Older blog entries for pbor (starting at number 5)

Flu

Felt like crap the whole day: as usual I get ill during a week-end. Didn't manage to get anything done school-wise, I spent the day between IRC and TV... At some point I got bored enough to prepare a couple of patches and file them in bugzilla.
I think I also have a simple Evolution patch, but I have still to see if it works properly.

Gnome 2.6

In the past week the first pieces of Gnome 2.6 have started to get into Fedora Rawhide. Since during the transition many things are still broken (e.g. I don't have items in the Applications menu), I took the chance to switch again to a Gnome cvs HEAD installation made with jhbuild.
During the 2.3 series I run cvs HEAD all the time, but during 2.5 I limited myself to try cvs HEAD only of some apps I'm interested in. This for two reasons:

• I didn't manage to get Fedora GDM to log into my GNOMECVS session by default: it always tell me to use SwitchDesktop and that crap, but it only sees the standard Fedora Gnome.
• Spatial Nautilus. It's not that I don't like it or that I'm against it: if so many people I trust think it's a good idea it's probably true... on the other hand it gets in my way of doing things. Probably I just have to get used to it.

Anyway as a whole it seems that Gnome 2.6 is shaping up really nice and clean.</ul>

UART

Started to work seriously at the "Electronics of Digital Systems" assignment (design and implement on a test FPGA board an UART in Verilog). Until yesterday I didn't do much more than find out what a UART is.
We split the thing in 4 parts:

• Transmitter
• Receiver
• BaudClock Generator
• Bus Control

I think I have pretty clear idea of how to implement each component, but I didn't imagine that was such a pain passing from the "alogorithm" (eg "oh ok, the txmit is a state machine that does this and that") to a working (where working means "it passes all the test benches") module.
Extra grief was caused by the crappy Xilinx tools.
We started from the BaudClock Generator: it's a relly simple component that given the system clock and the selected baudrate outputs a clock which is 16x the baudrate; for example, this clock is used in the receiver to do triple sampling on the incoming bits.
Basically it's nothing more than counting up to N and switch, counting up to N and switch, etc.
It passes the behavioural simulation just fine, but when we mapped it, all we got as output is wire connected to ground. Wonderful.

Gedit

Yesterday paolo committed a big patch, which among other things introduces the new close confirmation dialog. I like it, but during the UI-review clarkbw and others made good points about some potential usability problems.

In the time since the last update I've submitted some misc patches to MLView and gedit, mostly simple ui improvements, but today I submitted a patch for a gedit bug that was marked a Maj in bugzilla, waiting for the review...
I got the chance to talk a bit with the maintainers of these two project (respectively sdodji and paolo) so I decided to certify them here on Advogato: both as Masters since they are major contributors to Gnome.

Also nice to see a burst of activity (or better hack-tivity) on glade-devel wrt Glade-3, things have been quiet for a while and I didn't get the chance to work on it lately... I hope that some new contributors get involved!

I've now installed Fedora Core on my new laptop. It seems to work mostly fine, even if I still have to investigate some minor annoyances:

• sound doesn't work (I think I have to use ALSA)
• the irritating GDM "beep" at login is _very_ loud.
• I have to learn stuff about acpi/suspend/special keys etc.

The thing that annoys me most, though, is that the touchpad is always active and while typing I often move the cursor by mistake. Under Windows you can turn the touchpad on/off with a special key, but that doesn't work in linux.

I finally got my new notebook: it's an ASUS M3425CH and so far I'm quite happy with it; not only it's powerful and light, but it is also quite nice to look at (quite a surprise, since the online pictures did not reveal it).

Of course it came with WindowsXP installed and unfortunately I cannot wipe it away yet since for the "Electronics of Digital Systems" course we have to use Xilinx, and the "free as in beer" WebPack runs only on Windows; for this project we are stuck with Xilinx, but I wonder if there are any open source Verilog/VHDL tools that are mature enough...

While waiting to get the Fedora Core cds from a friend (hopefully today), I played a bit with Windows after many months without having used a MS operating system... I may be biased, but I have to say that it sucks in many ways even if it didn't crash (yet).
The OS comes preinstalled and preconfigured, but I had to spend _hours_ retrieving drivers and utilities from the net... I'll probably simply laugh at the next one which complains that FC doesn't plays mp3s out of the box, when all you have to do is install *1* rpm.
A feature that I lack badly are multiple workspaces... I wasn't aware that I was so addicted to it.

On the bright side I got the chance to try Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird and the first impression is really great, especially the mail client is tons better than the last time I tried a mozilla mail client!

More on the linux installation later.

In the last few months I've been reading lots of interesting entries here on Advogato, so I finally decided to create an account here... don't expect daily updates though :-)

For now I'll start certificating people I've worked with...