Colin Charles Agenda

Trawled Bugzilla today, mainly poking at gpdf/openoffice, so there was a lot of upstream stuff there too. Annoyed as to why Rhytmbox only works using “osssink” rather than “alsasink” - gstreamer bug, wish #121671 gets released as an update soon (since Rhythmbox will be preferred to XMMS soon).

I’ve started using gvim again - long forgotten software, and for once, I don’t have a gnome-terminal open! vim-X11 provides it (on Fedora), and “set shell=/bin/sh” fixes my custom .bashrc.

Some useful resources for those running Fedora, and needing to build the latest tarball releases of GNOME. I decided to use GARNOME, instead of jhbuild this time, which meant I had to learn how to use GNU arch. Fedora/Fedora.us don’t have arch, so I rebuilt a source RPM and it installed fine.

Alternatively, read the GARNOME TLA (GNU Arch) HOWTO and there are links to some arch RPMs. That’s basically all you need to read to get started with garnome. Bob Kashani has further information at his site, and a useful script would be the FC2 dependency installation script.

Building it just takes some time, and when its done, create the garnome-session file, and then add a garnome.desktop (an example of the jhbuild equivalent). Happy usage! More details at the 2.7.x Development Series. Also, on the plus side, my Evolution issue has been fixed now :)

Argh! The spatial way hit lwn, and the comments have landed not on any list, but my inbox. nautilus-list is good for this sort of thing - not complaining, but possibly giving new ideas for improvement.

If there are any PC Gemilang users needing to upgrade to FC2 from FC1, there’s a guide: Upgrading your PC Gemilang (Fedora Core 1) to Fedora Core 2, which was a quick walk-thru of the experience. Others might find it useful if you performed ‘everything’ installs.

Evolution is giving me grief. When I right click a message, and select “Copy to Folder”, it comes up with a pop-up. Now, if I hit a key on the keyboard, say ‘t’, it should go to folders with names starting with a ‘t’, like Trash, or tech, or something. It seems to work on a clean FC2 install, but my upgraded FC1->FC2 e-mail box displays this. Is there a workaround?

Don’t know why I’m jumping with joy, but Fedora Core 2 has been released - the release announcement are a must read (very funny, movie like sequence). I’ve got some shots of the FC1 to FC2 upgrade - they’re just anaconda snaps. Release notes too.

Otherwise, of some definite interest would be The Spatial Way, a little guide as to why spatial browsing is nice, with references, and stuff. Decided to do it now, rather than later because of the recent discussions on desktop-devel-list, plus the fact that FC2 is sporting this too… If there are comments on it, please send them my way, I’ll gladly improve it.

Elsewhere, I caught Troy. Bring’s new meaning light to Achilles’ Hell, and the Trojan Horse. Good watch.

Not eating for about 45 hours was fun. Even while at the karaoke place last night, it was really hard not to eat, but I guess that means if pledged, I can do it. General happiness.

Fedora’s kernel-2.6.5-1.358 (on PowerPC) exhibits the same behaviour as a mainline 2.6.6 - it oopses when running ifconfig eth0 mtu 1300. That aside, GNOME 2.6 got hosed as well! Hosing GNOME 2.4 was relatively easy (like if the laptop ran out of power), but I thought 2.6 was rock solid - seems Nautilus is refusing to come back up, the bonobo-activation-server is all gone awry, and the panel is dying. Different users, etc… makes no difference.

• Bought The Official GNOME 2 Developers Guide and skimmed thru it. Definitely going to be a good read and reference point, though it does assume some fairly strong C skills - this is where a gap exists for complete newbies. So I’ve made my donation to the foundation :)
• Want GAIM, the CD player, or even up2date to sit on your “system tray”? Right click the GNOME panel, Add to Panel, Utility, and select Notification Area.
• Browsing JB Hifi (where I bought some CDs incidentally), I saw mini-CDR’s going for about $1/CDR. That’s about 185MB of storage, and being mini-sized, it struck me. Seems like a good marketing tool to push some open source software, that runs on Microsoft Windows to “to-be converts”. MozOO.org distributes CDs that are full-sized, but their package set is definitely small enough for something like this.
• If Siemens thinks StarOffice is mature enough, this is definitely good news for the OOo camp. A conclusion that training didn’t cost more - in Malaysia, “open source training” costs a bombshell - maybe costs can be drastically reduced by getting in-house training sorted by ByteBot.Net Training Materials. Also, keep in mind that eWeek conducted an independent study to show that OpenOffice.org is cheaper than Office 2003 in the SMB market.
• Dick Smith, in New Zealand, is now selling OpenOffice.org among a few other software packages for NZ$4.95.

I really want to sync mail between the desktop and the laptop, now that I have a working desktop. So I gave MultiSync from CVS a shot (requires evolution-devel, openssl-devel on FC). Not bad, it does Contacts, Calendar and Tasks, but no Mail (and really, I don’t use the other features often). Multisync however has a cool Opie plugin, so if GPE is still at the status it is at (haven’t updated my iPaq in a while), I may just reinstall it with Opie for a bit. Very promising software, and when it reaches 1.0, they’ll apply for GNOME inclusion - good.

That said, Evolution is now synced, with the wonders of rsync! Small script kills evolution on both desktop/laptop, and starts syncing the important stuff over. For a ~/evolution of size 1.6GB, it completes in under twenty minutes - thats a pretty long wait if I’m going to do this about once or twice a day. Guess I’ll start deleting mailing list archives, and stop being a pack rat, since they’re usually available online anyways. Oh, and a fairly good guide on backing up Evolution.

Yay, Fedora installed super-quickly on the spanking new box that I have here - the new albus. Everything “just works”, just think I’m missing the PC speaker sound - could be an hardware issue, but I’m back to using a desktop again.

Evolution is a bit of a pain I guess - I moved ~/evolution from my laptop to the desktop, and to make sure all is really well, you should perform “evolution –force-shutdown” first and then backup ~/.gconf/apps/evolution as well. Seems to be a real FAQ on the lists, with repeated introductions of how tar works too. Someone should come up with a “sync Evolution” script, so things work seamlessly on say a laptop/desktop kinda use case.