Category: Blog

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 🙂 .

Talking about KDE 4.1 again

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’s  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!

Windows Genuine Advantage Validation tool fails to install?

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.

Spam

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!

OpenSolaris 2008.05

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 🙂 .

So, what is good, what is bad?

Let’s sum up the good things first:

  • The driver diagnostics tool is an awesome idea. I don’t know why this isn’t part of any better live system. It shows you exactly what devices will work and where you’ll expect trouble. In my case I was a little puzzled that my cheap-ass SATA II RAID controller on my ASUS main-board worked out of the box but my PCI IDE controller didn’t/doesn’t.
  • Familiar programs, easy migration: SUN doesn’t leave you in the cold, the familiar programs of your run-of-the-mill GNOME desktop are also present in OpenSolaris. Furthermore, the GNU userland tools are available (thank goodness!) and the shell du jour is BASH 🙂 .
  • I love the way you administer and control services. svcadmin is such a powerful tool. Haven’t worked much with it since I don’t have to tinker with the configuration, though.
  • If there’s KDE, that’s a good sign. 3.5.8 could be running on my machine… but I’d have to get it through the package management first (what an ordeal!).
  • All the ZFS goodness makes my heart all warm and fuzzy. For every negative point I’ll list in a few lines… just scroll up to read about ZFS again. It makes up for so much (especially since the performance is worlds apart from ZFS on Fuse [which I love a lot!]).

The problem with OpenSolaris is that it is relatively immature. So, without further ado:

  • pkg performance is abysmal. This is my biggest complaint. I wanted to install Mplayer, which should be a rather trivial task. I ended up downloading the sourcecode and building it manually because that actually saved me time. Remember: If building the application takes longer than installing it through the package system your package system is flawed. This needs to be fixed ASAP, it’s not about the GUI or whatever, fix the CLI tool!
  • Did I mention that searching software with pkg was abysmal as well? It deserves it’s own bullet because searching is just as painful as watching the software do nothing. Why can’t I search in all repositories at once, for pete’s sake?
  • The installer took half an eternity to evaluate my disks. Maybe it doesn’t like mdraid?
  • Improve your GRUB support, SUN! I already had GRUB, I read in your documentation that you would just overwrite it without asking me for my consent… but still. Make it an option, at least. And when you detect Windows, why don’t you detect Linux? Ah wait, that’s a GRUB problem… 😉
  • I couldn’t seem to get the partition part of the installer to work properly, had to create a partition manually and overwrite it through the installer. Creating new partitions resulted in a error message.
  • What the hell? No support for NTFS by default? Are you joking? Installing some extra program from the repositories is no option for me (because it’s just a pain to use pkg).

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 😉 .

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.

Das Paradoxon

Haha

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 abgehört werden könnte, andererseits beschließt man nun die BKA Gesetzesnovelle, die genau diese Mittel auch legitimiert.