Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

Received the following email this morning:

Last night our Transifex installation turned 1 year old. I think with
101 users and  4012 submissions in 45 languages it has been quite a
step forward compared to the previous mailing list-based submission
system. For that I'd like to thank all the people involved, most
noticeably Jannis for the initial setup, the Transifex guys for help
and fixing bugs, Og for the appliance we've been running for the last
half year and of course the Translators with all their patience and
effort to make it a success.

Cheers,
The Xfce development team.

This has an extra special meaning for me, not only because I am one of the 101 users contributing translations to the Xfce project, or because I’m a huge supporter of the work the Transifex guys have been doing, but because of their use of the Transifex Appliance!

You see, a while back I needed a “pet” project to use as a learning tool to learn about creating, maintaining and deploying software appliances with the technologies we develop here at work. Transifex was the project that caught my attention, mainly for being a tool for translators and for using Django under the hood.

I’ve been maintaining the Transifex Appliance for quite some time now, all by my lonesome self and putting a lot of my free time. So it feels great to hear that the appliance is being used in a production environment and that it is used by several users!

So, congratulations to the Xfce translators and Nick Schermer for sticking with the appliance and providing tons of great feedback on how to improve it!

This month's Xfce desktop:

icons: awoken
gtk+: axiomd
xfwm4: axiomd
background: The Crown of the Sun
cursor: Obsidian xcursors

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper and conky configuration:

I built my environment around the wallpaper, an image of a solar eclipse, bringing out the haunting beauty of the sun's corona. I cropped this photo from APOD to fit my screen dimensions.

With such a beautiful cosmic backdrop, I had to search for matching theme elements. I used the same window manager and gtk+ theme, axiomd. It's nice and dark, with moon dust highlights.

It's been a long, long time since I last installed conky. I decided to give it another go, now that it's capable of doing beautiful things with Cairo and Lua. I was especially impressed by this configuration I found on the Arch Linux forums.

I made a few modifications to the ring meter scripts for conky. The end result is pretty decent, considering I haven't done much heavy tweaking yet. You'll need to emerge conky with the lua-cairo and lua-imlib USE flags set, or else the scripts won't function.

The rings frame the corona, with just a touch of transparency to blend it into the deeper space backdrop. From left to right, the rings measure: CPU core 2 load, memory usage, /usr/portage, /, and CPU core 1 load. Adding, removing, shrinking, or expanding rings is pretty easy. The ring scripts are well-commented. The biggest obstacle I've run into so far is adapting the configs to my screen size, ensuring that items are placed just right. I could tweak the ring's curvature to precisely match the eclipse, but it's close enough as it is.

I picked up the icon set because it's very attractive for both dark and light environments. It's very flexible, with numerous alternative icon versions, extra standalone icons, many distribution logos, and a number of helpful scripts inside the tarball. I used one of the included Gentoo logos as my Xfce menu icon.

The mouse cursor theme is glossy and dark, yet it has a few blue animations to add a splash of color. To get it, run emerge obsidian-xcursors.

Applications

In the foreground, Decibel Audio Player is running in the "mini" mode, playing a beautiful track by Planet Boelex.

Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. An Xfce terminal displays an eix-sync operation.

Running in the panel are an assortment of application launchers, including customized dropdown menus for frequently used programs.

After the Xfce menu, launchers, and taskbar, the notification area holds the tray icon for Decibel Audio Player. Then a genmon applet that runs my lastsync.sh Portage script. After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and local weather.

Now that I'm using conky, I can probably find a way to integrate the weather, clock, and Portage sync script with the existing ring meters, or even run it in another instance off to the side. Anything to reduce my crowded top panel.

Been meaning to provide a follow-up to the last documentation report for a few days now, as well as a couple other news items.

Gentoo in the press

LWN ran an article on Linux distributions for PowerPC machines. Gentoo gets the top mention.

Package maintenance

I had the treecleaner team remove a package I maintain, WhaawMP. I hadn't used it in a long time and was no longer interested in maintaining it. Upstream seemed to be dead, and there were several user interface bugs and crashers in daily use. Also, I didn't want to put in the work on trying to make the ebuild comply with the stupid Python3 stabilization forced on all our users. Thanks to Jeremy for punting it. If you're looking for a lightweight video player alternative, please read the comment I left on the bug. bug 315067

Documentation status

Now, down to the docs work I've done, mostly on the 21st and 22nd, after the last status report. The biggest news is that I finished rewriting the handbooks for the autobuilds. In two days, I did four architecture handbooks. I put in some long hours, but it felt good to finally have them all done.

Handbook updates

• Sparc: updated the handbook for the autobuilds. Also fixed the kernel config "conditionals" by adding in version strings to the handbook index code, so that the latest stable version magically appears in the guide. Truly XSL is an awesome thing. The former GDP lead once said that writing for the handbook is almost like programming it. The code is designed to take variables, drop them in place for given conditions, and to test for those conditions depending on the presence of other variables (which we call "keys"), which architecture you're viewing, etc, and then drop those variables in to the rendered page. Once the XSL framework is in place, though, maintaining the GuideXML in the handbooks is much easier. We just drop the newest variable for LiveCD ISO size into the appropriate arch index, and it shows up as "115 MB" in that handbook. You can see some of our keys and how we use them.
• PPC: updated handbook for the autobuilds. bug 260403, bug 292726, bug 234310
• PPC: fixed the abstracts in the index. There was a lot of abstracts in the toplevel index. Abstracts are supposed to be in each chapter, so that the index just picks them up and includes them in the rendered page. Our XSL is frickin' amazing.
• PPC: removed the warning and kernel config for voluntary preemption. I asked the PPC team if this old warning was still valid, and it turns out that the preempt code in the kernel actually works okay. Thanks to Joe for investigating.
• PPC64: updated handbook for the autobuilds. bug 260403, bug 292726, bug 234310
• MIPS: updated handbook. MIPS still doesn't have weekly stages or LiveCDs. Because MIPS media dates back to 2008, there are some things I can't fix in the handbook, like using eselect for profile management. If it's not in the stages or CDs, I can't document it. The profiles in particular have been significantly reworked for 10.0, and like everything else, will require some heavy rewrites in the handbook. The team is aware of how ancient their releases are, and are working to put out new media for more recent MIPS chips. bug 260403, bug 292726, bug 234310
• AMD64: fixed a broken link to the AMD64 FAQ

Desktop doc updates

• Xfce guide: updated the firefox package name. I was watching #gentoo-commits and happened to notice that nirbheek changed the name from mozilla-firefox to just firefox.

Other doc updates

• OpenRC migration: added a note on kernel module variables and how OpenRC assigns priority. bug 269349
• vpnc guide: updated the kernel configuration and adjusted the GuideXML to match coding standards. Thanks to tanderson for reporting via IRC. Also changed the text on vpnc overwriting /etc/resolv.conf. Old versions didn't overwrite it, but recent releases do. bug 330345
• Optimization guide: I updated the GCC documentation links to point at the 4.4 series, since it's been stable for awhile now. The links were pointing to the old 4.3 series.

Project page updates

• Updated project status notes: GMN, GWN, Installer

Website updates

• Where: removed the last reference to 2008.0 media, as the handbooks have all been switched to the autobuilds. Only HPPA still referred to the 2008.0 LiveCD, since that's the last available release. That information has been in the HPPA handbooks for a long time.
• Contact: added another note saying that PR does not provide user support. We've been getting a lot of emails asking us for support, so I've been adding notes to our project page and the toplevel contact page.
• Lists: updated the list of mailing lists with information on closed and inactive list. Thanks to Jeremy for the patch. bug 291860

I've been smashing documentation bugs left and right since getting back from vacation, as well as searching out old documents and project pages and fixing 'em up.

Most of the updates have been to the installation & Portage handbooks, but there are many changes to the other documentation, including the desktop guides for graphics cards, and my Xfce guide. There's even a new doc on Logcheck, written by one of our developers.

Here's a brief summary of what I've done in the last week:

New documentation:

• Logcheck guide: Thanks to phajdan.jr. bug 322223

Handbook updates:

• Change ccache recommendation; it's really only for developers: bug 327945
• Use layman rather than gensync for working with Portage overlays: bug 305047
• Add another note on IA32 emulation in the kernel for (non-)multilib users: bug 326691
• Fix file verification process for the Alpha, AMD64, ARM, HPPA, IA64, and x86 handbooks: bug 283402. This was an old one: when we went to the weekly media autobuilds, Release Engineering signed the files with a new GPG key, and changed how the files were signed. All the handbooks need to be updated, as they still have the old keys and instructions from the previous release.
• Update installation instructions for the autobuilds. Completed Alpha, AMD64, ARM, HPPA, IA64, and x86: bug 283402, bug 292726, bug 260403. Still need to do PPC, PPC64, Sparc, and possibly MIPS, if they have sufficiently recent media.
• Use -march=core2 for recent Intel EM64T chips, rather than the old -march=nocona. Fix MCE section of kernel config. Add new Atom processor type: bug 323381
• Update Grub documentation links. Upstream removed all grub legacy instructions in favor of grub2, which won't be stable any time soon. Fixed the handbooks and other docs to use the offsite Grub Wiki: bug 328679
• Fix a missing fstab. Gave ARM the same generic fstab example as the other arches: bug 328095
• category/package move for chkrootkit

Desktop doc updates:

• Xfce guide: Change USE flags for opera; no longer needs qt-static. bug 328087
• nVidia guide: Use new driver installation methods. Add links to xorg-server guide to get X configured before dealing with nVidia-specific issues. Update kernel and module info. bug 307481
• ATI FAQ: General cleanups. Add R800 (Evergreen) info. Remove old GATOS project text. Update Catalyst availability section.

Other doc updates:

• FAQ: Update Grub documentation link. Update gcc -march info for x86 and AMD64. Fix internal GuideXML code. bug 328679
• Quickinstall guides (x86, LVM2+RAID): Fix ccache recommendation. bug 327945
• LDAP guide: use more recent 2.3 configuration file shipped with the ebuild. bug 325497
• SHOUTcast guide: Miscellaneous typo fixes. bug 323401
• IPv6 guide: update net-dns/totd info now that it's stable. Fix GuideXML and minor text issues throughout. bug 326771. This doc presents an ongoing problem, because it recommends a package it shouldn't. I sent an email to the gentoo-dev mailing list asking for help with this one.
• AMD64 FAQ: Update Flash installation info. Adobe decided to drop 64-bit versions (again) beginning in version 10.1, and our developers had to mask 10.0 for security reasons. This means that there is no Adobe Flash for non-multilib profile users. And nspluginwrapper is (once again) too unstable, so 32-bit Flash with a 64-bit browser is not recommended. Probably will have to install firefox-bin or some other 32-bit browser. Stupid Adobe.
• UTF-8 guide: Fix wrong category for the Xfce terminal, leftover from when it was moved out of xfce-extra. bug 328977
• Fix metadoc index for retired developers and add logcheck guide entry

Project page updates:

• Overlays userguide: Extensive GuideXML, grammar, etc. rewrites to make the guide more readable and more helpful. Add more instructions for things like keywording packages per the Portage handbook. Add SCM homepage links. This series of updates was prompted by bug 305047, the gensync to layman change.
• GUIs: Update retired developers
• PR: Add note stating that PR does not offer user support, and list available support resources. Hopefully this will cut down on the amount of support requests the PR team receives in our inbox every month.

Website updates:

• IRC: Add the Qt project channel, #gentoo-qt. bug 328665

One of my fellow developers, jkt, has been helping out a bit in the last couple of weeks, closing bug 301840 and bug 325885. This was especially important when I was on vacation and then out sick. I'm always happy when someone besides me steps up and gets our docs into shape. Thanks, Jan!

So that's about it. There are still plenty of open documentation bugs, but the list has shrunk significantly. My biggest project now is to finish the rest of the handbooks for the weekly autobuild instructions. The rest of our open bugs will require just as many hours and days to fix, as large portions of our handbooks and guides will need to be rewritten. Hopefully I can at least get the autobuild updates done in the next few days.

I guess it’s time for an update.

This week I passed the last of four final exams in computer science and human-computer interaction at my university. Not only am I pleased that nine months of learning are over; I am also blessed with excellent grades. And while my understand of good grades is similar to that of money (nice to have it but nothing to focus on and/or brag with), I have to admit that this time I’m at least a little proud of myself. Five years at the university are slowly coming to an end, the first friends are leaving town and it will soon be time to take the next big step in life.

I cannot leave this city before writing another thesis, however. Thus, I am currently looking for a Diplom thesis at the university or at companies related to open source technologies. If you happen work for such a company with interesting thesis ideas or opportunities, please let me know. The thesis is supposed to take about 6 months, ideally starting early in September. After that it’s time to pack my stuff and look for an employer. I’m hoping for a position in open source software development. Areas I’m particularly interested in include Linux, mobile computing, desktop-related technologies as well as renewable energy, environment protection and open government. I’m here to make a difference.

On to something else. A few weeks ago I was offered sponsoring in order to work on thunar-volman for a few days. I accepted the offer, so for the entire next week from 2010-07-19 to 2010-07-26 (including the weekend) I’ll do some sponsored work on porting Thunar and thunar-volman to udev and GIO! The goal is to finish all major features (storage devices, cameras etc.).

Yesterday I did some warm-up hacking on tumbler to verify that if I’m still up to the task. The results: a new ffmpegthumbnailer-based video thumbnailer plugin (written by Lionel Le Folgoc), a new PDF/PostScript thumbnailer plugin based on poppler-glib and a new tumbler release (0.1.2). The master branch contains another commit adding arbitrary URI support to the PDF/PostScript thumbnailer but for that you’ll have to wait until the next release.

That’s it for now, I’ll be a lot more active next week. Take care everyone!

A quick note so I can delete it from my desktop. In order to produce only a Bzip2 tarball with the Autotools, specially when running make distcheck, set the automake init call with these parameters:

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([no-dist-gzip dist-bzip2])

By the way I wonder if it's worth dumping bzip2 against xz.

As promised, here comes the post about recent changes in Xfce4 Display Settings. For those who do not know, Xfce4 Display Settings is the dialog which allows you to set the screen resolution, refresh rate, to activate external monitors, etc.In Xfce 4.6, it only had one problem: it was totally useless and not working.

Then came mr_pouit, who decided it was time to clean that mess! He started to dig in the xrandr code to understand how the kryptic Randr API works and to bring that sweet magic to Xfce. So what do we have at the moment?

The new dialog is at the moment almost similar to the old one, except that every thing should work correctly and that it is rocking simple to use! We also added some goodies such as timed confirmation for critical changes and a simple dialog which can be called with the media keys or with Win + P to quickly configure an external output.

But there is more to come! First, we are still working on fixing bugs, simplifying the code to make it rocking stable and awesome like Barney's suit. Then, we are planning a lot of UI improvements, the biggest one being a graphical way of setting the screens' layout : it will allow the user to set the relative positions of external monitors. We hope to have that done in the next two weeks, but it could take a little more time. And yes, that'll mean that 4.8 TODO list will have lost one item

I've seen a lot of people on IRC lately asking why 4.8 was not released on the 12th of June as scheduled. Well, the schedule could not be respected and we currently have no scheduled release date. There is still a lot of work to do and we lost several key contributors and we obviously did not gain new ones...

So if you want to see Xfce 4.8 out, come and help us! We need help to implement the 4.8 features (have a look at the bottom of schedule page, there are links to the goals of each module) and to fix bugs.

A good way to get started is to choose some bugs on the Xfce bugzilla and to submit patches, come and bug us on #xfce to get your patches reviewed (it may take a while but that's definitely useful!). We need a lot more contributors if we want to get things moving forward!

In a post that will follow shortly, I will discuss a merrier topic: the new awesome work of the mighty mr_pouit (his only vice being that he maintains Xubuntu :D) on the display settings dialog (the dialog to set the screen resolution, frequency...). Stay tuned! (Yes, this means we are still active :D)

It's done. The task manager application available in Xfce for quite some years is now available with major changes. It has been rewritten from scratch, with GtkBuilder UI definitions and GObjects, everything is fresh and clean. The application has support for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris.

Let's start by visual changes:

• The buttons at the bottom are gone, the progress bars at the top are vanished, say hello to a toolbar with buttons and monitors.
• You read well, monitors are in, they show a graph of the CPU and memory usage by time.
• A status bar is visible at the bottom, it displays a general information about the system usage.
• Icons are displayed beneath the task names.

Let's continue with less visual:

• Tasks that start are displayed with a green background for a short delay and tasks that terminate with a red background.
• Tasks which state is changing are temporarily displayed with a yellow background. This covers tasks changing their state from idle to running, vice versa and etc.
• The tree views context menu contains the same actions as before, sending signals to the task and changing the priority. They have been polished however, for example the continue and stop signals aren't shown altogether anymore, and there are only five priorities to set ranging from Very low to Very high.
• The tree view columns can be reordered as you wish.
• An optional status icon can be activated allowing you to hide the application.
• It is possible to display percentage values with more precision.
• And finally, the default refresh rate is 750ms and it can be switched from 500ms up to 10s.

And the result is as follows:


The application is fully translated into fifteen languages!

Go to project webpage.

This month's Xfce desktop was inspired by old Japan.

icons: Feel of Japan
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: axiomd
background: The Great Wave off Kanagawa
cursor: Obsidian xcursors

The icon set is very pretty, with lots of creative touches. It can be a little hard to tell what an icon represents, but the more time I spend with this set, the easier it is to recognize items. Sadly, this set only had one release, and it's still incomplete.

The gtk+ theme Simplistica (from April's desktop) returns for June's desktop. Its colors add an old-time feel to the desktop. The blue menu rollovers even match up with the wave colors of the background image.

The window manager theme is the darker variant of axiom, a simple, elegant theme. Its deep hue provides richly contrasts the sandy, woody tones of the gtk+ theme, and suggests dark, stormy skies to match the waves of the background image.

The wallpaper is a famous woodblock print by Hokusai, from the series 36 Views of Mount Fuji, and a simple Google search turns up any resolution you could want. The Great Wave is one of my favorite works. It was on my February calendar, and now it's on my desktop. The image isn't quite the rustic picture of ancient Japan that I'd like - that would take a couple of weeks to locate - but it's still pleasing. Sakura, from last month's desktop, is another good choice, but variety is the spice of life. The Great Wave goes well with my SLiM login theme, Wave.

I picked the mouse cursor theme because it reminds me of wet ink on rice paper, and it has occasional blue animations that match the wave colors. It's available in Portage; you can install it by running emerge obsidian-xcursors.

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:

Applications

Thunar is the filemanager open in the foreground. An Xfce terminal shows an update to Gnumeric being compiled in the background.

Running in the panel are an assortment of application launchers, including customized dropdown menus for frequently used programs.

In the panel, I changed the default Xfce menu button (the blue X on the far left) to use a different icon; look in /usr/share/pixmaps for the four menu icons shipped with Xfce. Right click the menu button to change the icon. Since you have to supply the full path, it means that when you change icon themes, any menu icon included will not automatically be applied to the menu button. You'll have to change it manually every time you change your theme.

After the launchers and taskbar, the notification area holds the tray icons for Claws Mail and Pidgin. Then a genmon applet that runs my lastsync.sh Portage script. After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and local weather.

This month's mostly warm, occasionally cool and windy weather inspired me to create a working environment that called to mind the pleasant days of springtime. The wallpaper is suitably natural, with pale blossoms and soft shadowed reflections at the water's edge.

icons: Crashbit
gtk+: Lila-Xfce
xfwm4: axiom
background: sakura
cursor: gentoo-xcursors

The gtk+ colors were chosen to complement the lavender cherry tree blossoms. While Xfce includes a gtk+ theme with matching colors, Xfce-Cadmium, one of the Lila themes had better-looking widgets. Cadmium is still a good choice, as are Lila-Simple and Lila-Industrial.

The icon set is an older version of Crashbit. The window manager theme "axiom" was chosen because it picks up the neutral background colors. Most themes are designed to pick up one of the primary colors, but that made things too purplish. The Lila project offers a couple of xfwm4 themes, but both are too harsh for this desktop.

The final piece of the theme is the mouse cursor. Normally I just use the Vanilla DMZ cursor theme, but I thought I'd try out a cursor set created specifically for Gentoo, which you can install by running emerge gentoo-xcursors. It even comes with an animated Znurt for "working" operations. The light on his head pulses rapidly while you wait. Cute, very cute. The Lila project also has a few cursor themes, but I decided to stick with the Gentoo theme, because of Znurt.

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:

It's a pleasantly warm background, medium contrast, so it's easy on my eyes at all times. Plus, the water complements my SLiM theme, Wave.

Applications

Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. An Xfce Terminal displays the working directory for my LogJam fork. (Ebuilds in the overnight overlay.)

The weather plugin is running in the panel, displaying the local forecast, just after the very flexible Orage clock and my lastsync.sh script in the genmon plugin.

Also visible: the Xfce Task Manager and Decibel Audio Player. Decibel is running in Playlist mode, playing the album Raja by Planet Boelex. The album is beautiful, relaxing, entrancing. It's freely available at Soft Phase.

Problem

I need to get a NAS. A small one, due to physical space constraints. Yet it still needs to hold 3 or 4 drives. Cheap, too. Ideally I'd spend $150, but I can do more if need be. Total cost must be less than $400.

The single media storage drive in my desktop workstation has run out of room, and the box itself has become increasingly unreliable due to overheating and flaky parts. So before the thing dies and takes my drive with it, I should stick it in a separate box, along with two other drives, and thus put all my home media needs in one easily accessible place. I need to get a NAS that can hold at least 3-4 drives.

Options

There are two ways of doing that:

1. Buying a NAS device.

Synology, Buffalo, QNAP, and others make 2-to-4 drive NAS boxes with decent firmware and web interfaces, and are guaranteed Linux/Mac compatible, which is good for all my machines. The downside is that they typically cost $300 - $500 new, which is more than I want to pay. I've checked eBay, but NASes from these vendors and others are purchased very quickly, as there's a thriving resale market. Even used, the devices command a very high price. QNAP, which seems to have the best NAS devices (according to Small Net Builder, would be my first choice based on firmware features and reputation, but the few 4-bay NASes on eBay are still too expensive, and they're sold within just a couple of hours or days.

2. Building my own NAS device.

In theory, this could be much cheaper than purchasing a NAS from a vendor. The downside is that I have to buy the components, assemble them, hope they all work, find a decent NAS operating system, hope it installs, configure it, and hope it works, and then carefully administer updates and other things I don't want to be bothered with.

That's why I was so set on getting a small QNAP or DiskStation -- the firmware and web UI are already in place, and easy-to-use. I just want to put in the drives and set my sharing services. Paying a slightly higher price in exchange for less hair pulling seemed like a worthy trade. On the other hand, choosing my own NAS OS means support for certain things all the vendor-supplied NAS OSes lack, like better filesystem support, or running all kinds of sharing services without being limited to what's in the firmware, for example UPnP/DLNA.

That brings me to the next part:

Requirements

These things will determine what kind of NAS I purchase or assemble, and what operating system I install.

Media serving

1. UPnP: The UPnP server needs to support streaming to normal UPnP clients and an Xbox 360. There's an ION-based HTPC (Zotac MAG) and an Xbox 360 in the living room, attached to the home network.

Right now the HTPC has XBMC installed, but it's so frustrating to configure I may switch to Boxee or some other more user-friendly HTPC OS. Still, at least it does UPnP, which the easiest way to stream something from the desktop workstation, without having to setup Samba or NFS.

Currently, I run uShare from my desktop workstation whenever we want to watch something in the living room. The workstation has all the media files. However, to access them from the HTPC or the Xbox 360, I have to close all networked programs, turn off iptables, and then start the uShare service on the desktop. Not ideal.

2. MPD: Once the NAS is set up, I figure it's a smart idea to just use streaming players, since there won't be any local playback, except for audio CDs on the workstation. All other music will be on the NAS hard drives.

3. iTunes: We do have a Mac on the network, so I probably need iTunes server support via something like Firefly. That way no matter what's connected, it can still receive media streams.

File serving

1. Samba: The universal file sharing protocol. NFS is too unreliable. Samba can be used by anything and everything. The HTPC needs always-on access to the NAS. Same for the workstation and laptops -- they need to transfer content to and from the NAS.

The downside in Linux, at least, is needing to setup transparent Samba mounts for Xfce. It took me quite awhile to figure out how to setup Thunar, FuseSMB, FUSE, gvfs, and Gigolo. That's far, far too much effort, but at least it works when I needed to send stuff to the HTPC's hard drive over the network. Thunar is not a network-aware file manager, nor are there any plans to make it that way.

2. rsync: Useful for backups, as well as other things, I'm sure.

Filesytems

Right now, all my media is on ReiserFS, ext3, and vfat drives. I have two spare drives formatted with ReiserFS but nothing's on 'em, so I can always reformat if necessary. Whatever NAS or NAS OS I choose, it needs to support these filesystems, preferably read and write. I really don't want to have to swap files around when installing, simply because the OS doesn't support a certain filesystem.

Interface

1. Web GUI: The most important: an easy-to-use, preinstalled web user interface. I don't have the first clue on how to install and configure one myself, and I don't want to learn. It needs to already be there. Setting up a NAS should be mostly painless, so it should already provide easy configuration for Samba, access controls, media serving protocols, scheduled backups, and other bits.

2. SSH: I've discovered that with my HTPC and routers, SSH access is sometimes a lot quicker than going through a web GUI. In the case of the XBMC HTPC, sometimes it's ,em>required for upgrades and troubleshooting. There probably aren't many NAS OSes that don't offer SSH access, but it is something to check.

Which one?

If I buy a NAS, I'm at the mercy of the manufacturer for firmware updates, bug fixes, and new features. If I build my own, then the problem is which OS do I choose?

I probably won't choose Gentoo, given that nothing is ready ahead of time. Plus compiling on a low-power NAS box isn't fun. Stock Debian is right out: again, nothing's setup for serving or the web UI.

FreeNAS is often mentioned, but it has subpar filesystem support, and as a BSD, its nomenclature is quite different from Linux. Hardware support is another issue: it doesn't support as much common hardware (such as NICs) as Linux does, based on a survey of low-power Atom and ARM platforms.

Full-on server operating systems, like Ubuntu Server, seem rather bloated, and most of them aren't setup for the NAS role; they're made to be web servers, not media servers for small home networks.

The rest of the server OSes I've come across are designed as firewalls, gateways, or domain controllers, and only offer FTP access -- there's no real file sharing.

* * *

So, what are your thoughts on cheap home NAS devices? Have you built your own? Which OS did you use? What'd you pay for it? Did you buy a vendor-made NAS? Which one and why?

Lemme know!

Over this past weekend I found just enough time to finish reading Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose, a book about the story of the men of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, U.S. Army infantry. Back in 2006 HBO had turned this book into a 10-episodes mini series which I avidly watched in one shot one day while visiting my friend Vinny in Massachusetts. He had a pretty nice home theater system hook up at his place and since there was nobody else around, we were able to watch it all with the volume turned way up.

The book tells us the story about the men that formed Easy Company, from the early days of their boot camp at Camp Toccoa, to their many missions through Europe including the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the failed invasion of Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, culminating with the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.

Traditionally people say that books are usually better than the movies that were based on them, so I had pretty high expectations about reading it. The first chapter was quickly finished and I thought to myself, “I’ll be done with it before the week is over.” Unfortunately, the next following chapters didn’t read as smooth as the first one, and my spider senses started telling me that I was in for a not so pleasant surprise. The entire book felt like reading a quilt of different stories that were hastily put together from memory with several missing gaps sown in between. Some paragraphs would start telling you a story in a tense and the next one would totally change the flow to a flashback or a dialog, leaving me hanging and wondering about what had really happened to the original idea. It was a major turn off for me!

Despite all of this, I decided to finish the book with the hope that something new that was not included in the HBO series would come up, but that was not the case. This was definitely a case where the movie came out better than the book and I have to tip my hat to producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks for doing a fantastic job at turning this book into a masterpiece!

One thing about the story itself that impressed me was how most of the survivors from Easy Company, once back in the US after the war, took advantage of some of the programs the government offered to them and went to college to pursue a higher education, some going on to become very successful business man or instructors/teachers! Another interesting point that was brought up by the book (and not as much in the mini series) was how important Captain Sobel‘s rigorous and, dare I say sadistic, training methodology played a major role into shaping Easy Company into a well oiled war machine. The mini series only portraits him as a petty, chickenshit slinging, tyrant-abusing character but one could say that it was because of Sobel that Easy Company men became the best of friends and were able to surpass every single obstacle that the war threw their way!

If you asked me to recommend the book or the mini series? Go with the mini series, no doubt about it!

It's only been two weeks since my last awesome desktop, but already I've found a new look. Where mid-April's look was grungy, stormy, and dark-toned, my newest desktop is sleek, airy, and light. It exudes a reserved warmth; perfect for the approaching summer. Lots of light wood, airy spaces, pale blue skies, and soft shadows.

icons: Simplistica
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Shards

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:

The downside to such a beautifully bright environment is that it's too bright when using the computer in dim light. 'Specially late at night or early in the morning. Dark themes with lower contrast are a bit easier on the eyes in those cases.

The Simplistica icon set is comprehensive and well-designed: It's intuitive and it has more icons than even Tango, at least on my machine. Every icon looks good, though I wish there were a few more mimetype icons, for example .txt and .xml. Something like the appearance of the .zip and .tar icons.

Applications

Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. Check out those icons.

The weather plugin is running, displaying the local forecast.

That image editor is Fotoxx. When you need to make quick touchups or corrections to pictures, give Fotoxx a shot. It's way faster than The Gimp, and easier to use. There's an ebuild available in my overlay, though I need to update the ebuild for the 10.x releases.

Also visible is xfrun4, a popup application launcher that remembers your most recent commands. It's pretty nifty; I like its autocomplete feature.

From the “better than sliced bread” department, I bring you Terminator! No, not that terminator. This Terminator:

“Terminator is a program that allows users to set up flexible arrangements of GNOME terminals. It is aimed at those who normally arrange lots of terminals near each other, but don’t want to use a frame based window manager.”

Basically, think about opening a single terminal (console) window and then splitting it down the middle (vertically) to get now two separate and independent terminals… and then splitting the left terminal horizontally, giving you now three terminals… and then… well, you probably get the drift by now.

But why would you want to split your terminal like this? I can’t speak for everyone but splitting the terminal allows me to be more productive at work and at home, as I can perform several tasks in one single window and see all of them at the same time. For instance, I can package software in one console (upper left), watch my system’s resource (upper right) on another, and keep up with what’s happening on IRC (lower) at the same time!

Wouldn’t you prefer tabs instead? Well, how about both? Terminator can handle both tabs and splits, which can be very useful when you’re working on multiple things that require some level of separation. For instance, you could have several terminals in one tab, and a whole bunch of other terminals on a second tab dedicated to some other activity.

At work I usually have several ssh connections open to several different servers, running some Fabric scripts in one terminal while watching a log or two on other terminals. Sometimes I want to run the same exact command interactively on several different servers. For these scenarios a very nifty trick is the grouping feature which allows you send the same text typed in one terminal to a group of terminals.

For someone who is so addicted to custom keyboard shortcuts as I am, Terminator offers a huge number of actions that can be performed without having to move your hands away from the keyboard. I don’t know about you, but the less I have to use the mouse, the more productive I am! Check out some of the things you can do:

Ctrl+Shift+O

Split terminals Horizontally.

Ctrl+Shift+E

Split terminals Vertically.

Ctrl+Shift+Right

Move parent dragbar Right.

Ctrl+Shift+Left

Move parent dragbar Left.

Ctrl+Shift+Up

Move parent dragbar Up.

Ctrl+Shift+Down

Move parent dragbar Down.

Ctrl+Shift+S

Hide/Show Scrollbar.

Ctrl+Shift+F

Search within terminal scrollback

Ctrl+Shift+N or Ctrl+Tab

Move to next terminal within the same tab, use Ctrl+PageDown to move to the next tab. If cycle_term_tab is False, cycle within the same tab will be disabled

Ctrl+Shift+P or Ctrl+Shift+Tab

Move to previous terminal within the same tab, use Ctrl+PageUp to move to the previous tab. If cycle_term_tab is False, cycle within the same tab will be disabled

Alt+Up

Move to the terminal above the current one.

Alt+Down

Move to the terminal below the current one.

Alt+Left

Move to the terminal left of the current one.

Alt+Right

Move to the terminal right of the current one.

Ctrl+Shift+C

Copy selected text to clipboard

Ctrl+Shift+V

Paste clipboard text

Ctrl+Shift+W

Close the current terminal.

Ctrl+Shift+Q

Quits Terminator

Ctrl+Shift+X

Toggle between showing all terminals and only showing the current one (maximise).

Ctrl+Shift+Z

Toggle between showing all terminals and only showing a scaled version of the current one (zoom).

Ctrl+Shift+T

Open new tab

Ctrl+PageDown

Move to next Tab

Ctrl+PageUp

Move to previous Tab

Ctrl+Shift+PageDown

Swap tab position with next Tab

Ctrl+Shift+PageUp

Swap tab position with previous Tab

Ctrl+Plus (+)

Increase font size. Note: this may require you to press shift, depending on your keyboard

Ctrl+Minus (-)

Decrease font size. Note: this may require you to press shift, depending on your keyboard

Ctrl+Zero (0)

Restore font size to original setting.

F11

Toggle fullscreen

Ctrl+Shift+R

Reset terminal state

Ctrl+Shift+G

Reset terminal state and clear window

Super+g

Group all terminals so that any input sent to one of them, goes to all of them.

Super+Shift+G

Remove grouping from all terminals.

Super+t

Group all terminals in the current tab so input sent to one of them, goes to all terminals in the current tab.

Super+Shift+T

Remove grouping from all terminals in the current tab.

Ctrl+Shift+I

Open a new window (note: unlike in previous releases, this window is part of the same Terminator process)

Super+i

Spawn a new Terminator process

Want to take it for a spin? Terminator 0.93 was released yesterday and is currently available for several different distributions and can be installed using your system’s package management tool. As always, I made sure that my distribution has it available for our users!

Hasta la vista dudes!

Behold this month's Xfce desktop.

icons: Smokikon
gtk+: Shiki-Colors
xfwm4: Shiki-Colors
background: paleis by Steven Schreurs

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:

It's nice and grungy, though the gtk theme's blue highlights aren't quite dark enough. A simple color mod would fix that. I do like Shiki's unified titlebar; it lends an elegant touch. Someone needs to port Shiki to the Rezlooks engine, since Clearlooks is just too smooth, too nice for the grungy wallpapers I favor. Also, there aren't nearly enough decent grunge icon sets. Everything's too bright, too shiny, too smooth, too 3D, etc.

Applications

As usual: Decibel for playing music, and Thunar as the filemanager.

Highlighted in the panel menu is PyRoom. An ebuild for it is available in overnight.

The album featured in Decibel is Rain on Mars by Koalips. It's freely available at archive.org.

Three months since the last release, and three months since it is available as a separate standalone application running in the notification area. This has made it a lot easier to test and debug, as before I had to build the plugin, install the plugin, restart the panel or remove/readd the plugin in the panel, now I just have to run ./xfce4-notes from the source directory.

This new release has seen some structural tree changes to save time during compilation. Now everything is in src/ and lib/, where lib/ contains code to build an XnpHypertextView, an XnpNote (a composite-widget that embeds a GtkScrolledWindow with an XnpHypertextView and sends “save” signals on changes), an XnpWindow with the custom made navigation and title bars and the right click menu on the title bar, and finally an XnpApplication class that is the heart of everything, it handles creations/deletions of notes, loads/saves the data, etc. The src/ directory contains the main files for the panel plugin, the status icon, the popup command and the settings dialogue.

The new stuff is mostly eye-candy as stated in the previous blog entry. The GTK+ RC style has been pimped up with custom made scrollbars and the source code contains a self-drawn close button. The stuff about GTK+ scrollbars theming is grossly explained on live.gnome.org but I opened the GTK+ Dust theme files which was, to me, more understandable :-) Also it was because of this particular theme I took a look at customizing the scrollbars, see below the before/after screenshots. The older article about writing a Widget with Cairo helped me getting started from scratch with an empty “close button” widget to replace the simple GtkButton with label. As I liked very much the time passed on these changes I contributed a tutorial “Monochrome icon” available only in PDF as of today which I hope to be useful for Vala beginners but also a nice update of the article about Cairo but with Vala language.


The fixes included in this release are the following: correctly restore sticky-window and keep-above states after some race conditions, and restore tab label orientation after renaming a note. And last but definitely not least the undo feature was not working because an internal timeout wasn't reset to zero which made the code think a snapshot was needed and thus the undo/redo buffers ended with the same content after the timeout elapsed. Thanks to Christian (the developer behind Midori) otherwise I would still not have taken a look around this!

The forthcoming features I have in mind would be a search dialogue and per-note options for activating a stripped down “markdown” syntax, an orthographic corrector and wrapping words which is the default for the moment.

The release is available at archive.xfce.org.

Thanks for the feedbacks and reports you sent and will send back.

Update: The tutorial is now also available on the Xfce wiki.

Shook up my Xfce desktop a bit. I've always been a fan of darker environments, especially those with blue tones. This one's mysterious and fantastic. I did keep the same icon theme as last month, as I don't have anything more suitable installed at the moment. I'm still looking for something a bit more suited to my current setup.

icons: Area o.43
gtk+: Cold Blue, my own theme based on this one. Still a work in progress; I'm trying to get the colors to match the background image. (Pixmap and Mist engines)
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Summerwood

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:

Applications

You can find the ebuild for The Widget Factory in my in my overlay. The audio player is Decibel in the "mini" mode. I'm using Thunar as my filemanager.

Panel

The left side of the panel has the start menu, followed by launchers for my favorite apps: Terminal, editors (submenu), Thunar, Firefox, Claws Mail, and instant message applications (submenu).

I used to just have gVim in the editor launcher, and just irssi in the IM apps launcher. However, I was tired of having to drill down through a few start menus for my frequently used applications, so I just stuck 'em in their own easy-access submenu on my panel. Using submenus is one of the most overlooked abilities of the Xfce panel. In 5 years or so I've never really tried it out, but now I'm seeing some real benefits. I get quick access to my often-used apps, but without wasting panel space on a bunch of individual launchers.

Here's the editors menu:

An ebuild for PyRoom is available in overnight.

. . . and the IM apps:

After the launchers, there's a taskbar, then a genmon (generic monitor) applet. It runs my Portage script that checks the last time I ran emerge --sync. Here it is, lastsync.sh:

#!/bin/bash
qlop -s | sed 's/\ >>>.*//' | tail -n1 | xargs -i date --date="{}" '+%b %d'

You need portage-utils to make it work.

After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and weather.

Nifty, eh?

Overnight overlay

I've added a few more ebuilds to my overlay, including a useful calendar utility called gsimplecal. It was originally written for tint2, but since it just uses gtk+, it's suitable for just about any environment. It doesn't come with the Xfce dependencies of Orage; it's just a quick, simple calendar.

If you use tint2, you can actually configure the clock to show gsimplecal just by clicking it. Clicking again quits the program. While tint2 doesn't actually have a launcher function (yet?), this is as close as it gets. You can do some pretty tricky things just by using the built-in clock click actions. Left click for gsimplecal, right click to launch a weather checker, for example.

I've bumped a few packages to the latest version, which included some build/install fixes for Fotoxx and Printoxx. Fotoxx, I'm happy to say, has finally dropped the dependency on freeimage. Freeimage was removed from Gentoo awhile ago because it has unfixed security vulnerabilities against the bundled libraries, which are really copies of things probably already installed on your system. Fotoxx relied on freeimage only to work with TIFF images. Fotoxx 9.8 and up now just use libtiff directly. Security improvements for the win.

Keep checking my overlay; I'm always adding nifty new applications and cleaning up existing ebuilds.

I’ll make it quick so I can go back to watching TV:

Announcing my first attempt at a generic Django Developer Kit, a CentOS (powered by rPath‘s conary) based software appliance with all you’d need to run a Django project.

The current images are built on the development stage, which means it includes the very latest Django 1.2 code line straight from the subversion repository. Currently, the following packages make up the base appliance:

• django
• django-ajax-selects
• django-authority
• django-cache-memcached
• django-contact-form
• django-db-postgres
• django-filter
• django-notification
• django-pagination
• django-piston
• django-profile
• django-sorting
• django-tagging
• django-threadedcomments
• file
• gettext
• httpd
• less
• mod_python
• mod_ssl
• mod_wsgi
• mx
• openssh-clients
• openssh-server
• openssl
• PIL
• postgresql-server
• psycopg2
• python-ctypes
• python-markdown
• python-memcached
• python-urlgrabber
• PyYAML
• scgi
• sendmail
• south
• sqlite
• sudo
• tar
• vim-enhanced

I’m still working out the kinks and have decided to not include openssl by default until I have a generic way of generating a certificate for the appliance. I will also be adding tools such as git, mercurial, etc so that people can use the appliance as a testing lab/environment for their own projects.

Once you’ve either installed the appliance or launched on EC2 or ESX, make sure to visit your appliance’s htts://IP:8003 address to configure the administrative interface (log in as admin with password as your password). Then click the Updates plugin to get updates as I will be making changes between now and the time I publish this post.

Download it today!