Since I stated contributing to OpenStreetMap I got totally addicted to it :)
 

I just love driving around with my bike around the city and why not also make a map while I’m enjoying my ride? I also drive a lot when I’m at work so I also took advantage of that and made a lot of gps tracks while I’m just driving around town doing my regular work related tasks. I just returned from my holiday - you can probably guess that I tracked it the whole time, and it was a really fun thing to do.
 

I usually use my Asus Eee 701 to capture gps tracks in .gpx files and them upload them to OpenStreetMap site, and then work on those tracks to make maps from them. While Eee is a great and small gadget when compared to classic laptops it still doesn’t fit in your pocket.
 

The good news for all OpenStreetMap nuts out there it that there a lot of options for making gps tracks; you can use your laptop, mobile phone, pocket pc or almost any other gadget out there. For the complete list of supported gadgets check out this wiki page.
 

Mobile phones that have gps embedded are hard to come by and are usually quite expensive, the good news it that there is an alternative - external bluetooth gps receivers. In Croatia the price of external gps receivers has come down to 430kn (60€ or 85$) so it is not prohibitively expensive to join OpenStreetMap and start contributing.
 

I have few mobile phones, LG KU990 Viewty, SonyEricsson K750 and Nokia 6230i. The older ones like Nokia 6230 (over 3 years old) and K750 you can pick for dirt cheap. Is almost impossible to find a mobile phone that doesn’t have bluetooth and support for java applications.
 

One great java application for making gps tracks (you can use it also just as a classic gps app) is MobileTrailExplorer. You can easily transfer .jar and .jad files to your phone and just install them from there. Nokia is a bit more specific so you need to use a special software for installing applications to it. If you use windows then you need to use Nokia Mobile Suite and for Linux desktops there is gammu.
 

You need first to configure gammu for your specific phone and you can just start gammu-config or copy/paste this text below to .gammurc file in your home folder.


[gammu]

port = /dev/rfcomm0
model = 6230i
connection = bluerfphonet
synchronizetime = yes
logfile =
logformat = text
use_locking = no
gammuloc =
port=00:00:00:00:00:00


under “port” you need to enter your phones bluetooth mac address.
 
and now you just download your java app and install it from command line:
gammu nokiaaddfile Application TrailExplorer
 

Hope this helps some body out there and I hope more people start contributing to OpenStreetMap.
 

Links:

• OpenStreetMap
• OpenStreetMap Wiki
• Gammu
• List of supported gadgets and software for OpenStreetMap
• Mobile Trail Explorer

Fedora 10 Alpha is out and Fedora developers and Red Hat have asked us to join in and provide feedback. First you need to download Fedora 10 Alpha then read instructions on how to provide feedback back to Fedora developers.
 

If you have trouble booting up Fedora 10 Live CD - give your feedback, if you have problem installing CD or DVD versions - give your feedback, some piece of hardware fails on Fedora - give your feedback, if you see some application not working as it should - you got it by now :).
Le’t take this chance and make together Fedora 10 the best Fedora release so far!
 

If you have any problems understandig some part of providing feedback you can contact me or even better join Fedora users mailing lists. If you prefer there is also a IRC channel on feenode.net servers - just follow these instructions.
 

Some of the exciting new features in Fedora 10 are:
• RPM 4.6
• Brand new boot environment
• Wireless connection sharing
• Improved audio system
• Security audit utility
• Better webcam support
• Improved infrared remote control support
• Haskell support
• OCaml support
• Upstream bugfixes, improvements and enhancements.
 

A bit expanded explanation of some great new features:

* Glitch free audio. The revolutionary PulseAudio stack has been enhanced to use timer-based scheduling. This means that it uses less power, is more hardware independent, and adjusts dynamically to keep audio data flowing without interruption — minimizing drop outs.
 

* Sectool. Fedora 10 will feature a brand new security auditing and intrusion detection system. It has both text and graphical front ends, features highly configurable groups for adjusting test runs, and is completely modular and extensible. Administrators and the community at large can write their own tests to extend its functionality even further.
 

* Connection Sharing. Fedora 10 delivers on the promise of NetworkManager’s “Create new wireless network” tool, with easy setup of an ad-hoc wifi network on any machine with a network connection and a spare wireless card. If the machine has primary network connection (wired, 3G, second wireless card), routing is set up so that devices connected to the ad-hoc wifi network can share the connection to the outside network.
 

The best thing is to keep checking out the ever-changing Fedora 10 feature list.
 

Links:

• Fedora 10 Alpha: Give Us Your Feedback
• Download Fedora 10 Alpha
• How to provide feedback
• Fedora users mailing lists
• Fedora IRC howto
• Fedora 10 feature list

I found a great video lecture on home automation at linux.conf.au site. Looks like this conference is great, and for the rest of us who can’t be there videos are a god send!
 
Check it out:
Linux and Home Automation - Lessons Learned presented by Glenn Wightwick
Download the video here or look at the slides
 
Look at whole Linux.conf.au 2008 programme.

 
Im this tutorial I will show you how to download patched driver and compile it yourself, but first I would like to explain why wireless drivers aren’t working on Eee PC running Fedora 9.
 

Asus Eee PC uses Atheros wireless chip AR5007. Atheros as a company doesn’t support linux and doesn’t make linux drivers available, there are linux drivers but they are made by madwifi project crew. Atheros company doesn’t make any effort in making their wireless chips work on linux; they hide specifications of their wireless chips and don’t make them available to linux developers. It is amassing that a developers around madwifi project actually succeed in making these drivers considering all the obstacles. Madwifi drivers still needs Atheros binary HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).
 

This HAL is not binary firmware but a piece of code that needs to run in the Linux kernel. It consists of header files for which no permisison to modify is granted, and pre-compiled object files. The vendor’s position is that the Linux community simply needs to accept this sourceless HAL, since in principle the Atheros chip could be tuned to any frequency, and thus produce RF interference with systems operating in those frequencies. This binary HAL is unacceptable to the Linux kernel developers, and the madwifi driver in this state will never become part of the official kernel.
 

Some OpenBSD developers, facing the same issue, reverse-engineered the binary HAL and have produced an open source driver (ath5k), which has now been picked up by the madwifi team as the future direction. At the same time the madwifi driver has been labeled ‘legacy’ to reinforce this point.
 

So we have two drivers that support Atheros chip based wireless cards; madwifi and ath5k, but neither of them currently supports the chip that Asus choose for Eee PC - AR5007. That is now true, you say, my Eee PC runing Xandros linux has a working wireless! If you weren’t aware Xandros uses NDISwrapper to load windows drivers (to learn more look at NDISwrapper article on Wikipedia). So Xandors is using windows and not linux wireless drivers.
UPDATE: I checked with lsmod and Xandros also uses madwifi (ath_pci) driver. They have also custom patched the driver to work.
 

athk5 driver is under heavy development and it is now known when it will support AR5007. Madwifi has a patch that adds support for AR5007, but unfortunately this patch cannot be committed to madwifi, since it breaks the ABI for all non-i386 HAL binaries.
 

In order to get your wireless working on Eee PC with madwifi you need to patch the driver manually so here is step by step walktrough:
Update: Im this tutorial I will show you how to download patched driver and compile it yourself.
 
Update 2: If you don’t wan’t to compile the driver manually then you need to configure Livna repository and then just issue yum command to install the driver.
As root do this:
rpm -i http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm
yum --enablerepo=livna-testing install kmod-madwifi
 

If you still want to do it manually and perrhaps learn how to do it then you need to install all necessary packages; as root do:
yum install make binutils gcc glibc-devel glibc-headers libgomp patch kernel-headers kernel-devel wget
 

Then blacklist the ath5k module; edit your blacklist file (as root) in \etc\modprobe.d\blacklists (I have to reverse slashes because mod_security on this blog that prevents writing \etc\ with regular slashes) and add the line with “blacklist ath5k”
echo "blacklist ath5k" >> \etc\modprobe.d\blacklist (reverse the slashes)
 

You should also edit your \etc\modprobe.conf to look like this:
## Start Atheros Stuff
alias wifi0 ath_pci
alias ath0 ath_pci
options ath_pci autocreate=sta
## End Atheros Stuff
 

Download patched madwifi driver:
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007.tar.gz
 

Extract madwifi source code and compile it:
tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018.tar.gz
cd madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007
make
su
make install
 

That is it, after reboot you have a working wireless under Fedora 9.
 

Links:

• Madwifi project
• madwifi Support for AR2425 (AR5007EG) chipset
• ath5k developers mailing list
• Madwifi page on ThinkWiki
• Fedora Eee PC Wiki page

Udruge Linux-Osijek i Osijek Wireless pozivaju sve zainteresirane na predavanje i linux radionicu:

Pozivamo sve zainteresirane na predavanje i radionicu koja će se održati u četvrtak, 15. 5. 2008. u CnC Klub za Mlade (Strossmayerova 68 - blizu Rokove crkve) s početkom u 18h.
Linux distibucija Fedora 9 izlazi dan prije, stoga ćemo imati prezentaciju novih i najzanimljivijih stvari u Fedori 9. Nakon prezentacije Fedore 9 dijelit ćemo besplatne instalacijske medije Fedore 9 i Ubuntua 8.04 te još neke stvari koje će za sada ostati iznenađenje. Ako vas zanima što će to biti, morate doći i sami vidjeti. ;) Samo ćemo vam reći da ponesete svoje USB stickove. ;)

Nakon prezentacije i dijeljenja poklona kreće praktični dio, odnosno install fest. Kako je radionica već popunjena nemamo više mjesta za one koji bi željeli doći na praktični dio radionice i sami instalirati linux na svoje računalo. No svi zainteresirani mogu doći pogledati radionicu i naučiti kako se vrši instalacija tako da poslije i sami mogu instalirati linux kod kuće . Ako želite doći ili na bilo koji način prisustvovati; bilo samo pokupiti poklone, gledati prezentaciju ili naučiti kako se instalira linux, svakako se prijavite putem emaila: info@linux-osijek.org

Google karta - http://tinyurl.com/6rhwge
Karta - http://tinyurl.com/5pf54a

Link na stranicu udruge Linux-Osijek:
http://www.linux-osijek.org/node/14

This is a short post regarding my experience installing and using Fedora 9 (currently preview, not released version).
I have tried installing eeedora on 8GB SD card for many times but without any success. I have successfully run eeedora from my usb stick but when I tried installing it on SD card it failed while trying to copy files from USB stick to SD card.
I have external DVD burner so I popped in Fedora 9 Preview. To my surprise, after bad experience with eeedora, installation went smooth. I had some issues with LVM crashing anaconda but after I manually created partitions with fdisk and rebooted Fedora 9 it was installed without any problems. After partitioning the only issues were the GUI ones - anaconda installer just doesn’t fit in such a small screen. I hope that can be fixed before Fedora 9 ships.

Here is how Fedora 9 boot screen looks like on Asus eee:

 
Fedora 9 wallpaper looks great on eee, much better than on my big 19″ screen. The issue here is that “Install fedora” icon is visible but the text beneath isn’t. If you don’t know exaclty what you are looking for it is hard to start the installation. Here is how Fedora 9 looks on my Asus eee:

Here is how Anaconda Installer looks like like on eee:

As you can see the buttons aren’t visible in Anaconda installer.

 
When I used “create default partition layout” with LVM this is the error I got:

I tried saving this bug but save button freezes Anaconda, so I couldn’t save the bug report.

These all are just small cosmetic bugs and I’m overly impressed how great Fedora 9 works on my little eee! I can’t wait to use it in my daily routine because Xandoros has lots of limitations compared to Fedora.

If you have followed my previous webcam howto guide and found out that you need uvcvideo module for your webcam just follow this howto.

First install subversion, if you don’t already have it installed, so you can get the latest code from uvcvideo project svn repository. As root just start yum in console or if you like gui application managers like pirut just use them. Here is how you can install it with yum:

yum install subversion

now you need to get the source code for uvcvideo webcam module:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk linux-uvc

and when the download is complete you can compile the code:

cd linux-uvc
make

Now you need to become root and install the module in correct place:

su
make install INSTALL_MOD_DIR=extra/uvc

Then you will get an error saying:

depmod -ae `uname -r`
/bin/sh: depmod: command not found

because you don’t have /sbin directory in your path so only thing you still need is this:

/sbin/depmod -ae `uname -r`

now you can load your module with command:

/sbin/modprobe uvcvideo

and run cheese to test your webcam.

links:

• Fedora webcam howto
• uvcvideo project

ps. I choose images for my blog by going to http://images.google.com and seraching for the most obvious keyword in the article, for this article it the word was webcam. As you can see this keyword provided some interesting search results :)

If you run Fedora as a home or work desktop and you are the only user on that system then you probably don’t want to enter root password for every update.
If you would like to have more user friendly updates that don’t ask you for root password for each update then you need edit this file as root:
/etc/pam.d/pup

Original /etc/pam.d/pup file on Fedora 8 looks like this:
#%PAM-1.0
auth include config-util
account include config-util
session include config-util

You need to add a line before the first “auth” so that your new /etc/pam.d/pup file looks like this:
#%PAM-1.0
auth sufficient pam_console.so
auth include config-util
account include config-util
session include config-util

Now try to run pup from console as a regular user and you shouldn’t be prompted for your root password anymore.

I have used mugshot service for some time now and I really like it. If you haven’t used it before I highly recommend you sign up and install mugshot client. So far I know this is the only linux user specific social network service and it is made by Red Hat. There is also a windows client but it is more tailored to linux desktop users.

So I wanted to spice up my blog a bit. Wordpress has sidebar in which you can add different add ons. Mugshot people have made “mugshot mini badges” that you can put on your facebook, wordpress and other blogs.

You need to go to your Wordpress administration page and under Manage / Files edit Sidebar file. Choose the appropriate place and just copy/paste the code from mugshot badges page.

If you are interested in how mugshot mini badge looks like here it is:

Update:
Flash version has some issues with my blog, so I found a HTML one also and here is how it looks like:

If you have a webcam that needs some module (driver) that it is not in Fedora kernel then you usually need to compile it manually. Fedora doesn’t include any modules that aren’t in upstream kernel. Livna repository has some modules for some webcams. But if you have a webcam like mine that uses uvcvideo module which isn’t in livna repo then only solution is to compile it manually.

First step in getting your webcam working is to check if maybe it is working but you don’t know it is :)

Install application called cheese with your favorite gui of cli tool. I use yum so here is how I do it:

su -
yum install cheese

If you webcam works that is it, if it doesn’t work then you need to find out which webcam module you need to install or compile.

Start tool called v4l2-tool, if you don’t have it install it. When you start it you will see this:

Click on the last tab labeled “suggest driver”:

Then click on “lsusb output” button:

Now you need to recognize which of all listed usb devices is your webcam. I had only two lines and I recognized microdia as manufacturer of my webcam so I used manufacturer and model ID from that line in my cast that is - 0c45:62c0.

Now you need to enter that info back in main window in “vendor ID” and “product ID” boxes and press suggest driver button:

How you should get the module name and link where to get more info for installing your webcam in Fedora.