If you are an heretic like me, by saying so I mean that you use both Emacs and Vim on a regular basis, I’ll point you directly there :
There are many plugins to change the current song within your Pidgin status (by Pidgin I mean libpurple in general) coupled with your favorite media player. In particular there are such plugins for Audacious (a modern and worthy descendant of the mighty XMMS, love it). Although I don’t use them since there is a much simplier way to do that. You may send the song directly from Audacious up to Pidgin with purple-remote. There is a plugin in Audacious to execute a command when the song change. Just add these :
New song command: purple-remote "setstatus?message=(8) %a - %T"
End of playlist : purple-remote "setstatus?message="
Title change : purple-remote "setstatus?message=(8) %T"
This will update your status message with your current song. The status will be emptied when the playlist is over. Note that this also works with plugins such as Pidgin-PBar.
This is a quick interface to translation tools. In particular it was made to interface a specific tool from Weboob. For those who don’t know Weboob is a collection of applications able to interact with websites without a browser and mostly from command line interfaces. This allows GTranslate to use web translation services such as Google-Translate. However it can also be used with others translation tools as long as they offer a simple command-line way to translate a text from one language to another. It can also be easily adapted to any tool to provide an interactive conversion from one type to another. I made this tool to try out GTK-3 and GtkBuilder and actually building interfaces with Glade is really easier.
You may found the github page at http://github.com/gawen947/gtranslate.
And a small project page at http://www.hauweele.net/~gawen/gtranslate.html.
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| GTranslate |
Speaking about Weboob I think this is a very good initiative because I’m getting a bit sick of these overpowered web-browsers outshining the application landscape. I mean we should tend toward a web of services but instead we just spend our time recoding everything we already had in JavaScript and shiny HTML5 interfaces. And I think, or rather hope that the future of web lies outside the browsers.
Today I was surprised to see a GTK-3 application opening an HTTP URL with Opera. I don’t use Opera and I just installed by curiosity long ago and forgot about it. I configured the Debian alternatives however GTK-3 seems to use xdg-mime as confirmed with an strace of the concerned application and references to /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. Note that you may have to create a symlink for defaults.list to /usr/share/applications/mimeapps.list.
You can use the xdg-mime command to configure the default application for each protocol:
$ xdg-mime default chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/http $ xdg-mime default chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/https
You can also configure this manually by editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. Just add these two lines:
x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop
In the [Default Application] section. Thunar and Chromium also use this so you can configure them to open PDF and handle Skype calls properly. See:
[Default Applications] x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/skype=skype.desktop text/html=chromium.desktop application/pdf=mupdf.desktop
This should do the trick. You can get the list of available MIME types with this command (note that the path depends on the location of the shared-mime-info database):
find /usr/local/share/mime -name "*.xml" -exec cat {} \; |g -E -o "type=\".*\"" | sort | uniq
Otherwise you may also use the dconf-editor from the dconf-tools package or gconf-editor to configure GNOME-2/3 default applications. With gconf you should search the following keys:
/desktop/gnome/applications /desktop/gnome/url-handlers
With dconf instead you should search for:
/desktop/gnome/url-handlers /org/gnome/desktop/applications
Today I’ve done a lot of rebasing with a series of patches that I needed to push to the master branch of some project. The patches originated from a branch named injector and I prepared the merge in another branch named injector-merge. When it came time to merge my branch back into master I should have written :
git merge injector-merge
But instead I wrote :
git merge injector
Damned auto completion ! Huh… That wouldn’t be so bad if only I hadn’t pushed that to upstream too… So I had to get rid of my master branch and replace it upstream as quickly as possible before anybody could clone or pull from it. By chance this is a fairly new project and I guess nobody cloned or pulled in such a short amount of time (this whole thing lasted no more than one minute or so). So I moved my master branch and replaced it with the injector-merge branch and pushed-force everything.
git checkout master
git branch -m oldmaster
git branch -m injector-merge master
git log
Hum… Everything seems to be in order! Now push it back!
git push -f origin master
No complaining so far? Right! Well from now on I will call the merge branches merge-* instead of *-merge.
The non-breaking space is a variant of the space character which as the name suggests prevents automatic line breaking when using a space character. Another common use of it is to avoid collapsing of white-spaces in formats such as TeX or HTML. There are also some others specific typographic uses but nevermind.
setxkbmap -option "nbsp:none"
However this won’t work as you might expect it especially when you have multiple keyboards with different layouts. So another solution would be to specify XkbOption directly within the Xorg configuration file, one for each input device. But this won’t work neither if you use a Bépo layout as this option will simply disable the use of underscore (AltGr Space). So the final solution is based on xmodmap to modify the list of keysyms assigned to the space keycode (0x41). You may just add the following line to ~/.xmodmap and ensure that the file is loaded when your session starts with xmodmap ~/.xmodmap.
keycode 65 = space space space space underscore underscore space space
PCIe ASPM is an hardware power management protocol for PCI express devices. It allows a far better power management than what can be done with software power management at the price of an increased latency to the device. However some hardware don’t advertise it properly. And this was in fact the origin of the power regression case of 2.6.38 which was later fixed in 3.3.
It may also cause some Intel NIC (such as e1000e) to fall asleep unintentionally. So if you have an Intel NIC on Linux and it even fails to acquire an IPv4 address then you might try to add this option to your kernel command line : pcie_aspm=off. On Debian you can add this option to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub and issue an update-grub.
You may also want to change the link-state of one specific device to L0/L1 at runtime. For this I’ll point you there : http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/ASPM.
I’ve been a long time user of IPv6 tunnels from SixXS to provide an access to the IPv6 Internet behind my ISP. These tunnels also allow me to use static IP addresses for my home servers along with static AAAA records and this is cool !
Currently I use several Debian GNU/Linux based soft-routers with two (100 and 1000) Ethernet ports. These are often running on old recycled laptops which consumes around 40 Watts of power at peak level. Next to that the ARM Raspberry Pi platform consumes around 3 Watts of power (though I still have to measure it by myself). So I thought about replacing all my home-routers with those.
However the Raspberry Pi model B uses a SMSC LAN951x chip which includes the USB 2.0 Hub and an 10/100 Ethernet controller on top of it (which is known as smsc95xx in the Linux kernel). My main concern was that it would not be fast enough to support the IPv6 tunnel at its peak bandwidth of 60Mbps (that is 30Mbps downstream/upstream).
I already use one RPi as an experimental home-router here. Our Internet bandwidth is a bit slow (12Mbps) so the USB-Ethernet shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve conducted quick tests with IPerf and as you can see the results are pretty good as long as it doesn’t involve I/O on the RPi.
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 10.0.0.1 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.3 port 37373
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.1 sec 114 MBytes 94.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] local 10.0.0.1 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.3 port 37376
[ 5] 0.0-10.1 sec 114 MBytes 94.5 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 10.0.0.1 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.3 port 37377
[ 4] 0.0-10.1 sec 114 MBytes 94.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] local 10.0.0.1 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.3 port 37378
[ 5] 0.0-10.1 sec 114 MBytes 94.5 Mbits/sec
If you stumble upon bugs in package dependencies on Debian you may work around these using the equivs package. This package will allow you to create trivial Debian packages.
You need to create the controle file and then build the package :
equivs-control <control-file>
equivs-build <control-file>
Back again with news from Steam and Valve! So it seems that Valve plan to support other distributions after all. Anyway there has already been a lot of job done by the community to get Steam running on Debian (in particular). I used the following script to install Steam on Debian x86_64 with Awesome WM, Intel i7 and 8Go RAM (funny I got this script from an article of someone who did this with a similar configuration here):
http://kanotix.com/files/fix/install-steam-wheezy.sh
You need to launch this as root to install all dependencies and then again with a regular user to fetch the last version of glibc from the Ubuntu repositories. You could also use the experimental glibc from Debian but believe me experimental versions are somewhat… well… experimental.
Once everything is installed you may start Steam directly with the steam command. It will update itself and start again. It will also probably ask to install the jockey-common package. It’s an user interface and desktop integration driver management tool. But I didn’t installed it since there is no such package in the Debian repositories and even if I could I wouldn’t and Steam seems to launch cleanly without this anyway (notwithstanding a complaining message at each start). If you are using a tiling window manager be sure to put either Steam or your tag in float since some components don’t like it so much.
I did a first try with Team Fortress 2 (which is now no more listed as a beta) with a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The games files will be installed by default in your home directory (~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps) but you may change that easily. Once installed you may start the game from the Steam interface and believe what… It works !
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| Team Fortress 2 (Single-Player) on Linux |
So the game runs very smoothly. I didn’t check the FPS against the Windows version but beside that the game loads faster. The same applies for Steam as well, actually everything loads a lot faster thanks to Linux. The first difference I noticed in the interface from the Windows version are the fonts. Also if you don’t have any sound while playing you might check this environment variable:
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulseaudio
There are fewer sounds options than on Windows, only “2 Speakers” was available. The mouse seemed (perhaps it’s just an impression) less sensitive too. Although I’m sure you can tune Linux for a better gameplay. You may also easily change tag while playing which allows you to do a lot of other things at the same time.
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| Spy among us |
The two previous screenshot were games with bots. After that I also checked a game on Internet. No problem here either but a lot more fun. Again the game did run smoothly with no glitch and a network latency around 30 ms.
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| Ka-Boom! |
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| Steady… Steady… |
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| X3-Reunion on Linux (again) |
A newcomer in the Linux Steam catalog is the beta for Half-Life (the first one). Although still marked as a beta the game is playable too. With the particularity that it also works on an Intel GMA card. That’s it no nvidia proprietary driver anymore !
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| Prepare for unforeseen consequences |
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| System crash back in ’98 |
What more is the clients for other classic modifications of Half-Life are available but not listed in Steam. Some of them are somewhat playable. Opposing Force for example lack some models but CS:CZ instead did run perfectly. Blue Shift, DoD, Ricochet and TFC did not work at all. You should start those games directly with the hl_linux command as they are not listed in Steam:
$STEAM_LOCATION/SteamApps/common/Half-Life/hl_linux -game $GAME
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| You have spotted a friend |
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| Opposing Force |