digital home of MacSlow | Die of exhaustion… not of boredom!

Revision 2024

This time I managed to get to Revision 2024 in Saarbrücken, Germany again. Phew… what a behemoth of an event… as usual! Three and a half days of demoscene extravaganza! My personal highlights were ‘Fragments of Self’ by xy (4k executable graphics) and ‘Empires’ by Conspiracy (64 kBytes PC demo). The other submissions in all the different categories were also very impressive, but these aforementioned entries stood out in my view. Unusual and pleasantly surprising where the number of native Linux entries this year. While I was the only one…read more

Talk about kmscon at FOSDEM 2024

This upcoming Sunday, 4th of February 2024, I will be talking about my patches to kmscon at FOSDEM 2024. The slot for the talk is allocated in the graphics dev-room between 15:05 – 15:30. Here is the direct link to it: “Scratching an itch… by patching kmscon” or “How OpenGL can lead to systems-programming”. If you attend FOSDEM 2024 this weekend and are curious about all the shenanigans I did (or plan to do) to kmscon, be sure to stick around the graphics dev-room.

How to compile kmscon (and libtsm) from source

Posted by SiteRunner in Uncategorized

Due to popular demand by an insane amount of people – one person on the entire planet – I provide here a brief step-by-step guide for grabbing, unpacking, compiling and installing kmscon using some of my patches/branches. This is not for the meant for beginners and people new or unfamiliar with the command-line and the typical software-development tool-chain under Linux. While I wish everybody to be able use the software they desire, I cannot write a full-blown and bullet-proof guide for beginners. This is a ton of work to get…read more

Rant about Canon

Situation at hand Printers from Canon and the accompanying (setup) software are pure crap! There is no solution for the use-case of setting up a canon-printer as WLAN-printer under Linux… with no other operating-system at hand. The printer works fine and prints nice high-resolution graphics, photos and text, if connected via USB. But that very much misses the point here! The setup-software which comes with these printers is Windows-only… in such a way that it does not work via wine. I did not spent any time or brain-cycles to figure…read more

Godot Engine at gamescom 2023

Attending gamescom Third time is a charm. This year was my third attempt to attend the gamescom fair in Cologne, Germany. The previous two attempts – around 2018 and 2019 – did not work out, since I did not want to wade through the massive crowds on the weekends. This time I managed – after some hassle – to get myself trade-visitor tickets and attend gamescom during the business days, which have a much reduced people-density. Meeting the Godot team and W4 Games On two afternoons I had the chance…read more

Cut&paste working in kmscon

The necessary chore – libtsm Reading through the sources of libtsm was the only way to learn about it. There is just no documentation. Only wlterm is stated as an example of how to use the API. But the exact details of how to use libtsm‘s calls for selection and text-copy features are not obvious *sigh* I never enjoy these types of tasks! It is one thing, when doing these chores during paid work. But when working on code for fun, during your spare-time, such obstacles are a total motivation…read more

Adding mouse- and selection-support to kmscon

Pile up of itches to scratch The output-rotation is now working as I initially intended, and there is also gyro/accelerometer support in the pipe. But using my version of kmscon daily now, I quickly ran into the issue of missing cut&paste functionality, which one usually gets via gpm, when using the old-school text-console VTs under Linux. “How hard can it be? Can’t be that much work ;)” whizzes by my mind. I have dealt with nastier things in the past without prior knowledge or preparation. Occasionally I am a magnificent…read more

Teaching kmscon output-rotation à la xrandr

Focus is paramount Because of my slightly uncommon monitor-setup (two 24″ LCDs locked in portrait orientation side by side) using the VTs under Linux is very cumbersome. That has got to be a developer quirk. But because of that, I like to work on VTs exclusively from time to time… this helps with focus. I even turn off Xorg and/or wayland-based environments. So what can I use to solve this issue with wrongly orientated text-output? xrandr obviously does not work in such a situation? There is an interesting – sadly…read more

Next on the reading-list

I am done with Graham Hutton’s book “Programming in Haskell” and do not plan to let my mind rest. One of the intrinsic benefits of Haskell, is its natural fitness for parallelism and concurrency. This combined with my interest in fast code and the desire to get what I paid for from my CPU’s cores (“Light up all the transistors, man!” 😀) quickly drew me to grab Simon Marlow’s book on said topic. Enter… This kind of material is probably a bit early for somebody like me, who is still…read more

Effectful Haskell with gloss

By now I am well past writing only pure functional Haskell (besides, solving problems from Project Euler is a bit dry in the long run). Avoiding side-effects does not get you very far when you want to use a programming language for solving problems in the real world. Any kind of output (or reading non-deterministic input) shifts you back on the path of impure (aka effectful) programming. Me being me, the “effects” I enjoy writing the most are from the field of computer graphics. While not yet fluent enough for…read more