Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Pommed v1.30: bug fixes

Published on October 22, 2009 in Hacks. Closed

Pommed v1.30 is a bug fix release fixing two small bugs:

  • a crasher bug on PowerMac machines
  • a bug in the sysfs backlight driver, mishandling brightness values with more than 3 digits

If you are running on a recent MacBook/MacBook Pro with a recent kernel, you’ll probably want to upgrade to this release.

pommed v1.29: architectural fix

Published on October 19, 2009 in Hacks. Closed

pommed v1.29 is a bugfix release, kind of. The fix is an architectural one related to the video mode switch feature.

When pressing the video switch key, your graphical pommed client of choice checks which VT its X server is running on and whether this VT is the active one before executing your video mode switch script.

To check that the VT is currently active, it is necessary to open one VT (we use the one our X server is running on) and perform an ioctl() call on it.

Depending on your setup (login manager or startx, basically), your user will or will not have any right on the device node associated to the VT. Which means the VT state checking code would always fail in some setups.

This is now fixed by moving that code into pommed itself, with a DBus method for the clients to call. You’ll need to update both pommed and the clients for this to work, for obvious reasons.

About box 2.0

Published on October 7, 2009 in Rants. Closed

You want to revitalize a dying, inactive free software project. How do you proceed?

  1. You write code, contribute, get involved in the community, get in touch with the previous developer(s) to try and join the team or take over the project. Failing that, you fork the project, because this is how free software works after all. Then, once you’ve got something to show, you start talking about it;
  2. You set up a new forum, brag about it on the old one, arrange with the previous lead developer to make sure you can use the name and logo, then open a twitter account so users can follow the new forum’s setup process minute by minute.

There’s this saying about opensource/free software that says the logo and about box are the very first (and only) things that work in new/young projects (and sometimes that’s also true for more “mature” projects, as we all come to know).

Choice 2 above is the About Box 2.0. Unfortunately, that’s the way a handful of people choose to revitalize mt-daapd/Firefly Media Server. Of course, not one among them can code or has actually got a clue about the current codebase.

FAIL of epic proportions. Facepalm.