Psi cvs (0.10) for SUSE 10.0

Since the release of SUSE 10.0 and from what I had seen from Brainshare 2005, I was curious enough to install it on my laptop. I didn't leave Kubuntu, as I'm still using Breezy on my desktop. I don't know what to think about Novell's decision to go for Gnome as the default window manager for their enterprise products, especially since I'm using KDE for years now, and I like its degree of customization. One thing is for sure, it's easier and cheaper to maintain only one environment, especially if you have to support all choices. But I hope KDE will still get enough attention in coming OpenSUSE releases. Let's wait and see what the future brings :-)

Anyway, back to the topic! ;-) I love to use Psi as an IM-client for my Jabber and MSN contacts (and now also Google Talk contacts). I tried GAIM before, but what irritated me was the lack of seeing your own status (maybe that fixed by now) and Kopete, but I prefer the simple and powerful look and feel of Psi. You can download version 0.9.3 from Guru's website, but Psi 0.10 (which is currently still in development) has a few interesting features like:

• auto-resize roster
• tabbed chat windows
  
• auto-resize text input

Especially the first 2 are my favorites!

For those of you running (Open)SUSE 10.0, you can download my Psi cvs RPM based on cvs date 2005-11-05.

Psi 0.10 will probably be released soon now, if no critical bugs show up in their test3 release, but this cvs version seemed already very stable.

Kubuntu upgrade from Hoary to Breezy

With the upcoming release of Breezy and the availability of RC1, I thought it was time for doing an upgrade. I modified my sources.list, changed every instance of "hoary" to "breezy", followed by an "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade"... and there we go!

In the progress of downloading and installing, I realized again how powerful APT really is... I was upgrading my system to a whole new release version, while I continued listening to my music, browsing the web, hanging around on IRC, etc. After a while, I noticed Konqueror couldn't surf the web anymore, due to a communication problem with kio_http, but what would you expect?

The upgrade went smooth, except for some dependency problem with mozilla-firefox and the firefox package, but that was easily fixed by uninstalling one, and install the other... Then it was time for a reboot, so I could run the newest kernel... Ow, I also added kubuntu-default-settings and kubuntu-desktop to the install list, to make sure I had all newest stuff installed, like usplash.

Booting went fine, except that usplash didn't seem to work... I also had troubles getting my network up. My desktop connected wireless to my router, and there seemed a problem with my ndiswrapper config (I'm using a Linksys USB dongle). Ok, maybe I was looking for trouble with this setup ;-)

To solve the networking problem, I first tried to update the ndiswrapper kernel module (although it's there by default, but I thought it was causing the troubles). Therefore I first had to download the package on another machine of course. After compilation, it seemed my fresh kernel module was compiled with GCC 4.0, while the kernel was compiled with GCC 3.4... ok, I changed my /usr/bin/gcc link to point to the right gcc version, and tried again... No luck! Dmesg output told me it loaded the ndiswrapper driver, but it didn't seem to detect the hardware (although ndiswrapper -l showed the driver was installed and the hardware was present), but the kernel didn't give me the required wlan0 interface! In the end, I removed the Windows driver using "ndiswrapper -e rt2500usb" and I reinstalled it with "ndiswrapper -i /path/to/rt2500usb.inf". This time, things started to work! :-))

I don't know what the problem was, and why I had to reinstall the Windows driver, because it was already installed in /etc/ndiswrapper/... but it fixed my problem. I'm sure if I had use proper hardware which has native Linux drivers, I wouldn't have had this problem, but oh well, I'm glad if I can learn something new.

Running Breezy for half a day now... it seems pretty stable. I also upgraded to KDE 3.5 beta (yeah, I love living on the edge), which seems pretty stable too! Actually, I didn't have a single crash yet... The only "problem" I have, is that my "Terminal Sessions" menu item disappeared from the K-menu for some reason, while it's still checked in the panel properties. Disabling and re-enabling didn't fix the problem, so maybe I should report this as a bug. Last night I also had some trouble with loosing my network connectivity, but this problem seems to have vanished...

Meanwhile, I'm also downloading OpenSUSE 10.0, since I may give it a try on my laptop... I'll see...

Brainshare 2005

Finally some time post an update here! It's almost a week now since my visit to Novell Brainshare 2005 in Barcelona for work related business. Well, it's acutally a bit longer, but I stayed a few days extra to enjoy the local goodies, and Barcelona plain rocks! At Brainshare I was for most interested in the Linux technical tracks. I saw some really promissing live demo's from the Novell people about stuff they are working on for SLES10 and Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) 10.

Some Linux highlights:

• Beagle, the new desktop search tool for NLD and SUSE, which performed very well and can scan PDF, mail, Word/Openoffice documents, etc almost realtime!
• Xen 3, which would be part of SLES10. I saw a live demo of a virtual machine migration (video streaming server was running in it) from one system to another, while a client was streaming a video. The migration took about 20 seconds, but the best part was that the actual switch only resulted in a 1-2 second delay in the video, after which it continued to play!
• Clustering capabilities: the new heartbeat 2.x branch wouldn't be restricted to only 2 nodes. Tests have been done up to 16 nodes. Together with DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device), one could set up clusters without the need for special hardware (SAN), apart for an UPS or a power switch. Another important improvement is the availability for resource monitoring, which lacks today in heartbeath 1.x
• Novell Small Business Suite for Linux also looks promissing with the 7.x release, which will be a lot more complete than the current 6.5 release for Linux.
  

Although I'm a happy Kubuntu user, maybe I'll give OpenSUSE a try after what I've seen...

Amarok 1.3 + MusicBrainz on (K) Ubuntu Hoary (continued)

A few days ago, I posted the availability of my Amarok 1.3 packages for Ubuntu Hoary. Meanwhile, I noticed there was a problem with the MusicBrainz functionality... it didn't work! When I clicked the "Fill-in tags using MusicBrainz" button, I always got the message "No tracks were found in the MusicBrainz database"... for every song I tried.

Someone at the Amarok forum pointed me at a link which described the problem and the solution... GREAT! (thanks Firetech). The problem is that libtunepimp is not compiled with mp3 support (libmad0). Simply recompiling libtunepimp after installing libmad(-dev) would fix the problem... and sure it did!

Then I realised that I compiled my amarok packages on my "tainted" Kubuntu system. I have KDE 3.4.2 running, so it became a dependency, while standard Kubuntu is provided with KDE 3.4.0... not good for users who still use the official packages, and I don't want to force them to upgrade... So I created a build environment with only packages from Ubuntu main repository (no multiverse or universe repositories, for maximum compatiblity).

For the happy Kubuntu users looking for Amarok 1.3 packages with working MusicBrainz support, get the packages from http://users.telenet.be/tasador/kubuntu/ You will need the packages beneath the "amarok", "libtag" and tunepimp directories. (Tunepimp for the mp3 Musicbrainz support).

At least you will need libtag-1.4, libtunepimp-bin, libtunepimp2 and the amarok packages (you don't really need all engines, but they are all available). I used the same package structure as with the official amarok packages, so nothing would break after installation.

Enjoy your music!

Ow yes... maybe some day I should create an apt-repository for these packages, so for now you'll have to install them manually with dpkg...

smb4k to the rescue

Today I was delighted to finally have a nice application to browse Windows networks. Nothing special you would say... I know Konqueror supports this too with kio_slaves like smb:/ etc... and it does it well, except for one thing... it won't show share names longer than 12 characters, and this can be very annoying in a corporate network. Most of the applications I tried were affected by this Samba long share name "bug"

A work-around was to use the "net" command to find those shares, but then you would have to use the command line tools to also mount the share. Nothing wrong with this, but I was looking for a GUI application that properly integrates with KDE. I didn't find KDE applications that managed to display those shares (apart from this, Nautilus didn't show them either). But the smb4k 0.6+ versions do support them now. That's quite a relief in those cases that the IT staff decided to use long clear names for once... ;-)

From the 0.6.0 changelog:

"Added support of the 'net' command (closes #2227). This adds the advantage of the ADS and RPC protocol being used and even very large share names will be displayed. Additionally, it seems to significantly speed up the lookup process."

Too bad, the default Kubuntu Hoary package (version 0.4.1a-1ubuntu1) cannot yet see those share names longer than 12 characters. So I took the latest source (0.6.1) and turned it into a (K)Ubuntu package. Feel free to download it if you need it...

Still one minor issue... it seems kinit processes keeps the smb mount busy after mounting it, so you have to do a force unmount (it's an option from a right-click menu). But this is a known issue with the smb4k developpers. It probably will get fixed on day. In the mean time, you can do:

$ kill -HUP <pid of kinit process that uses the mount>

Probably, one day this will get fixed too :-)

Amarok 1.3 packages for Kubuntu Hoary

The great Linux music player amarok has recently been released as version 1.3. There are some nice visual improvements like the tabs around the context browser, the new wiki page for the current artist, playlist enhancements... Reasons enough for an upgrade!
Too bad I couldn't find any Kubuntu packages yet, and since I didn't want to wait any longer to try out the new version, I warmed up gcc for a ride. For people who also want to upgrade, you could find my home-made packages here

You'll also need to upgrade libtag to 1.4, packages are also included.

Enjoy rediscovering your music!