The pl111 driver might be the most satisfying driver submission yet. Not because I’m desperate to see it in tree; I don’t actually have that hardware. Not because it’s bringing really exciting new capabilities. But, from Eric’s v5 submission: v2: Nearly complete rewrite by anholt, cutting 2⁄3 of the code thanks to DRM core’s excellent new helpers. and a follow-up review: I must say the driver is really slim and readable with all the new helpers from DRM, good job all who refactored the DRM support for simple framebuffer systems. [Read More]

On Friday, after consulting with the other freedesktop.org admins, I pushed a change to the freedesktop.org wiki, adding a Code of Conduct, based on the widely-used Contributor Covenant. In doing this, we join pretty much every other large open source project on the planet, with the exception of the Linux kernel, a magnificent anti-pattern. From this point on, all projects hosted on freedesktop.org are subject to this CoC. why so broad? [Read More]

Everyone’s favourite Australasian open source conference, linux.conf.au, is unsurprisingly back for 2014. This time, it’s in Perth, where it’s relentlessly hot and sunny all year; I’m told the beaches are nice too. A nice break from Europe and north America in January, then. Or wherever you happen to be from the 6th—11th January. But you can’t make a great conference without great talks, which is where you come in. The Call for Papers is closing this Saturday, the 6th of July. [Read More]

One of the platforms we’ve been working on for a while at Collabora is the Raspberry Pi. Obviously the $25 pricepoint makes it hugely appealing to a lot of people — including free software developers who up until now have managed to avoid the agonyjoy we experience on a daily basis working on embedded and mobile platforms — but there are a couple of aspects which speak specifically to us as a company. [Read More]

So, in my earlier post, I mentioned that I’d been working on a library called xkbcommon. Since it’s got a massively misleading name (and renaming hasn’t been totally ruled out yet …), it’s probably worth an introductory post. tl;dr: It loads XKB keymaps and can manage tricky things like modifier state for you. tell me more! At its core, xkbcommon is nothing to do, as you might think, with X11. [Read More]

hi Yeesh, it really has been a while, hasn’t it. Last time we spoke, I was working on X11, and my blog was being served off a FreeBSD 4.3 machine (obviously named ‘amnesiac’), from the datacentre of an ISP who had long since forgotten which ex-employee’s Pentium II was sitting in that rack. Unfortunately I didn’t back it up, and no longer even have a copy of the RSS feed to import. [Read More]