Cultural Exchange 2

Gnome would crash before the panel would show up. Also, the text console did not work (graphic artifacts instead). Failsafe Gnome did work, which does not have Compiz, so I took a hint to change the graphics driver. System / Management / Hardware drivers offered me to install the non-free xorg-driver-fglrx and now it works.

command-not-found is enabled out of the box and it rules. openSUSE should have it by default too.

dpkg phrasebook:

rpm -ql foo

dpkg -L foo

rpm -qa "foo*bar"

dpkg -l "foo*bar" (and it also shows packages that are not installed)

Cultural Exchange: First Blood

I decided to expand my horizons and install Ubuntu on my main work computer. So today I offer you the first notes from my observations.

mutt somehow stopped tracking new mails. Fortunately :set check_mbox_size on works around that.

My subversion working copy from openSUSE was created with svn 1.5 but Hardy has only 1.4. So I manually got debs from the coming Intrepid release, and luckily 3 of them were enough: dpkg -i {subversion,libsvn1,libneon27-gnutls}*.deb from here and here.

LinDevDoc Got Tagging

Bluebear has improved LinDevDoc (original announcement) so that it can do tags now.

Addressing Lines in Plain Text Files

Jirka suggested a possibility to enhance YCP documentation with real-life code examples. For that, we'd need to point to numbered lines within the source code. I thought that ViewVC can do it but apparently not (maybe annotate has it, but it is broken at our site). But there is a new generic way: RFC 5147: URI Fragment Identifiers for the text/plain Media Type. Only none of the browsers seems to support it today...

This points to line 13, with the prototype of main:

http://svn.opensuse.org/svn/yast/trunk/libyui/examples/HelloWorld.cc#line=,13

Medoosa in OBS

Medoosa is a documentation tool for C++ that can produce UML class diagrams including generalizations and associations. Corrections can be made interactively in a diagram editor (Dia) and are fed back into the source as Javadoc-style comments. At this time, the layout must still be done by hand. Some code is already present to produce the layout with Graphviz.

I wrote it for my master's thesis at the Charles University back in 2001 and it has been since then quietly sitting at SourceForge. Today I have rebuilt it in the openSUSE Build Service: Medoosa, CcDoc-0.7a (required).

cnetworkmanager 0.4

I pulled together 0.4 yesterday:

• New: changed license to GPLv2 or later, to match other parts of NM
• New: distinguish WEP, WPA, WPA2 for -n.
• New: -o, -w control online and WiFi status.
• New: basic device info for NM 0.6
• Fix: recognize Notification Messages in knetwormanagerrc.
• Fix: -u: better error message when applet not running.
• Fix: standardized option parsing, both -Cfoo and -C foo work.

The software is now hosted in a Git repository.

KNotify Client

Korshak asked how to do emerge -uND --world && knotify "Done!". I thougt it would be a piece of cake, but apparently not.
The short answer, zypper in libnotify; notify-send Done, has a disadvantage of requiring a fair amount of GNOME software. But it does use a proposed freedesktop.org standard.
Then I find the method org.kde.KNotify.event, but its nice signature (ssavsayasx) means dbus-send (dbus-1-1.2.1-12) cannot invoke it (it cannot pass empty arrays, and it cannot wrap variants in arrays). No problem, let's use Python. But then we are blocked by knotify4 (kdebase4-runtime-4.0.4-19) reporting a wrong signature via the introspection interface.

# killall knotify4; cp /usr/bin/knotify4{,.bak}
# sed 's/type="a(ss)"/ type = "av"/g' /usr/bin/knotify4.bak > /usr/bin/knotify4

Now which event should we use so that the user actually sees the message? There are many of them, with user configurable actions. warning/kde seems to work out of the box.

#! /usr/bin/python
import sys
import dbus
m = sys.argv[1]
kn = dbus.SessionBus().get_object("org.kde.knotify", "/Notify")
i = kn.event("warning", "kde", [], m, [0,0,0,0], [], 0,
    dbus_interface="org.kde.KNotify")


That did it. But I still hope that there is a simple solution for KDE4 that I have missed.

D-Bus Spy

Like dbus-monitor, it monitors the system or session bus. Additionally, it can write the traffic to a file and read it later (-w, -r). It can dump all the gory details (-d) or pretty print all the gory details (-p). Like DBusMessageBox which inspired it, it can make message sequence charts (-c). It has some simple filtering abilities (-f, -F).

Try 0.1 if that sounds interesting.