Motorcycles, computers and beer
I was installing a fairly old piece of software on Arch Linux, and it was failing because I didn’t have xmkmf installed. After some longer Googling than would be expected, I found that xmkmf is part of imake (which was distributed with XFree86, but is no longer used by XOrg).
So, for the benefit of anyone Googling for, say, “xmkmf: command not found” on an Arch Linux system, install the imake package (pacman -S imake) and all will be well.
KDE 4.1 was released today, and is already in Arch Linux’s repos, so I decided to update and give it a try.
First impressions - pretty slick indeed, especially after turning on proper compositing support for various funky effects including see-thru windows, “wobbly windows” etc - lots of which is fairly pointless but very nice at the same time 
So far it seems very polished, it looks like the KDE team have put in a whole lot of work here!
Screenshots/videos may follow, if I get a chance (although I’m sure there’s enough out there already).
Even with the extra eye-candy enabled, the system feels at least as responsive as it did under KDE 3.5, and I think even more responsive actually.
Just found Facebook Chat for Pidgin - a plugin for the popular Pidgin (formerly Gaim) multi-network IM client.
It allows you to chat to your friends on Facebook using Pidgin rather than the little chat widget on the Facebook site, and supports showing the profile picture and current status etc too. Very nice stuff.
Arse - I updated my Arch Linux install last night, and X will no longer start using my previous config. I can start X using the vesa driver, so X itself isn’t broken, but when I try to start up with my multiple monitor setup (3 screens on 3 seperate ATI Radeon 7000 PCI cards) I get a crash, with the following backtrace:
Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x7e) [0x80d9d5e]
1: [0xb7ef4420]
2: X(xf86RandR12SetRotations+0×6b) [0x80f58ab]
3: X(xf86CrtcScreenInit+0×9e) [0x80f173e]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so(RADEONScreenInit+0×17fa) [0xb7adfcaa]
5: X(AddScreen+0×1fc) [0x80733dc]
6: X(InitOutput+0×21e) [0x80a769e]
7: X(main+0×296) [0x8073b66]
8: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0) [0xb7cb9390]
9: X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0×201) [0x80730d1]
How annoying.
I think the issue is down to changes in the X server for Xinerama (used to spread your display across multiple screens) to use RandR, which doesn’t seem to play well.
I’ll post updates here as/when I find a fix.
If you use Arch Linux I’d strongly suggest using the snippet of code below to use rankmirrors to sort your pacman repository mirrors into an optimal order, to use the fastest servers first.
cd /etc/pacman.d
for repo in *; do
echo "Processing $repo..."
mv $repo $repo.b4.rankmirrors
rankmirrors -v $repo.b4.rankmirrors > $repo
done
I was getting an average of about 300-400K/sec; after doing this, I was reaching 10M/sec!
This is as much for my own reference as for anyone else, but hey. I use Firefox, and have become accustomed to typing “google whatever” into the address bar to Google for “whatever”. Unfortunately with the fresh install of FF on my new (well, not so new any more) laptop, that stopped working, as Firefox had automatic keyword search enabled, so typing anything in the address bar that wasn’t an address would be turned into a Google search. This meant that “google whatever” would result in a Google search for “google whatever” rather than a search for “whatever”.
The fix: go to the advanced config by typing about:config in the address bar, find the setting keyword.enabled and toggle it to false.
Now, set up bookmarks with keywords - I haven’t time to type that up, so read the recent post on Lifehacker - Fiften Firefox Quick Searches - it’s easy stuff.
Now, things are as they should be. If I want to Google for something, I’ll type “google whatever”. If I want to go to a web address, I’ll type a web address. If I want to look something up in a dictionary I’ll type “dict whatever”. If whatever I type isn’t an address and isn’t one of the keywords I’ve set up, Firefox will tell me that I’m being a muppet - exactly as it should do IMO, rather than just automatically going to Google.
If you have your own server, why not consider joining the pool.ntp.org project to help provide accurate time to many client machines?
NTP, or Network Time Protocol, is a method for computers to obtain the current time accurately in order to keep their clocks correct. Even when set accurately, the clock on most computers will eventually drift until it is no longer accurate - often made worse when the computer is being heavily loaded.
NTP allows a client to ask a time server to tell it the current time. The “main” timeservers have accurate timekeeping equipment connected (GPS receivers are common) to give them the correct time. Other timeservers simply keep in sync with several main servers, and accept requests from client machines.
The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers striving to provide reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients without putting a strain on the big popular timeservers.
Been meaning to do this for a while, but I’ve finally set up a new public NTP timeserver.
It’s a stratum-3 server, syncing to several decent stratum-2 servers, and answers to the name of time.preshweb.co.uk.
It’s entered the UK pool.ntp.org DNS pool, and I’m seeing quite a few requests already - currently my stats show 4.2 requests per second.
NTP is a damn useful tool to keep system clocks in sync and I’ve been using it for ages on all my boxen; it’s nice to be able to help out by sharing the load a little.
Read more info about NTP or about the pool.ntp.org project. If you have a server somewhere and are willing to help out, the project needs more pool servers to share the load - read more about joining.
I’m setting up a PC for my future father-in-law right now. I’m avoiding installing Windows as I hate dealing with it. I’m happy to help him to get to grips with using the machine and doing whatever he wants with it, but not so happy with having to provide Windows support (after all, I don’t use Windows, so I can hardly call myself an expert at it).
So, I needed a Linux distro that’s clean and simple that he should be able to just get on with. My friend Tony recommended PCLinuxOS as a suitable distro, so I thought I’d give it a spin. It boots as a live CD incredibly easily, auto-detecting everything. Once at a KDE desktop, it’s a usable system already. If you want to actually install to the HDD, just double-click the install icon on the desktop (yes, it has KDE set to require double-click for icons; no doubt useful to save confusing people moving over from Windows, but left me wondering why the hell it wasn’t doing anything). The process is simple, and the ability to sit here with a working system and a copy of Firefox to keep me amused whilst the installation progresses is actually quite cute
For ages I’ve found Firefox on Linux very, very slow when I go to Digg. It takes a while to load the page, and scrolling is horrible.
Finally found a solution to the problem.
Continue reading ‘Firefox slowness rendering digg.com - fixed’
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