bleedingpaper.com » Linux

Installing Windows 7 in a dual-boot environment

kingair6 — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 08:47:14 +0000

It has been a while, but recently I have been playing around with my windows install once again (after almost 1.5 years of happy coexistance). The decision to redo windows was made after I acquired a Win 7 Ultimate key. I am hoping to resolve some speed issues with certain games, finally make my wifi USB stick work and so on.
So after inserting the disc and booting from it, I was not really expecting any problems, since it was a straight forward thing: kill the old partition – reformat – install. Or so I thought. Turns out, the Win 7 installer is to limited to give me any options on how to format a partition, or tell me that I should actually use two partitions as best practice. Yes, indeed, Microsoft now wants to have a 100-200 MB Partition for whatever sort of recovery shit. On top of that, Win 7 has issues when multiple HDDs are used with multiple partitions. Even the BIOS boot order AND/OR the SATA port to which the drives are connected can make installation impossible.
Here is my solution. I booted into a real OS (Ubuntu), opened GParted and used some unallocated space to make a 200MB recovery partition plus a some 200GB main install partition. Booted of the Win 7 disc and voila – it works. Dunno why, before the installer would just tell me it hadn’t found a „system partition“ – whatever that may be. So no the installer is happily humming away and I enjoy staring at the somewhat lame percentage figure that slowly approaches 100% – previous Windows installers had cool graphics and time estimates that never were accuracte – could be called a regression I think?

Release: gm-notify v0.10.3 for Maverick

Alex — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 10:15:34 +0000

Good morning ladies and gentlemen,

I finally found a workaround for the bug which raised the CPU-usage of gm-notify to 100% when using it on Maverick. Now it’s working flawless, so start having fun with it ! Other changes are:

It’s opening the correct inbox according to your settings in Google Mail
Bulgarian translation included
when using mutt as client, the labels will be opened correctly

One great improvement on Maverick is, that gm-notify made it into the universe repository (thank you, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio). So if you can’t guess how to install it now, updated instructions are on the gm-notify page.

Thanks to all bug reporters and contributers for their work, and all users for their patience!

Developer-user relationships and its strange curiosities

kingair6 — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:31:01 +0000

We love users. They make us all smiles and cheers if they like our program or product. They endorse our project and maybe even contribute to it. They cherish our work and make us feel needed and our work worthwhile. Without them, developing wouldn’t be half the fun.
Yet, we hate them. Users are often stupid, insight-less, negligent, annoying bastards. They make our days horrible by forcing us to build in yet another input check. They make us stretch to ever more high-flying solutions to fulfill their needs, even though we might have seen enough of the framework by the time the alpha was released.
This paradox remains unsolved and riddled in the brains of many a programmer (or developer of anything for that matter). This will be an attempt at trying to understand, why it is exactly that users have this very unique feel about them.
The loving, endorsing user gives us a homey feeling because we have a task to live up to – make that person happy. Help him get along. Helping is nice. Being nice is… well nice, I guess. And while being nice and all, we might find that wicked cool workaround for a tricky programming question that really challenges our minds in the kind of way that makes you want to work all day on it. This type of user might even be the reason we are doing the work we do. They may have brought our minds to the problem they are facing – one that we share but never noticed. Thereby, they support our creativity and imagination, make us innovative thinkers.
The opposite is the evil, mean-faced user writing nasty mails that my first ever alpha 1 was buggy and it’d need 1000 more features to be usable. In giving us the scope of what may lie ahead of us in order live up to our own goals (after all, we want to bring it to a good release!), they make us feel small, incapable and overworked. Seeing you still have to write 100000 lines of code is not exactly a pleasant experience. In trying to fulfill a thank-less user’s feature request, we might reach a boundary which is not easily crossable – in our heads or in our programming capabilities. The framework may run out of solutions, or those left might be so ugly and lengthy we are scared to try them. This is the horrid, negative user, that makes us want to delete the project irreversibly from our HDD.

Without a user, our life were meaningless, with one it can be ever so much harder. Feel it yourself? Comment pls.

Release: gm-notify v0.10.2

Alex — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:34:42 +0000

here we come to release 0.10.2 after 0.10.1 was available but never really announced because the new features didn’t work very well. So this is more or less a bugfix release with some polished features from 0.10.1 which include:

Configurable autorun
Usage of the default mail icon
It’s possible to ignore the inbox

I wish you a lot of fun with this release – it should update automatically if you added the PPA to your repositories. For instructions about a fresh install visit the gm-notify page.

Release: gm-notify v0.10

Alex — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:27:47 +0000

ok – Ladies and Gentlemen, to be true, I’m kind of proud to finally present the new version of gm-notify – and it’s the first which simple works great (at least for me ).

So, here comes the interesting part – new features:

Google Talk Backend: What does that mean? To cut it short -> Instant/Push-like mail notification
Lucid Lynx Support: Complete integration with new indicator-applet features
Hide Labels with a count of zero to keep it all tidy
moreover it fixes about 30 Bugs

Have a look at the new gm-notify page on this blog for installation instructions. I hope you have fun with this

UPDATE 2: The unbelievable – new gm-notify version out in the near future?

Alex — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:25:46 +0000

well guys, I promised it many times, and I tried it many times: Writing a new backend for gm-notify which works more reliably than the current one. But every darned time, when I was almost finished, there was some freaking sort of bug which prevented everything from working flawlessly.

But now I just pushed a new version onto Launchpad which features a new google-talk backend – so we don’t need a CheckInterval any more If you want to go ahead and do some alpha testing (yes, it’s not feature complete and there are many known bugs) – here are the instructions:

sudo apt-get install python-twisted-mail python-twisted-words
sudo apt-get install python-indicate python-gnome2 bzr
bzr branch lp:gm-notify
cd gm-notify
sudo cp data/gm-notify.desktop /usr/share/applications/
python gm-notify-config.py
python gm-notify.py

When configuring your credentials please make sure to use your complete mail address with the correct extension (the correct address is displayed in the header line of the google homepage if you’re logged in).

Known Bugs:

When applying config settings there is an error – ignore it
Credential checking is not very useful and correctly working
sound does not work

if you find more bugs I would be glad if you could report them here as a comment And now happy testing – so that I might push it to a final during the next weekend

UPDATE 1: You’ll find revision 41 on Launchpad which now has a much more stable connection handling… The gm-notify process itself should work perfectly – please let me know if not. Config will be done in the near future so we can release . To update your already obtained copy go into its directory and type those two commands – have fun:

bzr pull
bzr update

UPDATE 2: Released See http://bleedingpaper.com/2010/04/21/release-gm-notify-v0-10/

Alex

Awesome WM on big/small screen

kingair6 — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:01:36 +0000

To get back after some time, a report on a new discovery: Awesome Window Manager for X. One (meaning, me) just gets bored ever so often with the look of Compiz/Metacity/Beryl… whatever. I just go and get a new theme every now and then, when I am content with one, I might stick with it for a month or two – New Wave I found THAT good, or Mac4Lin. However, now after close to two years of life in the Linux world, using Gnome without exception, I got bored of the feel of the standard Gnome desktop too. Sad as it is, I began searching for a satisfying solution to this problem.
The result was Awesome WM, a window manager belonging in the category of „tiling“ WMs. It spreads windows across the whole screen in order to utilize the whole screen.
This makes it especially suitable for large displays. My 22 inch LCD is really put to its use with three rows of windows: Pidgin plus a message window, one, two, three terminals, maybe Rythmbox and Firefox somewhere. My second monitor, an old 17 inch flat screen is also managed separately. This means, the „view“, so to speak, can be arranged for each monitor accordingly. Awesome, even though being a tiling WM can also do regular floating windows, arrange them by „spiral“ or „Z“ or maxmimize a window at two strokes on the keyboard.
Also, it features 9 virtual desktops that are not really virtual desktops but „tags“. Tags are assigned to each programm (one can contain multiple tags) and when a tag is selected the so tagged programms are shown arranged in whatever view the tag is set to. Each monitor also has individual taggs – quite comfortable and flexibel to use.
Best by far is the usability via keyboard. By default, the „Windows“ Key, also called „Super“ or „Mod4″ is the action key which, combined with some shortcuts, gives you full controll over your screen – great for people who type a lot and don’t want to be bothered by their mouse. Developing is just so much fun in Awesome!
Now the disclaimer: Awesome is not for nOObs. Why? Cause it does not feature nice GUIs to configure its behaviour. It can be scripted very flexibely in Lua via a config file but ONLY via this config file. The awesome menu is not necesserily a A+ in usability, but who needs a menu when via Mod4 + R you can run any command as we were used to via Alt + F2.
Installation is simple on Debian based systems – its in the repos. For Fedora it’s more of a demanding process since it does not come via yum – however, there are RPMs available.

Enjoy trying it, i can strongly recommend it!

Django Syslog Middleware

kingair6 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:23:21 +0000

Hi Folks,

for some time, Alex and I have been working on a simple Book Rating system for school, which, of course, was developed using Django. It sits on a PostgeSQL database and authenticates users against an LDAP which the school runs – pretty neat. However, for reasons of time and safety we do not fancy setting up a webserver to get mails every time an error occurs (still quite frequently according to the users). What to do? Apache Error logs are not very meaningful, since all they say is „Provide a 404 Template“:.. aint gonna do that! The shortest way around was simply writing up a Middleware, which, upon error, would write request and exception to the syslog – sorry Windows users, YOU can not use it. Aside I figured it’d be neat to also have a full fledged output file right in app, even though Alex didn’t like the idea too much, granted, the syslog thing IS cooler. So I ended up implementing that funky solution which nobody ever seemed to have thought of (????). Here’s the code:

from syslog import *
import time

class SyslogOutput:
    def process_exception(self, request, exception):
        # Compile the string for the exception in the format: "Variable: Value" so as to make it readable
        request_string = ""
        filename='/var/www/django/log/%s_error.csv'%(time.strftime('%y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%s'))
        txt = file(filename, 'w')

        for item in dir(request):
            value = getattr(request, item)
            request_string += "%s:  %s\n"%(item, value)
            request_string += "\n\Exception: %s"%(exception)
        syslog (LOG_DEBUG, request_string)
        txt.writelines("Exception: %s"%(request_string))
        txt.close()

        return None

If you find it helpful or have any contributions to improve the behavior, please feel free to comment! Hope this helps some folks getting the logs they want.

Ubuntu 9.10 available – working on gm-notify update

Alex — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:01:33 +0000

Hey guys,

finally, Karmic was released yesterday including many very interesting new changes and features. Personally I use this version since one week and I am very satisfied with the whole system – smooth and stable… At least since I found the reason for a bug in the nm-applet which wouldn’t let me connect to my SwissVPN: I spent hours to find a solution and in the end it was a wrong password

However, the indicator-applet was part of a big evolution, too – and the possibilites and API changed a lot… Currently I’m trying to adapt gm-notify to the new situation and it almost works – at least the way it did before. Nevertheless, the checking algorithm never was really convincing at all, so I’m trying to rework this, too. If anybody has an idea or some documentation how GoogleMail can push new mails to the notifier please let me know

All in all I hope that I can release a new version in a few weeks!

Alex

Call for Help: Getting gm-notify ready for Karmic

Alex — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:03:27 +0000

Good evening

well, maybe you noticed that the gm-notify development was a bit slow in the last few months. But now, six days prior to the 9.10 release, I need to fix several issues with the indicator applet, since the API changed a lot between both versions.

My problem is that I can’t find any documentation about the python-indicate lib – or even worse: I don’t really know what exactly has been changed or which new features I could use…

So: If anybody knows a good blog post documenting new features or has some piece of doc or example code I would be glad to get some hints -> Let’s make gm-notify again the best Google Mail notifier for Ubuntu 9.10!

Alex