Posted by lostson on February 11, 2010 – 9:46 pm
Well with all the buzz about google buzz competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter a new thought occurred to me. What the heck ever happened to IRC ? You know good ol Internet Relay Chat ? Let us compare some of the similarities shall we. For instance on most of the social networking sites I can become a member or fan of a group, I can do that exact same thing by joining a channel on a IRC server, which is usually populated with people I want to talk with right ? Must be because I joined the channel.
Next say someone in this channel is a butthead and I really don’t want to listen to them anymore, so I use the /ignore command and they magically go away. Much like blocking someone on a social website. Now they can probably still see what I am saying but I no longer have to deal with them. Pretty nice feature huh. Now lets say I want to only talk to one particular person, I can then institute a dialog with this person, so now it is just me and them talking about whatever we wish to talk about without interruption.
Most IRC servers have a message system or memo service that you can use to leave a note for a friend, Hmm sounds alot like posting a status or something to one of these other social sites to me. You can also register your nickname so no one else on that particular IRC server can use the same nick as you. Is this all starting to sound very familiar ?
Some other points to mention is that some IRC networks allow encryption via ssl, so for those who hold their privacy near and dear to their heart can encrypt their sessions as well. Also if I want to post pics or a good article I read I can merely post the link in the channel and all my new found friends can enjoy. Even most media players have a irc script that will post the song you are listening to in the channel you are in. Wow does this not about cover all of the inglorious spam you wish to spread to the planet ? You can whoa wait for it —- create your very own channel, yep you read that right your very own channel. With its own topic and operators and everything. Wow what a novel idea huh ?
With that said I have been using IRC for years now and it is still my preferred way to communicate even over instant messaging which is basically again just over glorified IRC. So my question persists social networking ? Why yes I do I use IRC everyday all day!
Posted by lostson on February 9, 2010 – 7:50 pm
Well as usual on my weekends off I try to get to one of my many projects but this weekend I suffer from slackeritis. I had all the best intentions of getting to some things but I didn’t. Every time I sat down I just didn’t have the normal fuel I do for getting things done, and when I am feeling that way it just doesn’t pay to try as it wont work anyway. So I took this weekend off just kinda laying around the house, went out with family, watched the super bowl and really not much else. Could be all the snow we are getting today that has just put me in kind of a foul mood, who knows. Hopefully this will go away soon and I will get back to my normal insane list of projects I have that I wish to get done. Hope your projects are going better than mine, so til next time then, remember CentOS isn’t just for servers ya know…
Posted by lostson on January 26, 2010 – 7:44 pm
Filed under Linux, centos
Well as most of you know by now I use CentOS, and some things just need to be tweaked. I for one have always liked the panel applet for sensors the version I was using was a little old and I wanted to see if I could update it and sure enough I could and I did. Obligatory screenshot
So as always the rpms are located in the rpm4centos section and you will need two of these which are
libXNVCtrl – which gives lm_sensors the ability to see nvidia cards
gnome-applet-sensors – the panel applet for gnome
You need to have lm_sensors installed for this to work which you can just do a yum install lm_sensors for.
Then if you have not run /usr/sbin/sensors-detect as root do that before installing these packages. Then
as root install the libXNVCtrl first then the sensors rpm with the normal rpm -Uvh command, log out of gnome and back in and click on your panel and select add applet. Then look for Hardware Sensors Monitor and add it to your panel. There are some settings you can adjust in the applet preferences so be sure to check that out as well after you have it on your panel.
If all goes well you should now have the sensors displaying their temps in your panel.
Posted by lostson on January 26, 2010 – 3:51 pm
Filed under Linux, centos
New in the rpms4centos category I have built the latest version of Xchat for CentOS along with Easytag v2.1 as well today they are available in the rpms4centos section. On a side note for Xchat to install you will need libsexy which you can get from Dag’s repo which is here, Enjoy!
Posted by lostson on January 25, 2010 – 6:20 am
Filed under Linux, centos
e16 1.0.2 was released yesterday so it was time to update my rpms4centos as well. New e16 rpms can be found in the designated area. Some of the fixes in this release are as follows this is from the mailing list
e16-1.0.2:
- Fix bogus image cache directory files being written in home directory.
- Enable pango by default.
- Enable showing mini icon in border part.
- Fix stacking order when showing desktop state is set off.
- Merge autoraise settings into focus settings dialog.
- Remove old e-icons, add some new ones.
- Fix manual placement when switching desktop.
- Fix potential crash when window is destroyed while being
moved/raised/lowered.
- Merge miscellaneous documentation into e16.xml/html.
- Add simple e16 man page.
- Fix old translucent move mode when shm pixmaps are not available.
- Many minor bug fixes and enhancements, see ChangeLog for details.
As usual enjoy!
Posted by lostson on January 24, 2010 – 7:36 am
Woke up early today and wanted to make a new background for my blackberry so I whipped up these based on a tutorial in my Linux Format magazine, enjoy!
Posted by lostson on December 22, 2009 – 4:23 pm
Filed under Linux, centos
Well here we go again kids building packages just in time for christmas. So I built up the latest stable release of kvirc for CentOS 5. For those of you not familiar with kvirc, it is a irc client much like xchat or konversation except that it has a million options and theme support and a treasure trove of other features. You can learn more about kvirc here.As usual I have placed the rpm in the link above rpms4centos, src rpms are also available as well as debug info. Enjoy and happy holidays.
kvirc 3.4.2 Shiny
Posted by lostson on December 15, 2009 – 8:13 pm
Filed under Linux, centos
Kopete for CentOS 5 has not been able to log into Yahoo for a pretty lengthy amount of time so I wanted to sit down today and figure out why and see if I could fix it. Well upon my search I discovered that the folks over at RHEL where not going to fix it you can read the bug report if you like but it basically says they are not gonna fix it. This fired up my beans so I had to try, I mean cmon who can resist a challenge. So I sat down and got to work.
What I did to fix this was grab the src.rpm from the repo for kdenetwork. I then upgraded Kopete inside the rpm to 12.7 then patched the yahoo protocol. Now Yahoo works perfectly with Kopete. You can read my bug report for CentOS HERE. All in all a success.
To update your version of Kopete from the link above rpms4centos grab the kdenetwork rpm. Now you will first need to “yum remove kdenetwork” then as root “rpm -Uvh kdenetwork” that will get the new Kopete installed for you. The devel and debug rpms are in there as well if you need them along with the src.rpms which are in the srcrpms directory.
On a side not while working all this out today, if you are gonna use google talk with kopete grab the qca-tls rpm as well and install via “rpm -Uvh qca-tls” this is needed for the SSL protocol that google talk uses.
All in all a productive experiment and I hope it can help others out as well.
Posted by lostson on December 3, 2009 – 9:12 pm
Filed under Linux, centos
So I have been wanting to get away from gnome and kde all together and I have fond memories of using E so I thought I would sit down and see if i could get it all working with cent, and low and behold I have and its just as fast and slick as ever. Long before compiz and all that jazz was E16. When you wanted eye candy and speed this was the window manager of choice.
e16 on CentOS 5.4
So as my little project was going getting E16 installed was a breeze but getting Eterm was not as easy as I would have liked. I had to do some tweaking and roll some new rpms, but it worked out just fine. So if you are interested in using E16 & Eterm on your CentOS box hit the link above that says rpms4centos and grab the e16 Eterm and libast rpms. Install in this order libast e16 then Eterm. There are some dependencies but you can easily grab them from the standard repo. E16 will now be available via your login manger be it gdm or kdm. The nice thing is also in your gdm or kdm you may notice other entries like e16-gnome or e16kde – yep thats right you can use E as your window manager inside of gnome or kde, how sweet is that! As always here is a note of warning these are not officially supported rpms built by the CentOS team these are built by me for my use and I like to share them. So if you are gonna use these and run into problems do not ask on the mailing lists or in IRC as they only support what they ship, so please contact me if you have any questions or comments, thanks and enjoy.
Oh btw I am going to be putting together some rpm’s for themes as well soon but for now check out this site e16 themes for all kinds of extra themes for e16.
Posted by lostson on November 24, 2009 – 10:16 pm
Well I haven’t been posting much lately as life has got a firm grip on places I would rather not mention. I have been having troubles with my stomach recently and had to go get a camera put down my throat to inspect what is going on down there. Needless to say the results were not all that great. They even found some polyps in there and took some samples to biopsy. So now I wait for the test results.
Work has been a bear to say the least working lots of overtime, I have been trying to get to some new CentOS projects but unfortunately between my health, family and work it is slow going. I am hoping to get to some soon so stay tuned.
