And the thrilling continous...

Well, I tried to post a paragraph yesterday but Opera Mobile in my Samsung i8910 posted only the title. I was using Opera mobile because I was inside the plane that brought me to Madrid waiting for it be fixed. There was a problem in the plane's air-conditioner and it took almost two hours to be detected and fixed. The plane was already going to the runway when the problem was detected. After the strike in Madrid, which really lasted one day, I thought what else could happen to me during this trip to Europe :-) Fortunately everything is going quite well and I hope Solid Sprint bings new bug fixes and features to KDE. Metal workers are doing their best here, the results are showing up as I write this...

Solid Sprint starts tomorrow

Here I am at São Paulo international airport waiting for my flight to Madrid, which is going to take off in two and a half hours :-/ I am travelling alone and there isn't much things to do here. I arrived here three hours ago and finished to do everything I needed to, including my notebook at Receita Federal (or a risked it being confiscated when I return to Brazil next week). I have found a good spot here at the last floor, near a power outlet and the terrace. I can see most of the airport from here. There are few people here, which is good, now I can type my password on the sites I access without anybody looking at me :-) I am arriving in Madrid tomorrow around 12:15 (local time), so I already missed Sebas presentation in Madrid tonight :-/ Well, the Solid Sprint starts tomorrow and I will be there :-)

E-sata and Solid

Some days ago a guy asked in the kde-hardware-devel mailing list how to make disks connected to an e-sata port to behave like removable disk in KDE. I have a notebook (Sager np7652) with one e-sata port and had this problem too, but have never tried to fix that, until now. I think what I have found can help other people too so I am writing this post.

After some tries I found a way to tell hald that my disks' partitions come from a removable disk. That works but have an inconvinience, I needed to create one configuration file per partition. Some more tries and finally I got to configure hald to treat all disks connected to my e-sata controller as removable:

1. Add this file to your system:
   
   

   File /etc/hal/fdi/policy/40-e-sata.fdi

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="linux.sysfs_path" contains="/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/"> <merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">false</merge> <merge key="@block.storage_device:storage.removable" type="bool">true</merge> </match> </device> </deviceinfo>

2. Change the contains part to match your e-sata controller's. You can find it using the command:
   

   Code

   evolucao ~ # find /sys/devices/ -name sdb /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/target4:0:0/4:0:0:0/block/sdb

3. Restart hald: /etc/init.d/hald restart
4. That's it :-)

The strange thing is that the file /sys/class/block/sdb/removable contains 0, it should contains 1 since the disk is removable. Maybe it is a kernel bug.

Hal is deprecated for some years now, KDE SC, more precisely Solid, is the only desktop/library that uses it extensively. When we, Solid metal-workers, finish Solid transition to udisk and upower probably hal is gonna vanish for ever.

In less than two weeks there will a Solid Sprint in Madri (Spain), I will be there :-), and we are going to discuss how far we are from the end of this transition. Honestly I like hal, it is flexible from users point of view. I have never used udisk and I do not know if it possible to workaround a problem in the kernel such as this one about disks connected to a e-sata controller using udisk. I hope it is.

Plasma NM: Mobile Connection Wizard

Hi all, two months ago I said I was working on the porting of the nm-applet's connection wizard to Plasma Network Manager. The first part is almost done:

Vendor and model name only appear if Plasma NM has been compiled with ModemManager support and if ModemManager has already enabled the device. If neither of those conditions has been satisfied then "Installed GSM device" it will appear instead. By default ModemManager allows only root to enable devices, so I cannot enable them in the wizard. Solid also does not return my modem's vendor and model names. Maybe Network Manager can help me here.

I had to recreate the code from scratch because last month I deleted all what I had done by accident :-/

I still need to fix some bugs in the wizard and make the code cleaner. I also have thought  in prettifying the wizard but QWizard does not have many options to do that. For instance, I would like to use images instead of the < and > characters, but I as far as I know there is no way to do that. nm-applet's wizard also uses a blue background in the page's title ("Choose your Provider" in this screenshot) and a frame around the widgets, it looks good in my opinion. So far I have not found how to do that neither.

I am using QDomDocument to parse /usr/share/mobile-broadband-provider-info/serviceproviders.xml, it really simplifies the code. Talking about code, nm-applet's wizard is a difficult to read code, lots of macros and options to functions, several things done "by hand", which in Qt is a simple method call.

The next step is salving the options, but I will reorganize the code first, maybe next weekend. I still need to add the code to get data for CDMA connections and some more code to hide/show the widgets that should not appear in such case (CDMA connections does not use APN for instance). There are a lot of small things to do yet, so "keep walking" :-)

Symbian Modding

This week I changed my i8910's firmware from HX to n2o4. n2o4 has very fast kastor effects so I like it at first, but I do not like some other things: the theme is too "yellow" to my taste and I like the icon's white border in the original Nero II theme, which I use with HX. The problem is that I also like to listen to radio but Nero II (and all other Morkino's theme I have used so far) has a problem that radio frequency does not appear. Yesterday I tried to solve this problem and finally I got success :-). What I did is:

1. Install siscontents160b
2. Open Nero_II_HD_.sis
3. Click on the icon "Contents"
4. Select the file "themepackage.skn" in the contents
5. Click on View details
6. Then on "Colours" tab
7. Then on "Add colour groups" and select "Samsung Text Colours". You can keep the default colours or change it for your taste
8. Click on "Close"
9. Click on "File" menu entry, then "Save as..."
10. Install the fixed theme :-)

I have also changed the homescreen toolbar icons to fit Nero II using these steps. This is the result:

Pra quem estiver interessado fiz upload do arquivo "Message 1.aac" que uso como tom para chegada de mensagens.

Bug Corrections

This week I decided to search for some bugs to solve in bugs.kde.org. I searched for bugs related to Plasma NM, Kopete and Bluedevil, three programs that I use a lot. One day I will stop by to try to solve some bugs in Amarok (specially 188360 and 234833). I am not familiar with Amarok's source code, some months ago I even tried to solve one bug there but it did not work out.

In Plasma NM I tried to solve these bugs:

1. 214297: multiple interfaces of same type not distinguishable in UI (commited)
2. 249702: Network Manager Applet crash after reconnect to 3G (not solved yet, waiting for reporter's feedback)
3. 233469: knetworkmanager confused by /etc/init.d/network restart (I have been trying to solve this one for months but still no go)

In Kopete I tried this one:

1. 222689: Tool tip systray of kopete icon missing (patch ready, if nobody asks to change something else I am going to commit it tomorrow)

In Bluedevil I fixed this crash:

1. 246638: kded crashes in latest trunk (I do not have write access to Bluedevil's git repository, so I am waiting for the developers to commit my patch)

I also asked the sysadmin team to solve two bugs I found in reviewboard site: Bug 250050 - Wrong email for the kde-networkmanager mailing list and problem uploading images. The bugs were solved in few hours, I like when things are solved quickly :-)

I am monitoring some other bugs, but I have not had the time to investigate them. Three bugs solved this week, that is ok for me :-D