Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category
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A New Coat of Chrome Just Hit My Desktop
Just did an apt-get update & upgrade, and saw a new version of Google Chrome was being fetched. No biggie, me thinks, happens regularly. Except this one is really different.
This new version that hit my desktop, 6.0.472.53, is quite awesome, to tell the truth. Visually, it’s become even prettier than before, even more screen real estate is being used for content instead of controls, menus and other crap (hello, IE?), and those of us running KDE 4 are obviously happy to see it fitting even better into our Oxygen or Air themes.
An annoying drawing bug that has plagued Chrome for awhile, but only on my laptop with integrated Intel graphics, weird white blocks covering tabs when resizing the window or opening new tabs, is gone.
Font rendering is absolutely stunning. This is funny, because recently I desperately tried to get better font rendering in all of my apps. Had this been Windows, all my fonts would’ve seemed fine, but having Linux, and then being presented to the FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts, DAMN! Nothing else will seem pretty anymore. In Firefox, I forced all font families to FreeSans, FreeSerif and Liberation Mono to get pretty fonts, but this is not really a fix, so I’ve been looking for a proper fix, getting “regular” fonts to render more nicely. With Chrome, I didn’t have the same option to override font families, so I had to settle for proper fonts with strong hinting and jagged edges. This new version, everything looks beautiful!
Oh, and the speed… I mean, was this a minor update? I think not! It’s so extremely fast now that I don’t know where to start. I’m thinking it might somehow have to be related with the fixed font issue, really, and I’m suspecting that maybe now Chrome pulls more from your fontconf and GTK stuff. But really, I’m just talking out of my ass here
Oh yeah, and Ctrl+Shift+I now opens the “Chromebug” pane
Either way, here’s +1 from one happy camper!
If ChromeOS is going to be anything like this, hmmmm… Why not?
Fantastic font rendering, fast HTML rendering, sweet experience all the way
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Ruby 1.9.2 on Ubuntu/Mint with no Fuss and no Muss
Okay, so I was wanting to try out the newly released version 3.0 of Ruby on Rails, and I didn’t want any of that old and slow Ruby 1.8.x series that has been the default for years in Kubuntu, and probably any other Debian-based distro (I’m on Mint Isadora right now, and it’s the same thing here).
Why? Well, you can take that jRuby and stuff it, because even if it beats the 1.8.x MRI “vanilla” Ruby in performance, it comes nowhere near the x4 performance Ferrari run you get with Matz’ MRI Ruby 1.9.x. Besides, let’s move the fuck on people, the first preview of 1.8 was released in 2002, and 1.9 has been here for three years! Could we just try to not fall asleep, please?
Well, anyway, as this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to go the 1.9 way with Kubunuxumutuntu, I kinda expected it to suck, because I’ve never seen it actually just install and run as “ruby”. I’d always add the packages I wanted using apt, then do ruby –version, and be greeted with the all to familiar,
The program ‘ruby is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install ruby…sigh. Thanks. Of course, this isn’t because ruby wasn’t installed, it’s because it’s installed as “ruby1.9.1″, gem is “gem1.9.1″, and so on and so forth. So do you go with the symlinking approach, possible breaking future package installs that try to install ruby 1.8.x as a dependency, do you try to configure your way out of it and aliasing commands in bashrc, or do you go Googling as usual?
Of course I go Googling, and this time I was actually in for a couple of surprises. First of all, Rails doesn’t even support Ruby 1.9.1, if you want 1.9, you have to go with the brand-new version, 1.9.2! The missing support for 1.9.1 surprised me, because I’d thought “they’d come around by now, what with 3.0 and all”. Anyone who’s tried Railing on 1.9.1 will know that you’d get into some serious trouble getting the gems up and running. Sooner or later you’d be staring at a compiler error taking all the fun and future hopes out of it all.
Second of all, I came across RVM, or the Ruby Version Manager. This sweet, sweet tool will not only automate the retrieval, compilation, and installation of any Ruby version available from Matz, IronRuby, jRuby or whatever, it will also do it non-intrusively, by installing everything in your home dir and no go fudging with system binaries that other, older, and quirky applications may depend upon.
And get this: That’s not all of it, you can also install any number of different revisions to suit all kinds of crazy apps and setups you may have that needs it. Sounds fussy? Fuck no, it’s a piece of cake
There are lots of other cool things it can do that, some that I don’t even understand, but either way, just go read about it, then go install it, and set up your Ruby version(s)!A couple of tips to add to what you read there:
- The documentation claims you need to install a 1.8.x branch before any of the other versions, but I found that doing “rvm –install 1.9.2” twice with a ctrl+c when it starts to download 1.8.x on the first attempt will install just the 1.9.2 branch in the second attempt without any issues (yet).
- You probably want to set a Ruby version as the default after you’ve installed. I did “rvm –default ruby-1.9.2“.
- Remember to follow the directions on packages you need to install, and note that git-core should probably be installed before you start doing anything. You don’t really need vim, either, unless that’s your preference. I use Aptana.
Let’s go Railing 3.0-style on the 1.9.2 Ruby branch motherfuckers! Yeah!
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PHP 5.3 Made It to Lucid
Great news! A major package update just broke some PHP scripts on my Lucid Alpha installation.
“Why is that great news?” you might ask. Well, because the reason is that apparently PHP 5.3 has just made it on the official packages list just about a month away from the official release!
That is fantastic news especially considering that Lucid is the next LTS, or Long-Term Support version of Ubuntu, so it’s gonna be around for quite some time.
Time to rejoice!
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NumLock On After KDE 4 Startup
Weird that this isn’t a standard configuration setting, and very weird that you need to install extra software to enable you to do this. Anyway, here’s how:
sudo apt-get install numlockx
or “emerge” or “urpmi” or “yum-yum” or whatever’s your flavor
Then, in system settings, go to Autostart, click Add Script, and in the dialog window type in the path to the numlockx program, probably /usr/bin/numlockx
That’s it
It’s not a toggle thing, so a subsequent login won’t turn it off again -
ICS/IP Masquerade on Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Debian-ish Distros
Primarily a post-it note for myself, so excuse me for not being overly verbose.
Scenario: One Kubuntu box, connected to the internet via eth1, want it to share that connection (and expose some services such as Samba and SSH) via eth0 to some other machine. The Kubuntu box is on 192.168.2.200 to the internet, 192.168.2.1 is a WiFi router, 192.168.1.1 is the ADSL modem that the router is connected to, so I’m gonna use 192.168.0.0 as the local network, i.e. where I want eth0 to live and expose the internet to my other comp.
Adding this to /etc/network/interfaces:
# Here we be sharing to da eth0 gigamabit intamaface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255Starting the masquerade ball:
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE iptables -A FORWARD -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -d 192.168.0.0/16 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -i eth0 -j ACCEPT
Restarting the network and bringing up the shared interface, then activation ip forwarding:
/etc/init.d/networking restart echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
No DHCP here, so whatever comp wants to access the internet must set a static IP in the 192.168.0.2-254 range, using 192.168.0.1 as gateway, and also manually putting in DNS server addresses. These could be OpenDNS, which would be 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
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Installing Java JRE in IE6 under WINE or CrossOver Office/Mac
If you’re a client in one of those banks that don’t seem to know how to write a proper Java home banking application, forcing you to use that horrific Internet Explorer 6.
It’s pretty easy, actually, and should work for Macs as well as regular PCs:
- Install Windows Installer 2.0 for Win9x Systems (in WINE/CX).
- Fire up IE6 in WINE and go to http://java.com/en/download/windows98me_manual.jsp?locale=en&host=java.com:80&bhcp=1.
- Click on the “Windows 98 and Windows ME Online” installation link.
- Follow instructions.
- Find another bank
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Recent Posts
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- A New Coat of Chrome Just Hit My Desktop
- Pretty Fonts in VMware Player and Workstation
- Ruby 1.9.2 on Ubuntu/Mint with no Fuss and no Muss
- Be Gone, Stupid Aptana Studio 3 Folders in My Home Folder