Andrea Grandi

Yesterday, during the final UDS party, I had an idea to improve Ubuntu development, but I didn't know if it could be a good idea or a stupid one, so I talked to Daniel Holbach and David Planella about it and they were happy to hear about it and Daniel told me to talk about this directly to Mark (and I did it).

Let's explain the basic idea. From an UDS and the next one, it would be useful to have a development sprint where people can talk about assigned UDS blueprints, at which point they are on their tasks, if they have any problems and if they will finish them within the next UDS. Of course Canonical cannot organize another meeting, it would be very expensive, so the idea is: why don't we use Google Hangout to organize the sprint? I has a limit of 10 people, I know, but we could select (for example) 5 from the community and 5 from Canonical. There would be parallel meeting and tracks, we would use the same blueprints used during the last UDS and we would add further notes. The attendees would be able to listen and watch the stream and make questions through the available chat.

I don't want to write more details here because I don't think it's the right place (and probably it's not the moment to write a similar blog post, since I'm still in th SFO Airport), my idea is to create a wiki page to explain all the details, so everyone would be able to add more ideas and see if it's doable or not.

So, what do you think about? I think we should try, it doesn't cost anything except some hours in the week we'll organize it. I wait for your comments then.

After upgrading my desktop PC to Ubuntu 12.04 (actually my main machine) I started experimenting many Xorg crashes and instability issues. I reported the bug, but I had to find a solution or I should have rolled back to Ubuntu 11.10. The problem (from my point of view) is of the new Nvidia 295.40 binary drivers. I also tried an older version (295.33) experiencing the same problems. I then decided to give the Nouveau opensource drivers a try.

I must say that in over 24 hours I didn't have a single Xorg crash. My desktop is very stable and Nouveau drivers are pretty fast: I can watch a 1080p video on Youtube in full screen without having any problem. The only problem with my machine is that I'm using a VGA Switcher to share my monitor wit Xbox (see this old post), so my monitor capabilities cannot be detected automatically and I had to do some manually tuning of the Xorg configuration.

First of all I had to resolve a very annoying problem: the screen was blinking every 10 seconds and this really hurted my eyes. To fix this I had to add a kernel parameter: drm_kms_helper.poll=0
you need to add this string in /etc/default/grub to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter. After this your line should look like this one: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash drm_kms_helper.poll=0"

Don't forget to execute: sudo update-grub from the command line.

Then I had to create a proper xorg.conf setting my resolution (1680x1050) manually:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "DVI-I-1"
    VendorName     "Asus"
    ModelName      "Ancor Communications Inc VW222"
    Modeline "1680x1050R"  119.00  1680 1728 1760 1840  1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync
    Option      "PreferredMode" "1680x1050R"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Monitor        "DVI-I-1"
EndSection

How do you generate the Modeline line? It's very simple. Just execute: "cvt -r 1680 1050" in the command line and you'll get a line similar to the one I added (of course substitute those numbers with the resolution you want).

You have to save this file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot your system to use all the new settings. Now my system runs nicely and very fast! I'm really enjoying the new Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. I just hope that Nvidia guys will fix the sta
bility issues of their driver as soon as possible, so I'll be able to choose again between the opensource driver and the closed source one (faster with 3D stuff, but more unstable as you can see).

A big thanks to everyone in #nouveau IRC channel on Freenode. They were very kind to help me configuring their opensource driver.

With BlackBerry PlayBook you can now use Qt libraries to develop your applications. The problem is that QML components are not available yet (they will be available with CascadesUI in the near future), but you can use Symbian qt-components to develop your application UI. This should also make the porting of an existing Symbian Qt application easier.

We suppose you have already built and installed QtQNX under this directory: ~/QtQNX/ARM/ (please change it matching the folder where you installed it).
At this point you have to get qt-components sources using this command:

git clone git://gitorious.org/qt-components/qt-components.git qt-components

Now enter the directory you just checked and compile the components:

cd qt-components
QTDIR=~/QtQNX/ARM/
./configure -symbian
make

Whend you complete all the previous operations, you'll have two directories inside qt-components/imports, please copy them inside the QtQNX installation directory:

cp -R imports/Qt ~/QtQNX/ARM/imports/
cp -R imports/com ~/QtQNX/ARM/imports/

That's all for now. In the next posts I'll show you how to use these components, providing a small code example. In the mean time you can find more informations here http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Native-SDK-for-BlackBerry-Tablet/QML-symbian-qt-components-for-PlayBook/td-p/1574275

Yesterday in Pistoia (Italy) we had the Ubuntu Global Jam and about 15 people attended the event. We began with an introductive talk by Paolo Sammicheli about the Italian Ubuntu Community and how it is possible to contribute to Ubuntu. We divided in two small groups, one translating from English to Italian (coordinated on IRC by the people of the community) and another group leaded by Marco Trevisan, learning how to implement automatic tests in Unity code (in particular he introduced us Autopilot, more information here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/QA/Autopilot ). Next time I would like to ask people to register to Launchpad and sign the Code of Conduct before attending the global jam. We wasted a lot of time with this task.

At the end of the day me and the other people from Pistoia, took the other people for a quick tour around the city where we had the possibility to eat some tasty food. It was a very amazing day and people who started collaborating for the first time were very happy! I think this has been a successful day, at least for us. I hope the other LoCo are having a good Jam as well and I really can't wait for the next Ubuntu Global Jam.

Few days ago I decided to move my Xbox 360 from the room where is the TV to the room where I have my desktop PC. I wanted to avoid wasting precious space on my desk, so I decided to share my 22'' monitor with the Xbox and I bought a VGA Switcher. With this product you can easily switch the VGA signal between your PC and the Xbox and also the audio signal.

The problem with this solution is the fact that your monitor is not anymore attached directly to your graphic card and this causes problems detecting the monitor capabilities. Please note that the switcher doesn't reduce the resolution you can have, it just make the graphic card impossible to detect the correct resolution.

If you have an Nvidia graphic card you can use the nvidia-settings tool to manually set the configuration and to save it to a file, so during the next boot even if Ubuntu won't be able to detect the proper resolution for your monitor, it will simply apply the configuration found in xorg.conf

Please remember to also set the refresh rate of the monitor (I was having a very bad resolution until I didn't choose 60 Hz in the settings window). If you don't have a Nvidia graphic card (and the proper tool) to generate a xorg.conf file or if you just want to give a look at my configuration here you have a copy:

# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings
# nvidia-settings:  version 280.13  (buildd@rothera)  Thu Aug 11 17:28:49 UTC 2011

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Ancor Communications Inc VW222"
    HorizSync       31.0 - 81.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8800 GS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "CRT-0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1680x1050_60 +0+0; nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Remember to save the file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and on next boot you will have the right resolution even with your VGA Switcher in use.