Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Feedback from Wammu

Wammu now finally has initial support for Gammu Phone Database. I talked a lot about this and now I finally wrote some code for it. It allows you to fill in values in program, all basic information (phone manufacturer and model, connection type), are automatically prefilled from what Wammu already knows. The dialog itself is more or less a copy of same web page, as you can see on following image:

Talkback screenshot

python-gammu 0.18

python-gammu 0.18 has been just released. New features:

  • Cleaned up build system.
  • Support for crosscompilation using MinGW32.
  • Compatibility with current gammu releases and CMake build system.

Gammu test version 1.09.19

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. There is quite a lot of changes:

  • Do not ship make-release in tarball.
  • Fixed wrong encoding of text to vCard when last field was missing.
  • Fix crash when deleting entry from OBEX using LUIDs.
  • Improve detection of invalid config file (bug #68).
  • Support for MinGW cross compilation including Bluetooth and IrDA.
  • Support for generating installer using CPack.
  • Add Nokia 6030b ID.
  • Full support for enconding recurrency in vCard.

This release first comes with precompiled Windows binaries and Windows installer!

python-gammu for Windows

After some playing with distutils to make cross compilation using them possible, I finally gave up. Maybe I did not understand some part of guide, but resulting library only crashes Python.

So I googled once more and I found another approach to cross compile Python extensions for Windows on Linux.

And it was quite simple to do it. First you need Windows installer for Python. Now you need to get dll and includes out of this. I decided to leave hard work on Wine and hoped it will work:

/usr/bin/msiexec /i /tmp/python-2.5.msi

Now you have installed Python somewhere in ~/.wine/drive_c. All what is remaining is tuning of makefiles from original howto. You can also look on code for python-gammu which deals this issue.

Thanks to Matthew Mueller for great howto! BTW: I tested it with Python 2.5 and MinGW 3.4.5.

xfs troubles

On my testing computer lived till today quite outdated Debian Unstable. As I needed to perform some testing with that which required recent version of some tools, I bravely did upgrade using aptitude.

After two hours of downloading, packages started to install, but it crashed while installing linux-kernel-headers. Well as I didn't know in what shape my last tests kept Debian and XFS filesystem it uses for root, I rebooted using live CD and ran xfs_repair.

It found several errors, I rebooted and reran aptitude. To my suprise the problem did not went away, and after another boot using live CD, I saw that xfs_repair still sees those problems.

Fortunately I noticed that live CD contains quite old xfs_repair and I used the one which is currently in unstable. And it seems to finally fix my problem! Now I can finally start my upgrade and it works :-).

Čistá duše - Music club with African music

This time it won't be about food, but only about entertainment. Čistá duše is music club in Prague centre (on Charles square). I think it can be called as meeting point of African culture (well at least it looked as such to me :-)).

Every evening (probably) you can listen there to rhythms of African drums and enjoy dancing on them.

Drinks are for reasonable price for this part of town, but you won't get there anything to eat, so you should choose something else to fill your hungry stomach.

Sonata 1.0 for Debian

I finally forced myself to prepare packages of new Sonata release. I hoped I will be able to upload them myself, but NM process will probably need some more time, so I just sent request for sponsoring to Daniel, who kidly uploaded previous version.

You will probably miss some of new Sonata features in Debian, because some Python modules which are needed for it are not available. Maybe somebody will package them, if not, I will do it on my own sometimes :-).

Installer for Gammu on Windows

Thanks to CMake, it's part CPack and a bit of my hacking, I can now easily produce installers for Gammu on Windows. I haven't much tested result, but it installs and uninstalls fine and Gammu seems to be working.

How it is done? Eveything on Linux. All you need is small patch on CPack to allow using NSIS also on Linux. If you have this one, just download Gammu, cross compile it and start CPack. Everything is so easy:

mkdir build-mingw
cd build-mingw
cmake .. -DCROSS_MINGW=ON
make
cpack

And you will get Gammu installer for Windows (please note that this is not even testing release, it's more some kind of snapshot of my development tree, so it does not have to be release quality).

Thanks again to CMake and NSIS to allow me to do such thing. This is way I can support Windows :-).

Gammu cross compilation using MinGW and CMake

I just implemented in my Gammu tree support for cross compiling for Windows on Linux host using MinGW. The support of CMake for this is quite limited, but implementation was not that hard.

The only tricky part was to include compiler settings from Windows and force setting of library and executable prefixes and suffixes. Then only build time configuration had to be disabled. If you want to do this for other project, see changeset for changes needed for this.

Resulting binary works without problems on Windows, the only problem right now is disabled IrDA and Bluetooth support, but I hope I will resolve this soon.