Base-Art / Linux

Coherence and Nautilus, UPnP a bit more on the desktop

Philippe Normand — 2008-10-27T14:49:39Z

Frank is at it again on his quest to make Coherence conquer the GNOME desktop. This time Nautilus is part of the game, allowing the user to easily share files over UPnP and easily select a MediaRenderer to play media files.

Checkout the video on his post, it is just awesome! Thanks Frank for all this work, hoping it will give ideas to others :)

Upgrading to Ubuntu Feisty in text-mode

Philippe Normand — 2007-04-21T09:33:14Z

In Debian it's really easy to upgrade to a new version of the distribution:

replace old distro with new distro in /etc/apt/sources.list
run apt-get update
run apt-get dist-upgrade

This used to work fine for me in the past. Now I'm using Ubuntu and I have to use their update-manager if I don't want bad things to happen... Why is that? Don't ask me I have no clue :)

Problem with that update-manager is that it's a X11 application, this is good for the lambda user who just want to hit the button "upgrade to feisty", reboot and enjoy.

I wanted to see what happens in the background when you hit that famous button. So, the update-manager doesn't really handle the upgrade itself. Have a look at the end of your ~/.update-manager/meta-release file:

Dist: feisty
Name: Feisty Fawn
Version: 7.04
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:00:00 +0200
Supported: 1
Description: This is the 7.04 release
Release-File: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/Release
ReleaseNotes: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/ReleaseAnnouncement
UpgradeTool: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/feisty.tar.gz
UpgradeToolSignature: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/feisty.tar.gz.gpg

Before the upgrade, the update-manager will download a software archive from ubuntu website (the UpgradeTool), extract it and run a command called "feisty".. This app is written in Python, so it was really easy to figure out how perform the upgrade without their UI under X.. Just run feisty like this:

sudo ./feisty --frontend DistUpgradeViewText --mode desktop

This is very handy to upgrade my mac mini (without mouse nor keyboard) over the network :)

Painful Ubuntu upgrade

Philippe Normand — 2006-10-28T10:32:47Z

After Edgy Eft official release, I figured out it might be a good idea to upgrade my laptop running Dapper... Because I didn't want to spend hours in front of the screen waiting the 800Mb to get downloaded, I did the upgrade remotely via SSH...

Ok i was a bit of a player here :) So far, so good, everything runs fine, until i loose my SSH connection, in the middle of the upgrade... Hmmm, back at home, the computer simply made me the "black screen of death"... reboot... hard disk corrupted, e2fsck got fskd up... boot using a live CD, try to repair the partition... reboot... continue upgrade... had to reinstall some packages after disk corruption (like upstart, ncurses and some others)... 2 hours later... I get an edgy efted ;)

Now evolution messes up with my IMAP folders and doesn't want to remember folder subscriptions... Hrmm.. Then trying to get hibernation support back... My swap partition blows at each boot, so the resume-from-disk doesn't work.. 1 hour later I got it solved thanks to this

I read that many people upgraded like a charm using the easy way (update-manager or something...), maybe next time i'll give it a try :)

Good job Ubuntu folks by the way, Edgy (once working right) is a good milestone.

update: It seems i'm not the only one who had problems upgrading .. Good to know we're all in the same boat ;)

Choosing a Home Theater Platform

Philippe Normand — 2005-10-19T17:15:47Z

I'd like to setup a HTPC software in my living room, running on this tiny computer ... I had a look at various softwares but i'd prefer one implemented in Python, so that extending would be quite easy.

I'll mainly use it to have tv channel schedule (XML-TV), listen music (ResPyre), and handle video content. The machine won't be able to handle PVR-like usage, but it's not critical since i'm not TV-addicted :-)

So, first off, i looked at the widespread MythTV, and it's really a pain in the ass to setup, then it's easy to understand the success of KnoppMyth (a full blown linux distro including the Myth out of the box). Anyway the main killer feature of MythTV is TV time-shifting, in this particular field it rocks, but i don't need that feature, i'm not inclined to install KnoppMyth, so i forget MythTV.

Next, i had a look at the Python powered Freevo. The website seems dead, Freevo's 1.5 code is a mess, but hey, there's a rewrite taking good shape! In fact Freevo 2 will be a good candidate for me, architectured around Kaa which is an amazing Python multimedia (GUI, EPG, ...) framework using a bunch of good bricks like Evas and Imlib2, allowing full-blown effects in Freevo. Well i tried it, and it looks good, even still in heavy development. The configuration is quite simple, it's my best candidate for now, and guess what ? Plugins seem really a piece of pie to implement :-)

Any other HTPC challenger ? (please no MS Media Center, my box runs linux :)

update: for a more in-deep view of MythTV gaz usine, check http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/

When firefox extensions mess it up

Philippe Normand — 2005-02-25T20:11:23Z

Yeehah i found a new way to burn my Firefox profile ... upgrading extensions. Very nice huh ? Here is the outter-space-sticky-bottom-bar new firefox extension from hell:

You won't be able to live without it :)

My new mail checker

Philippe Normand — 2005-02-15T19:21:57Z

It's been long to find the mail checker of my dreams. Embrace is a little E17 application which can monitor pop,imap(s),etc mailboxes. Currently, 0.0.1 version displays read/unread mail number per mailbox, that suits my needs for the moment :-)

Also, Debian sid users may have a look at E17 Debian packages

Shut up, noisy computer !

Philippe Normand — 2004-11-23T08:10:29Z

Now computers tend to be more and more silent, even servers (have a look at latest Dell ones) become noiseless. I had a quite peacefull mini-computer (EPIA M9000 + Cubid 2699) during more than one year, but it wasn't really fanless (1 8mm noisy fan, 2 short-life 8mm case-fans), though quieter than desktop-computers ... I'm not the only one to complain about that computer, some people put Zalmann heatsink on the CPU, but personnaly i wasn't convinced by that option. And it was time to bring a wind of change out there :-)

So i bought a real fanless computer which looks very eye-candy no ?

MV823A motherboard
VIA C3 1Ghz
512 MB RAM
VIA CLE266 graphic chipset
S-Video input and output
Weight about 2 Kilos (passive cooling has a price ?)
2''5 20Gb HDD

Of course 20Gb is not enough when one wants to store and play his huge music library so i put a 3''5 big HDD (tough not as silent as i would) in a FireWire/USB2 combo box, connected to the brand new machine. Linux runs fine on it, once patches from EPIAWiki are applied on the kernel.

Well now the only annoying thing with the machine is that i tend to forget to shut it off since i can't really hear it without putting my ears on it :) Well yeah, there is a nice blue LED lighted when the machine is on, it's the only normal-human proof.

Testing GMailFS

Philippe Normand — 2004-08-30T22:48:31Z

After being invited by Daryl to GMail, i took 15 minutes to get FUSE / libgmail / GmailFS working out of the box :)

It's quite amusing to mount a FS like this !! Even if gmail is not intended for that it rules.

Copying one 8Mb file to the gmail-space gives me following mails in my inbox:

I guess there is one mail per block and each mail has an attached file of BIN mime-type. Uploading this file has been quite long though (about 2 minutes), but i don't think i'll put 1Gb of mails there, so space has to be used anyway :)

Even better, notice the NTFS ad on the right:

Useless but essential : Bootsplash

Philippe Normand — 2004-08-22T16:34:50Z

Today i installed the latest 2.6 kernel, 2.6.8.1. That was the day to give a chance to bootsplash .... This thing installs like a charm (found a french tutorial) ... execpt the sysv-rc-bootsplash package which didn't want to install (version conflict w/ sysv-rc) .. So i manually patched /etc/init.d/rc{S,}.

Finally hard to choose a theme in long themes list on bootsplash website. Unfortunately the theme i preferred supported only 1024x768 resolution (and i am running at 1400x1050) .. So this script came to help me to bring the theme to 1400x1050 :-)

Have phun w/ Bootsplash !

Firefox bookmarks remote backup

Philippe Normand — 2004-07-19T22:13:07Z

Tonight I upgraded my firefox debian package, re-installed my favorites extensions (mozex,webDeveloper, ...) and Bookmarks Synchronizer. Well last time I tested it, there was support for FTP only, but now the thing can handle HTTP(S) PUT :) That's was THE missing feature, I love it now, it's a must-have !