tuxmaniac’s blog

gResistor is a Resistance calculator tool written in Python. I saw this tool in FEL and found out its absence in Debian/Ubuntu. Its a tool with no active development as of now (no bugs, no maintainance required) but very helpful in calculating resistance values fast. A brief description of the tool as described here follows:

To allow for identification, resistors are usually marked with colored bands. Often refereed to as color codes, these markings are indicative of their resistance, tolerance and temperature coefficient. gResistror is a great program that will help you translate a resistor color codes into a readable value. All you have to do is watch the colors on the resistor and then enter them in the program. As you enter you’ll see that the resistor value is changing according to the selected color.

Its one of the fastest packaging I have ever done and uploaded to REVU. If any MOTU is reading this post, it would be nice if the package is reviewed and sponsored.

REVU Link:  http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?package=gresistor

LP Bug report: #251919

Free Software updates

- PIKLab, the  IDE for application development for PIC Micro controllers was failing to build from source on Fedora 9. Fixed it and uploaded into the Fedora repos. Thanks to Chitlesh for sponsoring the upload. Here is the commit message.

- Working on getting Ecos packaged for Fedora. Fedora Electronic Laboratory 10 “DVD” is on its way..
- Still no updates from the Regents of the University of California regarding the license of Magic. Still to get into Debian/Ubuntu. Same story holds good for IRSIM. But, IRSIM has an explicit COPYRIGHT file which clear mentions that it is licensed under GPL, the debian mentors team would want it to be included on all source file headers. May be I misunderstood this thread. If anyone can provide more clarity on this, I would be more than happy because its struggling to get into the repos.

- Committed a patch provided by Marcelo Souza to fix SF Bug #1966993 in gnusim8085. Still loads more to go.

- It is very clear now that Debian/Ubuntu are lagging behind in the tools available for Electronic design, embedded development. May be I can change that. Seems like the target I set for the year regarding the same is on track, just with some of the above mentioned license issues stopping it from going to completion But its Never say Die. Certain things are never in your hands.

Personal updates

- Been living like a nomad for the past few days out of my car. Sleeping at all friend’s places, using my employer’s restrooms to great extent.

- My three year long stay in Bangalore coming to an end. More updates on that soonish.

Off late, all blog rolls seem to be talking on the OpenSSL vulnerability in Debian based systems. Well, I took it a bit lightly given the lazy goose I am. But some of my work for the weekend threatened to come to a grinding halt as most of the servers which I access, disabled my blacklisted ssh key. So had to regenerate the keypair and re upload to all the servers. Man!! I seemed to have access to shit loads of servers. I recommend this article by tonnere which gives a very nice gist of the actual problem and the affected systems.

Also the Debian folks have released a package to check whether your key is vulnerable or not. If you are on any Debian based system, just run “sudo ssh-vulnkey -a” to check for all existing key pairs to find out whether they are blacklisted.
Simple steps to update your ssh keys

1. $ssh-keygen

2. Copy the ~/,ssh/id_rsa.pub to the server you wish to update your ssh key.

3. Safeguard your ~/.ssh/id_rsa private key.

For all those VLSI enthusiasts, Magic is now debianised. For people who are still wondering what “Magic” is all about here it goes..

Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980’s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.

For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main

For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.

http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb 

The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.