New cycle

It’s been a while without a post… I don’t want to post just for the sake of it. With this blog I wanted, and I still want to share with other people what I like, discover from them and vice versa. As the title of the post assume it seems that I don’t have  that much “free-time” anymore.So I decided to organize my work. By doing so, I will let this blog be  dealing with the open-source world and my other hobbies. And on the other side, I’m actually putting up another blog/web-site for my “professional” projects. That said, I’m going to post weekly a little recap about the most important news in the open-source world (of course important is relative to me :p) . With this I hope to keep this blog up for a little while.

Till the next post then

 

Qt training tutorials

Hi everyone , I’m passing by as fast as I can (If there were some kind of Dopler effect you would have noticed it ).

Anyways here is a link to a site called ICS Network . What’s special about it is that it holds interesting Qt ressources. Under the Learning Center tab you can find Video tutorials and white papers , seminar and trainig courses you can attend depending on where you live on this planet .

Hope this will be helpful to you as it has been to me.

 

Debugging using gdb

Again I didn’t manage to put post I i’ve been busy elsewhere, sorry about that. But here is a new post about gdb. Gdb stands for GnuDebugger. If your using Linux/Unix systems it’s a must have tool. I’ve come throught a segmentation fault and it really helped me finding where the problem where coming from. So here are two links if you want to give it a try

• Installing gdb .

• A tutorial about gdb

Here are two screen-shots of me using gdb (still debugging T_T)

gdb edit command in visual mode

 

Linux Media Centers

Well here I am again, it’s been a hole week without a post. I feel sorry about that T_T ( been kinda busy with lot of stuff ). So what else ? Well wondering around the web I found some very intersting Linux media center distros and apps here is a little list , some projects are still young but if you have time give them a try

For first : GeexBox it’s a pretty nice media center distros that comes out in live-cd and can be installed on the hard driver as well on usb key, I tried this one about 2 years ago and I was satisfied. I’m gonna suerly give it a try sometimes soon. Here is the official descritption a pretty long one that defines somehow a media center distros :

GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.

GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows developers adding easily extra packages and features but that might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded Linux systems.

Then we have Linux MCE, this is the official description as it comes in the main page :

LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Kubuntu including a 10′ UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.

Another linux media center is Elisa as the previous one here how they officially describe it :

Elisa is an open source cross-platform media center connecting the Internet to an all-in-one media player.They have a pretty nice web site

The next one is XBMC, it is a multiplatform and what is special about it is that it comes for XBOX as well, again the official description :

XBMC is your one stop shop for all your media. Be it music, videos, pictures, streams, online radio or optical discs, XBMC can handle it and manage it for you and best of all, it’s free!

I hope this will be helpful for you if you’re looking at making a media center system

 

Blogs and sites I love

The title says it all so no more waiting let the drum rolls:

At first http://fracturedpsyche.wordpress.com/ a very nice blog if you look for something interesting go ahead you won’t regret it .

Then we have this one a linux blogs listing you will find great blogs over there .

And other two blog for Apple fanboys or fangirls : one and two they are pretty nice .

Another one ? Ok here is a site for all Japanese technology fans its called Akihabaranews after The famous Tokyo District known for it’s … well if you want to buy some good new technology stuff there you should go .

Hmm ok ok I’ll give you another one : a blog of a french that lives in Japan he actually founded a family and works there as a Photograph Journalist . He does works for the Akihabaranews sites and others Check it out , By the way it’s in french , but check it out anyways you got to love the photogaphic skills of the author .

And the last one will be tuxmachine.org : It’s a great linux web site news blogs and forum and other nice stuff.

That’s it for this session hope you enjoy .

 

Adding emoticons in KDE4.1

Hmm while I was trying to find out about why not all the emoticons sent in Pidgin (even the official Tango theme) or Kopete, I found out an easy way to add emoticons in KDE. The thing is that it works for kopete only it seems .

Go to the personal settings

personal setting

Then head over to the apperance, and from there to the emoticon tab .

adding new emoticons set

After that click the add new themes button and you will be connected to kde-look.org emoticons .You can choose your favorite ones and install them easly. Or you can install from a downloaded file on make your own. I did choose the onion-head ones from the kde-look.org emoticons .

Now go ahead to the kopete configure pannel as shown below:

Kopete configuration menu

As you can see the theme has been added, now enjoy your new emoticons

 

Mint Linux and Sabayon

These two linux distros are more friendly user than other distros .This doesn’t mean that other distros aren’t friendly user but these are more.Both distros are live-cd or live-dvd with the possibility to install on hard drive .

The first look will be for the linux mint distro. It’s based upon Ubuntu and what makes it a special distros is of course that it’s more friendly user than ubuntu. Mint Linux is available in different graphical environment such as KDE, Gnome, XFCE, FluxBox as you can see in the scree-shot below .

What is special about this distros is that they provide utilities that helps making the end user experience more comfortable by adding utilities that helps the users to configure their systems easly such as MintDesktop , Mintupdate and MintInstall . You can get more info from their web site and if you want check this PDF manual guide for Mint .

The sabayon distros is based upon gentoo linux distro, the special thing ubout this distros is that it comes already with software packages that aren’t usually per default installed like skype google earth and a bunch of games  drivers, and the required media codecs . It’s desktop experience isn’t that great like mint but it’s got it’s own flavor, it just my personal opinion. About the live-dvd it is really intersting since you can boot with different option like anonymous web surfing or media center such as geexbox .If you want a complete distros out of the box without the need to install any additional software this distro is what you need . Here is a link to get more informations about this distro .

Be sure to check out these two great linux distribution .

 

Hands on KDE 4.1

Yeah I got my hands on the new KDE desktop version How I did well ? quiet simply and easly  by clicking :

It’s from the OpenSuse 11 site so I don’t know if it works for other distribution (I didn’t take time to learn about it :p ) Anyways, if it works for other distros  than OpenSuse please let me know . Other than that, the change from the last official version for the end users are great. The hole experience is great. Now the plasma engine works smoothly . Strange thing I’ve noticed a huge leap in the 3D performance, I’m using the ATI propriatary driver by the way and it works fine. The compositing effects that comes with KDE4 have also seen their performace increased ( Is it related to the fact that all the 3D acceleration has been more effective ?). By the way if you want to install new widgets it’s been made a lot more easy.You just have to click install new Widgets and that’s it.I don’t know why but after the install the new widgets don’t come up in the list, quiet sad. Anyways the installation of new features has been made easy for the hole Desktop , like the splach screen, the icons the emoticons the colors, and surely I forgot some.

By the way I noticed the nepomuck wich comes with strigi, you can find it in the system setting in the advanced tab.

This features allow tagging and rating files as well as semantically searching files. Quiet a nice feature

 

Pidgin : adding emoticons

Yesterday I tought of adding emoticons to pidgin, the onion head ones .So this is how I did .

Go to this directory /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/emotes.

Should be logged in as root so you can add a folder to this directory, in this case I named it onion .

Put your emoticons in here ( The folder you’ve just created ).

Create a text file called theme in the same folder .

Now go back to the parent directory and open one existing folder for exemple the Tango folder .

Copy and paste the contents of the theme text file in the Tango folder in your own theme file.

Tweak it ( your theme file ) According to your own emoticons name and your own shortcut

Here is the exemple of my theme file .

Name=onion
Description=onion_head
Icon=sol.gif
Author=http://www.onion-club.net/

[default]

shy.gif O:)

sol.gif -_-

study.png o_o

bye.gif bye

onion added

You can notice that the icon showed in this window is ” Icon=sol.gif ” from the theme file .

I hope this will help you getting you favorite emoticons into Pidgin.

By the way here is a site were you can find a lot of stuff about the onion head :

http://www.onion-club.net/

Update : It’s sad but it seems that even tought the onion emoticons are properly added when sent only text is visible for the receiver. I’ll try to figure out a solution If that’s is possible. If it worked out for you please leave a comment. And I apologize for the ones that are or were disapointed by this little first how to . I’ll try to make it up .

 

KDE 4.1 release date.

It seems that KDE4.1 has been set to release on the 29th of July. As they mention on the site this date is subject to revision. I hope they will get it in time so I can enjoy this Desktop Environment . Here is the complete schedules as mentionned on the site as I’m writting these lines .

July 8th, 2008: Artwork and Bindings Freeze

All artwork is frozen on this date. No new artwork should be added. Existing artwork can continue to be tweaked and fixed.

No new additions to the language bindings, except optional bindings as permitting by the kde-bindings team.

July 8th, 2008: Tag KDE 4.1 RC 1

Trunk is frozen for RC 1 release tagging. Only urgent fixes, such as those fixing compilation errors, should be committed.

July 15th, 2008: Release KDE 4.1 RC 1

RC 1 becomes available for general consumption. Incoming bugs will be reviewed for their severity. Additional release candidates will be created as needed.

July 22nd, 2008: Tag KDE 4.1

Assuming there is only one release candidate, trunk is frozen for KDE 4.1 tagging. Only urgent fixes, such as those fixing compilation errors, should be committed.

July 29th, 2008: Release KDE 4.1

KDE 4.1 becomes available for general consumption.

Retrieved from “http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Release_Schedule“