Mandriva

This week’s TechMail is Use command-line MySQL for additional flexibility which delves into some quickie commands useful on the MySQL CLI client, such as setting prompts, using mysql output in scripts, etc.

Last week’s TechMail was Securely delete files with shred, a quick introduction to the shred tool in order to securely delete files on a Linux box.

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of its latest distribution, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring. This new release brings features like full support for the Asus Eee, easy synchronization with Windows Mobile 5 and later, Blackberry, and Nokia devices, a new parental control utility, the Elisa multimedia center, Codeina for easy installation of necessary media codecs, PulseAudio by default and much more. Software updates include KDE 3.5.9 (with 4.0.2 available from the official repositories), GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, X.org 7.3, Compiz 0.7, and more.

If you just can’t wait, you can download the One (live / install CD) or Free (traditional installer, 100% free / open source software) editions of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring right here. Direct BitTorrent download links can be found here, as the mirrors are likely to be overloaded for several days. The commercial edition, Powerpack, featuring exclusive commercial applications, is available immediately for direct download, and can be pre-ordered in boxed form (delivery will begin in two weeks), at the Mandriva Store. A large amount of information on the new release is also available at the Mandriva Wiki:

Main 2008 Spring page
2008 Spring Release Tour: a graphical guide to what’s new in 2008 Spring
2008 Spring Release Notes
2008 Spring Errata
2008 Spring Reviewer’s Guide: a useful read if you plan to review 2008 Spring

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Yes, it’s finally done. And for the first time…well…possibly ever? Certainly since I can recall, anyway…it’s on time. In fact, a day early, really, as our initial plan set release for the 10th.

Yep, 2008 Spring is done, we stuck a fork in it and sent it to the mirrors this morning. Early seeding has been up for a couple of days, and the torrents are now open to all. I’m also happy that we got everything out at once: Powerpack, Free, mini, and all versions of One (including extra language versions) are out together. Powerpack subscribers can get it right away, and the box sets should start shipping within a couple of weeks. All in all it’s been a remarkably good launch process so far, but I’m sure something will go wrong soon enough.

The release has some really nice new features, and looks to be pretty solid and stable. We’re really happy with it. The community announcement is up on the Club, the press release is on the main site, and you can download it from the official page or find the torrents directly here. The Wiki, of course, has all the nice info on the release, including the Release Tour, Release Notes, Errata, Reviewer’s Guide and more. The main page, from which all the others are linked, is here.

So go out, grab it, and enjoy it! I’m off to get some rest…

Yes, it’s finally done. And for the first time…well…possibly ever? Certainly since I can recall, anyway…it’s on time. In fact, a day early, really, as our initial plan set release for the 10th.

Yep, 2008 Spring is done, we stuck a fork in it and sent it to the mirrors this morning. Early seeding has been up for a couple of days, and the torrents are now open to all. I’m also happy that we got everything out at once: Powerpack, Free, mini, and all versions of One (including extra language versions) are out together. Powerpack subscribers can get it right away, and the box sets should start shipping within a couple of weeks. All in all it’s been a remarkably good launch process so far, but I’m sure something will go wrong soon enough.

The release has some really nice new features, and looks to be pretty solid and stable. We’re really happy with it. The community announcement is up on the Club, the press release is on the main site, and you can download it from the official page or find the torrents directly here. The Wiki, of course, has all the nice info on the release, including the Release Tour, Release Notes, Errata, Reviewer’s Guide and more. The main page, from which all the others are linked, is here.

So go out, grab it, and enjoy it! I’m off to get some rest…

[pt_BR]

Usar Qt4 para desenvolver software é muito fácil. As facilidades que o toolkit oferece fazem tornam triviais grande parte das tarefas do programador. Tenho criado alguns programas em Qt ultimamente (alguns deles presentes no Mandriva Linux, inclusive), e fico cada vez mais entusiasmado em utilizar Qt tanto quanto possível.

Dentre estes projetos, está o krozat-effect. O screensaver padrão do Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring usa um efeito de reflexo em suas imagens:

As imagens do screensaver foram geradas manualmente, então surgiu a idéia de criar um assistente para gerar este efeito em qualquer imagem:

Esta ferramenta está disponível no Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring. 

Outro programa que ainda estou trabalhando é uma interface gráfica para o Yafray, um software livre para raytracing: 

Esta ferramenta ainda está em desenvolvimento, mas snapshots estão sendo publicados aqui.

Uma grande vantagem do Qt é a alta portabilidade dos projetos. Sem modificação alguma, um mesmo programa pode ser compilado em Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, e outras plataformas suportadas pelo Qt.

Até mesmo um protótipo de player de vídeo usando Phonon (que possibilita o uso de áudio e vídeo independente de plataforma) eu comecei a fazer:

Além desses, tenho outros projetos pequenos (que já foram mencionados em posts anteriores) que fiz por diversão.

Resumindo: uso Qt e recomendo

Mandriva Spring right on time!

We are delivering our Spring Distro on time, i.e., on the very same day we had planned 6 months ago. Thanks to the hard work of the developers in France, Brazil and elsewhere, thanks to the help of all the contributors, without whom none of this could happen, and thanks to Anne’s – how should I put it– gentle, but very firm stewardship. It’s a great distro and we’re proud of it.

Contributions to the Kernel

The Linux foundation recently published information on who contributes to the kernel development. Out of the 30 or so companies which contribute significantly to the kernel, there are only three distribution editors: Red Hat, Novell and Mandriva (and none other). We are happy and proud to do it. And please remember, when you buy Mandriva products or services, you help us contribute to the Linux kernel.

Manbo Labs

We reached the end of our first cycle of Manbo Labs. We set up this joint development effort with our friends from Turbolinux in the Fall of 2007. It was not easy at first since we had different cultures and approaches, but we learned how to work together. The first delivery of Manbo Labs now serves as the core of our Mandriva 2008 Spring distro. Turbolinux will base its next product on the same core. We are happy we did this together, it allowed us to invest more in the core technology. As announced, the core components are all available under a free and open source license

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/start rant

Switching my servers from Annvix to Mandriva is absolutely maddening. The biggest problem is dynamic uid/gid mappings. Do you know how frustrating it is to have apache uid 77 on one machine and uid 92 on another? Or svn is gid 75 on one and gid 76 on another? It’s driving me absolutely bonkers.

Why on earth we switched, years ago, from static uid/gid mapping to dynamic mapping is beyond me. It’s the most utterly retarded thing possible. Consistency between different installs is not a bad thing people! Sure, the original argument was “it keeps the passwd file smaller” but… news flash! It’s *easy* to specify the uid or gid in the spec file and it’s trivial to keep a publicly-accessible list of the map so people don’t grab inappropriate uid or gid numbers. I mean, seriously… I implemented that in Annvix over 4 years ago! It was one of the first things I did.

Of course, mention this and developers/maintainers poo-poo the idea (no, that’s not theoretical… after I did it Annvix I proposed it again and… gasp… it was poo-poo’d… like usual).

Gaaaahhh! If I had a brick wall handy I’d be smashing my head in it at the moment.

/end rant

Someone told me some years ago:

You cannot just put a son in the world. You need to take care of it, to suport it, and help it to grow.

So, because of this, I’m releasing a new N8X0 version of Pychord.

As you know, Pychord is an application to help musicians with song chords. It can be summarized as a Song Book, but it’s not only a song book. Think about having all your musics in a small device with a good screen. Think about fast searches by lyrics. Think on changing music tones on demand! It’s Pychord!

So, if you want to test it, get the install file here.

Pychord HowTo 1 - Pychord file format

First, you need to know the format pychord accepts. It uses a chr file format. Bellow you can see a simple example of a valid chr file.

name:Backet Case
artist:Green Day
D#5 A#5
Do you have the time
C5 G5
To listen to me whine
G#5 D#5 A#5
About nothing and everything all at once
D#5 A#5
I am one of those
C5 G5
Melodramatic fools
G#5 D#5 A#5
Neurotic to the bone no doubt about it

So, we have two headers:

1. name: Name of the music
2. artist: Name of the artist

And below we have the chords in pure text. It’s very simple.

2 - Installation

Take the latest deb file here and install it on your device. After that, go to your “Extra Menu” and open Pychord.

In the pychord first screen we have some informations like:

1. Text you want to search in the database
2. Search context. You can search music by “Music Name”, “Artist” or “Word” (Lyric part)
3. Search button
4. Close window button
5. Information window
6. Playlist window

3 - Start and update

First of all, you need to create your database file. When you have new lyrics, or in the first time that you execute pychord, you have to execute pychord’s update procedures. To do that, just click on Information Window[item 5 for the list above]. There’ll be a window like this:

1. Where pychord will install their database files (Internal Memory, external memory card, Internal memory card)
2. Where pychord will look for chr files on updates (Internal Memory, external memory card, Internal memory card)
3. Show Advanced Options
4. Save settings
5. Update database

Just explaining: [1] and [2] are combo boxes with a few options (I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible). If you want to set a specific local, click on advanced options. ComboBox[1,2] will be replaced by input boxes. And there you can type full paths.

When you are done configuring Pychord, just press Save.

Suppose that your chr files are in your external MMC. On “Song Directory” select “Pychord/ (External Memory Card)“. Then, click on Save, and click on Update.

Probably this operation will take 1 or 2 minutes. Pychord will search by every chr file in “Song Directory” and put this songs in its database.

Your files needs to be encoded in UTF-8!!! This very is important!!! Remember: UTF-8!!!

4 - Using Pychord as an advanced SongBook

One major advantage of using Pychord instead of using conventional songbooks is: Faster searches!

Go to pychord main screen and type anything about the song that you are looking for. Now, select the field to be used. It can be the name of the artist ( Artist ), part of the lyric ( Word ) or part of the music’s name ( Music ). Now, click on Search button.

In the next screen you will see a list of results. If the result list does not fit in the screen size, it can be scrolled down so that more results can be seen. To scroll the screen just press anywhere on the result list, and scroll. If you want to do a click, just click the screen without moving.

4.1 - When viewing a song

After choosing your song, it will be displayed in a screen like this:

1. Song (scrollable list)
2. Options window
3. Scroll speed down
4. Scroll stop
5. Scroll speed up

4,5,6 are scroll control buttons. Keep the button 5 pressed and see the song [1] scrolling. To reduce the scrolling speed, press button 3, and to stop it press buton 4.

To change song’s font size, press hardware keys ZoomIn/ZoomOut.

Pressing Button-2, a new screen will be displayed.

Inside this window, we have tree buttons:

1. T+: increase the music tone
2. T-: decrease music tone
3. Add to playlist: adds (or remove from) the music to playlist =)

5 - Using Playlist

On pychord main screen, click the Playlist button and a new window will be shown. In that window you will find all the songs you have added to your playlist.

To remove a song from your playlist, open this song, and click on information button and after that, click on “Remove from playlist”

You can clear your Playlist by clicking in “Clear Playlist” on your Playlist screen.

6 - Final comments

I’m working on an heuristic to recognize whether a line is lyrics or chords. It’s far away from being perfect, but I’m working on it!

Pychord is not working with OpenSong format yet because it’s not so easy to create the xml file. I thought of an easy way to put songs into pychord, and chr file was the easiest format I found. But I want to support opensong, and it will happen soon.

This is a beta version, the main features are working, but you can find some bugs!

PLEASE: WE NEED YOUR HELP! How?

1. Tell me your ideas
2. Send me suggestions and critics
3. Report bugs

So, I’m finishing this post. You are invited to test pychord. I’m waiting your comments.

[ ]’s

Thanks to Gustavo Boiko, who helped me with this text.

I recently discovered a very nice site hosting a lot of interesting Howtos (mostly for servers configuration) : HowtoForge. You’ll even find a dedicated Mandriva section and a forum. Have a nice browsing…

Today (6th of April) is my birthday, and my GF, being rather artistic, decided to go a different route when it came to the gift certificates she gave me.

This one is for TuxGames (well, this was /really/ from the cat (Junior) and the hamster (Tuxine)):

This one was for Aetolian credits (Aetolia being a MUD):

And the final one was for Wii points in the wii shop channel:

Got plenty of great presents (not going to list them all here, just wanted to note the cool gift certificates), its been a good day.

Jeudi de la semaine dernière, je ne sais pas ce que j'ai chopé (gastro, intox alimentaire), mais j'étais dans un état lamentable. Ça a duré de 1H30 à 4H30, avec une bonne feinte d'évanouissement dans les toilettes vers 4 heures du matin. Me cogner la tête à l'encadrure de la porte m'a au moins fait oublier que j'y étais allé pour me vider (oui, bon, je vous passe les détails). Je suis donc resté le vendredi à me reposer à la maison : arrêt de travail pour la journée. Heureusement je me suis remis assez vite, ce qui me fait plutôt pencher pour l'intox alimentaire (pas près de remettre les pieds dans la crêperie où j'avais mangé ce soir là).

Lundi, je me dis que ça va aller, même si je me sens encore un petit peu faible. Et puis je dois me remettre pour pouvoir me faire vacciner (le fameux rappel de tous les 10 ans, c'était l'année dernière que j'aurais dû le faire). Et bin le vaccin ce sera pour plus tard : j'ai chopé un rhume du diable dès le lundi soir, qui m'a mis K.O. pour la semaine. Ma copine étant pro-homéopathie, j'ai tenté ce coup ci, mais cela n'a pas changé grand chose (à sa décharge, la première fois qu'elle m'avait fait essayer ce type de "médecine", ça avait fonctionné).

C'est tout moi ça... Suffit qu'il se mette à faire un peu beau pour que je chope un truc. J'espère que ce sera fini d'ici la fin du week end. D'ici là, appelez moi "monsieur miasmes".

Some people may want to test the latest Cooker in order to test the future Mandriva 2008.1. So I will give a way to do an upgrade with urpmi from 2007.1/2008.0 to Cooker/pre-2008.1. With some minors changes, this will also allow people to upgrade from 2007.1/2008.0 to 2008.1 when it will be released. So here are the instructions :

1. Remove or disable your previous Mandriva repos : In order to not have some conflicts, you should disable your current Mandriva repos with : urpmi.removemedia -a
2. Remove kernel packages from /etc/urpmi/skip.list : Indeed, in previous Mandriva versions, the kernel packages were not updated automatically, so they were added by default in urpmi skip.list file. However presently this is no longer needed, so it's safe to remove theses entries.
3. Add Cooker mirrors : Now you can add the Cooker mirrors. For this, you can use easyurpmi to do this. Please add Main, Contrib and Non-Free by using synthesis files
4. Possibility #1 : upgrading directly : Now that you have had the Cooker media, you can eventually directly try to upgrade your Mandriva system with the following command : urpmi --no-verify-rpm --auto-select
5. Possibility #2 ( recommended ) : cleanup your system : urpmi may issues doing the upgrade directly, especially if you have the big transaction bug. That's why I advise to remove desktop packages before reinstalling them. On top of that, you will have the default packages selections for the desktop. So for KDE, you will uninstall kdelibs-common package, and then use task-kde metapackage to install KDE : urpme kdelibs-common
   urpmi task-kde
6. Update your kernel : By updating manually your kernel, you will be able to select the right flavor for your computer. Presently there's mostly 3 main flavors ( I'm not counting i586 kernel and tmb ones ) : kernel-laptop, kernel-desktop and kernel-server. From the name you can guess the usage of theses kernels. So for someone having a fixed workstation, you can update the kernel like this ( -devel are installed for dkms support ) : urpmi initscripts nash dash dash-static kernel-desktop-latest kernel-desktop-devel-latest
7. First pass with --auto-select : Now you can try to updates the whole system with urpmi : urpmi --auto-select --no-verify-rpm
8. Do a second pass : As Cooker is a moving target, during the time you are installing your packages, others may be updated. That's why refreshing repositories urpmi media and doing a second pass is advised : urpmi.update -a && urpmi --auto-select --no-verify-rpm
9. Reconfigure graphic cards with drakx11 : Indeed, sometimes the support for a driver may change, or the support could be dropped ( cf Nvidia case ). To avoid this issue, you'd better use drakx11 to reconfigure your graphic card.

Now normally, you're system should be completly updated. You can now reboot. Don't forget to removed old orphans packages and older kernel if everything is fine. To have the list of the old packages, you can use rpm : rpm -qa | grep mdv2008.0 or rpm -qa | grep mdv2007.1

I barely use pidgin (and jabber even less), but today, I was just fed up of having the same connection error. I'm using the 2.2.1 version, shipped with on Mandriva 2008.0. The problem is that I had an SSL certificate error each time I would try to connect to jabber.org. The solution from the french Ubuntu forums I found was overkill: recompile and install pidgin 2.4.0. Fortunately, I found on the Arch Linux forums a much better solution, which might be helpful for people having the same problem :

rm ~/.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers

Enjoy :)

I knew about CBC's show "Canada's Next Great Prime Minister", having watched it last year. This year I was out of town (driving back from Rapid Lake actually) when it aired, so I missed it.

It looks like CBC must have hired some enlightened intern or something, because they seem to have seen the light. On the show's page, they provide:
- a torrent of the show in XVID
- a torrent of the show in QVGA H.264
- both free of DRM
- links to open-source cross-platform torrent software
- links to open-source cross-platform video players (VLC actually!)
- a forum for public feedback on the electronic media delivery experience

Wow. They might actually "get it".

But that was only the half of it. I downloaded both torrents, and the QVGA file played on my Blackberry, so I watched it on the subway ride to school. Then, to ice the cake, a METIS DOCTOR won the show. This is like, the greatest day ever.

Faith in humanity restored. For a few hours anyway.

This year the April fools are original. The best one IMHO is about Project Lafayette which aims to build a major Open Source layer by combining some french opensources companies and then doing an IPO on Red Hat :) Another one was about KDE team voting yes to OOXML approval as an ISO standard after having received a 10 000$ donations from an "unknown" company. Another one, harder to decipher was about OOXML being approved as ISO standards. eWeek reports the news and linked to some blog normally following the vote. However when looking at the Open Malaysia blog, you will noticed the reference to 1st April. However, this fiction may become a reality.

A while ago I purchased a new laptop. I carry it everywhere, and I've had several lead bricks in the past, so I opted for something small and light. The Fujitsu T2010 has been one of the best electronic gadgets I have ever owned. I have not regretted my choice for a second, which is odd for me.

BUT, it has no optical drive. I hate disposable things. I hate unnecessary printing. I hate disposable cutlery and dishes. And I hate CD-Rs. In the age of USB hard drives and USB flash drives, why are CD/DVDs neceassary anyway? (See Macbook Air.)

Neither of my favorite distros runs 100% on it though, so I keep switching between them. But to add insult to injury, neither is embracing non-CD installs.

Mandriva: the easiest way to do a low-bandwidth GNOME install is via live-cd. Yet even though Mandriva has marketed and sold its own ("Flash") USB flash distro, there is currently no way to install the live image from USB. Grrr!

Fedora: the live CD is currently broken for my hardware AND they recently dropped the .img files required to install either over the network. One can do a net install, but only from an .iso.

Hey both of you -- all current and modern distros should offer both:
1. a bootable image to install over the network
2. a live image for USB sticks or which can be converted to a USB stick

End venting. I feel better now.

I work with PDFs every day. PDFs are extremely common in publishing of course (which I do as co-Editor-in-Chief of the Indigenous Law Journal), but they are also popular with lawyers, who have this strange delusion that communications sent as PDFs cannot be altered. Duh. Well, anyway..

What I really need is not available under linux. I need a simple and easy-to-use GUI, so easy that Windows users could figure it out, which can do operations on PDFs that people commonly perform on word processor files, and more.

I need to:
- join PDFs into one
- split PDFs into multiple parts
- compress by resampling or compressing graphics
- embed fonts or removed embedded fonts
- edit PDF metadata

If I had a few weeks, I could probably do this myself with perl-GTK2, but someone more skilled than I could probably do it in an afternoon. It could be done using:
- pdftk as a backend (don't handle font embedding to my knowledge)
- the ghostscript PDF writer itself (most work)
- some perl modules I don't know about
- nautilus extension scripts (least versatile)
- pure gnome libraries in C (if you're insane)
- Python, QT, or other languages and toolkits I don't like and know nothing about

Anyway, if you're interested in creating this tool for me, I have like, uh, $50 to give away? And lifelong fame of course. ;-)

In preparation to my trip to Nepal, I'd like to share with you experiments I've conducted in the previous weeks regarding GPS in n810 (thanks Nokia for selecting me in Maemo developer program, BTW) and geotagging photos.

First, some comments about GPS in n810 :

• it is a good way to learn some things about GPS technology (thanks to Wikipedia) when you want to understand why it is taking so long to get a position fix. And then, you start to speak about sky search (take about 12 minutes to download satellites constellation rough positions for your position, called almanac, valid for several weeks), cold fix (take about 6 minutes to download satellite precise position, called ephemeris, only valid 4 hours) and warm fix (take about 30s, when ephemeris is still valid in the device).
• Of course, there is no way to easy way to guess what kind of search n810 is doing when starting GPS. For the first time you use it in a geographical area, you can expect to wait for about 20 minutes. If you didn't get a GPS fix in the last 4 hours, you can expect a fix between 5 to 10 minutes. If you got a fix in the last 4 hours, you can get a fix in 30s to 1 minute (it is not impossible, I've been able to get such fast hotfix in a moving bus in Paris ;)
  
• You should really install Maemo-Mapper. Preinstalled software (called Maps) is a stripped version of Navicore. Unfortunately, it is barely usable, since its main goal is to see license for full version. Its main feature is using vectoral maps (so you get France maps for about 300MB) and being able to do address search offline. It is quite funny to discover it uses ogg vorbis audio files, despite no "official" support for Ogg Vorbis in IT2008 from Nokia. OTOH, Maemo Mapper, after preloading maps from either OpenStreetmap, Google, Yahoo or Virtual Earth, is way more powerful : you can easily record tracks, way points, import POI (with help of gpsbabel, you get virtually import any GPS data into Maemo Mapper).
  

My first experiment was done in Brussels during FOSDEM in February. I spent an entire day walking and photographing in Brussels, with GPS tracking enabled (with Maemo-Mapper) on my n810. It worked fine with a full charge (about 7h of tracking) but the initial fix was quite slow to get (it was my first real experience with GPS, I learned a lot about it after FOSDEM). You take a photo of n810 displaying GPS time (to record time offset between camera and GPS) and then, you can start shooting and keep Maemo-Mapper in tracking mode. A nice addition to Maemo-Mapper would add a "low consumption" mode (ie no maps nor tracks drawing) but if you disable "auto-center","display track" and "show GPS details", you can get something decent.

Then, back at home, after developing Raw photos (using Ufraw), I geotagged them, using gpscorrelate and gpx track from Maemo-Mapper and pushed photos to Flickr. Et voilà : they are available on Flickr, with geo data. I've noticed a Geotag extension for F-Spot is being developed so I hope to be able to use it for my next batch of photos.

In preparation to my trip to Nepal, I'd like to share with you experiments I've conducted in the previous weeks regarding GPS in n810 (thanks Nokia for selecting me in Maemo developer program, BTW) and geotagging photos.

First, some comments about GPS in n810 :

• it is a good way to learn some things about GPS technology (thanks to Wikipedia) when you want to understand why it is taking so long to get a position fix. And then, you start to speak about sky search (take about 12 minutes to download satellites constellation rough positions for your position, called almanac, valid for several weeks), cold fix (take about 6 minutes to download satellite precise position, called ephemeris, only valid 4 hours) and warm fix (take about 30s, when ephemeris is still valid in the device).
• Of course, there is no way to easy way to guess what kind of search n810 is doing when starting GPS. For the first time you use it in a geographical area, you can expect to wait for about 20 minutes. If you didn't get a GPS fix in the last 4 hours, you can expect a fix between 5 to 10 minutes. If you got a fix in the last 4 hours, you can get a fix in 30s to 1 minute (it is not impossible, I've been able to get such fast hotfix in a moving bus in Paris ;)
  
• You should really install Maemo-Mapper. Preinstalled software (called Maps) is a stripped version of Navicore. Unfortunately, it is barely usable, since its main goal is to see license for full version. Its main feature is using vectoral maps (so you get France maps for about 300MB) and being able to do address search offline. It is quite funny to discover it uses ogg vorbis audio files, despite no "official" support for Ogg Vorbis in IT2008 from Nokia. OTOH, Maemo Mapper, after preloading maps from either OpenStreetmap, Google, Yahoo or Virtual Earth, is way more powerful : you can easily record tracks, way points, import POI (with help of gpsbabel, you get virtually import any GPS data into Maemo Mapper).
  

My first experiment was done in Brussels during FOSDEM in February. I spent an entire day walking and photographing in Brussels, with GPS tracking enabled (with Maemo-Mapper) on my n810. It worked fine with a full charge (about 7h of tracking) but the initial fix was quite slow to get (it was my first real experience with GPS, I learned a lot about it after FOSDEM). You take a photo of n810 displaying GPS time (to record time offset between camera and GPS) and then, you can start shooting and keep Maemo-Mapper in tracking mode. A nice addition to Maemo-Mapper would add a "low consumption" mode (ie no maps nor tracks drawing) but if you disable "auto-center","display track" and "show GPS details", you can get something decent.

Then, back at home, after developing Raw photos (using Ufraw), I geotagged them, using gpscorrelate and gpx track from Maemo-Mapper and pushed photos to Flickr. Et voilà : they are available on Flickr, with geo data. I've noticed a Geotag extension for F-Spot is being developed so I hope to be able to use it for my next batch of photos.