Colin Charles Agenda

While I am not a Jeff Waugh apologist (disclaimer: he’s a friend of mine, whom I met through the open source community), I find this kind of journalism, simply appalling.

Five whole pages over the running of a Planet? With pulling out details from the archives of lists? It clearly looks like Sam Varghese is a little bored these days. And iTWire, which is on my “daily” to read list, is on the verge of being removed. Its becoming drivel.

If Jeff was really doing a bad job, and this is after all the open source world, where is the fork of Planet GNOME?

P/S: For added value, read the comments.

Standardisation is important.

Tagging in Uploadr involves writing tags in the format such that its:
    australia victoria melbourne “notting hill” clayton

Tagging in ScribeFire, involves writing tags that are parsed in a different way (for Technorati):
    australia, victoria, melbourne, notting hill, clayton

Notice the commas (”,”)? Without them, your tags are all lumped together. I’m wondering if I should change Uploadr to similar behaviour as ScribeFire (or vice versa)? What do other applications do for tagging in a field?

It should be trivial to make this change, the question is if my patch will be accepted upstream. I’m already using a patched version of Uploadr, as I await the author to implement my patch (which adds a description field, which the Flickr API supports). Incidentally, PyGTK is pretty easy to get around with, with superb documentation making it easy for anyone to get on the bandwagon. More on pygtk programming later…

Technorati Tags: tagging, uploadr, scribefire, standardisation, tags, flickr, pygtk, firefox, gnome

Surely there must be a better way of handling this:

gnome-obex-server receiving lots of images from the phone

So, is this a bug or a feature? I need to see if OS X or Windows handles it differently? The smart thing to do would be to group it together, rather than having these many dialogs. Or maybe, just use the notification infrastructure and automatically accept it to a path of your choice (currently, it defaults to ~/Desktop so a quick mv operation has to happen later). The maintainer listed has switched to a Mac, so I wonder if this software is being enhanced further…

Sometimes, when I have my laptop, well, on my lap, I accidentally hit the F1 key when I really am aiming to hit the Escape key. I dislike Help popping up, regularly. In vain, I looked for a way to do this in System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. I gave up, and thought maybe removing yelp might help. It doesn’t.

Is there any way I can disable F1 == help in GNOME?

Technorati Tags: ubuntu help gnome f1

gnash

I’ve not exactly seen much working with Gnash, which is what I have installed: gnash and gnash-plugin. A quick visit to Youtube, confirms that gnash is still not exactly usable, and the bug seems to be with ActionExtend and Super (AS inheritance) not being implemented yet. There is hope nonetheless, as Lulu TV also use these features, and are hosting the Gnash developers wiki, which might mean there’s some corporate backing of gnash development.

gnome-dictionary

gnome-utils provides the Dictionary, which is just a front-end to an online dictionary. This is great, but works horribly if you’re offline. Mac OS X clearly has the upside here, as I can just use the Dashboard dictionary applet to find words. It also comes with a working thesaurus, something the “Similar Words” feature in the GNOME Dictionary doesn’t seem to grok.

Deskbar

Like Quicksilver? You’ll definitely like the Deskbar Applet (deskbar-applet from Fedora Extras). Its not Ctrl+Space controlled, which it instead has picked up on Alt+F3 as the keyboard shortcut of choice. It has Beagle (Spotlight equivalent) integration, can connect to the Fedora bugzilla just via a bug number, and do so much more. I don’t have Thunderbird integration, and notice that its a planned feature for the future - I can’t hardly wait.

David Woodhouse: 30 May 2006:
I’ve taken to running Evolution in a loop: while true; do evolution; done
At least I don’t have to keep restarting it every time it crashes now — an event which occurs ten or twenty times daily.
Oh my gosh. So it wasn’t just me then. This weekend I let Evolution run its course, and I restarted it twice when I came to check up on it. I was wondering if all the mail was causing it to crash, but it wasn’t. No OOM messages that I saw in a log, just an empty workspace. I switched back to Thunderbird (which means no convenient way of reading email via ssh exec-ing imapd), thinking maybe it was just me.

Updated Fedora Core 5, on an x86 even. Just about 3 IMAP mailboxes, and several (~4-5) POP boxes. IMAP mail tends to be large…

On another partition, I popped Ubuntu 5.10 on the Thinkpad R51. I figured I need to eat some of my own dogfood, and give it more use. Here are some notes:

• Installation went smoothly, installing side-by-side with FreeBSD. It however, didn’t write to GRUB that FreeBSD actually exists, and use that as an option for booting. It also, didn’t give me an option (or I missed it?) to say if I didn’t want it to install the bootloader. Anyways, in /boot/grub/menu.lst, add:

title FreeBSD
root (hd0,0,a)
kernel /boot/loader

• My WiFi (ipw2100) actually just works. Ubuntu includes the firmware it’d seem, which explains why RMS doesn’t think Ubuntu is free software.
• 96.9MB of updates were waiting for me the moment I logged into GNOME. The kernel update broke around 50%, but I was amazed to see it resume the download from there. Is this some dpkg/apt cleverness that we could use in rpm/yum?
• I tried to install something (gforge-*), and apt barfed. I presume this is how people mentioned RPM hell and what not… There exists APT hell too, folk.

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su - shouldn’t be a problem.

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0×48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.

sudo /sbin/losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0/mnt
merrily going on making changes
sudo umount /mnt
sudo /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image - make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.

MySQL running on the OLPC

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of /var/log and /etc/yum.repos.d/ and so on…

From reading the software task list, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips - the simulator debugging did come in handy.