Yesterday I stayed up until 4:30 AM while trying to fix Amarok to works on Windows and when I got it to build it was so late I was too tired to test it. So I fired it this morning and this is the result (click for larger images):
I have tested and it plays MP3, WMA, APE and whatever Magnatune streams on. Built with Visual C++ 2008.
Update Two more screenshots added and in case you were wondering, yes, Plasma works!
Yesterday I fixed the Phonon DirectShow 9 backend for Windows. Now audio and video are available to KDE applications on Windows, which means Amarok 2-trunk works! Currently, it can only play .WMA files (I think I have to install the .ax files for the MP3, MIDI, WAV, etc codecs in the KDE bin or libs directory, I’ll try and fix that next week). In the meanwhile, you need patch #6 if you want to build Amarok on Windows and hear something. Please note I’ve only tried to build it with MSVC2005, not MinGW, not MSVC2008 yet.
Si utilizas una distribución de Linux/BSD/etc con servidor X11 X.org (el 99%) y estás te ha afectado el bug 9763, que hace que para teclear ‘~’ (dead tilde haya que pulsar AltGr + 4 dos veces (en lugar de una), aquí tienes el parche que corrige el caso de la tilde muerta.
Para Ubuntu Hardy, hay paquetes en mi PPA
Y ahora, que alguien me explique qué clase de mantenedor es el de los mapas de teclado en X.org que cambia el mapa de teclado de español de España porque un usuario
Yesterday I started preparing my computer and myself to upgrade from Kubuntu Gutsy to Kubuntu Hardy.
As trivial as it might seem, any upgrade is quite complex to me because I use a lot of post-stable, and even post-unstable, packages coming from my PPA. I backport packages from Ubuntu unstable, Debian unstable and experimiental, and quite often I package myself versions which are not available yet in any of the former.
Given that the PPA “copy packages” feature does not work for me (when I copy a Gutsy package to a Hardy package, it is built but never made available for Hardy from my PPA), yesterday I spent most of the day producing Hardy versions of my packages and fixing issues (what’s with the libfcgi maintainers!? why are they slightly changing the package name almost with every release!?)
In the end, the upgrade went mostly fine: everything worked save for my USB external disk, the mouse in X, and the volume control. The only missing application was KSynaptics, which I use to disable the touchpad 99% of the time (I like it better my laser mouse).
The external USB disk issue was rather easy to fix: just add usb-storage to /etc/modules.
The mouse problem has drove me crazy for a couple of hours but I finally figured it: the new xorg.conf had set the mouse to InputDevice "Mouse0" "AlwaysCore" (whatever AlwaysCore means) and the fix was as easy as commenting out the "AlwaysCore" part.
KSynaptics missing proved to be a bit more complex. The application does not work with modern versions of X.org, apparently due to X.org people forgetting about proper versioning of APIs, therefore KSynaptics’ developer decided to stop working on it and starting a new application (TouchFreeze) with a different approach. While TouchFreeze works fine, it was missing the enable/disable touchpad actions, which are the only reason I wanted to use it. But my friends, that’s the joy of open-source: I took the sourced code and a few minutes later I had implemented those actions and added a “disabled” icon like the one KSynaptics had. Here is the patch against TouchFreeze 0.2, in case you want to use it (I’ve sent it to the author to inclusion in a future release of TouchFreeze)
At Guademy I live translated three conferences from English to Spanish. I have never done that but, given that the translators we had hired told the organization the day before the event they would not come (very unprofessional, btw), there was no other option than using me and my broken English.
All in all, it was an interesting experience. I was told my translation was about 85% accurate, which is IMHO quite good: I had not trained for that, therefore my “buffer” was quite small. The most difficult part of live translating was a) lisp (I’m used to American English, not to British English) and b) memory (I seldomly need to memorize something, therefore my short-term memory is quite bad). Fortunately all the conferences were about open source software I know quite well, therefore specific vocabulary was not difficult.
Apache Log4CXX is a logging framework for C++ patterned after Apache log4j. It also happens to be quite difficult to build on Windows if you are using Microsoft Windows SDK 1.0 (AKA Microsoft Platform SDK 6.0). If you are building software for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, or using Visual C++ 2008, you are using Windows SDK 1.0.
The reason Log4CXX 0.10.0 is hard to compile with Windows SDK 1.0 is a bug in APR 1.2.12 (the latest version available as of this writing) and a bug in Windows SDK 1.0 itself (a preprocessor redefinition due to including twice a header file). Here comes the recipe in case you want to build the stuff yourself:
IMHO FreeDesktop.org is a weak organization and it’s specification are not taken seriously enough. Gnome and KDE are suggesting developers follow those specs, as opposed to strongly demanding they do. The end result of that is worse interoperativity between Gtk+/Gnome and KDE applications, therefore users get frustrated.
IMHO KDE and Gtk+/Gnome should define an “acceptflow” to follow in order for an application/library to be included. Briefly: if you are not using fd.o’s specs, you need to really convince us there is a good reason for that.
Expanding it, this is my proposed workflow:
I’m at València, Spain for Guademy 2008.
Guademy is a combined Gnome + KDE conference, hence the name (Guadec + aKademy), where developers of both desktops (actually every free desktop developer is invited) try to improve collaboration. IMHO it should be renamed to “Freedesktop.org Conferences” because that’s what it actually is.
I’ve seen some frienly faces I knew from other FLOSS events (Aleix Pol, Rodrigo Moya, Carlos Garnacho, Will Stephenson) and I’ve met people I had only read so far (Jos Poortvliet, Holger Freyther). There are some people that were not under my radar, too (Richard Hughes, Vincent Untz).
Yesterday we had talk about QtWebkit by Holger. He tried to show us how good Qt integration with Webkitwas. But he failed. Miserably. It’s not good. It’s AMAZING. Thanks to QtWebkit, he was able to wrote a browser with tabs, cookie management, bookmarks and plugin support in 7800 (seventy eight hundred) lines of code. In five days. The only thing missing was SSL certificate management. Awesome. I provided live translation to Spanish, for non-English speaks.
In the afternoon we had a couple of talks about FreeDesktop.org by Rodrigo, Will and Vicent. In the end, I think the problem with FreeDesktop.org is Gnome and KDE are just suggesting, instead of strongly demanding, their developers to work together.
After that, Aleix talked about KDevelop 4 and demoed it. I have to say I’m gratefully surprised by its progess. Last time I tested it (like 5 months ago), it was totally useless. Currently it works and it works reasonable well. I may start using it soon.
After so much talk, we were quite tired and hungry and went to Los Bestias (“The Rudes”) for dinner. It’s not the typical Spanish restaurant, it’s a “funny restaurant”: the bartender threw (literally) salted peanuts all over the our table, they brought us urinaries with beer and sangria, etc. It was quite funny, IMO.
There are two more days of Guademy, I’ll post more tomorrow.
Many people I know routinely use GNU Screen but I had never used it because a) I usually work on servers locally or on-site through SSH, b) it’s quite complex to learn and key combinations interfere with other applications.
This time, however, I’m VPN-ing to the servers I’m setting up Zumastor on. There are two steps in the set up which take a lot of time, initializing the logical volume with nulls (optional, but my advice is you accomplish it for improved replication times) and creating the filesystem. If you are over a bad VPN connection (as it was the day before yesterday), you are essentially fucked because every time the VPN disconnects, the interactive command you launchped is aborted and you need to start it over again. Grrr.
So I decided it was about time to get me started with ‘screen’. Oh my. I love it. It comes with every Linux and *BSD distribution and it does its job very well. In case you want to give it a try, read the GNU Screen introduction and beginners tutorial which Kuro5hin (read “corrosion”) published four years ago.
Estaré en la Aditel iParty 10 hablando de CMake, CPack, CTest y Dart. No sé todavía cuándo será mi charla, pero el evento es del 26 al 30 de marzo en Castellón. Seguiremos informando.
Actualización: Transparencias