FOSSwire

Ohio LinuxFest is ready for 40 Years

Ohio LinuxFest is definitely one of my favorite Linux and open-source conferences. If you’ve never been to a Linux conference, now is a great time to begin. If you have, it’s also a great time to experience this conference.

The main reason you should go? It’s free. OLF is funded by sponsors, so you aren’t required to pay to get in (though you certainly can upgrade your conference pass if you choose). The only thing you have to do is register. Registration closes on September 19th, so be sure you’re not left out!

From Ohio LinuxFest: Back to the Future of Linux!:

Don’t miss your last chance to register for Ohio Linux Fest! A mere two weeks away on September 25–27, it’s coming faster than a Free Software freight train!
...
People come to OLF to meet with others that have helped create things like the backbone of the Internet, FireFox, Linux and the Apache web server. If you come to Ohio Linux Fest you will gain a unique perspective of this community. You will see the technology and some of the faces that have made possible such a wonderful change to the digital world.

There are some great speakers at the event, including Doug McIlroy, the inventor of the UNIX pipe, as a keynote speaker:

The featured keynote speaker this year is Doug McIlroy, a major contributor to the great grandfather of Linux and a direct contributor to code that powers many of the Unix products of today. Doug invented the concept of pipes inter-process data streams that no true Unix / Linux geek can live without. This concept made its way into less stable products as well from other proprietary vendors.

It’s definitely an event you don’t want to miss. Visit the Ubuntu booth and there’s a good chance you’ll see me there.

OLFU training classes will be offered the day before the event on the 25th. This is, literally, a bargain. This years training will be guided by LOPSA Where else can you go and get a days worth of training for only $350.00?
What other crazy things will you miss out on if you miss OLF? You’ll miss cool Tee Shirts, the yearly After-Party, the Free-Geek Columbus Linux Basics and more. Don’t be sorry that you didn’t register for the event.

There’s a rumor about that some people go to OLF for the after-party.

Regardless of your reason, make it a point to register. You’ll have a great time, trust me.

See you there!

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The File Menu

This.

The File menu has been around since the dawn of user interfaces. But do you know what? It has overstayed its welcome. The File menu has been abused in far too many applications.

A File menu should deal with files. That’s it. Open a file, save a file, print a file, quit editing the file. Some, no.. most applications have been using the File menu to do everything from opening new windows to changing preferences. They don’t belong there: opening a new window should go in a Window menu, and changing preferences should be under Edit or Tools.

Here are some specific instances I’m talking about. I’m not trying to pick on any application or developer, these are just applications I have installed at the moment. But they should be fixed.

Firefox, Epiphany, Opera, and many other browsers are abusers of the File menu. A browser generally does not have a whole lot to do with files at all. Two, maybe three items on their File menus might actually fit. But things like Open Tab, Location, and Send Link? No. It would make more sense to rename the File menu to "Browser" or "Web".
GNOME System applets like system-config-printer-applet that only have one option in their File menu: Close. Really?
Seahorse has a File menu that will create, import, or export keys and passwords. It kind of makes sense, but a something like "Key" or "Keyring" sounds more in-context.
GNOME Terminal has a File menu that doesn't have a thing to do with files.
Evolution has a huge File menu that has little do with files. "Mail" or even "Evolution" would be more appropriate.

Synaptic's File menu could be "Package," but considering there is already a Package menu other things would need to be reorganized.
Olive's File menu has more to do with branches, though some items would fit as File.
GConf Editor's File menu has five items for managing keys, two of which are disabled unless you know what you're doing.
D-Feet has a File menu that allows you to connect to different D-Bus sessions. I can't quite put my finger on what this should really be labeled.
Devhelp, a documentation browser, has a File menu that opens new windows and prints.
Many, many more.

Again, if you’re a developer of something on this list, don’t feel too offended. Glade (a GTK+ designer program) sticks a File menu on new menubars by default, so it may just be an oversight. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be fixed.

There are programs where it does make sense to have a File menu: Gedit, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, PiTiVi, and other applications that edit files as their main function.

Instead of dropping the File menu, it should be renamed to something more useful. Even though many applications abuse the File menu, there are plenty that do not. Banshee has a Media menu; Rhythmbox has Music. Most GNOME games have a Game menu. Baobab has Analyzer. Totem: Movie; Vinagre: Machine; Empathy: Chat; Gwibber: Gwibber.
Yes, even renaming your File menu to the name of your application might even be a good option.

So the next time you’re designing a GUI, keep in mind that your menus should make sense. Do that and we’ll have world peace. Well, maybe not, but it will shut me up.

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OpenShot — Video Editing Made Simple

Desktop Linux isn’t necessarily the first platform you’d think of going to for video editing. Despite that, there are several great projects that offer video editing functionality; things like PiTiVi, Cinelerra and Kino to name just a few.

Jonathan Thomas wasn’t satisfied with the existing video editing solutions on Linux, however. They weren’t easy enough to use, powerful or stable enough. Enter OpenShot, Jonathan’s solution.

Let me say right up front — the project is in a relatively early stage of development. There are plenty of things not yet completed or that don’t work quite right just yet. But I’ve had a brief play with OpenShot, and I am really quite impressed.

The interface will look familiar if you’ve used any other timeline-based video editing package before. You have a project bin on the left, a preview monitor on the right and the timeline at the bottom, where you arrange the clips in sequence to make your movie.

You can’t capture clips directly from a video camera at the moment, but if you are able to get video captured via another source, you then just import the video into OpenShot. I had some old PAL DV footage lying around. I just went to File > Import Files and selected the files.

Right away the clips just appeared in the Project Files area. It just, sort of, worked — I didn’t have to wait any time for the clips to be processed or for any conversion to take place. Now I did only import three clips of fairly short length, but it really was an easy, slick process.

You can then drag the clips to the timeline and arrange them. You can use the Razor tool to slice the in and out points of a clip or split a clip into two and rearrange it. It all really works in a very friendly, familiar way if you’ve ever done anything like this anywhere else.

The only thing that did throw me off with the timeline is the fact that the clips don’t seem to ‘snap’ to the edges of other clips, for example, so at times it feels quite difficult to line clips up one after another without having black space in the video between them. Having a satisfying ‘snap’ feel to the timeline where appropriate would really enhance it.

When you’re done, you can export the finished sequence into an array of formats.

Again, I’m going to admit to being lazy. I just accepted the default settings and exported — and it just worked, again. It is somewhat of a complicated dialogue box if you’re not into video codecs and standards and all of that, but you don’t necessarily need to spend time fiddling with it — the default settings will produce something useful (provided you can play back the codecs in your favourite media player).

There are issues with this project. I found the interface a bit — blue — and not really to my tastes. Also, the icons feel a little bit indistinct and unclear. It’s quite difficult to see quickly what each icon does and I did find myself taking a few minutes to get to grips with which button was which because of that.

Some keyboard shortcuts I’d expect to work, such as the Delete key to delete a highlighted clip in the timeline, spacebar to toggle pause/play in both the timeline and the clip preview in Project Files, to not yet be functional.

I want to stress again that this is an early in-development project. Despite that, it’s the most user friendly, simple video editing program I’ve used on the Linux platform. It just seems to have the attitude of a program that follows conventions, is really simple and just plain makes sense.

There are a lot of features more demanding users may expect before it can be accepted perhaps by a more seasoned video editing audience, but OpenShot shows promise and real potential to be the best home-orientated video editing solution on Linux.

You can download some pre-built packages for Ubuntu as well as source code from the OpenShot Downloads page. If you’re into video editing with Linux, give this a try.

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Hosting Mercurial Repositories with Nginx

Introduction

Mercurial

Mercurial is a great distributed version control system written in Python. It is a "fast, lightweight source control management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects".[HTML_REMOVED]1[HTML_REMOVED] It is used by such projects as Aptitude, Mozilla, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, Python, and Xen, among many others.[HTML_REMOVED]2[HTML_REMOVED] However, I have always found that hosting Mercurial repositories is painful. There are many options, including CGI/FastCGI and SSH based approaches. But none easily provided what I was looking for: anonymous cloning and use of the web interface, with HTTP authorization required for pushing.

hg serve

hg serve is a Mercurial command that starts a lightweight, built-in Web server. However, it provides no authentication.

Nginx

Nginx is a lightweight, fast web server and proxy. It powers WordPress.com, Hulu, Github, and Ohloh, among others[HTML_REMOVED]3[HTML_REMOVED], and is the fifth most popular server on the web today.[HTML_REMOVED]4[HTML_REMOVED] It was already in heavy use on my server, so I decided to find a way to solve my Mercurial hosting problems with it.

Configuring Nginx

The first step is to configure Nginx.

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name <your-server-name>;
    access_log  /path/to/access/log;
    error_log   /path/to/error/log;

    location / {
        limit_except GET {
            auth_basic           "Restricted";
            auth_basic_user_file /path/to/htpasswd/file;
            proxy_pass           http://localhost:8080;
        }
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

The first line simply starts a server directive, inside which configuration for that server is defined. The next lines are standard directives for any server block. The limit_except block says to do the following for all requests except GETs: set the authentication realm to "Restricted", (or whatever you want to call it), use the specified htpasswd file for authentication (created in the next section), and then proxy to port 8080 on localhost if authentication succeeds. Since clones and web interface views are GETs, this means you will not have to be authorized for them. The proxy_pass directive simply needs to point at whatever port you have hg serve running on.

Configuring htpasswd

htpasswd is a utility used to manage flat files that store usernames and passwords for basic HTTP authentication. It is most likely provided in whatever package in your distribution provides the Apache server. To use it, cd into the directory you specified for auth_basic_user_file directive, and run htpasswd -c [file-name] [username] and enter a password. This creates (-c) an htpasswd file with the specified file name, with a user identified by the provided password. If you need to add another user, simply cd back to that directory and run htpasswd [file-name] [new-username].

Configuring Mercurial

The final step is to configure Mercurial. cd into the root of where you want your repositories to be served from, and create the hgweb.config file as discussed here. Then, inside each repository, modify [HTML_REMOVED]/.hg/hgrc to contain the following in the [web] section:

push_ssl = false
allow_push = *

This disables SSL, and turns off the Mercurial repository trying to authenticate, since Nginx is taking care of that.

Launch

Now, in the directory where your repositories are stored and your hgweb.config is, run hg serve --webdir-conf hgweb.config (the -d option, which daemonizes the process, is also useful). If all went well, you should be able to browse your repositories via the web interface and clone repositories with no authentication, but when it comes time to push you will need a username and password from the htpasswd file.

Caveats

There are drawbacks to this approach. First, authentication is done over HTTP, not HTTPS. For me, hosting personal projects, this isn't a big deal. Second, authentication is done site wide, so once someone has push privileges to one repository they have them to all. This is easily worked around by creating a location /[repo-name] block for each repository, and point auth_basic_user_file to a different htpasswd file for each repository.

Sources

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ProjectsUsingMercurial
http://wiki.nginx.org/Main
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/07/28/july_2009_web_server_survey.html

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Dim the screen at dark

Are there times of the night that you find yourself adjusting your screen brightness lower, either to help your eyes or not bother someone else? It can be annoying have to tweak brightness settings all of the time. We'll show you how to set your brightness automatically during the night. Read on.

To start, you need to have a laptop or a display that supports software brightness configuration. You'll also need to make sure that your GNOME brightness settings are working. (KDE fan? Submit a relevant article.) Also, take note that if your system is not on when brightness settings change, they will not be updated.

Now, pop open a terminal to edit your crontab:

crontab -e

Now you'll want to add some time and brightness settings. Use this as a template:

0 22 * * * gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight/brightness_ac 10
0 7 * * * gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight/brightness_ac 100

The first line will set the brightness value to 10% at 22:00; the second sets it to full brightness at 07:00. Note that these are not hardware brightness values, but power manager values that scale from 0 to 100. You can add as many lines as you want. If you're proficient in your crontab syntax, then you can even use settings that only apply on weekends or weekdays.

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Get your GObject on with Vala

We’ve all heard the rants: Mono has patents, Microsoft releases community promise, community ignores, flamewars continue. Enough to make any developer want to stop programming out of sheer annoyance. Mono is an excellent language and platform; there’s nothing anybody can do to change that. People will continue to develop C# apps, and those that continue to hate Mono will continue to complain.

There was always one thing about Mono/C# that I wondered: why does it have to use a JIT or a runtime? It seems like the sort of language that you could just compile and forget about. Perhaps I was a little naïve; Mono provides a lot of benefits like managed memory.

And then here comes Vala. Saunters into the room like it owns the place. Claims to be that magical language that translates C#-ish code to C with a little help from GLib and GObject. What?! Skeptical, over the past couple of months I decided to give this fancy language a try.

And I am left stunned. Vala code is very easy to write, and compiles without a complaint. It feels a lot like C#. Being a Python programmer, actually writing in this language felt really new, yet somehow familiar. Time to summarize!

The Good

It’s a runtime without a runtime. Vala, true to its word, converts the source to C and compiles it. Memory and variables are all managed using GObject. Opened files and resources are closed automatically. Less and less do I have to worry about a leaky application. Sure, it requires the GLib library, but that is almost as ubiquitous as the standard C library on free software desktops.

The bindings! This is the real sweet spot. Since Vala code appears as C to the target machine, that means that almost all existing libraries can be made compatible. Vala bindings can be as simple as a single file. 200 lines is all it takes to bind to WebKit. On top of that, it was automatically generated! Thanks to GObject introspection, bindings for many GObject-based libraries can be entirely automatic. That’s smart.

It has nice error messages, unlike GCC. This alone might be a compelling reason to switch. ;-)

The bad

There are cases when Vala doesn’t quite hit the target. Granted, it’s still under active development and hasn’t hit a 1.0 release yet. While it is pretty good at catching potential programming issues, there are cases where some errors might slip by and you are left with debugging C source. This is mostly when you have a stray reference or unowned variable that goes berserk.

Speaking of C sources… they aren’t very pretty. _tmp_ variables are thrown all over the place, and the memory management code seems to take up a bulk of the source.

If you’re looking for documentation on Vala, well… you might be looking for a while. There is a constantly updated tutorial and a plethora of examples, but I wasn’t able to find anything that really went in-depth. Installing Devhelp and looking through C documentation helped out. The fact that the bindings’ VAPIs are fairly readable makes them a good place to look for function definitions, but explanations might be hard to find. If you’ve a C# or Mono programmer, Vala shouldn’t be much of an issue. Someone like myself who hasn’t worked with a C#-like language might be baffled for a few moments understanding how things work. Again, since Vala is constantly changing, it could be difficult to keep documentation up-to-date. But it would certainly be a nice thing to have.

All in all, Vala is a pretty sweet language. If you’ve ever had an interest in C#, I highly suggest you check it out.

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Still Here

Things tend to get a little crazy around the summer, don't they?

I'd like to apologize for the lack of recent content on FOSSwire. We've all been pretty busy with many different things, but I can promise you that we're not jumping the ship. New articles and fun things for you to read will be back online before you know it.

FOSSwire is also a great place to get your own project some publicity. Just wrote a really cool new application? Submit an article about it. Found a sweet new way to configure your kernel? Tell us about it. It's easy: sign in, submit your article, and get it reviewed, edited, and commented on until it makes its way to the front page. As long as it is open-source related and doesn't sound like a complete advertisement, we'll allow it.

We have a decent backlog of posts, tutorials, and articles. Help contribute yourself and have your name on the next popular article!

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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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