Awesome Linux

Pidgin GTalk "mail.google.com" Certificate Issue

2011-12-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Here is how I dealt with connection problems this morning using Pidgin. I am writing this in hopes other people with this problem can benefit from my stumbled-upon fix.

This morning my router stopped working around 2am (much to my annoyance because this interrupted other things). But it was only a partial failure. The wireless stopped working. It still presented an active access point, but nothing could connect to the access point, despite everything else looking okay. (I tried to laptops and one cellphone. Nothing worked.)

However wired connections partially worked. Some machines seemed to have decent Internet access but very slow response times. My main desktop worked alright, except that Pidgin seemed to have trouble connecting to GTalk.

To enable Wireless back for other devices, I power-cycled the Router, which seemed to fix the problem. Wireless came back and I proceeded to debug Pidgin with GTalk. Important note: I did NOT reboot my desktop during the network down/up cycle, which I believe lead to problems later.

I began to debug the Pidgin GTalk problem. The details seemed to be this (taken from the console debug output):

proxy: Error connecting to gmail.com:5222 (Connection timed out).

I began investigating, and fiddling with the settings. At one time I managed to get a connection by setting the account connection security to "Use old-style SSL". However then I received this message once a connection was partially (successfully) established, in brief:

Verify certificate for "mail.google.com":

Finger (SHA1):
59:29:78:a7:2a:90:61:f7:0a:d7:c4:4c:4d:44:9d:cf:25:8c:d5:34

I became really puzzled at this. While investigating the problem, I was forced to reboot for another reason. Upon reboot, Pidgin worked perfectly again. I restored the setting back to default and now I'm writing this post.

All I can figure is that my Router had a hiccup, probably some corrupt data table and partial crash (the wireless going down), but the power-cycling fixed that. However I needed to reboot my system to clear the DNS and other Network info cache. (You can do this without rebooting, but I don't know the commands off hand, so it was quicker to reboot.)

2011-11-12T01:28:00.000-08:00

Sigh. I'm posting in annoyance/anger here. This is just a (short) rant. I like OpenOffice (I mean LibreOffice, but that name is lame and sucks) as an Office Suite, but MY GOD their search-and-replace dialogue sucks mountains of hairy wet ass. I cannot fucking click in the text field with my fucking mouse. If I type something that remotely resembles previous text, once I move my focus from the text input field to one of buttons, it IMMEDIATELY auto-selects previously entered text.

It is abjectly and utterly useless. I have to use another application to do search-and-replacement of text in, especially if it is regular expression. This is so fucking sad, because I know I had this problem years ago with the program. I would have thought they'd have fixed this by now.

Okay, /rant.

Force Enable KDE File Chooser Previews (KFileDialog)

2011-10-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post. In Kubuntu 11.10, running KDE 4.7.2 (and possibly earlier) I have noticed a problem. When using the File-Choosing dialog, I click enable Aside Preivew, which works for the time. Once I choose a file and the dialog closes, if I reopen the File Chooser, the preview option is disabled again and I have to manually re-enable it.

This is a quick fix for force enabling Previews in QT/KDE's File Chooser (KFileDialog).

Open the configuration file '~/.kde/share/config/konquerorrc'. Find the section marked '[KFileDialog Settings]'. Find the line which reads "Previews=false" and change it to "Previews=true".

Save the file and exit it. Restart whatever program you want this to take effect it, and Aside Previews should be enabled by default.

IF YOU NEED HELP EDITING CONFIGURATION FILES UNDER LINUX, please see this link: http://awesomelinux.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-edit-configuration-file.html

Ubuntu Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard (Part 2)

2011-10-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

I reported on problems with Ubuntu Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard, and now in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric the problem has resurfaced. But the solution is slightly different than before.

This solution is using for the Logitech diNovo Edge in Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Symptoms are the bluetooth-device-manager kept prompting me to connect to the device but nothing I did ever worked.

Here is the solution / fix for getting the keyword to work. The source for this information is here.

The problem is in the udev rules. In 11.04 there was a special line in '/lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules' for Logitech devices that started with KERNEL=="hidraw*".

This is now missing in 11.10. This fix adds this line into another file instead which makes things work.

Edit the file: /lib/udev/rules.d/62-bluez-hid2hci.rules

(If you need help editing a file, see bottom section.)

Change this line:

# Logitech devices
KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

I have made the changed sections BOLD. Save the changes to the file. I also turned bluetooth off from the icon in the system tray.

After making this change, I turned on my wireless keyboard, unplugged it's bluetooth dongle, plugged it back in, paired the keyword with the dongle, and a few seconds later it worked. I did not even have to reboot.

IF YOU NEED HELP EDITING CONFIGURATION FILES UNDER LINUX, please see this link: http://awesomelinux.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-edit-configuration-file.html

Shadows Removed / Missing in KDE 4.7

2011-08-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

Overview: Window / Widget shadows are suddenly and COMPLETELY gone in KDE 4.7.

Background Info: So I haven't blogged in a while about any personal issues with the KDE 4 series, because by and large I like what they are doing and I've come to accept the things I don't.

However I just upgraded my system to KDE 4.7 and I noticed a feature is gone that, initially I really hated, but now I really really like. Shadows. Yep, shadows on my windows. Not quite sure how to describe it but my transparent console

Details: Actually, the shadows are both missing and removed, while still present and there. (Big flub-up on KDE's part, IMO. Thumbs way down this time.)

Please see http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/08/shadow-and-no-oxygen/

All users who do not use our default Oxygen widget style and window decoration might have had an unpleasant surprise after upgrading to 4.7. Our old shadow effect provided generic shadows for all windows no matter which widget style or decoration is used. In case the decoration provided its own shadow that one was preferred.
The new shadow system does not provide any generic shadow. The compositor is just providing a service to the widget style for rendering the shadow. This means that the widget style has to implement support for the new shadows.

So, apparently they are still here, but I cannot find any information on getting the shadows back. Neither from their new system or from the Oxygen theme, or whatever. I'm disappointed.

A big thumbs down from me.

Beta Gimp 2.7.x Segment Fault problem and workaround

2011-06-05T20:40:00.001-07:00

I have been using the beta version of the Gimp 2.7.x series and I encountered a problem I want to share. Obviously I also want to share the workaround solution.

Long story short, the program will have a segment fault if it is run and the directory ~/.gimp-2.7 does NOT exist. So make sure it is there. I had deleted mine.

Similar symptoms occur if the file ~/.gimp-2.7/contextrc DOES exists. So make sure it does not.

KMix Lockups, Freezes, and Performance

2011-02-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

Recently I experienced serious problems with using KDE's audio system, which I eventually tracked to the program 'kmix.' The symptoms were extremely slow response on volume-changes and mutes. By slow, I mean taking a full minute or more to apply. Also, it was taking up 100% of the CPU sometimes for minutes at a time (when it was not responding). Thank goodness I have a quad-core.

I am not sure if the problem is the result of using KDE 4.6.0 or not, since it is very recent and it might have introduced some bugs.

Regardless, I eventually figured a solution to the problem: Quit kmix. You may need to actually kill the program. Next move/delete/rename the folder 'kmix' in the folder '~/.kde/share/apps/. Restart kmix, and it will recreate a default '~/.kde/share/apps/kmix/' folder with default settings.

This fixed my problem. Hopefully it will help with yours.

Hamachi for Linux / Ubuntu

2011-01-20T19:08:00.000-08:00

Hamachi is a Zero-Configuration VPN (Virtual Private Network) service. Unfortunately getting the Hamachi service to work well in Linux requires a few steps, and until recently it was more difficult. Here is my guide for how I get it working with as few hurdles and hassles as possible:

There is a progam called 'Haguichi', which supports the Hamachi protocol and is an up to date program. It has a PPA available for Ubuntu. Go and add the PPA to your system, and then update and then install Haguichi.

Hamachi backend itself must be installed, which must be downloaded, compiled and installed. You can grab the official legacy client from here: http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/. To compile it, extract and run 'sudo make' which will auto-install.

After that, the program 'tuncfg' must be started. Running 'sudo tuncfg' on command will do this. (NOTE: That is 'tuncfg' NOT 'tunecfg'.)

If you have connection problems, try disabling your computer's firewall. This is probably blocking the Hamachi port. (I have no idea which port it uses.)

Ubuntu Graphics Session Fix after botched Kernel Upgrade

2010-11-23T12:20:00.001-08:00

Overview
This post is about restoring graphics to your Linux Desktop session if you install some kernel updates that don't go so well. Particularly, ones that fail with your graphics drivers.

Quick Steps
If you get error message (when trying to upgrade kernel packages or kernel drivers): "Skipping (driver build) at this time because kernel-source is missing." Try the following steps:

Note: `uname -r` is a commandline option which will auto-substitute your kernel version and architecture into the install command. If installing via a GUI, just use the info output from running the console command `uname -r`.

sudo apt-get install linux-source-`uname -r` linux-headers-`uname -r`

If this does not automatically cause your nvidia drivers to compile, cause a manual install with:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

If that still doesn't work, try uninstalling and reinstalling nvidia-current.

Background
Today I noticed there were some kernel updates in Ubuntu, but they had been kept back. So I decided to manually install them, since they did not appear to be causing any package conflicts. I do updates from command line with 'apt-get' (because I'm awesome that way *wink*). While installing the held-back packages, being kernel updates, it tried to accommodate my Nvidia graphics drivers.

Apparently, this failed. I noticed the error on the console, and immediately downgraded my kernel back to the previous versions. But alas, it did no good. I rebooted and was confronted with a text-only machine. Now, I'm fine with this, since I spend a lot of time on console. (Screen, vim, ssh, and elinks are usually all I need for most rescue operations. Sometimes rtorrent, wget, and curl are handy too.)

After trying to get the packages to jive well together, I gave up trying to juggle the kernel packages and instead focused on the Nvidia drivers. I tried installing the nvidia-current package provided by the Ubuntu repositories. (I was running a later version from a PPA.). This failed, but triggered the same error.

"Skipping (driver build) at this time because kernel-source is missing." Now, I've seen this error before. So I quickly installed the linux-source-`uname -r` package. This did not quite do the trick, and I have been around long enough to know that the source-packages often require the header packages as well. So I install linux-headers-`uname -r` package.

Once installed that, I didn't even have to do anything. The system automatically compiled the missing nvidia drivers and installed them for me. A quick reboot later, and now I am blogging about this simple solution.

How to replace Pidgin certificates (the GUI method)

2010-11-18T16:12:00.000-08:00

This morning I tried Pidgin and got an error message saying:

"Unable to validate certificate. The certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com could not be validated."

For the record, the problem isn't on Pidgin's end – it's a misconfiguration of the MSN servers. Here is a short term fix until the problem on Microsoft's end is fixed.

How to replace your certificate (the GUI method)

Go to pidgin's Tools->Certificates. Remove the old certificate. Don't close this window yet. (You can, but it is easier to not).

With your browser, go to https://omega.contacts.msn.com. It will give you "Directory Listing Denied"error.

With Firefox, click on the lock symbol in the lower right corner. This will display dialog box about the page info. Click the button "View Certificate." On the window that pops up, go to the Details tab. Click on the "Export" button to export the certificate to a file.Call it whatever you like.

Now, go back to the pidgin Tools->Certificates dialog. Click the "Add" button to add the newly exported certificate. I had to specify the hostname as explicitly: omega.contacts.msn.com

This was the only way I could get it to work.

Harddrive Space Disappearance and Freespace

2010-11-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

Overview
This is just a quick list of places to look to free up space on your harddrive when using KDE. (In this article, I am dealing with version 4, but some of it does work for version 3 too.) This can be helpful if you ever suffer an anomaly of used space you just can't seem to locate and free up under the great KDE desktop.

Background Information
Sometimes rarely in Linux (running KDE) I receive the message that I'm running low on diskspace on my root (/) partition. (I only give it about 15 GBs total.) After emptying my Trash, most of the space on root (/) was still in use. So I began to dig around to find out the cause of this.

Akonadi
Size: 140.9 MB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/akonadi
Though I own a Droid X smartphone, I do not use any of KDE's utilities to synchronize my devices. So I was quite surprised to see it taking up that much space. Please note, this is not the location of the installed program, just some data it had accrued about me personally and stored in my home directory.

Nepomuk
Size: 378.2 MB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk
I have not used Nepomuk since it came out. (It is a fine service but I simply don't choose to use it.) It has been disabled forever on my system, and it was still disabled when I checked it this morning. Yet it was taking up quite a bit of space.

Thumbnails
Size: 4.6 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.thumbnails
Now this one makes sense. I collect literally tens-of-thousands of images and regularly browse them, so I'm not surprised this is so large. Still, it would be nice to specify a limit to the size of this folder.

Clearing out this folder took a bit of skill. I had over 100,000 files in this directory total, and even doing `rm .thumbnails/normal/*` threw a rarely seen error: "Argument list too long"

The simple solution is just to delete the sub folder 'normal' and 'large' inside of '.thumbnails'. I could tell you some nifty console commands to hack around this, but this works just fine.

Apt cache (a.k.a. the System Package Cache)
Size: 1.3 GB (on my system)
Location: /var/cache/apt/archives/
If you are not a seasoned and knowledgeable Linux user, chances are you don't know about this one. Whenever you install any new updates or packages through any number of GUI / Graphical front-ends (such as Synaptic or Software Management) or through command-line program like dpkg or apt, all downloaded files (called packages) have to be placed somewhere while downloading. This location varies a little between Linux distributions, like Ubuntu versus Red Hat. Under Ubuntu and Debian (and any Debian forks) are placed in /var/cache/apt/archives. This can become very full with lots of temporary download files. There are a couple of ways to clear this folder out. My favorite is simply from command line:

sudo apt-get clean

Wine
Size: 5.0 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.wine
Lastly is the Wine folder. I was pretty surprised by this one also. All my Windows applications are installed in non-home-directory locations and I haven't done much with Wine lately, so this folder should have been relatively small. After doing some quick checking, I found the folder (.wine/drive_c/users/MY_USER_NAME/Local Settings/Temporary Internet Files) to be the culprit. I suspect this came from updating a videogame of mine recently, since it had a multiple Gigabytes to download and install.

Hope that helps you clear up some space on your home-directories and root partitions.

Update: Added the Wine section.

MPlayer / SMPlayer problems in Ubuntu 10.10

2010-10-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

I'm current having some small problems with SMPlayer in Ubuntu 10.10. I'm not sure what the cause is but I'm fairly certain it relates to the recent switch to Kernel Direct-Rendering-Management (DRM) and Nvidia drivers. I say this partly because I am noticing other small video glitches but for the most part they are not worth even mentioning.

However specifically there seems to be problems with trying to use VDPAU. (If you don't know what that is, in a nutshell it is letting your videocard's CPU, often called a GPU, do video playback/decoding for you, which is faster than using your main CPU as well as leaving the system CPU free for other tasks.)

While the problems with VDPAU are hard to pin down (I'm having trouble finding an exact bug report to list here), I have found a small fix to help with my other SMPlayer problems.

I have started using daily compiled MPlayer packages from this PPA.

https://launchpad.net/~motumedia/+archive/mplayer-daily

It seems to have helped with smoothing playback in other areas where I might get lockups when I would use some more exotic SMPlayer/MPlayer feature.

Rip Subtitles from YouTube (and Google Video)

2010-10-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

Rip Subtitles from YouTube (and Google Video)

Today I needed to extract some subtitles from a cute video I found on YouTube, and I tracked down this piece of software that lets you do it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/google2srt/

It's a very simple program, but it does the job. Simply give it the URL of the target video, optionally give it a file-path to where you want the output SRT (subtitle) file to be saved, and hit Read. It will present you with a list of the subtitles it can find at that URL address. Check the subs you want, and hit GO. It will save them for you.

It saves the subs in SRT, which is a generic and well supported Subtitle format. In the case of most video players, if you name the SRT file exactly the same name as the video file, when opening the video in a media-player the program usually automatically detects the subs and enables them for you. (Or if your media-player doesn't, you should get a better one that does, like SMPlayer or VLC.)

How to Edit a Configuration File

2010-09-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

HOW TO EDIT A CONFIGURATION FILE

New users to Linux may have trouble editing configuration text files at first. I'll try to be simple, and this guide is for people using Gnome or KDE.

The simplest way is using a user friendly program. In Gnome (which is normal Ubuntu), the default text editor is gedit. In KDE (in Kubuntu) it is Kate. Also, this is a protected system file, so you need to use special Administrator privileges before you can edit it. Don't worry. This is simply.

In this example I am showing how to open a BlueTooth configuration file, but it works for any other example configuration files.

KDE

In KDE, you need to find the "Run Command" option the Application menu. (The App menu is usually in the lower left-hand corner, with a colorful K-button.) In KDE4's new menu style, the "Run Command" is (currently) under the 'Computer' section, near the top of the small list. Find the option and click it.

In the input box that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

kdesu kate /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

The 'kdesu' program tells the system you want to run the text editor (kate) with Admin access. You will be prompted for your individual user password, which you enter. Then kate should open with a file ready for you. (This is the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules file which we told kate to open for us.) If this file does not open, you can open it manually by going to menu File -> Open... and then navigating to the '/' root directory, down to 'lib' and so on until you find the file ' 70-hid2hci.rules'.

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit Kate.

GNOME

In Gnome, first open the Terminal through the Application menu. (The App menu is usually in the upper left-hand corner, labeled as Applications.) On my system, it is under Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

In the input command window that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

gksu gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

The 'gksu' tells the system you want to run the text editor (gedit) with Admin access. You will be prompted for your individual user password, which you enter. Then gedit should open with a file ready for you. (This is the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules file which we told gedit to open for us.) If this file does not open, you can open it manually by going to menu File -> Open... and then navigating to the '/' root directory, down to 'lib' and so on until you find the file ' 70-hid2hci.rules'.

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit gedit. You can close the Terminal also.

Hope that helps.

Network Management Disabled

2010-09-05T22:39:00.000-07:00

I am surprised I have not mentioned this before. This is a recurrent bug that's been cropping up in KDE 4 since version 4.3 as far as I can tell. (It may have started later, so don't quote me on the exact date, and it might have nothing to do with KDE itself, and might be an Ubuntu thing.)

The symptoms are the computer boots, the desktop environment loads (Gnome, KDE, etc.) and there is no Internet, when there should be. You click on the Network Manager and it tells you "Network Management Disabled." Bug report here. This bug has come and gone for me for a while now.

The problem is an incorrectly configured configuration file. (Basically, this is a bug that should never have happened but it did. Thankfully it's easy to fix.)

Open this file /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state with Admin privileges, and make the following changes. (If you need help on editing a system text file / configuration file, see this Article for a simple New Users guide.)

NetworkingEnabled=false

NetworkingEnabled=true

Save the file and close it. There may be a system service you can restart, but I cannot recall it at this time. Just reboot and your network should return to normally.

2010-08-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

Source: I copied this article verbatim from http://www.unixmen.com/linux-distributions/4-ubuntu/1069-ppasearch-a-tool-that-search-and-add-ppa-repository-in-ubuntu-via-command-line

I am only keeping it as a personal backup here in case it moves. All credit goes to them for presenting this great tool.

PPASEARCH is a nice tool that search launchpad PPAs via command line and add them to Ubuntu repositories, it is available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

The use of PPAsearch is easy, just open terminal and type ppasearch .

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Open terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wrinkliez/ppasearch

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get  install ppasearch

Using PPASEARCH:

For example i want to search for deluge ppa, open terminal and type:

ppasearch deluge

You will got a list of PPAs that contain the package deluge, choose one by typing the number and confirm.

The EULA is sometimes only a one way deal

2010-08-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

I just read this post over here: http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/08/it-is-windows-world.html

And I knew it was something I just had to pass along here. The story summary is this: The article is about the person who wants to get a refund for the bundled Windows 7 copy that arrived on his computer. He read the manufacturer EULA (End User License Agreement) and it clearly states they will handle refunds for things like the software. So he calls them up and navigates through the phone-center-maze for multiple hours. He even goes as far as contacting the specific store he bought the item from. All say they do not do refunds for the software. He eventually calls the higher supervisors at ASUS back, and they flat out tell him they do not handle this, despite it being clearly written in their EULA that they do.

I like the poster's comment at the end. If we, the user, should break the EULA we can get our asses sued, but if the company decides to mess around with you, we the user are ... sore out of luck?

This is yet another reason why I, for entirely personal experiences and reasons, never buy ASUS products. I keep hearing great experiences from friends involving ASUS, but all of my numerous experiences with them have been various degrees of disaster and frustration. To be clear, I am not saying ASUS is the only company to do this. I know for a fact hundreds, if not thousands, would do the same in an instant. I'm just saying... well, it's ASUS. I don't buy from them.

This is another reason why Linux users should never ever have to buy a copy of Windows. 99% of us already have been forced to pay for some bundled copy of the software we neither want, nor can use, and certainly cannot refuse. I personally have been forced to pay for at least three bundled copies of Windows, and I sure has hell will never use them. It is for this reason I feel pride and triumphant when I use Windows products without paying for them. (Yeah, I do. Just try and sue me). At this point, I have more than paid for every copy of Windows I use.

KDE 4.5 Review: Bugs return!

2010-08-13T04:04:00.001-07:00

So I've been using KDE 4.5 since the evening it came out. I don't know what it is about every time the KDE claims "this is a stabilizing release" but it seems to be the opposite of my experience. This is easily the buggiest point release of KDE since their last "stabilizing release" of KDE 4.3.

Now admittedly, the list of bugs is small... but they are hitting my hard and frequently. Very frequently. Usually about 12 to 20 times a day. I am hoping (and I'm pretty certain) these bugs are just for my installation.

Konqueror: I use Konqueror as my file manager, and since the upgrade about twice an hour it has a total lockup/total freeze for a duration of anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds. It's pretty horrendous sometimes. It also won't let me close tabs on occasion. There have been some more minor but less frequent bugs but I lost track.

User management: I cannot add a new user to my system, at least not through the GUIs nicely provided by KDE. I wanted to add a new one so I could check his default Konqueror configuration settings against my own. BUT creating a user is proving problematic, since after I create one and set it's password, I switch sessions to log in with it. However, at the login screen it asks me to change the password (root required) it says. HOWEVER YOU CANNOT TYPE ANYTHING INTO THE BOX. At first I thought it was an error with my wireless USB keyboard, so grumbling I plugged in a wired keyboard, but it actually made it worse (the mouse cursor stopped working when I did that). So I cannot log in with the new user I created. That's.... pretty hilariously bad.

Plasma: Presenting all Windows is slow. I don't know why because everything else seems better. This is a pretty minor bug because it does not really impair functionality, mostly. Sometimes it is so slow the cursor doesn't reach the correct window in time when enter is pressed or the window is clicked

Klipper: It stays open after you select some previous entry. It stays this way unless you click it closed. Perhaps this is a feature?

Kubuntu KDE 4.5 Upgrade Problem and solution

2010-08-10T17:13:00.001-07:00

So I just did an dist-upgrade of my Kubuntu 10.04 system running KDE 4.4 to KDE 4.5. Upon a reboot, there was a problem. I had no desktop. Just a blank black screen.

So I began to dig around to see what the problem was.

SOLUTION
The solution was to install the package 'kubuntu-desktop' which triggered a group other packages to be installed (such as kdebase-workspace-bin, for example). This group turned out to have everything I was missing. I have NO idea why these packages were not install during the upgrade, but this has been a weird one. (During the past few days, when checking if I had any updates, I was presented with what looked like have available dist-upgrades to KDE 4.5, which would have resulted in some strange installations AND removals had I applied it. I can only assume this was because the packages in the repositories were being updated over a few days and thus the lists had some old and new mixes that didn't jive quite perfectly until all were updated.)

Also, during the install I failed to update the /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc file to the newest version (my fingers slipped on the keyboard, if you can believe it). I don't think this was the cause of my problems, but I did manually upgrade that just to make sure.

Noteably ktorrent is not available in the Kubuntu PPAs because of a version dependency. Strange. Hope they fix that soon.

Synergy configuration example

2010-05-21T00:09:00.000-07:00

For a year or more, I have been using the program called Synergy to control multiple computers from a single machine with a single keyboard and mouse. Synergy is available for most Linux distributions, but it is also interesting to note the original program has not been upgraded since 2006.

Synergy+ is a maintenance fork for implementing bug fixes to the original Synergy by Chris Schoeneman, which hasn't any source updates or new releases since 2006 (as of writing this). If you experience any odd problems with your Synergy that are not configuration bugs, try using Synergy+ instead.

My configuration of Synergy is slightly more complex than your average one. The main differences are that the top and bottom 5% of each screen are not shared, so you can safely use the buttons and window-controls in each corner without problems of jumping to adjoining screens. Also, I have a Logitech Revolution MX mouse, which has about 9 buttons. I have added mouse button configuration to make sure I can use Thumb buttons for Forward-History and Back-History. (Without this configuration, my machines were disconnecting from each other.)

In this example, I have two screens. Misty is on the Left, and Jenny is one the Right.

section: screens
Jenny:
Misty:
end
section: links
Jenny:
left(10,90) = Misty
Misty:
right(10,90) = Jenny
end
section: options
mousebutton(6) = keystroke(WWWBack)
mousebutton(7) = keystroke(WWWForward)
mousebutton(4) = ;
mousebutton(5) = ;
end

I hope this example configuration file is helpful to any viewers.

(And by the way viewers, connections with Synergy are not encrypted, meaning not secure. It is open to monitoring, so if you type something critical or secret, it can possibly be viewed. To secure Synergy, you should tunnel it through a secure connection, like SSH for example.)

Ubuntu Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard

2010-05-02T00:11:00.000-07:00

I use the Logitech diNovo Edge in Ubuntu/Kubuntu and I love it. When I installed Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid, this wireless keyboard failed to work. The bluetooth device manager kept prompting me to connect and pair the device with a PIN but nothing I did ever worked.

UPDATE/EDIT: This problem has been reported in version dating from 10.04 to 11.04. This solution works for those, but there is a slightly different solution for 11.10.

Here is the solution / fix for getting the keyword to work. The source for this information is here.

Edit the file: /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

(If you need help editing a file, see bottom section.)

Change this line:

# Logitech devices
KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

I have made the changed sections BOLD. I also turned bluetooth off from the icon in the system tray.

HOW TO EDIT THE FILE (for those who need help with this stage)

New users to Linux may have trouble editing text files at first. I'll try to be simple, and this guide is for people using Gnome or KDE.

KDE

In the input box that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

kdesu kate /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit Kate.

GNOME

gksu gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit gedit. You can close the Terminal also.

Hope that helps.

Google Still Not Evil

2010-04-29T05:34:00.001-07:00

I probably shouldn't be posting this, since I feel commenting on anything related to politics is foolish on the Internet, but I'm doing it anyway. (Perhaps I'll delete this post later.)

Google is Still Not Evil.

I hear people talk about this and to be honest, I try not to be disdainful of their thoughts but it's hard.

GMail: If you worry about Google reading your email when using Gmail, there's a solution: Don't use it. Good Lord people, it's a great free service, but you aren't required to use it.

Do be honest, it's basically impossible for your email to not be ready by any modest sized email provider now days. For spam purposes alone your email is scanned. Not to mention there are other things being watched for. About the only way you can be "safe in your privacy" is to run your own email service, and even then that won't be a guarantee. Email isn't very secure to begin with and people need to realize that.

But I'm not done here. Gmail is awesome, and it's free. Do you remember the days of 10MB inboxes? I sure do. Do you remember the days of abysmal email interfaces? Thank God Google came along and improved things. (Though some old companies still haven't got with the program of using anything beyond HTML 2.0 or HTML 3.2. I'm looking at you Yahoo.)

Google Search: If Google started censoring their stuff, people can always choose to use something else. Though they are censoring things now, but that's not because they want to but because Government's and independent Agencies ask them to (like the RIAA and MPAA).

Google Earth: Paranoid much? Get over yourselves. You can tell Google not to map your private residence. (I know at least two people that have done such.) But you have to be a private estate or some-such and if you whine about not having a private place... that's not their problem. As far as seeing them as Big Brother for mapping the whole earth, you are just being an anti-big organization paranoid person, because Lord knows many Governments and probably numerous companies have already done this. At least Google's been upfront and honest about it.

Google Phone GSP: You think that just because your phone has GSP, that suddenly now you can be found? Um... unless you had powers of invisibility, you could be found before, albeit it not as quickly. Your cellphone can be tracked by cellphone tower transmitters along, alone. Let's also not forget that Google Phone's are not the only ones with GSP. Numerous phones have them, from many companies and providers. Honestly, this point alone is just banal and so are those people who worry about it.

Google Phone: I have not heard this argument spoken much but some people, namely Steve Jobs, seems to think Google is in fact being evil because they entered the cellphone business. Umm.... Steve, aren't you just being juvenile because you now have to share the cellphone-industry sandbox? Seriously, Google has just as much right to venture into that industry as you did to make your portable music player. Nay, strike that. They had more rights, because they made (good) software, not hardware, whereas you often make both. Grow up Steve. Sometimes I respect you, and other times I wonder if you've gone off your medication.

Google Chrome: People worry about it being closed source. ... Wait, what? People worry about Chrome, but you don't worry about Internet Explorer, the Blackhole for Viruses and Security vulnerabilities? Or what about Safari? Opera? They are all closed source. Most people seem to single out Chrome for some reason as dangerous because it's closed source. Well, again, all I can say is you can always use another browser. There are plenty now, and if openness matters, you know where to go: www.getfirefox.com

I'm aware people worry that it watches your activity and possibly stores the information, in the supposed interests of providing better features and usability for you. If you don't like being watched and recorded however, get a different browser. Simple as that.

YouTube: This isn't mentioned by people when talking about how evil Google is becoming. That's probably because it's a point in their favor mostly. Google spends multiple millions of dollars a year to keep YouTube running, because that website has never made a single penny of profit. But they've done more than just keep it running. They've added numerous great features, most prominent among them being higher quality video. That's just awesome.

Conclusion
The list of great things Google provides we the people for free goes on and on. (Something that neither Apple nor Microsoft can boast. Certainly not for free, and in my opinion, not even with price disregarded.) Google contributes every single year to the free open source community, something you don't see Microsoft do very often and certainly not for the many early years of their history.

Honestly people, Google isn't forcing you to use their products and they are still free. If you are worried about misuse of power, you ought to be flipping outraged at Microsoft. You'd have trouble getting away from them and they sure has hell are not free. (For more information, check out http://techrights.org/)

In conclusion, because I don't want to talk about this anymore, I've yet to see one decent piece of convincing evidence to show that Google is Evil or becoming Evil.

Command to Logout / Shutdown / Restart KDE4

2010-04-12T04:52:00.001-07:00

There may be another easier way to do this, but this command will bring up a dialog box with the options to Logout / Restart or Shutdown KDE4.

qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.logout 1 -1 -1

This is useful for when Plasma crashes and will not restart. (I actually have no idea how to manually restart plasma.)

KDE Compositing Won't Enable

2010-04-10T04:50:00.001-07:00

Today, I started KDE and for some reason Compositing was disabled, and my System Settings icon was missing from its normal place in the KDE Menu. I could not re-enable Compositing. I suspect the problem is because of some recent software upgrades I loaded for KDE 4.4.2. Here is how I fixed my problem. Hopefully it will help others.

General Troubleshooting
To make sure there was no problem with my computer, I did a simple but easy test. I created a new user through KDE's system, and logged into that account. Everything worked fine. So, I knew it was a configuration file problem.

I could now compare the new account's config files (which reside in the an individual's home directory and typically start with a '.' or are stored in a directory starting with a '.'). Comparing the new account's config files against my own. I was able to eliminate quickly all of the non-KDE config files fairly quickly.

I made a backup of the .kde/ directory in my home directory, using a tar file. Then that directory, I used a simple divide-and-conquer technique for finding the troubled files. Instead of checking the over 100 config files from my directory, I simply copied the first half of the new account's config files over my own, and logged-out-logged-in to KDE to check if that fixed the problem. If not, I tried the other half, and repeating the eliminating half until I found the files the troublesome files.

Solution
The files in question was all prefixed with kwin. Had I guessed intelligently I would have tried these first. But simply overwriting all the kwin related files in ~/.kde/share/config/ with the newly created account files (which were probably created from defaults) fixed my problem. Compositing was restored and all I had to do was reset a few minor customizations I had before.

KDE 4.4 Feature: Drag to edge to Maximize

2010-03-17T03:13:00.000-07:00

I do not like the new feature in KDE 4.4 for dragging a window to top of the screen to maximize it. Here is how to disable this feature.

Open System settings -> Workspace Behavior -> Screen Edges

Now deactivate:
* Maximize windows by dragging them to the top of the screen

Thanks to commentors for the updated info.

Fix Pidgin's Google IM "Lost Connection with server" error

2010-03-10T14:13:00.000-08:00

(Please note this fix was some time ago with an older version of Pidgin, and older versions of Gtalk. Particularly the address 'talk.gmail.com' doesn't always work.)

Recently I encountered an old error in Pidgin, and here is my solution to it. While visiting a network at a local college, my Google IM account throws this error in Pidgin:

Lost connection with server: Connection reset by peer

Here is how to fix this.

From within the main Pidgin window, select the menu "Accounts"-> "Manage Acconts"
Select the Google IM account in question. Click the "Modify..." button.
Check the option: Force old (port 5223) SSL
Uncheck the option: Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams
Set Connect Port: 443
Set Connect Server: talk.google.com
Click the "Save" button and re-connect with your account.

Trouble Shooting
If you get a message asking you to accept a certificate, you have probably forgot to add the Connect Server address.

Ubuntu Linux software easy download support

2010-03-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

This is mostly a thought piece or commentary. One reason to run a very popular distribution of Linux is that it tends to be widely supported. Ubuntu is certainly one of the most popular Linux Distributions in the world.

Just today, I checked out the www.pidgin.im website and to my delight I found, under the Downloads section, an explicit area for Ubuntu. It had easy to do instructions for adding automatic Pidgin updates into your Ubuntu system. These updates are made possible by members of the community running their own complimentary APT repositories (PPAs under the Launchpad website), which Ubuntu helps provide with bandwidth, tools, tutorials, etc.

The APT system is one of the greatest inventions in computer software management history, and one of the absolutely greatest features of Linux. Ubuntu has helped foster spreading of the marvel and ease of the APT system.

So, the one line conclusion: The APT system is great (if you didn't already know) and Ubuntu is continuing too expand and make great use of it.

Firefox plugin support under Ubuntu

2010-02-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

So for some of you, this will be old news, but it was new to me.

In times (not so long) past, a major complaint concerning Linux was its plugin support for browsers. Namely, if you went to a website that needed, for example, QuickTime... Firefox would inform you that a certain plugin was missing and that's about as far as it would help. Installing the plugin (and anything else needed) would fall to the user, and sometimes that task was not easy.

Ubuntu continues to make the user experience better in their distribution, since they apparently have a solution to this problem. Ubuntu provides a package program called Ubufox which will assist users in automatically install plugins as necessary. It's a simple "Enter your password" and click Next solution, and doesn't get much smoother than that. I used this for the first time today and I didn't even have to restart Firefox. It just worked.

I haven't found something this nice since they automated Nvidia driver installation with the (KDE/Gnome)-Jockey program. Nicely done once again Ubuntu.

Firefox add-on/extension woes -- Corrupt profile

2010-02-19T03:28:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: I apologize for any strong language in the original post (listed below for history's sake). I was very frustrated at the time this was happening. The short version of this story is that I had serious Firefox profile and add-on corruption issues when I updated to a particular version of Firefox 3.6, and it drove me crazy.

I found a solution. Use the bleeding edge versions of Firefox in Linux. It is shockingly stable and works great 97% of the time, seriously. Plus it's sound-barrier-shatteringly fast compared to the current stable Firefox.

OLDER POST:

So I have literally done 3 and 1/2 hours of debugging Firefox 3.6 lately and all I have to show for it is certain knowledge which plugins are causing my profile to CONTINUALLY become corrupted.

Ever since Firefox reached 3.6, I have had corrupt profile problems. This is pretty annoying, I must say, since this only very rarely happened under 3.5. Now, it should be noted I use quite a few extensions/add-ons/plugins. About 20 currently. I used to utilize more in the past.

Now, I only know the profile is somehow corrupt because Firefox 3.6 simply REFUSES to start occasionally. I have rebuilt my profile probably literally 30 times by now.

So far, any single one of these following extensions (as of today) are corrupting my Firefox 3.6 profile:

Autopager
Download Helper
DownThemAll!
FireFTP
FireGestures
Xmarks

I'm currently looking into what I can do, since these are probably some of my favorite add-ons, especially Xmarks, FireGestures and Autopager. At this point, I'm going to start using the Firefox debugger more in depth and also doing code comparisons between these add-ons to determine if they have any similarities between them.

UPDATE/EDIT v1:

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news: I could not figure out how to use the firefox-dbg package (the firefox debugger). Also, the source code to comb through with the above listed add-ons is huge, and seeing as how I am not a Firefox add-on programmer, it would be quite a lot of work.

The good news: I pulled down the Mozilla Daily Builds of Firefox and the corruption bugs seem to be gone for now. (WAIT, no it is not. See update v2.) It is possible this profile corruption bug has been aggravated in the currently point release which just came down the Ubuntu apt-pipe this morning, because the latest build is version 3.6.2 and the problems seem to be gone. Let's hope this is pushed out to official quickly.

UPDATE/EDIT v2:

I spoke to soon. The bug remains even in the latest daily Mozilla. Fuck this shit. I'm moving to Chrome for the time being. I am still a mozilla Firefox fan, but I can't use this right now.

As it is, even though Chrome only supports about 70% of all the add-ons I use, that is more than I can current use in Firefox. This is embarrassing and infuriating.

UPDATE/EDIT v3:

Chrome is not the answer to my problems, though it has been an interesting experiment. I have switching back to Firefox 3.5 for the time being until I can confirm where the problem lies.

UPDATE/EDIT v4:
Use the bleeding edge versions of Firefox in Linux. It is shockingly stable and works great 97% of the time, seriously. Plus it's sound-barrier-shatteringly fast compared to the current stable Firefox. The bugs are gone.

Windows plagued by 17-year old escalation bug

2010-02-18T05:16:00.000-08:00

Back in June of last year, a vulnerability was discovered in the Windows Kernel which that allows untrusted users to take complete control of systems running most versions of Microsoft Windows.

The vulnerability resides in a feature known as the Virtual DOS Machine, which Microsoft introduced in 1993 with Windows NT, according to this writeup penned by Tavis Ormandy of Google. Using code written for the VDM, an unprivileged user can inject code of his choosing directly into the system's kernel, making it possible to make changes to highly sensitive parts of the operating system.

"You can in theory write to memory segments that are otherwise considered highly trusted and sensitive," said Tom Parker, a director in the security consulting services group at Securicon, a Washington, DC-based security practice. "So for example, malware could possibly use it to install a key logger."

The vulnerability exists in all 32-bit versions of Microsoft OSes released since 1993, and proof-of-concept code works on the XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, and 7 versions of Windows, Ormandy reported.

Ormandy said the security hole can easily be closed by turning off the MSDOS and WOWEXEC subsystems. The changes generally don't interfere with most tasks since they disable rarely-used 16-bit applications. He said he informed Microsoft security employees of the vulnerability in June.

"Regrettably, no official patch is currently available (then late January 2010)," he wrote. "As an effective and easy to deploy workaround is available, I have concluded that it is in the best interest of users to go ahead with the publication of this document without an official patch."

Microsoft security officials - who are already working double-duty responding to a potent Internet Explorer bug used to attack Google - said they are looking in to Ormandy's advisory and are not aware of attacks that target the reported vulnerability.

Early this month, Microsoft did finally put out a security update patch to this bug, more than 6 month after it was reported. Laughably in standard Microsoft quality and style, this update promptly crippled some systems with the notorious Blue Screen of Death. The systems thus falls into a reboot loop. The only way to solve the reboot looping or BSOD is by removing the patch... or such was the conclusion of thread pertaining to the issue on the MS support forums.

And people wonder why I still claim Windows isn't a very secure OS.

Microsoft Windows bugs that could be fixed, but won't be

2010-02-07T01:30:00.000-08:00

This is just a list of the bugs I observe in Microsoft Windows that are still popping up, more than 10 years after viable solutions having been discovered. (In the case of some bugs, the time is even longer). The list is short right now but I will update it as I find more, which shall doubtless occur in time.

The follow Microsoft Windows bugs that still exist because they don't care enough about you as customers to fix them. Instead they'd rather kowtow to the RIAA and MPAA with useful system performance leeching software you never wanted and will ONLY inconvenience you. Yeah, way to go guys. Give the people stuff they'd riot about if most people knew or understood it, but never fix real problems for them.

Virtual Memory running low / running out. [Confirmed since Windows XP, until currently today (2010-02-06) with Windows 7]. It should be noted this still occurs on machines equipped with tons of memory.
File System Fragmentation (with NTFS and/or FAT32). [Confirmed since Windows 2000 until Windows 7]. Let's not even start on the abysmal performance of Microsoft File Systems.
Rebooting (still too frequently). Need I say more? Every single update that is security related requires an update, and not just those. Too much I tell you, especially for a system that is so horribly insecure.

This List is not necessarily Bugs, though they are still problems that COULD and SHOULD have been fixed decade(s) ago.

Slow Windows Update Downloads. There is no excuse for this. Honestly, none. Not anymore anyway.
Slow Windows Update Execution. I really forget how long these can take sometimes and just accept this as normal. It's pretty ridiculous when I take a moment to notice it.

Modify / Disable Logitech Mouse Search Button

2010-02-05T01:16:00.000-08:00

Overview
On some computer mice with extra buttons, some buttons will trigger a search commend. In Ubuntu, clicking this button will just open your browser to your default search engine. Here are details on how to make sure you have control of your mouse button, so it does not bug the hell out of you.

Background Details
Until recently, I was never plagued by this truly abysmal feature. I had remapped this little button my Logitech MX to be "go up a directory" which I frequently used in my file manager and image viewer. It was very handy.

But on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, suddenly my wonderful mouse was cursed with this abysmal feature. The source is your Desktop environment.

Disabling The Feature
In KDE 4.4.2, go to System Settings -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Settings -> khotkeys.

Find the option for Search and disable whatever key is set.

I hope that helps all of you.

Finding the Button Key Code (Optional)
Sometimes it useful to determine what your mouse-button's keycode is. For this, we use the program 'xev.' ('xev' is part of the X-Windows system under Linux, so chances are you probably already have it on your Linux machine and do not need to install it).

Open a console, and enter the xev command. It will dump a lot of information to your terminal. Simply click the button you are curious about, and then carefully close the small graphical window that popped up. (Do this by only moving your mouse over the window-manager boards of the window, not the content area of the window, if you can. If you do move your mouse over the content area, you will see a lot more info output to your terminal, which will be slightly more work to comb through.)

Here is some sample output (from my system):

.....
FocusIn event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyAncestor

KeymapNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
keys: 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0

KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 25847246, (258,7), root:(264,28),
state 0x0, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 25847246, (258,7), root:(264,28),
state 0x8, keycode 111 (keysym 0xff52, Up), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

MappingNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
request MappingKeyboard, first_keycode 8, count 248

MappingNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
request MappingKeyboard, first_keycode 8, count 247

KeyRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 25847332, (258,7), root:(264,28),
state 0x0, keycode 225 (keysym 0x1008ff1b, XF86Search), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

PropertyNotify event, serial 38, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
atom 0x187 (_NET_WM_ICON_GEOMETRY), time 25847344, state PropertyNewValue

PropertyNotify event, serial 38, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
atom 0x187 (_NET_WM_ICON_GEOMETRY), time 25847693, state PropertyNewValue

ClientMessage event, serial 38, synthetic YES, window 0x1800001,
message_type 0xfe (WM_PROTOCOLS), format 32, message 0xff (WM_DELETE_WINDOW)
... # This was the end of the output.

In this case, my system was seeing that pressing this small button triggered approximately three key sequences. The two I had program (Alt+Up in this case), and also something called XF86Search. This is the dreaded name for this abysmal feature.

Firefox 3.6 for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

2010-02-01T04:36:00.001-08:00

This news is a bit old, but Firefox 3.6 is out now. For Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, this new version is not in the official repositories yet. Here is a way to install it for yourself.

For those who don't like to download and run the files straight from the getfirefox.com website, here is an apt repository for Ubuntu which works well.

The group's website is here: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-stable

They have instructions there for adding this software repo to your system, but basically you do the follow.

1) Close down Firefox completely. This includes all download and add-on windows.

2) Add these lines to your apt-sources list. You can do this by editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list or adding them through whatever graphical package manager you use (such as KPackageKit or Synaptic).

# Firefox Stable Channel Packages
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu karmic main

3) Add the repositories apt-authentication keys to your system, and thus help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Running this command on a console will do it for you.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com CE49EC21

4) Refresh/Update your apt lists. (This downloads the newly listed software). You can install it by using whatever graphical package manager you use (such as KPackageKit or Synaptic) or from a console with this command:

sudo apt-get update

5) Install the program Firefox. Not firefox-3.6 (which won't really give you anything). You can install it by using whatever graphical package manager you use (such as KPackageKit or Synaptic) or from a console with this command:

sudo apt-get install firefox

There. You are done. Under KDE, you should be able to just click the firefox icon in the apps menu and in all Linux system you should be able to just run the command 'firefox' to load the browser. Happy browsing.

KDE 4.3 Fails to Load after System Update (Solution)

2010-01-21T19:09:00.000-08:00

After installing my system updates yesterday, KDE 4.3 failed to load upon reboot this morning. It boots until it reaches the KDE login screen (with KDM) but it will let me log in from there at all.

The last updates installed were:

Package: xserver-common, version 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4.1
Package: xserver-xorg-core, version 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4.1

Though I suspect that the recent updates to gcc/g++ and libc/libstdc++ may have also affected this. I can't be sure.

Either way, I don't know exactly what the problem was, but here is the solution I found. My '.Xauthority' file in my home directory was the problem. I don't know what was wrong with it, but after I cleared that file of all contents, KDM let me log in normally. I hope this fix works for anyone else.

NetBeans with native OS Look and Feel

2010-01-12T03:53:00.000-08:00

I have my own system color preferences, mostly low contrast and dark, in order to be gentle on my eyes. I know Java's programs tend to have good integration into the native "Look and Feel" of the working Operating System.

I have been trying out NetBeans recently on Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic and I had not been able to get the native colors to be enabled, until just tonigh.

NetBeans needs to be invoked with the following command argument --laf .

To get GTK/QT Look and Feel working, run NetBeans with this command argument:

netbeans --laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel

VirtualBox wins an award for Best Technology of 2009 from InfoWorld

2010-01-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

InfoWorld has published it's opinions on this year's best technologies, and Sun's VirtualBox 3.1 is one. They find it to be a compelling high performance, cross-platform virtualization software alternative to VMware Workstation, noting that VirtualBox definitely supersedes this competitor in scalability.

VirtualBox 3.x supports up to 32 virtual CPUs per VM, while VMware Workstation supports just 4. "Add to this improved snapshot capabilities and 2-D acceleration for virtualized applications, and you have a solution nipping at VMware's heels in the general desktop virtualization space," writes InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy.

Another feature highlighted is VirtualBox's teleportation capability. The command-line function allows users to use a simple syntax to move a VM running under VirtualBox on one system and "teleport" it to another VirtualBox system, all the while preserving the VM's runtime state.

The most remarkable feature of VirtualBox is the speed with which it has developed into a real competitor in the desktop virtualization market. "In a little over a year, Sun has turned this relatively unknown fledgling from an obscure German software developer (Innotek) into a potent threat," observes Kennedy. "Our advice to VMware (and Microsoft): Be afraid. Be very afraid."

InfoWorld article: http://www.infoworld.com/print/105458

Convenient Audio Converter for Linux

2010-01-08T01:13:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered a handy audio conversion program that does not have much publicity (mostly because the program is written by a French person, and not covered in any English websites I could readily find).

The program is called XCFA (X Convert File Audio). It supports a wide range of conversion for input and output formats, and when using it under Ubuntu, it offers the option to (attempt to) automatically install any missing dependencies (such as support for FLAC, AAC, etc). It has additional features besides conversion, but I won't cover those here.

The general use is to start the program, go to the Files tab, and import the music you want to convert. It analyzes the input files and presents you with your options for conversion. (If you open a lot of files, it can be a little slow, but it's fast when opening just a few.) It's pretty straightforward and this is one of the nicer audio conversion tools I have used since dBpoweramp back in Windows. (I would not quite call this dBpoweramp for Linux, but it's the closest I have used in years, and certainly a viable alternative.)

Included is a picture of me using it to convert a bunch of my flac files to MP3s.

It appears to be available in Ubuntu in version 9.10 Karmic or later, which does not surprise me too much as the program is fairly new.

Virtualbox + Games = Solution to last major hurdle?

2010-01-03T19:43:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post. This is probably old news to many of you, but I continue to have high hopes for VirtualBox solving the Gaming issue with Non-Windows system (i.e. Linux). My hope is that using VirtualBox, people will eventually be able to simply play their Windows videogames in Linux.

There are people already dabbling with this idea and things continue to improve.

Here are a couple of articles talking about success stories with gaming through VBox:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualbox-3-directx.html
http://vmetc.com/2009/07/18/video-of-working-windows-directx-games-in-virtualbox-302-on-ubuntu-904/

These articles are somewhat old and VirtualBox has already released newer versions with even more 3D acceleration support. According to some of the information I have seen about porting videogames to Linux, one of the biggest hurdles is the 3rd party applications used. This is frequently things like login software, sound systems, or anti-cheating. These are often proprietary, totally closed source, random applications that can be really a problem for porting.

Using VirtualBox, it lets Windows handle everything but the direct video rendering, which is passed up to the host OS, where it is offloaded to the resident GPU. Assuming this pass-through can be done with minimal performance loss, this option for gaming is basically awesome, since it lets Windows handle all the nasty software pitfalls.

I remember when I learned about Virtualization software years ago, and naively thought I would be able to play my videogames through it. Now several years later, this is slowly becoming a reality. Using VirtualBox, the Linux community might be able to overcome much of the last major hurdle for Linux adoptation into the Desktop Market. Namely, gaming.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Nvidia-settings parse fail with xorg.conf

2009-11-17T02:50:00.000-08:00

There is a bug in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic with the default /etc/X11/xorg.conf involving Nvidia. If you try running 'kdesu nvidia-settings' or 'gksu nvidia-settings', then try to save with "Save to x confguration file" button, but receive the error:

Failed to parse existing X config file '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'

I found the problem by running:

sudo nvidia-settings 2>/dev/null

VALIDATION ERROR: Data incomplete in file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Undefined Device "(null)" referenced by Screen "Default Screen".

Erreur de segmentation

My default /etc/X11/xorg.conf looks like this:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
DefaultDepth 24
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

To fix the problem, just remove the Section "Screen" part. IF YOU NEED HELP EDITING CONFIGURATION FILES UNDER LINUX, please see this link: http://awesomelinux.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-edit-configuration-file.html

The final version (before you edit it with the nvidia-settings program) should look like this:

Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

Tab Complete with Bash Functions

2009-09-20T03:01:00.000-07:00

About two years ago I had trouble figuring out how to program bash shell script functions to use tab-completion options. Here is what I learned, hopefully it will help someone out there, someday.

How to programming TAB completion into bash functions, programs and other such things.

Minimum Requirements
Here are the minimum requirements for BASH tab completion.
Code:

# 'local' can only be used within a function, exclude it if not using a function
COMPREPLY=()
local cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
local opts="--whatever --tabbing --options --you --want"
COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W "${opts}" -- ${cur}))

You need one more line after this somewhere in the file, usually after your function:

complete -F "function_name" -o "default" "function_name"
# Replace function_name with your function

Example
A simple example with the current code:

Code:

function sd
{
# 'local' can only be used within a function, exclude it if not using a function
COMPREPLY=()
local cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
local opts="--whatever --tab --options --you --want to have!"
COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W "${opts}" -- ${cur}))
... # more bash code
}
complete -F "sd" -o "default" "sd"
# complete -F "sd" -o "nospace" "sd" ## Use this if you do not want a space after the completed word

Slighty Advanced
You can manipulation the string input however you want, just make sure you clear COMPREPLY, and grab the current command prompt info, and append them using compgen.

Wacom Draw Tablet under X-Windows

2009-08-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

Problems with Monitor and Draw Tablet Screen
I have been using my draw tablet for about a year in Linux. While Ubuntu now makes the installation as easy as a KDE/X-Windows session restart, I still have some problems. Over the years I have tried every option I can think of to get things "perfect" but nothing has quite worked. But I have managed a workable solution for when I draw, so I will share it.

If anyone knows a better solution that what I am have here, please feel free to comment.

My System
I use an Nvidia 9400 GT with my Dell 2407WFPHC and my Wacom Cintiq 12WX CRT. I also use the Nvidia provided graphical configuration program for my display. (The package is called nvidia-settings. The program shares the same name.)

Using the Nvidia program, I have the following options:

Disable
Separate X screen
TwinView

Let's talk about them.

Separate X Screen
This is pretty straightforward. X-Windows treats the displays like separate X-screens. But for me, this option has had major problem since KDE 3.5 until even now in KDE 4.3 (and every version of Xorg in between). X-Windows does indeed create an X-screen on each device. But when using this, KDE creates a session on Screen 0, but fails to create a session on Screen 1. I had hoped that KDE 4.3 would have added this feature, now that they have improved Multiple Monitor support, but no such luck yet.

On top of not KDE not opening/creating a session on screen 1, there is a pen-tool error between both displays. The pen-tool's movement is radically distorted with the cursor movement between the screens, making it completely unusable. No positions or orientations I have tried have fixed this even a little.

Xinerama (under Separate X Screen mode)
When using Separate mode, I can choose to enable Xinerama. Unfortunately that breaks Compositing, which means Alpha-transparency and other desktop effects are disabled.

But the real deal-breaker is the unusable cursor-movement with the pen-tool. There is a problem with the cursor jumping between the two displays after moving a percentage of the way across the screen. The distance roughly corresponds to the difference in resolution pixel size between my tablet and my monitor. So, depending on the positioning of each display in my Xorg.conf (left of, right of, below, above, etc), the areas of the screen where the cursor will jump to-and-from varies but the square area is generally the same.

This is, I believe, an unfortunately reality of Xinerama from what little research I have done on the subject. If my tablet were able to do a resolution like 1920x1200, like my desktop monitor, perhaps this would not be a problem. Sadly it is, and I have never found even the slightest hint of a solution or work around for this.

TwinView
TwinView mode works great for multiple desktops in KDE. Using KDE 4.3, the system detects both displays and works very nicely. Compositing and all those lovely eye-candies are still present.

Unfortunately, the pen-tool error between both displays still occurs. The pen-tool's movement is radically distorted with the cursor movement between the screens, making it completely unusable. No positions or orientations I have tried have fixed this even a little.

Workaround Solution
The only workaround solution I know that does let me use my tablet with no distorted cursor/pen-tool movement is disable my monitor display and use the tablet as the primary display. This always makes me a little sad, but I live with it. I keep hoping one day this will be fixed.

Nifty Recovery Tool and KDE 4.3 Review Continued

2009-08-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

So after using KDE 4.3 for a while, I am happy to report it is an excellent upgrade.

Possible Retraction
The problems I have been experiencing with KDE 4.3 on my system may be related to slowly failing hardware. I believe my motherboard may be going bad, which could be causing the shutdown problems.

KDE 4.3 Upgrade Problems - Not Hitting Everyone
KDE 4.3 may upgrade smoothly for some, especially if the user never changed many of the KDE configurations. For my brother, upgrading from KDE 4.2.4 to KDE 4.3 was smooth as silk. Flawless. He had left everything default in 4.2.4. I can only assume my prior problems were caused by a few problematic configuration files that were created while I used KDE 4.2.4 plus, and I do customize a ton in KDE.

There is another thing I forgot to mention, whichk I only found out about today. If your KDE 4.3 upgrade screws up and you don't get any desktop displayed, this fix may help:

Reboot and when GRUB is starting to load, switch into the Recovery mode and boot with that. Upon startup, you will be given a nice little Text GUI with several common options, such as root console, root console with networking, package manager, etc. I have never seen this option screen before but I was both surprised and delighted by it. This is no doubt an excellent helpful tool for new and even old-but-inexperienced users for recovery.

I have no idea how long this feature has been here, nor do I know if it is from the Kernel Devs, the GNU, Debian/Ubuntu or what.

I even got to test one of these options just today. When upgrading my VirtualBox Kubuntu KDE 4.2.4, it had the same configuration errors I had experienced when upgrading my main desktop. The X-Windows system started and KDE 4.3 went through its startup but in the end all I got was a mouse-cursor and a black-blank screen with nothing else.

Since I could not easily get to a virtual-terminal in the VM window (by using CTRL+ALT+F1 for example), I decided to reboot and use the recovery mode. That is when I discovered this new Text GUI window with options. Looking through the options, I decided to try 'xfix', not thinking it would work. Imagine my shock when IT FIXED IT. I don't know exactly what it did (I wasn't watching at that moment) but it definitely sets many (if not all) configurations of the GUIs/X-Windows back to default. But hey, it fixed it.

Konqueror
I don't really give Konqueror credit for the subtle but truly excellent upgrades it has been receiving for a while. To name a few I have noticed:

Auto-column (re)sizing
Easier/smoother sorting order changes in Icon mode
Better toolbar icons + functionality available
Better shortcut support (but that's a whole KDE thing now)
Better Ark integration and configuration
Transfer Management: Transfer start-stop-pause control of multiple file transfers, not to mention a more unified and convenient window-management for the transfer-statusbar subwindows.
Latest version of Konqueror supports inline renaming, just like old times.
More options for general configuration

Another piece of news worth noting: Konqueror restores all of my tabs upon restart-from-konqueror-crash, and I do mean ALL my tabs. That means, for example, restoring multiple tabs split into 8 or more sub-panes windows, in different view modes and sorting modes. That is Im-Freaking-Pressive.

I have never been able to Columns view, and it always breaks when I do, even mangling the program restart with a few residual error messages on the restart. But oh well, I don't use that mode. (I just wish I could remove that button from my toolbar!)

Stability
KDE 4.3 is definitely more stable. Though I thought KDE 4.2.4 was pretty good, KDE 4.3 is better. The small errors have been smoothed over, though I still occasionally have crashes with Gwenview viewing from within Zips files. I'm inclined to wonder if it is a combination of Gwenview and the KDE KioSlaves not jiving well together.

Usage
Again, the changes are subtle, but influential. I have noticed that the passive notifications and progress/statusbars now fit even more nicely and less obtrusively into the KDE system-tray icon for them. I am not if some of the Konqueror features I mentioned should be attributed to KDE or not. Either way, I like where things are going.

Remaining Problems

Konsole

Shortcut keys: The default shortcut keys in konsole interfere with real work. But you can change these through the Settings -> Configure Shortcuts menu. My case is CTRL+S, which locks my console. I have seen this behavior before but never from Konsole.
Transparency: First, Good transparency was removed from Konsole. It was replaced with Alpha Transparency.... which has never actually worked 100% properly in KDE 4 to date. In KDE 4.2 I was able to find workaround to make it function more or less correctly. Now that workaround no longer fixes the problem, so I'm stuck with a butt-fuck-ugly konsole with a washed-out white undertone on EVERYTHING. To whomever screwed this one up, I hate you.

It is hard to believe that the transparency feature in Konsole went from great, to bad, to really bad.

Gwenview
There are a few features still missing from Gwenview, which does vex me. I am hoping to see them by the next major update. It seems to me that the rest of the more complex features have been implemented by now.

Missing features:

Key shortcuts for Beginning/End of the current image list (in the current directory or archive).
Option to enable automatic disregarding of changes without prompting.
Duplicate Detection plugin
Image counter: (Without using the thumbnail bar) shows your progress in the current list of images. Something like 53/100. This was very useful for me.

I am actually kind of surprised that Gwenview is only missing a few features before it is back to what it was before.

PulseAudio - A new system to solve many problems

2009-08-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Overview
What PulseAudio is, and why it is great for Linux.

Forward
Someone once asked me why PulseAudio is being pushed and I only had some vague ideas why. This article briefly mentions some new reasons I did know. I thought you might be interested:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzIwMg

I have been reading up on PulseAudio and like I said before, if it becomes the standard (and I think it will) it will be great and solve a lot of the problems in Linux. Sufficient to say, if PulseAudio can do all that I have ever seen listed on websites for features, it will be the end all of sound systems for Linux. :)

Just to name a few features PulseAudio has that I like:

Support for a far wider range of audio devices ( Bluetooth/Apple Airport)
Flat volume support (similar to Vista's audio controls)
On-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices
Native support for 24-bit samples.
It will run on Windows, both natively if desired or through Cygwi.
Support for allow networked sound (between Windows and Linux)

These last two two features are things I have personally desired from a sound system. Previously I had never successfully enabled transporting of sound across a network from a Windows Machine to a Linux machine. (The occasion for wanting to do this was that I had a Windows machine in my room, running games which I was controlling from my Linux desktop via Synergy. I did not want to setup a second pair of speakers to hear the games. I wanted to have the audio from that computer piped into my main desktop speakers.)

About two years ago, PulseAudio was rather unsupported (maybe even broken), at least in Ubuntu. Maybe it was the programs... or maybe it was the kernel. I don't know. It could have been both. But now most of my programs run PulseAudio just fine. I remember the annoying problems I would have with OSS audio in the past. This transition to PulseAudio is much less of a problem for me.

I suppose a user must need to be somewhat advanced to experience the occasional difficulties with software audio protocol conflicts and difficulties. I can safely tell you that I definitely experienced more problems with audio 6 years ago when I began to seriously use Linux. I also experienced more when I was using a wider variety of software.

In the past 6 years I have been watching, there has been larger move towards supported ALSA in most applications, and now support for PulseAudio seems to be coming along nicely. The best part of PulseAudio is that, to my understanding, as long the application uses ALSA, ARTS or ESD, all of those are wrapped under the PulseAudio umbrella.

So if PulseAudio is actually working on your system, the system is backwards and forwards compatible, and all sound play nicely together. Well done, huh?

Of course, there is the issue that PulseAudio will have more overhead than systems like ALSA, which of course has more overhead than OSS. Personally though, I seriously doubt this is going to even be noticed on desktops with Dual-cores and even more so as Quad-cores become commonplace. Also, we are not talking about a lot of overhead here, especially when the system is not doing much.

KDE 4.3 and Konqueror's Neglect

2009-08-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

KDE 4.3 Ain't So Stable (Yet)
KDE 4.3 was released yesterday. My advice to anyone considering trying it out right now: DON'T UPGRADE! If you are going to use it, do a fresh install, unless you know how to juggle config files. Edit: I did an upgrade of KDE 4.3 on my brother's laptop, and it went smooth as silk. KDE 4.3 works flawlessly for his computer, yet mine still had/has some issues. So your mileage may vary.

While any of you that know me are aware I am an avid Linux fan (though this is really about KDE, not Linux per se), the following post has some bad new to report.

KDE 4.3 is supposed to be a stabilizing release, focusing mostly on bug fixes (over 10,000 completed) and some feature updates. That may be, but I'm afraid my experience so far has been anything but stable.

1st: I installed KDE 4.3 from the apt-repositories. Then I restarted KDE/X-Windows. KDE proceeded to start, but never showed me my desktop, just a blank workspace. Obviously KDE 4.3 did not smoothly upgrade from KDE 4.2.4.

2nd: After 30 minutes of doing a fairly straightforward but advanced detection and fix, I was able to isolate a group of the problem files and repopulate my KDE configuration files. Things progressed smoothly until I encountered the next major bug: Exiting KDE.

KDE 4.3 will NOT, under any circumstances, Shut down the computer, Restart the computer, or Log out. It simply will not do it, no matter how many times you try. Luckily I know the manual shutdown command, but that's a pretty heinous error.

3rd: Konsole. The transparency in KDE Konsole is... wait for it.... even more broken than before. I have trouble believing my eyes on this one. I'm pretty shocked it did not get fixed. Even the WORKAROUND for the bug, that has been there for over a year, no longer works now. I guess this just gives me more impetus to get back to writing my own alternative virtual terminal, because God-Damn-it, we need one fucking badly.

4th: EDIT. I fixed the problem. It was a setting configuration, though it was really damned hard to find.

5th: Be forewarned this has some rather ranting moments, so I apologize.

Konqueror is without a doubt the best file manager I know of currently. But it has been pretty broken since KDE 4.0.

Even by KDE 4.3, it still have issues, plus some new bugs. For me, the most apparent bug in KDE4 Konqueror is the utterly awful way Images are handled within it (opening, previewing, mouse previewing). Since one of my primary hobbies is collecting images, this has been a constant colossal pain in my side. I keep waiting for that be fixed but it has been 18 months now. That's pretty f**king unacceptable. (Can you tell I'm mad?)

On a less rage filled thought, Konqueror is in serious need of being updated from QT3 to QT4. Namely it needs the standard QT4 navigation bar, and god-damn-it would be nice to have meta/information panels like Dolphin does. Actually, even though I don't use Dolphin because of its imposed limitations, I like several things in it.

But there is good news. At least, partially. The KDE team has been planning to add these exact updates for a while now. It would just be nice if they actually did it.

Cursory Review of KDE 4.3
Konqueror:

Konqueror Gestures are back. I did miss these, but ironically now I don't so much need them if I have my new mouse with 5+ buttons.
Better Ark integration (with more menu support too).

Ark:

Support for more formats and a few small bug fixes.

Gwenview (changed from version 2.2.4 to 2.3.0):

Bug Fixes: God Almighty I hope the bugs are really fixed. They were simply AWFUL at points (way too frequently) and they should been fixed a long time ago. Really, they should have been. No excuse. Should have been done months ago.
Plugins: In case you did not know (like most KDE 4 users), you have to install the kiki-plugins package to enable the plugins for Gwenview. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed since the prior version.
It is still missing the most important plugin for me: Find Duplicates Images.
Sidebar: Better hiding and restoration interface.
Thumbnail Bar: Now it can be vertical, which I prefer. Nice.
On a personal note, though Gwenview is still missing a few features I consider crucial, I really do like all the new features that have been added.

Conclusion
I sometimes ask myself, "Should you try using KDE 3.5 again?" The answer is mostly no. The biggest problems (that I know of) for KDE 4 has been Gwenview and Konqueror, which are two programs I use constantly, and they are usable, just not fully-functioning. If I look beyond that, KDE 4 is a great system. I can live with the small little lack of eyecandy in Konsole. Even in KDE 4.2.4, when Plasma would crash, it would do so very gracefully and almost immediately restore itself with no noticeable ill-effects.

Firefox 3.5 is finally out!

2009-07-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

So Firefox 3.5 was finally released officially yesterday. Any of you Slashdot readers probably knew about it just slightly before I did!

If you are running Ubuntu, as every good person should, Firefox-3.5 is not in the official repositories yet. But do not despair! You can add the PPA Ubuntu Mozilla Security repository to your system and download FF35 immediately.

For full details, see here: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-security/+archive/ppa

For the quick 6-step process, do the following:
(All from command line.)

sudo echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys B9F1C432AE74AE63
gpg --armor --export B9F1C432AE74AE63 | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5
firefox-3.5 & # Or just start firefox-3.5 from the Run Dialog

You will still have firefox-3.0 on the system and in fact, it will still be the default application if you ever simply ran the command 'firefox.'

I probably will be running some speed tests here soon, and if I do, I will post the resulting comparison between the two browser versions.

Ubuntu makes Draw Tablet installation easy as could be

2009-06-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

So I own a Wacom Cintiq 12WX draw tablet. Yes, it is a very expensive toy and I use it in Linux.

Prior to switching to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, the process involved with getting my tablet to work was somewhat involved.

Plug in the device
Throw some generic config lines into /etc/X11/xorg.conf to enable the input devices
Compile the latest Linux Wacom Project drivers myself and load them into my kernel
Change my nvidia settings to accommodate my new display
Restart KDE
Enable the input device in The Gimp

Oh yeah: I also needed to make sure I had the darn thing plugged (usb and vga/dvi) in properly. (I have missed it a few times among all my other cables).

Not a lot of work and the compilation is pretty simple.

But now with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, my job is much simpler:

Plug in the device
Change my nvidia settings to accommodate my new display
Restart KDE
Enable the input device in The Gimp

Let me tell you, it does not get much easier than this. I mean, plug it in and go!

I am having a minor configuration issue with simultaneously using my tablet input and my mouse to work on the same drawing area. It seems that somewhere along the way, the tablet input takes precedence and disables using the mouse to affect the Gimp Drawing area. I'm looking for a solution and I will post it when I know it.

Logitech diNovo Edge bluetooth connectivity issues

2009-06-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

Sort of like USB support years ago, BlueTooth still has some bugs under Linux. Currently I'm referencing just connectivity issues. From what I can tell, this particular issue has been around in Linux since July 2007 at least according to some bug reports.

I use the Logitech diNovo Edge. This keyboard is awesome and I love it. When the dongle is not initialized as a bluetooth device - ie in bios, boot, install etc it simply emulates a usb keyboard / mouse and works (without any fancy features) perfectly. Hence, it works in text mode great. This happens during during System Startup, BIOS access or during the actually Linux console startup sequence.

However, as soon as it is initialized as a bluetooth device it forces you to use bluetooth pairing to work (this applies to Windows too). So, as you can imagine, by the time I reach KDE the keyboard doesn't work.

A solutions I have found to this problem (Source http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=355497):

Edit with sudo (text-editor) /etc/default/bluetooth

Then look for the line that says:
HID2HCI_ENABLED=1

and change it to this:
HID2HCI_ENABLED=0

Linux Promotional Rant - Windows Recovery versus Windows

2009-05-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

Overview
I saw this quote in an Ubuntu Forum thread and I felt like making my own reply.

Quote source from http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/hottechnology/thread/b998ea87-1857-4bd1-ba38-a202c4ce6b97/

A post by jgalley:

"You are doing an automatic upgrade of your OS and in the middle of the application of the patches the power fails and your system crashes hard. What OS do you want to be running? From my experience if it is Linux then you are about to see firsthand why Ubuntu is free and Vista costs 400 bucks.

If I have to rebuild my worstation and development environment even once then the actual cost of Ubuntu is more that the cost of Vista. In fact, for every extra time my Ubuntu system crashes hard and fails to boot I could have purchased a new Vista system from Dell, thrown my old system in the trash and still come out ahead.

Linux is the best, if what you like to do is rebuild and reinstall operating systems or endlessly search the internet for cryptic instuctions on how to edit /etc files to make some piece of hardware or software sort of work."

Yeah, I know anything from the Microsoft forums is pretty much flamebait, but let's go with this.

This entire speech totally belies the fact that in my experience a Windows Machine tends to bug-out after a sudden power loss, while nothing so palty even shakes a Linux system.

Right off, this guy is not being specific with his arguments. Let's get specific.

Harddrive Hardware Failure
When dealing with hardware failure due to spontaneous power loss, then RAID systems and backups are all you have to deal with. Shockingly those have very little, if anything, to do with the Operating System. The same goes for any other hardware you have die from the experience.

Harddrive Filesystem Failure
When dealing with software file-system problems due to spontaneous power loss, then there is no contest. Linux journaling File-Systems just win.

I occasionally see print claiming that NTFS is a journaling file-system like EXT3/4. To be bluntly honest, I don't know if I would believe ithad journaling even if I saw the source-code myself, because NTFS sure as fuck doesn't act like it has journaling.

At least not journaling like I have enjoyed with Linux file-systems. Of course, that assumes one is using NTFS, which is a fair assumption now days, but again this poster did not mention that. For all we know, there are Fat32 systems involved and let me tell you from experience, doing scandisks on huge Fat32 formated Harddisks takes hours.

Maybe it has been a few years, or maybe Vista has something magically under the hood, but no NTFS file-system I have even heard of makes serious recoveries as quickly and thoroughly as a Linux journaling file-system.

Fixing A Broken OS
What about when the OS is broken and won't boot properly. Of course, exactly *how* broken has an significant impact. Misconfigured files? Broken drivers? Broken kernal? The poster does not mention the specific methods of restoration.

He might mean throwing in some vendor provided disc and hoping its magic works. I would not know, Linux does not need these things. But since he's not specific, let's assume he means doing some manual work on a recovery console. In fact, this is very likely exactly what he means.

I need to stop here for a second and point out something: Is this n00b actually claiming it is easier to do something in the console/command-line in *Windows* than in Linux? ...? The next question of course is WTF? Yeah, let's move on. Alright, so it is safe to say it is going to be easier to do work on the console/command-line in Linux than Windows any day of the decade.

But what kind of work you ask? Well, whatever work you need to do to restore your system. Let's hope you know enough about the clearly documented and well designed Windows system architecture. Let's also hope that you can do all your recover from a console text environment and nothing requires a graphical session. At this point alone, Linux recovery is more certain than Windows, because in Linux literally anything that can be done from a graphical session can be done from a console, while the same is certainly not always true for Windows.

As for what exact work is to be done, I don't know since each situation varies but I'd like to see him edit his registry through a console Microsoft Console and call that "easy." Meanwhile I will just be using my Vim editor to modify human-readable-flat-text-configuration-files and browsing the Internet from command-line via eLinks for further help.

In Linux, one can completely recompile/reinstall anything needed without a graphical session. Debian Software Packages and shell-scripts for the win. That does not happen with all the numerous variety of Windows installer programs.

Using a boot disk, with some careful work, one can even do recompilation/reinstall for a non-booted system. I would like to see any Windows machine compile from command line as easily as Linux. Hell, I would like to see Windows compile ANYTHING as readily as Linux tends to.

Instructions
The poster mentions "Cryptic instructions." Well, I won't say Linux is easy to use as a Fisher Price toy, but few powerful tools are. Since turnabout is fair play, if he wants to talk cryptic, then let's go all the way and discuss poor instructions. This, of course, leads to Microsoft Help Files/Manuals.

I certainly will not claim every Linux/BSD Man-page ever written in the world is great and has all the information needed. But in my experience, easily 90% of the time, man-pages will give provide most if not all ones needs. I have yet to even hear of a single good Microsoft Help file. (And I have talked with career technical writers on the subject).

Of course, this side-steps the point about the architectures and system designs themselves.

Full OS Reinstall
Now, if the poster is talking about a full OS reinstall, I can fucking-money-back-guarantee-you Ubuntu Linux will be fully installed and have completed any updates with all my software installed well before Windows has the 2nd Service pack installed (if even the 1st), let alone all other personal programs and virus/firewall software.

And that does not even address the issue of live-booting. :P

Development Environment
The guy mentions rebuilding his development environment. ... I am going to assume that means installing Visual Studio, or something of the like, and a train load of additional software libraries.

I got news for the poster, in Linux that is as easy as a few mouse clicks with my package manager, or a single Shell-script execution to send commands to apt-get. In a word: Owned.

Further Laughs
This guy identifies himself as a ripened idiot by going on further to state: "In fact, for every extra time my Ubuntu system crashes hard and fails to boot I could have purchased a new Vista system from Dell, thrown my old system in the trash and still come out ahead."

Even from my longest recovery time, my time has never been equal to the couple thousand dollars to build my new powerful desktop, and certainly was not worth the recovery of my irreplaceable data files. Maybe this guy takes his computer to the Geek Squad and has to wait two weeks for recovery? (Yeah, I know they don't do Linux, but you get my point).

Lastly, what sort of piece of shit computer is he running that is worth less than $400 + New Deskstop that he casually throws away?

Shear Idiocy -- Economics of Morons
"If I have to rebuild my worstation and development environment even once then the actual cost of Ubuntu is more that the cost of Vista."

I really have to address this one. So, "free" is somehow going to become more than $400 through just one occasion? Are you fucking kidding me?

Beyond the fact that the poster is utterly failing to take into account the 10 to 1 ratio of Windows system breakdowns versus Linux, he arbitrarily states that any recovery with Linux will be more than $400. The logical converse of this argument is that any recovery with Vista will be automatically less. (And that does not even address repeated recovery costs, which Linux most definitely trumps Windows on because of better system longevity).

Is he claiming that any recovery done with Vista will be less costly (time and money and effort invested) over Linux? Really? Seriously? ...I actually think this person is claiming exactly that. Well, he's completely wrong.

Situations vary and thus recoveries do. In the 1 out of 10 situations where Linux has a problem like Windows, the situations is going to be specific and relate to the knowledge of the person doing the recovery. I am not going to claim Linux recoveries always cost less than Windows recovery because making such a blanket statement about all situation is foolishness, and the same goes for Windows over Linux.

I will just say this: Linux recoveries happen less frequently... and chances are, you can find the "cryptic" instructions online, and you will be able to access your configuration files through console easily and recompile/reinstall any software necessary. Windows can't claim that people. It just can't.

Move from VMWare to VirtualBox

2009-05-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

If you use Virtual Machine software, in particular VMWare, this will be of interest to you. If you use Ubuntu, I suggestion you consider using VirtualBox for your VM needs and here is why. Please note, this is only talking about non-VMWare Fusion products.

I have been using VMWare for about 2 and 1/2 years now, but just recently I have decided to move to using VirtualBox.

The Reasons I Left VMWare

Apt-get Availability: VMWare is not available in the Ubuntu apt repositories and I have never found any other Ubuntu/Debian repos to use. It was once available via 3rd party repos from Ubuntu, but not for well over a year and a 1/2.
Compiling: Because there are no easily available apt-repositories packages, I have been compiling VMWare myself for a while. I don't mind compiling (in fact, I think it is a great and powerful feature of Linux) but because VMWare has close ties with the kernel, occasionally I would have to recompile VMWare after a kernel or kernel module update from Ubuntu. In general, the compiling was not a major annoyance but it was not convenient.
Compiling Problems: In Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04, I have not been able to compile VMWare 1.x no matter what I try. I attempted to use verrsion 2.x, but that didn't work out well.
Future VMWare Versions: I successfully compiled and ran VMWare 2.x but it radically fails to meet my needs for a Virtual Machine program. Furthermore, it fails (perhaps even spectacularly) to meet some of my most basic preferences for a program in general. I personally found its interface ridiculously slow, featureless, and extremely unusable.

Reasons I Moved to VirtualBox

Competitors: VirtualBox is the major competitor to VMWare.
Features: VirtualBox actually has a few features that VMWare does not have, such as dynamic virtual harddrive expansion and shrinking and not require full diskspace pre-allocation. VirtualBox also supports limited 3D Acceleration (both OpenGL and Direct3D), with more in development. (This feature VMWare completely lacks). I have yet to find any features missing in VirtualBox from VMWare.
Integration: Though my recent usage experience has not been excessive, the integration of VirtualBox into my host Linux system has been better and smoother than VMWare. In particular:
- Using VMWare I had network issues when running KDE4 in a VM. VirtualBox has no such issues.
- After installing the Guest Additions, my mouse can travel smoothly between my VirtualBox guest VM display and my desktop without being stuck/limited to the display area. (Vbox specifically informs you of this capability actually post-installation).
- Guided steps with the GUI for sharing files between the host machine and guest VM. VMWare required mounting via commandline which worked but was somewhat buggy.
Availability: VirtualBox is available right through the Ubuntu apt-repositories. If I want a more up-to-date version, I can easily find apt-repo at PPA launchpad. (This sort of community is yet another reason why Ubuntu is so great).
Portability: Just like VMWare, Virtualbox runs on every major OS out there.
Cost: VirtualBox is free as you get. While VMWare never cost me anything to run, there may have come a day when I was faced with paying for their products. I won't have to worry about that with VirtualBox.
Performance: Though I have not thoroughly tested the performance, from my own experience and the reviews I have read online, VBox does not perform (process tasks as quickly) as VMWare but it certainly is not casually noticable. I know VBox is continuing to push for improvements in this area.

Summary
I have been using VirtualBox for about 2 weeks now and it is exceeding my needs. VBox meets my needs in a more convenient way than VMWare did before, especially after installing the Guest Additions. Though VBox has a different interface from VMWare, I think I actually prefer the organization concept and designs of the VirtualBox system over VMWare's organization, particularly with shared resources. Overall, I think it is a better piece of software.

Yet more support for Linux from NVidia and ATI

2009-05-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

This was news to me. It makes me very happy to see this. Long story short, Nvidia and ATI/AMD are providing programming API's to allow software in the *nix world (Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc) to utilize GPUs on their hardware. Specifically,VDPAU from Nvidia and XvBA from ATI/AMD are the systems for the X Windows System. They are equivalent of the Microsoft's DirectX Video Acceleration (DxVA) API for Windows^.

Those links will give you more information if you are interested. There are several other programs I personally know of, most notable Avidemux's latest development branches, which are working to make use of this new programming API and technology. It makes me pleased to see these systems coming into place in the *nix world, breaking down yet another barrier between competing Operating Systems.

Even though the protocols from Nvidia and ATI are still limited in what they can do, I have little doubt the capabilities will be extended and based on stirrings in the Windows world, I am sure of it.

KDE4 very good but still has some glitches

2009-05-12T05:10:00.000-07:00

I really like KDE4 and I look forward to when it is "complete." By that I mean, when all of the features I previously enjoyed in KDE3 are available. I am seriously considering seeing if I can help with a few features I want right now, such as all my Desktop Wallpaper options... and a few extra features I have thought up along the way.

In an attempt to eschew being a Linux Fanboy and merely be a bigtime fan, I will list the glitches I have encountered so far. To be fair, not all of these may be relating to KDE but instead with the current Linux kernel version I am using.

I will list my problems and any solutions or workarounds that I have seen.

Konsole transparency

Description: There is an odd white glow to any konsole color profile transparency settings initially when the konsole is loaded. This glow remains regardless of what appears to be half of all possible colors and is present at zero percent opacity. Even when using my work around, the problem returns if the konsole is resized at all.
Number of times encountered so far: This is a reproducible bug.
Successful Solution: The glow disappears and proper opacity returns when you cause a full desktop redraw. (I believe actually a full Plasma Desktop redraw, but I'm not sure.) This can be done by going to System Settings -> Desktop -> Desktop Effects -> All Effects and changing or literally toggling an option. As long as you can and do hit the "Apply" button to force a redraw, the konsole will display the proper opacity.
Note: There may be other color errors, and I suspect there are, but I have not had time to properly check for them.

Keyboard failure

Description: My keyboard stopped working completely, and this was not related to my wireless bluetooth keyboard. I always have an axillary PS2 keyboard plugged in and this too would not function.
Number of times encountered so far: 2
Attempted (but failed) solutions: X-Windows restart.
Successful Solution: Rebooted.

Mouse failure

Description: My mouse stopped working completely. I did not attempt to use a USB mouse to check if that still worked.
Number of times encountered so far: 1
Successful Solution: Rebooted.

Application Menu Shortcut Keys

Description: Tried to set Meta+O to start OpenOffice writer, but this did not seem to work. No error message or related conflicts were encountered and everything looked like it should work, except that it never did.
Number of times encountered so far: 1
Attempted (but failed) solutions: X-Windows restart.
Successful Solution: Rebooted.

Gwenview

Description: Randomly seems to crash and no noticeable pattern of problems. Unfortunately Kubuntu is not compiled with backtrace abilities or I would provide bug reports.
Number of times encountered so far: 3 (which is pretty good since I have used this program probably over 200 times)

Ark

Description: When selecting "Compress to..." and choosing a specific archive type, Ark seems to crash when you use more than a single '.' (period) character in the file name, especially with .tar.gz.
Number of times encountered so far: This is a reproducible bug.
Successful Solution: Don't use an extra dot.

Konqueror crashes

Description: Konqueror has crashed several times on me randomly and I am not sure what to say about that, since sometimes it just crashes when I'm not even actively using it.
Note: Konqueror is usably stable and I expect it to only improve. At the moment, Konqueror is seriously a work in progress, based on the updating of features, protocols, refactoring of features and its unholy union with the file manager Dolphin.
Number of times encountered so far: Around 6 times so far.

Monitor Timed Power-off

Description: My monitor will not shut itself off after extended use, despite configuring it to do so. Not sure if it is a configuration bug on my part or not.
Number of times encountered so far: 1.

Lock Screen fails to engage

Description: Could not engage a session lock.
Number of times encountered so far: 1.
Successful Solution: X-Windows restart.

GTK / QT4 Button Mis-arrangement

Description: The Yes/No, Replace/Cancel, Overwrite/Replace, etc. buttons in some applications are in the incorrect order, as dictated by the HID standard (which I believe GTK at least adheres to, and probably QT as well). I have confirmed this in Kate and Firefox at least.

More updates to come as I see them.

Make Kubuntu 9.04 use a single Kate session

2009-05-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this was a KDE4 team or Ubuntu change, but somewhere along the way Kate stopped using a single session and started to open an instances of itself for each file. I suspect this is an Ubuntu change.

Anyway, if you want to have only a single instance of Kate running, here is how to fix this. You can edit the Kate menu entry by right-clicking on the K-menu and editing it. Edit the "Command: " line and insert '--use' between 'kate' and the '%U'. It should end up looking like this:

Command: kate --use %U

The other option is to manually open the file in a text editor: /home/user_name/.local/share/applications/kde4-kate.desktop (Where 'user_name' is the target user name).

You want to change the "Exec: " line. Insert '--use' between 'kate' and the '%U'. It should end up looking like this:

Exec: kate --use %U

Test the new configuration in Konqueror. If Konqueror gives you problems about not being able to open /usr/bin/kate, this is to a known bug in the KDE-Libs with DBUS. There is a workaround for this.

Open the file in a text editor (again): /home/user_name/.local/share/applications/kde4-kate.desktop (Where 'user_name' is the target user name).

Find the line "X-DBUS-StartupType=Multi" and change the "Multi" to "None".

That should fix your problem.

Ext4 and Btrfs Benchmark tests

2009-05-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

While researching EXT4 performance, I came across this website:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_benchmarks&num=1

They were quite informative. If you are interested in learning how EXT4 compares to EXT3 and other major filesystem competitors of the day (XFS and ReiserFS), have a read. One caution, read their bar graph summaries/legends carefully because the graphs can be misread if you don't pay careful attention.

EXT4 does not win at everything but it seems to hold the best place in more tests than its competitors. Well, at least in these tests.

For those of you interested in next generation filesystem coming our way, Btrfs, they also have benchmarks for the current development snapshot.

Ubuntu brings advanced Screen features to everyday users

2009-05-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

If you use terminal to get much done in Linux, you will probably encounter the GNU program called "screen." If you haven't yet, take the time to learn. It is great and extremely useful if you do serious work on the console.

The learning curve is a steep but short. Once you learn about 4 basic commands, you can start working and learn more as needed.

However, the old news is that Ubuntu has once again tried to make another powerful tool of the Linux world more accessible and user-friendly for the masses. Ubuntu by default installs the package 'screen-profiles' which adds a couple of nice text interfaces and predefined settings to help new users learn the tool.

That is all well and good and I applaud this move. However, if you are an old or advanced Linux user, Ubuntu's move might interfere with some of your daily work. The screen-profile's try not to interfere with a ~/.screenrc file, but they still can slightly.

Uninstalling the package will solve most issues, but there is one very VERY important feature that has been changed as a problem prevention step for newbie users. In some shells and within Screen itself the command CTRL-s if used inappropriately with other key combinations can cause your visible text area to halt until CTRL-Q is pressed.

Now, I use CTRL-s for searching my Bash command history and for saving within my Vim session. So I safely use CTRL-s and I want it around and not interfered with their problem prevention. To get around Ubuntu's new default configurations, simply add this line to your ~/.bashrc file, or type it on the command line whenever you open a new screen window.

stty -ixon

A weird tale of SELinux, Firefox and Jaunty Remix woes

2009-05-07T03:07:00.001-07:00

Foreward
Here is an unusual story I experienced many months ago. First let me tell the reader what you are about to read is not normal. I have never heard of SELinux behaving like it did with me here, and I have used it for several years before and since this incident with no problems. (Though I have switched to using AppArmor based on recommendations from Ubuntu). I have also never had this problem since it happened.

The Story
Back on April 7th 2009, I installed Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 KDE3 remix.

I did all the update and upgrades and grabbed all the new kernal goodness. Then I installed SELinux and rebooted. Upon reboot, I found something (SELinux I can only guess) had DESTROYED all the Japanese text in my filenames. It turned them into complete garbage and I don't know why, because this has never happened before. (I assume it did this during its scan of my hard-disks.)

In general I favor running SELinux and I don't believe this behavior is normal (especially since I have run it before and since with no more problems). I am thinking it was perhaps a problem with the package of SELinux itself from Ubuntu.

This type of file corruption would be a major catastrophe except that I am such a good person for backing files up, so I was able to recover from most of it.

Firefox 3.5's new JavaScript engine to use revolutionary new JIT method

2009-05-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

Here is small post for you programmer guys that you may find interesting.

Sure, you know what JIT is and why it makes so many modern interpreted languages actually usable in terms of speed/performance. But you probably have not heard of the exact methods through which JIT is achieved, and much less of a new method called "trace trees."

Apparently Mozilla's JavaScript engine has a new feature called TraceMonkey which is based on this new JIT compilation method and "The net result is a massive speed increase both in the browser chrome and Web‐page content."[1]

Programmers may find reading about Trace Trees to be interesting. I did.

For more detailed information about how this works with Firefox 3.5, take a look here.

More Evidence of Linux All Around You

2009-05-03T04:03:00.000-07:00

Here is another story for you readers to remember the next time you see some Linux hater or hear people saying Linux is not popular, or common, or is losing popularity.

I have heard more than once that Hollywood uses Linux a lot, which is to say in a more correct sense, the Entertainment Industry uses Linux. Well, here is a little story about one such company: Walt Disney Feature Animation.
http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/case_studies/WaltDisney.pdf

Ubuntu Jaunty - No Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace for You!

2009-04-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

So Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has by default disabled the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace keysequence for restarting the X Server. For some advanced Linux users, this might be completely offensive. But let's remember that Ubuntu us targeting both existing Linux users in addition to newbies.

To Reverse / Fix

KDE 3.5
If you are using KDE 3.5 in Jaunty, you reverse this change to normal behavior by adding this code to your xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
 Option  "DontZap" "off"
EndSection

KDE 4
1) Install the “dontzap” package (hopefully this step can be skipped in the future):

sudo apt-get install dontzap

2) Launch “systemsettings” and select the “Display” module

3) Click on the checkbox labeled “Ctrl+Alt+Backspace restarts the xserver” and press the apply button.
After that, type in your password. You know the drill.

Thoughts
Sometimes I wonder about things like this begin cropping up in future releases. But honestly, as far as I am concerned, so long as I have the power to re-enable whatever feature was taken away, I don't see a problem here. Others may disagree, but overall I feel confident that this will be a non-issue.

Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE3.5 released!

2009-04-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE3.5 has been released! Get your ISO images here.

For some reason, the torrent never worked for me, despite fiddling with my settings quite a bit. I had to download the ISO file in the end, but that was very fast.

For more details on the release, go here.

Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 3.5 slightly delayed

2009-04-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

So according to the Kubuntu download pages, the release of Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 3.5 packaged by default is slightly delayed. I will personally be watching for this attentively myself, but for those who want to watch themselves, check kubuntu.org, and https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty for updates.

Text to Speech in Linux

2009-04-22T22:44:00.000-07:00

After using my friend's Amazon Kindle 2 and its Text-to-Speech (TTS) feature to read something I had written, I became interested in getting a TTS program for my own use. The best solution I have found was a combination of KDE's Text-to-Speech manager and an external TTS program.

KDE's readily available TTS system integration makes me proud of how the open-source and Linux communities attempt to help people for free.

Part 1 Choosing a TTS Program
Most TTS software in Linux does not seem to provide a graphical user interface for control, just a command line utility. This utility can be tied to a graphical controller, but first you must choose which TTS program option is right for you.

Option #1: For the Free of Charge or Open-Source only People
For the people not willing to pay for any TTS software (and yes, there is some good stuff available for Linux), or for those who will only use completely Open-Source material, Festival + some other voices is probably your best option.

Festival
Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system and it is probably the first thing one will encounter when researching TTS in Linux. It is well supported in Linux and I personally was able to get it to read a text file within minutes.

To get it to work with kttsmgr, there was no editing of configuration files necessary, but to use it directly from command line I had to add this /etc/festival.scm for ALSA sound support:

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -D plug:dmix -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'snd)

In festival, the voice synthesis is pretty good, though I found it sometimes too fast, particularly over some punctuation, and the voice is obviously synthetic. If you are hoping for something a little different, read about solution #2.

This is a really great tutorial on how to get Festival working with a variety of other voices that are available.

If you are interested in using Festival, but want different voices, Option #2's voices can be made to work with Festival as well.

MBROLA
MBROLA will frequently pop up on Google during TTS searches, or at least it did for me. Wikipedia explains this project better than I, but simply put: It is a free system for enhancing the quality of TTS systems, but it is not itself a full TTS system. MBROLA can be used along with Festival, as the tutorial link above will show.

Linux-Sound.org/Speech
This webpage is a great resource for the many numerous TTS systems and projects in Linux and the open-source world. If you want additionally information about TTS and other related projects, I suggest you go there.

Option #2: Purchased voiced & Closed source
For those willing to pay a little to buy a TTS voice and are willing to use a closed source TTS project, I suggest Cepstral. Their product is very high quality and is available for Linux (32 and 64 bit), Windows and Mac OS. Take a look at their demos and you can tell fairly quickly if their product is right for you.

Their Windows version comes with a nice and simply GUI program to read text, and provides graphical configuration of the programs voice, which is fairly customizable. Their Linux version(s), as far as I can tell, comes with only a command line utility, but they product documention on their website FAQs about using their program with KDE's TTS manager.

Part 2 Configuring a Frontend Graphical Controller
While there may be other controllers, I used KDE's program: kttsmgr. This is their Text-To-Speech manager and it supports a great variety of TTS command line programs.

There are plenty of tutorials on getting Festival to work with kttsmgr.

Update: Besides making sure you install a festival voice, I am not even sure any additional configuration is necessary beyond going through the kttsmgr and adding a talker.

Option #2 Cepstral with kttsmgr
[Taken from Cepstral's own FAQ docs]

To integrate Cepstral voices into the KTTS text-to-speech system (present in KDE 3.4 or later), first select KTTS from the KDE menu or run kttsmgr from the command line to open the configuration manager.

In the Talkers tab, click the Add button to add a new voice. Now, select the "Show All" option for synthesizers, choose the Command synthesizer, and click OK. You'll now be asked to choose a language. Select anything here, as it will be ignored. Finally, it's time to specify the swift command to run. To speak using the default voice, use:

swift %t -o %w

If you want a specific voice, use the -n switch like this:

swift %t -o %w -n Isabelle

You'll also want to select Latin1 as the character set. Click OK, then Apply to set the current voice. Your voice should now work in any KDE app that uses KTTS.

I found that selecting UTF-8 instead of Latin1 caused no problems, but I am also not using any sort of foreign language texts.

Update: When using Cepstral's swift on the command line, you may encounter OSS sound compatibility errors. Install the package alsa-oss and use the program it provides 'aoss' to act as a sound wrapping layer for ALSA. For example:

aoss swift -f file.txt

Recommendations
Try Festival and if it meets your needs, great. Personally I needed something like Cepstral and I was happy to pay for the voice. It worked great with my software.

Amazon Kindle's Text to Speech legal thoughts

2009-04-22T03:11:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post: I found an article with a lawyer discussing the implications of the Authors Guild's resistance to Amazon's Text to Speech feature in their Kindle. He makes some great points.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/31/cory-doctorow-kindle

Swiftfox (AMD/Intel optimized Firefox)

2009-04-20T01:47:00.000-07:00

Overview
"Swiftfox is an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox. Swiftfox has builds for both AMD and Intel processors and is based on the most cutting edge Firefox source code available."

I learned about Swiftfox while investigating some slow performance I have been experiencing in my normal Firefox. When trying Swiftfox, even after only a few minutes, I noticed some improved "snappiness" in my browsing. That is to say, I noticed switching between tabs was faster, graphics and pages both loaded and refreshed more quickly, and Gmail was significantly faster and more responsive.

Optimizations
Here is some information from the Wikipedia page on Swiftfox. It is interesting to note that the compiled binaries were made using GCC version 4.0.x, while I know for a fact that later version of the 4.x GCC compiler have improved optimizations. Under different circumstances, I might assume this would result in lesser performance, but since the Swiftfox creator has a knowledge of assembly instructions for several architectures, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for knowing what he is doing by using an older compiler.

The Swiftfox build is optimized using the following methods:

Binary code optimization

Compiled with the highest level of compiler optimization, rather than optimization for binary size.
- Swiftfox is compiled -O3,^[1]^[2] (the highest level)
  - The resulting Swiftfox binary is larger than Firefox. (It should be noted that -O3 is not necessarily faster than -O2, or -Os. -O3 introduces two more options on top of -O2: -finline-functions and -frename-registers. The latter is good for CPUs with many registers but may actually be slower on other CPUs.^[3])
- Firefox is compiled -Os^[2]. (-Os is the same as -O2 but removes optimizations which would increase the binary size ^[3].)
Binaries incorporate additional instruction sets.^[4]
- Intel and AMD: MMX, SSE, SSE2, (not generally SSE3^[5]).
- AMD only: 3DNow!
Optimization specific to the build microprocessor architecture.^[4]
- Intel: Pentium 4, Pentium 3, Pentium M, Pentium 3M, Pentium 2, Prescott.
- AMD64: Athlon64 (32bit binary).
- AMD: Athlon XP, Athlon, K6-2.
Compiled with newer version of GCC (Firefox 2.0 uses 3.3.2, Swiftfox 2.0 uses 4.0.4).^[2]

Increased Security

Better protection from Buffer overflow attacks^[6] (Swiftfox 2.0 uses -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2; Firefox 2.0 uses gcc 3.x, which does not support this).^[2]

Simplify

Pango is not included in the build^{[citation needed]}. This means that Unicode fonts remain supported (see Unicode and HTML), but without certain extra features^[7] provided by Pango. This simplification reduces the binary size, and reduces rendering.

Changed default preference values

IPv6 DNS lookups are disabled.^[8]^[4] preventing slowdowns experienced^[9]
HTTP pipelining is enabled by default.^[8]^[4] Note that Fasterfox provides a GUI to adjust these settings.
For full details, see [1].

Conclusion
It is a bit early for a conclusion yet. I'm going to keep trying to use it and see how it continues to performs. The next few days will give me a good idea of how fast it really works compared to regular Firefox.

For more information on Swiftfox, go to: http://getswiftfox.com/

Currently there is no PGP apt-package signing available for the Swiftfox repositories. If anyone learns of some, please let me know.

Update
Ironically, no sooner do I start investigating some benchmark tests for Swiftfox, than I discover an alternative to Swiftfox named SwiftWeasel. I am going to be investigating both of these browsers in time and I will bring you reports of what I discover.

GCC does everything MSVC does, and more

2009-04-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

I came across a very encouraging report on compiler optimizations. I am bringing you some of the selected comparision results between GCC and MSVC. Source for this information is Software optimization resources published by Agner Fog. In particular, I used this PDF, which was last updated January 23, 2009.

The table in the PDF source states these results were from GCC 4.1 and MSVC 2005 which are probably from his original publication in late 2008. However I do not know what updates occured since, so these could be taken from later versions of either compiler. I do not know about MSVC, but I know for sure that GCC 4.2 and 4.3 are just getting faster and faster, and that is not counting LLVM.

One thing this evidence shows is clear: Saying MSVC produces faster binaries than GCC is simply not true, especially if they don't specify compiler versions and platforms and computing task. The next time you hear someone rip on the GCC compiler for being slow without specifics, just laugh in their face.

Save Larger/Big Images from Flickr

2009-04-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

Overview
Say you want to save a private picture at full resolution size from Flickr Photos, but the image has been blocked from saving/downloading. Here are some quick steps to bypass their restrictions to save the larger resolution image.

Saving the Protected Image
Normally, you can save pictures from Flickr (or any website) by right clicking the photograph and saying "Save Image As..." but in the case of protected Flickr images, all you will see on the desktop is a blank 1x1 pixel placeholder image called spaceball.gif

This happens when a Flickr member has set download permissions to disallow his/her photos from being downloaded. Flickr places a transparent image overlaid on the actual photo so the right-click method fails.

You may either use the good-old Print Screen or the method below works to defeat the Flickr image protection:

For Firefox
Goto the Menu: Tools -> Page Info. Select the "Media" tab.

Click on the image addresses listed in the top section. You will see the image appear in the Media Preview Window below. Click/scroll until you find the one you want.

If you don't care about getting the potentially larger image, just click the Save As button now.

Saving the Larger/Big Image
Restricted/Protected images on Flickr are also frequently only displayed in small resolutions.

Now comes the magic. Right-click on the address of the image you want and select "Copy." This will copy the address into your clipboard. Open a new tab/window in Firefox.

Paste the address but do not execute it yet. In the address text, at the end of the link, just before the .jpg, add _o which is an underscore and a lowercase o. Here's what the link will look like:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/5678/4532356709_c3d4f5g7e5_o.jpg

Press Enter to open it, and that will get you the original size of the picture. Now you can save it out to your computer. This won't work for some pictures. In that case, try _b instead. This will get you the large (a.k.a big) version of the picture. If neither of those work, then the medium size is the best you can do.

KDE 4.2.2 Things are getting good

2009-04-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

So I tried KDE 4.2.2 through VMWare today. I'm really pleased with the impressive improvements I see. I feel like I might be jumping the gun by saying this but KDE 4 may very well be ready for me to use. Here is a quick run down of what I checked/noticed since my last review.

System Settings

Overall / General: For one thing, the System-Settings area has been filled out a significant amount. Many things are there now that were missing only a few months ago, and what's there seems to work well.
Notifications: I need to confirm whether this is easy to disable all sound. By going to Player Settings and choosing No Audio Output, things might be what I want.

You cannot turn off all the audio notifications in an easy way. I really hate the concept of going through every single program and turning them off. I like my computer to run silently so this is a personal annoyance, but to be honest the previous system under KDE3 was not great, just more usable.
Startup: Sweet new interface for adding startup programs/scripts. Very nice. Not tested yet myself but this is a cool feature.

Shortcut Keys Binding
Previously I mentioned that KDE4 seemed to only allow binding a single shortcut key sequence in programs, instead of their KDE3's well-established two sequence binding options. I notice that KDE4 may have added, or at least begun adding, options for binding two keys again. This is great.

Gwenview
Gwenview 2.xx is pretty much ready for use... for me anyway.

When I tested Gwenview, as of today, 90% of the "shitty" zooming issues (enlaring smaller images) previously noted have been resolved. I don't exactly know what source these fixes came from, but they are there. I am not even sure if there are any zoom related problems left.

I tested enlarging small GIF/PNG/JPG files and all of them look very good. It is difficult to say whether the zoom quality is "at the highest possible" while using VMWare but it sure looks quite acceptable for the time being.

The only unusual thing I noticed was on the enlarging of small PNG files. Gwenview may not have been performing perfect binary interpolation on all the sample test images I tested. Regardless, the enlarging zoom was still of a very acceptable level of quality.

Konqueror Preferences/Settings
Konqueror seems to have fixed some of its bugs since I last reviewed it, especially the great many of the issues I care about.

View Configuration: Many of the preferences are now saved, in particular Menu: Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> File Management -> Views.

These were some of the most important for me. Though there seems to be a bug with not displaying the check in the checkbox for enabling "Show Delete in Right Click menu" but the feature is still enabled.
Tabbing: Tabbing still seems very solid, but I cannot remember if this successful preference saving was present in my last review. Regardless I take this a good sign of progress.
View Mode Icon Size: The bugs with inconsistent view modes icon size have been fixed. This time around, I only had one instance where the zooming was off slightly, but a quick setting of the zoom and the problem never repeat itself.
Toolbars: I already mentioned the Toolbars in Konqueror were improved and I am still impressed with them. Nice and usable and still quite configurable. That annoying bug with some element misplacement that occurred with KDE3.5 because of Gwenview integrated image viewing is gone.

Konsole/Console/Terminal profiles
The feature for smoother switching profiles within Konsole has been integrated. Very nice.

Power Management
Yet another sweet looking application I cannot wait to try. This is looking seriously awesome. I have not been able to try this on a mobile device but I will report on it as soon as I do.

Desktop Themes
This is pretty impressive. I guess is just goes to show that KDE can be even more customizable if you want. I don't even know where to begin with all the options. To be bluntly honest, even just testing this a tiny bit with impresses me. I see major potential for smooth and easy eye-candy customization.

Misc.
There are several things which I don't use but their existence is worth noting.

Digital Camera integration: I don't use a digital camera so my word is that of a novice but it looks like KDE is providing (or will provide) a pretty good user interface for accessing it. This is a nice thing to have since it promotes inclusion of more users in the future.
PDA/PIM utilities: KDE 4 looks to have some nice (and assumably working) PDA/PIM integration and software. I don't use a PDA (yet) but doubtless I will when the 2nd generation of the Google Phones come out. I am glad that KDE has good these utilities.

Themes
When I installed KDE 4.2.x from within Gnome, I ended up with a lot of more color themes... and they were good! When I reinstalled KDE4.2.x from Kubuntu, I was sadly surprised to find it does not ship with some of these themes. I hope that gets fixed because those themes were nice.

Font size
There are still some real font issues, but these may be less of a deal breaker than I first experience. Today in KDE 4.2.2 I set the entire system font size to 7 and then Konqueror and System Settings looked okay. Actually, everything I tested seemed to look just fine after this change. The exception was the Classic-Applications Menu, whose font became quite small but still readable.

Network Manager
I experienced Network Manager problems when using it through VMWare, but I'm not sure how it will perform on an actual system installation. The Knetwork-manager seems to cause a lot of problems for some people, though I have luckily avoided most of these problems through serendipity.

If you are going to use KDE4.x, I would seriously recommend having a diffferent network manager installed and functional. I suggest Gnome's network manager.

Mouse Gestures in Konqueror
Currently I cannot find anyway to enable mouse gestures in Konquorer. I conclude that this feature is not available yet in KDE 4.2. This is unfortunate because I use this feature every day. This is not technically a bug, just a missing feature.

Media:/ protocol
The 'media:/' protocol is not present in KDE4 yet. This is known to the KDE team and it is on their list of things to do.

Conclusion
I am pretty set to use KDE 4.2.2 right now, but I will hold off. I don't have any pressing need to switch yet, and the few missing features are not deal killers but important for me.

Previously, the failure of Konqueror saving settings properly and icon size mismatching was the deal killer for me. But now there only are a few missing features left on my list. Good times.

KDE3.5 an official option for Kubuntu Jaunty

2009-04-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

So the Kubuntu team, in their wisdom, is offering an official "remix" version of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty pre-setup to use KDE 3.5 instead of KDE4. This is pretty cool in my opinion. I know a lot of users, myself and many of my friends included, are still using KDE 3.5.

The official news posts about it is here: https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty

I like I have said before in my previous posts, I won't give KDE4 a serious try until their release of KDE4.3 scheduled for June sometime. Prior to this news, I was planning on installing Ubuntu and then throwing KDE3.5 on top. In the meanwhile, this Jaunty with KDE3.5 release saves me a bunch of work.

Speed up Firefox with TmpFS

2009-04-11T02:25:00.000-07:00

Introduction
This shows how to speed up Firefox by running it entirely from RAM to improve speed. Most of the credit for this article should go to here, from which I have taken most of this information, with the exception of improving his shell-script understandability.

Firefox uses SQLlite to store most of its information. As SQLite accesses are I/O bound, Firefox suffers when from disk drive bottleneck and competition for read/writes with other processes.

Create RAM partition

Add this entry in /etc/fstab:

firefox /home/xxxx/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default tmpfs size=128M,noauto,user,exec,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

Shell Script

#!/bin/bash

WORKING_LOCATION="/home/jondoe/Sata/Linux/presets/home-configs" # Directory where RAM_DIR and LOCAL_DIR exist
RAM_DIR="/home/jondoe/Sata/Linux/presets/home-configs/firefox3_ram" # Location mounted TmpFS
LOCAL_DIR="/home/jondoe/Sata/Linux/presets/home-configs/firefox3_local" # Harddrive folder for out-of-RAM storage

#cd "$WORKING_LOCATION" # Switch to location of working location -- unnecessary if using absolute paths

if [ -z "$(mount | grep -F ${RAM_DIR} )" ]; then # Check if firefox TmpFS already mounted
# Not mounted
mount firefox # Mount it now
fi

# The file '.unpacked_to_ram' is an indicator that we have synced into RAM
if [ ! -f "$RAM_DIR/.unpacked_to_ram" ]; then # Check if we have sync into RAM
echo "No file found indicating synced to RAM"
echo "Executing sync to RAM"
rsync -av --delete --exclude .unpacked_to_ram $LOCAL_DIR/* $RAM_DIR # Execute sync to RAM
echo "Creating note for synced to RAM"
touch "$RAM_DIR/.unpacked_to_ram" # Create note for synced into RAM
else # Already in RAM.
echo "Syncing Firefox3 TmpFS to local folder..."
rsync -av --delete $RAM_DIR/* $LOCAL_DIR # Sync back down to disk
fi

exit

Crontab
*/5 * * * * jondoe bash /home/jondoe/.tmpfs_firefox.sh >> /home//cronlog.txt 2>&1

Funny Manpage for apt-get

2009-04-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

My friend Jeff discovered this today. Thought I would share it.

LLVM-GCC vs GCC

2009-04-07T21:56:00.000-07:00

So I have been reading up on the LLVM, and on integrating it with GCC. I care about a possible integration of the system because I want Linux programs to continue to be fast. The compiler is an important component in that speed. Furthermore, unlike Microsoft, the GCC project does not have direct communication with Intel Compiler designers, so it is important that GCC compiler be damn good.

From what I read online, it seems like some people like to decry the GCC project as being difficult to contribute to, and perhaps it is... or was. I don't personally believe this after reading experts from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. But I also do not have a lot of experience with the GCC project personally. If nothing else, the history of the GCC since the late 1990s has definitely been one of better community involvement.

Benchmark Data
There is a project called LLVM-GCC which is the combination of GCC and LLVM and I have been trying to collect information on performance between the two compilers. Here follows some of the things I have found.

To note at the beginning, the speed of the compilers is dramatically effected by the CPU architectures they are compiling on. So, an X86_64 architecture compared to Darwin/PPC could give wildly different results for the same code. Many of these tests don't even mention their architectures.

At Cliff Hacks, we see the GCC outperforming LLVM when maximum optimization is enabled (-O3). Unfortunately comparing GCC with -O0 and LLVM standard is fairly invalid, since -O0 effectively ties GCC's hands for speed.

At Laurovenancio, we see LLVM-GCC outperforming GCC by about 2-4%, but this is using GCC 4.1.x. I know from other research that there have been some serious speed improvements in 4.2 and 4.3, and I know that 4.4 is continuing these efforts with Stack management improvements. Because of these updates, I would not take these results as very reliable now.

Leonardo-m's blog is the most recent (2008-12-14) and best illustration of results I have found so far.

These results seem to indicate an overall small speed increase when using LLVM-GCC. The nbody section was a bug which has been reported and fixed already.

If nothing else, the GCC is still an amazing piece of work to be competing so well, even with all of "supposed shortcomings" that I see frequently mentioned in relation to LLVM.

One reason that LLVM has not been adopted into GCC officially is that there are license conflicts between the two projects. I don't really care to list them now, but basically the GCC want to keep things GPL'd and LLVM is more interested in a BSD style license. This is probably because of funding and influence from Apple, their sponsor. I don't fault either party for their intents.

A Final Thought
If LLVM-GCC should become a significantly better/faster/superior/prettier compiler over the GCC, I wonder if there will be a movement to adopt it as the official compiler for Linux distribution packages? I mean, would Debian or Ubuntu start to build their packages with LLVM-GCC if it was a superior compiler? Or would they stick with GCC? Does license matter more than speed? Does "the official Linux compiler" stamp from GCC matter more the perceived performance?

I just hope that if LLVM-GCC should become a "better" compiler that the Linux community, specifically the package maintainers, will consider it as a possibility.

Quest for a Music Player

2009-04-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

Abstract
My experiences personally and impressions while looking for a music player in Linux today.

Introduction
So I have used the music player program Audacious for years. I did this because before it, I used BMP, which is the successor to XMMS, which is a WinAmp Clone and I have used WinAmp ever since I started listening to music on my PC.

Why the search for something new? I have been stuck in Ubuntu Hardy for various reasons, and their version of Audacious has some bugs, because it seems to fail to load a bunch of files that are perfectly valid. Also, because of Hardy's libraries I cannot compile and use their latest version myself.

Another bigger reason is that, I have started to really listen to my entire music collection of a few thousand songs, and Audacious is not really a music manager, just a really good player. So my needs have grown beyond Audacious, though I still think it is a stellar program and the best WinAmp clone ever.

Today I looked around to find a music player that suited my needs. Namely, it needed to the following:

Support MP3, OGG, WAV, MPC (very very important), FLAC and WMA (yeah, I have a few, though the format is terrible).
Make use of the keyboard for control, preferably something like Audacious/WinAmp
Have a mini-mode. (A mode where the GUI is small and unobstrusive). This could be anything from a System Tray icon, to the mini-mode that Audacious/WinAmp do.
Support thousands of songs in a massive single playlist.
Additionally, it should be easy to use. (Believe me when I tell you this is not the case for most music players out there).
Normalization of audio.

JuK
Got me off to a pretty fast start. They were able to import my music quickly and start playing. However, when I reconfigured their shortcut keys, the program stopped working properly. Most of what I assigned did not seem to function properly and soon after the program crashed.

The program also lacked various extra features usually provided by plugins.

In the end, the playlist system seemed quite clunky and did not work very well for me. Doubtless there is a proper way to do it, but it was not apparent to me. The display is not very informative at points, so sometimes I did not know exactly what songs I had queued up. Perhaps it is my style of use, but again I found the keyboard interfering with controlling the system instead of helping it.

Amarok
Amarok and I have a history. Each time I have tried it, I did not like it, but I don't clearly remember why. This time around, after trying to use the program three times, I figured out the trick to the Playlists. Not exactly intuitive but still useable.

Their interface is pretty nice actually. Nice shortcuts. Good random playback system. Nice SystemTray icon.

File Information: Initially had some trouble using the interface to examine the filetype and bitrate information for my audio files. But figured it out at last.
Volumes Synchronization Problems: I cannot figure out how to make Amarok use KDE's volume. I end up having to control two volume systems and this is kind of annoying. I suspect there is a way to do this, because it would seem like a very important feature.

Amarok hung for a bit when I tried to seek forward/back while certain visualizations were enabled.

Aqualung
Simply failed to load. I'm pretty surprised actually. Normally these things don't happen.

Listen Music Player
Simply not enough control as well as customization for me. It looks like a nice little player but not enough for me.

Exaile
Tried it. I could not customize the keys, and I did not really like their default keys. The big deal was that I simply could not get it to play my music. I was unable to load anything into the play lists. I tried on three separate occasions over a few days. It cannot be done without knowing the black magics I guess. Too bad. Not a usable program.

Conclusion
I went with Amarok and I'm generally quite pleased. The program has a lot of things I wanted in Audacious and I'm organizing my music far more easily than before. There are two things I really want though:

Good normalization system: I downloaded and enabled ReplyGain (which was annoyingly not available through Get More Scripts option system within Amarok itself). ReplayGain works alright. There is no AAC/Musepack options in my Linux distro so that is a pity. I believe the plugin is going through and putting Replay Gain values onto my music files, which is cool, but if it is not, then I'm in trouble because a lot of my files don't have a gain value stored in them, certainly not some of my WMAs. (Again, yeah I know they suck).
Slim Player Window Like Audacious/XMMS: I really want a slightly slimmer player window for Amarok. Something like Audacious. Even after tweaking the window with KDE's configuration options, it is still rather large.

Update: There is a bug with Amarok 1.4.9. It will not skip forward or back nicely on certain file types, like FLAC or Musepack. This annoying and I hope this behavior has been fixed in Amarok 2.

Daemon Tools utility for Linux

2009-04-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post here: For those of you that use the program Daemon Tools in Windows, you may have lamented the lack of such a program in Linux. (Even though the ability to mount something in Linux with the mount command has been around for longer than Windows itself).

Lament no longer! The program Gmount-ISO comes to the rescue! The package name in Ubuntu/Debian is simply gmountiso. Like Daemon Tools in Windows, Gmount-ISO provides a graphical user interface for mounting ISO files.

See this wiki page for more details.
http://swik.net/gmountiso

One important piece of information for non-Gnome users! You must have the program 'gksu' installed. This is a password authentication program for Gnome, similar to kdesu (used by KDE). You need this or Gmount-ISO won't work.

Though I have never tried it, another program worth looking into would be CDEmu, specifically the linux port of it, GCDEmu. It has more features that Gmount-ISO, but it is not in the repositories of Ubuntu/Debian.

Edit: Alternatively I have found Furious ISO Mount to also be a good program for this. Perhaps even better.

Use Tor in Ubuntu Linux

2009-03-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

This post deals with setting up Tor (with Privoxy) and the Tor related GUI TorK on your Linux system.

Frequently Asked Question: What is Tor?
Simply put, it is a program that helps to keep your activities over the Internet more anonymous. It's free to use and damn useful. For a more detailed definition, see here: https://www.torproject.org/faq#WhatIsTor.

Why Use Tor?
There are a lot of reasons. You can be more anonymous when doing things online. For example, when doing something that is.... tenuously legal... this is just another layer of protection. You can also claim your IP is in another country.

The Number #1 thing I use Tor for is whenever I have to do something with proxies. Using Proxies can be a colossal pain because you have to find a good free one, sometimes in a different country, and lets hope that proxy does not have bandwidth limits.

Tor just makes it so damn easy for me. I seriously never have to deal with finding useful Proxy IPs and then swap them in-and-out of my browser. I just let Tor handle all that for me and it is a like a dream.

There is a downside to using Tor: Since your connection's download/upload speeds depend on the Tor-Node you randomly connect to, it can be slow sometimes. (I say slow like only getting 45kbps down for example). But for the sake of anonymity, it is usually worth it and patience is a virtue they say.

Getting the Latest Version of Tor
You should try to have the latest version of Tor is possible.

For details on how to get the latest tor packages for Linux distribution (Debian or Ubuntu), go here:
http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorOnDebian

Install Tor and Privoxy
In a Debian/Ubuntu system, installing Tor is as easy as running the following from command line:

sudo apt-get install tor privoxy

Note, you will need to have the "Universe" apt-repositories enabled if you are running Ubuntu (I believe this is default now). If you get a message about packages not found for Tor, you probably need to enable it and run:

sudo apt-get update

Configuration Setup Tor and Privoxy after Installation
The default Tor configurations work generally well but you MUST enable the listening port for controller programs.

1. Edit the file /etc/tor/torrc with root permissions (using sudo or kdesu or gksu or as the root user). Find the lines for ControlPort. It will look something like this:

## The port on which Tor will listen for local connections from Tor
## controller applications, as documented in control-spec.txt.
#ControlPort 9051

You need to remove the '#' from the beginning of the ControlPort line. NOTE (important): This should not be confused with SocketPort line!

2. Edit the file /etc/privoxy/config with root permissions (using sudo or kdesu or gksu or as the root user). Add this line anywhere in the file:

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

NOTE 1: The trailing space and period after the number must be included.
NOTE 2: These two port numbers must NOT be the same for both Privoxy and Tor

3. Restart the prixovy and tor services. You can do this on the command line with:

sudo invoke-rc.d tor restart
sudo invoke-rc.d privoxy restart

4. Setup TorK. See the section below.

Installing TorK

Tork is a GUI for using Tor+Privoxy. It is very useful. In a Debian/Ubuntu system, installing Tor kis as easy as running the following from command line:

sudo apt-get install tork

Run the program 'tork' from either command, or your applications menus. It should lead you through the rest of the setup. The interface is fairly straightforward and quite useful for running your applications anonymously.

Additional Information
See the Tor homepage: https://www.torproject.org/
The Onion Router: http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter

SSHFS - Network Shares made easy with SSH

2009-02-21T01:05:00.000-08:00

Overview

SSHFS is a program that can use the SSH connection on a computer for mounting a network share / network drive from that target machine to your local computer.

The great news is that you only need to install SSHFS on the computer which you are doing the mounting on, you do not need to change anything on the remote target computer. Put another way, if you want to mount your remote SSH machine's harddrive on your local desktop, you only need to install SSHFS onto your desktop. This is particularly convenient when you don't have administrator control over the remote target client and cannot install extra software.

SSHFS is running through an SSH connection (duh!), so your activity is as encrypted as your SSH connection is (which is pretty good if you use SSHv2, which you should be). SSHFS also inherents the permisssions of your SSH connection, so if you connect as a non-root user, you will be limited to the access that user account has.

Installing SSHFS

This guide assumes you can install SSHFS through your Linux distribution's package system (apt/yum/whatever).

For example, in Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get install sshfs

Preparing to run SSHFS

Make sure the 'fuse' module is loaded into your Linux kernel.
Check by running this command on a terminal:
lsmod | grep -i fuse
If you don't see it loaded, you can load the module with this command:
sudo modprobe fuse

Info on Mount Permissions

Mounting shares with SSHFS is like mounting devices in Linux. They require root/administrator level permissions to do, unless you have specifically changed it to otherwise.

Also, you need specific the permissions of the mounted shares when you mount them, or else your normal user account won't be able to read/write/execute anything in the shared directory.

To enable others to read/write/execute the shared directory, use the mounting command switch:

-o allow_other

You need to run the SSHFS commands as root or with the 'sudo' command.

The Dot '.' Special Character (convenient time saver)

Like the SCP command, SSHFS uses the '.' symbol as a quick way to write '/home/user' (substituting whatever username is invoked with the mount command).

Mounting Shares

The generalized format of the SSHFS mounting is this:

sshfs SSHFS_OPTIONS -p SSH_PORT SSH_USER@REMOTE_TARGET:. LOCAL_DIRECTORY

Here is an example line to mount an network share through SSH:
sshfs -o allow_other -p 7689 jon@192.168.0.10:. /home/jon/shares

In this case, the '.' is being translated into '/home/jon' on the remote target machine. This just saves time. You can explicitly mount other directories.

For example, the user 'bob' is logging in as 'jon' to the computer with the IP address 192.168.0.10, and is mounting that computer's /media/disk1 to his local directory 'shares' on his computer.
sshfs -o allow_other -p 7689 jon@192.168.0.10:/media/disk1 /home/bob/shares

SSHFS can be chain mounted if you desired, so you could mount from a mount from a mount over several SSH connections, but that would not only be ugly but probably slow.

Unmounting Shares

To disconnect a network share, you simply unmount it like any other device in Linux. This require the use of the umount command (not to be confused with 'unmount').
You need to run the 'umount' commands as root or with the 'sudo' command.

sudo umount /home/user/shares

You simply unmount whatever directory where you mounted the SSHFS connection to. Very simple.

Additional Information

SSHFS has several options you can set. Read the manual for more information.

A Word on Speed

SSHFS is pretty fast on local networks. I find their packets to have speeds that are always as fast as SMB/Samba packets. Over a remote network, it is hard to say but I find it is usable even on slow connections.

TROUBLE SHOOTING

SSHFS has only a few simple dependencies usually but your package manger should take care of those for you automatically. The only one it might miss is install the FUSE program.

If you cannot run SSHFS, try install the fuse-utilities.

Also, make sure you have the fuse module loaded into your kernel.

Make sure you are connecting to the correct remote target IP/Host.

Make sure you are using the correct login name for the remote target IP/Host.

Make sure you have permission to read/write/execute the target directory you are trying to mount locally.

Make sure the local target mount directory exists!

A word on SSH Public Keys

Mounting through SSHFS can give you cryptic/unusual errors if there is an error with SSH keys.

This is because of the layers of software it is translating through. In general, you will only see errors while mounting if you are connecting over SSH to a machine whose credentials don't meet expectations.

This typically happens if the remote target SSH machine's IP changes, or their SSH keys change on that machine.

You can confirm this is your problem by trying to connect via normal SSH to the remote target IP/Host. If you get a SSH key error, that is the source of your problem. You can edit your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file and delete the (entire) offending line.

But beware! If you get this error and you don't know why, LISTEN TO IT! SSH stores information on the IPs and the SSH keys it connects to. If the credentials don't match you might be under a Man-in-the-middle attack. So only modify your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file if you know the error message is not valid.

Afterward

The title of this post is "Network Shares made easy with SSH." Some of you might think is a lot of work to get a network share working. It is easier because, really, have you ever tried to get Samba shares working? :)

SSH for Windows

2009-02-21T00:13:00.000-08:00

How to get SSH to work on Windows

We are going to use Cygwin's SSH package. Briefly, Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:

A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.
A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.

Setup SSH in Windows

This guide should work for most Windows. It has been tested on Windows XP, 2000, and Vista.

Download and install Cygwin. Note, if your selected download server is slow, try different one. There are good ones out there.
When selecting the packages to install, make sure to include the following:
SSH (Net/openssh).
May also need zLib and TCP_Wrappers (both in Net).
Be sure to install a good console text editor (Vim or Emacs or whatever).
Set permissions for your SSH daemon configuration files.
By default, Cygwin sets the file permissions to 600, so you cannot write to anything.
To change this, you can set the group for the file, or set the permissions:
chmod ago+w /etc/sshd_config
or
chgrp $USER /etc/sshd_config
Next, open the file /etc/sshd_config in your text editor. Set the options as you like. I suggest a non-standard port in the thousands.
Set permissions for HOST DENY/ALLOW configuration files
By default, Cygwin sets the file permissions to 600, so you cannot write to anything. To change this, you can set the group for the file, or set the permissions:
chmod ago+w /etc/host.allow
or
chgrp $USER /etc/host.allow
Open the /etc/host.allow in a text editor. Make sure you allow sshd with something like this:
sshd: ALL
IMPORTANT: If you see a line that looks like:
ALL : PARANOID : deny
You MUST remove or comment-out that line.
Save the file and close it.
Restart SSH Daemon via 'services sshd restart'
Firewall Configuration
You need to enable an exception through the Windows Firewall for the SSH Port you are going to use.

Control Panel -> Windows Firewall -> Exceptions : Add Port

IMPORTANT: Make sure you ALLOW exceptions, as Windows frequently disables them in the firewall by default.

You may also need to enable an network rule or exception in any other firewall software you use, such as Ghostwall or Zone Alarm.

TROUBLE SHOOTING

PATH Environmental Variables:

You may need to set your Windows PATH variable to include the cygwin executables.

Go to:
Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environmental Variables.

Find the PATH variable and append c:\cygwnin\bin; or wherever you installed cygwin.

CYGWIN Environmental Variable:

Go to:
Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environmental Variables.

Find the CYGWIN variable. If you cannot find it, create it.

Set the value to: ntsec tty

KDE 4.2 Review Continued

2009-02-18T21:04:00.000-08:00

Abstract
My final thoughts and observations on KDE 4.2 before I switched back to KDE 3.5.

I have gone back to KDE 3.5. Thank God (or specifically Partimage) for ghost imaging because this would have taken me a lot longer to get back to "perfect working order" otherwise.

So I have used KDE 4.2 for about 12 hours no. Not a single crash yet, which I must say I am still very impressed with. Here are my final thoughts for the moment:

Better Bluetooth: I take it back what I said before. Their integration certainly is better but their program itself is still buggy. It keeps failing to recognize my keyboard after a reboot.

New Run Dialog: Very nice. A real improvement over what came before. Many individual programs are updated by their respective developers with new features (and taking advantage of many new things in KDE 4). The eye-candy, when I use it, seems nice but that's no surprise. Some new features are half-there, which look promising, particularly for Konquorer.

"Toggle Present Windows": This feature (keystroke CTRL+F9 by default) is really cool. This is a feature taken from Mac OS's dashboard and it is great. I am glad we have this in KDE by default now.

Desktop Backgrounds / Plasma: Despite their lack of tiling+scaling, I praise the KDE team for finally writing a good resampling algorithm for the desktop background display. Finally my pictures look good when scaled.

I have observed at least one image resizing bug with Plasma's desktop area. The image displayed without scaling (and it should have been scaled). I could not repeat it, and it was really a minor bug.

Show Desktop: I don't know if there is an option to "show desktop" in KDE 4 anymore. There is an option to show the Plasma desktop but since I'm not seeing my desktop background, it is missing one of my most important features.

The only thing I have found is adding a widget for this.

Widgets:

Show Desktop: There is a bug with this as it does not toggle all the time. It seems to work for 2 or 3 key-presses right in a row, then it stops working and leaves you on the desktop feebly pressing the shortcut key.

I may have mentioned that the Icons seem to be spotty (ugly or not working properly) in some situations but this is planned to be addressed in KDE 4.3.

Ark (zips, rar, 7zips, gzips, tars): The new Ark program for KDE is looking mighty fine. KDE has finally fixed their annoying bug with extracting multiple archives as once (it would often not extract all archives fully, only grabbing some of the files). Ark was in great need of an update even though I really appreciated the presence of Ark period. I remember what it was like in KDE before Ark appeared.

However I did manage to cause a "Fatal" error in Ark though it was the most graceful error I have ever seen in KDE 4. This happened when I told it "Extract to subfolder, name autodetected."

Konquorer:

Folder Tree Refresh: There is a bug with the Folder Tree view in Konqueror. It does not refresh and you can't manually refresh it without closing and reopening the application.
Renaming: So like I mentioned before, the rename file function in Konquorer has changed from an integrated view to a separate window. Now, at first I thought this was annoying because it was an unnecessary change and for a variety of reasons I thought it was an deprovement, not an improvement to Konquorer. But I lived with it. However, if you have malfunctioning Window Management Preferences (like I do now with Konquorer) then the tiny Rename window can fill your whole screen, becoming maximized. This just goes to show that separating the rename function into a different window was a thorough mistake.

Gwenview:

Before I begin talking about Gwenview's problem, I want to note that I am aware the Gwenview Developer(s) have stated that 1.4.2 is their stable version, not the version 2.2.0 that ships with KDE 4.x.

Gwenview Zooming:
This thing gets it own section.

Zooming: Zoom out on a large picture is not really a problem but enlarging a small picture looks bad. It appears that the older enlarging method applied a (Gaussian) blur of some kind after performing bilinear (or trilinear?) interpolation. I think this was nice and I miss it. The new images look very pixelated as they are enlarged.
The more I use Gwenview with this shitty zoom algorithm, the more I realize I can't stand it. It is horrible for reading comics with.
The subtle irony here is that while Gwenview had good zoom quality for years, KDE's desktop backgrounds did not. It seems this has reversed as now Gwenview has shitty shit zooming while KDE's desktop background looks nice.

Draconian DRM in Windows 7

2009-02-18T16:28:00.000-08:00

Nothing new here. Slashdot already reported it but it bears repeating.

So, surprisingly, I was getting my hopes up for Windows 7. From all that I had witnessed from my friends beta-installation, Windows 7 seemed to be pretty good. Sure, it was a straight rip off from KDE 60% of the time, and the other part it was a ripoff of Mac (which itself is a ripoff of KDE). Nonetheless, Windows 7 seemed to be better than Vista.... which is honestly not difficult to do.

But now, comes the new and even worse DRM measures being discovered in Windows 7. Thank you Microsoft, for making me realize just what freedom in the digital world is, and thank you further for making me once again happy to be using Linux.

Best quote from the original article:
"...but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons"

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257&from=rss

KDE 4.2 Review

2009-02-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

Summary
KDE 4 right now is like using a nice Beta operating system. Well, not exactly. Your filesystem and kernel are not likely to crash. It should be noted that KDE 4.2 never crashed on me once, which is quite impressive. However there are still lots of features/customization options missing from KDE 4.2. The problems with Konquorer was the deal breaker for me, but at least everything else seemed usable for the time being.

The detailed breakdown....

I am spending a lot of time learning how to do the same old tricks in a new way. I'm really trying to hold back judgment because a lot of the ability to customize, which a core feature of KDE, is still missing. I won't be satisfied until it is there.

Now, I think KDE 4 is adding a lot of features that were needed. Better Bluetooth integration for one thing. EDIT: It is a little bug at the moment but when it works it will be nice.

The Problems and the Bugs....

QTCurve: There is a bug with using QTCurve for the Windows Style, which makes lots of black lines in Konquorer, which is too bad. I like that style.

Konsole:

Shortcut keys: The default shortcut keys in konsole interfere with real work. But you can change these through the Settings -> Configure Shortcuts menu. My case is CTRL+S, which locks my console. I have seen this behavior before but never from Konsole.
Transparency: Good transparency is gone from Konsole. I knew this had happened already and I need to find a good konsole now, but this needs to be stated: True-Alpha-Transparency is a tragedy because we are losing the "good transparency" in our programs. I have no use for this True-Alpha transparency and loath it with every fiber of my fibrously fibrous being. I want to see my desktop background in my semi-transparent console window, and I don't want to see the 20 windows below it.
Default Transparency: Ironically you have to open Konsole with a specific switch to enable transparency. Seriously? Lame.

KWin: There are bugs with not saving various preferences correctly. In particularly, I ran into problems with preferences for Konquorer. It was pretty annoying and attempting to delete the settings after they had been stored seemed to be impossible.

Konquorer :

(All the problems with Konquorer in KDE 4.2 is precisely why I hate Dolphin)

File Renaming: Changed to a separate window interface, not integrated into the current window interface. Doubtless this is because of Dolphin. Curse it.
Folder Tree: Many of options are missing from the right-click menu in the Folder Tree. For example, cannot rename folders by right-clicking; it can only be done in the right hand pane.
Configurations: A bug with Konquorer not saving configuration options, like showing tooltips or expandable folders. I hope they fix this soon.
Severe conflict between the detail view mode and the icon view mode. This is due to Konqurer stubbornly refusing to save my view settings correctly, if at all. I cannot enable previews in the icon mode and disable them in the detail mode.
Sizes of the icons are synchronized in all views. This is simply unusable. I need my icons to be large in Icon View mode and small in Detail view mode. Switching between Icon view and Detail view results in major pain because you will constantly be resizing your icons.
Gwenview integration is broken. I can no longer browse images quickly using the Space and Backspace keys in Konquorer. I am sure this will be fixed eventually, but I miss it.
'media:/' protocol: Not there yet and I miss it, but it is planned for KDE 4.3.
Mouse gestures: These don't seem to work and the System Settings dialog for configuring them is just.... weird. The problem might be PEBKAC though.

Note on Konquorer:
Despite all the problems, I see some really nice stuff coming our way for Konquorer. The new buttons added to the toolbar menu are nice.

They finally fixed that really annoying bug with sporadic location bar position changes when using integrated Gwenview. I'm happy for that.

Konquorer's bugs were the last straw that made me switch back to KDE 3.5 but when those are fixed I think I can finally use KDE 4.xx.

Dolphin:

Tabs: Tabs now available in Dolphin. Makes me wonder how it is so different from Konquorer... on the surface anyway. I know underneath it is not a web-browser anymore.
Double Clicking: The Folder Tree view requires double clicking to use, not single clicking like it has been for generations. I hope that when this Folder Tree is ported to Konqueror (as the developers plan) they realize the need to improve this. I suspect they will.

Desktop Background: I am actually shocked and appalled that the Slideshow option is without features for scaling/tiling/positions. I was always saddened that KDE used an ugly resampling algorithm for their image scaling (shame on you guys), but this is ridiculous! I can only scale or title but not both! (All the other options are meaningless!).

The Panel:

The panel is fairly devoid of all the customizability that really matters.
No task grouping options. I have always hated Windows for offering to group my tasks together. I'm not a moron. I know what programs I have and I don't need you to group them. EDIT: I have discovered their is an option to not group specific programs, so they are obviously moving in the fully customized direction.
No task sorting options
No transparency configuration options. I do not know how to tell it to organize my tasks (or not organize them). Also, I don't know how to tell it to be "Elegant for Transparency" like back in 3.5. I miss that feature. Lets hope it comes back.

Application Menu:

The KDE team really should have put some thought into why Microshaft made their Vista startmenu and why they needed it.

The reason: Microshaft's program menu has no order, so people need help finding their applications.

The new style of KDE app menu takes more typing and more mouseclicks to access programs. It slows down the user for no good reason!! A hybrid system of the search-and-program-list would be nice. However a pure Vista knockoff is awful. Whoever thought this was a good idea for KDE should be ashamed at not thinking things through and blatantly following in the stupidity of Microshaft.

Most Recently Used Programs: This is a must have feature, and its not here. EDIT: This is already implemented in KDE 4.3, which does not surprise me and makes me happy.
Editing entries: You cannot edit application-menu entries by right-clicking on them and selecting "Edit this item." That activates the item. Instead, the only way to edit a menu entry is to right-click on the App Menu itself and select Menu Editor. Certainly not a deal killer, but a feature I miss when I'm setting up a new installation.

System Settings:

Empty Space: Several areas have lots of empty space, while their more advanced options are on other tabs. This just results in unnecessary clicking for me to reach my options again.
Colors: Creating custom color schemes is more laborious because what used to take 1-2 click now takes about 4-5. Very very annoying.
Some listings in configuration areas are not sorted by name... or by any logic I can see. One is the video section of the File Associations area.
Hard drives & File Systems: this configurae interface is missing. This is a critical thing for some people and I cannot BELIEVE that Kubuntu 8.10 shipped without it. It is not even there when I updated to KDE 4.2. Now, I know how to manually configure my own hard drives with Vim in a console, but I thought we were beyond those days guys? Come on! This is an F- grade.
Window Behavior: This is already semi-buggy as I mentioned in my tests with Konquorer, but they are planning to redesign and improve this interface by KDE 4.3. So for now we are just waiting.

Hot Keys:

Only One HotKey: Since when did KDE decide I can't have 2 hotkeys for the same feature/function/application? This is a mistake, but I suspect this bug will be fixed eventually.

Default Themes: Though I like the default themes of Wonton Soup and Obsidian Coast, both of these have problems. On webpages that need black-text on a white background, they too dark and fall under the perpetual problem we low-contrast users experience. Damn it. I had to recreate my own CDE theme from scratch. Slightly annoying. Not really KDE's fault unless you count lacking a greater variety of default available themes.

There is more to say but I don't feel like going on....

Conclusion
I'm giving up on KDE again this year. I have to find an alternative that works. I will probably switch to Ubuntu and toss KDE 3.5 back onto it.

KDE 4.xx has yet again wasted my time, sadly. I like some of the new things coming out in KDE but most of the functionality I need to use day to day is just not there right now.

Introduction

2009-02-11T04:43:00.000-08:00

More than once I have wanted to make a blog to share some of the knowledge I have acquired pertaining to Linux.

I hope to publish some real content soon but for now I'm just registering a useful blog URL to have something nice for use in the future.

This blog will eventually contain information about Linux, various tips and stories involved with it, and also by proxy related information and tales about other Operating Systems, such as Windows.