The project was linked on a news site today, but voroskoi already poked me about "hey, you should try it out with Frugalware", so I was aware of the project already. The reason I point it out is that now they create a sample for Git as well, and I seem to appear in it at 4m25s, heh.

The IPv6 tunnel I use changed its IPv4 address. This caused some great silence in my IRC client, basically none of the freenode people was able to poke me with random problems. ;-) But the party is over, since the tunnel guy was kind enough to mail the new IP.

i just recently got a mail about that 'bitlbee1.asnetinc.net' is a public server with my skype plugin installed. in other words, you no longer are forced to run your own bitlbee server if you want to use skype from bitlbee, yay! :)

note: actually if you are behind nat, then this is not something useful for you as the public server will want to connect to your skype instance, actually. :/

so, one of my friends called me a few days ago, saying 'hi, i got this eee pc, it's shipped with win xp, could you please install frugalware on it, making it dual-bootable?'.

today i got the gadget, i had about 3 hours to play with it, so i did not have much time.

first, there was an installer bug, but fortunately it was trivial to fix it up. second, the internal wifi card is not supported by 2.6.26, so i made a kernel package from 2.6.27-rc6 and made a custom usb installer using that kernel.

once that was ok, the installation went fairly easy. minor problems were that the netinstall by default wants to use ftp but we were behind a proxy, so we needed http. and other problem was that there were two ntfs partitions, the second was empty, i just formatted it as ext3, using it as /, but i did not set the partition type from ntfs to linux and grub refused to install because of my laziness.

i did not want to do a full install but i needed network, so i installed base+network. once that was fine, i installed some other packages/groups: acpi, mc, x11 and kdebase.

so far what i saw working:

• wireless, that was working in the netinstall as well after the kernel update
• touchpad
• xorg, using that 1024x600 custom resolution.
• acpi reported the correct battery status

unfortunately i had no more time to play with it, so i did not check how suspend, 3d acceleration, ethernet card and webcam works.

in short, i think it's nice it has no major problems, but probably it's hard for non-developers to install it as long as we don't have kernel-2.6.27 in current.

Probably most mobile users know the 'acpi' command, a simple command-line utility that shows the state of the battery on a PC.

The problem is that iBooks have PMU, not ACPI support, so that problem can hardly output anything useful. I searched for an equivalent for a while, but actually couldn't find such a utility, and quite frankly, it's not a big deal to write such a one, so I stopped wasting with searching alternatives, I just wrote one.

Sample outputs:

$ acpi
     Battery 1: discharging, 92%, 04:34:17 remaining

$ acpi
     Battery 1: charging, 99%, 00:10:53 until charged

$ acpi
     Battery 1: charged, 100%

The short script (54 lines) is available here.

many of you asked, so it's better if i describe it here.

i recently started working on ppc packages, without any kind of big announcement. that was on purpose. i don't have too much time for this (so surely i won't maintain - at least not manually - a full ppc port with security fixes, etc), but i'm interested at least getting a working toolchain, so that anybody who has such a machine and time can easily help.

so no, this will not be in 0.9, we didn't plan anything like that.

maybe for 1.0, we'll see :)

ah, as a side not, it was interesting today, i met (unintentionally) one of the Hungarian summer of code guys. i previously collected such a list, and i was surprised about i did not know about him. so i asked to type "blogs.frugalware.org", and search for "summer of code" to see if he is really missing from the list. actually he was not missing. but the funny fact was that - as usually - i was prepared to be forced to spell "frugalware", but this was not the case this time, he typed the word properly without asking. heh, we're getting known! :]

It seems recently one of my favorite topics is 'how to convert from $random SCM to git' ;)

So, I already had a configuration using tailor, but that was slow. I know this already. Tailor is good because it always works, it isn't good because it's fast.

First, you need git-1.6.0rc0 or higher, you can find an fpm in my bmf repo.

Second, you need the bzr fastimport plugin:

bzr branch lp:bzr-fastimport

Then enable the plugin:

cd ~/.bzr/plugins; ln -s /path/to/bzr-fastimport fastimport

Now you can clone git-bzr itself:

git clone git://github.com/pieter/git-bzr.git

Put it to your PATH:

cd ~/bin; ln -s /path/to/git-bzr/git-bzr .

NOTE: so you should not symlink the dir, but the script inside the dir.

Okay, this is done, now clone (branch in bzr terms) the bzr repo you want to convert. For example:

bzr branch http://code.bitlbee.org/bitlbee/

Finally do the conversion (from the git-bzr README):

git bzr add upstream ../bzr-branch
git bzr fetch upstream
git checkout -b local_branch bzr/upstream
: hack hack hack
git bzr push upstream

Actually for now I only needed a one-directional convert, so my update-bitlbee.sh now looks like:

cd ~/scm/bzr/bitlbee
bzr pull
cd - # so we are again under bitlbee.git, it works in bare repos as well!
git bzr fetch upstream

And yes, the resulting trees match perfectly! ;)

(Yes, I plan to package git-bzr and bzr-fastimport but I want to give it a good testing first.)

The GSoC student list is not public, and to be honest, usually it's boring. In most cases you just want to read the mails matching ^From:.*google.com, and just delete the remaining junk. However, there was a funny thread there, about how others deal with the usual problem: if you want to describe others (read: who is not a geek) what do you do (hack PaX, rewrite git-merge, etc.) you probably need a half an hour. Or maybe it's better not describing your job at all. Let's see some funny quotes:

The "I gave up" one:

After the first 10 fails, I decided to say the following as fast as I can: Me: "I am doing "something" and Google is paying me to do it. I don't know why they are, but I assume its' because they aren't evil and stuff. End of story". Other: Oh. (Coding resumes)

BTW, the guy adds vim support to anjuta. :)

If you have nice friends, you'll get:

People who don't understand usually state as much, followed by, "...but if Google is paying you, that's pretty neat."

The "involved" one:

Unfortunately, I end up rambling for twenty-plus minutes and they are sorry they ever asked...

The "practical" one:

In my case, everyone in my university thinks it is an intern program so they ask me when I am going to travel. I have memorized the response.

The "religious":

I spent about twenty minutes explaining to a reporter from business week the finer points of open source vs free software.

And the typo kign:

> thanks very much gays ...... > GUYS .... really, I was miss typed ... now, again. Thanks very much GUYS

(I hope this post does not count as a leak, though. :P)

in this mailing list post, the recent gsoc podcast is linked, which is actually about git. two times my project is explained as well, about 11m14s and about 26m09s.

it's usually hard to describe to people what i'm doing in my project, maybe this'll help a bit? :)

so, in the latest stable version of asciidoc, the default pdf backend of a2x is dblatex, not fop.

given that this way we can avoid Java, that must be a good thing ;) (faster, freeer, etc)

here are a few tricks:

• if you want to hide the "revision history" page:

  0

• if you want to avoid the dblatex logo, just comment out the line:

  1

• it seems that atm the $ math expression $ form is not supported, but you can do for example:

  <inlineequation><alt>
  \[ \$\alpha + \$\beta = \$(\alpha + \beta) \]
  </alt></inlineequation>
  

  AFAIK this was not possible till now, using fop. :)