René Rebe

Thanks god I’m not only wondering how much sense cmake does make!

Just spotted this on my neighbors blog. Sadly I have to fully agree. The amount of upstream breakage, regressions and such, I have to deal with in T2 is beyond believe, and no fun at all.

This is one reason we still use a way older udev version, but that is not even the most broken stuff I have come by recently, …

Update: Looks like others feel the pain, too, …

I do not believe it, until I see it.

This would be way too strange to become real. I mean what would they gain? Not much actually, they can produce their own, optimized, ARM flavor already. The only benefit would be to take ARM away from competing companies. And in that case they would end up with a huge, unprofitable subsidy – unless they lay off most of the ARM staff.

However, if Apple really would cease ARM supplies to competitors it would certainly hurt the whole embedded industry – given that nearly any crapgadget, from your mobile phone, router, access-point to the NAS near you is powered by an ARM cpu.

Well, then, if that really turns out to be true, and Apple would indeed stop licensing ARM to others, there still are MIPS, SuperH, AVR32, heck, even PowerPC. Well, even x86 gets more energy efficient, (think post Atom silicon) … So the other companies still have options to continue their business.

So instead they could also directly burn their money. But still, I get to think that is an good Aprils fool – just 21 days off, …

PS: From my own experience AVR32 is pretty competitive on the performance per watt scale, if they just would scale their core IP to the GHz range (up from the current 140-200 MHz), …

My current displays are a little aging, and with Apple not coming out with updated Cinema Display, and disqualifying itself with those glossy ones I can not work with (too many reflections, need my eyes some more years, …) I got to think about what be the perfect display color. White (light, grey, silver, aluminum, etc.), or black. Some argue for some improved visual screen contrast with black border. Currently my very old ViewSonic display are kind of silver (plastic), and the likewise, but less, aging Apple Cinema Display is aluminum:

Just comment, what do you think?

(Image courtesy Mac Rumors.)

I want one two! I never quite liked the chrome bezel of the iPhones up to now (1st, 3G, 3GS). The frameless style is exactly what I envisioned.

However, a slightly smaller display would not fit into my vision – I’d prefer a slightly bigger one (not just in terms of resolution), to make reading websites or other material more enjoyable. But then again, that might hurt iPad sales, so a smaller iPhone display would certainly favor people getting an iPad for reading. On the other hand I really prefer just to take one device “that fits all” around with me.

I really do not want to be the Apple employee who actually lost the phone in the bar! Unless, of course, it was an intentional leak – to make the media and us desperately long for it, awaiting the new iPhone in the summer.

So with T2 SDE I do this open source thing for over 10 years by now. I was lucky for the opportunity to already toy with an IBM XT (clone) in the 1980’s. And more lucky when my dad invested into a second floppy, a 40GB hard drive, and later a 386SX board (25MHz, with 2MB RAM) and some OAK VGA card (with NEC MultiSync monitor)! I became aquatinted with DOS at that time, and while BASIC didn’t cut it for me, with Pascal and assembly. Yep, assembly. We wrote half of the programs in it at that time. Interestingly with deep knowledge in both, (Turbo) Pascal and assembler, the transition to C was not as easy as I would imagine from todays perspective.

Anyway, when Windows 95 didn’t really cut it, a friend and I start our own protected mode kernel, when we accidentally encountered Linux. The first version I tried (some Debian) sucked and scared me enough to wait another year to try [Linux] again. As it still sucked, but seeing the potential I was about to create an own distribution when I encountered ROCK Linux. We found it usable enough to contribute, and push a Desktop flavor (Desktop ROCK Linux, dRock in short). I even got a photo from this area at the end of the 1990’s:

With all projects came the usual, policy (and marketing) issues, which made me fork of try two.

T2 now comes with over 3000 packages. These are the vanilla upstream packages, not split into the artificial -lib, -doc, -noarch, -whatever slices. To compare this numbers with other, well known distributions, you can safely multiple the count with 3, or 4, …

Since data storage does not cost as much (as the before mentioned 40MB drive) I do not clean up the download upstream source archives on my primary development server for some time now. While working on the GCC 4.5 update, it stroke me to take a look how much sources I got archived: It is 65 gig by now! Yep, that’s 65GB worth of archived open source history! As an overview the storage size for the T2 package sources of the respective release branches:

3.8G mirror/2.1
5.3G mirror/6.0
6.0G mirror/7.0
15G mirror/8.0

The 64GB are just since the Summer of 2006, … wished I’d kept more of the past – though I recently enocounted some source archive backup DVD-R. If I’m lucky it’s still readable, and I could mix in some more history for the fun of it :-)

Now after the WePad demonstration, which was just playing a mockup video inside the Windows Media Player, I guess Neofonie needs some private lessons how to build, and introduce a Linux tablet, even more so that the JooJoo tablet is already there, and is shipping:

• never ever show-cast it with Windows
• even less so if it is x86 based, there is virtually no setup cost, hell take any Linux, ChromeOS, Android or -as last resort- Ubuntu near you
• don’t claim a cheap Asian OEM device is “designed in Germany”, in times of the internet people will notice
• don’t just start importing an Asian OEM device when others (iPad, JooJoo) are already shipping, and don’t wait another half a year until your employees learned to create a Linux product, by that time the underdog is even less hot
• don’t name it like a utility to pee, the lesson should already be learned after Nintendo’s Wii

That’s was the basic introduction, as Mr. -red scarf- Neofonie is located in Berlin, too, he may feel invited to contact me for some more private Linux and marketing lessons (and Asian connections).

Yesterday I ordered at the Jacob Elektronik online shop for the first time. Although I have a mixed history with those non-major online stores, the price for the Intel X18 SSD was pretty good.

Long story short: it’s actually no long story, they shipped it it just some hours after I ordered, and it arrived in just 24h, that is today!

Then you might be surprised that Apple now forbids using your language of choice, …

So you want to upgrade the quite slow Toshiba, MK1235GSL (4200rpm, quickly auto head parking, so that (any OS) UI freezes on FS object access until the disk spun up again).

Fortunately it is pretty easy to open, disassemble the Nokia Booklet. The keyboard can be flipped open by pressing back 2 clips with a plastic (like credit) card, and the keyboard sides with either a tiny plastic tool, or a fingernail.

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