So apt-get does install the recommended packages automatically. While I can understand this I personally think it’s a bit annoying when you want to keep your system clean. Just add this to /etc/apt/apt.conf:
APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";
And here we go…
Today we went to Brussels for the FOSDEM. For those who don’t know it’s one of the greatest FLOSS event in Europe with more than 5000 peoples from all over the world. We could hear German spoken, French, Dutch, Italian even Russian (or do I think so ? I never had a gift for languages) and many that we could not in fact identify. But in the end we just spoke English from one to the other with a huge medley of accents. We had a great day !
Anyway I guess we spent more than 50€ at the Debian stand. And they distributed nice RedHat gloves (actually I wasn’t there when they got one, I’m so jealous).
Little side note here: It was great to be there but I could never live in a city like Brussels. It’s so large, so cosmopolitan. I’m really not a city guy. Little side note is over.
How do you do a snowman when you live in a flat ?
On the railing of course !
It seems that Valve games are on bad terms with Intel cards on Linux (which I fully understand), all I got when I first launched TF2 on my Thinkpad was a full black screen. But that black screen was nevertheless promising so I repeated the expriment on another machine with a GeForce GTX 560 Ti.
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| Running Team Fortress 2 on Linux |
I managed to launch the game manually but it lacks some authentification mechanisms so I wasn’t able to start any game for now. Launching the game directly through steam doesn’t work probably due to an error in the launcher script which I have to dig into when I’ll have time.
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| Team Fortress 2 (fullscreen) |
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| CD Key authentification invalid for internet servers. |
There’s one thing I’d like to investigate is it possible to work on a free implementation of the Steam chat protocol ? I didn’t look into this at all but a Pidgin plugin would be very cool. Talking about Steam something that scares me though is the idea that only one well known distribution would actually be supported, a stance that we increasingly tend see in the matter of porting prorietary software to Linux but again Ubuntu is not Linux, far from it (I should post about this someday too) !
I wanted to watch a movie on my Archos tablet just to find out that actually I can’t !
Archos charges me with additional fees to watch movies with Dolby AC-3 or MPEG-2 codec. But I’m glad we have free alternatives, I mean Flac, Vorbis and Google’s VP8. And now I’ve a reason to reencode all of these using free codecs. Yeah !
So I made a little script to ease encoding with ffmpeg and another program to manage concurrent queues to leverage the dual core cpu. I use a combination of the above codecs which I put in a Matroska container. Actually VP8 is doing quite well with high quality VOB (far better than Theora which came from VP3 anyway) but it still shows some encoding artifacts here and there. Though it may take up to 2 days to encode and I’m still struggling to integrate multiples soundtrack in the resulting Matroska with ffmpeg.
GMail has a new compose and he sees fit to remind me constantly whenever I write a new message. But I’d like to have my say on this since we’ll be forced to use this thing in several month anyway. So let’s get things straight, I really hate this, it is just stupid and I guarantee that if Google eventually puts this in place and forces us to use it, I’ll just quit ! That web interface was everything but there it just feels like a hyped gadget.
At least -please- put an option to get back to the original compose permanently so we can write real mails that we focus on. I mean I know most of them are just quick informal replies, just like we would use mobile messaging and I know for sure that services need to evolve from time to time but they just make everything easier and it just gets more useless and annoying at every step.
It still amazes me how many people use their shiny Linux machine out there touting for its safety and robustness but never thought to put a single iptable rule in it. Is there any kind of default firewall into those linux-for-wide-audience distributions that I didn’t know about ?
Anyway I finally made my handcrafted profil-based IPv6-ready stateful firewall. Well the “handcrafted IPv6-ready stateful firewall” was already there since years but the “profil-based” part of it wasn’t ! I use 2 profiles basically (home and public) and do the switch automatically with network-manager (/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d).