Linux conf au one

Well, here it is. Another conference has come to a close, and it is time again to try to make sense of all the amazing things that were seen and discussed. Overall LCA was a great meet-up, although there was one big negative: there were so many good sessions to hit that it was impossible to not run into at least some scheduling conflicts. Of course the good news there is that the volunteers are working to get slides and video up for as many of the sessions that they were cleared to. One things are up, I'm sure I'll find even more to ponder.

Probably the first thing to hit is the topic I came down to speak on: Color Management. My presentation went pretty well, and I had a few people talk to me about it later (and that was despite being scheduled right next door to the Linux powered clarinet playing robot). Additionally Carl Worth introduced me to someone who has started poking around in Cairo, seeing about hooking in color management. We also got a chance to go over what's needed to get things hooked into Cairo and get some nice CMYK PDF output. The next step is to collect up some representative use cases so we can figure out exactly what the API changes will have to be supported. I'm going to be pestering the Scribus guys to see what they know of, but if anyone out there has any experience or needs of going to print, send off an email or comment so that we can be sure to cover things well.

Next up is extended input. I attended a talk by Peter Hutterer (of MPX) that went over a bit of the state of things and then the new changes that have been going in. Over the course of the conference I had ended up chatting with him a few times, and verified that I am on track with where I'm working on taking the new extended input support (good support will need to leverage D-Bus and HAL). He also had poked around for a couple of weeks with Wii remotes, but had since moved on. That actually was a fairly common story, and it seems that it's up to me to address the GUI and application levels.

And to keep things short for now, there's one last point I want to cover: technical drawing. Of people I talked to who were not using Inkscape or not using as much as they could, the most common question seemed to be with technical drawing. We could probably pick up a good usability boost and garner another user segment if we just tune up things to make technical drawing and diagramming better. Most of what we need to do is probably already well known to us. However, we could benefit from a quick review and a little refocusing. I think one person's question really summed up the viewpoint we need to use when looking into this: “So, will Inkscape let me finally move off of Xfig now?” The people we could help with that are probably using Xfig or Dia (or nothing yet) for simple charts, diagramming, home layout and the like. Perhaps focusing down on some casual use-cases like that will help us sight some low-laying fruit and get a jump up in this area.

As usual, I'll send out more info as I digest things and get them settled out in my head. In the mean time, feel free to ask about any specifics you might care about. Perhaps Peter or Andy or some of the other Inkscapers who were there might chime in also.

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Eee PCs and Tablets and remote X11! Oh, My!

One thing that has slowed down some of my Inkscape development has been that Hardy is not happy with my tablet on the laptop I usually use. It worked fine when I booted up from CD, but fails once I install and run from hard drive. I had been waiting to see if the last few rounds of beta updates would fix it, or if I could give any helpful testing feedback. Alas, it was not to be. So on OS X there is no extended input from my tablet working for X11 apps, and on Ubuntu the tablet doesn't even work as a plain mouse. That, of course, means I can't work on things like pressure sensitive behavior, extended device configuration, etc.

However... this week I thought of something. The tablet is USB after all, and I do have a second little computer with USB, so perhaps that could be used to help some how. I did a quick search on the Eee PC's filesystem and found it had wacom drivers already. A few quick minutes hacking away on xorg.conf files and it actually worked! The tiny computer was running happily with my tablet.

Of course, I then hit the big problem that it *is* a tiny computer, and I don't have a workflow to get custom things compiled and installed yet (keeping it stock for now). But then the UNIX world came to save me with remote X11! Just toss in ssh and a little X11 forwarding and voila! the Eee PC is displaying the application and running keyboard, mouse, and tablet input, while the program itself is actually running on a different computer.

I had done a few test runs with ssh to my laptop from the Eee PC in the past, so I tried again. Well, the connection and all worked, but the version of GTK+ on there did not have extended input support compiled in. So even though the X11 front end running supports it, the application didn't listen to the X11 server. Off to another computer then! Tried it with ssh to run the app from an Ubuntu 7.10 box and it worked!!!

Of course I still want to use the laptop, so I ended up using ssh there too. So the development (Emacs), compiling and running is all done on a Linux box in another room, but my editor/IDE is displayed here on the laptop and the app I'm building and running is displaying on the Eee PC. Kinda kludgey, but it works.

And then finally the size of the Eee PC in relation to the tablet is something I find quite amusing. The poor little PC is basically dwarfed by the Wacom. Literally it is only as big as the active area on the tablet itself.

What makes it even sadder is that the Eee PC is pretty good for travel and presentations, so I'll now be stuck with toting around the ridiculous pair.

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