Gnome-shell in Ubuntu 9.10

Even though gnome-shell is really only a preview of what is to come for gnome 3.0 and it's still buggy and sometimes not completely stable perhaps, I really like it.

When I first saw the screenshots I was less then impressed, I thought it didn't at all look like anything new or innovative, but rather messy and confusing. But me being ever interested in new things and all I just had to give it a try (the gnome-panel look was starting to bore me).

Installing was easy

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

and starting it afterwards was easy too

gnome-shell -r

Though first I had to disable compiz, which I don't really use anyway.
I was also using avant-window-navigator, which disappeared on me but still kept part of my notification area to itself. So the time after that I first closed AWN and all was as it should be.

I didn't feel like having to manually start gnome-shell every time I logged in so I started looking into a way to replace metacity and gnome-panel with gnome-shell and found that this could be done by editing you gconf (with, for example, gconf-editor) and setting the /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager key from metacity to gnome-shell.

Of course, since it is a composited window manager you need a video card and driver that can handle screen compositing.

Convert .VOB to .WMV with ffmpeg in Linux

A fairly simple command gets the job done:

ffmpeg -i filename.vob -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -sameq -s 720x576 filename.wmv

Quick mail post

Linux has an excellent command: mail, now who can guess what it does?

Anyway, I was searching how to send something with this today even though I've looked at this before, it somehow got screwed up.
We only have mail on our server (and sendmail, but that seems way more complicated) and we need to send an attachment and have a sender address.

After looking around for a while I found this:

uuencode $writefile $readfile |\
mail -s "$subject" $recipient -- -r "$sender"

sorry if you don't like the use of variables in explanations, but this seemed easiest.

$writefile	is the filename as the person recieving the email will see it (can be same as $readfile)
$readfile	is the filename as it is stored on your hard drive
$subject	is of course the subject of the mail you are sending
$recipient	is the email address of the person you're sending it to
$sender	is the email address that others will see in the From: field in their mail

uuencode should encode the file so that it will show as an attachment instead of just binary giberish or plain text, but for me, in thunderbird, this doesn't work.
the '|' of course means that you're using the left command as input for the right one
and mail is the mail command.

My walk around the block

About a week ago I got fed-up with Zenwalk. I had a stint of trying to install software from source and I had some less-then-encouraging results, since many things just didn't build and some didn't build and didn't even give a reason why.



I started looking for alternatives. I tried to avoid Fedora in the beginning, but that didn't last long, since it is one of few mainstream distributions that features gnome as it's standard window manager.



I tried installing Mandriva with gnome first. Though since it got stuck in the initial phase of the installation, before I even selected a single package or anything, that effort was put a stop to quite quickly.



Then I thought about Arch Linux, since I'd already downloaded the install CD anyway, but as I started installing it I changed my mind.

I ended up installing Fedora 10 at that moment, which of course gave me grief over my video card, not allowing me to go beyond a 1024x786 resolution. Eventually I got it fixed though, but then after a few days I wanted to install MP3 and other non-free things such as win32 codecs and such, but then I rebooted my computer and it wouldn't start anymore. So I gave up on fedora too.



I then tried Gentoo, I have been working with Linux for a little over a year now and I thought it might be interesting to build it from near-scratch, and it was. But after going through the entire installation process with documentation and failing to get Xorg to work, I stepped off that train and moved on again.



I got to Arch Linux again, this time I actually went through the trouble of installing it and running it. Again though, the Xorg setup is what killed it, since it's documentation was not up to par with Gentoo.



I also tried g:Noblin, but since it didn't recognise my very generic 3-button mouse, it got thrown in the trash bin too...



Finally I got back to Zenwalk again. I installed it, it feels very comfortable to be back. This time I installed the gnome version, only to find out that it has just been cut-off from support since the guy maintaining the gnome parts had a fight with another guy and got kicked off. I hope he comes back or someone takes his place because I just can't deal with xfce.

During install I did have a few fatal errors installing certain packages, but fortunately I know enough to seemingly fix most of them.



The grass always seems greener on the other side, but when you actually go there you find out that it wasn't so bad where you were.

If I get fed up with Zenwalk again, then my only other option will become Ubuntu most likely, and even though it's very user friendly and all, but I feel it is too easy, I don't feel I will learn much from it. Besides, having it on my work laptop is enough for me, I'd prefer to use something else on my home computer.

Zenwalk: Logitech Quickcam Pro for Notebooks

After days of searching and dead end results I have finally been able to install my Logitech Quickcam Pro for Notebooks in Zenwalk.
It is surprising what kind of (old) junk you have to go through (like qc-usb, pwc and gspca) to find out that there is actually a universal driver that is integrated in most modern linux kernels.

So, today I finally found out that UVC is the way to go for my 0x46d:0x991 webcam. I checked compatibilities here.
If you're not quite sure which camera exactly you have you can always check by opening a terminal and typing:

/sbin/lsusb

Which will result in all devices that are hooked up to your USB hubs to be listed. This would be my webcam, and yours most likely would be similar:

Bus 005 Device 002: ID 046d:0991 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro for Notebooks

if you take a look at this line you will see the name and the ID of your webcam.



All I had to do was download the uvc drivers from here, and then type:

tar -xzvf uvcvideo-5ba3bf58b52d.tar.gz
cd uvcvideo-5ba3bf58b52d
make
su
[password]
make install
modprobe uvcvideo

after which I saw that I finally had a /dev/video0 file, meaning succes!



Skype did not yet respond to it though, so I edited my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file to modprobe uvcvideo every time zenwalk starts and I rebooted, and it seems to work fine now, Skype finds it and shows an image when I press test which even moves.



You might need to install the kernel source packages for this to work, you can find these with netpkg, called kernelsource. I've tried 3 other drivers before finding this one so it got a bit messy in the end.

Zenwalk: Intel 82801G NIC

I have recently made a switch from Fedora to Zenwalk 5.2 Linux and today I got my internet connection (YAY).



Turned on my computer and to my surprise Zenwalk didn't recognize my ethernet card (an Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) LAN Controller, as I found out by starting an old Live Fedora cd I still had lying around, though later I found out I could have used the command 'lspci -v' aswell).



I looked around a little and found out I had to start the mii and e100 modules in order to get it working, which worked, but then I still needed them to be loaded at startup.
This time around for as much and as long as I can I want to do thing right, I don't want this linux ending up the same way that my Ubuntu has and my Fedora had where I didn't know what was installed where or how.



Looking around a little I found out that you should edit the file /etc/rc.d/rc.modules to include these 2 modules at startup.



So, if you're having this same trouble that I'm having, all you need to do is edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file:

su
[enter password]
vi /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

(I use vi but you can of course use any editor you like)

and then add or uncomment the lines:

/sbin/modprobe e100
/sbin/modprobe mii

And that should get it working again for you.

Gfire on Fedora 9

Updating or installing software that does not come from the regular rpm repositories can be a big pain in Fedora. Especially if you don't have a lot of experience, like me.
I've only been using Linux for a few months now, and I don't have the time to find everything out from the beginning, I'm just doing what I can when I need to.



Now today I wanted to update my version of gfire, since I hadn't in a while and it had been acting up. Most likely since every time xfire updates it changes something in it's protocols which make all other things just act wacky.



I went to the website and downloaded the RPM, which started complaining about missing a certain rpmlib. This told me that I might be using an older version of RPM (which I found out after some googling), so I updated my system in the hopes of getting a new version of the RPM package manager, but alas this was not to be.

Found out later in the gfire forums that it was because the RPMs they offer are made for Suse.



Somewhere along this path I had already tried installing it from source, but the source files kept complaining that the pidgin package was not installed, even though it was.



The fix in the end was simple.

If you are having the same troubles as me then just install pidgin-devel and libpurple-devel and try to configure/make/install. This worked for me, it might too for you.

su -c "yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel
or
sudo yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel

Depending on which you prefer to use.

And then to install gfire from source go to where you extracted the source files (for me this was '~/Download/gfire/gfire-0.7.1/' and type:

su -c "./configure;make;make install"
or
sudo ./configure;sudo make;sudo make install