Glass Half Empty

Network neutrality in Europe is under threat. Not in some vague possible future; right now. In one week, on Tuesday the fifth of May, the European Parliament will vote on the second reading of the Telecoms Package and amendments.

I urge all EU citizens to contact an MEP, via e-mail or (preferably) phone, and encourage them to support the Citizens’ Rights Amendments, which reaffirm net neutrality and anti-censorship positions adopted by the European Parliament in the first reading but subsequently removed by the Council of Ministers in their "common position".

The primary purpose of these amendments is to make it explicit that the European Convention on Human Rights applies to internet and telecoms legislation. This should be obvious, but it is clear from the actions of politicians that it is not; it is all too clear that many see the internet as a frivolous toy, and civil rights obviously do not apply to toys. (It occurs to me that politicians are probably among those in the western world least affected by the digital communications revolution; if they need to communicate, they talk to their secretaries.)

Draft texts of the amendments (not yet numbered) can be found here: part I, part II, part III. There’s a (rather bad) campaign site here, and a less bad editorial – for all that it’s in a pointy-haired e-mag – in Computer World UK here.

The above lifted wholesale from ahruman's blog, since I feel similarly to him about this one. Contact your MEPs, people. Or face the consequences.

The Glass: empty

At work, I'm involved in building a kind-of glass cockpit for a small ground vehicle. Since there aren't that many howtos for getting the specific touchscreen I'm using working under Linux (generically, as opposed to a distro-specific package), I thought I'd write up the procedure. I make no pretense that this is a generic howto, but it works in this case, and will hopefully give other people a place from which to start.

My starting point was a mini-itx computer with an eGalax Touchkit-based touchscreen. The touchscreen has a VGA connector for video in, and a USB connector for data output, for which it emulates a mouse. Thus, move your finger on the screen, and the cursor follows it around. Press, and the cursor clicks on whatever is under it. Press and hold to right-click.

1. First, ensure that certain components have been compiled into your kernel.
   [Device Drivers -> Input device support -> Event interface]
   and
   Device Drivers -> USB support -> USB touchscreen
   (this last one may have been named differently, support for the eGalax Touchkit USB Touchscreen)
2. Rebuild your kernel, if necessary.
3. Get the "official" eGalax driver here. This is the slowest website I've ever encountered, taking upwards of five minutes to load a page. Click the link, then go have a cup of beverage-of-choice. You'll need to select the right driver, based on your version of the kernel and your X server.
4. Place egalax_drv.so in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input
5. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   1. In 'ServerLayout' add the line 'InputDevice "EETI" "SendCoreEvents"'
   2. Declare an input device:

      Section "InputDevice"
              Identifier "EETI"
              Driver "egalax"
                # Where 'X' is the event number of the device, check /proc.
              Option "Device" "/dev/input/eventX"
              # File to store calibration, must be writeable.
              Option "Parameters" "/etc/touchscreen.calibration"
              Option "ScreenNo" "0"
      EndSection
      

6. Start X, and use the "Touchkit" executable supplied with the driver to calibrate the touchscreen.

...and you're done.

The Glass: half-empty

"Could not open default font 'fixed'"

This very special message caused my Xorg 7.2 server to crash on startup, repeatedly. It turns out that Slackware 12.0 has a known bug whereby it doesn't quite get the X fonts install 'right' the first time around. The fix is simple: reinstall the packages "fonts-misc-misc" and "fonts-cursor-misc". Fault confirmed in Slackware 12.0, unknown in 12.1. Since this bug only appears to really be triggered when the X server is installed into an existing Slackware system, but not when a system including an X server is installed all at once, I don't imagine this will be a problem for many people. Still, I thought I'd scribble the fix down somewhere public, to add my voice to the throng of people making this suggestion.

The Glass: half-empty

Curious. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the new, shiny, modularised X-server is that the input modules (you know, keyboard driver, mouse driver and so on) are not considered part of the core, at least not under Slackware. Thus, if I want full X server functionality, I have to install all the x packages, then all the optional x packages separately. Finding this empirically is a real pain, since at the moment I have a two-hour turn-around on installations (update image, flash 4GB image on to Compact-Flash card, load card into machine and test - that middle step just isn't quick, even over USB 2.0). So, now to lunch, and hopefully the flashing will be done by the time I get back.

On the up side, I finally finished rebuilding the rear axle on my bicycle last night, having worked out what I can use for containment washers. Y'see, with this hub design while the bearings are held into the hub by the cone-nuts, the back faces of the bearings are open to contamination, which can't be good. The last set of cones fixed this with a metallic washer 'skirt', but one skirt is completely wrecked following the accident at Coldean Lane last year, and the other one is fused to the cone that is, in turn, jammed firmly on to the axle. After a fair bit of work with a stanley knife, one of the foam inserts from a cake-box of CDs does the job nicely, preventing grease from leaking out and dust, gravel and stuff from getting in. Win.

The Glass: half-empty