RabbitVCS: Manage Your SVN Repository With Nautilus

I discovered this fine piece of software the day I pushed ghostship to sourceforge. SF.net allows you to choose between several version control systems, GIT and SVN among them. I usually choose GIT and to make life easier, I decided to look for a GIT integration in Nautilus. But I got pointed to RabbitVCS which does the exact thing for SVN. Actually they plan to implement GIT support in the next version, but as it isn’t there yet SVN got the cake.

Just take a look at the screenshots on their website – the integration is fantastic!

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

Archlinux and 64 Megabytes of RAM (Update!)

Recently I decided to get out the old GTA2 Laptop again. Why GTA2? Because that was its killer application, as it only features a 600 Mhz Intel Celeron, some on-board graphics card and 64 MB of RAM. This game runs pretty well while being very much fun, especially the LAN mode is just awesome. If you never played GTA2 yet, here’s a multiplayer gameplay video I just googled up. Also the game became freeware, so if you like it download it!

But let’s get to the point of the article. I have always played with the thought of installing (any) Linux on this notebook, until yesterday it was running a very nlited Windows XP.  So I finally decided to throw that off the about 5 GB harddrive and give arch a shot. Why did I choose Arch and not lets say Debian? The later one compiles x86 packages for i386, but archlinux compiles to i686, which is less backward compatible, but a bit faster. Plus the other reasons why I just love archlinux – simple configuration, pacman and yaourt, aur and so on.

While downloading the lastest snapshot for i686, I browsed a bit around and came across this thread from which I used their suggestions to add lowmem to the kernel line as well as setting ramdisk to 20% (also kernel line in grub). Then /arch/setup worked out pretty good, just like any installation. It was a bit slower of course, but I didn’t expect it to behave different.

Suprisingly WLAN actually worked with ndiswrapper, I was not sure about that at all. This laptop has a T-Com Sinus 154 Card, I took the windows driver from the installation CD. The next not-so-clear-thing was setting up xorg without nvidia (I’m used to do it with that), but after I found hwd, it worked out fine.

lxpanel displays the CPU usage at the bottom right corner

To get decent performance, only lightweight and fast software would work. As WM I chose openbox with the lxpanel. The browser with the best performance after text browsers is propably dillo. But dillo can’t even display common websites like wikipedia and google right, because its CSS implementation has just started. Even worse, javascript does not work at all, so sadly half the web does not work. If you just want to do some quick research, it is enough though, so I kept it installed. Firefox was slow as hell, just the experience I had using it with windows XP. Because of that I tried some alternative browsers. Chromium (the opensource project behind Google Chrome without the spyware) just segfaulted, so I tried the closed source Opera (10). Yaourt -Ss opera lead me to opera-snapshot from the archlinuxfr repository, which was actually pretty fast. In every other case, it would have been Firefox. But as this was just a matter of speed, Opera took the cake.

QMPDClient open

Other software I installed is mpd, mpc and for the first time QMPDClient as GUI. Mpd is very lightweight and can be used without a X server, just like unix tools should behave. I chose the said graphical user interface, because it is not written in script-languages like python or perl, but in c++ which not only has less dependencies, but also brings more speed. In fact, I have nothing python or perl related installed on this machine.

desktop pc: copying music from within amarok to my laptop

Another pick was OpenSSH and SSHFS over nfs and samba. Why? Because nfs did not work at all and samba plus its dependencies was about 100 megabytes. When I mounted my laptop’s music folder on my desktop computer, I was able to fill it from within amarok via drag and drop, just like any mp3 player, which is quite useful

Other applications I installed and tested were pidgin, codeblocks and lbreakout2. For pidgin, I think BitlBee plus something like xchat would be the better choice, but I have not tried that yet. It was usable though, as well as codeblocks and lbreakout2 were. What I did not try yet is GTA2 (with wine), but I will likely do that.

No desktop icons, no wallpaper

Software I did not install on purpose: A program that displays a wallpaper and/or desktop icons and a file manager. These are just too wasteful for that little system.

Update: As expected, GTA2 is not playable at all. The wine-layer is just slowing it down too much, and while epsxe offers more tweaking, it is not faster. On the other hand, I’ve got bitlbee with the otr patch running. Bitlbee is a fake IRC server which displays contacts from other IM networks that all IRC programs can connect to. Since I found out that Opera has an integrated IRC client, I don’t even need another program and so I removed pidgin.

Furthermore I did not mention the usage of the Vorbis audio codec yet, which is better known by its file extension ogg. Because they are so small, you can easily fit much music on such a tiny harddrive. Oh and I compile most aur packages from my arch32 environment on my desktop pc. That saves much time.

So in conclusion there’s pretty much you can do with a low-end machine like this. The most exciting feature for me is ssh and ssh-fs. GTA2 does not work anymore, but I have played the single player mode almost through anyway. LBreakout2 works fine and without making the cooler get very loud, like GTA2 used to. Plus now I just have a fully running linux with all its nice CL tools

Doom3 engine goes opensource when Rage comes out

John Carmack told that to LinuxGames in an interview at the QuakeCon;

What we can’t do is we can’t take time away from [other projects]… it does take effort to get these things together. If we are still heads down trying to get Rage out the door, I’m not going to task somebody with putting together the Doom 3 source distribution. But when Rage ships, you can expect the Doom 3 source code to be coming out.

This might mean that Doom 3 gets ported to the Pandora some day by its community and also allows total conversation mods to become free standalone games.

source

Cinemassacre: Ghostbusters Xbox360 Review and New AVGN Game! (Update: AVGN hat)

James did his first gaming review without the Angry Video Game Nerd leading it, which features a great intro and feels – except for the fact that it’s about a game – like one of his movie reviews. Speaking of which, he also did one of those, but I don’t know anything about District 9, so I didn’t watch it (I hate spoilers, you know…). Mike Matei notified us just about a new boxing AVGN fangame by Devin Cook, which is actually downloadable as ATARI-Rom image. As I don’t have the real thing here (but I know it from the Games Convention ‘08), I use Stella as suggested by the article. This opensource emulator can also be compiled under Linux, so when you are on arch

yaourt -S stella

will do the job AURtomagically. The game is fun to play and has some decent retro graphics of course. If you can’t figure the controls out, take a look at the well written manual (seriously, looks like it is a real game).

Update: Not worth a new post, but ScrewAttack made a nice promotion video for the new AVGN hat!

Windows: ImDisk, the open Daemon Tools alternative

So you are on Windows and want to mount an image file (iso for example). How do you do that? Right, you can’t do it with shipped programs. So the first step is finding an application that is able to just do that.

At this point I used to go to the Daemon Tools website, but since I became a happy GNU/Linux user I tried a little harder a few days ago and found a great piece of software called ImDisk. As you may have guessed it from the title of this article, it is opensource and does not install anything like a useless toolbar or set another startpage in your browser (Daemon Tools likes to do that). Nor does it have a limited number of virtual drives (the only limit seems to be that Windows assigns letters for each drive, so when you run out of letters you get a problem, DT limits the virtual drives to 4 in the basic version). Like DT it also works with Windows 7 and supports the x86_32 as well as the x86_64 architecture and is easy to use through a GUI.

So if you use any Windows OS beginning from Windows NT 3.51 and need to mount images, you can just go ahead and give it a shot:

http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk

Mounting Windows AIK here. Finally that iso gets a purpose...

Thats how it looks like while being mounted