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Spotify tips for using wine in Foresight Linux

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Connect Spotify with Facebook under Foresight (using WINE)

This is actually very easy. It doesn’t even involve the Spotify client directly. All you have to do is open your Linux browser (Firefox, Chromium or whatever) and:

a) go to: http://www.spotify.com/ and log in.

then,

b) go to: https://www.spotify.com/en/account/social/facebook/. Click the “Allow access” button and that is it!




Play local mp3 files with Spotify Windows client under Foresight (using WINE)

for playing mp3 files with the new Spotify 4.x
sudo wget http://http://www.foresightlinux.se/filer/winemp3.acm -O ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/winemp3.acm


Open Wine Config (Applications > Wine > Configure Wine) and ho to the Libraries tab. Under “New override”, enter “winemp3.acm” and click Add.

Important note: you’ll have to use this work-around every time you upgrade WINE! (not sure yet)


Open Spotify links in your default Linux browser.

By default, Wine doesn’t open links in your default Linux browser (Firefox, Chrome or whatever) and you may want this for sharing songs from Spotify on Facebook and so on. But you can change that easily.

Open Wine Regeditwine regedit


Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER (a.k.a HKCU) -> Software -> Wine and look for a key called “WineBrowser”, if it does not exist, create it.
Under the newly created “WineBrowser” key, create a string called “Browsers” with the following value:xdg-open,firefox,konqueror,mozilla,netscape,galeon,opera,dillo


Don’t worry about the browsers order in the above code. Just make sure “xdg-open” is the first one, as that will make sure that when you click a link in a Wine application, your default native Linux browser will be used to open that link.

But we are not done! At this point if you click a link in Wine, you’ll get the following error:

err:winebrowser:get_url_from_dde Unabled to retrieve URL from string L”\”"
err:winebrowser:wmain Usage: winebrowser URL



To fix this, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT -> http -> shell -> open -> command and edit the data value by adding “%1″ at the end of the line, so that it looks like this:


C:\windows\system32\winebrowser.exe -nohome "%1"


Then close all Wine applications and try it out.

Intel WiFi Link 5100 slow Wireless N connectivity, Draft-N fixes in Linux

First make sure your router supports 5 GHz range.

open this file:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf


add: options iwlagn 11n_disable=0 11n_disable50=0 swcrypto=1 swcrypto50=1
and save, will only be that in that file. (if you havent created it before)

Then run:
sudo modprobe -r iwlagn && sudo modprobe iwlagn




Now you get alot faster internet, if you got a fast internet.




Earlier, the speed was around 18-20 mbit/s only

Web-browser Chromium - java, flash working from start

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After been using opera 10.0 for some time, it was time to try out Chromium. And it almost blew my head away, its really fast and everything works out of the box. I thought Opera was fast, but Chromium is faster. So i tested out youtube, to see if it can handle Flash.

youtube-chromium

Youtube site and flash is working just fine with Chromium. now its time to test java support.

javatest-chromium

No problem there, works fine with sun-java. Now its time to try out tvplay.se and some movie trailer site.

tv4play-chromium

hollywood-chromium

No problems there either, both works as they should. Sometimes it can hack for a sec, but general it works fine. And it will only be better in the future.

Now you can run Chromium without doing any ugly hacks in your system. As Foresight Linux is taking care of that for you.

this version is only available in fl:2-devel repo, until it gets promoted. But that don't need to stop you for trying it out. So open a Terminal and write:

sudo conary update chromium=@fl:2-devel

Kupfer - summon the object you are thinking about right now

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A simple, flexible, application launcher for Gnome. Kupfer is a summoner/launcher in the style of Quıcĸsılⅴεʀ; you do not use it to search your files, you use it to summon the object you are thinking about.

Kupfer can right now summon Applications, Recent Files and Places, your chosen folders and their contents, Bookmarks, Windows and Gnu Screen sessions.

The ‘kupfer’ command launches kupfer, or spawns it if it is already running.



Just push enter, if you want to launch the application you see.

Remember, its very fresh application. So it may dont work as you wish, but its worth a try.

To install it, open Terminal and write:

sudo conary update kupfer=@fl:2-devel


Maybe, just maybe you need to install a dependency. But im abit unsure about it.

A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux

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Rune asked me to share some comments from a discussion we had. He
noted that things have seemed slow in Foresight lately, and I think
it's obvious to everyone why -- despite having several people who
are formally recognized as Foresight developers, a lot of the core
has remained a one-man operation. Ken and António both have shown
nearly boundless energy and commitment as core developers, and are
responsible for a lot of Foresight's success, such as it has been.
A few somewhat more specialized contributors have made truly
major ongoing contributions -- one of the easy examples to cite is
Pavel's ongoing OpenOffice.org work. For several years, Justin
provided excellent kernel support. And so on. Most of the existing
Foresight developers fit into this second category. I've been rather
on the fringe, honestly. Perhaps that gives me more perspective.

What Foresight doesn't have is pure OS distro specialists. This is
showing a lot right now, when nothing has shown up in a released
group on fl:2 for months. António has made up for many manpower
deficiencies in the past by burning the candle at all five ends,
but that is not sustainable.

I'd like to propose a radical return to what Foresight has been
good at in the past, which necessarily implies deciding to walk
away from some of the things that the Foresight development
community has desired to become (sometimes with more success,
sometimes with less).

Originally, Foresight was about getting the latest versions of
cool new software to users quicker. Since the point of the latest
versions is that they are changing rapidly, this necessarily implies
that the target users are those who accept and relish this change.
The technology that enabled Foresight was Conary: with Conary,
Foresight could be built on top of another distribution. rPath
Linux provided that base on top of which Foresight could focus on
the new bits.

However, the fact that Foresight is rolling to new versions at
any time and rPath Linux is maintained as a classic stable
distribution, and that rPath has not found strategic value in
maintaining a constant stream of development updates for a set
of rapid releases of new versions of rPath Linux, has created
an immense amount of duplicated work in Foresight, outside of
the core competence and purpose of Foresight. We saw this with
fl:1; it got better when fl:2 was closely based on rpl:2, and
now that fl:2 is barely related to rpl:2 we're back to progress
being very hard to attain.

I think it's time to propose a change.

Because I'm rPath's Director of Operating Systems, in charge of
rPath Linux, this may come as a big shock, but perhaps I'm the one
in the best place to say this: rPath Linux is not the right base
OS for Foresight. rPath Linux is a great OS for the purpose for
which it was built, and delivers great value to rPath's customers
for building server-oriented application stacks that include a
versioned operating system -- in fact, it is based on demand from
those customers that rPath has concentrated on doing incremental
improvements to a stable OS base rather than new OS versions.
The development model of rPath Linux is too divergent from the
development model of Foresight to make it an appropriate long-term
base for Foresight.

Most of you know that rPath now provides multiple OS bases
by importing existing OSes built with other technology into a
Conary repository. We have automatically-updated imports of SLES
10 and SLES 11 (both available by subscription only), CentOS 5,
and Scientific Linux 5. We have imported a version of Ubuntu
Hardy as a functional proof of concept that we can improve based
on customer demand. We have done some work on importing a few
other OS variants, too. We do this with a tool that we can make
available as Open Source so that Foresight is not dependent on
rPath to maintain the import of another more frequently-updated
OS as a base.

I think that Foresight needs to be based on an upstream distro that
is regularly fully updated and refreshed, and that is maintained by
distro specialists with experience and expertise that is just plain
missing within the Foresight development community. That distro
needs to be imported into a Conary repository; that will allow
Foresight to continue to use Conary to manage the process of building
a set of consistent modifications relative to that upstream distro,
providing a true rolling release. That would allow Foresight
developers to concentrate on only the problems inherent in
integrating the very latest development source against a recent
base that is relatively close to the basis on which the software
is maintained.

If I were to make the decision of which distro to use as a base, I
would choose Fedora, not because I was the original Fedora leader,
but because rPath Linux has followed many Red Hat conventions, and
therefore the change would cause less turmoil on installed systems
and would require less ancillary work (for example, fewer changes
would be required to anaconda for installable ISO images). However,
it's not infeasible to choose another distro that is rapidly updated,
such as Ubuntu; it would just take more work (*lots* of anaconda
development, a good bit of development on the OS importer tool; and
I don't know who has the time to step up to do that work). For the
purposes of this proposal, I'll just say "Fedora" as a reasonable
proxy for whatever upstream the Foresight developers might choose.

I want to be clear that part of what I'm proposing is that Foresight
be built on a *binary import* of Fedora into a Conary repository,
updated with all security updates that are released for Fedora, with
only things that are clearly important for Foresight's unique vision
built separately for Foresight. I suggest that to accomplish that,
the Fedora import should stand alone -- it should be useful per se.
That would mean that a user could install a Conary-managed Fedora
system, migrate to Foresight based on the same Fedora version,
migrate back to Fedora, and so on. That would make Foresight's
differentiating value clearer, and it would be very easy to
understand what's different between Fedora and Foresight.

It would also mean that Foresight would be *rebased* to every
new Fedora version. It wouldn't have to happen immediately on
the release of a new Fedora version, but when deciding whether to
deviate from upstream Fedora in Foresight, a specific Foresight
developer would either have to successfully argue that the deviation
is required only for a single upstream Fedora version, or explicitly
volunteer to maintain the deviation indefinitely.

In the Fedora-based Foresight universe I imagine, there would be
at least four sources for binaries that are included on a Foresight
system:
1) Packages included in a stable release of the base Fedora OS
2) Specific rawhide packages, either imported as binaries or rebuilt
3) Specific packages from third party repositories built for Fedora
that are useful for Foresight but for whatever reason are not
acceptable for inclusion in Fedora
4) Specific Conary packages that are newer versions of packages from
Fedora or are unique to Foresight for whatever reason

I'd love this to be worked as a cooperative relationship with the
upstream project. I see this as symbiotic, not parasitic -- the sort
of thing I would have wanted to encourage when I was the Fedora lead.

Am I crazy?


Source of article: http://lwn.net/Articles/347275/

Which Linux distribution should you use?

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It all depends what you are looking for really. First you need to figure out if you want to use Gnome or KDE as desktop environment. Many users is using Gnome as their desktop envionment, so lets say that´s the one you want to use. Now we need to think about using 32 or 64bit Linux system, you probably want to use 32bit for the first time to be sure everything works. But you also want 64bit available too. Now we need to think about how your system should be updated/upgraded. Some Linux distributions have upgrades every 6/8 or 9 months, some using rolling updates and be upgraded as soon there is a new stable version of something. As regular usage of the computer, you probably want to use latest stable versions of everything. Instead of getting few hundreds updates every 6-9 months. (can also be a pain if something breaks during the update) And maybe you don´t got a great internet speed, and want to save some bandwith too. Fedora, Ubuntu or Opensuse uses 6-8 months upgrades and even installs back the default applications you uninstalled. That is something i don´t want to happen in my dist i use. And offcourse you want to be able to rollback the system if something should break. Like go back in time to a point where the computer worked just fine. So this is want we want:
  • Gnome
  • 32 or 64bit system
  • Rolling updates
  • Rollback feature
So lets go to Distrowatch to see which Linux dists that have these features. Foresight Pardus (KDE as default, but can install gnome afterwards) These two distros was the only i could find that have rolling updates and rollback feature. But iv´e managed to find some distributions that have atleast Rolling updates, but no rollback feature. Arch PCLinuxos Debian Testing + There is a few more distros that manage it, but either they don´t have Gnome or 64bit system as we also wanted. So in overall, there was only 2 dists that i really wanted to use. But looks like Foresight has better documentation available and main language for the dist is English. For Pardus it is Turkish. So thats why i use Foresight and probably many other users too. Its all under the hood where Foresight is so bloody great.

Another opera snapshot

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After updated opera in Foresight, had to update it again. So now we got latest one. Opera 10.0 beta 3

to install it in foresight linux, open terminal and write:
sudo conary update opera=@fl:2-devel

Happy surfing.

Newest Opera 10.00 Snapshot 4529 in Foresight Linux

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Newest Opera is built in Foresight Linux, it's time you use a Linux that provides the latest opera all the time. And you will also get the updates automatically.

to install it in Foresight Linux, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update opera=@fl:2-devel

Thats it!

Tremulous – Great first person shooter game, free too

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Homepage: Tremulous

The biggest RTS element in the game is the ability to build structures with a wide variety of functions such as healing, respawning and defense. This feature enables more strategy than just running around and shooting at the opposing team. Another big difference in this game is the two races: humans and aliens. Aliens are more fun to play than the humans due to the ability to climb ceilings and evolve into other classes as they rack up kills. All in all, Tremulous is a must for any gamer looking for a deeper online shooter that is free to play.



Key Features
Free to play and open source.
Combines team-based FPS elements with RTS elements.
Two races: aliens and humans.
Can play as various alien classes with special abilities.
Different advancement structure for humans and aliens.
Humans get credits for kills that can be used to buy gear while aliens change classes with kills.
Players can sell and buy new weapons and armor.
Aliens can scale walls and ceilings.
More realistic physics than most other online shooters.
Structures with different functions such as respawning and healing can be built.
In order to win, one team must wipe all the players of the opposing team and destroy their respawn structures.



To try it out in Foresight Linux, open Terminal and write:

sudo conary update tremulous=@fl:2-devel

Happy gaming