My big headache

Today I’m suffering from a really big headache, I can’t remember when it was last time I actually had such an headache the whole day long. I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I’d bet on a mixture of many different causes, one of them being me thinking of my future and my work.

I haven’t been able to actually get into the kernel debugging of the SPARC64 box, I really need to ask Javier a few things before starting; yesterday I tried to install NetBeans on Prakesh to test it out, but I wasn’t even able to get a deptree clear, as one of the package depends on a JDK 1.4 (that we can’t provide, the diablo Caffe and Latte packages are only for 1.5), so I had to ask Betelgeuse help for cleaning up the dependencies, and now I’m waiting for him to have time to complete the splitting of mx4j so I can proceed to check the rest of the deptree (although having the deptree sorted out is not enough, the second step will be to check that all the dependencies are ported to Java Generation 2, as we also provide only that, missing 1.4 series of both JDK and JRE).

At least, with kernel 2.6.19 I was finally able to use my cellphone as MP3 player without much hassle, as the flush mount option (that Caster suggested me) is working quite fine.. unfortunately KDE will use it only if HAL reports it as acceptable (and the version in portage does not, I had to add a custom FDI file), and for some reason I’m not able to tell HAL to mount the partition with ISO8859-15 charset.. seems like setting the default options cannot be done anymore, and the “desktop session” should give HAL the options to mount the device with. Now, this means that HAL won’t be abstracting anything anymore, because the desktop session has to know what on Earth the device is and supports…

And I haven’t forgotten that using a digital camera on Gentoo is not as easy as plugging it in and starting DigiKam, as I’ve seen users commenting about it on the blog. I’m thinking of something about it, unfortunately I don’t have a digital camera myself so I’m both not that convinced to work on it more than in spare time, and I cannot just decide to test it. What I have in mind is, though, a simple way to abstract setting up the permissions for devices, so that, for instance, also mobile phones can get a decent default permission, both on Linux and FreeBSD.. on a first thought, the thing that I’d like to do is writing an XML description of the devices, and then use XSLT to transform the generic listing in mapping files for hotplug, in rules files for udev and in something for FreeBSD too. This way it would be possible to just have one single listing and many different operating systems could make use of them… but I need to flesh out the idea more.. unfortunately I know already it will never get enough mindshare because I usually don’t write on mailing list and thus I cannot even hope to convince other people to work on this and share a good database of devices..

I need a clone.