The recovery console didn’t care about that useful bit of information I’ve lived with comfortably for about a year. My friend told me that Windows sees the first NTFS partition as the C drive, and thats that. Problem was, that windows couldn’t recognize any drives as being my NTFS partition. Linux could *guess* that sda1 had an NTFS header, but the important bits of the header were corrupt so it couldn’t be mounted. In the recovery console, I, J, and O were non-existant. The only drives I could see were two missing floppies, my two DVD drives, and my three hard disk partitions. After an hour of jumping through logical problems such as “If windows marks the drives it sees in alphabetic order, but my windows drive is actually called I in real life, and chkdisk might find a partition, then maybe I’m probably not screwed.”

I gave up¹, rebooted to Linux in single user mode, and ran TestDisk. Problem solved.

Lesson learned here? You can’t use Windows to fix Windows. It just simply isn’t equipped to do so. I’ll gladly stick with software that gives me the tools to do what I want.

¹: My friend actually donated a spare harddrive for the night that I quickly installed a fresh copy of windows to, letting us finally start our game at 2am. I fixed things when I got home later that day.

Having never hacked on xine before, the code isn’t nearly as nice as I want it to be. In fact, you’ll notice around line 215 that I magically multiply the image size by two and it suddenly works. Yay. There’s also a few other interesting bits, such as returning “v4l:/” as the media URI I’m currently playing, despite being told to play /dev/video0. This appears to be the only way to get the v4l demuxer to start demuxing my video stream. After that though, it Just Works.

So right now my plans are to get it included into xine-lib proper, which might mean porting it to the 1.2 unstable branch. In addition, it needs to be able to support more than just one format (including the MPEG streams that some capture devices use), radio devices, closed captioning, OSD output, and probably most importantly, audio. Bits of that sound to me like I’ll have to write a better demuxer, specific to v4l2 to better handle things. I’ve heard demuxers are easy though.

Lastly, in reply to all the comments on my last v4l-in-phonon post, thanks for the links, but the bit about wanting to write a photobooth clone was just a handy introduction to the real goal: getting webcams in phonon. I don’t really think its possible to simply ‘drop in’ one of those many libraries into Phonon to make things work, as those are all C++ (both gstreamer and xine are pure C), and its the backend’s job to handle getting video from the device anyways. But the kopete library is where I started, and its how I learned how video4linux2 works, so thanks for that.

If thats not enough, then here’s some words:

Juuuuuust before the last day of classes before thanksgiving break at Akron, and before the hard freeze I moved device-automounter out of kdereview and into kdebase. The screenshot above shows the configuration page, which is off by default.

A few people might be wondering why, but this mail in the kdereview thread probably explains the background a bit. In my opinion, it just isn’t an easily solvable problem right now. I’m leaving it up to the distros to decide if they want it on/off by default (just hack lib/AutomounterSettingsBase.kcfg or create a proper kded_device_automounterrc config.)

Administrivia aside, the automounter has a little bit of intelligence in it (explained in the SETTINGS file). With all three boxes checked (my recommendation!), the following logic happens whenever it sees devices:

If a device has ever been mounted (specifically, ever mounted while device-automounter was around), it is tagged as ‘familiar’.

Device-automounter only cares if a device is ‘familiar’ if that second checkbox about manually mounted devices is checked. If checked, it only mounts familiar devices. Otherwise, it’ll mount everything. It might sound strange, but its useful to me when I plug in friend’s random devices on my laptop to let them charge, and I don’t want to have to make sure I ‘eject’ or ’safely remove’ or unmount them.

So now we just need some way to get the lower level bits (like DeviceKit) to do this stuff. Then maybe we’ll be a few years closer to catching up to 2009.

As a bonus, the keyboard is detachable and the display can be stuck on your fridge since it has a magnetic back. Has anyone else out there ever heard of this thing?

IRC Nick: tdfischer

IRC Channels: #plasma #kde #fedora-ambassadors #fedora-kde, lots more on freenode, and #uakroncs on slashnet.

Fedora Ambassador: At the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA

Dancing on top of an igloo last winter.

This week we had at least 10 people say they’ll be at our install fest next Tuesday “for sure”. Combined with what we had two weeks ago, I think our installation day is going to be rather busy.

As far as how exactly we’re doing our installs we’ll be having people either bring in their own computer, where we can then do the install and tweaking for them (including getting icky broadcom drivers to work, proprietary graphics, and setting up a connection to UA’s wireless). When they show up we’ll ask a few questions such as “Do you play games on windows?” or “Is there any software you use a lot [that wouldn't be available on fedora]“. Then we customize the system for them (dual boot, setting up wine, showing cedega, etc) and send them home with a copy of the install CD we built with Revisor for their system. The CDs get labeled nice Fedora/ACM logos with the disk printer the CS department bought us just last week.

If you’re a fedora user or a UA student, drop on by the 3rd floor of the student center. We won’t be too busy to say hello!

But with the second half, thats one 3-hour class less I have to take twice a week. Woo hoo free time!

Anyways, we have one big project that’s been going on since two weeks ago. A fedora pre-release event! The UA campus is a very windows-powered campus, with people looking at us crazy if we say we don’t want windows 7 even though it is on sale at the student center for only $25. The concept of free software and not liking windows is foreign to them it seems.

So two weeks ago the ACM has set up a little table in the student center where we sit down and show off the latest and greatest OS on the planet: Fedora 11 with KDE!

It has been pretty successful with a ton of people stopping by to wonder what the heck isn’t windows and why there’s a crowd around the table. But we consider two weeks ago to be more of a ‘trial run’ of what we’re really going to do this week. On tuesday, we just had a small banner and two laptops with small screens. By friday we had swag, big 23″ widescreen monitors and lots of shiny shiny to draw a good crowd. So this morning, I’m creating some small flyers in Inkscape to add to the swag of things to give away with stuff.

The real fun starts next tuesday (11-10-9, geddit?) when we start performing installs, dual-boots, migrations, and a full Q&A session of anyone who wants to try Fedora 11. And folks show up at the table this week, we have a LiveUSB creator station all set up for people who want to try. Last time about 5 folks grabbed a copy, and we’re hoping for twice as many this week.

I’ll have some pictures up later today and more this week for everyone to see the fruits of our labor :)

Over the weekend I moved device-automounter into kdereview. If all goes according to plan, it should be in kdebase, after which I shall continue hacking on it and combining it with the solid-actions stuff (and perhaps consolidate the other two hardware-centric KCMs into one ‘hardware’ page) for 4.4.

Also over the weekend I tinkered around with RPM packaging and created my first RPM. Its an RPM for device-automounter that should work nicely on Fedora 11 KDE 4.3. Get it here. Its my opinion that if there is anyone thinking of including this into fedora repositories, they shouldn’t. It is an already out-of-date export of the svn, it isn’t a ‘real’ release 0.1, and it (hopefully) will be released as part of kdebase-4.4. Having said, that, enjoy automounting in your KDE 4.3 on fedora :)

Its currently the last week of classes, and next week is finals week. Naturally, that means every teacher wants to cram in those last few major projects. And with 19 credit hours this semester, that leaves very little time for me to do much of anything. So in these last three weeks, I’ve been slammed with two rather big projects.

The first one is a rewrite of a lot of obfuscated C that tries to implement a parallel fast fourier transform algorithm (theoretically faster than FFTW, but we’ll see…). For an example of the original code, its on the class’ github repository. Its not pretty, especially considering how the math professor behind this project seems reluctant to teach us how his algorithm actually works. We’re really flying blind here.

The second project is a rewrite of the guest tracking system we use on campus for student dorms. The current system apparently never had any user feedback during development. Somehow, simple tasks such as checking in people takes way more steps than just “scan the barcodes”, yet checking out entries (as long as it is one of the 5 ‘random’ entries in the sidebar) is one click with AJAX. In fact, the job training to use the system actually includes “Use ctrl+f to search a page to find if they are checked in. If its not there, go to the next page and try again.” Its not uncommon to have 10 pages of entries.

The last two projects are actually pretty simple. The third project is a kind of mapquest involving distributed computing and graphs. The other is bolting on a quick menu system to our previous midterm project.

PROTIP: If you take CS classes here at UA, Dr. O’Neil and Dr. Chan make the projects in the rush weeks painless. Highly recommended.

The big personal project for this semester was a presentation I gave as a Fedora Ambassador. Last friday I gave a presentation explaining “Open source software: what it is, why its important, and how to get involved”. In reality, it was mostly about free software. For a startlingly pro-microsoft campus, a gentle introduction to the difference between the two seemed like it’d be a good, popular presentation. Only 10 or so people showed up. Can’t blame them though, since it /is/ almost finals week. I’ll be uploading my slides someday soon.

Finally, there was some relatively important news I’d like to announce here. Last Wednesday, I was elected president of the student chapter of the ACM. Neat. My term officially starts on the 6th of March, so I won’t be able to do a ton yet, but I’m already thinking up some good ideas for this coming year.

So, if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been coming to any Fedora ambassador meetings or why I haven’t already joined the KDE-SIG, or done any commits in KDE, this is why. Apologies for not carrying out duties or whatnot (if any were really even given to me). It also really doesn’t help that our campus network is still randomly blocking PING/PONG messages on unencrypted IRC due to “security concerns”.

Keep an eye out when 4.3 ships. You’ll like it :)