Meego installation on a USB stick

This post wouldn't be if the hard-drive from my Acer Aspire One didn't die. I have a fresh backup of the disk (a full 'dd' plus a separate one for just the home partition) so if I need something back, and I know I don't I care but backups are important, I can always mount it in a loopback and copy files.

The hard-drive is actually, what I want to call it, a cheap and fake SSD. It's a PATA SSD that I'm sure I will never find a replacement for. Look:

Now the dilemma was easy, or I threw the netbook to trash, or I found something to boot on. I started to look for a solution and Meego just got released, this is crazy timing. I downloaded the boot image and tried it out, and guess what, it is getting better and better. It's definitely more beautiful, it is getting faster, it has better dialogs for customization, well just try it out if you didn't yet, you wont be disappointed but surprised.

So in the end, installing a system on a USB stick is the only solution I can come up with. I ordered an extra USB stick, but mini please, a Kingston DTmini10! Now when I tell people this is my actual hard-drive, they are like “say-whaaat.”

The installation of Meego didn't went that fluently. I have two USB sticks, one with the boot image, another serving as target device for installation. The installation worked fine without any modification, it boots but ends on a black screen with the CAPS del blinking. Boo, kernel panic, or something else ungroovy. I also tried an installation with the file-system ext3, the default is btrfs, but then the grub installer fails and the Meego installer is knocked out in a waiting sequence. So I did a default installation again, sigh. After a search I tried out some parameters for the kernel command line and adding “rootdelay=8” did the trick. In fact, the USB stick boots without problem, but past that there is some delay for the kernel to discover the USB device, you can then see the following message:

   sd 11:0:0:0: [sdx] Assuming drive cache: write through

If there is no rootdelay parameter there is no root device found, and booting just ain't gonna work out. End of story. There are some tiny tweaks to be done afterwards. The kernel command line must point to the right root device, just like for the fstab file. The kernel command line can be edited in the file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. Everything else works out just fine. Booting time, except the rootdelay, is acceptable, but shutting down seems to be endless, and precisely when I want the netbook to turn off I want it to be really fast. I'm going to send it to sleep more often than usual, by closing and opening the lid, which is the fastest “boot” sequence one can get ;-)

Update: I've been wrong stating the shutdown process is taking ages, I just did a shutdown and this time it went quick, so something must have been be unlucky and the disk synced something around and around.

Moblin blazing fast

I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.

The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.

Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.

VLC with GTK+ look-n-feel

To get Qt applications to look like GTK+ applications run qtconfig and in Select GUI Style choose GTK+. Next click in the menu bar File > Save.

Something is still puzzling me, why does GNOME run VLC automatically with native GTK+ look-n-feel and not Xfce?

Update: Thanks to the power of tig and grep, I figured the Qt library (qt_init function) defines the desktop environment as GNOME for Xfce (this results in GTK+ theming, GNOME like Open dialogues, etc) by retrieving an X11 atom on the root window and compares it to “xfce4” but it seems that this doesn't work nowadays (at least it didn't work within an Xfce 4.7 desktop session). I'm looking forward for sending patches.

Update2: The latest version Qt 4.6.2 doesn't include the code for checking the X11 atom (it's in git), which explains why it doesn't work.

New notes plugin release 1.7.3

Three months since the last release, and three months since it is available as a separate standalone application running in the notification area. This has made it a lot easier to test and debug, as before I had to build the plugin, install the plugin, restart the panel or remove/readd the plugin in the panel, now I just have to run ./xfce4-notes from the source directory.

This new release has seen some structural tree changes to save time during compilation. Now everything is in src/ and lib/, where lib/ contains code to build an XnpHypertextView, an XnpNote (a composite-widget that embeds a GtkScrolledWindow with an XnpHypertextView and sends “save” signals on changes), an XnpWindow with the custom made navigation and title bars and the right click menu on the title bar, and finally an XnpApplication class that is the heart of everything, it handles creations/deletions of notes, loads/saves the data, etc. The src/ directory contains the main files for the panel plugin, the status icon, the popup command and the settings dialogue.

The new stuff is mostly eye-candy as stated in the previous blog entry. The GTK+ RC style has been pimped up with custom made scrollbars and the source code contains a self-drawn close button. The stuff about GTK+ scrollbars theming is grossly explained on live.gnome.org but I opened the GTK+ Dust theme files which was, to me, more understandable :-) Also it was because of this particular theme I took a look at customizing the scrollbars, see below the before/after screenshots. The older article about writing a Widget with Cairo helped me getting started from scratch with an empty “close button” widget to replace the simple GtkButton with label. As I liked very much the time passed on these changes I contributed a tutorial “Monochrome icon” available only in PDF as of today which I hope to be useful for Vala beginners but also a nice update of the article about Cairo but with Vala language.

The fixes included in this release are the following: correctly restore sticky-window and keep-above states after some race conditions, and restore tab label orientation after renaming a note. And last but definitely not least the undo feature was not working because an internal timeout wasn't reset to zero which made the code think a snapshot was needed and thus the undo/redo buffers ended with the same content after the timeout elapsed. Thanks to Christian (the developer behind Midori) otherwise I would still not have taken a look around this!

The forthcoming features I have in mind would be a search dialogue and per-note options for activating a stripped down “markdown” syntax, an orthographic corrector and wrapping words which is the default for the moment.

The release is available at archive.xfce.org.

Thanks for the feedbacks and reports you sent and will send back.

Update: The tutorial is now also available on the Xfce wiki.

Include custom GTK+ RC style

I've been using a custom GTK+ RC style for the notes plugin since the version 1.4.0, right now it is at version 1.7.2. I have been playing with GTK+ theming again these last two hours, and I've get custom scrollbars, a gradient for the custom-made “title bar”, and better colours for the notebook to get the current tab stand out from the crowd.

While experimenting on a test-case code I found out a better way to parse a gtkrc file in the program. The first time I was fighting with the existing gtk_rc related functions, I gave up on a solution I partially dislike that is to include a line to the custom gtkrc file within ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

Today I understood how gtk_rc_parse(filename) behaves. You have to call this function at the beginning of the program before building any widgets, it will work even if the file doesn't exist yet. Next, while the program is running, you can modify the file, create it, delete it, truncate it, whatever, and call gtk_rc_reparse_all() to get the style refreshed in the GUI. It's hard to believe that such easy things are sometimes a PITA :-)

Be prepared for a 1.7.3 notes plugin with nicer colours.

Show/hide functionality from notification area

When using a status icon within the notification area it is common to use the left-click action to show/hide the main window. Obviously this is often done in different ways. So here is my tip on how to do it right :-)

What I believe to me the most sense-full way is to:

1. Check if the application is invisible and show it,
2. Otherwise check if the window is inactive and present it,
3. Otherwise hide it.

In C language it looks like this:

/* Show the window */
if (!(GTK_WIDGET_VISIBLE(window))) {
    gtk_widget_show(window);
}
/* Present the window */
else if (!gtk_window_is_active(GTK_WINDOW(window))) {
    gtk_window_present(GTK_WINDOW(window));
}
/* Hide the window */
else {
    int winx, winy;
    gtk_window_get_position(GTK_WINDOW(window), &winx, &winy);
    gtk_widget_hide(window);
    gtk_window_move(GTK_WINDOW(window), winx, winy);
}

I have been doing this for quite a long time inside the Xfce Notes plugin, except a little different with multiple windows.

Some remarks, the PendingSealings proposes gtk_widget_get_visible instead of its analogous MACRO. And as you may also notice when the window is hidden it gets moved just after, this is important as otherwise the window would be repositioned by its initial value once shown again (e.g. centre of screen or dynamically by the window manager).