2013-07-25 Update

Part of this article has been self-censored to keep it strictly focused on its main topic, now that it’s disconnected from the reality that it was referring to. Only the bits relevant to working on a large FOSS project and how release cycles can make contributions pointless remain.

As a Free Software developer, there is of course one thing that I cherish very much: Freedom. Today, I’m going to talk about my involvement in some particular FOSS projects – and how I think my freedom to contribute to and use these projects has been restricted, in a way that I can not accept anymore.

Today, I heard another one. Just a little one. I heard another yesterday. I hear them, in fact, everyday. And there is no day for them to make me laugh. And every single day, when they reach me, when they go through my shell of indifference, they hurt a part of me. Tremendously.

I’m talking about jokes. Sexist jokes. Racist jokes. All those discriminatory jokes, that titillate the beast¹ and are outrageous to the grown-up human inside us. Today, it begun with the evocation of that wonderful thing HTCPCP is:

• Me: there is a protocol to control coffee machines from your PC
• Some guy: I know, it’s called wife

I know only a few days have passed since my previous update, but today, I’m gonna talk about this week mesa’s improvement and the Kernel Mode Setting with the r7xx radeon family.

Mesa’s improvement

Concerning mesa’s improvements, we can notice a real difference in 2D performances when using GTKPerf.

Without composite, GTKPerf used to perform in 7.79 seconds. Now, it performs in 6.76 second (13% speed-up).

Using composite, GTKPerf took 17.48 seconds to perform in my previous blog post. It now performs in 12.67 seconds (27.5% speed-up).

Composite 2D-performances are getting good-enough to be usable but the graphic corruption on text-entries still remains. Only little advancements have been made about it.

Unluckily, I didn’t notice any 3D-performances improvement.

Roughly one month have passed since I first tried the 3D support on my radeon HD4770 (R740), it is time for a little update :)

I - Overall impression

While I was away from my computer featuring the HD4770, the mesa build system changed and kind of broke my compilation scripts. It took me some days to figure this out as the compilation script didn’t notice anything. I figured it out after seeing a “make install” failing while I was looking at the compilation listing.

So, I did a new compilation system, based on the latest Archlinux stable mesa’s package source. What’s interesting to note is that I now compile every dri driver available and it seems like they are compiled correctly :D

Hello there,

Writing this (superb) blog post in order to present me, since I seem to have settled in that wonderful octopus cave. This is my first blog, and it’s weird to think about the incredibly high amount of people who will praise those lines (means me, when checking for typos).

Ten days after my article r6xx/r7xx open source driver evolves fast!, there have been quite a lot of work and commits on mesa but it seems like my corruption problems are not going away.

It is time for another video !

Back in the January 2009, AMD started releasing code and documentation for r6xx/r7xx ATI Radeon series. This has been made to allow further development on the open source drivers xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd.

The first release was only able to draw opengl triangles. One month ago, AMD’s Alex Deucher announced on new milestone had been completed, glxgears on r6xx/r7xx, and, finally, fifteen days later, he also announced compiz started working with xf86-video-ati.

Since I bought a new computer last month, I decided it was time to test this new driver !

PPassKeeper, my main project, intends to become a plugin-based portable way to store passwords in a secure and easy fashion.

The API for getting and setting passwords is quite simple and is good for modules like the Gnome-Keyring or the KWallet but there are some cases where this simplicity is just disastrous. For instance, for modules like WebDAV or LDAP (these modules have not been coded yet). In fact, there are loads of parameters needed by some modules and the only way they had was to use configuration files.

This time is over as PPassKeeper now provides a way to handle parameters !

Would you fancy a C-container that can hold a string, an integer or a float ?

There are some cases where you need, for instance, to return a value that could be of any type. This case just happened to me when I needed to handle parameters for PPassKeeper modules.

In this article, I will explain a solution to solve this problem from the basics to the final code I did.

This article describes how to set up a fully chrooted Cherokee server with a Django web site. This is certainly not an obvious task and I think others may find it useful, so here’s how to do it.