In light of my new found love for Realtek, here's a list of the hardware that's still an issue for me in my new laptop:

• ipw3945 WiFi adaptor
  Mostly working, provided I don't try to make my WAP support 802.11b as well as g. See Novell bug #202619.
• Integrated SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro reader
  This is a Ricoh R5C822/R5C592 host adapter. The module to support this was merged with the main kernel tree starting with 2.6.17-rc1 and versions from 2.6.18-rc1 onwards contain a rewrite the followed a major audit of the code following the release of the specification of the interface. This means it should work with Factory/10.2.
• Internal modem
  Who cares?
• The various 'special' buttons around the keyboard
  See the modem comment

Mad About You just started on LivingTV - happy happy joy joy...

This morning, I emailed Realtek's NIC support line to ask about the Linux driver they offer for download for the 8168 NIC in my laptop. It's a source-code download (nice one) but it has never compiled on SUSE (not so nice one).

Having sent the email, I went out, had some lunch and did some shopping. I returned to a reply from one of Realtek's Tech Support guys. It wasn't the standard "thank you for your email, we're looking into it" email either, it had a tarball of the latest beta version of the driver attached. This update had clearly (based on the changelog) been produced as a result of my email. Best of all, it worked. I built the module and installed it. Then I fired up YaST and was able to configure it.

Now, to try and determine the license, line 98 of r1000_n.c reads

MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");

However, no copy of the GPL is included. If it turns out that it is GPL (or at least OSI approved), I'd love to see this included in openSUSE for 10.2.

...oh I believe in Yesterday! I do - I was there, it really happened.

Morning was 'fun'. There was a coffee morning at college, part of the welcome assault for new students. I was planning to go but also hoping to not get rained upon. When the rain stopped I seized upon my chance but had barely got to the end of the road when the heavens opened again. Still, it was nice to meet some of the new arrivals.

Popped in to see Steve and Ali on the way home and to meet Grace who was three weeks old yesterday - she's tiny!

Did some housework in the afternoon, I'm doing what I'm calling an Autumn Clean (since it's not Spring right now) and then started looking into my wlan issue. In addition to the mailing list thread I linked to the other day, I posted one of my own. Turns out that the wlan-kmp-* packages contain quite an old version of the ipw3945 module (even in Factory) and the way that the packages are built meant that I wasn't able to simply rebuild the IEEE802.11 subsystem and module and slot them into place (the ieee80211* modules are also quite old).

Need to find out if we can get that package and the kernel package updated. Time to post a bug...

Update: It's now bug #202619.

Congratulations to Michael and J. on the arrival on Mirriam Julia Mercy. One question: What channel had back-to-back All Creatures... at that time of night?

Well, having sorted out my Ogg Vorbis playback issues on the Life Drive yesterday, I decided to address the issue of it not talking to my Wireless Access Point. Initially I thought it might be a problem with it authenticating via WPA-PSK. It then occurred to me that it might be that it doesn't talk 802.11g. Checked the specs and sure enough, it only supports .b.

So, logged into the router/WAP and changed its settings to support .g and .b. The LifeDrive went right ahead and connected once I provided the authentication key. Problem solved.

Well, not quite because with the WAP accepting .b and .g, my laptop (which frankly it's more important to be able to use Wi-Fi with) only communicates at 1Mb/s rather than the 54 I'd expect. I confirmed that this wasn't just nm-applet getting confused in reporting the speed by pinging a machine on my LAN, the response times with .b and .g enabled were about twice those with just .g enabled.

The wireless adaptor is an Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG which uses the ipw3945 module and I've confirmed that it's not the adaptor itself that uses the slower speed when both are available by booting in to the Less Free OS^TM and it connects at 54Mb/s then.

I've looked at the README and checked the mode, normally it is mode 7 (802.11abg) but even if I set it to mode 4 (802.11g only) it still only connects at 1Mb/s with both types enabled on the WAP. One interesting thing is that when I enable both types on the WAP, nm-applet reports the connection strength as being 60% or so whereas normally it is 90%+ in this room.

I've searched a lot and come up with no more help, so I ask the Planet SUSE/Planet GNOME UK communities if they are able to help. If so, please get in touch.

Oh yes, if it helps, it's roughly the same as this problem but the suggested solution - iwprive - is what I've tried to no avail.

Users of Mad Penguin who are syndicated on Planet SUSE (Fred, Narayan) should drop me an email as soon as they know what arrangements they're going to make for their blogs once MP apparently goes the way of the (mad) dodo.

Had a lovely day yesterday. We had lunch together at the Cadland before heading over to Derby. We spent the afternoon with Liz and it was just wonderful to see her. When it got to the evening we popped round the corner to Simon and Jo's and, once they'd put the boys to bed, we had a glass of wine and ordered chinese food.

Today addressed the issue of Ogg Vorbis playback on my LifeDrive. Discovered that the bundled version of Pocket Tunes that comes with it doesn't support plugins (you have to buy the Basic or better version from them) and so can't play Ogg files¹. A quick hunt around revealed two real possibilities. The first, which would be my preference if it supported background play, is the Open Source Core Pocket Media Player. Since it doesn't support background play, I've gone for the free version of AeroPlayer. I don't have any MP3s, so I don't need to pay for it. When I plugged the LifeDrive in in Drive Mode to copy music to it I discovered something odd. In spite of the fact that it reports 2.3G of free space on the drive, the OS reports the external drive that it is mounted as as having only 50.8M free! No idea why...

¹How bizarre - the free version supports MP3 which should require a royalty payment whereas to play the royalty-free Ogg Vorbis, one must pay!

Many thanks to Bjørn Lie who gave me the information I'd requested. The yast2-gtk packages have now been updated and build on x86_64 too. If you install it, remember to read the contents of /usr/share/doc/packages/yast2-gtk before trying to use it.

We're home and our house now has a drive - yay!

Pack-down last night went well with just a minor hiccup when the crew dealing with the kids work venue pulled the power on the CTP machine in there while I was taking an image of the Presenter install so that we can ensure that all righteousness is fulfilled regarding copyrights.

Popped in to Bristol on the way home to see Caz, lovely to see her although then getting out of Bristol was a pig. Still, we made it.

yast2-gtk packages are now in my Build Service repo, they don't build on 10.0 because they require the new libzypp based package manager. They're available for 10.1 and FACTORY on i586, but they fail on x86_64 with the following:

rm: cannot remove `/var/tmp/yast2-gtk-0.1_r284-build/usr/lib64/YaST2/plugin/libpy2gtk.la': No such file or directory

That file has been installed into /usr/lib/.... Now, I don't have an x86_64 box to check this on so can someone tell me if that's correct or if lib64 is correct for where YaST sticks its plugins. One way or the other, once I know which it right I'll fix either the %build or %install section of the .spec accordingly.

Rather than try to use a text editor and FTP client, an SSH client with a half-decent soft QWERTY keyboad will do the job.

Christoph has very kindly sen me he spec and tarball that will form the yast2-gtk package du to land in FACTORY soon. In a day or so it'll be in my Build Service repo for 10.1 an 10.0, assuming it builds on them both of course.

Yes, that's right folks, tomorrow I get to go home. I'm currently sat in the lounge on site, trusting that at some point the power's going to come back on and bring the wi-fi back with it.

Had some fun yesterday repatching composite cables in the big top yesterday. Someone had managed to lose the video feed on the DVD channel to the mixer/switch. We still had the audio feed to the sound desk^[1] but no pictures.^[2] Anyway, it was a right old mess down the back of our desk, but after much cable tracing, the connections were made and we had life.

Had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Kitto, who it turns out knows Mordecai Vanunu, someone for whom I have nothing but total respect. Carolyn and her husband Fuzz have been here doing some seminars. Fuzz also occasionally pops in to MCYM to do a bit of teaching. MCYM is based at St. John's.

^[1]Ooh, the power came back then. But only briefly.
^[2]Back again!

Summer of Code is over and Ricardo's announced YaST-GTK. I'll package it up when I get home. Don't think I'll have time today. This is great news though and fantastic to see a project I proposed come to fruition. Next step: A usable YaST-GTK for installation.

Just uploaded the first batch of photos from Soul Survivor to the gallery. Haven't added any comments to them yet, but I will - I promise.

YouTube/Stakes on a Plain goodies:

• Foxes on a Kayak
• Aardvarks on a Tank
• All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us

We're now into Momentum, which is the conference for students and young adults. Yesterday was the first day and we had the worst rain I've seen in a number of years. It was actually cascading through the roof of the big tent and a number of venues (as well as people's tents) were flooded out.

An interesting thing, that I have a couple of photos to prove, is that in the speakers/team leaders' lounge, there is a much larger number of laptops running UNIX based OSs than Windoze. Mostly Macs, but at least one Linux

Jakub blogged about a relatively unknown feature of the GIF standard that allows the use of local palettes. You can add the 'Blazer' browser on PalmOS to the list of browsers that have a funky ZX Spectrum style loading effect for that sort of GIF.

With reference to Joe, how long until SoaP is confused with SOAP?

(This was originally prepared on my Palm yesterday, but it turns out life's just too short to try blogging on a PDA...)

I'm blogging this backstage at the last night of Soul Survivor B and I just had a very weird experience. A guy from SS New Zealand told me that one of the team down there wanted to know if I blog my backstage experiences... Could it be that I have joined the ranks of the Minor Christian Celebrities (MCCs)?

Look forward to my photos of the events, coming soon...

Final day of Soul Survivor B, Momentum starts tomorrow.

Beagle 0.2.8 is out and I've added it to my Build Service repo. At some point I'm sure it'll start to build and I can start to figure out which patches have been folded into the main tree.

Welcome to Planet SUSE, Martin and Will.

Oh yes, the new Beagle packages also include a new sub-package, beagle-thunderbird, which contains the new ThunderBird backend.

Cool thing for today: Using your Palm to SSH to your home server because your laptop is otherwise engaged. Next step is to install an FTP client on it so I can blog from it too

That's where I am, where I've been since Wednesday. We went down to Amanda's parents' on Tuesday and then up to site the following day. The event's going well - about 10,000 people at Week A and even more booked in for Week B (which starts tomorrow) apparently. CTP started hairily (that's not a real word, I know) with equipment not working and too many PCs dieing at inconvenient times but it now seems to be going swimmingly.

It's been great catching up with people who we've not seen in a while (and in one case since university!) and they're far too numerous to list here.

So, what's been going on in the world while I've been offline? We have access to TV news so I've been monitoring the situation surrounding the alleged terrorist plot as much as I can. This is very convenient timing for western governments who want to push through a weakened resolution at the UN. It also serves to help those who want to keep the people in a state of terror. That's not the 'terrorists' that are banged on about ad nauseum by those in authority but rather the 'hawks' within the UK and US governments and security services. A handy link to Roger's blog with a list of other events in the last few years that have resulted in some yolk and white on the faces of the security services. It also helps John Reid who, in Blair's absence, has supplanted Prescott as the person apparently in charge. Could it be that the Blair camp in the Labour party are using this event (be it real or concocted) to push their candidate for the leadership? Surely not even they would be so craven. Would they?

The terrorists continue to bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age and the UN (well, mostly the US and UK actually) continue to do nothing to try to stop them. Thank goodness we now have a resolution that requires them to withdraw, but it doesn't require them to cease 'defensive' operations. Now I have no problem with Israel, or any country, being able to defend itself, but (a) that's not what Israel have been doing, they have been bombing civilians, especially when those civilians have been trying to escape the bombs and (b) Israel describes the whole war as a defensive operation, whose job is it to determine what is and isn't defensive? It should be the UN but is the US really going to allow any vote that might cause Israel to be censured?

openSUSE is one year old - happy birthday to this rocking, kick-ass project. Celebrate by downloading the latest version.

It's 1-1 at half-time in the Community Shield - come on you reds!

With reference to my previous entry, I often get emails when I post screenshot type things asking what the icons on my panel are, so from left to right in that short, you can see:

• Beagle search
• Tomboy notes
• Gaim
• Screen resolution changer
• Mail Notification
• GNOME Power Manager
• NetworkManager
• Volume Control
• Connect to a remote server
• Pilot Sync monitor
• Workspace switcher
• Clock
• GNOME Blog editor

Look at the date in this image:

I'm 30! I'm officially old.

Going out for a meal with a few people connected with college tonight.

Had a few more songs sent through for the conferences, they're all now set up in Presenter. We head down to Somerset tomorrow for the events.

Planning to add the latest gimp-unstable version to my Build Service repo. Anyone who wants to test the multisync-gui package from there needs to use the OpenSync repo as well.

...is my middle name.

Mowed the lawn this morning, no mean feat given the size of our garden, then set about doing some more work using the Build Service. The repo is in the process of being reorganised, but basically you want Factory, 10.1 or 10.0 depending on your SUSE version. The following packages are currently available from this repo:

• mail-notification
• multisync-gui (note, this package also requires you to be using the OpenSync repo
• tomboy

Not all packages are available on all SUSE versions yet.

Yes, that's right folks, mail-notification is now in my home repository on the Build Service. If you're using 10.0, 10.1 or FACTORY on i586 or x86_64 then you can get it.

The repo is here and you can either download directly or add the repo to your favourite package manager.

I finally got around to getting myself a Build Service account and I have to say it's really nifty although I've got to add BuildRequires lines to all my spec files. I'll do that as I move my packages over to the service. At the moment I'm trying to get mail-notification 3.0 to build for 10.1.

We've opened #openSUSE-GNOME on freenode for GNOME discussion. If you're interested in GNOME on openSUSE then pop in and say 'hi'.