Entries from April 2008 ↓
April 24th, 2008 — Linux, Other
I daily read a lot of blog posts. To keep up with what’s happening in the ruby/linux community and what’s the latests buzz in the webdeveloper world.
I’m now using google to keep track of the RSS feeds. I’ve used some desktop applications in the past (like rssowl and liferea). I think I’ll switch to a desktop application again. Liferea has the nicest gui. So I think about using that one.
I also found Blam! and Straw. But blam looks very gtk1-ish and the news for Straw hasn’t been updated in 4 months and has no screenshots. And you have to have good documentation as an open source project.
April 15th, 2008 — development, Linux
My boss recently bought some inexio touchscreens. Including a nice little 12.1 inch variant. I thought about using it in my living room for controlling audio et cetera. But alas, a no go. Because there weren’t any linux device drivers available for it. So I played with the idea of creating my own driver for it.
Examples enough: usbtouchscreen and mtouchusb. But how to start (I have totally no c experience). I think the biggest problem is getting to know the kernel api. After reading through the source code of some modules I realised that a lot of the lines were kernel macro’s & functions and just a little bit of real coding.
Searching for tutorials produced some nice results. But a lot of the tutorials were of a real “hello world” level. And very few (no?) tutorials/how to’s rose above the mediocre level. Some few I found:
Helpful, but not really geared towards my problem. So I ordered some books, asked the manufacturer for some info on the protocol (hope they will co-operate!) and spent a lot of time reading tutorials and source code.
But I still have a lot of questions. What is the best IDE (kdevelop I believe)? Why has no c IDE/editor descent auto-completion for kernel functions/macros? Where can I ask my question without being flamed to death?
When the driver is ready (or when the project has failed) I’ll post some tips and maybe a full blown tutorial on (not) writing device drivers.
April 8th, 2008 — development, Ruby
I’ve been using GIT now some weeks (for my ultra-secret ruby project) and I must say it’s nice. Nothing more than nice. Just like svn was nice to use (compared to old-school full backups). When I first saw the GIT commands I was dazzling with confusion. But after two days you get the hang of it. I haven’t done anything special like branching so I can’t tell you about the advanced features. But the base is solid.
Ow, and github is really nice. I read somewhere that rubyforge now has git support too. Gonna check that out. But beating github will be difficult. Well, at least for now when Github is still free of charge!
April 8th, 2008 — Linux
Do you want to install the restricted modules but not the nvidia driver? I do! Because I want to install the newest & latests nvidia driver directly. Then read the following post:
http://ark.asengard.net/blog/2008/02/19/nvidia-api-mismatch/
But do not use “nvidia” but use “nv”. “nv” disables the three nvidia drivers.
April 8th, 2008 — Linux
Lately, whenever I’m feeling bored and I don’t feel like programming or watching tv or anything (well, I can’t actually. Because my tv is not connected at the moment) I browse to the new Ubuntu brainstorm website. There are a _lot_ good ideas for Ubuntu (and some really, really, really bad ideas). And some ideas are already implemented by some piece of (open source) software.
For example, I found this one.
April 8th, 2008 — Linux
I always installed the flash plugin by hand, unrar all the codecs et cetera. But on the forum I found someone who recommended the package ” ubuntu-restricted-extras”. Did an apt-get install and I worked great! Installed all the stuff I needed:
[quote]
flashplugin-nonfree, gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse, libdvdread3, liblame0, msttcorefonts, sun-java6-jre, unrar
[/quote]
