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Three days after applying, I got my Flattr invitation. For those who haven't heard about it before, Flattr is a web micropayment platform. From The Flattr story:
Flattr was founded to help people share money, not only content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this is quite high. People would just ignore sending donations if it wasn't for a really important cause. Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Who would ever even login to a payment system just to donate €0.01? And €10 was just too high for just one blog entry we liked...
You can use it to send and receive donations for any content you create. It, at least in theory, is especially useful for small payments. There isn't an awful amount of content online supporting Flattr yet and the service itself is still in beta release, but it looks quite promising.
I activated my account by loading a small amount of money to my account and integrated it to my PyBlosxom flavour, so it automatically submits every blog post to Flattr. We'll see how it goes.
Recently, I attended the OpenBTS workshop organized by David Burgess. The 4-day workshop was hosted by Dieter Spaar in his lovely Bavarian farm. Beside the many participants from across the globe with a variety of backgrounds, Harald Welte and Karsten Nohl were also in attendance. I won't get into much detail about the covered material since I'm sure they will be properly summarized in the OpenBTS Blog soon. Instead, I will just share some snapshots.
David Burgess did a superb job at covering a large set of topics.
Dieter Spaar had a neat UNIX-based spectrum analyzer box running.
Harald Welte gave demonstrations of OpenBSC and OsmocomBB.
OpenBSC-supported Siemens BS-11 BTS
USRP with an external duplexer used for OpenBTS
The OpenBTS base station I had the pleasure of configuring and messing with during the workshop
I have been watching the Free Software tinkerers' much needed approach to cellular phone networks for the past few years, albeit from a distance. Cellular telephony seems to be the biggest network implementation (bigger than the Internet in means of user base) that has been surprisingly closed to inspection and experimentation despite its age. Lately, I've started actively getting informed about GSM network protocols and their free implementations such as OpenBTS and OpenBSC. Both projects provide very promising opportunities for various scenarios. However, even if the two projects are combined with a free mobile operating system, one still wouldn't have control on a very important part of his digital telecommunication. This is because the client side (i.e. the mobile phone) of the GSM connection would still be handled by proprietary chipsets whose innerworkings are unknown and out-of-reach.
About two months ago, Harald Welte announced a project called OsmocomBB which intends to close what might be called the missing link between the free GSM network implementations and the free mobile phone operating systems. When accomplished, the projects aims to have a fully functioning and free GSM baseband software stack in the mobile phone.
What I wanted to share was a paper titled Anatomy of contemporary GSM cellphone hardware released by Harald Welte today. Even though most of the concepts are still above my head, I very much enjoyed having a concise overview of all the processes going on in a phone. A tip for beginners: Print out the article if you can. It is bound to host a bunch of small side notes as you research around and come back to it.
Here are two paragraphs from the ending personal rants section to whet your appetite:
The GSM industry is one of the most closed areas of computing that I’ve encountered so far. It is very hard to get any hard technical information out of them. All they like to spread is high-level marketing information, but they’re very reluctant when it comes down to hard technical facts on their products.
All the various vendors do more or less the same. The fundamental architecture of a GSM baseband chip is the same, whether you buy it from TI, Infineon or from MediaTek. They all cook with water, like we Germans tend to say. The details like the particular DSP vendor or whether you use a traditional IF, zero-IF or low-IF analog baseband differ. But from whom do they want to hide it? If people like myself with a personal interest in the technical aspects of mobile phones can figure it out in a relatively short time, then I’m sure the competiton of those chipset makers can, too. In much less time, if they actually care.
Very exciting times are awaiting us.
As planned, I did my talk about the thriving fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement at yesterday's FSFE Berlin Fellowship meeting. I started with the basics of the Free Software ideal, moved on to the problematic issues concerning mainstream GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian and then discussed the solutions to these problems. I also had the chance to share some of my favorite fully free GNU/Linux distributions.
The interest in the topic was amazing, and the Q&A discussion after the presentation turned out to be more interesting than the presentation itself. After the event, I even managed to get my share of the FSFE's Hug A Developer campaign!
I can has hugz! (Original picture from Matthias Kirschner's weblog)
Fortunately, I had brought a microphone with me and recorded the talk including the engaging discussion afterwards. You can find the Theora/Vorbis OGV video of the talk below.
Those who prefer to only have the audio can download the Vorbis OGG of the talk as well. Both the video and audio are licensed under the free CC-BY-SA license.
If you, your friends or your organization might be interested in this topic, please note that I would love to give an improved and updated version of this presentation to any group as long as my travel expenses can be met.
While at it, I compiled a list of interesting links relevant to the talk below.
I will be giving a talk about the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement in the Free Software Foundation Europe's Berlin meeting on Thursday, February 11th, next week. The talk will start at 19:30 in the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystraße 48. Hopefully, we will have a chance to continue discussing the topic over a few beers right after the meeting, too.
Here's the abstract of the presentation:
For the past few years, a growing number of GNU/Linux distributions have been started with the specific goal of ensuring users' software freedoms before everything else. In this presentation, I will try to draw an overview of the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement and provoke participants to think about software distributors' ethical responsibilities. What aspects of mainstream GNU/Linux distributions does this movement not find sufficient? Which distributions align themselves with the movement? What is their rationale for limiting functionality of their software offerings in the name of upholding user freedoms? What does a binary blob mean and what does the Linux-libre Project claim to accomplish that the vanilla kernel Linux doesn't? How does the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement affect the rest of the free software ecosystem? I am planning to keep the overall tone of the discussion newcomer-friendly while also providing some food for thought for the technically inclined.
The wording has been deemed "clunky" by Karl Goetz, the lead developer of gNewSense, but it's the best I managed to do in a busy week. If you are in Berlin next week and interested in discussing this new movement inside the free software world, you're welcome to join us.
I have just got this message in Pidgin from a friend over the MSN Messenger Service:
"dude, my internet connection is fucked up. i'm getting disconnected every time i open msn."
Predictably, he was offline when i saw the message.
I had an interesting day yesterday. I attended my first Fellowship meeting in less than 24 hours after finally joining the Fellowship of Free Software Foundation Europe. The Berlin group of the Fellowship turned out to be full of interesting people not all of whom are technogeeks. After Hugo Roy's presentation about the alarming features of the upcoming EIF, I had a chance to get to know the FSFE some more. Despite being sister organizations, different Free Software foundations (such as FSF, FSFLA and FSFE) have, in my experience, different cultures. I first got in contact with the FSFE people during the CELF Embedded Linux Conference Europe last year and, combined with my observations yesterday, a general picture of FSFE's style is starting emerge in my head. But I'd better save it for a later blog post, or one of my ignorant comments would likely draw me into a flamewar. :)
When i came back home from the meeting, I was greeted by Tobias and Randi's over-enthusiastically jumping around and yelling "vintage laptops!" The laptops that Sam Geeraerts graciously sent me from Belgium had arrived.
"vintage laptops"
Mainly thanks to K.Mandla, I became interested in experimenting with "old" (i.e. approximately sub-300MHz) laptop computers and using them for daily tasks with Free Software. My attempts at finding such machines in working condition locally had failed (please let me know if you know of any shops or organizations that have such machines in Berlin) and, as a desperate attempt, I was yelling for help on the IRC. That's where Sam stepped up and donated these three machines that he had scavenged from his company. These laptops run on 266, 233 and 100MHz processors and have respectively 96, 32 and 40 MiB of RAM.
I was too tired and sleep-deprived to start hacking on them immediately, but it didn't prevent us from having some fun...
I, Randi and Tobias monkeying around
...Or from opening a bottle of sparkling wine and having a little Windows launch party.
The launch party ensues with a game of strip solitaire...
EDIT: Hello there, FSFE Planet!
It has been a chaotic couple of weeks, but I'm finally settling in Berlin. Although I haven't found my final home yet, I finally have a reliable Internet access thanks to a little 3G USB modem. (Andreas Gohr's blog post helped greatly in straining out some details of wvdial configuration for the German T-Mobile.)
I have been collecting a few tips and tricks about free command line utilities for some time and I plan to share them here in near future. For now, I'll start with a single tip.
In my quest to grok the most popular kernel for GNU, I am making some distinct, albeit slow, headway into the inner workings of Linux. Before completely delving into the source code, I wanted to have a last overall look on kernel configuration, which may also end up providing some new insight relevant to the Freedom Shoppe builds.
In my search, I found Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linux Kernel In A Nutshell.
It is a concise reference guide and, even better, under a free license! And I don't mean a semi-free license; it is genuine Attribution-Share Alike. The only point that bothered me was that every chapter and even part headings were separately packaged. But it isn't really the GNU way to simply complain about works that you're allowed to hack on. :-) So, I did some scroogling and found here that the Ghostscript interpreter can be used to easily glue multiple PDF's together into one file right on the command line. Here's how to do it:
After downloading and uncompressing the tarball of all PDF files, I had all chapters of the book (except for the cover which may be under O'Reilly's strict copyright.) After figuring out the order of these files, I ran this command:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=LinuxKernelInANutshell.pdf title.pdf LKNSTOC.fm.pdf ch00.pdf part1.pdf ch01.pdf ch02.pdf ch03.pdf ch04.pdf ch05.pdf ch06.pdf part2.pdf ch07.pdf ch08.pdf part3.pdf ch09.pdf ch10.pdf ch11.pdf part4.pdf appa.pdf appb.pdf LKNSIX.fm.pdf colo.pdf
With this command, Ghostscript writes multiple files in given order into a single PDF. As you can check for yourself, files given after -sOutputFile=LinuxKernelInANutshell.pdf are original PDF files listed according to the book's order.
I am hosting the resulting single PDF file, so feel free treat yourself to a geeky afternoon read. ;-)
One of the free software related mailing lists I'm subscribed to is called GNU-Linux-libre. It's a list where developers of fully free GNU/Linux distros and other projects involved in spreading software freedom gather to exchange experiences and opinions. For the last couple of days, there has been a heated discussion going on over how a free kernel should behave in certain situations. It's a tricky subject, if you're not familiar with it. Basically, some Linux drivers (including Intel wireless drivers), even though they're free themselves, require the loading of firmware codes which are not free software. Logically, the Linux-libre project removes these not free firmware from the kernel to ensure users' freedom. However, the question comes to what should be done about the left drivers that are rendered useless without the firmware. The current solution is to leave these drivers as they are and make the kernel print a *DEBLOBBED* message whenever the driver looks for the non-existent firmware.
A few days ago, the developer community started to discuss if the drivers themselves should also be removed from the Linux-libre source code. (You can read the discussion thread here.) The argument for removing the drivers is that those drivers act primarily as a trap for the user to switch to non-free firmware. And, the counterargument to that is that the drivers themselves don't restrict user freedom and should be left as an invitation for hackers to write a free firmware. From my point of view, both sides of the argument have valid points. However, the discussion seems to be blown out of proportion for such a relatively minor issue. I am saying minor because nothing significant changes for the regular user of a free distribution either way. The involved device would be unusable regardless of whether the discussed drivers are purged or not. Furthermore, if a user has enough skills and motivation to plug a non-free firmware back, she could also just compile the whole driver module.
Anyway, the real reason why I wanted to post was to share a quotation from a mail sent during the discussion. It's written by Daniel Olivera who is the leading developer of UTUTO, the first fully free distro recognized by the FSF. For a few years, it remained the only such distribution, until the number of free GNU/Linux distributions came close to ten with more lining up to get included. Although the language is a little bit broken (probably due to the heat of the discussion), its hilarity should make up for it. :-) And, nevertheless, there is some truth in it, too...
This hackers, and this Gnu Project and other free software fighter never create a free system. All rules, All software, all hackers, all gurus, all free software moviment never use a 100% free system. I create this system. I first hacker from free software moviment what compile and put only free software in one CD are me. you don't need teach about the history, I write de history.
I had a cheap MSI laptop lying around with no functioning hard disk or CD drive for a while. I have tried switching HDDs, yet it continued failing to find a drive, so I'm guessing there was a motherboard trouble involved. (Though I'm a sub-newbie when it comes to PC internals.) Today's been a slow day and without knowing I found myself with a screwdriver in my hand and a dissected laptop on my desk in front of me.
I don't know if this happens to other people too but I occasionally start hacking on something without realising. In this case, I have been listening to some music and chatting on the IRC when, out of nowhere, I started thinking about the sad little laptop sitting on one of my "TOHACK" hardware piles. In the end, I grabbed it and started unscrewing without even thinking about it.
By the time I came to myself I already opened up most of the case, so I went ahead took everything apart. I examined, smelled and tasted every part I could get my hands onto. Meanwhile, I also took mental notes of their possible uses for future projects.
After this, it would be a waste to assemble it back into its old, unused shape. What do you do with a laptop that has no access to a CD drive or hard disk and that has the cheapest possible keyboard (think about the whole board bending and all keys shaking even if you type gently) and an awkward track pad? Well, the only idea I had that was doable in an hour or so was making an LCD terminal into which I could plug a bootable USB stick and boot into a system created with FUSBi or a persistent installation like the one on the FSF Member Card.
And that's what I did. In the simple sense, it required reversing the LCD Panel, so that when the laptop's lid is closed (which will be its default state) the screen will be looking to outside. I also needed to take care to make sure that the old keyboard surface remains uncluttered so the now reversed lid closes snugly and that the power button, which normally stays under the lid is reachable from outside. And, yes, it involved a soldering iron. I'm not arguing I followed the most elegant or civil method here. :-) In the end, it kind of looks like a one piece LCD panel.
In the pictures, the panel is standing on a basic book holder which does a decent job. (I have also used this book holder as a stand for my Eee PC in the past.) And, sure enough, it makes a perfect companion for my FSF Member Card running gNewSense and the Happy Hacking Keyboard.
© Ali Gündüz 2008 - 2010 CC-BY-SA
