Category archives: Young Coders

My morning was a lot of frustration trying to get the Fedora Core sugar-jhbuild image to a reasonable working state. Basically got stuck trying to get the vmware-tools installed, there are no kernel headers, but yum insists they are already installed and won't install them without ripping out critical components.

Sugar doesn't yet support wpa_supplicant. Our whole network is wpa_supplicant controlled. So at home the little laptops have no network connection. That makes it annoying to use them as development platforms. So, today I tried to convert our network to be WEP-based (despite not liking the idea of an easily cracked network).

Unfortunately, I couldn't ...

I normally carry my B2 with me when I go down to work at Linux Caffe (well, almost everywhere, really), lets me put it out on the table and let people who are interested in the project strike up conversations even when I'm working on other client's projects. Find some good contacts that way, do ...

I spent much of the day yesterday trying to get my OLPC hacking environment back up and running so that I could work on the code again. At one point I got everything save 1 package (libabiword) to build, but then I noticed that there was an old Python 2.4 install in the build directory ...

Showing the laptop to a lady yesterday I discovered that the touchpad/trackpad was misbehaving. Moving the cursor would work as long as I was touching the trackpad, but when I took my finger off the trackpad the cursor would jump back (that is, in the reverse of the direction of motion) a couple of cursor-widths ...

Came into the "office" this morning to discover a last-minute project in-process. Project was attempting to get a "boxed" Edubuntu configuration that was to be carted over to Nigeria for one of their model schools. 3 hours to build the whole system.

We wound up with just the server (an old laptop) poorly configured, but ...

Was invited to speak at the Ontario Linux Fest in October. Needed to write up a biography for it. Seems everywhere I speak to more than a few hundred people they want a biography. Anyway, here it is for the curious:

Since VServer appears to be going in (somehow, for some period of time) I spent quite a bit of time while not emailing today reading up on the technology. It's basically some capability bits and somewhat improved chroot implementation AFAICS.

The most disturbing issue VServer seems to address is a trivial escape provided for ...

Been thinking a bit about how to handle multi-application environments, and one case that comes up immediately is the command shell (i.e. bash). With the overlay approach, we could start bash in an empty workspace, but then how do we get access to the files we want to manipulate?

We could alter bash to allow ...

Been trying to get csound built on my workstation since midnight or so. So far I've got the ebuild to the point of compiling everything, but I can't get it to properly install the _csnd library. The install.py file seems to assume the wrong file-name for the .so file, but I can't seem to get ...