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A scene from Ireland

2009

Linux.conf.au 2009 - Hobart Tasmania

I recently had the pleasure of attending linux.conf.au 2009. When I go to these conferences I like to write a trip report to share will my colleagues. And having written it, I thought I would share it with you too.

Enjoy.

linux.conf.au 2009 was held in late January in Hobart, Tasmania - the southernmost city in Australia. With a population of around 200,000 it is big enough to offer all the facilities conference attendees would require, without being so big that it takes an hour just to get out into the countryside. And the country side is well worth seeing as Tasmania has much beautiful scenery and wilderness to enjoy.

The talks covered a wide range of the sort of technical and social commentary that you would expect from an Open Source based conference. From providing low-infrastructure small town telephony through mesh networks (google:Mesh Potato) through the use of wikis in documentation and community building to the difficulties of building a robot to play a clarinet, there were talks for all tastes.

One theme that emerged for me (possibly because I attended a number of talks at the "mobile devices" mini-conference) relates to issues with Embedded Linux.

  • in Hardware
  • 5 min read

Screen Lock on the Freerunner

(golly, nearly two years since I have posted anything. I probably just think that I have nothing interesting to say...)

About 6 months ago I purchased an Openmoko Neo Freerunner - a nice (if not totally modern) piece of hardware that could make a nice feature-phone if it had working software (which some day it probably will). I've been playing with it on-and-off over the months, though have never used it as a regular phone.

Just lately I have had various bits of leave which have allowed me time to play more intensively with the phone and get it to do some things that it didn't before, or to get it to do them differently. And I thought it might be nice to write about some of that.

Background: I use the "FSO" distribution. However I've discarded illume and e-wm in favour of matchbox-window-manager and matchbox-panel. They might not look as pretty by they seem to be much lighter on resources and they stay quite nicely out of my way. I also don't use "zhone" and have disabled most of "frameworkd"...

All of my programming has been with python using the GTK toolkit for display (via pygtk). I wouldn't say that GTK is a particularly good tool kit (I've used TK before (with TkTcl) and my memory is that it was a much more well rounded kit. But memory could be playing tricks on me). I'm using GTK simply because it was something different but easy to learn.

The first little project I want to talk about and share is my program for locking the screen.