Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/foms-lca-recap.html

Finally, here’s my linux.conf.au 2007 and FOMS 2007
recap. Maybe a little bit late, but better late then never.

FOMS was a very well organized conference with a packed schedule
and a lot of high-profile attendees. To my surprise PulseAudio has been accepted by the
attendees without any opposition (at least none was expressed
aloud). After a few “discussions” on a few mailing lists (including
GNOME MLs) and some personal emails I got, I had thought that more
people were in opposition of the idea of having a userspace sound
daemon for the desktop. Apparently, I was overly pessimistic. Good
news, that!

During the FOMS conference we discussed the problems audio on Linux
currently has. One of the major issues still is that we’re lacking a
cross-platform PCM audio API everyone agrees on. ALSA is Linux-specific
and complicated to use. The only real contender is PortAudio. However,
PortAudio has its share of problems and hasn’t reach wide adoption
yet. Right now most larger software projects implement an audio
abstraction layer of some kind, and mostly in a very dirty, simplistic
and limited fasion. MPlayer does, Xine does it, Flash does
it. Everyone does it, and it sucks. (Note: this is only a very short
overview why audio on Linux sucks right now. For a longer one, please
have a look on the first 15mins of my PulseAudio talk at LCA, linked
below.)

Several people were asking why not to make the PulseAudio API the
new “standard” PCM API for Linux. Due to several reasons that would be a
bad idea. First of all, the PulseAudio API cannot be used on anything
else but PulseAudio. While PulseAudio has been ported to Win32, Vista
already has a userspace desktop sound server, hence running PulseAudio
on top of that doesn’t make much sense. Thus the API is not exactly
cross-platform. Secondly, I – as the guy who designed it – am not
happy with the current PulseAudio API. While it is very powerful it is
also very difficult to use and easy to misuse, mostly due to its fully
asynchronous nature. In addition it is also not the exactly smallest
API around.

So, what could be done about this? We agreed on a – maybe –
controversional solution: defining yet another abstracted PCM audio
API. Yes, fixing the problem that we have too many conflicting,
competing sound systems by defining yet another API sounds like a
paradoxon, but I do believe this is the right path to follow. Why?
Because none of the currently available solutions is suitable for all
application areas we have on Linux. Either the current APIs are not
portable, or they are horribly difficult to use properly, or have a
strange license, or are too simple in their functionality. MacOSX
managed to establish a single audio API (CoreAudio) that makes almost
everyone happy on that system – and we should be able to do same for
Linux. Secondly, none of the current APIs has been designed with
network sound servers in mind. However, proper networking support
reflects back into the API, and in a non-trivial way. An API which
works fine in networked environment needs to eliminate roundtrips
where possible, be open for time interpolation and have a flexible
buffering (besides other minor things). Thirdly none of the current
APIs offers enough functionality to properly support all the needs of
modern desktop sound systems, such as per-stream volumes, stream names
and notifications about external state changes.

During FOMS and LCA, Mikko Leppanen (from Nokia), Jean-Marc Valin
(from Xiph) and I sat down and designed a draft API for the
functionality we would like to see in this API. For the time being we
dubbed it libsydney, after the city where we started this
project. I plan to make this the only supported audio API for
PulseAudio, eventually. Thus, if you will code against PulseAudio you
will get cross-platform support for free. In addition, because
PulseAudio is now being integrated into the major distributions (at
least Ubuntu and Fedora), this library will be made available on most
systems through the backdoor.

So, what will this new API offer? Firstly, the buffering model is
much more powerful than of any current sound API. The buffering model
mostly follows PulseAudio’s internal buffering model which
(theoretically) can offer zero-latency streaming and has been
pioneered by Jim Gettys’ AF sound server. It allows you to seek around
in the playback buffer very flexibly. This is very useful to allow
very fast reaction to the user’s playback control commands while still
allowing large buffers, which are good to deal with high network
lag. In addition it is very handy for the programmer, such as when
implementing streaming clients where packets may arrive
out-of-order. The API will emulate this buffering model on top of
traditional audio devices, and when used on top of PulseAudio it will use
its native implementation. The API will also clearly define which
sound formats are guaranteed to be available, thus making it a lot
easier to code without thinking of different hardware supporting
different formats all the time. Of course, the API will be easier to
use than PulseAudio’s current API. It will be very portable, scaling
from FPU-less architectures to pro-audio machines with a massive
number of synchronised channels. There are several modes available to
deal with XRUNs semi-automatically, one of them guaranteeing that the
time axis stays linear and monotonical in all events.

The list of features of this new API is much longer, however,
enough of these grand plans! We didn’t write any real code for this
yet. To make sure that this project is not another one of those which
are announced grandiosely without ever producing any code I will stop
listing features here now. We will eventually publish a first draft of
our C API for public discussion. Stay tuned.

Side-by-side with libsydney I discussed an abstract API
for desktop event sounds with Mikko (i.e. those annoying “bing” sounds
when you click a button and the like). Dubbed libcanberra
(named after the city which one of the developers visited after
Sydney), this will hopefully be for the PulseAudio sample cache API
what libsydney is for the PulseAudio streaming API: a total
replacement.

As a by-product of the libsydney discussion Jean-Marc
coded a
fast C resampling library supporting both floating point and fixed
point and being licensed under BSD. (In contrast to
libsamplerate which is GPL and floating-point-only, but which
probably has better quality). PulseAudio will make use of this new
library, as will libsydney. And I sincerly hope that ALSA,
GStreamer and other projects replace their crappy home-grown
resamplers with this one!

For PulseAudio I was looking for a CODEC which we could use to
encode audio if we have to transfer it over the network. Such a CODEC
would need to have low CPU requirements and allow low-latency
operation, while providing hifi audio. Compression ratio is not such a
high requirement. Unfortunately, as it seems no such CODEC exists,
especially not a “Free” one. However, the Xiph people recommended to
hack up a special version of FLAC for this task. FLAC is fast, has
(obviously) good quality and if hacked up could provide low-latency
encoding. However, FLAC doesn’t compress that well. Current PulseAudio
thin-client installations require 170kB network bandwidth for each
client if hifi audio is used. Encoding this in FLAC this could cut
this in half. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

So, that was FOMS! FOMS is a definitely highly recommended
conference. If you have the chance to attend next year, don’t miss it!
I’ve never been to a more productive, packed conference in my life!

At LCA I met fellow Avahi coder Trent Lloyd for the first time. Our
talk about Avahi went very well. During my flights to and back from
.au I hacked up avahi-ui
which I also announced during that talk. Also, in related news,
tedp started to work on an implementation of NAT-PMP
(aka “reverse firewall piercing”; both client and server) for
inclusion in Avahi. This will hopefully make the upcoming Wide-Area
DNS support in Avahi much more useful.

linux.conf.au was a very exciting conference. As a speaker
you’re treated like a rock star, with stuff like the speakers dinner,
the speakers adventure (climbing on top of Sydney’s AMP tower) and
the penguin dinner. Heck, the organizers even picked me up at the
airport, something I really didn’t expect when I landed in Sydney,
which however is quite nice after a 27h flight.

Two talks I particularly enjoyed at LCA:

• nouveau – reverse engineered nvidia drivers (Ogg Theora)
• burning cpu and battery on the gnome desktop (Ogg Theora)

And just for the sake of completeness, here are the links to my presentations:

• The PulseAudio Sound Server (Ogg Theora; Slides)
• Using Avahi the “Right Way” (Ogg Theora; Slides)

Ok, that’s it for now. Thanks go to Silvia Pfeiffer, the rest of
the FOMS team and the Seven Team for organizing these two amazing
conferences!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahify-your-app.html

It has never been easier to add Zeroconf service discovery support to your GTK application!

The upcoming Avahi 0.6.18 will ship with a
new library libavahi-ui which contains a GTK UI dialog
AuiServiceDialog, a simple and easy-to-use dialog for
selecting Zeroconf services, similar in style to GtkFileChooserDialog and friends. This dialog should be used whenever there is an IP
server to enter in a GTK GUI. For example:

• Mail applications such as Evolution may use it to browse for POP3, POP3S, IMAP, IMAPS and SMTP servers.
• VNC applications may use it to browse for VNC/RFB servers
• Database clients such as Glom may use it to browse for PostrgreSQL servers
• FTP clients may use it to browse for FTP servers
• RSS readers may use it to browse for local RSS feeds

So, how does it look like? Here’s a screenshot of a service dialog browsing for FTP, SFTP and WebDAV shares simultaneously:

The dialog properly supports browsing in remote domains, browsing for
multiple service types at the same time (i.e. POP3 and POP3S) and supports
multi-homed services. It will also resolve the services if requested. Avahi
will ship a (very useful!) example tool zssh.c which
if started from the command line allows you to quickly browse for local SSH
servers and connect to one of those available. (Short Theora screencast of zssh –
Please excuse the strange cursor, seems to be a bug in Istanbul 0.2.1,
which BTW is totally broken on multi-headed setups):

A simple application making use of this dialog might look like this:

#include <gtk/gtk.h>
#include <avahi-ui/avahi-ui.h>

int main(int argc, char*argv[]) {
    GtkWidget *d;

    gtk_init(&argc, &argv);

    d = aui_service_dialog_new("Choose Web Service");
    aui_service_dialog_set_browse_service_types(AUI_SERVICE_DIALOG(d), "_http._tcp", "_https._tcp", NULL);

    if (gtk_dialog_run(GTK_DIALOG(d)) == GTK_RESPONSE_OK)
        g_message("Selected service name: %s; service type: %s; host name: %s; port: %u",
		aui_service_dialog_get_service_name(AUI_SERVICE_DIALOG(d)),
		aui_service_dialog_get_service_type(AUI_SERVICE_DIALOG(d)),
		aui_service_dialog_get_host_name(AUI_SERVICE_DIALOG(d)),
		aui_service_dialog_get_port(AUI_SERVICE_DIALOG(d)));
    else
        g_message("Canceled.");

    gtk_widget_destroy(d);

    return 0;
}

A more elaborate example is zssh.c. You
may browse the
full API online.

AuiServiceDialog is not perfect yet. It still lacks i18n and a11y
support. In addition it follows the HIG only very roughly. Patches welcome! I
am also very interested in feedback from more experienced GTK programmers,
since my experience with implementing GTK controls is rather limited. This is
my first GTK library which should really feel like a GTK API. So please, read
through the
API and the
implementation and send me your comments! Thank you!

If you want to integrate AuiServiceDialog into your application and
don’t want to wait for Avahi 0.6.18, just copy avahi-ui.h
and avahi-ui.c into your sources
and make sure to add avahi-client, avahi-glib, gtk+-2.0 to your pkg-config dependencies.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/freedom-lovers.html

On popular request, the slides of my PulseAudio talk at linux.conf.au 2007 are now available
for download. And here are the
slides of the Avahi talk Trent and I did on GNOME.conf.au 2007. Videos will hopefully be available shortly from the LCA web site.

… Horses? Did anyone say “Horses”?

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/foms-lca-2007.html

On Wed, January 17th, I will be speaking at linux.conf.au 2007 about the PulseAudio sound server. Before that, on Mon January 15th, I will do a presentation about Avahi, together with Trent Lloyd, at GNOME.conf.au 2007. And even before that, I will attend FOMS 2007, and probably say a word or two about PulseAudio, again.

Can’t wait for those 25h+ of flying from .de to .au!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/2.6.19.html

Yes, finally Linux
2.6.19 has been released. So you wonder why is this something to blog about? — Because
it is the first Linux version that contains my super-cool MSI
Laptop driver, one of the most impressing attainments of mankind, only
excelled perhaps by KRYPTOCHEF,
the only tool in existence which does fullbit encryption.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/ubuntu-vs-free-software.html

Everybody should read Roman Kennke’s
take on Mark Shuttleworth’s OpenSUSE spam mail. It’s constructive and sensible.

I hope the Ubuntu people find the strength to resist the short-term bliss of
desktop bling for long-term software freedom!

Please learn the lession Java teaches us: resist the temptation of
closed source software and develop alternatives as free software!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/uds-mtv.html

Is anyone who’s attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountain View right now heading for San Francisco tomorrow? I plan to stay a few days in the city to do sight seeing and stuff. Please catch me at the conference today if you are interested to join me visiting San Francisco!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/cui-bono.html

So, you thought that only Linux users (and other alternative OS zealots)
would benefit from reverse
engineered Windows drivers? Ha! Far from the truth, it’s the Windows
users themselves who are benefitting. (Sorry, that link is in German)

Too bad that this specific Windows port actually infringes my copyrights
since it links my GPL’ed code against the non-free inpout32.dll. And the guy who did
that port doesn’t even think it’s necessary to put his email address anywhere.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/megawiki.html

MSI Laptop Owners! Join us and extend the MegaWiki, the new Wiki for all kinds of information on Linux on MSI MegaBooks! (and all MSI built laptops sold under other brands)

The MegaWiki is still rather empty but we hope that it will soon grow as
large as our inspiration, the ThinkWiki
which collects information about IBM ThinkPads. For that we need your help!

This site will be the new home of the MSI laptop drivers (backlight control,
rfkill) and provide modified ACPI DSDTs to fix a few BIOS errors. And more!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/conferences.html

To my surprise I have been invited to the Ubuntu Developers Summit in
Mountain View early next month (as a “ROCKSTAR”, to quote Mark), to promote PulseAudio. And that although I am not an
Ubuntu developer, nor even much of an Ubuntu user. I’ll be available for
discussing everything Multimedia/PulseAudio related. While I’ve not been
invited because of my involvement in Avahi/Zeroconf I will, of course, also be
available for discussion of these topics. As it appears, Canonical is not
resentful, or maybe it’s just their way to bribe me into registering with
Launchpad? 😉

After UDS I plan to stay a few more days in San Francisco to visit the city.
Can anyone point me to cheap accomodation in SF, or perhaps even lives in SF and
has room where I could sleep?

In addition my PulseAudio presentation has been accepted at linux.conf.au 2007. At GNOME.conf.au I hope to give
another presentation, together with Trent Lloyd about Avahi, everyone’s favourite Zeroconf
implementation. And finally I plan to give yet another presentation, again about
PulseAudio, at FOMS 2007, the Foundations of Open Media Software
conference, which happens shortly before linux.conf.au, also in Sydney. FOMS
is still looking for more people to speak at the conference, so, please go to
their CFP page
and send in your proposal if you have something to talk about!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/fring2.html

A while ago I
played around with Cairo and created a Python tool fring, similar to KDE’s Filelight, however not
interactive and very simple. Frédéric Back took my code and gave it a little
GUI love, and this is the result:

Frédéric added a nice interactive GTK GUI and a fully asynchronous directory
walker based on Gnome-VFS which runs in a background thread and thus doesn’t
block the UI. This makes the user interface snappier than Filelight’s ever was.
It’s a lot of fun to navigate your directories like this!

I would have liked to post a screencast of the new fring in action here, to show how
snappy it is. But unfortunately both Byzanz and Istanbul failed horribly on my 16bpp
display.

The current version of fring is not yet polished for a public
release. In the meantime, you can get the sources from the SVN:

svn checkout svn://svn.0pointer.de/fring/trunk fring

Yes, I am aware that a future version of Baobab will offer a similar view of
the filesystem. However, it just was so much fun to hack on fring, and
due to the power of Python it was so easy and quick to develop this tool, that
we just couldn’t resist to do it.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stuff.html

Various, unrelated news:

Thanks to Marvin Stark my project syrep is now
available in Debian. As you might know all the cool kids have written their
own distributed revision control systems. This is my contribution on this
topic. Although I started to work on it four years ago syrep is still unrivaled
and unbeaten in its specific feature set. (Which is admittedly very different
from the feature set of most other software in this area.)

Thanks to CJ van den Berg and Sjoerd Simons (and a few others from
#pulseaudio) PulseAudio is now available in
Debian, the auxiliary GUI tools like pavucontrol seem to
be still missing. Nonetheless: it’s now easier then ever to try PulseAudio:

sudo aptitude install pulseaudio \
    pulseaudio-module-hal \
    pulseaudio-esound-compat \
    pulseaudio-utils \
    libgstreamer-plugins-pulse0.10-0 \
    pulseaudio-module-gconf \
    pulseaudio-module-x11 \
    pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

For the next months I will focus on my Diplomarbeit (German equivalent of a master thesis). Due to this I passed maintainership of Avahi to Trent Lloyd and of PulseAudio to Pierre Ossman. I hope to resume maintainership of both projects in January.

My first non-trivial kernel patch has been merged into Linus’ kernel, although the 2.6.19 merge window was already closed. I take this as birthday present from Linus.

If you have a laptop (such as the MSI S270) with Ricoh SD/MMC
interface (not one of the new controllers which are SDHCI compatible, but the
old ones where the SD/MMC is a virtual PCMCIA slot identifying itself as
Bay1Controller), then please support me in writing a Linux driver for
it and request the necessary documentation and datasheets from Ricoh. For more
information on this issue see this
posting on the s270-linux mailing list, and this followup.

That’s all for now.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6.14.html

A few minutes ago I released Avahi 0.6.14
which besides other, minor fixes and cleanups includes a new component avahi-autoipd.
This new daemon is an implementation of IPv4LL (aka RFC3927, aka
APIPA), a method for acquiring link-local IP addresses (those from the range
169.254/16) without a central server, such as DHCP.

Yes, there are already plenty Free implementations of this protocol
available. However, this one tries to do it right and integrates well with the
rest of Avahi. For a longer rationale for adding this tool to our distribution
instead of relying on externals tools, please read this
mailing list thread.

It is my hope that this tool is quickly adopted by the popular
distributions, which will allow Linux to finally catch up with technology that
has been available in Windows systems since Win98 times. If you’re a
distributor please follow these
notes which describe how to integrate this new tool into your distribution
best.

Because avahi-autoipd acts as dhclient plug-in by default,
and only activates itself as last resort for acquiring an IP address I hope
that it will get much less in the way of the user than previous implementations
of this technology for Linux.

State of the Lemur

Almost 22 months after my first SVN commit to the flexmdns (which was the
name I chose for my mDNS implementation when I first started to work on it)
source code repository, 18 months after Trent and I decided to join our two
projects under the name “Avahi” and 12 months after the release of Avahi 0.1,
it’s time for a little “State of the Lemur” post.

To make it short: Avahi is ubiquitous in the Free Software world. 😉

All major (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, OpenSUSE) and many
minor distributions have it. A quick Google-based poll I did a few weeks ago
shows that it is part of at least 19 different
distributions, including a range of embedded ones. The list of applications
making native use of the Avahi client API is growing, currently bearing 31
items. That list does not include the legacy HOWL applications and the
applications that use our Bonjour compatibility API which can run on top of
Avahi, hence the real number of applications that can make use of Avahi is
slightly higher. The first commercial hardware appliances which include Avahi are
slowly appearing on the market. I know of at least three such products, one
being Bubba.

If you package Avahi for a distribution, add Avahi support to an
application, or build a hardware appliance with Avahi, please make sure to add
an item to the respective lists linked above, it’s a Wiki. Thank you!
(Anonymous registration without Mail address required, though)

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/fring.html

Play around with Cairo: Check!

One thing that has been sitting on my TODO list for a very long
time was playing around with Cairo. No longer! Yesterday I spent a
little time on hacking a Cairo based equivalent of KDE’s Filelight (Which
BTW is one of the two programs that KDE has but GNOME really lacks,
the other being KCacheGrind). The
result after two hours is this:

This screenshot shows the development tree of my Syrep tool.

This tool has definitely nicer anti-aliased graphics than
Filelight, doesn’t it? The source code is here: fring.py. Anyone
interested in turning this into a proper GNOME application?

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/pulse-news.html

Thanks to Marc-Andre Lureau there’s now a jhbuild file
for PulseAudio. And there is this (little bit chaotic)
Wiki page in GNOME Live! about the relation of PulseAudio and
GNOME.

A few weeks ago I wrote a new page for our Wiki where I tried to
describe the steps necessary to get the most out of PulseAudio. It’s
called the Perfect
Setup.

A few minutes ago I released PulseAudio 0.9.5 and new versions of the auxiliary tools. The changelog:

• Add module-hal-detect, a module that detects all local sound hardware using HAL and loads the necessary modules. Handles hot-plug and hot-removal of audio devices. (Contributed by Shahms E. King)
• Add shared memory transfer method for local clients
• Update module-volume-restore to automatically restore the output device last used by an application in addition to the volume it last used
• Add a new module module-rescue-streams for automatically moving streams to another sink/source if the sink/source they are connected to dies
• Add support for moving streams “hot” between sinks/sources
• Reduce memory consumption and CPU load as result of Valgrind/Massif profiling
• Add new module module-gconf for reading additional configuration statements from GConf
• Fix module-tunnel to work with the latest protocol
• Miscellaneous fixes

One of the nicest new features of PulseAudio 0.9.5 is HAL
integration (which has been contributed by Shahms King). PulseAudio will
now automatically detect all available sound devices and will make
use of them. It supports both hot-plug and hot-remove.

Another nice feature is the GConf integration which allowed us to add another nice application to the PulseAudio toolset: the PulseAudio Preferences utility:

The idea is to have a simple, nice configuration dialog that allows
configuration of the more exotic features of PulseAudio which we do
not enable by default due to security considerations or to not
confuse the user. Right now a lot of features are hidden behind
non-trivial configuration file statements. This preferences tool shall
make them available for the users which are not so keen on editing
configuration files.

Playing around with Valgrind‘s
Massif tool and KCachegrind I did a little bit of memory and perfomance profiling of
the PulseAudio daemon. The 0.9.5 release contains a lot of
optimizations which are result of this work.

Before:

After:

These plots show the memory consumption against the time, from
starting the server, to playing stream, to stopping the stream and
shutting down the server again. The major improvement was actually an
update to libsamplerate done
by its maintainer to improve the memory handling of that library. (He
didn’t release an updated version of his library containing the
changes shown in the plots yet).

PulseAudio had the nice feature of remembering the playback volume of every
application for quite a while. Starting with 0.9.5 PulseAudio it also remembers
the output device for every application. Together with an updated Volume
Control tool which now allows moving streams between sinks while they are
played this can be used to configure a ruleset like “Ekiga always on the USB
headset, Rhytmbox always on the external speakers” very intuitively and easily:

And here’s a final screenshot showing all the tools we currently have for PulseAudio 0.9.5.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/launchpad-stole-my-name.html

I always think twice before entering my name in any web form or posting to a
mailing list. Is the web site/list respectable? Do the owners of the web site
have any commercial interest in my name (spam, marketing, …)? Would I ever
regret that my name can be found with Google in context with this web
site/mailing list? If I enter my name is it used for collecting data about me?
Is there any reasonable privacy policy?

Often enough I refrain from entering my name after deciding that the answers
to these questions are unsatisfactory. I like to be in control of my name. If I
am not confident that I remain in control I don’t enter my name to any
service.

Recently it came to my attention that Canonical decided to create an account (!) for me in their
commercial, proprietary bug tracker called “Launchpad”. I never asked for one!
I never even considered having one, because their service clearly is nothing
that would pass the tests mentioned above. They are a commercial service, my
account data is apparently “content” for them, they don’t seem to have any
privacy policy. (At least I couldn’t find any, the navigation is pretty
crappy.)

Canonical’s nimbus of being “the good guys” doesn’t hinder them to
incorporate data from free sources (apparently they got my data from the Debian
BTS) and make a commercial service of it, without even asking the original
contributors if that would be OK with them, or if it is OK to incorporate their
name or personal profile in the service. Apparently Canonical is not much
better than a common spam harvester: generating personal profiles for
business, without consent of the “victim”.

If anyone from Canonical reads this: It is not OK for me to use my name as
“content” for your commercial, proprietary service. Please remove any
reference to my name from your “account” database. I don’t want to have a
Launchpad account. I don’t plan to use Launchpad. Let me decide if I ever want to
join! Thank you very much.

Update: I especially dislike the fact that they created an account for me in
a service where Hitler apparently already has six (!) accounts. I am very sure
that I don’t want to be part of that community.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-win32.html

Are you a Win32 hacker and looking for something worthwhile to do in Free Software? We’re
eagerly looking for someone to port Avahi to
that platform. Now that D-Bus is available on
Win32, the last major stumbling block for this feat is no more.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6.13.html

I am happy to bring you yet another release of Avahi, everyone’s favourite Zeroconf stack.

• Add a new D-Bus method for changing the mDNS host name during
  runtime. This functionality is only available to members of the
  UNIX group “netdev”, which is the same access group that is
  enforced by GNOME’s NetworkManager daemon. Since NM will probably
  be the most prominent user of this new method, we decided to limit
  access to the same group. The access group can be set by passing
  –with-avahi-priv-access-group= to “configure”. If you need more
  sophisticated access control you can freely edit
  /etc/dbus/system.d/avahi-dbus.conf.
• Add a new utility “avahi-set-host-name” which is a command line
  wrapper around the aforementioned SetHostName() method.
• Bonjour API compatibility library:
  • Implement DNSServiceUpdateRecord()
  • Allow passing NULL as callback function for DNSServiceRegister()
  • Implement subtype registration in DNSServiceRegister() in a
    way that is compatible with Bonjour.
  • Update to newer copy of dns_sd.h
• If the host name changes update names of static services wich
  contain wildcards.
• Don’t build documentation about embedding the Avahi mDNS stack into
  other programs by default. This is a feature used only by embedded
  developers. Pass –enable-core-docs to “configure” to enable
  building these docs, like in Avahi <= 0.6.12.
• Build Qt documentation only when Qt support is enabled in
  the configuration. Same for GLib.
• Change algorithm used to find a new host name on conflict. In
  Avahi <= 0.6.12 a conflicting host name of “foobar” would be
  changed to the new name “foobar2”. With 0.6.13 “foobar-2” will be
  picked instead. This follows Bonjour’s behaviour and has the
  advantage not confusing people with regular host names ending in
  digits.
• Don’t disable all static services when SIGHUP is recieved.
• Fix build when Avahi is configured without Gtk+ but with Python
  support
• Fix build on MacOS X
• Support using Solaris DBM instead of gdbm for the service type
  database. The latter is still recommended
• Minor other fixes and documentation updates

The relevant NetworkManager bug about SetHostName() is #352828.

And our bug tracker is back to only two open bugs for Avahi. That’s a good feeling, I can tell you!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/s270-kernel.html

Earlier this year I worked on reverse engineering the
brightness control of my MSI
S270 laptop. Turning this work into a proper kernel driver was still left
to be done. Until yesterday… The result of yesterday’s work are two kernel patches I already posted
for upstream inclusion.

If you want to test these drivers, download the latest kernel patches:

1. acpi-ec-transaction.patch
2. acpi-s270.patch

The two patches apply to kernel 2.6.17. After patching activate “MSI S270
Laptop Extras” under “Device Drivers”/”Misc devices” and recompile and install.
After loading the s270 module, you now have a backlight class driver
exposing its innards in /sys/class/backlight/s270bl/. For
changing the screen brightness issue as root:

echo 8 > /sys/class/backlight/s270bl/brightness

This will set the screen brightness to maximum. The integer range is 0..8.

In addition to this backlight class driver we export a platform driver which
allows reading the current state of the WLAN/Bluetooth subsystem. The platform
drivers also allows toggling the automatic brightness control feature:

cat /sys/devices/platform/s270pf/wlan                 # Show WLAN status
cat /sys/devices/platform/s270pf/bluetooth            # Show Bluetooth status
echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/s270pf/auto_brightness # Enable automatic brightness control

If the driver refuses to load (returning ENODEV) and you are sure you have
an MSI S270 the machine is probably not recognized correctly by its DMI data.
In that case you can pass force=1 to the driver which will force the
driver load even when the DMI data doesn’t match. YMMV. If everything works
correctly please make sure to send me the output of dmidecode, so that
I can add the DMI data to the list of known laptops in the driver.

There might even be a chance that this driver works on other MSI laptop
models, too (such as S260). YMMV. But don’t come running when the driver causes
your machine to explode! MSI laptops such as the S270 or S260 are often sold as
OEM hardware under different brands (such as Cytron/TCM/Medion/Tchibo MD96100
or “SAM2000”), so if your laptop looks remotely like this one and dmidecode |
grep MICRO-STAR yields at least a single line, and you are adventurous
than you might want to test this driver on it. And don’t forget to send me your
dmidecode output if it works for you!

Unfortunately HAL (at least in my version 0.5.7) doesn’t support the generic
backlight device class yet, which means no gnome-power-manager support
for now.

Although this driver is based on reverse engineered data it should be
legally safe even in the US. After I did my initial work on the S270 controls
MSI supplied me with a register table of their ACPI Embedded Controller
(which is what this driver interfaces with) and one of their engineers even
tested my work.

Last but not least I created a mailing list for
discussion of Linux on the MSI S270. Please join if you run Linux on one of
these machines! I will announce future driver work for the S270 there.

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/bonjour-apache-license.html

Yesterday Apple Bonjour has
been released
under the Apache License 2.0, replacing the old much criticized (because
non-free) APSL licensing.

What does this mean for Avahi? First of all
although the Apache
License is much better than the APSL it still isn’t GPL
compatible (at least in the eyes of the FSF), which effectively means that
Bonjour still cannot be used by more than 66% of the Free Software
projects available. Secondly Avahi is more powerful in most areas than Bonjour
ever was. (In fact, there is only a single feature where Bonjour surpasses us:
writable “Wide Area DNS-SD”). Avahi uses all the “hot” Free technologies like
D-Bus and a has much better integration in the Linux networking subsystem. Avahi is more secure (chroot()…)
Avahi is compatible API- and ABI-wise with Bonjour, but not the other way
round. Avahi is now part of every major Linux distribution.

Avahi is actively developed. The aforementioned Wide Area DNS-SD is currently
being worked on by Federico Lucifredi. Since I will write my master thesis
about mDNS scalability a lot of additional development will be done for Avahi
in the next month.

In short: Avahi is here to stay. Apple’s move to the Apache license is too little, too late.

Update: the Bonjour client libraries are BSD licensed, so the 66% argument doesn’t hold.