Archive for the ‘GNOME’ Category

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No, I haven’t forgotten digital (darktable for the epic win)

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

This was my first real play with darktable. It’s a fairly new “virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers” but if you are into photography and into freedom, you need to RUN (not walk) to the install page now.

My first real use of it was for a simple image that I took from my hotel room when I was in Hong Kong last week. I whacked the fisheye on the D200, walked up to the window (and then into it, because that’s what you do when looking through a fisheye) and snapped the street scene below as the sun was going away.

Hotel Window (Hong Kong)

I’d welcome feedback… but I kinda like the results, especially for a shot that wasn’t thought about much at all (it was intended as a just recording my surroundings shot).

The second shot I had a decent go at was one I snapped while out grabbing some beers with some of the Rackspace guys (Hi Tim and Eddie!) in Hong Kong. Darktable let me develop the RAW image from my D200 and get exactly the image I was looking for…. well, at least to my ability so far. Very, very impressed.

Hong Kong streetlife

Being a photographer and using Ubuntu/GNOME has never been so exciting. Any inclination I had of setting up a different OS for that “real” photo stuff is completely gone.

(Incidently, I will be talking about darktable at LUV in July)

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Posted in GNOME, Photos | 3 Comments »

Problems with Tracker (and why I’m back to Beagle)

Thursday, October 18th, 2007
  1. If you have more than 8192 directories, it can’t monitor them (max inotify limit)
  2. No search results
  3. access(), stat() and then lstat() called on *every* file that it’s going to index… this takes a long time.
  4. Did I mention that search doesn’t actually give you any results?
  5. Even when you run strings on the database and then search for something there, you don’t get any results
  6. Even when you search for the name of an application, you get no results.

Posted in GNOME | 5 Comments »

Everything that’s wrong (and right) with Ubuntu Gutsy

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

So, I’ve upgraded two boxes: my laptop and my mail server.

Wrong:

  • courier-imap-ssl broke. My cell phone could no longer pull mail.
    I got something like in the log:
    imapd-ssl: couriertls: connect: error:1408F10B:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_RECORD:wrong version number
    The fix for this is to change the TLS_PROTOCOL option in /etc/courier/imapd-ssl to SSL23 (an option not listed in the “possible verions” list in the config file). So mail now works.
  • Evolution now seems to put a blank line at the top of emails when replying (before quoting the message). GRRRRRRR…
  • The Window Manager (metacity) has changed how it arranges new windows. Instead of cascading them down, so if you’re opening a bunch you can easily switch between them, it now puts them right on top of each other GGRRRRRR.
  • It set up my Xorg to *not* to X monitor hotpluggy goodness. I’ve managed
  • Login seems to take a fair bit longer than before
  • Tracker
    • trackerd will index while on battery power… GRRR
    • trackerd will hog disk and CPU
    • I haven’t been able to get any results out of tracker.
    • There is no tracker-status or something to check that it hasn’t just stopped working
    • Tracker will use up all your remaining disk space… (I initially only had a few GB free.. and trackerd filled it up)
    • I haven’t actually had a query work at all. i.e. it seems to be useless. I just get a “trackerd exited with status 0″.
  • There is no “remember passphrase” button in Evolution for GPG signing anymore. I think this is now set in the global preferences… but the behaviour change is annoying.
  • The pidgin icon is different than the gaim icon in the Notification Area… this is annoying as I can never find it anymore
  • The Window List applet changed behaviour to now *not* group windows together at all… making having lots of windows open (as I often do) completely unmanagable as opposed to (previously) just annoying.

The Awesome:

  • X monitor hotpluggy goodness (known to others as xrandr 1.2). VGA out works with the free radeon driver now! *YAY*. (I can rearrange screens using xrandr… awesome)
  • Pidgin is quite nice… the likelyhood of reply plugin is neat. More compact IM windows (also cool).
  • Syncing between Pidgin and Evolution with contacts seems to work okay now.
  • Suspend and resume still works
  • New version of f-spot – goodness!
  • New OpenOffice.org (2.3)  sucks less.
  • emacs22 (shiny)
  • New WINE does real neat stuff (such as have menu items for browse C drive, remove software)
  • Evolution doesn’t seem to leak memory as much anymore. Only 316MB RSS at the moment!
  • Lots of neat Liferea bug fixes – much nicer! (read items in the planet.linux.org.au feed stay marked read now!)

Posted in GNOME, life, the universe and everything | 5 Comments »

Backup solution for mum…

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

Dear Lazyweb,

I really want a GNOME application with a big button that says “backup” and proceeds to ask for a series of DVDs, on which it writes out everything on the hard disk (/ and /home) which can then (relatively easily) be used to restore the system.

I figure this would work for mum.

The old “drag and drop onto a blank DVD” doesn’t really work:

  • things get bigger than 1 DVD (e.g. Photos)
  • Important things like mail and bookmarks are hidden away in special dot folders (begging the question “so how do I back up my email?”)

Even a GUI around xfsdump that split the dump file into DVD sized chunks would be great…

Posted in GNOME | 1 Comment »

Evolution import VCF possibly the slowest thing in the world…

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. It’s only a few hundred cards in there…. urrggh.

Posted in GNOME | No Comments »

I heart recordMyDesktop

Friday, April 13th, 2007

So, I wanted to get some feedback before I presented my sessions at the upcoming MySQL Conference (be there, it’ll be cool). I thought… hrrm.. distributed company… I can’t just ask a couple of people to listen to me in the conference room as we don’t really have one (apart from IRC).

So… I thought.. hrrm… didn’t i see something about screencasting on the program for linux.con f.au ? Well, the answer was yes – Screencasting HOWTO. Started watching – I then proceeded to try the list of screencasting software.

Istanbul didn’t work – I got images and audio, but only when there was a change to what was being displayed… so a static slide with me talking, didn’t work. Same with a similar python script.

I then grabbed recordMyDesktop and it worked. ./configure; make; ./src/recordMyDesktop  …. and ctrl-c when done.. encodes to Ogg Theora and *WORKS*

Brilliant.

I then got to convince some coworkers to spend time listening to me speak about stuff they may already know to test it before the conf.

Posted in GNOME, mysql | 1 Comment »

I heart Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Jonas just switched me on to Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager – a simple GNOME app that stores a list of SSH tunnels you want and can automatically start and stop them.

Totally useful for those who travel (hrrm.. fair few MySQLers there) and/or always have SSH tunnels to places (hrrm… MySQLers there too).

There’s a debian package up there (and you can build one easily) but it’s not yet in the Ubuntu archive… maybe for the next release. But works fine on edgy for me!

Posted in GNOME, mysql | 2 Comments »

Pleading for a better mail suite….

Friday, March 9th, 2007

or really just all the Evolution bugs that I consistently hit to be fixed.

Why it needs hundreds of megabytes of memory just to list a single mail folder? What could it possibly be doing, loading the entire mailbox into memory? ick..

currently, after a crash “checking folder consistency” for at leat 10 minutes now… and aparrently i haev 13000 unread messages in INBOX. Bull. About 250 more likely. This will probably be some arse load of crack i’ll have to remove the cache files, restart evo 10 times and sacrifice  a goat to the gods of crackful annoying-apps.

Posted in GNOME | No Comments »

interesting rhythmbox bug…

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

It continued to play Tool, but wouldn’t let me pause (or, indeed, call up the window from the systray icon).

Gotta love the taste in music at least.

Posted in GNOME | No Comments »

wishlist: Face Recognition and f-spot

Monday, October 16th, 2006

It’d be really neat if f-spot could use face recognition and self-tag photos with who’s in them. It’s a real pain going through all my photos and adequately tagging them.

Posted in GNOME, cool gadgets, life, the universe and everything | No Comments »

Sound Volume

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

I like listening to music while I work. I also like notification sounds – such as gaim chiming when messages are received (so I look at them) and such things.

I use an iMic USB audio dongle to output sound to my headphones (partly because the connector on my laptop is a bit dodgy now) and I’ve detailed in the past how support for hotplugging of audio devices leaves a lot to be desired (it’s worse than it used to be sadly – I used to just be able to run esd against sound device and all was hunky dory).

What currently gets me is that music can be an adequate volume and then WHAM this loud gaim notification comes through.

Setting gaim to be softer and music to be louder isn’t immediately obvious and is easy to get wrong. It’d be great if the Volume Control applet could tweak it all from one place (and there was a way to change what the drop down volume applet controlled).

Posted in GNOME, life, the universe and everything | 1 Comment »

MySQL Bug Deskbar plugin

Friday, June 30th, 2006

Over at my junkcode section, I have mysqlbug.py which is a plugin for the GNOME deskbar panel applet.

If you’ve used Quicksilver on MacOSX, then you know the kind of app that Deskbar Applet is.

This one lets you type “bug 1234″ and be given the action of “open mysql bug 1234″. If you type “edit bug 1234″ it gives you the option of editing that bug number.

We’ll see if this proves useful.

Many thanks to kamstrup (one of the Deskbar developers) on #deskbar on gimpnet for helping me out with the plugin.

I totally heart Deskbar. It’s awesome.

Posted in GNOME, General, heart-it-or-fart-it, mysql | No Comments »

Unintelligent Design of Evolution

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

let’s see… evolution-2.6 process 383MB RES, evolution-data-server, 130MB RES…

That’s  513MB.

WHY OH WHY DOES EVOLUTION HATE ME?

(and this is on a good day)

Currently I have to quit and restart evolution every day. it just eats too much memory.

Posted in GNOME, Inciting Hatred, heart-it-or-fart-it | 1 Comment »

Maemo 2.0 (Nokia 770 Internet Tablet OS 2006)

Friday, June 16th, 2006

Installed the Beta on my 770 the other night – rather cool I have to say. A few small niggling things, but it is BETA.

Things feel snappier, the thumb keyboard thing is actually pretty good, the handwriting recognition seems faster, perhaps a bit more accurrate (but still nowhere near even the Newton MessagePad 120 – with version 2 of the OS of course).

I still need to get the screen fixed on mine though, as soon as you get much black (or blue) you get ugly stripes and it becomes unreadable.

Can’t wait to get GPE PIM stuff working. Oh, and actual syncing with Evolution.

Posted in GNOME, cool gadgets, heart-it-or-fart-it | No Comments »

Ubuntu and more than 1 audio device

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

Welcome to a new category of blog post: heart-it-or-fart it.

This is an extenstion on the “Inciting Hatred” category, also allowing for praise.

I have a headphone socket on my laptop that seems a bit loose or a connection is dodgy. So, I’ve pulled out my old-and-trusty iMic – a device that came around so you could (for example) have sound input on a bunch of Macs that didn’t come with it (like my old 500mhz iBook). It also happens to have great audio out.

So, plug it in. little thing pops up saying “found new sound device, would you like to open the sound preferences panel”. So far, so good. So that’s what I do, open it, select my audio device and close it.

Then, if i’m lucky, it’s actually seleted it. More likely I have to go back and select it again, kilall esd, select it, relaunch rhythmbox.

Then i can play.

Maybe one song.

Then it skips over everything else in the playlist without playing them.

Quit rhythmbox, start it up again, works. for one song.

rinse, repeat.

Or, if you’re more lucky, you’ll get a fraction of a second of sound out of rhythmbox before it skips over everything. you even get a red stop icon next to the song. If you click on it, you see “Playback Error. Not negotiated”. Hrrm… not a very good error message there.

Oh, the other thing, if you succeed in playing your playlist, you then get, at the end, ALL OTHER SOUND EVENTS that happened for the ENTIRE TIME your playlist was playing. Because what pleases me more than ever is hearing 80minutes worth of gaim sounds one after another.

In the old days i would just “killell esd; esd -d /dev/dsp1″. This doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Verdict: fart it.

(oh, and before anybody says anything – i will be filing a bug report. just the sort of bug that you’re amazed that it was let out as a non-beta release)

Posted in GNOME, Inciting Hatred, heart-it-or-fart-it | No Comments »

Welcome – Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Welcome – Ubuntu Linux

I took the plunge and last night I upgraded my laptop (my primary work machine – as in it cannot be busted[1]) to Ubuntu 6.06LTS (otherwise known as Dapper Drake. The LTS is for Long Term Support). It went pretty smoothly.

I had to remove irda-utils after the upgrade as a module being loaded was causing a panic (which showed itself by having everything freeze about 4 seconds after gdm started up and you’re about to enter your username). I should report a bug for that…

It’s slightly annoying that I had to disable gdm so i could see the panic to find out what was crashing. Perhaps we need either:

  • crash dumps (a-la IRIX and others where you can then run a debugger on an image of the crashed system)
  • panic over the top of X (a-la early MacOS X)

I have to say though, I am very pleased with the upgrade. Everything seems a bit snappier (much welcome) and NetworkManager works! I haven’t tried to suspend my laptop yet though.. so we’ll see if that works.

But a recent version of f-spot is welcome, I’m thinking I’m going to start using it for my photos. The next trick is going to be when i completely run out of disk space on my laptop for them.

The new Rhythmbox has me using it again. Disappointed not to see google talk support in gaim (although maybe i’m just not looking right).

The Window List still exists – a UI element I solemly think should die a quick death. It didn’t work in Microsoft Windows 95 with more than a few windows  open and it doesn’t work any better now (okay,  a little, but not much).

I want to take a second and marvel at the look of the new Human theme. It is rather lickable and, as we know, the only thing that matters with UI is how much you are licking your monitor. Even without wizz-bang GL compositing powered by cold fusion bucky ball quantum knot computers, it seems nice.

gnome-xchat is taking a little bit of getting used to, but the toast that pops up when somebody “stewart: hey”‘s me is useful.

Epiphany has received some updates too which are quite welcome. A bunch of elements used in phpBMS for Web 2.0 stuff are a lot faster. In previous blog entries I’ve said why I’m using Epiphany and not Firefox. I may re-asses this at some point, but I’m not really in any mood to manually move over saved passwords.

Evolution seems to suck up a bit less memory. Started out only using about 247MB. Now 338MB+52MB for evolution-data-server though…. maybe I’m just not feeling it as much due to other things chewing up less. WHY THE FUCK DOES IT TAKE 390MB FOR A PUNY 10GB[2] OR SO OF MAIL?

On the other hand though, there’s been a bunch of UI improvements in Evolution that are really welcome. I’m quite pleased with the upgrade.

My Bluetooth seems to have broken (my send image from phone to laptop didn’t work). I haven’t had time to debug yet.

Is it just me or do fonts look a bit better too?

I’m probably going to run beagle soon too.

The new version of Deskbar seems to work a lot better. I’ve noticed I’m using it more. Although is it worth 37MB of RES memory?
Tomboy seems to have gotten a bit better, but I’m still experiencing a bug where if i click anywhere that there isn’t text in my “Start Here” note I get a new note with some random large chunk of text from my “start here” note. I credit tomboy with a lot – namely a boost to productivity and not loosing notes. I massively heart it.

I’ll be trying MonoDevelop again to see how easy it really is to whip up something quickly. In breezy things seemed to crash too often to be useful.

The support for switching between audio output devices is much welcomed. However, there still seems to be some bugs – especially related to USB audio devices. I have an iMic here that I bought years ago and am again using since the headphone port on my laptop seems to be having problems (electrical connection related, not software).

Liferea (feed reader) has a lot of improvements. I think it’s chewing less RAM too.

I had to fiddle with my keyboard layout things to get my DVORAK layout working properly. It still seems as though Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow (and Right) to switch between Workspaces only works for the left cntrl and alt – not the right ones (that are closer to the arrows). Although now the little keyboard applet shows “USA” for Dvorak, “USA*” for QWERTY and “Swe” for Swedish.
My build of MySQL that I use (for important things – i.e. my invoices that make sure I get paid) that is typically a close-to-top-of-tree 5.1 install kept working after the upgrade – i.e .binary compatibility didn’t get boned. I did, however, need to rebuild some of my MySQL source trees afterwards (some linking with SSL foo failed, clean build fixed it).

I also did a fresh install from the Desktop CD under VMWARE on another machine. Quite nice installer.

I feel like I’ll move my Mum’s machine over to 6.06LTS very soon (this weekend) as I’m confident it’ll be a great release for her. I’m sure she’s going to love f-spot. I’m also going to introduce her to rhythmbox, Sound Juicer and possibly last.fm as she now has speakers plugged into her computer and a CD player in her car (okay, had it for a while, just slack in getting her up and running burning copies of CDs for the car).

I didn’t get Avahi out of the box after the upgrade… I wonder if I need this manually for the “Share my Music” feature of Rhythmbox to work. Installing now, so I’ll soon know.

I haven’t tried Ekiga (GnomeMeeting, but new name) Internet Phone yet with any SIP things. Since I have a physical SIP phone (a SNOM-190) I may not really use it (except when travelling). Good to test at some point though.

The real OpenOffice.org 2.0 is much overdue – as I’ve sworn rabidly about before. Big difference being this version actually works.

A very worthwhile upgrade IMHO.

The next box to get the upgrade will by my MythTV box – or Mum’s. But probably both this upcoming (long) weekend.

[1] I, of course, have up to date backups and a quick disaster recovery process (get machine, xfsrestore / and /home, continue working). However, this is a pain in the arse.
[2] This may be wrong… “du -sh Maildir” just takes too damn long. My Maildir is currently 1.7GB in a tar.bz2 archive.

Posted in GNOME, General, Inciting Hatred, cool gadgets, life, the universe and everything | 6 Comments »

Upgrade to OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 and stop murderous urges

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

It’s no great secret that I think the stability of OpenOffice.org2 Impress in what’s shipped in Ubuntu Breezy leaves a lot to be desired. By ‘a lot’ I mean copy and pasting is unreliably and the Slide Sorter just stopped working for me without crashes (in at least one document).

However, I took the plunge and did something I usually don’t like doing – installing non-official debs.

deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ breezy-updates/
deb-src http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ breezy-updates/
I am now a much happy camper.

Saving is still amazingly slow, but the lack of crashes has made my week.

doko is my hero for the week. A Tip Of The Hat for him.

Posted in GNOME, life, the universe and everything, mysql | No Comments »

last.fm

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

Set myself up on last.fm, changed to amaroK for playing music (so things go to last.fm) and added foo to the sidebar of my blog. I guess the trick now would be to get something to auto-add my current tune to the bottom of each entry. Maybe :)

I’m a GNOME boy, but amaroK seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of either rhythmbox or the version of banshee that ships with Ubuntu Breezy.

My main complaints with amaroK are that it looks nothing like my other desktop applications – it stands out that it’s a KDE app and not a GNOME app. Some clue on how to fix this would be appreciated.

Back to last.fm, I think the goal is to help suggest music that you may like by looking at what you listen to and what other people who listen to some of the stuff you listen to listen to. Seems interesting at least.

Newfangled technology to remove the “so what have you been listening to?” question from the list of things to talk about with friends :)

Posted in GNOME, General, life, the universe and everything | 1 Comment »

Beat on “state of the dolphin” (or: Why Software is never really ready until a .20 release)

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Beat Vontobel blogs about “fuþark: The silence of futhark and the state of the dolphin” which is basically about how he’s found that the 5.0.20 release of MySQL is when the 5.0 release is really starting to shine.

This confirms my theory (that I’ve had for quite a while now… like years) that a software release is never really mature until it hits about .20 (that’s dot twenty, not dot two).

When something reaches .10 (dot ten) it’s no longer going to be annoying for most uses, but .20 means that you’re going to be happy. Don’t ask me really why this is the case, but it is.

Think about the 2.6 kernel (yes, Linux Kernel – honestly, you think i was talking about something else?). At about 2.6.10, it would no longer be a pain to use and get things going – everything was starting to be smooth. As we’re getting closer to .20, things are getting better too. Mind you, everything here does run 2.6 now (and so does my mum’s machine – which is always a good sign of something being ready). With 2.4 hitting .20 – you’d never even think about using 2.2, 2.4 was perfect (except when you wanted 2.6).

GNOME (and everything attached to it) is getting to be a really good desktop – ever since about the 2.10 release I’ve been using just much more of the GNOMEy way of doing things because they’re actually getting useful and usable (don’t get me wrong, previous releases were good too – but a lot more things annoyed me). As the releases have progressed, I’m increasingly convinced that 2.20 will be the “we’re here” release. 2.14 is a lot better, but there’s still a bunch of stuff that has to be done before it’s totally kick-ass.

There are no surprises in MySQL 4.0 (it’s past .20 – at .26 now). Everybody knows and trusts it. 4.1 is at 4.1.18 – which is about as good as a .20 and it’s a pretty happy release. But due to 4.0 being rather solid – a lot of people have just stuck there. We’re seeing a bunch move to 5.0 – but my theory is that this will be 5.0.20 or above. Hrrm… anybody see a pattern?

MySQL 5.1 is at 5.1.10 (or so) and it’s stopped being annoying, and that great march towards a .20 is healthy and active.

GCC 2.95 had a lot of respect for a very long time (now it’s just a bit old). Note that .95 is higher than .20 :)

EMACS is at version 21, but ed is only at .2 (hrrm.. and which is used by more people as their editor i wonder).

aptitude at 0.2.15 (getting to .20) – while apt is at 0.6.40 (above .20). RPM is only at 4.0.4 – so a bit to go there :)

The version of postgresql is 7.5.9 over here… so getting to the .1 stage, but away from the .20. (now I’m going to watch comments fill up with postgesql guys going on about something, i just know it :) But there is 7.3.14 – a lot closer to .20!

MythTV is at 0.19 – getting closer to the .20 release (it’s a lot better than even just a few releases ago).

(versions here mostly taken from whatever ubuntu 5.04 has)

Note that attempting to skip a whole bunch of versions and label your software 95, 98, 2003 or whatever doesn’t get you “.20″ status. Neither does just skipping to “.20″ automatically. It’s about hard work and removing annoying things (we tend to call them bugs).

This is a really stupid metric of software maturity. It is, however, disturbingly accurate.

Posted in GNOME, life, the universe and everything, linux-kernel, mysql | 6 Comments »

It’s Evolution Baby

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

Evolution baby!

Posted in GNOME | 3 Comments »

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