Munckfish.net

My dad met Jon Maddog Hall (from Linux International) in London this weekend at Kew Bridge Steam Museum. Nothing to do with Linux at all, he was visiting the museum where my dad is a volunteer. Jon was involved early on with Linux, he helped source DEC Alpha hardware for Linus to develop on. Here’s the photo he mailed on to us.

Found this via the Ubuntu forums. It’s a More 4 (UK Satellite/Cable TV channel) news feature on Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth:
TV interview with Mark ‘Ubuntu’ Shuttleworth

I’ve recently become a bit of a vim convert. Not for all editing tasks at the moment, but I’ve found myself choosing it sometimes in preference to my previous favourite editor JEdit.

I like vim for quick editing as I’m finding the key sequences very speedy once you’ve learned the basics. I miss JEdit’s fantastic hypersearch feature, however, knowing vim I’m sure there’s a way to do something similar.

Found this article today looks like it’s got lots of useful power-user tips for getting more out of vim. I’ll have a look through later.

Power Vim Usage: Tips & Tricks for Everyday Editing

Found this neat wizard to help potential Linux users choose which distro(s) would be most suitable for their needs: Linux Distribution Chooser.

Quite good I think.

I’ve wanted to make a note about this for a while. Seems ubuntu_demon (one of the ubuntu forum moderators) has collected together some interesting links on the subject here: Some interesting (ex-?) Mac users are switching to Ubuntu(3).

One Mac guy I noticed make the move is Mark Pilgrim. See When the bough breaks and Essentials, 2006 edition. Mark is the author of the excellent Python book Dive Into Python.

I used to use FileZilla on Windows before I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Found out today that the FileZilla team are working on a port to Linux. Alpha snapshots are available here:

http://filezilla-project.org/nightly.php.

FileZilla is a great FTP tool, user friendly and very capable. It appears that the team are using the cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit for the UI, it uses GTK+ on linux so FileZilla already looks good on the Ubuntu (Gnome) desktop. I look forward to the official release of version 3 on linux. Here’s a screen shot.

This Ubuntu forum post contains instructions on how to make QT apps look a bit better under Gnome without having to install loads of KDE libs: HOWTO: Make QT apps look more Gnome’ish - Ubuntu Forums.

Found a interesting article on Sitepoint about currently available open source JavaScript libraries.

The JavaScript Library World Cup [JavaScript & DHTML Tutorials]

Finally managed to find the documentation for the standard Gnome and GTK command line options. I’d been googling for this information a couple of times recently without success. Searching for ‘gnome command line options’ wasn’t bringing up the authoritative reference I expected it to. The key word missing from the search was ’standard’. When I added that the first result page lists a online man page half way down for ‘gnome-options’. Anyway now I’ve found them I’m noting this permanently.

• Standard Gnome Options: man gnome-options
• Standard GTK Options: man gtk-options

Note: I’ve linked to Andreas Gohr’s (creator of dokuwiki) man.splitbrain.org man page site as it’s got a really nice interface and lists both gtk-options and gnome-options whereas the original link I found to die.net doesn’t list both.

The company I work for has recently released a Java application which makes use of the Java Fullscreen Exclusive Mode API. It works great on Windows but because of a longstanding Java bug it is unable to change the display size and suspend windowed mode on Linux. Luckily the fix for this issue has been included in Java 6 Mustang so I’ll have to download a new snapshot and test it out with that.

Anyway, while reading through the bug listing I found some hints on changing the X server screen resolution, which were a great find for me as I was wondering how I could get MPlayer to play movies in proper fullscreen mode and hadn’t justified the time to research the solution.

To change the screen resolution on Linux you need to send an instruction to the X server to switch to another of its preconfigured modes. One way is to use the Ctrl+Alt+NumPad[+|-] key combination which iterates either up (numpad +) or down (numpad -) through the available modes. The only draw back to this on my platform (Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger) is that when switching to smaller resolutions it didn’t resize the Gnome desktop and open windows it just acted more like a global magnifying glass to the desktop which made it rather difficult to work in any new mode.

The best way I found is to use the RandR extension which provides a command line tool called xrandr to manipulate the screen modes. I’m not sure how widely available this extension is on other distributions but it was certainly present on my Ubuntu installation without me having to install it.

To use it to change the resolution you first need to get a list of available modes to change to. To see a list open a console and type xrandr -q. This is what gets listed for my machine:

daniel@coltrane:~$ xrandr -q
 SZ:    Pixels          Physical       Refresh
*0   1440 x 900    ( 373mm x 231mm )  *60
 1   1024 x 768    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 2    800 x 600    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 3    640 x 480    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 4   1152 x 864    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 5    640 x 400    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 6    512 x 384    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 7    400 x 600    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 8    320 x 480    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
 9    320 x 400    ( 373mm x 231mm )   60
Current rotation - normal
Current reflection - none
Rotations possible - normal
Reflections possible - none

You can see that the current mode is highlighted with ‘*’. The first column in the table is the index number of the screen mode. My default has an index of 0. To change to another mode simply look up the index of the mode you want and type xrandr -s [index]. I needed to swap to 800×600 so I just typed xrandr -s 2 and the screen switched mode and most importantly also updated the layout of my desktop to fit the new screen size. To get back to the default I just typed xrandr -s 0.

After swapping to 800×600 MPlayer correctly took the entire screen in its fullscreen mode for the video clip I was playing and ran just as well as on Windows - no need to reboot back into XP to play my clips anymore!