With no standard ways of plugging input methods into Linux desktops, trying to develop one used to be difficult. No more — now there is an actual standard to address this small but important part of Linux, especially for East Asian users. Last week, I was in Beijing to chair the Input Method Sub-Working Group meeting for the 13th time over the past three years. The IMSWG is part of the larger Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum (NEAOSS), formed by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments for pushing open source software. Over the past few years, every detail of how input methods should work were discussed and debated among participants from the three countries. All had strong opinions on the architecture of the system, and at times it seemed impossible for them to agree on the specification. We solved that by getting them to write software code instead — being programmers, we found they understood each other better in computer languages than in English. Now, not only do we have an agreed specification, but we are also developing a reference implementation, IMBus, thanks to the hard work of all involved, which includes James Su of SCIM fame, and Hideki Hiura, the designer of XIM and IIIMF. James gave a nice talk about IMBus at last year’s LF Desktop Architects Meeting. I said “nearly” because the overhead of being a semi-government entity means the specification won’t be published until later this year. But all technical issues have been dealt with. With hope, this specification will work its way up to ISO and published as an ISO standard in future. ISO being ISO, this won’t happen anytime soon — I’ll talk more about that later. Update: this post now also up on the Outblaze blog.

Note: tested to work at least on Thinkpad X60, Debian unstable, recent 2.6 kernel.

# apt-get install hibernate
# hibernate-ram

Done. I thought a lot of people knew this already… PS. You might need to set IbmAcpi yes in /etc/hibernate/common.conf. Edit: thanks to Evgeni Golov for the even shorter command.

etch is finally out of the door! Hooray! Congratulations to everyone involved, forget about what the /. crowd is saying, this looks likely to be a very solid release. If you happen to be in Hong Kong, there will be a Debian etch release party this Sunday afternoon. Please do come along, it’ll be fun. I’ve also translated the etch release announcement into Chinese, but it seems a bit more work needs to be done before it will appear on the Debian website. In the meantime following is a copy of the Chinese translation: (more…)

, ! Sadly no Debian birthday party tonight in Hong Kong, since everyone is so busy… actually which DD is still in HK nowadays?

I have been working on non-BMP characters support for Pango for a while: Notice the screenshot shows a screenful of characters with 5-digit Unicode canonical values. Of course, apart from using a non-BMP-capable Pango, a font that actually has some non-BMP glyphs is also needed.

Currently, Nautilus is hardcoded to draw the desktop icon’s captions in white with a black background. This works well for Latin scripts, but for CJK scripts where each character is pretty complex, the captions quickly become a jumble of black and white pixels. Hence the following patch against Nautilus 2.12. It adds a GConf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow, which when set to False prevents the shadows from being drawn. A nice side benefit is that Nautilus then checks the background colour, and draws captions in black if the background is light. Nice. Screenshots later; gotta run now.

--- ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.c.old 2005-11-19 10:58:42.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.c 2005-11-19 11:00:32.000000000 +0800
@@ -404,6 +404,10 @@
      PREFERENCE_STRING,
      NULL, default_font_callback, g_free
     ,
+          NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW,
+          PREFERENCE_BOOLEAN,
+          GINT_TO_POINTER (TRUE)
+         ,
    /* Icon View Default Preferences */
      NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_ICON_VIEW_DEFAULT_SORT_ORDER,
--- ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.h.old 2005-11-19 10:58:47.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.h 2005-11-19 10:59:35.000000000 +0800
@@ -54,6 +54,7 @@
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_SHOW_DESKTOP          "preferences/show_desktop"
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_IS_HOME_DIR                "preferences/desktop_is_home_dir"
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_FONT          "preferences/desktop_font"
+#define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW               "preferences/desktop_label_shadow"
 /* Display  */
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_SHOW_HIDDEN_FILES         "/desktop/gnome/file_views/show_hidden_files"
--- ./libnautilus-private/apps_nautilus_preferences.schemas.in.old  2005-11-19 11:04:30.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/apps_nautilus_preferences.schemas.in  2005-11-19 11:06:17.000000000 +0800
@@ -321,6 +321,20 @@
     <schema>
+      <key>/schemas/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow</key>
+      <applyto>/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow</applyto>
+      <owner>nautilus</owner>
+      <type>bool</type>
+      <default>true</default>
+      <locale name="C">
+         <short>Desktop label shadow</short>
+    <long>
+     If set to true, then Nautilus will draw shadows for the desktop icon's captions.
+         </long>
+      </locale>
+    </schema>
+
+    <schema>
       <key>/schemas/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir</key>
       <applyto>/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir</applyto>
       <owner>nautilus</owner>
--- ./src/file-manager/fm-desktop-icon-view.c.old   2005-11-19 10:53:43.000000000 +0800
+++ ./src/file-manager/fm-desktop-icon-view.c   2005-11-19 10:58:01.000000000 +0800
@@ -532,7 +532,7 @@
    fm_icon_view_filter_by_screen (FM_ICON_VIEW (desktop_icon_view), TRUE);
    icon_container = get_icon_container (desktop_icon_view);
-   nautilus_icon_container_set_use_drop_shadows (icon_container, TRUE);
+   nautilus_icon_container_set_use_drop_shadows (icon_container, eel_preferences_get_boolean (NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW));
    fm_icon_container_set_sort_desktop (FM_ICON_CONTAINER (icon_container), TRUE);
    /* Set up details */</schema>

Rumours about possible consolidation in the Chinese Linux market are spreading fast. Most concentrate on the business side. While there are some truths there, as with most rumours there are nothing substantiative in any of the news articles… other than quotes from a disillusold guy. Also, there are more politics involved than others imagine. One is hated by the government, another not doing well financially, while one appears to be facing their own China-Japan relationship problems…

First of all, thank you DebConf5 organizers! You guys did a fantastic job in providing the opportunity for both DDs and non-DDs alike to meet face-to-face with each other. Debian definitely is alive and kicking! So it is with great disappointment to see articles like this (”No Way For Linux To Replace Proprietary Software”) when I came back to Hong Kong. It’s an op-ed piece in a local newspaper by Charles Peter Mok, and begins by attacking last week’s Evans Data report for lacking objective data, therefore the conclusion reached (OSS adoption is speeding up) is too far-fetched. This is followed by (translation to English mine):

In fact, due to their love of open source systems (sic), open source supporters often are shallow when it comes to analysis and reaching conclusions, and confirming their subjective wants become their priority; of course, open source critics, like the Microsoft Windows camp and Sun Micro’s Unix camp, sometimes do the same thing.

Maybe he takes the /. crowd too seriously? Anyway, he then essentially translates the month-old SG Cowen report as an example of an objective argument… actually the translation is rather dubious. For example, the report only said “Linux seems to be hitting a limit” (via BusinessWeek); he translated that as “Linux’s development has reached the stage where it’s facing piling limitations”. What a nice and objective extrapolation! Moving on, he uses the report to reach the conclusion that (again translations mine):

… whether Linux will still enjoy considerable growth, or the red light has been lit, is at the moment too early to say. Enterprise and personal users who use proprietary software such as Windows are still the majority.

Thanks for stating the obvious, Charles. So where’s the objective argument that supports the title of the article?

I’m still arranging things, but it’s looking very likely that I will be at Debconf5…

Just went back from today’s roundtable discussion on “IPR Issues and Open Source” hosted by the National 863 Project. It was well attended, with major software companies as well as experts from MII, MOST and the academia. In particular I found the talk by Peking University’s Dr. Zhang most enlightening — they have done extensive research on almost all open source licenses (including CDDL), as well as the impact of software patents on open source. Unfortunately I’ve learned today that China has already granted software patents. Even more sadly is the fact that most participants viewed software patents as ‘inevitable’, as a thing that Chinese companies need to deal with as they join the global community. I told them about the various software patent backlashes around the world, especially in Europe; and also asked them to ponder the question of whether software patents, as currently implemented by the US, is a sensible and logical thing for China to move towards. Hopefully this will get them thinking…