aufs - please support Mr. Okajima
Aufs filesystem is a full-featured, full-fledged layered filesystem for Linux, created by Mr. Junjiro Okajima. It is an alternative to "unionfs", Unlike unionfs, however, aufs is actively developed, and actively supported. Unlike other alternative Linux layered filesystems like "overlayfs", aufs is feature rich and has a lot of options. Aufs is mature and stable software, it is about 10 years old by now.I don't know how extensive aufs is used in the field, but I have a suspicion that many "live" OS systems (with support for persistence) will use aufs in form or another. I also think that aufs would be widely deployed in the embedded world, where one needs to have "writable" rootfs while still having the base OS in ROM. What I *do* know is that aufs is used in Fatdog64, FatdogArm, Puppy Linux and its multiplicity of derivatives, Slax, AntiX, and perhaps many others.
I recently had the pleasure of working directly Mr. Okajima.
I had problems with kernel oops with FatdogArm on cubox-i. Researching the problems, I found that kernel oops was a known common problem in the official cubox-i kernel and there were some solutions - but they didn't seem to work for me. My oops symptoms were quite different, too - the kernel didn't immediately crashed; but all filesystem operation failed, which lead me to suspect that the problem may have had to do with aufs (the other popularly Linux distros on cubox-i - Arch, Ubuntu - they all don't use aufs as far as I'm aware).
I escalated the problem to Mr. Okajima through the public mailing list and to my pleasant surprise, found that he was all courtesy, and very responsive. Mr. Okajima is very knowledgeable person - not only he helped me to troubleshoot the problem, but he actually solved it. This is despite the fact this was his first time looking at problems in ARM systems (and the problem required looking at ARM code dissasembly to find the cause); and the fact that he didn't have any ARM boxes whatsoever to reproduce the problem. One rarely encounters this kind of support and talent - even in the commercial world.
I'd encourage those who beneftis from aufs - especially commercially - to support the work of Mr. Okajima in whatever means that they can. Donation link is here (this goes straight to Mr. Okajima - not to me).
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Skype - please re-enable ALSA support!
I use Skype. Not because I'm a fan of it (after all, I wrote PSIP, but by necessity.Recently I've got an email from Skype that they are terminating access from all Skype clients prior to 4.3 - so if I haven't upgraded to the latest and greatest, I'd better do it, or else no connection.
Which is generally fine and dandy except that Skype 4.3 drops support for ALSA. ALSA is the *native* audio system in Linux. Skype does, however, chooses to support PulseAudio instead. I don't have a problem with them supporting PulseAudio, but why the need to drop support for ALSA, which has been working for years and years?
I don't want to discuss the merits (of the lack thereof) of PulseAudio here - I'd just point out that not all of us Linux users run (or can run, or want to run) PulseAudio.
Since the ALSA back-end used to work beautifully (ALSA was supported in version 4.2 - one version before 4.3), and since PulseAudio usage is clearly optional (one can run Skype even without PulseAudio installed - but you don't get voice services (call/talk) - you can still send text and files) - I don't think it's that difficult to get ALSA support back in the next updates.
Skype - if you're listening, please, enable back ALSA support in your next update.
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Xscreenshot
Xscreenshot is a simple program to take a screenshot of a selected area in your desktop.You can run it in single-shot for multiple-shot mode; in multiple-shot mode you can use it to take successive screenshots of different area of the screen - very useful when capturing screenshots for documentation.
Xscreenshot is packaged as part of Xannotate.
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Xannotate updated
If you've got the first released version of xannotate yesterday, you should get it again.The new version (dated 2014-07-27) now supports three pens, eraser, and support for alpha transparency (if you're running a compositing manager) which makes it run faster.
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Xannotate, a desktop annotation tool
I like gromit, but unfortunately it is not working for me. The code itself is good, the bug is probably due to the subtle changes of GDK/GTK behaviour over the years.Anyway, I decided to write my own, and call it xannotate; because it does "annotation" and it only depends on Xlib.
Here's a shot:
More details (with download links) here.
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Alternative URL for this site
Recently there was a fiasco between No-IP and Microsoft. You can google that yourself. The end result is, this blog went down for a couple of days.To avoid that in the future, I'm planning to get my own domain; but for the time being if this site is down again, you can try to access it from http://jamesbond3142.ddns.net/blog instead.
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Updated links
I have updated my links with some of the projects that I maintain. They are mainly small, old projects that use GTK2. Some of them have disappeared completely from the web, so I suppose I just publish them so people can grab the source if needed.The one I've just worked on recently is Xarchiver. I have fixed on the bugs that cause crashing when command line parameters are used, I've also updated the rar module to work with the new unrar 5.x.
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Running new application on older glibc
New article on running new applications on older glibc here; and patch for yaf-splash enable support for UTF-8, here.Comments - Edit - Delete
Happy Easter
Easter is just around the corner. Happy Easter everyone
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Musl Libc 1.0 is released
musl libc is a new system library for Linux systems which features small, correct, and clean code; with full-support for static linking, and still being reasonably fast (in that order).Because of its size, it can easily acts as a replacement for uclibc or even dietlibc, because of its completeness and compatibility it can even replace GNU libc (glibc) for many purposes.
After being in development for over three (3) years, musl has finally hit its 1.0 release.
Musl libc is included as part of Fatdog64 development package (devx.sfs) mainly for building small static executables; musl took over this role from dietlibc two years ago.
Go musl!
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