Linux users of Sony Z1 series

[Stuart Shelton <>]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 

 wrote:
> I am afraid I am not qualified enough for the packager job as I know almost
> nothing about perl.

Hey - no problem!
(Seriously, though - Perl rocks.  Definitely worth spending a little time
looking into.  It may interest you to know that sonyxosd is only my third
attempt at any serious perl coding.  The first were a could of really
simple TCP socket utilities, and the second was a simple webserver)

> I followed instructions given by Nicolas, but also
> found that I need to install X-Osd 2.2. from
> http://www.ignavus.net/software.html
> prior to span's X::Osd module - it lacks osd.h to run.

Yep, you're right: the X::Osd module does depend on the XOSD library.
Sorry for not mentioning this, I'll make it clearer in my docs.

> Now sonyxosd is up and running and looks very nice indeed. Congratulations!
> Although sometimes it just show a black rectangle instead of bars, but the
> dunctionality does not seem to be affected. Looking forward to the new
> version.

Interesting - I know that if you use X and start an SSH session with X
Forwarding, then you get black bars on your X root window (not my fault -
SSH overwrites the Xauthority file, meaning that nothing started prior to
the SSH tunnel can connect to X*).

I also know that if you hit a sonyxosd-handled function key as X is
starting, the blanking bar will (temporarily) overwrite the top-left of
the X root window after 5 seconds.

But I don't know of any other case where you should get black rectangles
or bars - if you'd like to explain what happens (and when) in a bit more
detail, I should be able to fix it for you.

> I just thought that the installation maybe a rough ride for an arevage
> user ;-)

Yeah - this is something I'm planning to fix sooner rather than later.  I
suppose it's something I didn't think about when changing sonyxosd from a
tool that I use to a more widely available utility for other people too.
The problem being that I don't have envery Linux distro under the sun
installed, nor the time to do so!  Even with RPMs, I'm not sure how much
the different RPM-using distros differ in their available packages and
installation locations - although I assume that the LSB should dictate
this...

> Maybe Nicolas would agree to help, if we ask him kindly? ;-)

How far did the (Mandrake?) package go, Nicolas?  I do realise that you're
waiting on me for documentation (sorry!) - but was it all good except for
that?

P.S. New version should be live within 1/2 hour...

Cheers,

        Stuart

* Unless you see "Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data
for X11 forwarding." when you ssh to a remote host, it seems.  So either
I've fixed it on my machine but forgotten or, more likely, ssh has been
fixed :)