Und erwähnt mich. Zitat:
Hanno Böck, der die freie Geodatenbank Openstreetmap vorstellte, war extra nach Augsburg gereist, da es »hier noch besonders viel zu tun gibt«. Ein Blick auf eine Augsburger Stadtkarte zeigte, was er meint: Einige Straßen sind schon drin, Bahnlinie und Hauptbahnhof auch, sogar Sträßchen wie Kappelberg, Milchberg, Bäckergasse und Hallstraße sind eingezeichnet. Aber wo ist die Maximilianstraße? Der Rathausplatz? Da sieht es doch recht leer aus.

Augsburger Allgemeine: Damit der PC mit seinem Nutzer rechnen kann

Gestern war ich auf dem Augsburger Linux-Infotag. Ein kleines, aber feines Linux-Event für den im Moment etwas unterrepräsentierten süddeutschen Raum.

Mein OpenStreetMap-Vortrag wurde von knapp 50 Menschen besucht und lief ganz passabel. Erste Spuren in der bislang etwas vernachlässigten Augsburger Innenstadt sind schon sichtbar (Slides wie üblich hier, aber kaum verändert zum letzten Mal).

Am CAcert-Stand war man optimistisch, dass noch (Zitat) »dieses Frühjahr« die Firefox-Integration klappt (aber das habe ich schon oft gehört...), die Freifunker in Augsburg sind nett, PacketRadio und Amateurfunk taugt nicht für Freifunk (due to Gesetz, welches den Content einschränkt) und insgesamt war es ein nettes Event. Ich denke nächstes Mal bin ich wieder dabei.

Bilder vom Linux-Infotag Augsburg gibt's hier.

nouveau, the project for creating a free 3D linux driver for nvidia cards, recently got first support for real 3D applications with gallium on some NV4X cards (see Nouveau Companion 36). Today I got it working on a friends machine.

Here you can see an openarena benchmark (also uploaded on youtube). It got 55 fps, which is far away from the nvidia binary driver yet (178 fps), but at least more than my r200 setup (32 fps).

For the brave ones, here's a quick and dirty howto for Gentoo:
a) Get the nouveau overlay with svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/nouveau-overlay and add it to PORTDIR_OVERLAY in make.conf.
b) The nouveau-overlay won't install the nouveau/gallium-branch of mesa. Get my overlay with svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/overlay and also add that to your PORTDIR_OVERLAY (I'll try to contact the nouveau-overlay developer if we can merge this).
b) Add media-libs/mesa, x11-base/x11-drm, x11-libs/libdrm and x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau to /etc/portage/package.keywords and merge them.
c) If you've been running the nvidia binary driver, eselect opengl set xorg-x11, change the graphics driver in xorg.conf to nouveau, rmmod nvidia (if you've been running the binary driver), modprobe nouveau and start X.
d) Have fun!

Note: The nouveau developers consider gallium completely unsupported at the moment and don't want to get end-user bugs. If it runs, fine, if not, don't nag them with it.

Habe dieses Jahr wieder die Chemnitzer Linux-Tage besucht, die sich inzwischen zu einem der wichtigsten Events der Linux-Community hierzulande entwickelt haben.

Ich habe tendenziell wenige, dafür aber gute Vorträge besucht (einen zum Hackerparagraphen und einen über Spam). Videos gibt's wohl leider keine, aber Audioaufnahmen sollten demnächst kommen. Desweiteren war ich aktiv am OpenStreetMap-Stand beteiligt, wir bekamen freundlicherweise bei der Wikipedia ein bißchen Platz. Für die Zukunft sind aber dann eher eigenen OpenStreetMap-Stände angesagt (beispielsweise beim Linux-Infotag in Augsburg).
Auch den Organisatoren sollten wir OpenStreetMap noch näher bringen, so war auf der Seite für die Wegbeschreibung lediglich map24 verlinkt. Zumindest ein alternativer OSM-Link sollte doch obligatorisch sein.

I recently wrote about geo-tagged images. This makes use of the fact that different devices collect data and you can associate the data by the timestamp. It's most probably interesting for much more than gps/images.

While it's possible to get accurate timesetting by hand, it's usually not what you want. Preferably one wants to sync all devices with an internal clock automatically from the computer or some kind of network connection.

As a first step, we want to get our computer's time accurate. There are tons of tools out there, some linux distributions (and also windows xp) do this automatically on boot. I'm usually using rdate, it's small and simple:

rdate -s [any public timeserver]

There's a list of public time servers here. Other tools like netdate, ntpdate etc. will do it as well.

Now, my digital camera is a Canon Ixus 50. It uses PTP (picture transfer protocol) for data communication. If you have a PTP camera, most likely it supports time syncing. Syncing the camera time to the system time was recently added to libgphoto svn, but it's not yet available in a release. It also doesn't support any timezone management yet, so I'll get GMT time (while I live in the CET zone). The command to do it is:

gphoto2 --set-config synctime=on

If you don't have PTP, you're not completely lost. There's support for a lot of proprietary cameras in gphoto, some of them also support time syncing. Give it a try. I don't have information about usb storage devices (many cameras are just storage devices), links welcome.

Next device is my mobile phone, Nokia 6230i. As a mobile phone is permanently connected to the GSM-network, the obvious option would be time syncing over gsm. This protocol exists and most phones (including mine) support that. But bad luck, many mobile providers don't support it. So I'm out of luck here (vodafone, pointers to information about different provider support that are welcome).

Now, this device also speaks bluetooth, so timesetting via the computer should be possible. Both gammu and gnokii (the common applications to talk with all those proprietary mobiles out there) have a timesetting-option, but it rounds down the time to zero seconds, thus making it useless for exact time. I'm not yet sure if this is a limitation of the hardware or a bug in the software. An option would be to send the timesync-signal at the moment seconds turn to zero, but that would require application support, as there's a relevant diff between the application call and the moment the time get's set (because you have to ack the connection on the phone).
Though at the moment my phone needs manual timesetting, but the only data I'm collecting with it is gps-data, which get's it's timestamp via gps, so this is fine.

I got an old laptop donated a while back, Pentium 133 with 24 MB RAM, no CDROM, no USB. I wanted to provide it for someone else as a basic internet surfing and office writing station and faced the problem what system would be suitable for that.

I tried some old flavours of Debian, but wasn't really happy. Then I found that there's a dsitribution called DeLi Linux that seemed to be just perfect. What they're doing is providing an intelligent mix of current and old software (yeah, xorg really runs on a P133). They have installation floppies for network install (well, it was nontrivial to find three floppies in my room). It's all a bit like doing Linux by foot, they're missing a real package management (they have one, but no auto-dependencies) and things like that, but that didn't really hurt.

In the end I had an IceWM-Desktop, together with Konqueror-Embedded, alternatively you can use Firefox 1.5 (they backport security fixes) linked against plain X-libs. Texts can be written with AbiWord, linked against gtk1.
It's a nice solution, if you once need some system for a machine where xubuntu is far too bloated, you might want to try out DeLi Linux. According to their webpage, it runs on a 486 with 16 MB.

My stub of an installation report for the HP OmniBook 5500CS is here (I may extend it when I get the laptop back, it has some more devices to explore, internal soundcard, tv-out).

I know you've been waiting far too long for that. Now that Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.6 are out, I've added them to portage.

The background: Compiz and Beryl, the two famous 3D-composite/windowmanagers for Linux, have merged forces. Main Compiz still resides in the package x11-wm/compiz, many additional plugins and tools are fetched in by the x11-wm/compiz-fusion metapackage.

The ebuilds are all based on the xeffects overlay, with some cleanup by me.

Happy window-wobbling!

Today I found a note about the movie The Codebreakers. It's a free-licensed (cc-by-sa) documentary about free software in development countries.

It brings up different examples about successful usage of free software in different parts of the world. Worth watching.

Ein guter Tag also für alle meine Blog-Leser, sich mal wieder Gedanken drüber zu machen, welche Software sie nutzen und wem sie damit eigentlich vertrauen. Ich glaub der ein oder andere fühlt sich angesprochen.

Für alle im Umkreis von Backnang sei noch gesagt, dass die LUG heute abend in die Bar »Das Wohnzimmer« einläd und über ihre Aktivitäten informiert.

Die FrOSCon ging heute zu Ende.

Von meinem OpenStreetMap-Talk gestern gibt's Folien (OpenDocument) und einen teilweisen Mitschnitt (Theora, aufgenommen mit Digikam, nur 20 Minuten, aber danach ging's nicht mehr so lang).

Bilder gibt's irgendwann hier, aber im Moment hab ich nur langsames Netz.

Heute ist der erste Tag auf der FrOSCon (Free and Open Source Conference), einem lokalen Free-Software-Event bei Bonn (Siegburg für die Ortskundigen). Vortragsprogramm ist umfangreich und interessant.

Werde um 19h noch einen kleinen Vortrag über OpenStreetMap halten. Mitschnitt wird versucht, ich kann aber noch nix versprechen.

Maybe you've read that I did some coordination on relicensing the old GATOS TV-Out code to make inclusion into the radeon driver possible (gatos was gpl, while xorg uses mit-license).

Now, shortly after that Alex Deucher started implementing tv-out in the randr-1.2-branch of the ati driver based on that code. randr-1.2 is the new and shiny stuff that will make future versions of xorg manage resolutions and output connectors much better. As you can see on the picture, today I played around with the new code and got it working (get Gentoo git-ebuild here).

As a short howto, on some cards (including mine), autodetection of the connector status doesn't work yet. You'll have to manually force the connector:

xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600

This is especially exciting as it is the last features of my laptop that was missing for »full linux-compatibility« (some minor issues left, as the cardreader only reads sd at the moment, the modem needs a binary driver).

In wenigen Stunden geht's los zur webinale open in Ludwigsburg. Dort werden wir als Linux User Group Backnang präsent sein, ebenso wird schokokeks.org sich präsentieren.

Am LUG-Stand werden wir verschiedene Projekte, unter anderem OpenStreetMap und CAcert, vorstellen, sowie Kubuntu-CDs verteilen und Compiz zeigen.

Erste Bilder

I'm here at the Linux-Infotag 2007 from the linux user group Augsburg. It's a small and familiar event. Seems that there are a lot of freifunk-people (free wlan networks) in augsburg. On my way to Augsburg, fitting to the topic I had to switch trains in the linux-town Treuchtlingen.

I had a talk about 3D-Desktops (Linux 3D-Slides, OpenDocument). Will stay for some more hours.
It's nice to see more local linux events evolving.

Update: Some pictures from the LIT 2007

My laptop (Samsung P35) has an internal card reader (SD and MemoryStick) done by Ricoh. Several other laptops have this device. It's internally connected as a pcmcia-device and shows up as RICOH Bay1Controller on pccardctl ident.

For years now there was no way to get this thing running in linux, which stopped me from doing projects like having a crypto-key on a small SD-Card and insert that on boot. Now, finally someone did the job and reverse engineered the device: sdricohcs

In my first small tests, I could already download some photos from my digital camera card. No problems so far. Now, the only thing I'm really missing with linux on my laptop left is TV-Out (works with ati binary drivers, but they are unstable like hell). I heared some Xorg-devs are already working on it, so maybe I'll soon announce the »nearby 100%« support for Linux on Samsung P30/P35.