dagus.org

Back to blogging after a while, but i dont think it will last.

I am quite pissed of with the new notification system in ubuntu jaunty for several reasons, that i wont state here. One of the later is the fact that you can not change the position of the notification bubble. As i only use one panel and in the bottom, i dont focus my vision on the upper right corner. Because of this i made a patch that moves the notification bubble to bottom right. The patch just does that, for example it wont queue notifications above this bubble…. If you think it could help you, patch is here,

http://dagus.org/files/bottom

Best way to apply is with apt-src

sudo apt-src install notify-osd

cd notify-osd-0.9.11/src/

patch < /path/to/patch

sudo apt-src build notify-osd

sudo dpkg -i notify-osd_0.9.11-0ubuntu3_i386.deb

I just finished installing  installing Ubuntu hardy 8.04 and it’s far more stable and preforms better than it’s predecessor Gutsy, somethings that i liked so far are,

• Suspends and Hibernate works by default on my T60 with amd propietary drivers.
• Firefox performance kick ass compared with previous versions.
• New intel wireless driver for my 3945 is way more stable than the one in gutsy.
• Compiz-fusion feels more stable and responsive.

I like avant-windows-navigator but I can not use it with compiz-fusion as performance in it’s really bad. The most important problems is rendering in applications like firefox or evince, this sort of task eat my cpu. In this sort of programs responsiveness is one of the key features so i dumped compiz-fusion some time ago and got back to the plain old metacity till I found that a composite manager was being developed inside metacity. It worked good (better than compiz-fusion) but still eats some additional resources.

But the other day i changed my settings again for a nice new project called Cairo Composite Manager. From the project page,

Cairo Composite Manager is a versatile and extensible composite manager which use cairo for rendering. Rendering can be done in 2D or 3D, using Xrender and Glitz backends. Plugins can be used to add some cool effects to your desktop.

So here the instructions on how-to install it,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add this lines,

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gandalfn/ubuntu gutsy main universe

now exceute,

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get install cairo-compmgr

An icon will appear on Applications > System Tools, so try starting it from there.
Now there are some tweaks that you can do, but you will need to test if they work fine for you (for example glitz backend dosen’t work for me)

Glitz backend (default is xrender),

gconftool-2 --set --type=string /apps/cairo-compmgr/screen_0/general/backend "glitz"

This one is quite unstable so rollback if it dosent work,

gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/cairo-compmgr/screen_0/general/native_pixmap_bind true

Finally if you like it and want to run cairo-compmgr every time you login do,

System > Preferences > Sessions , and Add a new entry,

Name: Cairo Composite Manager
Command: /usr/bin/cairo-compmgr

And now some screenshots from the author,

Enjoy!

I just found that there’s a new PPA available in launchpad, this new PPA is telepathy related. A PPA (Personal Package Archives) as you may already know it’s a service provided by launchpad to developers that simplifies software distribution for ubuntu distros. In the other hand Empathy might be the next IM client in the GNOME desktop, it was proposed for inclusion some time ago, but enoght talking, lets how easy is to install this great program.

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

#telephaty ppa
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu gutsy main

(You can do it from a terminal, wih something like this, sudo nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list)

Now update the repositories,

sudo apt-get update

And finally install Empathy,

sudo apt-get install empathy

And you are done, try out and report bugs!

Obviously the mandatory screenshot here and here

Sometime ago i was playing with powertop and as recomended by it, i ran the following command,

sudo hal-disable-polling --device /dev/scd0 'hal'

Yesterday i was trying to burn a cd and my box was having problems with the detection of the blank cds, and i was suspecting that it was related with this.

sudo hal-disable-polling --enable-polling --device /dev/scd0

The above line fixed the problem! And i was able to burn all my thesis files! (great no more thesis! yahoo!)
I will probably end up filling a bug in launchpad (nautilus ?) cause mounting of normal CD were working, but blank CDs were having problems while mounting.

Yes! guys and gals, our beloved window manager is kicking ass in composite land. There’s a new branch on metacity subversion were developers are working on composite features for metacity. So far we have, transparency, shadow and ALT+tab Godness, and now that I’m running a composite WM i can use the nice MAC OS X like dock bar, AWN. All this without the lag (and CPU masacre) introduced in compiz-fusion when scrolling applications.

If you want to install the development branch you can do it this way, first check out the code form gnome subversion,

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/metacity/branches/iains-blingtastic-bucket-o-bling/ metacity

(you will need subversion package for this, if you don’t have it just, sudo apt-get install subversion)

then change to the metacity dir and for the next steps you will need some libraries so install the following packages,

sudo apt-get install gnome-common build-essential autoconf gnome-devel libtool

(hmm…I’m probably missing something….)

cd metacity

/bin/bash autogen.sh

./configure --enable-compositor

make

Now go and edit the following this key /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager,

gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true

Now you can dotwo things, one just test it

./src/metacity --replace

And the second one is run a make install to install it system wide, but this is totally optional.

If you want to run it at start up, you just need to modify the key on /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager

And i could finish the post here, but you will kill me if i dont show a screenshot :P, so here it’s

UPDATE:  This branch was merged in trunk and it’s now deprecated, you should download the code from there now.

I just found this video, it’s Linus presentation on git. It’s more a “why you should choose DSCM and more specifically git” with a high dose of Linus ego. But apart from that he point one important thing that most of the times gets on a secondary place on almost all the projects, PERFORMANCE.

The idea that got my attention was, “If you can do something really fast, really well, people start using it different” (50:30). And he is right and how many times in the history of computers did we saw this happening ? a lot! a few that got to my mine now,

• Desktop search, who ever used the default windows search feature ? I think no one, people used to have the stuff on his desktop organized so they could find things quick, till Google Desktop appeared or they changed to MAC OS X and stated using Spotlight, or Beagle in Linux.
• Internet the most common example…
• and many others

Several people asked me recently (in different situations) about what are the sites that i read/visit on a daily basis (most times hourly :P). So here it goes the list,

• Planet GNOME - This is my favorite one, great hackers post here.
• Unofficial Planet Python - great planet.
• Planet DEBIAN - You can find some good posts here also.
• Planet Ubuntu - My distro plane.
• Universe Gentoo - The “distro i would love to have time to ” planet
• Monologue - Planet of mono developer.
• DIGG - im getting bored of this one, but from time to time you find a great article.
• Slashdot - i dont read it this one as frequent as before, but i enjoy reading the comments.
• LinuxToday - Quite good in selecting linux news.
• Phoronix - Mostly hardware reviews.
• Reddit - better than digg in some aspects but very similar idea.

That’s the list, there are other sites that i visit from time to time like lenovo blogs or planet openbox. Also to the list above you can add my family/friends blog that you can find in my blogroll.

Watch the following video,

It’s a nice a video that reveals that the rest of the players in the market (read nokia, MS) are freaking afraid of google, somethings to note,

• Ballmer arrogance never changes,
  • He makes a similar argument as the one he did when the iphone came out.
  • He says that they made a great work in openness, he has a very particular definition of open…..
• Symbian representative dismiss the project saying that, “it’s just another linux platform” and he is right. The problem is that this one is supported by google (a successful company, with great employees and a lot of budget) and many others vendors and carriers and that it’s half GPLv2 and half ASL (thing that i think symbian is not even close).

Here is where the competition begins and the options seems to be,

• iPhone
• Windows Mobile device
• Android device

I tried the android sdk too and it feels good, also the videos are short and very educative,

Presentation(I guess only Sergey Brin can wear that t-shirt on the announce of the software platform that will probably rule cellphones in the next years)

Androidology -Part 1 of 3

Androidology -Part 2 of 3

Androidology -Part 3 of 3

This post is available in spanish and english.

Avant-Window-Navigator(AWN) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen. It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets. This is a really nice application, not only for the eyecandy, but also for productivity. One of the things i love is that all the applications icons are available in all the workspaces, so if you are working on a workspace and click in an application that’s in an other workspace it will take you to that workspace and show the app. That’s really nice and if you add a 3d cube to that it gets even better :DI’m not actually using it as i disabled compiz-fusion cause it was eating up all my cpu when rendering windows while scrolling and eye candy is nice but it dosen’t worth that much. If you are using ubuntu you can install it like this,

Add the following lines to you /etc/apt/source.list

## AWN
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42 gutsy avant-window-navigator
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42 gutsy avant-window-navigator

Signature,

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/reacocard.asc
sudo apt-key add reacocard.asc
rm reacocard.asc
sudo apt-get update


Now update repositories,

sudo apt-get update

And now install AWN,

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-bzr awn-core-applets-bzr

If you want to start awn when ubuntu starts, do the following,

System > Preferences > Sessions

And add a new entry with the command,

avant-window-navigator

Here you can see a video on how it works,

I love this application, it’s a pity that my video card (I have an ATI X1300) sucks so hard….