Category Archives: Planets

by calvaris

Installing scratchbox under amd64

As Igalia bought a new laptop for me (actually this is done for every worker from the second year on), I installed Debian Amd64 on it as a challenge, because everybody was telling me about all the problems: flash, scratchbox and all the ghosts they could imagine. I thought: ‘this can’t be that difficult’ and somebody has to try at least to say why it is a bad idea. And maybe we could collaborate a bit with that architecture, this exactly what I am doing right now. Why did I choose amd64, already explained, but what about debian? It’s because of purity. I couldn’t give up on installing debian just because it is not that easy as Ubuntu… Let’s face it! And I did it! As far as I remember the biggest problems I faced where nvidia’s driver (I could make it work only with nvidia’s proprietary driver and thank Juan), the wireless driver (I had to install the firmware), fingerreader (you have to install the driver and configure pam) and flash (I just installed flashplayer-mozilla package and it worked at the very first moment). For the kernel I just borrowed berto‘s configuration and changed the things I needed. There are some remaining things that don’t work yet (like hibernation), but I don’t care very much.

One of the most scaring things for me were the scratchbox because everybody was telling me that it couldn’t be installed under amd64 and I could get much problems because of that. Steps:

  1. apt-get install ia32
  2. dpkg -i --force-architecture scratchbox-*.deb

That’s it (uhuuu, I’m afraid of the 64 bits!).

by calvaris

Me and Igalia

Me

This is going to be my first post at Igalia’s planet a I just wanted to talk about me and my company. First of all, my presentation. I am Xabier Rodríguez Calvar but everybody on computer’s world knows me as calvaris. I grew in Marín a village in Galiza. I studied ‘Computer Engineering’ in the ‘Universidade da Coruña’ where I met my girlfriend and some colleagues who founded Igalia, where I am currently working on GNOME Mobile technologies, specially Maemo and fighting with Epiphany and WebKit.

Why did I write my when talking about Igalia? Because it is my company. Actually it is not because I’m still a partner on trial but if everything goes as expected I shall become a partner in a couple of years. This is one of the things I love in this company. Others are good working environment, working with Free Software, specially with GNOME, company facilities and specially the feeling of working for my own company, where I have the right to say whatever I want and that my opinion is so important as all of them, because there is nobody over me. That’s all! Join Igalia!