Category Archives: Software

GTK G-Rays2: Debian/Ubuntu packages

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Still I like to make use of my WBT-201 GPS logging device by Wintec. (I might have mentioned this before ;-) ). Wintec does not provide software for Linux and the latest version for Windows is from 2008. However, there still is this nice peace of software by Jonathan Hudson called “GTK G-Rays2“. He recently released a 2.x version as source, now supporting GTK3 but doesn’t provide packages for Ubuntu anymore. So based on his former 1.x packages I did my worst and built them for Ubuntu 12.04. I also built Debian packages for Debian Squeeze, but of course they are still version 1.x based.

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Pimping Unity’s indicator panel

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With Unity becoming Ubuntu‘s default desktop we had to say goodbye to all those nice applets we got used to (or at least I did) while running Gnome 2.x. I’m especially thinking about sensor-, CPU- and system-monitor-applets. Those applets are not available anymore for Unity. Instead it’s making use of indicators. So I just fired up synaptic (still don’t like Ubuntu Software Center) and searched for “indicator” – and I pretty much found what I was looking for. :-)

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EncFS & Dropbox for Linux/Android/Windows/MacOSX

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Nowadays there are a lot of possibilities of storing documents online – which is quite handy if you need to have stuff available on different devices or share it with others. I think one of the first who managed to make this quite easy and even supported all major OS’s was Dropbox. So I take Dropbox as example but this should work with Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Google Drive as well. You have to put a certain amount of trust in these companies and when it comes to data a little more sensitive it’s advisable to encrypt it before uploading. My first approach was a TrueCrypt container and this of course works very well but when I stumbled upon EncFS I seconded TrueCrypt. The combination of Dropbox and EncFS works on all my OS’s: Linux, Windows, MacOSX and Android – isn’t that great? :-)
Let me state this right at the beginning: I gathered almost everything in this post from others and I will indicate the original source. I just wanted to put it all together – next time I need it I know where to look!

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Kernel-remover for Fedora

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Once you have Fedora running for while you’ll gather a bunch of kernel updates on your harddrive – and it’s likely you’ll need none of the old ones anymore. So from time to time I tend to clean up and remove old kernel packages keeping only the two latest updates. This procedure involves checking for installed kernel packages and possible related packages and then removing them – but keep the current and running kernel (of course! ;-) ). Inspired by aptosid‘s and siduction‘s kernel-remover package I wanted an automated process. This resulted in a little script which until now seems to work fine. Don’t get me wrong, this is no big deal and it’s definitively not as sophisticated as the one from aptosid/siduction, but I don’t have to think anymore when trying to remove old kernel packages! ;-)
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Conky with Debian Squeeze & Samsung R780

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I wasn’t aware of this nice little tool called “Conky” until I stumbled upon the Pinguy OS website and saw the screenshot of it’s default desktop. To make Conky (and the sensor readings) work with Debian Squeeze on my Samsung R780 notebook there was some work to do. Once done, it’ll look like this:

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VMware with kernel 2.6.38 [updated for kernel 2.6.39]

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Running Debian Squeeze with the latest kernel 2.6.38 from Debian Backports I had some trouble getting VMware Player to work. Once started it complained about not being able to compile the “vmnet” kernel module. I found the solution here and this is how you can make it work:

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“googlecl” RPM for Fedora

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Recently Google released a command line tool to manage it’s many different services: googlecl. This might be handy for those who want to script some operations. It’s quite simple to use, i.e.:

# google picasa post title <PHOTOALBUM> /path/to/photo.jpg

would upload “photo.jpg” to the Picasa album <PHOTOALBUM>. Run

# google --help

for more options or have a look at this page.

Google provides the source code or a Debian/Ubuntu package (here), but no rpm. So, if you like you may download the one I built for Fedora 13 (requires package “python-gdata” – install it via ‘yum install python-gdata’):

googlecl-0.9.8-2.fc13.i386.rpm.tar.gz (md5sum: 58e6a2c404d1bd3feb49f39a429164f8)

Or the source rpm:
googlecl-0.9.8-2.fc13.src.rpm.tar.gz (md5sum: 61b111467291182686c866fe01e27fc4)

Have fun!