the Design Experience Weblog Archive

Almost everything works out of the box.

So far I have only found two things you need to play with to get it working.

1) Wireless. This laptop uses a Broadcom chipset, which has native drivers, which did not want to work for me. I went back to ndiswrapper and everything seems to be fine. Luckily now the wireless power button actually works in Linix.

2)ACPI does not work for the AC Adaptor or Battery out of the box. You need to load a modified DSDT in initramfs.
Fixed DSDT for Acer Aspire 5004 wmli

Steps to fix it:
copy fixed DSDT.aml to /etc/mkinitramfs
run: mkinitramfs -o initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386
copy initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386 to /boot
edit /boot/grub/menu.lst
change line: initrd to initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386 Note: may want to duplicate a grub entry so you still have the good one.
Reboot

The only thing left was bibernate/suspend. First enable suspend in gnome-power-manager. I clicked System, Preferences, Power Mangement, and enabled suspend on lid close in the various tabs. Next I installed powersaved (apt-get install powersave) which integates with gnome-power-manager. I edited /var/lib/powersave/do_acpi_sleep to save and restore the vbestate with vbetool since s2ram (which does this automatically with powersaved) is not available for kernel 2.6.15. Modified do_acpi_sleep.

Also if you happen to have installed Orace, you need to edit /usr/share/hal/scripts/hal-system-power-suspend and /usr/share/hal/scripts/hal-system-power-hibernate to ignore the redhat branch of the switch (you need to add /etc/redhat-release to trick Oracle into installing).

After I did this, hibernate and suspend to disk worked, but suspen to ram would immediately shutdown, because of a power button event upon resume. I edited /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh to not shutdown when the power button is pressed and now I can close the lid and suspend to ram.

Further reading: Ubuntu Wiki Page on Acer support https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportMachinesLaptopsAcer

An addition day or two of hacking/bug-fixing activities are tetatively planned.

Some folks are putting together ideas to disucss about OpenACS and there is a list of people who are interested in attending

I am planning on talking about automated testing, and the benefits of adding testing to your design and development process, as well as discussing the future directions for OpenACS with anyone who is interested.

A very common requirement in OpenACS, and I assume most web applications, is relating one thing to another. Most often in OpenACS this is a desire to upload an "attachment", a file or image related to a forum post, bug report, etc...

Historically there hasn't been a straightforward, best-practice for accomplishing this goal, leading to duplicated similar code that almost did the job. Today I am putting together all the pieces to solve this once and for all. I finished added the final touches to OpenACS 5.3/CVS HEAD so the code is not officially released yet.

Step 1) Upload a file.

ad_form -html {enctype multipart/form-data} -form {

    item_id:key

    {upload_file:file {label "Upload a file"}}

    {object_id:text(hidden)}

} -on_submit {

    content::item::new \

        -item_id $item_id \

        -name [template::util::file get_property filename $upload_file] \

        -parent_id [ad_conn package_id] \

        -tmp_filename [template::util::file get_property tmp_filename $upload_file] \

        -mime_type [template::util::file get_property mime_type $upload_file]

Step 2) Add a link between the file and the object you want to attach to application_data_link::new_from \
-object_id $item_id \
-to_object_id $object_id

}

That will take an uploaded file and add it to the content repository. It also creates a link from the uploaded file to the object you are attaching to. That's it, one simple form, and two tcl procedure calls. No other package infrastructure is needed, this is all available in the core OpenACS installation.

Uploaded files have a standard URL that you can figure out from the item_id without much work. http://yoursite.com/file/${item_id}
You can add the filename to the tail of the URL to make it prettier http://yoursite.com/file/${item_id}/${filename}

One added feature you might want is handling images intelligently. If you have imagemagick installed you can use the new features in OpenACS 5.3 to handle the image and generate a thumbnail.

if {[string match "image/*" [template::util::file get_property mime_type $upload_file]} {

    image::new \

       -item_id $item_id \

       -name [template::util::file get_property filename $upload_file] \

        -parent_id [ad_conn package_id] \

        -tmp_filename [template::util::file get_property tmp_filename $upload_file] \

        -mime_type [template::util::file get_property mime_type $upload_file]



    image::resize \

        -item_id $item_id \

        -size_name thumbnail

}



Images also have a pre-defined URL.

http://yoursite.com/image/${item_id}

You can view a thumbnail with

http://yoursite.com/image/${item_id}/thumbnail

and each image has a "info" page that shows metadata about the image

http://yoursite.com/image/${item_id}/info

The filename can be appended after a trailing slash on any of the image URL formats to make it prettier the same way as with files.