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Pidgin & Facebook: problemi su Ubuntu Karmic

2009/11/15 – 12:16 am

Pidgin FacebookNon me ne vogliate, ma Empathy proprio non mi piace, anche perché non sono riuscito a far funzionare la chat di Facebook (che dovrebbe funzionare comunque, visto che alla fine è tutto in salsa Purple). E poi Empathy è proprio brutto. Non mi piace. Ecco.

Detto questo, da alcune settimane avevo notato difficoltà a fare il login su Facebook da Pidgin (versione 2.6.2 come da repository ufficiali Canonical per Ubuntu Karmic). La chat di Facebook, che su Pidgin si utilizza tramite il plugin pidgin-facebookchat, pur essendo accessibile dall’esterno e documentata, non rispetta uno standard consolidato come l’XMPP. Lo farà in futuro, ma per il momento è possibile, e anche probabile, che alcune modifiche al protocollo la rendano inutilizzabile dai software di terze parti.

E così è successo per Pidgin su Karmic. La soluzione è semplice: basta installare una versione aggiornata del plugin. Il deb, che va bene sia per Ubuntu che per Debian1, si trova alla pagina principale del progetto Pidgin Facebook Chat. Basta scaricarlo e installarlo (bastano un paio di click con il mouse, non pensiate di usare ancora il terminale!) per risolvere il problema.

Giacché siamo in vena di aggiornamenti, suggerisco anche di inserire nei propri repository il PPA ufficiale degli sviluppatori di Pidgin. Chi utilizza Karmic Koala (che personalmente consiglio vivamente) può aggiungere il nuovo repository inserendo dal programma Sorgenti Software (dal menu Sistema -> Amministrazione) la riga:

ppa:pidgin-developers/ppa

Istruzioni più complete e che funzionano anche sulle altre release di Ubuntu sono presentate in dettaglio nella pagina di Pidgin dedicata alla distribuzione africana. Una volta completato l’upgrade, la versione di Pidgin passerà dalla 2.6.2 (dei repository di Karmic) alla 2.6.3 che è invece la release più recente.

I più pigri possono installare sia Pidgin che il plugin per Facebook cliccando su questi due link (magie dell’APT):

  1. Non si ricorda mai abbastanza che Ubuntu senza Debian non avrebbe mai iniziato e non potrebbe continuare [↩]
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Using Remember the Milk with Mozilla Sunbird

2009/06/01 – 3:19 pm

The Calendar manager Sunbird is one of the less knows product by Mozilla, but as for its more famous brothers Firefox and Thunderbird is one of the best software in its field. This short guide will help you to connect Sunbird to Remember the Milk, the well known on-line service for todos and tasks. In this guide we’ll assume that you already have a working installation of Mozilla Sunbird 0.9. The following instructions should work with later versions as well. Remember the Milk is often shortened in RTM.

The guide is divided in 3 steps:

  1. Install the RTM Add-on
  2. Authorize Sunbird
  3. What you can do and what you cannot

Let’s start.

read more »

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howto linux

Perfect Skype setup on Dell Studio XPS with Ubuntu Jaunty

2009/05/24 – 10:25 am

Getting Skype working on my brand new Dell Studio XPS 1340 notebook under Ubuntu Jaunty was quite easy except for some minor but still annoying issues. Here you can find some quick suggestion.

Installing

On this kind of notebook, I would suggest you to install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Jaunty: it is faster and it can easily use all the RAM you have installed (4GB in my case). So, if you follow my suggestion and choose the 64nbit install, you’ll need some extra work to do to install Skype, since this software for Linux is only available in 32 bit flavour. The extra work consists in installing a few more packages to get a 32bit compatibility layer. Those packages are also needed for many other 32bit only software, like Google Earth. The fastest way to install the needed packages is by opening a console and typing:

sudo apt-get install -y util-linux ia32-libs lib32asound2

If you are reading this article from your Jaunty box, it will be even easier: just click here and follow the instructions on the screen.

At this point you should be ready to install the Skype package. You can download it from the Skype download page, or from this direct link, save it on the desktop and than double click on the file and install.

After install setup

Now the Skype is almost ready to work. Start it (you can find it in the Internet menu) and insert username and password. Are you ready to make your first call? No, you are not. In fact if you try you will get some audio error: Skype audio section is not configured correctly on this computer.

Right click on the Skype icon in the icon tray (on the top panel, if you are running Gnome). Now choose “Options“.

Skype Options

In the Options Window go to the “Sound Devices” section, and make sure you have this settings:

  1. Sound In: HDA NVidia (hw:NVidia, 0)
  2. Sound Out: pulse
  3. Ringing: pulse

Skype Sound Devices

I also suggest you to not allow Skype to automatically adjust your mixer levels. This is mainly because Skype is easy to lower the volume on the mic (e.g. for a sudden strong noise) but it is not as easy when the volume needs to be a little higher.

To adjust the volume of your integrated mic, go to the volume applet in the icon tray, right click on it and choose “Open Volume Control“.

Open Volume Control

In the Volume Control window, go to the “Recording” tab, and press the “Preferences” button. Set the “Capture” on. This is necessary since the “Mic Mixer” in the Recording tab is actually the external mic you can plug in the front of the computer. The integrated mic is controlled by the “Capture” mixer level.

Capture Mixer

Now you can close all the extra windows you opened and return to Skype. You are ready to make your first Skype call from Ubuntu Jaunty on the Dell Studio XPS 13 notebook.

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Make Gengo and Simple Tags live together in WordPress

2008/12/21 – 10:47 pm

As I already pointed out before, Gengo and Simple Tags plugins are not made to live together. Luckily there is a fix that must be applied every time you update or reinstall the Simple Tags plugin on your WordPress. The fix consists in a small edit of the simple-tags.client.php file, which is part of Simple Tags.

I made a page that will link to the fixed version of this file, edited by me following the original instructions. What you need to do is to download the file and copy it in the right directory in your WordPress installation. Further information can be found on the dedicated page.

I cannot assure you I can keep this page updated, but I’m quite sure it will be updated as much as I will update plugins on my wordpress installations.

So, now you only need to visit the Gengo and Simple Tags fix page.

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howto linux

Automatically reproduce a playlist when you start Ubuntu

2008/11/29 – 1:45 am

I have been asked: «Can I start a playlist automatically when Ubuntu starts?».

Yes, you can.

A shot of the graphic effects played by Totem when reproducing a song

A shot of the graphic effects played by Totem when reproducing a song

First of all you need to prepare your playlist. In this example we will use Totem, the default player in Ubuntu. So, load the media files you want to play in Totem and reorganize them in the order you prefer. Remember that Totem will show the playlist in the sidebar.

Now you need to save the playlist. Press the “Save” button, and choose a filename. In this example the playlist will be saved in your home directory and the filename will be “playlist.pls”. So the full path for this file will be /home/user/playlist.pls where “user” is your username.

Now you need to tell your Ubuntu box what to do with this playlist. From the menu “System”, choose “Preferences” and then “Sessions”.

In the first tab press the button Add (+). In the name text box insert “My start playlist” (this name is not important, so choose one you like). In the command text box insert

/usr/bin/totem playlist.pls

Note that in this case we don’t need to add the full path to the playlist.pls filename: Ubuntu will look for it starting from your home directory, that is also the most usual place in which you will store your files. Now you can close the window and restart your computer.

Probably you will also like to start it in full screen mode. In this case you will prefer to use this command:

/usr/bin/totem --fullscreen playlist.pls

The option –fullscreen has two ‘ - ‘. If you have any doubts copy and paste the text. Yes, I know… I chose a very bad font format for this blog. I promise I will change it.

You don’t need to repeat all these steps if you are going to change the media files (songs or videos) you want to play. Just re-open the same playlist and add or remove the songs.

Please note that it is very important you deactivate from automatic start (again in the Sessions configuration window) all the programs that could prompt a password when your computer start. It is even better you deactivate all the programs that are not needed. For example it is very probable that in this case you will not need Pidgin. I will also recommend you to deactivate in Sessions all the items that are related to Evolution.

For any question, just leave a comment.

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howto linux

Webcam, Cheese, GStreamer and UVCVideo problems in Intrepid

2008/10/25 – 8:08 am

I bought a new webcam, a Logitech E 3500 and it works great on Skype. Unfortunately, on my Ubuntu Intrepid box, Cheese and other GStreamer based programs are not able to make the webcam work.

At the beginning, since it was working with Skype and not working with GStreamer, it seemed a GStreamer bug. It is not. It is a bug with the uvcvideo module loaded in the kernel. As soon as you compile the SVN version of uvcvideo the webcam start working with all the programs which can interface with Video4Linux2.

Here a few steps to make it working.
First of all: you need to install some build tools and the kernel headers:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential subversion

Create a folder on which you will work (let’s say it’s in your home, but you can change it):
mkdir ~/uvcvideo
cd ~/uvcvideo

Now download the latest source from the SVN server:
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
cd trunk

and build it:
make

Now you are ready to load the brand-new module, but first unload the old one:
sudo rmmod uvcvideo
sudo insmod ./uvcvideo.ko

Now start Cheese and smile! In my case the resolution selection is still not working, but that’s a minor problem.

Please note that now you are using a module that is hand-loaded. If you want your kernel to load the new uvcvideo module automatically instead of the old one, enter the following commands:
sudo cp ./uvcvideo.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/uvc/uvcvideo.ko
sudo rmmod uvcvideo
sudo modprobe uvcvideo

This will overwrite the old module. The classic make install won’t work, since it will install the module in a different folder from the default tree of the kernel in Ubuntu Intrepid.

Personally I hope Ubuntu will soon provide a correct patch: even this worked for me, I don’t really like quick&dirty ways

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howto linux software

When Evolution freezes

2008/10/10 – 4:16 pm

As many of you could easily understand, I’m not talking about the human evolution, but about the PIM software Evolution.

It’s generally a good software, although I thing there is much space to improve, much more than what Evolution has done in the last few years.

Today a classic case has happened again. I started Evolution, and immediately clicked the Calendar button. Unfortunately I was too quick, and I pressed the holy button before Evolution had finished loading the mail component, which is the default component loaded at start.

What happened next? Evolution has frozen and trying to close its window made my computer ask whether I want to forcedly terminate the program. I had no choice and I killed it.

The problem is that Evolution doesn’t want to start again, unless I go and find the evolution-data-server process to kill it as well. If not, Evolution will actually launch (you can see the correspondent process in the system monitor, or in “top”) but will never appear, waiting for some God-only-knows event.

Actually it’s quite probable that the standard users don’t know about that: the only choice for them is to restart the computer, or at least end the session and login again. This is absolutely unacceptable: if you like to restart when things go wrong, you could just use Windows.

I hope this problem (along many others) have been solved in the 2.24 version (I’m using 2.22 which is included in Ubuntu Hardy). However, I don’t count on it. Let’s see a few weeks later, after upgrading to Intrepid.

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Problems with database when rolling back from F-Spot 0.5 to F-Spot 0.4

2008/09/24 – 10:22 am

Some people would like to try the new F-Spot 0.5 just to see the new features, and then rolling back to F-Spot 0.4, which till now looks stabler.

Actually the new F-Spot uses a different version of the database: upgrading F-Spot will upgrade the database, so rolling back to an old version of F-Spot will result in database damaging. Obviously it’s better to avoid this.

So ff you are planning to try F-Spot before switching to the new version, there are a few things you can do to save your work1 .

First method. Make a backup of your F-Spot settings

To make a backup of your F-Spot settings, you only need to make a copy of the ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ folder, which is the place in which F-Spot store its database. You can navigate to that folder by using Nautilus, or run a simple command from the console:

cp -av ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ ~/.gnome2/f-spot.backup/

After you finished trying F-Spot 0.5 and you still like the 0.4 version, you can easily rollback by running:

rm -rf ~/.gnome2/f-spot/
mv ~/.gnome2/f-spot.backup/ ~/.gnome2/f-spot/

Those two lines will restore the backup you made and will delete all the work and the updates you made while trying F-Spot 0.5.

Second method. Run F-Spot with a new empy database

You can also run F-Spot without touching at all your old database by using the following:

f-spot --basedir /tmp  --photodir /tmp

This will store all the work you make during the try in the temporary directory, which will be deleted on your next reboot. F-Spot will not touch any of your old settings.

I already got database error: am I lost?

No, your aren’t. Everytime F-Spot gets an error loading the database it will try to restore it but will also make a copy of it in your home directory. So just have a look in your home: you will probably find a file called photos-20080924-0.db. The name could change a little bit: those numbers are the date in which the database was created, so in this case it’s 24th semptember 2008. After you find the file, you only need to copy it (do not move it, copy it) over the damaged database file, that is located in ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db. Just remind that this will be the database used by the 0.5 version, so you must use that version to load it (i.e. you cannot use 0.4 anymore).

  1. we all know how long it takes to tag all the images [↩]
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howto

Tweaking Firefox Full Screen

2008/09/17 – 8:10 am

Firefox can go full screen by just pressing the «F11» key on your keyboard or choosing the Full Screen option from the “View” menu. It will also hide away the top bar, which in full screen mode is composed by the address bar and the tabs bar. The browser will also play a smooth animation when hiding away the unnecessary part of the GUI.

Unluckily my computer is not that fast and Firefox interface is much slower on Linux than on Windows1 . So I would like to change some behaviour of the full screen mode, but the standard Preferences window doesn’t include any option about that. The only way is to go through the about:config interface.

Just type “about:config” in your address bar and press Enter. Please remember that this interface allows you to modify every little behaviour of the browser: pay extremely attention! After promising you will not do anything wrong, look for the following keys (you don’t need to type the exact words, just type “full” and they will come out):

  • browser.fullscreen.animateUp
  • browser.fullscreen.autohide

The first one, browser.fullscreen.animateUp, is about the animation: to stop any animation set it to ‘0‘ (zero). Setting it to ‘1‘, which is the default value, will make Firefox play the standard sliding animation. Other values have same behaviour as ‘1‘, but in the future may be used to specify different kind of animations.

The second option, browser.fullscreen.autohide, says whether Firefox should keep some of the interface (address bar and tabs bar) in full screen mode or not. Of course, if you set this option to ‘false‘, the previous one has no more meaning. The default value is ‘true‘.

  1. believe me: it’s hard for me to admit [↩]
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Hibernate eventually working on my Linux Box

2008/09/11 – 8:05 am
de fence - by stockwerk23

de fence - by stockwerk23

I have to confess: I had surrendered a lot of time ago. I was not able to get my computer hibernate, or better, it could hibernate, but it would not wake up correctly and I needed to restart. Just like Walt Disney.

Luckily Ubuntu is updating twice a year and so I tried again yesterday. And it failed. So I had a look on the logs and I found out the problem was the X server, whose process was eating 99% of the CPU after waking up. Even the computer seemed hanged it wasn’t: I could login through SSH. So after a visit to Ubuntu Forums, I guessed it was because of NVidia proprietary drivers and I eventually reached this page, from which I got some good hints.

Basically what I did was to add the

Option "NvAGP" "1"

under the device section in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and change the following

ACPI_SLEEP=true
ACPI_HIBERNATE=true
SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=true

in the /etc/default/acpi-support file. Remember that both files must be edited as superuser: have you ever heard about sudo?

I did not blacklisted the agpgart and the intel_agp (altough I have via_agp) and it worked anyway.

Next step: convince screenlets to do what I want insted of what they want.

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