What I found is a 2.4 driver and a small patch to port it over to 2.6, some small work from my side to catch up with 2.6.13 pcmcia API changes. That's it. The last time I checked it was recognized, not more. I'm pretty sure it needs some real love to get in shape for mainline, but it could be a nice coding project even if the docs are not available as far as I know. At least some code as reference.

I already send a mail to the linux driver project, but gathered no feedback so far. If any of my readers like to give it a try or know somebody who likes, just drop me a mail and I'll send the device over.

Still I'm looking forward to it. This time I hopefully have some time to attend the technically talks. I look at you kernel track. And let Harald de-mystify the security of the micro waves around us.

So the toy is called BT-451 and has a u-blox ANTARIS4 SuperSense chip build-in. Getting it to work is easy:

hcitool scan
rfcomm connect hci0 

After this you have a serial port (perhaps /dev/bluetooth/rfcomm/0) where all the NMEA data comes in. Just give this one to gpsd and you can use it in multiple applications. I also heard that this is even easier with gypsy. No more need to deal with rfcomm yourself. That screams for a test once it is in debian.

There is some more stuff I like about the BT-451. Once it had a fix I was able to put it in a pocket of my jacket, sit in my car and it still gets the position. Tested with driving home with my notebook on the seat next to be and tracking the drive with navit. Daniel also discovered that the USB plug is not only for charging, but also shows up as ACM modem and spies out the NMEA on /dev/ttyACM0. And once connected via USB it also works without a battery.

The above mentioned navit is one of the most promising stuff I like to use regulary with the GPS. It's a navigation system with a routing engine. Not only download maps and show them, but do real routing with vector based maps. As we all know maps are problematic. OpenStreetMap is working on this problem. Until this is useable everywhere I like to have some commercial maps I can route with on my linux system. Don't expect some vendor has got this ready. :(

But FOSS has, as almost, an answer for me. Navit support different vector maps for commercial CDs. Just buy such one, copy the files and navit handles the rest. Great.

No I just need to test the navit setup on my Neos. :)

But thanks to the work on poppler and evince this gap is closed. I know this news is perhaps not bleeding edge, but just today I installed it from debian experimental. Be aware that you need to install evince-gtk instead of evince.

Thanks to everybody who made this happen.

For the randr-1.2 support inside the xserver and xrandr you need pretty new versions of it. Xserver-core should be version 1.3 no idea about xrandr. Using Debian SID everything you need is already there. Perhaps you need to install some -dev packages for X stuff.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
git checkout randr-1.2
./configure
make

The only missing thing is now to copy the driver in the right directory. Make sure you backup the old driver before.

cp src/.libs/radeon_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/

Now you can restart X and run xrandr. Attach another monitor and run it again. :)

For some further tips I found this blog entry from Ross Burton very helpful.

Here is a short overview about the topics we like to cover:

• Show actually prototypes. (We will have P0 and P1 devices there)
• History and background of the project
• Hard- and software status
• How can I participate
• Questions and answers

The latest point should be the longest.

After some research I found the Brother DCP-8065DN. The price on the website is too high. I got mine for 490 Euro.

That is really cheap if you look at the features the beast offers me:

• Duplex laser printer with PostScript 3 and some other emulations.
• Parallel, USB 2.0 and network connection. (Even IPv6. cool)
• Duplex copies up to 50 sheets at once.
• Scan sheets, put them into a PDF or leave as JPEG and upload it to a FTP server or send per mail.
• Perhaps network scanning. Need to check linux support here, but this has no priority at the moment.

Besides the printer and copy features especially the duplex up to 50 sheets scan feature is just great.

Take a pile of paper you like to get rid of. Put it into the machine and you get a nice PDF uploaded to your FTP. Great. :)

Pentium M 1,6GHz, 512MB RAM and 80GB slow notebook hdd is nothing what I would call the right system for building packages and images the whole day.

So I'm now searching for nice components to build my own compile monster. My limit is 1500 Euro without display. It follows a brief list of components I like to have in it:

• Two Opteron CPUs with dual-core.
• 4GB RAM
• Matching motherboard with Gigabit onboard. Good linux support is a must here. I like to use it as production system without playing to much with kernel patches on it.
• At least one 400GB SATA HDD. I'm not sure about raid yet.

My biggest problem is to find matching components. All the different names, versions and marketing foo is a hell for building a system on its own.

If anybody has any hints for good components, just drop me a mail

Notification-daemon and libnotify are the way to go here.

They provide a nice little commandline tool to generate notifications calls notify-send. You can set title, text, icon, level and category. Really neat to notify you about stuff in your own scripts.

But there is a problem if you like to notify the user from scripts running with another uid. You need the right dbus session address. This little script fixes the problem for you. Searching for the address and set it correctly before executing notify-send.