• Linux Without a Bootloader (Greg Ungerer) – A well paced example on booting Linux without a direct bootloader (for NOR flash) or without U-Boot (for NAND flash). Good demos, and a good discussion post presentation. This will be an approach I will try in future systems, combined with Kexec
• Kexec – Ready for embedded Linux? (Magnus Damm) – A good talk discussing the Kexec framework on embedded systems – especially relevant after Greg’s talk
• Android: A Case Study of an Embedded Linux Project – All around fun, and highlighting some of the problems with the current fork of Android. The only thing this keynote could have done better is presenting at least one concrete example of how mainlining reduces overhead for the developers. Not that I don’t agree with Greg, but it would be great to use this keynote as ammunition in all companies.
• Flattened Device Tree ARM Support Update (Grant Likely) – In the “things to watch” camp is the upcoming unification of the flattened device tree support in PowerPC and SPARC, adding ARM support. This will be something to hack on to make sure all the various system drivers work correctly, and something I will be tracking.
• Ftrace – Embedded Edition (Steven Rostedt) – A very energetic example of what FTrace can do for you, and the announcement of trace-cmd and kernelshark. This will be going into my toolchest.
• State of Embedded Linux (Tim Bird) – Overviews can be drab and boring, but this was enough context to bring in people who don’t follow lkml on a daily basis. And Tim, I will test out LogFS and ramzswap on my systems and report back
• Link Time Dead Code and Data Elimination Using GNU Toolchain (Denys Vlasenko) – A good overview on the current support and caveats with -function-sections and –gc-sections in the GNU toolchain. Could have used some more technical insight, but the discussions it triggered generally filled any holes.
• A Consideration of Memory Saving by Efficient Mapping of Shared Libraries – A very indepth technical discussion which is invaluable for very small systems. The slides are great as well.

This is hardly a complete list of the talks I went to, and only reflects some of the most interesting and relevant areas to me (sorry, I don’t do much RT or media). To those not mentioned, I still enjoyed hearing you speak!

And yes, I do have a shiny new free Nexus One thanks to Chris DiBona and all of Google. You still should work on mainlining your code though

Fun read, if not a bit immature.

I have to say I agree with his reasoning on all counts. I have licensed software under the BSD or MIT series of licenses in the past, but often for small little utilities that I don’t think contain much intellectual worth or don’t represent new concepts or major time investments. Anything “big” comes under the GPL.

This is a good point to discuss the applicability of the Affero GPL license. If you are developing software which will likely never offered or downloaded to a client machine (the “distribution” step in the GPL, which is absent in most web applications and SaaS), but would like to force users to offer the modified source code to your product, this is the license to use. There are very few pieces of software which carry the AGPL license to date, however with the growing trend of cloud computing, it is well worth considering.

The only downside to the AGPL are libraries, which carry the full force of the GPL license. There is no “ALGPL” version, allowing linking of code into other products without bringing the requirements of the GPL with it.

Here is the text of Microsoft’s announcement:

I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs.

ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments.

“The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers,” Scott Guthrie, the Corporate Vice President for the .Net Developer Platform, told me July 6.

It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions.

You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications.

The Promise applies to developers, distributors, and users of Covered Implementations without regard to the development model that created the implementations, the type of copyright licenses under which it is distributed, or the associated business model.

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

You can find the terms of the Microsoft Community Promise here.

I told you this was good news!

Of course this isn’t a legal document by any means. But if you take it for what its worth, its a decent step forward. The problem with .Net and this agreement however is that it doesn’t cross over to the vertical components of their runtime, like Windows.Forms and ASP.NET. So I guess you can feel free to write free and open source code while using the Mono libraries which are not re-implementations of the Windows counterparts (like Gtk#)

You can read more about this on Miguel de Icaza’s blog here.

More of the beginning of the end for Java?

I’ve been using both KDE and Gnome on Linux for many years, and also use the Redmond user-interface (aka Windows). I also own a Mac. The Macintosh (OS X) and Windows are similar models, and Gnome and KDE are even more similar to Windows. Now, I am not saying that either interface is unusable, but it is an inefficient choice if you fall into the categories above.

Granted, the classic window management paradigms are very familiar. I won’t say natural, since computers are really not natural, they’re a learned behavior. Computers only feel natural when they operate in a similar fashion to other computers you’ve used or seen in the past. The problem with this user interface paradigm is becoming apparent as screen sizes grow (and shrink!). Your desktop is simply far too large to use properly in its overlapping window mode. Plus all the mouse work moves you away from your primary user interface device: the keyboard.

Many program designers have noticed this. They’ve moved away from the nightmare of MDI (multiple overlapping windows inside of your overlapping window), and developed docking elements. The toolbar you can dock and move. The properties editor on the right. You can’t (generally) overlap the dockable elements. But in all cases, the elements are on the side or around your document or main view. Stuff stays put, is intelligently placed, and doesn’t get in your way constantly. Why can’t a window manager work the same way? But it can! Enter the Tiling window manager.

I like StumpWM, which is a tiling window manager modeled after ratpoison (and all other tiling managers before it). Its command set is a good mix of GNU Screen and emacs. Its also written in pure Common Lisp. There are other tiling managers out there, such as my second favorite, XMonad, which can even work flawlessly in Gnome and KDE (or mostly flawlessly anyway). XMonad has the advantage of automatic layout modes which StumpWM currently lacks. I didn’t particularly like Ion3 or WmII: the multi-monitor support is not as developed as StumpWM), plus Ion3 open-source development could be at risk. .

I’ve been using StumpWM for a couple of days. I am trying to quit Gnome cold-turkey, and so far have been successful. All of my applications work. The few gnome specific management applications I used I’ve managed to replace (such as NetworkManager for the laptop). My environment is lighter without the 50 background processes Gnome uses for automagic abilities (HAL, DBUS, etc). It doesn’t suffer the “users like simple, so lets not complicate stuff” philosophy Gnome uses in several places (an example: gnome-screensaver vs xscreensaver). Plus, I can use the keyboard almost exclusively, only touching the mouse to use certain applications. All window operations are entirely keyboard driven.

But if you’re not trying to quit Gnome completely, both window managers can show the normal Gnome panel for you. One thing you’ll have to scrap is the Desktop paradigm – you can put a picture on your root window, but the cluttered mass of icons isn’t available – you’ve put something far more useful there instead. Your applications.

It may seem scary at first, but I encourage you to try a tiling manager. Give yourself several hours of dedicated time. Will yourself not to switch back to the old familiar interface. Print out the quick reference or the whole manual, just in case you get lost in how to move around . Its well worth the effort.

It features a Mobility Radeon FireGL V5200 (the Widescreen models may use a V5250 – you’ve been warned) . Out of the box, the last fglrx driver to support this card is 8.35. Yes, the FireGL driver doesn’t support FireGL cards anymore, so says the top-notch driver division at ATI.

The 8.35 driver has some important breakages:

- Can’t suspend or resume (on Kernels with a SLUB allocator, like Ubuntu)

- Can’t hibernate (ditto)

- Weird things happen when you’re dual monitored and start X without a monitor connected.

-

But, perhaps the 8.42.3 driver, hot off the presses, fixes some of that right?  I sought to find out.

The biggest hurdle is 8.42.3 doesn’t support FireGL cards. Ooops. But thanks to these forum posts and mini-patch, it is possible to use the card. For the record, I’m using the provided defaults for CARDIDs.

 http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5203

Next up, you have to grab a 8.35 installer packet, extract it (–extract), and then copy common/ati/control over /etc/ati/control, or you’re forever running around with a fantastic watermark in the right corner (whoever thought that was a great idea at ATI deserves to get shot).

So, after mucking with it for an hour, I’ve concluded

- Suspend works, but resume does not, when in multiple monitor mode (wtf)

- Ditto for hibernate

- Compiz runs, but doesn’t really work well at all.

This is in stark contrast to the NVidia-GLX driver, which I use on my desktop, and is a fantastic piece of work, never breaks, and delivers outstanding performance.

Maybe 8.42.4… Or RadeonHD. Or just buy a new laptop with n Nvidia card.