The p-Code Machine

Recently I tried to upgrade the BIOS of my Intel DQ35JO motherbord, with which I’ve been pretty happy. After the upgrade to the most recent BIOS (11.22) my Linux kernel (2.6.28-16-generic/amd64) failed to boot, producing the following error message:

PANIC: early exception 0e rip 10:ffffffff8041f9b4 error 2 cr2 ffff87ffffffffff

Downgrading the BIOS to a somewhat older version (but newer than what a started with) solved the issue again. So I set out to finding out in what BIOS revision the regression snuk in:

• 09.42 works
• 09.91 works
• 10.16 works
• 10.56 fails
• 11.22 fails

So when upgrading your Intel DQ35JO motherboard, I recommend you stick with BIOS version 10.16 for the time being. I reported this issue to Intel, and I was told the issue would be passed along to the engineering department (with little guarantee this would be fixed). But Intel being Intel I have good hopes this will get resolved with some patience…

Richard Hughes has recently been rocking my world in a very big way… Color management on Linux/GNOME has been too hard for much too long and GNOME Color Manager is about to fix that. The hardcore groundwork of reading colorimeters and color calculus had already been taken care of by Graeme Gill with ArgyllCMS. GNOME Color Manager built on that by providing users with a very easy going GNOME user interface, while in the background driving ArgyllCMS to do all the hard work.

Another “problem” of using the commandline utilities of ArgyllCMS was, that display profiles consist of two parts. A VideoLUT which has to be applied by X11 or loaded into the video card, and a color matrix with gamma shaper which has to be applied by the color management aware applications like GIMP and UFRaw.

In the past, I’ve always built simpeler (and less accurate) profiles, to prevent me from having to load the VideoLUT every time I logged in. GNOME Color Manager solves this by introducing a service which does this fully automatically. Making it easy to use more accurate profiles.

Last but not least, GNOME Color manager also adheres to the XICC specification, and makes sure color management aware applications like GIMP and UFRaw can automatically see for which profile the VideoLUT had been applied, and thus dictating which profile to load in the application.

As could be expected, I’ve been building Ubuntu (Karmic) packages from regular git checkouts, which are available at my PPA.

It’s been a while since Ubuntu One was announced, but now in Karmic Koala it’s getting included by default, so I finally decided to try it… And it really works like a charm. I’ve configured my home workstation, my laptop and my workstation at work all to my Ubuntu One account, and now I have a quick and easy way to getting files in sync on all three… In the past used used to scp files around, which could get pretty bothersome… Ubuntu One makes this all automagical!

Canonical has received some flak from the community about keeping the server backend closed source… Lets keep some perspective on this… First Canonical releases their Enterprise (LTS) version binaries for free… RedHat (RHEL) certainly doesn’t, Novell (SLES) even makes it bothersome to get to the sources of their Enterprise product, or at least it wasn’t obvious to me. Google doesn’t release the sources to their search engine either… We still (sortof) love Google, don’t we?

My point being there is nothing wrong with Canonical wanting to make a buck. And their offer for 2GB of storage for free is more than generous. Especially since it’s not really ment as a replacement for regular file transfer protocols.

And most important of all… I don’t need to install some oddball proprietary binary on my workstation (in the hopes it won’t send some of my user info to some company in secrecy) to use Ubuntu One. Remember the client is very open source, so we can verify, that at least the client is to be trusted.

I’m usually not one for showing off my desktops, but hey… why not…

If you want to have a similar desktop, make sure you have the gnome-themes-ubuntu, gnome-themes-extras and gnome-colors packages installed. Then go to System, Preferences, Appearance. In the Appearance dialog on the Theme tab, select the New Wave theme, and then press Customize… In the Customize Theme dialog on the Controls tab, select Inverted, then go to the Colors tab and press Reset to Defaults, then go the Icons tab and select your favorite icon theme, I used GNOME Brave from the GNOME Colors project, but Fortrot works very well as well. To finish things off you can use this as a background.

Credit should be given where due, the basic New Wave/Inverted/Fortrot combination was suggested to me by Loe Spee. Thanks!

It’s been almost a year since I last updated my Canon EOS 400D color profiles (for UFRaw). I’ve learned a bit since then, and made a new set of profiles. The set includes an accurate daylight profile, and five Canon picture style emulation profiles, which should get you the general look and feel of camera generated JPEGs out of UFRaw while using these profiles.

You can download the profiles here, or get them nicely packaged for Ubuntu Karmic from my PPA.

A few days back both UFRaw 0.16 and Lensfun 0.2.4 were released. I have made Ubuntu packages available for both in my PPA, built for Ubuntu Jaunty and Ubuntu Karmic. These milestones also mean I’ll stop tracking development releases for a while now. So no more svn/cvs releases until interesting things start popping up again. Since both these builds are release grade quality (knock on wood), I’ll be dropping support for my Jaunty repository and builds. Karmic will be released very soon.

Something I’ve noticed before, and recently very bluntly noticed again, is that a lot of people use their native language for their computer. So in Ubuntu’s case, that means most people in the Netherlands set their GNOME Language to Dutch… same for the Germans in Germany, and so forth…. There is nothing inherently wrong about this. However, when posting screenshots to bugtrackers, or when mailing others, it never seems to cross peoples mind’s that the receiver might not speak (or read for that matter) the receiver’s native language. Making it an incredible pain for the receiver to understand/interpret the screenshot.

Especially when contacting people about problems, where you want their help, please remember, that you are asking someone else to spend some of their private time (for free) to help you. If you can’t be bothered to make an English language screenshot, why should they (the person you’re asking for help) be bothered to help you out?

I few weeks back, I ordered a new Seagate 1500GB, 32MB SATA drive (ST31500341AS, CC1H firmware). The first thing I did with this drive was DDing the disk surface from /dev/zero. After booting a Karmic Live CD the next day, it immediately began howling about SMART and the drives reallocated sectors (48 already). So I brought the disk back for RMA purposes, and got another disk back labelled “Seagate Certified Repaired Disk”, though the serial didn’t match, so it wasn’t mine. At first this disk seemed to work well, it survived the DDing from /dev/zero. However after two weeks of idling, and a single day of operation, reallocated sectors began popping up again… So here we go again…

Since I’ve begun fiddling with Karmic on my laptop, I’ve also been building my UFRaw CVS packages for Karmic as well. Since the latest checkout UFRaw should support the new Canon EOS 7D and Sony Alpha 850 camera’s. The packages are available at my PPA as usual. I’ve updated my UFRaw FAQ as well, with some more information on demosaicing artifacts, and JPEG quality.

At the moment lensfun no longer seems broken in Ubuntu Karmic, so you can upgrade to the latest version of lensfun again.

HP has a laptop diskdrive protection system similar to IBM’s hdaps. It’s called HP 3D DriveGuard (and possibly had other names in the past). The problem with these systems is that they are mostly software based, they consist of two parts, a general purpose accelerometer (usually with freefall detection), and software to monitor the accelerometer’s freefall detection, and swiftly park the disk when the laptop is considered to be in freefall.

Ubuntu Jaunty’s kernel was already capable of reading my laptops accelerometer (lis3lv02d), but back then there was no software to actually park the disk. In the meanwhile this seems to have been solved: a simple piece of code (hpfall.c) has been included in the kernel, as an example of how to do this. The code is very basic, but should work. I haven’t really tested it yet, by dropping my laptop onto the floor… But I have packaged the code, including a (nice) init script. It’s available for Karmic on my PPA, the package is appropriately called hpfall, use at own risk though.