Older blog entries for Marcus (starting at number 114)

Regarding the LWN article &building the whole debian archive with GCC 4.1&...

Folks, SUSE Linux 10.1 (coming out soon) is compiled with GCC 4.1, and together with SLE 10 building all packages on: i586, x86_64, ia64, s390, s390x, ppc, ppc64 and we were tracking the GCC 4.1 development pretty closely and helping to fix the bugs. Redhat does the same thing. So that it builds lots of packages without much problems is not just thanks to the GCC team but also thanks to SUSE, Redhat, Gentoo, and other early adopters.

Hah, found the problem...

This patch makes the EHCI driver not support writes from userland with len==0 before 2.6.16.

And did I mention I stared for hours at the 2.6.16 driver version while testing against the 2.6.13 driver? *sigh*

Warm weekend ... So lots of outdoor activity.

However also some hacking...

I polished up my notes on the PTP/IP protocol. Portions of it are implemented in libgphoto2 already (usable for download from my Nikon P2 already).

I bought a Creative Zen Microphoto, a player supporting MTP. Found some bugs in the upload code, notably that mp3s were not mapped to the ptp PTP_OFC_MP3 object code.

Also on USB 2 interfaces there is a problem with uploading files dividable by 512 byte (the maxpacket size). The problem is that PTP / MTP requires a short write or NULL packet to finish sending of data. libgphoto2 currently does not do it.

Some devices seem to be able to cope without, some others don't. The MTP players on USB 2.0 (ehci) apparently do not. :(

An empty write helps on OHCI, but not on EHCI.

Happy St. Patricks day!

March ... Brainshare time. (Novell mains customer fair in Salt Lake City). Almost every Novell employee is there, at least if he/she is in Utah.

I am not, for reasons of budget and not really needing to be there. And I am happy too, because up to now I lived 32 years without having my fingerprints taken and I hope this stays so for a while.

Otherwise a quite busy week, discounting 2 days sickleave being down with the common cold.

Spring is still not arriving, but hopefully next week.

Now off for some Guinness with colleagues and good old friends.

Pictures from the openSUSE folks at FOSDEM are available. Its a best-of collection from all the guys who had digital cameras with them, exported by digikam, post edited by yours truly.

A full report will be posted soon I hope.

Lots of normal security work last week. Reviewed the new update programs (zmd / zen-updater / web-updater) in regards to their security models and similar.

Management training coming up this week, will take 3 of my days.

Some gphoto work, I reverse engineered the 9007 Nikon command to upload WLAN profiles. Now I just have to implement the configuration wrapper for it.

Back from FOSDEM with an uneventful flight.

It was a action filled and tiring weekend. Saw Richard Stallmanns Keynote on Software Patents, but no other talk in the main tracks. Helped staffing the openSUSE booth, handing out free T-Shirts and pins. Not much Internet over the days.

Only old non-Novell friend met was Heike, who is writing her second Linux book (on Debian).

My lecture on SUSE Security work went well, but only around 20 people saw it. You can catch it on Video later I hope.

Hotel was okay, except that I had a smokers room with old smoke still hanging very strong in the air, even on the second day. And the window in the main room would not open. *sigh*

Oh and on the second day we found out that we do not need to change tramlines/metro to go between Hotel and FOSDEM, but could just take the bus on the backside of the hotel that goes there directly.

Images and Slides later.

Busy week again. Holding presentation in front of potential customer on thursday, holding presentation in front of FOSDEM crowd on Sunday. Lots of slide preparations and review necessary. All this while juggling kernel updates, gpg updates, etc etc etc.

This also means if you go to FOSDEM, you can meet me and other SUSE developers there. Just ask at the openSUSE table / devroom.

My current PTP/IP work for libgphoto2 is now in the CVS tree. The part of the camera driver is still disabled (it needs a bit more work), the port handling is however in there and enabled. Its shaping up well.

The next major step will be reverse engineering the WLAN profile setup for the Nikons, so you do not need Windows the configure the WLAN of the camera.

No time for WINE work, except build RPMs for the 0.9.8 release.

Lots of work in the last 2 weeks, did not really come around to hack on opensource stuff.

I figured out zeroconf support for the P2 ... And my code now detects it... Needs mDNSresponder running and firewall open to port 5353. Needs some work to not hang too long if there is no camera online.

Spent time preparing kernel security updates, and pushed out 10.0 kernel update in front with a remote issue. The rest of the updates will follow in the next days.

Spent the nice and sunny weekend ... sick in bed.

Some gphoto work done in the last days ... I implemented the Nikon SDRAM capture mode. Capturing to SDRAM of the camera instead to the card has the obvious advantage that you safe the save-to-card / reload-from-card cycle if you just use the camera in a webcam like mode.

The capture-download-delete mode of gphoto2 now can capture and download around one 5megapixel image every 5 seconds from the P2.

I have ported my previous Canon SDRAM capture integration to use the same methods. Since my IXUS 2 uses USB 1, it is a bit slower in turning around images, but at least it does now in a consistent way.

On the PTP/IP front ... I can now download images over WLAN. Things missing are: Eventhandling, Data write, and lots of cleanups. Also zeroconf discovery is still missing.

I spent quite some time over the weekend on getting PTP/IP to work... Some restructuring of code, some writing and I now can list files over the air. Then the battery was empty and I noticed that I forgot my charger at home. Well.

Lots of MTP and PTP fixes in libgphoto2 done nevertheless. There are still some hickups in the MTP devices, regarding the 512 byte border problem, filenames longer than 64 characters and some more. But most of the pressing issues have been fixed.

Check out the new and improved gphoto2 --summary for PTP devices. It now shows:

• Storage information (internal and card memory)
• PTP dynamic abilities (like if the camera can capture or not, if it can delete files, etc.)
• Capture / Play formats
• Available Object Properties for MTP.

On t he SUSE side I am currently trying to get all the correct permission handling into our hal / resmgr / libgphoto2 setup. This is difficult, because the usb device abstractions are not really fitting the unix device model (1 device - 1 node), but you have interfaces, now raw devices et.al.