peewit, Lapwing-Linux and annoying kernels

I’ve been working on peewit recently. I’ve finally got it talking to telepathy-mission-control, logging in, retrieving a contacts list, displaying it in the GUI and updating when contacts leave/change status.

The current code is the master branch, but extra work may go on in the “tmc” branch.

This has distracted me slightly from Lapwing-Linux, but not by much. Updates are still occurring, although the 2009 core is starting to creak a bit. I’ve decided therefore to limit updates to aaa_base/aax_base to security and major bug fixing only; there is a lot of exciting things coming in the next 6 months or so (gobject-introspection, GVariants, GTK3, GSettings) that would be more suited to a clean base, rather than getting tacked onto or hacked into 2009.

Where does this leave 2009? I am going to get a release out, with a LiveCD and GUI installer. First however I have to get the web2py site working as I’m fed up with TikiWiki being so clunky (yes, I do remember singing it’s praises before. Blogged too soon …).

Writing a custom site will be better in the long run, but is still a long run ;) The current hurdle is porting my bastardised version of pyForum to work on GAE, or writing it from scratch to work without SQL based queries.

Whilst it would be nice to get the bugtracker and package lister working, I’d be happy to settle for the wiki, forum and user apps working to start with.

LiveCD/installer wise, I’m probably not going to use anaconda, it seems to be getting weirder with each release. vanellus will be the installer for the forseeable future, basically copying the SquashFS image to the HDD. Currently it requires code to do the actual installation, the GUI is good to go AFAIR.

Kernels. Damn. 2009 will ship with a 2.6.30 kernel. Mainly because I’ve been using it constantly since August last year without hiccup; also because the last few kernels (2.6.33, 2.6.34, 2.6.35) have an annoying bug/feature/omission/regression with “snd_hda_intel spurious response” in dmesg. It seems lots of people are having this problem, especially with VIA chipsets.

It doesn’t cause no sound or clicks, but under heavy load the sound will skip, and having dmesg full of noise prevents real errors from appearing, like why nouveau doesn’t like resume from hibernation, resuming to a garbled screen and then a hard lock up.

I’ll take solace in that the mainline distros with kernels > 2.6.30 also have this sound problem, so it’s not just me being stupid.

Until next time :)