope the extra train switch doesn't make the trip last for more than the 6th on its own, or otherwise I'll probably miss breakfast.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Also, at Google today, I was trying to figure out how the expresso coffee machine worked and asked a guy that was using it. While he was explaining to me the details of how to use it, I quickly noticed that special English accent that Spanish people have (I do too for sure). Guess I'll have someone to go partying this weekend!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;And at last I'm trying to figure out housing once again. I visited three different flats today. Let's hope I get an answer by tomorrow...&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Phew, this blog is starting to look like a diary... well, will be good to remember this nice experience in the future.&lt;/div&gt;</content>

23 Jul 2008 2:48am GMT

Today I spent most part of the day at Google. I took a tour through the offices, dealt with paperwork and chatted with my boss. I don't know what things I can say about what I saw, so I will only mention one thing: the place is great. Looks like it'll be hard to leave when the internship finishes!&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Later this evening, I went shopping to Whole Foods per a suggestion from my boss. Everything in there seems pretty darn expensive but also of good quality. And the place was incredibly crowded.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Ah, and one more thing that surprised me about the city and that I forgot to mention yesterday: almost everyone who rides bikes wears a helmet. That's "hard" (not uncommon, just not typical) to see in Barcelona.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Last random note: my annoying journey to look for housing continues...&lt;/div&gt;</content>

22 Jul 2008 12:48am GMT

Google's Summer of Code has passed the midterm date. With it, students and their mentors were asked to give internal status reports of thei works. While the internal reports themselves are not public, many of our students have sent mail to NetBSD's public lists, giving details on their status. Let's give a summary of the state of affairs. Projects were students have posted reports come first:

• wscons: Expansion for wstablet in NetBSD
  Student: Jason W. Beaudoin

  To support tables for the wscons console driver, a number of changes to the wscons API have been proposed in the student's status report. While there are a number of similarities with the wsmouse interface, there are also a number of differences that need to be worked around, e.g. absolute vs. relative coordinates. Many of the proposed changes are implemented, and we're looking forward to complete this project successfully within time.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• subfiles: Subfile Support for NetBSD
  Student: Adam Burkepile

  Subfile allow to associate data with a regular file, just like regular allow to associate data with a directory. New internal data structures were defined to identify subfiles within the file system, and tools like newfs and dumpfs were adjusted. An API is being designed to access subfiles, and work to realize the assorted functions is being approached.

  Status report part 1 / 2, project page, project proposal

• hurdt: Hurd translators
  Student: Marek Dopiera

  Translators are programs which provide filesystems in user space functionality. This is provided via NetBSD's RUMP interface, and additional system calls and file system operations have been defined to activate the server processes when access to such a "translator" is made. Currently, the translators are only implemented in NetBSD's ext2 file system, as this allows testing of interaction with Hurd - Hurd's support for FFS seems non-working, unfortunately. The project's under busy development, and we're looking forward to see the final results.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• lvm: Write and improve NetBSD LVM driver
  Student: Adam Hamsik

  This project implements the Linux LVM API (libdevmapper) on NetBSD, to allow using Linux' lvm2tools for logical volume management. The project's making excellent progress, there is an ISO image (see URL in status report) as well as a qemu image available for testing, and latest reports show that linear volumes can be configured and mounted already.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• uvc: Add support for UVC devices (USB web-cams)
  Student: Patrick Mahoney

  A kernel driver was developed to read data from webcams using a custom API, work to implement the video2linux API is under way. Current challenges lie in NetBSD's USB stack, which lacks support for isochronous transfers, which is used by many (but not all) webcams. The project has made excellent progress so far, and we're positive that the project will be a success.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• dvb: DVB drivers and kernel framework
  Student: Jeremy Morse

  This project implements a driver for Digital Video Broadcasting to supplement bktr(4)'s TV card support. So far, a driver and an API to transport data from the kernel to userland was implemented, matching LinuxTV. The project's making good progress, even due to conflicts with the academic schedule.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• install-tool: Customizable install tool for NetBSD
  Student: Zachary Wegner

  NetBSD's current installer, sysinst, is being split into frontend and backend parts, with a configuration file building the interface between the two parts. Untangling the current mix of user interaction and install operation are ongoing, with challenges like request of install media (think floppy #42) and network configuration. Also, a parser for the configuration file was written, and work not started yet is the frontend creating the configuration file for the backend.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• fs-utils: File system access utilities
  Student: Ysmal Arnaud

  This project is using NetBSD's RUMP and the ukfs library to access a file system image from userland. So far, makefs(1) can generate a file system image, and it can now be manipulated as well. Both a "file system console" as shell to operate on the image as well as separate tools for single operations have been designed. Many of the "normal" userland tools' functionality like ls(1), cp(1) and rm(1) were implemented. This project has made excellent progress so far, see the status report and project page.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• cwrapper: pkgsrc: rewrite wrapper framework in C
  Student: Amitai Schlair

  The student was distracted by travel obligations for some time, but work has started in pkgsrc now. Current work includes a set of ATF tests to cover the usage of the existing pkgsrc wrapper framework and a design plan for the new wrapper implementation. The actual wrapper implementation remains to be written, and we're looking forward to see the it happen, including integration into pkgsrc plus benchmarks on the increase in speed.

  Status report, project page, project proposal

• atfify: Converting remaining regression tests to the Automatic Testing Framework
  Student: Lukasz Strzygowski

  The Automated Testing Framework was added to NetBSD as a result of last year's Summer of Code. This year, all the remaining regression tests from src/regress are being converted to ATF. Test suites for tools (awk, grep, make, ...) and libraries (libm, libpthread, ...) were converted so far. Tests for libc are currently being converted, and kernel tests are next. We're looking forward to get all of src/regress changed to ATF!

  Status report, project page, project proposal

No status report was sent by the following students (or at least I haven't seem one). Data given here is from the project pages, mostly:

• ext3: Implement Ext3 file system support
  Student: Rus-Rebreanu Alin-Florin

  This project intends to implement journaling in the file system by reusing Wasbi's wapbl code. Unfortunately, little has happend to reach this goal (to say the least), and the student got AWOL. Interested parties are welcome to try out ext2fuse (which also does ext3, despite the name) for now.

  Project page, project proposal

• packet-classes: Create an in-kernel API for "packet classes"
  Student: Anish Babu

  Nothing has happened in this project as well. I hear about communication problems, and it remains to see if things move forward here. :-(

  Project page, project proposal

• teredo: Implementation of RFC4380 (Teredo) in NetBSD
  Student: Arnaud Lacombe

  The project aims at creating a Teredo client, server and relay via a kernel pseudo device and assorted userland tools. The project is currently still in the analysis and design phase, which will give it little time for completion -- as for other students, this is due to a clash with the academic schedule of the student. We're holding up hopes that the set goals can be met at least partially.

  Project page, project proposal

• syslogd: Improve syslogd
  Student: Martin Schütte

  The project aims at implementing the upcoming IETF standards for syslog transport over TLS (instead of UDP), a more formal format of the messages themselv for easier automatic parsing, and signing of messages to assert authentication, integrity and correct sequencing of syslog messages. The first part of this is already working, the second part is development. We're looking forward to see this project succeed, as it will be of benefit not only to NetBSD.

  Project page, project proposal

So much for now. We wish all our students good luck in the second part of this year's Google Summer of Code, and are looking forward to see your final results, which are due in 3-4 weeks from now. Keep on hacking!

Update: Fixed a typo (thanks tron!), got an update on the ext3 project, and added a link to the status report of the cwrapper project, which I've missed (sorry!).

21 Jul 2008 11:07pm GMT

Finally, my adventure in NYC started yesterday. I had to pick up the flight at 14.50 but it got delayed by an hour. In the end, the plane landed at around 19.15 local time (which means a damn lot of hours inside the plane). Going through immigration and customs was boring but easy.&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Getting into Manhattan was quite a mess though. Instead of picking a taxi, I decided to try to make my way through the subway system. So I first picked up the AirTrain and, instead of getting to the E train, which is the one I needed, I ended up in the A train. OK, looking at the map it was clear that A could take much more time to get to the destination than E, but it could bring me there anyway; so I waited for that train instead of going back. Going through Brooklyn took quite a bit, and when the train got to Manhattan, something happened (it was spoken out loud, but I couldn't understand it) and the train changed its way through another line. So I couldn't get to the station I planned and decided to get down in another one to later take the 6 line. However, to pick the 6 line in the correct direction, I had to go out of the metro system and reenter again at some other place. At this point I was so bored (due to carrying all luggage) and stressed that I stopped a taxi.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;The thing is that I had to be at the apartment between 9pm and 10pm so that the tenant could give me the keys. As I was certainly going to be late, I attempted to call her when the plane landed, but she didn't pick the phone. As a result, when I got to the apartment, nobody was there. Uhh... scam? No. Fortunately, I could check my email through the mobile phone and saw a mail that told me to go to another direction to pick up the keys. This mail also had her mobile number, and I noticed that I had written it down incorrectly... hence why nobody picked it up before. So taxi to downtown again, pick up the keys, and another taxi uptown. Expensive, yes, but I was not going to attempt the subway again carrying all my stuff.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;At around 11pm I got to the apartment, made the Internet connection work on my laptop and went to sleep. 30-hour long day finished. (Note to self: I had wished multiple times to have longer days. Don't say that again!)&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;As regards today, I have read the New York Times (pretty darn expensive), explored the surroundings of the apartment (located at the Upper East Side), checked the way to get to Google using the Subway (not that difficult, now that I wasn't stressed), had lunch downtown, bought a local SIM card for my cell phone and went running in Central Park. Yay!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Now, some things that have surprised me from the city so far.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;It is amazing how widespread and easy is the use of credit cards to pay for virtually anything and everywhere (even inside the taxis!). Of course, it's also frightening the fact that there is no ID check for the use of the credit card, so losing it is... uh... scary. Also frightening is the way you spend money... virtual money is much easier to give away than physical one!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Tipping is annoying. Come on, just tell me how much I owe and don't make me figure out how much to add to make it &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"&gt;right&lt;/span&gt;. You know, taxi drivers, waiters... everyone expects tips and there are some guidelines on how much you are supposed to leave. I guess some taxi drivers got angry yesterday...&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;The subway system is quite... "interesting". Everything seems very old, and the way it works is not too clear. Some stations don't open all day as others do, in some you have to change the direction by going outside, some trains don't have any clear indication of what is the next station... so far I think Barcelona's system is much nicer. Maybe except for the MetroCard.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Water is free. What do I mean with this, you say? This morning I sat down in a bar to get a coffee and, before I even ordered, the waiter served me a big glass with water and ice. Similarly, when having lunch, I also got water without having ordered it. And what's more, the waiter refilled the glass as it emptied.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Speaking of glasses... mixed drinks seem to be common here. The lunch menu included one mixed drink (some with champagne and some with vodka), and I saw several bars in which the happy hour started as early as 4pm. Oh, and the names for these drinks are quite "funny". Guess I'll have to learn them and what they are composed of.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;I don't know which language to use to talk to people. Many of them seem to understand both English and Spanish.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;The blocks in Manhattan are not as big as some people made me think. You can, in fact, do trips that span multiple blocks on foot.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;And, at last, the weather is unbearably hot and humid. Not good for sweat.&lt;/div&gt;</content>

21 Jul 2008 12:48am GMT

Micro-blogging services are preventing me to write real posts in my blog... so here comes a summary of recent happenings.&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;I finished my master's degree in Computer Architecture, Networks and Systems a week ago, when I presented the master's thesis titled &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"&gt;Task scheduling on the Cell processor&lt;/span&gt;. I'll try to post it somewhere online when I have good internet connection.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Then, I've spent this whole week at the &lt;a href="http://www.hipeac.net/summerschool/"&gt;ACACES Summer School&lt;/a&gt;, a meet-up of people from the &lt;a href="http://www.hipeac.net/"&gt;HiPEAC&lt;/a&gt; project to take courses on several computer architecture topics and get to know new people that works on similar areas as you. This meet-up happens in a campus at L'Aquila, a small town in Italy. I don't understand why some people at my university said that they did not want to come... because for me, it has been a great and fun week!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;And well, tomorrow I'm leaving ACACES and flying directly to New York City, to start my 4-month internship at the Google SRE group on Monday.&lt;/div&gt;</content>

18 Jul 2008 3:48pm GMT

I've found a bit of spare time upgrade a NetBSD 4.0 system to NetBSD-current (4.99.69), and during the usual update procedure (boot new kernel; build.sh install=/; etcupdate) I found a number of user-visible changes over NetBSD 4.0 that I'd like to spotlight here:

1. audit-packages and download-vulnerability-list are now part of the NetBSD base system, there's no longer a need to install them via pkgsrc. I haven't found any hooks to run them automatically every night, but that can be done easily via cron(8). The commands in question are:

        # download-vulnerability-list
        # audit-packages 
   

2. Per-user-tmp: Currently, /tmp is shared by all users. In order to avoid name clashes (example: I use /tmp/foo for temporar data as both root and "normal" user), the /tmp directory can be made to be unique for each user now, much the same way as this is done e.g. on Mac Os X. To do so, set

           per_user_tmp=yes 
   

   in /etc/rc.conf and reboot. In effect, /tmp is unique for each user then. The implementation is done via magic symlinks:

           # cd /tmp
           # pwd
           /private/tmp/0
           # ls -l /tmp
           lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  18 Jul 13 22:41 /tmp -> /private/tmp/@ruid 
   

3. httpd: NetBSD now ships with a web server in base. Seriously, I have no idea why this is, but it can be enabled by removing the commend signs of the 'httpd' service in /etc/inetd.conf, and by populating /var/www. After that access by both IPv4 and IPv6 is possible.
4. dhcpcd: NetBSD has shipped with ISC's DHCP client so far, which uses quite a bit or memory. As a supplement, Roy Marples' dhcpcd has been added to the base system. In order to use it for interface xx0, put

        ifconfig_xx0="dhcp" 
   

   into your /etc/rc.conf file (replacing the old "dhclient=yes" setting).

   On a test system, both dhclient and dhcpcd had ps(1) display a VSZ (virtual size in Kbyte) of ~770, but while dhclient had a RSS (real memory / resident set size, in Kbte) of 1068, dhcpcd only had a RSS of 548, i.e. the new DHCP client daemon uses about half as much RAM as the ISC dhclient.

5. /boot.cfg: Last, NetBSD's second stage bootloader can now load a configuration file on the i386 and amd64 platforms. Assuming the bootloader was updated after the upgrade ("cp /usr/mdec/boot /boot"), the config file /boot.cfg is used to print the boot menu and offer appripriate actions:

        # cat /boot.cfg
        menu=Boot normally:boot netbsd
        menu=Boot single user:boot netbsd -s
        menu=Disable ACPI:boot netbsd -2
        menu=Disable ACPI and SMP:boot netbsd -12
        menu=Drop to boot prompt:prompt
        default=1
        timeout=5 
   

So much for a first adventure into NetBSD-current. Feel free to point out more goodies in NetBSD-current that will be new in NetBSD 5.0 over NetBSD 4.0.

14 Jul 2008 7:38pm GMT

Jan Schaumann announced: ``A NetBSD developer's summit is currently being planned for Friday, October 10th, 2008. The event is sponsored by and leads up to this year's NYCBSDCon and will take place at Columbia University on the island of Manhattan in New York City, NY, USA.

While the program for this full-day event is not yet finalized, it will be open to the public and may include formal presentations as well as informal discussions of both technical and administrative nature. A public hackathon is anticipated to run in parallel throughout the weekend.

The common social activities such as PGP signing and consumation of refreshing beverages or communal ingestion of nutrition are likely to follow.

If you have any suggestions, would like to offer your help, plan on attending or have any other comments, please contact <jschauma at netbsd dot org>.''

13 Jul 2008 4:33am GMT

The following list gives changes to NetBSD-current between end of may to second week of july. Note that NetBSD is currently in a feature-freeze to prepare the 5.0 release, so there are more stability improvements going in than new features being added:

• Work on the wrstuden-revivesa is ongoing. The old Scheduler Activations (SA) based threading code that was removed from NetBSD after 4.0 is adapted for NetBSD-current, so any applications that depend on SAs can continue to run. This is important for binary compatibility.
• More changes towards the new kernel modules (kmod) framework:
  • file systems' sysctl init code is now ran in a fashion so that the modules can either be linked statically into the kernel, or loaded as module during runtime, without recompiling the code. (this used to be done via some #defines previously, which either expanded to code for the LKM, or to code for static inclusion).
  • the uaudio driver can now be compiled as kmod. More work is done to actually attach audio to newly found devices, though.
• Wasabi's journaling filesystem support was added on the simonb-wapbl branch. There are still a number of issues to be resolved before this gets to flight under real life conditions.
• Support for LVM as part of this year's Google Summer of Code was added on the haad-dm branch. Currently it is possible to create a logical volume, newfs and mount it with the Linux lvm2tools lvcreate utility - the NetBSD driver is API-compatible with Linux.
• After TNF has changed its copyright from 4-clause to 2-clause, other holders of material in NetBSD's code base have made similar changes.
• The yamt-pf42 branch was merged, which merges in a newer PF packet filter from OpenBSD 4.2.
• Management of processor sets and thread affinity was added, see the cpuset(3), affinity(3), pthread_setaffinity_np(3) and pthread_getaffinity_np(3) manpages as well as the cpuctl(8) and psrset(8) commands.
• The Red-Black-Tree code was optimized more, and moved in a place so that the same code can be used both from userland (libc) and kernel code.
• ifconfig(8) was changed to allow easy adding/removal of features such as address families (inet, inet6, iso, atalk) and protocols (802.11, 802.3ad, CARP) via the Makefile.
• SSH was extended with the HPN-SSH patch, which aims at improving performance of SCP and the underlying SSH2 protocol by dynamically allocating buffers. See the HPN-SSH homepage for more information.

13 Jul 2008 4:22am GMT

This makes jails easier

05 Jul 2008 11:48pm GMT

Past weekend, for some strange reason, I decided to dump all the MBP's hard disk contents and start again from scratch. But this time I decided to split the disk into multiple partitions for Mac OS X, to avoid external fragmentation slowdowns as much as possible.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I &lt;a href="http://julipedia.blogspot.com/2007/01/install-mac-os-x-over-multiple-volumes.html"&gt;already did such a thing&lt;/a&gt; back when the MBP was new. At that time, I created a partition for the system files and another for the user data. However, that setup was not too optimal and, when I got the 7200RPM hard disk drive six months later, I reinstalled again in a single partition. Just for convenience.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;But external fragmentation hurts performance a lot, specially in my case because I need to keep lots of small files (the NetBSD source tree, for example) and files that get fragmented very easily (sparse virtual machine disks). These end up spreading the files everywhere on the physical disk, and as a result the system slows down considerably. I even bought iDefrag and it does a good job at optimizing the disk layout... but the results were not as impressive as I expected.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This time I reinstalled using the following layout:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;System: Mounted on /, HFS+ case insensitive, 30GB.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Users: Mounted on /Users, HFS+ case insensitive, 50GB.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Windows: Not mounted, NTFS, 40GB.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Projects: Mounted on /Users/jmmv/Projects, HFS+ case sensitive, 30GB.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;Windows had to go before Projects so that the MBR partition table was constructed correctly; otherwise Windows failed to start after installation. The Projects partition holds those small files as well as the virtual machines. And Users keeps all the personal stuff such as photos, music and documents, which are mostly static.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Using this layout, the machine really feels a lot faster. Applications start quickly, programs that deal with personal data such as iPhoto and iTunes load the library faster, and I don't have to deal with stupid disk images to keep things sequential on disk. However, the price to pay for such layout is convenience, because now the free disk space is spread in multiple partitions.</content>

05 Jul 2008 11:48am GMT

Note to self, here's what needs to be put into xorg.conf to get 1920x1200 going:

Section "Monitor"
        ...
        Horizsync       31.5-76.0
        Vertrefresh     56.0 - 75.0
        modeline        "1280x800@60" 83.46 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828 -hsync +vsync
        modeline        "1440x900@60" 106.47 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 901 904 932 -hsync +vsync
        modeline        "1920x1200@60" 193.16 1920 2048 2256 2592 1200 1201 1204 1242 -hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Device"
        ...
        Driver  "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        ...
        DefaultDepth    24

        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                #Modes  "1024x800" "1920x1024"
                #Modes  "1920x1200@60" "1280x800@60" "1440x900@60"
                #Modes  "1920x1200@60"
                Modes   "1440x900@60"
        EndSubSection
EndSection 

04 Jul 2008 3:42am GMT

I have an old Aiptek mini PenCam 1.3 MPixels, identified by USB vendor 1276 and product 20554. I want to use this webcam for videoconferencing in the machine I am setting up for this purpose. This machine carries a Fedora 9 x86_64 installation, as already mentioned in the previous post.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Whenever I connect the camera to the machine, HAL detects the new device and then GNOME attempts to "mount" it using gphoto2. The result is that I get a new device on the desktop referring to the camera, which is pretty nice, but it does not work at all: accessing it raises an unexpected error and thus the photos stored in the webcam cannot be seen.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Anyway, I do not care about the photo capabilities of this camera, just about its ability to stream video. Hence, I installed the &lt;tt&gt;gspca&lt;/tt&gt; and &lt;tt&gt;kmod-gspca&lt;/tt&gt; packages from the &lt;a href="http://rpm.livna.org/"&gt;livna&lt;/a&gt; repositories and, according to the &lt;a href="http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html"&gt;gspca&lt;/a&gt; driver, my camera is, supposedly, fully supported.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Unfortunately, I was not able to get the &lt;tt&gt;/dev/video&lt;/tt&gt; device: it didn't exist, even with the kernel modules loaded. After some manual investigation on the console (so that gphoto2 couldn't get in the way), I found that the video device really appears but vanishes as soon as gphoto2 attempts to access the camera. I suspect it is not possible to use the photo and video capabilities of the camera at once with the current drivers.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, how to avoid this problem? I had to tell HAL to omit this device, so that GNOME did not get any notification of its existance and therefore the interface did not attempt to mount the camera using gphoto2. However, there is few documentation on how to do this, so I had to resort to reading the files in &lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/hal/fdi/&lt;/tt&gt; and guess what to do.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I ended up creating a &lt;tt&gt;10-broken-cameras.fdi&lt;/tt&gt; file in &lt;tt&gt;/etc/hal/fdi/preprobe/&lt;/tt&gt; with the following contents:&lt;pre&gt;&amp;lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;lt;deviceinfo version="0.2"&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;device&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;match key="usb.vendor_id" int="1276"&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;match key="usb.product_id" int="20554"&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;merge key="info.ignore" type="bool"&amp;gt;true&amp;lt;/merge&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;/match&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;/match&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;lt;/device&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;&amp;lt;/deviceinfo&amp;gt;&lt;/pre&gt;What this code snippet does is match the camera device using some of the properties that are attached to it and, once there is a match, appends the &lt;tt&gt;info.ignore&lt;/tt&gt; property to the device description to tell HAL to not use this device any more. In order to set up the matching of a device, you can see the full list of properties of all device descriptors using the &lt;tt&gt;hal-device&lt;/tt&gt; command.</content>

29 Jun 2008 12:48pm GMT

I'm setting up a machine at home to act as a videoconferencing station so that my family can easily talk to me during the summer, while I'm in NYC. This machine is equipped with an Athlon 64-bit processor and a nVidia GeForce 6200 PCI-Express video card. I decided to install Fedora 9 in this computer because this is the distribution I'm currently using everywhere (well, everywhere except on the Mac ;-). Plus it just works (TM), or mostly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The 3D desktop is not something that is really needed for daily work, but I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, I could not get the desktop effects to work the first time I tried. I enabled the livna repositories, installed the nVidia binary drivers and configured the X server to use them. However, telling the system to enable the Desktop Effects failed, and running glxinfo crashed with a "locking assertion failure" message.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Googling a bit, I found a page mentioning that one has to run the livna-config-display command to properly configure the X server. I think I did not do this, so I just ran this manually and later restarted X. No luck.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Fortunately, that same page also contained a snippet of the &lt;tt&gt;xorg.conf&lt;/tt&gt; configuration file that was like this:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;pre&gt;Section "Files"&lt;br /&gt; ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"&lt;br /&gt; ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"&lt;br /&gt;EndSection&lt;/pre&gt;Effectively, my configuration file was lacking the path to the nVidia extensions subdirectory. Adding that line fixed the problem: now the server loads the correct GLX plugin, instead of the "generic" one that lives in the modules directory. I guess &lt;tt&gt;livna-config-display&lt;/tt&gt; should have set that up automatically for me, but it didn't...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The desktop effects are now working :-) Now I figure out why compiz feels so slow... specially because I have the same problem at work with an Intel 965Q video card.</content>

28 Jun 2008 4:48pm GMT

This has been looming around for some time - it has been requested by a couple of companies, and after a vote of the NetBSD developers it's official: NetBSD is now available under a two-clause BSD license. The former advertizement clause (#3) and endorsement clause (#4) have been considered as more hindrance than useful, and thus been removed from the current code.

Here is a full copy of the new license:

/*-
 * Copyright (c) 2008 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.
 * All rights reserved.
 *
 * This code is derived from software contributed to The NetBSD Foundation
 * by FOO BAR <baz@example.com>
 *
 * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 * are met:
 * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
 *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
 *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
 *    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
 *
 * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE NETBSD FOUNDATION, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS
 * ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
 * TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE FOUNDATION OR CONTRIBUTORS
 * BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR
 * CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF
 * SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
 * INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
 * CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)
 * ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
 * POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
 */ 

Enjoy!

P.S.: While there, here's a funny comparison of the BSD license over time with the various versions of the GPL, in words:

24 Jun 2008 11:25am GMT

Jared McNeill send me a note that he's been working on a driver for the Sony Playstation Eye camera, which is an accessory for the Playstation 3 game console.

See Jared's blog for the driver sources, sources for a snapshot and viewer utilites and install instructions.

23 Jun 2008 11:52pm GMT

Adding RAID-1 to an existing FreeBSD 7 installation

23 Jun 2008 11:48pm GMT