The Gnomification of Firefox

After the small post about Gnome3 as a working environment, I stumbled in a French article about regaining screen estate in Firefox. The advice seemed sound, and I went to apply the changes.

I already posted on Google+ the results, so I'm now summarizing the steps you need.

• First things first, you need the Adwaita Theme[en] that, as usual, you can find on addons.mozilla.org.
• Then you need the HTitle extension, from the same source. Big warning! The extension hides the titlebar, so if you use the same Firefox profile in other desktop environments, you could loose the titlebar when Firefox is maximized!
• Next you want also the Movable Firefox Button. This is optional but very convenient as you can move the FF button (which contains all the menus and such other things) in the url bar or in the tab bar, in the position you want it. In the original article it's just after the url bar, I prefer to have it as the first item in the tab bar.
• Install the OmniBar which let you merge the url bar and the search bar as Chrome do, but without losing functionality.
• Now you can move the tab bar on top of the url bar if you like, just type the usual about:config into the url bar and set the property browser.tabs.onTop to True.
• Now you can install the Status Titlebar Gnome Shell extension. This is also optional but it may be very useful in case you have similar windows open.

And then you're done, this is this same post viewed in a gnomicized Firefox:

Mageia 2 on Macbook Pro: how to enable brightness keys with nvidia driver

Here's how to make brightness keys (eg. F1 and F2) to work on Mageia 2 on Gnome 3.

Add this line to the Device section of the xorg.conf (after you configured the proprietary drivers under Mageia control center):

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

Here's the page that helped me.

Edit: note that this configuration may lead to X11 crashes as well as the same configuration with noveau (which does not need any Option in x.org.conf).

Mageia 2

It's out. It's amazing. It works on the macbook pro. Enough said.

Go update or install NOW!.

Mandriva and Mageia, Am I not a farseer?

Note this blog post of mine (and the date) and this announcement from Mageia.

No more left to say.

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.

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.

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.

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.