Marcelo Toledo

“Lately it’s hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks — the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC. Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming GDium netbook system, produced by Emtec. The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10″, 1024×600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The innovative G-Key system stores the Mandriva operating system and all the user data on a USB key — nothing is permanently stored inside the GDium. You can use your own desktop and data by plugging the G-Key into any GDium.”

From: http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/19/1750243&from=rss

It’s really sad for me to read this, Mandriva few years ago changed it’s name from Mandrake after buying the leader in Brazil, Conectiva, a company that made an impossible mission in an environment with deep complexities, showing strenght, leadership, innovation and positive will.

Mandriva is doing totally the opposite, clearly lost, nobody really knows what it’s doing and not even them when I read news like this, it should be working hard to do what they proposed, Linux. There are so many points to be improved that could make their market share increase, how it’s possible to see RedHat, OpenSuse far away and they doing nothing about it?

They have been still for a long time now and when you think they will do something innovative to shake the market, they present an OEM machine from Taiwan/China/Whatever and expect what? To be another Sun? valinux?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Computex is one huge event, all over Taipei you can see signs of it, everyone knows about it and looks everyone is going to it. We went there all days, we passed for every single booth, I gave so many business cards that I had to make more. If you or your company needs electronic equipment’s this is definitely a good way to start.

The event is divided in five sections:

• Communications products
• Peripherals
• Mega trends
• Media
• Display and Digital Entertainment

I believe that most of the opportunities are for OEM, companies that know how to build very well, but don’t know or don’t want to sell directly to the end user. One famous company that passed through this is Asus, they have part of the company selling OEM for big companies, but they also have their brand Asus, which is getting so big and so strong that is making front with companies like HP, Dell, Samsung, …, so what they did? Spin off the company, because of course you can’t compete with your own client.

Taipei is a very interesting city, it’s very hot, but very cloudy, rain almost everyday, people are warm, they are always very friendly and when they understand English they are so kind trying to help you everywhere.

Food is singular, the first time we chose a restaurant we made a mistake, asking for the set, I’ve never seen so many weird things in my life, unfortunately I am not used to it and I couldn’t eat most of it, so I am more cautious with food now. 

Tomorrow heading to Amsterdam, I’ll definitely miss Taipei, Zàijiàn!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Rafael Ugolini sent me these awesome links about Embedded Linux Conference 2008, all the videos and reports (from all years):

Videos like…

Keynote: The Relationship Between kernel.org Development and the Use of Linux for Embedded Applications, by Andrew Morton (Google)

UME - Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, by David Mandala (Canonical)

Back-tracing in MIPS-based Linux Systems, by Jong-Sung Kim (LG Electronics)

Using a JTAG for Linux Driver Debugging, by Mike Anderson (PTR Group)

…

Go check:

Videos: http://free-electrons.com/community/videos/conferences/
Reports: http://free-electrons.com/articles/conferences/elc2008-report/

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Our new baby is about to born, look how beautiful:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A new wireless technology has been developed that should serve as an extremely fast replacement for technologies such as Bluetooth and ultra-wideband (UWB), says Australian research group NICTA. Nicknamed GiFi, the process would use a chip (not pictured) that transmits at an extremely high 60GHz frequency versus the 5GHz used for the fastest forms of Wi-Fi. The sheer density of the signal would allow a chip to send as much as five gigabits per second. While the spectrum would limit the device to the same 33-foot range as Bluetooth or UWB, it could theoretically transfer an HD movie to a cellphone in seconds, the researchers claim.

The technology could also be used for beaming full HD video in real-time and could be used by notebooks and other computers to wirelessly connect virtually all the expansion needed for a docking station, including a secondary display and storage. Mixing and signal filtering would keep the signal strong versus the longer-ranged but slower and more drop-prone Wi-Fi option of today.

NICTA does not expect a production-grade chip to leave the development stage until early 2009 but notes that any future chip would likely cost about $10 or less to build. This and a small design would allow cellphones and other small devices to add the technology without significantly drive up the price, according to the company. The change opens the possibility of a successor to UWB and its related technology Wireless USB, which matches the same range but roughly the same 480Mbps peak speed of its wired equivalent.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

My friend Camilo Telles did his master thesis on this exact subject, he projected this camera entirely in wood and cheap web cameras, he also wrote a software to integrate all the images in one single, it’s not his work, but it’s similar and very interesting.

Reference: http://adn.blam.be/papervision/

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

You will need windows or Mac for the first moment and then you’ll be free. I have a VMware image in my computer and I could never make it work with USB, this time I had a chance to look after this issue and found out why. Linux’s VMWare doesn’t work with USB 2.0, to workaround this you can either change it to 1.1 through software (Kernel or BIOS) or you can use a USB 1.1 Hub, another option is using a temporary machine with windows, I have one at work and that’s what I did.

You need to install the latest iTunes and then install a software called iBrickr. The interface is designed to read like an interactive tutorial - just download the Zip file, extract it somewhere and run ibrickr.exe. You only need to install the application Installer, which will make it possible to install things directly from an iPhone connected to Wi-Fi or EDGE. From now on you won’t need Windows or Mac anymore.

Setting up your iPhone

1. Go to your iPhone and connect to the internet

2. Open Installer and install OpenSSH

3. Find the ip address you are connected to, ssh to it. Will take a minute or so to generate the keys for the first time. Enter the default password dottie, change it and log out.

Mounting iPhone on Linux

Now we need to make your Linux machine able to mount a directory remotely through ssh. You have two options, you can either use Ubuntu or command line sshfs, I will use sshfs here.

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Add yourself to the fuse group

sudo adduser johndoe fuse [Replace johndoe with your username]

Re-authenticate using su - johndoe to avoid /dev/fuse errors later on (or reboot). We’ll be leaving this terminal open for the rest of this guide. Turn off auto-lock on your iPhone by going to Settings -> General -> Auto-Lock -> Never, if it shut down you will lost carrier.

When running sshfs you may receive errors. Common ones are about /dev/fuse - logout, reauthenticate using su - johndoe, or rebooting is a simple solution (although not needed).

Finally mount it

sshfs root@iphone-ip-address:Media /media/iphone-media/

Installing latest Gtkpod

Now we’ll set up gtkpod, it will be installed in a different directory and won’t affect your current installation. Check out libgpod and gtkpod via svn.

svn co https://gtkpod.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gtkpod/gtkpod/trunk gtkpod
svn co https://gtkpod.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gtkpod/libgpod/trunk libgpod

Install libgpod

cd libgpod
mkdir ~/storage
./configure --prefix=~/storage
make && make install

And now the gtkpod

cd ../gtkpod
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=~/storage/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=~/storage
make && make install

Create a ~/bin/gtkpod-local.sh with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/storage/lib ~/storage/bin/gtkpod

Give permission to execute

chmod +x ~/bin/gtkpod-local.sh

Use your script to run it and you can use it just like a normal device that has been mounted, set the exact version of your device, ignore any errors about mmap’ing the ArtworkDB, or about not having permission to copy the playcount file. The current version doesn’t support album images, but someone is working on a patch and should be ready soon.

After transferring your data you might want to restart the iPhone, open the iPod program, then hold the home button for a solid three seconds, this will restart springboard and have it read the newly written database, your music should be available right away.

To unmount use:

fusermount -u ~/iphone-media

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I try not to spend my money on things that doesn’t work for me, I had a Palm V years ago, it was perfect for a few months, then suddenly it became too heavy and too complicated to carry. I realized that the only similar thing I would like to have is a smartphone.

Yesterday I was thinking if I should buy a Nokia N95 or an iPhone, I made my mind, my perfect phone doesn’t exist yet and I will stick with my simple phone for a while more.

Mark Pilgim has a strong opinion on the iPhone case.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

One of the systems I work on is VexBox, a multi-architecture Linux distribution for hotspots, it comes with all the softwares needed to serve a user, dhcp server, legitimate ARP Spoof, web server, radius client, etc.

For simple testing purposes it’s ok to open up a notebook, find the SSID, connect and do all your tests. But some times you need more then this, you need more users, more time connected and you might not have all the resources you need.

That’s when I came up with the idea of creating a hotspot simulator. For each client we use an Access Point (AP) running a modified version of VexBox.

Each one of them can be seen as a real user with a Wi-Fi enabled device, they will do exactly the same thing users does, it will navigate, download, idle, roam between APs, disconnect, reconnect and everything you can imagine.

We have projected and implemented a model to handle twenty simultaneous users, they are stored in two piles connected to two switches and one external power source with enough watts with an on/off button.

The main software controls the clients telling them what to do, find the SSID, try to get ip, authenticate, do some traffic, disconnect and so on.

It is written in Python and has a ncurses GUI so you can watch clients activities and control each one of them individually or globally. This way it can run in background or screen for months and can be accessed from any external network via a simple shell.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!