Steven Harms

Life, Linux and Technology

Archive for March, 2009

New NVidia driver out

Mar 30

Posted by sharms in General | 4 Comments

NVidia Graphics

NVidia released a new stable driver today. You can download it here. A lot of fixes in this one, especially for their hardware video decoding, VDPAU. Also it fixes KDE4 Plasma OpenGL crashes, X server crashes, and crashes with redirected OpenGL.

Sounds good to me.

Update: Just installed the driver, and it also fixes a World Of Goo issue I had where it wouldn’t run under Jaunty AMD64. It now runs, and runs awesome!

wordofgoo

Tags: ,

Migrated to a VPS

Mar 30

Posted by sharms in General | No Comments

This weekend I moved my weblog to a VPS. The site should load much much faster, and hopefully I can create some custom sites using either Django or Symfony. In this next few days I will be posting some tutorials on how to move your WordPress blog from host to host, and setting up the Cherokee webserver with WordPress / Permalinks.

Stay tuned and let me know if you see any problems with the site.

Tags: , ,

Thank you

Mar 25

Posted by sharms in General | 3 Comments

I want to thank Mark, Canonical, and all the Ubuntu contributors who put so much time and effort into making my desktop and servers rock.

At home and work, I run Ubuntu. I play media, edit html, administer systems, twitter, burn cds, all because of so many people’s effort. To think where, in these 10 releases, how far Ubuntu has come is simply staggering.

My video cards work automagically, my desktop has 3d effects, my system always has the latest security updates, installing codecs is no longer a mystery, and one of the biggest forum communities on the internet has formed around Ubuntu. Ubuntu transcends all of the previous stigmas, and I even have a dell machine on the way pre-installed with it. It is a night and day difference from the project’s inception until today.

Thank you, everyone.

Tags:

Gwibber on Ubuntu Jaunty

Mar 24

Posted by sharms in Linux | 8 Comments

Gwibber is a tool that allows you to use social networking on Linux, in a very nice looking interface. Gwibber on Jaunty supports: Ping.fm, RSS feeds, Flickr, Facebook, Jaiku, Laconi.ca, Twitter, Digg, Pidgin and Identi.ca out of the box. I am using it for my twitter and Identi.ca accounts, and it works great.

Installation
To install gwibber, you can use the Synaptic Package Manager, or just open a terminal and run ‘sudo apt-get install gwibber’.
Installing gwibber using apt

Run it
Once you install it, it will be under the Internet tab of your menu.
Launching gwibber

Setup your accounts
From here you can add the accounts you want to use. In this example I setup a twitter and an identi.ca accounts. One thing I have here is that both are set to receive, but for send I only have identi.ca marked. So when I type in the input box, it only sends to identi.ca. I then have identi.ca send it to twitter.
Setting up gwibber accounts

Gwibber in action
Once everything is set up, it will look something like this. Have fun, you can adjust the color of each service to see what is coming from where also.
Gwibber in action

Jaunty Notifications
And every time someone twitters / identi.ca’s whatever, the new Jaunty notifications pop up and look fantastic.
Ubuntu Jaunty notifications

Tags: , ,

Fixing configuration files

Mar 23

Posted by sharms in General | 3 Comments

I read on twitter from Ryan Gordon:

” So I might find I have a tree like this:

/home/icculus/Configs/Subversion
/home/icculus/Configs/DBUS/Config
/home/icculus/Configs/DBUS/Keyring
/home/icculus/Configs/Mozilla Thunderbird/Address Book
/home/icculus/Configs/Mozilla Thunderbird/Extensions

We can call it “Configs” or whatever, but it should probably be user-visible
(that is, without a prepended ‘.’), be standardized, and allow apps all the
space they want in their own folder under this root.”

I encourage you to read his whole post as that is just a little bit of it. He posted a follow up today:

“There is apparently a freedesktop thing, but looking aside the infuriating need to stick “XDG” on everything, I’m not sure I dig on the idea of using environment variables. I’d rather this have to call a piece of system-controlled code that can set policy, and handle things like creating directories, etc, so every app that needs to be changed needs extremely minimal changes, and reduce their ability to get things wrong. Granted, that system code could respect these XDG_* variables if that makes sense. Even looking beside that: dude, it’s 2009, can we stop using environment variables and shell scripts for everything? Is it heresy to ask that?

Honest to god, though: how’d that $BROWSER thing work out?”

I totally agree with him on this. The number of hidden files in my home directory is unmanagable, ugly, and a ton are not even close to intuively named.

To see how many hidden configuration files you have in your home directory you can run this:

ls -la ~ | awk '{print $8}' | egrep '^\.' | wc -l

I encourage anyone written an app to not put all of your configuration stuff in the base home directory, hopefully everyone can arrive at an intelligent solution. Ryan has a great start.

Tags: ,

New Jaunty Wallpapers

Mar 19

Posted by sharms in General | 6 Comments

New jaunty wallpaper

New jaunty wallpaper

Jaunty has some new wallpapers today. I like them both, art team is rocking.

Tags: ,

Jaunty's new Usplash theme

Mar 18

Posted by sharms in General | 6 Comments

If you are running Jaunty, when you upgrade you will see a new Usplash theme (The graphical screen you see while booting up and shutting down). Looks very slick, nice work! Looks very refined and professional.

Tags: , ,

Quick tip: Counting lines of code

Mar 11

Posted by sharms in General | 11 Comments

I wanted to count the lines of code on a project I am working on. From the base directory of the project, I wanted to line count all files ending with .php. I also needed to ignore the directories with test, model/om, cache and plugins. Using grep, find and wc you can do this:


#!/bin/bash
grep -v '^ *$' `find . -iname "*.php" | grep -v model\/om | grep -v \/test | grep -v \/cache | grep -v \/plugins | grep -v \/web | grep -v lib\/OFC` | wc -l

I am at 15645 lines of code, which includes comments. What are you at?

Tags: , , ,

My twitter

Mar 10

Posted by sharms in General | 2 Comments

I have a twitter also, I generally twitter about tech stuff and coding – http://www.twitter.com/stevenharms

Tags:

Make your bash shell cool again

Mar 10

Posted by sharms in Linux | 4 Comments

I originally wrote a spec in 2006, but it never actually made it in.  You can see it at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Spec/EnhancedBash .  The good news is, it is just as relevant today. Hopefully these tips will make your life easier, I use them on all of my systems.

Use the page up key to complete the command
What this does is, if I type ‘ssh ‘ then hit the page-up key, it will complete the line to the last time in my history file that I typed ssh. Hitting page up again will go to the 2nd to last time I typed it. Incredibly handy if you ever type the same commands more than once. This actually has been the default of SUSE based distributions for quite some time.


echo "\"\e[5~\": history-search-backward" >> ~/.inputrc
echo "\"\e[6~\": history-search-forward" >> ~/.inputrc

Increase history size
Now that you have the pageup / pagedown bindings to auto-complete your history, you are going to want to store more of it. You can store the previous 1000 commands using this.


echo "export HISTSIZE=1000" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export HISTFILESIZE=1000" >> ~/.bashrc

Color grep
Using the following bash alias, you can make grep highlight the word it is matching in color. I grep about 10000 times a day, so this makes it a bit easier on my eyes to focus where I need to:


echo "export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'" >> ~/.bashrc

Command matching
There was also someone who contributed more sane command matching (ie what happens when you hit the tab key a bunch). I use these also, which tell it not to do stupid things like try to match hidden files and to display both files if they are ambiguous:


echo "set match-hidden-files off" >> ~/.inputrc
echo "set page-completions off" >> ~/.inputrc
echo "set completion-query-items 350" >> ~/.inputrc
echo "set show-all-if-ambiguous on" >> ~/.inputrc

Tags: , , , ,