Evil Home Stereo

Last Monday I got my hands on a Siemens Gigaset SE515 DSL/cable router (the successor of the SE505, officially not yet available but already shipped for free if you order a new DSL account at GMX). The box and the software itself looked pretty good, much better than the D-Link DSL-G664T router I had to configure before.

At some point I switched on the logging feature in debug mode (why is another, rather long story) and suddenly some Linux boot messages stared at me. Very cool. I finished my job (or not, part of that other story) and went home. But before that I looked on the CD, in the manual, everywhere. Nowhere I found a notice where one can get the GPL’d sources from.

At home I decided to write them a mail and (politely) ask for the sources. And today (almost a week later, but hey) I got an answer:

Guten Tag Herr Stretz,

vielen Dank, dass Sie sich mit Ihrem Anliegen an Siemens Customer Care wenden.

Hier können Sie Informationen und den Quellcode finden. Diese Seite wird noch weiter aktualisiert werden.

http://now-portal.c-lab.de, dort nach “gigaset” suchen (search)

Wir wünschen Ihnen einen schönen Tag und freuen uns, daß Sie sich für Siemens entschieden haben.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Harry Wilms
Siemens Customer Care Center

And indeed, here is the code. I haven’t looked at it yet if it’s complete, but at least something’s there.

A word about that NOW Portal: Looks like yet another open source project hoster like SourceForge, BerliOS or Tigris.org, but focused on a collaboration of German companies with open source projects. It’s sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

unsermake is a pretty cool replacement for automake in KDE, developed by Stephan Kulow. It’s already been around for quite some time but had never an offical website and the code was available only via CVS. So today I created an unoffical homepage at the KDE Wiki and wrote a small script which generates nightly builds on my website.