BT747 on gentoo

Last week I bought a Pentagram PathFinder P3106 GPS logger device. To use it I decided to install BT747 - a swiss army knife for MTK chipset-based devices - as it is called. First I tried install from portage - it succeeded, but I couldn't make it to connect to the device. I googled for help, but nothing seemed to work for me. I've even installed 2.2 version of rxtx from portage overlay but without aby difference.

Eventually, I found out that I did not have an USB_ACM module (USB Modem (CDC ACM) support) selected and compiled in my kernel. When I did that at least a /dev/ttyACM0 device began being visible in my system after connecting the logger. Then I downloaded and unzipped the newest version of bt747 (not in the portage) and this one worked!

DVD quality scans on GNU/Linux

Yesterday I bought a decent DVD recorder - Lite-ON DH 20A4H. As for now (two DVDs burned) I can't say a bad word about it. However, one of the reason why I bought a recorder from this particular vendor was support for quality scans of recorded media. For GNU/Linux based OS there is already the QPxTool, which allows for PIE/PIF analysis. Nonetheless, stability of this program leaves some place for improvements. My attention, thus, quickly turned to Wine and possibility to run such tests using win32 apps. I tried CDSpeed from Nero Utilities, but despite positive feedback on the cdfreaks forums I could not run it. Then I tried Kprobe2. It does PIE/PIF analysis, just as QPxTool, but not jitter. Same with DVDInfoPro, which should support jitter scans, but for some reason I cannot have them done.

Maybe one day NeroLinux will support jitter scans, or I will be able to trace bus data flow with CDSpeed run on Win32 to see what is being sent between the system and the hardware. With this in hand I might then write a utility myself, or contribute to the already existing GPL projects.

A tip for other users who'd like to run Kprobe2 or DVDInfoPro: in the Graphics tab of winecfg turn off the option which allows your WM to manage wine apps windows.

BOUML 4.2.1 ebuild

The latest BOUML ebuild. Enjoy. If you'd like to make it yourself next time, then use the

ebuild [path_to_the_new_ebuild] digest

command to create auxilliary files within the portage overlay.

BOUML 4.2 ebuild

It's been quite a while since the release of BOUML 4.2 but its ebuild is still missing in gentoo-protage. Having found few minutes of spare time I decided to create its homebrew version to share with all of you who sit there and wait looking forward to it being published on the gentoo-portage website. The uuencoded version is included below. Enjoy!

Coral UML modeler on Gentoo

Coral is a UML modeler with QT4 gui written in python. It is being developed by the staff and students of the Åbo Akademi University, gathered around CREST. According to the authors it should be able to generate Python code from created UML schema, but unfortunately I have failed in my attempts to do so. Nonetheless, prior to my tinkering with coral I have prepared few ebuilds which allowed me to install coral within the portage tree context (uuencoded below). Enjoy!