G(r)eek Bitches' Blog

Eee PC 1015 disassembly

2012-01-06T22:52:00.001+01:00

As previously mentioned, I'll not take apart my ASUS U43 unless I absolutely have to. However, one of my friends had an Eee PC with a possibly broken DC jack, so we decided to have a look.
Luckily, the Eee PC is quite popular and there are a few Youtube guides:

The example above was very helpful once we had understood that the first thing to remove is the keyboard and its black plastic enclosure. It is held by plastic clips in the battery enclosure (0:28 in the video) and at the rims on the side of the case and above the touch pad (you might need a spudger to pry them open). The next layer is a plastic plate with the touch pad embedded at the bottom (see 0:52). There are openings through which the keyboard and touch pad ribbons can be disconnected (the clamps are either flipped up (1:11) or pulled outwards (0:42)). Afterwards, we unscrewed all visible screws (again, check the video for screw sorting (1:09)) and pried open the clips holding the plastic plate to the front of the case (1:33). This gives access to all of the hardware. To take out the motherboard, unscrew the wifi adapter at the bottom left, disconnect the ribbons on top of the hard drive and the screen connector (top left, near the screen hinge) and take out every screw on the board except the ones holding the copper cooling element, as well as the 2 screws holding the hard drive down.Motherboards are probably not the best things to practice soldering skills, so we left the DC jack problem to someone more experienced. However, here's a handy guide.All credits go to youtube user Fessor6262 and laptotrepair101.

Asus Bamboo disassembly

2011-11-15T18:04:00.001+01:00

I don't want to try this until I absolutely have to, but I found a short disassembly guide for my Asus U43jc hidden in an insanely long forum thread (page 188, user tenchi71):

[some remarks about changing WiFi adapters] To get to the card I removed the battery, dvd-drive, hard drive, and ram. I then needed to remove all screws visible from the bottom, as well as screws under the two rubber feet. Make sure you keep the screws organized after removal, they are not all the same size. Next, I flipped the machine over, opened it as wide as it would go, and carefully pried the entire top portion of the laptop off using a plastic pry tool. Use a plastic tool, you'll be prying all along where the chrome parts meet the bottom plastic. A screwdriver will mar this very easily. Most of the prying was all along the front, right where the LEDs are located, so be careful not to harm those. Once the front pries away, the rest lifts up easily, the entire top portion is one piece (palm rest/mouse-pad/keyboard/buttons). Be careful, there are 4 thin and relatively short ribbon cables connecting the keyboard/mouse/buttons to the motherboard. To be able to get to and remove the wifi card, I needed to disconnect the first two ribbon cables going from right to left. Be easy on them. They have little black levers that you lift up to unlock the cables. Next, carefully disconnect the two antennae cables, and then remove the two screws holding the wifi card into place. The card then pops up and comes right out.

Someone even took pictures.

Kmail opens hyperlinks in two browser tabs

2011-10-20T20:03:00.000+02:00

I found the solution on the KDE community forums: Go to System Settings->Default Applications->Web Browser (not KMail settings) and remove the '%U' argument.

batch convert svg->pdf with Inkscape

2011-09-23T00:42:00.000+02:00

for file in *.svg; do inkscape -z -f=$file -A=${file/.svg/.pdf}; done
In other words, RTFM ;)

Corrupted directory on NTFS partition

2011-09-02T13:40:00.000+02:00

...which I hadn't done for 6 weeks (expect snarky comments from daWuzzzz below). Imagine my joy when Kubuntu came up with I/O errors trying to open my research data directory. Of course, it had to be the single most important directory on my computer, everything else on my NTFS partition was fine. And of course it had to happen at 2am. Windows wasn't more helpful and just displayed a 'corrupted directory' message. In retrospect, I suspect a damaged master file table. A quick summary of last night:

Find 320 GB of free space on my external hard disk. The data directory is just 5 GB. If someone knows a trick how to back up partition subsets, please let me know.
Create a partition image with dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/some/mountpoint/or/other. I didn't gzip the image, as I wanted to be able to mount it. At least this manoeuvre bought me 4 hours of sleep. Note: how about a USB3 backup disk?
Boot up Windows, start an administrator shell and run chkdsk /f F:. Lots of 'orphaned file' messages, but the directory is accessible again and everything seems to be where it's supposed to.
Do. A. Backup.

Could have been much worse.

enabling Nepomuk/Strigi search eats up home directory space

2011-08-24T20:28:00.001+02:00

A few days ago I decided to enable Krunner's desktop search/strigi implementation - strigi indexing was not enabled before.
It might have slowed down Medusa a bit, but the most noticeable feature was my 30GB home partition running constantly out of disk space.
File/directory size analysis with du -h --max-depth=2 | grep '^[5-9][0-9]\{2\}M\|[0-9]G' > listfile.txt and ls -lha | grep 'G' ~ found the culprit: a whopping 13 GB .xsession-errors file. This is a well-known problem, apparently Nepomuk/Soprano is pretty garrulous.
First aid: delete the file and reboot. For a more permanent workaround, a poster in this discussion suggests linking .xsession-errors to /dev/null via an autostart shell script. As an alternative, I'd suggest adding ln -sf /dev/null /home/<yourusername>/.xsession-errors to your ~/.bashrc.
As an aside: for anyone puzzled by the redland/sesame backend debate, the current backend is virtuoso and supposed to be faster than any of the above.

openSuSE 11.4 on VMware Player Win

2011-04-06T08:34:00.001+02:00

Since my Samsung P35 already choked on 11.3 and runs Kubuntu very nicely without hassle, but I still was curious about 11.4, I decided to install it in VMPlayer on my Windows 7 office machine.

Since VMPlayer offered "Easy Install" for 11.4, I followed the choice and let it install this way. After the installation process had completed, I was offered the login screen. What an optical disaster! This greyish-greenish somewhat looks like moulded Momo's grey gentlemen. By the way, you should first do a reboot to enable network capabilities.

The first update session installed vmware-tools, who are obviously out of date. Well, no harm done, since vmware offers good installation guides. Important: before starting the installation process of the vmware tools, you need to install the kernel-develop package matching your installed kernel, either from CD or from the network. Since the network is down while installing the vmware tools, you might find it helpful to know this before you start... ;-)

First overall impression: runs charmingly well on a virtual machine, although I really have to get used to this green-greyish colour scheme.

Windows 7 SP1 is out…

2011-03-17T03:59:00.000+01:00

… and I should know by now my MBR wouldn't survive it. Well, what do we have SuperGrub for? Still, there was too much trial and error involved in restoring it, so, for next time, here's my log on how to restore openSuSE's MBR on the ASUS u43jc after Windows wiped it.

I booted willy-nilly into Windows, started untebootin and installed the latest SuperGrub CD to a freshly FAT32 formatted thumb drive
I got into the BIOS with F2, the USB boot option is pretty well hidden (entry 'Hard Drive BBS Order' in the Boot tab)
The SuperGrub disk brought up my installed grub, note that the disk order has changed by booting from USB -- my primary hard disk was now hd1 instad of hd0, so I had to change the first line to root (hd1,7) (typing 'e' is for edit in Grub, 'b' for boot)
Restoring the MBR in YaST or reinstalling the grub package didn't help, I had to setup grub directly in the MBR via the grub console (I'm sure this is possible from the YaST GUI, but the options are harder to figure out than typing a few bash lines)
sudo su
grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (hd0,7) #or whatever the find command returned
setup (hd0) #this writes grub directly into the MBR. Setting it up on (hd0,7) didn't help
quit

Eureka.

openSuSE 11.4 update notes

2011-03-11T02:20:00.005+01:00

As Kubuntu copes better with Medusa's hardware, SuSE isn't my productivity distro right now, so I decided to risk an online upgrade. I mainly followed the SBD instructions on http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade.

I uninstalled OpenOffice in YaST as a precaution (11.4 comes with LibreOffice), disabled all repos (OOO and Mozilla build services, KDE Factory and the basic ones) except Packman, which I replaced by its 11.4 counterpart.
Online update protocol:

sudo zypper refresh

sudo zypper update

sudo zypper modifyrepo --all --disable

After that, I changed packman in YaST to 11.4 and re-enabled it.

sudo zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.4 OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/ repo-11.4-oss

zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.4 Non-OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/non-oss/ repo-11.4-non-oss

zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.4 Updates" http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.4/ repo-11.4-update

zypper ref

zypper dup --download "in-advance"

Up to that point, everything went well, so I dared to reboot, which resulted in a powered-off screen shortly after the Grub menu. A failsafe boot got me as far as "blogd: cannot read from fd 0: input/output error". I went home, grabbed a DVD, burned the 11.4 ISO and did an upgrade of the upgrade from there, which, thankfully, worked. Still, this is a glorious first: on previous releases, I always ended up with a complete root disk wipe and a new install.
First impressions: the graphics/overlay problems which annoyed me on 11.3 seem to have been resolved, KDE 4.6 looks pretty slick (might have been hardware specific, Medusa has an Optimus chip and I didn't have the problem with Tisiphone's standard Nvidia). The bureaucracy-grey-green stripes are somewhat depressing, though - being a girl, I liked the bubbles in 11.3. Firefox 4 beta seems to have a problem with Flash video, Chrome hasn't. LibreOffice integration looks good. And being a person continually tempted by bleeding-edge releases and too often let down by Factory in the process, I m rather excited about Tumbleweed…

Random gem from openSuSE'S Licence:
"As required by US law, you represent and warrant that you: ... (d) will not use or transfer openSUSE 11.4 for use in any sensitive nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or missile technology end-uses unless authorized by the US Government by regulation or specific license;" I double-checked my government issued Mad Scientist SuSE Usage Licence and happily typed 'yes'.

Attempting to sync an iPod touch 4G

2011-03-11T01:30:00.004+01:00

How to live with an iPod Touch 4G and not too much Windows involvement...
On USB connection, the iPod is identified as a camera, images can only be viewed and downloaded. I checked with libgtkpod: touch/iphone 4 are only supported read-only, so no GTKpod or Amarok support.
I don't mind too much using Windows/VirtualBox to move mp3s/e-books etc. for a while (apart from the fact that the ridiculously bloated iTunes freezes my VBox install trying to handle my 50 GB+ mp3 library, sigh...). However, synchronising Kontact obviously doesn't work like that and the only way I could see was to use my Gmail calendar and address book as a go-between.
On the ipod side: when you set up your account (Settings->Accounts), use the Microsoft Exchange account for Google e-mail, address book, calendar. If you have a @googlemail.com account (German specialty), use that for your address; @gmail.com or ID without domain will lead to a wrong password error message for some reason.

The Kontact side requires a bit of work:
Akonadi has direct gcal support with the akonadi-kde-resource-googledata (akonadi-googledata from KDE:Extras if you happen to be on SuSE) extension. Here is a very nice walkthrough.
Note: if you get an "Invalid password" message while configuring Akonadi google resources, check System Settings -> Network Settings -> Proxy ->Connect to the Internet directly (the default setting is 'preset proxy variables'). Also, use the full xx.yy@googlemail.com as user name if you happen to be German.

Surprising fact of the day: Wine seems to have limited USB support and iTunes 10.2.1 runs great (with minor graphics hiccups and no video playback) on Wine and seems to have no problem tackling my library. Now, if it only deigned to recognise my iPod...I mean, who in their right mind would use iTunes to listen to music?

Kile, KDE 4.6 and autocompletion

2011-01-31T03:47:00.007+01:00

After installing KDE 4.6 (from Kubuntu backports), LaTeX autocompletion was gone in Kile 2.1 β4. It worked on β5, which can be downloaded as a source tarball from the Kile homepage.

I followed the README instructions, but used sudo checkinstall instead of sudo make install to get a .deb package (source ubuntuforums). The kile executable didn't end up in a PATH directory, so I linked it into /usr/bin via cd /usr/bin; sudo ln -s ~/kile-install/bin/kile
The package system tried to 'update' to β4, so I had to protect the newer version with e.g. sudo aptitude hold kile.

Note on a second install: with just cmake . / make / sudo checkinstall instead of the README approach I ended up with the kile executable in /usr/local/bin. I prefer that to the version in /home, as kile is integrated into the package system via checkinstall anyway.

Keynotifying PDF presentations

2011-01-30T06:12:00.016+01:00

Confession time: I did my defence on daWuzzzz's MacBook. The first reason was that I already had an Apple remote, the second was Keynote's excellent presenter console.
The downside was having to import my LaTeX/Beamer PDF presentation as images into Keynote and fiddling around with movie positioning afterwards.
You can do something like that purely on Linux - excluding the Apple remote :-) - so this post covers 3 topics:

the PDF presenter console
a harangue on crappy vector graphics import in OpenOffice and its presenter console
using python scripts to convert PDF into ODF with page images

If you have a not too long PDF presentation without movies, the PDF presenter console looks pretty promising. It provides a slide and next slide preview, a timer and a page counter: timer and active screen are configurable from the command line invocation. No slide browser or notes view, though. In case of movies it should be possible to use the mplayer workaround. What bugged me most was the incredible prerendering time - loading page images of an 28 page presentation into memory froze Medusa (i5-450M, 4GB RAM) for several minutes. Prerendering can be disabled with the -c option, but then slide transitions take rather long.

Another option along the lines of the Keynote import workaround would be to use Open Office's presenter console extension (openoffice.org-presenter-console from Ubuntu universe, or OOO's extension page) . I tried direct PDF import (openoffice.org-pdfimport, extension page), which was gruesome: the files had to be linearised first (pdftk file1.pdf output file2.pdf) and the imported slides preserved neither fonts nor images. Converting to SVG with pdf2svg and trying libreoffice's SVG import was not much better - this time I got images but a completely messed up page. The presenter console, however, merits some effort, with previews, timer, slide browser and note view.

The last remaining option was to convert the PDF into PNG page images and have them converted to ODP by a python script. I found the excellent pdf2odp script by yc, which edits an ODP template file and has no external dependencies except Imagemagick and zip. I made some small changes (mainly running ghostscript and convert separately, which generates smaller file sizes, see here), the result of which you can download here.
As I had previously found this odfpy photoalbum example, I decided to adapt it for PDF slides (download here) with some inspiration from yc's version. No template file necessary, but additionally dependent on the odfpy module (if you have python-setuptools installed, get it with easy_install odfpy). Usage: pdf2odp.py -w <width> -d <density> <filename>.pdf or pdf2odp.py -h for help.

New bitch on the blog

2011-01-29T03:08:00.001+01:00

To be precise, a partially wooden contraption charmingly christened Medusa (Asus U43JC-X1). Goodies include nVidia Optimus hybrid graphics, USB3 and an i5-450M processor with multithreading support.
Cutting-edge hardware can be a problem with Linux. On this laptop, it mainly boils down to three issues: First, the USB3 module interferes with hibernation. You have to unload it manually in the hibernation scripts. Second, limited touchpad support by default. There's a boot option to fix it for newer kernels (post-2.6.34, see here).
Third, nVidia doesn't offer Linux driver support for the Optimus series, as Xorg can't cope with the hardware architecture and on-the-fly switching yet. Check this mailing list for news.
Some laptops come with a BIOS option to switch GPUs at boot, but this one doesn't, so we're stuck with the Intel on-board chip, which performs OK, btw. The nVidia card can be powered off with a patched DSDT file in a custom kernel.
Sounds scary, but there is an excellent HowTo on the Ubuntu forums.
My comments:

Makelocalmodconfig didn't work for me, makeoldconfig did.
For KDE, don't bother about the gnome-settings and jupiter stuff. The touchpad JustWorks™ with the appropriate boot option (kernel ... psmouse.force_elantech=1 in grub1's menu.lst) and can be configured in the KDE system settings.
The same goes for CPU frequency scaling, just add the processor.ignore_ppc=1 kernel option.

More install notes:

I had planned to go with my much-loved SuSE 11.3 and a backup Kubuntu for emergencies, but somehow the graphics setup on SuSE was even more screwed than usual and the desktop overlay effects are a real eyesore for now. Kubuntu looks much better, but I sorely miss YaST. The installation order was preinstalled Win7, Kubuntu, SuSE, so I had to add the Kubuntu section manually to SuSE's /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Kubuntu 10.10
   root (hd0,5)
   kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda6 ro quiet splash
   initrd /initrd.img

Germans get more for their money: one key, to be precise.The physical layout is american, using the german layout I sorely missed the <> key. I thought about remapping the Caps Lock key with XModMap, but in the end I just installed both layouts and set a global hotkey for switching.

Why is there pulseaudio in Kubuntu? I hate pulseaudio. Somehow, my built-in microphone is randomly muted and I have to use pavucontrol to get it working again. Both microphone and webcam work out of the box with Skype, btw.
Kubuntu's device manager allows to sudo mount internal drives not in fstab, SuSE's doesn't. Here's a fix for SuSE. Note that Kubuntu sports a different version of PolicyKit.
Fstab cruelties: SuSE uses /dev/disk/by-id, which is bad enough (e.g. if you clone your system on a different hard disk), but Kubuntu has UUIDs, which stumped me a bit. Luckily, you can get the UUID list with sudo /sbin/blkid -o list -s UUID
I wanted both OS's to share a KMail directory, so I listed SuSE's data folder in Kubuntu's kmailrc, as described here.
What's still buggy: xrandr and external monitors. Holy cow. Screen extension and cloning work, but as soon as Medusa goes to sleep or I inadvertently pull the monitor cable, I get GPU errors galore and have to restart X or get a total system freeze. Tisiphone never had that problem.

How to get ImageMagick to convert PDF to PNG with reasonable image quality

2011-01-28T02:58:00.007+01:00

Without special effort, converting PDF to a series of PNG images produces images that look kind of corroded. The reason for this is related to ImageMagick's ghostscript backend, which sucks at antialiasing.
Thus, the only way to get better images would be to convert at an insanely high resolution (convert's density option) and resize afterwards. This can be done in one go by ImageMagick:
convert -density 1000x1000 <thepdf.pdf> -resize <xsize>x test%03d.png
However, I found that running ghostscript separately reduces the eventual image size by a factor of 2-3. I don't know why, it seems to be relatively device-independent (tested with both png16m and pngalpha).
gs -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=test%03d.png -r1000 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH <mypdf.pdf>
for file in test???.png; do convert $file -resize <xsize>x $file; echo $file; done

Big problems with simple solutions

2010-10-09T03:29:00.001+02:00

Number one: KnetworkManager claims "Network Management disabled", no matter what you do in YaST. This had me triple-boot Kubuntu for a few weeks, until Kubuntu had the same problem after a botched hibernation.
This worked on both for me:
Edit /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state Make sure it says NetworkingEnabled=true.

Number two: With the fixed network settings in place, I did a system update including a new kernel. What came up after the boot menu: "File not found ... You need to load kernel first"
Ouch. OK … google … The Kubuntu grub has to be told about SuSE's new kernel. I bang my head on the desk a few times (can't hurt, apparently there's nothing viable in it anyway) and run sudo update-grub in Kubuntu.

Samsung SCX-4200 on Kubuntu 10.04

2010-08-14T20:31:00.002+02:00

Short summary: Don't use Samsung's Unified Driver (which worked OK on SuSE). The scanner works plug-and-play with Skanlite (not in Kubuntu default install, btw), and the printer works after adding it in CUPS without proprietary drivers.

Unified driver: See the openSuSE version of this post for more details. There is also a fairly epic discussion on the Ubuntu fora about Samsung multifunction devices, the Unified Driver and its problems with Lucid.
First impression: starting the install script actually resulted in a GUI installer (although a pretty ugly one). This had failed on SuSE, but, actually, I prefer a decent console walkthrough with some informative output. I restored the original /usr/bin/lpr and tried to print a test page both from the installer and from CUPS, which got me only a "mfp failed" error message in CUPS. Ultimately, I just ran the Unified Driver's uninstall script and installed the printer over CUPS' web administration interface (SpliX driver).
Seems I've been lucky - according to the forum discussion, it can get pretty complicated with less basic machines (e.g. colour, duplex or network printers).

Murphy's law - or triple boot using a thumb drive

2010-08-09T20:39:00.004+02:00

The good: Windows 7's partitioner is great.
The bad: I did some update on Saturday afternoon which completely fried my KNetworkManager (it keeps claiming "Network management disabled", no matter what I do) - which is not good, considering that the unstable university wireless keeps kicking me out and I have to run YaST's network settings every time to reconnect. Also, for some reason, 11.3's suspend to RAM feature which I had really liked before in terms of shutdown/wake-up speed, froze my system several times. Not exactly good, either.
This taught me how much I rely on a working KDE system. For most of my work needs I've found Windows 7 workarounds by now, but I kind of made my bed when I formatted my big external data drive to ext3 - apart from the aesthetic and practical unpleasantries related to Windows workarounds…
So, get an independent backup KDE solution like Kubuntu - until I've found time to sort out the SuSE trouble.
The ugly: Try downloading a live image over an unstable network connection. I opted for Bittorrent as a breakdown-resistant download manager and kept restarting the network connection occasionally for two hours.
Apparently, my CD drive is failing: it refused to burn on Windows and produced nothing readable on Linux - which brings me to the only constructive item in this harangue: running Kubuntu from an USB thumb drive. The place to go to is in this case www.pendrivelinux.com and their ISO converter, which is, ironically, a Windows app (no luck with wine, as wine doesn't support USB). I used it to extract the ISO onto a 4GB thumb drive, and, once I had found out that the drive was listed under "Hard Drives" instead of "Removable devices" in the Samsung BIOS, I was actually able to boot Kubuntu - with fully functional network handling. I had already resized one of my NTFS partitions from Windows - gparted wouldn't do it, while Win7 is apparently able to resize on-the-fly.
I installed Kubuntu from the live drive to the new free disk space - I probably still need to sort out the SuSE/Ubuntu grub chainloaders, but all OS's are bootable and Kubuntu networking works pretty well for now.

OpenSuSE 11.3 - less fun on a Samsung P35 - ATI woes continued

2010-07-27T09:11:00.004+02:00

After the tremendously positive testing results of avocadohead with Tisiphone, I tried my luck some days ago with 11.3 on Thukydides, a Samsung P35 notebook, not the newest hardware and unfortunately with an ATI graphic card.

Installer:
as avocadohead had stated, nothing really new. The partitioning tool has improved, beside the fact, that they chose a too large font for the buttons, which rendered them unreadable. But there's always the right-mouse click so no real problem at all. Installation went smooth.

First StartUp:
looked great but using it for a few minutes the computer froze entirely, no switching back to a console, no reaction at all... then sleep interfered with new tests...
The next morning the same result: firing up seems to work, but the computer freezes after some minutes. I already deleted all kde-related folders in my home folder (which I kept from the previous install), and tried again, but the freeze persisted. On the other hand working only on a console the computer worked for several hours, so I strongly suspected graphic driver issues. Several restarts and playing around a little with different settings for the X-Server didn't help, as well as trying to install a closed-source ATI driver.

Why, oh why openSuSE do you refuse to treat ATI graphic issues (especially for a card like mine, which is quite a bit of time out in the wild)? Since I'm not keen on wasting a lot of time for getting basic functionality like a working GUI, I'll just switch back to another distro which can deal with ATI.

Why it's a bad time to buy a laptop right now

2010-07-23T20:58:00.003+02:00

Tisiphone is getting old and slightly cracked around the edges, so I thought it might be time for a replacement. After all, two major reasons to move to the US are cheap clothes (girls) and hardware (guys).
I don't want to indulge in product placement but the Asus U30Jc looked quite sexy to me: a moderately fast i3 processor, 13 inch, not too heavy, widescreen, 8-10 hours battery life, at least a partial aluminium case, hybrid graphics and significantly cheaper than a comparable MacBook Pro (and before daWuzzzz starts a war in the comments section: the hardware-optimised OS on the Mac is no good if you intend to run Linux...)
Ay, there's the rub: hybrid graphics on Linux is still in early development, and apparently the Nvidia Optimus technology (check out this Nvidia whitepaper for specs) would need a major Xorg makeover to function.
I'd consider just getting the machine and waiting for Xorg/driver updates, if I could at least use the Nvidia chip all the time or manually switch with a server reboot, but apparently one is confined to the Intel-on-board chip right now. Nvidia blames Xorg and has better things to do than work towards a solution and the Linux hybrid graphics hackers concentrate more on getting the conventional switching setup to work.
I really don't like settling on an older model just for compatibility reasons and I have forsworn ATI forever (don't start me on driver issues), so I'll see what transpires and in any case wait for the USB3-capable chipsets to become standard.
I think I'll have to go on a major frustration shopping spree now - in this town, it should be easy to spend the equivalent of a quite high-end notebook on shoes and handbags.
Update (7/26): There seems to be slight progress on the vga_switcheroo front with the nouveau drivers on an Asus N61 with an Optimus card according to the hybrid-graphics mailing list - they didn't specify the exact model (hopefully the N61Jq, it's the only one with Optimus).

ntfsclone - a nice tool for dealing with ntfs partitions

2010-07-22T08:42:00.003+02:00

Again another crashed harddrive... (maybe we should start a counter on this blog how many crashed harddrives we already got through?)

By chance, I fell over a tool called ntfsclone using gparted, because in the error analysis of the damaged harddrive showed up a tool tip to use ntfsclone to get an image of the partition before doing anything else.

Usage for getting a complete image in case of damage is fairly easy: install ntfstools, connect the questionable drive to your system and have another one ready, where you have enough file space available using a file system, which can deal with large files (not FAT(32)...) or split the image of the questionable drive with the options given on this web page. Become root on a console and cast the command

ntfsclone --rescue /dev/partitionyouwanttoclone -o /mountpoint/yourimagename.img

The --rescue option will the program force not to stop when reading errors occur.The written image is (hopefully for you) mountable via the loop-option of the mount command -see this post.

mount -t ntfs -o loop,ro /pathtoyourfile/filename.img /mountpointyouwanttouse

If you experience error messages regarding a corrupted ntfs file system, you might want to add the "-f" option to force mount to make the image readable available to be able to restore as much data as possible.

This tool is apparently helpful as well, if you want to keep a working windows installation as an image for a fast restore.

Lilypond fails at ghostscript PDF conversion

2010-07-17T18:06:00.001+02:00

openSuSE 11.3 came with the new ghostscript 8.70, which lilypond wasn't quite ready for yet. On my system, gs consistently threw a "failed (256)" error when called by lilypond - just copying and pasting the gs code from the lilypond log into a shell worked, btw.
Quoting Graham Percival on the Lilypond mailing list:

Ghostscript was bumped to something.70, and a bunch of extra patches we apply to ghostscript changed. We'll look into it.

He has already posted an apparently patched development version here, but I haven't seen a linux x86 version there. Anyway, for all x86 users and people who'd rather stick to the stable release, there is the simple solution of downgrading to ghostscript < 8.70 - I used openSuSE 11.2's ghostscript-library 8.64, which worked fine, at least with LaTeX and lilypond.

Really, openSuSE!

2010-07-16T03:22:00.012+02:00

Touchpad control - great!
Improved wireless handling - impressive!
No desktop effects without kernel tweaking - priceless.

The 11.3 installation report:

To get the Nvidia graphics driver working in 11.3 (source openSuSE forums):
YaST -> Boot Loader Settings -> Section Management: Edit the standard 11.3 boot option and add nomodeset to the kernel parameters at the bottom.
The System/Kernel option NO_KMS_IN_INITRD should be set to "Yes" in YaST's /etc/sysconfig editor.
Download the latest driver from Nvidia, reboot. Kill the X server from a root console with rcxdm stop (or switch to runlevel 3) and run the driver installer as a shell script. Restart the X server or reboot.
My nobly grizzled Tisiphone seemed incredibly sluggish with effects enabled; in retrospect, this might have been due to the incredible number of krunner plugins enabled by default. Still, scrolling is a bit slow.
Now for the good parts: I am really impressed by the KSynaptics and KNetworkManager improvements, both work without a hitch. (two-finger tapping and sideways scrolling, yay!) I'm glad to have a few KDE 4.4 features back (e.g. inline spell check, the device manager panel applet and the improved icon handling in vertical panels). Major KDE apps like Amarok or Digikam come in shiny, recent versions without horribly conflicting with other KDE components - and talking of package conflicts: finally I can run eric and frescbaldi on the same system (OK, I don't think a lot of people had that particular problem).
I'm not sure all repositories are complete yet - no Nvidia repo and I didn't find a working and up-to-date python-matplotlib anywhere.
Apart from the ado about the Nvidia driver, the installation was easy and not very different from 11.2's. I had no network connection during setup, as the DVD installer doesn't seem to know PEAP, but that didn't bother me much.
So, while it's probably not the linux distribution you'd recommend to your granny, it's a very decent piece of work from the openSuSE people.
Update: More bad news about the driver issue - I can't get either nVidia's TwinView or screen extensions with disper to work properly. On a very basic level, screen cloning (disper -c) works, so it should be possible to use a projector. The nVidia config applet keeps complaining about failing metamodes. Meh.
More Updates: Nvidia repo is up and running, driver version 175 works OK, apart from some troubles setting the main screen and the occasional disper failure.

HowTo edit lilypond with TeXworks

2010-07-15T18:48:00.001+02:00

Apart from jEdit, which is awfully bloated, there is no decent Lilypond editor for Windows and it sucks to close the Acrobat Reader every time you recompile - which you do really often while typesetting music.
It is, however, possible to tweak TeXworks (included in MikTeX), whose PDF viewer doesn't create a lock that keeps lilypond from compiling. You have to do two things: create a lilypond compiler profile in TeXworks and edit one of Lilypond's scheme files to prevent the PDF file from being deleted (else you get the "backend-library.scm Permission denied" error). I got the trick from this comp.tex.texworks thread (by Helge Kruse).

Compiler profile: Edit->Preferences->Typesetting: add <Windows program directory>/LilyPond/usr/bin to the list of paths on top and create a new processing tool "lilypond" with the app lilypond-windows.exe and the $fullname argument.

Lilypond tweak: Open the file <Windows program directory>/LilyPond/usr/share/lilypond/current/scm/backend-library.scm in an editor with admin permissions, search for these two lines:

(if (access? pdf-name W_OK)
(delete-file pdf-name))))

and comment them out (take care of the brackets):

;;(if (access? pdf-name W_OK)
;;(delete-file pdf-name))
))

Remember to do this each time you update Lilypond.

Why I can hardly wait for 11.3

2010-07-05T22:45:00.002+02:00

No irony here - I mean it.
First and foremost reason: KDE 4.4 is finally in the stable repos - just in time before the 4.5 final release (sigh…)
As the SuSE people decided against a separate 4.4 repo - maybe with the 11.3 release already in mind - it's only been in Factory up to now. I had it for a few months and was ruefully forced back to 4.3 by some nasty package conflicts (the phrase "symbol lookup error" comes to mind).
What's to look forward to: an improved device manager with customisable automount, inline spell check in all KDE editors, screen edge window maximisation "inspired" by Windows 7 (I feel embarrassed to mention it, but it's pretty comfortable on a Win7-SuSE dual boot), improved icon handling in vertical panels - at least, OTTOMH, that's what I missed most after the downgrade. Not to mention major new versions of Digikam, Kontact/Akonadi, Amarok. Touchpad support is buffed up with Synaptik - am I going to get sideways scrolling back?

On desktop alternatives: I've no experience with LXDE, but I think it's a good move to include a supposedly very light-weight and resource-saving alternative - in my case it might squeeze a few more minutes running time out of Tisiphone's venerable battery. Definitely looking forward to trying that one. There's a new Gnome included, too, but seriously: how many people choose openSuSE for Gnome support?

On the package handling side, they have announced some work on zypper, included a KDE-app for package installation on demand, and the KUpdateApplet seems to be able to do distro upgrades by now. (Not sure I trust this feature. To me, the KUpdateApplet is a YaST-interfering nuisance I tend to kick from the autostart ASAP, while distro upgrades usually screw up my system already when done from a setup DVD. The combination seems a tad unfortunate - how much, we'll see next year with the 12.0 upgrade).

Under the hood: apart from a recent kernel, I mostly noticed two things: btrfs file system support is included in the installer - thanks, but no thanks! OpenSuSE actually warning about a feature being experimental sets off all my alarm bells, and I'm rather attached to my data. As default Nvidia driver they chose nouveau, which has been reported somewhere not to support desktop effects. We'll see - usually I've switched pretty fast to the closed source ones for exactly these reasons anyway.

Well, let's hope I will not be forced to blog from Windows next week.

Parallel Python Client with matplotlib and pylab trouble

2010-05-06T17:38:00.026+02:00

Problem: use OpenSuSE 11.1 as parallel python client with numpy, scipy and matplotlib, which starts automatically at boot time without the need to have anyone logged in.

Solution:

install python 2.6, python-matplotlib, python-scipy, python-pylab via YaST - there is a repo called science where you can find all those packages. You might want to use OpenSuSEs software search to find the appropriate repos
download the newest parallel python and install it according to the readme file in the tar-file
create a new user with YaST (I call it ppython here). I disable the login for security reasons for this user
become root, create a text document, copy the following content into it, save it to the folder /etc/init.d/ with the name ppython and make it executable (chmod a+x ppython) - change the dummy IP to your actual IP and the username ppython if you named it differently
(the startupscript will start the parallel python server at bootup with the user ppython running in the background, listening on the port specified after the -p argument - here 35000 - so that there is no need for anybody to log into the computer).
#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/ppython
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: ppython.py
# Required-Start: $network $remote_fs
# Required-Stop: $network $remote_fs
# Default-Start: 3 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6
# Description: Start the parallel python server
### END INIT INFO

# Some things that run always
# touch /var/lock/blah

# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
start)
echo "Starting parallel python server"
echo ""
su ppython -c "/usr/local/bin/ppserver.py -p 35000 -i 123.45.167.34 &"
;;
stop)
echo "Stopping parallel python server"
echo ""
killall python
killall ppserver.py
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/ppython {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

I know, the script is extremly dirty and could be improved a lot, but it works.
Start the Module System --> RunLevel editor in YaST, look for ppython, switch to expert mode, check runlevel 3 and 5 and say ok to the changes.
Open the port ppserver is listening on for TCP und UDP in the Firewall using the Firewall Module in YaST.

After a reboot the process ppserver.py shows up with two additional python processes run by the user ppython. So far so good. But trying to use the client did not work: all jobs were handed back with a lot of error codes refering to GTK problems.
The solution is to change the backend to TkAgg as follows:

install the package python-tk
look for the file matplotlibrc - it normally resides in /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/, open it as root and look for the "backend =" line - there change from GTKAgg to TkAgg

Now you should be able to use the parallel python client.

Dual boot Windows 7 64bit and OpenSuSE 11.1 Linux - GRUB magic

2010-05-06T10:56:00.040+02:00

After having installed OpenSuSE 11.1 on my office machine quite a long time ago and found, that Windows 7 was not bootable any more I simply repaired the boot by using the Windows 7 Installation DVD and forgot about Linux on that machine. A few days ago the necessity of having Linux as well showed up again and I wanted to integrate both systems into GRUB, which for whatever reason failed. (I guess it is due to the 64bit Version which in my case added an invisible boot partition of roughly 100 MB as first partition on the hard drive.) I finally ended up integrating GRUB into the Windows Boot Loader using mainly this entry (thanks and credits to the author!) which I will fine tune and enrich with additional information in the following:

What you should have ready:

A live-linux cd or dvd of your choice containing the version of GRUB you have on your system. I prefer Xubuntu 8.10
The Windows 7 installation DVD, 32bit or 64bit depending on your OS.
Windows and Linux installed
A USB stick or write-access to one windows-readable partition within your Linux installation

How to reinstall grub
Normally, you will have installed Windows first, then Linux and then have repaired your Windows Boot using the Automatic Repair of your Windows 7 installation DVD, which means, you cannot access your Linux any more. Therefore you will need to reinstall GRUB.

Boot the live-linux of your choice
Open a console and become root (according to the live-linux distro)
Cast grub on the console and you will get
grub>
You are in the "interactive mode" of grub.
Find the partition where GRUB resides by casting find /boot/grub/stage1 to grub - you will get something like:
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,5)
grub>
Tell grub to take the partition (in my case (hd0,5) ) as root partition, install the boot loader and quit afterwards:
grub>root (hd0,5)
grub>setup (hd0,5)
grub>quit
After successful isntall you can restart and boot into your Linux system.

Great, Linux starts and Windows 7 will, if you had an entry for it in your GRUB menu, tell you "BOOTMGR missing" if you try booting into it.

To include GRUB into the Windows 7 boot loader, it has to be installed in the root partition of your Linux installation:

boot into your installed Linux (if not already done so) and open a root console
find the partition where your Linux resides using fdisk -l. The response will look somewhat like /dev/sda5.
install grub into that partition with the command
grub-install /dev/sda5
(change the /dev/section to meet your output.) There might be minor errors which are marked "non fatal". You should get a successfully installed message in the end.
Export the Linux boot sector using (again change /dev/sda5 to the device where your Linux resides):
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/tmp/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
and copy the file /tmp/linux.bin to a location which you can access via Windows 7
cp /tmp/linux.bin /yourmountpoint/

Now you need to get back the access for Windows: boot with your Windows 7 installation DVD, choose: "install now" --> "Choose language" --> "Use Recovery Tools" "Startup repair" and restart. If your Windows 7 doesn't start however, boot again with your Windows 7 DVD, choose: "install now" --> "Choose language" --> "Use Recovery Tools" --> "cancel" --> "Command Prompt", navigate to the root directory of your DVD and cast the command: bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr. After that, restart your computer, and you should be able to boot into Windows 7 as usual.

Add Linux to the Windows Boot loader

boot into your Windows 7 installation, if not already done so
copy linux.bin created before into the root directory of your Windows installation (normally C:\)
start a command prompt with administrative rights: to do so, click start, type cmd into the start text field, DON'T press RETURN, but press CTRL+SHIFT+RETURN.
in the command prompt cast bcdedit /create /d "GRUB" /application BOOTSECTOR This will give you back an SID like {63ea1432-234ff-44da-bd24-ceb4e3230e14} which I refer to as {yourSID}
cast bcdedit /set {youSID} device boot - which sets the destination of the Linux boot
cast bcdedit /set {yourSID} PATH \linux.bin - which sets the path for the destination
cast bcdedit /displayorder {yourSID} /addlast which sets the menu entry
optionally, set the waiting time using bcdedit /timeout 15 or whatever waiting time you want.

A reboot should offer you a booting choice of either Windows 7 or the Linux GRUB.

Side note: this should work for almost any Linux distribution out there, which uses GRUB as boot loader.

Sooo PC now!

2010-04-21T03:37:00.013+02:00

Nobody really likes renaming their blog. However, together with such venerable institutions as the most famous s***m whale in fiction, we are victims of the Great Online Bowdlerisation Initiative - as witnessed on the openSuSE forums (asterisks in the blog URL, yay!)
Some lame excuses for the old name:

Really, that blog name was totally inconnuous in German!
Did we mention our outstanding women's quota?
We are still allowed to abuse our computers, right? (Yes, Tisiphone, talking about you, you ugly brainwashed crackpot…)
People googling "bitches in latex" are in for a very educational evening
Can't we be a bit naughty now and then?

So, Eumenides it is. The Kindly Ones. Bloody old euphemism, which hopefully won't get bowdlerised into the page-not-found-nirvana. We illustrate our newfound virtue with a picture including three semi-naked women with snakes in their hair.

And no, potter wasps are Eumeninae. With an n.

Digikam and the Marble symbol lookup error

2010-04-19T19:01:00.000+02:00

(double posting this on the opensuse forums)
With KDE 4.4, digikam > 0.10 for quite some time crashed on startup with something like this:
digikam: symbol lookup error: digikam: undefined symbol: _ZN6Marble12MarbleWidget16staticMetaObjectE

The Marble symbol lookup error seems to be vendor related: upgrading to the KDE 4.4 Marble version requires a vendor change from openSuSE to obs://build.opensuse.org/KDE in YaST. Usually this ought to be done automatically by the dependency checker during an update to KDE 4.4 as it happens with a lot of other KDE 4.4 packages, but apparently this dependency is not registered. Find marble and marble-data in YaST, go to the Versions tab and select the 4.4 version.
With digikam 1.2, this got me at least as far as the splash screen before it crashed ("Trying to open ksycoca..." on konsole).
Digikam finally worked after downgrading to version 1.1 (from software.opensuse.org search). Well, sort of: it crashes on quitting…

Notes on replacing Tisiphone's hard disk

2010-04-14T21:35:00.005+02:00

Yet another faulty hard disk…

Restoring the home partition from a gz-compressed image with the aid of an Ubuntu live CD: uncompressing the image directly onto the target partition took ages, especially as the amount of uncompressed data is the actual partition size and not what's on it.
It was considerably faster to uncompress the image in place (even regarding the bottlenecks of booting from CD and the USB connection to the external drive), mounting it and just copying the contents. (see daWuzzz's contributions on gzipped images and image mounting)
Just a reminder: only copy the bare necessities using a live system. USB data throughput was about four times slower compared to copying with a system on disk.
Importing users from a previous installation, using the copied home partition: This is a bit tricky, as the installer DVD actually needs an existing installation to read from. Inelegant solution: first do a dummy install setting up fresh users with the same properties (easiest way in a single-user environment), then format the home partition and copy your user data, and finally install the OS again, this time importing the user from the dummy setup using your previous home directory. Alternatively, restore both your old root and home partitions before the fresh install and import the users from there (cumbersome if you had a lot of data on the root partition).
Other variants I tried but ran into problems with: create a new user and use the old home (KWallet password fail); formatting and rewriting the home partition after the system install (ate my GRUB)
Opensuse 11.2 still reports a failure on the network connection during install despite obviously being able to download release notes
.

Importing UNIX users into webmin

2010-03-18T23:55:00.000+01:00

After getting CUPS to accept my username and password, I moved on to the last root-only web interface standing, i.e. webmin.
Webmin's import feature is pretty sophisticated, as you can specify permissions for subsets of modules and users via the concept of webmin groups.
This implies that you first have to create such a group before you can import UNIX users.
Groups can be defined in the Webmin->Webmin Users module, I called mine "admins" and gave the members every permission available.
I then converted my UNIX user to webmin, checking the box "Use same password as unix user in the future" and assigned the admins group.
Apart from the "create group first" point, pretty intuitive.

How to stop CUPS from asking for the root password

2010-03-17T17:34:00.007+01:00

CUPS has a quite restrictive allow/deny policy. Cancelling jobs requires the owner or root (OK, makes sense), for starting and stopping printers you also need root privileges. My root password is befittingly cumbersome, so I looked for some kind of CUPS sudo.
The file to look for is /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, which can be conveniently edited from the CUPS web interface's (localhost:631) Administration tab.

There are two options: either disable the password prompt completely (convenient, but on the risky side), or give your own user CUPS admin rights.
First option: change the line "DefaultPolicy default" to "DefaultPolicy easy". No password prompt ever, even if you fiddle with the configuration files. Not sure I like that.
Second option: Get the password prompt to accept your own user. For this, change the line "SystemGroup sys root" to "SystemGroup sys root lp" and make sure your user is a member of the lp group.

Judging from the structure of cupsd.conf, I suppose it is possible to fine-tune individual permissions by changing/commenting out the AuthType/Require user statements in specific <Limit> … </Limit> blocks, but I saw no need to do that.
The CUPS web interface will restart the server after changing the configuration, however, your login status is apparently preserved. Reopen the interface in a new browser window to re-login.

NY = outer space

2010-03-12T03:17:00.000+01:00

...at least according to wetter.com, providing data for the LCD Weather plasma applet. And yes, space is actually warmer.

I love disper!

2010-02-25T20:29:00.007+01:00

...and, if you use a laptop with nVidia graphics and want to extend/clone your screen output to an external monitor or projector, you will, too.
Disper is a python-based command line app and can be downloaded from here. I don't think there are any prerequisites except the nVidia packages and basic Python, and potentially xrandr. Install with make /sudo make install.
The beauty of disper is that it automatically and quite intelligently fits your screen resolution and panning to the detected displays.

Extend to an external monitor:

disper -e

Clone, e.g. to a projector:

disper -c

Revert to single-screen:

disper -s

For more options, see disper -h.
Disper can get befuddled by removing the monitor cable, I think; in that case, restarting X helps. Set khotkeys shortcuts for quick switches.
Notes:
I got the tip from this thread - btw, creating a dual-monitor xorg.conf as proposed there is not necessary.
Usually, Plasma should set up a full-blown activity on the external monitor, including an independent background image, widgets, proper window maximisation and so on (cf. my screen shot). Sometimes this didn't work for me; I could move windows to the external screen, but had no background, widgets or maximisable windows. Using disper -S before disper -e helps for some reason. Sometimes Plasma chokes on the disper operations, restarting Plasma (without reverting to single-screen with disper) helped in my case.

State of Pymorph Address

2010-02-10T19:08:00.003+01:00

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:
Ahem.

Actually, I was just looking for a quick 'n dirty Python morphology library to do a kind of string length image analysis and pymorph looked promising. Sadly, a major overhaul seems to be going on there right now, so while the actual code I ended up with is nice, short and robust, getting there was quite a pain.
Pymorph's old (<= 0.8) version has some very helpful demonstration pages, which have to be adapted for the new version (0.92 - and I found nothing but win32 packages for 0.8). Some hints are given on the developer's page, but quite a lot one has to figure out for oneself - mostly formatting issues.

name space sanitisation - the mm prefix has been discarded as unpythonic. Most old functions work if you drop the prefix.
Some things like image importing and display are already implemented in PIL and matplotlib, so they have been dropped altogether. This leaves the question what data type the pymorph functions will actually work with, and it turns out it's numpy arrays - boolean for binary images, uint 2-d arrays for greyscale.
To replace pymorph's mmshow(), one could just use PIL's show() routine, which is a xv wrapper. To get it to work, you either have to install the venerable xv, or, as proposed here, hack a symlink to ImageMagick's display.

To illustrate, here is some basic example code (blob labelling a greyscale image, e.g. the one above):

import pymorph as p
import numpy as n
from PIL import Image
im=Image.open('test.jpg')
im=n.asarray(im) #convert to numpy array
bin=im>50 # binarise to boolean array
a=p.label(bin) # do blob labelling
Image.fromarray((a*255/n.amax(a)).astype(n.uint8)).show() #scale contrast and display
p.blob(a,'area',output='data') #blob sizes

Anyway, I'm glad the library is still around. Kudos to the developers.

PS: Official feedback (see comments): The 1.0 release including new tutorials is approaching.

Rotating my screen output

2010-01-19T19:04:00.011+01:00

or: Who ate my xorg.conf?
Oh. SuSE did, as the xorg.conf file is deprecated for newer versions of Xorg. Right.
Which posed a bit of a problem, as I needed the file to make xrandr work. Xrandr is a console app able to flip your screen by multiples of 90° (actually, it can do a lot more) via
xrandr -o left #right, inverted, normal
To enable xrandr, xorg.conf needs the following option enabled:

Section "Device"
     Identifier "Card0"
     Driver "nvidia"
     VendorName "Unknown Vendor"
     BoardName "Unknown Board"
     BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
     Option "RandRRotation" "true"
EndSection

If (and only if) xorg.conf is empty, log in on a text screen as root:

rcxdm stop #stop the X server

Xorg -configure #write new xorg.conf

cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf #copy over old one

rcxdm restart #restart X

The autogenerated xorg.conf is pretty generic (see it in the quoted section), so don't do this if you have a more specific one written by e.g. your graphics driver setup. Testing the new file from the root console as Xorg proposed (X -conf xorg.conf.new) only gave me a black screen, but it worked fine after restarting X.
There is a pretty krandr plasma widget, but even after all of the above it only managed to turn the screen upside down, so I'd recommend just setting general keyboard shortcuts (with khotkeys) for the xrandr commands.
BTW: Mouse output is not rotated!

Samsung SCX-4200 on SuSE 11.2

2010-01-18T23:47:00.006+01:00

First problem: Samsung Universal driver nowhere to be found, at least not in the download links for this model. Well, it's supposed to be universal, isn't it, so I got the tar archive from the SCX-4300 download page.
Installation: untar, cd to cdroot/Linux, ran sudo ./install.sh and followed the console instructions. And yes, the scx-4200 was included. What worked out of the box: Scanning, both xsane and skanlite interfaces. Printing worked for all kinds of files and apps except PDF from whichever source, which is a bit of a bummer.

Condensed console output from Okular and acroread:

WARNING: configuration file not found

malloc: using debugging hooks #5 repetitions of this line

libusb couldn't open USB device /dev/bus/usb/001/001: Permission denied.

libusb requires write access to USB device nodes. #repeat that for all USB devices except the printer

unknown key <-P> #or any other first lpr option

From the lsusb output I got: Bus 001 Device 017: ID 04e8:341b Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd SCX-4200 series
As the Samsung driver setup had created a file 99_smfpautoconf_samsung.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d, including a rule for idVendor=04e8, and libusb had specifically not complained about device 001:017, it was probably not an udev problem.
I found a lot of "new" printers in CUPS (http://localhost:631), removed scx4100 and scx4200 (default), where CUPS claimed "backend failed", and set the default printer to SCX-4200-Series.
In the end, I traced the error back to the venerable lpr command (learned a lot about udev handling on the way), which acroread and okular seem to use as backend to print intermediate Postscript files.
lpr -P SCX-4200-Series test.ps produced all of the errors listed above, lp -P SCX-4200-Series test.ps didn't - and printed faultlessly.
Come to think of it - why is there a file lpr.orig in /usr/bin/ and why, oh why, does /usr/bin/lpr link to /opt/Samsung/mfp/bin/slpr?
Restoring the original lpr solved my problem.
To be fair, judging from the file creation dates in /opt/Samsung/mfp/bin, there might have been remnants of a botched installation of a previous version of the Samsung driver, which has a nasty trail of bugs.

console copy without overwriting

2010-01-08T18:35:00.004+01:00

To copy an arbitrary number of files without overwritting existing ones, use:
yes n | cp -i <source> <destination>
Found here.
Note that this does not work for scp, as there is no -i option. A workaround proposed here suggests setting previously copied files read-only - which you can't do on FAT or NTFS partitions, btw.

timidity vs my USB sound card

2010-01-07T00:46:00.003+01:00

timidity refused to play MIDI files with cryptic error messages:
can't create mcop directory
and, after I had created /tmp/ksocket-<myuser>:

sh: arts-start: command not found
Couldn't open output device

It turns out that the problem lay with my USB sound card, which I had set as the primary card in YaST to get the sound output from online flash movies etc. on it (Firefox is not handled by Phonon, so you have to do it permanently via YaST), and which I had unplugged. Setting the on-board card as the primary card again solved the issue. I suppose plugging in the USB card might also help, but I don't have it with me right now.

How to dismantle a Verbatim 3.5'' SmartDrive

2009-12-28T21:24:00.009+01:00

WARNING: This will void your drive's warranty.
Most external drive cases are absolutely self-explanatory, this one is a bit scary (too many plastic notches and bendable stuff). If you've still got a choice, better get a completely unscrewable one like the Western Digital model with the silicone covers.
You need: a small Phillips screwdriver and a spudger or Mum's nail file. The drive inside is SATA (in my case, a Samsung HD103SI).

Put the case upside-down and prise loose the back cover (the one with the power and USB connectors below it) using the spudger on the three small slits at the case border (see image 2). Remove the cover by sliding it upwards.
Slide off the outer metal casing and remove the 4 Phillips screws holding the drive to the inner part (image 3), as well as the 2 screws holding the logic board.
Lift the back part of the drive carefully upwards over the case's back rim and pull it free from the board. The SATA connectors in the case are in a truly awkward position, see image 4.

So, yeah, it works. It even worked after reassembling, although I'd recommend a ground bracelet.

Frescobaldi opening Kile

2009-12-22T16:57:00.001+01:00

Today frescobaldi surprised me by opening source code references from PDF annotations in Kile. Hey, I love Kile! Still, not very practical.
Solution: open an external instance of Okular, go to Settings->Configure Okular…->Editor, choose Custom Text Editor instead of Kile (the command should read frescobaldi --smart --line %l --column %c), apply, restart frescobaldi and you should be good to go again. Apart from the fact that now your LaTeX source code annotations will be opened in frescobaldi…

Copying calendar and contacts from Kontact to an iPod with the proper encoding

2009-12-17T22:17:00.003+01:00

Copying your personal data to an iPod is surprisingly easy:
Calendar: export your calendar as an iCal file (File->Export…) and copy it to the Calendars directory on your mounted iPod (e.g. /media/MYIPOD/Calendars)
Address book: File->Export->Export vCard…, take care to export your contact list to several files. Copy to the Contacts directory on your iPod.
It's getting a bit trickier if you have special characters in your files, as these have to be converted from Kontact's UTF-8 to the iPod's ISO_8859-15 encoding. Recoding can be done by iconv with a shell script. Run from the directory where vCards and calendar have been exported to:

FILES="*.vcf"
for f in $FILES;
do
  iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO_8859-15 $f >00_$f
  mv 00_$f /media/MYIPODSNAME/Contacts/$f
  echo $f
done
iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO_8859-15 *.ics > 00_mycal.ics
mv 00_mycal.ics /media/MYIPODSNAME/Calendars/mycal.ics
echo mycal.ics

ATI woes

2009-11-17T16:25:00.007+01:00

I had a go at installing SuSE 11.2 on Xanthippe, my slightly mercurial desktop computer (Athlon 64bit, ATI graphics, Atheros WLAN chip). The 11.0 kernel kept warring with the WLAN chip, so it was time for an upgrade.
After a normal install, the system claimed to have no working graphics during the configuration reboot (c'mon, it's only an elderly Radeon X1300) and started the console YaST.
Well, the console YaST ist quite usable, so I just went along with it, until YaST crashed during the network setup and left me with a bare console and no users created except root.
Right. Deep breath.
Console login, open YaST, get the bare necessities. I set up my own user account, added a few repositories and installed a console browser, just in case. At this point lynx insisted on installing Adobe Flash, which was about the only thing I found amusing by that time.
The ATI 11.2 repo link from opensuse.org didn't work with YaST, so I got the driver download link from the ATI homepage, fed it to wget and started the shell script.
The driver refused to install or create an RPM, which might have been due to the fact that ATI stopped supporting most non-HD cards in March. Thank you, ATI! I began looking for a cheap Nvidia card on ebay…
I still don't quite understand why the open radeonhd driver (installed and updated) didn't work with my card, as it is listed in the 'supported' category. As I am not going to use Xanthippe much in the next two years, I capitulated and installed 11.1, which just worked™.
I suspect this is my last ATI post ever.

Amarok: Again the album art issue

2009-11-15T18:47:00.008+01:00

Amarok doesn't handle album art well for me. They can't help some of the main issues: Amazon's API restrictions have forced the developers to switch to last.fm for automatic cover fetching, which apparently is not implemented in v2.2.0 yet. Additionally, for classically minded listeners like me it's generally difficult to get the matching cover without manual intervention (sorting out composers, artists, correct album title).
It doesn't get easier if you want to synchronise an iPod or similar and need to merge collections from different sources.

OK, I'll stop whinging.
Amarok can't display id3tag-embedded cover art yet (see this bug), but it does display images saved to the album directory, provided they are named album.jpg. Note that you have to do a complete collection re-scan to display new or changed images.
If the album art is already organised over the Amarok database (saved to ~/kde4/share/apps/amarok/albumcovers/large), the export-amarok-covers python script can batch export the images to the album folders (Amarok 1.x only). For 2.x, there's the copycover script on kde-apps.org, which exports during playback. The exported file is usually cover.png, so here is a shell script (tolerating white space file names) for batch conversion to album.jpg:

find /your/mp3/directory -type f -name "cover.png" | while read FILE
do
newfile=`dirname "$FILE"`
echo $newfile
cd "$newfile"
convert cover.png album.jpg
# rm cover.png #uncomment to delete cover.png
done

GTKpod will transfer the album art from the folder to an iPod by setting the file name to album.jpg in Edit->Preferences->Metadata->Add cover art using the file name template
It should be theoretically possible to update the artwork from amarok directly. Check out the Ultimate IPod Guide.

It sort of works

2009-11-14T17:54:00.002+01:00

First impressions of 11.2
The first one is purely aesthetical: the SuSE 11.2 installer looks like a gothicised version of Win 7's cutesy scrollwork, in a blackish-green colour scheme and without all those birdies.
The setup procedure (64-bit) was not noticeably different from 11.1: in partitioning, I fared best with importing the previous installation's partitioning and setting the root partition to be formatted to ext4 after that.
For a moment, I was really impressed by the network setup during install - my laptop's WLAN chip was recognised and even displayed the local network. My favourable impression somewhat cooled when during the connection test both cable and wireless connection came up with "network not running" and nothing worth mentioning showing up in the error logs. A few clicks later the computer condescended to download release notes and updates over the oh-so-disabled network.
This seems to be a recurring theme in the new release: the KDE4 network manager is still enigmatic to the point of uselessness. However, just now I'm comfortably logged into a WPA2-encrypted wireless network, even if the tray app seems only complains about the unavailability of a cable connection. Oh, well…
I got stuck a bit with the mp3 support, just adding the packman repo and doing a quick update had no effect. However, the restricted formats installer (codecs-kde.ymp) from opensuse-community.org appears to fix everything.
No trouble with graphics: I had the full Plasma glory after getting the driver from the Nvidia 11.2 repo.

More fun with Kernel Panic

2009-09-17T16:09:00.007+02:00

After an update session sometimes ago (and yes, I didn't need the computer for quite a while, that's why I can't really tell you the cause). I experienced a persistent fault: "Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/blablabla-part2 - Would you like to fall back on /dev/disk/by-id/blablablabla-part2 (Y/n)?"
Regardless of the answer Medea went to everlasting sleep, um, well, till the reset button was pressed.

The funny thing about this error was: I could easily start a rescue system, mount the drive and all the partitions were there, well readable and according to fsck without any error. Under windows, the partitions were at least correctly shown as well. Repairing the boot manager didn't help, as well as rewriting the partition table. Chroot onto the system as avocadohead mentioned did work as well.

After more than one hour of spending my precious time on the problem, I gave up and reinstalled (openSuSE 11.1 32bit). Runs like a charm again, even with all the customized stuff - thanks to the separate home partition (which by the way during setup Yast still initially wanted to format - when do the openSuSE people actually learn that their customers have separate home partitions ON PURPOSE).

Yay! Kernel panic!

2009-09-15T10:54:00.009+02:00

It's really no reason to rejoice.
On Archimedes (a meticulously preserved SuSE 10.3) the Virtual Box update seemed to have trouble with the fact that there were apparently three kernel versions installed (no idea how they got there), so I decided to get rid of two of them with YaST. And so the catastrophe began…
I think my initial mistake was not to reinstall the active kernel - on the other hand, daWuzzzz also just got a non-bootable system after a normal update. Anyway, my boot folder ended up with a kernel but missing the initial ram disk (found that out by booting a live linux) and I sat there staring at the grub console. Pointing grub to the new kernel by hand or by editing the menu.lst file from the live linux did not work, naturally (thus the aforementioned kernel panic).
First option: the System Repair mode from the installer DVD, which usually works great with missing kernels etc., but just crashed this time.
Next try: the rescue console (login: root, no password). I got the next steps from all over the net, but forgot the individual sources.
I created a mount point and mounted my root partition:
mkdir disk
mount /dev/sda1 disk
The next step is to chroot into your installed system as nicely explained here, and write a new initrd.
mount -o bind /disk/dev /dev (I did this analogously for all the root tree)
chroot disk
mkinitrd -k /boot/vmlinuz-<version> -i /boot/initrd-<version> (with the kernel present in the boot folder for the -k option).
Sadly, mkinitrd aborted with some "missing node" message. At that point I decided to give up and just get SuSE 11.1. I was in luck: with python-matplotlib 0.99 out, the Python/C stuff I work installed on the new system with minor alterations; I had everything up and running in a matter of hours.
Morale: after a kernel update, check the contents of your boot folder.

openSuSE 11.1 on an Apple MacBook Pro

2009-09-11T14:05:00.010+02:00

Meet polyhymnia, my new Apple MacBook Pro 13'' with standard processor and 2 GB RAM. For convenience, the first thing I did was exchanging the 160 GB harddrive against a 500 GB one. While installing MacOS X I already left 60 GB free for an openSuSE installation. If you want to install openSuSE as well and didn't do that, follow the hints on OpenSUSE.org.

Preparation: I installed rEFIt 0.13 on MacOS X. After a reboot, you should get a boot manager, which I actually didn't get.
Opening a terminal and casting the commands (from rEFIt documentation:

# cd /efi/refit
# ./enable.sh

the bootmanager started and let me choose what and where from to boot.

Side note: ouf of curiousity, I deinstalled and reinstalled rEFIt using only the installer and with the third (!) reboot the bootmanager came up miracuosly - without the need to do the steps above.

After that I simply did the normal installation routine of openSuSE 11.1 - ensure, that the bootmanager is NOT installed into the Master Boot Record (MBR) but rather in the partition where your openSuSE installation resides.

Having started the freshly installed system, I recognized the following problems:

the mouse pad cannot be tapped for clicking, you need to press down the pad
the mouse pad does not respond to multi-finger actions which is a real problem, because you are not able to access the "right click" - there should be fixes around in the world wide web
wireless is not working at all
you cannot adjust the brightness of the monitor, which can be very annoying in dark ambience since the LED backlight is very bright

Well, I didn't spend much time on that issues any more, since I will try again with openSuSE 11.2. More to come

Crackling USB sound card

2009-09-06T15:29:00.004+02:00

Short note: My laptop's new USB sound card made annoying crackling noises at high CPU load (simple check: swipe mouse over buttons in task bar with full plasma desktop effects :-) ) . Apparently this is due to the USB bus not supplying enough power, because I got rid of this by using an externally powered hub.
Hm. Simple solution, but dire consequences: lugging around a fat hub and its power supply? Or get a Y adaptor (like this one) and let it block two of my precious USB ports? Not amused.

Oh, those sneaky Apple people…

2009-09-03T14:16:00.007+02:00

…still trying valiantly to keep us from procrastinating. Apparently they now deny apple.com/trailers access to all non-Quicktime users, which is more or less the Linux community. Hey, and I always thought we stood all united against Microsoft.
Several workarounds have been proposed.

If you are using firefox, get the User Agent Switcher addon (extended Ubuntu forums discussion) and set it up as a friendly participant suggested. This solved my problem for the moment.
If that doesn't work for you, get the *.mov file's address from the page source code and paste it into a new tab, as described here. I didn't get the "Get the latest Quicktime" message though, so I couldn't try this.
Opera user? Opera can natively spoof user agents (change preferences with the opera:config URL), but none of the default strings seem to get accepted by Apple. It ought to be possible to make this work with user javascript (enable in opera:config) as described in this blog (not tested by me).

On the other hand, Gmail only works in basic HTML mode with the User Agent in Apple compatible mode.

DigiKam woes

2009-08-21T17:02:00.009+02:00

Archimedes reproducibly failed to connect to my digital camera with digiKam, with the following message:
'Failed to connect to the camera. Please make sure it is connected properly and turned on. Would you like to try again?'
Root access worked.
The omniscient Google came up with two answers:

Modify udev rules (from hyperborea.org). I had to change the print-camera-list syntax listed there to
print-camera-list udev-rules version 0.98 group users … to get it working (probably different libgphoto2 version). Didn't solve my problem though and I never had that particular issue elsewhere, so I think the rules issue might be fixed by now.
A discussion on the openSuSE forums pointing to an old HAL bug.

In the end, I traced the error back to an old Konqueror/KDE3 automount interface popping up after some time. digiKam connected faultlessly after I cancelled the automount window. (I should really remove the KDE3 remnants…)

My USB soundcard did not want to play mp3s

2009-08-15T00:33:00.008+02:00

As Tisiphone's line out jack is pretty worn out, I bought a cheap C-Media USB soundcard to finally get stereo sound again. It's quite plug-and-play, the channels showed in KMix without me having to change any settings, but the damn thing refused to play mp3s.
It turned out to be Phonon's fault, and it's actually a pretty cool feature.

You can set output preferences for each type of sound individually in the Personal Settings->Multimedia->Device Preference dialog. The internal sound card, which I had muted, was still on top of the devices list, so I moved the C-Media device up, and voilà, stereo music. If the USB card is not present, Phonon will fall back to the internal one.
This is generally true for all KDE multimedia apps, e.g. Kaffeine. It doesn't work with non-KDE apps like VLC (and probably mplayer), as they address the backend (e.g. alsa) directly. For VLC go to Preferences->Advanced Settings->Audio->Output modules. Set the output module to ALSA, then choose the right card in the device names list (subitem ALSA). It's also possible to use the USB card as ALSA default by setting it as the first sound card in YaSt->Hardware->Sound (or see e.g. here). AFAIK, this is the only way to channel sound output from Firefox/Flash to the USB card. To set your KMix master channel permanently, change DefaultCardOnStart in ~/.kde4/share/config/kmixrc to the USB device

Plasma can be hungry... kill the widgets!

2009-08-07T12:31:00.007+02:00

Some days ago, after I had played around with some plasma widgets, I recognized Medea (AMD Athlon 2000+) becoming very slow and not very responsive after about 20 minutes of operation. Good old console "top" yielded that plasma was eating up CPU time up to 80% and was consuming a lot of memory. Short googleing didn't find any really helpful results, although the problem seems to appear at least for some users.

I was too lazy to sort out what was causing the problem, but deactivating all widgets I had started (calendar, clock and the analogon to knotes) solved the problem and my computer runs nicely again.

For the interested guys: openSuSE 11.1, KDE 4.2

Tu quoque, Python?

2009-08-06T01:02:00.003+02:00

Ah, well, it's nothing compared to certain Excel bugs…

Texlive 2007 and inkscape 0.46 on openSuSE 10.3

2009-08-05T23:43:00.013+02:00

I hadn't thought this would be a problem, but I fiddled quite a while with inkscape's and texlive's alternating complaints about missing poppler libraries.
Poppler is a pdf rendering library (xpdf fork), of which texlive 2007 needs version 1 (provided by the poppler package), while inkscape 0.46 (yes, the new version with built-in pdf import) needs libpoppler2. For some reason YaST apparently deleted one of them :-(
Well, I learnt quite a bit about library linking conventions.
Altogether, it has to be some problem of the expiring support for SuSE 10.3; texlive 2008 probably already depends on a newer poppler version (cf. the 'PageGroup detected' error, which is fixed by now), but it's packaged only for 11.0 and higher. Still, Archimedes is stuck with 10.3 until I've got my PhD at least - or so I thought.

Switch to KDE 4.3

2009-08-05T00:44:00.008+02:00

It's not like the quantum leap from KDE 4.1.3 (shudder…) to 4.2 , but 4.3 is slick and was pretty stable even in β

Lots of improvement in Plasma: bundled notifications, hover folder previews, taskbar icons work - and a pretty new theme to boot
greatly improved krunner - I love the list view and it's much faster in selecting frequently used programmes
KDE PIM works at last - no bloody akonadi crashes every 5 minutes
the NetworkManager has been ported
revamped system tray

More features in the release announcements.
And it's been out since yesterday! For openSuSE it's still on Factory, though.

Miserable renegade

2009-08-03T17:58:00.001+02:00

DaWuzzzz just got himself a MacBook Pro. I am not going to talk to that smug bastard ever again. Expect some posts about how to get openSuSE to run on it ;-)

Seasick...

2009-07-31T12:59:00.003+02:00

I am all for eye candy, but the new overshooting compiz cube is maybe a bit too realistic, at least on 3 cups of coffee and an empty stomach.
I looked for a damping factor in CCSM, had to get a new python-gtk on the way (PyGtk 2.12.0 or later required) and at least got something I could live with by turning the acceleration down and the speed up. Not exactly intuitive.

Browseable backups with rdiff-backup and archfs

2009-07-21T13:20:00.020+02:00

Note: archfs is now rdiff-backup-fs (see comment below).
In contrast to tools like rsnapshot, which always backs up full versions, rdiff-backup saves only incremental changes in diff files, which takes much less space (and can take a lot of time, too). Because of this it is rather unsuitable for browsing different versions, which is where archfs cuts in.
You need:

rdiff-backup (Python script, in main repo)
librsync (from repos, or patched sources, see below)
Keep (rdiff-backup-frontend, e.g. from the community repos)
archfs
fuse-devel

librsync seems to be a bit of a zombie (no updates since 2004), but there is a patch from 2006 to fix a serious problem with files greater that 4GB. Run the patch linked in the bug report in the directory above (check the paths in the patch file) the extracted librsync sources:
patch -p0 < 4Gigbug.patch
If you don't have large files, the openSuSE rpm should also work.
archfs: install the tarball and create a mount point, e.g.:
sudo mkdir /media/archives
sudo chown yourname /media/archives
Note: I tried to use a root-owned mount folder with read/execute access, but after the archfs mount all permissions were screwed up. However, the mounted archive is always read-only, so you're on the safe side even if you have full access to the mount point.
Usage: back up with Keep or the rdiff-backup script from command line. With
archfs -r <backuplocation> -m /media/archives/
you will get a browseable archive with version folders listed by date.
Unmount:
sudo umount /media/archives
Use the keep wizard to restore old versions.
OK, OK, the Time Machine has definitely a flashier GUI…

More Virtual Box: USB devices

2009-07-17T17:12:00.010+02:00

Actually, the last remaining device I need Windows for (apart from the printing issue) is my Sony HI-MD audio recorder. The usual Sony support bullshit: software and standards are closed source, the system is too dated and unpopular for any viable Linux hack (though there are some people in Berlin working on it), and Wine is useless with anything involving a USB connection.
So I upgraded my VirtualBox to the non-OSS version (the OSS version in the SuSE repos doesn't have USB yet) from their Wiki (for a SuSE 10.3 RPM, go to "older versions" and get 2.2.4).
I followed the USB instructions from the openSuSE page. To get the MD recorder passed through to Windows, I had to set a device filter in the VirtualBox USB settings (see image). I plugged it in and chose the recorder in the Add Filter dropdown. Easy as pie, and at least I don't have to re-boot any more to download recordings.

The only thing that didn't work was exporting WAV into the virtual network folder on the Linux host from Sonic Stage, I had to take a detour via a regular folder. No big deal.

On Kile forgetting shortcuts

2009-07-17T13:19:00.005+02:00

The Kile-KDE4 version installed on Archimedes (SuSE 10.3) kept forgetting user-defined shortcuts when restarted. This was a bug, which has been fixed in newer svn versions (like this one).

Yes, I'm lazy: Windows network printing…

2009-07-16T19:06:00.023+02:00

… on a virtual box.
Meet Marcellus. The guy who tried not to kill Archimedes. In other words, the XP VirtualBox running on SuSE in order to spare me running to the network printer all the time (No idea how to print automated duplex from Linux acroread or okular - and the Linux printer driver is a real pain)
After installing VirtualBox (I recommend the newer non-OSS edition from VirtualBox.org, but there are also OSS versions in the official SuSE repos) I set up a virtual hard disk with the nominal size of 10 GB in my home directory and installed XP from an image. Works, apart from the fact that I have to recompile the vbox kernel before each run.
For the network (Details->Network) connection I chose NAT, which seems to be the easiest option (Here your physical netword card acts like a DHCP router). IP configuration worked with DHCP, except I had to set the DNS servers by hand (I just used our university's).
To get a printer running, you have to use the CUPS port of your Linux host (see here. If you check localhost:631 in Konqueror, CUPS should list your printers, which you can access from the guest Windows by supplanting the local host with the virtual IP of your network card, e.g.
http://10.0.2.2:631/printers/myprinter Set up a network driver with the Windows wizard and that URL.
Getting a shared folder: 1) install the VBox Guest additions. Note: The GuestAddition ISO VBox downloaded by itself was corrupted. I got an alternative image from the TU Vienna and mounted it by hand under Devices->Mount CD-ROM… The HowTo for automatic setup is here. Start the XP Machine. Install the guest additions from the virtual CD-ROM. Shut down the system.
2) In the VirtualBox Main App, define a shared folded (let's call it share). Direct access via \\vboxsvr\share from the Explorer didn't work for me, so I defined a permanent network share as described here:
net use x: \\vboxsvr\share -p.
I installed the bare necessities (Adobe Reader, Firefox) and printed blissfully ahead.

And yes, I'm breaking a fly on the wheel here - but maybe I will try adding USB support and get my MD recorder to work … bye, bye, dual boot!

Note: Okular does support automated duplex in the printing options and I have no insurmountably problems with Linux printing on either the HP network printer at work or my Samsung at home right now (new work, new town, new printers). Either Okular fixed this or the drivers got better…

Change "Open containing folder" in Firefox

2009-07-11T20:00:00.007+02:00

In the Firefox downloads dialog, the containing folder is opened in Nautilus, which is a nuisance as well as an eyesore on my nice KDE4 desktop.
Two solutions are proposed on the web.
The first (from Rubylution), more elegant, is to fiddle with the about:config in Firefox by defining 3 new preferences: network.protocol-handler.expose.file = true (Boolean), network.protocol-handler.external.file = true (Boolean) and network.protocol-handler.app.file = konqueror (String). See the link for detailed instructions. Sadly, this had no effect, I still got Nautilus.
By the way, there is no way to delete erroneous preferences from about:config in Firefox, you have to edit ~/.mozilla/firefox/<yourprofile>/prefs.js by hand and restart Firefox.
The second (from hombrepac.com.ar) method stealthily substitutes Nautilus with Konqueror in the KDE mimetype handling. This basically makes Nautilus unusable, which might be a problem if you are an occasional Gnome user.
Well, I'm not - and this time, it worked.
Update: Newer Firefox versions (confirmed with FF 3.6.6) apparently detect KDE's default file manager - anyway, the downloads folder is opened in Konqueror without me having to do anything about it.

Canary Islands?

2009-07-11T06:02:00.007+02:00

As mentioned previously, we love blog statistics (right, procrastinating again). And it's nice to see where our visitors come from. Still, the Statcounter algorithm exhibits a geographical recklessness of almost Shakespearean dimensions.
Last time I looked (5 seconds ago, out of my window), Constance University was about here. Close, but no cigar.
Out-of-office notice: Sailing off the Bohemian coast…

Brute force presentation clock

2009-07-09T12:11:00.029+02:00

Prerequisites: KDE 4.2, Superkaramba, Acrobat reader.
The idea is to force the relative placement of the Adobe Reader and a Karamba clock widget. This doesn't work with Plasma widgets and the Okular presentation mode, as both seem to override Kwin placement rules (plasma is desktop-integrated anyway).
Get a suitable Karamba clock or countdown widget from kde-look.org (small and preferably with transparency) and put it onto your dektop.
Back up your present window rules:
$ cp ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc.backup
Start Personal Settings->Window Behaviour->Window-Specific, define a new rule. In the Window tab, grab the widget properties with "Detect Window Properties" and by clicking on the widget.
In the Preferences tab, set "Keep above" to "Force". Additionally, you can force a fixed position in the Geometry tab (in the image above, it's [1080,80] on a 1280x1024 screen, but remember that a projector will have a different resolution).
Next, we define a rule for acroread. Open a presentation, switch to presentation mode with Ctrl+L. Change with Alt+Tab to the Personal Settings window and define a new rule by grabbing the fullscreen presentation in the background and forcing the placement to "Keep below".
This will place the presentation below all windows including the Plasma panel, so you have to minimise all windows and auto-hide the panel with Configure Panel -> More Settings…->Auto Hide.

If you use Acroread and the Clock widget outside presentation, these rules can be pretty annoying. So we define a shell script presmode (download) to change the config files and reload Kwin. Make it executable, (chmod a+x presmode), usage presmode -p or presmode -n.
You have to resart/reload Superkaramba and Acroread for the new settings to take effect.

#!/bin/bash
killall kwin
sleep 1
while getopts ":pn" opt; do
case $opt in
p) #presentation case
d=`diff ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc.presentation | wc -m `
if [ "$d" -le "100" ]; then #avoid overwriting normal backup with presentation mode.
echo "already in presentation mode";
else
cp ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc.backup
cp ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc.presentation ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc
echo "presentation mode";
fi
;;
n) #normal case
cp ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc.backup ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrulesrc
echo "normal mode"
;;
\?) #all other options
echo "unknown option"
;;
esac
done
sleep 1
kwin --replace --nocrashhandler & > /dev/null

Possible improvements: Merge the backup script with the Acroread embedded movie workaround.

NB: A beamer sample document for the presentation style used above can be found here: .tex, .pdf.

How to fake footnotes…

2009-07-06T11:14:00.004+02:00

…at the bottom of a LaTeX figure page. Not very elegant, but here goes:

\usepackage{eso-pic}
...
\begin{figure}[p]
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{bigimage.jpg}
\caption{Some really important figure.\protect\footnotemark[1]}
\AtPageLowerLeft{\begin{minipage}{0.9\textwidth}
\vspace{0.8em}\rule{14em}{0.5px}\\
\hspace*{1em}\footnotesize{$^1$Ceci n'est pas une annotation.}
\end{minipage}}
\end{figure}
\addtocounter{footnote}{1}

Adjust the number by hand and fiddle with the spacing until it looks like a footnote.

Disable file system check at boot

2009-07-02T10:13:00.006+02:00

Just a self-reminder: the file system check at boot can be disabled or tuned with tune2fs. See this blog or man tune2fs for details.
E. g., to disable it completely on the /dev/sdx drive, use sudo tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 /dev/sdx

More fun with Frescobaldi: KDE updates

2009-06-30T01:53:00.008+02:00

On Tisiphone, Frescobaldi had a segmentation fault immediately at startup after a KDE 4.3 update; the next update corrected that, luckily (OK, score wizard is still broken, there seem to be major overhauls somewhere). Now the problem has diffused to Archimedes' 10.3 / KDE 4.2 setup, and here it's rather sticky.
Frescobaldi is written in Python, so I tried running frescobaldi.py line-by-line from the build directory. Turns out that the PyKDE4.kdecore module is broken, it kills python as soon as you try importing anything from it. You can't use a different version, because it has to be in sync with your KDE build. I tried building the source RPM, however, it crashed building libakonadipart1.cpp :-(

Hell, I don't even use akonadi on 10.3 because it breaks down anyway...

Update: As of today, (July 6th), the python bindings from the KDE:42 repository seem to work, as well as frescobaldi. Frescobaldi 0.7.13 in combination with KDE 4.3 even displays the score wizard.

Flash not working on some pages?

2009-06-27T14:12:00.005+02:00

… e.g. thedailyshow.com or arte.tv (yep, procrastinating again). By now, some pages require Flash 10, while the SuSE repos are stuck on v9. Get the Flash RPM from the Adobe page. Remove flash-plugin in YaST, and install the new one. Flash will still not work in Firefox, because a symlink is missing. Ben Kevan found it:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so

Microsoft Research publishes in LaTeX

2009-06-15T11:26:00.007+02:00

…as witnessed by this paper (and many more) I found linked on Heise Security.
It's declared a tech report and not published in a specific journal, so I imagine they could have used Word. We have to ask ourselves: are the Microsoft Research employees a bunch of faithless renegades?
I think not - because this is a pretty appalling example of LaTeX layout: A strange mixture of Computer Modern in the document body and Helvetica (?) in the section headings, capitalised headings, crowded pages, orphaned lines, horrendous bad boxes…
If this is an informal pre-print, I concede the orphans and bad boxes, but deliberately choosing a document style this ugly?
Now that's what I call partisanship.

Fres -- co -- bal -- di!

2009-06-04T14:55:00.012+02:00

Frescobaldi has a nifty tool for setting hyphens automatically in Lilypond lyrics. For this purpose it uses hyphenation dictionaries included in myspell, OpenOffice etc. As the locations for these resources vary between distributions, frescobaldi is likely to not find the dictionaries automatically: you have to set the paths by hand in Tools->Configure Frescobaldi…->Paths and, if you don't know the location, look for the hyphenation dics in the file list in YaST-> software. I had no luck with myspell (frescobaldi didn't list any languages), but after installing OpenOffice_org-hyphen I found appropriate files in /usr/share/ooo/hyphen and automatic hyphenation worked reasonably well (didn't hyphenate "buia" and couldn't do vowel slurs/elisions, of course).
Did I mention that I like Frescobaldi?

How to eject an iPod

2009-05-30T10:37:00.005+02:00

Archimedes is notoriously bad at automounting, which means that it's a bloody nuisance to play music from my iPod. The sound output from Archimedes' on-board audio is not that good anyway, so I just want to use the USB port to power the Universal Dock. The only problem is that Archimedes still grabs enough control over the iPod's disk for it to display the Connected. Eject before disconnecting message and not play any music, even though the drive doesn't show up as mounted.
How to eject it properly (see the comments here):
Find out which device the computer is using for the iPod with ls -l /dev/disk/by-id. Eject the pod with sudo eject /dev/sdd1. (replace "sdd1" appropriately)

How to align plasma widgets

2009-05-25T22:54:00.005+02:00

The discussion about how to best do plasma layouts is in full cry in the forums (e.g. here), so this is the foot soldiers' method to somehow uniformly scale and align plasma desktop widgets:

All geometry values are set in the ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc file (KDE4.3; 4.2 users take plasma-appletsrc).
The relevant entries have e.g. the following structure and can be identified by their plugin name:

[Containments][73][Applets][76]
geometry=1168.0,480.0,90.0,90.0
immutability=1
plugin=networkmanagement
zvalue=418

The geometry option specifies xposition, yposition, width, height. According to this (german) forum discussion zvalue handles foreground/background and transform specifies rotations. Adjust to your liking (those calculations could definitely be done by a script) and restart plasma as described here

Hey, I know that one!

2009-05-19T12:36:00.002+02:00

A problem apparently not confined to Windows.

Be careful with your KDE4 update

2009-05-19T11:01:00.014+02:00

…if you are using factory: openSuSE snuck in KDE4.3 β 1, and it has its snags. Shouldn't beta 1 be in the unstable repo?
Systray icons seem to be an all or nothing issue: while their display has greatly improved on Tisiphone, they are nearly unusable on Archimedes (try and find Kmail in the image above…). Akonadi keeps popping up an error message about not being able to connect to localhost on SuSE 10.3 for all KDE versions - the akonadi/PIM integration in KDE 4.2 is still being worked on according to the developers.

Tisiphone greets me with a plasma crash each time I log in; apart from that, most things work OK. Akonadi seemed to work here: no error messages and synced my Palm without more ado.
If you are not keen on KDE β, remove the Factory repos and switch to the new build service-KDE42 repo (thanks, daWuzzz). Downgrading from 4.3 was dependency-ridden and pretty ugly:

I recommend to log out and do this with the console YaST (yuck), as my KDE crashed mid-install after I foolishly confirmed an X message. Or do not click any OK buttons at all during installation.
I disabled KDE Factory and added the KDE 4.2 repo via one-click but cancelled the installation.
In YaST->Software->Search I selected everything containing "KDE" in title and summary and had YaST update (i.e. downgrade/reinstall) all packages unconditionally.
Unsolvable dependencies forced me to get rid temporarily of akonadi, kpilot, amarok, skanlite and a few associated libraries.
The system tray icons are still broken, which might be due to the old 10.3 distribution.

Regarding the broken icons: a few updates later (4.2. repo), the plasma desktop started crashing regardlessly, which eventually got me to delete all ~/.kde4/share/config/*plasma* files. Lo and behold: icons in the taskbar! (still the 4.1.x eyesore, but altogether usable)
However, the combination of SuSE 10.3 and KDE 4.3 seems to have persistent issues with the icon display, and considering the expiring lifetime of the 10.3 release, this will probably not be fixed. Consider an update to 11.1 (or wait for 11.2 in autumn)

Unison fails to set permissions

2009-05-11T14:13:00.004+02:00

Unison persistently refused to synchronise new files not present on one of the machines claiming:
"Failed to set permissions of file …" (different users, by the way).
The solution (found here) is to disable owner and permission setting in the corresponding ~/.unison/<theproject>.prf file. Add the lines
owner=false
perms=0
and you should be fine.

Pulseaudio - I'm lovin' it

2009-05-09T14:04:00.010+02:00

Freedom of choice is great - but SuSE 11.x definitely sports too many sound servers and backends. There is Pulseaudio (GNOME), Phonon (KDE4) and good old Alsa (just to name the most common ones), and I don't even want to try to understand how they work together or, actually, don't.
Repercussions on my system were that flash video in a browser doesn't play back properly as soon as any audio app is running, even with stopped playback. Sucks.
I decided to get rid of pulseaudio. You have to disable all pulseaudio support with
sudo setup-pulseaudio --disable
Afterwards, you can uninstall all pulseaudio packages, except for libpulse0, which seems to be a dependency of all sound-generating apps. This solved my problems for the moment.
For the Phonon/Pulseaudio discussion, see the disabling HowTo, Aaron Seigo's blog and the packaging mailing list.

GRUB and broken drivers

2009-05-07T20:03:00.005+02:00

Thanks to the automatic update I messed up my freshly installed openSuSE 11.1. i.e. when starting Xorg I got a black screen, also the consoles were no longer reachable because they stayed black as well. In case this happens to you (or you find another driver module troublesome) try to add

brokenmodule=fglrx

(or whatever you suspect to be the problem) in the GRUB command line. After doing so, I could boot into a visible console (YEAH!) and start a console yast in order to delete the magic fglrx driver...

matplotlib and PDF bounding boxes

2009-05-07T18:32:00.010+02:00

python-matplotlib can be a bit temperamental sometimes (at least 0.91). At the moment, I am preparing some figures to be included in a (PDF)LaTeX document, which should use correct fonts, math typesetting in the axis labels and a rather small figure size, so that I don't have to scale down in LaTeX, which would give me thin lines and tiny fonts. There is a very handy example in the SciPy Cookbook for all of that, which uses EPS output. No matter, pylab.savefig() also generates PDF when asked to do so - however, with little regard for the actual figure size, so usually the labels are cut off somewhere at the page border.
OK. EPS output and convert to PDF afterwards:
pylab.savefig('myfig.eps')
dum,my=os.popen('epstopdf myfig.eps')
A bit cumbersome; the converted eps figs look murky on some pdf viewers, but they print out OK.

TeXlive 2008

2009-05-02T18:07:00.013+02:00

… promises to offer some nice fixes: e.g., it disposes of the annoying "Page Group detected which pdfteX can't handle" message that comes with most OpenOffice or inkscape exported pdf figures (confirmed). Get it from the openSuSE:publishing repo. However, the openSuSE packagers removed the tlmgr (TeXlive update manager) utility, because it screws with the rpm database. (see this comment by tlmgr developer Norbert Preining). Completely understandable, but a bit of hard luck if you have to add packages not included in TeXlive. So you can either use the rpm-based TeXlive and install missing packages with mpm (remember to use the right install root and the fact that mpm doesn't manage packages installed by TeXlive), or install the tarball from TexLive and use tlmgr. Personally, I prefer the first option, I didn't gel with tlmgr, the GUI is an eyesore and uninstalling was a pest.
TeXlive 2008 is also only packaged for 11.0 upwards, so it's tar only for 10.3 and below.

The joys of plug and play

2009-04-25T19:14:00.004+02:00

Oh, that scanner. Well, apart from that, it works OK, albeit slow.

Getting PDF two-page views righted

2009-04-18T23:40:00.006+02:00

This has bugged me both in Okular and Adobe Reader: They are capable of displaying facing pages next to each other, but both display the first page on the left by default and all the following as they come, so individual pages are on the wrong side in standard books, where page 1 is on the right.
Annoying if you want to check layouts.

Adobe Reader solution: View->Page Display->Show Cover Page During Two-Up
Okular solution: Settings->Configure Okular…->General->Centre first page

I think all of this could be a little more intuitive.

Wireless trouble and more

2009-04-17T21:57:00.019+02:00

After some major update my wireless stopped working on Tisiphone (Samsung R55 Cavan, Intel 3945 chipset). Not good. wlan0 didn't even show up in the ifconfig output. dmesg showed some startup problems with the iwl3945 kernel module.
The solution was to remove the compat-wireless drivers, you don't need them for the Intel 3945 chip (Some other update tried to sneak them in again, so beware!)
On the way (rebooting at least once without a working X server), I found that I had both a default and a pae kernel, which was interesting (to put it mildly), the latter had accompanied the uvcvideo-kmp-default module. No idea why.
To top everything off, the uvcvideo, wacom and nvidia modules refused to work with each other's preferred kernel version, and I wondered how my system had been running before and what my webcam was doing with uvcvideo when I had championed gspca previously. No matter, I changed the driver to gspca-kmp-default (not in the default repos, search software.opensuse.com for it).
So finally I can film myself using the Wacom tablet with the webcam and stream that over wireless all at once - I'm so hip I can't see over my pelvis.

Sloooooooow printing

2009-03-31T18:19:00.003+02:00

...with our office HP LaserJet 1300n, especially for anything containing images, until I changed the printer model in YaST->Hardware to LaserJet 1300n hpijs with the corresponding .ppd file. See the OpenPrinting database for the differences between the postscript and hpijs drivers.

Empowering a Powerbook

2009-03-24T11:34:00.009+01:00

To make it kind of a challenge, the Powerbook Aluminum 12'' was addled by a small HD, a slightly bent case, little RAM and a coffee-soaked combo drive.
Good news: most standard notebook HDs, RAM and slot-in optical drives (remove the slot facing on the replacement drive) fit, and Linux ought to run OK an a New World ppc.
Specs (L*W*H, in mm): optical drive 129*128*12.7, HD 100*70*9.5 ATA, RAM: SO-DIMM PC333 (2700) DDR, only one slot.
Bad news: you have to disembowel your powerbook completely to get at the optical drive, including removing the mainboard, detaching the heat sink and managing over 50 ridiculously small screws. Hard disk replacement happens on the way. Check the ifixit guide.
Additional things to have at the ready: ground bracelet (exposed mainboard and processor, remember), tweezers for lost screws etc, thermal conductivity paste, a soldering iron (for accidentally ripped cable connectors). A big hammer. Patience. Bravery. Faith.
Actually, the ifixit guide comments the necessary removal of a few keyboard keys with: This is scary - take a deep breath before continuing. A few pages later, you get such laconic gems as Support the heat sink with both hands, and carefully lift it out of the computer, or Lift the logic board partly up from the optical side - without any further encouragement. God, I need a shrink now.
Tisiphone (Samsung R55 Cavan) got a hard drive upgrade parallelly: a matter of two screws and one cable…
After that, everything went OK: We left 50 GB for Linux in the Apple partitioner. By patiently pressing "C" during bootup, the Powerbook was persuaded to boot both a Kubuntu hardy ppc CD and a SuSE 11.1 ppc DVD, though we haven't got around to installing anything yet.

WTF???

2009-03-23T15:00:00.002+01:00

iPod Classic: not again the composer tag!

2009-03-22T22:29:00.014+01:00

I use to organise my largely classical mp3 library via Amarok: stored in a composer->album directory tree, sorted by composer tag, album art selected by the Amarok Cover Manager. Some folders contain old .m3u playlists.
Results of dumping the whole shebang onto my iPod via gtkpod:

Albums accessed by the Composer, Album etc. menus are played alphabetically by their title tags and not by track number (imagine a mass starting with the Agnus Dei).
Lots of albums apparently contain double entries.
Similarly named albums by different composers are merged (e.g. Faure's and Verdi's Requiems)
When I access an album from the cover flow, track numbers are kept. Still, albums are organised by artist, so I have to remember who conducted that damn piano concerto, and whether I didn't put the soloist up front after all.
Hardly any covers are transferred (they are mostly in the ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/albumcovers folder, after all).

So I decided to tweak a copy of my library into iPod compliance with a few scripts and tools.

Export all album art to the mp3 directory. I used the export-amarok-covers python script for that. Note that you have to get python-setuptools (available from packman) to use easy_install.
Remove .m3u playlists. File paths are likely to contain blank spaces, so I did it with
find . -name '*.m3u' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
from the mp3 root directory.
Find a nice id3 python lib. python-id3 only supports id3v1; eyeD3 can't edit composer tags. python-mutagen (also available from packman) is documented more or less OK and does what I want.
Tweak the id3 tags: Move the composer tag to artist and include composer and track number in the title tag. Cf. the python script.
For any tag issues not sorted out, get a good editor. mp3tag is self-explanatory and runs great on Wine (not v2.42 though, get 2.39).
Get GTKpod to transfer the album art. Edit->Preferences->Metadata/Track info-> Add cover art using file name template. Set the template to cover.png. I have different versions of GTKpod and one keeps forgetting about the template, so check it before synchronising.
Synchronise and enjoy.

PS: Apparently there is some encoding problem with id3 tags written on a linux machine, e.g. by the python script or amaRoK when you transfer them onto a regular player like my Sansa Clip. Tags are read falsely or not at all which results in jumbled playing orders and no album groupings.
A workaround would be to install mp3tag with wine and let it batch re-encode them.

Apple is not that nice.

2009-03-16T16:13:00.029+01:00

Apple sells slick high-quality hardware and software combining usability and eye candy admirably. It's hip. It's not Microsoft.
Thus, we are tempted to confuse the cuddly guys from Cupertino with some kind of universal messianic benefactors - and forget they can be pretty evil and patronising, too.

Macbooks run only at half-speed when you remove the battery "This prevents the computer from shutting down if it demands more power than the A/C adaptor alone can provide." Besides, you might accidentally detach the maglock. I still fail to see the method behind this madness. How about a maglock arresting switch :-p And I haven't seen a laptop yet exceed its A/C adaptor - Macbooks are not exactly high-performance machines anyway.
Expensive spare parts - and pretty gruesome to take apart.
What on earth does one need a power cord for? OK, we all know the iPod just has the USB connector cable. That the Universal Dock, which is specified as a standalone charging station, comes without any cable, is a tad brazen.
Speaking of the dock: it ships with the Apple remote sporting a "Menu" button which has no effect on an iPod, because it's for FrontRow. Maybe the remote hardware guys could talk to the people developing the iPod firmware about that - they happen to work just around the corner. OK, right: Menu without clickwheel is a bit pointless - but couldn't the button do something?
Persistently ignoring the USB standard. Hang 'em high - with their own connector cables, preferrably.
iTunes. Said enough.
The new Shuffle and the headphone issue. BoingBoing Gadgets seriously suspects Apple of scheming for world domination. Well, good luck against Google.

I suppose my next computer will still not be an Apple machine - although I'm severely tempted each time I see a Macbook Pro.

Frescobaldi on SuSE 10.3/KDE 4.2

2009-03-16T12:15:00.012+01:00

I love the music typesetting language lilypond, but I was missing a powerful editor for it - never got the hang of denemo (might be because I can't play midi keyboards). Last week I found out about frescobaldi, which blew me away completely.
It started off as a Kate plugin, but is by now a fully-fledged Kile-like editor for KDE4 written in Python with lots of goodies.
Tarball installation on 11.1 worked OK, on 10.3 I ran into some problems with the dbus-1-python>0.82.4 requirement (availability: 0.82.0 from official, 0.83.0 from user repos): cmake either complained about the wrong version (0.82.0), or missed the python dbus and dbus.mainloop.qt modules (0.83.0). In the end, I got the dbus-1-python-0.82.4-49.1.src.rpm (11.0 repo, but doesn't matter), ran rpmbuild and installed (you need to have pyrex installed). Cmake ran OK after that.
With frescobaldi 0.7.7 and later, make complained
No rule to make target `/usr/share/kde4/apps/ksgmltools2/customization/kde-chunk.xsl'
and exited. This was due to kdelibs4-doc not being on the system. After that, the error message changed to
/bin/sh: KDE4_MEINPROC_EXECUTABLE-NOTFOUND: command not found,
which is due to cmake just not finding meinproc (/usr/bin/meinproc4). See this message from Frescobaldi developer Wilbert Behrensen.
This worked:
cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(kde4-config --exec-prefix) -DKDE4_MEINPROC_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/meinproc4

NB: Uninstalling frescobaldi is a bit of a pest, as there is no script for it. However, all files are listed in install-manifest.txt.
Here is a primitive shell script rm_lines.sh to remove all files in a list file:

#!/bin/bash
exec < $1
while read line
do
rm $line
echo $line deleted
done

Make it executable and run sudo sh rm_lines.sh install_manifest.txt (all in the frescobaldi install folder). If you want to remove frescobaldi permanently from your system, you might also want to delete the /usr/share/kde4/apps/frescobaldi and /usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/frescobaldi folders.

Webcam adventures

2009-03-08T14:19:00.011+01:00

Buy and install:
A few years ago, video skyping under linux would have been completely unthinkable. Just one more reason for me to finally get a webcam and test skype-2.0's video capabilities. Model: Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Deluxe, which is reported to work more or less with both the gspca and the uvcvideo driver - and not too expensive, either.
I installed uvcvideo-kmp-default and libv4l in YaST, rebooted, camera was not found (kopete, skype), so I replaced uvcvideo with the gspcav-kmp-default driver. That worked.
Testing:
Skype video support worked out-of-the-box on all systems, but the preview window is too small for self-testing. There are several webcam viewers for linux, but those were mostly incredibly old, didn't work with the camera or refused to install altogether (spent a wonderful hour resolving ruby dependencies with webKam).
kdetv displayed something (see image) on Archimedes (SuSE 10.3) after enabling the video4linux plugin (Settings->configure kdetv…->Video). Setting the Grab & Display Method to X11 (with shared memory) under Configure selected plugin… definitely improved the colour space.
On Tisiphone (11.1), I had no luck with kdetv at all, however, the Kopete viewer worked faultlessly. Oh, well…

Installing cb2Bib on openSuSE

2009-03-04T03:00:00.004+01:00

Today I discovered cb2Bib, a very useful tool for extracting BibTeX data from clipboard contents or PDF papers. It doesn't work perfectly (get real, how could it), but might save a lot of tedious copy and paste if combined with JabRef.
Only hitch during installation: Only src RPM available, rpmbuild complained about not finding qmake/qt4, which is understandable, as I hadn't installed libqt4-devel, which provides it. Afterwards everything worked flawlessly.
# rpmbuild --rebuild cb2bib-1.2.0-1.src.rpm
# rpm -Uhv /usr/src/packages/RPMS/x86_64/cb2bib-1.2.0-1.x86_64.rpm
The resulting GUI is mainly self-explanatory point-and-click.

KDE on Windows

2009-03-03T12:08:00.007+01:00

Starting with KDE 4, the KDE Team has ported a sizeable part of KDE to Windows.

Stuff working out-of-the box: Kate, KDEEdu, Kile starts. Windows/KDE relies on Qt4, so you actually get a preview of the upcoming Kile 2.1/KDE4. Compiling works (...). Some bug: Exiting and restarting Kile fails if you don't kill all KDE processes via the Task Manager inbetween.
needs some work: Amarok crashes at startup, caused by the Librivox plugin. Solution: edit ~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc.
[Plugins]
Librivox.orgEnabled=false
I had some trouble finding my .kde directory on Vista: C:\Users\myusername\AppData\Roaming\.kde

A very impressive feat by the KDE team. Made me realise again how much I hate Vista.

Spring cleaning: Find big directories

2009-02-28T23:37:00.013+01:00

du is a tool listing directory tree sizes. Simple du produces tons of console output, so we reduce the search depth (anything below is summed up anyway), run it through grep to exclude small dirs and pipe it to a file.
du -h --max-depth=2 | grep '^[5-9][0-9]\{2\}M\|[0-9]G' > listfile.txt

-h for human: lists sizes in G, M, and K. Important for grep search. Change the max. search depth to your liking.
Grep string: searches for 500-999M at the beginning of the line or anything containing a number and 'G', thus anything over 500MB. See this link for grep reg. expressions. "\|" is the grep "or" operator, btw.
If you want a graphical tool, try KDirStat (it's also in the openSuSE main repo). It's a bit old, but works well on KDE 3 and 4.

No microphone recording with Skype (and elsewhere)

2009-02-28T21:38:00.031+01:00

I had made several not very earnest attempts to place Skype calls from openSuSE, which failed on three different machines (a Samsung R55, an ASRock and an Asus board) as the microphone was not recording anything. Sound output worked. Three things to check:

Sound volume settings in YaST: I had Mic actually down to zero because of some feedback noise in my Line out. Also, look at the channel settings in the alsamixer console tool - the YaST mixer doesn't list all channels. Check whether the capture is set to the right channel and whether any volume is 0 that shouldn't.
The 'Sound in' Default device setting in Skype menu->Options->Sound devices didn't work. I had to choose an explicit device (took the first in the list at random) to record anything. No idea what Skype supposes the default device to be. With 'Sound out' the default setting works fine. This did it for Archimedes.
This affects microphone input in general (check 10 s recording from a shell with arecord -d 10 test.wav, or audacity). Sometimes ALSA assumes a wrong model for your sound card or codec.
Get the necessary information from arecord -l:
card 0: M5461 [HDA ULI M5461], device 0: ALC861 Analog [ALC861 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Edit /etc/modprobe.d/sound:
options snd slots=snd-hda-intel
# MZfG.1be8IFnUvYA:High Definition Audio/AC'97 Host Controller
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=asus-laptop
If you use a different codec or soundcard model, check the codec list in ALSA-Configuration.txt. Actually, try all possible options until it works: for Xanthippe's ASRock 939 desktop board (ULI M5461 chip with ALC861/660 driver) the 'asus-laptop' option worked, while 'auto' didn't.
I restarted the module with su -c 'rcalsasound restart'
Here, KDE wanted to forget about some allegedly removed devices: I opted cautionarily against it (it's KDE 4 Factory, after all). KMix was shot down and had to be restarted by hand. Skype and Audacity recording performed faultlessly, arecord was a bit thin and noisy (I can live with that). Did it for Xanthippe and Tisiphone.
Try the diagnostics offered in this forums.opensuse thread or the openSuSE SDB. Note that tsalsa is available as a Packman package.
If nothing helps: A cheap USB external sound card might do the trick.

Even Macbooks do crash

2009-02-24T21:12:00.020+01:00

A friend of mine brought her 2-year-old Macbook with the hard disk in a sorry state and asked us to salvage some files she hadn't backed up yet.
Lots of things to learn:

Should have got and used dd_rhelp right away, even if it's not installed by default and dd_rescue is. 5 minutes googling, d'oh. It tackles the really damaged sectors only at the very end: considering that those are usually not usable anyway, you can abort after a few hours and still have a mountable image.
Where is that hard drive anyway? (see the ifixit Guide)
running a ssh daemon on Knoppix: go to the Knoppix menu->Services->SSH daemon. Knoppix prompts you for a password for the user "knoppix", ssh runs on the standard port. I am a bit uncomfortable about that for security reasons: with a standard user name on a standard port, the only thing that keeps others from breaking in is your password - make it strong! You should definitely set a root password (also in the Knoppix menu).
Trying to log in from home, I got a refusal accompanied by a "IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!" warning about a man-in-the-middle attack with a changed RSA key. This was due to the fact that the ssh daemon on the non-live system used a different RSA key and the daemon employs strict checking. I removed the host and key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts and accepted the new key at the next try.
getting dd_rhelp to run on Knoppix: it's not installed by default. Get it from here, any version >0.1.0 will do. I extracted it right in the directory I wanted to write the image in, it's a shell script, so it runs out-of-the-box with
./dd_rhelp /dev/sdxy image.iso
(Any compiling instructions out there refer to older versions)
screen is awesome: As I had started dd_rhelp from a ssh session, I wanted to keep the process running after closing down the ssh session. Here, screen is the solution, where you can manage lots of virtual shells at once. It's installed by default at least on Knoppix and OpenSuSE. Running screen (root shell) on Knoppix got me "Directory '/var/run/screen' must have mode 755." at first, but chmod 0755 /var/run/screen solved that issue.
I started the session with screen, acknowledged the greeter message with <Space> and started dd_rescue in the shell appearing after that. I detached the shell with <Ctrl+A> <D> (message [detached]).logged out and shut down the remote machine. I reconnected later via ssh and got the screened session back with screen -r.
I ran photorec next: lots of unsorted, renamed and mostly fragmented files. Definitely a start, though.
mounting and checking hfs+: The native tools for openSuSE seem to be the hfstools including hpfsck (no, there is no standard fsck.hfsplus). I don't know whether this has changed by now, but a number of web discussions report hfstools as badly maintained and indeed hpfsck had no clue about the disk image. Darwin's diskdev_cmds seem to be better, so I got them as described here. The opendarwin links didn't work for me, so I got the packages after some googling from a Gentoo repo. However, any mount attempts failed spectacularly (figures…); I set up the image as a loop device and ran fsck.hfsplus:
losetup /dev/loop0
fsck.hfsplus -rfd /dev/loop0
Still no luck, errors: "Catalog file entry not found for extent" … "volume check failed with error 7". Googling got me the Mac OS disk volume structure overview. Damaged catalog file. Bummer. Last resort seems to be Disk Warrior, which is Mac OS only and costs 100$.
Reassembling sucks: This machine doesn't want you to screw around with it. After accidentally detaching one of the small rubber guides in the narrow drive bay (it coiled up right in front of the SATA connectors), I attempted to remove the back cover, which is actually worse than assembling an IKEA wardrobe. In the end, I got the drive in with a combination of perseverance, pliers and praying.

KDE surprises

2009-02-13T12:02:00.007+01:00

On my desktop I keep a slightly experimental system (no SuSE 11.1 though, due to Compiz issues), including KDE Factory. Last night Xanthippe greeted me with a noticeable KDE makeover - hiding icons in the system tray, button grouping in the task bar and a pretty transparent copying progress dialog. At that point I grew suspicious and checked my KDE version, which was in fact KDE 4.2.0, which has been released on Jan 27. Lots of features I am itching to try out: integrated power management, more and improved desktop effects, a configuration makeover, revamped Dolphin and file dialogs, a new krunner… check out the visual guide.

We seem to have a case of the old KDE4/openSuSE dilemma (compare the 4.0 to 4.1 switch): Major new KDE versions are shipped with new OS releases and are kept in Factory (unsupported) more or less up to the release date. While this is very reasonable from a developer's point of view, it's a bit hard on the user: at the moment, every KDE release is significantly more stable and complete than its predecessor, while the KDE and openSuSE release cycles are shifted by half a year. At the moment, KDE4:Factory provides a nice and apparently stable KDE 4.2 at the price of a few resolvable package conflicts, but you have to keep in mind that it's still a development snapshot and might land you with 4.1.3 beta at some point in the future.
Understandably, the developers wouldn't want to move the whole community to an unsupported KDE 4.2 right now, but couldn't they copy the KDE 4.2 stable release from the Factory repo to a separate branch at this point?

Catalyst 9.1 (fglrx 8.573) - I believe in miracles…

2009-02-12T00:54:00.007+01:00

…and fairies…the Easter Bunny…Santa Claus…whatever. ATI has finally managed to release a graphics driver capable of running compiz and flicker-free video at the same time, well… most of the time. Same procedure as always (see this post), tested with openSuSE 11.0_x64, compiz 0.78, AIGLX and a Radeon X1300 card.
Kaffeine and the mplayerplug-in still have displaying troubles sometimes (video shifted, distorted, interspersed with GUI elements), but given a large choice of media players one usually finds one that works - and I haven't seen a system freeze yet.
ATI is teaching real Epicurean values here: keep your standards low, and you might get lots of pleasant surprises.

Mplayerplug-in and Quicktime cause Firefox to segfault

2009-01-18T18:54:00.006+01:00

I can't remember quite when the mplayerplug-in started to kill firefox when playing Quicktime movies (doesn't affect WMV, by the way). They haven't updated the plugin for ages, so I suspect either a firefox update, new Quicktime codecs or some general SuSE 11.1-ness. Setting full debug in /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf didn't help, as it crashed before generating a single line of debugging output.
Quick fix: switched to gecko-mediaplayer, which is also a mplayer front end, according to its YaST description still under heavy development, but seems to run stable enough for now.

It had to be just the right kind of Java…

2009-01-18T02:30:00.002+01:00

More fun with JabRef and the AWT toolkit. Starting JabRef by java -jar JabRef-2.4.2.jar got me a string of errors and no GUI:
ERROR while starting or running JabRef:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class java.awt.Toolkit
The reason for this appears to be that openSuSE uses the non-proprietary OpenJDK Java runtime by default, while you need Sun's JRE for JabRef to work (available in the non-oss repo).
Check with java -version - if it says "OpenJDK" instead of "Java(TM)", you need to switch the packages in YaST or zypper.

Insufficient CD/DVD drive permissions on openSuSE 11.1

2009-01-17T23:48:00.017+01:00

One of those "I should have known..." posts. I just could not get my flu-addled brain to google the problem and, I am ashamed to confess, watched DVDs on Vista instead.

Audio CDs and video DVDs were displayed in Konqueror, but not played (and yes, I had all the codecs).
K3b warned me about not having a burner.
wodim --devices found nothing.

This has made the most-annoying-bug list on opensuse.org, and the developers keep bickering in the bugzilla comments. The most popular workaround seems to be to add your user to the disk group, which works, but poses an ugly security risk: disk members have raw access to all hard drives.
Pawel Stolowski on the bugzilla thread suggests changing the group ownership to cdrom for all optical drives in the udev rules:

add your user to the cdrom group in YaST->Users and Groups.
create (sudo) a file 99-my.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ containing this line:
KERNEL=="sr*[0-9]", GROUP="cdrom", MODE="0660"
reboot

Worked for me. There seems to be an upcoming hal etc. patch by Danny Kukawa, which ought to sort out the problem. Oh, and other cynical bastards like me out there might derive some guilty amusement from the troll wars in the bug thread.

openSuSE 11.1 - cool stuff and quirks

2008-12-23T11:35:00.023+01:00

A small list of what we like and don't like about openSuSE 11.1:

Like

A surprisingly eloquent shell: If I try to use a package not yet installed, information is provided in which repo the package might be found and which syntax to install it with.
If I am not root and try to use something from sbin, the fact is reported back and I am politely requested to get superuser privileges.
"Command not found" means exactly: you don't have this on your system and it's not in the repos.
Suspend to RAM and disk works OK, at reasonable speed. Even the wireless chip wakes up again, although I have to reconnect manually (auto-connect disabled) in both cases. At some point my system even went into some Vista-inspired auto suspend mode.
A lot of things do work, actually (before this gets too negative). Lots of others require some fiddling. Haven't chucked it yet.

Don't like

The amount of KDE3 left: Konqueror is installed for both KDE3 and 4, there are only KDE3 versions of Kate and Kwrite (and I really liked the KDE4 versions…). Install kde4-kate and kde4-kwrite.
First install (default): no compiz. Second install (replaced compiz from X11:Compiz repo): compiz kept crashing. Third install. Removed compiz from the initial selection, installed it afterwards from X11:Compiz. Worked satisfactorily until I tried to update... Actually, this seems to be an old problem - see this discussion. So, if you have a working compiz, better keep it.
If you use the KNetworkManager to handle different connections, ifup/ifdown is blocked. In theory, it's not a bad idea to cleanly separate the two, but then the KNetworkManager has to function reliably. It doesn't.
Talk about clean separation: To use DHCP in the ifup config I set "Modify DNS configuration" to "Only manually". As a result, KNetworkManager didn't accept static DNS settings any more. Installing a vpnc client disabled DNS resolution completely.

Things to note

Yast logging: /var/log/YaST2/y2logRPM is gone. According to this bug report, it's been replaced by
# save_y2logs <somename>.tar.gz
Actually, this just archives the /var/log/YaST2 and /var/log/zypp directories, still no y2logRPM. Try
# sudo tail -n 100 /var/log/zypp/history
Logs all YaST calls to zypper.
More fun with YaST/Software: some repos are identified by their zypper aliases like repo_1 etc. Not very conclusive, you have to look the real names up with
$ zypper repos