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Bye fglrx...

Submitted by msameer on Thu, 09/04/2009 - 9:59pm

Thanks to all the hard work by the fglrx packaging team, DRI, MESA, Xorg, Radeon,... etc people!

I've been using fglrx with my laptop since I've had it:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X1400

And to the people behind the Debian packaging..
* xserver-xorg-video-radeon from testing.
* libdrm-intel1 and libdrm2 from unstable
* libgl1-mesa-dri and libgl1-mesa-glx from experimental

vader:~# apt-get --purge remove fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-src fglrx-kernel-2.6.26-1-686 fglrx-sourceReading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done

The following packages will be REMOVED:
   fglrx-driver* (9-2-2)
   fglrx-kernel-2.6.26-1-686* (9-2-2+2.6.26-13)
   fglrx-kernel-src* (9-2-2)
   fglrx-source* (9-2-2)
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 17 not upgraded.
After this operation, 38.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

I probably lost the ability to suspend and resume but I don't usually do it with that laptop.

Now let's hope my lapop at work will be adapted easily too :)

UPDATE: Seems you lose OpenGL 2.0 if you use the free driver. If you are doing OpenGL stuff like me then you are in trouble ;-|


Katoob, the baby has a new father.

Submitted by msameer on Mon, 12/05/2008 - 9:31pm

This post has a bit of my history and emotions. It can be skipped!

The summary is: Katoob has a new maintainer.

...


I love KDE. It just works!

Submitted by msameer on Fri, 25/01/2008 - 7:13pm

I have 2 laptops. My personal one at home and my work one at the office. Both are running testing. A month or two ago, I did a dist-upgrade on the home one. Later on I rebooted (DUH!) it for a reason I can't remember just to end up with very tiny fonts under GNOME. It took me some time to tweak them back again and play with the GNOME anti-aliasing dialog. Now if you know me well, you know that the last thing someone should do to me is to touch my font settings. I have a very sensitive eye (Because I have a very low vision) and I hardly tweak the fonts. All went somehow fine after that. Problem is I wasn't sure whether it was fglrx or GNOME who's responsible for that.


More packages for Chinook.

Submitted by msameer on Sun, 16/12/2007 - 4:47am

I was trying to package hunspell-ar for Chinook so I ended up packaging:
* hunspell (libhunspell and its development headers)
* enchant (hunspell and ispell providers but I'll disable ispell soon)
* hunspell-ar
* dictionaries-common and dictionaries-common-dev (hunspell-ar depends on them)

As for dictionaries-common and dictionaries-common-dev, they are different than the Debian ones. Yes I'm using the same source but I'm only providing the bits related to myspell. I didn't include the policy too.

uri = ftp://foolab.org/pub/apt
dist = chinook
components = spell

him-arabic is also available as well as a few Arabic fonts:

uri = ftp://foolab.org/pub/apt
dist = chinook
components = arabic


hildon input method and new languages...

Submitted by msameer on Fri, 14/12/2007 - 7:25pm

I noticed this because of my work on him-arabic.

If your plugin provides a language other than the 16 "known" languages, It will be displayed as " ()".

Ideally, The fix should be somewhere else but not all of the components are open so even if I can fix it, I won't be able to publish patches or packages.

It seems that the source provided with the SDK is a bit outdated so I had to grab the latest trunk: https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/hildon-input-method/

And here's a patch. It'll return the language code if it fails to get the language description. (I know it's a bit hackish :|):

diff -Naur him.orig/src/hildon-im-languages.c him/src/hildon-im-languages.c
--- him.orig/src/hildon-im-languages.c  2007-12-14 19:09:29.000000000 +0200
+++ him/src/hildon-im-languages.c       2007-12-14 19:12:31.000000000 +0200
@@ -82,7 +82,18 @@
   }
   if (translate_function)
   {
-    return (*translate_function) (lang);
+    gchar *res = (*translate_function) (lang);
+    if (!res) {
+      return res;
+    }
+    else if (!strcmp(res, " ()")) {
+      g_free(res);
+      res = g_strdup(lang);
+      return res;
+    }
+    else {
+      return res;
+    }
   } else
   {
     gchar path [sizeof(GCONF_TRANSLATION_STATIC_PATH) + MAX_LANG_LENGTH];

Apply, build the packages and install hildon-input-method_1.99.33-2_armel.deb and libhildon-im-ui3_1.99.33-2_armel.deb

I hope it will be fixed otherwise I'll be providing packages soon. I know I promised to provide a lot of things (-:

Have a nice weekend.


My Arabic related TODO list for maemo

Submitted by msameer on Tue, 04/12/2007 - 7:45pm

This is my Arabic related TODO list for maemo. It's my personal one not the Nokia employee one :-)

* katoob should be fully functional (I'm learning here). Actually I did more work today and I guess it's fine.
* Package and publish some Arabic fonts (I know there's one provided by the browser team).
* See what can be done regarding input (Low priority. Sorry to say that I don't like the HIM plugin interface).
* Check arabeyes.org apps. Is there anything useful and needs "porting" ?
* glibc/x11 Arabic locale ?
* Any suggestions ?

I'll not translate the UI for 3 reasons:
* I'm not of a translator.
* The license you agree to while downloading the OS image prevents me from doing that.
* Because we are using logical IDs in the code, we will f*** up the UI unless all of the strings are translated.


Hello, Planet\n

Submitted by msameer on Wed, 14/03/2007 - 2:31am

Thanks to all the people volunteering their time for Debian and FOSS, to my sponsors, to anyone who gave me a tip and to those involved in the NM process.

I'm now a proud DD!


So yesterday.

Submitted by msameer on Wed, 14/03/2007 - 2:00am

* A month since I've been here in Finland and started working for Nokia
* I've got my creditcard PIN code in the morning (From the nordea bank suckers). At last they accepted my application but they decided to send the card to the wrong branch. 7 minutes on the phone to convince them to send it to another branch. It takes them also 2-3 days to send it to another branch!
* My debian.org account has been created and NOW I'm at last an official Debian Developer (Technically, this happened on the 14th. An hour ago ;-))


Yay, My Debian AM report is out.

Submitted by msameer on Sun, 07/01/2007 - 2:24am

Marc Brockschmidt, my Application Manager wrote it at last :-)

Thanks to all the cool people out there who helped me!


The spammer or a DoS attack ? Doesn't really matter.

Submitted by msameer on Sun, 10/09/2006 - 8:55pm

So, I'm still a hardcore GNU/Linux administrator after all ?!

Apache "The webserver" is down. Looks like the master process gets killed by the kernel. That's weird.

Now what's interesting is the dmesg output: