April 6th, 2008
Some UMTS/G3 cards currently still have a problem with umtsmon as it has a usage pattern of the ttyUSB ports of those cards that makes them act very strange or even don’t work at all with them. While there is a simple workaround to let umtsmon only use their first port via the ‘-s’ parameter this is very annoying as it won’t allow umtsmon to update the signal strength display while its connected.
Klaas (the author of umtsmon) is already working on a “good” fix, but this patch at least for now can give you a working Option GE/GT 0201 card with also a updated status/signal strength display.
Currently umtsmon (in usual two port mode) uses the 2nd port (usually ttyUSB2) to send AT-commands to the card while the first one (usually ttyUSB0) is used for the ppp connection. So the second one can still be used to query the signal strength for example. But it seems some cards like the Option GE or GT 0201 can only do the ppp connection on the port where the final ATD(T) command was issued.
So the one port workaround also will make this happen, but the attached patch will do so with still using the second one later on while connected.
Once this is fixed by Klaas neither the one port workaround nor this quick dirty hack is needed, but for now i thought perhaps maybe someone might also find it useful.
newportusage3.patch
Posted in Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware | No Comments »
April 6th, 2008
If your notebook has a Ricoh RL5c476 controller which also provides the MMC host adapter R5C843 you got quite some trouble getting access to real MMC memorycards with the internel cardreader. But already since upstream kernel 2.6.25-rc1 there is patch from me included that’ll solve this problem for you by extending the ricoh_mmc driver accordingly.
Should you still encounter problems with mmc cards on this controller i’ll be very happy to get some feedback from you.
Posted in Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware, SuSE/Novell | 1 Comment »
April 6th, 2008
The nozomi driver in the upstream kernel in the meantime got some nice improvements. Especially a patch from me (available since 2.6.25-rc6) fixed a stability problem when accessing the card extremely early after insertion (e.g. when doing constant polling on /dev/noz* devices). The driver now contains a simple state management allowing access not until the card is really ready for it.
Since this change i consider the driver to be extremely stable. I wasn’t able to trigger any problems with it on a lot of very cruel tests. If any of you still sees problems with your nozomi card, please let me know it!
Posted in Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware, SuSE/Novell | No Comments »
February 1st, 2008
Today morning i stumbled over this nice (german) page (http://www.tuxevara.de/categories/5-Linux) about my backport patch for the kobil_sct driver to kernel 2.6.22. In openSuSE 10.3 (where i first saw the problem that those Kobil USB cardreaders don’t work anymore) i fixed this, but in some other distributions this still seems to be missing. That page describes how to fix it for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon using my patch and i was very pleased by the nice words about me 
Thanks!
Posted in Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware | No Comments »
January 29th, 2008
The nozomi driver, needed for many Option UMTS/3G(+) datacards, now finally made it to become part of Linus official Linux kernel (git-) tree.
Since Gregs commit on last friday the driver can now be used when you compile your kernel with CONFIG_NOZOMI set.
Due to my care of the nozomi driver (btw: this is japanese for hope) i also have the honour to be listed as its author
To check whether your card is one of those supported by it, lspci of your card should report to have the Option Qualcom MSM6275 UMTS chip (PCI ID 1931:000C).
Thanks a lot to Greg Kroah-Hartman, who made this possible
For those of you who wonder how to use this card: even with this driver you need some userspace bits to really make use of your datacard. But thanks to e.g. utmsmon this is really easy.
Posted in Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware | 1 Comment »
January 24th, 2008
Since my wife gave me a Garmin eTrex H (small but really nice) gps unit on last christmas, we both enjoy making use of this thing whenever there is time (which sadfully wasn’t that much the last weeks). For her its mostly the geocaching that makes fun, doing some intersting puzzles while taking walks in the nature or nice parts of the city. For me it became additionally interesting since my RS232-Cable for this unit arrived
Thankfully there are already a lot of nice Linux applications for it (geocaching and my garmin), but the best of it – QLandkarte, a Qt4 application – didn’t have a driver for my eTrex H back then. Of course this gave me the nice chance to step in and write one for it .. which i did immediately. In the meantime the support for my unit is one of the best in QLandkarte. I added support for waypoint up- and downloading, track-downloading, route-uploading and Display/Screenshot-downloading, which is already all available via the upstream svn .. while the last feature (screencapturing) isn’t even supported by garmins windows tool, i’m still working on the last possible feature to add: realtime-logging support. Fortunately QLandkarte has a really nice and open community. I also made sure QLandkarte is now also available in openSuSE Factory (although not with the latest and greatest features from svn, but I’ll definitely update it for 11.0). Until then i’ll probably also have the realtime-logging feature ready. Additionally i did quite some rework of QLandkartes “serial-access-layer” (its CSerial class) which now greatly improved and speeded up the access to all units using a serial interface.
To make best use of QLandkarte you’ll also need a Garmin Map File (*.img), but there are a lot of free ones available and of course you can make use of OSM and convert it (with Mkgmap) to one.
(Screenshot of QLandkarte showing my way from home to the office with activated track info)
On the commandline there is gpsbabel which is kind of a “swiss army knife” in this area. The openSuSE Buildservice of course also has a prebuilt package for it in the Application:Geo project. E.g. a simple “gpsbabel -w -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx” transfers all saved waypoints (from the garmin gps unit connected to ttyUSB0) to the waypoints.gpx file (a very common fileformat for a lot of geo usecases).
To organize your geocaches (you already did or plan to do) there is e.g. CacheWolf (eventhough its a java app its quite ok).
Posted in Family, Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware, Private | 3 Comments »
August 28th, 2007
FrOSCon really was a great event. To be honest, beforehand i personally doubted it could be even comparable to e.g. FOSDEM in Brussels, but i was totally wrong! Eventhough it probably was a little bit smaller than FOSDEM, in many aspects i found it even better than FOSDEM this year.
The more i found it sad, there has not been a openSUSE booth or let alone a openSUSE track of presentations.
The organizers of it really did a fantastic job. Absolutely every aspect was prepared very well, so e.g. i think this was the first conference i attended where not a single presenter i saw had to struggle (wasting time) getting his/her laptop to work with the installed beamer, or even not to forget the free coffee for all visitors and a very reliable wireles internet access.
Most of the presentations were really very good (and one could also additionally give feedback and rate them on a webpage). Topics were nicely spread over many areas and levels, so everybody should have found appropriate talks.
The booths (too many to remember and name all here) all had many visitors and the ambience was very positive and relaxed. I felt very welcome and absolutely everybody was very willing to help with any kind of question or problem.
I really hope i can make it again there next year.
Posted in OpenSourceSoftware | 1 Comment »
May 31st, 2007
One of my very little side-projects – a digital picture frame out of old disused hardware – is getting really interesting. I was able to setup a complete self-contained system.. ranging from automatic gathering of pictures as soon as one inserts a CD into it .. to a very extreme powermanagement setup where i took special care of the harddisk (that is really really loud). Now i came up with a special harddisk monitoring that refreshes the caches quite intelligently and shuts the disk off again. So theres nearly no harddisk activity at all while the system is up.. its really amazing.
Hopefully i can present more on this topic soon here. Perhaps even with pictures of the finished device.
Posted in Hacking, OpenSourceSoftware | No Comments »
May 18th, 2007
In the last days and weeks i realized a lot of things in my life changed or seem to do so soon. Some of those changes are extremly welcome while others are not. A very positive example is my current focus on getting a full-time kernel developer. Even though its not yet fully clear to me if or what of my set goals in this regard will actually become true, but at least i have quite some hope a transitioning towards upstream kernel development is achievable or nearer than ever before. So, please keep your fingers crossed..
On the other side a quite sad example showed up the last day. While a very nice family celebration i had to realized the “gap” between my seven years older brother and me seems to have become quite large. Don’t know why we are that totally different. I used to think thats because of our big difference in age, but comparing it e.g. to my awesome colleague “seife” – who is even a bit older and who i really look up to – i meanwhile doubt this heavily. In fact i’m feeling e.g. indescribably more comfortable being with my team colleagues than with my own brother.
I guess that’s just the way it is. So, live is change, but having so many great people i can rely and trust on .. starting from my beloved wife to my parents and in-laws to my great colleagues .. this is as right as rain.
Posted in Private | No Comments »
May 16th, 2007
Last week i had a fantastic business trip to Prague (capital of Czech Republic). I really got a hell of a lot out of it in so many ways this blog wouldn’t last out for. But i want to thank Lars, Greg, Jeff, Nat, Lucie and all who made this fantastic thing possible! Thank you so much for this great opportunity!
Of course i also had recreational events that were really nice. Let me tell you that Prague is a very beautiful city and always worth a visit. Beyond even the surrounding area was really awesome and very recommendable for a trip.
Posted in Private, SuSE/Novell | No Comments »
