Debian wiki for Xorg 7.0

I did not see it before but this
page may help Xorg 7.0 transition.

Red eyes removal with The Gimp

There are many tutorials about red eyes removal with The Gimp. Many of them make suppositions on eyes configuration (visible or not visible iris, circular pupil, …) and are not usable on all photos.

I am using this one. It gives nearly perfect results in all cases. It looks like it’s concidered as opsolet by it’s author but I currently prefere it to the new version, which use channel mixer. May be I have to practice a bit more…

Exporting symbols from a DLL

Still playing with Visual Studio C++ 2005…

When I build a JNI DLL I get an import library (.lib). As DLL are dynamically binded to the JVM I do not need this file. Now let’s concider building a DLL from something which used to be a static library (and to be a bit more realistic a Linux static library). In this case the .lib is not created.

By default Visual Studio do not export symbols in DLL and GCC have the oposit behavior. There is no problems with JNI libraries because javah and jni.h handle the definition of exports. So how to define such exports ?

It can be done with __declspec(dllimport) and __declspec(export) keywords. If you are compiling the DLL you must use __declspec(export). If you are linking an application to your DLL you must define the symbol with __declspec(dllimport). As you are using the same header file to define exports and imports you will have to play with #define.

Recent GCC versions also have this feature. It allow to dramatically reduce the size and the load time of libraries. Read this page to know more. There are also examples on how to use __declspec(dllimport) and __declspec(dllexport) in a common header

Here is the MSDN reference concerning DLL import/exports

Visual Studio Express 2005 permanently free

Visual Studio Express 2005 is now permanently free.

A bit more about Xorg 7.0 transition

I have just migrated my Debian/sid at work to Xorg 7.0. Here are my observations:

• Install the discover package if your want to have hardware detection in dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

• /usr/X11R6/bin is linked to /usr/bin by the x11-common package upgrade, so the upgrade will fail if there are unexpected program there. I was using vncrec and I needed to uninstall it. Once you /usr/X11R6/bin empty you can do apt-get install --reinstall x11-common to fix the problem.

• The font path change so the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file need to be manually changed. A simple way to do it is:
  • mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.6.9
  • dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg (answer what you want as we will only keep the font configuration)
  • mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.auto.7.0
  • mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf.6.9 /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf.auto.7.0 /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • Manually replace the “File” section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the one of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.auto.7.0

• The nvidia-glx package 1.0.18756-4 support Xorg 7.0. You will need to rebuild the kernel module:

  • apt-get install nvidia-kernel-source
  • m-a build -t nvidia
  • dpkg -i /usr/src/nvidia-kernel-2.6.16-1-686-smp_1.0.8756-4+2.6.16-7_i386.deb

• The current fglrx-driver package is not installable with Xorg 7.0

Xorg 7.0 in Sid

Yesterday evening I install Xorg 7.0 on my laptop. I fell on these problems:

1. Special keys (Shift, F1-F12, …) no longer working
2. Xterm and gtk application crashing with a BadRequest error
3. fglrx-driver no longer compatible

• [1] can be fixed by doing apt-get install xkb-data
• [2] is a known bug which may be fixed today
• For [3] I need to wait for a new version of fglrx-glx or try to compile a new one. May be the sources are compatibles.

I also needed to replace xfree86-driver-synaptics by xserver-xorg-input-synaptics. It cause ksynaptics to be no longer installable. I need to try to recompile it.

fglrx successfully compiled with 2.6.16

I was wrong. I was trying to compile the fglrx-kernel-src from the ati web site,
not the one from the debian repository. The Makefile are different. I guess the
one from ati is not up to date.

I still get the “seems to contain unconfigured kernel source” warning.