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• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

This morning, I stopped by #ubuntu-offtopic just to rant about Matrox’s support for X.org 7.x — rather, lack thereof. Ubuntu bug #58721 is one of my favorite bugs, titled “Edgy upgrade breaks multiple Matrox cards” (High,Confirmed). Of course this is so because I have a Matrox G550 in my old desktop box at home.

When I built this machine many moons ago, I picked the Matrox card specifically because of Matrox’s great support for XFree86. Later, as the consumer graphics card business was divided between NVidia and ATI, the only customers that Matrox had left were the *nix users. Then all of a sudden, when X.org 7.0 came out (and entered Ubuntu Edgy), the mga driver was suddenly broken and Matrox responded to the flood of angry Linux users on their support forums by simply closing them down. Way to go. Of course, I ranted about this quite enough at the time, so there’s no need to reiterate.

Obviously Matrox thinks it is a magic company who doesn’t need customers. Good luck on your way to the Deadpool.

Anyway, when i ranted about the bug, saying it should be marked (Critical, Confirmed many times, Unfixable) instead of just (High,Confirmed) it seems like gord really meant what said when he quoth thusly:

<gord> Nothing is unfixable! *gets out his sticky tape, a screwdriver and a cardboard box*

Terminus actually developed a method:

<Terminus> topyli: aha! you can use duct tape as a stream editor thereby creating a program that automatically fixes the source code of the driver, compiles it, and installs it!

<Terminus> and now, for breakfast!

* Terminus vanishes

<topyli> it's a bird! it's a plane! it's Terminus!

When i got home from the office this evening, an email was waiting on my inbox, from bugs.launchpad.net, by rix:

I’ve got a Matrox MGA G550 and I’ve experienced various kinds of X crashes after upgrading to edgy. I’ve tried all the solutions proposed above and here is the combination that works for me:

* No framebuffer enabled in xorg.conf and no special kernal module loaded (I’m using standard edgy kernel)

* Added vga=795 (1280×1024 resolution) in kernel parameters (/boot/grub/menu.lst). Without this it was booting with a very dark screen and the monitor was refusing to display anything after gdm started;

* I’ve upgraded the driver to John’s backport above to have 3D (e.g screensaver) working. without this upgrade gnome-screensaver was giving a blank screen before crashing X.

Now it seems to work very well and MUCH faster then VESA.

You bet! I just enjoyed a quick game of Planet Penguin Racer and 3D acceleration and all is working. I only used vga=791 in menu.lst though, for 1024×768.

I don’t know if gord and Terminus are in the same team with rix, but thanks to all three as well as others who have helped sort this out at Launchpad and elsewhere. Very special thanks to John of course, for backporting the fixed driver for Edgy.

If you use Edgy and have been suffering from the mga driver bug, you can get John’s package from Launchpad until it gets backported for real. Of course, nobody knows if it will fix your X or break your system altogether, but it Worked For Me ™. :)

Also note that the bug is still officially non-fixed until the fix has been either backported to the current X in Edgy, or the new driver enters the backports repository. Until then, this workaround is not a fix.

Update: Fixed in feisty, edgy backport is being debated. Backporting all of X is not a very popular option, but we’ll see if the build dependencies can be relaxed so that this single driver can be made available.

The network gods are not always favorable to us. wooties_puppet and Roey learned this today, although wooties_puppet was obviously the bigger loser in this incident. As latecomers often do, miyako walked on the tragic scene happily unaware and unhurt. Hence, this installation of tales from the offtopic has a moral to it, although I’m not entirely sure what it might be.

This installation of tales from the offtopic tells the sad story of arnducky’s hopeless crash with Lynoure. In the end, Vladdy’s words of wisdom are his only comfort.

We all wish him a speedy recovery.

Today I learned that Linspire and Canonical have just announced a significant partnership. Both companies produce a Debian-based desktop distribution, but they approach the problem of bringing Linux to the masses differently. Ubuntu proclaims to be first and foremost a Free Software distribution, while Linspire boasts with its proprietary drivers and codecs to make all the evil file formats and mystery hardware work out of the box.

A combination of both would be ideal from the user’s point of view, wouldn’t it? Free OS for humans who just wants stuff to work. This deal could bring such an OS closer to Ubuntu users. Here’s the shortest possible version of the FAQ issued by the companies:

• In the future, Linspire will be based on Ubuntu rather than directly on Debian
• Linspire’s Click-N-Run service will be available on Ubuntu so that users can easily get proprietary drivers multimedia codecs and applications on their systems

I don’t know enough about Linspire to be able to say much about what this means to them. It might well be easier for them to build desktop-only systems on Ubuntu and have some of the Humanization work already done for them.

For Ubuntu, the integration of CNR could solve one of the most pressing problems: the Evil Proprietary Driver and Codec problem.

• Canonical can ship a 100% free distribution and users will know their operating system is not evil when they install it
• Users can, if they wish, easily install whatever proprietary stuff they need / want and purchase appropriate licenses for them (if Click-N-Run lives up to its name, it must be easy). No more system and upgrade breakage after newbies try to find and install their “essential” flash plugin or WMA codec.

So, all in all this is probably a good deal for both distributions and companies, and the users of both.

I’ve been looking for a good way to “jabberify” some of my online tools. Since any Web 2.0 application worth the name has an open API, I figured it must be possible to talk XMPP to them. I wanted to get to my calendar info, online bookmarks, TODO notes and perhaps even to Gmail via just a standard Jabber client and was looking for a bot that would do it for me - if something is hackable, someone must have hacked it!

The IMified buddy adding an important task to my RTM list

Well, turns out that now someone has! I found about IMified, an instant message buddy that will connect you to Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, Blogger and a number of other services, plus offers a simple notes list, todos, and reminders on its own too. I’ve played with it a little, and it works rather well after the initial unstability (the service was launched just four days ago.) You can add the buddy to most of the popular IM services but we Ubuntu users of course only use Jabber since we like our freedom :)

The interface is nice, and works great on my mobile phone too since IMified doesn’t hit my screen with too much verbosity. Yet it always providies clear instructions, I haven’t been lost once. Google Calendar has some timezone problems, and the Remember the Milk functionality could be more advanced (and no, you don’t get mail notifications), but IMified certainly has my support - I won’t be studying XMPP on my own any time soon :)

Done!