Archive for the ‘GNU/Linux’ Category

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Day Planner maemo port under way

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Okay, I gave up on the point of getting the perl bindings for gtk2 going.
It was just too much work, and would not only require getting the gtk2 bindings going, but also writing bindings for hildon, the maemo-specific stuff.

So I went to plan B, which was to reimplement a maemo-specific GUI in python that just talks to a perl back-end which takes care of all of the actual data processing. This is now well under way. A working prototype of the GUI in python is now in SVN, it can read and display calendar data, but has no edit capabilities yet. The back-end portion is just about finished, it is a mixture of code from the dayplanner perl client and the dayplanner-daemon, what’s missing there is more configuration file handling (which can’t be done yet, because I’m not quite sure what config options the maemo UI actually needs) and synchronization code.

This has helped make Day Planner even more modular. I split out some code that is useful elsewhere into a DP::CoreModules module. That module now has code that for instance handles the configuration files, parses date strings, creates config dirs, runtime module loading, summary string wrappers and localtime() wrappers. All code that can be shared (and doesn’t merit having their own module) will be put there.

I expect the maemo port to have initial editing capabilities within 1-2 weeks, depending on my workload.

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Posted in Day Planner, gtk2, Maemo, perl, python | 2 Comments »

N810!

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

It’s finally here, and I’m loving it so far :).
Tried some basic stuff, installed ssh+scp and tried ScummVM on it. All running nicely.
Now I’m about to move to the hard part, getting Day Planner actually ported to the thing.

The gtk2 perl bindings still don’t have a maemo port. I’m going to have a go at those first to see if I can get them running half-decently without too much work, if not I’ll have to look at other more dirty hacks. Though if I can get the bindings themselves running that would be much better and would make the port a lot easier to maintain. Here’s hoping!

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Posted in Day Planner, GNU/Linux, Maemo, perl | No Comments »

Proprietary webcam driver wonders

Monday, December 10th, 2007

My girlfriend has a builtin webcam on her new x86_64 laptop.
The webcam has no free drivers, but there is a proprietary one available on linux-projects.org.

Pay 10EUR and you get the driver. Okay, doesn’t sound /so/ bad. But the driver is only available for x86 ubuntu gutsy, no other arch, no other distro, no other kernel. If you want it for /your/ kernel you have to pay 100EUR. Wonderful. There’s no way I’m paying 100EUR for a proprietary webcam driver. Buying a new, working, webcam would even be cheaper! She runs x86_64 so there’s no way to get that driver working there, without paying that 100EUR. The camera is Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0c45:624f Microdia.

If someone does decide to write a free GPLd driver for it, I’ll donate some money to that person (I don’t have 100EUR to give away, but I can do at least 30-50EUR).

This again goes to show the pain of proprietary drivers. I don’t mind *paying* for drivers, but when the drivers cost more than the device did, and a device working equally well would be cheaper than buying the drivers it has gone too far. I would have easily donated money if the page said “here’s the driver, it’s GPL so do what you want, but please donate 10EUR if you can” (and I have donated to FOSS projects before).

Update, see: http://blog.zerodogg.org/2008/04/27/microdia-0c45624f-webcam-on-linux/

Posted in Bugs :(, Debian, GNU/Linux, Mandriva, Ubuntu | 4 Comments »

Maemo (Nokia N810) device program application accepted

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Yay!

I’ve been picked as one of the lucky 500 that will recieve a Nokia N810 at a heavily discounted price.

My initial plans will be to investigate ways of porting Day Planner to maemo. Because there are no Gtk2 perl bindings for Maemo at the moment, as far as I know. I’m going to have a look at how hard it would be to port the current Gtk2 perl bindings to Maemo, and if it’s rather simple I’ll just bundle them along with Day Planner., or create a package for them. They might even run with little effort, who knows (heres hoping). Even if they don’t work 100%, as long as the methods DP uses work adequately I will be able to use them. If not, well, then I’ll have to look at other options, which include writing a dumb UI in python that talks to a perl-backend.

In any case I will need to figure out how to best integrate the daemon+notifier functionality. The platform probably needs its own notifier, if it is to have such a thing at all, though I’m hoping the daemon can work without major changes.

And now I just need to wait for it to be released so I can get it.

Posted in Day Planner, Maemo, perl | No Comments »

Day Planner packages available for Debian and Ubuntu

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Day Planner debs are now available on http://www.day-planner.org/. Both for Debian and Ubuntu (in addition to the already available Mandriva RPM and generic installer).

Creating a deb was interesting, as I had never done that before – used to rpm packaging, though I got a lot of help by Morten Werner Olsen.

The packaging also uncovered quite a few limitations in both the default tarball and the Makefile, which should not only make the deb possible, but also improve the RPM.

I’m hoping to get Day Planner into Debian too, but I’ll have to write a proper deb for Date::HolidayParser first. Debian, like Mandriva, wants to have modules available as seperate packages, and as Date::HolidayParser isn’t *really* Day Planner-specific it makes sense distributing it seperately. The current debs has it bundled, and I might be inclined to continue to have the ones on the website bundle the module (the RPMs on the website does this, even though the package in Mandriva does not), so that there is only one package to install to get Day Planner installed.

In other (somewhat) related news, I’ve changed the URL structure on the Day Planner website. It previously used ugly looking index.php?page=foo&type=bar URLs. It now uses clean index.php/foo/bar URLs, which incidentally was rather simple to implement once I found which variables to parse and PHP functions to do it with.

Posted in Day Planner, Debian, Packaging, php, Projects, Ubuntu | No Comments »

Ubuntu/Mandriva comparison

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

I know you’re probably sick and tired of these comparisions. If so, don’t continue to read, and definetely don’t troll in the comments :).

I had so many various problems with 2008.0 that I felt it might be prudent to try some alternatives (I’ve upgraded to 2008.0 on 4 boxes so far, with not a single one going smoothly without issues). My choice fell on Ubuntu. Was considering to try out Debian too, but I know Debian is good – but not quite end-user desktop-friendly.

I live on the commandline. So just about all I do is identical on all distros since I just carry my configs with me. However I still see hw-detection and general usability and integration. So, I’m going to just start with a little comparison, and we’ll see where we go from here. The comparison is seperated into positive (+) and negative (-) comments.

This is all my personal opinions.

Ubuntu (7.10):
+ Live installer works very well. Especially nice that it removes unneeded locales and downloads missing ones during installation.
+ GNOME default desktop
+ sudo-only actually works quite well
+ Very well integrated into GNOME (ie. 3d-effects can be set up in the appearance applet in GNOME)
+ Clean, empty GNOME desktop by default
+ apt-get is great and shows how much it needs to download
+ aptitude looks good
+ integrated distribution-upgrade system
+ detected all the HW and worked nicely
+ Quite polished
+ Appears quite stable
+ gnome-app-install is pretty
+ Firefox patched to use native package manager to find plugins
+ Totem automatically finds missing plugins
+ More progress shared with other distros (ie. networkManager)
+ Progressbars when installing software (always in the GUI)
+ Ability to see verbose installation messages in the GUI
- Missing some translations
- Some of the translations isn’t of the best quality
- Synaptic is very ugly
- For some reason when I removed evolution, the menu item didn’t get removed (not even when using apt-get purge)
- Uses a white mouse pointer by default (I don’t like it, but luckily that can be easily changed)
- No profile.d
- Told me it needed to reboot after installing the nvidia driver

Mandriva (2008.0):
+ urpmi is also good
+ Well translated
+ Good hw detection
+ Has a tool for /everything/
+ PLF
+ RPMDrake is good (better than synaptic, not close to gnome-app-install)
+ Great perl module packaging
+ MP3 playback by default
- GNOME Live CD not published along with the rest of the distro
- GNOME Live CD not advertised for new users, they only get the option of KDE
- No beta of the GNOME Live CD
- Not as well integrated into the DE
- The tools aren’t as “polished”. Ie. when a drak* tool needs to install something it pops ups 3-4 small windows informing about what it’s doing – none of them has a progressbar, and sometimes they say the same. Also the windows aren’t refreshed as often, but block and become unresponsive.
- Although urpmi got improved it still doesn’t say how much it needs to download. Something other distros have had for ages, and that I opened a wishlist bug for in 2005
- I haven’t installed one 2008.0 machine without various issues (sound stopping to work, performance bad, sound not working properly, X driver not set up properly)
- Live CD set up autologin by default without asking about it
- No Mandriva Flash GNOME (except GUADEC edition)

Trolls and flames in the comments will be deleted.

Update:
Note that I made no conclusion on which distro was better. I’m simply attempting to write a simple and incomplete comparison. The comparison is also mostly based upon first impressions, and should be treated as such.

I’m also not saying I’m switching camps for those wondering ;).

Concerning GNOME Flash. Well, maybe that isn’t really fair. Flash is good, and GUADEC flash is good. However I did get annoyed that only a KDE was made available.
Also, no, the point isn’t /really/ that Mandriva prefers KDE for LiveCDs – it so happens I prefer GNOME and thus see GNOME as a plus.

When I talk about “better” integration, what I mean is basically that Ubuntu is more centered around the desktop environment than Mandriva is (which can be good and bad I guess).
In Mandriva to configure stuff you would use drakconf, in Ubuntu most is in the GNOME System menu. Granted, some stuff from Mandriva is available there too, but Ubuntu has everything.
However, Mandriva has, like stated, tools for just about everything. Ubuntu does not. They’re quite differently structured. The Ubuntu tools look like they are /made/ for GNOME and part of GNOME (which I guess they are). The Mandriva tools look like a seperate app, which they are, and is probably also good considering the wealth of tools available. It just feels a bit easier to just System -> Administration and select whatever you want to do there. Don’t get me wrong, Mandrivas GNOME is good. Kudos goes to Mandriva for giving a GNOME LiveCD, I’d just like to see it better marketed (not like on mandriva.com right now where you only get the option of KDE. KDE is good but imho you should be able to chose, as Mandriva One now appears to be the preferred version to download).

Concerning autologin, if I recall correctly, the previous versions of Mandriva One did not activate autologin by default, which is why I reacted negatively to that this time.

Update 2:
Yes, urpmi displays how much it needs to /install/. But it doesn’t (and can’t, since the information isn’t available in the current hdlist formats) display how much it needs to download. Which is often a good deal less than what it will take when installed.

Posted in Mandriva, Personal, Ubuntu | 15 Comments »

drakSimpleConf

Saturday, September 16th, 2006

I’ve been thinking of a method of creating simple configuration UIs.

Take the following config file:
RunMode = Inetd
AuthMode = Closed
Restricted = true

To create a simple configuration GUI for this I would write something like this:
filename is /etc/example.conf
setting RUNMODE can be (Inetd, Daemon)
setting AUTHMODE can be (Closed, Open)
option RunMode is RUNMODE with name "Run mode" and tooltip "Which mode to run in"
option AuthMode is AUTHMODE with name "Authentication mode" and tooltip "Which mode to use for authentication"
option Restricted is BOOLEAN with name "Enable restriction" and tooltip "Enable this if you want to enable restriction of user rights"

The initial filename option selects which file the config file is.
The first “setting” defines a type of entry in the config file that can be either of the value “Inetd” or “Daemon”. This would create a drop-down widget where you can select “Inetd” and “Daemon”.
The second setting defines the same for “Closed” and “Open”.
The first “option” defines that the option in the config file “RunMode” is of the type “RUNMODE” and the name of the option that is displayed in the GUI is “Run mode” and it has a tooltip saying “Which mode to run in”
The second is the same.
The third one defines that the option “Restricted” is of the predefined type “BOOLEAN” (which is predefined to be true/false, this creates a checkbox instead of a drop-down box).

Now begin your slaughtering. This is still just an idea. There is no code yet. What do you think of the concept of creating a whole configuration GUI for an app using a single file like this? I’m thinking it would be okay for daemons and such.
What do you think of the syntax? I just grabbed it out of my head today and thought it might work. I want the syntax to be simple and human-readable. The point is that you should be able to hack together a GUI for any program with a simple configuration file in a few minutes.

Flame me.

Posted in drakSimpleConf, Mandriva, Random | 5 Comments »

Italian ssh tips translation

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006

Now this is quite cool, Davide Duina (I think I spelled it right! :) of http://mandrakeitalia.org/ has posted an Italian translation of my SSH tips and tricks.

Original at: http://zerodogg.iamaturtle.org/index.php?type=docs&page=sshtips
Italian at: http://www.mandrakeitalia.org/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=151

Posted in Mandriva, Personal, Projects | No Comments »

Where is the madness police?!

Friday, December 16th, 2005

Okay, I was just made aware of the Brazillian Mandriva store by Claudio. The DARNED THING USES ASP! AFAIK it isn’t Mandriva that runs it (duh), but STILL!
For a little more clarification:

[0 zerodogg@drizzt html]$ HEAD mandrivastore.com.br
...junk...
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
...junk...
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Someone tell me I’m dreaming! *cries*

Posted in Bugs :(, Mandriva, Politics | 3 Comments »

*yawn*

Friday, October 14th, 2005

Sooo, plane leaves in ~2 hours and I’ve had, let me see, 0 hours, 0 minutes and 0 seconds of sleep this night. Mmm…

Posted in Personal, Random, SkoleLinux | No Comments »

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