It seems that Sharp will no longer produce the Zaurus line.
Hi all,
yes, we have to confirm that Sharp pulled the plug out
of the Zaurus line.
No successor model is planned, and the end of production
will be early February.
For sure we’ll continue with support, service and accessories
for the Zauri. Also there’re interesting other products around,
so the fun with mobile Linux products is definitely not over.
///TRIsoft
Marc Stephan
http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=22804&view=findpost&p=150920
Another birthday present was a laptop IBM ThinkPad 385XD upgraded to 96MB of RAM and 10GB HDD.
It came with Windows 2000 preinstalled but I already build a Gentoo image on my desktop for it.
Due to the fact that it has a quite slow CPU and only 96 MB of RAM, I was thinking to use xfce as Desktop Manager. Then I thought that I should also try KDE because I had nothing to lose (except a few hours of compilation time on my desktop machine). So I emerged them both.
The conclusion is that KDE works like a charm on this machine. The whole system runs quite smoothly. I use distcc in combination with the x86 chroot of my desktop machine to emerge the new packages.
I had no problem to get a Surecom cardbus wifi card working with it using the rt2x00 driver provided by Gentoo.
On my birthday, my friends bought me a Logitech Formula Force EX Feedback Wheel. After playing with it a lot in Windows, I decided to make it work on Linux. The force feedback part didn’t work out of the box. I managed to make it work with the usb-hid driver after I added it’s usb id to it. You can find the patch against kernel 2.6.18 here.
- Copy the file to your kernel source root directory.
- Apply the patch:
patch -p1 <logitech_formula_force_ex_ff.patch
- Recompile the usbhid module
- Reload the usbhid module.
- Have fun testing it with ffutils.
(Only the constant force effect works as this is the only effect currently implemented in the driver).
The ebuild for the Linux port of DC++ Direct Connect client (Linux DC++) was added today to Gentoo portage. I was waiting for a long time to see a reliable Direct Connect client on Linux.
When I was in highscool I was part of the Romanian demoscene subculture under the “PuthreGuy” nickname and I was part of the “General Failure” demogroup. I was also the SysOp of InfoVox BBS (FidoNet 2:531/10). “General Failure” was later renamed to “Float Entertainment” then to “Float|FX” when it merged with “Brain Damage” group. As of 1997, “General Failure” had 4 members:
PuthreGuy – code
Little Kopsha – code
PhM – music
Foaming Creature – code (more…)
It seems that Piatra Neamt looks better than ever this year. Too bad I could not go there these holidays.
(Picture by Roger Mantu)
More pictures can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/acsell/2006_12_13MyPiatraNeamt/
Configuring a Bluetooth GPS receiver on Gentoo was pretty straight forward for me.
This assumes that you already have the bluetooth stack up and running on your Gentoo box.
# emerge -p gpsd
# hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A iBT-GPS
# sdptool browse 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A
Browsing 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A …
Service Name: SPP slave
Service Description: Bluetooth SPP V1.23
Service RecHandle: 0×10000
Service Class ID List:
“Serial Port” (0×1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0×0100)
“RFCOMM” (0×0003)
Channel: 1
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x656e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0×100
# rfcomm connect 0 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:0B:0D:6E:65:8A on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup
On another terminal, start the gps daemon.
# gpsd /dev/rfcomm0
The fun begins:
# xgps
I run into some problems when I upgraded udev to version 103 on Gentoo.
In order to have it working I needed to:
emerge -C coldplug
emerge -C hotplug
emerge -C hotplug-base
emerge -C udev
rm -rf /etc/hotplug
rm -rf /etc/hotplug.d
rm -rf /etc/udev
emerge udev
emerge baselayout
etc-update
rc-update del coldplug
rm -f /etc/init.d/coldplug
reboot
See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml and http://webpages.charter.net/decibelshelp/LinuxHelp_UDEVPrimer.html
for more information about udev.
For the first time ever, the Linux Kernel includes a stackable file system. The new file system name is eCryptfs and it is based on FiST.
“eCryptfs stores cryptographic metadata in the header of each file written, so that encrypted files can be copied between hosts; the file will be decryptable with the proper key, and there is no need to keep track of any additional information aside from what is already in the encrypted file itself. “
eCryptfs can make use of the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) using TPM Keyring.
