new releases of powerd and olpc-kbdshim (alt. power mgmnt)

[pgf]

i've released a new version of both olpc-kbdshim and powerd.

olpc-kbshim supports the XO grab keys, rotates the touchpad action
when the screen rotates, and provides user (in)activity status
for powerd.  with this release olpc-kbdshim is now integrated
with HAL in order to allow tracking USB mice and keyboards.

powerd is a more flexible and configurable replacement for ohmd. 
it's not a "drop-in" replacement, but it's getting close -- there
are a few things ohmd provides which are hard for powerd to do
in exactly the same way.

i'm about to start the review process for getting these both into
fedora -- if you've been thinking of trying them, but haven't, i
could use the feedback.  remember that you'll need to install
powerd on a laptop running an OLPC kernel, otherwise suspend and
resume won't do anything anyway.  olpc-kbdshim should work on the
latest rawhide releases.  (i hope -- feedback please, i haven't
had a chance to try rawhide myself.)

powerd disables ohmd when it installs, and reenables it if it's
uninstalled.  so there's no conflict unless you install ohmd
after powerd, which is unlikely.

both packages will apply small patches to sugars keyhandler.py,
in order to take back control of the rotation and brightness
keys.  (i've suggested these patches become permanent, somehow,
in SL #737.) if you later remove either of my packages, the
keyhandler.py patches remain, but are benign.

i could go on about features, etc, here, but since i'd be quoting
or paraphrasing info that comes with the packages, i'll just
refer directly there.

olpc-kbdshim  is described in its README:
http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/pgf/olpc-kbdshim/tree/README

powerd is described by commentary in the core script itself:
http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/pgf/powerd/tree/powerd

the git trees for the two packages are here:
http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/pgf/olpc-kbdshim/
http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/pgf/powerd

RPMs live here:
http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/rpms

and the initial announcements of powerd is here:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-March/023798.html

olpc-kbdshim wasn't as well announced, but was described here:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-March/023703.html

paul
=-
 paul fox, p...@laptop.org
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ANN: rainbow-0.8.4 release.

[Michael Stone]

Folks,

I've put together a new rainbow release, rainbow-0.8.4,
   
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Rainbow
   http://dev.laptop.org/~mstone/releases/SOURCES/rainbow-0.8.4.tar.bz2

with three tasty new features which I think you might enjoy.

New Features


   1) support for reusing existing containers (uids)

   (this should be particularly useful for sugar since it gives activities
   persistent $HOME dirs where they may save their configuration.)

   rainbow-run option: "-r 10001"

   2) better data-sharing functionality through isolated "topic dirs" 

   (these are just groups and matching setgid group-writable directories
   like "movies" or "banking" which have both owning uids and isolated uids
   as their members -- think of sugar's per-bundle "$SAR/data" dirs)

   rainbow-run option: "-i movies -i banking"
  
   3) experimental support for generating nested Xephyr X servers

   (mainly as a thought experiment)

   rainbow-run option: "-o xephyr"

Quality
---
  
This code is NOT KNOWN TO BE CORRECT [secure]. It just passes my most primitive
smoke tests. Therefore, please try it out and send me bug reports so that it
can one day become production-quality or, if you're feeling adventurous, do
some code-review (patch-level, module-level, whatever...) or test-case
submission (automated or otherwise) yourself so that we can all laugh at my
silly mistakes now instead of crying over them in the future. (Obviously, I'd
be happy to review patches that you send to me as well.)
   
   code: http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/security
   tests: mainly the example scripts on the wiki page

Compatibility
-

This code is definitely not backwards compatible with previous APIs.
The biggest compatibility-breaking changes that I presently know about are:

   a) I no longer generate $HOME/{data,instance,tmp} since there's plugin-like
  functionality which can be used to do so when it's necessary and because:
   
* "data" is subsumed by the "topic dirs" described above.
  
* "instance" was a design mistake which is finally fixed by support for
  writable persistent $HOME dirs and container reuse

* "tmp" was removed because I'm not sure how to implement it correctly
  and because $TMPDIR, /tmp, and /var/tmp are good enough for me at the
  moment.

  At any rate, I /think/ that Sugar activities which now require these dirs
  can be made to work without modification with a little bit of
  plugin-development by me and the Sugar team; my goal at the moment is to
  make sure that rainbow is generally useful and that new activities can be
  written against a less-contrived API.

   b) I'm sure that I've broken rainbow's "options" support for things like
  strace, constant-uid, and serial usage. (This should be easy to fix; I
  just decided that I want to ship the rest of this code "sooner" rather
  than "later".)

Regards from Santorini,

Michael
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