Have a taste of what we suffer here.
SOPA/PIPA
Arch Linux At Last!
Yesterday after a (long time 
) I decided to install Arch on my computer. It was tough at first but I managed (It was much easier than I expected).
The reason I was so hesitant in installing Arch was that I was satisfied with my Ubuntu and debian based distros. But Arch is nice.
I made a mess during the installation of it on my PC but somehow It started and worked flawlessly (first without X and after the fix perfectly).
Later I’ll write about my experiences with Arch
New Facebook sucks!!!
What’s wrong with the designers over Facebook? Can’t they see the clutter and disorganisation in their design?
Although new features are welcome but presenting them is also very important. You cant just add some new features and drop it on the screen. I’m not going in details about user interface, because I’m not that qualified, but have to say the new design (layout) SUCKS!!!
Networking problem
I used to have a wireless internet which used PPoE, I also have a wireless router for my LAN. Recently I changed my ISP to WiMax so I had to change my network setup which gave me a bit of headache. The thing is both my router and WiMax CPE have DHCP and that made a bit of mess and headache for me.
The solution is to disable DHCP in wireless router and turn it to be a plain access-point and let all the networking for CPE.
Meego on My Laptop
Today I downloaded and installed Meego on my laptop ( description is coming soon ). Just a quick note, Debian ROCKS!!!
After using Ubuntu and Debian based distors for a while I got so accustomed to its packaging system that I almost forgot how painful it can be to install applications on Linux box. Now I’m running Meego and trying to update. There are lots of errors in the fresh system that makes me think about dumping the whole thing.
Why Meego is based on RPM? Maemo’s packaging system was one of its highlights, Why changed to RPM?
New WordPress, New Look
It’s amazing. The new wordpress is absolutely amazing. Hope this upgrade make me write more posts
Dark Table
One of my hobbies is photography. I’m not good at it but I really like it. Back when I was using OSX there was a program called Lightroon by Adobe which is photographers best companion. It was THE best program for importing RAW images and manipulating them. Its a great application and very professional.
When I dumped OSX for Linux one of the things I missed was Adobe Lightroom. Sure there were lots of programs for importing RAW files but none was as good as Lightroom, not even close. I thought Lack of such professional level programs was price of freedom! , I was wrong. I found Dark Table.
In my first encounter Dark Table was at version 0.4, It was young, full of potentials an useless! and lately I started to use 0.7.1. It’s simply amazing. Watching the screencasts made me speechless, and it was completely usable. As I said I’m not even good at photography but comparing Dark Table and Adobe Lightroom (in my unprofessional view), I believe Dark Table has no lack of features. Those of you who have used Lightroom take a look at this great application and let me know how much I’m wrong!
Backup and sync to the Cloud
Recently I’ve become obsessed about syncing and I’ve been looking for ways to always sync my computers and phone.There are so many options for you if you want to be synchronized.
There are so many backup solutions out there for you Linux systems. You can use rsync, you can use bacula and so on. But I’m too lazy to setup and configure those solutions on all my computers to be honest, therefore I’ve always ran away from backing up my files (I know! I’m a dumb person).
Recently after I bought an Android phone (HTC Hero to be exact) I tried to Root and install too many ROMs on my phone and after lots of manual work to setup my phone I decided to look for some smart ways to backup my files and other stuff. I know there is a Google App for everything, But I dont want to rely heavily on Google (If thats even possible), So I looked for alternatives. So I discovered “Remember the Milk”, “Dropbox”.
All these apps are free for limited features that those limeted features are way more than I would need ( at least for now). I’m going to start with remember the milk or RTM.
RTM is the only solution that I couldn’t find worthy opponent for it. After signing up for RTM now you are ready to use this fabulous task manager. The beauty of the RTM is not the website itself but those fantastic third party apps that let you use the service. In Android you can install “Astrid”, Which is one of my favorite apps on Android market. Its a free app that syncs with RTM and its very easy to use and have a great widget. What about Linux? There are multiple apps that you can use for this matter but I found GTG or “Getting things Gnome” the best.
You can add the most update version like this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gtg/ppa && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gtg
After installing GTG you should go to Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins and activate the RTM plugin and follow the instruction and you are set to go.
Now I have all my tasts synced between my computers and phone, what about anything else? Now comes along Dropbox. First to say that there are multiple alternatives for Dropbox like Ubuntu One, SpiderOak and others but I found Dropbox the most convenient and also there are native apps for all other OSes.
After Going to dropbox.com and installing Dropbox on your machine (no need to say that you have to signup at dropbox.com!) you can start taking advantage of this fantastic service. The most visible use of the dropbox is the dropbox folder that is created on your home folder by default. Everything that you put in there is synced online, Is’nt that great? you can put all your documents, pictures and ever file you want to store online in this folder and thats it, you are on the Clouds!
But what about every other files that you cannot put in dropbox folder? Over time I have built a huge bashrc for my terminal use, what about that? Or all those system configs or notes taken by tomboy or Gnote? Although Dropbox only syncs its own folder you can use symlinks to do everything else for you.
If you use tomboy for your notes you can use its synchronization option to sync with a folder inside your dropbox and If you dont like tomboy (like me) and prefer Gnote its a bit tricky. Gnote as I discovered use two places for storing the notes. One in “~/.gnote” and the other one in “~/.local/share/gnote”. All you have to do is delete these folders and create a symlinks instead of them pointing to a folder in your dropbox folder.
I’ve set up a directory in my dropbox folder for my configurations and moved all my config files there, then I created a shell script to automatically set up the symlinks and delete the directories. All my custom made themes, Gnote notes, bashrc, Custom projects and so on are all in my dropbox folder with links all over the place!
Now I have all my files backed up and synced in all my computers. If I install a new OS all I have to do is to install Dropbox and run my shell script and I’m back in the business.
This set up is the best set up I could come up with for backup and sync my work and desktop. Of course its not perfect because of the size limit of the Dropbox, But 2GiB is sufficient for everything except for multimedia files that you can back them up by using rsync and an external HDD.
BlueTile window manager
Are you a programmer working on multiple editors, terminals or browsers? Are you a student working on your paper with multiple documents and web pages open? Are you ran out of desktop real estate? Then you probably would love tiling window managers.
Wikipedia defines Tiling Window manager as: “In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.”
There are multiple Tiling window managers out there like Awesome, xmonad, dwm, i3 and some other but they are dependent window managers. I like gnome (not as much as KDE which is going to have tiling window management in 4.5) and I like the way I’ve customized my gnome session. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tiling manager in gnome and to be able to turn it on and off when you needed it?
And here comes BlueTile. Its based on xmonad and haskell but it works on gnome ( haven’t tried it on KDE). you can install BlueTile two ways. First add the PPA repository to your synaptics:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
and after update you can install int by:
sudo apt-get install bluetile
The other way is to install the package by “Cabal”. I wasn’t familiar with it so I just installed the Ubuntu packages.
OK. Now its installed and you can run it by executing the “bluetile” command on your terminal.
Tiling window managers main purpose is to improve productivity. In tiling window manager there are no overlapping windows and all windows are tiled beside each other. If you are not familiar with this concept you may get really frustrated at first. But Bluetile tries to ease the process of getting familiar with tiling window management by letting you to use windows in traditional way and tiling way.
After starting Bluetile you are welcomed by a dialogue that tries to help you get familiar with the concept. by dismissing the dialogue you may notice that the window decoration of your desktop is changed and turned to some text like decoration. Except window decoration and the left side panel nothing special happens. In the left panel you see some numbers which represent different workspace and buttons with “A”, “S”, “D” and “F” on them.
By pressing the “A” button (or win+a shortcut) you enter the stacking mode. The stacking mode is the common window positioning system. you can change windows my using you mouse click or using win+j for next window and win+k for for previous window(like Vi) . These shortcuts work in all modes.
If you press “F” button you enter the Full screen button. In this mode all windows are at maximum stance and maximized. Bluetile’s maximize is not very maximized and you have some padding from sides.
Now lets start tiling. If you press either “S” or “D” button on panel (win+s and win+d) you go to tiling mode. in each modes there is a bigger area that is called master area that uses half the screen.”S” is for horizontal layout and “D” is for vertical. Master area normally has one window but you can increase number of windows in it by win+, (decrease by win+.). This decorations are specially useful for programmers who want to have multiple windows opened. The best use of tiling windows is for multiple monitor use where you can easily traverse through multiple monitors in ease and speed without using mouse.
There area different shortcuts in Bluetile, you can go to the main window by pressing win+space. To change your current window with the main window press win+shift+space and you can go to different workspaces by using win+number. There are other useful shortcuts that you can check them out at Bluetiles website.
As you can see Bluetile works pretty good and you can have a tiling window manager without pain. But there are some problems here. The main reason for me to use a tiling window manager is to use all the screen real estate, but Bluetile doesn’t do such a good job here. there are lots of space between windows and the panel is bigger than my current gnome panel. window titles are also a bit bigger than they should. I’m sure there are some configurations that you can do overcome these shortcomings but I’m not interested in learning Haskel for that (I would if I had time). The biggest problem with the current version, I think is quitting the Bluetile. Quitting doesn’t work well and after quitting you end up with no window decoration and you have to reload window decorator manually. Another problem that I had was when I was trying to take screen shots the print screen didn’t work so there would be no screen shot for this post .
All in All I like Bluetile. I like the fact that it opens in gnome with its current theme and it doesn’t seem that much different from normal gnome setup. I may use use Bluetile but because of its problems that wouldn’t be much. When I discovered Bluetile I was hoping to use it on my laptop but because of its waste in screen real estate that’s not going to happen. If you really need a tiling window manager you better use a real one that I mentioned some of them above.
Multi touch in Linux Mint
One thing that I miss about my Macbook pro is its touchpad. I don’t know only Apple produce big enough to be applicable. The other thing is that in although macs have only one mouse button you can simulate right click by two finger tapping on the touchpad and you also can scroll with two fingers. These simple things made using Mac’s touchpad delightful.
I didn’t know about the fact that you can do the same thing until recently so I started to activate the feature in my Acer 3810T. 3810T like other non Mac laptop has a small touchpad and it has a single button thats too tough to click and use.
I think you can do this on any touchpad but I’m not sure about it. To activate this feature you first need to create a text file and paste these commands in it:
#!/bin/bash # xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 4 xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 8 xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 1 1 xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Edge Scrolling" 0 0 0 xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Jumpy Cursor Threshold" 250 xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Tap Action" 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Palm Detection" 1 xinput --set-button-map "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" 1 3 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 exit
after that you need to make the file executable:
chmod +x yourfile
now if you run your script you have a touchpad similar to Mackbooks. There are several options that you can change by reading this man page. also notice that I’ve changed the mapping of the middle mouse button to right mouse button to be able to right click by two finger clicking on the touchpad.