KDE4 = KDE Vista
10:39am EDT, 11 Jun 2009

After upgrading to Jaunty on my laptop, I noticed that kmail and akregator were a little slower than usual and thought it might help their performance by logging into KDE instead of GNOME. Besides, maybe KDE4 just sucked because I was trying it out under Mandriva.

Um, nope. more...

More Mandriva to Ubuntu migration stuff
10:47am EDT, 4 Jun 2009

In Mandriva, there's a file, /etc/urpmi/skip.list, into which you can just put names of packages or regular expressions matching packages. So when I had to install a version of bitpim (tool to back up most Sprint/Verizon cell phones) from the developer's website because the version in Jaunty crashed in the middle of the backup, and then had Ubuntu try to pull in its broken version again in the next round of updates, I went looking for the equivalent Ubuntu mechanism. more...

Apt-get hints for Mandriva users coming to Ubuntu/Debian
03:23pm EDT, 28 Aug 2008

I've been using Mandrake (now Mandriva) for almost 10 years, but more and more I need to administer Ubuntu machines. I really like urpmi; I'd say it's more consistent and capable, but I think it's just because I know urpmi so well that I can build packages for it pretty easily. Still, if you're used to urpmi, the "apt way" of doing things is not intuitive. Read the rest of the article to get some rough equivalents to common urpmi operations. (I'm putting this out there as much for my own reference as anyone else's.) more...

cdtray: detecting an open cd tray without closing it
02:54am EST, 28 Jan 2008

I have a CD collection that numbers in the 4-digit range. Sadly, the number of them that I've ripped numbers only in the 3-digit range, which is plenty to fill my Nintendo DS but I really want to get one of those Archos 160gb jukeboxes. Over the last few years I've been trying to remedy that using some batch CD ripping programs, where I drop the disc in the drive, the program polls the drive for a new disc, hits freedb, rips, encodes and then ejects it so I can put the next one in.

Unfortunately, polling the drive would always pull the tray back in. I knew there was an ioctl to tell you the drive's status, but because it didn't seem to work under perl, I figured it wasn't really supported. Turns out I was wrong, so tonight I sucked it up and wrote some C code that seems to work like a champ so far. more...

Adventures in Mandriva 2008, part 1: Wifi
01:12am EST, 30 Dec 2007

So I still find myself clinging to Mandrake, years after they started buying other distros, got a ridiculous name, and were outshined as the darling of community distributions by Ubuntu and even PCLinuxOS, itself a Mandrake spinoff.

But I'm comfortable with urpmi, so here we are.

I helped a friend install Mandriva 2008.0 on her Acer laptop. The install went smoothly until we encountered something that had been a minor annoyance in 2007.1 and became a bigger problem in 2008: the Broadcom bcm4318 wifi adapter. more...

stupid web browser tricks
02:33am EDT, 24 Jun 2007

Stupid.... yet so cool.

more...

gambas 1.0.16 and 1.9.31 rpms for mandriva
01:57pm EDT, 29 May 2006

Catching up on Gambas releases, here's the stable 1.0.16 and unstable 1.9.31 versions. Lots of new stuff since the last unstable package, including an official MDI version of the IDE with a new editor control, the ability to edit the controls' tab order using the hierarchy window, the much-needed ability to nudge controls on forms using the arrow keys, updates to the language itself, and like a hundred bug fixes. more...

gambas 1.0.14 and 1.9.25 rpms for mandriva
05:45pm EST, 21 Feb 2006

OK, I've been packaging stuff all this time but wasn't updating the blog. I just made packages of Gambas 1.0.24 (stable) and 1.9.25 (development) for Mandriva 2006. more...

Firefox "View Selected" extension
11:51pm EDT, 6 Aug 2005

This isn't new, but for some reason Mozilla Update doesn't like it. View Selected simply opens a new browser window and displays the selected text (actually, the smallest amount of valid HTML that includes all of the selected text.) more...

gambas 1.0.9 packages
02:16pm EDT, 21 Jul 2005

This new stable version of Gambas is primarily a bug fix release. more...