Fixing click to focus problem on Gimp-X11 on MacOS X

If you try to use gimp on MacOS X, you'll find that all the clicks in the tool window needs to be repeated twice, once to select the window and once to select the tool.

If you don't like this beaviour, I stealed from this site the solution:

1. Open a terminal
2. Write

defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

3. Restart X11 if you have it open
4. Enjoy

Fix MSN certificate problem with Pidgin

To make a long story shot, grab the certificate (here) and install under Pidgin.
Screenshots here.

Update: Of course the update to Pidgin has been issued and all. Just a reminder.

Come utilizzare Time Machine su share Samba (non supportato)

Eccomi con la versione italiana del mini-howto. È probabile che aggiunga degli screenshot non appena rimetto le mani sul MacBookPro.

Ieri mi sono cimentato nel convincere TimeMachine a utilizzare una share di rete samba come disco di backup, dato che ho completato la configurazione del mio MSI Wind Box con dual Atom.

Così, dopo un po' di prove, controprove, smanettamenti e ricerche su Google, ho trovato questo post sul forum di macrumors, che mi ha fatto risolvere tutti i problemi.

ATTENZIONE: Questa modalità d'uso di TimeMachine non è supportata da Apple, quindi usatela a vostro rischio... eccetera.

Richiede l'uso del terminale.

Using (unsupported) SMB shares for Time Machine

Yesterday, after setting up my Samba NAS based on a dual-Atom MSI Wind Box, I fought against Time Machine, which refuses to use a shared folder as a backup disk.

So after a long struggle, I found this forum post which make everything work.

DISCLAIMER: this use of Time Machine will be unsupported by Apple, so use it at your own risk, warranty is void, and so on.

Terminal access is required.

About Mandriva

This post is about my own opinion on the whole Mandriva issue.
(for the Italian version, keep scrolling)

The Fork

I think that putting up a forked project for the "community" edition of Mandriva (Mageia) is good. This should become what Fedora is for Redhat, a community-driven distribution, high on Mandriva standards and willfull to embrace new technologies in Cooker.

The Company

The company should leverage Mageia by producing a derived distribution from the stable version, including former One live editions, and selling powerpacks. From the solid base, they should expand and integrate the Enterprise Editions

The Community

Having both Mageia and Mandriva, the community should try to integrate both distribution to work with binary packages in the contrib, plf and mib repositories, so you should have binary compatibility in the stable Mageia version and in Mandriva. Projects like Codeina should go on and simply just work.

The Future

We will see if the sinergy will work correctly as I hope. In the meantime, having a backup project like Mageia, will easy the transition for many users, including myself. For now, I'm postponing the migration to CentOS as it seemed so obvious to do it just a few days ago.

File versioning

I wrote a small script to do file-level backup/versioning of a single file or group of files as a whole, without resorting to anything beyond basic cp, tar and rm.

Basically it works like this:

How to write accented (capital) letters on MACOSX

It's usually not a problem for me to input accented letters directly with a 1-key press. But I'm used to capitalized accented letters correctly at the beginning of phrases, since in gnome or kde you must simply hit CAPS-LOCK and the accented letter key to get something capitalized (eg. È which is third person present for the verb to be in Italian). But MacOS does not change the capitalization this way.

So I had to watch out for alternatives: compositing keyboard. In Snow Leopard (at least) you can use ALT+8 or ALT+9 and the a vowel key to get respectively an acute or grave accent. Just before pressing the vowel key you'll get the accent alone underlined (as a prompt to press a letter key).

In addition, you can user ALT+O to generate german umlauts (eg. ü) or ALT+N to generate tilded characters (eg. ñ).

Ext3 Under OSX

I recently got a replacement notebook, since my favourite MSI s271 presented quite a few disk errors on smart, and it's a while that this one has the usb nonfunctional.
After looking for a new notebook, in the 12"-13" range, I found with some disappointment that those niceties come at a premium price, and most of the time they are built on cheaper consumer-level standards.
So, after some research, I went for a refurbished MacBookPro, the newest model with a 13" screen.

Now the challenge is, reading all those external disks (or internal slices/partitions) which are unfortunately ext3 formatted.

I tried not to choose the straightforward path which leads to Paragon software, and instead go the MacFuse way. This post helps a lot and basically it's all you need: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&p=220020

The modification to the script is really needed only if you require r/w, which is basically not advised from the authors of fuse-ext3, my tests say they are quite ok.

Now I need a way to bypass the default users and permissions that macosx uses to be able to write/read the data both under linux and under osx without touching sudo or becoming root.

Mutt and Imap

Yesterday I was having problems using the corporate webmail (yes, the one with three letters in the acronym), and lacked the chance to use a full-featured mail user agent.

So i remembered the old days :) when I used mutt and fetchmail to read my personal mail... and recalled mutt supported IMAP too. I started googling to find a tutorial and read a couple of nice pages (see below). In a pinch I was able to read imaps mailboxes in the console.

Linux with no primary partitions left

I got a new company PC, an Acer Aspire 5372ZG, nothing to say about it, just yet another consumer notebook with a 15.6" 16/9 gloss display, very big and quite heavy, nice keyboard if you don't mind having the home and end key on the keypad only.

The problem is, the 320GB HD is partitioned into three partitions, two of them are hidden. All are primary partitions. No primary partition left to install linux. So I did my homework and discovered that unlike the lilo of old, Grub is able to boot quite nicely from any filesystem it is compiled to support.

Ext2 under Windows

I finally had the definitive data loss on my (historical) FAT32 partition that I used to share between Linux, Windows and the odd other OS (sometimes FreeBSD, sometimes OpenSolaris). So I was looking for a way to share those data without the hassle of a yesterday filesystem. I was rather disappointed with the status of NTFS under linux, both native and under FUSE, not to speak about my mascotte ZFS.
Finally, I found this Ext2 driver with finely works under Windows, reaching near NTFS native speed, so I adopted it on the pc I switch OSes more, currently the Asus EEEPC 1101HA (yes, I finally got one).
The driver is nice, if you don't mind using your favourite ext3 filesystem in compatibility mode, which only means under Windows there's no journal, and you must bear the casual fsck when windows hangs, and the fact that you can't access your filesystem under windows if it has a dirty status on linux (the journal needs to be replayed). Of course you can simply make this filesystem a simple ext2 and get on with it.
By the way, you find everything here: http://www.fs-driver.org/

Note: remember to create the ext2/ext3 filesystem with the option -I 128, which means an inode size of 128, most moder distribution set this value to 256 which is not compatible with these tools.

Update: It works under Windows 7 too with some quirks. The first is that the installation requires Windows Vista compatibility mode (not an issue for me). The second is that the drive letter utility seems not to stick with the configuration done upon reboot. I'll investigate this further.

Firefox 3.5

As usual, I upgrade the pc I use at work before anything else: I use it for more time and I usually have to fix issues quickly. It's a Mandriva 2001 Spring, of course, and firefox has been installed in /opt using the tarball from the Mozilla Foundation.

Apart of the usual addons that get disabled, everything seems fine. It seems pretty responsive too, in spite of the low specs of the machine (Intel P4 2GHz, 768 MB of Ram, slow ide disk). A couple of crashes hit the usability, but thery a mostly related with plugins, maybe they should be updated too.

I don't use many of the new features, so I don't comment on them.

Resume sftp transfers

Of course there should be some way to resume transfers done via sftp.

Technically the way presented here is not sftp compliant (uses curl or, better, rsync --inplace).

But it's a way to start.

Note that I don't know if sftp subsystem supports resuming natively...

Heartbeat and two-nodes clusters

Heartbeat (from http://www.linux-ha.org/heartbeat/) is a nice software to manage linux high availability clusters. When you are in need to use a two-nodes cluster you want to prevent a situation known as "split-brain": when a node does not communicate with the other but neither two know which is the failing node.

This can lead to having the cluster drop all the services or having both nodes with the services on (in case of shared storage, this will lead to corruption unless the filesystem is clustered and supports multiple writes from multiple nodes). To make a long story short, split-brain is bad.

To counter this effect, you can use a ping host. Ping hosts are fake cluster members used by heartbeat to use the network connectivity as a mean to break ties in cluster node weight computations: if a node pings a ping host and the other doesn't, the hosts which pings is the winner. To make this configuration successful, you need an additional link between the nodes. This additional link could be serial or another ethernet.

To use ping hosts, this is the bare minimum configuration:

ping 10.10.10.10 # insert the ip of the ping host.
respawn hacluster /usr/lib64/heartbeat/ipfail # use /usr/lib on 32 bit hosts
apiauth ipfail gid=haclient uid=hacluster # this is for process security

But which ping host to chose? Use a reliable ping host; this can be the default gateway (if it's a router which has a very high uptime) or a local layer 3 switch. Don't use a server o a workstation!

Use hearbeat reload to configure the ping host without stopping the cluster and lose resources.

Linux first support for usb 3.0

The interesting news is that Linux could be the first mainstream OS to support Usb 3.0. Really, the support is already there if you mind building your own kernel.

The good news is that finally some female hacker comes to the surface. I felt rather fed of seeing Linus or Andrew Norton faces on articles (not minding Richard Stallman's). :)

Flashblock in Opera

I tried successfully the following operations to activate Flashblock in Opera (it worked with Opera 9.64 on Linux):

1. Download this file http://lexi.ucoz.ru/userjs/FlashBlock.js and put it in a directory of your choice
2. Go to Tools|Preferences|Advanced|Content|Javascript Options|User Javascript Files|Choose and choose the directory where you downloaded the javascript file.
3. Try it ;)

Note to Italian Opera users: you must use Strumenti|Preferenze (CTRL+F12)|Avanzate|Contenuti|Impostazioni per Javascript|Cartella dei file Javascript dell'utente|