The changelog can be found on Gitweb – It’s mostly bugfixes and some random quirks that some messed up drivers need.

Probably the most boring release in ages

James

Whether you like the music track or not, the video footage is spectacular, particularly the picture-in-picture parts. It shows the Shuttle mission right from pre-launch to landing, giving a great overview of how the vehicle operates and what they do.

Goes right through to launch, orbital operations, installing and configuring Kibo (the massive new Japanese built laboratory), footage of spacewalks, and shuttle manoeveurs like the R-bar pitch manoeveur (backflip), and the flyaround of the space station.

For more of Max Q’s videos, visit Max Q Entertainment or register (free) at NASASpaceflight.com and take a look at their video section. Their videos are also on youtube

(for those who want to know what happens at the end of that video… it’s possible to get “stranded” in a space station as there’s no gravity to return you to the “floor”)

The changes in this release:

netcfg v2.1.0 beta 2

• Remove driver specific hacks/quirks, and require them to be opt-in via config option
• Separate automagic connection code from net-profiles
• Fix various bugs (not all flyspray reports have been closed yet, will do tomorrow)
• Add option to run iwconfig with whatever arguments before connecting (all wireless setups)

More details on the netcfg2 git branch on projects.archlinux.org

Documentation for the changes is found on the Network Profiles development wiki page.

The plan from here?

Rather than going for a big change like jumping right to netcfg3 I’ll work on incremental releases.

My aim for this release is to focus on compatibility and getting everything working well as support for many drivers and configurations seems to be sucking now. After I’ve acheived  that to a reasonable standard I’ll move onto 2.2, where I’ll move to a wpa_supplicant and iputils based setup.

Some of these are great if you have five minutes and want to get a quick rundown on whats happening, others have so much content that you could spend hours reading.

Here’s a summary of what I’ve found to be the better websites on the internet, and what they cover. This list is by no means complete.

Planetary Exploration (Rovers on Mars, Landers, Orbiters, Exploration Probes)

• Planetary Society Blog – Daily updates on the big events in exploration, and a weekly run down of all the big missions.
• If you find an interesting mission, take a look at that mission’s individual website. Often they’ll have blogs or news updates, and more recently many have been twittering.

Manned Spaceflight (People in space, spacewalks. Space Shuttle, Space Station)

• SpaceflightNow – Good articles, daily updates. The video section is worth the subscription, even if you just get a month subscription during a shuttle mission.

• NASASpaceflight – Concise thorough articles, can be technical at times but breaks the best news first and with all the details. Good source to follow news on Project Constellation (Ares I/Orion) which will replace the Shuttle. The free video section is also very impressive.

Insider info (news before it breaks, technical details, internal documentation)

• Unmanned Spaceflight
• NASASpaceflight – For inside information, NASASpaceflight is again brilliant. An L2 subscription offers an incredible range of videos and information, from internal presentations to shuttle and crew manuals/checklists.

As a “touch phone” it’s OK. I see it more as a PDA with some useful touch capabilities and believe it should be judged as such because it blows similar priced PDA’s away (at time of purchase). I don’t use the stylus often, though it has taken a few modifications and settings to get to that.

Good

• Reasonably priced, decent price for a phone/pda.
• Good hardware, looks good, durable and well made. Doesn’t creak, feels solid. Still looks new after a few months of use.
• Comes with reasonable set of accessories. Headphones, pouch, screen protector, AC adaptor, USB cable, 1gb MicroSD, paper manual
• A paper manual! I never need it, but i’m impressed that they actually include a somewhat dense paper manual, not just a 5 page quickstart (though that’s also included).
• Touchflo is useful, the contacts page in particular. Can be customised with third party freeware application.
• Good call quality, better than previous phones (Nokia 6280, Sony Ericson T600, Nokia 3315)
• HTC Home plugin is a great today plugin offering weather, launchers, clock and profiles. The other HTC added software works similarly well.
• Sprite Backup is included, which is some great foresight from HTC.

Bad

• Battery is average. I can get 2 days out of it easily, and maybe 3 if I was really conservative. If I use WiFi, the battery just vanishes.
• Touch interface is disappointing and doesnt extend deep enough, though this can be worked around with a couple of addons. PocketCM Contacts and Keyboard (Free) are practically essential. HTC includes a touch keyboard, though it’s fairly clumsy, requiring too many taps to get to simple things like punctuation. The PocketCM one also has some corrective ability, so I can enter “petson”, and it’ll suggest person. It appears that HTC’s newer products have a much more thorough touch interface.

Ugly: Windows Mobile

• Office defaults to docx, and doesnt allow to save new documents in doc. Workaround: Save as .txt before you start and then save to .doc from that. I find that blindingly stupid that it’s capable of saving as .doc, but just doesn’t allow it on new documents. Same goes for Pocket Excel. Fairly sure this can also be worked around by creating a new template using doc/xls.
• Default task manager believes that the ‘x’ button minimises. Right… Best thing to do is spend $5 and get Wisbar Lite, which also comes with a great battery meter.
• Windows Mobile alarms follow the system volume, so unless I set my volume to loud before bed – I don’t wake up the next day. Again, solved using a third party alarm application.
• Windows mobile is buggy. Soft restarts aren’t uncommon, and it has a few rough edges around the place
• Mobile IE is pretty poor. Mostly slow, and doesn’t do a great job of rendering for the small screen (even with fit-to-screen). Third party fixes this again… when Opera release Opera Mobile 9.

Overall, I’d give it a 9/10. It’s a very useful device and does everything I’ve needed it to along with a great feature set for an equally great price.

Phoenix

• The most recent mission to Mars, the Phoenix lander, safely landed on the 26th in a near perfect landing.  Since then Phoenix has been proceeding well with it’s science mission, there’s been some problems, but most of them have been overcome due to the great work of the team.
• To keep track of Phoenix, the Planetary Society Blog gives wonderful sol by sol summaries and brilliant round-ups of all the news in unmanned exploration through the week
• Also, the Phoenix Lander home page for the latest raw photos down from Mars.
• Or if twitter is your thing, Phoenix is twittering

• The Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter took this incredible photo of Phoenix landing while itself travelling at orbital velocity, and Phoenix at hundeds of km/h.

STS-124 – Discovery

• Launched in spectacular Shuttle style last week, taking the laboratory for the Japanese Kibo Module to the International Space Station. The launch was nearly perfect, with no concerning foam losses from the External Tank.
• This mission there’s been three space walks, which have been aiding the installation of Kibo, investigation of a problematic Solar Array Rotary Joint (on which one of the Solar power arrays turns to track the sun) and housekeeping tasks for the station.
• To keep track of and learn about Discovery’s mission, take a look at SpaceflightNow or for all of the unpublished and raw details NASASpaceFlight.com
• Or for video, take a look at ReelNASA
  
  

SpaceX Test Firing

• SpaceX tested five of their Merlin 1C engines on their Big Falcon Test Stand (BFTS) and are on track to add more. They’ll eventually reach 9 Kerosene/Liquid Oxygen powered engines, which will be used on their Falcon 9 launch vehicle.
• For a video and more details see the press release or the YouTube video

This release is just to stabilise netcfg2 a bit more before I really consider netcfg v3
Source Downloads

Packages will be in [testing] in the next 48 hours.

netcfg v2.1.0 beta 2

• Remove driver specific hacks/quirks, and require them to be opt-in via config option (see wireless.subr)
• Separate automagic connection code from net-profiles
• Fix various bug
• Add option to run iwconfig with whatever arguments before connecting (all wireless setups)

More details on the netcfg2 git branch on projects.archlinux.org

In other news my wireless card is sick, it does this intermittently. A quick search on LKML and a few other places found no other cards experiencing this.

From dmesg…

ipw2100: exit - failed to send CARD_DISABLE command
....
ipw2100: ipw0: No response from Symbol - hw not alive
ipw2100: ipw0: Error loading microcode: -5
ipw2100: ipw0: Failed to power on the adapter.
ipw2100: ipw0: Failed to start the firmware.


Oh and the questions:
raca: But could you add suport for wvdial and ppp connections?
ppp support is in netcfg2 already, have a look at the example config. If you’d like more, post a feature request on the Arch Bug Tracker

lloeki: also, I hope you will be keeping the unix philosophy of ‘one good tool for one precise task’ and not create some kitchensink
Definitely keeping the one tool philosophy. That’s one reason why the automagic connection stuff has been separated out.

Patogen: I would like to see that you could execute certain commands for certain profiles
Already there. Have a look at the PRE_UP/POST_UP PRE_DOWN/POST_DOWN options. You can set either a path to a script, or just some commands separated by semicolons.

In netcfg3 I hope to fix all that things about netcfg2 that I think _suck_.
* Move from iwconfig -> wpa_supplicant
* Access wpa_supplicant via dbus rather than crappy autogen configs
* Replace all scanning and ‘detection’ code
* Move from ifconfig/route -> iproute
* Gut existing attempts at ‘automagic’ – they all suck.
* Distro independent
* Route handling
* Not break current profile config syntax (no promises)
* More detailed status output

As for feature additions:
* A better auto connection system, packaged separately
* Possibly a daemon of some sort to monitor connection state and act upon changes
* Closing of existing feature requests on Arch bug tracker

Small goals, but should make a significant difference. The implementation will be cleaner and more flexible.

And it’s cool. You can do useful things with those functions. My ~/.xinitrc starts up different applications depending on what network I connect to. Or you could write a really good detection/automatic script.

That kinda didn’t happen. I don’t think I’ve seen a single third party script. Slightly my fault, I should have advertised it better, though I’m surprised nonetheless.

netcfg2 wasn’t mean to be the automatic network magic tool either. I probably didn’t do myself any favours including the auto-wireless and EXCLUSIVE= hacks though.

I’ll release another netcfg 2.0.x bugfix, and netcfg 2.1. After that the work will be on netcfg3 which will remedy netcfg 2.0′s flaws and bring it up to date with current standards. More on that another time…

Instead, there’s:

• The History? according to schivmeister
• Patching from phrakture
• The Arch Way

These should all be required reading…

Arch is what you make of it. It’s yours to adapt to your liking, but don’t expect anyone else to adapt it for you, and don’t expect to get anything by demanding it.