Harish, we had the same problem in ooo-build. By default automake runs tar with the -o option to create archives in V7 format which allows only filenames up to 99 characters. You didn’t use -o in your manual tar invocation, so that one worked fine.

To solve this problem, we added tar-ustar to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.in (you have to use the one-argument form of AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE). With this option automake will create files in ustar format that allows filenames up to 256 characters. Note that this option is only available in automake 1.9 and later.

Here’s my way to help improve GNOME 2.14 performance: Ubuntu packages for the sysprof profiler:

    deb http://www.gnome.org/~martink/2005/sysprof/i386 ./

    deb http://www.gnome.org/~martink/2005/sysprof/amd64 ./

    deb-src http://www.gnome.org/~martink/2005/sysprof/source ./ 

They were built on Ubuntu dapper but probably work on breezy too. Sysprof comes with a kernel module. I’ve included packages for the Ubuntu 2.6.12-9 kernels. If you’ve built your own kernel, install the sysprof-source package and module-assistant, then run:

    sudo module-assistant auto-install sysprof-source

and if all goes well, the module will be built and installed for your running kernel.

I’ll happily hand off maintenance of these packages to a Debian Developer or an Ubuntu MOTU. Just as happily will I accept patches to make this work on Debian.

Saturday was the third Linux-Info-Tag, a small regional Linux gathering with project booths and two lecture tracks, in Dresden. I was there with Julius to man the GNOME booth. Unfortunately the GNOME Event Box was still in Munich, so we didn’t have any big banners with GNOME feet. That, and almost 600 Ubuntu Breezy CDs, made our booth look much like an Ubuntu booth. Oh well.

This has immediate consequences on the questions people ask. Instead of “What is GNOME,” they ask “Is Ubuntu like Linux or SUSE,” or instead of “I’m a happy KDE user, why should I use GNOME,” they ask “What does Ubuntu that SUSE doesn’t do.” I always forget how wide-spread SUSE is among (at least the) less geeky Linux users here in Germany.

OTOH people ask more general Linux questions, like “I’ve got a TV card and use it as a digital VCR with Windows. Is this possible with Linux,” or extremely specialized questions about PDF (I didn’t even tell him about my GPdf/Evince background).

Most visitors came in the breaks between the talks. That means we didn’t have much to do during the talks. So we decided to re-enact the Ubuntu CD cover (photo by Sven Guckes):

Eduardo de Barros Lima has revived Tommi Komulainen’s Maemo port of Evince and posted some beautiful screenshots. And Alp Toker is playing (fighting?) with (among other things) poppler on mono on maemo.

Last week I got the Nokia 770 that I had won at GUADEC in Stuttgart. Yesterday I set up my first blog. That means I can increase both the number of meta posts and of N770 posts at one fell swoop.

My first impression: the screen is gorgeous. 800×480px at 225dpi means really sharp text. I’ve previously read ebooks in Plucker on a Palm V (160×160px) and a Tungsten E (320×320px), and thought the Tungsten was a great improvement. But the N770. Wow!

First thing I installed was scummvm and Monkey Island I (German/DOS version) ;-)

Also started a list of things you shouldn’t do with it:

• running sudo /etc/init.d/af-base-apps stop. Finding a command that sudo executes without a password might be cool, but having to reboot the device afterwards isn’t
• building xrandr and trying it with the N770 X server is not a good idea either. The onscreen keyboard doesn’t follow the rotation and you have to type the command to rotate it back blindly. I did get out of this without rebooting.

OTOH I did pass the desk stand and MMC slot intelligence tests. But I had to use pliers the second time I wanted to remove the MMC card.

Oh, and Hello World!