Josh Saddler

SCALE

It's been a coupla weeks now since SCALE 6x, so it's about time for an after-action report.

My wife and I arrived Friday night after suffering a two-hour delay because of heavy traffic. The 405 was the worst. LA traffic always gives me nightmares.

Saturday morning came far too early, but at least we were already registered. We got there the same time as omp, who'd brought a Windows-using friend along as a booth slave--er, volunteer.

Our booth setup included a giant Gentoo poster, omp's desktop rig, and one (occasionally both) of my laptops, displaying Xfce. It was more popular than the extremely minimal openbox desktop, so HAH! We gave out lots of bribes--snacks--and even more LiveCDs. It's too bad we didn't have flyers, business cards, shirts, or other Gentoo swag this year. Lots of folks were asking for them. At least we gave out snacks'n'luv.

Wireless internet sucked throughout the weekend. Apparently it was the same for everyone. Spotty, minuscule bandwidth, and nameservers couldn't be reached. Made it hard to demo things that needed internet access, such as emerging packages, looking up our homepage, or highlighting documentation.

One of our users, calculus, was around much of the time to help out; was nice to see him at SCALE again this year. And wormo made an incognito appearance, too. To all the users and everyone else who stopped by and asked questions, gave feedback, or just chatted -- thank you. You're terrific. I'm always excited to meet a Gentoo user in person. It's like "Really? you use Gentoo? No way!" We were possibly the least-known distro there (tied with Foresight and Damn Small Linux?), certainly the least commercial one. The other distros were all heavyweights: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Fedora, etc.

Still, we had lots of traffic. Several people wanted to know what's up with Gentoo in regards to our recent legal status issues, so I provided the news in-person, and that seemed to go over well. Curiously, none of the enterprise-level folks were much interested in our legal status. They pretty much all said the same thing: "We're not worried. All the technical development is still there; nothing's changing." It was only the individual users who had all kinds of worries and needed the explanation. The corporate sector wasn't worried at all: "As long as it's still being developed."

There are plenty of pictures of our booth around the 'net in reviews and photo sites; you just have to look for 'em.

I had a blast at SCALE. I plan to attend next year, too.

ebuilds

Lately I've been poking random ebuilds from the tree, posting updates to Bugzilla, creating new local ebuilds, asking for keywords/stabling, and so on. It's a lot of fun. A fair amount of edgy experimentation, but that's what my new laptop is for. Things like wicd that I'd like to see in the tree, or the latest version of brasero.

burning apps

Speaking of burning software . . . brasero seems to be the only actively developed gtk+-based application. Everything else hasn't had a release in years. Xfburn, gnomebaker, graveman, xcdroast....you name it. That's not good news. Brasero is a good choice for my Gnome desktop workstation, but I wouldn't even think of putting Gnome on my laptop, which is a pure Xfce machine. And yet I hate the idea of putting K3B on my laptop even more, because of the ugly, ugly Qt and kdelibs dependencies.

I went ahead and installed brasero on my laptop anyway, since it's gtk+, and it can work with DVDs. None of the other apps I mentioned support 'em. That added 33 huge Gnome deps, including (ugh) nautilus. The irony? K3B only wanted 18 total packages. Still, it's uglier. That's what counts, right?

So thinking about this sad state of affairs for gtk+-based burning apps got me thinking . . . what would it take to create a new one? Something fast, with minimal dependencies, and gtk-based.

gtk

I've skimmed the gtk tutorial and the reference manual before, but only as a passing curiosity. Today I really took a shot at figuring 'em out. This is where I ran into the cliff known as "C programming."

I'm not a programmer. I can do markup languages, I can do some bash, some javascript, little things like that. But I've never been trained in OOP. Or any kind of programming, except some BASIC in elementary school and college. My degree is in theatre, not computer science!

Still, I'm determined to make what headway I can with these gtk+ guides. I've started to see what does what, and why. And some of the necessary parts of an app. Now I need to find out how to get that button press to do something, like . . . burn a CD. Copy a disc. Save an iso. And so on. For that, I've been poking at the source code for Xfburn, libburn, and brasero. This is all still just a bit over my head, but I'm trying, at least.

I've already partly answered my own question of "Why aren't there more up-to-date gtk+ burning apps available?" because I created a sample task list.

Writing a graphical app is a huge undertaking. What burning backend will be used? cdrtools, cdrkit, libburn/libisofs, dvd+rwtools are all possibilities. Same goes for the media types used in writing audio discs. The app has to handle notification (possibly via dbus), disc drive status/detection, set/get write speed, and a dozen other critical tasks. Oh, and it needs to be translatable (those pesky .po files that take up space), and it really should make use of autotools. What other libraries will it use? Will any of its features be optional compile-time switches? Got to add those too. Where will the project be hosted? What VCS? And so on.

Lots of stuff to do. No wonder brasero's the only active gtk+ burning app. And that's too bad, too. It has a ton of dependencies that folks using Xfce or just a WM don't care to install. I'd like to see the huge gap between "brasero" and "nothing" filled by a low-dependency, fast, capable application. I just don't think I'm up to the task of creating it all by myself.

Off to SCALE. Gentoo, represent!

See you there.

Right, I'm almost done setting up the Thinkpad.

The keyboard is still taking some getting used to -- I hate having the Fn at the far left, where the Ctrl key should be, and I hate not having the Del/Home/End keys vertically aligned with the right edge of the keyboard. I also keep forgetting I have a working middle mouse button for Firefox. Too used to having to Ctrl-click tabs on the Toshiba. And . . . I love the scroll function on the synaptics touchpad. Love it. The pad itself I don't use much; I'm too used to trackpointers. Plus it's too easy to turn a drag motion into a sudden click. I do like the IBM trackpoint more than my Toshiba; the IBM one is more accurate and has a nicer surface.

Fingerprint use: for the time being, I've uninstalled fprint, and installed thinkfinger instead. Why the switch? Because thinkfinger works out-of-the-box with SLiM, and pam_fprint doesn't work with it at all. If it worked with SLiM, I'd switch back. Also, thinkfinger's enrollment seems to work better. I'm getting far fewer rejected scans. I'd like to file a feature request bug with fprint upstream to get SLiM supported, but its bugtracker mails aren't getting through to my devmail. dsd, you reading this?

I still haven't bothered playing with hdaps yet or finding out why it thinks my disk is unsupported. While on the subject of disks, it occurs to me that I really should have created a /usr/portage partition and formatted it as ReiserFS. ext3 is just too slow for Portage ops.

I at least solved my networking issues by adding a couple of required modules and undoing parallel startup. I also fixed a typo in conf.d/net. I don't plan on using NetworkManager any time soon, as it requires lots of Gnome dependencies. For now, I added a second network block to wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
        key_mgmt=NONE
        priority=-9999999
}

I haven't tested it yet, but I think this should work for unsecured public access points. Actually, I think this was probably in wpa_supplicant.conf before I deleted everything and added my own config.

My desktop and development environment are just about complete; got my keys imported and my firewall setup and everything. Still haven't setup my system for Bluetooth or audio production yet. Or games.

As promised, I've made my working kernel config available. For all you Intel X3100 users, this may be of use in setting up uvesafb. Also, if you've got an IPW3945 ABG network card, this may be useful if you're using the in-kernel iwl driver. I've enabled the appropriate statistics options to use powerTOP, which is a very nice way to monitor power usage. I get about 2.8 hours doing basic wireless internet, docs work, etc. with my screen almost at full brightness. Not bad. I think I waited too long to get an Ultrabay battery; SCALE 6x is less than a week away!

Speaking of SCALE, I'm going. So I should probably get tickets & registration for me and my wife, yeah? Oh, and a hotel reservation. My new laptop has been such a distraction.

I've discovered a really unusual bug/behavior. I removed alsasound from the boot runlevel, in case I'm running on battery. Now, unless you blacklist them, your sound modules will still get loaded regardless, taking that much more power (even with aggressive soundcard power management enabled.) So what I had been doing was starting and stopping the ALSA initscript once my desktop was loaded. Here's the bug:

Starting and stopping ALSA this way actually kills all GTK theming in Xfce. The decorations revert to GTK defaults, the window colors go to their GTK defaults, the panel becomes ugly, you name it. All I have to do to re-apply the default (pretty) Xfce GTK theme is open one of Xfce's configuration utilities. Any of them. Isn't that bizarre? I have no idea why the hell that happens. Every time I stop ALSA. It's a minor nuisance, I guess.

On thinkpad_acpi and hotkeys:

It's a known bug that the brightness hotkeys don't work, but echoing values directly to /proc does. There won't be a fix for this any time soon, either. I've been in contact with upstream, submitting reports to their database, etc. Still have to go through and test the rest of my hardware (Bluetooth, etc.) and submit another report, but the outlook is not favorable for hotkeys. I still need to find a good program that will recognize the Fn-Home/Fn-End key command for brightness adjustments. xbacklight works, but I need keybinds to call it. Xfce has a built in keybind program, but it can't see Fn key combos. I'll have to find a sane xbindkeys setup (or similar app); there's probably something on ThinkWiki or the Gentoo Forums.

Signing off for now . . . maybe I'll see ya'll at SCALE? Come on by the Gentoo booth! Devs, users, groupies, etc. are all welcome.