N900 standby time

It seems that the N900 is able to run for > 3 days in standby, I unplugged it Friday on 7:00, and it lasted until Sunday 23:50. I used it for browsing the web a bit and to listen to music via FM transmitter.

Just uninstalled hal

I have just uninstalled hal from my laptop running unstable, and everything still seems to work, including suspend & resume.

python-apt 0.7.93 just hit unstable.

I just uploaded python-apt 0.7.93 to unstable with support for Python 2.6 and Python 3.1, meaning that there is now a single development branch again.

This uploads brings developers the new API with real classes in apt_pkg (you can now use pydoc to view documentation), C++ bindings for making apt-pkg applications scriptable (although they should be considered experimental), a test suite (although aptsources fails in one test for now) and many new context managers for enhanced Python 3 coding fun. And objects are now freed when their reference count reaches 0. A more complete list of news can be found in the What’s New In python-apt 0.7.100 part of the documentation.

For the next releases until 0.7.100 release, the focus is clearly on fixing bugs and improving the documentation. We need more tests of the Python 3 builds, especially in areas dealing with str and unicode stuff.

Have fun, read the documentation, and code.

New keyboard

My brother and I just replaced the keyboard of my HP Compaq 6720s with a new HP replacement part (a christmas present). The old one had no characters on some keys anymore and it did not look very well. Replacing the keyboard was a matter of removing two screws, and then just ‘clicking’ the keyboard out. The old keyboard lost a few keys during the process, but this is not really important anymore. Typing now feels a bit different and I have to get used to it during the next days.

In other news, the defect N900 with QWERTZ keyboard is back to Amazon.de; and I have ordered a QWERTY one on expansys.de yesterday. Let’s see when that one arrives.

Nokia N900

Yesterday, an N900 I bought from Amazon Warehouse Deals arrived. The device is great, but I discovered today that the AV output only outputs sound on the right speaker and nothing on the left one. So it seems that I have to send it back and will thus not have a N900 during Christmas.

Appart from that problem, the device works almost perfectly. The internet browsing experience is faboulus, the camera is good, and the device is fast; the screen is great and the speakers are great as well. The keyboard is easy to type with and you can type fast after a short time. The video player does not seem to like my H.264 files (the OpenMAX decoder fails whereas on my PC ffmpeg is able to play it).

That’s all for now, I’ll write again when I have a N900 with working AV output.

The previous post

Well, it seems that several news sites (golem.de, pro-linux.de, linux-magazin.de, linux-magazine.com, ubuntu-user.de [the last ones all from the same publishing house]), especially German ones have picked up the last blog post with same false impressions.

First, they stated that I am planning an APT2 release for Christmas. They took the statement

[...] the internal branch has seen a lot of new code[...]. Most of the code will need to be reworked before it will be published, but I hope to have this completed until Christmas.

as a proof for this. But in the context of this paragraph, ‘publish’ was not meant in the term of publishing a release, but in the term of publishing the code (of the internal branch) in the public repository. The code is public now and lives in a ‘temp’ branch and will be reworked there for inclusion in the master branch.

Secondly, those news sites called me an Ubuntu developer. While I do contribute to Ubuntu, and am an Ubuntu Member, I am NOT an Ubuntu Developer, as I am NOT a member of the relevant ubuntu-dev team at launchpad.

Thirdly, those who stated that speed is a goal (mostly pro-linux, at least from my understanding): It is not, at least not now. It is just a coincidence caused by using a relational database. Furthermore, the test was not really fair, since the other package managers both provide more information than capt; information which has yet to be made accessible in APT2. It was just an initial conclusion that SQLite is quite fast.

Please note that APT2 is a free time project in development, and the programming language used is still in development as well; as well as some other reverse dependencies. I should also state that neither Debian nor Ubuntu have any plans to drop apt at the moment; and APT is still actively developed.

APT2 progress report for the 1st half of December

This week was successful. I have pushed some changes from November to the repository which change the license to LGPL-2.1+ (which makes bi-directional sharing of code with other projects easier, since most Vala code is under the same license) and implement HTTP using libsoup2.4 directly, instead of using GIO and GVFS for this. I also added a parser for the sources.list format which uses regular expressions to parse the file and is relatively fast. The code needs a current checkout of Vala’s git master to work correctly; as released versions had a bug which I noticed today and Jürg Billeter fixed in Vala 25 minutes later; thank you Jürg.

While nothing else happened in the public repository, the internal branch has seen a lot of new code; including SQLite 3 caches; Acquire text progress handling; and capt; the command-line advanced package tool. Most of the code will need to be reworked before it will be published, but I hope to have this completed until Christmas. It will also depend on Vala 0.7.9 or newer, which is yet to be released.

The decision to use SQLite 3 as a backend means that we won’t see the size limitations APT has and that development can be simplified by using SQL queries for filtering requests. It also means that APT2 will be very fast in most actions, like searching; which currently happens in 0.140 seconds (unstable,experimental and more repositories enabled), whereas aptitude takes 1.101 seconds, cupt (which has no on-disk cache) 1.292 seconds, and apt-cache 0.475 seconds. Searching is performed by one SQL query. I also want to thank Jens Georg <mail@jensge.org>, who wrote Rygel’s Database class which is also used with minor modifications (like defaulting to in-memory journals) in APT2 as well. Rygel.Database is a small wrapper around sqlite3 which makes it easier to program for Vala programmers.

The command-line application ‘capt’ provides a shell based on readline with history (and later on command completion) as well as direct usage like ‘capt config dump’ or ‘capt search python-apt’. Just as with Eugene’s cupt, ‘capt’ will be the only program in the core APT2 distribution and provide the same functionality currently provided by apt-get, apt-config and friends. The name is not perfect and can be easily confused with ‘cupt’, but it was the closest option for now; considering that the name ‘apt’ is already used by Java (for its “Annotation Processing Tool”).

That’s all for now, I’ll tell you once all those features have passed my QA, and there is really something usable in the repository. In the meanwhile, you can discuss external dependency solvers, database layouts and other stuff in their threads on deity@lists.debian.org.

And a ’screenshot’ from capt:

jak@hp:~/Desktop/APT2:temp$ capt
apt$ help
APT2 0.0.20091213 command-line frontend

Commands:
  config dump               Dump the configuration
  config get OPTION         Get the given option
  config set OPTION VALUE   Set the given option
  search EXPRESSION         Search for the given expression
  show PACKAGE              Show all versions of the given package
  sources list              Print a list of all sources
  version                   Print the version of APT2
apt$ search python-apt
build-depends-python-apt - Dummy package to fulfill package dependencies
python-apt - Python interface to libapt-pkg
python-apt-dbg - Python interface to libapt-pkg (debug extension)
python-apt-dev - Python interface to libapt-pkg (development files)
python-aptdaemon - Python module for the server and client of aptdaemon
python-aptdaemon-gtk - Python GTK+ widgets to run an aptdaemon client
apt$

MySQL

If Oracle owned MySQL, it would not make a big difference with regards to competition on the database market. Oracle would then own 2 relational databases. But there is also the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced open source database with several enhanced products from companies.

If Oracle closed MySQL, the community would step in. I truly believe that the free software community is strong enough to support MySQL. There already is MariaDB and I believe that this project could serve as the base in case Oracle closes MySQL or stops MySQL completely. The community was strong enough to build complete operating systems and maintain them, so it should not be that hard to support one database.

All in all, I don’t see how Oracle buying Sun (and thus MySQL) could negatively influence competition in the database market, and I would therefore recommend the EC to approve the Oracle-Sun deal as it, without imposing any conditions on Oracle.

Ubuntu Software Center coming to Debian

I just uploaded aptdaemon 0.11-1 and software-center 1.1debian1 to Debian unstable. They are currently waiting in NEW, and will hopefully pass it in a short time. I plan to replace gnome-app-install with software-center for Squeeze, but you can currently have both installed.

Ubuntu Software Center (or just ‘Software Center’) is a new graphical user interface for installing and removing applications; replacing gnome-app-install. Under the hood, it uses aptdaemon which exposes an interface to APT via D-Bus; i.e. something in the direction of PackageKit. At a later stage, the Software Center shall replace Synaptic, Update Manager and various other programs related to package management.

The aptdaemon package is completely compatible to the Ubuntu one, and could thus be synced directly to Ubuntu without any change (if Ubuntu supports “3.0 (quilt)” source packages now, I have not looked into this). The software-center package is based on the latest Ubuntu lucid package; and contains some generalization (e.g. replacing ‘Ubuntu Software Center’ with ‘Software Center’) at some more places. It still needs some work in the documentation and some parts of the program will have to be adjusted for Debian aswell. We also do not have a debianized icon yet; this will be worked on later.

Back to the ’90s – Bye PC, welcome back thin clients

In the ’90s, you had a large machine and several thin clients accessing it by using X11 via network. In 2010, you will have large datacenters providing applications to and storing the data of millions of users. As you might have guessed, I am talking about Google Chrome OS.

It seems that the PC era is slowly coming to an end, with devices being increasingly connected ‘to the cloud’ and people being always online; and storing their data on Google’s servers. We do emails online using Google Mail, we do navigation online using Google Maps, we edit and view our documents using Google Docs, our newspaper is Google News; and when we want entertainment we open the browser and type youtube.com into the URL bar. Even if we were formatting the hard disk and reinstalling the system, most people wouldn’t even notice; because all there data is stored online.

There is also the question of freedom. Free software is not very widespread in the SaaS world. You also lose the control over your data. But RMS can tell you more about it.

So it seems that 2010, Google is the new mainframe and netbooks and smartphones are the new terminals. Whether this is good or not cannot be said. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you can trust Google to keep your data secure or not. I trust them enough to host all of my emails, the RSS feeds I read, my searches.