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 , so here it’s

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

For those looking for vmware-player in the last version of ubuntu, you wont find it it was removed.

But you can install it from a ppa repo.

Add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cschieli/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/cschieli/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

Then update,

sudo aptitude update

Finally, install

sudo aptitude install vmware-player

After installation you will probably want to comment that repo.

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/

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!

Been quite busy with my thesis work and i have not been doing much of the things that i would like…. but well…. Today i found this nice video about django on a google plex presentation, the video is quite nice and there are other videos also interesting (like this one about python 3000). The videos are from the 2006 but still interesting . This also remembers me how bad the experience of uploading a video to an ipod is…..

Investigating about Amazon S3 (God damn they are cheap!i think they are using recycled paper as storage medium ) i found this great article of guy explaining REST to his wife, the article is great and it explain some core definitions in a very simple way.

On other news tried Ubuntu 7.10 tribe 3 some weeks ago but rolledback as it’s way too green for me and i don’t have the time to try to fix it. i did not saw such a improve in battery life as a lot of people are saying with tickless kernel, i played with powertop and some of the upcoming gui modifications that will be showing on the next version of ubuntu (they made a winblows-like dialog for screen proprieties management, don’t spend 15 minutes looking for the font configuration app at System > Preferences is not there). I think this will be an other great release of a great Operating System, i just hope my cheap video card manufacturer release a decent driver with AIGLX support, apparently the last version, release today is more of the same crap. Well at least i know i wont be buying AMD any more.