Linux Blogs2k

It’s Up again

2009-07-11T14:24:47Z

Good news comes out from LQ forum that main website of Slackware has been up again after having some hardware issues in the last few days. Still, there’re no updates on -Current, but i think they will come up with good news in the following days, so stay tuned on Slackware development tree since it’s getting closer and closer to a final release of Slackware 13.0 which will be the first Slackware release that includes KDE 4 and also 64-bit version as well as 32-bit.

The Search for a Good Blogging Client

2009-07-11T03:49:46Z

I’m using Drivel, and sometimes Tomboy to post blog entries on my blog. They each have different purposes that’s why I use them both. Tomboy is very useful when it comes to posting something without graphics and really quickly. I have the tendency to use Tomboy when I need to take down notes during conferences and other such meetings and get-togethers because the outliner of Tomboy is really easy to use. Drivel, on the other hand, is richer in the way that I could format my blog entries as well as the fact that I could insert image links in the blog entry.

Why am I searching for a good blogging client?

It’s simple really. I want to write my blog posts offline, and without distractions on the internet. If I have my browser open, I tend to just read on and on and I can’t stop myself so I end up clicking too many links and too many tabs and before I know it I haven’t written the blog entry I was originally thinking of. Sometimes I even forget what in the world the topic is!

I like it that Drivel and Tomboy can both post to WordPress and Livejournal blogs. But what I really am having difficulty with is posting with tags. Those things which add more clue as to what the blog entry is all about. Actually, in Tomboy there is none of that and in Drivel, I am limited to selecting only one category.

So how now?

I am not sure. BloGTK is giving me pains as I try to use it so I’d have to keep on searching for a good blogging client. What are you using? Maybe what you’re using is better than mine. Could you share with me what your blogging client is? It would be great if it could let me update tags on blog entries.

Post from: New Linux User

Learn to Write Your Own Twitter Client in Python

2009-07-11T02:49:58Z

Akkana Peck has an awesome guide to writing your own Twitter client in Python. The timing of this article is perfect because I’m now using Empathy and I currently don’t know of any plugins to let me follow and post to Twitter.

What do you need?

python-twitter (source:http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/)
SimpleJSON (source: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/simplejson)
Tkinter or python-tk

Akkana Peck’s guide teaches you what to write, line by line. Hers might be a simple Twitter client but it’s functional. Her guide teaches you what packages are needed, what the commands are for, and which variables are customizable. The guide also notes which lines of code must not be indented or else it will be part of the loop that might end up going on more than is expected.

If you don’t want to use clients that require Adobe Air, her Python scripts are quite interesting and useful. All of them are actually available on her site and because those scripts are all available for tweaking, you might end up learning a lot about Twitter and improving the client scripts to suit your needs. (Admit it, you’re probably hooked on to Twitter too! And so you must have a personalized Twitter client.)

Good luck with Python programming your client. I could imagine that the guide she wrote could be the start of your own Python programming exercises, especially for those who want to learn on their own time.

Post from: New Linux User

Akademy 2009 Group Photo

2009-07-10T23:30:19Z

International Freedom Fighters of KDE.

Full photo with names poke me (Riddell) on IRC with additions and corrections.

GSOC 2009 Progress - Smoke Bindings Generator

2009-07-10T19:32:38Z

Yesterday I wore my GSOC tee-shirt at GCDS and got together with Arno Rehn to review his smoke bindings library generator tool. It turns out the project is going great and is pretty much finished.

I can’t say I’ve done a lot of mentoring other than to have an initial discussion about which variant of Roberto Raggi’s C++ parsers to use. We chose to use the KDevelop one with some KDE dependencies removed, although in fact from Roberto’s comments on Arno’s blog it might have been best to use the Qt Creator one.

To test the generator, first I dumped off all methods in the current version of the smoke library for the Qt libs using the ‘rbqtapi’ tool that comes with QtRuby. Then we built the same lib with the new smoke generator, and dumped off the methods in that into another text file and compared them with Kompare. There we a few minor things wrong like constructors being marked as ’static’ methods, but nearly always the new compiler was giving better results than the previous Perl version.

This is really good news for language bindings, as for KDE 4.4 we will be able to install the smoke generator as a binary, put up some instructions on TechBase explaining what to do in order to create a Smoke library for your KDE app or library. Mainly you just need to create a list of the C++ classes you want to wrap in an XML file, give it the headers to parse, and you’re done. I’ve already got a script to create a Smoke lib based Ruby extension to use with QtRuby/Korundum, and we can automate that part too. We will be able to move individual bindings out of the kdebindings module and put them in with the app or lib that they wrap. Then we can just have the bindings tools and the core Qt and KDE libs stuff in kdebindings itself.

So congratulations to Arno for doing such a great job, and also delivering one month ahead of schedule (my summary comment on the Google mid-term review was ‘Absolutely excellent!’).

“Sucks to be a Windows User.”

2009-07-10T17:10:40Z

This came in my email….

Sucks to be a Windows user.

IT: Korean DDoS Bots To Self-Destruct on Thursday July 09, @11:41PM
Posted by timothy on Thursday July 09, @11:41PM
from the someone-needs-a-little-hanging-before-bed dept. security tsu doh nimh writes “Several news sources are reporting that the tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows systems infected with the Mydoom worm and being used in an ongoing denial of service attack against US and S. Korean government Web sites will likely have their hard drives wiped of data come Friday. From The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog, the malware is ‘designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads “memory of the independence day,” followed by as many “u” characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.’ ChannelNews Asia carries similar information.”

Right you are, my good man.

Savage Patch 2.1 Released

2009-07-09T20:07:48Z

Homepage | Beginners Guide | Changelog

At 03.07.2009 (some days ago) Mercenary released the latest patch. (version 2.1)

You can find the changelog under “Read more …” or the link above

Savage 2 takes the best of the FPS, RTS, and RPG genres and blends them seamlessly into an extremely addictive and complex experience.

And the best of all, it’s free to play and available for Windows, Linux and Mac!

In Savage 2 you can choose between the Human and Beast team. Each team has its own units with unique abilities and playstyle. Each team also has a commander who plays the game from an RTS perspective. He can research new technology, place various structures and use spells to help his team win the game.

As the game progresses, your team can build a hellshrine which allows you to spawn as powerful hellbourne units and obliterate the enemy.

Savage 2 is a melee oriented game. While there are many ranged weaponaries, be prepared to get in close with your enemy!

At 03.07.2009 (some days ago) Mercenary released the latest patch. (version 2.1)

You can find the complete changelog under “Read more …” or the link above

Multitouch On Linux Is Pretty Cool

2009-07-09T17:45:38Z

Multitouch is pretty cool technology, no question about that. And for awhile there, many folks such as myself were feeling pretty skeptical as to whether or not we would ever be enjoying this technology on the Linux desktop.

But as you can see in this article and with the video below, multitouch has arrived for the Linux platform. Best of all, it appears to work pretty darn well.

As you can see from the above linked article, everything you need is fully accessible. Now I would point out that this is still very much in development and this is not something that is really set for the casual users just yet. But as a proof of the technology working, I think we have arrived.

VideoLAN Player 1.0.0 Is Out!

2009-07-09T17:40:46Z

I have been a huge fan of VideoLAN for what seems like forever. Both on Windows and for Linux, VideoLAN remains my all time favorite and frankly, most powerful video player I have ever used.

Likely due to the simple fact that it will play nearly anything out of the box, regardless of platform, is likely why VLAN has done as well as it has for this long. And now we enter 1.0.0 status!

What is still rather comical however, is that most users barely scrape the surface of just how powerful this media player actually is. From transcoding video from one format to another, down to streaming movies across your LAN. Clearly there is very little that this media player cannot do.

Did Microsoft Woo ASUS

2009-07-09T17:28:43Z

Why did ASUS suddenly stop supporting Linux on their hardware? What is the benefit of this? How could they choose this course of action? Considering the fact that a properly installed Linux distro runs better on lower end netbooks that Windows ever will, seems fairly obvious that Microsoft must have given ASUS a deal they couldn’t refuse.

Why did Microsoft see what was seen as such an insignificant market share as a threat? There is no real question why ASUS made its choices. They are simply following where the money is and frankly, the believe that the money is with Windows.

As for Microsoft however, it is clear that they were not interested in allowing yet another market slip through their fingers. Just as they doing in Search, it seems like they also want to pickup as much of the netbook market as possible.

Thank you, Klaas

2009-07-09T07:40:34Z

I’m back from the awesome Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. It feels good to be back in Berlin and with my family, but I’m very scared of the backlog that now awaits me. Before I tackle it (and potentially blog more about the event) I need to get something off my chest, lest it is forgotten. I’d like to publicly thank Klaas Freitag, who’s term as a member of the KDE e.V. board of directors just ended with our general assembly a few days ago, for his contribution to our project. He stepped up to help out with the more mundane and every-day tasks that are required of the board, thus freeing up people like our beloved bouncing ball and poster boy Aaron (who’s term also ended, but who’ll get plenty credit anyway to do what they do best. I really admire the effective, quiet and ego-less way in which Klaas has carried himself and represented us. He’s done a lot of work behind the scenes that benefits KDE greatly and helped get e.V. and its operational side up to a sustainable level. So thank you very much, Klaas, and enjoy the extra time you can hopefully now spend with your family again.

More productivity tips

2009-07-08T23:32:10Z

I learned a number of useful productivity tips during this akademy, so as the self-appointed guy-who-shares-productivity-tips-with-the-rest-of-kde, I thought I would share them here

Read more below for yokadi, ack-grep, autojump, and cgdb.

The first one is yokadi, a command-line Todo-List manager program, which allows me to finally start applying the principles of “Getting things done” so I stop forgetting important tasks. http://yokadi.github.com - it’s developed by two KDE contributors, actually: Aurélien Gateau of gwenview fame, and Sébastien Renard, coordinator of french translations.

The second one is ack-grep, a grep alternative with more human-readable output, builtin skipping of unwanted files (.svn subdirs, backup files, etc), ability to grep only certain file types, perl regexps, and more. Didn’t use it much yet, though.

The third one is autojump: a “cd” command that learns, over time, where you go most often. So very quickly you can jump into the most commonly used folders by simply typing their name rather than their full path. Get it from “git clone git://github.com/joelthelion/autojump.git”

Last but definitely not least: “cgdb”, a very useful (text-based) wrapper around gdb, which shows the source code in a splitter above the usual gdb prompt. This is really great, I was looking for this for a very long time. Typing “list” all the time in gdb is so cumbersome. gdb in emacs can also show source code, but I always forgot to run gdb in emacs, while now I have alias gdb=cgdb , and I didn’t figure out how to attach gdb-in-emacs to a running process, and the keybindings were different, etc. cgdb, on the other hand, can be started exactly like gdb, and is editor-independent.

With thanks to Aurélien and Sébastien for all these useful tips!

Firefox 3.5 Problem Solved

2009-07-08T18:14:14Z

Thanks to olego, a new LQ member who has posted at my thread about the same problem that he had with Firefox 3.5. He tried to comment out libsafe entry at /etc/ld.so.preload and this trick works. It makes Firefox 3.5 works as intended. What is libsafe anyway?

Libsafe is a library that intercepts calls to vulnerable functions in the standard C library at runtime, replacing these functions with safer ones that do not allow buffer overflows (SecurityFocus).

So, i was wondering whether Mozilla Firefox 3.5 uses insecure C functions on the code so that libsafe changed them and makes it broken?

Using OpenProj

2009-07-08T17:50:44Z

OpenProj

Ever wondered what you could use instead of Microsoft Project? OpenProj (http:/openproj.org) is actually a good project management tool. It helps you build up your chart and account for the hours your team will and is spending on the project. As the developers of OpenProj have pointed out, it is "interoperable with Project, with a Gantt Chart and PERT Chart."

I personally like the fact that it's available for both Windows and Linux which means that I could share files with co-workers and not have a problem of reading and editing those made in OpenProj.

What can you do with OpenProj

create a Gantt Chart
create a Pert Chart
create WBS/work breakdown schedules
create Earned Value costing
open MS Project files

OpenProj is Java-based so you need to install that first. I just started using it because of work and so far, the user interface has not confused me much. If all else fails, there's always the online help. You could search the wiki for instructions on how to do things and they usually have screenshots so they are very helpful.

If you've been looking for something to help you manage projects, OpenProj seems to help a lot. Download and see for yourself.

Post from: New Linux User

Fear Not the Penguin!

2009-07-08T17:40:09Z

There are days when I just want to tell friends and co-workers to just use Linux even when they express so much fear. Why? Because there’s nothing to fear! I haven’t had something as tricky as a kernel panic for the longest time. When it comes to drivers, there are a lot of helpful forums, plus our sys ads are capable of helping us. Even if they don’t know everything, they are skilled enough to help us through our problems, whether it’s on Linux or Windows.

I see that some of our co-workers have family members who use netbooks with Linux. If they can use it, why can’t my co-workers? Right? Absolutely! A lot of our software engineers are actually using Linux on a daily basis because of the development machines that they have come with Linux. But I do know that there are those who have chosen to use Linux even at home. Imagine! At home, they even share the computer with other people and yet they use Linux. This is one of those times that I think that what is really making it hard for people to even give Linux a chance is that mindset of losing touch with the familiar.

I recall the time that I practically made my mom use Ubuntu at home. She basically just asked me how she’d know if she’s online, what she could use to chat, what she could use for writing, etc. It wasn’t totally easy but because she asked me what applications she can use, it was actually alright.

Maybe it’s time to emphasize on how much Linux can do even if it’s not totally the same as what they’ve been used to. The reality is not so happy but we could find something to make it work. :) Maybe the Linux mascot Tux can help me find ways to make users feel at ease. After all, it does look cute and cuddly and everything.

Post from: New Linux User

WMIface 2.0 - CLI scripting of any (decently wm-spec-compliant) window manager

2009-07-08T16:20:13Z

I noticed yesterday that at the kde-apps.org page for WMIface, a tool that allowed scripting the window manager used by KDE3 from command line, a comment appeared asking about a version for KDE4. It felt like a good idea to do something as simple as this in the evening as a relaxation, so, after quite some time playing with C++ templates and so on (since I’m a lazy developer and therefore I went with doing some extra work that would save me from doing work), I have to disappoint you. There is no version specifically for KDE4. In order to reduce the dependencies I made it depend on just QtCore and X11 libs, with those few important classes from kdeui copied into the project. No KDE dependency whatsoever. This provides the CLI tool with startup time decent enough for direct usage, and makes it usable on every system, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, whatever.

PS: The possibility of the much more powerful scripting in KWin itself is still there for anybody interested enough to do it.
PPS: Anybody who ignores the kdeui classes for window management and uses this user scripting tool from an application will be tarred, feathered and publicly laughed at. You’ve been warned.
PPPS: Every decent system, that is - anything that has QtCore and a reasonably wm-spec-compatible window manager.

Netbooks Now - Time To Buy?

2009-07-08T04:02:30Z

As the prices continue to drop on netbooks, it has some people wondering if the prices will end up falling even further? Still, with so many netbooks running specs that are just too low for daily use, the charge remains that many distros can run on them no problem. Sure, unless you use YouTube or anything else that is not viewing a website from 1999.

Look, netbook or notebook, get as many hardware upgrades as possible when shooting for the low end. While you might not really need the next Dual-core system with four GBs of RAM, it would also be cool to be able to edit documents without it taking all day for them to load.

Should you steer clear of the VIA setups? For me, I break it down this way. Never buy from an OEM unless they are also providing you with aftermarket support. If this is too much trouble, then you need to think the hardware you are about to select.

Careful - Some Linux Distros Can Give You Mono

2009-07-08T04:02:20Z

People often wonder why so many Linux purists are against any use of Mono and Novell for promoting it as an open source answer to Microsoft’s .NET. If you read through this article very closely, you will instantly understand just how insidious Mono “could” be.

Some people fear that including or embracing Mono within the Linux community may lead to Microsoft controlling aspects of Linux application development, through Novell’s efforts.

Speaking for myself, I refused to give either party that much credit. I think that it is true, that there are aspects of Mono used with desktop Linux that is a concern. But at the same time, so long as it is a choice to include or not include it with specific distros, I do not think it will lead to anything too terrible. Besides, applications built with GTK and Mono such as Banshee are not bad to use whatsoever. Actually, I rather enjoy it myself.

Palm Pre For Linux Users

2009-07-08T04:01:56Z

Most desktop Linux users might find themselves to be more inclined with the usage of the G1, being it plays well with popular Linux distros. But as I learned from this article here, apparently the Palm Pre also is a phone to consider if you are a Linux user.

As you can see in the above linked piece, the Pre does well with mounting the file system via USB, but there is the question as to whether it works well with music players such as Banshee or amaroK.

I suspect that it is likely that the file system will mount just fine and allow for a fairly straight forward data transfers. This also means that it is plausible that music transfers should work easily as well. But I would be interested in hearing from any of you that might own a Pre and are using it with desktop Linux.

Firewall with iptables using mac address filtering

2009-07-08T01:09:47Z

There are times when you might need to filter the traffic on your firewall using MAC addresses instead of IP addresses, iptables has the option to do it.

From the man page of iptables:

Note that this only makes sense for packets coming from an Ethernet device and entering the PREROUTING, FORWARD or INPUT chains.

<!–break–>
You may want to insert this line in you firewall script.

iptables -A INPUT -m mac –mac-source 00:11:2f:8f:f8:f8 -j DROP

This way the packets comming from the network element with the MAC address 00:11:2f:8f:f8:f8 will be denied.

That is if you want to block the incoming packets to the firewall, but the blocked machine may still be able to send packets across the firewall, so to block those packets, you may want to add also this line.

iptables -A FORWARD -m mac –mac-source 00:11:2f:8f:f8:f8 -j DROP