Older blog entries for sdodji (starting at number 118)

upgrading my Thinkpad T42

I have recently changed the hard drive of my 5 years old T42 Thinkpad laptop. I had a 30 gb hard drive and that was obviously not enough to compile all the things I want to compile. Just to give an idea, I want to have xorg and nemiver jhbuilds as well as OpenEmbedded and OpenMoko builds around. If you add the fact that I use ccache extensively, I really needed more disk space.

So I went to memorysuppliers.com and ordered a hard drive of 160 GB. They did a very a good job in sending the disk very quickly. I backed up my home directory by simply using the excellent rsync program to save stuff on an external hard drive connected to the laptop via USB.

Then I followed the instructions here to remove the old disk and replace it with the new one.
After that, I just reinstalled a brand new GNU/Linux system and recovered my backed up data.

Everything went smoothly and took around 2h. Pretty neat.

I did also upgrade the ram to 2Gig a couple of months ago so compiling C++ programs is quite OK on this 5 years old machine now :-)

Syndicated 2008-05-15 08:18:00 (Updated 2008-05-15 09:30:28) from Dodji

DNS problems.

I have been unreachable at seketeli dot org since yesterday I believe. It should be back soon. So if you sent me an email that did not arrive, please try again shortly.

The reason of that failure is that my hosting provider (online.net) did change his DNS server addresses and I forgot to forward the information to my registrar which is gandi.net. Shame on me. Especially because I was notified about the DNS address change something like a year ago. Everything should be back in order soonish. I am sorry for the annoyance.

Syndicated 2008-05-15 07:35:00 (Updated 2008-05-15 07:40:58) from Dodji

A new place to hang my hat

Yesterday was my last day as an OpenedHand employee. Working at OpenedHand has been a breeze, really. The crew there is an impressive pool of clever geeks. A high density of skills, enthousiasm and willingness to do the right thing. Clearly, there is no doubt that amazing things are going to be popping up from the OpenedHand towers. Ciao fellows, and thank you for the warm and fruitful atmosphere.

Now I have to write the coming pages of my personal history. I have been given the chance and honour to settle at Red Hat, in the tools group. I am really looking forward to working with the bright folks there, and keep on modestly helping to shape the future of Free Software as much as I can.

Syndicated 2008-05-01 15:53:00 (Updated 2008-05-01 16:09:41) from Dodji

nemiver debugger article on fosswire

I have been extremely lazy lately concerning writting about nemiver. Maybe that's because I just prefer writting code rather than articles ? :-)

Fortunately some nice people put together an introduction article about nemiver.

Maybe at some point I should start writting a serie of simple articles presenting interesting features of the debugger.

Syndicated 2008-04-29 09:03:00 (Updated 2008-04-29 09:11:03) from Dodji

Xglamo: the X server of the neo GTA02 device

The GTA02 hardware of the OpenMoko project sports amongst other things the Glamo3362 GPU from smedia.

I have been working on an Kdrive based X server, dedicated to that glamo chip: Xglamo.

I basically took over the job done by Chia-I Wu, aka Olv (man, get yourself a blog ;-) ) in putting together an X server for that chip.

I did hack on bringing support of hardware acceleration in areas like blitting, solid fills, RandR support and XVideo so far.

For blitting and solid fills, we did start using the Kaa acceleration architecture. It seems to be pretty robust and did speed up things like scrolling a fair bit.

For RandR acceleration I hacked the kernel framebuffer driver to make it support hardware assisted rotation and fleshed out its resolution setting code. With that setup, I just made the Xglamo RandR extension implementation use that shiny new kernel framebuffer rotation and resolution setting capabilities.

The XVideo extension driver exposes a textured video port that supports clipping and scaling for planar YUV 4:2:0 frames. I am still working on supporting parameters settings like brightness, saturation and so on. For now, I can play videos using mplayer on the device, or even launching totem on my desktop and making it display its output on Xglamo server running on the device. The basics are in the box.

All that code is already integrated in regular OpenMoko builds that you either compile yourself or grab from the daily builds directories.

There should be more to come on this topic in the coming days and weeks. In any case, I try to sent regular updates to the openmoko-devel list.

So stay tuned :-)

Syndicated 2008-02-05 08:41:00 (Updated 2008-02-05 09:17:29) from Dodji

CELF Embedded Linux Conference

I am about to leave soon to go to the CELF Embedded Linux Conference in Linz, Austria.

I will be talking about the nice things happening in PokyLinux, and the Gnome Mobile And Embedded Mobile platform.

I am going there along with my OpenedHand mates Samuel Ortiz and Richard Purdie.

So if you are around, please come and say hi :-)

Syndicated 2007-11-01 12:42:00 (Updated 2007-11-01 12:51:24) from Dodji

Xephyr XVideo and GL has landed

I forgot to say that the Xephyr XVideo and GL hack I talked about earlier has landed in git master some while ago.

So now, to get the sources you can do:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/xserver xserver.git

To compile:

cd xserver.git

./autogen.sh --prefix=/your/prefix --enable-debug --enable-xephyr --enable-kdrive --disable-xorg --disable-dmx --disable-xorgcfg --disable-xcalibrate --disable-xsdl --enable-dri --enable-glx --with-mesa-source=/your/mesa/chekout --disable-xprint --enable-builtin-fonts --disable-tslib


Oh, you have to have a recent mesa as well. To you can get it with:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/mesa mesa.git

I personally use jhbuild to compile xorg stuff. If you have not tried it yet, you should give it a try because it eases dependencies management a lot. You can follow the instructions given here.

Mandatory screenshot:

Syndicated 2007-10-17 12:31:00 (Updated 2007-10-17 13:04:16) from Dodji

online.net erased my blog comments ? okay moving to blogger.com

For some reason, all the comments before 29th September 2007 got erase from this blog. In the meantime, online.net, my hosting service provider announced that it has experienced a disk crach on his mysql DB server. Coincidence ?

Or maybe that is a dotclear bug ? In any case, the comment table in the DB is empty. It was also the biggest table.

Enough is enough. Cheered up by my colleagues, I decided to move to blogger.com. Let's see how that one will look like.

One nice thing I like in there among all its feature is the ability to have one rss feed per category if you wish. So the rss link for my english posts will be:

http://dodji.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/english

The rss link for my french posts will be:

http://dodji.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/francais

I wish I could import the posts from this blog in there automagically. Any thoughts on how I could do that, dear lazy web ?

Syndicated 2007-10-01 09:34:35 from Dodji on the wire

OpenGL and XVideo acceleration in Xephyr

For those who don't know, Xephyr is an X server that "displays" stuff into a window of the host X server currently running on your machine. You can simply launch Xephyr on your desktop and make your favorite applications use it as their display.

So Xephyr normally does its rendering in software and then sends the image resulting from that rendering to the window of the host X server. That means it does not take advantage of the possible hardware assisted acceleration that can be provided by your graphics card. One of the implications of this is that Xephyr did not support XVideo or DRI based OpenGL acceleration. At least until recently :-)

One my recent projects at OpenedHand was to plug that hole and make Xephyr support XVideo and OpenGL acceleration.

The principle was basically to make Xephyr act as an XVideo/GLX client of the host X server, on behalf of the actual client application. That way, Xephyr leverages on the acceleration capabilities provided by the host server (if any), without being tied to anything specific to the underlying graphic card. It is a way to use the host X as a portable acceleration layer, in a sense.

In short, if your host X server has XVideo and GLX acceleration, Xephyr will use that.

For GLX acceleration, Xephyr uses the Direct Rendering Infrastructure to talk to the host X. That implies that the system will work with free software DRI drivers only.

Now, video time.

DISCLAIMER: YOU HAVE TO WATCH THESE VIDEOS IN FULLSCREEN. Otherwise they are of very very poor quality.

glxgears in Xephyr without acceleration

glxgears in Xephyr with acceleration

getting the code:

git clone http://people.freedesktop.org/~dodji/xserver dodji-xserver.git

compiling:

You new to checkout out mesa:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/mesa mesa.git

cd dodji-xserver.git

./autogen.sh --prefix=/your/prefix --enable-debug --enable-xephyr --enable-kdrive --disable-xorg --disable-dmx --disable-xorgcfg --disable-xcalibrate --disable-xsdl --enable-dri --enable-glx --with-mesa-source=/your/mesa/chekout --disable-xprint --enable-builtin-fonts --disable-tslib

make

launching:

hw/kdrive/ephyr/Xephyr :1 -ac

Syndicated 2007-09-25 11:26:50 from Dodji on the wire

New bits in nemiver

We have been quite busy on the nemiver front lately. We finally moved it into the GNOME SVN.
libgtksourceviewmm got moved there as well. yay.
Now, translators can unleash their enthousiasm on nemiver as well ;-)

On the cool stuff front, Andreas Nilsson, master of icon-foo, did a new icon for the project:

Woot !

We also added (at last) the suport of gdbserver. In short, you can now debug a program that is running on a remote box, using gdbserver. You just have to use a dialog box like this:

hit okay and boom:

Beside these visible bits, quit a number of bugfixes and polishing when into the repository lately. To have a more precise idea about those new stuff, you can read this or that.

Maybe we should think about doing a new release soon.

Syndicated 2007-05-03 16:41:56 from Dodji on the wire