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opinion that if there is anyone thinking of including this into fedora repositories, they shouldn’t. It is an already out-of-date export of the svn, it isn’t a ‘real’ release 0.1, and it (hopefully) will be released as part of kdebase-4.4.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 :)

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 :)

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!

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.

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?

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.

With the holidays done with, I had some time today to toy around with the Video4Linux API. After a few hours, I had a small console program with Qt that opened up my webcam and…didn’t do much else. I read about the many different formats supported by the API, all of which looked like a pain to write support for. Then I remembered that Kopete has had webcam support in for a very long time. A little more digging later and I found rudimentary support for webcams in phonon/experimental.

Turns out the code in phonon was lifted almost verbatim from kopete, but it hadn’t been touched since 2008. That meant it didn’t work with my webcam right away. However, I committed some changes a little bit ago that port the kopete changes over to the phonon copy. Now Phonon has working rudimentary support for my webcam. Neat, huh?

But I’m not done yet. I’m only the second commit on the phonon-webcam stuff. While it does work, it probably isn’t ready for primetime yet. Theres bits and pieces (also from 2008) that seem unrelated to the kopete code in phonon, but they make passes at dealing with video capture.

Now here’s the question: is anyone still working on video capture in phonon? If there is, I’m here to help. If not, I’d like to jump in and get things going again.

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.

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.

I’ve wanted to work on that since it seemed like it’d be really simple and quick to do. However for the past few weeks, I’ve been stuck working with an iRobot Create for my robotics class. [plug] My team and I have been using the libirobot library I started writing a long while ago to get our two projects done.[/plug] Since the library is completely unfinished and experimental, it took up all of my KDE hacking time. D’oh.

But after the two projects were done, I suddenly found myself with free time again. So instead of working on getting webcam support into phonon like I should’ve been doing, I fiddled around with the organization. (Here’s a WIP-quality screenshot too)

I asked a few folks who thought it was disorganized, and they seem to like the new ordering. The only problem though, is that we need a new icon for the new ‘input hardware’ category. I created a bug report, to which pinheiro replied:

ok valid bug, there is a bunch of icons in kcm that could be better a comprehensive list of those and also proposals to make them better would be fantastic.

pinheiro on bug 231270

I’m going to go through them this weekend with some other campus KDE users and a new design major friend I recently met (who has never used or seen KDE before) and look at what needs improvement.

’till then, if you’ve got a problem or suggestion for some icons, go say something in that bug.