Archive for the 'Software' Category

if you keep getting the annoying “Launching HTTP Cache Cleaner” in the panel on ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex while running amaroK or other KDE apps you’ll need the new kde4 systemsettings manager to hide this.

to get this to work just type:
sudo apt-get install kdebase-workspace-bin systemsettings


and then run
systemsettings


then this windows should popup

then click on desktop and you’ll see the notifications

just uncheck the “enable taskbar notification” part and you’re done!

[edit]
for those who don’t want to install this stuff you can also just edit the file:
~/.kde/share/config/klaunchrc

and set
TaskbarButton=false


mine looks like this:
[BusyCursorSettings]
Blinking=false
Bouncing=true
Timeout=30

[TaskbarButtonSettings]
Timeout=30

[edit #2]
somehow this doesn’t quite work as good as i thought. you might want to check the ubuntu bug for updates.

since firefox is getting slower each day the developers code. i started using epiphany instead.

it has some cool features like the “Smart Bookmarks” which i have configured to be some sites in my toolbar that i can directly enter the search term. in the bottom screenshot you see an example wikipedia search and how it is set up. smart bookmarks are even smarter though, check out some samples they have on the galeon website.

since the gecko engine has gradually made me sicker and sicker i decided to recompile my epiphany browser with webkit. woohoo! so i followed the howto here.

after installing libxslt-dev and the gstreamer development packages (libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev and libgstreamer0.10-dev) which solved my dependency problems i compiled WebKit/GTK+ from the svn source with the option –enable-video just for the heck of it.

running the very simple browser found under ./Programs/GtkLauncher i receive the user agent
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/525.1+) lt-GtkLauncher


to fix the glib requirement version >= 2.15.6 i just installed glib from the hardy repositories. then compiled epiphany with the option –with-engine=webkit.

now if i check the user agent i get:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/525.1+) epiphany


and i’m finishing this post right here with epiphany/webkit.

a fun little experiment but it seems it’s just not ready to actually use on a everyday surfing basis!
some things that don’t work:

• gmail (i’m guessing because of redirects)
• http authorization
• flash content (no youtube browsing)
• secure http connections
• and it has bugs in various form fields

well the whole character encoding problems in the german language with utf-8 and iso-8859-1 is pretty tedious. a fine little program called iconv does the whole encoding changes pretty nicely but… (well there had to be a but huh?) you can’t switch encodings with input and output being the same file.
so moving/deleting/renaming makes it a little painfull.

i wrote a little script that does this for me, it’s really simple but simplifies everything.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Convert arguments handle different encodings
iconv -f $1 -t $2 "$3" -o "$3-new"
# Create backup
mv "$3" "$3~"
mv "$3-new" "$3"


i called it “econv” and instead of:
iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 myfile.txt -o myfile_new.txt

then deleting the old file and renaming the new one, i just type:
econv iso-8859-1 utf-8 myfile.txt


which does the trick and even creates a “myfile.txt~” backup of the original.

put the script in your /usr/local/bin or whatever you prefer and you can use it globally.