hesa’s blog

Speaking about free software in Huskvarna (Sweden), but missed Stockholm

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 | Copyleft, Copyright, FOSDEM, Free Software, GNU, Software, conference, event | No Comments

Since we’ve been experiencing the most snow for many many years in Sweden the trains and the tubes don’t seem to be on schedule. And add to that the presentation in Huskvarna (see below) tomorrow it didn’t take much to convince my self and the others (Johan Thelin, Jonas Öberg and Jeremiah Foster) to bail out of the foss-sthlm meeting. Would have been great to see Simon Josefson (he couldn’t come to FOSDEM) and finally buy him the dinner I still owe him.  ….. which reminds me of that ams all of a sudden claims he owes me a dinner. Strange days indeed

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking in Huskvarna about free software. It’s a bit of a tailor made presentation which has been very fun to elaborate on during the last weeks. I’ve made some new friends through this presentation so even before it feels great. Here’s the invitation.

I will speak a bit about the history of free software, GNU, copyright/copyleft, licenses, project management and motivation in the community and bridge to the next speaker (Jeremiah (see above)) by talking a bit about Moblin and Maemo … and yes, Meego.

FOSDEM – here we go

Friday, February 5th, 2010 | FOSDEM, FSCONS, Free Software, GNU, Software, Uncategorized, X11, conference, event | No Comments

… having finished a hectic period I must say that leaving for FOSDEM tomorrow morning feels great. I will team up with Daniel Stenberg, Magnus Hagander and of course some GNUs, I know that some of the people at last year’s GNU Hackers Meeting (held the days before FSCONS) will come over to FOSDEM as well . Going to be great meeting Brian Gough and Jose E. Marchesi while I am not stressed of work overload, GHM planning and FSCONS planning. Brian and Jose were organising the GNU Hackers Meeting with me.    … and as always I’ll team up with the FSFE folks.

As for the presentations I will surely go and see:

• Sylvain Beucler talk about GNU Savannah: 100% free software mass-hosting

a topic I find interesting for many reasons, more on that later

• Daniel Stenberg talk about Rockbox: open source firmware replacement for music players

since I missed Daniel talk about this at FSCONS. As a FSCONS organiser I can’t just sit

• Mirko Lindner, Jon Phillips talk about Copyleft Hardware and the Ben Nanonote

I missed Mirko’s presentation at FSCONS as well …. always on the move at FSCONS

And, of course I hope I will be able to do some business (Sandklef GNU Labs) down there. During some breaks I will prepare some presentations at “my” University next week and also prepare a Free Software presentation for a company later on in February (more on that later).

This year I’ll be traveling with Andreas Nilsson and Jeremiah Foster.  Same procedure as last year…

see you there

… did you see how I managed to mention FSCONS 6 times (including that very last)

libarduino – hacked it a bit

Friday, January 29th, 2010 | Arduino, Free Software, Software | 3 Comments

Found a lib the other day that can be used instead of the Arduino IDE. The library is called libarduino.  Using the lib means I can switch entirely to using C when teaching embedded at Gothenburg University/IT University. Only real problem was that the library really wasn’t prepared for producing a stand alone library or for being installed and will therefor not be that easy to use for the students. So I started hacking the makefiles to solve the problems. And now I have a libarduino that creates a static archive (library) and can be installed for later use by other programs (linking the libarduino library (libarduino.a)).

Cool thing is that the makefile for the new program becomes really small. For a new program, do a Makefile looking something like this:

SRC=test1.c

PROG=test1

include <your path>/libarduino/arduino.mk

… and you can now do (among other things)

make

make install

the last target install the application to your arduino.

Speaking about Free Software at Chalmers

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 | Free Software, Software | No Comments

Today, I have been invited to talk about Free Software at Chalmers. I’ll start off at 13.15…. I assume it is in one of the rooms in “Hörsalsvägen”

Anyhow, the presentation is open I think, so if you care to come over, just do so