Memoirs of a QWERTY Keyboard
CCV (Community Core Vision) today almost made me wish I were on Ubuntu and not Linux.
Trying to build it on ArchLinux x86_64 took about 2 hours of searching solutions, building-installing and locating libraries, adding references, counting off one compile-error after another. Nothing has ever thrown errors harder at me. Makes me remember dependency hell.
Well, at least its not Windows and its lack of helper core programs.
Rant Mode Off
You might think, like I did: Isn’t OSS dead? Didn’t ALSA replace it ages ago?
Open Sound System - Much better!
The answer, as I learnt, was both yes and no. It did die, only to be revived later by 4Front Technologies who developed it under a commercial license for quite sometime. It went GPL only recently, although with a paid premium-support and on certain platforms only. The improvements made in it are simply amazing. I’ll leave the rest of the mystery to be covered by 4Front’s own blog post. It’s a nice read 
The following guide on how to shift to OSS from PulseAudio/ALSA is for Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope, 9.04*) users alone. A proper guide to ArchLinux’s solution might be found here.
Read the rest of this entry »
Strangely the site-packages directory used by Python (2.6) to place/install modules and packages is nowhere to be found in Ubuntu’s Jaunty Jackalope. The newer directory is called dist-packages, no idea why (Only know that it sounds like its for distribution-installed modules).
So to place a package or a link to one, simply do so in the /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ directory.
With the onslaught of these micro-blogging sites I just can’t think of writing anything more than 140 characters. I’ve tried posting a digest of the same in the blog every week just to keep it going here but it does not look so neat. The Lifestream plug-in, now in action at one of my pages, keeps track of most of the 2.0 updates while I try to bring myself back to posting proper web logs.
With the model exams over, I have about a month’s holidays to prepare for the 6th semester exams. Too much time, probably cause I listen in the classes. This semester was pretty good compared to the five before since it had two programming and one cryptography topic accompanied with some mathematics to keep the dullness taking over. I don’t know what they’ve chosen as electives for the next semester, but I do know that learning Compilers and related topics at college has nil possibility now. I can learn things myself but I don’t always have that discipline required, hence the sadness of not being taught.
I’ve decided to merge here, the PyQt blog I have running over at WordPress.com. I’ve not posted much there, and think that it will be better off at my own blog. Will be posting the existing posts one at a time. Qt 4.5 brings in quite a lot of performance boosts and their blog is very active these days with new concepts/features being put up almost every week. Thank you Nokia!
I also upgraded my Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04 flawlessly. The updater’s config-file diff warning notices need to have more options since it blocks the update process; an editor should do well. Jaunty Jackalope, as it is called this time, has good updates like OpenOffice.org 3 (Took long enough), Qt 4.5 (Wonder how KDE4 would perform on this one), Python 2.6 (Deprecation warnings, yum). A lot of other updates are present too, I just mentioned the ones I cared about.
One of my cabinet fans started making very loud droning noises and it made my temper flare quite a few times. I literally punched it, hard. The everlasting dust issue also started to seek attention again and I had no choice but to sit down, yet again, and clean the CPU off its dust. The graphic card had quite a lot of dust collected upon it this time, and that was the reason why the computer whined when I played a graphic-intensive game. After cleaning off the cabinet using an air-blower, I detached the side fans and after discovering that they had a secret compartment beneath the sticker I gave it some oiling.
It does not make much noises now, except for a few audible scratches when my Prescott is really hot trying to run the VisualBoy Advance at 400% throttle. Peace in my small room, at last. I’m losing patience on this 4 year old machine and I have probably mentioned that a hundred times. Yet I can’t seem to take a decision and buy a newer PC, and I don’t know why. The only things am sure about right now is on getting a 22-inch monitor and half a terabyte of secondary storage with two or four gigabytes of primary memory thrown in. The processor and the motherboard, however, are still delaying my decision with new ones coming in every other month. I’m dying to dive into the upgrade pool.
Having, at least, three weeks of free time I decided to get myself the Spider-Man’s Web of Shadows game. It does lack in performance but has some cool moves, like the last movie game did. I also want to play the Broken Sword series again but I don’t think I’ll find time to do that. For now, let’s just swing with the symbiotic.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve done in the past three days. More as they come.
You might find that some keyboard shortcuts for the VMware Remote Console Firefox browser plugin don’t work in Ubuntu as they do on other Linux distributions (Ubuntu version 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex).
After hours of irritation, of not being able to release the input by pressing the default Ctrl + Alt buttons, I finally found a solution to it. Thanks to this website for it, though its problem seemed slightly different, it did the work for me.
The trick is to put this line into the ~/.vmware/config file.
Create it if it does not exist and add the following line:
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
That should do the trick, and all the keys should work fine now! Even escaping or releasing the input and thus, no messy reboots to save yourself.
