Two days ago, Conrad Sanderson released another bug-fix version 3.0.3 for the 3.0.0 branch of his excellent Armadillo C++ template library for linear algebra. The new RcppArmadillo release 0.3.0.3 which contains it appeared on CRAN yesterday. Beside Conrad's bugfixes we also added an example script for fastLm and faster linear model fits. The short NEWS entry follows below.

0.3.0.3 2012-05-03
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.0.3
          * fixes for inplace transpose of complex number matrices
          * fixes for complex number version of svd_econ()
          * fixes for potential aliasing issues with submatrix views
    o   New example script fastLm 

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for 0.3.0.3 relative to 0.3.0.2 As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod [1] (Android 2.3.7) for most things, and I have a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 running Android 2.1 that I use for taking photos, some occasional Wifi web browsing, and using some applications. Comparing Android Hardware The hardware for the Xperia X10 is better than that of the Galaxy S in many ways. It has a slightly higher resolution (480*854 vs 480*800), a significantly better camera (8.1MP with a flash vs 5MP without), and a status LED which I find really handy (although some people don t care about it). The only benefit of the Galaxy S hardware is that it has 16G of internal storage (of which about 2G can be used for applications) and 512M of RAM while the Xperia X10 has 1G of internal storage and 384M of RAM. These are significant issues, I have had applications run out of RAM on the Xperia X10 and I have been forced to uninstall applications to make space. Overall I consider the Xperia X10 to be a significantly better piece of hardware as I am willing to trade off some RAM and internal storage to get a better resolution screen and a better camera. The problem is that Sony Ericsson have locked down their phones as much as possible and they don t even give users the option of making a useful backup they inspired my post about 5 principles of backups [2]. The fact that the Galaxy S allows installing CyanogenMod which then gives me the liberty to do whatever I want with my phone is a massive feature. It outweighs the hardware benefits of the Sony Ericsson phones over Samsung phones prior to the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note. For an individual user the ability to control their own hardware is a feature. Such an ability wouldn t be much use if there wasn t a community of software developers, so if you buy an Android phone that isn t supported by CyanogenMod or another free Android distribution then whether it is locked probably won t matter to you. But for any popular Android phone that s sold on the mass market it seems that if it s not locked then it will get a binary distribution of Android in a reasonable amount of time. Comparing with Apple It seems that Apple is the benchmark for non-free computing at the moment. The iPhone is locked down and Apple takes steps to re-lock phones that can be rooted as opposed to the Android vendors who ship phones and then don t bother to update the firmware for any reason. The Apple app market is more expensive and difficult to enter and if an app isn t in the market then you have to pay if you want to install it on a small number of development/test phones. This compares to Android where the Google market is cheaper and easier to enter and anyone can distribute an app outside the market and have people use it. But for an individual this doesn t necessarily cause any problems. I have friends and clients who use iPhones and are very happy with them. In terms of software development it s a real benefit to have a large number of systems running the same software. As Apple seems to have higher margins and larger volume than any other phone vendor as well as shipping only one phone at any time (compared to every other phone vendor which seems to ship at least 3 different products for different use cases) they are in a much better economic position to get the software development right. As far as I can tell the hardware and software of the iPhone is of very high quality. The iPad (which has a similar market position) is also a quality product. The fact that the Apple app market is more difficult to enter (both in terms of Apple liking the application and the cost of entry) also has it s advantages, I get the impression that the general quality of iPhone apps is quite high as opposed to Android where there are a lot of low quality apps and many more fraudulent apps than there should be. The lack of choice in Apple hardware (one phone and one tablet) is a disadvantage for the user. There is no option for a phone with a slide-out keyboard, a large screen (for the elderly and people with fat fingers), or any of the other features that some Android phones have. The lack of a range of sizes for the iPad is also a disadvantage. But it seems that Apple has produced hardware that is good enough for most users so there aren t many complaints about a lack of choice. It seems to me that the biggest disadvantage of the closed Apple ecosystem is for society in general. Anyone who wants to write a mobile app to do something which might be considered controversial would probably think twice about whether to develop for the iPhone/iPad as Apple could remove the app at a whim which would waste all the software development work that was invested in writing the app. Google seem to have much less interest in removing apps from their store and if they do remove an app then with some inconvenience it can be distributed on the web without involving them so the work won t be wasted. How Much Freedom Should a Vendor Provide? The Apple approach of locking everything down is clearly working for them at the moment. The Samsung approach of taking the Google prescribed code and allowing users to replace it is good for the users and works well. The Sony Ericsson approach of taking the Google code, adding some proprietary code, and then locking the phone down is bad for the users and I think it will be bad for Sony Ericsson. People are more likely to tell others about negative experiences and negative reviews are more likely to be noticed than positive reviews. So while many people are reasonably happy with Sony Ericsson products (until they find themselves unable to restore from a backup) it s still not a good situation for Sony Ericsson marketing. It seems that there are benefits to hardware vendors for being really open and for locking their users in properly. But being somewhat open isn t a good choice, particularly for a vendor that ships poor quality proprietary apps such as the Sony Ericsson ones. In terms of application distribution Google isn t as nice as they appear. The Skyhook case revealed that Google will do whatever it takes to prevent apps that compete with Google apps from being installed by default [3]. Google is also trying to make money from DRM sales via Youtube which it denies to rooted phones [4]. Again it seems to me that the best options here are being more open than Google is and being as closed as Apple. Google might gain some useful benefits from applying DRM (even though everyone with technical knowledge knows that it doesn t work) but the Skyhook shenanigans have got to be costing Google more than it s worth. How to make Android devices more Free The F-droid market is an alternative to the Google App market which only has free software [5]. On it s web site there are links to download the source for the applications, including the source and binaries for old versions. In the Google App market if an upgrade breaks your system then you just lose, with F-droid you can revert to the old version. A self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [6] can be used as an alternative to the Google Music store as well as for hosting any other data that you want to store online. The Open Street Map for Android (Osmand) project provides an alternative to the Google Map service [7]. Osmand allows you to download all the vector data for the regions you will ever visit so it can run without Internet access. But it doesn t have the ability to search for businesses and the search for an address functionality is clunky and doesn t accept plain text, which among other things precludes pasting data that s copied from email or SMS. While Osmand provides some important features that Google Maps will probably never provide, it doesn t provide some of the most used features of Google Maps so uninstalling Google Maps isn t a good option at the moment. The K9mail project provides a nice IMAP client for Android [8]. Use K9 with a mail server that you run and you won t need to use Gmail. There are alternatives to all the Google applications. It seems that apart from the lack of commercial data and search ability in Osmand an Android device that is used for many serious purposes wouldn t lack much if it had no Google apps. Google seems to be going too far in controlling Android. Escaping from their control and helping others to do the same seems to be good for society and good for the users who don t need apps which are only available in proprietary form.

• [1] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [3] http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/
• [4] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/05/google-blocks-android-movie-rentals-from-rooted-devices.ars
• [5] http://f-droid.org/
• [6] https://owncloud.com/
• [7] http://osmand.net/
• [8] http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/

Related posts:

1. Dual SIM Phones vs Amaysim vs Contract for Mobile Phones Currently Dick Smith is offering two dual-SIM mobile phones for...
2. My Ideal Mobile Phone Based on my experience testing the IBM Seer software on...
3. Old Mobile Phones as Toys In the past I have had parents ask for advice...

When buying hardware for a Linux system, often we need to hunt for their support status by searching for PCI or USB IDs in the kernel source, or by looking up the printer model on the linuxprinting.org (now freedesktop.org) openprinting database, or similar things. This is something I'm used to, and not at all unexpected anymore. And after having done it a thousand times for several customers as well as for myself, it's become routine. So in that light, I was pleasantly surprised last monday when I delivered and installed a Xerox WorkCentre 3220 at a customer last week to see that they support Linux on the same level as they do Windows and MacOS: the "system requirements" part of the manual contains a section laying out the requirements for a computer running Linux, as does the "troubleshooting" section; and when there are Linux-specific bits to be said, there'll just be a Linux-specific section in the manual to tell you what to do. Also, the CD-ROM that came with the device has a Rock Ridge extension, which means that if you pop it into a Linux system you'll see an installer for CUPS and SANE drivers. The only criticism I have is that it's an installer, and not an LSB package or some such. But hey, for once I didn't have to fight to get a printer to work properly!

Since my yesterday upload sshfs is now comaintained with Dmitry Smirnov and in fact he prepared the latest upstream version which is 2.4.
If anyone else would like to join and help improve the package further then Dmitry created Git repository for that purpose.

Most popular web browsers cause quite a lot of I/O on a user s home directory and their cache s also take up quite some disk space with Google s Chrome/Chromium you can t even configure how much disk space should be used for the cache. This causes unnecessary network traffic and no more makes sense if the home directory itself comes over the network, e.g. via NFS or Samba. And on laptops it spins up the disks and unnecessarily costs battery power and therefore lowers the potential battery life. Such caches also costs scarce disk space on SSDs or flash cards as common in laptops, netbooks and other mobile devices, and often get backed up without any real use. To take some of this burden off our NFS servers at work I started to develop an Xsession.d hook which moves off such caches to the local disk and puts in symbolic links instead into the user s home directory when the user locally logs in. This hook quickly became a standalone Perl script named unburden-home-dir and the Xsession.d hook just a wrapper around it. Due to some unsolved issues I didn t feel it s good enough for Debian Unstable, so I uploaded it just to Debian Experimental back then. Pietro Abate s recent blog posting about unburden-home-dir on Planet Debian gave me the right kick to make another try to solve the remaining issues. And the mental distance gained over the time indeed helped and I could fix the remaining issues. So I added some polish to the package and uploaded it to Debian Unstable. If you used the previous version from experimental, you have to take care of a few things:

• Previously some configuration files sported unburden_home_dir as base name while others used unburden-home-dir as base name as that s also the package name. Now all configuration files use the package name, i.e. unburden-home-dir as base name.
• Conffiles under /etc/ should be renamed by dpkg automatically, but per-user configuration files ($HOME/.unburden_home_dir and $HOME/.unburden_home_dir_list) must be manually renamed to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir and $HOME/.unburden-home-dir.list.
• By adding UNBURDEN_HOME=yes to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir every user can decide himself if he wants the Xsession.d hook to be used when he logs in under X. On managed workstations with many users this eases testing of unburden-home-dir with just a few users a lot.

You can follow the development of unburden-home-dir also on GitHub and on Gitorious as well as on Ohloh. Enjoy!

S more patches today to the grooven vibes of Home Movies.

• 667221 (kdesvn)
• 667200 (hexxagon)
• 667190 (gpsim) - not really a patch, updated existing patch
• 667230 (kredentials)
• 667233 (kvpnc)

Consider helping out :)

As usual if I m trying to solve some issue there is a technology that solves it.
But it s in early stage of development, poorly packaged, stable versions lack most of the features, and basically it s recommended to use git snapshots and to patch all the software that is going to use it. I m talking about usbredir and SPICE.

I think Weblate is really ready to be released as 1.0 release. It runs pretty stable on https://l10n.cihar.com, I got some bug reports from others, but these were quickly fixed and now nobody complains. The issue tracker lists few improvements which I plan after 1.0 which will help in user experience and performance, but I see nothing what would be needed right now. So I'm ready to release (even before deadline I have set to this milestone). Anyway you're welcome to give it some testing and complain if anything is broken. One area where I desperately need feedback are checks, which probably still miss variations for some languages.

Filed under: English Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

I've enjoyed past extended weekend in S chsische Schweiz. I really like this area and we've again seen there wonderful nature and climbed thousands of steps :-). The weather was not that nice for taking photos, but still I can show few of them:

Filed under: English Photography Travelling 0 comments Flattr this!

Last weekend I put up haskellonline.org, which is basically a thin web frontend over ghc, the Haskell compiler. It is limited to one Haskell module, but it makes the experience of studying Haskell much more pleasurable by running the typechecker in the background as you type. Plus, it is web-based - no local installation necessary!

The thing about Haskell is that it has a fabulous type system which can weed out a broad class of bugs at compile time. However, the usual interfaces with the compiler leave a lot to be desired. Vim + ghci in a terminal of course works, but I have already been spoilt by IDEs, and the "Alt-Tab; Up; Enter; wait; Alt-Tab + jump to line manually" dance does not appeal to me at all. Emacs integration might be better, but I do not know emacs well, and it is never a good idea to start learning two things at the same time.

Note: I suspect that many of the problems I encountered were due to the fact that I use MacOSX.

I have looked a few of the existing IDEs, but that did not go well. EclipseFP did not offer any benefits over a text editor at all. I found a blog post saying that implied that it would work better with a newer version of GHC. Cue a few hours of reinstalling GHC and compiling Haskell packages, and I got the system set up, but that made the situation even worse. Eclipse would simply crash on startup every time until I wiped the configuration directory clean. So much for EclipseFP.

I also tried Leksah. At least it did not crash, nevertheless, I found it quite unwieldy, especially for learning purposes. The autocompletion is broken in annoying ways. For example, if you type "f a = a<enter>", Leksah will autocomplete the second "a" into "as". It took me a while to discover an error in my program that was due to this autocorrection mechanism.

Leksah does have a "compile in background" mode, which was admittedly a source of inspiration for haskellonline.org, but the implementation is subpar. It simply invokes the compiler and simply redirects the output to a display pane on the window. As you write code, the text in the pane constantly scrolls, which is very distracting. The implementation is also buggy. Occasionally errors are interleaved with status output:


There is also tryhaskell.org, but it does not work not nearly as well for Haskell as its cousins trypython.org and tryruby.org do for Python and Ruby, respectively. All are limited to evaluating expressions, but in Python/Ruby that actually gets you a long way, while nontrivial Haskell programs are complex static structures that are unwieldy without a persistent text editor.

Despite all the trouble, which, again, probably has to do with my choice of MacOSX, these issues do not detract from the beauty of Haskell as a language. If you are interested, I can heartily recommend learnyouahaskell.com as very good reading material, and Tony Morris's course exercises (in combination with haskellonline.org) for practice.

... is drawing closer again, and today I've booked my flights. I'll be arriving in the early evening on the 1st, and leaving again on the 15th. The flights will be Brussels->London->Miami->Managua, which unfortunately means I'll have to deal with US border control, but hey. Also, in order to avoid having to get up at early-o-clock on the morning of the 1st, I'll be flying from Brussels to London on an afternoon flight on the 30th, which means I'll have an evening to spare in London. While I've been there a few times before, it's not a city that I've ever actually visited; my previous three visits were limited to Heathrow, King's Cross (IIRC; could be another train station) and driving through the city on my way from (and to) Steve's barbecue last summer. If anyone will be there as well that night and would like to meet for beer and/or keysigning, I'd be interested.

As stated in the 2012-04-30 edition of the Debian Project News, this weekend I will be meeting Holger Levsen (who has been there for over a week now) in Managua, Nicaragua, as part of the Debian Tour 2012, a set of talks meant to raise awareness and interest on Debian between the Nicaraguan (+Central American) user groups, university students, companies and government. Not all of the planned activities are present in the Debian Tour webpage. I know I will be giving my talk on Debian in the Free Software projects' universe, this Saturday at Universidad Centro Americana (UCA). Besides this, we will be meeting on Monday with the UCA staff to discuss some DebConf-specific issues. Sunday? Well, I hope^Wfully trust we will have interesting activities as well :)

Acoustiblok is an interesting product for blocking sound, it works by dissipating sound energy through friction within the sound barrier materiel [1]. They sell it in varieties that are designed for use within walls and for use as fences. As it isn t solid it won t reflect sound so it can be used to line the walls to stop sound being reflected back at you. It s design is based on NASA research. The web site claims that a 3mm sheet of Acoustiblok gives a greater noise reduction than 12 inches (30.7cm) of poured concrete. I am a little dubious about that claim as I ve read a report of someone using three layers of Acoustiblok to make a quiet room for recording music (and to be used as a play-room for an Autistic child). I find it difficult to imagine someone needing a meter of concrete to stop any sort of noise that they might encounter in a residential area so the fact that someone needed three layers of Acoustiblok is an indication that it might not be quite as good as they claim (although there is the possibility that Acoustiblok was badly installed). I wonder whether the claims about concrete concern particular frequencies. The technical specifications and product comparisons page [2] shows that Acoustiblok is least effective at 130Hz where it only reduces noise by 12dB and that it s effectiveness increases to 38dB at 5KHz. So perhaps a concrete wall to stop low frequencies and Acoustiblok to stop high frequencies would be the best solution. The Australian distributor for Acoustiblok is based in Brisbane [3]. The same company also sells Thermablok [4] which is the first aerogel based insulation that I ve seen being advertised for commercial sale. I guess that it must be rather expensive as they are mostly advertising it for use as thin strips to cover stud faces (steel studs conduct heat well and can cause a lot of heat loss). A note in their FAQ says that it s available in rolls for insulating entire walls or floors. The FAQ also indicates that they sell samples suitable for science classes. They are also apparently looking for retailers, it would be nice if someone wanted to sell this in Australia.

• [1] http://www.acoustiblok.com/
• [2] http://www.acoustiblok.com/products.php
• [3] http://acoustiblokau.com.au/
• [4] http://www.thermablok.com/

Related posts:

1. Noise Canceling Headphones My patience with the noise of airlines has run out,...
2. Testing Noise Canceling Headphones This evening I tested some Noise Canceling Headphones (as described...
3. I Bought the Bose QC-15 I bought the Bose QC15 noise canceling headphones for my...

Past Saturday April 28 I attended to the FLISOL 2012 Puno hosted at the Casa de la Cultura in downtown Puno. It was a great experience to deliver a talk after a while, the second speech since I enrolled into the UCSP s Computer and Engineering Faculty to get my Computer Science BS degree. Puno is really a nice city with a great landscape for those like me who enjoy the sun, lakes, wonderful mountains and, as it s name says, the Andes plane 3860m above sea level. Pretty high and very cold at night indeed but a lovely place. FLISOL is short for Latin American Free Software Installation Festival that just aged 12 this year. In my talk I wanted to describe the motivations behind the Free Software movement origins. I specially remarked the fact that the movement doesn t look for technical excellence, even though this is something we thrive for, rather than preserving a common set of guidelines for protecting assets we do value such software and freedom. Later I discussed about how Debian have become a key actor in the free software ecosystem. Primarily as a huge software library, second as a building block for specialized distributions (such as Ubuntu) and third, but not the last, as a facilitator for new developments and contributions to the ecosystem, and I mentioned here the Debian GNU/Hurd project. Through such topics I explained what we do, why we do it and why they may want to contribute. There was a good reception from the audience and there were many questions on the subjects I elaborated on. I was impressed to see many Debian users, some of them power users , and even tried to help one to configure his obscure Xorg settings on his laptop (didn t succeed because lack of connectivity, will send him testing CDs eventually). I d like to thank to the organization who made a great job. The team, nearly 30 students from Universidad Nacional del Altiplano plus local activists, started working in February collecting funds and managed to gather more than 330 attendees during the almost 10 hours of the event. Also special thanks for the coffee machine that was available!

I'm happy to finally announce an open-source (GNU GPL), cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Windows, ...) logic analyzer software package myself and Bert Vermeulen have been working on for quite a long time now: sigrok (it groks your signals). History I originally started working on an open-source logic analyzer software named "flosslogic" in 2010, because I grew tired of almost all devices having a proprietary and Windows-only software, often with limited features, limited input/output file formats, limited usability, limited protocol decoder support, and so on. Thus, the goal was to write a portable, GPL'd, software that can talk to many different logic analyzers via modules/plugins, supports many input/output formats, and many different protocol decoders. The advantage being, that every time we add a new driver for another logic analyzer it automatically supports all the input/output formats we already have, you can use all the protocol decoders we already wrote, etc. It also works the other way around: If someone writes a new protocol decoder or file format driver, it can automatically be used with any of the supported logic analyzers out of the box. Turns out Bert Vermeulen had been working on a similar software for a while too (due to exactly the same reasons, crappy Windows software, etc.) so it was only logical that we joined forces and worked on this together. We kept Bert's name for the software package ("sigrok"), set up a SourceForge project, mailing lists, IRC channel, wiki, etc. and started working. Overview, Features You can get the lastest sigrok source code from our main git repository:

  $ git clone git://sigrok.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/sigrok/sigrok

Here's a short overview of sigrok and its features as of today. The software consists of the following components:

• libsigrok, a shared library written in C, which contains the general infrastructure for handling logic analyzer data in a streaming fashion.
  
  It also contains the individual hardware drivers which add support for various logic analyzers. Currently supported hardware includes: Saleae Logic, CWAV USBee SX, Openbench Logic Sniffer (OLS), ZEROPLUS Logic Cube LAP-C, ASIX Sigma/Sigma2, ChronoVu LA8, and others. Many more devices are on our TODO list (and we already own them), it's just a matter of time to reverse engineer the USB protocols and implement a driver for them. Thanks ASIX for being open and helping with the ASIX Sigma driver, and many thanks to ChronoVu for being open as well and providing information about the ChronoVu LA8 protocol! Thanks to H vard Espeland, Martin Stensg rd, and Carl Henrik Lunde (who contributed the ASIX Sigma driver), Sven Peter and "Haxx Enterprises"/bushing (for contributing the ZEROPLUS Logic Cube LAP-C driver, ported from their zerominus tool). Also, thanks to Daniel Ribeiro and Renato Caldas who worked on the Link Instruments MSO-19 driver (still work in progress). Finally, libsigrok also contains the individual input/output file format drivers. Currently supported are: sigrok session (the default format, which contains all metadata), bits, hex, ASCII, binary, gnuplot, the OpenBench Logic Sniffer format, the ChronoVu LA8 format, Value Change Dump (VCD) viewable in gtkwave, and Comma-separated values (CSV).
  
• libsigrokdecode, a shared library written in C, which contains the protocol decoder infrastructure and the protocol decoders themselves, which are written in Python (>= 3.0). The list of currently supported protocol decoders includes:
  

    dcf77                DCF77 time protocol
    lpc                  Low-Pin-Count
    mx25lxx05d           Macronix MX25Lxx05D
    jtag_stm32           Joint Test Action Group / ST STM32
    i2s                  Integrated Interchip Sound
    spi                  Serial Peripheral Interface
    edid                 Extended display identification data
    pan1321              Panasonic PAN1321
    mlx90614             Melexis MLX90614
    jtag                 Joint Test Action Group
    rtc8564              Epson RTC-8564 JE/NB
    transitioncounter    Pin transition counter
    usb                  Universal Serial Bus
    i2cdemux             I2C demultiplexer
    i2c                  Inter-Integrated Circuit
    i2cfilter            I2C filter
    mxc6225xu            MEMSIC MXC6225XU
    uart                 Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter
  

  Many more decoders are on our TODO list, and we especially welcome contributed protocol decoders, of course! We intentionally chose Python as implementation language for the decoders, to make them as easy to write (and understand) as possible, even if that means that performance suffers a bit. Have a look at the SPI decoder for example, to get a feeling for the implementation. Protocol decoders can be stacked on top of each other, e.g. you can run the i2c decoder and pipe its output into the rtc8564 (Epson RTC-8564 JE/NB) decoder for further processing of the RTC-specific, higher-level protocol. We also plan to support more complex stacking and combining of decoders in various ways in the nearer future.
• sigrok-cli, is a command-line frontend, which uses both libsigrok and libsigrokdecode. It can acquire samples from logic analyzers and output them in various formats into files or to stdout, and/or run protocol decoders on the aquired data. Example: Data acquisition with 1MHz samplerate into a file.
  

   $ sigrok-cli -d chronovu-la8:samplerate=1mhz --time 1ms -o test.sr
  

  Example: Protocol decoding (JTAG).
  

   $ sigrok-cli -i test.sr -a jtag:tdi=5:tms=2:tck=3:tdo=7
   [...]
   jtag: "New state: EXIT1-IR"
   jtag: "IR TDI: 11111110, 8 bits"
   jtag: "IR TDO: 11110001, 8 bits"
   jtag: "New state: UPDATE-IR"
   jtag: "New state: RUN-TEST/IDLE"
   [...]
  

• sigrok-qt, a Qt-based GUI for sigrok, using both libsigrok and libsigrokdecode. This is intended to be a cross-platform GUI (runs fine and looks "native" on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X) supporting data acquisition and protocol decoding. NOTE: The Qt GUI is not yet usable! We're working on getting it out of alpha-stage for the next release.
• sigrok-gtk, a GTK+-based GUI for sigrok, using both libsigrok and libsigrokdecode (soon).
  
  This is a cross-platform GUI contributed by Gareth McMullin (thanks!), supporting data aqcuisition (and soon protocol decoding). NOTE: The GTK+ GUI is not yet fully usable (but it's more usable than sigrok-qt)! Consider it alpha-stage software for now.

We're happy to hear about other (maybe special-purpose) frontends you may want to write using libsigrok/libsigrokdecode as helper libs! Firmware Some logic analyzer devices require firmware to be uploaded before they can be used. As always, firmware is a bit of a pain, but here's what we currently do: For non-free firmware we provide instructions how to extract it from the vendor software or from USB dumps, if possible. For distributable firmware we have a git repo where you can get it (thanks ASIX for allowing us to distribute the ASIX Sigma/Sigma2 firmware files!).

  $ git clone git://sigrok.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/sigrok/sigrok-firmwares

Finally, for all Cypress FX2 based logic analyzers we have an open-source (GNU GPL) firmware named fx2lafw, started by myself, but most work (and finishing the firmware) was then done by Joel Holdsworth, thanks! The support list includes Saleae Logic, CWAV USBee SX, CWAV USBee AX, Robomotic Minilogic/BugLogic3, Braintechnology USB-LPS, and many others. Get the code from the fw2lafw git repository:

  $ git clone git://sigrok.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/sigrok/fx2lafw

Example dumps We collect various captured logic analyzer signals / protocol dumps in the sigrok-dumps git repository:

  $ git clone git://sigrok.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/sigrok/sigrok-dumps

They can be useful for testing the sigrok command-line application, the sigrok GUIs, or the protocol decoders. We're happy to include further contributed example data in our repository, please send us .sr files of any interesting data/protocol you may come across (even if sigrok doesn't yet have a protocol decoder for that protocol). See the Example dumps wiki page for details. Packages, distros, installers I'm currently working on updated Debian packages for sigrok (will be apt-get install sigrok to get everything), and we're happy about further packaging efforts for other distros. We have preliminary Windows installer files (using NSIS), but the Windows code needs some more fixes and portability improvements before it's really usable. On Mac OS X you can use fink/Macports to install as usual, fancier .app installer files are being worked on. Future Apart from support for more logic analyzers, input/output formats, and protocol decoders, we have a number of other plans for the next few releases. This includes support for analog data, i.e. support for (USB) oscilloscopes, multimeters, spectrum analyzers, and such stuff. This will also require additional GUI support (which could take a while). Also, we want to improve/fix the Windows support, and test/port sigrok to other architectures we come across. Performance improvements for the protocol decoding as well as more features there are also planned. Contact Feel free to contact us on the sigrok-devel mailing list, or in the IRC channel #sigrok on Freenode. There's also an identi.ca group for sigrok. We're always happy about feedback, bug reports, suggestions for improving sigrok, and patches of course!