Category Archives: Linux

More Linux eye candy: CGWD Themes

If you’ve seen my desktop machine at home you’ll realise I’m a big fan of the Xgl and compiz stuff and now thanks to a Linux Journal article I’ve discovered the CGWD Themer.

Installing it in Ubuntu is as easy as adding a new site to your apt-get repository list and firing up apt-get in the usual way and grabbing the binaries from their repository. Then either launch it from the command line using the command “gcompizthemer” or go to System->Preferences where a new menu item called “CGWD Themer” can be found. The themer does nice things to the borders of and bars of your windows. I love the glow of the min/max/close buttons that spills over the side of the window!
Oh, and just because I bought a Mac laptop doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux. I fell in love with my Gnome+Xgl desktop once again when I came home from San Francisco!

Later – two articles features on digg and delicious which might be of interest:

  1. An Overview of modern fancy Unix desktops – good summary of the competing technologies that make the 3d and special visual effects possible
  2. The Linux Desktop Myth – a long essay on one man’s experience with switching to Linux and GPLed software.
  3. Suse Compiz page – has lots more info and lists all the options and configurable bits! (via)

Reboot me when I panic!

The VPS this site is hosted on has a tendancy to kernel panic since I upgraded the kernel to 2.6. I'm not sure why, and the ticket I opened requesting help was replied by someone saying I should check the console. Fat lot of good that did me when this site was down for a few hours.

Help is at hand however in the shape of Mark Ferlatte who mentioned that adding the following to /etc/sysctl.conf and running sysctl -p will make Linux reboot after 5 seconds! Adjust to taste:

kernel.panic = 5

Hopefully we'll have less downtime here.

Xgl on a live CD

If you want to try Xgl to see what all the fuss is about, then you should download the Kororaa live CD. I downloaded the 441MB iso, burned it on CD and rebooted into Xgl.

Wow. All the eye candy looks great, the cube revolved when I switched desktops or dragged the background with CTRL pressed. Dragging windows from one side of the cube to another desktop was really cool, but not as much fun as watching a sticky window bend and deform as I dragged it!

As someone pointed out on digg, it’s not just eye candy. The openGL powered desktop uses my video card to move pixels around and feels responsive. I’m very tempted to upgrade to Ubuntu Dapper so I can install the Xgl binaries! (via)
Later… I updated my Ubuntu install to the latest Dapper release using apt-get dist-upgrade and after some minor fighting with a customized xorg.conf and following the instructions I have an Xgl powered desktop! Nice.
Slightly Later… I found a showstopper bug. It doesn’t do full screen image viewing. At least as far as gthumb or f-spot is concerned anyway. Gthumb just dies and F-spot displays a thumbnail in the corner of a grey screen.

Some people had the same problem playing movies and the solution was to use openGL as the full screen driver but I don’t think the same can be done with an image viewer, can it?
It’s alpha software so hopefully this will be worked around sooner or later!

InnoDB: Starting shutdown…

Calling all MySQL admins! When you’re working with InnoDB tables you may have noticed that MySQL takes an extraordinary amount of time to shutdown. Don’t panic! It’s normal.
InnoDB has extensive logs that it must run through and if your server is at all busy these logs can be quite big.
After you’ve started the equivalent of “/etc/init.d/mysql stop” it may not return for quite a while. Simply open another terminal and examine the system log. On a Debian or Ubuntu box, look at /var/log/daemon.log and you’ll see the “InnoDB: Starting shutdown…” message.
Now, go off and make a cup of tea because this could take a while. On a fairly large and busy database it might be half an hour or more!
Please, please, please don’t be tempted to killall -9 mysqld because bad things will happen! Even if your boss is looking over your shoulder, and you’ve promised that the company webserver will be online in 2 minutes, don’t do it.
However, cases where it is ok to kill the database with a “kill -9”:

  • International terrorists are planning on robbing the World Bank and you’re the only secret agent who can bring down the database which will stop them.
  • Lassie will be run over by the evil farmer who plagued the local village with his monster cows unless you can corrupt his database in time.
  • Or finally, you like hard work and restoring from backups!

My Linux Webcam

When I bought me PC last year it came with a small little webcam which never worked for me until today when I plugged it in and Ubuntu Linux detected it using the Spca5xx driver. This is what the kernel reported:
“USB SPCA5XX camera found. SONIX sn9c102 + Pas106”
Easycam made it easy enough to install new drivers, and Camorama is a useful tool to control it. (via)

Unfortunately this isn’t very exciting for a number of reasons:

  • It has a manual focus and doesn’t handle changes in light very well.
  • I can’t get it to capture more than 176×144 352×288.
  • There’s no busy road or traffic to see from my window. I could point it at the LEDS on my DSL router?

Oh well! That was fun for five minutes!


An exciting scene in blarney today

TuxKart 3D racer!

apt-cache search racing returns a number of interesting looking games, one of which is TuxKart by Steve and Oliver Baker. A quick “apt-get install” and I was up and racing!

The game itself is simple, and if you’ve played any of the other kart games around it’ll be familiar. I laughed when Tux first ran over a fish and heard a big gulp sound but it might get annoying to those around you, so turn the volume down!

Check out the homepage linked above for screen shots!

Gizmo – A free phone for your computer

I tried Gizmo a few nights ago and it works really well! The conference feature could be invaluable for global groups who need to keep in touch.

I’m probably one of the few people in the world who hasn’t used Skype so I can’t compare yet. Skype does offer almost-worldwide calls at 2c/minute I think but for calling the US, Gizmo is better at 1c/minute!

Even better, just like Skype, Gizmo also runs on Linux!
(Edit: the url for this entry has been updated because when I copy/pasted the title I brought over a strange “-” character that the post slug didn’t like! You should be able to click this entry now!)

Upgrading to Ubuntu Breezy

I resisted for as long as possible, but I finally upgraded to Ubuntu Breezy.
It was quite easy in the end. The upgrade notes and this page were of some help of course.
Be warned, that if you have GNUcash installed on Hoary, you should uninstall it. I didn’t and ran into these problems with libofx2. How to fix? Uninstall gnucash with the following command:

dpkg -r gnucash
dpkg -r gnucash-common

Now, run apt-get -f install and finally apt-get dist-upgrade again!

I can’t run GNUcash yet, I hope they get this fixed soon! (In an ironic twist, launchpad.net is down for maintenance, it’ll be back later!)

Later! I discovered how to fix the problem with libofx2! You need to remove libofx0c102 first!

# apt-get remove libofx0c102
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libofx0c102
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 803kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
(Reading database ... 84490 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing libofx0c102 ...
# apt-get install libofx2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libofx2
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/454kB of archives.
After unpacking 3731kB of additional disk space will be used.

Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 84466 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libofx2 (from .../libofx2_1%3a0.8.0-3ubuntu8_i386.deb) ...
Setting up libofx2 (0.8.0-3ubuntu8) ...
# apt-get install gnucash
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
gnucash-common
Suggested packages:
gnucash-sql gnucash-docs
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gnucash gnucash-common
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/4194kB of archives.
After unpacking 16.6MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package gnucash-common.
(Reading database ... 84713 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking gnucash-common (from .../gnucash-common_1.8.10-18_all.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package gnucash.
Unpacking gnucash (from .../gnucash_1.8.10-18_i386.deb) ...
Setting up gnucash-common (1.8.10-18) ...
Setting up gnucash (1.8.10-18) ...

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