Sunday, Jul 26 2009

After installing both bundle-kde4-ssl-x11 or bundle-kde4-ssl-mac, very few applications would launch successfully. Mostly they would complain about mime-types, i.e.

Could not find mime type inode/directory

and half a dozen others. After finding hints online about linux kde packages needing to reinstall kdebase, I did the equivalent in fink, i.e. reinstalling kdebase4-x11. It was here that I caught the message

== KDE4 Applications Have Been Updated ==
You should start a new shell, or run /sw/opt/kde4/x11/bin/kbuildsycoca4 to update the KDE4 application database.

And that was the trick!

Update: maybe not. It looks like it worked just that once. Since then, it looks like dbus has stopped working? If, for example, I launch gwenview, I get


john-evanss-imac:web jevans$ gwenview
gwenview(5606) mac_initialize_dbus: warning: unable to initialize D-Bus environment!
Dynamic session lookup supported but failed: launchd did not provide a socket path, verify that org.finkproject.dbus-session.plist is loaded!


and this leads on to the same errors as before. Hmm….

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F1 key in KDE4 on Macbooks Saturday, Nov 8 2008

The F1 key doesn’t seem to invoke Help properly in KDE4 on my macbook which runs Mandriva. Solved this by

• Used xev to figure out that the F1 key is attached to the 101 keycode.
• Created a .xmodmaprc file with the lines

                 keycode 101 = F1
  

• invoked xmodmap ${HOME}/.xmodmaprc in my .bashrc file.

Restarted X and it worked!

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Syndaemon Sunday, Jun 8 2008

The macbook/linux combination has one huge out-of-the-box useability issue, and that’s the overly-sensitive trackpad. It was a real pain to have to continually hit my browser’s back button because a hyperlink got accidentally activated without actually clicking on it, and often the cursor would suddenly jump while I was in the middle of typing. This was so bad at first that I actually gave up on Mandriva and went back to Mac OS X for a few months. I hate unsolved issues, though, so after perusing the Ubuntu forums, I came up with a combination of steps that worked for me.

The first was to put the following stanza into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Synaptics TouchPad"
    Driver "synaptics"
    Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
    Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
    Option "SHMConfig" "true"
    Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
    Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
EndSection

And also add the synaptics identifier to the ServerLayout section as follows…

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "layout1"
    InputDevice "Synaptics TouchPad"
    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
    Screen "screen1"
EndSection

Then restart X.

The SHMConfig line is the key here, as it is required to start syndaemon (part of the synaptics RPM package). I chose to just put it into my .bash_profile

syndaemon -i 1 -d

Syndaemon disables the touchpad for a specified period in seconds (the -i option) after a keypress.

This helps, but the trackpad is still too sensitive. Will have to play around a bit more with the synclient.

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: June 7 Saturday, Jun 7 2008

Here’s what’s new in the Mandriva /Backports repository since June 1.

tulip (3D and graph visualizer) I can’t cover this any better than it’s been covered here, where the version covered is 3.0.0. The new /Backports version is 3.0.1, which looks like it mostly provides some improvement in RPM infrastructure having to do with QT4. The splash screen certainly got my attention!

textext (LaTeX editor extension for Inkscape) Looks like just a minor point update from 0.4.2-1 to 0.4.2-2. Not tested.

gpodder (podcast manager) Something is odd here. I covered the 0.11.2 /Backports release of gpodder last month and ended by saying something to the effect that it would be hard for gpodder to displace amarok for handling my podcasts… Well, somehow the new release is now USING amarok for playing podcasts. I’m positive it wasn’t doing that last time. I dug into the preferences to see what was going on there, and it seems that gpodder uses xdg-open for handling music/audio. Xdg-open just uses the user’s “preferred” application. I’m not sure why amarok wasn’t used last time, though. I haven’t updated amarok since last that previous update of gpodder a month ago, so I’m not sure why this happened. Not that it’s a bad thing…

Gpodder is definitely the most useful app of this week’s /Backports crop (there’s no better way to listen to Battlestar Galactica producer commentary), but your mileage may vary.

xrdp (terminal server / remote desktop server) It was difficult to figure out what’s new here, because the changelog just says “lots of bugfixes” and the upstream web site doesn’t even say that much. Not tested.

perl-SVN-Notify: (perl-wrapper for svnnotify) I haven’t much use for a subversion repository on my little macbook, so I can’t test this. A point update.

mozilla-firefox-theme-oxygen: This is a new package altogether and gives firefox the same toolbar icons as konqueror. It ain’t enough to peel me away from konqueror 🙂

On a totally unrelated note, I hate how wordpress posts that look good in konqueror end up looking bad in safari (I dual boot my macbook between MacOS and Mandriva).

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cpufreq governors Monday, Jun 2 2008

I’m an idiot. I just found out why my macbook (running Mandriva Linux) was running so hot. The CPU frequencies were both pegged to 2.167 Mhz (the maximum) because the CPU governors were “performance” by default. This hardly needs to be the case for a laptop… All that was needed was to edit /etc/sysconfig/cpufreq, set the governor to “conservative”, and restart the cpufreq daemon. Now the CPU frequencies rarely exceed 1 GHz and the fan is nowhere near as loud.

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 31 Saturday, May 31 2008

It’s been a hectic week, so I’m reviewing just one package this time around, ipython. It’s an interactive shell alternative to the regular python shell. I had heard of it, but never really tried it out until now. It seems to be just as functional as the regular shell, but it also has a few extra features that one might find appealing. For me, tab-completion alone is reason enough to use it exclusively from now on for interactive work.

This backports release is just a minor rev to version 0.8.3, more evolutionary than revolutionary. The ipython homepage has the details, but said details just make me think I just don’t follow python developments as closely as I should (“twisted reactors???”).

Update: Just one day after posting this, the 0.8.4 update appeared in /Backports. The ipython homepage hasn’t been updated yet to show what’s in the new version, though.

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Cape Breton Wednesday, May 28 2008

Memorial Day always finds me in the most beautiful place on the planet, Cape Breton NS. I’m usually running the Cabot Trail Relay with the Maine-iacs (one of four teams based in Central Maine), but once again I was injured and couldn’t run. See Ouch for the reason… Once again the Maine-iacs dominated the event and won easily, but the Maine Road Hags (yes that is their team name) did pretty well, too.

After the last relay leg got underway, I took off for Halifax to visit some friends of mine, some fellow New Jersey ex-patriots. I have to say, I love living in Boston, but Halifax is enticing.

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 24 Tuesday, May 20 2008

Short /Backports article this time, I’m in Nova Scotia for the weekend.

pydb is a python debugger whose purpose seems to be to just look a lot more like gdb than the usual python debugger, pdb. I’m ok with my pdb skills, although it’s never been something I’ve been entirely comfortable with. But, I just so happen to have a python script in need of debugging, and since I’m fairly proficient with gdb, it was no problem at all to use pydb to get at the root of the problem.   The is something I can use.

Next up is a little gem called kde4-kgeography. I had never looked at this before, but I can tell you that I would have dearly loved to have this way back (W-A-A-A-Y back) when I was a kid. I used to spend hours pouring over maps, memorizing capitals and provinces and such, and this package would have been ideal for that.  I didn’t see a map for Russia, but a quick jaunt over to http://kgeography.berlios.de reveals that this is in SVN (along with a LOT of other maps in progress), so I think we can expect to see continued good things from the many contributers of kgeography. 

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Mandriva /Backports Roundup: May 17 Saturday, May 17 2008

Since KDE 4.0.4 was announced on May 7, RPMs have been coming in fast and furious in /Backports. With over 100 installed already, I’ve decided to take the plunge and not go back to KDE 3.5.9 (the default KDE install in Mandrive 2008.1) unless there’s an absolute show stopper of some sort. And just to put this into context, pretty much my whole KDE point of view centers on how well konqueror performs.

The Mandriva changelog for the kde4-konqueror RPM only reveals the mere fact of the 4.0.4 update; the official KDE changelog shows one bugfix involving plugins and plenty of changes to khtml. That made me a little uneasy, because there’s no reference to the issue that stopped me from jumping into KDE 4.0.3, which was that when I fired up konqueror and tried to read Gmail, I got something like a “cookies are not enabled” message. Attempts to start the cookie handler service via Settings ==> Configure Konqueror failed.

Unfortunately, the issue persists in KDE 4.0.4, and I’m about ready to call it quits, as this is kind of a big deal. I know from past experience that this is an issue related to the KDE daemon kded, and eventually it occurred to me to just try to start it manually. Huh… kded is already running… I happened to look thru /opt/kde4/bin for some reason (/opt is where KDE4 RPMs get installed so they don’t trip over your KDE3 installation), and lo-and-behold-what-do-my-eyes-see but something called kded4. Could it be as simple as just starting that? … It is!!! Gmail and Facebook both load just fine now, and KDE4 passes it’s first big test. Kind of an odd thing, though, that konqueror cannot start kded4 by itself? It seems that kded4 is actually running when I first log in, but it dies sometime between then and when I try to point konqueror towards gmail. And why is the KDE 3.5.9 daemon running under KDE4 anyway?

For the rest of the roundup, I’m turning things over to Donald Stewart, with whom I’m tag-teaming the Mandriva /Backports Roundup. Take it away, Donald.

Xfce has got a picture app, which fits in with the lightweight nature of the
Ristretto is a fast and lightweight picture-viewer for the Xfce desktop environment. This is /contrib/backports.

Also for Xfce, Xfce-utils 4.4.2-18 is now availble for 2008.1 in /contrib/backports.

As for video, there is this useful application to add to the list:
themonospot is a simple application that can be used to scan an avi
file and extract some informations about audio and video data flow:

– Video codec used
– Frame size
– Average video bitrate
– File size
– Total time
– Frame rate
– Total frames
– Info data
– Packet Bitstream
– User data (in MOVI chunk)
– Audio codec used
– Average audio bitrate
– Audio channels

Using themonospot it is also possible to modify FourCC informations (FourCC code in video chunk and FourCC description in stream header) and also change some problematic UserData values for table players (it set the value to DivX999b000p). This is in /contrib/backports.

For the gamers amongst us, the much awaited 1.0.0 version of wine is coming ever closer. It has just made a large leap towards completion with the release of wine 1.0.0 rc1. This is now in /main/backports for 2008.0 and 2008.1. Happy gaming.

Also Nexuiz has been backported to /contrib/backports, Nexuiz is a multiplayer 3D first-person shooter based upon a
heavily modified Quake 1 engine. The packager warns that this game contains violence and is not suitable for children.

Both 2008.0 and 2008.1 have received two releases nfoview, nfoview-1.1.2 and 1.1.1, an app for viewing nfo files, which are “ASCII” art in the CP437 codepage. The advantages of using NFO Viewer instead of a text editor are pre-set font and encoding settings, automatic window size and clickable hyperlinks. This can be found in /contrib/backports.

For me, the most important thing to be added is Amarok, the default KDE music player. While it is too heavy for some, I find the extra features to be very useful, there is an automatic look up for album covers off Amazon, and Wikipedia is tied in so that the artists page there can be viewed from within the player. Also, there is a way to look up the lyrics to the song that you are listening to, so a sing along is always accurate.
This can be found in /main/backports.

The dual booters with windows also have something to be interested in, ntfs-3g-1.2506 has been back ported to 2008.0 and 2008.1. This is in /main/backports.

As for web browsers, and to carry of from the light weight picture application earlier, there is Midori, Midori is a lightweight GTK+ 2 web browser based on WebKitGtk. It features tabs, windows and session management, bookmarks stored with XBEL, searchbox based on OpenSearch, and user scripts support.

This is available for both 2008.0 and 2008.1 in /contrib/backorts.

Version 0.3.10 of Conduit has been backported as well.
Conduit is a synchronization solution for GNOME which allows the user to take their emails, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.

Conduit manages the synchronization and conversion of data into other formats. For example, conduit allows you to synchronize your tomboy notes to a file on a remote computer, synchronize your emails to your mobile phone, synchronize your bookmarks to delicious, gmail, or even your own webserver, and more. This is in /contrib/backports.

Blender has also been backported, release 0.20080502.1 of version 2.46 of the popular animation application is now available for the 2007.1 in /main/backports.

With cooker starting to move at its usual rapid pace, and more importantly with the switch to KDE4, it is hardly surprising that some of use are tearing our hair out at the current state at which cooker is in as the new features are added and the the process of getting it ready for realise as 2009.0 begins. However, this is very good for /backports, as now there are lots of apps coming into the 2008.1 repo that are from this development. The most notable being the continued development of KDE4, this has led to a number of KDE4 bits coming to 2008.1, including kdebase4-runtime-4.04, kdepimlibs4-4.04 and kdelibs4-4.04. Hopefully these willstart to bring KDE4 to the stage where it will hopefully be at when 2009.0 is released.

Also for KDE, there is ktorrent, the popular torrent application, ktorrent-2.2.6 is now in /main/backports for both 2008.0 and 2008.1.

Other updates include Mozilla’s Sunbird to version 0.8, The X.org driver for AMD / ATI r5xx/r6xx chipsets (Radeon X1xxx and HD 2xxx cards), The Mandriva Management Console by Linbox, which has various modules including one for mail, samba and network.

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Battlestar Galactica Saturday, May 17 2008

I love this show. 59 minutes and 30 second of “pretty good”, and then 30 seconds of “I SO-O-O-O did NOT see that coming!”

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