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.

Copying User profiles while in use

I know it’s not a feasable way to do it but sometimes you can’t get around to copy a user profile while it’s still locked (think: Windows locks it even after the user logs out).

To copy such a pesky profile I use Hobocopy:

hobocopy /full /y /r “%HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%” “C:\UserProfileBackup”

The program makes use of shadow copies to perform the process so the resulting file will still be locked but at least it was copied. This becomes quite useful when used in conjunction with, for instance, the portable version of CCleaner and it’s /AUTO switch.

Wine 1.0 RC

Woot woot. Good things do happen 🙂

Now it’s time to do some regression tests. Without implying bad things here, but people should be very strict with applications before giving out platinum status.

Things like “does work perfectly fine as long as you don’t click button X” or “works perfectly fine but has some visual glitches” usually mean the application does not work perfectly fine and therefore doesn’t really deserve platinum status. Feels a bit like cheating on yourself if you give out platinum too easily. Just my two cents, though.

CoreAVC 1.7 + Mplayer

It took me about a week to sort out some issues with my setup but now CoreAVC 1.7 is running fine in my SVN version of Mplayer thanks to the revamped patches from the CoreAVC-for-Linux project (yay, no more old builds!).

Some notes:

  • If you’re using the correct-pts option in your ~/.mplayer/config you should set it to “no” to get a huge performance boost. I dearly hope this is a new thing… otherwise I’d have to redo all my benchmarks 😉 .

CoreAVC for Mplayer dead, reborn, punching bad boys to a pulp

It’s a real shame: A while ago I blogged about a very nice set of patches to make CoreAVC work on Mplayer. Now it seems that a DMCA note was filed and Google has kicked the project from it’s Code page.

Don’t fret, though! CoreCodec is a little torn apart on this issue but is apparently helping Alan, creator of this great patchset, to make the patches ready for CoreAVC 1.7 (the most recent one, you had to use 1.5.* before):

Regardless of the cause, CoreCodec and I have resolved the conflict, and CoreAVC-for-Linux should be back online soon.  In addition, the patches for 1.7.0 are ready to go, and Linux users should see a nice performance improvement on Dual-core machines (compared to 1.5.0) once it is available.

Geez people, don’t scare us like that!

Nemo

Can’t really tell how I’ve managed to overlook this great program 🙂 .

Nemo is a file manager without… well… it’s more like a calendar actually… but with files. Hard to explain but very fitting to keep track of my incredible heap of data. I’ll keep an eye on this project as it is not only written in C# (Mono) but also utilizes the capabilities of Xesam. That makes 2 great reasons to love it already 🙂 .