Will I lose my dignity? Will you still care?

Thanks to Jeremy Olexa (aka darkside) I now have 2 new Atheros based cards.

One is a Belkin N1 Wireless Notebook card, Part #F5D8011 – ath9k based, although I’ve gotten it recognized by the kernel and I can get an IP address via dhcp, as well as connected via WPA2, I can’t seem to pass traffic.
Two is a Buffalo AG54 WLI-CB-AG54L, this one seems to be ath5k based, although I haven’t attempted to use this one at all yet.

Currently towards the bottom of the todo list, is to get these both working, preferably using the N1 as an access point, so I can test out the speeds of the Efika MX’s wireless. This has a secondary goal of seeing if the wireless issue that I have (currently I cannot seem to ssh into any wireless clients) is the AP I am using (pfSense based) or if it is something more; I’m guessing the former.

While working on the Gnome overlay with the Gnome team, I decided to give Empathy a go.  I talk to maybe 3 total people on AIM, and no one on Yahoo, which just leaves me with Jabber (Gmail) contacts that I actually talk to.  So I installed it, I even enabled webkit so that I could use Adium themes with it (I personally prefer Stockholm, just be sure to look inside the folder and only move the style into the right place.)

It was kind of a disaster.  I’m running on a Quad Core, 2.4ghz machine, and double clicking on a contact would take up to 25 seconds for the window to show up.  I was not a happy camper.  Watching htop, I could see that my DBus session bus was working hardcore.  100% cpu usage on 1 core.

No problem, I thought to myself, whipped open my handy terminal, ran “dbus-monitor –session” to watch the traffic that was causing it to use so much cpu and…. nothing.  Zilch.  There was no (apparent) traffic going on but the session bus was still using 100% cpu.

I popped over to the Gnome bugzilla, and started reading through bugs, but none were coming close to what I was seeing.  In desperation, I turned to the faithful Google.    And I searched… and came up empty – not so much empty as simply results that weren’t helpful at all.

I let it go for a few days, asked a couple people if they were having any issues, and most don’t use Empathy, so that was a bust.  Then I was looking around while I was “at work” which really meant I was sitting in the office as opposed to my room using the computer, and I came across Bustle; http://willthompson.co.uk/bustle/

Bustle is very nice, in that it can show you timings.  Once I had that compiled, I used Recordmydesktop to take a video of me using Empathy, with Bustle running, logging everything that went on with Empathy.  Then I popped in to the Empathy IRC channel (#empathy on irc.gnome.org) and mentioned in the channel that it was taking a long time for my IM windows to open, and pointed them at the video ( http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/files/empathy-dbus.ogv (21MB)) and then at the two screenshots of Bustle ( http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/files/screenshots/empathy-bustle1.png andhttp://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/files/screenshots/empathy-bustle2.png ), and Danni replied to me, asking why I was using the logger, when it shouldn’t be enabled.  So I disabled it, and removed telepathy-logger from my system, re-compiled Empathy, and sure enough, the IM window pops up instantly.  I’ve removed the dependency as well as got rid of the useflag (with a note in the ebuild about why) and committed it to the Gnome overlay.  Due to Danni saying that no one should be using telepathy-logger, I’ve also package.masked it in the Gnome overlay.  I must say, using Bustle is *very* nice, and I’d like to thank Will Thompson for writing it.

I also smiled at the “How?” section of the Bustle website, considering that was the exact purpose for me downloading it.

I’m hoping to write an ebuild for Bustle, and apparently it is really easy to do with Haskell as the Gentoo Haskell team has a script that you run that will write the ebuild for you.  I haven’t started working with it yet, but I definitely plan to, as Bustle is now definitely on my radar for usage in debugging what is going on with apps and their DBus usage.

Client Reason Code…Description…Meaning
0…noReasonCode…Normal operation.
1…unspecifiedReason…Client associated but no longer authorized.
2…previousAuthNotValid…Client associated but not authorized.
3…deauthenticationLeaving…The access point went offline, deauthenticating the client.
4…disassociationDueToInactivity…Client session timeout exceeded.
5…disassociationAPBusy…The access point is busy, performing load balancing, for example.
6…class2FrameFromNonAuthStation…Client attempted to transfer data before it was authenticated.
7…class2FrameFromNonAssStation…Client attempted to transfer data before it was associated.
8…disassociationStaHasLeft…Operating System moved the client to another access point using non-aggressive load balancing.
9…staReqAssociationWithoutAuth…Client not authorized yet, still attempting to associate with an access point.
99…missingReasonCode…Client momentarily in an unknown state.

Just posting it here for future reference

So, I have an overlay set up for the Efika MX.  If anyone out there has one, you are free to use it, keep in mind that some of these ebuilds are very rough and some (imx-lib) are perfect examples of how not to write an ebuild

I’ve got it hosted on Github, http://github.com/steev is the main page.  There *are* other packages than just Efika MX related, simply because I use it for keyword testing, as well as for a few things that I want on the Efika MX without enabling some other full overlay.

What I currently have working is :

Xorg 1.8 RC2 (xorg-server-9999, mesa-9999, libdrm-9999) 2D acceleration in X, still no 3D driver yet (I’m watching the msm kernel closely as the video card in the Efika MX *seems* to be the same one that is in a Snapdragon.)

I need to write an ebuild for the Ralink driver for wireless.  I’m not a huge fan of it, but having used it, it DOES work.  My own attempts at getting the one in staging for the kernel by backporting the 2.6.34 stuff ended in lots of kernel panics and divide by zero errors.

TODO:

Clean up the current ebuilds, make sure they do the right thing.

Ebuild for Ralink driver Thanks to Arnaud Patard from Mandriva, this isn’t needed as he got the rt2800usb in-kernel driver working.

Ebuild for the binary amd-gpu driver (this one is more along the lines of copying a bunch of files into the right place(s))

Look into what is needed to get the fsl_linux_sdk_codec_1.7.1 installed and working, and then write ebuilds.  A preliminary glance at the contents shows 3 tarballs, and a PDF.  One of the tarballs is just docs, the other appears to be a gstreamer plugin, so that shouldn’t be too difficult to compile itself, however the fsl-mm-codeclib Makefile looks like its going to make baby jesus cry.

Other things I’d like to do:

Move the Efika MX into my room, out of the office, which would put it on a different switch in the home network.  This would also put it on a slightly smaller monitor since it is currently plugged into the DVI input of one of my monitors used for work.

Get the PPC Efika back up and running – the main issue here is the lack of an outlet to plug it in.  This last one will probably have to wait for spring cleaning to come around, as I know I have some more UPSs in the garage, I just don’t remember where.

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