Alberto Milone's Homepage

This is just a brief announcement, I hope to have the time to say more when I’m back to Italy (currently I’m in the US).

• EnvyNG and Envy are no more. I had no time to maintain them and I really prefer to work on Jockey (I had already contributed code to it in the past) as it’s our general purpose driver manager.
• The Nvidia installer from Nvidia’s website won’t work anymore because of the new alternatives system that I have implemented in Lucid. I’ll work on this so that it’s fixed before the final release.
• Thanks to the new alternatives system you will be able to have all of the nvidia drivers and the fglrx driver (when the latter will be compatible with Lucid, that is) installed at the same time but use only one at the time. Switching between drivers will only be a matter of launching Jockey and selecting the driver you need. Ideally (in the future, not in Lucid) you won’t even have to do this and Ubuntu will switch to the right the driver on boot.

I hope to be able to blog more about my work soon.

Posted by Alberto Milone | February 12, 2010 5:33 pm
Filed under: Envy, Planet, Ubuntu
Comments (6) |

EnvyNG:
I have updated envyng-core (2.0) and envyng-qt (2.0) in Intrepid. The GTK interface doesn’t work and even if I managed to solve the problems with GTK and threading I couldn’t upload it since we’re in feature freeze.

The new textual interface and the QT4 interface now rely on python-apt and python-xkit. Thanks to the work I did on the drivers I won’t have to keep the compatibility list updated since it will rely on the same system which we are using for Jockey.

By testing EnvyNG you will (indirectly) help Jockey too since you will test X-Kit and some other features I have worked on for Jockey.

NOTE: if you have this problem please have a look at the suggested solution in the same bug report.

NVIDIA and kernel 2.6.27:
Currently only driver 177.68 seems to work with 2.6.27. I have written a patch for driver 173 too, however I’m experiencing a rather nasty problem.
EDIT: the driver works well with a new patch now

URandR:
as you can see on Bryce’s blog I am now contributing to GNOME’s Monitor Resolution Settings panel. There is still some work to do (in C) and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I find it a great program and I’m focusing on it instead of completing the rewrite of URandR. I’m not saying that URandR is dead but it’s development has stalled.

Stay tuned

Posted by Alberto Milone | August 28, 2008 2:16 pm
Filed under: Envy, Planet, Ubuntu
Comments (23) |

If you experienced problems with the NVIDIA driver 173.14.09 you might want to give version 173.14.12 a try.

The driver is available on Hardy in the hardy-proposed repository (you will have to install it through EnvyNG, if you haven’t already done so) and should now work with Xen kernels too (thanks to a little trick which I backported from Intrepid).

The name of the package for Intrepid is nvidia-glx-173.

Release Highlights:
Added support for GeForce 8600 GS.
Fixed a problem with missing rendering in OpenGL Workstation Overlays.
Fixed a problem with running some SDL applications and virtual terminal switching.
Fixed a potential crash in nvidia-settings when saving to the X configuration file.
Improved error recovery paths in the case of corruption of the commands sent to the GPU.

Please test the driver (for Hardy) and report your experience with the driver in this bugreport.

NOTE: the driver has been uploaded today but should be available tomorrow.

Posted by Alberto Milone | August 4, 2008 6:36 pm
Filed under: Envy, Planet, Ubuntu, Uncategorized
Comments (18) |

It took me some time to update the FGLRX and the NVIDIA driver in Ubuntu since I’m working on the drivers for Intrepid and on my new projects for Ubuntu. Furthermore driver 173.14.09 breaks the compatibility with realtime kernels and I didn’t want to upload something which would cause problems to a lot of users. For this reason I have written a patch (thanks to mizvekov from the NvNews forums for the tips) which will fix this problem while keeping the compatibility with non-realtime kernels.

Both the NVIDIA and the FGLRX contain a lot of fixes and I need your help to test the packages so that we can get them into hardy-updates (i.e. the stable repositories) soon. Please report your experience with the driver in this bugreport.

NOTE: the instructions to enable and use -proposed are in the bugreport (see Martin’s link)

Posted by Alberto Milone | July 8, 2008 8:52 am
Filed under: Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Ubuntu
Comments (14) |

Today, I’ve uploaded the latest release of the NVIDIA driver (173.14.05) to the the hardy-proposed repository (you should thank the Ubuntu-SRU and the MOTU-SRU teams for this). This is the bugreport containing the request for a SRU (Stable Release Update). Please test the new driver and post your comments there so that we know whether the driver works well for you too, and if it does, the update will be moved to the stable repository.

NOTE: this update won’t affect Ubuntu’s official linux-restricted-modules but only the linux-restricted-modules-envy so that nothing will break if you use the former.

Instructions:
All you have to do in order to test the new driver is enable the hardy-proposed repositories, refresh your list of packages and:
1) if you have already installed the driver through EnvyNG you should receive an update through Update manager
2) otherwise you will have to install and launch EnvyNG and select the “Manual selection of the driver” (since I haven’t had the time to update EnvyNG’s compatibility list for the automatic detection).

News:
I promised that I would blog about the projects I was assigned at the UDS and here’s the first news: I’ll maintain the NVIDIA driver for Ubuntu Intrepid together with Timo Aaltonen while Mario Limonciello will take care of the ATI (fglrx) driver. We’ll use DKMS for both drivers.

Stay tuned for more news and please help us testing the driver.

P.S. I’m working on the latest ATI driver too

Posted by Alberto Milone | June 11, 2008 9:00 pm
Filed under: Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Ubuntu
Comments (45) |

It’s been a month since my last blog post. EnvyNG was included in Hardy but it had a few problems and I have worked to fix them. I can’t upload such fixes since Hardy is a stable release. This means that all the updates will have to be tested before they are moved to the stable repositories. This is why I need your help. The more users test the fixes the sooner we can get them into stable.

Special Thanks:
All this wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing support of Martin Pitt, who guided me and helped me with the SRU (Stable Release Update). He has spent a lot of time on EnvyNG, gave me a lot of extremely useful suggestions, therefore I can say that you should really thank Martin for this release.

Timo Aaltonen brought bugs #212648, #186382, #118605 to my attention and suggested the solution. In case you don’t know it already, he’s one of the guys who take care of Ubuntu’s restricted modules. Keep up the good work, Timo!
(more…)

Posted by Alberto Milone | May 10, 2008 10:16 am
Filed under: Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Python, Ubuntu
Comments (65) |

I’m working on EnvyNG every day. I’m fixing as many bugs as possible. Here’s a list of what’s changed in EnvyNG and Envy Legacy:

Improvements in EnvyNG-core:
* New connection detection method (based on Network Manager)
* Update compatibility list
* Update translations
* Use unicode (utf-8) for the translators' names
* Use an additional xorg.conf parser in order to set the default colour depth


EnvyNG checks the availability of an Internet Connection either by asking Network Manager (through dbus) or (if you don’t use network manager) by using only Python’s “urllib2″. This solves Bug 211620.

The latest update of EnvyNG-core includes an additional xorg.conf parser which should finally solve the problem with ATI cards which don’t have a “defaultdepth” option set in xorg.conf. This made the Xserver crash (at times?) since the fglrx driver assumed that the default colour depth was 8bit.

Improvements in EnvyNG-qt:
* The links in the about dialog can be selected with the mouse cursor
* Fix complete dialog showed up when restart dialog should have
* About dialog can expand now
* Fix if both EnvyNG-qt and -gtk are installed, -qt should be the one which is launched on KDE

Improvements in EnvyNG-gtk:
* GTK filechooser points to /home by default

Bugfixes in Envy Legacy:
* Fix Bug #210392 in classes
* Catch exception in classes.restorenvfolder()
* Add "n/a" to dkms blacklist so the unofficially dkms is not installed
on Debian Lenny (Lenny is still unsupported)

Should you find other bugs, please report them to me.

Posted by Alberto Milone | April 9, 2008 3:15 pm
Filed under: Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Python, QT, Ubuntu
Comments (73) |

I’ve set up a new PPA repository for Hardy containing EnvyNG 1.1.0. The repository includes a new version of the three packages with a few bugfixes.

Add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list so as to be sure to get always the latest release of EnvyNG :
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/envyng-hardy/ubuntu hardy main

Update your list of packages:
sudo apt-get update

and then, for the textual installer, type:
sudo apt-get install envyng-core

or for the GTK GUI:
sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk

or for the QT4 GUI::
sudo apt-get install envyng-qt

I have followed your suggestions and I’ve fixed a few inconsistencies in the QT4 interface, therefore I need you help again with the translations for just 1 word (”Cancel”). I’ve tried to use what Rosetta suggested as alternative translations from other packages (i.e. firefox 3) therefore some translations will look like they are complete but please check that everything’s ok even in such case.

Thanks again.

P.S. please keep reporting bugs so that I can fix them ASAP.

EDIT: I had posted the wrong repository. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Alberto Milone | April 2, 2008 5:38 pm
Filed under: Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Python, QT, Ubuntu
Comments (35) |

Here is a new release of EnvyNG (which supports only Ubuntu Hardy). EnvyNG 1.1.0 is made up of 3 packages:

• envyng-core (which contains the main program + the textual interface)
• envyng-gtk (which contains the new GTK interface for GNOME, XFCE, etc. users)
• envyng-qt (which contains the new QT4 interface for KDE users)

Brief Explanation
If you install only envyng-core you will have only the textual interface which (currently) has less features than the 2 GUIs.

If you want to install either envyng-gtk or envyng-qt you will have to install envyng-core first.

New Features
The 2 GUIs now enable you to:

1) Install and save the packages with the driver to a folder
2) simply download the packages without installing anything (this will be useful if you want to install such packages on a computer which is not connected to the Internet)

EnvyNG relies upon my PPA repository (the packages are no longer built locally), therefore every time a new driver is released I will only have to update my repository and you won’t have to install a new release of EnvyNG. You will receive the update via update manager. The packages use DKMS (i.e. you won’t have to reinstall the driver for each kernel you have since this is done automatically), do not conflict with Ubuntu’s linux-restricted-modules, do not cause problems during dist-upgrades since they can be overwritten by Ubuntu’s official packages (if they provide a driver which is newer than the ones in my repository or if the kernel is upgraded, say, from 2.6.24 to 2.6.25, ABI bumps won’t do anything).

Translations
There was a problem with Launchpad therefore I wasn’t able to upload all your translations in time (but I promise I will ASAP). Thanks again for your translations.

Instructions
Please read point A of the FAQ before you install EnvyNG (so that the old EnvyNG doesn’t conflict with version 1.1.0)

Testers
Please test the packages and let me know if there are problems.

Credits
As I said in the past, I would have never done all this alone. I would like to thank all the Ubuntu developers who helped me, all the artists who participated in the artwork contest, and the translators. And special thanks to Carlos Perelló Marín who helped me with Rosetta.

Posted by Alberto Milone | April 1, 2008 5:01 pm
Filed under: Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Python, QT, Ubuntu
Comments (50) |

I’m still trying to get over the stress of graduating, dreaming (every night!) of having yet to do exams in order to graduate doesn’t help though. I’m working on my projects at a slower pace, fixing a few bugs here and there before the release of EnvyNG. I have designed a new system for URandR and I hope to write some real code soon.

Today I have fixed a nasty bug in the old EnvyNG which affected automatic hardware detection with the following ATI cards:

['ATI FireGL V7300', 'ATI FireGL V7350', 'ATI FireGL V7350 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V3400 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V7300 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V5200', 'ATI FireGL V3300 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL Z1 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL X3-256 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL X1 Secondary', 'ATI FireMV 2200 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V3200', 'ATI FireGL X3-256', 'ATI FireGL Z1', 'ATI FireGL V5200 Secondary', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V5200', 'ATI FireGL X1', 'ATI FireMV 2200', 'ATI FireGL V3100', 'ATI FireGL V3300', 'ATI FireMV 2200 PCI', 'ATI FireMV 2200 PCI Secondary', 'ATI FireGL 8800', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V5000', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V5000', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V5250', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V7200', 'ATI FireGL V5100', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V3100', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V7100', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V3200', 'ATI FireGL V7200 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL T2 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V7200 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL T2', 'ATI Mobility FireGL T2/T2e', 'ATI Mobility FireGL V5100', 'ATI FireGL V5100 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V7100 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V3100 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL X2-256/X2-256t Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V5000', 'ATI FireGL V3300', 'ATI FireGL V5000 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL V7200', 'ATI FireGL V3200 Secondary', 'ATI FireGL X2-256/X2-256t', 'ATI FireGL V7200', 'ATI FireGL V3400', 'ATI FireGL V7100']

It’s all fixed in EnvyNG’s new release.

As regards the translations for EnvyNG 1.1.0, you’re doing an amazing job. Thank you all. One thing that I’ve noticed though is that a few translators are having problems with the translation of the word “Main”, maybe because it’s a rather generic word which doesn’t make much sense out a context. Here is screenshot which hopefully will make things a bit clearer (”Main” is the label of the 1st tab):

Posted by Alberto Milone | March 29, 2008 2:37 pm
Filed under: Daily routine, Envy, GNU/Linux, Planet, Python, Ubuntu
Comments (3) |