ATI fglrx driver
It is Radeon Xpress 200 graphic adapter that is making trouble.
The open source radeon driver is OK for almost anything, specially after removing strange sized "Virtual 3840x1200" when frame rates jumped to values comparable to proprietary fglrx, but the "Almost" is a keyword here.
Despite glxgears giving nice number of the frames per second, Google Earth was like molasses, and fan would start turning in high speed almost from start, YouTube videos refused to take full screen, with Flash actually going on strike.
So, to cover those cases I attempted to install fglrx again.
First attempt was to compile driver, but that didn't work well. The ati installer didn't do the job well.
Using /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh I removed remnants of "Hard Way" installation and used procedure described in http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Radeon_Xpress
When all was done, Google Earth was running as it should, YouTube didn't complain to run in full screen mode.
GtkBuilder on IronPython
Someone asked me if I could add the missing parts of GtkBuilder in Gtk#Beans so he could use it with IronPython on mono.Hey, it looks there's no missing parts ! It all works fine since day one. Here's the the trick:
Now your IronPython skills are ready to rock Gnome3!
import clr
clr.AddReference('glib-sharp')
clr.AddReference('gtk-sharp')
clr.AddReference('gtk-sharp-beans')
import Gtk
import GLib
import GtkBeans
import System.IO
def PyBuilderAutoconnect(builder, target):
def _connect(builder, object, signal_name, handler_name, connect_object, flags):
name = ''.join([frag.title() for frag in signal_name.split('_')])
event = getattr(object, name)
event += getattr(target, handler_name)
for object in builder.Objects:
setattr(target, object.Name, object)
builder.ConnectSignalsFull (_connect)
class Application:
def __init__(self):
builder = GtkBeans.Builder (System.IO.FileStream ('ui.ui', System.IO.FileMode.Open))
#use this ctor if you don't like FileStream
#builder = GtkBeans.Builder ()
#builder.AddFromFile ('./ui.ui')
PyBuilderAutoconnect (builder, self)
self.window1.ShowAll ()
def onbuttonclicked(self, o, args):
Gtk.Application.Quit()
Gtk.Application.Init ()
app = Application ()
Gtk.Application.Run ()
Firewall Zone Switcher Updated
I have updated the Firewall Zone Switcher.
It now starts with a main window by default instead of
directly going to the system tray. There’s a settings dialog that
allows to enable the system tray icon and optionally also enables
starting the applet on log-in. Furthermore the daemon now uses
PolicyKit for access control and the applet supports i18n.



Packages for openSUSE 11.1 are available from the openSUSE build service. You also need to update SuSEfirewall2 from that repo. Source code repo is available at gitorious.
Awesometastic

The HTML/js UI is pretty slick even !
The code is not merged yet, but I packaged the extension and it's now installable from within F-Spot (> 0.6.0.0) from the "Extension Manager" dialog.
More details can be found on Anton's blog.
[Update 2009/09/15. The code is now merged]
Clicks with touchpad trick (11.2 M6)
If you are running the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 (Gnome 2.27.5, Kernel 2.6.31-rc6-3-default) and find out that clicks of touchpad do not work, then this might help you a bit.
First of all, go to the Control Center, and look up for the Mouse item. Then click on Touchpad (obviously not using your computer’s touchpad, heh) and mark the option Enable mouse clicks with touchpad. That’d work fine 

I must thank my friend Pedro Villavicencio of Ubuntu for letting me know about this solution.
Yahoo Mail and free IMAP
If you are using yahoo mail, like me, then you missed for a long time IMAP access for your inbox. They provide just POP3 access and I don't want that. I would like to have/access the messages also via web interface and also to have them on my computer for offline access. So, the solution is Zimbra Desktop and you can use it on Windows, Linux or Mac.
"Zimbra software is open source, meaning we make both the software code and the application itself available to anyone at no charge. Also, Zimbra Desktop is a full version; there are no missing features or catches"
For a complete list of features see this link: http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop_features.html
If you have any issue with it you can find the answer on their wiki.
Here is just a screenshot:

It's gonna be legendary
F-Spot 0.6.1.0 is out!This one is coming quite soon after 0.6, and contains only fixes, cleanups and translation updates.
It aims to be a packager friendly release, as it drops some bundled code, some dependencies, a few megs of code, and more than a megabyte of installed size !
So, if you were using or packaging 0.6.0.0, jump in now, enjoy the .1.
[Update: I pushed 0.6.1.1 to avoid a reported build issue]
Tomboy 0.15.6 Released, ~/.tomboy is no more
"Light Hearts", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission
Yesterday I released Tomboy 0.15.6 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The biggest change is invisible to most users: we've gotten rid of ~/.tomboy.
Anybody who's backed up their notes or created Rube Goldberg-esque sync solutions is familiar with this hidden directory holding note files, user-installed add-ins, and various bits of configuration. As of today, ~/.tomboy is no more. We've separated out notes, configuration, temporary files, and even the log, and relocated them according to FreeDesktop.org standards on Linux, and appropriate conventions on Mac OS X and Windows. Everything will be automatically be moved. Details available on this wiki page.
The benefits of this move to users are:
- Users who are already trained to back up directories like ~/.config and ~/.local won't have to remember to add ~/.tomboy to that list (same argument for ~/Library on Mac OS X)
- Folks who want to set up their own ad-hoc note sync will now have a much easier time, because they can just sync the notes folder. Use any popular method of synchronizing a directory (rsync, iFolder, UbuntuOne, Dropbox, whatever), and combine that with our NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in, and you should be good to go. You'll miss some benefits of our sync infrastructure, like conflict handling, but you'll gain one big feature missing from Tomboy: automatic synchronization.
If you maintain some tool that expects Tomboy note files to live in ~/.tomboy, please update it to also look in (by default) ~/.local/share/tomboy. Thanks!
In the previous release I cleaned up the Search UI according to input from Andreas and Kalle at GCDS:
The original Search UI: Pretty with a lot of wasted space and one useless feature (click for full window)
Other changes since the last time I blogged:
- New underline formatting add-in from Mark Wakim
- Keyboard shortcuts for changing font size
- Improvements to HTML export
- Less command line output unless you run Tomboy with --debug (this actually has a positive impact on performance, by the way)
- Add "Get More Add-Ins..." button in the Preferences UI
- In SSH sync, we no longer force port 22 if no port is specified
This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.
Education Team Meeting 2009-08-26
We would like to announce, The Education team is meeting on 2009-08-26, 14:30 UTC. We would like to invite all interested parties to join us in discussing what this years openSUSE for Education group will focus on.

