Another year passed. It was busy one with some job related turbulence… But let me start.

January

• Made short research to find out which Android tablet to buy. Month later I bought Archos 80 G9 Turbo.

February

• Linaro Connect in Redwood City (San Francisco area) was great event. The walk to Golden Gate was one of best parts of whole trip. Too bad that I decided to not stay for ELC which was few days after — most of US OpenEmbedded developers were there…
• Went to New York City on return trip. 36 hours is far too small amount of time to visit this town… Met guys from Bug Labs ;)
• Skipped FOSDEM for second time ;(
• I bought that Archos 80 G9 Turbo tablet. Most often self asked question during next months was “why???” — it feels slower than my Nexus S… But my daughter likes it as she has some games, books and films on it.
• My howto about flashing U-Boot on Efika MX Smartbook got re-used somewhere on Genesi website as many people found it useful.

March

• Joined MOTU team in Ubuntu. Not that I use that often…
• Due to amount of spam about Raspberry/Pi I wrote a post why I am not interested in R/Pi. I suggested BeagleBone instead.
• Published last version of cross compilers for ‘oneiric’ release of Ubuntu.
• Wrote post about cross compilation of ARM kernels under Ubuntu 12.04. It is still one of most popular posts.
• Went to AmiWawa meeting. Lot of friends from old Amiga times…

April

• Easter. Family etc.
• Attended local Ubuntu release party.

May

This was busy month — just one weekend for family ;(

• Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland (San Francisco area again). Did some sight-seeing, went to cinema — had good spent time. As usual did some shopping at Amazon ;)
• Attended Tizen Developers Conference as it was just 2 stops from UDS/Q hotel. And some friends from Maemo times were there. And there was great social event on Tuesday…
• Got Tizen Developer Platform device, played a bit with it and wrote few words about it. Few months later I sent this brick to some guy in Norway — maybe he will do something interesting with it.
• At end of month I went to Hong Kong…

June

• There was Linaro Connect q2.12 at Hong Kong. For me it was first visit in Asia. Did some sight-seeing but hope to see more in March 2013 when Linaro Connect Asia will take place at same hotel.
• ARMv8 related work started.

July

• New stuff, old tools. Or in other words: started using OpenEmbedded again. This time some preparations for ARMv8 work — created some images and Jenkins jobs to build them. Few months later we switched architecture and fun started.
• Also unbricked my SheevaPlug after my friend’s play. Now it is un-bootable again ;D

August

• Spend few weeks on holidays. Good time it was.
• Some people assigned by Canonical to work on Linaro went back and left our teams. I was on a list too, but convinced management that ARMv8 work may need my skills ;D

September

• Applied for Debian Maintainer. Got accepted some time later.
• Attended SmartDev Conference. I was member of programme committee. Nice event it was. Also met some old friends there ;)
• Started ARMv8 work in OpenEmbedded. First with some internal patches so I could not tell too much about progress. And there were sad moments due to that — like when I cross compiled first programs but had to wait 2 more weeks before could say that in public…
• Wrote two posts about ARM devices and why I am not interested in anything below Cortex-A9 ones. This time it was more polite than similar post from 2011.

October

• ARMv8 sprint in Cambridge. During that week Linaro published glibc patches for AArch64 so I was able to finally share my work with outside world. And as usual met some old friends ;)
• 3 weeks later everyone was able to run ARMv8 binaries.
• Also that month there was decision made that I will move to Canonical at beginning of December. Everything was setup so I sent farewell e-mail to everyone at Linaro. But later it got reverted and I will probably never know why and who made that decision.
• Went to Copenhagen for Canonical internal event to meet the team which I planned to join. Got lot of information about company plans which I am not allowed to talk about.
• Another Ubuntu Developers Summit took place.
• Also Linaro Connect q3.12 started.
• And Google + Samsung announced new, ARM based, Chromebook. So I bought one ;D

November

• During Linaro Connect Andrew Wafaa gave me my Chromebook and I managed to get Ubuntu running on it. Lot of help came from Olof Johansson — without him it would be much harder work. Managed to fry speakers ;(
• Then I went to Barcelona for ELC/E and Yocto developers day. Met friends, had lot of fun.
• Got BeagleBone and The Fish River Island 2 devices. Still did not booted second one.
• Spent few days at Palamos, Spain. Lovely time to relax after 3 weeks of conferences — thanks to Zygmunt Krynicki and his wife.
• Did last update of cross compilers for Ubuntu. Looks like Matthias Klose will take care of them now.

December

• My sister gave birth to two daughters! So now I am uncle at my part of family as well :)
• Created project and team at Launchpad to unite people hacking on ARM Chromebook support. Mailing list is not so used but we got some bugs and first set of packages. So if you have such device and use Ubuntu on it… join us! If you use other distribution then also join us ;)
• Snapdragon S4 Plus APQ8060A based DragonBoard arrived on my desk. Waits in queue…
• Got own kernel working on Chromebook. It is now available in PPA.
• Went to Silly Venture demoscene party. It was Atari event. Awesome one!

What will 2013 bring? There will be some changes, new projects, devices… But I will write about them at proper time.

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2012 timeline was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

During last few days I played with CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly builds on my Nexus S phone. Then went back to CM 10 as it is more stable. But this also reminded me that I have 2 years old device…

So I did another round of checking what are options. As it will be for next 2 years I want 2GB of RAM, 720p screen and LTE support. And there is very small amount of those :(

1. HTC Butterfly. MicrosD slot, 1080p screen, Japan only so far.

2. LG Nexus 4. Latest Android for few releases granted. But also lack of microSD slot and only 16GB of storage.

3. LG Optimus G. Base of Nexus 4. Not available outside of few operators (mostly US).

4. Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE (GT-9305). MicroSD slot, MHL video output.

5. Samsung Galaxy Note II. MicroSD slot, MHL video output.

Now it is time to complain :)

LG Nexus 4 is available only in some stores (or phone operators) for 450+ € — no Google Play Store like it was with earlier models (I do not call current state as selling). Also no LTE on European frequencies. No 32GB storage model.

Samsung GT-9305 sounds interesting. But… It is Exynos 4412 based. And I read The Saga of a CyanogenMod Exynos4 device maintainer by Andrew Dodd which gives clear message “avoid Exynos4 if you can”. If even Samsung update can break your device then something is going wrong. And so far SGS3 LTE lacks CyanogenMod support which is one of main blockers for me as it shows that there are no custom “ROMs” for it (I do not count images remixed from stock images).

Galaxy Note II is huge and would take some time to get used to it. Has CM support already. But again — Exynos4 ;(

So it looks like I need to wait another few months and check will there be something worth buying. In meantime I will stay with last CM10 release running on my Nexus S.

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I want to update my mobile phone was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Few people already asked me how open Samsung Chromebook is. So let’s take a look.

Kernel is open. Git tree is available and so are instructions on how to build it. You can check post by Olof Johansonn or take a look at Chromium ebuild. Remember that images need to have DeviceTree attached.

There are few firmware blobs but most of them are available in “linux-firmware” package in Ubuntu. The only exception is “mrvl/sd8797_uapsta.bin” file which is present in Marvell’s firmware repo.

You also need to sign kernels. But tools and developer keys are available as well. We have preliminary version of package for it.

X11 drivers are available as well. Both video (armsoc) and input (cmt) are open. You can run X11 just fine without them even. I provide armsoc one but decided to skip “cmt” one cause “evdev” one works ok.

So where are those ugly binary blobs? In standard places…

One is OpenGL ES support. There is “libmali.0.0.35″ which works as libEGL and libGLESv2 but no source for it (kernel part is open). Also license is missing. You can copy it from Chromium (I made package for Ubuntu) but results vary. I would love to get it working cause it can make Chromium browser faster.

Other is video acceleration. Under Chromium there is set of OpenMAX libraries. Under Ubuntu I see only crashes.

Flash plugin is yet another story. Rune K. Svendsen got it partially working but it is still not like it could be.

There is also Google Hangouts plugin under Chromium. So far no information will it work under non-Chromium distribution.

If you have anything to add here then write a comment. And consider joining “Samsung Chromebook (ARM) hackers” team to help us in getting our distros working better and better.

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How open Chromebook is? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some time passed since my earlier post. I had to think about few things and made some decisions.

I will write an installation instruction for Samsung Chromebook users — about installing other operating system on internal storage. Targeted at advanced users but with more or less exact steps. If you do not know how to enable “developer” mode in Chromium then sorry…

And in meantime I worked on packaging. Few minutes ago I pushed kernel to my PPA and once it get built I will offer it in Chromebook hackers PPA so users will be able to use it instead of Chromium OS one. It will need signing and putting on proper partition but, like I wrote above, my packages are not only for novice level users.

Thanks to work started by Antonio Terceiro we have preliminary version of vboot utilities package. I cleaned it a bit and got to state when “cgpt” and “vbutil_kernel” are provided so playing with partitioning will not need files from Chromium OS. Will upload it into PPA as well.

Left speaker in my Chromebook died totally so I decided to spend some time on getting UCM profiles available in “quantal” and “precise” releases of Ubuntu as well. SRU process in progress…

Also got 32GB microSD card so one step closer to having other distributions running. Thinking of Debian here of course. But it is in deep freeze now so harder to get new packages there.

How can you help? Test, file bugs, attach fixes to bugs. And can also replace speaker in my Chromebook so I will not have to use headphones ;D

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I did not finished with Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Lot of people asked me how I managed to fry left speaker in my Chromebook. There are also few which said that it is Ubuntu fault.

So today I used recovery to wipe out my installation of Ubuntu from device and decided to check under Chromium OS. And yes, I got nice smell of burnt plastic etc coming from left speaker area.

Why? Because it is kernel bug. Not Ubuntu, ALSA or user. Ok, it is a bit of user’s fault cause you should not have to play with ALSA mixer. But you can — all binaries are part of Chromium OS stable.

So let me give you needed steps:

1. Boot Samsung Chromebook (ARM one) to Chromium OS
2. Login or use guest session
3. Run terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t)
4. Run “alsamixer -c0″
5. Set “Lineout” to highest value
6. Unmute everything what starts with “Left” or “Right” (depends which speaker you do not like)
7. Touch speakers (but better not for long)
8. Hold “Power” button to shut down before it will burn though your desk.

In normal situation I would assume that sound driver will take care of combinations which may break your hardware. But looks like Chromebook developers did had such idea.

Is this howto useful? I think it is. Cause if you have device broken in some way and you want to get it replaced you can just run it and hope for replacement instead of repair.

And when next time someone will write me “go and fix ubuntu rather than putting blame on samsung. Its Ubuntu which is the cause” like I got in recent comment I will just ban such person from commenting.

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How to fry speakers in your Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I bought many Samsung products. There were monitors, cellphones, storage and others. But I am starting to feel that it is time to change vendor…

All because Chromebook…

Device pushed to market in a big rush with kernel allowing users to burn devices. I really do not like smell of burnt speakers and plastics. Like Dylan Reid commented my Google+ post:

I’m guessing that a path was set up from MIC1 (wired to DMIC in) to the left speaker output. Playing the digital mic input as analog at full volume seems like something that might cause speaker failure, and wouldn’t necessarily be audible while it is happening.

My device runs Ubuntu 13.04, has UCM profiles installed to get sound working on what left from speakers but if application touch ALSA in wrong way then I have to open windows to get some air and get smoke out.

I never had such problems with all devices I played with. NEVER

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Dear Samsung: @#$@%@!!!!11!!$#$# you! was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I do a lot of cross compilations. With different software elements. But sometimes I want to kick their authors into ass…

There is a good sign when you see $(CC) in Makefiles as it shows that author of code learnt that “gcc” is not the only compiler. But this is not the only compiler you should know about.

Recently I was adding one component (will save a name) into OpenEmbedded as this is one of dependencies for some bigger project (which I do not want to blog about). Argh… I managed to cross built it but patches are UGLY (will get better).

Using $(CC) to build everything is just broken. Especially when you need to compile a tool which will generate some code to get everything built. There is $(BUILD_CC) for it but you have to use it wisely. If there are common parts then compile them with $(BUILD_CC) if you need to run it and with $(CC) if you not. This way we, cross compilation guys, can just do “./configure;make;make install;package” is it native or cross build. Autotools (die, die, die) are able to handle that — so is your code if you write Makefiles properly.

But do not reuse same object files for target and native binaries — let it be “common.o” and “native/common.o” for example. OK, if you do only native builds then it will take a bit more disk space but we have 2012 not 1995… Storage is cheap.

There is also $(HOST_CC) but that’s for other post…

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There are other compilers than $(CC) was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Somewhere in 2010/11 I decided to clean up mess of naming machines at home and decided to go with character names from “Winnie the Pooh” books (Polish edition). Today I got new developer board and had to spend a moment to get a name for it.

So “klapouchy” (Eyeore) will be new name for DragonBoard. Maybe not best one but most of the names are already taken:

• krzys (Christopher Robin) is my router (because Chris decides who can enter Hundred Acre Wood which is the name of my WiFi network)
• puchatek (Winnie the Pooh) is main desktop
• lumpek (Lumpy) is conference laptop (it was lucek before because it got Ubuntu Lucid as first system)
• gofer (Gopher) is Efika MX Smartbook
• krolik (Rabbit) is Samsung Chromebook
• malenstwo (Roo) is Pandaboard (there were malenstwo-a1 and malenstwo-ea1 when I had two boards)
• prosiaczek (Piglet) was MX53 Quickstart
• kangurzyca (Kanga) is my wife laptop (she chosen the name)
• sowa (Owl) is another router
• tygrysek (Tigger) is my VPS (at beginning it was up/down/up/down all the time)

So most of the names from books are already taken. There are also Disney movies which adds few new ones (like Gopher and Lumpy) and cartoons (which I am not fan of). In worst case one day I will start re-using names or add names from other story.

What I used before? Desktop was “home” or “hrw”, Dell laptop (now “kangurzyca”) was “maluch” (small) due to 12″ size, “lumpek” was “lucek” due to Ubuntu Lucid installed and rest was named by hardware name (which is a default in OpenEmbedded).

How you are naming your machines?

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I am running out of names for computers was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I created a project at Launchpad to have one place to gather hackers playing with ARM based Chromebook support in their distros.

Project is named “Cross distro support for Samsung Chromebook (ARM based)” and is maintained by team named “Samsung Chromebook (ARM) hackers“. If you want to join then you need to have Launchpad account and then join the team.

Why Launchpad instead of (insert any similar place)? Because I know it and it has very good bugtracker which allows to track other bug trackers. And it does not have to have anything related with Ubuntu…

OK, most of bugs now are about Ubuntu but that’s because I added them. But take a look at bug about ALSA UCM support. It affects our project but also affected “alsa-lib” and “alsa-utils” packages in Ubuntu. There is nothing which could stop us from adding links to Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE or other distros bug reports there.

I added PPA there which will get binary packages for “raring” (unless they got merged) and backports for “quantal” and who knows, maybe one day even for “precise”. Due to policy that repository will not be able to build for “armhf” architecture but one of my personal ones can so I will copy packages.

So, who wants to join us? We already have non-Ubuntu people in the team!

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Chromebook hackers: unite! was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

During last days I spent some time in binutils, gcc, gdb, glibc, libffi repositories. All of them have GIT mirrors but most (if not all) are kept in CVS by default.

I used CVS in previous millenium just because I did not know good alternative. But I also know that move from it to other SCM can be painful.

But digging though commits because shortlog view is useless hurts… Exported patches need to be edited to drop all changes to many Changelog files. For libffi it is even better to grab patches from mailing list than from repository…

Life sucks, then you die^Whave to deal with CVS git repos.

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I hate CVS based repositories was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

When I bought Samsung Chromebook friend started “nbench” on it. So I did same on my conference laptop. None of devices won…

Idea of testing cpu power was sitting somewhere at back of my head and finally I decided to just run one simple command available on nearly every GNU/Linux based system: “openssl speed”. Sure, on some systems it will use hardware accelerators, on others (or not) some options enabled to get more speed (like ARM assembly version which is not enabled in Debian/Ubuntu systems). But it is something what anyone can run at home.

Table may be hard to decipher so I also give it as Google Docs. It also has few more devices listed and whole tables (one below is for 8192 size samples).

Devices in table are:

• my Intel Core i7-2600K desktop
• my Intel U7300 (ultra low voltage) conference laptop
• Exynos5 Dual powered Samsung ARM Chromebook
• Exynos4 Dual powered Tizen development platform (got rid of it today)
• i.mx515 powered Efika MX Smartbook
• Beaglebone with AM335x cpu
• Sheevaplug (as only armv5te device which can compare with other entries)

Devices were running different versions of OpenSSL under different systems. It is listed in Google Docs document.

Most interesting columns are U7300 and Exynos 5250 ones — 3 years old laptop which I bought for conferences compared to Chromebook. Looks like for next conferences/events I will rather go with Chromebook not UL30A. This will give me one or two hours of battery life less but it is much lighter device at same time. But have to test it first for few days to check is it comfortable enough for daily use.

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Let’s compare some cpu ;) was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Half year ago I got Tizen development platform device. Played a bit with it and then put in a drawer due to other things to do.

Today I looked again at Tizen. Nothing changed. Git repositories still scream “****@#$!$ *** *** you developers!” due to lack of any commits other than code drop bombs.

So if someone (from Europe) wants this device — be first to comment. Sending with DHL and you pay for posting.

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Does someone wants Tizen development platform device? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Today I added some Chromebook related packages into my PPA. What is there?

• xserver-xorg-video-armsoc == accelerated Xorg video driver.
• chromium-mali-opengles == OpenGL ES support — works as long as you have ROOT-A partition with Chromium OS cause I mount it to get Mali library.
• libasound2 == ALSA packages with UCM profiles for Chromebook. Say “no more” to fried speakers.

No support from me as usual. I provide packages for just released Ubuntu “quantal” and for development version (“raring”).

Kernel will probably be next. There are instructions from Olof Johansson for it. Not hard task but requires some time. Also requires packaging of vboot tools (for signing kernels) and cgpt (for manipulating GPT).

Another part is touchpad snippet for X11:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
EndSection

Any idea how to package it in friendly way? I thought about “meta-chromebook” package for such tweaks but it does not sound nice to me.

Video acceleration would be great. But this part is beyond me so far.

So, if you have Ubuntu running on your Chromebook (nevermind is it on internal storage or side SD or USB stick) as long as it is at least “quantal” go and grab my packages. They will make use of device much more pleasant. Share any tweaks and tips in comments.

UPDATE: There is a new project related to Chromebook support in distributions. More about it in my blog post about it.

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Chromebook support for Ubuntu was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Lot of services followed article on EETimes where it was announced that Samsung will present 8-core ARM cpu. What was skipped on some of them is that this is big.LITTLE design so it is made as 4xCortex-A7 + 4xCortex-A15 setup.

Good to know that there will be silicon from other vendors than ARM Ltd. Current development platform is Versatile Express TC2 (Test Chip 2) which shows that amount of A7 cores does not have to match A15 ones (it has 3xA7 + 2xA15).

But amount of cores is one thing. People usually complain about battery life and guess that such setup will suck power like crazy… when it is especially designed to save power.

Take a look at current “war” at mobile market. 2 years ago single core 1GHz Cortex-A8 cpu wit 512MB ram was high end. Then we got dual core cpu (usually Cortex-A9 based like Exynos4, OMAP4, Tegra2) and 512-1024MB of memory. Battery usually had similar capacity and lived similar time. During 2012 we saw move to quad core processors in mobile devices (Exynos4412, Tegra3) with 1-2GB ram. Space for battery was same or smaller. Next year will bring Cortex-A15 cpu (Exynos5, OMAP5, Tegra4) but this eats power…

So phones will probably get big.LITTLE processors to give users with lot of cpu power when needed and battery life otherwise. Cortex-A5/8/9/15 will not disappear from market — will land in normal and cheap devices.

I have dual core Cortex-A15 netbook now (Chromebook) and it works fast. Who knows, maybe in 2014 I will be able to replace it with something powered by 4xA7 + 4xA15 processor (unless ARMv8 will land at same time). And there is a work on getting ALL of cores running at same time…

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Samsung will have big.LITTLE. So what? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

As you know I am responsible for building cross compilers for Ubuntu. They targeted “armel” and “armhf”. But this will change.

During last few weeks I was slowly updating cross compiler source packages for ‘raring’ (current Ubuntu development version). Most of time was taken by conferences so it had to wait until previous week when I got first two parts (binutils/cross and arm{el,hf,64}-cross-toolchain-base) working. I found some issues in binutils, eglibc, linux, gcc-4.7 but make workarounds for them — will report bugs and work on fixes of course.

But situation is not nice. Armel was dropped from ‘raring’ which made building a bit harder (had to find a way to get “linux-libc-dev” package from “linux-source-3.7.0″). But I am more and more convinced that I should just drop “armel” cross compiler. It will make my life easier but of course patches are welcome.

Multilib support will get dropped as well. “armhf” cross compiler will not build for “armel” cause there will be no eglibc packages.

But there will be a bonus — I work also on “arm64″ cross compiler.

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Ubuntu cross compilers situation for 13.04 ‘raring’ was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

People told me many times that I complain a lot (maybe even too much sometimes). But this is who I am and you have to live with it.

When I get new device I usually blog about it — like I told during recent conferences: “give me a device and I will find something to complain about, but also will usually tell something positive as well”. Sometimes those posts even got presented by other people at management meetings as an example of what is good/wrong in described products.

But so far I never got an email with ask to remove any blog post — there were comments outside of blog sometimes but never request to take my opinion down. I edited two posts — first one was before publication because I sent it for review (it was not requested by company), second time when I got some information about product in public space but device had to be announced week later at big event during one of trade shows.

What do you think? Should I write more about devices or rather not?

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Complaining was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Week ago I got message that someone higher in chain decided that Canonical will not get me this year. Took me few days to get it fully confirmed so I can now write about it.

So for another few months I will stay at Linaro. What will be after that time? Will see — Linaro got new members, there is enterprise group now so many interesting things can happen.

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Staying at Linaro was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some days ago I got Chromebook and have to say that device is amazing. Light, small and fast enough for conference laptop. During Linaro Connect I did some hacking on it with help from Olof Johansson and Andrew Wafaa (he brought Chromebook for me from Cambridge). I also used script from Jay Lee to get all information required to resize STATE partition and fit Ubuntu on internal storage.

Now I am running Ubuntu ‘raring’ on my Chromebook with XFCE as a desktop — all running from internal storage (16GB eMMC from SanDisk). So far I did not remove original Chromium from device as I keep it as a reference system to be able to compare what I got with how it works with system from Google.

So what works? Most of things — suspend/resume, wifi, bluetooth, sound, touchpad, usb ports, sd storage, camera. But why they should not work when I am using same kernel binary as Chromium OS does ;) So far did not yet came to rebuilding kernel — there were more important things to do first.

During Wednesday hacking evening I updated xf86-video-armsoc driver to X11 ABI 13 used by packages in ‘raring’ so I got 2D accelerated environment. Tried to find all sources required to build xf86-input-cmt driver but then got hint from Olof that “evdev” driver is enough — all it needs is small snippet of X11 configuration. And yes — it works but is not precise. Andrew told that he will try to build “cmt” driver for OpenSUSE so we will know how better it is.

What next? I have to create package for “cgpt” (GPT manipulation tool with support for Chromium OS extensions), tools and keys needed to sign kernel and kernel itself. Then some work would be needed for OpenGLES stuff but this can wait. I plan to upload everything needed into Debian and then request syncs to Ubuntu. From yesterday’s discussions I know which mailing lists I should go.

But I do not plan to cover everything. There will be no installation support from me. Users have to do it on their own cause there are several ways of getting other operating systems on Chromebook:

• boot from SD card
• boot from USB storage
• resizing STATE partition to put system on internal eMMC (I did that)
• removing Chromium OS completely to get more space for own system

Then there are also systems when user has developer firmware installed (that’s different that developer mode) or even setup where normal U-Boot is used as bootloader.

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Used Chromebook for few days was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Time to do hard task — write job description for my replacement at Linaro. Or maybe not replacement but for someone who will take some or most of my duties there.

I did so many things at Linaro during last 2.5 years that it is hard to decide what such person should know. I learnt Bazaar (not hard once you know Subversion), improved Git skills and tried few projects which tried to bridge both. Learnt more about Launchpad than wanted — people at #launchpad channel are really helpful (same with #bzr ones).

There was lot of building involved. From fixing packages in Ubuntu and Debian to building with OpenEmbedded. I even did some build automation with use of Launchpad. Then there was Jenkins where we moved most of our builds.

I became MOTU in Ubuntu and got Debian Maintainer status in Debian. Have to clean some things and take “android tools” package more into shape as there are co-maintainers waiting in queue with patches. Also updated my OpenEmbedded skills to current state as last time I was using it there was no layers ;)

But how to summarise it in short job description? You will see soon at Linaro’s jobs page soon.

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It is hard to write job description when you are leaving was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Today is 2.5 year of my work at Linaro. It was very good time. But good things have one thing in common — they end at some moment. For me that moment will be 30th November — after that I will be working at Canonical.

For me it will be like starting new job because they hired me to work at Linaro so I never really worked “at” Canonical — always “for”. Hope that it will be at least as interesting as Linaro work was.

When I think about all those 30 months few things came to my mind. First one is people. Linaro gathered many good engineers (and non-engineers as well) and it has many stars as well.

For example: Nicolas Pitre. I had big respect for him since I started work on embedded Linux. But until sprint in Prague, July 2010 I did not realise that he is blind… We went for some beers, chatted about things we did at previous jobs, spent good time (and I managed to not fail too much as a guide).

Other example: Few days ago Arnd wrote on Google+ about mold problem which forced him to throw some books into trash. Beside cookbooks and Discworld ones he found one written by David Rusling (CTO of Linaro)… It is hard to check Linux history and not meet someone who works at Linaro.

I learnt a lot during those 30 months. Not only about toolchains, cross toolchains and toolchains (yes, ‘toolchains’ are repeated) but also on Debian/Ubuntu packaging, relations between those two projects, how to get own packages into them, how to get fixes there etc. Now I am member of Ubuntu MOTU team (can upload to ‘universe’ part of Ubuntu) and since this week also Debian Maintainer. But at same time also learnt how OpenEmbedded works today and managed two Linaro layers for it.

AArch64 porting was/is a great project. There were some issues because it was internal only for some time when we had some internal patches which we preferred to not show to public. But that feeling when I got “hello world” compiled as one of first people outside of ARM Ltd. will always be something to remember. And now everyone can check how it works ;)

When I was at ELC/E 2011 in Prague there was a talk by Pawe? Moll about running Linux on non-existing hardware. At that time it sounded like science fiction to me but later when I had to use Fast Models to boot AArch64 kernel I realised that it is not s-f.

But technical things are just one side. I enjoyed Linaro Connect meetings, chatting with people from different countries on technical and non-technical matters. It helped to improve my spoken English which I was not using so much before. I even had discussions about English itself with people like Andrew Stubbs — thanks man!

There were also funny moments. I remember when in Budapest David Rusling told me that I got unofficial title “main complainer at Linaro” due to my post about what is wrong with all those cheap developer boards we supported. We were sitting at a table during “Meet & Greet” and there was one guy sitting there. I did not saw his badge and asked him which boards he used so far. He told: Freescale Quickstart. I answered: Ah, that square one with five edges? And then I told what I like and dislike in it. We had interesting discussion and at the end I saw his badge – he was Freescale person at TSC ;)

Or visit in Computer History Museum. Man, I should follow Paul McKinney there — he recognized probably most of the devices there and know what they are for. We had interesting talk about it next evening in a bus.

So, there are few weeks of Linaro work for me. During this week I am be in Copenhagen at Canonical’s Summit where I met my next team to find out what exactly I will be working on. Then we have Linaro Connect co-hosted with Ubuntu Developer Summit. It will be a strange week for me. Will attend ARMv8 Summit sessions due to work I did in last weeks but other sessions? For sure will attend some, both Linaro and Ubuntu ones but this time not as much as on previous summits. If you need me on you session then add me to the list of attendees or contact me.

Week after LC/UDS I will spend in Spain. There is Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Barcelona where I will have a talk about AArch64 support in OpenEmbedded. There will be also similar session by Wookey about ARMv8 in Debian — check LinuxCon Europe schedule for it.

But Barcelona is also OpenEmbedded related for me. There will be General Assembly of OE e.V. and then Yocto Project Developer’s Day where I plan to discuss with OE developers about merging AArch64 support.

Then few days of holidays at warm country, visit Zygmunt and go back home for another 2-3 weeks of Linaro work.

So lot of work to do. Need to take a look at what exactly I did during those 30 months, which parts of it will need new maintainer, write some notes/documentation for it, check PPAs for things which may need updating etc. So far I did not yet decided will I maintain cross compiler packages in 13.04 and later releases of Ubuntu or not. For sure I will do that to android-tools which are now part of Debian.

But is it end of my Linaro journey? I hope not. Time will show will I stay at Canonical. Today it is hard to tell because there are interesting projects there as well. But I do not want to end my Linaro adventure.

And one more thing. As usual when I end my work at one place I gather recommendations on LinkedIn. If you have few spare minutes and want to write something then it will be appreciated: my LinkedIn profile.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
So long, and thanks for all the fish was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website