Anjuta 2.1.0 is out!

15. January 2007

The Anjuta team is proud to annouce Anjuta 2.1.0, the first beta release of the anjuta 2.x series. This release is also the first that is sticking to the x.1.x = unstable convention as many people have been confused by this before. Read the full release note and get if from our website.

Printing made easy!

25. December 2006

Today, I installed my new Laser Printer (Samsung ML-2010). I thought that this would become rather difficult like most other hardware installation on Linux but it was not.

First, there is a banner on the package with says that “Windows ME/XP, MacOS X and various Linux” are supported.

All I had to do to install the printer was to connect the (of course not included) USB-Cable and click on System->Administration->Printers->New Printer. The dialog told me that it had detected the printer and asked whether I wanted to use it. I confirmed that and the use of the default driver and was now able to print a test page. Very cool!

The printer is a bit laud but you can of couse switch it off when you do not need it.

Why DRM is not a solution!

22. September 2006

This is a reply to Rodney Dawes’ post on DRM:

Why DRM cannot work
DRM wants to make people able to hear their music or view their videos without seeing or accessing data. While it is no problem to encrypt data in a save way, it has to be unencrypted if the user wants to do anything useful with it. If it is unencrypted* the user is able to do anything with it that he wants and that’s not what the music industry wants. Houston, we have a problem.

* in the player, the hardware, in the air, wherever

Of course you can try to make it extremly difficult for the user to break your system but this leads to the crappy implementations you see all the time.

Why DRM is obsolete
There is a much better technique as DRM, that is signing the sold music/videos with a secret, unremovable key. This can be done to mp3 for example. Now, the user can do with it’s data whatever he wants but once he does something what law does not permit, the right owner knows who is to judge.

The only music shop where I buy only music using exactly this signing technology which was developed at the Frauenhofer Institut (where mp3 was developed, too). And therefore it is the only webshop where you can listen to legal music on Linux without doing any crap.

Vista RC1

16. September 2006

After registering at microsoft and downloading Vista RC1 yesterday (2,5 GB) I decided to give it a try today. I had not installed Windows on my Notebook after my harddisk died last time but had left 10 GB free space in the partition table.

Installation
After booting up from the DVD and waiting some time a complete graphical installation wizards starts. You have to fill out your language, your Key and accept the license agreement. There are two installation modes, “Update” and “Expert”. “Update” was not availible as I did not start the installation out of Windows. In Expert mode you have exactly one choice, the partition information. There is an fdisk front-end that looks quite good though it does not know about linux partition types and gave me a bad error trying to format a linux partition with ntfs. Anyway, after deleting my spare partition and letting it create it’s own one, Vista was installed without demanging my other linux partitions while overriding grub.
Two reboots are necessary until the installation is finished, after the first you can enter your username and choose the background picture.

Hardware
As expected, anything worked out of the box like it did with dapper. I have a Centrino notebook which has no special hardware.
– The WLAN drivers seem to be better in Windows because they connect faster. I hope this will improve in Edgy
– Suspend to RAM is also faster on Windows

Software
There is lot of stuff preinstalled I would rather not need, like Media Center. The new Internet Explorer looks interesting but I immediately downloaded Firefox 2.0 Beta which works very good, too. All in all, Windows looks very media centered and wants to lead you to buy DRM-stuff very often.

The “Run…” field in the menu has been replaced with something which is more or less simular to the Deskbar-applet in Gnome.

Look and Feel
If there is some bling in Vista, it seems to be disabled with my graphic hardware. I really look forward to AIXGL in Edgy which hopefully supports my hardware.
The default theme looks much cooler as the ugly used in Windows XP. IMHO Gnome should also use a better default theme, maybe even parts of this suggestion.

Conclusion
I am a bit disappointed so far. I had expected that they would include really cool features in Vista which would really make me think about switchting back to Windows but they did not. There is nothing with is not also availible in Ubuntu Dapper.

Musik befreit!

15. September 2006

Mit Erstaunen habe ich heute bei Heise Online gelesen, dass endlich das erste DRM-freie Musikportal in Deutschland eröffnet hat. Nicht nur das, sie haben auch wirklich gute Musik und lassen den ganzen Chartkram erstmal komplett weg. Die Preise sind zwar auch nicht günstiger als bei anderen Portalen, aber wenigstens kann ich die Musik gemütlich auf eine CD brennen, auf meine iPod überspielen oder auf meinem mp3-Server lagern und das alles völlig problemlos unter Linux. Wenn man die Preise mit denen von Amazon vergleicht, spart man aber dennoch ein paar Euro auch wenn man natürlich keine CD mit Verpackung erhält.

Ich hoffe das Portal wird ein Erfolg, deshalb will ich den Link auch nicht vorenthalten und entschuldige mich schon mal für die Werbung: Akuma.de.

VDR fertig!

29. August 2006

Seit heute ist mein erster wirklich wohnzimmertauglicher VDR fertig geworden.

Features:

  • DVB-C, alle Kanäle außer PayTV
  • Timeshifting
  • DVDs anschauen (alle 😉
  • DVDs brennen mit Menu
  • 250 GB Platz für Filme

Eigentlich würde ich das ganze gerne noch etwas toppen, aber leider konnte ich die WLAN Verbindung mit WPA-PSK nicht stabil zum laufen bekommen, deshalb gibt es erstmal kein streaming auch auch keine mp3-Datenbank, weil ich für das CD einlesen Zugriff auf freedb benötigen würde. Aber was nicht ist kann ja noch werden!

hildonmm

15. August 2006

The C++ support for Maemo is moving forward. Today, I have uploaded the packages for libhildon-fmmm and libhildon-widgetsmm which should allow to write complete maemo applications in C++ in theory.

libanjutamm
Libanjutamm is slowly on the way. I have wrapped most important things excluding the interfaces and written a sample plugin which does not yet load because I have to fight more with the GType system. Anyway, I hope to finish this sample soon and write a script to automaticly wrap the interfaces. Happy C++ coding 😉

gtkmm on maemo
The gtkmm package for 386 should be up now and I am working on the armel package which should be finished soon. Next is the packaging of hildonmm which should hopefully not be too difficult.

Update: gtkmm packages for armel have been uploaded!

Debian, Anjuta, gtkmm

10. August 2006

Today, I built my first debian package. I still don’t fully understand how the whole mechanism works but at least I got good results by reusing the debian/ directory of an existing package as a starting point.

Naba made a great job and implemented a good auto-indent feature for anjuta, though the supported languages are only C, C++ and Java in the moment. Libanjuta is now a bit more wrapping friendly because I added “G_BEGIN_DECLS” and “G_END_DELCS” to all headers.

I am working on a libanjutamm. I follow the excellent instructions in the Gtkmm Documentation but I still have some problems. Anyway, I hope the nice guys at #c++ will be able to help me.

Today’s work!

9. August 2006

Maemo

I set up a maemo environment on my ubuntu box today. It was quite easy as they provide a good documentation and an easy installation script. There are some things that do not work perfectly yet but I think they can be fixed.

Glom

Currently trying to set up glom put I have problems to connect to the database. Seems like libgda got installed without support for postgresql but I am not sure yet. Retrying with jhbuild now…

gnome-build

No volunteers for gnome-build, yet! Applied patch from Günther Brammer (thanks!) to fix a parsing bug with “+=”.