Last 5 Posts from 2006/December

Trolltech Qtopia was the first framework that enabled GNU/Linux to run on embedded systems, like Sharp Zaurus, that did great by end of this decade.

While it did great, being based on Trolltech Qt, it was version 2 and while Qt improved a lot in version 3, Qtopia was never updated and no free version was available.

Now Qt is in its 4th generation and have great improvements, like painting system (Arthur, similar to Cairo) and text engine (Scribe, similar to Pango). They have a really easy and intuitive API, while being very optimized, Arthur supporting even OpenGL-ES. And the big news was that Qtopia was upgraded to cope with Qt4, making things interesting again that Gtk was doing its first inroads on embedded systems.

The bad news so far was that Qtopia4 was closed source, but since Trolltech announced their Greenphone people were asking Trolltech to release it. Being a good Open Source citizen, they did a wonderful announcement releasing Qtopia 4.2 as GPL.

Great work Trolltech! Now I just hope someone will have it running on Nokia 770, bringing some competition to Maemo, at least some speed comparisons.

I managed to get my IBM Thinkpad T41 Radeon Mobility 9000 running Ubuntu Edgy with X.org 7.1 to display on my Sony Bravia 40&rdquot;!

I was trying to get this laptop to support 1360x768 at 60Hz without luck. At first, I was unable to have the open source driver to use this mode and frequency. Later I tried binary driver, but seems it doesn't support Xv, making video playback slow as hell if you want to scale it.

But after some googleing I've found a nice example of using various servers layout on top of the open source driver http://mg.pov.lt/xorg.conf. Then I found how to get the correct mode-line using read-edid (get-edid | parse-edid).

Now it is working perfectly, even with MergedFB option (radeon's own Xinerama implementation), with monitors at different resolutions working together!

Download: http://www.gustavobarbieri.com.br/xorg.conf-wxga_sony_bravia_40

I'm moving away from my old server at my parent's store to http://dreamhost.com, a really cool hosting service.

After this change I also opted to move away from Blogger to WordPress, which is much nicer and full of features, like post tags.

Since dreamhost's SVN is really old (1.1.3), I'm moving my self-hosted svn projects to somewhere else. My old university projects (computer_graphics and passive_replication) and personal code playground will go to code.google.com, while Eagle will go to tigris. I still have to move these and setup everything properly, I'll post when I have those done.