Stefan aka Noneus

I recently installed the latest Fedora release. After installation sudo was painfully slow. About 30 seconds until the command executed. The problem was, that the hostname was missing in /etc/hosts:

Before:

127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

After:

127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost noneus-laptop
::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

In my case the hostname was noneus-laptop. You can figure out your own with the command hostname.
Happy sudoing!

I have to use Matlab for university. But starting it is annoying. You can’t link directly to the matlab-startup-script in a .desktop-file, because it crashes, if it is not started from a terminal. To overcome this hurdle I start matlab with a xterm. The xterm minimizes itself once started. You can find icons in <matlab-basedir>/X11/icons. The command I used is: xterm -iconic -e <matlab-basedir>/bin/matlab.

UPDATE:
I’m currently testing Kubuntu. Starting matlab in KDE can be done without an taskbar entry with kstart:

kstart –skiptaskbar –iconify xterm -e /home/noneus/Programs/matlab/bin/matlab

I got Left4Dead fever. Left4Dead is a shooter by valve. Unfortunatley only for Windows. So I need wine or one of its forks to play the game. First I thought Wine was the deal. But it was not. It doesn’t support the advanced graphics stuff. I had to turn down all graphics in order to get playable perfomance with wine. But there was still stuttering.

Cedega on the other hand works much better. Decent Framerates right out of the box. I was really suprised how much better cedega works with source games. Just make sure to start the Games with their CDDB profile from the cedega UI and NOT from the Steam Games List.

I couldn’t resist… I bought an Android Developer Phone. It was quite expensive. The device itself was 399$. Getting an Android Market Account 25$ and a whopping 91.71$ for taxes. 42.60$ for shipping. So in Total I paid about about 550$ for this phone. Shipment from the US to Germany took about 5 days. I won’t make a review about the phone-software. Just search Youtube for G1 Android Review. But I will review the Development Tools shortly in this post (In more detail in about a month).

But first things first. The device came in a simple white box. There was no fancy boxing. No CDs. Just the device with a charger for America (I charge the phone through USB), and USB-cable and Headphones:

The box of my Android phone.

The Box opened with the phone inside.

Contents of the Android Box.

You can find the complete specs for the phone on Wikipedia. A great feature is the supported UMTS speeds. 7.2MBit/s down and 2.2MBit/s up (in theory). The build quality of the device could be better. Especially the mechanism to open and close the keyboard. When the device is closed the display wiggles, which is kind of annoying. But enought about the device. Let’s talk developing.

Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to write my own isomounter. Of course there are enough isomounters. I’m currently doing an internship with a lot of python programming. So I decided to write the whole thing in python with gtk is the toolkit. After 3 hours I have the base functionality working:

It can mount and unmount isos. It’s currently done with sudo mount -o loop,user -t iso9660 <iso> <mountpoint>. But you need the NOPASSWD option in sudo for that. Either I only make the mounter available as root or I integrated the gksu stuff. It doesn’t require any settings atm, because the mountlist is read with mount | grep ‘type iso9660′ | grep ‘/dev/loop’.

NISOMounter will be part of a whole set of iso managing utilities. I plan to make a converter and creator. Both this apps will be a frontend for poweriso. But first I want to clean up the mounter make some pretty icons and read more about uidesign.

UPDATE: Source in: http://trac.noneus.de/nisotools/browser/trunk

Since I can’t get ffmpeg-mt work I tried my luck with coreavc and coreavc-for-linux again. I actually got it working. I can now play h264 1080p without stuttering! I made a package for AUR. Hope it works for you too.

I recently decided to use Kde4 again. I ran in a problem with phonon. It didn’t use my dmix setup. Well I got it working. Phonon detects devices with a new alsa command in the asound.conf called ‘hint’. Here is my new /etc/asound.conf and ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 8192
rate 44100 #many new cards are 48000 only
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
hint {
show on
description "Onboard Soundcard"
}
}
ctl.dmixer {
type hw
card 0
}

On the lines 25-28 is the part so Phonon find it. Now you can setup Phonon with your new sound device. It has to be on top for all outputs. (I had to set all of them separately.)

I really like what AMD is doing. They opened up graphics card documentation and are contributing to the opensource radeonhd driver. All that is part of their new opensource strategy. They also released an “AMD Performance Library” on Sourceforge called Framewave. Of course Intel did that too. But my heart is with AMD (Too bad their new processors suck.)

Yes. Noneus’ mass renaming tool is still alive. I added some functionality and created a Sourceforge Project. All the sources are in the subversion repository.
So the current features are:

-Delete from position to position
-Insert string at position
-Remove/Replace strings
-Lower-/Upper-/Camelcase
-Delete field with specified field delimiters

This last one took some serious thinking. A major problem at the moment is that multiple operations in one cmdline are not supported. I will fix this very soon.

[Update:] Fixed the issue. Revision 2 now does multiple operations.

Over night I uploaded packages of amarok2, koffice2 und kde4 with current svn-revisions. This is for archlinux x86_64 only and you need the testing repository enabled. Here’s the entry for the pacman.conf:
[kde4]
Server = http://repo.noneus.de/kde4
Just do pacman -S kde4 amarok2-svn koffice2-svn and you have it all. I will upload packages for other kde4 apps sometime soon.

To rebuild everything on your own you can download the PKGBUILDs I used: http://repo.noneus.de/kde4svn-pkgbuilds.tar.gz

Build these with
versionpkg -o=-is
Do not add the clean flag and never delete the build folder or you have to rebuild the whole package! Using -is will only rebuild the sourcefiles that actually changed.

Enjoy!