Mandriva 6:31 pm
The F1 key doesn’t seem to invoke Help properly in KDE4 on my macbook which runs Mandriva. Solved this by
keycode 101 = F1
xmodmap ${HOME}/.xmodmaprc in my .bashrc file. Restarted X and it worked!
Mandriva 12:22 pm
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.
Mandriva 2:10 am
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.
Mandriva 5:42 pm
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.
Mandriva 12:35 am
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.
Mandriva 11:55 am
This is the first in hopefully a series of reviews of packages released into Mandriva /Backports. /Backports is a way to get the latest releases of RPMs from Mandriva without waiting for the next official release. Mandriva Club Monkey Adam Williamson suggested that in order to get familiar with the backports system, I should sign up to the Mandriva ChangeLog mailing list and filter the deluge for 2008.1 and backports. I was a little overwhelmed at first when I got over 124 announcements of main and contrib backport packages in just the first day!!! Amost all of these were plug-ins for vdr, a video disk recording program, however, and traffic since then has been quite a bit lighter. In any case, I’ll just be reviewing a few packages at a time.
First up is is something called midori, a GTK-based browser from Germany. Midori was recently rebuilt with WebKitGtk, hence the reason for it showing up in /Backports.
Gmail is the web site I visit the most while at home, so that was the first test. I launch it from a terminal, but after logging into gmail, the following message appears in the terminal and then the screen goes blank. Reloading the page results in the same behavior.
(midori:10490): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkXtBin to a container of type MidoriWebView, but the widget is already inside a container of type MidoriWebView, the GTK+ FAQ at http://www.gtk.org/faq/ explains how to reparent a widget.
Midori has problems with Facebook as well, crashing on the FunWall application. Ok, so it won’t be replacing konqueror on my laptop any time soon, but to be fair, konqueror has trouble with Facebook, too.
Next is mozilla-sunbird, a calendaring application which appears to not have been released in 2008.1. Holy crap, 17MB… and when I launch it, I get a pop-up stating
Sunbird could not install this item because of a failure in Chrome
Registration. Please contact the author about this problem.
This doesn’t seem to be a real problem as sunbird continues to launch, and I’m soon presented with a rather complex-looking calendaring application. I found that it is pretty easy to access remote calendars, and pretty soon I have it displaying my google calendar. I don’t see a way for kontact to do this, so this is kind of cool. So if you’re into calendaring applications (I’m not…), this could be useful.
Next is ntfs-3g, the read-write driver for NTFS systems. I dual boot with Mac OS X, not windows, so this isn’t terribly useful to me personally, but it should be for those who are (ahem) forced to co-exist with windows. About the only thing I did with it was to format my USB thumb drive to the NTFS filesystem (which actually used the ntfs-progs package instead), mount the drive, and save some files to it.
According to the ntfs-3g website, this release has some important bug fixes and the upgrade is strongly recommended. According to the ChangeLog, an update following the official MDV 2008.1 release obsoleted the libntfs-3g package… perhaps this is why its in /Backports rather than updates?
Next is gpodder, a podcast “receiver/catcher” written in Python. This application wasn’t on my PowerPack installation DVD. I test it by subscribing to the podcast of the best show on TV, Battlestar Galactica. Downloading the commentary for the first episode of the 4th season causes totem to launch, but subsequent pop-up informs me that some necessary codecs must be downloaded from one of three repositories, “Fluendo” (which I know nothing about), “Plf,” or “Mandrivalinux”. I choose Mandrivalinux, a couple of gstreamer codecs get installed, and the commentary starts. Not too shabby, but amarok is a tough competitor in this area.
Lastly, backports of KDE 4.0.4 are starting to trickle in. As of the moment, only kdebase4-runtime, kdepimlibs4, and kdelibs4 have come in for the 4.0.4 release, so I’ll wait at least until kde4-konqueror makes its debut. Getting KDE 4.x updates is something that makes /Backports something of enormous interest to me. The KDE 4.0.3 rpms for 2008.1 aren’t quite useable for me yet, and source compiling via SVN takes up about 7-8 GB onto my already-crowded disk. Tune in next week to see what comes of this…
Mandriva 5:23 pm
Ok, so installing isn’t the problem, it’s that first reboot that’s the killer. Having looked thru the Ubuntu forums for advice on how to pull this off, I seem to have come away with the impression that the boot loader should not be installed onto the MBR, but rather the linux partition itself (dev/sda3 in my case). When I tried that and rebooted, all I got for my efforts was a quick flash of something about GRUB, and then another reboot to the rEfit screen. Rinse, recycle, repeat…
After repeating the installation a few times with the same result, I installed GRUB to the MBR (the way one would normally do it on PC hardware), and it worked. The rEFit boot menu came up with the mandriva option alongside of OS X, and I was giddy with anticipation.
My hopes were soon crushed as KDE wouldn’t start. Hmm, maybe that error message during installation about libkdebase4 being corrupt wasn’t kidding… Oh well, icewm started up ok and I was able to get libkdebase4 from the repositories, and then KDE was fine. Obviously I burned a bad CD.
Wireless worked right away.
Next thing to figure out is this infernal trackpad. It’s just way too sensitive; it interprets regular mouse motions as clicks when I definitely did not click.
Random Rants 