Archive of posts from 2011
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GNOME won't let you watch your videos in peace
Screensaver control on the Linux desktop is a total mess, but the xdg-screensaver command provided an interim cross-desktop solution by detecting and using the appropriate underlying interfaces. For GNOME, it depends on the gnome-screensaver-command --poke option, but that has been broken and then removed in favour of
the cross-desktop D-Bus API org.freedesktop.ScreenSaveranother GNOME-specific API which can't practically be used by xdg-screensaver.What's more, switching to the new API seems to have introduced various bugs in GNOME's own video player, Totem, such that it often failed to inhibit the screensaver in GNOME 2.32 and 3.0. Apparently everything is wonderful again in 3.2; here's hoping.
(In case anyone asks where my bug report on the totem package is, I already looked at the bug list and it's clear that there's no point.)
Updated: Well I said the GNOME Session D-Bus API couldn't practically be used in xdg-screensaver, but then set out to prove myself wrong. And with the aid of Perl, I may have succeeded.
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I am going to DebConf11
I have a talk to give, hacking to do, and I should be helping with
video as well. Hope to see you in Banja Luka!
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Testing new hardware support for Debian 6.0.2
The Debian kernel team regularly backports driver updates to the Linux kernel in stable releases to add support for new hardware, and I've prepared several updates intended for point release 6.0.2. Since the kernel team does not have a large collection of hardware on which to test driver changes, we would appreciate test reports from users. It is important to test not just that new devices are supported properly, but that there are no regressions in support for older devices.
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Upcoming changes in Debian Linux packages for i386
The major upcoming configuration change in Linux 2.6.39 is to get rid of the '686' flavour. This may be surprising, because it's the most widely used flavour of the 4 we have a present:
Name Minimum CPU features Maximum total CPU threads Physical address space 486 486-class 1 4 GiB 686 686-class; CMOV instruction 32 4 GiB 686-bigmem 686-class; PAE 32 64 GiB amd64 x86-64 512 64 TiB -
Recent changes in Debian Linux packages
Linux 2.6.38 and 2.6.39
As you've probably seen, the testing suite finally got a new upstream kernel version (Linux 2.6.38) and is currently synchronised with unstable. I'm just about to upload a new version of linux-2.6 based on upstream stable update 2.6.38.4.
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Distinguishing Ethernet-like net device types
David Paleino asks:I'm still missing how to reliably detect if a device is a "wired" or a "wireless" one. I suspect that checking the existence of /phy80211 would be enough, but I can't really tell, and seems like I'm not able to find an exhaustive sysfs reference manual.
Sadly there is no exhaustive manual, but many attributes found in sysfs are documented under Documentation/ABI/. In this case you need the DEVTYPE name from the net device's uevent, which may be e.g. 'wlan' or 'wwan' (and is absent for wired Ethernet devices). I don't know why this isn't also exposed as an attribute in its own right.