Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.
— Oscar Wilde
Cloudy Sky. Occasional Rain.
Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.
— Oscar Wilde
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 ๐ .
The internet makes you stupid.
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 รโย รโย รโย รโย รโย รโย รโย 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.
Lately Qyoto won’t build because of a rather minor issue in the code. Basically it references itself in kdebindings/csharp/qyoto/src/SmokeInvocation.cs on line 20, so be sure to comment this line if you want the build to succeed.
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 ๐ .
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 ๐ .
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.
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
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.
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”:
What are your favorite not-so-obvious features?
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 ๐ .
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 ๐ .
Last time I didn’t find too many positive words for KDE. Therefore I’m happy to announce that the points noted in the last article are not entirely fixed, the DE is very useable though.
Yes, what I’m trying to press out is that I’m using KDE 4.1 from Debian’s experimental repositories as my new desktop environment now. If I wouldn’t be such a klutz I could probably use the patches from OpenSUSE to fix all my outstanding problems since the oS v11 seems to have the patchpower behind it (main problem’sรโย still that I cannot reorder items in the panel).
I’m thorougly impressed by the FolderView plasmoid that I do not have as of yet — but the videos, screenshots and blogposts sound exactly like the thing I want (basically: an old-fashioned desktop with icons so I can drag and drop stuff onto it).
The Debian packages are a little broken, unfortunately. To get as much plasma love as possible you should apt-get source extragear-plasma and build the applets manually, otherwise you’ll have just 2-3 usable plasmoids left. Also, there seems to be an issue with moving plasmoids around on the activity-desktop-thingy.
Apart from that: I’m really looking forward to 4.1 final!
Well, well, well — Windows is full of shit sometimes.
So there’s this dreadful Windows Genuine Validation crap thing Microsoft pushes down your throat. Now, that’s fine as long as the crap works but sometimes it fails to install via Windows Update; consequently you can’t install any other updates at that time. Bummer.
But there’s a (relatively) easy way around it: Try to install the control (yes, it’s a dreadful ActiveX control) directly through Microsoft Genuine: On the site click “Validate Windows” and the control should install. After that you can continue to install Windows updates.
I hate it when companies try so hard to show it the evil software pirates and end up annoying the paying userbase only. Thanks a lot, Microsoft.
By now I’m used to my daily dose of comment spam. Now I’m also getting spam on my domain e-mail account. Thank god the recipient mail address is just a non-existing bouncer anyway; disabling catch-all solved the problem quite nicely.
Still, gah. GAH!
I’m a big fan of Solaris. But maybe my expectations for OpenSolaris’ Project Indiana are too high…
My idea of Project Indiana was that the final product would be something like a Debian for Solaris. I mean… they’ve got Ian Murdock and stuff ๐ .
So, what is good, what is bad?
Let’s sum up the good things first:
The problem with OpenSolaris is that it is relatively immature. So, without further ado:
So, overall… what’s the verdict? I love Solaris. I did before, I do now. There are flaws, that’s to be expected. I was really stunned by the repository of drivers that is shipping with OpenSolaris now. When I tested Nexenta last year many components didn’t work — now they perform flawlessly. I somehow feel I can’t always name ZFS as my favorite feature (gosh, I love ZFS, did I mention it’s the default filesystem in Solaris now?) so I’ll go with something else I found really attractive: OpenSolaris has a certain pure UNIX feel to it. With Linux you have all your kinky tools and graphical frontends to control your system, OpenSolaris – in contrast – has absolutely great CLI tools that did the job just as good (even better?). I can’t say anything about usage or administrative tasks on servers but for desktop machines the system quickly catches up to Linux. Don’t ask me what I consider a pure feeling, it’s probably something gross to you ๐ .
So… throw in improved package management and keep building packages — and you’ll have yourself a winner, SUN. But until then… I’ll stick with Linux.
Heise hat manchmal einen ungewollt zynischen Humor. Oder ist das eher das Talent unserer Regierung?
Auf der einen Seite schlotterts in der Hose, da man ja jetzt abgehรฦยถrt werden kรฦยถnnte, andererseits beschlieรฦร ยธt man nun die BKA Gesetzesnovelle, die genau diese Mittel auch legitimiert.
Going since 2004, Tsukasa no Hibi is my personal blog about technology, media and sometimes society.