If you want to be able to commit changes to the Subversion repository, or just want to check out branches that aren’t contained in WebKit.git, you will need track the Subversion repository. To do that, inform git-svn of the location of the WebKit SVN repository, and update the branch that git-svn uses to track the Subversion repository so that it will re-use the history that we’ve already cloned from git.webkit.org rather than trying to fetch it all from Subversion:

cd WebKit
git svn init --prefix=origin/ -T trunk http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit
git config --replace svn-remote.svn.fetch trunk:refs/remotes/origin/master

This will add the following section to your .git/config:

[svn-remote "svn"]
url = http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit
fetch = trunk:refs/remotes/origin/master

You can then run the following command to have git-svn rebuild its metadata from your local repository, and to pull any recent commits from the WebKit SVN repository.

git svn fetch

So, let’s say you have a subversion repository:

svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk

and you also have a git clone of that repository:

git://nbd.name/openwrt.git

(Obviously these examples come from OpenWrt)
Now if you don’t want to fetch the whole history from svn, which will take forever, here is what you can do:

mkdir openwrt;cd openwrt;
git svn init --prefix=svn/ svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk
git remote add nbd.name git://nbd.name/openwrt.git
git fetch nbd.name
git config --replace svn-remote.svn.fetch trunk:refs/remotes/nbd.name/master
git svn fetch

1. The git config line tells git-svn to use the history in nbd.name, so you won’t need to checkout the same commits from svn.
2. Use --prefix=svn/ to separate nbd.name upstream and svn upstream.

And it’s running Windows XP.

Not that I’ve anything against Win XP. It’s stable enough, compatible with most of the stupid government and bank websites and applications, so I can use it to pay taxes, use web ATM, etc. It’s really useful. Mine is a legitimate copy, but I didn’t buy it. It’s actually a gift from Microsoft many, many years ago, in my previous life…

Anyway, the problem is that it’s hard to move to another PC. I’ve never be bothered enough to figure out how to use the ‘sysprep’ util, but start from scratch and update/install everything instead. It’s too much trouble, so it kinda stopped me from replacing it.

So, I was window shopping on the Internet and this Giada N20 caught my attention. It’s really small – 0.6 liter – and it comes with a remote control and HDMI. Video files could be decoded by Nvidia ION2. It’s exactly what I need. The real issue was that do I have to buy a Win 7 with it? People told me it’s really hard to use. Another thing was that the hardware is not particularly fast, so running win 7 might be too much for it. I figured I can try to install XP, since the manufacture said it’s fully supported.

I was so wrong.

I plugged in my ancient USB CDROM with the original XP CD in it. It booted into install screen and the process went just fine. I noticed that the reported hard drive capacity was incorrect, but I told myself it’s nothing and will be fixed as soon as I update the software.

No matter how hard I try (well not that hard, I just pressed the power button and F8 a few more times), it just cannot boot into XP. I thought it need some new drivers, but I couldn’t install the driver until I had a running XP, can I? Indeed it has an option saying that one may install 3rd party drivers during the install process, but it needs — floppy! Gosh, yeah I do have a floppy drive on my old machine, but who has a floppy with ‘USB’ interface nowadays? Guess I could just forget it.

In my desperation (I almost hit the shopping button for a win 7 copy), I figured maybe I can try to install Linux on it. It wouldn’t hurt. If it didn’t work I could put win 7 in it anyway. So I took out my trusted Ubuntu 11.04 USB flash and installed it.

After it booted for the first time, of course 3D didn’t work. I launched ‘Install additional driver’, it recommended Nvidia, I installed it, reboot… Yeah Ubuntu Unity interface was on, which means 3D was working. Then I enabled Mediabuntu, installed mplayer along with w64codecs, etc. Tried some high definition movies. There’s no audio output. Well, the display seemed to be fast enough, but it’s obviously running on the CPU so the codec was slowing things done. I clicked sound preference, picked HDMI 2nr (or something like that) then audio worked. mplayer picked vdpau as the video output, so I checked ‘mplayer -vc help’ and found some ffmpeg with vdpau support. I put these into ~/.mplayer/config, then 1024p movies played smoothly on my 52 inches LCD TV. Cool!

The remote control runs just like a keyboard input on this thing, and it can remotely power on/off this box. So I set the keyboard shortcut and set the default power button to ‘suspend’. Now I can resume and control it with a remote.

The last thing was to connect my Lavry DA-11 to it. It comes with USB interface and it’s standard USB audio, so there was no issue. I could switch sound output between HDMI and USB, depends on weather I want to hear the sound from the TV or my stereo set.

That’s about it. I must say it exceeds my expectation. Yeah the software is definitely there, but the hardest issue has always been the hardware. A media center relies on valid hardware drivers to work. Congrats to Ubuntu (and Linux) and Nvidia for going this far.

Android RenderScript on LLVM
by 廖世偉 博士

Is parallel programming hard? And if so, what can you do about it?
by Paul McKenney

Guides To Analyzing WebKit Performance
by Holger Freyther and Jim (jserv) Huang 黃敬群

Linaro and Android Kernel
by Andy Green

There are still some slides missing and I’ll keep updating here.

0xlab is going to co-host this event on 2011/04/28. Please refer to
http://www.digitimes.com.tw/seminar/android_1000428.htm
for more information. The introduction page is in Traditional Chinese, but some of the sessions are in English.

We think there are quite some Android summits out there, but most of them are about application development and business trends. We want to focus on the system development aspect from a more technical point of view.

Oh by the way, did I mention it’s free of charge?

Extract the tar balls under /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source , then apply this patch. Enter each directory, make.

Put the generated *.o under /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/misc , symlink them to *.ko, depmod -a. Done.

https://launchpad.net/~fingerprint/+archive/fingerprint-gui

1. Since ubuntu-desktop depends on notify-osd, I have to keep it.
2. Install notification-daemon
3. sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.notify-osd /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service
4. logout, login again

This is all too familiar. The power users ask an open source company to change their design, then the company says “hey, this is open source! We are aiming at normal users, not you geeky developers. If you don’t like it, go fork your own project. We know what’s best for our users, and you *don’t*.”

This is just too sad.

Our Ideas

We believe open source is the right thing to do. Its contribution could be shared by everyone around the globe and allows people to build upon each other’s work. Plus, as a developer, coding makes much more sense if you can see the whole source. It’s something that makes our job as a software developer fun and meaningful.

On the other hand, we believe there is a chance in Taiwan to make open source profitable. We’re not talking about the conventional thinking that business should lock up as much as possible and only release source code enforced by the GPL-like license. We are talking about being a good community member and opening up as much as possible, not only the source codes, but issue trackers, documents and discussions yet still making money because of openness.

This is not a new idea, but already a practice. Companies such as Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Novell, Redhat, Sun, etc. open up to attract more brain power and get more publicity. Contradicting conventional wisdom, openness is actually becoming a good business strategy.¹

We believe that there exists an ecosystem that combines both the open source developers and the hardware manufacturers in Taiwan. Our focus is to strengthen this connection and make it profitable for both parties.

So, how are we going to do this?

1. Opening up the non-essential part of the software development and working with the communities. For the open source world, this means more contribution and feedbacks. For the business, this means minimized development and maintenance effort.
2. Focus on the unique advantage that is a combination of hardware and software. The actual profit comes from selling the physical product instead of selling the software, which is not a financially good idea anymore.

Businesses should cooperate on #1, so they could put more resource to build their own unique advantages #2.

A healthy ecosystem is the way to make open source prosper. So, by making this ecosystem strong, we can effectively make open source stronger in Taiwan, which is something we have long waited for.

Our Works

Timeline

2009/4/27 – 0xlab launched, sponsored by AzureWave Technologies, Inc.

2009/5/15 – Project Android Eee PC launched. It aims to bring Android to Eee PC but the current focus is 3D acceleration support.

2009/6/2 – Computex. 0xlab demonstrated Beagleboard and Samsung 6410 connected to the WiFi/Bluetooth combo module from AzureWave.

2009/6/10 – FreedomHEC. Talked about "Qi – Lightweight Boot Loader Applied in Mobile and Embedded Devices".

2009/6/22 – Project android obex launched. It provides obex file sharing via bluetooth in Android.

2009/7/1 – First code drop. 0xlab now has the following projects on gitorious: MadButterfly, Android Eee PC, 0xlab’s Linux Kernel Tree, esuit and android obex.

2009/7/14 – Project 0xdroid launched. It’s the 0xlab’s Android distribution with Beagleboard as the reference platform.

2009/8/7 – The first release of 0xdroid, Beagle-cupcake-0×1.

2009/8/15 – COSCUP, the biggest open source conference in Taiwan. 0xlab is a sponsor with 4 talks and 1 lightening talk.²

2009/10/9 – Beagle-cupcake-0×2 released.

2009/11/3 – Project FreeBroid created. It enables FreeBSD users to do Android development.

2009/11/6 – Created our branch of Qi supporting omap3530 (Beagleboard).

2009/12/18 – Beagle-donut-0×3 released.

2009/12/25 – Merry Christmas! Android with 3D Effects is our Christmas gift.

Business Review

Hardware is becoming more and more standardized and keeps converging to a few solution providers. From the technical point of view, businesses have to stand out in software and the hardware/software integration.

However, the cost of creating your own proprietary OS is sky high and it requires a dominating power on the market to create enough acceptance, such as Apple. Solutions like Windows Mobile require royalty and the room to customize is rather limited because it depends on the kindness of its provider. Open source solution is a way out, but it’s not without its problems.

The Impact of Open Source

There are mainly three obstacles that are often missed by project owners:

1. The technical understanding of the code: most of the time the existing projects can only partially meet the requirement, so a certain amount of engineering resource is required to fill the gap. However, just because the code is opened does not mean it could be modified easily. A big, complex project can be very difficult to trace and understand. Inappropriate modification to the source code leads to maintenance hell, while the ability to change properly is rare. Without a thorough understanding, the exact effort to develop/fix/maintain the code could be hard to estimate, as well as the risk of the project.
2. Lack of overview: a Linux based product usually consists of multiple projects. These components may base on different technologies and work in different system levels with different functionalities. The way they interact with each other and the rule they play in the system could be hard to understand without prior knowledge of these projects. Thus, to obtain the overview of the system and to get a grip of the project status could become a challenge. The project owner must understand what’s the core advantage/business value of the project and the rest should be opened to save development effort.
3. Don’t know how to work with upstream: the best way to understand the source code and to get support is maintaining a good relationship with upstream. The best practice is working directly with them and merging back new functionalities and bug fixes. However, communication could be difficult because open source communities have their own development model, tool and culture, and will react rather badly if you don’t follow.
4. Legal issues: many businesses intentionally or unintentionally violate open source license. This puts them under the risk of being sued by people like our friend Harald Welte. These businesses need experienced people to deal with license issues, especially when you mix codes with different licenses.

How to Deal with It

1. Work with businesses that provide open source services. These are people who not only understand open source, but also bear the business value in mind. They have experience in commercial projects before, so they are very likely easier to communicate with.
2. Hire experts. If you can’t directly hire upstream developers, hire developers who are familiar with your target projects.
3. Train your own experts. You still need to find some ‘seeds’ first. This takes longer but in the end you get your own group.
4. Managers with rich experience in open source is a must.
5. Seek legal consult familiar with different open source licenses.

New Challenges from Android

1. Multilayer debugging: Android is a complex combination of various technologies. Most of its platform services are a mix of different computer languages and run across multiple layers. Debugging (inside the platform itself, not the application layer) often requires tracing back and forth between the java framework and native libraries across different processes. This is significantly harder then tracing the old fashioned pure c/c++ codes.
2. Follow the fast paced upstream: Android evolves really fast, i.e. two major releases per year. This means your product will become outdated during the development phase and you will have to do the catching up and the product development (polishing, bugfixes, new features, etc.) at the same time. This will be a new challenge to a software team.
3. Knowledge of various technical areas: as mentioned before, Android is a complex mix of different technologies. Peripherals, power management, mobile phone protocols (2G/3G/…), graphic 2D/3D acceleration, virtual machine (Dalvik), toolchain (bionic, gcc, …), the design of user interface, certifications, etc. , each one of these could be a big topic. Android provides a basic platform to build on, but the entry barrier to build on top of it properly is still high, if not even higher.

Where We Stand

0xlab has an unique standing facing all all these new challenges. Most of us are both professional engineers experienced in shipping end products and active open source developers.

We consist of experts in different areas. Experience in major smartphone brand/ODM R&D, User interface, virtual machine, compiler, low-level kernel development, multimedia codecs, Mesa 3D contributor and Openmoko, the world’s first open phone, gives us everything we need to do Android platform development.

We offer the following:

1. Reduced development effort by working with the communities. Short time-to-market. Automatic testing suite to ensure quality.
2. Contribute back to the industry to make a bigger pie.
3. Cutting edge technology by following upstream development closely.
4. Commercial friendly license because we use the same license as Android.

Work with Us

We are accepting the following possibilities if they are technically related to Android:

1. Community: follow the convention. Join our mailing lists, chat on IRC, fire questions and share your knowledge just like any other open projects. Get helps for free by helping others.
2. Project: we’re accepting offers to work on a specific project as long as our work could be opened as well.
3. Consulting: contact us to get more info.

For Developers

0xlab is a virtual organization consists of full time employees and freelancers. We welcome passionate developers to join us. It doesn’t matter if you’re employed or self-employed as long as you share the same idea with us.

For Businesses

We encourage businesses to change mindset and open up non-essential parts to gain more developers’ eye balls. The more eye balls you get, the more powerful you’ll likely become. You don’t need to own every part of the software to sell the product. You just need your own unique advantage and that’s where you should really focus on.

Background

Why Android

Android is the event of the year with regards to mobile devices, which is our primary interest. Many OEM/ODM manufactures and brand names in Taiwan have put development resources into it, while the government agencies provide budgets to encourage Android research and development. We want to reuse as much resource as possible, so we picked it as our development focus.

Beagleboard

One of the problem we faced when 0xlab was just getting started is that it’s not easy to get a hardware platform. We picked Beagleboard because it’s modern, powerful, cheap and open with an active community. We do not have any business relationship with TI, but we do like their idea of opening up hardware. However, we are indeed the world’s no.1 RMA customer with the highest return rate since we broke a lot of boards while trying to do hardware modifications. We are software developers, after all…

Beagleboard is the platform we focused on, but it’s not the only platform we are interested to work on. We welcome people sending us their cool gadgets. If you want to find out what Android can do on your device, send us some sample. We may work on them and try to keep them in one piece.

More Info

We use git as our primary SCM, and use gitorious to host all of our projects. Some projects with the same name were created on google code as well for issue tracking and an easier to use wiki.

0xlab.org is hosted on our own cost and acts as an entry point. It provides basic information about us. The most interesting page is perhaps Planet, since it acts as a aggregation of our blogs.

Here is a list of all the rss feeds about our blogs and projects:

• http://0xlab.org/atom.xml
• http://code.google.com/feeds/p/0xdroid/updates/basic
• http://code.google.com/feeds/p/0xlab-kernel/updates/basic
• http://code.google.com/feeds/p/esuit/updates/basic
• http://gitorious.org/0xdroid.atom
• http://gitorious.org/0xlab-kernel.atom
• http://gitorious.org/android-eeepc.atom
• http://gitorious.org/android-obex.atom
• http://gitorious.org/esuit.atom

About 0xlab

0xlab is founded on 4/27, 2009 in Taiwan by a group of enthused FOSS³ developers, some of the finest. Most of its members are of Linux background with rich experience in embedded systems and created/contributed to various open source projects such as Linux kernel, opkg, OpenOCD, OpenEmbedded, QT Extended, Packagekit, FreeType, Kaffe and LXDE.

They met each other in the local FOSS community and at the startup Openmoko, from where they became familiar and connected with developers worldwide. This differentiated them in pan-Asian because they stay much closer with the mainstream and are actively attending the ongoing development.

The list of its current members could be found on our gitorious page. 0xlab aims to be a virtual organization, but at the moment it mainly operates in Taipei. 0xlab could be reached at:

Contact Us

• IRC: #0xlab
• mailto:contact@0xlab.org

Links

• http://0xlab.org/
• http://gitorious.org/+0xlab
• http://www.youtube.com/group/0xlab

Mailing Lists

• http://groups.google.com/group/0xlab-devel
• http://groups.google.com/group/0xlab-discuss

2. http://jserv.blogspot.com/2009/07/0xlab-coscup-2009.html

3. Free and open source software, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software

My .fetchmailrc:

poll gmail
     via pop.gmail.com
     protocol pop3
     username "xxx@gmail.com"
     password "####"
     mda maildrop
     ssl

poll dotcom
     via dot.com
     protocol pop3
     username "xxx"
     password "####"
     mda maildrop

My .esmtprc:

# default
identity = xxx@gmail.com
    hostname = smtp.gmail.com
    starttls = required
    username = xxx@gmail.com
    password = ####

identity = xxx@dot.com
    hostname = smtp.dot.com
    username = xxx
    password = ####

My .mailfilter:

if ( /^List-Id:.*<android-porting.googlegroups.com>/:h )
    to $DEFAULT/android-porting

if ( /^List-Id:.*<android-ndk.googlegroups.com>/:h )
    to $DEFAULT/android-ndk

if ( /^List-Id:.*<android-platform.googlegroups.com>/:h )
    to $DEFAULT/android-platform