MyGOSSCON 2009 on theStar

The latest promotion on the Malaysian Government Open Source Software Conference 2009 or MyGOSSCON is on the theStar newspaper today, see "A Vision Becomes Reality"

Upcoming MyGOSSCON 2009 Conference

The 3rd in the series of conference for the Malaysian Government on OSS will be coming this 5-6th October 2009 at PICC, Putrajaya.
To kick off the conference, following events have been scheduled:

1. OpenOffice.org contest (for primary students to show off their skills on OSS presentation tools)
2. OSS Case Study Award (Government and Institution of Higher Learnings share their OSS experiences through a write up of their implementations)
3. 24-Hour WebDev Contest (Allow groups of programmers to compete heads on to grab a chance to show-off their skills)

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[Jaunty] Firefox Foxtab

Firefox provides a large number of extensions that enhances the user experience. The extension to increase its fancy tab switching is called FoxTab. Install this and on the superb KDE display, things get even better. I have version 1.2.1 on Firefox 3.0.14.

Once installed, use the F12 key to view multiple tabs.

I dont use a mouse that much but if you do, make full use of its mouse gestures. E.g. Hold the left mouse button, then hit the right mouse to launch the Interactive mode of Foxtab. The next time you need to do a presentation on web apps, try it with Foxtab. In terms of memory usage, when Firefox with 6 tabs (includes images) an average of 105,120k memory is used. Launching the Foxtab this increased to 108,492k on average. This is about 3,000k of extra memory is used.

[Kubuntu] Upgrade OOo 3.1.1

Just did an OpenOffice.org upgrade to 3.1.1 and it seems to be working fine on Jaunty. Additionally, I had to install the openoffice.org-kde and openoffice.org-style-oxygen.

The install provides OOo310m19 (build 9420).

For those who have been struggling with the slide transition preview, will now find it is much smoother. Same goes for the custom animations, great improvement. On the status bar of Impress, Calc and Writer it indicates when the document have been edited and needs to be saved.

The sliderbar to zoom is available for all 3 main components and you can also double click the zoom display to bring up the zoom dialog box.

Tried the overlining of text features, cool. Now, when will I ever need this?
There are a whole bunch of other features listed at OpenOffice.org

London Stock Exchange to consider Linux?

The concern for performance in time sensitive financial environments is very real when the London Stock Exchange (LSE) had a system fault in Sept 2008. The TradElect system in place was MS Windows based and may be considered to be replaced as interviewed by Computerweekly and finextra.com.

During the recent visit by Redhat to Malaysia, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was mentioned as an example of financial systems using Linux. The trading speed of 0.4 milliseconds have been mentioned in the same article. This is almost double the speed of the TradElect but will the investment of billion of Pounds justify replacing it with another new system like Linux? Anyone knows what KLSE is using?

Financial systems world wide looking at the future of their architecture might learn a lesson or two with how the LSE takes charge of their investment and business needs.

[kubuntu] Rename FAT label

The Kubuntu Jaunty did not allow me to change the USB diskdrive label. This I found was because it is FAT32 formated. Why would I want to change the label and maintain it as FAT32 format?

1. If someone finds my disk and would care to return it, they can mount it and find my phone num ber as the label.
2. The FAT32 allows me to plug the USB diskdrive to MS Windows and Linux operating system interchangeably.
3. I backup to this disk for both operating system.
   

Here are steps to change the label name.

Step 1: Install mtools if not already done.

$ sudo apt-get install mtools

Step 2: Identify the USB diskdrive (or partition) to be formatted.
Plug in the USB diskdrive. Then identify the USB device in a terminal, type:

$ tail /var/log.messages

I found mine as /dev/sdb1

Step 3: Rename the label with 11 characters maximum

$ sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdb1 ::0161234567

Test the results by unplugging the device, then plug back in to see the difference. Thank to the reference at Ubuntu.com website.

Yahoo Messenger upgrades its servers

Early this month I failed to connect the Kopete 0.70.2 to Yahoo Messenger. There were several suggestions to use alternate messenger server IP manually. Initially it worked, but soon all of the suggested servers failed.

This was due to Yahoo upgrading their servers. Matt Rogers, the maintainer for Kopete soon received info from Pidgin maintainers on the authentication changes. Yahoo have upgraded its authentication to version 15 from version 13 and this is now resolved. But the KDE 4.2 based distros may well have to wait for a package on this. In the mean time, revert to Pidgin or compile from Kopete SVN.

Howto on installing from SVN

Step 1: Install svn client from a terminal.

sudo apt-get install subversion subversion-tools

Step 2: Install the tools to compile (generate the executables) from a terminal

sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev kdelibs5-dev  [36Mb +]
sudo apt-get install libqimageblitz-dev [33Mb+]

Step 3: Follow are instructions from kopete.kde.org in a terminal

svn co -N svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdenetwork
cd kdenetwork
svn up kopete cmake
mkdir ../kdenetwork-build
cd ../kdenetwork-build
cmake ../kdenetwork
make
sudo make install

If you get errors below on building, then it may require the other libraries to build the KDE source.

CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake-2.6/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:57 (MESSAGE):
Could NOT find KdepimLibs (missing: KdepimLibs_CONFIG)
Call Stack (most recent call first):
/usr/share/kde4/apps/cmake/modules/FindKdepimLibs.cmake:73 (find_package_handle_standard_args)
CMakeLists.txt:33 (find_package)

Solution: Read the KDE4 build instructions and at a terminal type following before you resume where you left off in step 3. This will take a good 270Mb+ but you can install any future source from KDE easily.

sudo apt-get install kdepimlibs5-dev

Test Kopete with the Yahoo Messenger account. The package can be removed with the command

sudo make uninstall kopete

[Jaunty] Configure program at system boot up

The tpb services can be started from the command line as follows

/etc/init.d/tpb start

This allowed the interaction with some of the Thinkpad laptop special function keys. Now, how can I get this activated automatically during bootup?

Previously, KDE provided KControl where I can choose the various programs available to start or not during system boot. In Jaunty and KDE 4.2, its gone! Here I list 3 alternative ways to manage this. First 2 require users to have a basic knowledge of the runlevels.

METHOD 1: Back to old debian school!
Step 1. Install the sysv-rc-conf from a terminal

sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

Step 2. Run the program, choose what you want activated at each Runlevel.


To select the next page press Control+n or p. Other than that just use the cursor arrows to move to different services.

METHOD 2: Use Gnome Bum. Better to also understand scripts priority that begin with "K" means to shutdown, "S" to start up.
Step 1: Install the Bum with the terminal.

sudo apt-get install bum

Step 2: Start the Bum.
From the KMenu ->Application ->System ->Bootup Manager

Since its menu driven, should be easier to figure out.

METHOD 3: Start a script during login, with KDE Autostart
Step 1: In KDE systems, all scripts located in ~/.kde/Autostart will automatically run when a user logs in (Where the ~ means your home directory). Create a new file called mytpb.sh with the following contents to start thinkpad sound mixer;

#!/bin/sh
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
tpb -m on

Step 2: Save the file.

Step 3: Change the mode to executable

$ chmod u+x ~/.kde/Autostart/mytpb.sh

Step 4: Logout, then log back in.
You can then try the Thinkpad's volume control. This should produce the on screen display (OSD) of the volume bar. Other settings can be configured in the /etc/tpbrc or ~/.tpbrc