Jitu

Diwali is a huge and extensively celebrated festival in India. Preparation actually start more than a month before with shops announcing special offers on their products. So if you buy a MP3 player, you get a hair dryer for free. Or buy items for more than 1lakh (around EUR2000) and get a micro wave oven for free. Buy one shoe and get the other one for the other foot free of cost.

Then the actual festival starts. In India all kind of festivals last for more than a day. In addition sometimes even the date differs acompared to other states. For example Karnataka (a state in south India) celebrates Diwali on the 27^th of October, whereas it is one day later in Andhra Pradesh. So a smart guy is probably able to celebrate a whole week by just travelling to the states, in which the festival is currently celebrated. And even these dates are not fixed. In Bangalore (which is located in Karnataka), I had two tough nights starting from Sunday, when the people started to play with fire crackers in front of my room on the street on Sunday (26^th) morning 5AM.

So, enjoy the season! Happy Diwali!

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Whenever the host is hibernated or suspended, the guest system crashes. Unfortunatley it crashes in a way, that even after killing all processes, the guest machine does not come up anymore. In addtion the kernel module vboxdrv cannot be reloaded, since rmmod reports that it is still in use.
According to this bug report the problem is known and will be fixed in a future release. The hibernation or suspending transition is not reported to the guest operating system so that the direct access to the CPU provided by the VT-x/AMD-V extension is literally pulled away from the guest system. Once lost, it cannot be reinstatiated. Until a fix for this problem is released, there is (as I know) now work around by either deactivating this extension in the setting dialog or to shut down the guest system each time the host is suspended.

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Marrying a partner should be a decision that should be well thought through. In the end you have to spend the rest of your life with your “choice” (well, at least you should). Getting divorced is not an option and although most of the marriages are arranged, the majority of marriages in India do not split up.
Many Indians (especially boys) are very keen to get married at the age of around 23 to 25, since it means that they are officially allowed to have sex (and most of them have it only after marriage). However sometimes marriages are arranged very fast and it might look way too fast. A friend of mine told me a story that his friend got married next day although he got to know the girl only a day before. First I could not believe it, but then I saw this advertisement in the matrimonial section of a Telugu newspaper. In my opinion marriages in India have a different meaning than in the Western culture: In India the marriage serves more a purpose and is a thing that needs to be done in someone’s life (like a checklist; something like: “I want to get married, so search for a willing human of the opposite sex and simply get married”). In the so called “first world” marriages are an additional proof to show someone’s love and are considered more from the emotional point of view. Therefore it is not surprising that in the advertisement searching for a bride or groom, even US visa status or the yearly income are mentioned (refer to the advertisement above the circled one). The higher the earning the more beautiful will be the wife.

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If the proprietary NVIDIA is installed, it becomes some kind of adventurous, if a new for the Debian distribution kernel is released. Often something new is activated in the stock kernel, so that the kernel module of the NVIDIA driver cannot be compiled resulting in overfilled forums where users ask for solutions.

It is therefore advisable to install a module that comes from Debian, since it will run without any major modifications. In fact even glx and 3D acceleration is supported out of the box without messing up the kernel modules and libraries. Following this guide will lead to a system, where the user benefits from an accelerated 3D desktop system (e.g. for compiz) without leaving the path of Debian’s repositories. This results in a much smoother transition in case of a kernel update.

However the proprietary NVIDIA installer is quite rude regarding the libraries already installed on the system. Since the glx support coming with this driver clashes with mesa, which provides a software emulation of a 3D acceleration for those (though much slower than the hardware solution in the graphics adapter), mesa libraries or links to them are moved out of the way or simply removed. Even if the driver is deinstalled, the previous status before the installation is not or cannot be restored. If nvidia-glx from the Debian repository is installed successfully, the missing links are not repaired and if you check the log files of the xserver, you can find entries like

(II) LoadModule: "glx"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so
(II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
compiled for 1.4.0.90, module version = 1.0.0
ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 0.3

Fortunately this issue can be repaired easily by restoring the proper links to the libraries. If you like to force the xserver to take the right glx libraries by force, you can also remove the packages libgl1-mesa-glx, which will result in many dependency problems (basically the dependency resolution wants to deinstall everything regarding the xserver). The better way is to simply point to the correct libraries:

1. Login as root.
2. Go to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions (maybe you have to replace lib by lib64) and check where the link libglx.so points to.
3. Remove the link and create a new one (with ln) pointing to the nvidia-glx library in the same directory. On my box, the directory reads:
   jitu:/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions# ll
total 1508
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19243 2008-09-30 05:36 libdbe.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40804 2008-09-30 05:36 libdri.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 151818 2008-09-30 05:36 libextmod.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2008-10-17 18:14 libglx.so -> libglx.so.177.80
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1246936 2008-10-08 21:54 libglx.so.177.80
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28575 2008-09-30 05:36 librecord.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40153 2008-09-30 05:36 libxtrap.so
   As you can see, if have version 177.80 installed.
4. Change to the directory /usr/lib, where the mess continues.
5. Check the links to libGLcore.so.1 and libGL.so.1 and repair them similar to the steps above. The links should look like the following lines:
   jitu:/usr/lib# ll libGL*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 2008-10-17 18:14 libGLcore.so.1 libGLcore.so.177.80
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14071292 2008-10-08 21:54 libGLcore.so.177.80
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2008-10-17 18:14 libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.177.80
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 386460 2007-08-28 16:11 libGL.so.1.2.bak
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2480440 2008-07-12 23:02 libGL.so.1.5.070004
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 661380 2008-10-08 21:54 libGL.so.177.80
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2008-10-17 15:22 libGLU.so.1 -> libGLU.so.1.3.070004
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 532152 2008-09-20 21:19 libGLU.so.1.3.070004
   The right libraries can be easily identified by the version number (177.80). Most probably you also find the libGLcore libraries of mesa in the same directory. However they are not listed in the directory listing above, since I moved them into a backup directory in an attempt to repair my system.
6. Restart your xserver (Ctrl + Alt + Del) and check /var/log/Xorg.0.log again, if the glx module could be loaded properly. The entry should read:
   (II) LoadModule: "glx"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so
(II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: X.Org Server Extension
(II) NVIDIA GLX Module 177.80 Wed Oct 1 15:06:06 PDT 2008
(II) Loading extension GLX


Congratulations, if you have completed the above steps successfully. However it does not work (yet), although the correct module is loaded. Do a glxinfo | head in the console and you will see
name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
server glx vendor string: Brian Paul
server glx version string: 1.4 Mesa 7.0.4
server glx extensions:
GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer, GLX_MESA_pixmap_colormap,
GLX_MESA_release_buffers, GLX_ARB_get_proc_address, GLX_EXT_visual_info,
GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig, GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
client glx vendor string: Brian Paul
So still the mesa glx libraries are used and using compiz or any other 3D application is not very funny. To solve this problem perform the following steps:

1. Log in as root again.
2. cd /usr/lib/i686/cmov
3. Replace the link pointing to the mesa library by a link that point to the glx library from NVIDIA, which is located two directories below the current one. In my case the directory reads:
   jitu:/usr/lib/i686/cmov# ll
total 9232
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2008-10-17 15:23 libavcodec.so.51 -> libavcodec.so.51.50.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4541100 2008-10-03 20:07 libavcodec.so.51.50.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2008-10-17 15:23 libavformat.so.52 -> libavformat.so.52.7.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 651612 2008-10-03 20:07 libavformat.so.52.7.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 2008-10-17 15:23 libavutil.so.49 -> libavutil.so.49.6.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42884 2008-10-03 20:07 libavutil.so.49.6.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1375556 2008-08-04 04:36 libcrypto.so.0.9.8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2008-10-21 09:59 libGL.so.1 -> ../../libGL.so.177.80
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2468076 2008-07-12 23:02 libGL.so.1.5.070004
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2008-10-17 15:23 libpostproc.so.51 -> libpostproc.so.51.1.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46884 2008-10-03 20:07 libpostproc.so.51.1.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 285156 2008-08-04 04:36 libssl.so.0.9.8
4. A glxinfo | head should print out the following by now:
   jitu:/usr/lib/i686/cmov# glxinfo | head
name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
server glx version string: 1.4
server glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_SGI_video_sync, GLX_SGI_swap_control,
GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_NV_float_buffer,
GLX_ARB_fbconfig_float, GLX_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB
   and glxgears to check out the correct installation should print out
   jitu:/usr/lib/i686/cmov# glxgears
19293 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3858.536 FPS
19420 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3883.991 FPS
   instead of
   5466 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1093.091 FPS (on a NVIDIA GT8600M)

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Today I found something interesting for those who are interested in the openmoko project or are eagerly waiting for their purchased and shipped device to arrive.

Since the source code of the operating system of the phone is freely available (see also this post), it is quite easy to install an emulator that gives the interface of the Neo1973 (not the freerunner so far) in Ubuntu. For a short preview and to play around a little bit, this is quite sufficient. A detailed manual and howto lists all necessary packages that need to be installed on the Ubuntu box. The same instructions also apply, if you have Debian installed. Follow the steps one-by-one and especially Xaos’ hint (in the problem section) to get it working in the emulator.

If you want to remove the emulator again, simply delete the directory in which the emulator resides. Also the installed packages can be removed to save disc space. I provide a list of installed packages as a reference.

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“Please write neatly!” was nicely (notice the circle as i-dot) written on the answer sheet after return and corrected up by the professor. I have to apologize for my unreadable hand writing, because I have other concerns during an examination that watching the curves and lines of my writing: Usually time is running fast and knowledge is running low.

But I promise to work on my hand writing till the next upcoming exam. I did not get any points after another remark on the answer sheet: “Can’t figure out anything”. Maybe that is the reason, why I did not perform that well in the exam…

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Recently someone asked me: “What will you take home from India? What experiences did you learn?” My simple reply was: “Patience!” So far many people especially in government offices taught me to be patient, since it takes sometimes days to get a few papers done. One example: Last week I needed a set of papers (maybe 3 to 4 sheets), so Friday afternoon I went to the office to ask for a print out and I wanted to pick them up immediately. Unfortunatley the responsible clerk was not present and he already left for the weekend. So I was asked to come back on Monday morning.

Monday morning: The clerk was present and he asked me to wait, while he gets the papers ready. After 1 hour of waiting, I approached him again and he told me that he could not find my file. He asked me to come back at 4PM.

4PM: I was back in office and asked for that guy. He was not there, so somebody from the office phoned him to come. After 1.5h he was back and told me that he did not find the file until now. He was delighted to hear that I have already a copy of a first set of the same papers. Basically I needed a second set in original. So he wanted to see the first set, so he can copy the content and just sign it. Unfortunately it was already 5.30PM and therefore it was too late for that. I told him that I will bring the papers in the morning on Tuesday and even if he is not there, I will put them on his desk. He agreed to it.

Tuesday morning: I put a copy of the papers on his desk.

Tuesday 4PM: I wanted to pick up the copy. Before that I check his desk, if the papers are still there or if something moved on his desk. I was asked to wait. After round about 45 minutes, I was the proud owner of a second set of 3 sheets of papers in original and certainly I did not get the papers from him.

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Something like a hype was created after the global player Google announced its ambition to create a platform for cellphones called Android which should be freely available. That was almost a year ago and by now the customers can purchase the first cellphone based on this platform.

So, the question arises, how “free” this platform is in reality. Well, it provides definitely more freedom than the AppStore by Apple, which seems to keep deleting applications in the directory randomly. Just recently an application has been removed called “MailWrangler” that provided a single interface to manage multiple Google Mail accounts through its web interface. Reason: MailWrangler would confuse the costumers since there is already a mail client available in the iPhone. It clearly shows that the people of AppStore cannot differentiate between a program using a web interface and a mail client. Another question: If it copies the functionality of a mail client, why are 20 different calculator applications available in the store?

But back to the topic: In the past months developers for the Android platform suffered from an incomplete SDK making hacking an application very difficult, while Google’s “premium” developers could implement and test their applications on the most current version. In addition, the first Android cellphone is only available in the US through T-Mobile and has a SIM lock. Is the bounding to a specific service provider called freedom in the land of freedom? I need to hack the phone to gain my freedom?

The freedom comes into picture, if the Android platform will be published under an open source license. Nevertheless many parts such as the GSM module and the SIM lock implementation will not be published. To high is the interest of the involved companies in making money and the risk to damage the GSM network.

Fortunately there is a platform that is absolutely published under an open license called Openmoko. Except for the GSM part, this includes not only the software and operating system running on the phone, but also the hardware. A very active development community has been established around this platform and implements many nice gadgets. If there is not enough software in the original repository, even Debian with its huge package archive can be installed. It is up and free to the user, what operating system and which distribution he wants to use. Till now the software is still under heavy development and basically the phone is a Linux box with a phone facility. So the usual stuff like SSHD etc (as known from a desktop running with a Linux distribution) is available.

Currently the phone is not recommended for public use, since it is still a little bit buggy. But the speed of development and the idea behind it, makes it very interesting for Linux enthusiasts and for people, who want to know, what is going in in their cell phone. Needless to say that nobody (and especially no big global player) can dictate, what you want to use and what you want to do with your device.

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