Timo’s Blog

Now this is fun. Not. [English translation]

I’m deeply disappointed by the organization committee of the LinuxTag. Speakers: What about using some of this beautiful artwork on your slides? Or make it simple and obvious.

Oh, finally.

The new Beatsteaks record “.limbo messiah” just leaked. Congratulations for delaying the leak — by tomorrow morning everyone can grab the CD at stores. I’m already looking forward to take an indirect way to work and get it early.

Exactly three years ago, on March 29th 2004, they have released their last record Smack Smash. That has been such a long time…

Living in Berlin? Lucky you.

Now that was amazing. Got my new mobile this morning. I was worried about nothing but getting my contacts synced without too much fiddling.

I can recall last time I went through this. It was a pain. It was incomplete. It came with wth dta lss. It even forced me to use the other operating system.

That was roughly two years ago.

Today, it was complete, I did not suffer data loss. I was not required to use anything but free software. Thanks Daniel and the OpenSync crew for that nifty piece of software.

Anyone heading to FOSDEM: Don’t miss Daniel’s talk on Sunday. And: Bring your mobile gadgets — I’m pretty sure that Daniel will sync anything… at least for beer.

It just have been a few days when I realized that this does not only does the trick for GNU/Linux on IBM^w{IBM,Lenovo} ThinkPads. Today an ASUS R1F made its way into the notorious office of the Team Mobile Devices, here in Nuremberg at SuSE.

After a couple of minutes — about 20 minutes to install SLED10 SP1 Beta2 on that cutie — I was stoked to see that ASUS is shipping the UPEK/SGS Thomson Microelectronics fingerprint reader, too. ThinkFinger just works.

RandR/xrandr(1)/resapplet work as expected, letting you rotate the screen in any direction. However, the cursor is moving a little funny when using the touchscreen. I’m pretty sure that Danny will take care of that.

Lazy? Get packages of ThinkFinger 0.2.1 for either SLES/SLED 10, SLES/SLED 10 SP1 or openSUSE 10.2.

Just released ThinkFinger 0.2.1. Even if the project is just growing up, the resonance is just smashing. It is getting busy on the list, patches are flowing in. Thanks to the efforts of Wolfgang the project now has a nifty website. It is very well integrated with the SourceForge services: Once a news item is added using the SourceForge news system, it also shows up on the project website. Less work — more fun.

What. A. Beauty. [http://thinkfinger.sourceforge.net]

Oh, not that I miss the project news: ThinkFinger is not just for IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. The received reports state that ThinkFinger also breaths life into the UPEK/SGS Thomson Microelectronics fingerprint readers built into Dell and (selected) Toshiba laptops. I will talk about ThinkFinger on this year’s FOSDEM.

P.S. Drop me a note if you speak Hebrew.

Tired of typing passwords? Tired of using closed source products? If you caught yourself nodding twice in a row please read on.

Several laptop vendors (e.g. IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba) are using a fingerprint reader developed by STMicroelectronic/UPEK. Up to now there was some closed source solution in order to use the fingerprint reader with GNU/Linux and PAM. Last year Pavel came up with his hack called thinkfinger which — by now — has grown a little. I have taken over and created a small library (libthinkfinger) as well as suitable pluggable authentication module (PAM). That’s all you need to get rid of the binary crap which was previously unavoidable.

ThinkFinger: Just a swipe (YouTube)

Preliminary instructions should be straight forward. OpenSUSE users feel free to grab packages from here. I’ll push them to our build service as soon as possible.

Get ThinkFinger 0.2. You will need PAM >= 0.81. Expect regular code drops on SourceForge SVN. Discuss on thinkfinger-devel.

It finally earned its first version tag — I just released KNetworkManager 0.1. After almost one year of development it was about time to push out a versioned tarball rather than working and releasing subversion revisions.

KNetworkManager connected to a wireless network; exposing device and network details. [enlarge]

Connection in progress. [enlarge]

Editor for wireless networks. [enlarge]

Configure notifications (such as ‘new wireless network found’) [enlarge]

Tooltip in the tray while being connected. [enlarge]

Configuration dialog for WPA Enterprise. [enlarge]

If you don’t find bugs feel free to send us meaningful feature requests :-)

In other news, our interview “Going Mobile” (a.k.a. “the Nuremberg Beer Garden Edition”) hit Novell Open Audio. Go, give it a listen.

Late in spring I’ve spent two weeks in Spain. Accepted Barcelona as yet-another-huge-city — exploring the north (Cadaqués, Olot) and south (Tarragona) definitely shows you more about life in Catalonia.

Novell expanding its business? Coffee break in Tarragona [enlarge]

Tarragona at Night [enlarge]

Back in Nuremberg work was fun, pushing out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 shortened the nights. Once taking a break from hacking I have spent most of the time assembling and riding my new bike. No assembly instructions used.

White is beatuful [enlarge]

The first weekend in August the city of Nuremberg all belonged to them. The best mountainbike freeriders stopped by and caused surprise by everyone passing.

Paul Bas’ at the Red Bull District Ride 2006 in Nuremberg [enlarge]

A week after the Red Bull District Ride, Ted and Erin — the driving forces of Novell Open Audio — stopped by in Nuremberg. As representatives of the Team Mobile Devices Holger and me gave an interview on our current work and future plans on how make our distributions rock even more ;-) For a suitable atmosphere we decided to let all this happen in a lovely beer garden not far from the SuSE headquaters. Expect the results to show up on Novell Open Audio shortly.

Beautiful Crozon [enlarge]

It turned out that France was the best choice for freeing my mind from work. The trip: Paris - Crozon - Quiberon - Paris. Both, Crozon and Quiberon are peninsulas. Crozon was the better place to stay at — by far. I have never seen such a beautiful coast in Europe like on the west coast of Crozon. It felt like the best mix of the rough coast of Cornwall and the sandy 90 Mile Beach in the north of New Zealand.

While roaming Montmartre I got scared: The first aliens I have seen in my life! And they looked as real as it could get — at least on a Atari 2600. Be aware, they are not only in Paris.

Space Invaders in Montmartre [enlarge]

Two weeks ago I attended the SuSE Labs Conference 2006. This year it was held in the Harrachov, Czech Republic. The conference was fun and now I finally can associate those fancy nick names on IRC with real faces. The conference was followed by a social event called Indian Summer. Incredible how much efforts our friends from Prague invested to make this unique event happen.

Having a beer with Holger at the SuSE Labs Conference [enlarge]

Time to get busy: Let’s see what we can do this time to make openSUSE 10.2 the best distribution around ;-)

Heading towards Release Candidate 1 of SUSE Linux 10.1! RC1 is going to be released on Thursday, be prepared. It will ship with NetworkManager 0.6.2 and, of course, with the latest version of KNetworkManager.

A few days ago Will committed KNotify support while I’ve been mainly hunting for lurking bugs. There were quite some show stoppers which are fixed now. Feel free to grab a copy of the latest version (SVN r5961).

Watched the trailer of Drop In Season 4 this weekend — simply amazing. Lucky kiwis, I really miss something similar on kraut TV. Especially the second part of the trailer is awesome as there is a terrific song playing in the background. It took me some time to find out who is playing (The Resistance) and which song it is (Revenge on the Riverside, sample).

It’s out! After an exciting (well, nerve-racking) week of identifying and eliminating nasty bugs we have mastered Beta 8 of SL, SLES and SLED. Get involved — give it a try. It’s worth it.

The Latest: SUSE LINUX 10.1 Beta 8 [enlarge]

Having implemented the final bits for VPN and WPA Enterprise support, KNetworkManager now has entered bug-fixing mode. With regard to this: Beta 8 comes with the latest NetworkManager (0.6.1, changes) — delightful.

The other day, I got my hands on some pretty amazing sampler of Victory Records. Listening to it using my omnipresent companion I was instantly hooked on two songs. As I could not find any track of both bands — Bayside and The Forecast — in my otherwise well sorted archive I had to get in touch with my pal Stephan. And…. That goes without saying: He had them all. Bayside - Sirens and Condolences (2004), Bayside - s/t (2005) and The Forecast - Late Night Conversations (2005). Impressing. Oh, by the way, Stephan just turned 0x20. Congrats.

Please Take Your Choice: WPA Enterprise Support [enlarge]

My last post on KNetworkManager triggered quite some feedback — thank you! Answers to the questions posed are usually of interest for the rest, too. On that score: NetworkManager does support WPA/WPA2 Personal and WPA/WPA2 Enterprise. And so does KNetworkManager. Today I have committed another hunk. WPA Enterprise: WORKSFORME. Unfortunately, KNetworkManager has not yet found a public CVS/SVN home. Here’s a snapshot as of today.

Beta 7 is out. My installations were smooth, no major bugs found. The last couple of days I’ve been hacking on the KNetworkManager implementation for VPN support.

$ svn diff -r 5769 |diffstat |tail -n 1
19 files changed, 1184 insertions(+), 108 deletions(-)

As I did not have any VPN account to do some initial testing. I had to wait till this day to get first reports on the work. Juergen — based in Dusseldorf, one of Novell’s senior consultants — spotted a bug in the VPN back-end triggered by my front-end code. Fix should be out within a day. I was totally perplexed by the accurate debugging he did, great job!

Christian, our new trainee in the team Mobile Devices, spent most of the day on debugging and provided valuable information on how to set up pieces in order to enjoy Turnpike, the Novell VPN solution.

Tomorrow SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta 7 will be ready.  However — as Andreas mentioned in his post recently on opensuse-announce — the next public Beta will be Beta 8 (to be released on March, 17th).

If we keep up pushing things as we did over the last weeks we are going to ship a rocking, solid SUSE Linux 10.1. What else would we want to ask for in order to hardening Code 10? Succinct: Nothing.

Finally we have published the FOSDEM talks of the openSUSE crew. Three flavours: audio-only (ogg, 75kbps), small video (ogg/theora, 384×288) and large video (ogg/theora, 720×576). Grab your personal copy on the openSUSE wiki.

The most thrilling part of our talk on Linux Power Management definitly starts at around 17m15s. It was Holger’s sure instinct in avoidance of a cliffhanger.

Looking forward towards FOSDEM 2007.  Good point of time to get used to next year’s date.

About one year has passed since I fed my blog with updates. The perfect excuse for this: The only raison d’être for the blog was my diploma thesis. As I submitted my thesis in January 2005 I had no motivations to carry on posting. Nevertheless, I have decided to import the old posts as they are a valid part of my time blogging.

Racked with pain, this is something aweful.

Looks like the first TODO is already gone. Thanks to this post I’m no longer required to suffer while editing.