Still remember the “hal is dead, long live DeviceKit” buzz? It’s time to finally lay our hands on it. DeviceKit and DeviceKit-power themselves are available for a while in Jaunty’s universe, but installing them by themselves is pretty boring, of course. Last Saturday I packaged the new gnome-power-manager 2.25.x which is now devkit-ified and doesn’t use hal any more. It is now available in the ubuntu-desktop PPA. Please try it, break it, and complain over there 🙂 ... Read More

I was really looking forward to today. Today, the Sony PRS-505 eBook reader finally gets sold in Germany. Now, I already have mine since January, but the more exciting fact is that libri.de also announced selling their ebooks in the open epub format standard. When I bought my first eBook at libri.de in January, I unfortunately only discovered after the buy that you can only read it with the Mobipocket reader. ... Read More

The next Ubuntu release (9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”) will see the first set of changes introduced by Canonical’s Desktop Experience Team: The much-discussed notify-osd notification system, and the indicator applet. While we have worked, and will continue to work with upstreams to get those into official GNOME, this will take a while; those are design/usability experiments, and their full impact and consequences are still to be determined by a large user base, and GNOME rightfully applies their own scrutiny on new things to adopt. ... Read More

I just read Scott’s post about IM notifications. I have used the libnotify plugin of my IRC client for about a year now, and really do like it in general, for similar reasons that Scott mentions: I notice if someone wants to talk to me, and usually the notifications give me enough context to decide whether or not I need to reply at all, or later, or right now. However, I never actually felt the urge of clicking on those except to get rid of them when they cover an important part of my screen. ... Read More

Yay, I finally got my PRS-505 e-Book reader! I fed it with a couple of e-books from the Gutenberg project and its German affiliate, and I’m very pleased with the display and reading quality. Now I can finally take something to read with me again on conference travels and other occasions when I don’t want to have lots of luggage. Now that I can actually try it, I found that my initial packaging of calibre was pretty incomplete, it didn’t detect the reader at all. ... Read More

Oh the joys of Christmas presents… I gave a shiny new 24″ widescreen TFT to my wife, to replace that shabby and flickering 15″ CRT that drove me mad after working on it for ten minutes. That entailed some other hardware upgrades: a new graphics card (the old GeForce FX 5200 did not even do 1600×1200, let alone the 1920×1200 that the monitor supports), and thus while I was at it, I plugged that into my AMD64 box and put that under her desk instead of the Celeron 1. ... Read More

I could not resist and ordered myself a Christmas present, a Sony PRS-505 e-Book reader (it’s all Martin Pool’s fault! 😛 ) To use that with your own content, you need a software to convert existing e-book, HTML, PDF, and other formats to the formats that the PRS505 can understand. So I stumbled over calibre, which seems to be an awesome and complete solution for managing e-books. Of course I immediately went to package it. ... Read More

I spent the last week in Portland, Oregon, at the Linux Plumbers Conference. Since several people asked, here is my travel report: Tuesday This was not an official conference day yet, I just arrived early due to flights being cheaper. I spent the entire day with the LinuxFoundation driver backports work group, with Ram Pai (IBM), Jon Masters (Red Hat), and Andreas Gruenberger (Novell). Novell’s orginal member (Susanne Oberhauser) works on other projects now, so we gave a quick summary of the status quo, and the results from Austin to Andreas. ... Read More

I just released the first beta release of Jockey 0.5, which fixes a ton of bugs compared to the first Alpha from two weeks ago. Compared to 0.4, it grew quite a lot of new features: Split program into a privileged system D-BUS backend (access controlled by PolicyKit), and unprivileged frontend. This provides a cleaner design, gets rid of ugly distribution specific hacks and makes the program more portable. Add support for detecting printers. ... Read More

I’m quite a heavy user of chroots, since I work with many different releases, and Debian, too. That usually means I have to clean them up at some point, too. It happened at least twice now: I deleted an old chroot without unmounting all those bind mounts I have in them (/proc, /sys, /tmp, and most importantly, /home). Thus an rm -rf /chroots/edgy will remove my entire Home-partition, too! Fortunately I Control-C’ed early enough the second time to not cause any real damage except for killing my X socket in /tmp. ... Read More