ubuntu-desktop meta-package

Sometimes you're looking for something, could be a word, package name or whatever. You're so close, but still you can't remember. That is, until you worked around `the problem' and you suddenly remember what it was. Now I for one had to install ubuntu using an alternative method. I don't know why, but ubuntu (7.10) wouldn't properly boot off the cd. All I got was a busybox shell, not something I'm really happy with. So I decided I'd try some other liveCDs from other distros and because I'm a long-time Gentoo user I decided I'd first see if the Gentoo liveCDs work and when they did I decided to try archLinux. I never used it before or anything, but I remember that archLinux is based on Gentoo... I might very well be wrong, but that seems to has gotten stuck in my brain. So I dled archlinux, it booted fine, was able to run the installer, but couldn't mount the cd, so I dropped archLinux and decided to try to install ubuntu in another way (I wanted the machine to be up and running within a day or so, and wasn't willing to spent some hours doing it the gentoo way). So I found directions to install Ubuntu dapper using debootstrap. Worked quite well for feisty too (yes I know, gutsy is newer, just overlooked it), so I had feisty up and running, but no X or anything. Now I know my way on the terminal, but I wanted to see how well this box would do as a Playstation One emulator. And then I came to the problem I started this post with. I remembered there was some meta-package that would give me gnome and all, so I started searching for gnome metapackages. There was something like gnome-environment or whatever, when I installed it I still had no X. So I installed X (by installing Xorg) and then I noticed an error when I started GDM, stating that it couldn't find the human theme. And as soon as I logged in I remembered; the meta-package is called ubuntu-desktop.

Synergy when you need it

Perhaps some of you people have already heard about synergy. For those of you who haven't heard about it before, synergy allows you to share one keyboard and mouse between multiple computers. Synergy works on *nix and windows, that'll do for most people. When I bought my Mac Mini I decided that I'd hook up my Razer Diamondback to it, and I also bought an apple (wired) keyboard with my Mac Mini so the mini was going to be my synergy server.

From that point there's just 2 problems left to solve. The first is, how to connect to the synergy server. You need to specify an hostname or ip-address to connect to the server, so there's an easy solution: avahi/bonjour/rendezvouz/zeroconf. OS X supports bonour out of the box. Just give your Mac a nice name and you'll be able to reach it at .local. Mine's called Mini, so I can reach it at mini.local. Now the clients need bonjour support, which you can get with avahi. Ubuntu includes avahi by default, so if you're on ubuntu there's no extra work involved. I'm more of a Gentoo user though, and if you're on Gentoo you can just get Avahi from portage. Read the comments while it's emerging, they'll tell how to enable hostname resolving.

The first problem's solved. The second problem is how to start synergy. On your Mac you can get SynergyKM: Synergy and a nice GUI in one package. It'll add a system preferences item for synergy where you can change everything you'll ever need for synergy. On the clients I added synergy to the Gnome session startup programs. Now when you log in they'll start. This leaves part of this problem unsolved, how do you log in? The solution is quite simple. If you use GDM there's a /etc/[X11/]gdm/Init/Default, which can also be used to execute extra commands. Just add a line synergyc mini.local before the exit statement (replace mini.local with your synergy server hostname of course) and you'll be able to log in using synergy. So now all you need is one keyboard and one mouse to control your 5 computers ;-)

Mac and Myth

It's been a while since I've posted anything here, actually it's been a while since I've really done anything online other then reading... Anyway, this is the place to tell everyone I also own a Mac now (Mac Mini/Core Solo/512MB/60GB/Combodrive). Some people immediately scream that you should buy a Mac if you like stuff like AWN, but I still don't agree. Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac, but it's not all there is. I now have my 'old' computer as a home-theatre PC, recording tv shows and stuff, it works great except that now that I came back from my holiday I noticed it didn't fetch tv guide information so it didn't record everyhting it should've recorded. Other than that I hope to post here a little more often, and some more useful stuff too...

Don't you, forget about me...

The title was this time sung by the nptl useflag. On a new Gentoo server install I set -* and forgot about nptl and nptl-only for glibc, so glibc was build with linuxthreads instead of nptl. Not much of a problem you probably think, but there seems to be some bug in mysql that when running on amd64 with linuxthreads it just won't stop... Killing by hand won't stop mysql either, unless I use -9. So from now on I'll remember to put nptl and nptl-only in my useflags...

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/05/02/0235228.shtml

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9HaNbsIfp0

2ndw.net gentoo overlay

I'm back with other news... Me and a friend started a gentoo overlay at 2ndw.net. You can use the overlay by going to a directory where you want the overlay and typing "svn co http://2ndw.net/svn/". Currently ebuilds for AWN (revision 158) and gcc-4.2 (march 7) are in the tree. AWN will be updated whenever njpatel adds new stuff to the AWN repository, and more packages will be added soon...

gaim_awn, gaim_awn and birthday

I updated gaim_awn twice... revision 12 contains a Makefile that uses pkg-config to get include directories and fixes issue #1, that loading the plugin wouldn't always detect the right status. Revision 13 fixes a bug in this code where the icon wouldn't get updated if you would start offline and load the plugin.

While fixing these bugs I also noticed there's a bug in the gaim docklet, it doesn't connect to the account-connecting signal, and thus should never receive that an account started connecting at gaim startup. Due to the fact that it takes some time for the gaim docklet to get embedded into the panel and the fact that it polls then, it does show connecting status. Howeever, my plugin tried to poll status earlier, which doesn't work because the account subsystem gets loaded after the plugin subsystem, so I needed to connect to the account-connecting signal.

Last thing to mention today is that it's my birthday, I'm 21 now, so now I'm allowed to play with the sticky key sound in windows (press shift five times, hit enter, press ctrl twice, press alt twice, repeat last two steps until you get bored, then hit shift a couple of times). Also I'm now old enough to set text size for active title bar to 2000 so the active window will vanish of the screen... This also seems to cause display corruption in the titlebar... Thank god I'm a windows ABuser...

Compiling the gaim_awn plugin

I started working on the gaim_awn plugin from within gaim 2 beta 6 sources, but it's complete and utter BS to need gaim sources and Makefiles to compile the plugin, so my goal for today was to compile it myself and create a Makefile. At first I was getting nowhere. I tried to do the same as was done in the gaim Makefile, but that didn't get me any further. I searched the net a bit but didn't find much I could use. Then at some point I sort of compiled something, so I was looking at how to put it in a Makefile (been a year since I last used one) when I found how I could compile my module with ease. There's nothing to it... So in case anyone else has the same problem, here's how I did it:

gcc -fPIC -c gaim_awn.c -o gaim_awn.o -DVERSION=\"`date "+%Y%m-%d_%R"`\" -I /usr/include/gaim/ -I /usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include/ -I /usr/include/atk-1.0 -I /usr/include/cairo/ -I /usr/include/pango-1.0/ -I /usr/include/glib-2.0/ -I /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include/ -I /usr/include/dbus-1.0/

gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,gaim_awn.so -o gaim_awn.so gaim_awn.o

This evening I will fix my Makefile and put it on svn too, so everyone can compile without much hassle...

#awn IRC channel

I forgot to mention that avant-window-navigator has it's own IRC channel, it's #awn on irc.gnome.org (gimpnet). Perhaps I'll see you there?

awn-plugins on Google Code

Because it was nice to have a versioning system for my Gaim plugin and because it can be very useful in the future I started a Google Code project at code.google.com/p/awn-plugins/. The Gaim plugin is availible on that page now and instructions for svn access to the code are there too. There's also room for more developers and all plugins are welcome.

gaim_awn

Recently I discovered the miracle called avant-window-navigator made by njpatel. As soon as he mentioned dbus support to create plugins for AWN I decided I'd make plugins. I started with a gaim plugin, which you can currently download (binary and source) from the AWN wiki. More news on this plugin and AWN is to come soon.

Hello world!

Hello world!