Here’s a good way to irritate a Gentoo developer:

* Read on a mailing list that some driver was just released in a new version
* Wait 20 minutes
* File a bug report about Gentoo not having the newest version of the driver available in portage

Come on – developers read the mailing lists as well. For this particular project I even work closely with upstream on fixing bugs and providing patches, and anybody following the project closely would know this. New versions have always been added to portage within hours, if not minutes, after the release.

Rule of thumb for all those impatient end-users out there: Part of being a Gentoo maintainer of a package in portage is to watch for new releases, and update the existing ebuilds for these. If a new version of a package hasn’t made it into portage within a week of it’s public announcement, please file an enhancement request.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~brix/papers/net4801/net4801.html

I’ve just updated my Soekris net4801 HOWTO for linux-2.6.12, which includes the patch I wrote for determining the Configuration Block address at run-time. The HOWTO can be found at http://dev.gentoo.org/~brix/papers/net4801/net4801.html .

Edit: The HOWTO can now be found at http://www.brixandersen.dk/papers/net4801/net4801.html

Today sys-kernel/suspend2-sources, which has been living in my portage overlay for many months, finally made it’s way into Gentoo portage. The new kernel sources consists of genpatches and Software Suspend 2 and is targetted for laptop users who needs better suspend-to-disk support than the current in-kernel implementation of software suspend.

On a side note, Nigel Cunningham submitted the Software Suspend 2 patches to LKML for inclusion earlier today. Hopefully sys-kernel/suspend2-sources will be short-lived…

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/marksmith/tpaps.html

Finally it seems we have a break through in writing a Linux driver for the accelerometer found in several IBM ThinkPads. Mark A. Smith, an IBM employee, has written a detailed article on how his [unreleased] Linux driver for the APS accelerometer works, and Benjamin Reed shared this information with the people on the hdaps-devel mailing list.

While Mark is not permitted to release his driver source, his article contains detailed information about port ranges and which values to read and write to which port. If the information is accurate and complete, this should be enough to get an open source Linux driver going…