FOSS.in Call for Papers still open until Oct. 08

Many of you know that for the last three years I enjoy the conference for Linux, Free and Open Source Software formerly known as linux-bangalore, but now known as FOSS.in.

Compared with other big international events, FOSS.in call for papers is always tremendously late, which means that it actually is only some 10 weeks in advance of the event. The same goes for the event website. Please don't consider this as a sign of weak organization. It's just like this, it has been like this, and it worked well. This 'late start' has never compromised the vitality and success of the actual event.

If you have some interesting and technical topic in the Free and Open Source software which you want to talk about, I suggest submitting a proposal with the FOSS.in speaker registration website. Expect an excited audience of up to 3,000 attendees.

OpenPCD press release, online shop

Ok, after a painful day full of shippin rates, insurance, taxation issues, etc. Milosch finally worked out how to ship our product to about any country of the wokld. This means that the OpenPCD shop is now online, and we're accepting orders from those people who don't want to fabricate the four-layer PCB themselves ;)

We also sent out the Press Release, in the hope that some press actually might be interested in free hardware project.

On OpenPCD.org we now also published the first binary firmware images (source code has always been in svn), including full USB DFU (device firmware upgrade) support.

If I manage to resolve some of the problems I still have with the SAM7 SSC controller, then the PICC simulator should also get working some time soon.

gpl-violations.org prevails in court case against D-Link on the GPL

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in this blog that there was legal victory in a ground-breaking court case on the validity and enforcibility of the GPL.

Today, I have released this press release stating some more details on the case, including the name of the defendant: D-Link.

I'm quite happy to see that our arguments have convinced the court outright, and that we didn't have to go through a lengthy procedure of calling several prominent kernel developers as witnesses, and getting statements from technical experts or the like.

If you're interested in the (German) judgement of 16 pages, you can find it at my lawyers' website. An English translation is in the works, but will take another week or so.

We've already received some press coverage, mainly in Germany so far. Interestingly, in a statement of D-Link quoted by heise.de, D-Link seems determined to not take this to a higher court... which means that this judgement will soon be considered legally binding, and be one more tiny step in the clarification of legal questions on the GPL.

I'd like to thank my fellow developers Werner Almesberger and David Woodhouse, as well as my lawyer Dr. Till Jaeger and his colleagues for all their support and work. A lot of time and effort was spent in preparation of this case, and as it turned out, exactly that preparation brought the case to a quick ending.

Panasonic R5 battey life

On the trip back to Berlin (from netconf in Tokyo) I had the first real-world test case for my new Panasonic R5 laptop. This really is the best laptop I ever had, I'm very happy with it. The advertisements of 10..11h battery life time don't seem to be an overstatement. I'm not flying for more than 10 hours, but given the power readings that ACPI gives me, 11 hours should be very much possible, given the total power consumption of 4.3W while doing text file editing, such as writing program code or this blog entry.

Doing a kernel compile brings the total power consumption up to something like 8.9W, still pretty impressive (and should give about 6.5hours given the battery capacity of 57Wh).

On the driver/hardware support side: I got display backlight control to work with the out-of-tree pcc_acpi module, and ipw3945 also worked straight ahead. Now I basically only need to find some useful thing to do with the TPM that I unvoluntarily got with this device. Has anyone figured out a way to use it for dm_crypt key storage or something like it? That would be neat. And yes, I know, if the device breaks, my data is gone. But that's what backups, version management, IMAP servers and the like are for.

My latest toy: Panasonic R5

I was already assuming that I'd be spending some money in Akihabara (Tokyo, Japan) before I actually went there or knew for what it was going to be spent.

Browsing through the hundreds (literally!) of local electronics stores, I once again realized how nice and small laptops (sub-notebooks ?) are available in Japan. One really wonders why those devices never make it to the European market.

Anyway, I bought myself a Panasonic R5, which is a 512MB RAM, 60GB 1.8" hard disk, Intel U1300 CPU, 10.4" 1024x768 device that weighs 999grams and is actually really cute ;) Wi-Fi is provided by an Intel 3915 a/b/g chip, and graphics is an Intel 945 PCIe - so no problem with free software drivers at all (remind me to re-implement that binary-only daemon for the new Intel chipset if nobody else does it until the end of the year).

Debian unstable installed fine (from a USB stick, before Windows booted the first time, so it's still a virgin), Xorg is running, everything seems fine. One thing that I didn't realize until after the purchase, though, is that Intel's mobile CPU's apparently don't have the x86_64 extensions (or EM64T how they call their AMD copy), which is sad. This is actually the first 32bit system I'm using for a quite long time :(

Jamal also got one at netconf, and seems equally excited about his new toy...

netconf'06 over

Three days in fast-fowrard, this is how you could probably best describe how netconf was. In-depth technical talks, just like it is supposed to be. And I have to admit that even though I've basically paused my kernel network development in early 2006 (will be back next year!), I could still follow everything, so the risk of loosing track quickly is apparently not that high.

There are many exciting areas of work (and even more with interesting design ideas/discussions), so it's just too sad that I'll have to stick with other work for the rest of this year... embedded Linux, RFID and GPL enforcement :(

As usual at the end of the event, we had to think of where and when to hold the next one. After northern America (twice) and Asia/Pacific (once), it's definitely time for Europe next year. We haven't yet decided on whether to go to Sweden, Germany or Switzerland. I'll try to locate some scenic venue and sponsoring, maybe we can hold it in Germany after all.

At the dinner today both JamesM and myself did our best to promote FOSS.in 2006 among the networking crowd. It seems like Rusty, Jamal and Yoshifuji got hooked ;)

In other news, I couldn't resist but to buy one of those ultra-small notebooks that are only available in Japan but nowhere else. Specifically, it is a Panasonic R5, featuring 24.2 x 18cm size, exactly one kilogram of weight, 60GB hard disk, 10.4" screen, 512MB RAM (needs to be upgraded) and a ultra-low-power U1300 Intel CPU.

I've managed to install Debian unstable during the last sessions of netconf, up till now basically everything is running and I'm happily typing this blog into my usual vim-in-uxterm-in-ion3 setup. Let's hope this new notebook will end the suffering of my legs due to the exctremely hot (and power-consuming) Turion64 based MSI laptop.

A1200 LSM / SELinux update

James Morris got quite interested when I told him that the A1200 uses SELinux to lock out the users (owners!) from their own phone ;) So we both did some further analysis, and it turned out that Motorola had actually released the source code to their own policy engine (MotoAC) with the A1200 kernel sources on opensource.motorola.com, whcih is good.

Still we didn't understand why you would use an unmaintained, at least three years old version of SELinux to base a forked policy engine on it - but obviously this is the world of Free Software and everybody is allowed to make his own decisions.

I've also catched up with the A1200 in general and found out that people have already managed to flash their own kernel into it, whcih is great. I wish I had more time to put into OpenEZX at this point, turning it into something that is actually useful. HINT: Skilled volunteers needed.

Pavel Machek apparently got one and is annoyed by the restrictive SELinux policies. By now I'm quite sure that it's not all too difficult to get rid of them ;)

First time in Japan, visiting netconf 2006

I've just arrived in Japan for netconf 2006. It's quite a pity that I'll only stay one week, but my current business-related schedule doesn't allow for anything more (actually, it wouldn't even allow for netconf, but some events are just too important...).

So here's my report on the first couple of impressions:

• Everywhere (airport, train stations, inside trains, ...) it is extremely quiet. Almost nobody talks - and if, then very silently. This is extremely convenient, and I would love to see this to a similar degree in other places...
• At the airport, there was somebody "defragmenting" the luggage on the conveyor belt, i.e. assuring that the maximum number of suitcases fit onto it, rather than causing a queue of incoming luggage because of an apparent "full" belt.
• At the immigration, an extremely long queue formed. At some point a baby started crying. Immediately one of the immigration officers left his booth, made his way through the queue to escort father + baby (mom was not in the queue) directly to his booth, giving them preference. I'm impressed.
• At the airport train station, a ticket vending machine ate my 1000 Yen bill and responded with some buzzing and the very descriptive "Not Ready" error message. While I was still undecided whether that is a malfunction, or the machine is just checking that bill very thoroughly, some JR staff member was running towards me, apologised, and disappeared in some small service room. Two minutes later, he opened a small window next to the ticket vending machine, where he handed me back the bill. I'm even more impressed!
• Japan seems to be the only place (at least as far as I can tell) where "The Coca-Cola Company" has managed to produce soft-drinks that do not contain ridiculous amounts of sugar or artificial sweetener. (and I don't even know how it's called because there is only a Japanese name on it)
• At the airport I used WiFi. This is the first time that I used a public hotspot that did actually use stateless IPv6 auto-configuration to give you a valid IPv6 address. I praise those responsible for that... stunning!
• The only negative aspect so far is the lack of a GSM network here. Too sad...

OpenPCD - A 100% Free 13.56MHz RFID reader design

Finally, after a lot of delays, I am happy to announce - not yet the public release of the schematics, PCB layouts, and firmware source code - but at least a homeapge and photograph of OpenPCD, the completely free 13.56MHz RFID reader design. You can use it to talk to ISO 14443 A+B, ISO 15693 and related 13.56MHz transponders. We're still busy cleaning up the code and fixing the bugs in the schematics, but expect them to be released within this week.

This reader design is particularly interesting in everyone interested in RFID protocols and security, because of its many interfaces. You can modulate arbitrary waveforms onto the 13.56MHz carrier by bypassing the RC632 modulator/encoder and using the PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) or SSC (Synchronous Serial Controller) of the AT91SAM7 micro-controller. On the RX side, you can also bypass the RC632 decoder and use the SSC to sample arbitrary data, provided it is on a ISO-ocnformant sub-carrier frequency.

Many of the internal signals can be routed to U.FL connectors on the PCB, e.g. if you want to look at certain intermediate signals on an oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer or even sample it with some high-speed ADC like the USRP SDR.

So far we have only produced some five readers of this latest design. But for those of you not interested in re-building it from scratch, we will obviously be offering the ready-built reader in a web store soon.

Meanwhile, the openpcd.org team is constantly working on producing the counterpart, a 100% Free and Open RFID transponder simulator for 13.56MHz. Progress is steady [but slow]. Expect some more exciting news soon ;)

Meeting Michael Lauer (OpenEmbedded) for two days

The last two days, I've been meeting with Michael Lauer from OpenEmbedded. Among things that I cannot talk about, we've also been talking about OpenEmbedded on the EZX phones, as well as the Amida Simputer.

Victory!

Today I have receive news that we've won the first regular civil court case on the GPL in Germany. This is really good news, since so far we've only had a hand full of preliminary injunctions been granted (and an appeal case against an injunction), but not a regular civil trial.

The judge has ruled, but the details of the court order have not been publicised yet. I'll publicised the full details as soon as thus details are available in the next couple of weeks.

[p.s.: If you're from the press: Don't bother asking me about further details on who the defendant was, or whatever else. Patience. All shall be revealed soon]

ROKR E2 Linux Phone review

There has been an extensive review of the Linux based Motorola ROKR E2 phone at osnews.com.