BiggieStylin

So I’ve been waiting for a while for Digsby to finally release their Linux client. I just decided the other day to try and install Digsby through Wine on my Ubuntu install. I wasn’t having much luck with the default Ubuntu version of Wine, which is pretty old to say the least. I did a google search to see if I could find newer .deb files and ran across this http://www.winehq.org/download/deb which shows how to setup apt to pull from the latest builds on the site.

Now running the updated 1.1.25 version of wine, Digsby installed without a problem. I started it up, logged in and now its running just fine. The only issue I’ve noticed at all with Digsby under Wine is the fact that the text input box in chats seems to wrap text after a few words. Its annoying when writing a long reply to someone, but nothing more than just annoying. It doesn’t cause any problems or crash anything, so its just an annoyance at this point.

Hopefully this helps someone with Digsby under Linux. I love using it as my IM client, but I can’t wait until they get their Linux version going.

So I just installed Gentoo again because I miss being in linux. I am running amd64, so the first problem I had with totem is that it wouldn’t create thumbnails or play certian video files due to missing codecs. Some of codecs I was missing was MPEG-4 and some of the WMV codecs. If you’ve ever used the x86 branch, you know that by enabling win32codecs, you can get all of the neccisary codecs installed. Of course, this doesn’t work in the amd64 branch, but after a bit of googling, I tried installing gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg. Once I got that installed, thumbnails started showing up and videos started playing just fine. If you don’t really like totem, I can’t say I blame you, there’s also VLC which with the proper use flags works fine as well for watching videos.

Another issue I came across was when I was browsing around some files and realized that Nautalis wasn’t displaying thumbnails for .flv files. I remember coming across this a long time ago and never finding a solution for the problem, but today things have changed. One thing you will need is gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg installed. From what I understand here, thumbnails don’t show up due to Totem not getting the right mime type for FLV files. The comments mention that this is fixed in Totem 2.23.4, but amd64 only has 2.22.2. You’ve probably already noticed the XML file on the link, but I couldn’t make it work in its current format. So, I recreated the file using a format that worked fine for me. To load the file into your configuration just run the command `gconftool-2 –load flv_thumbnailerschema.xml`. Once I ran that command, I refreshed a directory with .flv files and saw thumbnails. YAY!

Here’s the download link for the XML file: flv_thumbnailerschema.xml

Anyway, I hope all of this has helped someone out.

Recently I was trying to watch a DVD on my laptop. I’m running compiz-fusion with my ati-drivers, and had a problem with the video showing up. I kept getting a blank screen with a few frames showing up once in a while. I fixed this issue in vlc by setting my video output to x11. I use Gnome for my desktop, and by default, it uses totem as its media player. I tried everything I could think of to find a way to change the backend settings for totem which uses gstreamer.

Finally, after some google searching, I found the solution. gstreamer comes with a configuration tool to change the audio and video settings. It’s called gstreamer-properties who would have thought? After running this I changed the video settings to use X11 for gstreamer as well, opened up totem and the DVD played fine! Just thought I’d share this little tidbit.

Recently I just converted my desktop back to linux, and of course, I’m using Gentoo. I’ve still got Windows so I can dual boot, but there’s just times when it isn’t practical to dual boot… so I’ve come up with another solution. I’ve installed VMWare Player and created a virtual machine to install Windows XP onto.

Once I got VMWare Player installed, I ran into a few issues. My first issue was that it was unable to find a specific symbol… this was in relation to recompiling dev-cpp/gtkmm with the use flag “accessibility”. Once that is rebuilt you also need to rebuild x11-libs/libsexy, dev-cpp/libsexymm and x11-libs/libview. Once those are rebuilt, the error about the missing symbol went away, then it was on to a whole new error message.

The next error message seems to come only when dbus is enabled

process 29624: Attempt to remove filter function 0x7f481078f444 user data 0x7a5490, but no such filter has been added
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace

Now I searched far and wide for this, and the only solution I found for a while was just to disable dbus completely. I didn’t want to do this because I’ve got a few programs that are using dbus. After searching more, I found something else. Finally, a Gentoo Bug that tells me what’s wrong! It appears by the bug report that if you have dbus running, you must also have hald running. Once I started up hald, vmplayer has worked perfectly.

Hopefully this will help someone and save them from pulling their hair out unlike I did.

Today I was trying to get Gentoo installed on my desktop from a stage1. I wanted the ccache feature enabled, but kept getting errors like the compiler couldn’t create executables and such. I went and did a little digging in the Gentoo forums but ended up finding nothing. It then dawned on me what was wrong after retrying without ccache.

When you first emerge ccache, it automatically creates symlinks to itself for your CHOST setting. That means that in /usr/lib/ccache/bin I had i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc symlinks to ccache. That’s why compiles were failing, the compiler didn’t exist on my system, but ccache was trying to use it like it did. The simple solution was to run:
ccache-config --remove-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
After using this, things were compiling again using ccache. I do want to note that after sys-devel/gcc emerges during bootstrapping, you’ll loose ccache because it will now use the new i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc compiler instead of ccache. All I did to fix this was pause my bootstrap using Ctrl+Z, then type the command
ccache-config --install-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
and then typed in %1 to resume the boostrap job I just paused. I can’t prove that this made it use ccache again, but it eased my mind.

So, to sum it up, if you want ccache when compiling from a stage one, you must use
ccache-config --remove-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
first, then
ccache-config --install-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
after sys-devel/gcc has emerged to make sure ccache works with your new compiler. Hope that helps someone out there!

Well, lately I’ve been having a little fun with my laptop that I got not long ago. It’s served me well, and has allowed me to work from it very nicely. The video card in it is ATI, and if you know me, you know I HATE ATI. Let me just give you a general idea of how much I hate them now after having this laptop.

If I wanted to run Beryl or Compiz from Linux… I might as well forget it. Between issues with my video card drivers and their lack of OpenGL support and the pure slowness of this video card, it’s nearly impossible. I had a bit of a hack going once using XGL and Beryl, but then I couldn’t use two monitors (LCD & External). So it was either a single monitor and sweet effects, or two monitors and no effects. *sigh* I also had Compiz working through Xgl, but wow… it was so slow I felt like I was back on a Windows 3.1 machine waiting for notepad to open.

Now lets jump into Windows… works great, until of course I actually want to play any kind of a game. Take for example, Call of Duty. Let me just list off the requirements by the game first…

• 3D video card with 32MB of RAM
  OK, great, this one has 128MB of onboard (not shared) memory, no problem, right?
• 700MHz processor
  Right… 2.4GHz ok? I’d hope so.
• 128MB of RAM
  1GB in this system, good to go.

So, everything major looks good to go, install the game, start it up… LAG. It starts up at 800×600 by default, and the game is already so choppy, I want to give up. Instead, I got online and found a couple tweaks so it was at least bearable to play… still laggy though. Apparently in Windows they didn’t complete OpenGL support for this video card in their drivers either. Now I’ve run into another problem… trying to play my Nascar Season 2003 game… for some *weird* reason it runs “fast”. Very hard to explain, but the timer counts anywhere from 1.5-3 seconds every second. When playing the game, it’s like playing in fast forward… wtf?! I can’t find anyone with the same issue, I can’t seem to do anything to solve it. I give up.

I’m offically signing off this laptop for any use beyond travel and other neccisary use. ATI, you *suck*. You can’t just make a video card, then fail to support it. The whole rundown with the linux drivers is, ATI doesn’t support the full capability of the video card, so OpenGL is useless. The open source drivers don’t know how to support it, so they’re just as useless. In Windows, well, I can only guess how that could possibly work. Anyway, I guess my reccomendation to you would be, if you’re looking for any kind of a video card (laptop or PC) … check out nVidia. Save yourself tons of headaches, driver wise and especially performance wise… BLARGH!