Archive for February, 2010

KDE 4.4 in Fedora: new Dasboard configuration

Saturday, 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 »

Oracle doesn’t like small customers, aka. “Is Solaris dead?”

Wednesday, 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.

(more…)

Posted in Solaris | 2 Comments »

Maemo 5 SDK: add repositories, install QT and deploy our first app in the emulator

Sunday, 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:

(more…)

Posted in Fedora, Maemo | 4 Comments »

Install the Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) SDK on Fedora

Saturday, 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.

(more…)

Posted in Fedora, Maemo | 9 Comments »

Compact VirtualBox disk images

Tuesday, 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 »