Today, Nokia and Intel announced the merge of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project. This is sad, because it will end the era of the Debian-based mobile operating system Maemo and replace it with a system using RPM and probably some other evil stuff as well. In fact, dpkg & apt-get where two of my main reasons to buy the N900. And another question is why yet another name. Moblin was already a well-known name and they shouldn’t have changed the name just because they switch the servers and add some Nokia developers. ... Read more 》

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.

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

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. ... Read more 》

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. ... Read more 》

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. ... Read more 》

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 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. ... Read more 》

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. ... Read more 》

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. ... Read more 》

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. ... Read more 》