Dual Head with Compiz and i965 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Everything works fine with the new distro, no need for external repositories anymore. BTW, the dist-upgrade also resolves issues with Blender, meaning that you can use the dynamically linked version from Ubuntu repos again.

Them Crooked Vultures

Es wird Zeit für eine neue Supergroup. Das, was sich jetzt anbahnt, übersteigt so manch eine Erwartung eines Rock-Liebhabers: an den Drums ist Dave Grohl, der Mann von Nirvana. An die Gitarre und Mikrofon macht sich der Frontmann von den Queens of the Stone Age ran – Josh Homme. Den Bass liefert John Paul Jones, das Sound-Genie von Led Zeppelin. Spreeblick hat schon berichtet, als erst ein Teaser raus war, was ich den Machern hoch anrechne. Jetzt gibt es einen ganzen Song auf YouTube zum „Probehören“. Video nach dem Klick.

Compile Android Cupcake from source on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

I have checked out the recent sources for Android 1.5 Cupcake on my Jaunty box and have not been able to compile it. After some research, I have found a solution, which originates from the android-porting mailing list. The problem is buried in the customized Qemu Makefile. You should apply the following pach and hope everything works fine for you, too:

project external/qemu/
diff --git a/Makefile.android b/Makefile.android
index 4c697fb..98d2084 100644
--- a/Makefile.android
+++ b/Makefile.android
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ MY_CFLAGS := $(CONFIG_INCLUDES) -O2 -g \

 # this is needed to build the emulator on 64-bit Linux systems
 ifeq ($(HOST_OS)-$(HOST_ARCH),linux-x86)
-  MY_CFLAGS += -Wa,--32
+  MY_CFLAGS += -Wa,--32 -D_GNU_SOURCE
 endif

 ifeq ($(HOST_OS),freebsd)

Wordle

Wordle macht Tag-Clouds auch von Delicious

Wordle macht aus einem Text eine Tag-Cloud, deren Aussehen man ziemlich fein abstimmen kann. Als Eingabe taugt ein beliebiger Text, oder eine Website, oder, wie in meinem Fall, ein del.icio.us-Account.

Dual-Head with i965 under Ubuntu

xserver-xorg-video-intel has been updated to 2:2.6.3-0ubuntu9.1 last Wednesday. Since then, XRandR forced the virtual resolution to 2048×2048 and ignored the custom settings in my xorg.conf. This bug hast been fixed on Monday, but is still in jaunty-proposed repository, meaning that you will have to wait a couple of days for it to be pushed through into the main jaunty repo. Alternatively, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-proposed restricted main multiverse universe
deb-src http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-proposed restricted main multiverse universe

Remember, this only resolves the problem with XRandR in a simple dual-head setting. If you also want to run Compiz at this resolution, you may want to use my custom packages. I have updated them to work* with the current Jaunty update without setting them on hold.

* Please beware – these drivers may crash your X11. I have only tested them with recent Lenovo Thinkpads (T400 and X200), and there have been no issues. But this patch has been reportedly crashing other systems.

Twitter vs. RSS [Update]

Twitter was actually not supposed to become something like this, but nowadays more and more blogs start sending updates through it. Due to the 140 character limitation, these updates tend to contain only the headline and a (shortened) link to the original post. A very obvious example is the German A-Blog Spreeblick. Some other users do the same, but not with their own posts, but instead, the tweets link to various sites which are worth sharing.

Otype already claims the death of RSS, but here is my own opinion: why not both? I like using Twitter from my mobile phone, because of its simplicity and its real-time manner. But if I really want to read news, not „brain farts“, I still use an RSS-Reader, even when mobile. With it, I can easily prefetch the feeds at home with WiFi and then read them offline when on the way. This preserves bandwidth and battery, which is not unimportant. And on the desktop, RSS still beats Twitter because you can organize feeds in categories.

So yeah, Twitter is cool for sharing, but it is still not a real syndication alternative.

[Update] Techcrunch also tells us to switch to Twitter and to let RSS die.

Dual Head with Compiz and i965 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

It seems that the bug mentioned in my previous post hasn’t been fixed in the upcoming Ubuntu release. I have uploaded the fixed driver packages into my PPA, so after upgrading to Jaunty, you should put this into your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fuzzbuntu/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/fuzzbuntu/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

After updating and upgrading with apt-get, you should have Compiz working again. To avoid display problems on first boot of Jaunty, please make sure you disable desktop effects before you upgrade.

Dual Head with Compiz and i965 on Ubuntu Intrepid

I have received my new ThinkPad T400 and installed Ubuntu Intrepid on it. Everything works fine straight out of the box, but Compiz refused to run a dual-head setup on the integrated Intel graphics. It reported the following:
Comparing resolution (3120x1050) to maximum 3D texture size (2048): Failed.
I’ve done a little research and found out that the graphics driver supports a maximum supported texture size of 2048×2048, which is false for the i965 chipset, which is natively capable of 8192×8192. The Mesa DRI driver caused the problem and needed a minimal patching, as described here, except that there is no need to patch xserver-xorg-video-intel on Intrepid. Here is a step-by-step guide for Ubuntu Intrepid:

• apt-get source mesa-common-dev
• sudo apt-get build-dep mesa-common-dev
• sudo apt-get install fakeroot
• cd mesa-7.2/src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965
• Now edit the file brw_context.c according to this patch:
  diff --git a/src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_context.c b/src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_c!
index 1601f6d..c06f5da 100644
--- a/src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_context.c
+++ b/src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_context.c
@@ -138,10 +138,10 @@ GLboolean brwCreateContext( const __GLcontextModes *mesaVis,
/* Advertise the full hardware capabilities. The new memory
* manager should cope much better with overload situations:
*/
- ctx->Const.MaxTextureLevels = 12;
+ ctx->Const.MaxTextureLevels = 13;
ctx->Const.Max3DTextureLevels = 9;
ctx->Const.MaxCubeTextureLevels = 12;
- ctx->Const.MaxTextureRectSize = (1<<11);
+ ctx->Const.MaxTextureRectSize = (1<<12);

• Get back to the root of the mesa-7.2 directory
• Edit debian/changelog. Just duplicate the last entry and modify its version number to a higher one, to make sure your package will not be overwritten.
• Run dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b in mesa-7.2 directory
• cd .. – get one dir level up
• In this directory you should see a bunch of *.deb files. Don’t install all of these! Pick onle those that you already have installed on your system. To find it out, run dpkg -l | grep mesa

You should be done by now. If you have problems, just leave a comment!

Kurzbericht

Hier die Bilanz der letzten Wochen bei mir:

• Rügen ist superschön.
• Ich habe endlich mal wieder ein paar gute Bilder geschossen.
• Rage Against The Machine sind die beste Live-Band ever.
• The Kooks sind live viel interessanter, härter und psychedelischer als man die aus dem Radio kennt
• Ich habe immer noch nicht auf Leopard geupgraded – jetzt wurde sogar schon ein Nachfolger angekündigt… :-/

Mac OS X: Dateien mit dem Präfix ._

Wie ich schon geschrieben habe, entstehen merkwürdige Ghost-Dateien, wenn man von einem Mac ein Verzeichnis auf ein anderes Dateisystem überträgt. Jetzt habe ich bei Apple eine Erklärung gefunden, aus der folgt, dass es HFS-spezifische Fork-Dateien sind und getrost ignoriert bzw. gelöscht werden können.