Problems with Lightning and Thunderbird 3

Speaking of AUR packages, I have spent a lot of time on trying to make a working lightning-hg package. In case you do not know what hg is, it is the name of the binary that one can use to access a mercurial repository (something like git, svn, cvs etc). Basically it should provide the most bleeding edge version on the interwebs, which works with thunderbird 3.

Anyway, the mozilla build process is very complicated as there is one repository for many mozilla apps and some of their add-ons. I made a PKGBUILD which downloads the source properly, but I couldn’t get the compile part right yet (and I’m too bored to try harder right now).

So if you think you are a skilled AUR contributor and/or would also like to see a lightning-hg package, write something in my archbbs request thread. Thanks

Urban Terror mapping on Archlinux

Yesterday and today I’ve been trying to get a version of gtkradiant working with Archlinux in order to make own Urban Terror maps. The result is that I expanded the UrT wiki page and created two AUR packages. Everything seems to work now, I just need to get skilled in that editor

Finally a new desktop

Yesterday night I decided that it was time to give my desktop a new design. In my case, usually everything begins with a new wallpaper, but this time I decided to also use a new icon set. So I asked yaourt what the AUR had to offer and stumbled upon some very nice themes called gnome-colors. They are beautiful, I am using GNOME-Carbonite, which is included in that package right now. The next step was to find a fitting background… in the end, I chose Kurt Russell who plays Stuntman Mike in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (which is part of Grindhouse). Needless to say that I like the movie and recommend it, if you like QT’s other movies. Last but not least, one needs to set some matching gnome colors (I pick them with GIMP right off the wallpaper) and re-configure conky. I’m glad I did that, because my old desktop setup got kind of boring (as with all of them after a while).

desktop, stuffed

desktop, clean

ghostship: first release (0.4)

Ghostship runs surprisingly stable (which may also have something to do with the recent upstream update of Ultrasurf from 9.5 to 9.6), so I decided to release an official source package.  It still does run Ultrasurf like an Unix daemon, I have written pretty much about that by now, so if you don’t know the project yet, check out its homepage.

Why do I start with version 0.4? Well, I just counted my first two attempts plus the major rewrite I did lately as single versions.

About packaging: I have already made two PKGBUILDs for the AUR, so Archlinux is all fine. Yoschi on the other hand will build Debian/Ubuntu packages as soon as I get the code ported properly (I am not quite sure, but I think that there are still some parts in the code that work only on Arch). If you would like to see ghostship on another distribution, please try to build a distribution specific package from the release and give some feedback.

PS: I guess I will add a little tutorial how to use Ultrasurf with Firefox on the ghostship homepage soon. The wordpress.com control panel tells me, that there are actually people looking for such information.

ghostship-svn in the Archlinux User Repository

Ghostship itself runs okay now in my experience, but I’ll keep on testing a bit longer, before I make a stable release. Archlinux is bleeding edge, so if you use that distribution, you may just build the most recent SVN revision from the AUR with the PKGBUILD I submitted.

Any feedback is welcome.

Speed Up Firefox And Liferea By Running VACUUM On Their Databases

Firefox and Liferea both use SQLite as their database-backend. You might try out running…

cd "~/.mozilla/firefox/yourprofile"
for i in *.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done

…to optimize Firefox’ databases (make sure you use the right profile folder) as well as the same thing for Liferea with (be careful with the version here):

sqlite3 ~/.liferea_1.6/liferea.db "VACUUM;"

If you run a desktop PC, you might want do do this parallelized to your boot-up, so on Archlinux I did the following:

• copy both code snippets in separate scripts, in my case ~/bash/speedup/(firefox|liferea) and give them executable rights
• write something like that (don’t forget to replace the username!) in your /etc/rc.local:

su yourusername -c ~/bash/speedup/liferea &

su yourusername -c ~/bash/speedup/firefox &

More Archlinux artwork!

Eleven days ago, I have posted my first piece of Archlinux related artwork, a wallpaper featuring the punk tux from this blogs header. Today I took a look at Ghost1227’s Arch logo variations thread (again) and decided that I should make one with the very same tux.

archlinux logo variation

svg file, archbbs

Later this day I was still experimenting with Inkscape and guess what just came out? Right, a wallpaper with an exploding taco. Ghost1227 says it looks great, and trusting his word I release it now. I hope you enjoy it

Exploding tacos and conky configs?

svg file, archbbs

PS: This wallpaper also includes the JDownloader icon background fix I mentioned in the first wallpaper’s post.

License for the archlinux logo and text:

The Arch Linux name and logo are recognized trademarks. Some rights reserved. (taken from archlinux.org)

License for everything else in both pictures:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

Running Amarok 1.4 From Within a Debian Chroot at Arch

Amarok 1.4 is obsolete, but it still is my preferred linux audio player (foobar2k is my choice for windows). I know that there is a newer version out there called amarok2, but as with all of KDE4 it is in my opinion lacking features the previous versions had. Especially the interface is just a big different approach, just look at some screenshots and you will know what I mean.

You might think now: Why don’t I simply install the Amarok 1.4 from the AUR or from kdemod-legacy? The answer is that the AUR version does not build at all with software of newer versions such as gcc and the kdemod build just keeps on crashing. Seriously, I have used the later one for a very long time now, but it keeps on crashing randomly.

Old… one might say stable software… where would you look for that? Debian! My first try was to just use Debians binarys and install them with a PKGBUILD. But it did not work, I don’t remember why exactly, but it had to do with the fact that kde(mod) is installed to /opt/kde on arch and that the libraries weren’t the same.

Yesterday I decided to take a look at chroot again, I already use it for my bundled arch32 installation anyway. I’ve set it up and now amarok is playing without crashing all the time. Awesome!

This is roughly how I did it:

• install debootstrap from AUR

• set up a debian installation in somewhere like /opt/debian and install amarok plus everything else you need via apt-get (eg. python for some plugins)

• copy over some important files, see the arch32 article for details

• create something like /etc/rc.d/debian which contains (adjust to your needs, make sure you mount the folder which has all the music; the mysql sock is used when you try to connect to localhost and dev is for accessing alsa’s dmix):

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions

case $1 in
start)
stat_busy „Starting Debian chroot“
mount –bind /var/lib/dbus /opt/debian/var/lib/dbus
mount –bind /proc /opt/debian/proc
mount –bind /tmp /opt/debian/tmp

mount –bind /home /opt/debian/home

mount –bind /dev /opt/debian/dev
ln -f /tmp/mysql.sock /opt/debian/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
add_daemon debian
stat_done
;;
stop)

stat_busy „Stopping Debian chroot“
umount /opt/debian/var/lib/dbus
umount /opt/debian/proc
umount /opt/debian/tmp
umount /opt/debian/home

umount /opt/debian/dev
rm_daemon debian
stat_done
;;
restart)
$0 stop
sleep 1
$0 start
;;
*)
echo „usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}“
esac
exit 0

• Find a way to start Amarok. Mine is to create two scripts, one (/usr/bin/amarok_debian) which contains the following and is allowed to be started by my user without my password (insert your own nickname here):

#!/bin/bash
echo „Starting ROCK stable amarok (from within debian chroot)…“
chroot /opt/debian su thoughtcrime -c „amarok $*“

• And the other one called /usr/bin/amarok, which just calls the previous one with sudo:

#!/bin/bash
sudo /usr/bin/amarok_debian

In the end, I want to warn you that if you use this method, you will not be able to download covers from amazon (note: there are plugins which can do a better job anyway) anymore as well as retrieve artist/song/album information from wikipedia inside of amarok. Why? Because the Web 2.0, fast as it is, just changes and Debian’s amarok does not have the needed patches to keep track of it. KDEmod does, but it is not stable.

My First (Arch)Linux Wallpaper

Previously I had drawn a black and white version of my punk tux (which is somewhat based on a debian wallpaper), but I couldn’t use it yet. So I decided to put it on a wallpaper and it turned out to be okay in my opinion. But decide yourself:

And yes, just as the arch philosophy says, I kept it simple.

For JDownloader users like me and its non-transparent tray icon, I added a special workaround: The whole bottom-area matches its background-color and because of that, it appears to be transparent. Of course this will only work if the panel holding the tray icons is on the bottom of the screen, or if you simply edit the SVG and put the lighter background on the top/wherever you want. It is just a blurred shape and easy to move with Inkscape

If it fits your over-all desktop theme, you might also try to change the color of the blue square. In my experience, almost every color looks good there.

Download:

Scalable Vector Graphic (recommended)

pre-rendered Portable Network Graphic (2560×2480)

License for the archlinux logo and text:

The Arch Linux name and logo are recognized trademarks. Some rights reserved. (taken from archlinux.org)

License for everything else in this wallpaper:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

In case you want to make archlinux related artwork yourself, just install the archlinux-artwork package from the extra repository.

archbbs thread

JDownloader, not package-able software and the AUR

Lately JDownloader 0.7 has been released. Its integrated update system notified me about it and told me that it would make more sense to go to jdownloader.org and download it from there. I thought about it and came up with: hey, that’s not how unix software should behave!

And where does an archlinux user look for software, which is not in the main repos? Right, in the User Repository. I didn’t really expect it, because I checked a month or so ago, but there actually was a jdownloader package this time. Its only problem was that it was not too well written, just downloaded the jd.sh and executed it. This caused a download-gui to show up while doing makepkg (!) and to download everything to /home/currentuser/.jd (!). This is bad practice, because it does not work at all on multi-user systems and can not be packaged without X. But it got me thinking about what the best way to package JD would be.

So I talked to Ravage and jiaz in #jdownloader on freenode, who told me that this software just can not be packaged. We heavily discussed it and I came up with some methods how it might work, which mainly were:

• JDownloader as one compiled package
• JDownloader as package, plugins as packages
• JDownloader as package, each plugin in its own package

But it turned out that nothing would be acceptable. Because JD gets constantly updated – approximately one plugin per day – , the first and second method would have much overhead.  Also with about 300 plugins, it does not make sense to put each one in its own package.

In the end, Jedipottsy, VuDu and I worked out a single package for the aur, though. It was based on Jedipottsy’s first approach, to download jd.sh, but the main difference was that this time it would be saved as /usr/bin/jdownloader in the package. Why? Because then every user who starts it, gets his very own JD installation. That way JD’s own updater still controls everything, but it works for multiple users and these can not do damage to other JD installation (which they could do in case JD would be somewhat shared and updated by each user).

One might think now: Whats the big deal about it? How is that useful? Doesn’t that even make it more complicated?

With such a package, you are not required to

• launch Firefox,
• find out the JDownloader homepage,
• find jd.sh,
• download it,
• read it,
• find the proper package names for the dependencies,
• install them,
• finally execute jd.sh,
• make a shortcut yourself afterwards and/or create a script in your $PATH that executes either jd.sh or java -jar JDownloader.jar and
• start JDownloader

Instead the system root installs the package once with

yaourt -S jdownloader

and then all users can set-up and start JD simply by typing

jdownloader

in a terminal or by clicking the menu shortcut (which is even easier). This makes it two steps instead of ten! Just imagine if you would have to download every Linux program with Firefox… it would take ages compared to using a package manager.

Menu shortcut, generated by the PKGBUILD