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Foresight Linux Newsletter Released

Issue 6 (Aug 2007) of the Foresight Linux Newsletter has been released. This month’s issue features an update on the Foresight Linux 2.0 development and release dates, upcoming speaking engagements by members of the Foresight Linux team, and an introduction and overview to PackageKit.

This month’s newsletter is available at http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/newsletter/2007/09/01/ or you can subscribe in your favorite feedreader such as Liferea, Bloglines or Google Reader by adding http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter to your feedreader.

A Feather in Conary's Hat

Reading the article “Mepis to switch from Ubuntu to Debian” one thing jumped out at me:

Woodford explained that Ubuntu is rebuilt almost from scratch every six months using source packages from Debian EXPERIMENTAL.

In using Ubuntu for almost 3 years, that was my experience as well. I formatted and installed fresh more than I just did a apt-get dist-upgrade.

And that is one of the major features of Conary – managing your applications and dependencies so you should never have to “install fresh”. Foresight, using Conary, believes in rolling releases – not big releases every 6 months, but incremental updates to keep you up to date with the latest software and security fixes.

Putting Calculus Books to Good Use

A good friend is letting me permanently borrow his 22″ monitor that he doesn’t use anymore. The timing was perfect, as I was just talking to a buddy about a week ago about his impending monitor purchase, and I mentioned I wanted to try a dual monitor setup, and now I am:

img_0053

(Click through to Flickr for larger versions, and note the Calculus books making a monitor stand on the 22″ monitor on the right).

A Dell 2405 is on the left with a default resolution of 1920×1200, a Samsung 213T is on the right running 1600×1200, both powered by a single BFG Nvidia 7950GT with the Nvidia propietary drivers on Foresight Linux. This gives me a default resolution of 3560×1200. Here’s a screenshot, click through to see a larger version on Flickr:

3560

It was easier than I expected – looking at a couple seach results in Google showed me how to add to my xorg.conf to set this up.

I added a second monitor section in my xorg.conf with the Samsung information. I then added the following lines in the Section “Screen”:

    `Option         "TwinView" "Yes"<br />
    Option      "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "39-85"<br />
Option      "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "29-81"<br />
    Option      "MetaModes" "1920x1200,1600x1200"`

I restarted X, and voila.

You can download or view my xorg.conf here.

ET: Quake Wars First Impressions

I stopped by my buddy’s place last night and put my ET: Quake Wars beta key to use on one of his Windows boxes. After downloading the client, I hopped in to a random ET:QW running about 8 on 8.

One word sums it up: Fast. It’s Quake3 / Quake4 fast. I’ve always thought and heard that Q3 was considered faster than UT2k4, and if that’s true, than Battlefield 2 is molasses.

There is only one map for the beta, and it feels a lot like the Assault mode on UT2k4 with timed objectives. I played human (GDF), and we were the attacking force. Once you met your objective, your spawn point became that forward way point, and the Strogg’s objective was to keep us from moving forward.

I played almost all of the classes, and in the 90 minutes I played, it was hard to form an opinion, but due to the speed of the game and the respawn, I was mostly assault, playing all 3 classes with the assault rifle, heavy machine gun and rocket launcher.

I tried Medic out briefly, and due to the speed and chaos, it was pretty easy to rack up some experience bringing back soldiers from the dead.

Speaking of dying and respawn, respawn is fast. Twenty seconds tops, on average about ten seconds before all the dead soldiers are re-deployed as a group at the most recent objective / spawnpoint.

I intuitively understood the layout and the icon structure, but feedback from my friends has been they’ve struggled with that so far. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been reading the fan sites off and on over the past few months and had a clue what to expect, but I was able to navigate the map and the objectives fairly easily.

You get experience based on kills, but more based on choosing an objective out of a few available, and then completing it. I was promoted to Soldier during one run where I had the rocket launcher, and my upgrade was that the lock-on for the rocket launcher went from about 7 seconds to 2. So there is definitely an advantage in going after the objectives than just randomly kililng people.

It remains to be seen if the maps at release are bigger, which reduces the speed and chaos, as it will give you and your fireteam (squad) a chance to get organized and go in together. The game also needs voicechat, you can’t keep up with the text on the screen with the speed of the game.

I’m going to need to play this a few more times – with UT2k7 on the horizon, I’m not sold on ET:QW as much as I was, just based on how fast the game was moving. I want my squad to move together as a team, not just keep rushing like lemmings against the objective.

Truth is, I’ll buy it to support gaming on Linux, but my first impression was cautious optimism. I may play a rounds of ET: Wolfenstein this weekend just to compare how fast the gameplay was in the orignial.

In related news, Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that ET:QW has been delayed again, this time until Sept. 3rd.

Innovate! Innovate!

(Said in a Dalek voice:)

Innovate! Innovate! Innovate! Innovate!

GUADEC, the annual GNOME user and developer conference, is in full swing in England right now. One of my favorite times of the year as a GNOME user, all the GNOME developers get together and blog about all the cool stuff they’re working on, or want to be working on.

I continue to be personally excited about Havoc’s vision for enabling an online desktop. This isn’t the first time he’s discussed this, or I’ve blogged about. First, go read the keynote presentation from GUADEC. I strongly agree with this vision of the future, and get excited just thinking about it.

Havoc’s blog links to a new wiki page for the Online Desktop. Right now, it’s one simple page covering the philosophy, and hosting the presentation and screencast mockups. (This is a small thing, but what I like about this wiki page is that it’s GNOME branded. This isn’t a Red Hat thing – this is a thing that all GNOME users and developers should give some thought to, tying back to the GNOME 3.0 / Project Topaz discussions).

Havoc’s expounds on the keynote in his blog. He shares his high level thoughts around the privacy issue, data hosting, and proprietary nature of some of the web services users would want to use. Well worth a read.

I’m enjoying the other GUADEC updates via Planet GNOME, and I thought the Multi-user Desktop presentation was well worth the read.

I need to continue to be more active in GNOME, and one of these years attend GUADEC.

Epiphany and me

A few months ago, I tried out Epiphany for 60 days after a particularily nasty Firefox crash caused me to lose a lot of content I was working on in a wiki page. At the end of the 60 days, I was pretty happy with Epiphany, and impressed with the developers in how they integrated Epiphany in to the GNOME desktop.

However, a few things had me coming back to Firefox:

  1. I have to use WindowsXP at work, and I use Firefox there. I love the Google Sync extension for sharing my history, cookies and bookmarks between my work computer and my two home computers.
  2. Extensions: I love the Gmail Manger and del.icio.us extensions. By far, the most useful two extensions I”ve come across.
  3. Epiphany’s default behavior for opening a new tab drives me crazy, as it opens Google, and the cursor sits in the Google search box instead of the URL field to type a new webpage address in to.
  4. And this is very minor, but Mugshot was opening in Firefox by default.
  5. Epiphany would always open in a new window, not a new tab.

After I switched back to Firefox a few weeks ago, it was just eating up too much memory and CPU cycles. Firefox then began pausing while using it when the CPU / memory use would spike, which drove me crazy, so I went back to Epiphany’s waiting arms one more time.

Since I have switched back, I have also invested some time in customizing Epiphany:

  • Changing the default home page to blank fixes the focus issue I had on the URI line, since Google is no longer the home page, it doesn’t default to the Google search box. This plugin does a similar thing as well.
  • Based on the screenshot below, you can see I’ve added an extra toolbar. Within that toolbar, I’ve added the “Post to del.icio.us” link since the Epilicious plugin is currently broken, which you can get from the del.icio.us home page. I’ve also added 3 search boxes:
  • Google: Add a new bookmark when you’re at Google.com, and then add %s to the end so it looks like this: http://www.google.com/%s Then View Bookmarks, and drag that bookmark to your toolbar.
  • JIRA: Search the Foresight issue / bug tracker from your toolbar: http://issues.foresightlinux.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa/%s (I may have a typo, I have issues with this one).

  • Search rBuilder / Foresight to see if a certain package is maintained on rBuilder: http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/search?type=Packages;search=%s” Great for when folks stop by in IRC looking for a package, and you can tell them to use Conary to install if it’s there.

  • Make sure you go to System > Preferences > Preferred Applications and have Epiphany chosen as your default web browser, and then click on the radio button for “Open link in new tab”. If you have Epiphany, and click on a Mugshot link for example, it will open in Epiphany. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an extension yet to have links in your web browser always open in a tab, ala Tabbrowser Preferences for Firefox.

One ongoing complaint, is the dialog box to remember passwords doesn’t work if I type “R” – I can only use the mouse, even when the dialog box has focus.

The last complaint I have is that the Epilicious and Gmail Notifier plugins are currently broken. I’m a del.icio.us and Gmail junkie, and those are almost enough for me to go back to Firefox, but I’ll manage manually.

If you haven’t tried out Epipany, take the challenge. Give up your other browser for 30 days, and with a few exceptions, Epiphany as just as good any other browser out there, and it integrates with your GNOME experience that much better. I’m dedicated to using Epiphany, and here is my obligatory screenshot (click through to Flickr to see larger sizes):

epiphany

More AWN Eye Candy

Neil Patel upated his blog with news that Avant Window Navigator, everyone’s favorite dock-like menu bar for GNOME, now had reflections enabled (and some bug fixes) in the latest subversion thanks to some contributors.

Pscott was kind enough to package it within minutes of being pinged in IRC, a simple conary update avant-window-navigator and voila, new AWN. (See, don’t you wish you were running Foresight right now?)

Here is a picture of my dock taken just minutes ago with the new AWN from subversion:

awn-dock-715-3

Changing AWN to use reflections and have the icons sit on top of the bar does require two changes in Gconf, it’s not in the AWN preferences yet. This Youtube click shows you how, or just do this:

  1. Open Gconf (Applicatons > System Tools > Configuration Editor)

  2. Click on Apps > Avant-Window-Navigator > Bar

  3. Change the Bar_angle value to 30

  4. Change the Icon_offset value to 10

  5. Close Gconf

  6. Restart Avant-Window-Navigator (Right click on it (not on an icon!) and click Close. Hit ALT-F2 to run it, and type avant-window-naviagor to start it. Voila!

Thanks again to the fine developers, and to Pscott for packaging it so quickly. It’s the little things that keep me happy, like eye candy.

_Update: Thanks to Cornelius in the comments, these settings make the reflection much more apparent:

_

bar_angle: 45

icon_offset: 18

Harmony 880 on Linux

I received an email from Phil Dibowitz two days ago regarding his work on trying to get the Harmony 880 remote working on Linux. He had seen a blog post from late last year where I had added on to Aaron Bockover’s bounty to get Harmony support working.

Ironically enough after responding to his email, I went through my morning routine of checking the news on the ‘net while I ate breakfast, and saw the same story on Digg (linking here), and now a few hours later, Phoronix has picked up the story as well.

I would like to post one correction to the stories I’m seeing: this was originally Aaron Bockover’s idea. Aaron is a Linux developer and maintainer of Banshee, everyone’s favorite music manager for the GNOME desktop.

I’m excited to see all the interest in getting Harmony remotes working on Linux, and take Phil’s advice: give Logitech constructive feedback that we want to see support on Linux.

Banshee plugin for X-Chat-GNOME

Will Farrington has created a wonderful plugin that controls Banshee from within X-Chat-GNOME. And thanks to Ken for packaging it so quickly.

It looks and sounds so simple, but it’s fun to play with. I absolutely love Banshee (and am so excited about all the Banshee news this week), and I spen a lot of time in IRC. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate, they just go together.

If you’re running Foresight, just do the following:

sudo conary update xchat-gnome=@fl:1-devel banshee-xchat=@fl:1-devel

I’m running a normal version of Foresight Linux (not the development version), but installing X-Chat GNOME out of 1-Devel hasn’t led to any issues.

Screenshot (Click through to see full size on Flickr):

xchat-banshee

Foresight Linux Newsletter (Vol 1., Issue 4)

The latest Foresight Linux Newsletter (Vol. I, Issue 4) has been released!

This month we bring you a special edition newsletter with a look at Foresight Linux invading BarCamp Chicago (your Editor included), Foresight’s founder and lead developer in the news, a look ahead to Foresight Linux 2, as well as a recap of bug fixes, security updates, and contributing to Foresight Linux. Don’t worry, next month will see the return of Tips & Tricks and the Package of the Month. Don’t forget you can subscribe to the newsletter in your favorite feed reader, just add http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter.