Stable Archlinux

Objective-C is now more popular than Java and C++

2012-07-06T07:51:00.001-07:00

How the TIOBE index is drive by the iOS money making apps! This month Objective-C has become more popular even than C++. Both Objective-C and C++ started in early 1983 as successors of the C language. Now Objective-C more popular (thanks to the iPhone and iPad), but not as a direct competitor of C++ any more.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is not just an index about what is the best programming language, but an

indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors.

You should check the index regularly to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. I'm glad to see my favorites - C# and Python are still in the top 10. Which are yours? And what position?

New C# Qt bindings package for Archlinux

2012-06-30T05:53:00.000-07:00

Assemblygen is brand new Qt4 binding for Mono C#. It aims to be more effective on signals / slots mechanism and is more C# friendly at all.

C# (eg. Mono) is not very popular in Linux these days. I don't know why. I think it is a powerful language with very bright future (especially in embeded or small sized devices), just like Java is.

And here is my small contribution about - an Archlinux package. To be honest, this is my first package I ever uploaded un AUR. Hope it is useful.

Here is how to install it under Archlinux or derivatives:

yaourt -S assemblygen-git

In case you have no yaourt installed, just download the package from here and build it. In this case you also need two more packages made by me:

smokegen-git and smokeqt-git.

And here is my first test program using C# and assemblygen, hope it will become a text editor some day:

using System;
using Qyoto;

namespace TextEd
{
public class MainClass : QMainWindow
{
    public QTextEdit editor;
    public MainClass(QWidget parent) : base(parent)
    {
        SetupEditor();
        this.MenuBar = new QMenuBar();
        this.CentralWidget = editor;
        Resize(600, 400);
        Show();
    }

    protected override void OnCloseEvent (QCloseEvent arg1)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("on close event");
        base.OnCloseEvent (arg1);
    }

    private void SetupEditor()
    {
        editor = new QTextEdit();
    }

    public static int Main(String[] args)
    {
        var a = new QApplication(args);
        MainClass w = new MainClass(null);
        QApplication.Exec();
        Console.WriteLine("exit");
        return 0;
    }
}
}

Stop overheating your notebook

2012-06-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

It is getting hotter and hotter and it is necessary to find ways to stay cool in the summer heat. Especially for notebooks.

I personally like ice tea, but your super thin and fast notebook doesn't have the luxury of a icy refreshing beverage to cool it off (and you don't want to try pouring ice tea on your lapt
op).

It is producing a lot of heat on his own and you've noticed it when your doing system intensive tasks like watching HD video or running a lot of applications at once. Mine gets more hotter when unsquashing livecd contents using all 4 processors. Such a heavy processor load prompts the computer's internal fan to whirl away a bit faster and you've probably heard it.

When the air around the notebook is hotter it becomes more and more difficult for the computer to dissipate that additional heat. This over time can damage your notebook.

If you have no air conditioning in your room (like me) there are still a few simple things you can do to ensure your notebook stays cool and runs smoothly this summer.

1) Make sure you have properly configured your laptop OS.
Running a non configured and not optimized OS can harm your notebook in

these hottest days, you know. The most important thing is to have all power-saving options and optimization on to avoid overheating. For me, running some kind of ArchLinux, it is necessary to install some additional packages for enabling power saving like this:

sudo packman -Sy cpufrequtils laptop-mode-tools acpid

see archlinux wiki for how to configure and enable them or simply add laptop-mode into your DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf

Another important thing is to avoid power regression kernel bug affecting Intel Sandy bride processors.

Just add this to your grub line:

pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1

This will save you a lot of power and will cool down your notebook. If you have an ATI video card along to Intel card, just switch it off if you don't play some games or run graphic eager apps. This can be done by mounting debugfs

mount -t debugfs debugfs /sys/kernel/debug
or in /etc/fstab:

debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs 0 0

then switch ATI card off usign "vga_switcheroo". A radeon module must be loaded before:

modprobe radeon
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
This reduce the power consumption of my notebook from ~20 -30 W to 10W, which is a lot.

2) Notebook cooling pad

USB powered cooling pad gives your laptop additional fans and a raised surface to sit on allowing better airflow underneath to dissipate the heat. If you can choose, buy one with bigger fan or multiple fans. Do not buy cheap ones. They are noisy or have vibrating body.

3) Keep your laptop in the shade
It is very important to keep your notebook out of the sun. Laptops are convenient because you can just pick them up and get to work anywhere, but make sure you
haven't left it baking in the sun all day. You'll also want to avoid leaving you laptop in your car this summer. Cars sitting in the sun all day can get really hot inside so if you have to leave your laptop in the car, give it some time to cool down before

getting right to work.

4) Keep your laptop, out of your lap
Try to keep your laptop out of your lap, and off of any fabric covered surface. Your laptop likely has small feet or risers on the bottom which are there to provide space between the laptop and the surface it's placed on. This allows space for air to pass under the laptop, helping cool the laptop by drawing away from the processor. Placing your laptop on a surface that doesn't allow that space can cause your computer to heat up. Now you have an overheating computer in your lap, which for obvious reason is also not comfortable.

5) Work from somewhere that has AC
When my apartment gets too hot for my laptop, it's also usually too hot for me as well. Instead of baking away in a stifling apartment treat both yourself and your laptop to the climate controlled bliss of a nearby cafe. You can even get yourself an delicious iced latte to beat the heat, all the while protecting you computer from damaged and overheating.

Rolling Ubuntu: Ubuntu tool for fixing wrong F10 behavior on termi...

2012-06-14T22:51:00.001-07:00

Rolling Ubuntu: Ubuntu tool for fixing wrong F10 behavior on termi...: I used to get the terminal in my Ubuntu open all the time . There are so many things to do or manage via ter English: Midnight Comma...

Rolling Ubuntu: Ubuntu 12.04 tip: booting to text mode (run level ...

2012-06-11T11:10:00.001-07:00

Rolling Ubuntu: Ubuntu 12.04 tip: booting to text mode (run level ...: Ubuntu is usually very stable (especially 12.04 LTS) and can boots on almost every one machine. But sometimes, there are cases when video...

Rolling Ubuntu: Meet SpeedCrunch - Qt based calculator for your ne...

2012-06-07T01:11:00.001-07:00

Rolling Ubuntu: Meet SpeedCrunch - Qt based calculator for your ne...: I'm a GNOME fan and my primary DE is GNOME or .... perhaps Unity . Recently I tried KDE on my fresh Ubuntu 12.04 and guess what... I real...

Rolling Ubuntu: Ubuntu performance trick for slow machines

2012-06-06T00:50:00.001-07:00

Rolling Ubuntu: Ubuntu performance trick for slow machines: If you have old PC/Laptop or low memory machine and want to install Ubuntu , here is how to increase overall performance. The trick is to in...

Rolling Ubuntu: Install LibreOffice 3.5.4 in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise ...

2012-05-30T13:59:00.001-07:00

Rolling Ubuntu: Install LibreOffice 3.5.4 in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise ...: The new LibreOffice 3.5.4 comes with up to 100% performance improvements and is de facto the fastest free and open sourc...

Mark Zuckerberg Gets Married

2012-05-20T01:52:00.000-07:00

A man, even if he lives worth, gets married. ;)

Whats a surprise. Facebook founder gets married. The girl is Priscilla Chan, his longtime girlfriend.

Zuckerberg and the 27-year-old Chan wed at a small ceremony at his Palo Alto, California.

Take a look at Zuckerberg's personal page on Facebook, and you'll see the above picture.

Google Search is dying or why SEO is ineffective and faulty

2012-05-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

First of all, I have to say I'm not a professional nor SEO expert, I'm just a human seeing things not visible for Google bots but obvious for others. And there I will expose my own thoughts and opinions and nothing more.

So, let me say it again: Google Search Engine is dying. There are serious evidences about bots being unable to understand web content and start complain.

"Duplicated content in your site, the page A has the same contents as page B, prioritize it for best indexing" .... what the heck is it. People often like to say something twice or more times. So what? Is it really duplicated content? No, it is not! I could say this is "same content in different context" or just "same content". And I really don't mind about prioritizing such pages. The pages are same, the bot must choose one and forget about other, not complain. This is really smart bot and Google claim to have such bots... or not?

This is really big questions. Does Google have smart bots or they just can not manage modern web contents as Google claims.

Does the people really need such (smart and mighty) search engine. Todays the people are often inclined to share their contents to friends, not searching for web contents. Put simply, just because there are no accurate evaluation of web content. At least for now. Why news spreading sites are so "SEO optimized". More often the content stream is not valuable information for more than of small group (1000~10000~100000) of people. Being that a simple true, SEO is just a cheap trick for money earning experts claiming they will make your site appear at first position in Google search results. People share the interesting content outside the mighty net bots limits. They speak each other, they write a recommendations (in a billion different ways), they draw a picture, etc. If web content is not interesting or valuable, there is no web bot being able to point people to it. You can say, people often click on one of the first 10 results. Yes, this is true, and I can say people are often disappointed from the content they are seeing.

Another frustrating thing: http://somedomain.com is different from http://www.somedomain.com (if there are no redirection) for Google. But it is not different for me. What the stupid bot you are to not know or learn about such idioms. This is same if someone call me Mr. John Smith or just Jhon Smith. People already know that, but machines not. This is another reason Google is going to die in the modern web.
Another example:
http://somedomain.com/some-page and
http://somedomain.com/some-page/ (note the trailing slash).
Google often complain this is duplicated content. How stupid. It is same if my wife call to me ending with "darling" or "honey". No difference, I already know it is a word (or call) about me and not complain. SEO experts told you "removing railing slash is Search engine optimization" and I believe they cheat you. If I'm going to write a search engine, I will certainly implement such a smartness in my bots.
I don't know why Google does not implement it. But I believe it will lead to Google death in web search race.

Thats all for now, late I will continue with my humble opinions and thoughts about web searches.

Google is dying.... long live the web.

GOLANG: Call inherited constructor

2012-05-05T00:50:00.000-07:00

Golang is new and innovative program language from Google. It is fast enough, flexible and powerful. But if you want to program something classic OOP, it is not so easy. At least, you have to change your mind, turn at 180°.
So, here is my 1 hour research about classes in Golang and class constructors.

First, I already knew there is a kind of inheritance in Golang structs (or classes in traditional OOP language). Now I will check is there constructor chaining when creating new class. To be more clear, lets look at C# example:

public class ClassA {

public int A;

public int B;

public ClassA() {

A = 1;

B = 2;

}

public ClassB : ClassA {

public string C;

public ClassB() : base() {

C = "test"

}

So, after ClassB creation, all members are initialized.
How this can be done in Golang? The answer is: easy, but not so obviously. Let see the Golang code (more customized and decorated with lots of println)

package main

type ClassA struct {
    A int
    B int
}

func (self *ClassA) PrintA() {
    println("A is ",self.A)
}

func NewClassA() *ClassA {
    a := &ClassA{1,2}
    println(a.A, a.B)
    return a
}

type ClassB struct {
    *ClassA
    C string
}

func NewClassB() *ClassB {
    b := &ClassB{}
    b.ClassA = NewClassA()
    println(b.A, b.B, b.C)
    return b
}

func NewClassB1() *ClassB {
    b := &ClassB{NewClassA(), "test"}
    return b
}

func main() {
    a := NewClassA()
    println("done A, a.A=",a.A,"a.B=",a.B,"\n")

    b := NewClassB()
    println(b.A, b.B, b.C)
    b.PrintA()
    println("\n")

    c := NewClassB1()
    println(c.C)
}

results here:
1 2
done A, a.A= 1 a.B= 2

1 2
1 2
1 2
A is 1

1 2
test

So, calling (chaining) inherited constructor is easy, just place it at struct initialization like this:

a = ClassA{inheritded_constructor, ....}

or call it separately on parent member like this:

   this_class.parent = constructor()

Thats all. Hope this example will be useful.

PS: archlinux users can install golang with:
# pacman -Sy go

How to get hibernate working in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

2012-04-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

When I installed Ubuntu 12.04 two days ago, I was a bit surprised to see there is no hibernate entry in Unity system menu. Hibernation is disabled by default because it is not working here and there... As most people have notebooks these days, they will prefer to hibernate their laptops over suspend. I personally prefer both and use hibernate in most cases. So, I missed Hibernate.

Here is how I get it back.

First I try the command line:

sudo pm-hibernate

yes, yes. it is working. My notebook HP Pavilion G6-1206su hibernated and went back smoothly. So, it is working, but I have no menu entry in Unity.

Damned Unity !@!@##@@#**#&#& !

After some investigation I see there is a solution. Create new file calling gedit through gksu

gksu gedit /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla

place this

[Re-enable hibernate by default]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultActive=yes

and save. After you logout and login again you will have the Hibernate entry in Unity system menu. Check yourself.

Incoming AmeLinux One alpha2

2012-04-22T08:25:00.002-07:00

Hi folks, the screenshot preview of my shiny new AmeLinux is here. The iso will be ready in a few days too.
What's new :
1. I'm switched to Gnome-Shell, it is more eye candy
2. New file system hierarchy, see contents of / and /System

Enjoy and please, link to this page too.

AmeLinux alpha1, for braveman only

2012-04-15T03:57:00.001-07:00

Hello folks, today I'm proud to announce the AmeLinux alpha1, based on OpenSuse and built with Suse Studio. You can download the is from here, and please, rate it and share the link for your friends too.

What's inside?
Well, KDE 4.8 only, but you will be surprised to know the Linix kernel is of version 3.3, there are broadcom-wl drivers, ATI/AMD drivers are built and waiting for uploading... and distrobution uses Tumbleweed repos by default. There is default wallpaper and Androbit plasma theme preinstalled. Currently, in this alpha version I can not set 'em for live user, will fix it in some future version. You can select in KDE control panel, though.
If you want to give it a try, you can write it to USB stick using simple command (as root):

sudo dd if=AmeLinux.x86_64-0.0.10.iso of=/dev/sdX
where X is a letter of your USB stick.
The iso is installable too, and all you will get is fresh Tumbleweed OpenSuse, maintained by me and large OpenSuse community.

I maintain a Tumbleweed repo for some packages as well, and many more will be addeed soon. The repo is here.
Building Live CD with Suse Studio is extremely easy, but there are some catches when dealing with repository priorities. I implement a post-install script to fix that. The AmeOS repo is now with priority of 80, then is Kde 4.8 repo and so on.

Thats all, hope you will like it.
Please let me know about any bugs or suggestions and imrovements.

PS. Currently GNOME 3.2+ edition is baking.

GCompris: wonderful educational game for children and adults

2012-04-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

This wonderful game has many educative activities for children aged 2 to 10 years old and not so. I also used to exercise my brain in some quests, :) Oh, yeah, there are some interesting computer discovery tasks, algebra solving problems, science, geography, various small brainfuck games, learning's etc.

I remember, it was 2008 or before I found this game, and I was impressed from how many languages this game supports: English, French, Portuguese etc. Now, i can see the game is also available for Windows and Mac OSX users too. See here for all available options.

Archbang & Archlinux users can install it the usual way:
sudo pacman -Sy gcompris gcompris-data

Do not play it too much, give a turn to your nephew, or little brother, heh :)

How to install Gnome Cinnamon in OpenSuse

2012-03-31T11:29:00.001-07:00

Gnome Cinnamon is a Gnome-Shell like desktop environment, that resembles Gnome2 wery well. Originally it started with Linux Mint. Currently at version 1.4 it is available to install for OpenSuse users too.

for OpenSuse 12.1 users : Click to install
for OpenSuse Tumbleweed (like me) : Click to install

One of the most exciting features in Cinnamon is an old-school styled panel with task switcher. I personally prefer it over Gnome-Shell task switching style as it is more fast. Another is Expose like tiling, which is not so handy if you have panel task switcher.

Unfortunatelly, Cinnamon 1.4 has serious design error with start menu, which I found very ugly; Also, there is a memory leak when you use Expose like tiling.

This is after a half hour of work - memory footprint started from 82-85Mib and grows every time I use Expose. Sorry, not for me, at least not now.
If that bug is fixed soon, I will give a try again.

Edit: The memory leak is also addressed here, and while I'm writing this, th memory footprint went at 122Mib. Too bad.

Microsoft frees ASP.NET

2012-03-30T02:38:00.002-07:00

Microsoft said, that ASP.NET component would be open sourced. ASP.NET MVC stack is now free plus the Razor Engine, System.Json, Web API and WebPages.
This is in hope for external contributions to these products and will be running the project like other open source projects are.
I personally like C# / Mono very much. Remember Docky ?

Docky is the best dock money can buy. And there are various other great Mono products. This addition will bring more popularity to the Mono stack.
Hope more people will appreciate Mono and forget the fears about Microsoft will sue every one using Mono and Mono is an Open Source bomb, ha :)

Nice jonery video I have made last year

2012-03-19T14:45:00.001-07:00

Here is very nice flash video site I have made last year. In fact, Evrodograma.COM was my first site written in Adobe flash, and my first large size webdesign work. Hope you like it.

Working with AS3 flash animations was fun except few moments where the component I need is for AS2 and .... arghhh.. all my flash clip is AS3...

Kernel 3.3 is out with long awaited Android support

2012-03-19T10:23:00.003-07:00

The latest release of the Linux kernel 3.3, is now available, this is the second release of the kernel in 2012 which brings with it the long-awaited merging of code from Google's Android project.

This is what particularly interesting to developers looking to boot Android or run apps on the stock Linux kernel and represents a resolution to the issues that kept the two apart for so long it's not the only new feature included. However optimized power management and other infrastructure that didn't make it this time will arrive in the next release that is 3.4

For a long time, code from the Android project has not been merged back to the Linux repositories due to disagreement between developers from both projects” the Linux 3.3 release notes state.

“Fortunately, after several years the differences are being ironed out. Various Android subsystems and features have already been merged, and more will follow in the future. This will make things easier for everybody, including the Android mod community, or Linux distros that want to support Android programs.”

Also made into the release are improvements to file systems like Btrfs, memory management, networking, security and much, much more.

Make your own local repo for Arch Linux

2012-02-19T04:23:00.000-08:00

Every one Arch user has built a package from AUR at least once. It is very useful to have some (unofficial!) packages locally, instead of building them and throw the binary away after installing it. This is the way I'm doing with my Broadcom B4312 wireless drivers. I keep the binary package safe, so I am able to install it right away after reinstall my Arch system. Yes, I reinstall my system very often, because I tried some other ditro too - Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse etc.
Having all such packages, like drivers and/or some extra packages from AUR in one place is very useful. Here is how.

First, move all prebuild packages into one directory.
Then, create a repository structure:

repo-add /path/to/repo.db.tar.gz /path/to/*.pkg.tar.xz

/path/to/ is a directory where you moved your packages
and repo.tar.gz is mandatory - this is repo structure itself and is created / updated every time you execute the command above; the repo name is the name of your new repository, in my case this is always ame - the repository for my AmeOS.
That's all, your shiny new repo is ready to use.

Next, add your repo to your pacman.conf - just open for editing the file /etc/pacman.conf with root privileges

sudo gedit /etc/pacman.conf or sudo kwrite /etc/packman.conf or whatever text editor you use.
I personally like nano.

Add the following next to testing section:
[repo]
Server = file:///path/to

where repo is the name of your repo, and /path/to is path where your repos is.
Save and sync your repos just to make sure everything is ok

# pacman -Sy

If everything is ok, you should read your newly created repo is synced successfully.
If you wish to add another package to the repo, just use the command

repo-add /path/to/repo.db.tar.gz /path/to/new-package.pkg.tar.xz

And in case you want to remove a package, the command is:

repo-remove /path/to/repo.db.tar.gz some-old-package

The removed package itself is remains into directory and should be removed manually.

VLC hits version 2.0

2012-02-19T01:48:00.000-08:00

VLC has more than 485 million downloads of VLC 1.1.x since now. Yesterday the development team presented the next major release - VLC 2.0.0 "Twoflower".
Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. There is also experimental supports for many new devices and BluRay Discs.

VLC team completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces which make the application easier than ever to use. Also, there are fixes for about several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers.

VLC 2.0 is available in Arch repos too. To install it, just type in terminal:

# pacman -Sy vlc

As always, full update for Arch system is recommended:

# pacman -Syu
# pacman -S vlc

For some unknown reason, I can not setup some of wonderful skins available here, even after I created

~/.local/share/vlc/skins2 and moved there all downloaded skins. This may be a bug in arch binary... let's hope it will be fixed soon.

AmeOS pkgbuilds repo founded, GoboHide patch inside

2012-02-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

AmeOS is the name of my own linux distro, based on ArchLinux, using Ubuntu development strategy - take a snapshot, make some patches, polish and publish. Simple, isn't it.

So, pkgbuilds repo for AmeOS is finally founded. It is located at https://github.com/ludmiloff/AmeOS, with core and utilities sections for now. Utilities is not really a pkgbuilds repo, but a source code for some handy utilities, which will be included into AmeOS.

What's hot?
The my shiny linux kernel pkgbuild for Linux 3.2.5. The kernel is patched with GoboHide patch. All is tested by me and working.

Later, I will publish compiled pkgs. Stay tuned

Important Archlinux update may break your system

2012-02-10T01:48:00.000-08:00

Recent release of libpng and libtiff arrived into main Arch repo and require a massive update for all packaged that depend on it. This update is dangerous and may or may not break your system. If you have installed packaged from AUR you should check it and rebuild if they depend on libpng or libtiff - mostly cairo-* packages, else they might not work.

Check with pacman -Qm for foreign packages.

WARNING: All ArchBang Linux users will be affected, because ArchBang uses cairo-ubuntu packge.
QUICK FIX: sudo pacman -S cairo and accept package replacement. make this fix immediately after the update or your system will ends broken very soon or after reboot.

If your system is broken and you cannot login into normal graphical environment, don't worry. just log into console and fix your system in text mode using quick fix above, then reboot. Good Luck.

Linux kernel 3.2.5 fixed problems with energy consumption

2012-02-09T03:29:00.000-08:00

The new release of Linux kernel finally fixed power regression and overheating. This bug comes from early 2.6.38 kernel and concerns great power consumption and overheating. There are many attempts for fixing it, including famous

acpi_osi="Linux" pcie_aspm=force boot line parameters.

I use them since 2.6.39 on my Arch Linux box and various Ubuntu instalations and I can say it partially works. Especially it works well on ArchLinux but not so good on Ubuntu or even OpenSuse.
But this new release has a patch, which solves the problem. Here is an announcement by Greg Kroah-Hartman about this patch. It will be available on 3.3 series and new Ubuntu and Fedora releases will benefit it.
The patch isn't tested very well (except on bleeding edge Fedora kernels). Greg says he is confident it will works. I want to believe him to.

The newly kernel 3.2.5 is also in Arch repos. I did not install it yet, but I will and I will use it very soon. Too bad I waste so much time in compiling 3.2.2 with GobiHide patch. Any way, I will do it one more time and I hope this newly 3.2.5 kernel will be the base for my AmeLinux distro.

KUBUNTU will be community only ubuntu flavor

2012-02-07T02:51:00.000-08:00

Such a shame. Canonical announced they will no longer funding Kubuntu after 12.04. After April release, Kubuntu will be treated like other community flavors such as Edubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu....
The reason ?
"...Not been a business success" .
After 7 years Kubuntu will die - no official releases, no paid Canonical support, no download links on Ubuntu.com site.

The question is whether the world really needs Kubuntu? Obviously yes, I think YES.But the truth is not like this. If is, then we will hope Kubuntu survive this crisis and people take initiative in doing the tasks.