1. Pyneo for Gentoo

    Something I wanted to do for a while, but never actually got started: Get pyneo supported in gentoo. So I finally wrote some ebuilds, starting of course with pyneod and its dependencies gsm0710muxd as well as python-pyneo. More to follow soon.

    The packages are based on the 1.32 tag in pyneo's git and pretty much identical to upstream, with the exception of the initscripts. My ebuilds replace them by proper gentoo-style initscripts that work well in openrc.

    How to use it

    Using this overlay is easy. Make sure you have layman installed, using the git USE-flag, and set up, e.g. as described here. After that you just have to add this overlay using:

    layman -o "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tg--/gentoo-pyneo/master/overlay.xml" \
-f -a pyneo

    That's it!

    Check it out on gitorious if you like!

    http://gitorious.org/tg/gentoo-pyneo


  2. sftool - initial release

    Today I pushed my sftool into git.

    It doesn't do much yet, except decrypting SandForces PKG firmware archives. Not much more to be said here, just check it out on my projects page.

    As you can probably see on the TODO, my next step for sftool is chipset detection, which means, that I would want to identify the chipset of the SandForce based drive and find the matching firmware file in the decrypted archive. This is far from trivial, but I could use help from every sandforce owner who also has a windows-copy:

    SandForces ssdupdate.exe tool creates two tempfiles during its runtime (both in the directory you run it from): sfpkgtmp and sfpkgfwtmp

    The first one is created initially after loading of the package file, which works using wine, the second one is supposedly created after you select the drive you want to update, which unfortunately doesn't work in wine.

    If you want to help, send my the exact model of your SandForce based drive and the sfpkgfwtmp file (less than 1 MByte). You have to copy the file before you close the ssdupdate.exe tool because it cleans up its tempfiles afterwards.

    I'd appreciate any ...

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  3. Bluez and the Keyboard

    I recently bought a nice little bluetooth keyboard. Being bluetooth based and supporting the standard hid protocol, I didn't expect any trouble at all.

    But I was wrong.

    After charging the keyboard and putting it in pairing mode, I tried hidtool scan - but it didn't find it. I checked my other bluetooth devices, and they were found - but they also found the keyboard.

    Long story short: Turns out it was a bluez bug - thanks to Pacho Ramos for the hint.

    As all howtos and so on only cover some GUI frontends for Gnome and KDE, as well as the old (and deprecated) hidd, it wasn't that trivial to get the keyboard to work even after it was finally discovered by hcitool.

    jhe in #bluez-users on freenode gave me a brief description on how to do pairing without all the stuff mentioned above:

    1. Install bluez with USE="test-programs" set
    2. Set the device to pairing mode
    3. Use hcitool scan to get the device address
    4. Run simple-agent hci0 $(hid device address)
    5. Enter PIN on both sides, PC first, Keyboard second
    6. Run bluez-test-input connect $(hid device address)

    After that it works fine.

    Using a frontend might be more viable though, seems ...

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  4. Hello World

    I have tested a lot of different blog software. But just like with mail-clients: every single one sucks. :)

    Some month ago I finally found one that sucks considerably less than anything else I tested: blogofile. Unfortunately I really didn't want to spend any time making a proper template to get started, so I let it rot on my webserver. Now I finally had some time and muse to finally get it done, and there it is.

    The layout is probably unfinished and will receive changes, but it's good enough to get started.

    I will try to get stuff to my projects and everything else posted here from now on.


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