Posted by lostson on August 9, 2010 – 7:33 pm
Well lately there has been alot of whirlwind subjects hitting the linux blogs and who am I to buck trend, so here are my thoughts on recent events.
#1 Tribalism
This got all hyped up because of Mark Shuttleworth going off and it seems as of late Ubuntu/Canonical have been taking some heat about its contributions back to the open source community. Really tribalism is nothing new in the linux world. All sorts of people use different
distro’s and they are fiercely loyal to their distro of choice. This has been going on long before Ubuntu even showed up and will continue long after many distro’s are gone. Contributions back to the community are important I agree, and alot of people jumped up and said Ubuntu is nothing more than a marketing company more than a linux distro. Now in some respects this may be true but due to the great marketing campaign of Ubuntu linux is becoming more and more popular. So would you consider this a contribution back to the community ? Is this marketing not beneficial to linux and the community as a whole ? I for one would say yes it is. If in any way shape or form that any distro markets linux to the masses and people switch from another OS to the one we love I would say they are contributing to the community. Ubuntu is still when you sit down and think about it a fairly young distro with limited amounts of developers so maybe their code contributions are not the highest but they have pushed linux out to the general population, and because of this we are seeing more and more converts everyday. I don’t always agree with what Ubuntu does either and I sometimes get angry with it as well, but for the most part I believe what they are doing so far anyway is honorable and I hope they continue to do so and travel the honorable path.
#2 Contributions
This brings me to the second point in my thoughts today community contributions. This by far seems to be a matter of opinion more than anything else. Which I covered above. And like my granfather says “opinions are like assholes and everyone has one.” Even when reading most distro’s pages when you are interested in helping your favorite out there are many ways to contribute to the community. Everything from writing documentation to helping in forums or packaging. You won’t get kicked out of writing documentation for your distro of choice because you have not submitted any code to the distro of your choice. So how can you condemn an entire distro because you deem their contributions to not be worthy. This would mean that alot of the little distro’s should be condemned as well shouldn’t it ? Agian to reiterate my point this is opinion based more than anything else.
#3 vanilla or twist
And the final point of interest is to vanilla or twist, alot of conversation has come up about distro’s using a vanilla gnome/kde versus distro’s twisting it up and branding it and adding their own tools and other such things. Really each distro does its own branding and adds their own tools. Just look at all the Ubuntu spin off’s that really only re-brand things. This again is merely a matter of opinion more than anything else. Each distro adds or subtracts things to make it their own. Is this a bad thing ? I think not and I don’t see a whole lot of noise coming out of any of the DE/WM camps yelling about doing this so really this is a pretty moot point.
To sum it all up these are just three things that have been being beaten to death on the blogs and to me it seems pretty pointless. Really this seems to be defeating what most of us out here want linux to accomplish which is world domination. I know that we are all going to have disagreements at times and things will boil over, but really for the most part these things when they happen are more damaging to linux and the community as a whole when they happen. This looks more like kids in a school yard arguing about whose dad or mom is stronger or better. As a community we need to nip this stuff in the bud and focus on pushing linux to the foreground of people’s minds. Throwing stones at each other’s camp is accomplising nothing for linux or the greater community as a whole. We don’t always have to agree but we have to realise we are all here with one common goal in our minds and that is to show the world the power and greatness of linux and why everyone should be using. Not showing people how immature and tribal(haha had to throw this in)we are. So lets start a fire and sing some kumbayyah and chill out people.
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 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 October 18, 2009 – 7:05 am
Filed under Linux, centos
I had a couple of emails wanting to know about the theme I use in my screenshots so here they are. The first one is my gtk theme which you can get here The icon theme is a hodge podge of icons I have collected mostly gtango, tango and others and you can grab that here as well. I will be adding these to the download page as well. Enjoy.
Posted by lostson on October 4, 2009 – 9:17 am
Filed under Linux, centos
I wanted to have the Nodoka gkt-engine and theme for my CentOS gnome so I sat down and built the rpms for them you can get them here. You will need all four of these, then to install you will have to rpm -Uvh each of these in this order
#1 – rpm -Uvh nodoka-filesytem
#2 – rpm -uvh gtk-nodoka-engine
#3 – rpm -Uvh gtk-nodoka-engine-extras
#4 – rpm -Uvh nodoka-metacity-theme
After this is complete you can go to your gnome menu System–>Preferences–>Theme and use Nodoka. These rpm’s install several nodoka theme’s which include
Nodoka-Aqua
Nodoka-Gilouche
Nodoka-Looks
Nodoka-Midnight
Nodoka-Rounded
Nodoka-Silver
Nodoka-Squared
and of course also the Metacity theme as well. Hopefully all went well and you can now use the Nodoka style with your CentOS system, if you have any problems or questions please let me know, enjoy.
Posted by lostson on September 22, 2009 – 5:59 am
So I was thinking lately about the system tray and its uses, and I have come to the conclusion that I am not sure if I need it. I will explain, I often have pidgin, liferea, and rhythmbox running at all times, and what has been annoying me is that to get at these apps I have to take my hands off of my keyboard to move my mouse to the tray to click on the icon and bring them up. Now this is really no hardship but it still can seem like kind of a pain sometimes. I am very use to Alt+Tab’ing my way to the app I am looking for.
I can see some things like network manager or update notifiers but why all these other applications. For instance I am working on a application for Identi.ca and have been pondering if I want to add system tray support or not. I want to add some notification’s to it but when I get notified that something has happened I would rather just use Alt+Tab and pull it up read what I need to then Alt+F9 it back to where it came from. Now of course this can make for a rather loaded up taskbar but still makes it rather quick and easy to get to the app of your choosing. I do use mail-notification and that pops up in the tray and that is a nice feature, liferea’s system tray icon changes color and can list the number of items updated and this is nice as well but then again I have to move to my mouse again.
All in all it really boils down to “to each his own” but my 2cents is that for alot of things this really isn’t needed with using multiple desktops and other various features and keyboard shortcuts, there really is only a few instances where this may be required. What do you think ?
