February 27th, 2010
As KDE 4.4 has hit the stable update repositories for Fedora a couple of days ago, I updated my parent’s computer. While doing that, I noticed that some options have been moved around, noticeably the ones concerning the Dashboard configuration.
Some months ago, I wrote a post about “Configure the KDE Dashboard to behave like in OSX“; the options to configure this have now been moved to System Settings > Desktop > Workspace. Simply select “Show an Independent Widget Set” in the drop-down box and you are done in KDE 4.4.
Posted in Fedora, General Linux | No Comments »
February 24th, 2010
Today, a not so surprising news showed up in my RSS feeds. It’s from PCA, an update tool I use for Solaris (because the tools from Sun are useless).
Attention: The patch policy has silently been changed by Oracle quite severely. The new strategy, which is also documented in Software Update Entitlement Policy for Solaris, enforces the requirement of a support contract to download any patch.
Unlike before, even security patches are not available for free anymore.
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February 14th, 2010
Yesterday I explained how to install the Maemo 5 SDK on Fedora 12 and launch the N900 phone emulator. Today we are going to configure the development environment for QT and deploy a “Hello World” application to the Nokia N900 emulator.
To have a better understanding of the whole platform, including GTK+ programming that we are not going to use, Nokia has a series of good videos:
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Posted in Fedora, Maemo | 2 Comments »
February 13th, 2010
Hey! I finally received my Nokia N900 phone/toy/thing last week after almost 3 months of waiting; of course it’s full of awesomeness like every device one buys. For those of you who still don’t know what I’m talking about, this phone runs Nokia’s Maemo 5 OS which is essentially a Debian-based Linux distro with an adapted GUI.
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Posted in Fedora, Maemo | 3 Comments »
February 9th, 2010
I’m using VirtualBox since a couple of years to run Windows on top of my Linux boxes. After a while, the virtual disk size may increase to unreasonable sizes and I was searching for an option to “compact” it like in Parallels/VMWare.
Contrary to these other virtualization tools, there is nothing in VirtualBox’ GUI to do this. Fortunately, you can use 2 tools to achieve the same goal…
First, you need to download SDelete from Microsoft and run it in the VM:
sdelete -c
Now stop the VM and compact the disk:
VBoxManage modifyhd blah.vdi --compact
That’s it, your disk is now compacted and you have probably gained a couple of GB!
Posted in /dev/null | No Comments »
January 21st, 2010
Today, we received a bunch of Android-based phones at work, amongst them a Motorola Droid/Milestone. I quickly tried to connect it to my Fedora 12 box and fired up Banshee. As you can see on the screenshot below, it was perfectly recognized without any intervention and I could synchronize my music library to it 
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January 12th, 2010
Ok, this is a pure rage rant. I’m really sick of companies paper launching products that are totally unavailable to customers for months. Last November I made a blogpost about the Nokia N900, which I finally ordered. On the paper it’s still the best Linux-based phone which has the greatest compatibility with my Fedora boxes.
Today I received an e-mail telling me that my N900 would probably be delivered mid-February. That would be almost 3 months since I paid and of course you don’t get any money back on the price drop that occurs during this period…how screwed is that? It wasn’t even a pre-order, the N900 was “available”. Nokia, if you can’t deliver a product to your customers, fucking don’t sell it if you have no stock! I’m so fed up of these lousy business practices.
Nokia are not the only to blame, nVidia and ATI behave exactly the same when they launch new lines of graphic cards. Whose fault is it? The marketing guys? I honestly don’t see how generating hype on a product and not delivering it for months will help you. All you gain are angry customers who lost money on pre-orders and all the buzz effect is gone once the product really hits the streets. Great job!
On the other hand you have Apple, they have a sense on how to deliver products to the market. When a product is announced, it’s available. Guess what? They are doing fine.
Posted in /dev/null | 4 Comments »
January 7th, 2010
To backup MySQL databases, there is the well known and handy executable called mysqldump. It has one big shortcoming though, you can either backup one database to a file or all databases to one giant file with the “–all-databases” option but you can’t backup every database to separate dump files.
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Posted in /dev/null | 3 Comments »
January 6th, 2010
RequestTracker is a widely used tool in many companies as it allows one to implement an effective workflow to handle any kind of events: customer requests, bug resolution etc…the requests are all filed as tickets to be resolved and put into queues.
RT also has a notion of priority levels for tickets, ranging from 0 to 100 and it supports scripting to automate some tasks. RT does a lot of things actually, but it’s a bit of a scary beast at first, with a not-so-clear documentation.
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December 4th, 2009
Pour ceux qui ne seraient pas encore au courant, l’association Fedora-FR organise les Rencontres Fedora 12 les 12 et 13 décembre 2009 à la Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie de Paris. Au programme il y a de nombreuses conférences et des ateliers liés au monde du libre, on vous y attend nombreux!
Le programme complet est disponible sur le wiki de l’association.
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