There are at least a dozen wireless networks visible from their house up on top of a hill. There is an open and unfiltered one close enough to use. There is one for the school across the street. There is free one for Socal Free Net unusably far in Carmel valley. Half of them are using the default SSIDs: “linksys”, “default”, “NETGEAR”. There does seem to be some correlation between openness and default settings.

Connectivity is a public good and free connectivity is even better. But there will always be locations where there isn’t connectivity. Currently, this includes flying. Online applications will always have problems with areas of poor connectivity. Instead of always-on web applications, a better model is email where it is possible to download messages and work offline. It is better to be online to have immediate communication and to be able to access email from anywhere.

The biggest problem is that suspend and hibernate don’t work. Suspend seems to work but does not restore. Hibernate suceeds with the most recent kernel but that kernel does not boot reliably.

I hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t running at the ideal resolution, 1280×900. 1080×768 looked a little squished. I had to switch to the ‘intel’ driver for Xorg for the graphics to work at the ideal resolution.

I just installed the compiz compositing window manager. The flipping effect when changing desktops is a nice touch even though it is a little blurry and jumpy.I understand what people were talking about with the wobbly window effect.

The Mighty Mouse is not detected automatically by the Bluetooth system. I have to run ‘hidd –search’ and occasionally restart the hidd daemon. The scroll ball only works in one direction. Unfortunately, moving the scroll ball horizontally scrolls vertically.

It allows downloading the packages from the mirrors which can be faster and easier than getting the images and producing the images from them. It is also more useful to keep the package repository and then produce the images as needed. I know some people keep the images and then mount them to get the files.

One thing I noticed is that the the disc1 and DVD templates are much larger than they should be. The cause is the repodata directory in the images is different than the one on the mirrors. My guess is that the output of createrepo is not deterministic; the contents seem to have different ordering but the input packages are the same.

The only problem is that iTunes does not support streaming Ogg files. The QuickTime Components do a good job of local Ogg playing but I guess iTunes does its own thing with streaming. It is supposed to be possible to setup transcoding so the server streams WAV instead.

UPDATE: Only development snapshots of mt-daapd support transcoding. And they support FLAC. But they don’t support Avahi and the patch does apply cleanly.

I don’t expect maintainers to drop everything and fix the bug. I would hope that they would at least send an acknowledgement that they have seen the bug and might work on it. A snarky “that is not a bug but a feature”, “it has been fixed in the latest release”, or “you are an idiot, do this instead” is better than silence.

If you post a module to CPAN, you have an obligation to maintain it. I suspect fixing bugs is more beneficial to the community than writing new, cool stuff. Even if it is really boring. The user has an obligation to report bugs if they encounter them so the maintainer is not in the dark. One big advantage of open source is that the user can provide a fix or at least a test case. The maintainer’s responsiblity is to apply the patch if it is suitable. Not let it sit there gathering dust.

The best example is bug 27, a major limitation in URI which is only 5 years old. People have even provided patches.

Also posted at use perl.

Unfortunately, the madwifi driver did not compile cleanly on the Fedora development kernel. First, the Fedora kernels are currently 2.6.18-rc4 but they are versioned as 2.6.17. There is code in the driver which detects 2.6.18 but that doesn’t work with the mislabelled version. Also, madwifi uses the config.h header which was replaced by autoconf.h but is finally deprecated in 2.6.18. I submitted a ticket with patch to get this fixed.

I wanted to install the kernel modules as RPMs instead of from source. livna.org has madwifi packages for FC5. With some patching, they are suitable for building with the kmod scheme. This involves building packages for each kernel release, variant, and architecture. I only build for the i686 standard variant. The command line looks like:

rpmbuild -ba --target=i686 --define "kversion 2.6.17-1.2586.fc6" --define 'kvariants ""' madwifi-kmod.spec

I have put the packages I built at my Fedora package directory. Installing the packages from the rpm command-line can be tricky because multiple versions are installed at once. Doing an upgrade will remove the version for an old kernel. Upgrading the module versions requires installing the new version for installed kernels and then removing the old versions. Yum is supposed to handle this.

Getting the wireless working once the module was installed was a snap. I used NetworkManager and it just worked. It detected the wireless network and switched to it when the Ethernet cable is removed. It prompts for the WPA password.

The install went smoothly. Fedora booted up without any problems. Lots of things just worked. The display was autodetected to the right size. The trackpad worked. The Fn key works as modifier. A few things didn’t work out of the box. The wireless card will require third-party drivers. The internal sound isn’t working. It sleeps but doesn’t resume. My Bluetooth Mighty Mouse works but only after restarting the hidd daemon.