Flock is almost 0.5.0

I’ve just updated Flock to the latest hourly, and it’s now identifying itself as version 0.5.0. Look out for a new preview release soon.

technorati tags: flock

Opera 9 PR2

Just been playing about with the new Opera 9 preview release, and I have to say I’m impressed. It feels nice – I know that’s not a highly scientific term, but the feel of an application can often make the difference, at least to me. Compared to version 8.5, it’s a browser I feel that I can use all of the time, not just out of curiosity.

There are many nice features to Opera. Whether they are unique to this release, or that I’ve never noticed them in previous versions seeing as I never really used them too much, I really wouldn’t know. However. The UI is very slick (how people still use IE I don’t know), better in places than Firefox et. al. Everything is so nicely integrated, it’s like a preview of IE7/Windows Mail or Firefox 3.0. The mail client, RSS reader and browser play together beautifully.

I haven’t gone into the nice extra features, like web widgets or the torrent client.

That’s enough expounding for now. Download it and see for yourself (if you need a link before I post it, digg for it).

technorati tags: software, web, opera

X.org, version 6.9

Hooray, I thought. X.org 6.9 released via the apt repos. Nice easy upgrade from 6.8, I thought.

Wrong.

I tried a couple of times to get this thing upgraded to no avail: each time I upgraded, on the next reboot X would fail and complain that it couldn’t find the necessary module (in my case the i810 driver). Doing an #init 3 and trying SaX2 also failed. So I would go back and reinstall from the DVD.

I found a set of packages, by luck, by trying #apt install -s xorg-x11* and seeing what it threw up. All of the upgrade packages were there, along with some I hadn’t seen before.

xorg-x11-driver-video

Bingo. So, before running #apt upgrade I ran #apt install xorg-x11-driver*. No errors, so I went and performed the upgrade on the other packages. One reboot later, and I’m now running X.org 6.9. Crumbs. Something tells me someone didn’t set up the dependencies properly.

Now all I need to do is find a way of stopping the 2.6.15-jad2 kernel from breaking my wireless.

technorati tags: suse, x.org, x11

Tap dancing

I don’t use tapping on my trackpad. It annoys me, especially when I select or move something while trying to move the cursor around. It’s very easy to disable in Windows, using the driver software, and the settings stick.

SuSE supports these pads by default, and provides all of the nice options like edge scrolling. It is possible to edit the settings of the trackpad using ksynaptics (not installed by default – an #apt install ksynaptics will work), but one setting does not stick – tapping. It is automatically enabled on boot, which for me is very annoying.

Doing quite a bit of Googling on the subject I eventually find an easy way to disable tapping by default. Simply add

synclient maxtaptime=0

to your .bashrc. This command is run every time you start bash (every time you log in), and disables tapping. Great stuff. You could even map this command to a key combination, if you wanted an easy way to turn tapping on and off (obviously changing 0 to a higher number, e.g. 20).

technorati tags: suse, synaptics, alps, touchpad

Hooray! Realtime scanning for ClamWin.

Finally. As you may (or may not) be aware, the Windows port of ClamAV (ClamWin) has an on-demand virus scanner, but no real-time protection. This is a major drawback and limits its use quite severely to checking downloaded files and email. As such, I had to install a real-time checker in tandem (F-Prot).

This can, however, be overcome.

WinPooch is open-source anti-spyware software. It offers realtime event filtering, which by itself is reasonably powerful, but every file that is run can be scanned by… guess what… ClamWin. It doesn’t need any prompting or setting up, just install ClamWin then WinPooch. WinPooch will find ClamWin and use it automagically. Great.

Therefore we have effectively gained a viable open source (and free) realtime anti-malware solution. Nice.

technorati tags: clamav, clamwin, winpooch, antispyware

Next-gen Webmail

I signed up for the Windows Live Mail beta the first time it was available, but of course it wasn’t compatible with Firefox. After that I went back to the old version. Then it gained FF support. Shame there was only a delete button and not much else. Anyhow. As I was filling out the questionnaire to say why I had given up for the second time, I hit on a fairly nice idea.

As I’ve been playing with SuSE I’ve set up GPG keys for my various email accounts. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, that I didn’t have to use an external application to encrypt and/or sign my email. Wouldn’t it be great, I pondered, if the webmail client had a built-in keyring. That way I could encrypt my email no matter where I am in the world.

What if encyption and signing are not done automatically? Then if a virus got hold of your address book, you could simply ignore and delete all unsigned email.

And just think. What if companies who held my personal data had their own key on my keyring. That would mean that I would be certain that communication came from them and not a phisher. In fact, the company could pay the webmail provider to have the public key provided by default.

Thank you, and goodnight. Killer application for the first webmail provider to implement it.

Oh, and I just received an email from MS inviting me to join the Live Mail beta.

technorati tags: windows, live, webmail, gpg

Windows Mobile 5 problems

Well, as nice as Windows Mobile 5 is, there are a number of problems with the Axim upgrade. Aximsite has threads dedicated to them, ranging from disappearing expansion cards, dodgy bluetooth stacks, white screens, battery drain, and no powering on.

My Axim has been subject to all of the problems, except the bluetooth problems as I rarely use that. However, the power on problems and white screen were happening with annoying regularity, battery life was irregular, and the SD card disappeared and was only fixed by a hard reset. So, go back to WM2003SE and everything is back to normal.

Interestingly, Dell have released several new ROM versions for the X51, and are now up to A05, whereas the update for the X50 is stuck at A01. I presume this is down to the X51 having no backup battery, so it won’t work with 2003SE, so there’s no option of a downgrade, whereas X50 users can go back and have a correctly working system. Anyhow, the sooner Dell get this fixed the better. Apparently HP IPAQs that have been upgraded have none of these problems. This is a shame, as there are some very definite benefits to WM5 compared to WM2003SE.

technorati tags: windows mobile, axim, x50, wm5

Measuring power use and cost

Hardware in Review – Computers, electricity, and you

Interesting article about power consumption of various hardware and software configurations. Most interesting are the relative consumption of Linux, BSD and Windows XP. Nice to see that on average *nix is cheaper to run than XP.

Plus, check the comparison between Intel Pentium D 820 and Athlon X2 3800+. The 820 doesn’t have Speedstep, whereas the X2 has Cool ‘n’ Quiet. Quite a difference in consumption, and worth bearing in mind if building an always-on system or recommending purchasing for a large number of machines.
technorati tags: pc, hardware

Novell AppArmour

Interesting thing this. I turned on AppArmour (or AppArmor for people who can’t spell ) a while ago to see what it would do. After all, an extra layer of security is never a bad thing. I also noticed that RealPlayer stopped working, which isn’t ideal. Of course, at the time I didn’t put the two things together. Running realplay at a command line threw a random access denied error, and did the exact same thing with sudo, which I thought was a little odd. So, thinking back to what I’d changed recently, apart from several apt updates, I thought of AppArmour. Turned it off, and voila, working correctly.

So, for the average user, AppArmour stops RealPlayer working.

technorati tags: linux, suse, real player

Using apt: Part 5

Problems with finding and using apt? A script rpm exists that will take care of everything, and does a very nice job of setting up reliable repositories.

Go to the SuSE wiki and grab the apt4suse rpm.

Made my life easier this time around after reinstalling.

technorati tags: linux, suse, apt