In the past I used several different sources to get VMware images, so here is a list of my sources with a short description on what’s the advantages of each source. http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/ The ThoughtPolice in most cases seems to be the best source if you need a base image for a server based on various operating systems. It provides fairly small images for Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora. http://virtualappliances.net/ Virtual Appliances provides ready to go images for Webservers based on LAMP, Apache Tomcat and many others. It’s the ideal solution if you need a quick preconfigured webserver. The images even seem to be ready for production use with only minor changes. http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

Update (2015): This is no longer true as this blog no longer uses Wordpress and the comments are now powered by Disqus. Since Microsoft and Google now decided to support OpenID. So now even more people have an OpenID without knowing it. So i think it’s a good time to finally install the OpenID Wordpress plugin to give my readers the possibility to leave comments with their OpenID account. I already used OpenID in some django and plone projects but now my blog uses it too :-D . I think this technology really helps to reduce the number of credentials one has to remember.

I don’t currently work a lot on ucplib. First because I have a lot of other work to do at the moment, and second because there is currently no need for me to get it finished. If there is somebody interested or even needs this library I will find some time to finish it, but you are welcome to help me out. :-D

After the last OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland I decided to take a deeper look at FreeBSD. What impressed me most was the jail mecanism that makes it very easy to setup isolated environments on a single machine. I currently mostly use Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS) on my servers, but I always thought FreeBSD is worth a look as well. And from what I can tell so far It definitely was! After experimenting a bit with jails I stumbled upon ezjail a tool that aims to make it easier to create and maintain FreeBSD jails. And it really does a good job. I found a good introduction to ezjail here.

Unfortunately I still was not able to get dfu-util working properly under Mac OS X. But at least I can work around the problem. Here a small resume of the workaround: Boot the Openmoko into U-Boot (AUX+POWER) Plug in the Openmoko via USB Execute the dfu-util command you want. To flash the rootfs execute: dfu-util -a rootfs -R -D rootfs_filename.jffs2 You will get an error like: Cannot set alternate interface: usb_set_altinterface: could not set alternate interface

I’m currently working on a cleaner API for ucplib. I got some pretty good ideas and started merging my work with another library which is doing basically the same. The current code can be found at launchpad.net

Even if I could not yet solve the problem to my full satisfaction. I at least found a workaround to get the dfu-util working inside VMware Fusion. Now I’m able to flash it from inside VMware and from Mac OS X. The workaround consits of using dfu-util form Mac OS X to get the openmoko ready to flash. I posted the Instructions under http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/MacOS_X. But I still hope I will find a real solution for the problem. If somebody has some hints please contact me.

I’m currently using Mac OS X on my MacBook Pro to do most of my day to day work. There are some people out there using Mac OS for Openmoko development. But there are lot more resources for Linux. Furthermore I’m more familiar with development on Linux than I am on Mac OS. So I decided to set up a Debian Unstable in VMware Fusion. I set up my virtual machine with USB2.0 functionality to access the Openmoko, and Host Interface networking to have Internet and SSH access.

Today I finally received my Openmoko it’s nice device. By default it came with Om 2007.2 preinstalled, but it didn’t work for me and I don’t like GTK that much. So I switched to Qtopia as my main Operating system as it provides almost all functions to use it as phone. Om 2008.8 seems promising as it uses Qt as well but is not very stable at the moment, so I use it for test and boot it from the SD card.

Here is a small tutorial on how to get the RestructuredText Wordpress Plugin working at Hostpoint.ch: Preparation At hostpoint.ch each $USER has folder where all it’s content lives. Where $USER is your hostpoint username. This folder is /home/$USER. It’s the same folder you see as / if you connect via FTP. We create a bin directory which hold the necessary scripts to render ReST. If you access via FTP just create a bin directory at the same level as your www and public_html directories live.