One of the first things that needed doing was to update the bootloader (otheros.bld) as the old Gutsy one wasn’t able to boot Hardy’s kernel. Once this was achieved (thanks to some great mentoring by a very busy Colin Watson and others) I was able to upgrade to Hardy and start fire-fighting.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to fix things in time for Hardy’s first release. X was crashing and trying to choose the wrong video driver (both now fixed), and the Kernel (still) has a memory allocation problem (fix on the way). There are various other problems waiting to be resolved, and a few suggested features too, but we’ll get to them all in good time.

Although initially the plan was to try and have an installable/usable Hardy by 8.04.1 in July, I think focus will probably be on Intrepid from now on. Getting fixes back into critical components such as the kernel and X for Hardy in time would be tough as this is considered an “unmaintained port” in Hardy.

So far working on this project has been a great experience for me. I am gaining a very broad knowledge of all aspects of how Ubuntu works, and also how Linux works on the PS3. I highly recommend any folks who are using Ubuntu on PS3 and have Debian/Ubuntu dev experience please jump on the development mailing list and look out for ways to contribute.

A status update has just been posted to the dev list today. I’ve tried to outline as best as I can the current state of the project.

Thanks to everyone upstream, downstream (ubuntu-ps3-dev, ubuntu-x, kernel-team), and in the community who has helped out so far!

As well as blogging about general Ubuntu stuff I’ll also be talking about the Ubuntu PS3 Port project which I’m currently obsessed with.

I followed the instructions on PSUbuntu.com to install the port of 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. The instructions are good but this is very early days for Linux on PS3; naturally there’s plenty of work still to do to smooth over the user experience. The Ubuntu builds for PS3 are maintained voluntarily by literally only 2 or 3 guys at Canonical, so it’s impressive it works as well as it does.

Setting up the screen resolution didn’t work quite as described - stopping gdm (the Gnome Display Manager) and setting the screen mode only changes the resolution for the current terminal not for the one which Xorg starts in, and if you specify a non-compatible mode your display may be a mess so you have to type blind to fix it (or better use the up/down cursor keys to access a previous working mode using shell history). Not a big deal for a techy but obviously could be quite a hurdle for your average punter. Anyway once the correct mode has been found setting up a script under /etc/event.d/ ensures it always boots into the desired mode.

Second issue was that the OS didn’t seem to be finding the ethernet network card. Luckily browsing the PSUbuntu Networking and Connectivity forum revealed the solution - disable NetworkManager and configure the network settings manually using the Gnome Network tool (or by editing /etc/network/interfaces directly if you know how). Seems NetworkManager doesn’t work quite right with the PS3 ethernet card yet.

Having got it up and running the next task was to choose a lighter desktop system than Gnome. I love Gnome but there’s only 256MB of RAM on the PS3 and the Gnome desktop on it’s own uses most of that so applications are likely to be swapped out to disk way to too quickly for my liking. There are some interesting instructions on the PSUbuntu forum which suggest all sorts of things like disabling the graphical login screen (gdm) and changing to use the Fluxbox window manager instead of the default Metacity, but I felt I wanted something less custom and more complete so I decided to install the Xfce desktop.

Xfce is the base of the XUbuntu distribution and is a lightweight Gtk based desktop system with its own window manager. It has some slick themes and also supports pretty features like transparency and drop shadows (using Xorg’s Composite extension). You can choose to install the entire XUbuntu default installation by installing the xubuntu-desktop package from Synaptic, but this will pull in all sorts of other peripheral tools such as the Abiword office suite. I didn’t need this stuff so I opted to install just the Xfce components by installing the xfce4 package.

Of course one thing which I want to take advantage of is the chance to experiment programming the amazing Cell Microprocessor. Included in the package repositories are the required development libraries and tools. Just search for the keyword ‘cell’ in Synaptic to find the relevant packages. There’s also a packaged copy of the Cell Programming Primer from kernel.org.

I happened to test out a Java game which uses Full Screen Exclusive Mode with a DisplayMode of 800×600. So far this app has been working ok on Feisty but when I tested it today on Gutsy it couldn’t change display mode. I discovered that Java was only able to see the current screen mode of 1280×1024 and no others.

I’ve opened a bug on Launchpad here: #154613: Java cannot change display modes / screen resolution in Gutsy, and I’ve been digging in trying to work out what’s going wrong.

I managed to locate the JNI function call in Java’s native C source code where it gets the list of modes. It’s called Java_sun_awt_X11GraphicsDevice_enumDisplayModes(...) and is in the file j2se/src/solaris/native/sun/awt/awt_GraphicsEnv.c. As expected the Ubuntu packages are built from the Sun Linux binaries - no source code. I couldn’t find the Java 6 source on Sun’s site, the link appears to be wrong. Instead I found the file in the Icedtea/OpenJDK source tree. Icedtea on Gutsy has the same problem so I’m fairly happy this is the the same or roughly the same code as in Java 6.

The function makes use of the XRandr Xorg extension to query the available display modes. I coded up a small test to see if XRandr was behaving correctly. It is, on both Gutsy and Feisty. So it looks like it could be something in Java 6 u3.

Will keep digging, as I really need this to work.

It’s fantastic to see this finally implemented, Graphics Card and Screen issues, in my experience, have been the most visible deficiency of the Linux distros compared with other operating systems.

Here’s some more background on this feature and the X server from the Ubuntu Fridge:  10 Rocking Features in 10 Days: Day 2: Bulletproof X and Graphical X configuration

Instead of a hard drive it will use solid state memory apparently either 2GB or 4GB. Anecdotal evidence from the comments on this page, suggest it will be running a version of Suse Linux.

This is more great news for Linux as it shows that there is a growing confidence that it is a viable alternative to Windows and Mac. We already have Dell introducing Ubuntu pre-installed machines into for the European market. RM are a big supplier of IT hardware and services into schools and this laptop will probably be targeted directly at the education market. Lets hope we see more and more of the education market share heading towards Linux (and Mac) so there’s a more level playing field and kids don’t grow up thinking that computers and Windows are the same thing.

Update: Here’s the link to the product description page on the RM site - RM Asus miniBook. I notice in the features page the operating system is described as an “Asus developed Linux based operating system”. A little Googling turns up a story on Slashdot from from last Sunday mentioning about an ASUS motherboard called the P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n that includes an embedded Linux OS called Splashtop which boots from the BIOS on the motherboard and allows you to use Firefox+Flash, and Skype in under 5 seconds from pressing ‘Power On’. The Splashtop site has a decent FAQ, and even a blog-post with a YouTube vid demostrating the OS. I’m not sure this is definitely the exact technologies the RM machine is using because Splashtop is developed by DeviceVM not Asus. The RM machine is basically a rebranded Asus Eee PC. The Eee PC site doesn’t give specific detail on the version of Linux it uses but it’s support page does link to Xandros Linux.

I was happy to find my patch was accepted and was eventually released in version 0.13. I’m even happier to find that with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 7.10 my patch has found it’s way downstream to my favourite distro too.

It’s interesting to chart the progress of an open-source contribution: I submitted my patch upstream (i.e. directly to the Banshee) on 13th Feb 2007, it made it into a stable release six months later on the 5th August 2007, and now in October it’s beginning to make it downstream into the distributions. In total around eight months have passed. At first this appears to be a long time but it’s better new features don’t float downstream too quickly so they have more time to mature.

• Finally the Evolution mail client has an icon for the Gnome Panel’s Notification Area, I hope it supports minimizing of Evolution too (without leaving behind the task bar button).
• Evolution now has a built-in backup utility to help export and move settings to another machine.
• The properties dialog for a mounted disk now shows a disk-usage pie chart - very useful.
• One neat feature is that if you lock your screen and go away someone can leave you a message to read once you return (no more sticky post-its stuck to your screen).
• Automatic unlocking of the Gnome Keyring (Password Manager) when you login or unlock your screen.

However, the thing I am most happy to see is the new Gnome Library documentation site. This is a very polished site collecting together Gnome related tutorials, manuals, and API references. I think this is a great step forward for the Gnome project; I have felt in the past the resources were not as well presented or well maintained as they could be, particularly developer docs on subjects such as Gtk and Glib.