Febuntoo News Generator

I'm blogging from Arch Linux :D

I've been meaning to setup Arch on my netbook for a while, after hearing a lot of people rave about how awesome pacman is and how fast their system is. I didn't want to spend time on moving to a new distro during my GSoC, so I kept putting it off. Yesterday Ubuntu borked on my netbook for some weird reason (I suspect it was my friend Rathna sitting on it, but might have been because I was thinking of moving to Vim too) - and I took the opportunity to install Arch. After some messing around, and some help from #arch, I was able to get myself a commandline that also connected to the Internet via wifi. Yay!

I tried out LXDE first, instead of my usual GNOME - and found that it was incredibly unpolished (compared to GNOME). So after a bit of a struggle (AND READING DOCS! (and yes, my problem was dbus)), I got a minimal (very application-less) GNOME up and running. And yes, it is way faster. And yes, the packages are newer (and shinier!). And #arch was helpful :)

I've had to (understand and) edit a fair amount of config files to get myself a working system. It's been a fun and informative journey - and I expect it will continue to be. My entire Linux experience so far has been with Ubuntu (hell, even the server I administer runs Ubuntu!), so coming to this world of required-and-encouraged config file editing is doing me good :)

I'm enjoying it :) If you're a geek who loves fast text scrolling on an LCD (and you also have the time), you too would.

Thanks to Flumotion, you can access and view the awesome talks that happened at GUADEC 2010.

I have got those related with Grilo, and put them here. Besides the original WebM format videos, I provide also Theora version (in lower quality, intended to those who can not play WebM yet), and the slides too.

The first is a complete talk about Grilo: what is Grilo, what provides, and some of its features.

The second one is a 5 minutes lightning talk, about using Grilo to create a daemon that is able to provide content to other clients through DBus.

The thid one, is also a 5 minutes lightning talk, that explains the port of Grilo to Maemo 5, and how it was used to add more multimedia sources to N900’s Mediaplayer.

Enjoy them!

• Iago Toral Quiroga, Grilo: Feeding applications with multimedia content (webm) (theora) (slides)

• Juan A. Suárez Romero, Rygel-Grilo (webm) (theora) (slides)

• Xabier Rodríguez Calvar, MAFWGriloSource (webm) (theora) (slides)

• Overslept, not into the 6:45am waking routine from the holidays yet. Fed, and hurried babes off to school. M. looking so tiny and sweet in her new uniform.
• Back to the mail hill, admin, Clarity, tested bootchart2 pieces, merged branches and pushed out a 0.12.4 - with memory graphing from Dave Martin at Linaro, and lots more nice fixes and features from Riccardo Magliocchetti.

While considering various options, upgraded on G5 from 10.04 to 10.10. The upgrade was smooth – except that new kernel turns CPU fans on (oh, what a sound!) and then after couple of minutes the system halts (the hardware considers itself overheated). Beta quality multiplied by “informally” supported Power architecture… Still, thanks to Canonical for fixing the annoying issue with lvms (I encountered while upgrading to 10.04).

This insomniac night I’ve added a little nice thing to Getting Things GNOME, which is the possibility to export and print a to-do list in a PocketMod format. This is nothing more than a little foldable booklet, so that you can carry around your grocery list without needing anything more technological than a pen (you can also use strawberry juice to mark your tasks, which is way more recyclable and a little gory).

This all comes from a bug reported by Jan Girlich, so kudos to him!

Obligatory screenshot:

By the way, GTG export plugin supports templates, so creating your own webpage/pdf/t-shirt with your own tasks is easy. I’ll be glad to help anyone interested in that.