I did it :) Arch Linux on my external USB disk

Posted on February 16, 2008
Filed Under arch, distros, linux | 4 Comments

The weekend brought to me a new shining toy to play with! I’ve installed Arch Linux on my external USB hard drive :) . Now I have a “mobile” Arch to use from any usb capable to boot machine (with some retouch of course).

First Impressions

I must say that I’m very impressed. I really can’t believe that it is so clean and simply customizable. I’ve already installed a lot of things, from Xorg to gnome to pulseaudio to compiz-fusion and all went smooth. It’s much more hard to customize an Ubuntu distro without breaking something. So Arch could become my first distro or maybe I simply will maintain both Ubuntu on my main hard disk and Arch on my external drive.

What could be improved

I would like that abs could sync aur PKGBUILD also, in a subdir called aur for example. Could be that this is already possible and I still don’t know how to do it (suggestions ?)

What I have done next

A really bad thing is that more and more users told me that they can’t build cGmail 0.5 for arch. I don’t want that any of you must survive without cGmail :) , so I have read arch docs on how to build a package, tweaked the 0.4.1 PKGBUILD, patched cGmail, and voilà now I have a working Arch package for it. In cGmail 0.5 release, I’ve used python-distutils-extra mainly for i18n. Arch doesn’t include this extras and for now i18n was disabled (you must use cGmail in english). In future versions of cGmail I will try to solve this problem.

PKGBUILD Download

cGmail 0.5 Arch PKGBUILD and patches

P.S. Please rename the file in cgmail-arch.tar.gz in order to be able to open it, wordress insist to rename it!

Rolling release vs. time based release

Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under arch, distros, linux | 3 Comments

I was wondering if a rolling based distro could be stable enough to met my needs. I use Ubuntu since dapper, and I’ve used suse, fedora, redhat, mandrake and others since my first steps into the linux distros world. Almost all this distros caused me troubles during upgrade process except Ubuntu. Ubuntu upgrade process got always smootly on my system and I’m almost satisfied with this distro. Anyway I’m tired to download hundred megabytes and wait hours to finish the update process each time a new Ubuntu release come out. Following the ubuntu development (using the next version repositories each time a new version come out) is nearly impossible, becouse they become very unstable and unusable as working environment. So I’m searching to test a rolling based distro.

For sure I will try Arch linux as soon as I find some time hoping it will be stable enough. Any other distro to suggest? Please take in mind that I’m an experienced user but I want to spend my time to use my system and not to frequently tweak it. So please no gentoo or not well supported distros!

cGmail 0.5 released

Posted on January 18, 2008
Filed Under cGmail | 24 Comments

I’m very proud to annunce that cGmail 0.5 is out :) Let me introduce you what’s new in this version.

For the user

Only few (but not less important) cGmail 0.5 changes are visible by users. cGmail 0.5 support for gmail was improved a lot. Now cGmail include support for “gmail for your domain” and, as requested by many people, labeled mails. Lot of bugs fixed and feature refined. Now only pertinet actions will be shown on notification bubbles (no more “go to gmail account” for pop3 or imap accounts)

Under the hood

cGmail 0.5 is almost a complete rewrite of cGmail, so the underground code is more robust and easily expandable. New bulid system, new account storage engine and new plugins like structure for checkers (checkers are things like gmail checker, pop3 checker and imap checker for now). In the future third party plugin could be written and probabily cGmail could become something more that a simply mail checker.

Dowloads

Source tar.gz: cgmail_0.5.tar.gz

Ubuntu deb: cgmail_0.5_all.deb

cGmail 0.5, call for testers

Posted on January 8, 2008
Filed Under cGmail | 13 Comments

cGmail 0.5 seems to be almost ready to be released. Anyway some testing will be appreciated. If you want to test the “will be 0.5″ please download it from here.

What need to be tested?

  1. Gmail for your domain now should work out of the box thanks to Keith Cirkel comment on cGmail 0.4.1 released but becouse I don’t have that kind of gmail account it needs to be tested.
  2. Lot of changes was done on accounts storage system so bugs could be flying all around :)
  3. Most of the code was rewritten from scratch so, to be concise, everything need testing.

Thanks in advance.

Important notes

When you launch this version of cGmail, all your previous accounts will be deleted! cGmail 0.4 series and 0.5 series have incompatible account storage system and I don’t want to waste time to implement an importer. It should not be a problem to reinsert 3 or 4 accounts.

Bash: how to get a password without displaying it on the terminal

Posted on December 7, 2007
Filed Under bash | 1 Comment

In bash scripting to require user input we must use the read function. For example to read an username we would make something like this:

  1. read -p "Give me the username " username;

But what about passwords? Using the read as shown, the password will be readable on the terminal emulator and we just do not want this. So how to proceed? Well, we need to stop the output to come on the terminal while typing own password and restart it when we have done. To achieve this we can use the command stty that, how its manpage say, change the terminal settings.

So, own script will become:

  1. stty -echo #disabling tty output
  2. read -p "Give me your password: " password
  3. stty echo #reenable echo

cGmail 0.4.1 released

Posted on November 28, 2007
Filed Under cGmail, gtk, python | 20 Comments

Today I’ve released a maintence version of cGmail. This version include some nasty bugs fix.

  1. No sound bug (Now it should work well)
  2. Pop3 bug. This bug prevented cGmail to notify correctly incoming mails on pop3 accounts. Now it works :)
  3. Autostart option bug. In cGmail 0.4 autostart option in preferences menu don’t worked well when the ~/.config/autostart dir was not previously created

I hope you enjoy the new version. Please download it from http://cgmail.tuxfamily.org/

Guitar Rig on Ubuntu Gutsy Howto

Posted on November 14, 2007
Filed Under audio, tutorials | 16 Comments

I use ubuntu for almost everything but I still maintain Windows Xp in dual boot for audio software as Guitar Rig. In this days I’ve finally found a solution and now I can run Guitar Rig on my Ubuntu box smoothly and without problems.
Here a shot on my ubuntu box:

Guitar Rig running on my Ubuntu Gutsy

This post is an howto to accomplish my results. First of all you need wine and a great peace of code that I’ve discovered from a couple of days: wineasio. Here the steps that you must accomplish:

Read more

gnome.sound_play method do not work on Ubuntu Gutsy

Posted on November 9, 2007
Filed Under cGmail, gnome, python | 1 Comment

I’ve noticed that the sound_play method from the gnome python package no longer work on Gutsy release and this is a bad thing. As you probabily have read I’ve released the 0.4 version of cGmail. cGmail by default prefer this method to play sounds on new incoming messages (that worked fine in feisty and before) and since this method no more work you will not have sounds :(

The bug is known and filed on launchpad https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/153704 (I’ve added my comment too)

For now to play sounds on gnome with python I suggest gstreamer.

Here an example on how to do. This play a file in async mode:

Python code

  1.  
  2. class __GstPlayThread(threading.Thread):
  3.         def __init__(self, ply):
  4.                 self.ply = ply
  5.                 threading.Thread.__init__(self)
  6.         def run(self):
  7.                 self.ply.set_state(gst.STATE_PLAYING)
  8.                 def bus_event(bus, message):
  9.                         t = message.type
  10.                         if t == gst.MESSAGE_EOS:
  11.                                 self.ply.set_state(gst.STATE_NULL)
  12.                         return True
  13.                 self.ply.get_bus().add_watch(bus_event)
  14.  
  15. def gstplay(file_path):
  16.         ply = gst.element_factory_make("playbin", "player")
  17.         ply.set_property("uri", "file://" + file_path)
  18.         pt = __GstPlayThread(ply)
  19.         pt.start()

cGmail 0.4 released

Posted on November 5, 2007
Filed Under cGmail, gtk, python | 13 Comments

Do you already know cGmail? And do you know that I develop that cool app :D ? Well I’m happy to announce that cGmail 0.4 is out. Please visit cGmail home page at http://cgmail.tuxfamily.org/ for more info about what cGmail is and to give it a try.

cGmail status icon

What’s new?

Well this version include a completely restructured code. Now cGmail is splitted into two apps:

cgmailservice, as the name says, is the service that run in background into your gnome session and check for new mails and alert you. cgmail is the app configurator. From cgmail user interface you can add/remove accounts, enable/disable accounts, start/stop cgmailservice, have feedback on service status and other cool things. cgmail and cgmailservice use a dbus interface for inter process communication.

Other news include the imap support and other configuration options such the possibility to set cgmailservice to autostart with the gnome session.

If you have used previus versions I strongly suggest to update to 0.4. If you never used cGmail I strongly suggest to give it a try ;) :mrgreen:

Tip: Vim and python indentation

Posted on November 3, 2007
Filed Under python, tips, vim | 1 Comment

Usually I prefer tabs indentation rather than space indentation for python code. Unfortunately often python code from open source projects or code that you can find on the net use space indentation. To convert from one to the other you can simply use a vim substitution.

Example:

:%s/    /\t/g

It’s as simple as this :)

This will convert a four spaced indentation with a one tab one and make we happy :D

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