August 1st, 2008 cmsj
Update: It has been suggested that it is not productive or collaborative to talk negatively about some developers releasing software for unixy operating systems without really trying to integrate it with the versions of widely deployed software available in those operating systems.
It is a fair point. It’s not productive or collaborative. It may be true, but ranting about it doesn’t help anyone but me.
More productive and collaborative would be to nicely ask these ISVs to establish a less isolated packaging process with our communities and companies (but I don’t mean LSB or a new package format). Clearly some people won’t work with them on ethical grounds, but a more pragmatic position will accept that commercial software exists, so it might as well not make our lives unnecessarily hard. And the companies shifting Linux are hot on ISVs.
Jorge: No, I don’t like having multiple JVMs, but I have been in corporate situations before where it has been necessary because specific applications have required different versions :(
Posted in FOSS, Rant, Techie, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »
July 27th, 2008 cmsj
There’s no doubting that the iphone is a hugely capable machine. It’s powerful yet easy to use, but it’s not perfect. Here are some things which I think are missing:
* DAAP - it would be great to be able to play music via wifi since the thing is a bit low on storage.
* Background apps - I understand the huge problems implied by this, but certain apps could be blessed with the ability. Either that or the excellent last.fm client should be integrated with the iPod app. Not everything can be made a push app (the api for which isn’t even available yet)
* IMAP subscriptions - I have loads of mail folders I don’t want to see, which is dead easy in most mail clients, because of the ability to only subscribe to certain mailboxes. I would like to see this in the iPhone mail client.
* IMAP new mail checking - I don’t have all my new mail go to my inbox, some gets filtered to other folders an I would like to be able to tell the mail client to check these too.
Posted in Techie | No Comments »
July 27th, 2008 cmsj
Still liking this excellent toy. I have now had most of the commonly seen bugs, and a couple of crashes, which sucks, but my N95 was pretty unstable too, and not even slightly as nice!
Posted in Techie | 2 Comments »
July 26th, 2008 cmsj
I picked up an iPhone a couple of days ago, and other than having to replace it already because the button didn’t work properly, I really like it. I’m writing this from a wordpress app on it.
Mostly it means I have a decent web browser in my pocket. Rock.
Posted in Techie | 1 Comment »
July 7th, 2008 cmsj
It’s been far too long, but here it is. Terminator 0.9.
As usual, head over to the home page to get all the links and information you need.
“So what’s new in this release?” Well let’s have a little look at the ChangeLog:
* Tab support
* Drag & Drop support
* Added support for ~/.config/terminator/config
* Switch the meanings of “horizontal” and “vertical” wrt splitting,
after extensive user feedback. Added context menu icons to try and
make the meaning clearer.
* Added keybindings for terms size and scrollbar manipulation. Thanks
Emmanuel Bretelle.
* Completely revamped config system which now transparently makes use
of gconf settings if they are available, falls back to sensible
defaults if not, and can be overridden entirely by ~/.config/terminator/config
* Support terminal zooming - now you can quickly hide all terminals apart
from one and either scale the fontsize or not.
* New application icon from Cory Kontros
* FreeBSD support (thanks to Thomas Hurst)
and a whole heap of bug fixes. Rock on!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »
July 6th, 2008 cmsj
It’s taken us some time to get there, but as this page shows, we now have all of the bugs we want solved for 0.9, solved :D
The string freeze came way too late unfortunately, so I’m expecting we’ll want to do a 0.9.1 consisting of translations and fixes for any other bugs we figure out on the road to 1.0.
I now need to prepare all of the parts required for a release and push out a final RC build into our PPA and if all is well, 0.9 will be released very shortly! Please test it now and tell us if you hit any last minute problems.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
June 19th, 2008 cmsj
The list of bugs left for Terminator 0.9 is getting shorter (although I do keep failing to resist the temptation to add more) and so it’s time to try and get some wider testing.
Therefore, we’ve started uploading beta packages of 0.9 to our PPA. If you want to help test and you run Ubuntu, add this apt source:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome-terminator/ubuntu hardy main
If you have Terminator installed already from a package, it should then be offered to you as an upgrade, otherwise run:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install terminator
Please report any bugs you find to http://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator/ and please feel free to drop by #terminator on irc.freenode.net with any feedback!
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator, Ubuntu | No Comments »
May 22nd, 2008 cmsj
After learning to use Meld and much chatting with chantra, I’m pleased to announce that we have landed his dnd-tabs branch into Terminator trunk.
What does all of that mean? Well, it means that we are a major step closer to being able to release 0.9 (which I have arbitrarily decided should be released only when we have tab support). That’s not to say that the release will be today or even in the next week - the branch landing may bring us all the infrastructure we need, but it needs some UI and behaviour love to make sure people don’t get lost in a maze of nested tabs (although this seems like such a powerful feature for some users that it may well be available as an option). This is the sort of thing I want to avoid out of the box:
One other nice thing we get from chantra’s branch is drag&drop re-ordering of terminals. You can kind of see it at work in the screenshot below - we highlight the area of the window where the terminal being dragged will end up (note that you can’t see the mouse pointer - it should be over the grey square with a drag icon of a terminal):
Thanks very much to chantra for his hard work on this, and indeed all of the team who have been rocking trunk for weeks now. We’ll get this polished and fixed ASAP and into a tarball/PPA and hopefully into things like Fedora and OpenSUSE :)
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
April 20th, 2008 cmsj
… neither of them good.
First off, in a stunning piece of fail, Lenovo have used a drive from one of the few manufacturers that enforces region coding on DVDs in hardware - Matshita, aka Matsushita, aka Panasonic. This is very frustrating and made worse by the drive shipping in a state with no region code set, so no DVDs at all will play. I now either have the choice of changing it no more than 5 times, or risking the drive with some custom firmware which claims to remove the region code.
Secondly, and more worryingly, there is a new BIOS release for the X300, but one report from a Linux user thus far suggests that the machine has started hard locking. I can’t confirm because this machine is far too important to me (ie I use it for work), so I am holding back on the update until I know what’s going on.
Update It occurred to me that it might be useful to document how I changed the region code - install regionset and run it. It will show you your current region code (0xFF for me, ie region 0) and how many changes you have left, then ask if you want to change it.
Second update Lenovo actually withdrew the BIOS update, so clearly something was wrong with it. This page lists the models for which they have pushed out a fixed version. The X300 is currently still listed as “Coming Soon” :(
Posted in Techie | 4 Comments »
April 8th, 2008 cmsj
You have new hardware (most likely server).
You pop in a debian/ubuntu installer CD, tell it what kind of keyboard you have and expect it to scan the CDROM for packages, but….uh-oh, it can’t find the CD!
What do you do?! Well, realistically there’s not a lot you can do to make it work, but you can do a lot to help get it fixed.
You need to pull off /var/log/syslog, the output of lspci, lspci -v and lspci -vvnn.
You may very well find yourself having a problem with that though, because you’re still pretty early in a typical linux boot process, so you probably don’t have any disks mounted and you may find yourself missing any modules to make that happen.
You should have usb-storage.ko though. That and isofs.ko.
Can you see where this is going? :)
find the .udeb’s on your install CD with a working computer, ar -x the core fs modules one and pull out ext3 (and jbd and mbcache), or vfat and its dependencies. put them in a directory, then do mkisofs -o /dev/usbstick1 /path/to/modules.
You now have a partition on your USB stick that is an ISO9660 filesystem (ie a CD). Obviously make sure you don’t do this on a USB stick you care about the contents of.
Chuck the USB stick into the broken server, modprobe usb-storage, mount the newly appeared partition and copy the modules over to the right place in /lib/modules/. Unmount the USB stick, modprobe the drivers and now you can put in an ext3/vfat formatted USB stick and you have somewhere to write the debugging information to!
Easy! :) Now file a bug with the debugging information you collected.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
