Free Software

With this entry a new category for emacs related posts will begin here. Bits from emacs.help are tips and tricks found while reading the emacs.help mailing list

Well, this tips is how to use su inside eshell

From the post: "...Doing su or sudo su does not work like you expect. This works under the normal shell (M-x shell). I am su:ing quite much ..." If you have tried, using su inside eshell is quite paintful, and doesn't work very well. But, come on, there should be a way of doing it, right?

From the reply: "...Tramp 2.1 supports it. Try "cd/sudo::" in eshell..." And that's it! you have a fully functional 'suded' eshell with completition available.

Wow!, Now it's time for a second beta release. The changes with the previous release are:

• New translations: it (thanks to giacomomargarito) and sk (thanks to shamotj)
• A new HACKING file.

I didn't expect to have translations so fast, and I have to apology because I didn't followed the issue tracker too close (I didn't configured the alerts). I hope the new HACKING file will make life easier to anybody who wants to contribute.

Here is the link for the new tarball

Warning: This is a beta version, it may kill eat your dog and steal your wallet. If you find a bug, please report it at our bug tracker

Today I've made available for testing the 0.2_beta release of gmail-sentinel. Among the new features we have:

• Ability to see all the new messages through the notification pop-up. Now gmail-sentinel features buttons on the notification itself so you can move forward and backwards to see all messages.
• A "open" button that launches the configured browser and opens the selected messages. Your message one-click away
• Other minor things...

If everything goes ok, I'll have a RC by Monday and a final 0.2 release by next monday. There will be no new features until 0.2 release, just bug fixes.

Here is the mandatory screenshot:

I'm glad to announce the first (yet alpha) release of GoogleMail Sentinel (gmail-sentinel).

From it's homepage: "GoogleMail Sentinel is a mail notifier for Google Mail (Gmail) that creates an icon in your Taskbar and features popup alerts when there's new mail in your GoogleMail (Gmail) account".

It's not yet ready for mass consumption but it's good enough for casual testing. And if you write python and want an easy project to start coding this is a great one. Very simple, few lines of code and a helpful upstream ;)

gmail-sentinel is my first publicly released piece of code that I wrote to scratch a personal itch. Although is not the first time I write some code, it's the first time I'm managing every single aspect of the process (finding hosting, writing an entry to freshmeat, etc.)

libnotify and notification-daemon are part of the galago project, a "desktop presence framework". libnotify shows popup windows on your desktop to alert you from some event, like new mail or an IM. I like the idea of use a single program to manage all your desktop notifications instead of having to implement the same code over and over again on all your apps. AFAIK libnotify is desktop-agnostic so it should work on GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc.

What about emacs? Well, if you use jabber.el for jabber chatting, erc or rcirc for IRC you can use libnotify to do some fancy notifications.

For erc this guy hacked the libnotify support. I haven't tested personally but seems interesting.

For rcirc there's a wiki page about rcircNotify

For jabber.el I wrote a libnotify alert, here it is the wiki page for it.

• Real programmers use Emacs
• Emacs learning curve
• Emacs fingers

EDIT 03/07/2008: Seems like the idea is not so unpopular after all. See this thread on gentoo.users mailing list

Edit 03/10/2008: Now there is a forum thread to discuss the idea. Thank you Dan

Gentoo is lacking man-power. If you ask any developer he/she will tell you that more developers would be great to help finishing all the task lying around. Where do you look if you want more developers? In the community and users of course! Gentoo needs new and interesting ways of involve more and more the users with the development process to find users willing to go to the next level and become developers.

Ubuntu has this site called: "ubuntu brainstorm" where users can propose ideas to be voted by other users and improve their ideas up to a feasible level. I think that Gentoo could use something like this. As with ubuntu's site we will be getting ideas like "Push Logitech to make Linux software for theire harmony remote controls". It's not a bad idea, but it's not something any distro could do (after all is the user who buys from X who should push for proper support, not the distro, because is the customer who was the power do to so). As with any brainstorm you will get a mixed bag of good and not so good ideas

Does this really help? I definitly think so. If the idea is good enough and popular enough, the developers could push the original reporter to create a more detailed view of the idea until you get a "blueprint" feasible of implementantion. What happens next? Somebody willing to help may step up, or even the proposer could try to implement it... you get new, motivated people working.

This idea was proposed as bug 212527 and Mike Doty's answer was WONTFIX:"we're not ubuntu. We have plenty of places for users to provide input, this isn't needed. nor do we have any source for it."

I know we are not ubuntu. Does it mean that we couldn't use any idea from them for the sake of "not being ubuntu"? As with the "plenty of places for user to provide input" I think Mike refers to mailing lists, forums, irc channels and bugzilla. All this places are good ways of input but none of them are specific for the task. What we get from a special site is an easier and centralized way of dealing with the ideas. This also mean that if an idea and a bug report are related they should link each other.

I own a AMD64 machine that includes hardware virtualization and since day 1 I wanted to take advantage of this. I tried Xen back then (almost a year ago) but it didn't convinced me, it seemed too much work for something I won't on a daily base. Then I read somewhere about kvm and how it got merged into the main kernel so quickly, how simple it was because it relies on hardware virtualization and kernel's internals for so much of the work, I got hooked.

Back then I used kvm-20 and while it worked it had a few glitches (video performance, random crashes on windows guest, erratic networking, etc.) . But fast-forwarding to 2008, kvm-62 fixes the last issue I had, video performance. Drawing grub's menu used to take around two or three seconds, but now it's instantaneous and works like charm. There's a great guide to install kvm on Gentoo here. If you have a CPU that features hardware virtualization and you want to run several instances of your favorite distro (and who doesn't?) I recommend you to give a try kvm-62

A week and a half has been since the Summer of Code officially began. I'm feeling more and more part of this and I'm as excited as when I was elected a month or so ago. But... we need to get down to business :)

All this time I've been working on two fronts. One is the database; basically defining how to create the relationships between jobs, its metadata and the target clients; the scheduling schema is going to use a crontab-like string as is by far the best way to do it and also is a well known syntax for the users. The database modifications weren't taken lightly as everything is going to be based on the database so they were very well talked with codeman and agaffney. If everything goes as it should *wink* the database schema shouldn't be modified from now on.

On the other side I've been working on the client and server side of the app. I've been using pychecker to review the code. It's easy to make mistakes if you are used to use a compiler to check your code :). On the server side I've added support to command-line arguments. I'm trying to check the client-server connection before doing any other work, and for some reason the SSL authentication is throwing me an error if the server and the client are on different machines; but if they run on the same they work... weird. Once that is over I'll focus on fix all the functions I broke with the modification to the database.

On a side note I finally have everything ready to work, the kvm virtual machines are working flawlessly and with the extra Gigabyte of RAM I just bought there's not a single delay while working with several virtual machines. Great!

Few days ago the first issue of "Qespisqa Kawsay (Free Culture)" has been published. This is a project of AQPGLUG and it's the result of the collaboration of several people that wishes to help to the big free software community. On its first issue you can find an interview to José Alonso Cárdenas Márquez, the first FreeBSD peruvian committer of the FreeBSD; an article about virtual machines using QEMU, two articles about FreePascal and other goodies.

You can see the announcement or download the magazine. It is only available in Spanish, for now.