Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project - companies could get Linux drivers written for their hardware free of charge, if they provided specifications (possibly under NDA). There is now an April 2008 Status Report for the project - they are short of companies and hardware to write drivers for. This is probably because Linux hardware support is excellent in all but a few specific areas - there is some interesting discussion of the efforts being made to support wireless devices and graphics cards later on in the thread....

I spent my weekend in Cambridge at the Debian bug squashing party. It was good seeing people again. I even squashed a bug, but then spent Saturday forwarding non-RC bugs upstream, and kernel hacking today. :) Walked back to Cambridge station - about 40 minutes, along the river for part of the way, and it was a nice evening. Living where I do, I don't walk as much as I used to....

June 30 - "That's the last day when large computer makers — the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of the world — will be allowed to preinstall Windows XP on new PCs." -- Computerworld story What caught my eye about this was the fact that OEM manufacturers actually won't be allowed to continue installing XP. This seems quite odd to someone used to distributions of GNU/Linux - sure, security support from the distribution might end, and you might well be hard-pushed to find someone to support your seven year-old software, but if your customers want the older, faster version of the operating system, you will always be allowed to sell it....

Lamby reckoned I wouldn't be able to resist using the DebConf8 blog sticker thing. And he was right. My horrendously expensive plane tickets arrived last week.

Yesterday, I was at the first ever PostgreSQL UK conference, in Birmingham. The venue was familiar from various events last year, such as GUADEC and PyCon UK - the Conservatoire is becoming quite established as a relatively cheap, central UK venue for technical events. I gave a talk about monitoring PostgreSQL databases on behalf of credativ. (Slides for all the talks are available on the PostgreSQL wiki.) I got a reasonable level of comments and feedback afterwards, and perhaps those will help with the development of some better monitoring solutions....

Following up on Saturday's post and various other blog entries about bash. While arguing with Anton about bash being slow, I discovered that /etc/bash_completion was sourced twice when starting a shell on my laptop; once in /etc/bash.bashrc, and once in ~/.bashrc. This is Debian bug #430501 - the suggestion there is that /etc/skel/.bashrc should change to check whether /etc/bash_completion had already been included. So, that saves 0.27 seconds. tim@regulus:~$ time bash -i -c exit exit real 0m0....

Beginning last night, I reinstalled my laptop. Normally, if it were just to clean up some packages, I wouldn't do this - the aim was more to try out removing the disk encryption that I was using, and the effect has been quite dramatic. I worked out a while ago that the device-mapper encryption was slowing down disk access - with it gone, boot times are much shorter (and I don't have to type in a LUKS passphrase)....

So, a benchmark. tim@regulus:~$ time zsh -i -c exit real 0m0.064s user 0m0.048s sys 0m0.008s tim@regulus:~$ time bash -i -c exit exit real 0m0.540s user 0m0.436s sys 0m0.100s Both shells had their respective completion systems enabled. (Without them turned on, bash actually beats zsh... but the times are small enough that it doesn't matter.) These times are with a warm disk cache - the first time through both shells were slower....

Yesterday evening, I finally found the patch for a bug in mono-addins that had been affecting f-spot extensions for a while - rebuilding the f-spot Debian package with no changes and reinstalling would cause the built-in extensions to disappear. In the end, the patch was just two lines long, and had been applied in mono-addins SVN (and in the copy of mono-addins that f-spot bundles). One less RC bug for lenny....

This weekend, I visited Derby, and updated the f-spot packaging in the Debian pkg-cli-apps repository. It's now at version 0.4.2, but this hasn't fixed the complicated extensions problems - they are Mono.Addins bugs, so we'll need to update libmono-addins0.2-cil to the version the f-spot devs claim fixes everything. Apart from that, I've been looking at my list of potential pet projects, and thinking about which of them I want to prioritize over the next year or so....