Info yard giveaway

Since 2005 that i am responsible for coordinating the openSuSE Portuguese (pt) translation team. We had some people in the group, like Elisio Catana, Rui Malheiro, Bruno Neves, Bruno Santos and Carlos Goncalves. Besides their valuable help, this people almost stopped helping, due to their professional and personal occupations but, what the heck, someone has got to do it. Right now (2007) i am doing this translation effort just with the help of Carlos Goncalves.

We are looking for Portuguese translators.

Please help us localizing this great distribution, which has a unique administration interface. YaST2.

At the time of this writing, we finished openSuSE 10.3 translation effort in time, specially with the help of Carlos Goncales. Many thanks to him.

You can always check the status of our translation here.

It is also possible to compare Portuguese translation with other countries.

If you want to see how translation is done, read here.

Posted in Projects

Now it's June 2008, and we have just finished translating openSUSE 11.0 to Portuguese, along with other fellows from many countries. Hope you like it.

Posted June 2008 in Projects

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Live recorder is a broadcast/audio permanent recorder.

After looking for some time, i couldn't find a recording solution for the legal demands of having a complete recording of all brodcasted contents of a radio station. The closest thing i found was programs devoted to radio timeshifting or internet stream recording, which is close, but not quite the same thing. Nowadays, i read about a very interesting program called Rotter, however i still think that live recorder has many advantages (and disadvantages) from rotter. I think we should merge functionalities. Let's share!.

Since i am a member of Radio Urbana, i thought that there should be an opensource solution for this, as my country (Portugal) has many modest stations, that would appreciate this low cost solution.

This is the first appearance of Live recorder in public, and i think i would need a devoted page, as well as i am looking to hear about your feedback!

Get more details or download Live recorder from here.

IBM Netvista N2200 (8363) is a nice computer. One of it's wonders is the lack of fans. I used it to make a home made internet radio to hear my favorite internet radio stations.

In the process of actually doing it, i stumbled across the need to use a 2.6 Linux kernel, as well as big compact flash memories. This turned to be a major task, including gathering information from many different places.

If you prefer the short story, here is a Netvista Compact Flash image. All you need to do is unpack this tar file into a compact flash, insert it into a Netvista N2200 computer, and you'l have openSUSE 10.3 running (user root and password the same). It's a minimum install, but a working one, plus the possibility to install any other apps you want.

Version 3

I have a new openSUSE 10.3 Netvista image (v3). It's an openSUSE 10.3 basic installation, with a custom kernel (2.6.24.7), with the new libata drivers, using PIO mode 4. This makes the system a little bit faster. Kernel is also compiled with alsa modules for the CS5530 sound card, as well as all the support for the remaining devices that kernel 2.6.24.7 supplies. Besides that, i setup a kernel with realtime capabilities, so you can run your sound player with realtime priority, and not cut the sound when you browse or anyway drain the GX1 processor resources. Version 3 of the image also has XFCE4 already installed. Just startx or init 5 to start X.

To use the image, you must have a Compact Flash connected to your computer, with a single partition already created. Assuming you have your CF card in /dev/sdd1 and want to mount it under /mnt/flash:

# mke2fs -I 128 /dev/sdd1
# tar -zxvf N2200-OSS-10.3-CF-v3.tgz /mnt/flash

Primary download site (faster): N2200-OSS-10.3-CF-v3.tgz (thank you ph030)
Download site (slow): N2200-OSS-10.3-CF-v3.tgz
Checksum: 2ea8ccb60bda1f66f6014e7b593013f8

Version 2

This is the older version (v2) of the openSUSE image for Netvista N2200 (8363). This image is still based on openSUSE 10.3, but lacks sound in the kernel, as well as XFce4. The size is somewhat smaller than the new version, just 400 MBytes. This image uses kernel 2.6.22.15.

Secondary download site (slower): N2200-OSS-10.3-CF-v2.tgz
Checksum: 21e03fb018e72d9a3cc976b0b117363a

If you want to install XFce4 using this image, follow these steps:

ok, yast patterns seem to be broken in any way i don't know how to fix.

However, you can still install xfce4, and not completely the hard way.

Start by installing X11

# yast -i xorg-x11 xorg-x11-server x11-tools xterm
# cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.install /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now proceed to install Xfce-4

The complete package list is in http://en.opensuse.org/X11:xfce_packages. Here, only the core packages are installed.

# yast -i exo gtk-xfce-engine libxfce4mcs libxfce4util libxfcegui4 xfce-mcs-manager xfce4-desktop xfce4-mixer xfce4-panel xfce4-session xfprint xfwm4
# ln -s xfce4-session /usr/bin/XFce

Now create a xorg.conf file

# Xorg -configure
# cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Edit xorg.conf, and change the driver "cyrix" to "nsc"

Now you are done, start X-Window and XFce-4 with

# startx

Other tools

However, the long story is sometimes more interesting or juicy. This howto will compehensively talk about all the needed configuration needed to place a working openSUSE 10.3 distribution running inside the N2200.

Here is the howto in text format How to openSUSE 10.3 under IBM Netvista 2200.

This script builds the custom kernel kernel build bash script.

If you want to create your own custom kernel, here are some config files to start with:

The .config file used for linux-2.6.24.7-N2200-RT.

The .config file to compile a custom kernel 2.6.22.5-RT.

If you want to patch your compiled kernel automatically, you could use this perl script to patch it kernel ELF program counter perl patch.

Dcmrelay is a set of scripts developed in bash and Perl, to answer some very special needs. It has been first installed in Hospital Amato Lusitano in Portugal, but quickly spread over many hospitals to address the same requirements. Although simple, these set of scripts have proven to be useful and reliable to many situations. Perhaps they can help you.

I have made a dedicated webpage for the dicom relay project.

If you happen to have a Fujistu Siemens laptop, you will probably have some buttons, that stay there all the time next to the main keyboard, doing nothing. Of course, someone has remembered to give them some functionality other than his primary use (for password boot), so they could now call some custom application when you press them. This of course, on a special operating system that we can imagine what it is.

What about Linux then? Could those keys work to call some kcalc or thunderbird when pressed?. People from Fujitsu-Siemens don't even know what i am talking about, so other people had to come with a solution for this. The project that makes this come true, is called apanel.

I also tried to make a small contribution to the apanel project but it turned out to be much more complicated than i wanted to be. Anyway, it is still a good project, with little effort nowadays, lacking a breath of fresh air, but still pertinent.

I actually tried to contact Fujitsu Siemens for some documentation that could help the development of a tool to make use of the panel buttons, but after some 6 emails, they nicely treated it as spam, althought they don't have anything like /dev/null.

Fujitsu lifebook application panel webpage.

TODO : Talk about other projects i am also involved ...