Just click your name in the top-right corner and select “System Settings”. The system settings window will appear.

There select “System Info”. (Yes… System Info) and there select “Graphics” tab. (Yes… Graphics)

Now all you need is to switch ON the “Forced Fallback Mode” and relogin.

After login you will be greeted with familiar two panel desktop with defaultish look. Panels work as always, with one exception – every widget is locked in place by default. To customize it you need to right-click it holding Alt button. And they may be aligned to the left, center or to the right of the panel – just by dragging them where you want with the middle mouse button, holding Alt of course. Try it by dragging the clock to the right position where it belongs. Right-clicking the panel (holding Alt button, remember) gives you the standard menu to customize the panel, add widgets and create new panels.

If you run Ubuntu, you can even get Unity’s Indicator Applets on the panel. See article for instructions.

How to restore GNOME 2 look to GNOME 3 desktop ©, .

Mer picks up the idea of MeeGo Core, and provides a very stripped down, mobile devices oriented Linux distribution. But this distribution is vendor oriented. Not end-user oriented. Mer’s goal is to provide a base that vendors can build on and create end-user oriented products.

There are two kinds of vendors. Ones providing a “hardware adaptation” and ones providing “user experience”.

Hardware adaptation lies below Mer, and makes Mer run on a specific hardware. Let it be an Intel CPU based PC or Netbook or an ARM SoC based mobile device or any other esoteric hardware.

User Experience vendor provides a layer on top of Mer, interacting with a live human user. This may be the MeeGo Tablet UX, MeeGo Netbook UX, Plasma Active, Cordia HD, MeeGo IVI or any other User Interface.

This allows for many combinations and decouples the effort. Of course you can be both hardware adaptation and user experience vendor, building a complete Product.

Have fun in the spirit of openness.

Mer – What is it all about? ©, .

Rebuilding the package didn’t help, so I started investigation. It turned out that the lua package SPEC “fixed” the CFLAGS= line in Makefile incorrectly, omitting $(MYCFLAGS) variable which is crucial to set POSIX support on Linux, thus most of POSIX support (ie. popen) was just skipped.

You will find fixed Lua and built LuaRocks packages at: http://codex.xiaoka.com/pub/packages/redhat/. Added bonus: Lua is patched to 5.1.4-3.

Lua 5.1.4-3 for CentOS with fixed io.popen ©, .

It was over a month ago and, oh boy, was it a good change! :-) Last time I tried SuSE several years ago I was hit by RPM-hell badly, reverted to Gentoo and never looked back. Then I grew to binary packages distribution and switched to Ubuntu.

When Nokia decided to ditch Maemo and its Debian based underlying technologies I wasn’t happy. Then I needed to package some things for my MeeGo ports, met OBS and was amazed how great tool it is. Then I realized how good packaging tool RPM became during the years.

Having openSUSE as my main system gives me the solid base of stable and well tested system and access to bleeding edge software in the areas I want. OBS builds the most recent GNOME or web servers not only for the running (Factory) distribution but for the stable trees too. So I have the flexibility of mixed stable+experimental system I was used to running Gentoo, without the hassle of building it myself.

There is one more thing – openSUSE developers does not feel that they know better than the upstream developers and does not ditch features users are expecting to find in their desktop environment, replacing them with custom, unstable and incompatible thingies. You still have this vanilla feeling using openSUSE – with just a bit of chameleon branding sprinkled here and there.

Bienvenidos openSUSE ©, .

Porting the MeeGo Core was very easy. I already had experience with building MeeGo images, so the only thing to get was Archos specific knowledge. openAOS is a very good resource and I had SDE firmware with openAOS multi-bootloader installed in few hours. It took me a few hours more preparing Archos specific firmware and configuration packages and building the image. Also the device kernel needed a little fix to build fine under CodeSourcery toolchain. And there I had it – MeeGo Core on Archos running omapfb X11 driver.

The next thing required for MeeGo is the 3D acceleration. The UI uses it for nice animations and will not work without one. Unfortunately the SGX bundle for the stock device did not work for me at all. Besides that, BuBu that got it working reported problems with scrambled font rendering.

So I decided to try another approach. MeeGo non-oss repository has the SGX driver and GLES libraries available for N900 and Beagleboard. Archos 5it uses the same OMAP3430 with PowerVR as N900 so it should be able to use the MeeGo provided binaries. The only thing missing in Archos kernel was the DRI2 kernel level glue layer for PoverVR. So I decided to backport drivers/gpu/pvr from recent MeeGo 2.6.35.3 Linux kernel to Archos provided 2.6.27.10. It required support for OMAP clock notifications, so I backported these too. Using my kernel and modules I was able to get fbdev-sgx X11 driver and GLES acceleration up and running.

Next step was building MeeGo Handset UI image to test the now-working Core.

My Archos kernel binary and MeeGo Core image with SGX acceleration working is available at http://codex.xiaoka.com/pub/meego/archos/

MeeGo for Archos Generation 7 ©, .

It turned out, that in the meantime Dovecot moved from 1.2 version to 2.0. So it was a good time to upgrade my packages to the new version. It required a bit of package reworking, but the packages are ready and running fine on my Chrome.pl mail server.

You may get these from Xiaoka APT Repository.
NOTE: Sieve filtering is no longer tied to main Dovecot binary, so you may to get it separately – install dovecot-pigeonhole package.

Dovecot 2.0.6 for Ubuntu Lucid ©, .

Being a good community member I reported them promptly to upstream explaining the nature of the issue and giving an example fix, which was working for me. ZF-8767, ZF-8768.

To my excitement when I updated Zend Framework SVN sources checkout an hour later, my fixes was already merged. :-) That’s nice.

But the bugtracker was strangely silent, so I got curious and looked at the SVN log to see whether my solution was correct, how it was implemented finally and commented. There were two commits to the library – first ones for a week or so. But surprisingly none of them mentioned my reported bugs. One fix was merged as a [GENERIC] bugfix, and second was expanded to a fix for the same error class in many instances and mentioned some other bug.

The real surprise came an hour later from the bugtracker. My reports were closed by the person committing changes to the SVN as… “Not reproducible within trunk. Probably already fixed.” WTF? What nerve.

Dojo Toolkit community was very skeptic when Zend offered joint-effort proposal. One might see why.

For me this is a complete credibility lost for Zend Framework. I doubt I will use it in any other project. You may think twice before doing so too.

Zend Framework – What does big business need the community for? ©, .

One possible solution would be to rewrite the SM to be multi-threaded. And I do mean rewrite – the way it is designed now, would mean rewrite (or reassembly) from scratch.

Other possible solution is to make the SM multi-processed. This means a possibility to launch many Session Manager instances to service one XMPP domain. This would balance processing load between many processes (possibly machines) and spread storage load on many separate DB connections.

Most server implementation approach this with a separate ‘clustering’ component, which tracks which session component is handling which user.
In case of jabberd2 I think it is not necessary. We already have the all decision making overseer – the router component.

I just committed to SVN trunk a router version, that handles many SM and/or external components (i.e. transports) instances for one XMPP domain. Router selects the destination instance using a hash of user JID (receiver in case of SM instances, sender in case of external components). This is an approach that most clustering HTTP deployments use, which select the web server using session-id hash.

I’m running clustered jabberd2 on Chrome.pl with no problems.

Clustering for jabberd2 ©, .

Today I committed virtual domains support changes to SVN branch http://codex.xiaoka.com/svn/jabberd2/branches/vhosts which allows you to configure more than one serviced domain in only one SM instance.
I successfully configured 3 domains in one SM instance and was able to talk between these 3 and one another in second SM process. All 4 connected to one Router process instance.

Unexpectedly it was pretty simple – it took me only ~6h. to get it working. :-)

Of course all domains serviced in one SM process have identical configuration. If you need domains with different configuration, you need to create another sm.xml and launch separate SM process for them.

The SVN vhosts branch changes need some polishing and testing. I would appreciate if you tried these and tell me what you think.

Virtual domains for jabberd2 ©, .

The best way to run monit is as the Init managed process. But there is no /etc/inittab on Ubuntu anymore. Instead we have Upstart. Adding Monit as an Upstart service is easy. Let me show you how…

Upstart is event based, and its event handling configuration is in /etc/event.d. The configuration is a bit similar to /etc/inittab, but a bit more verbose and placed in separate files. To add Monit as a managed process, just create a file similar to a getty spawner configuration in ttyX. I named my file: /etc/event.d/monit with content of:

# Run monit in standard run-levels
start on stopped rc2
start on stopped rc3
start on stopped rc4
start on stopped rc5
stop on runlevel 0
stop on runlevel 1
stop on runlevel 6
respawn
exec /usr/sbin/monit -Ic /etc/monit/monitrc

Next just start monit. Issue a command:
start monit

Good luck with service monitoring.

Using monit with Ubuntu Server ©, .