blog.crox.net

Until now I always recommended to use PDF as a format to distribute documents in case the recipients don't need to alter them[1]. This supposedly guaranteed that the document would always look the same on any computer/platform. But today one of our customers (running Linux) contacted our support department requesting help because he was unable to view the contents of such a "portable document". To my surprise, I saw the following contents when opening the file with evince:

To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade
to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html

There doesn't seem to be anything "magic" in this document that I haven't seen in documents using the "older" format, so maybe this is just an attempt from Adobe to regain market shares by forcing you to use their product. On the other hand I always thought of PDF as an open standard so it's probably just a matter of time until the "competitors" catch up. At least a bug has already been filled for evince.


[1] or even if they need to alter them, see this older post about Hybrid PDF-OpenDocument files

When trying to get the latest sys-libs/timezone-data on a somewhat old system, I got the following error:

[list of nearly all files the package was about to install]
 - Package 'sys-libs/timezone-data-2008i' NOT merged due to file
 - collisions. If necessary, refer to your elog messages for the whole
 - content of the above message.

According to equery, it looks like those files were installed by glibc:

# equery b /usr/share/zoneinfo/CET
sys-libs/glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r1 (/usr/share/zoneinfo/CET)

So I tried

# COLLISION_IGNORE="/usr/share/zoneinfo" emerge -av timezone-data

which showed less errors but still gave me:

 - sys-libs/glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r1
 -      /usr/bin/tzselect
 -      /usr/sbin/zdump
 -      /usr/sbin/zic

I ended up with

# COLLISION_IGNORE="/usr" emerge -av timezone-data

which worked well.

I looked at the ebuilds and saw that newer glibc packages depend on sys-libs/timezone-data, so upgrading glibc should solve the problem too. I've submitted bug 258802 since I didn't find the info anywhere else.

I've successfully installed and ran Android on my N810 following the instructions here along with the modifications described here. In the next days/weeks I'll have a deeper look at it and will also try to install some more apps.

There is another project (involving the same people?) called NITdroid, which allows to run Android directly, bypassing Maemo. However my understanding is that short of reflashing the kernel there is no easy way to switch between Maemo and Android (with the first method you only have to reboot to get back to Maemo after using Android). There are discussion here and there about using kexec to swich between Maemo and Android but so far I'm not aware of anybody getting kexec to work on a NIT.

android-n810 on SourceForge looks quite similar to NITdroid, according to the README in the distributed files.

Other things to look at some day:

• Gentoo on N810
• Debian on N810
• N810 Serial Console

This is a follow-up to my previous post about using the aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock (SPAC) on linux. You should probably read that post first.

There is now a new 2.0 version of the "aXbo research" software (thanks rac for the hint). It is quite similar to version 1.0, with the added feature that you can upload new sounds to the device. It's still a Java application, using a number of Open Source components => Look at NOTICE.txt, and from what I saw it seems it's being developed on OS X - a shame that they don't provide an easy way to use it with linux: while version 1.0 was launched using Java Web Start, version 2.0 is installed locally in an OS-specific way which makes it a bit more complicated for the (not Mac / Windows) users. As far as I can tell the software should work fine on all platforms supported by RXTX (as long as there is a driver for the USB->serial converter of course)...

Here are the steps that allowed me to successfully run version 2.0 on linux:

- download aXbo_windows_2_0_11.exe

- run wine aXbo_windows_2_0_11.exe, this will install version 2.0.11 (don't install the drivers, only the application)

- at the end of the install process, you can directly start the program. for me this triggered the download of aXbo_windows_2_0_13.exe (why they don't offer this file for download directly is a mystery)

- install / update to version 2.0.13 using wine again (and again, don't install the drivers, only the application)

At this point you can already use aXbo research through wine. I didn't test the sound upload, but the rest seemed to work fine, although there were some glitches with the display. Here is how to run it without wine:

- create a directory to hold the files, eg mkdir ~/aXbo-2.0

- copy the .jar files to that directory, eg cp -rp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/aXbo2/lib ~/aXbo-2.0/

- move axbo.jar one directory up, eg mv ~/aXbo-2.0/lib/axbo.jar ~/aXbo-2.0/

- get librxtxSerial.so, eg cd ~/aXbo-2.0/lib/ ; wget http://blog.crox.net/uploads/librxtxSerial.so

- run the application like this: cd ~/aXbo-2.0/ ; java -Djava.library.path=lib/ -jar axbo.jar


NOTE / RXTX:

- the librxtxSerial.so offered for download here is 32-bit, which means you need to run a 32-bit JRE.

- instead, you can also install a distribution-provided librxtxSerial.so, eg with Gentoo 64-bit:
emerge rxtx
java -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib64/rxtx-2/ -jar axbo.jar
(in this example you obviously have to select a 64-bit JRE)

(RXTX is distributed under a variant of the LGPL license, you'll find more info on the RXTX website.)


NOTE / Sounds Upload:

Be aware that the sounds upload function will upload the whole package at once, and that it will replace the sounds currently on the device, and not just add new ones.

This article discusses importing PDF files in OOo for editing with a new extension, which also brings a new feature called "hybrid PDF". Basically a regular PDF file compatible with any reader which also contains the original OpenDocument (odt, ods etc.) data. This extension requires OpenOffice.org version 3.0 and you can download it from here.

The article also mentions that Office 2007 SP2 will support ODF natively. This has been announced in May this year apparently but I missed it :o) The service pack will be available sometime in the first half of 2009.