It's been a while since the last release of the RadeonHD driver.

Since then this driver has made a lot of progress:

• Support for RV620/RV635 was added. This latest generation of ATI hardware has completely revised digital blocks to  provide support for DisplayPort - a new VESA interface standard for digital displays . DisplayPort itself isn't supported yet due to the lack of hardware.
• 2D acceleration for R5xx and RS6xx have been added.
• The driver can now light up the second digital output on RS690. ATI had introduced a new digital block which so far has only shown up on RS6xx hardware. We discovered the existence of this block was only recently.
•  Support for interlaced modes was added. This is currently still disabled for digital outputs (mainly due to lack of testing) but once available it should allow to support more modes on HDTVs.
•  Some feature I have already almost have forgotten about  since it's been so long ago: We initialize secondary graphics cards using AtomBIOS.
• A huge number of bugs got fixed.

All this adds up to 9klocs of C.

A lot of distros have picked up the last release of this driver.
To give their users the benefit of these new features we today have released version 1.2.0 of the RadeonHD driver.

There are other things just right around the corner:

• RS780 support is almost ready, we are just waiting for a missing piece of information form ATI.
• Krisztian Loki provided a patch for backlight control on panels.
  
• TVout support: A lot of pieces required for this have been added already. I just need to get around to finish  it.
•  Work on DRI support is in progress.
• Once DRI support is available Xv and enhanced EXA support is not far.

 

[English version below]

DESDE: Me enorgullece comunicar que finalmente el Planeta Mono-Hispano ha resucitado! Felicitaciones a toda la gente involucrada en que esto saliera adelante.

PARA: Si estás terminando tu carrera de Ingeniería Superior en Informática en la UPM (donde yo la hice también), conozco una profesora que está buscando un alumno para hacer un PFC en el que tendrá que usar Silverlight/Moonlight, así que si estás interesado, ponte en contacto conmigo!

--

[English version]

FROM: I'm glad to tell that finally the Mono-Hispano Planet has resurrected! Congratulations to all the guys involved in making this happen.

FOR: If you are finishing your engineer's degree in Computer Science at the UPM university (where I did in the past), I know a teacher that is looking for a student to do his PFC (how do you guys call this en English?) using Silverlight/Moonlight, so if you're interested, contact me!

Caixa Mágica and Sysbase for the 6th consecutive year are preparing Linux 2008, a National Open Technology Meeting event at the Auditório da Lispólis, Pólo Tecnológio de Lisboa, Telheiras, Portugal, coming up in 15 April.

Among many talks, "Linux in the low cost PC market" by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhnon, and "Debate: Definition of Open Standards and of Interoperability" by many known Portuguese and international people, including Manager Novell Portugal João Batista, would be personally the top moments of the day.

Also, there will be a short presentation about the recent decision that PSA Peugeot Citroën made for have choose SUSE Linux Enterprise for its desktop and server machines - 20,000 desktops plus 2,500 servers.


Unfortunately I will have to miss Linux 2008 due to an exam that I have to do (damn Maths!) ...

Example of use:

Solution:

Note:

I've neglected to mention it here until now, but here it is: the second openSUSE Packaging Day is today. Tomorrow too, because it's really a pair of packaging days, not just one.

So if you're interested in having your favorite program available for openSUSE, please do join in!

My flatmates and I are moving to another place. Actually, it's a place that is very close to the previous one, so we will still live in the center of Madrid. Basically the place is a bit better, with less traffic noise, and we now have a big terrace to enjoy the summer better!

However, the move is turning a bit irritating because it has coincided with the Q1 timeline of our project and I'm becoming crazy trying to give my best with both things. This move was planned even before I joined Novell; if I had joined before, maybe I would have preferred to stay in the previous place because now it's very likely that I move to Cambridge (MA) on October of this year.

It happened also that in the last step of our brand new Bridge (let's call it proof of concept for now), we had a very strange crash (you need GLib# and ATK# from SVN to build the testcase) just because we referenced in the last moment to the SWF library. Sandy did a wonderful work debugging it thanks to the help of Sebastien and Geoff, and we now are certainly sure that this problem comes from the fact that SWF happens to depend on GTK for a very specific feature related to colours.

We have for now two alternatives to fix this:

• Drop this dependency (Jonathan Pobst pointed out he would be glad to find a way of making the colours functionality not depend on GTK).


• Change GTK+ initialization in order to detect the existance of another library for managing ATK (very similar to Gail).

The latter will be the one I'll look at (because it seems easier, but a bit more less comfortable regarding packaging, because we would depend on GTK from SVN), so if you happen to think of another one, we will be happy to listen to your suggestion.

Well, now you would ask: why the title of this blog entry. Well, it turned out that yesterday when I came back from another trip for carrying furniture, as I was very concerned with this issue, I turned on the laptop to keep on working on it (that was when we figured out the cause of the issue, discussing it on #monodev and #mono-a11y channels), and I went to sleep at 2 AM, forgetting completely that I had my car badly parked (in order to take out the sofas in the closest place to the building), so this morning has happened to be a pain in the ass because the police has put me a fine.

And then I had a fantastic idea about fines that I didn't want to forget, which would be awesome if the government approved it because:

• It would avoid the fact that many people claim: the city's councils are lately having an overwhelming increase of traffic fines, just with the sole reason of collecting more money, making the police busy with this instead of tracking real crimes.


• It would allow the people not to feel so bad about having to pay such a high penalty, without loosing the real motivation of penalties: education.

Of course I don't want to pretend that I should not pay the fine, but my suggestion is: what if this money was given to the NGO of your choice? Recently I got contacted by some people from the WWF organization and was still wondering if subscribing to this one or to GreenPeace (I would also support Obama, but I think I can't because I'm not american ;) ). And now I realise I will pay for a fine more money that I would give for a one-year subcription to a NGO like these ones...

And now two questions to the readers (wow, I admire you if you have read until here):

• Does anyone recommend me a specific NGO that is worth being a member of?


• Does anyone recommend me a way to send this suggestion to the politicians? Do they have a bugzilla.congress.gov?

Update 21-JUL-2008: I'm a bit worried about these Obama's statements.

Update 16-SEP-2010: Talking again about fines, compare what other governments do to what the Danish government does (sorry, link in Spanish).

Just finished a three day training on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 for some iperintis folks. It was a nice change of pace for work and the interesting thing that I found was the tremendous amount of improvements that the SuSE distro has undergone. From it's butt slow updater in the 10.1 version to today's zypper and tolerable updater, I must say I do not have to strain to see the improvements that the team has done. The students were quite impressed to see that installing opensuse and sles was even easier than windows and were just tickled pink over some of the tools that they were shown. This first training is for the fundamentals level while next week they will be going through the intermediate and advanced levels. Good luck people !