Piazza Del Popolo

Happy new year!

I’m leaving to enjoy the new upcoming year near Florence, so…take care and enjoy.

ciao!

Back to Italy!

Tomorrow i’ll come back to my native land….so wonderful!

Nothing to add….

Ops…just one…i bought a new desktop pc, i should get it tomorrow, this means in 2007 i may restart some development.

Merry Xmas All!

Submount patch for kernel 2.6.19

Will Linux Kernel ever have some peace (read stable API) ?

Answer is “no”, of course. Confirmed by kernel guru and mainteneirs, by intent..
should be defined criminal intent…but..ok..
I have no will to open a flame about this, compared to windows stability
(of interfaces i mean, of course!).

In the meanwhile, enjoy the submount patch for 2.6.19, it seems that just a field in the
inode structure has been removed (if i’m wrong… sorry, i had to look into a 32mb patch file, had
no connection, so i don’t know the motivation nor the log of the change).

Tested, works ok on my floppy/cdrom driver.

As usual, enter the subfs-0.9 directory and apply with

patch -p0 < /path/to/the/downloaded/patch

and recompile as usual. I'm going to submit a Gentoo bug for that too.

However this is the listing
--- subfs.c 2006-12-17 16:32:19.000000000 +0100
+++ subfs.c 2006-12-17 16:35:51.000000000 +0100
@@ -310,7 +310,9 @@
if (ret) {
ret->i_mode = mode;
ret->i_uid = ret->i_gid = 0;
+#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,19)
ret->i_blksize = PAGE_CACHE_SIZE;
+#endif
ret->i_blocks = 0;
ret->i_atime = ret->i_mtime = ret->i_ctime = CURRENT_TIME;
ret->i_fop = &subfs_file_ops;

Download patch

Enjoy and report if you have problems

People that doesn't deserve their place…

Generally i don’t like to mock particular persons but groups!

ehheeh

this time I can’t stop from linking this nice document
i got in some email chain!

Four Parachutes Joke

Enjoy and have a nice weekend

ps. Yes, of course it was a PowerPoint file, but I converted it
with the newest OpenOffice 2.1 to the PDF format, I recommend all to
share open formats.

Gentoo Profile migration from x86 to x86_64

Back at the end of 2003: i had a Mandrake (yes, not yes called Mandriva) Linux distro (if i remember good the version was 8.0 or 8.1)
installed on my desktop pc (a really slow pentium2 400mhz) and i was really unsatisfied of performances.
I installed it because i needed an UNIX environment and i was swithing from WinXP,
with no experience at all.

I tried to use some multimedia applications like MPlayer and all films were not fluid,
audio jittering and so on….cpu usage always at 100%…
During some internet investigation i found some optimization tricks about MPlayer, and after recompiling
it manually from sources with cpu-specific flags i found it sooooo faster,
films were fluid with only 50% cpu usage!

So i thought: why not recompiling the whole system to have more speed?
I started manually but i soon realized it was impossible to manage without a package manager.
However the speed gain was important even if not like in MPlayer’s case.
I can say something between 20 and 30 per cent.
(ok, now someone can start a flame about that. On Pentium2 and after on upgraded Pentium3
the performance gain is really important. Maybe not as on fastest cpus, of course, this is a gcc trouble too,
which is not yet ready to do a perfect optimization, Intel compiler is much better but not opensource)

I started to wrote tons of bash scripts, and in the meanwhile i found Gentoo Linux was my distro!

I installed it in December 2003 and i’m still using it on 2 pcs now (p2 was upgrated to p3 500 and a notebook with celeron 650mhz);
i’m really satisfied of both, even if hardware is so old and slow.

Now i’m going to change my desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo machine.
Desktop life will be different after that! ehheeh

My main problem is now to migrate my desktop data to the new pc.
I know can you do a low level copy of partition, this is just a 20 mins problem.

The main problem is the arch. I need to migrate from x86 to x86_64 and this is a bit tricky.
I’m now studying some solutions to the problem, but as to Gentoo FAQs, it’s impossibile to
migrate, and they suggest to do a fresh install.

I really don’t believe this. Nothing is impossibile.
For me it’s not enought to migrate my home and my /etc config directory, i want to migrate all
flawlessy.

These are my plans at the moment:

1) boot with a 64bits gentoo minimal livecd (50mb cd)
2) download a portage-snapshot and stage3 pack and install them, having a minimal environment
3) with quickpkg create binary packages of critical dev tools such as gcc, binutils, libtool (any other needed? guess not).
4) low level copy of old desktop harddisk –>> will overwrite 64bits software from stage3
5) reinstall back 64bits packages of point number 3, ignoring some profile stuff, uninstalling old x86 ones
6) compile a 64bit kernel with 64bits native tools
7) reboot with the new kernel and not livecd
8) complete profile migration to x86_64 (maybe may be needed in point 5..)
9) emerge -e system and reboot
10) if all starts properly, emerge -eD world

I think it’s an acceptable procedure.
there are some points which i’m insure, but i suppose lots of unplanned problems may pop out.

I read x86 to x86_64 migration is impossible due to differences in the Gentoo installation process,
but i saw noone…..apart normal x86_64 options in kernel and similar arch specific….

Let’s see in some days, i’ll have new pc at the end of december, but having little time
i need to think about all that before

If works i’ll write a detailed howto, be sure

Full HD, HD Ready….or what?

Saturday i had a chance to see a full HD TV.

It was a Panasonic Aquos, 52 inches diagonal. Really impressive and huge,
elegant, smart….and…expensive of course! More than 4500 euros.

Connecting such monster to a normal analog source is a shame: images will be really a shit,
even worse than the normal crt tvs.
That’s why it was connected with a BluRay player, playing some new films trailers and parts…
using the 1080p resolution, the best possibile with actual technology.

I have to say i was so impressed of image quality, really incredible, even compared to a DVD source
(which was there for a comparison too)…

Sharpness, true real colors, details…never saw before like that.

But, more i was impressed, more i understood it was a so far reality for normal broadcasted tv programs.
It will use so much data bandwidth for every single channel…

And i was thinking about the “…digital tv of the future…” (as described by Italian politicians)
the DTT….it’s as old as wheels..
It’s not a marked complete break with the past, it’s just a stupid transition that will steal
money to ignorant (and not..) persons.
Too little bandwidth, ridicolous resolution, old compression algorithm…DTT has nothing really interesting.

HD is still more than a dream…of course much be refined…but basis are there at least.