Option “AccelMethod” “xaa”

In the driver section of xorg.conf. Hopefully EXA will get faster in the future.

Oh, and Nokia are giving the GNOME Foundation the proceeds from some number of their groovy N770 tablet things. This appears to have caused some problems with some people because of their stance on software patents. On which there was an excellent talk yesterday, which far too few people attended.

The big news of the day they weren’t allowed to announce because the Internet got taken out of the building and so people couldn’t check if it was already public news. So this morning we all discovered that Novell have signed a huge deal with part of the US Government which will involve Linux desktops being deployed… running GNOME of course, since it’s Novell.

Oh and apparently the Chinese government have over 1,000,000 machines running GNOME. Wow.

Now I just need to amuse myself until I meet up with Daniel again, and then go to the airport to catch my flight home.

Tomorrow may not be as good though, it’s GNOME User and Business day, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing happening before lunch that I’m really interested in. While on the bright side this means that I can actually have breakfast at the hotel tomorrow, it also means nothing to do…

I shall probably have breakfast then come in and use the wi-fi, do some hacking or some writing or something, and talk to people. I’ve not really done enough of that — I want to talk to Davyd Madely about his panel applets ideas, although I doubt I can add anything he hasn’t already thought of I may at least be able to get a clearer idea of what he’s after and how it’s all going to work.

Someone next to me just asked Keith Packard for his signature to, if I heard this right, stick on a mainframe somewhere. Cool and weird — that’s GUADEC. People are saying it’s the best one yet, which might just be nostalgic warm fuzziness, but may also have something to do with the fact that this has been a very good conference so far. I haven’t of course been to one before, so I don’t have a basis for comparison.

Went to Keith Packard’s talk, then to Owen Taylor’s. Both very interesting. Chatted to Murray Cumming. Had a bit of a panic about battery power of the Powerbook (see yesterday’s entry). Located an Apple Store — today I went there and got myself a PSU. Woohoo! Now I have a spare, although it’s got a German plug on it so I’ll have to get an adaptor at the airport to use it at home. Of course, at home is the proper one… I think I’ll keep this spare one in my laptop bag at all times to help prevent this sort of thing happening again.

Much kudos and many thanks to the people who helped me find the shop and lent me power in the mean time.

Am now in Davyd Madeley’s talk on panel applets and it’s interesting so I’m going to start paying attention. More later.

Did a very stupid thing though – left PowerBook charger at home. Bah. Have hijacked stacato’s computer to do this, but it’s going to severely diminish the time I was hoping to have hacking on Growl while I’m here. Which is a shame, because I was feeling all enthusiastic. Hopefully I can borrow someone’s charger, there seem to be a few people around GUADEC with Apple laptop and I hope that by using other people’s chargers for a bit of time here and there I can acquire enough charge for a bit of hacking or writing.

Writing would be good actually. Best thing about it? Doesn’t use much power. Muahahahahaha. Good thing I brought with me a couple of good books.

Byee!

Framebuffer console works to a point, but it doesn’t like me trying to specify modes. I need to look into that one.

The other night was the company Christmas do, excellent food, excellent company, good venue — couldn’t have been much better really! Here’s to as good a one next year. Assuming I’m still working for them next year, that is… no plans to leave just yet, but you never know.

Perhaps the biggest thing to change is the panel structure — gone are the different types of panel, and instead we have but one kind of panel which can pretend to be all the other kinds of panel, leading to much greater flexibility. The rounded corners on the menu panel are gone of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an applet to emulate those before too long. However, I personally don’t miss them, as it’s a bit odd to have rounded corners on a dead-square TFT screen like mine.

The other biggest thing one notices is that some of the library dependencies and packaging have been moved around. The one that may cause upgraders compiling from source the most grief is the removal of the liblinc package. All liblinc’s functions have been moved into bonobo-activation, and so if, like me, you upgrade using the ebuilds from BreakMyGentoo — which are no doubt similar to the ebuilds which will end up in Portage for 2.4.0 final — you will find that you have to recompile everything which links to liblinc, as bonobo-activation blocks on the linc package, thus forcing an unmerge before you can continue.

Happily, emerging a recent version of gentoolkit gives you the revdep-rebuild script, which although slow, is capable of finding everything that’s linked to libraries which don’t exist and attempting to remerge them. It doesn’t work out of the box, as if you don’t do an emerge -u world regularly (which I do not recommend as it’s the way to all kinds of grief especially if you’re using unstable) you’ll find it trying to remerge versions of packages you have installed — versions which have been pruned from the Portage tree.

My tactic, which worked fairly well, is to take its temporary file .revdep-rebuild.4_ebuilds, edit it to take out all the versions and then do something like ‘cat ebuild_list | xargs emerge’ to emerge all the packages in the file. You might want to do a pretend emerge on that first of course…

Hmm, I’ve digressed somewhat. One disappointment in GNOME 2.4.0 beta 1 is that the click-in-window-to-raise-it behaviour is back in Metacity, despite being out of CVS HEAD last time I checked it out. I shall check it out again and compare; with any luck the 2.5 Metacity is coming from a branch. I don’t want to have to try and persuade Havoc to change this behaviour a third time…

UPDATE: Looks like the Metacity maintainers have gone for the Bad Way to do quite a few things, so I’m trying out how well GNOME and xfwm4 get along, because although I love GNOME’s environment over XFCE, xfwm4 seems so much more sensible, and for some reason manages to have almost all the correct behaviour. What a shock that is.

sudo hdparm -S 252 /dev/hda /dev/hdb

21 minutes later… both hard drives spin down. Aaaah, quiet…

What I do mind is that GTK+ 2.2.1 appears to have broken coloured tabs in Galeon CVS… either that or it’s the new GNOME libgnomeui. I shall have to grab an updated version of Galeon and see if it’s fixed, but I’m disappointed – this is supposed to be API/ABI stable, but it’s not. Additions are all very well, but when things stop working, something’s going wrong.

I’m going to go to bed now.