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PackageKit

As a Foresight user, I’m very excited about the future of PackageKit, which was highlighted in the August Foresight newsletter.

PackageKit will be a graphical front end for helping manage software packages on your computer, including installation, removal and updates.

Ken VanDine and Elliott Peele among others are hard at work getting Conary to work with PackageKit.

The new PackageKit website / wiki is up, and I just finished porting Richard’s Docbook documentation (that he blogged about this morning) for PackageKit to the wiki, available here. The basics are there, and I’ve got the ToC and most formatting done, but it could use some help with proofreading and getting the tables set up.

That feeling of dread

I’m watching TV this past Sunday, streaming TV shows from my networked hard drive (a Buffalo Terrastation) to my Netgear EVA as my DirecTV is still out. I had noticed that when I hit play, it was taking a much longer time to start the show, but they started, and then halfway through one show it stopped, and couldn’t connect.

Walking into my office, all the lights on the Terrastation are flashing. The web interface came up, and the diagnostics report that one of the hard drives has failed.

Ack. Ugh. Many bad words I don’t want my children repeating.

A feeling of dread. Panic setting in – what isn’t backed up? What am I going to lose? What will my wife think?

I run some more diagnostics, generic drive failure messages. The Terrastation won’t give me status on the raid array because of the drive failure. Why, oh why was I running in drive spanning mode and not in a raid configuration where if a drive failed I’d still be ok?

The Terrastation has 4 160GB drives with the option of drive spanning, RAID 0, 1 or 5. Running a small version of Linux, which I always meant to hack with a custom firmware but never did for SSH access, it has FTP and Samba. I had Samba shares set up storing all my music, photos, videos and backup shares for both my wife and me. The Terrastation streams that content to my Netgear EVA at my home theater, the Sonos music players all over the house, and the hacked Xbox in the family room.

The lost data appears to be minimal – I have a full backup of my music on my desktop’s hard drive, and it looks like I have a copy of most of the photo’s, though I need to double check. Ironically, I lost most of the video’s I’ve downloaded since my DirecTV dish has been down, but that is what Bittorrent is for.

I’m not sure what was in the backup directories, I know I haven’t backed up much lately.

Now the question is – when is redundant backup not redundant enough? Do I want to take one of the extra computers I’m not using and install FreeNAS or Openfiler? My good friend Mr. Holzer recently built a FreeNAS server using compactflash to boot the OS with a bunch of hard drives. The price of external drives keeps falling as well, do I want to just be lazy and buy another one of those?

I hate that feeling of dread – I’ve lost my personal music collection and had to re-rip it at least 3 times now. I know hard drives don’t last forever, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

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.

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

Comcast speeds

I haven’t been a huge fan of Comcast since we were switched over from Time Warner last year. They jacked prices up 30%, and have horrible customer service, but the quality of service of the broadband connection has maintained.

I recently switched to a commercial account recently through an accomodation program at work, so I’m getting better upload and download speeds, for about 15% cheaper than my previous bill.

The speed tests were interesting, why couldn’t I have had this kind of speed 7 or 8 years ago when I was running a Counter-Strike server?!

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