Demystifying the init system (PID 1)

With all the talk about debian choosing a default init system (link, link), I've decided to share with the world a little project I've been working on to help me understand /sbin/init aka. PID 1. In this blog post I will go step by step showing what an init system must do to be functional. …

gst-av 0.6 released; more reliable

gst-av is a GStreamer plug-in to provide support for libav (fork of FFmpeg), it is similar to gst-ffmpeg, but without GStreamer politics, which means all libav plugins are supported, even if there are native GStreamer alternatives; VP8, MP3, Ogg, Vorbis, AAC, etc. This release takes care of a few corner-cases, and has support for more …

Android vs. Maemo power management: static vs. dynamic

Some of you might have heard about Google's Android team proposal to introduce wakelocks (aka suspend-blockers) to the Linux kernel. While there was a real issue being solved in the kernel side, the benefits on the user-space side were dubious at best, and after a huge discussion, they finally didn't get in. During this discussions …

A tale of just another Linux kernel bug

As part of a bigger effort to get my Nokia N900 in good shape for development, I decided to track down an issue with the keyboard; I could type 'a', but not 'A' or any special characters, so no 'shift' or 'ctrl' or anything special. Trying to figure out what was going on took me …

Scrobbler for Maemo, now both on N900, and N9

Version 2.0 finally moved to Fremantle stable, so everybody can start using it 🙂 If you are not familiar with it, this package will see what music you are listening on Maemo devices, and scrobble to your favorite service, either last.fm, libre.fm, or both. I already explained the features in an earlier blog entry, along …

N9 Swipe undocumented feature; activate sane behavior

Ed Page recently blogged about his idea to improve the Swipe UI. Fortunately for him, a bunch of people and I had the same idea inside Nokia 🙂 Update: apparently this is not present in the images distributed with the Nokia N950's, it was introduced after 25-3. If you open ~/.config/mcompositor/mcompsitor.conf, you'll see a bunch …

My disagreement with Elop on MeeGo

Some time ago I received a private email directly from Elop (just me, nobody else in CC, I am not going to go into details as to why), in which he explained that the biggest problem was the small amount of MeeGo devices in the years immediately ahead. This is simply not true. Before explaining …

gst-av 0.5 released; now with video encoding and decoding support

gst-av is a GStreamer plug-in to provide support for libav (formerly FFmpeg), it is similar to gst-ffmpeg, but without GStreamer politics, which means all libav plugins are supported, even if there are native GStreamer alternatives; VP8, MP3, Ogg, Vorbis, AAC, etc. In addition, it is much simpler (2654 vs 16575 LOC), has better performance, and …

msn-pecan 0.1.2 released; critical bug-fix

Hi, This is an important maintenance release, everybody should update. Apparently Microsoft shut down the Nexus servers that were used for authentication, which meant msn-pecan stopped working completely. Fortunately I found a trick to circumvent the problem without requiring an update the protocol used; use Passport 3.0 authentication. Had I known the fix would have …

Why Linux is the most important software project in history

Here's another post that for some people is obvious, but there are other (e.g. high level managers) that might not necessarily see the importance of Linux, in fact, I have been surprised by many open source developers who don't seem to be familiar with how Linux works (they think it's just something that works?). The …