I spent the entire week at Mandriva’s office in Curitiba (usually I work remotely from home, in São Carlos – about 500KM from there). It was a great, great week – I finally met the rest of the team (I already knew most of them because of past projects, and over the irc). And I love Curitiba city too – it is probably one of the most beautiful cities I know.
While there, I finally fixed all pending release-critical bugs which were assigned to me (including the infamous b43 bug 
). And, while waiting at the airport, I got bored and added support for Brazilian VIVO cellphone provider to drakconnect.
But overall, the trip was great! Looking forward for next one.
Also, not that long ago I discovered Nexuiz (opensource 3d shooter, based on Quake engine, but HEAVILY modified). From all opensource shooters I know, this looks one of the best. However, the recently-released 2.5 version has increased the size of game data to 600MB. I built it here on my machine, and was playing quite happily against bots for some time. But I don’t know if it is a good idea to submit 600+MB over SVN to Mandriva repository. Just to think about how long will it take scares me.
And finally, I (once again) tried getting used to KDE4, with a bit of persuasion from Helio Castro. From all KDE versions I used, this one is, in my opinion, probably the best. I managed to stay with it for about two days, but then returned back to XFCE. If the development of KDE goes with the same pace as of lately, probably the next KDE release will be good enough for me . But for now, nothing like good old XFCE 4.6!
P.S.: The picture on this post was taken by bedi. I have no idea how he managed to put those effects on the photo (probably it was beer effect ), but it looks cool! hehe.
“While there, I finally fixed all pending release-critical bugs which were assigned to me (including the infamous b43 bug”
awesome job! Sorry I wasn’t able to get you access to my b43 hardware earlier.
will 2009 spring be using b43 or wl by default?
wl didn’t worked correctly with the hardware I tested, so it still will be b43.
The problem was completely different from everything I expected. The b43 driver leaves its /sysfs/ directory empty, and drakconnect fails to map the network interface (wlan0) to corresponding driver, and this makes the firmware installation part to fail. I only discovered it after a few hours of digging into it.
So in theory this fix should also make other cards which have the same problem (almost empty /sysfs directory) to work too. But I suppose that b43 was the only one which had this issue
.
wl has a slightly smaller range of chips supported than b43 does, but afaik it works very well with all the ones it actually supports…i’ve never heard of anyone who got wl set up correctly but found it didn’t work.
hehehe
I guess the effect is ‘blurring background’ but i don’t know how my camera started this effect alone, I will push her.
s/push/punish