Difference Between the iPhone and a Stone

Check out this funny comparison between a stone and the iPhone.

Smooth Slide Saver

I think at least one of the best screen savers available on Linux is the SmoothSlideSaver. It's an enhanced version of the GL picture screen saver and as the name says it's really smooth. There was a version for KDE 3.5 available. I so wish someone would port it to KDE 4... *sigh* ... and I wish it was integrated into the main distribution - because it really deserves to, at least into extragear.

KDE 4.1 with Multi-Head

Just a short note: If you plan to use KDE 4.1 with Multi-Head, make sure you do *not* do it using xrandr, otherwise KDE gets confused and messes up your screen. So set up your xorg.conf statically.

Intel put up a short howto, but it shouldn't be that different for other drivers. The important part goes like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "intel"
Option "FramebufferCompression" "off" # on for battery, off for multi-display
Option "monitor-LVDS" "internal"
Option "monitor-VGA" "external"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "internal"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "external"
Option "RightOf" "internal" #the left display is the primary one
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "internal"
Device "Configured Video Device"
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2560 1024
# this should be as large as both displays next to each other
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
# Option "Xinerama" "true" # crashes
Option "AIGLX" "false" # crashes multi-head
EndSection

After doing that, (instead of crashes and frustration) you're rewarded with very nice customization options in KDE 4.1.2: You can set the wallpaper for each screen, put different plasma applets at different locations, etc.

If you're using the intel driver I can also recommend disabling AIGLX in the ServerFlags Section of your xorg.conf to make the setup more stable. After supend/resume I regularly have to set reconfigure the screen setup with xrandr and then switch back and forth between X and the console to turn my external monitor back on.

I wonder how the new X server version in Kubuntu 8.10 will be.

Divx Embedded Video with Mplayer in Linux

If you want to watch Divx embedded Videos in your browser, like they used to be offered by Stage6, you can use the mozilla-mplayer package with the following customizations:

Install the package mozilla-mplayer.

In /etc/mplayerplug-in.types you need the lines
video/divx:divx:DivX Media Format;
video/vnd.divx:divx:DivX Media Format;

and in /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf you need the line
use-mimetypes=1

Don't start your browser before you've made these changes, otherwise you need to uninstall the plugin, start the browser, exit it, reinstall the plugin and then it should work. This works in Opera and Firefox for me.

Update: Unfortunately this does not work on all pages, some seem to check specificly for the divx.com plugin, which of course won't work...

New Stuff

Pogue just wrote an article about basic things every computer users should know. Well, most of it I did know and won't write it here. But one thing I found interesting it the part about new hardware coming out:

iPods come out in September and digital cameras in February and October.

Midori

If you want to try out a browser that uses webkit in Linux, just try out midori. It's not a lot like chrome, though. It's not as fast, etc. I do hope they quickly port a privacy-enhanced version of Chrome to Linux...

At least in the meantime I will stay with Opera, and hope they incorporate some of those Chrome features. That might make Chrome entirely unnecessary, which would be good. Google is probably too big already. No need for them to dominate the browser market. If their products just weren't so good and innovative...

KDE Webkit

I just found out there is a webkit KDE port, called webkitkde, with Ubuntu (372kb) packages:

Webkit is what Apple uses for Safari and Google used for Chrome.

Update: This does not work cleanly if you use the kde 4.1.1 packages for hardy from the motu developers. Or to make it short: webkitkde works only in intrepid, because of wrong paths. If I have a workaround at the end.

Update2: Google Mail works with a bit of tweaking now. (I had to set Konqueror to identify as Safari 2.0 and reload the page mail.google.com.)

Update3: It's really beta software, you're not likely to have a lot of fun with it... :(. Gmail does not really work after all.

Update4: Even compiled from svn-trunk it's not really fun. There's some problem with the page loading, the fonts are too small I think. And just using khtml is much faster and more fun.

Just put this into your (Ubuntu hardy) shell:

sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list"
apt-get update
apt-get install webkitkde
sudo su -c "echo > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list"
apt-get update

# workarounf for hardy
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/
sudo ln -s /usr/share/kde4/services/webkitpart.desktop .
cd /usr/lib/kde4/lib/kde4/
sudo ln -s ../../webkitkdepart.so
# now the fine-tuning
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/apps/ && sudo ln -s /usr/share/kde4/apps/webkitpart
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/icons/hicolor/ && for i in 16x16 32x32 48x48 64x64 128x128; do cd $i/apps; sudo ln -s /usr/share/icons/hicolor/"$i"/apps/webkit.png; cd ../..; done;

kbuildsycoca4

And to uninstall:

sudo rm /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/webkitpart.desktop /usr/lib/kde4/lib/kde4/webkitkdepart.so /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/apps/webkitpart
cd /usr/lib/kde4/share/icons/hicolor/ && for i in 16x16 32x32 48x48 64x64 128x128; do cd $i/apps; sudo rm webkit.png; cd ../..; done;
sudo apt-get purge webkitkde

The README tells us:
You can switch between the different rendering engines:
View -> View Mode -> {KHTML, WebKit} (Website needs to be opened)
If WebKit does not show up in Konqueror, run 'kbuildsycoca4'.

If you want to set the WebKit part as default, run:
'keditfiletype text/html'
and move "WebKit (webkitpart)" in the "Embedding" tab to the top.

For more information about this project please see also:
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/WebKit

Browsers in Linux

Okay. After my Opera link frustration I must admit that I've come back. Firefox was nice and fast at the beginning, but it's got serious issues after using it for a while. And with many tabs it gets slower, it's not very pretty, it takes longer to load, FlashBlock causes me a lot of trouble. And other issues.

I just like Opera. It doesn't get slower after using it for a couple weeks. It's got a neat bookmark system (It better not dare swallowing my bookmarks again!!!), it's fast&snappy. I hope they'll fix the network issue which cause Opera to be faster on slow links but slower on fast links. And some webpage don't render well.

And I hope they'll quickly incorporate a lot of the improvements of Chrome. I think if it would run natively on Linux (it works quite well with WINE), I'd be very tempted to use it as my primary browser.

Google Ads Experiment Ended

I've ended the experiment with Google Ads and removed all ads. I've earned somewhere between 0 and 8 cents. Looks like my Blog (still) has way too few visitors. I don't even really know from looking at my ad control website. And then they did put some quite weird and non-fitting ads in here every once in a while...

But don't worry, I'm still spying on you with Google Analytics. ;)

Linux Boot in 5 Seconds (with subscriber link)

Linuxhaxor posted a special subscriber link to the long-awaited lwn.net article on how to get (the eee pc) to boot in 5 seconds as part of an (unfortunately superficious and highly redundant) collection of linux tip articles.

The lwn article turned out to be not as impressive as I had hoped and expected from lwn - usually their articles are of excellent quality. Don't get me wrong - I do like what they've done. But the documentation level is too low for my taste. It is far from a howto that someone in the comments then asked about.

But I can recommend the flame war in the comments about how to correctly measure the boot time of a distribution. Come one guys, it's still so far away from 5 seconds, it doesn't matter how you measure it. And yes, some serious changes arelikely needed.

I hope Ubuntu puts a lot of the boot time improvement into the next release. I would put up with a couple bug in the release for that.

Arjan van de Ven Interview

As I mentioned in my last post, O'Reilly interviewed him and it's a quite interesting read. I only disagree on one point. He says "I think there are always going to be keyboards." (...) "it's also the fastest way to get more than a few characters into the computer."

I think that will change. At some point voice detection has to come around and get better than the keyboard and we will finally start talking again - as nature wants us to - instead of quietly sitting in front of our computer.

And at some point there will be developments to directly transfer sentences from your brain to the computer without the need to talk - though I'm not sure if that's really an improvement, language is just too cool an invention imo.

Well, for now I really look forward to improvements in booting time and on latency issues. That's another point were Windows has a really hard time to compete. The drivers' and applications' code is mostly proprietary and hidden somewhere behind closed doors and servers.

It's simply a great technical advantage to be immediately able to look at all the code, see how it works and find out where's the best point to fix a certain problem. And then being able to fix the actual root cause of the problem. That's one of the neatest things about open source.

Registration Hell

I know this is an old hat: You have to register for everything. Then came OpenID to the rescue. Only that it's so complicated to actually implement it on the server side and use it on the user side (what exactly do I have to put into the user box?) that it never quite arrived.

Now more and more I notice myself not bothering to register somewhere to add a comment to a bug, or file a new bug if it doesn't really matter that much to me. I've got probably a hundred or more accounts at different places by now and it's so bothersome. I really hope something's going to eliminate that problem at some point...

The actual page that made me write this was a pidgin bug ticket, which is related to pidgin using fsync way too often and causing very bad latency in the process. (~300+ms on my system). I found it using latencytop after reading this interesting interview. And I was wondering if something has been done about the problem. It doesn't look like it...

Bashrc Tipps

Here's a little article with some tips for making your daily shell life easier which at least I have not seen before. They include saving the history of all shells on exit.

Quick Transcoding with Mencoder and Xvid

This little script helps you to quickly transcode any content mplayer accepts to an xvid avi file. It copies the audio track and encodes the video track to xvid in the original resolution in your current directory.

#!/bin/bash
# mencode.sh (c) 2008 linux-tipps.blogspot.com

# settings

BR=1400 # bitrate
lang=en # your language code for the DVD audio track, e.g. en/de/es
OUT=`basename "$1"`"-xvid-fast.avi" # output file in current directory
XVID="lumi_mask:interlacing:nochroma_me:me_quality=4:vhq=1:autoaspect:chroma_opt:bitrate=$BR" # xvid settings

# settings end

[ -f "$OUT" ] && echo File exists && exit 1;

echo Encoding $i
screen -O mencoder -alang $lang -cache 32768 -ovc xvid -oac copy \
-xvidencopts $XVID "$1" -o "$OUT";

e.g. bash mencode.sh dvd://

You may want to compile xvid and mencoder for your machine to speed it up even more, but I've already set the xvid settings to a reasonably fast mode. I get around 25-30 fps when doing a DVD to Xvid backup on my notebook.

You could add -vf scale=640:-1 but it doesn't really increase speed, but makes it look worse. I use screen, so I can detach(Ctrl-a, Ctrl-d) from the encoding when I have to e.g. exit the current X session.

Detaching also helps to decrease unnecessary screen updates which eat cpu in many terminals. And it's better than passing -quiet as command line argument, because you now have the choice between seeing what's going on and how long it'll take or not. Screen is great... You can re-attach with screen -r. If you have several cores, try adding threads=x to the xvid options.

Black borders are not removed. If you have an idea how to do that automatically, let me know. Interlacing is kept for a good reason: Deinterlacing slows down the process and usually also degrades the quality. Deinterlacing while playing is usually the better alternative.

By the way: The most important parts are the xvid setting me_quality=4 and vhq=1 - they speed it up a lot - and compiling xvid for your processor, because some distributions don't properly compile it, even for amd64.

You may not use this script for content you do not have the rights to transcode.

Iron - Chrome after Rehab

Some German developers put Google's Open Source Chrome browser into a rehab and removed most of it's spying functions. They call it Iron and you can already download it for Windows. It's from German developers but works fine in English. Be aware that the security problems are probably not fixed.

And don't forget to disable the Google Ad cookie (permanent link in my links box on the right side of the webpage)! ;-)

OpenOffice Tips

LinuxPlanet has a nice article with some tips for efficient OpenOffice (Writer) usage.

I always recommend continually saving with a new filename if you're working on a big document, e.g. Important00, Important 01, (...). This means that if your current document should for some reason get lost (which happens a lot with MS Office, but rarely with Openoffice), you can use the last save. I actually had Openoffice corrupt a document once I think.

Syntax Highlighting in Nano

You can easily activate a pretty nice syntax highlighting in the small nano text editor, by putting these lines into your ~/.nanorc:

include "/usr/share/nano/c.nanorc"
include "/usr/share/nano/patch.nanorc"
include "/usr/share/nano/sh.nanorc"

See what else is available with ls /usr/share/nano/

Found here.

Chrome Developer's Channel

There's now a Chrome Developer's Channel available with automatically installed bleeding-edge versions of Chrome.

Multiseat Display Manager Out Now

The Multiseat Display Manager is now out and (hopefully) helps you to set up a multiseat environment (much) easier than before.

I have always wondered when a software such as the MDM would come out, as the Unix and X architecture is already perfectly prepared for cases as this and even over Network it is already possible.

Now you need only one computer with several displays, keyboards and mice to let several users e.g. surf the internet at the same time.

I will post my experiences as soon as I get to trying it out. For the curious of you here is a link to installing instructions, packages for debian and ubuntu are provided, as well as the sources of couse.

Update: The packages is very large at 20K, but unfortunately at this point available only as i386 package...

Update2: I've quickly assembled a Ubuntu 8.04 package for AMD64 systems ;-).

Ubuntu Restricted Extras

I just found out how easy it is to install all that good stuff to be able to listen to mp3s and everything:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

You must of course first check the legal situation of these packages in your country.