Category: Blog

New nVidia Linux driver speeds things up

The end of the world must be near: nVidia released a new version of their GNU/Linux driver that fixes some of the annoyances regarding RENDER performance. Given you apply some manual adjustments to the configuration the new driver performs in a somewhat usable manner.

It is still far from the beauty that ATI users can enjoy (in terms of performance) but it’s an immense improvement over the old, totally unusable slideshow.

Fixing the “null” date problem in WordPress

If you’ve been a constant reader of my blog (and of course I know you are 😉 ) you could hardly have missed the ugly “0” date in the archives. Turns out that this 0 date was caused by all the old drafts I had saved but never published. Deleting the drafts would help, but simply assigning them a date seemed like a more sane solution. Voila, problem solved.

Making Cygwin portable

One of the very packages I always install when I have to work with Windows is Cygwin. Being able to use my beloved GNU tools really makes things easier. Often I don’t have the option to install it. I grieved a little bit about the fact that some problems could be solved with just 2 commands that were — of course — missing from Windows’ horrendous command prompt. So I snooped around and built the following batch that’ll start a full-blown Cygwin session from i.e. portable harddisk: 

@echo off set PATH=%CD%bin;%CD%sbin;%CD%usrsbin;%PATH set HOME=%CD%homePortable mount -bfu %CD%/ / mount -bfu %CD%bin /usr/bin mount -bfu %CD%lib /usr/lib cd %HOME% bash ----login -i

Easy, huh? All you have to do to make it work is renaming your /home/Username to /home/Portable (or simply adjust the setting in the batch). Pretty neat stuff.

Building recent Mplayer SVN + CoreAVC For Linux

As Michael points out there’s a slight problem with the CoreAVC For Linux patchset that enable Mplayer to take advantage of CoreCodec’s h.264 decoder — with recent changes in the sourcecode the old build_patch.pl script doesn’t produce usable output anymore.

There still is a way to compile Mplayer with the modification, though: Mithun Diwakar altered a patch to work against current subversion checkouts. How long this one will hold… we don’t know. But I think it would be preferable to fix up the patchbuilder. Maybe I’ll hack around on it during the weekend (no promise 🙂 ).

Wuala goes beta, Badges to celebrate

Along with the public beta of Wuala there’s also a new website.

Aside from the plethora of new information, a feature to install/launch Wuala straight from the browser and mucho polished bling, Caleido offers a few badges to advertise Wuala and link to your own shared files (very welcome indeed!)

Unfortunately all of those badges are… big. Many people (including myself) use the common 80×15 badges with the common layout icon on the left, text on the right.

That’s why I quickly threw together two small badges in the standard form-factor. Use them as you like 😉 .

Nice global environment variable additions

Since my vacation is coming to an end I thought I’d leave a nice little trick on how to administrate a number of environment variable additions for all users on the system.

Sure, there is the /etc/environment file but it seems rather limiting to me. I needed a little more control, so I came up with the following the little scripting:

Create a new folder /etc/environment.imports, in the folder just have a ordered/leveled number of scripts (i.e. 01_qt, 02_java). Add the following code to your /etc/profile:

# Custom PATH and LD_LIBRARY additions
xdg_source_list=`echo /etc/environment.imports/*`
for source_file in $xdg_source_list
do
 Â Ã‚ Ã‚ Ã‚ Ã‚ Ã‚  source $source_file
done

Now you can just export all the necessary additions through the files in /etc/environment.imports:

#!/bin/sh
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/wine/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=/opt/wine/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/wine/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/opt/wine/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS

This way it’s extremely easy to maintain a large number of custom-prefixed software for a complete system without touching the user’s custom profile.

A bunch of cool things

So far, this weekend has been a great one. Met a bunch of old pals again, fixed some long-due problems and even got something productive out of it!

The first cool thing is that Plasma does work correctly now. Yes, this means that this strange behaviour is history and I’m able to freely move plasmoids around the place. Problem was, as usual, not the main program itself but one of the underlying libs: In this case a fresh Qt checkout from KDE’s trunk solved the problem nicely. Yes, it really was that simple. Maybe this will be of help, as nobody on the official support channel really had an answer for that 🙂 .

In order to allow me a quick and dirty playground like that computing power is necessary. Compiling large projects like Qt takes a lot of time it becomes clear that reduction of this compilation time is advised. About a year ago I blogged about Icecream, a nice way of clustering compilation tasks around your network. By the time you read this all of my machines (except for one pesky bugger) are running Linux exclusively so getting a small cluster of dualcore processing power together wasn’t hard, it also allowed me to trash one system and set it up with Debian again, now it’s usable after whooping 10 seconds. Beat that, suckers!

I said to myself “Tsukasa, if you’re already using bleeding edge software like KDE 4.1, Wine and Mplayer then you should use the latest and greatest Mono + toolchain as well”. So I went on compiling Mono and Monodevelop straight from svn. Monodevelop did refuse to start though and presented me with the following error message:

Unhandled Exception: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
at MonoDevelop.Core.Runtime.Initialize (Boolean updateAddinRegistry) [0x00000]
at MonoDevelop.Startup.SharpDevelopMain.Main (System.String[] args) [0x00000]

Looking this up on the net didn’t bring any good results, trying to fiddle around with mdtool? No cigar, same message. So, what’s the fix? Simply delete your ~/.config/Monodevelop directory so the Add-In registry has to be rebuilt. Yes, it’s those darn buggers that make everything bad and boo. Now it’s up and running and I’m eagerly trying to build Qyoto now 🙂 .

Using twhirl on Linux – the nice way

Without any doubt twhirl is the greatest twitter client available. It’s an Air-based application – meaning you can even use it on Linux.

Now, as you may know KDE 4.1 comes with a handy little twitter client plasmoid itself but the functionality is really limited, the plasmoid is a little buggy and overall can’t compete with twhirl. So, let’s install twhirl then, eh?

First thing you have to do is installing the Adobe Air for Linux alpha. Since the installation is pretty straightforward and the package is an RPM I’ll skip the details.

After installing Air just navigate to the twirl website, look for the “manual installation” paragraph on the right handside and click “Download and install the latest twhirl release”. The installation will start and you’ll be able to start the application afterwards by executing (if you installed it to /opt) /opt/twhirl/twhirl.

You probably want to get rid of the pesky taskbar entry now: With KWin all you’ve to do is press ALT+F3, select Configure Window Behaviour and choose “Window Specific” in the dialog. Create a new rule by clicking New, click “Detect Window Properties” and select the twirl window. Just accept the settings in the upcoming dialog, and close it. Time to edit the rules a bit: Double click the new rule in the list, go to the Preferences tab and select “Keep below”, “Skip taskbar”, select “Force” for each item and don’t forget to enable the checkbox at the end. Apply the settings and voila – a nice, widget-like twirl on your Linux desktop.

The nice thing about twhirl is that it comes with different color schemes and the “Black Magic” colorset matches the dark Oxygen plasma theme almost perfectly.

Yeah, this post is pretty sketchy, I wish I could upload media to illustrate it – but that functionality is still broken.

Boring

Lupin thinks this blog needs more posts. Unfortunately there’s so much interesting stuff going on that the little time I have doesn’t suffice to satisfy err… bla.

Part of the reason I don’t post much is that

  • …this WordPress installation is somehow totally borked and doesn’t let me upload any more media.
  • …I don’t have that much time to spare to talk about every little bit that I’m working/interested on/in.

Posting something just for the sake of posting is bad. It’s not like there’s nothing to talk about, though.

If you want to know what I’m currently interested in you can check out the following things in Google:
kde 4.1, qyoto, pandas, koalas, pandas, koalas, pandas, koalas, pandas, koalas, ducks, powershell, nas, solaris, raptors, cmake, mono, kangaroos.

I think it says it all. There’s always action, explosions and much sex involved in my everyday life, so stop pestering me for more insight.

Did I mention I’ll be on vacation the next two weeks? No? That’s going to be great. Maybe it’ll be worth a post.

Favourite not-so-obvious features

They are near. Features that you wish you had. Often a function is implemented in a not so obvious way or you just don’t know about it.

I dare to call them the “not-so-obvious features”:

  • KWin (KDE’s great window manager) supports smart maximize – left click on maximize to… well, maximize. But right click on maximize to maximize horizontaly only. When clicking with the middle mouse button the window will maximize verticaly. Really great stuff 🙂 .
  • Jumping between words works by pressing CTRL and left or right. Awesome for correcting mistakes swiftly (although I never do, my way of speaking/writing is considered art).

What are your favorite not-so-obvious features?

Wuala invites

For a while now I’m using Wuala, a distributed redundant file system / P2P mashup application, one of these hard to classify programs that bear great features and sometimes pesky bugs. Theres less of the latter and more of the former so I’m very pleased with it.

In the last weeks features were extended quite a bit: A new “Pro” status was introduced to honor people who trade space and help the network grow. Pro status allows you to disable the ads and various other kinky things that I don’t know of yet (basically because I’m too lazy to change anything). Also new is the possibility to purchase space from Caleido AG directly – but the prices make it more attractive to just trade space 🙂 .

If you want to peek into Wuala before the big open beta starts you can do so: There’s loads of invites flying around the web. If you’re too lazy to search and just want to try it leave a comment in this post and I’ll send an invite your way. That’s the good thing about being a misantropic bastard: Lots of unsent invites left 🙂 .