tags/linux

James Davidson: Emacs Daemon

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:48:00 -0700

Just now catching up with using Emacs in daemon mode. On that blog post, an anonymous commentor shows the best way to use emacsclient to start the Emacs server if it is not already started.

One last note is that the -c option will result in the same behaviour as the -t option if the DISPLAY environment variable is not set.

James Davidson: Chromium and Flash on x86_64

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:52:00 -0700

I am starting to feel the slowness of Firefox so I wanted to see if Chromium could fulfill my web browser needs. So far so good.

The first big issue was getting Flash working with my x86_64 version of Chromium. I found a tidy set of instructions to get and install the 64-bit Flash plugin. Just make sure you get the latest version of the plugin.

Update: The 64-bit version of flash is too old and has many security vulnerabilities. You should really get the latest 32-bit version and use the 32-bit plugin wrapper for your browser if you run a 64-bit version of Linux.

James Davidson: Fix Pidgin to work again with AIM and ICQ

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:36:00 -0800

Recently I have been getting "Received unexpected response from..." errors. I found a TechSpot blog with a fix that worked for me.

James Davidson: F-Spot Mangles EXIF Dates

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:05:00 -0700

My wife has been organizing all our family photos using F-Spot for several years. After a long bout of inactivity, she started to work through the mass of photos that we have just been collecting and not sorting through. After she imported the pictured, she noticed that the date of the photos that F-Spot was reporting was off from when she remembered taking the pictures.

Well it turns out that F-Spot is indeed getting the dates wrong and is changing the EXIF header dates to be incorrect as well! A good summary of the problem is F-Spot Considered Harmful.

I think I'll take a look at digikam.

James Davidson: GNOME Color Manager

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:34:00 -0700

One area that the Linux desktop has been missing is proper color management. Well, Richard Hughes has started developement of a GNOME Color Manager.

James Davidson: x86info Fixes Merged

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Dave Jones got some spare time and merged in my first 3 x86info fix up patches:

There are a couple more patches I need to send Dave now that the first set have been merged.

James Davidson: Changing the Firmware project to use genext2fs instead of UML

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0700

At OLS2007 I went to Rob Landley's Cross Compiling Linux tutorial where Rob introduced his Firmware Linux project. Unfortunately we ran out of time and didn't actually get to using the cross-compiler.

Rob's approach to cross-compiling packages is to build a native environment (using qemu) so that you don't actually have to cross-compile packages. Cool idea!

Anyway, to build the root file system that qemu will use, Rob used UML (User Mode Linux) to step around the root privileges required for mounting the loop device. I had trouble getting UML going on my laptop so I wrote a patch that evening to use genext2fs to create the root file system. Just to show how slow I am at following through, I finally sent the patch to the mail list. We'll have to wait and see if Rob likes it.

Update 2009-10-12: Rob eventually started using my patch.

James Davidson: Keeping Kernel Config User Friendly

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 23:02:00 -0800

There have been some netfilter changes that have caused a lot of confusion when it comes to configuring the kernel. The new netfilter implementation accompanied a bunch of netfilter kernel configuration name changes.

Linus was not amused and then pointed out how the netfilter Kconfig could have been implementation to avoid any issues.

James Davidson: How To Compile A Kernel - The Fedora Way

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 14:46:00 -0800

A nice HOWTO on compiling a kernel for a Fedora system.

James Davidson: Writing a Simple File System

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:13:00 -0700

While I was at OLS this year, I attended the Writing a Linux Filesystem tutorial presented by Steve French.

During the tutorial Steve provided an excellent reference to the Writing a Simple File System paper. The paper has 2 extremely useful diagrams that depict the relationships of the VFS objects and the system call mapping to data structures.