Linux – Page 4 – Kasperian Moving Parts

Google Video Player For Linux

Friday June 16, 2006

Got your attention, did I? I run Linux on my Apple G4 Powerbook, which means that I don’t have the luxury of such niceties as… oh, I don’t know… FLASH!?!?! So I was happy to find that even though I can’t view Google Video’s Flash-based movies, I can easily enough still play them on my G4 Powerbook running PPC Linux. I whipped up a very simple and quick little script for it, as follows: #!/bin/bash PLAYER=kaffeine INFILE=$* TMPFILE=”/tmp/$(basename $0).tmp” echo “got->${INFILE}< -... going to work..." cp "${INFILE}" "${TMPFILE}" URL=$(grep 'url' ${TMPFILE} | sed 's,url:,,' ) ${PLAYER} "${URL}" I then saved in in ~/bin/google-video-player.sh and chmod +755’d it. I then clicked on the download link on google video’s pages, told Konqueror Read more…

Linux

SuSE 10.1 Online Sources

Thursday June 8, 2006

Just installed 10.1 on my work laptop yesterday. I have an IBM ThinkPad T42, and it doesn’t look like XGL is going to work for me on that. Bummer. That’s some of the reason that I went through this upgrade. =:/ Just found this helpful link for finding SUSE 10.1 online package installation sources, and am upgrading KDE from 3.5.1 to 3.5.3 now (yay!). Reason behind this was that there’s an annoying little buglet in KDE PIM 3.5.1 which shifts all of my appointments off by 5 hours (basically a time zone bug) that I believe was fixed in 3.5.2.

Apples, Desktop, Life in General, Linux, Movies, Music, Work Stuff

In The Last 48 Hours

Wednesday May 17, 2006

I have had the pleasure(?) of living through the following: Getting two problems (ABS light and Airbag light were both stuck on) with our new-to-us 2005 Town & Country fixed only to find another problem (2 radiator fans refused to turn off when car was turned off). Had to disconnect battery overnight to turn off fans and prevent battery drainage. Took said vehicle back into the dealer who promptly and courteously fixed it. Again. Finding out that the family dog (who just yesterday started limping–refusing to set any weight on her left, front paw) has Lyme disease. $200+ later and doggie is now feeling much better, apparently. Beating head repeatedly against same problem at work for a week now is Read more…

KDE, Linux, Open Source, Work Stuff

LDAP, Microsoft Exchange, and KAddressBook or Thunderbird

Friday May 5, 2006

My current employer uses Exhange 2003 as its current groupware solution. I have on-and-off-again been beating my head against the proverbial concrete wall in trying to get it to work nicely with LDAP and addressbooks other than Evolution or Outlook, for obvious reasons. Today, my geeky noggin’ has broken through the proverbial concrete wall and I now have both KDE’s kaddressbook and Thunderbird’s address book successfully using the Exchange server here at work. Yay, me! Two things I’ve found this morning that have helped my noggin’ and I’ll list them here for future reference for myself as well as in hopes of helping some other poor concrete/geek/proverbial/noggin’-banging soul. First, I’ve found this post which lists a very helpful step-by-step approach Read more…

Apples, Desktop, Life in General, Linux

This Just In: Linux Is Better Than OS X

Thursday April 27, 2006

Well, at least it is for me. And it’s taken me $1500 to figure it out the hard way. How much is it to ask for to be able to {alt,command}-tab through ALL bloody open windows in OS X? You know… ALL of them. Like, ALL of them–including the X11 windows that all get bunched up underneath one stinking X icon. Or the 2 Firefox windows. Not just one of them. ALL of them. And yes, I do know about Witch. And no, it doesn’t work with X11 windows. And why would I want to use X11 to begin with? Because sometimes Free applications are much, much better than the ones you have to pay for. For example, kontact is Read more…

Apples, KDE, Life in General, Linux

After All That, Back to OS X

Sunday April 16, 2006

So I’m a little disgruntled right now. I’ve rebooted back into OS X and I’ll likely stay here for a while. As it turns out, the show-stopper for me to be able to run Linux (which I’d much prefer) on this powerbook is not anything to do with Linux itself, but rather with the commercial/proprietary software that I find myself needing to run. I need to be able to use Moneydance to do my family’s financial account management and bill paying. Moneydance runs on Java. Apparently, the only full version of Java for Linux PPC is IBM’s JRE. That’s right, Sun doesn’t provide Linux-PPC users a JRE, how nice of them. And yes, I did spend a couple of hours Read more…

Apples, Life in General, Linux

Ubuntu Linux, External Speakers, Your Powerbook, and You

Saturday April 15, 2006

Yet another small blip from the life and times of a powerbook owner and Linux glutton-for-pain… I think this issue has been fixed in the Alsa 1.0.11-rc4 snd-powermac modules, but since I haven’t taken the time to recompile the kernel yet and since Ubuntu Dapper Drake still only comes with 1.0.10, I’m stuck with a workaround for a time being. So, I have a 15″ 1.5G powerbook, and I just bought some really nice Altec Lansing speakers from the local Target and would like to use them with my powerbook in Linux. Sounds simple enough of a request, no? Well, believe it or not, it doesn’t work out of the box. I plug my headphones/external speakers in and sound still Read more…

Apples, KDE, Linux

Kubuntu On A Powerbook

Wednesday April 12, 2006

So, in an attempt to get back to hacking/programming again (since I’m definitely not getting it at work), I’ve installed Linux on my Powerbook. Actually, I’d installed SuSE 10 on it the day after I bought the powerbook 5+ months ago, but I’d never really done anything with it–partly because I really wanted to see what OS X was really like (it is REALLY, REALLY cool, but not conducive to feeling like I can start improving things/hacking/programming) and partly because neither the trackpad nor the wireless ethernet worked. But recently, the folks at the Broadcom 43xx Linux Driver project have made GREAT strides in getting the proprietary Broadcom wireless network card working in Linux. And, the kind folks with the Read more…

Life in General, Linux

Now I Remember Why I Don’t Run Sid

Wednesday March 8, 2006

It used to be that I used Debian’s unstable tree (Sid–named after the “unstable” child from Toy Story) for my work machine and home machines. The only problem was that occasionally, when I would update to the latest and greatest packages, things would break and then it would take a bit of time and effort to get things back to working order. To some extent, this was actually fun and a good way to learn how things work. In general, I don’t learn how things work until I get over the fear of breaking something–play with it, break it, learn how to fix it, etc. At some point in the last few years, it became less than fun to constantly Read more…

Desktop, Life in General, Linux

Desktop Linux and Me

Tuesday November 29, 2005

This little excerpt is very exciting, I think. If the eWeek report is correct, and this truly does have the backing of the corporations listed, then it sure seems like people are starting to get serious about the real possibility of a Linux Desktop that has a chance at challenging the Windows desktop market share. I’m guessing that they’ll first be targetting end-user desktop market space, which shouldn’t be all that difficult, imho. Heck, I’ve been doing it for 10+ years now. What would be really interesting, however, is if they can target the corporate desktop environment. Now that’s a different animal entirely. Someone, please pay me to help develop the Linux desktop?!?!? =:/