Galapix meets Mandelbrot

Just hacked together some mandelbrot set support for Galapix. Its rather slow and rather buggy, but should make a good test case for expanding Galapix to support more then just plain image sources and of course it makes pretty pictures too:



Command to display mandelbrot is: build/galapix.sdl view buildin://mandelbrot

Galapix 0.1.2

Just did two Galapix releases in a row, as the first one contained an annoying little bug I overlooked, so here are a list of all changes from 0.1.0 to 0.1.2:

• added automatic check for libspnav
• added proper configuration variables to build script
• EXIF support
• Zoomify support
• available thumbnails are now loaded directly at startup, instead of dynamically later on
• FileEntry and TileEntry generation has been merged to allow faster loading
• image refresh on F5 has been fixed

Download is availabel at:

• http://code.google.com/p/galapix/downloads/list

Ubuntu 9.10

Just did a Ubuntu 9.10 Beta upgrade, so here a few quick notes:

• memtest86+ gives a few error messages during the upgrade
• the new Grub1.97beta4 is modular (see /boot/grub/*.mod) and much slower then the previous one, in numbers that is: it takes 40sec(!!!) to load grub
  
• my internal speaker stopped working, the sound is now handled by the soundcard, haven't figured out how to turn it back to the speaker, removing pckspkr from the blacklist and loading it manually didn't help
  
• the gnome-volume-control/mixer is gone, replaced by some another tool that doesn't allow much control and doesn't work at all without pulseaudio, gnome-alsamixer is still there as an alternative, but volume buttons on the keyboard no longer work without pulseaudio
  
• the soundcard now makes a very noticable *klack* whenever an app starts using sound, annoying, seems to be fixed after tweaking the mixer settings with gnome-alsamixer
  
• timer-applet now crashes a lot, also had crashes of Pidgin and Rhythmbox, maybe sound related
  
• Gnome keyring now asks on the command line for a passwort instead of with a new window, breaks using svn in emacs, haven't figured out how to fix it, libpam-gnome-keyring might be the guilty package
  
• Rhythmbox is behaving weirdly, sometimes seems to get stuck
• my USB HD now gets its USB port resets a lot, even when not in use, it also no longer properly suspends after inactivity
  

Galapix 0.1.0

Over the last two weeks I did some more work on Galapix, mainly just finishing up some work on the threading I started a long while ago and never fully finished. So Galapix SVN is now quite a bit more usable again. I also did a new Galapix release, which includes all the stuff that has allocated over the last year, namely support for a ton of new image formats, SVG, Krita, Gimp, RAW images along with archive files are now supported. There is now also a Gtk based GUI, but its still rather incomplete.

For those that don't know what Galapix is, its an zoomable image viewer for large collections of images, see this old Galapix 0.0.3 video:



You can find Galapix at:

• http://code.google.com/p/galapix/downloads/list

OpenGL Manpages for Ubuntu

Ubuntu currently doesn't ship OpenGL manpages, which is quite annoying. So here a quick howto on how to install manpages on Ubuntu:

1. apt-get install subversion docbook2x
   Maybe you need more docbook related stuff, haven't checked the exact requirements.
   
2. Download the xml docbook source from the svn repository:
   svn co https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/ogl/trunk/ecosystem/public/sdk/docs/man
   
3. Go to the directory with the XML files and run:
   for i in *.xml; do docbook2x-man -N "$i"; done
   The -N is there to fetch dtd's from the net, which is really slow, but the easiest thing to do, alternative would be to setup a catalog file and pass it in with -C.
   
4. Last step will give you *.3G files, which are the manpages, copy them to /usr/local/share/man/man3/
5. Run sudo mandb to update the mandb cache
6. Run man glCreateShader to see if everything worked out

Note that you can find prepacked man pages for Ubuntu elsewhere on the net and there are also some floating around on an FTP server from SGI, but I found those all to be outdated, lacking newer OpenGL functions.