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Linux Native Multitouch support

The Interactive Computing Lab at ENAC, Toulouse have collaborated with the Linux developers to add the native multitouch support in Linux Kernel.

They have recorded a video showing the multitouch effects that are being supported natively by sending ABS_MT_* events from the kernel and they have developed a simple application that reads these signals, do some gesture recognition then sends control messages to related windows using the DBus plugin in Compiz.

Maybe you seen before people speaking about MPX, that is only Multi-pointer and not multitouch.

When writing the code for the demos, They have chosen to use general libraries not related to a specific WM, to be able to run demos on any Linux platform.

if you want more information you can visit the related page in our website.

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Google Chrome ‘Developer’ Builds for Linux, OS X Released

The Chromium blog (Chromium being Google’s name for the open source project behind their Chrome browser) reports that developer builds of Google Chrome are now available for both Mac OS X and Linux.

Google Chrome has always been promised to be a cross-platform browser, right from when it was originally launched in September last year.

This is just the beginning—Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

However, up until today there have been no officially Google-branded Chrome releases for anything other than Windows.

Google are making it quite clear that Chrome is far from finished on the Mac and Linux platforms, strongly advising you not to use the browser unless you’re a developer, or love living on the bleeding edge.

It does seem to work pretty well actually as a browser, however. I’ve only played with it for a short time, but it seems to feel a lot snappier than Firefox on this machine. While the missing bits of functionality, such as plugins, does mean that it can’t really yet (and probably shouldn’t) become your primary browser, Chrome for Linux looks really promising as an excellent WebKit-based browser for Linux and a strong competitor for Firefox.

Right now, there are only .deb packages for x86 and x86–64 (AMD64) available, so you’ll need a Debian or Ubuntu system to run the test build. On my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 system it runs really well.

To download this test release, go across to the Chromium Dev Channel and scroll down to the ‘For Linux’ heading. Also do take note that the installation package will add Google’s repository to your system to automatically keep Chrome up to date.

What do you think of Google Chrome? Do we need another browser on Linux? Is Google Chrome set to be the best WebKit browser on Linux, the best browser in its own right or simply unnecessary or undesired on the platform? Have your say both in the comments and in the forums.

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PulseAudio Bluez

Some time ago, I’ve shown different methods of using scripts and configuration files to get Bluetooth A2DP audio working properly. But that’s a problem: it requires setup. Ideally this should all happen automatically right when the headphones are paired.

In the latest releases of PulseAudio and Bluez, I found this to be the case. It works so well that I figured I’d make a screencast out of it just to show you. The application used in the video is pavucontrol, the volume controls for PulseAudio.

(And a sidenote: this video was edited using PiTiVi, which just made a new release. I highly recommend you check it out.)

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Dig into your system with HardInfo

We all like to learn a little bit about our computers and how they stack up against others. Even if not, the information might be valuable to others trying to diagnose a problem with your machine. There are many ways to discover information about your hardware in Linux, but none of them have come close to the ease-of-use of HardInfo (install).

HardInfo takes everything it can find about your system and presents it in an organized fashion. There’s no need to dig through the output of lspci or run a few commands to find out some network statistics; it’s all right there in front of you.

One key feature that makes HardInfo valuable is its ability to quickly generate a system report. This can be very useful to bug triagers, developers, or your laptop’s eBay listing.

Finally, HardInfo is a great tool to use to rank your system against other machines with various benchmarks, which can tell you if your machine is running at full speed or if something is going terribly wrong. These are also included in the generated reports.

Overall: great tool, easy to use, useful for everyone. Give it a try.

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Find the package a file is from

A quick tip today for all Debian (and derivative) users:

Have a file on in your system that you just can’t figure out where it came from? Searching for the name in Synaptic doesn’t help? About ready to heave your weary keyboard out the window in an administrative rage? Fear not, dpkg to the rescue!

Let’s say you are trying to find out where in the world /usr/share/epiphany-browser/glade/epiphany.glade came into existence. You’ve checked epiphany-browser, but it’s not there. Let’s ask dpkg-query:


$ dpkg-query -S /usr/share/epiphany-browser/glade/epiphany.glade
epiphany-browser-data: /usr/share/epiphany-browser/glade/epiphany.glade

Okay, so it was in epiphany-browser-data. Let’s ask dpkg-query to do the reverse this time, and find all files included in that package:


$ dpkg-query -L epiphany-browser-data
/usr/share/epiphany-browser
/usr/share/epiphany-browser/components
/usr/share/epiphany-browser/components/epiphany.xpt
/usr/share/epiphany-browser/art
/usr/share/epiphany-browser/chrome
# ...

A good trick I use instead of remembering dpkg-query switches is to simply add aliases to my .bashrc:


alias dpkgs="dpkg-query -S"
alias dpkgl="dpkg-query -L"

The above example could then be shortened to dpkgl epiphany-browser-data.

Not all files are managed by packages, and so this may not always get you the results you wanted. Obviously, user-created files in /home will not be from any packages, nor will most files in /etc. But it’s still a handy way to figure out where a file came from.

In one last example, you can take advantage of shell command nesting to figure out which package contains a binary:


$ dpkg-query -S `which firefox`
firefox-3.0: /usr/bin/firefox

(Those are backticks, by the way, not regular quotes.)

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Make X.Org pretty with DRI2 and UXA

That’s a scary headline. Chances are, after seeing that, you might not care about the rest of this article. But hang on for a second: Have an Intel graphics chipset, or use an ATI graphics card (open-source drivers or not)? Then this image might be familiar to you:

If you don’t notice it right away, the glxgears window is below the other two. Ugly. This is a problem with the current X.Org stack using a rendering mode known as DRI1. I won’t go in to technical details of why this happens, but it all boils down to this: Using DRI1, 3D applications are given a space of the screen to draw into, and this is then sent directly to the display. That sounds somewhat logical, but when you throw in more fancy operations, such as Compiz and desktop effects, things get tricky. Keith Packard of Intel does a good job explaining this and other problems with X acceleration.

Keith mentions a golden combination that can be used right now. Fedora 11, arriving in one week, will include everything needed for a pleasant X experience. Ubuntu 9.04 does ship UXA, but it is not on by default due to stability issues at the time it was released. Instead, EXA is used, the same mode included with 8.10.

If you’re using Ubuntu 9.04 or another distribution with UXA support that is almost ready, there is a one-liner you can add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. In the Device section, add Option “AccelMethod” “uxa” as it is below:


Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Option	"AccelMethod"	"uxa"
EndSection

Be prepared to revert the change later: without a newer kernel or X server, UXA mode has proven to be a little crashy. I’ve had good experiences while using at a 2.6.30 kernel, though I still do not use it for day-to-day computing. Even if you can’t get it to work for extended amounts of time yet, it still is nice to see this:

The glxgears test is positioned neatly in the background; you can see it through the semi-transparent terminal. And if that’s not enough proof that this works:

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Use an ISO as if it were a real CD

There are a few occasions when you may need or want to use an ISO image without actually burning it. You may want to grab a file off of a CD, or maybe you’re storing an image of a disk for use in Wine. Using mount points, this is an easy task.

The Quick Way

On a recent GNOME desktop, opening or mounting ISO images (and other archives) is very simple. Simply right-click the image, and select Open With > Archive Mounter. Done! The image will show as a drive in Places or on your desktop.

This is the easiest way to grab a file from an image or an archive without having to open an archive manager or extract everything. But, it has its limitations. Because it is mounted under GVFS, it is typically only available on a GNOME desktop. Wine may also have trouble understanding where the image was mounted to as well, and reconfiguring Wine every time you want to change discs is no fun.

The More Reliable Way

Almost as quickly as the previous solution, you can mount the image in a terminal:

sudo mount -o loop /path/to/image.iso /media/cdrom

We’re using the CD drive location here to keep things simple: GNOME and Wine will both think that it is just a normal CD or DVD. The location of your CD drive on your filesystem may differ; check your distribution documentation for details. The -o loop option is needed because image.iso is not a block device, as the mount command would expect, but a file.

To remove the mount point again, point the umount command at the location of the CD drive:

sudo umount /media/cdrom

Bonus: The Graphical More Reliable Way

If you find yourself swapping disk images out frequently, you may find Gmountiso useful. You can easily swap out multiple images and mount points, and it works in the same manner as the mount/umount commands do.

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Restoring an Overwritten GRUB Boot Loader

I like to have lots of choice about which operating system I can boot to. Between my desktop PC’s two hard drives, I have at least three distributions of Linux and several versions of Windows, so I have complete OS flexibility.

Unfortunately, maintaining a multi-boot configuration like this can be a pain, especially if you later install an operating system which overwrites the GRUB boot loader you had in place (such as a version of Windows). If your boot loader is overwritten, you could be left with no choice but to boot the most recently installed OS.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to restore an overwritten copy of the GRUB boot loader by using a Linux live CD. In this example, my master GRUB installation is on a Kubuntu 8.10 installation, and I’m using an older Kubuntu 8.04 Live CD I have lying around.

This tutorial does require you to have some understanding of how your multi-boot system operates, disk partitions and using the command line. If you are not confident, perhaps find a friend who knows Linux more intimately to do this process.

Before Starting

It’s worth mentioning that you may need to use a live CD somewhat similar to that of your ‘master’ OS, where your boot loader configuration is stored. This is due to the technique we use to re-run the GRUB installer.

Also, you need to actually know which system holds the configuration file for your GRUB boot loader and on which partition it is located. If you have a more complicated multi-boot setup, like myself, you probably know this. If you have a more simple Windows-Linux dual boot, there should only be one Linux data partition where it could be.

Boot the Live CD

Start the Live CD up as normal. Don’t choose to install the OS if prompted, you want to come to a full live desktop to run the specific commands we need.

Identify your Partitions

You need to know on which partition the GRUB config file and associated programs are stored. You may wish to use a graphical program such as Gparted (if available). You’ll want to find out the device string (such as sda5) of the relevant partition.

(The screenshot above is actually from my triple-boot MacBook, but still shows you how you can identify the (ext3) partition of Ubuntu on that system.)

If you can’t use a graphical program to work this out, open a Terminal program and use the following command:

$ sudo fdisk -l

This will list all of the partitions on all the devices on your system. Under the ‘System’ column, you can see all of the partitions labelled as ‘Linux’. This won’t show you the difference between data and OS partitions, so is less useful in a more complex partition layout.

If you can work out where your Linux is from this, note down the information under ‘Device’.

Mount the Partition

We now must mount your partition, so that we can access it. Some Live CDs may do this for you, or offer to do so, but here we will perform the process manually.

We will first make a folder in which the partition is mounted and then do the mounting. Replace the device string /dev/sda5 with the device string that you identified earlier.

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/system

$ sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/system

You should now be able to browse your hard drive by navigating to that folder. The next process we are going to perform is to temporarily change the root directory of our terminal (chroot), so that we can run the GRUB installer directly from the hard drive. It won’t even realise it’s not running from the real system

On Ubuntu and other sudo-based distros, we must first do this:

$ sudo -i

to become root fully (sudo is not enough here).

Doing the chroot

The GRUB installer requires to read the devices on disk directly in order to write the GRUB boot record back onto the system properly. It therefore needs a working copy of /dev, inside the mounted directory.

# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/system/dev

Next, we can run chroot:

# chroot /mnt/system

From this point forward, be very careful. You have root privileges and full write access to your hard drive. The usual caveats apply.

Run the GRUB Installer

All we need to do now is to simply run the GRUB installer, which plonks the GRUB boot record back on the hard disk and gives us back all of our choices.

# grub-install /dev/sda

If you need to install GRUB elsewhere (such as a different disk or a specific partition), change /dev/sda. In most cases, just leave this as-is.

GRUB should be re-instated on disk. You can now simply close your terminal, reboot the machine safely and everything should be back to normal.

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Quick Tip: Clear Out GNOME Tracker Indexes

If you followed my recent video tutorial on enabling Ubuntu/GNOME’s Tracker search tool, you should now be enjoying the ability to search the files on your system.

During a recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04, which was recently released, I found that the Tracker search tool index had become corrupted. I tried to tell Tracker to rebuild the index, but experienced some weird issues.

In this quick tip, I’ll show you how to avoid this and other issues by deleting Tracker’s index and cache manually, so that it can start ‘from scratch’. Note that if you are having issues with tracker, it is worth trying to rebuild the index from the graphical interface first. This tip is a last resort if you need to clear everything out from scratch and start it again.

Tracker’s Files

According to the documentation, Tracker stores its files in the following locations:

Configuration Files – ~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg
Data Files – ~/.local/share/tracker
Index Cache – ~/.cache/tracker

If you’re happy with the settings you have, you may want to leave the configuration file intact, and just wipe out the data files and index cache.

Quit Tracker and Delete the Files

First of all, you need to go ahead and quit the Tracker application in the system tray.

Next, you must quit all processes of both trackerd and tracker-indexer, so open up a terminal and run these commands:

$ killall trackerd

$ killall tracker-indexer

And finally, carefully delete the files listed above (excluding the config file, if you don’t think you need to clear that out as well).

So to recap, go ahead and delete the folders:

~/.local/share/tracker
~/.cache/tracker

and if you wish, the config files:

~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg
~/.config/tracker/tracker-applet.cfg

To restart Tracker, I recommend that you log out and log back in so that trackerd and the system tray applet both restart properly. You should then be able to reconfigure it from the beginning as detailed in the original tutorial.

And that should be it – Tracker should rebuild itself from scratch. Useful to know for if things go wrong!

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Review: Backups with Back in Time

Backing up generally isn’t a fun activity, but always proves to be worth it when that disaster you are not expecting happens.

Building a backup strategy can be a relatively complex process as well. What exactly should you back up, what format do you use, where do you store the backups? It can quickly become a task that demands quite a lot of technical expertise without the help of a program to make things relatively easy.

Back in Time is a solution for Linux, somewhat modelled on Apple’s Time Machine backup system for Mac OS X Leopard, but it also inspired by a few other Linux backup tools.

It has a nice GUI interface, supports automatic backups at time schedules you specify and keeps multiple snapshots of the whole backup, while only backing up the changed files each time. So, what is it like to actually use?

For the purposes of this review, I’ll be looking at the GNOME interface version, but much of this should follow the same for the KDE interface as well.

Setting Up

When you first launch the program, you are presented with the settings window. You do have to set up a location to back up to and which folders to include in the backup (the Include tab).

This does require you to have spent some time thinking about what you need to have backed up first, and the multiple tabs across the Settings window could be a bit intimidating for the new user.

If you are confident with what you want to set up, however, you can quickly set the base directory for your backups (which is probably on an external disk somewhere), the files you want to include in the backup and any advanced settings if you want.

It would be nice to have a couple of preset backup profiles for people who really just want to click one button and have their system backed up. For example, a preset which backs up your home directory to an external disk would be nice to have in a one-click configuration.

Despite the complexity of the settings window for new users, it is really quick and easy to get started.

Running a Backup

Supposedly the application will backup on an automatic basis, based on the schedule you set earlier. I have to admit, I don’t leave my backup drive plugged in all the time, nor do I have Back in Time open all the time, so I haven’t actually tried this out.

Doing a backup manually is a really easy process. In the Back in Time interface, you can simply press the large Backup Now button and it gets to work making a new snapshot.

Back in Time uses rsync underneath to backup only the files that have changed, but you don’t really need to care how it works. You press the button, it works out which files have changed, and makes a new snapshot on your backup disk. It really is effortlessly simple and I like it.

Restoring Files

What I really love is that Back in Time’s snapshots work just like a normal hierarchy of folders on your backup disk. Each snapshot appears just like a folder containing all the files you have chosen to backup, so even if you want to restore a file on another machine where you don’t have Back in Time, you just copy a file across. Again, it just works. (It uses hard links, so it only uses the minimum space

Of course, Back in Time allows you to restore from within the Back in Time interface, it is again really easy to do. All of your snapshots are listed across the left hand side and you can pick one, browse through the file system and bring a file back by clicking the Restore button.

Conclusion

Having played with this for a while, I’m really impressed. There are areas, particularly initial setup, that could be made a little bit easier for new users.

Apart from that, this is a really robust and effortlessly simple way to back up your home folder, for example. Its snapshot functionality works really well, meaning you can have as much or as little backward history of your system as you need, while also keeping a copy of the whole system.

I love the fact that it requires very little effort on my part to update my backup – I just plug in the drive, launch the app and click Backup Now.

I also find it very reassuring that the files aren’t in a weird format which has to be decompressed or manipulated by a program; they’re just files sitting there on the disk that I can access.

I’ve found Back in Time to be really useful as a backup solution for my home directory on this machine. It’s not powerful enough perhaps for some requirements, but if you are using Linux as an everyday desktop machine and have some files you need to get backed up, give Back in Time a try.

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