How to deal with crazy people at the office?

I'm not sure but I'm learning how to right now. Its a real experience! After two months of pain, I finally decided to google for an answer. The first thing that came up was http://www.dumblittleman.com/2009/07/9-useful-strategies-to-dealing-with.html.

Looks like I'm doing everything wrong. Time to take on a new track. As its said in the Gita - focus on work and duty. 

Wading into a flame

Spent the afternoon building X11, Wayland, Weston etc.. Got past many issues except the last bit - weston. Weston is the reference compositor. It depends on a number of things include libudev. And that's where we run into a big problem. libudev is part of systemd, which for some reason depends on intltool. intltool by itself does not advertise it but requires gettext!

So, basically if you want a nice graphical compositor you need internationalization work.  One more vote for udev to split from systemd.

Linux News - Feb 10, 2013

1 Linux Graphics

1.1 FOSDEM 2013. I'm sharing slides specific to Linux graphics, X11 and Wayland.

• Razor QT is a lightweight desktop environment (unlike KDE). 1.0 release is coming soon. Slides presented at FOSDEM 2013 -https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/razorqt/attachments/slides/200/export/events/attachments/razorqt/slides/200/fosdem2013.pdf
• Lots of Videos including from previous events at http://video.fosdem.org/
• Wayland input methods - https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/waylandinput/
• Overlays in Wayland with atomic page flips - https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/westonoverlays/
• Walkthrough of the state of Linux Graphics and Security - https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/drinext/

1.2 Daniel Vetter's crash course on Intel's DRM/KMS architecture.

• http://blog.ffwll.ch/2012/10/i915gem-crashcourse.html
• http://blog.ffwll.ch/2012/11/i915gem-crashcourse-part-2.html
• http://blog.ffwll.ch/2012/11/i915gem-crashcourse-part-3.html
• http://blog.ffwll.ch/2013/01/i915gem-crashcourse-part-4.html

1.3 More wayland updates.

• The real story behind Wayland and X11 by Daniel Stone - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
• KDE will use Server Side decorations - http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/client-side-window-decorations-and-wayland/

2 Linux Distros

2.1 Fedora 18 for ARM released

• OMAP4 image - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F18_Release_Announcement.

2.2 So what is a Linux distribution?

• A Distro is the Linux operating system built on top of the kernel. Wikipedia has a great timeline of how different distros evolved. Each distro has its own goal. In general, here's a list of Linux Distros supporting Pandaboard.

Distro	Download Link	Instructions
Ubuntu (Desktop Image)	http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-12.10-desktop-armhf+omap4.img	Download and flash to SD Card
Ubuntu (Server Image)	http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-12.10-server-armhf+omap4.img	Download and flash to SD Card
Linaro	http://releases.linaro.org/12.03/ubuntu/oneiric-images/nano	Download and flash to SD Card
Fedora	http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/18/Images/armhfp/Fedora-18-panda-armhfp.img.xz	Download and flash to SD Card
Arch Linux	http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/pandaboard	Download and flash to SD Card
Debian	No direct support but supports OMAP3 (Beagleboard) and ARMv7 in general	Use Debootstrap to create ARMv7 image and flash to SD Card
Gentoo	http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/pandaboard/install.xml	Use a PC running Gentoo and build image by compiling every software from scratch. Then flash to SD Card
Yocto	https://www.yoctoproject.org/download/yocto-project-13-poky-80 + Meta-TIhttps://github.com/Angstrom-distribution/meta-ti	Use a PC and build image by compiling every software from scratch. Then flash to SD Card
Buildroot	http://buildroot.uclibc.org/download.html	Use a PC and build image by compiling every software from scratch. Then flash to SD Card
Slackware	No direct support but supports ARMv5+ -ftp://ftp.arm.slackware.com:slackwarearm/slackwarearm-14.0	Port from QEMU to OMAP4

2.3 Phoronix's comparision of 4 distros on Pandaboard

• http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=arm_linux_fourway&num=1.

Linux news - Feb 2, 2013

1 Automotive Linux

• The H Online has a post asking what's the next big platform for linux - http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-s-the-next-big-platform-for-Linux-1794404.html. Its worth a read esp. since its not the Auto Industry's perspective but one from mainstream Linux.

2 Graphics

2.1 QT

• New QT software releases this week. QT5.0.1 released - http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/01/31/qt-5-0-1-released/. At the same time, a new release of QT Creator is available - http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/01/31/qt-creator-2-6-2-released/
• There's a new browser written with QtWebkit for rendering. All the widgets are QT based - QUPZilla. Its lightweight too. -http://www.qupzilla.com
• Finally, QTWayland is in development with a QT native compositor framework. Full code can be accessed fromhttp://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qtwayland

2.2 Enlightenment

• E18 development has started. - http://e18releasemanager.wordpress.com

2.3 Optimus support in Linux

• One annoynance with the latest Dell laptops we have is that Optimus graphics. With Optimus, there are 2 GPUs - Intel GPU and an Nvidia GPU. In BIOS if you don't turn off the Nvidia GPU and you boot linux, then the CPU fan runs continuously. The solution which IT teams give is to turn off the NVidia GPU and only use Intel. But that means you get a very low resolution when running Linux. Dave Arlie (maintainer for DRM) has started looking at this and even has some code which doesn't require you to turn off the NVidia GPU. Details - http://airlied.livejournal.com/76723.html

3 General Software Development

• Raymond Chen has an awesome post on the name 'pivot' and how its used in Microsoft nowadays -http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/01/22/10387008.aspx. We have similar things in all companies too, where we seems to reinventing the wheel by forgetting how things were done 5-10 years back. No prizes for guessing what we are reinventing :-)
• Martin Fowler makes a great point on Internal Programmability -http://martinfowler.com/bliki/InternalReprogrammability.html. Emacs (and Lisp) users nod in agreement!