Chemistry Visualisation and Tools MeetingThursday, March 20. 2008Last week I was privileged to be invited to speak at a meeting about molecular modelling with a focus on tools, GUIs and visualisation. The meeting was held at the Holiday Inn in Runcorn and the Daresbury Laboratory (England). I wasn't expecting to be back in England quite so soon, having only just returned to Pittsburgh at the end of January. The meeting was a great opportunity to present some of the latest work I and others in the Avogadro and OpenBabel communities have been doing to create tools that enable the building of molecules and structures, as well as their visualisation. It was also a great chance to hear some very interesting talks by the developers of other building tools and some quantum codes. Donald and I were also invited to Daresbury Laboratory to work with some of the CCP1GUI developers. I presented my talk on Avogadro on Wednesday morning and have made the slides available here. Donald gave an introduction to Avogadro, some of the history and the architecture before I gave my presentation. We finished by taking questions while I demonstrated the Avogadro application. I think it was extremely productive. We had many more conversations over dinner and drinks later as well as in a workshop setting on Thursday afternoon. It was great to be able to put a face to a few of the names and discuss current issues more informally in the evening. The talks were all of a very high quality and from a varied list of speakers from other open source projects, some of the free quantum codes as well as commercial products. I have come away from the meeting with a much better appreciation of the needs in the community and I feel that Avogadro is in a great position to fill the apparent void. I am glad that we were able to get surface and orbital support working in Avogadro before the meeting. Right now we only support Guassian cube files but the implementation is general enough that I will be able to add support for further formats. I really think that if we can get enough people collaborating on a common project everyone can get the tool they need to effectively do their research at a much lower investment than could be achieved by working on many separate projects. I met Tristan Youngs, the developer of Aten, who had implemented some really nice features in his molecular builder that is much more focussed on molecular mechanics. It is well worth checking out. As is Zeobuilder which was developed by Toon Verstraelen. They both implement some great features and have strengths in different areas. Of course my dream is to integrate many of these features via Avogadro plugins and have one editor which is capable of being used in a diverse range of applications. It was also great to speak to Mario Valle who is doing some very interesting work in the area of new visualisation methods and supports a large user base of computational chemistry users. There were of course so many other talks but you can look at the schedule yourself and I think the slides of all the talks should be available in the near future. I feel sure that many good things will come out of this meeting and hope to be able to attend similar meetings in the future. I would like to thank Jens once again for hosting the meeting and taking care of everything. I hope to see some patches and/or commits from him in the near future
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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18:20
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Avogadro 0.6.1 ReleasedSunday, March 9. 2008I am pleased to announce that I tagged and released Avogadro 0.6.1 yesterday evening. This is a bug fix release which fixes one pretty large bug that slipped through - the OpenGL context was lost if switching between virtual desktops, multiple views etc rendering the OpenGL window useless unless the application was restarted. As such I would encourage anyone running Avogadro 0.6.0 to upgrade to this new version. It also features several smaller bug fixes and feature enhancements. ![]() The screen shot above shows Avogadro 0.6.1 running in a KDE 4 session. One of the small visual tweaks I made was to add a second light source to our default OpenGL scene which really helps to illuminate the other side of the scene. Thanks go out to Albert for his suggestion of adding another light source. Hopefully there are no really big bugs remaining but Avogadro is still in the beta stages of its development. It is rapidly approaching a stable release though and I am very happy with our progress so far. We would love to hear what you think of Avogadro. I had one person question why we always have to use the latest and greatest version of OpenBabel and felt I should offer some explanation. Many of the features exposed in Avogadro use functions and structures in OpenBabel. I myself was quite heavily involved in improving OpenBabel's support for Gaussian cube files and the cube format so that we could load and display orbitals for example. As such we often add new features or fix bugs in OpenBabel trunk and so a new release of OpenBabel must be used in order for everything to work. There are already ebuilds for this latest version in the Gentoo tree. Ubuntu/Debian builds are in the process of being built. We should hopefully have Mac and Windows binaries very soon too. I am headed to a meeting in the UK where Donald and I will be talking with other scientists about visualisation in chemistry and related areas. We will of course be showing off Avogadro as well as talking with many other people working in this area. I am very much looking forward to it and hope that this will lead to further innovation in the Avogadro project as well as the open source chemistry movement in general. It will of course be great to have a full English breakfast and some real ale too!
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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14:30
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Avogadro 0.6 ReleasedFriday, February 29. 2008Earlier today we released Avogadro 0.6. This release is quite overdue and we had originally planned to make a release around the new year. This release has many, many new features that have been implemented since the last release. ![]() I am especially proud of the new support for displaying surfaces. This initially led to the surface engine that displays a Van der Waals surface. Tim added the ability to map the electostatic surface potential onto that. I then began work on adding support for displaying orbitals. This led to me getting commit access to OpenBabel and making quite a few commits as I got Gaussian cube loading working. While I was there I couldn't resist improving the Grid classes (still a little more I would like to add in). Another new feature I am really pleased with is the QGraphicsView based periodic table. I think it works very nicely and I am hoping to add this code to Kalzium. I think the Avogadro library is in great shape for me to begin porting Kalzium to use it. Tim and Geoff have been doing some amazing work in OpenBabel on improving the force fields used for geometry optimisations. We have also been doing a lot of work to improve Avogadro's performance when rendering large systems. We have added quickRender functions and OpenGL display lists to improve interactivity as well as threading calculations where this made sense. We have a cool little colour widget Geoff coded too that allows colours to be displayed and picked easily, improved default layout and one of my personal favourites - persistent settings in most of Avogadro. There are certainly some bugs remaining. I would like to get to the bottom of as many as I can and hope to make one or two bug fix releases in the 0.6 branch. We would love to get feedback from people. We have already made a source release and a Mac binary. I will be adding Gentoo ebuilds shortly and we will hopefully get a Windows binary out by early next week. Hope you enjoy this release. I think we are getting close to a stable API that we can call 1.0 and have most of the core features I was hoping to get into Avogadro. Our framework is extremely modular and extensible and I hope that we will be able to build up a community around Avogadro. It was also great to be able to make this release on 29 February - we have so few of them
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22:01
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Avogadro: New Orbital Support and Gaussian Cube FormatTuesday, February 19. 2008So over the weekend I spent quite a lot of time hacking away at OpenBabel working on the Gaussian cube format support I needed to get working in order to be able to visualise electronic orbitals. The initial support was taken from Molekel but contained no error checking and it was not reading in the example cube file I had. Thankfully a colleague pointed out a page with details on the Gaussian cube format and I used this as a basis to get it working in OpenBabel with better error checking and a more resilient tokenisation of the cube points. I made my first few commits to OpenBabel over the weekend and got at least simple Gaussian cube files loading that only contain one cube. More will follow I am sure. ![]() After I got the file loading sorted a few more changes to Avogadro got me my first ever orbitals in Avogadro - the benzene HOMO! I believe the cube file came from the JMol test files. Geoff informed me that chemists for some reason see positive as blue and negative as red. That seemed very strange to me and I had initially put it the other way around. Growing up playing with electronics it seemed to me that positive should be red just as the wires in a circuit have a red positive... Other than that orbitals seemed to be working well and I was very pleased. ![]() Next I started to load up some other cube files I had been given as examples. I thought the above image of the electrostatic potential of CH3Cl looked very nice. When I showed Geoff he also liked it and we wondered if it had been visualised in this way before. I know normally the cube would be mapped onto the Van der Waals surface of a molecule. Anyway I was pleased and also felt more productive as I now have my laptop back up and running and am developing on Gentoo again. It would be great to hear what other people think of this new support. I am already working on various improvements to the code and getting ready for another release of Avogadro!
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21:00
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Avogadro: Surface SupportMonday, February 11. 2008I am pleased to announce that we now have working surface support in Avogadro. We originally began working on support for surfaces around November time when Geoff improved the support in OpenBabel for grids and added some initial code to the Avogadro repository. Quite quickly it became evident that this algorithm did not deal well with data sets containing discrete objects that you wanted to polygonise. I began a search of the available algorithms and came across a very nice guide to the marching cube algorithm with example code. I had a brief look for a C++ implementation and didn't find anything initially, began implementing what was on his page and then came across Zhu3d which is a Qt 4 based program that actually uses an implementation of the algorithms described in the guide and references them. As it is GPL licenced code I imported the relevant class into our repository and began the task of adapting it to fit into our framework. ![]() ![]() With some code from Geoff, more pointers from Geoff, some reading and quite a bit of help from Tim (not sure if he has a web page/blog) we got it working. Since then Tim has actually fixed a big bug in OpenBabel that was causing crashes and done more work on the IsoGen class. The screenshots above show the results of our early work where initially we got points and then lines working. I was very pleased at this stage as it adds a feature that had been missing for quite some time to the Avogadro framework. ![]() ![]() I then got filled triangles added with transparency support, allowing us to visualise the underlying structure of the molecule and map other parameters onto the surface. Tim then added electrostatic charge mapping to the colour of the surface which I hope you agree is already looking very good. There is still quite a bit left to do. I need to move the class into libavogadro and out of the engines, integrate it into our Painter API, implement caching and am thinking of using the Qt Concurrent framework to do intelligent multithreading once Qt 4.4 is released as surface generation is quite slow for big molecules. I also need to link the mesh size to the global quality level and see what other optimisations might be possible. Another big one is adding support for visualising molecular orbitals. Geoff has already done a lot of work on the back end in OpenBabel for this and so hopefully it will not take me long to get it added in. Lots to do but some great progress already. I would love to know what you think. Once we have been able to polish this new feature a little I hope we can get a release out of the door so that more people can test out these new features and let us know what they think, point out bugs and shower us with compliments Note: For some reason the exported graphics shown in this post were not antialiased. They are on screen and I need to look into why they are not when I export graphics in this way.
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11:50
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Avogadro: Just Hit Commit 1000!Saturday, December 15. 2007I just made a few commits using my trusty git svn dcommit (I am still really loving git and it looks like the bug I reported may be fixed in it now too). Then I saw the commit numbers - we just hit commit 1000. Development has really been accelerating recently and I haven't had time to write about as much as I wish I could. Hopefully I will get a chance to take some screenshots and show off some of the latest stuff. I have coded a QGraphicsView based periodic table I am pretty happy with. It is compact, allows elements to be chosen, shows our colour scheme and even displays a little extra information on the selected element. Then there is the ribbon engine which is coming along but needs some loving attention from some bio people. I am very pleased with the new quick rendering stuff we have added. It still has its issues. I had fixed some but some of Benoit's recent commits seem to have reintroduced the cache problem upon engine changes. Tim has added a new hydrogen bond engine which looks great thanks to some stipple line stuff from Geoff. There is some great stuff in the properties dialogs too along with lots of improvements to our force fields. There is certainly lots more for us to do. The biggest thing I still haven't gotten in yet is surface support! I really want to get that sorted as I think it will be both useful and should look great. Along with some extra dialogs for graphics export, POV-Ray rendering etc.
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17:52
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Avogadro: New Ring & Polygon EnginesMonday, November 26. 2007I recently added a couple of new engines to Avogadro and the screen shot below shows them both. The ring engine finds all the rings of the molecule and draws a transparent plane through the ring. The polygon engine finds atomic centres with three or more atoms bonded and draws a polygon around that atom. This is only done for atoms that are not the common organic types. ![]() I think these are useful engines that have been prompted by user requests. May be not as exciting as the ribbon engine or the surface support we are working on but useful to display certain structures. The ring engine has not been without its problems though as you can probably spot in the image below showing the ring engine rendering a carbon nanotube. ![]() The lighting just flips at certain points - the same happens as you rotate molecules that are using the ring or polygon engine. I guess the lighting is flicking on at certain angles. I would be interested if anyone with more OpenGL knowledge than I might know how I can improve the rendering. Some rings are near white and some of the back rings don't seem to be drawn - that could actually be drawing order though which is always tough to get right. Comments and tips are always welcome. The big challenge right now is getting surface support added in. This is something I think we really need and I would use in my daily work as I am sure many others would. I have been reading up on marching cubes and stuff but would welcome tips in that area too! Improved Ribbon RenderingTuesday, November 6. 2007Over the last couple of days I have made a few commits to improve the ribbon support in Avogadro. Many thanks to Geoff for fixing some bugs we found in Open Babel and to Thomas Margraf for his helpful suggestions and for letting me take a look at a little of his code that renders ribbons. Right now the ribbon is drawn as a tube between the carbon atoms of the backbone and so isn't really a ribbon at all. Then I looked at the image and it is looking quite a bit like a ribbon. The code is checked in and so feel free to take a look at it. I am using NURBS but am far from an expert on their use. My laptop failure has lost some of the tuning I had done too - this is my first screenshot from Apple Mac OS X Leopard! Points if you can tell me why the alpha helix looks pretty good despite me having not yet implemented anything to find the correct plane! Still needs some tuning but I hope you will agree that this is looking pretty nice now. It has also led to some optimisation of molecule loading but I am sure that there are lots of biologists who will tell me it still isn't quite right. Update: Geoff has now shown me how to do screen capture and so here is a pretty video of Avogadro rendering ribbons in action! Avogadro 0.2 Released TodayTuesday, October 23. 2007Today we released Avogadro 0.2 which features many improvements since the 0.1 release. It has lots of the new features I worked on during my Google Summer of Code project along with some great work by other contributors such as the bond centric manipulation tool coded by Shahzad Ali, Ross Braithwaite and James Bunt. Geoffrey Hutchison announced the release earlier today, on what I have been informed is mole day due to the date format used in the US - 10/23 corresponding to the 10^23 of Avogadro's number. So today seemed like an even more fortuitous time to make a release of Avogadro! Today also marked my first commit to the Gentoo repository in quite some time to add this release to Gentoo's ebuild repository. If you have been waiting for me to add/update packages and I haven't gotten around to it due to life being so busy now would be a good time to poke me. I will also hopefully be completing the ribbon support I have already talked about and that should make it into a release soon but wasn't ready for this release. We would love to receive feedback on the latest release of Avogadro. These new features will also make their way into Kalzium in KDE 4.1.
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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22:05
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Preliminary "Ribbon" Support in AvogadroMonday, October 22. 2007I term it as "ribbon" because it really isn't a ribbon. I haven't figured out how to calculate the plane the ribbon lies on and right now it is a series of cylinders drawn from point to point. I hope you will agree that it already looks fairly effective and can certainly show the nature of the secondary structure of biological molecules. ![]() There is still a lot to do such as draw the tube in a more efficient manner as a continuous OpenGL construct and draw each residue separately. It would also be good to be able to draw ribbons but this may take a deeper understanding of ribbons and how they are visualised than I have. If there are any biologists out there who want to help me out then tips, or even better patches, would be great fully received aKademy 2007 Was GreatThursday, July 12. 2007Originally I thought I would just attend the aKademy conference on the weekend and return home after that. I submitted an abstract for my talk on Gentoo and KDE and had hoped to meet some KDE developers and see if we could work with KDE better. Later I applied for my Google Summer of Code project working on the Kalzium 3D molecular editor and was accepted. This caused me to change my plans and stay for the entire week and I am really glad I did I have been to quite a few open source conferences over the years but I have to say aKademy is my favourite so far. There was a great atmosphere and lots of very intelligent and dedicated hackers present. There were also lots of laughs and humour along with important discussions and debates. I got to meet so many people who work on KDE and whose blogs I have been reading for years. My only regret is that I couldn't get out for a few more beers in the evenings... I thought it would be a good idea to camp as aKademy was in June and the odds were good that the weather would be fair. In the days leading up to my departure Sheffield flooded and I think it rained every day of aKademy (some days solidly throughout the day). On Sunday evening we came back to a rather large pond at the side of our tent that had previously been a patch of grass with a dip in it. I chose where to pitch the tent well though and the tent remained out of harms way Continue reading "aKademy 2007 Was Great"
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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10:19
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Open Street Map Party in SheffieldMonday, March 26. 2007On Saturday and Sunday I attended the Sheffield Open Street Map party. All this is pretty new to me but I was certainly interested in the concept of creating a free and openly editable map of the world. The party was kindly hosted and organised by the IET and ShefLUG in cooperation with the OSM guys who brought along some GPS gear for those of us who don't have our own. We got a crash course on how to use the handheld GPS devices and then went out to do some mapping. I partnered up with Dan on Saturday and we wandered around the back streets quite close to the Mappin building which was our base. We took it in turns making notes and using the GPS and I think we managed to map just about every street in the patch we covered as well as quite a few footpaths. ![]() Above is a copy of the OSM map of Sheffield as it stands right now after some of our weekends work has been added. It still hasn't rebuilt the tiles with the extra bits I have just added but I am sure it will get on there soon. I really enjoyed doing the mapping and hope to do more in the future. There are so many good reasons to help out with this project if you can. Marble is planning on adding support for OSM, it is also a great way to do something pretty geeky and get out of the office for a while Google Earth Linux BetaThursday, June 22. 2006
Been playing with the Linux beta of the Google Earth for the last few days. I had played with the Windows version once or twice and was impressed but as I do not run Windows full time anywhere (just very occasionally in VMWare) I hadn't played with it much. The Linux beta seems to be really good, it has crashed twice on me so far, but for a beta it has taken a lot of hammer and remained stable and it looks very slick.
I am really pleased to see Google developing for Linux too, and I think this is a very positive move on their part. They have been doing so much for the open source world it was starting to worry me that they like many large companies were neglecting Linux with their software offerings. I still haven't had chance to try Picasa which is a more disappointing port in my eyes, although a definite beginning. It didn't work on my amd64 system last time I tried it though... In other news I seem to be so busy right now! I can't make it to the Gentoo UK 2006 Conference down in London this year. I hope you guys have a great time, wish I could have made it myself. I would have even rustled up a talk for you guys AMD64 Based PVR: Part 2 - Some FailuresWednesday, April 5. 2006
I have been really busy recently and so haven't had as much time as I might have liked to work on my PVR. After spending a while working on it lastnight I thought I would write a little about some of my failures. On the whole the solution is working reasonably well, and some of these issues could be related to me using it in 64 bit mode...
The first is the image quality. Whilst playing DVDs I have found that xine works best and has DVD menu support which in my opinion is essential. On the whole the picture is pretty good but in fast moving scenes where large amounts of the background are moving quite quickly the motion becomes noticeably blocky during the motion. This can be really irritating and is not a great advert for the box when friends come around as even a £20 DVD player doesn't seem to suffer from this. The second is the picture quality from the TV. I never managed to get the composite or svideo connections working - I only ever saw black. So I am using the aerial and the picture is very noticeably more blurry than the same picture just fed straight to the TV. I am guessing this is just the poorer quality of the aerial signal or a hardware limitation. Either way it is not great. It would also appear that MythTV may have a memory leak as after the client had been running for a few weeks the system was out of memory. It would seem this leak is pretty slow though and so I am not sure how best to track it. This system has 1 GB of RAM so may be that helps give it a lot more time. The final issue I have not gotten to the bottom of is freezing after watching the TV for a while through MythTV. All in all it is not a bad solution, but it is certainly not a plug in and go solution. I wish I had just got myself a cheap DVD player as I just don't have the spare time right now. Hopefully this post will be seen as an honest appraisal of how things are working right now with my MythTV box. Your mileage may well vary and you may have a lot more time to tinker. My wife isn't all that impressed and quite honestly I don't know that I am...
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05:11
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AMD64 Based PVR: Part 2 - Mostly SuccessfulSaturday, February 11. 2006
Well I have been mostly successful I think with my MythTV project. Dabs still have me waiting around on the 300 GB hard drive and new case, so it is stuck on a temporary 40 GB hard drive and an old case. It is very quiet though. I finally got the two tuners working on my Hauppage PVR-500 MCE. I took out the tuner=57,57 and let it automatically detect the correct tuners! They now both work, and composite in works too. I tried to use svideo in though and that does not seem to work, although it could be a cable issue. I bought a SCART to svideo and two phono adaptor. I get nothing but a black screen from my Sky Digibox.
I can't get anything out of the radio tuner either. I discovered why xawtv and tvtime made terrible test programs - they don't understand the MPEG2 output I get from the hardware encoders. MPlayer made a much better test program. So so far I have managed to get both tuners working, using the mce_usb2 driver form the latest lirc ebuilds I managed to get the remote control and infrared receiver working, although still no luck on the built in IR blaster. There are two IR blaster ports and one supplied IR blaster - anyone got any tips on that one at all? The DVD player is working great although I switched to xine for the DVD menu support. I tried using svideo output but all I could get was black and white no matter what I tried. So I switched back to composite output which works well. So it seems that svideo sucks over here and doesn't work, but composite works just fine. I still haven't quite figured out MythTV either - I need to tell it about the five analogue channels and my Sky Box which is on a sixth channel - I have the channels but need to program them into MythTV. Right now I am using ivtvctl and ivtv-tune until I figure MythTV out. So it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to set up, but it is working pretty well right now. Need to figure out how to record programs too, but the core functionality is working well. I am really busy with lots of other stuff so this little project has ended up on a bit of a back burner. I do still find Linux very empowering though, and certainly have no intention of moving back to Windows any time soon for a number of reasons despite the extra effort required to get some things done.
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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15:14
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AMD64 Based PVR: Part 1 - The Adventure BeginsSunday, February 5. 2006
Well I had an old motherboard with an Athlon64 3200+ in it (previous burnt out PSU that wasn't quite as bad as it looked). So I bought 1 GB of RAM, a new PSU, a Hauppage PVR-500, used my old nVidia GeForce FX5900XT and a DVD drive for it. I installed Gentoo amd64 on it of course and then began my first attempt at MythTV.
I have TV out working and I can play DVDs, although I am using xine instead of mplayer for the DVD menu support. The TV tuners are recognised but all I get is static. I was working with this wiki article. I also have messages like this in dmesg, ivtv1: i2c attach to card #1 ok [client=(tuner unset), addr=61] which I think is my tuner failing to get set up properly. It looks like the infrared receiver/IR blaster doesn't work either, it is USB based and came with the package. I get ID 0609:031d SMK Manufacturing, Inc. when I plug it in but no lirc devices media-tv/ivtv-0.4.2 media-tv/xmltv-0.5.39 - current stable is unable to parse UK TV listings media-tv/mythtv-0.18.1-r2 app-misc/lirc-0.8.0_pre3
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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11:04
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ShefLUG Meeting: Alan Cox and Megan Larko TalksSaturday, February 4. 2006
Got back from the a full day of Linux discussion which started at around 10am this morning, and carried on until about 7:30pm. Saw an really interesting talk given by Alan Cox on software engineering and how the theory compares to how it is done in both open source projects and the proprietary commercial sector. It was a very interesting talk that really got you thinking.
This was followed by a talk from Megan Larko about their use of Linux at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Land Information Systems group where they really have pushed Linux to some extreme limits. Utilising multiterabyte RAID arrays and very demanding simulations on large datasets and hitting the 2GB per PID limit on 32 bit systems. It was really interesting to hear someone talking about real issues pushing Linux to the extremes and how they were able to overcome these problems. As well as a very honest description of a few of the failures made along the way. I only just upgraded my main development system to 2GB of RAM, and so it is hard to believe that there are real reasons to use all of this space for one process! The talks were followed by more informal followup talk given by Megan at the LUG meeting, and then informal chats and a nice meal at a local restaurant. I am now working on my 64 bit Gentoo MythTV box, not wanting to move away from the Linux theme. LUG meetings can be a great chance to meet some very interesting people and always give different insights to reading about this stuff in books and on the web. MADWiFi Working on AMD64 AgainFriday, January 20. 2006
Well they finally fixed the new MADWiFi driver to work with AMD64 again, after about two months or so of it causes a kernel oops whenever traffic was transmitted over the wireless link. I have been too busy to get a new card and so I am still using this one. Still not happy about the closed source HAL and think the reasoning behind it is flaky. It is little better than a proprietary driver, but the old driver worked and thanks to brix the new driver is in portage already and has been rekeyworded ~amd64.
Hopefully wireless in Linux will improve soon, I don't think closed source drivers are the answer though. In other news I have also brought the latest version of boinc out of package.mask to receive wider testing. It seems to be working pretty well, but still isn't as smooth as I would like. If anyone has ideas on how to improve it, or better yet patches, I would love to hear from you.
Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell
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13:25
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KDE 3.5.0 released!Friday, December 2. 2005
I haven't seen this announced yet by anyone on the Gentoo planet - KDE 3.5.0 has been released and we had the ebuilds available upon release thanks to the KDE folks. It is a really nice release with lots of improvements, although it still has a few bugs in there. There is a nice visual guide available with some of the highlights. I would recommend upgrading the the split ebuilds if you haven't already done so. It has been unmasked but it is still in the testing branch for a reason.
In other news KDE 3.4.3 has been targeted for stable marking and is already marked as such on several architectures. I think most of the bugs in the 3.4 line have now been resolved and this is a very stable desktop I use at work everyday. There was also the release of digiKam 0.8.0 which has a whole host of new features packed in. UK Linux Expo 2005Friday, October 7. 2005
The expo was quite interesting but far more corporate than FOSDEM. I was disappointed at the high prices of the tickets to see any of the talks - I think it was about £75 per session which is too much for us lowly developers... They didn't provide any kind of network access to us either, so we were cut off from the world and unable to fetch anything we didn't have mirrored on disk already.
We got set up with a dual xeon box loaned to us by James (edit_21) for the duration of the show along with a 15" TFT screen. I brought along my new toy - the Acer Ferrari 4005. I did manage to break it a little by recompiling everything with GCC 4.0.2... It actually works really well apart from the sucky ATI binaries which fail to load because they are binary and I am forced to wait until ATI choose to recompile their drivers (assuming they can) using GCC 4. As a result 3D performance was poor, and the silky smooth cube demo I was going to put on it ground to a jerky holt! The ComputaShop kindly printed the large G logo and donated the CD-Rs and printed labels for us to use at the show too. Once the portage xorg-x11 ebuild contains the patch for the open source drivers to work on my ATI X700 PCI-E graphics card I think I am going to abandon the binary drivers unless I need them for opengl (I hardly use that stuff anyway). When I do I should probably be working! I learnt something new whilst at the expo too - cokehabit actually does something productive for Gentoo! He is one of the contributors to the GWN, and I have a wonderful picture of this colourful Gentoo user at the expo ![]() Nick Veitch, editor of Linux Format (had my subscriber copy with me at the expo) presented us with the two awards we won earlier this year (best support resource and best distro), but I missed him and so couldn't get him to sign my GPG key We also had some GPG key signing action, extending our web of trust from the European devs at FOSDEM over to the UK devs (and lcars, our random dev from a long way away). It was great to meet up with so many UK devs, and some of our users too. I met up with Matthew and Pete from Bytemark Hosting too, they provided my Gentoo UML host for the last couple of years until I outgrew it and got a dedicated host. I somehow ended up with them and Gareth (oddjobz) - we managed to end up in a curry house a little worse for wear on Wednesday night after the Lonix event. It was a great night out where much was discussed and debated even if it wasn't quite as coherently considered as it could have been... Spoke to some of the KDE developers too and found them to be very interesting. They were using Kubuntu I believe to show off their latest wears, and had some interesting discussions with them about the upcoming 3.5 release which we at Gentoo have spent considerable time working on. I had the split ebuilds installed and running on my laptop throughout the conference too. On the last day we also met Mark Spencer, the creator of Asterisk who had given a talk at the conference (unfortunately didn't get to see any of the talks due to the price for tickets). He took us out for a beer, and some of our devs/users even stayed on a little longer for a meal. I am sure they had a great time whilst I had to leave to catch my train... Giving me time to type up this post in a better state than I would have been had I stayed on. UPDATE: My photos from the expo are here.
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