Daily Archives: July 27, 2007

OSCon Friday

Software

Fudge Update

Yesterday I blogged about the guy handing out fudge. He saw my post and explained why he was doing it. Today he was around handing out fudge, and I thanked him for his comment. He gave me two pieces of fudge for blogging about it.

Pineapple

At most of the breaks, they have this truly wonderful real (non-canned) pineapple. I think I have eaten more pineapple this week than any other week, ever. Very insidious, O’Reilly.

Conference materials

Slides of talks are available. Apparently keynotes are being posted on Youtube and Google Video, though they haven’t provided a specific link AFAICT.

Philip Rosedale, Founder/CEO of Linden Lab

Second Life and the XPrize are two examples of escapism: you can escape to virtual earth, or escape the planet entirely.

In order for Second Life to grow, it has to become profoundly open. It has to be a standardized protocol. They are working on code to let people run their own servers. They are trying to make the server trusted and make it able to be open sourced as well. They see openness as the key way for it to grow.

If you are writing a web app that depends on the network effect — such as Facebook — you should open source everything right from the beginning. Not because it’s best for humanity, but because you will win.

Jimmy Wales

He’s trying to do open source search. Nice idea, could have been summarized in 45 seconds, I think.

Simon Wardli

Was going to talk about Zimki, which was going to open sourced, but they decided not to.

Funny and interesting talk, I sorta forgot to take notes while listening…

Nat Torkington

OSCon program chair.

Funny talk about Linux, an adolescent at 16 years old. Thinking about different languages and how they’re doing. How the Linux community is organized: are we fighting battles, and do we need to?

James Larsson

This guy takes old hardware and makes insane devices out of it. 15,000 volts running over a coat hanger used as a “game controller”, for instance.

In all, awesome keynotes today.

OSCon Thursday Part 2: Linux on laptops

Linux

Matthew Garrett

A lot of background on the state of laptop support in Linux. It worked reasonably well in the 90s, but with the migration to ACPI, has become much more complicated and less reliable in general, especially with suspend/resume and video.

Emporer Linux and System 76 produce Linux supported laptops.

I wanted some more in-depth technical information and found Matthew later on at the Intel booth. Here’s what I learned:

s2ram is little more than a wrapper around standard ACPI sleep that has options to do video mode save/restore

I asked him about all the many, many different userland laptop management tools. He recommends simple acpi-utils with the ondemand governor. laptop-mode-tools tries to do way too much, and there is little point to using a userland governor anymore.

I’ve been having a problem with my MacBook Pro (Core Duo) hanging on suspend about 10% of the time. I explained the symptoms and asked him how to go about debugging it. He suggested disabling console suspend and enabling PM debug in the kernel. I will give that a try and see what I get.