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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.

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.

ls -lahS | awk ‘{if( $5==0 ) print $8}’ | xargs rm

Some weeks ago my father got one of those dialers (and one or two virus) in his computer, i don’t know how and i don’t even care. I wont make a post about how to delete a virus or stuff like that….. The thing is that this incident consumed me some hours of troubleshooting and eventually more hours formating and reinstalling the box. How was this time wasted ?

- FIrst of all i brought to my house only the box (no mouse, monitor, keyword etc….) so i spent like 30 minutes trying all the mice in the house to find that none of the usb or ps/2 mice were working in windows xp (yes a simple mouse, all those mice were working on linux boxes). I finally got an old mouse working and could continue.

- Formated the box and reinstalled os, 1 hour or so….

- Installed drivers and and upgraded the os 1 hour more.

- Installed office antivirus, antispyware, antiadware…. 2 Hours

As you see “Windows just works”, but no operating system is perfect, not even linux. That’s why like 2 months ago i wiped an opensuse installations cause it was doing some weirds things (nothing big, but i was too lazy) so i grabbed my ubuntu cd and reinstalled the os. In one hour i was finish with a new system everything working, office suite and stuff….

So i wonder why people keep saying that “Windows just woks” when it dosen’t…… (and this was just the installation, caused by something that in linux dosent even exist)

Finally, it will not be fair (for all of you that think that Linux is not ready for the non-geek people[2]) not note that my father a 51 years old layer uses both Windows and Linux.

[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=968

[2] http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070913/linuxs-free-system-is-now-easier-to-use-but-not-for-everyone/

This it’s really a step forward, well a big one, i wasn’t expecting this some weeks ago. It’s a pity that lenovo dropped ati cards some time ago. Either way this is just the begging and will cause a lot of movement on the market so lets wait and see what happens.

EDIT: Also on phoronix they are doing a follow up on this story.

Matt Kohut (Lenovo Worldwide Competitive Analyst) made a quite controversial blog post asking readers why waste your time using linux on a laptop ? and he realized how far away of the reality he was. So now he is asking which distro should be preinstalled on a thinkpad, so go and vote!

So… i finally managed to install opensuse, first impression was a bit slow system, mostly when loading applications. Once application is loaded it seems similar to my previous installation of ubuntu 6.10. Now i’m trying to add new repo with the yast wizard and this is taking way too long, i dont know what the heck it is downloading. My father just told me that the computer was a bit slow so, ill see if i can optimize this a bit….

I’m installing opensuse 10.2 on my family box and lets say that my installation experience got back to the linux old days. So far what i know from opensuse is,

-> You need to download a 3.7 DVD image.
-> Ugly Installer, no graphic mode (i have a p4 2.0 512 mb ram).

-> After installation opensuse did not boot.

Nothing has changed since i installed Suse 7.3 back in 2002.

If you are wondering why i am not installing ubuntu on this box, is just because it take ages to boot and thought on giving a chance to an other distro. Lets see if this end up working.