Recently Dublin got busy with the first ever MeeGo conference being organized for developers. For 3 days, geeks invaded the shiny (and overly expensive) Aviva stadium for talks, fun and code. It was also a cool opportunity to meet up with some esteemed Novell colleagues.

Among other goodness (hat off to the organizers for a truly top-notch event), Nokia and Intel in their great wisdom decided to hand out a free Lenovo S10-3t netbook/slate (pre)loaded with MeeGo to get our hand dirty with. I’ll probably discuss about MeeGo itself in another blog but for now I want to write here the couple of step I had to take to turn the Netbook edition into something suitable for the slate mode the Lenovo can adopt.

Basically by following this guide you will have: a working on-screen virtual keyboard and a tweaked Chromium understanding touch for scrolling.

The first step is to setup the keyboard. First of all, you have to enable the Handset repository to pull down some compatibility component (i.e. GTK+ immodule):

$ cd /etc/zypp/repos.d/
$ sudo -s
$ cp netbook.repo handset.repo
$ sed 's/netbook/handset/' -i handset.repo
$ zypper refresh # at this point you will probably have a security alert, ignore it
$ zypper install meegotouch-inputmethodbridges meegotouch-inputmethodkeyboard meegotouch-theme meegotouch-theme-meego libmeegotouch-qtstyle meegotouch-systemui

To avoid a weird parsing bug, comment out line 715 in /usr/share/themes/base/meegotouch/libmeegotouchcore/style/commonlayouts.css.

Then, open up the file /etc/xdg/autostart/meego-im-uiserver.desktop and change the Exec line to /usr/bin/meego-im-uiserver -target slate -bypass-wm-hint. Finally, append ;X-MEEGO-NB to the OnlyShowIn line (or remove it altogether), save, close up and restart your computer (all applications including MeeGo panel basically need to be relaunched to load up the new input engine so it’s the most straightforward way).

If everything went well (if not check that the process is alive and not choking), you should have a fair sized keyboard appearing at the bottom of the screen when a text field gets the focus.

Some comments here. The enter key on this keyboard is hidden behind the two modifier keys (bottom-left) and is only a n appender (read, it won’t fire any activated event). Thus when you need to validate something you have to either use your real Enter key or find a way around (« clicking » chrome first completion for an address, tweet/publish buttons, …). To make the keyboard go away (because it doesn’t resize any part of the UI it’s hiding) you have to use a ninja swipe to the bottom that precisely start at the top of the keyboard without touching a key (I did prepended ninja there).

On the web browser side (who use a slate for something else?), there is an extension that provide the scrolling gesture Android & IPhone user will be familiar with. To get websites to take you as a slate you can resort to the good old user-agent trick and make yourself look like an iPad though, as far as I tried using it, special interface such as GMail one doesn’t work.

To get back the MeeGo panel on the top when you don’t have access to the Windows key, a really high touch-click on the screen will still get it to slide down for you.

EDIT: on the matter of having the keyboard hiding the UI beneath it, if you don’t use the keyboard in software mode (that is, no -software switch in your .desktop), you can make most of the keyboard transparent by opening /usr/share/themes/base/meegotouch/svg/meegotouch-keyboard.svg and adding an opacity value in the style attribute of the svg root node, something like (extra attributes stripped for readability):

<svg version="1.1"
  id="meegotouch-keyboard-layer"
  viewBox="0 0 500 480"
  style="enable-background:new 0 0 500 480; opacity:0.4"
  xml:space="preserve">

EDIT2: I updated the zypper install line with package that I thought were pulled down automatically but apparently weren’t.

If everything goes well you should get that result:

As such, it’s impossible to manually set powersaving either using sysfs or via a command like iwconfig power.

Worst part is that the drivers aren’t even correctly advertising themselves to mac80211 (the underlying layer of the WiFi stack) as able to handle power saving operations thus preventing any event to be propagated back to the driver. You can find more information about the problem on the following thread.

Of course this sucks quite a bit for people who cares about their battery life and who don’t want to wait for 2.6.32 kernel. That’s why we decided to try up compat-wireless.

Compat-wireless is a set of scripts that allows you to install the freshest drivers from the linux-wireless project (list of driver here) in a safe fashion i.e. without messing up your distribution supplied modules and without need for a kernel recompilation. These new modules are also very easy to uninstall and everything is made to prevent you from nuking too much your system.

Turns out that in recent revision of the drivers (>= 2009-10-28), powersave is back in a sort of automated fashion and blocking powersave operations are now limited to the faulty driver/chipset : iwl4965. So if you either use iwlagn or iwl3945 (lsmod will tell you) chances are good that you will get back your nice powertop output (it did for a friend and I).

As for installing the beast, the instructions on the official website starting from here are simple and straightforward.

Of course, if you were using iwl4965 your are still left out. However, if power saving weren’t breaking up your driver on earlier kernel version, you can simply comment out the .broken_powersave = true configuration statement in iwl-4965.c (line 2282 or so) under drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/.

Check out the following message on Moonlight mailing-list for instructions on how to get the same thing.

Just to make you salivate :

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekfb6jCyDmM

Two hacking days later, I actually got something to « work ». At the moment it’s quite rough, hacky and it probably kills kitteh too (be careful, it makes shana angry, you wouldn’t like that).

Basically, what I did is to plug the OpenVG layer inside Moonlight custom version of cairo (using that code as a base) and then tweaked Moonlight to use the new surface (together with some changes in how drawing and caching is done internally).

Following is a screencast of the thing running Bubble Mark :

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dywInr08ySg

As you can see there are a lot of drawing issues remaining but the basic stuff is here. The code is not terribly faster (+10 fps or so) but that may come either from a bug in my graphic card driver (it already does the bizarre thing of slowing down after some time) or an other part of Moonlight.

It will definitely be better when OpenVG becomes more widespread, has more optimized implementations and can actually run on its own rather than on top of OpenGL (I’m eager to try that on top of Gallium3D when it will be ready).

As for inclusion in the mainline tree, I don’t know. I mostly did the thing for fun as a proof-of-concept and it’s certainly far too crappy to ever get integrated as is, but maybe someone will step up and do it correctly later .

Summary

D-Bus Explorer is a GTK+ application written in C# which use NDesk’s managed D-Bus library to display the API of D-Bus services. In summary, it’s a clone of dbus-viewer with a GTK+ interface.

New in this release

• UI cleanup. Interface generation is now only available when right clicking interface item and allow to select items individually :

  

• Method invoking for simple methods (i.e. only when base type are involved in the method prototype) :

  

• Property support is back :

  

• Yet another parser rewrite. This time it’s definitely cool.

Download

Tarball : http://www.ndesk.org/archive/dbus-explorer/dbus-explorer-0.5.tar.gz

Future

For my usage, D-Bus Explorer is starting to get rather feature complete. Therefore, if you have any idea of a cool feature that could be implemented don’t hesitate to drop your thought in the comments.

For screenshot fans that’s how it looks like :

Sudoku main interface

You can enable the use of ParallelFx via the two options « Use multiple processors to generate puzzles » and « Use speculative puzzle generation » found in the Game settings box :

Game settings window

The first one uses Parallel.For instead of a standard for to generate grids and the other allows the background generation of further grids using Future.

Tabbed browsing :

Good if you get lost like me with multiple DBus-Explorer windows (Ctrl+T to open and tab button to close, who say Firefox ?).

Multiple (possible) languages :

↓

Just write a definition file like the one in the screenshot and drop it in ~/.dbus-explorer/langs, « possible » because I was too lazy to write another language than C# .

Stubs autogeneration :

↓

For use with library like Managed D-Bus, yay \o/ .

There has also been work on the UI and other bugfixes but nothing major. All in one I think DBus-Explorer kept its KISS nature together with the few extra features it was missing. Now I just need to add dialogs for managing language definitions and stub generators in a friendly way.

Hot stuff to be grabbed on git at the usual place.

I passed the weekend but it was really worth it. I mostly followed the indications on the Arch Wiki for the installation part (using dkite’s modules and patched acpid) except that I used the latest intel Xorg driver package from testing instead of i810 and its ugly 915resolution hack. I also had some problems with partitioning my usb key (cfdisk was borking on the partition table) but a quick override of the table with parted seemed to resolve them.

So Vache is now powered by Linux 2.6.23, latest Xorg and Openbox 3.4.5 (will update to the, recently released, 3.4.6 version later). I made a sort-of desktop using xfce4-panel (I found out that AWN depends on too much gnome libs for my taste), xcompmgr for some compositing goodness like drop-shadow and window transitions (works pretty well apart from some odd painting behaviors in Firefox) and feh for the background handling. I also use other softwares from XFCE4 like Thunar (file manager), Terminal, Mousepad etc… for my everyday use. Media playback is assured by good-old MPlayer, networking is handled by Network Manager (if only it could drop some gnome dependencies too), Abiword for word-processing and of course Mono & Monodevelop for the geeky stuff . My autostart.sh is here if someone is interested.

Thanks to dkite’s acpid and kernel packages, everything works as well as on the default OS of the EEE (even the different state popups for sound, WiFi and all). Overall I’m very pleased with my setup : it’s fast, lightweight and do its job. The only culprit so far is memory when using Flash (which notoriously leak memory) and Firefox after some heavy browsing time. Moreover the shared-memory nature of the Intel graphic chipset cause the memory usage to go up when playing things like Youtube videos. I somehow fixed the former by using the FlashBlock addon and improved the latter by tuning some of the about:config keys. Guess that replacing the current RAM with a 2gb one will make everyone happy.

Some shoots of the unpacking below :

The package.

Shoot of the box.

Opening Ali Baba’s cavern.

First sight of the beast

Opened without the battery.

The rest of the box.

The welcoming screen in easy mode (the battery is normally located in the hole between the keyboard and the screen).

Mandatory screenshot .

System info.

Some impressions. First of all the machine is really small. Those who compared it to a plied A4 paper are completely right. But even with the small screen the image is very clear and readable (which was one of the thing I was afraid of when I bought it). It’s also ridiculously light and easily transportable (as it’s supposed to be anyway).

I ran it on battery for a while (browsing, playing videos, doing some console stuff) so battery life seems great. The only ventilator (cooling the CPU) is very discrete which, together with the SSD-based disk, allow a very silent system.

Keyboard is indeed tricky to get used to (some touch, like the numbers at the top, are a little translated compared to a normal keyboard) but after some learning time I was typing without problems (even with my big fingers). The trackpad is also very small and I found the right part (used to scroll in windows) to be really hard to use. I guess my next gift will be one of these micro mouse.

The base system is a modified Xandros running IceWM and some parts of KDE and, once you get the shortcut to launch a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T), administering it is a breeze if you already use a Debian or Debian-like distribution. All in one I found the whole system to be very fluid even with the limited resources of the machine (600-something MHz downgraded processor and 512Mo of RAM) with every applications (including OpenOffice) starting reasonably fast. I probably won’t digg any deeper in the OS as I plan to replace it.

I will add more photos once I put Arch on it (I already switched the system in « Expert » mode thanks to this howto). A bare Openbox session together with a small AWN bar, for launching and tracking the applications, will do the trick (since the EEE has an Intel chipset, Compositing support is good).

Btw, I have to give this baby a name (just « My EEE » isn’t that great). Nosfer suggested that I call it « La Vache » (pun with my name, here is what it means). I was reticent at first but in the end… why not ? . So let me introduce to the world « Vache », the EEE PC :

That’s all for now folks.

Is this supposed to be funny ?