xuedi 的 blog

A BLUG Spammers BLOG

What a week, first of all the beloved opencamp turned into to a sterile, boring, sponsored university lecture event without any charm, then ubuntu fucked up 10.10 netbook remix very badly.

Ok lets start two years ago, my first open/barcamp event, it was in a nice study bar, very affordable prices, they had food and drinks, a nice screen, two lecture room and many cool and nice people. You could easily meet new people, had a chat, change tables and discuss with others. Now 2010 and the last opencamp event, first of all, it is impossible to run a open office presentation, you have to have a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation to hold your open source talk, and no other way possible (some days before at SFD openoffice in the same room was working fine), then boring corporate lectures (some), no food, no power, no wifi but boring atmosphere.

Very sad, it was a truly great event before …

Then ubuntu 10.10 … oh oh oh canonical what have you done …  Since 6.4 every version kept getting faster and better, 10.4 with its netbook remix made me even move from my ‘awesome wm on gentoo’ back to ubuntu.

Now you have the not removable or changeable ‘unity’ dock and ‘mutter wm’. It takes 2 seconds longer to load than the normal gnome desktop?!? Did i missed something here? Neetbook remix used to stand for: fast and light weight small screen optimized interface… It works well on a heavy desktop system with 1G nvidia grafic card, but if your netbook don’t have 3D hardware the new unity dock is slow as hell and even hangs time by time.

If you start the netbook 2D thing you get the ‘old’ working system, but with icons that are 2 as bis as a menue entry and it is much more slow than the 10.4 interface.

I can understand that canonical waned to push some gnome 3 technologies into this release like ‘mutter’ but this is absolutely pre-alpha software!!

now it is ubuntu 10.10 with awesome-wm and if there is a ubuntu system (non-interface) bug it will be back again plain clean gentoo, if there is something broken at least i know what and why, because i did it … or maybe back to 10.4 maybe …

Hoping for more pleasant things to happen …
xuedi

P.S.
Later on at the opencamp after party it was nicer, free food and some beers, unluckily not every speaker had the pleasure … Sorry for the harsh words …

Really annoying and not fixed since 3 months:

last 1.2 release, signed in on Skype via 3G change to wiki and Skype is f**ked up, can sign in any more, only solution is to remove the Skype account and create it again. For me this mean to merge 100 contact into my phones address book again.

Nokia and Skype do not even reply to the Ticket i wrote via Support. its in the maemo bug Tracker since month with the info: it depends on action from Skype or Nokia….

Great, reason no. 1 to buy the N900 is not working any more So far i had only great experiences with the phone, hope it will be fixed soon…

Programmer are good ones if the are lazy in their style of work, and i using that concept for all my live. So one of my new laziness gadgets, imagine you lie in bed, but your laptop is playing music on your working desk, now a song came up you want to skip or you want to change the volume. Given the fact you have a ssh comparable device like i have my N900 with you, you can easily remote control rhythmbox.

The command line control is rhythmbox-client, unluckly its an GUI app that gets a bit confused if the right environment variables are not set, so that how i make it run easily for me.

First:

Make sure you can access the machine that runs rhythmbox easily, my laptop runs a SSH server, so first i created a certificate on my N900, this is not nessesary if you have there alreada a xxx.pub file:

cd /home/<yourUser>/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa

Second:

You need to make your machine that runs the music play to know that this created certificate is accepted, therefor you need to register it, the first variable here is the key file its called something xxx.pub depending if you use rsa or another algorithm. You also need to copy that key over via SSH so you need to enter the name and ip or your machine that runs rhythbox:

ssh-copy-id -i /home/<yourUser>/ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<hostname_or_ip_address>

Third:

Make it more easy to access your remote music machine, if you use it only in a home wifi you can create a SSH config file and if you gave your machine that runs ryhthmbox a name lets say ‘myLaptop’ then this command will connect you via SSH: ‘ssh myLaptop’ but you can choose freely run ‘vim /home/<yourUser>/.ssh/config’ and enter this config option:

Host myLaptop
User yourUser       #or whatever you like
Port 22
Hostname <MusicPlayersIP>
IdentityFile /home/<yourUser>/.ssh/id_rsa
TCPKeepAlive yes
IdentitiesOnly yes

Forth:

The command to change your rythmbox need some variables set as well, that makes it quite long, so i suggest you create an alias for that, normally you do that in ~/.bashrc (for your user only) /etc/bash.bashec (for systemwide) but if your machine like mine N900 just using shell not bash you need to use ~/.profile . Add  now the alias command to our file of choice:

alias rc='ssh yourUser@myLaptop env DISPLAY=:0.0 rhythmbox-client --no-start'

Usage:

You can use that new command now for:

• rc –help                    # get all options
• rc –next                    # next song
• rc –previous            # next song
• rc –volume-up        # louder
• rc –volume-down  # more quite
• rc –pause                 # pause the music
• rc –play                    # start playing music

Some tip, the volume up and down command just change the internal rhythmbox level, so before you go with some beers, sandwiches, to bed an plan to stay there all sunday long, set the rhythmbox level to middle and ajust your system sound level to normal room sound, now you have room for more lous and more quite, and no reason to get up at all … well, get some empty plastic bottle and you even can save the way to your washroom

N900, N810, N800 Users

You can also create a desktop icon for ever singe command and create your own remote control looking desktop, but don’t be inpatient, command via SSH take a second to work, so don’t press 10 time more loud, that will be still executed just a second later and you neighbors might not like it…

Cheers
xuedi

There are some good guides in the wiki, but they use sfdisk and you have to calculate the blocks yourself, what a pain, here is the way how to install fdisk on tn N900

cd /root
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/util-linux/util-linux_2.13.1.1-1_armel.deb
dpkg-deb -x util-linux_2.13.1.1-1_armel.deb root
cp root/sbin/fdisk .
rm -r root/
rm util-linux_2.13.1.1-1_armel.deb

In general it from huge advantage if you have a MicroSD card, then you can copy your MyDocs and the /home stuff first and can delete both partitions, after reboot you are totally free to repartinion as you like, after that mount the new partitions, copy the backup back where they belong and reboot again. It worked well if you change the design, for ex. have the vfat on the secon part, but some 3rd party< programms might not like it, so better keep it: part.1=cfat (MyDocs), part.2=linux (Home), part.3=swap. my actual partition table looks like this:

1. 3G vfat
2. 27G ext3
3. rest swap