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!

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.

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!

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 :)

even if you don’t like that, there’s:

2. A system of religious belief and worship.
[1913 Webster]


so that covers every religion as a cult. As for dangerous - they have a well documented history of legal threats, intimidating behaviour, etc.

Update: It seems that sanity is not lost and the guy isn’t going to be prosecuted because, as should have been fairly obvious, his sign wasn’t inciting anything \o/

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” :(

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.

As usual hit up the Terminator home page for more.

terminator -x screen -U

should cause terminator to execute screen -U. By default, most options parsers will see this as the -U being passed to terminator and screen being the argument to -x.

After looking around the docs and asking on #python, optparse seemed to be a better option than getopts, so I switched it over and implemented a callback to extend the default argument processing for -x. It wasn’t quite working, so after another quick foray into #python I ended up reading this page which provided everything I needed. More than I needed, in fact, since their while loop has conditionals which affect whether or not the next arguments are added. I just want to gobble them all up and stop them from being parsed :)

Head over to its homepage for all the links you need to ease yourself into the future!

Except that’s not its name.

Not when it’s booting.

It turns out that having created the RAID volume while fully booted, it had been tagged as being for a machine with a hostname of “tenshu”. The initramfs does not know your hostname because your hostname is stored on your root partition, which is a RAID partition that hasn’t been mounted yet. It is possible for the initramfs to have a hostname, and I expect it might even have a kernel commandline option to specify it, but either way it’s not there by default.

As any string comparison function will tell you, “tenshu” is not an acceptable match for “(none)”.

So to fix this, boot the system and it should sit for ages waiting for the RAID arrays to assem ble (this timeout is *far* too long. what the hell takes this long to be detected by the system?!). After a while it will get bored and give you an initramfs shell. Busybox to the rescue!

I suspect you can run mdadm -A /dev/md0 --auto-update-homehost, although I ran mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdb3 --update=homehost to be specific and because I found those options first.
Reboot and bam, the orange bar of progress skips up merrily.

Assured that my data is safe on the new partition, I can now proceed to trash the original disk and grow the RAID1 to include it.

What does all that mean? It means I can view/copy the photos/movies/music from the phone with my PS3, which also means I can not only use the TV out to display arbitrary things, I can also view the media digitally, via wifi through a easily available/usable interface.

This feels like the future!

GPS is obviously useful, you can bring up a map of where you are and look around. The TV Out was a total surprise though, and is incredibly cool. I figured it would just be used for things like image galleries, and while they are specifically tailored for TV output, it works everywhere! You can nagivate all the menus, run apps and so on.
Symbian is just really handy because there are plenty of apps for it and a pretty open development environment.

Short review, but all in all, I’m happy so far :)