Back at work on WineLocale

OK, first off, talk about a blown release date! I said I would have a beta out what … a year ago? Ubuntu is on its second release since that announcement and my old guide fails on Ubuntu Ibex.

While I personally have little use for Wine let alone WineLocale, I do realize how important it is to other people. You can give special thanks to Dan Kegel, who has written to me many times over the last few months and without whose mails I likely would never have looked at this again.

I’m not complaining. I am actually very glad someone cares enough to write me!

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Lessons from 2 years without Windows

I dropped Windows in December 2006. At the time, Ubuntu Feisty was in beta and I upgraded to it from my initial Edgy Eft install. While I had used Linux for 4-month intervals from 1997 onward, this was my experience in jumping ship entirely.

I have learned a lot—both about Linux and about my own desktop usage—in the past two years. This post is my opportunity to share these with you, the reader.

Lesson 1: Do not customize

Linux is hailed as the customizer’s friend. Most applications store their data in user-editable INI-like files. Root has the power to overwrite any ugly image that offends your optic nerves. If something is shittily organized, you can always reprogram and recompile it to make a sensivle UI as I did with MadEdit.

However, as on Windows, these customizations are temporary.

What I mean is that there is no effective way to preserve your changes during upgrades, and there is no way to collect or save these changes when you need to reinstall your system—especially once you begin tap dancing outside /home/.

Once outside your own user directory, all bets are off. A new update can and will overwrite your configuration changes. While some data in /etc/ might not overwritten—assuming the package scripts were written by a courteous maintainer—changes in /usr/ will be toast.

Did you fix your OpenOffice.org icons to match the same Tango used in your OS rather than the poorly-matched Tango in synaptic? Tough cookies. Those are now gone. Hope you made a backup.

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Ubuntu ate a frisbee

Apparently I did something that Ubuntu really, really did not like. currently any GTK application that displays text will segfault. I think that includes just about … everything.

Thunar can run, but right clicking anything to view its properties causes a segfault.

I’m currently in the process of doing backups from the command line. I’d kind of like to install a dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu environment this time so that I can have a faster machine for Quark. An EeePC can run it, but it is painfully slow at times and the resolution leaves much to be desired. I used to run it in VirtualBox but got sick of the crashing.

Who knows, maybe I’ll throw on Windows for a change until the next Ubuntu release comes out. I need to figure out how to install Windows without a bootable CD-ROM or floppy device anyway.

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Patched module for Hardy kernel 2.6.24-17

I have compiled and released a patch acpi-cpufreq.ko module for Hardy Heron kernel 2.6.24-17, which is currently in the repository for proposed updates. You still need to install any Linux-PHC initialization scripts, but this will help any fresh Gutsy to Hardy upgraders or Hardy installers who accidentally grabbed the proposed kernel and found their PHC dead.

You can grab the patched module from this Ubuntu Forums post. The same thread also has a module for kernel 2.6.24-16.

Howto: Use EeePC XP in VirtualBox

If you have been watching the torrent sites, you may have seen a “Windows XP for Asus EEE PC” floating around. Its first edition came out in January, but a new “2.0″ was released this week. For those reluctant to sail over to a certain bay of pirates, I will summarize.

The “EeeXP” carries a 45MB RAM footprint one booted and requires only 289MB of disk space, bringing it into the range of Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. Not only that, but it promises boot times so fast that the XP splash screen can only scroll its blue loading bar once before displaying the desktop.

Seeking to reinstall my cluttered Windows XP virtual disk that was up to a whopping 5GB, I decided to give this one a whirl using innotek’s VirtualBox on my clunky old Gateway laptop. The results are staggering.

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A new look for Audacious

Happy Valentine’s Day.

This is an Audacious Media Player theme based somewhat on the packed in Ivory theme. It is made to match my D Blues theme for Openbox and QtCurve. Even if you only use my QtCurve theme, it should integrate very well into your desktop.

Due to the special styling used, this theme does not correctly shade. You will get corrupt graphics, same as in Ivory. Since Audacious lacks a way to make themes force shading disabled, I just made all the shade graphic an ugly magic pink. Hopefully it will scare you into unshading.

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An Openbox theme that doesn’t suck

I am proud to release D Blues, the first Openbox theme which — if you are using a Sans 9 Title Bar font — does not suck.

Aside from being the only Openbox theme which does not suck, it is the only one to not use a variant of the same shitty buttons found in every Openbox theme.

You can get it from my DeviantArt page. A screenshot follows the jump.

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Fixing Openbox’s separator color

One small annoyance with Openbox that I found was that its separator color does not match up with how things are handled in most Gtk and Qt themes. The color of the separator is taken from the text color rather than from the disabled text color.

Fixing this is not hard if you do not mind recompiling Openbox. Like all tutorials here, this will assume you are using Ubuntu.

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Openbox is fun, but not for me

byuu threw me a message earlier today about Openbox, a minimalist window manager. He was trying to fix some problems with bsnes going to fullscreen in this window manager, when it works fine in every other.

That should tell you something right there.

I am always looking for handy and practical ways to save resources, so it seemed like something fun to try out. After three hours of playing, I can say Openbox is great, and if I had a slower PC, I would use it over Xfce4. It reminds me of how slick and snappy Xfce used to be — back at version 2.0. However, there are a few put-offs that prevent me from adopting it.

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Busted splash screen on fresh Ubuntu

This problem I had seen every day since installing Gutsy, but it was to until today that I found a fix.

What is the problem? On bootup, you see nothing but a black screen. No text, no logo. Nothing. It’s hard to tell if the machine is making any progress without checking the blinking hard disk light.

The problem is because in Gutsy, the default splash screen resolution was changed. It was made much, much larger, and unfortunately, many cards — especially on laptops — do not support such a high resolution.

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