qarsh 1.25 released

Qarsh is a remote shell for testing environments.

qarsh-1.25.tar.bz2

This release includes a few new features and a few bug fixes.

• Handle growing files better in qacp.  You can now copy /var/log/messages without getting an error.
• Add a quiet option to btimec.
• Only look up the local user when the remote user is not specified.
• Add an SE Linux policy for qarsh. This work was done by Jaroslav Kortus and allows qarsh work with SE Linux enabled. It allows us to get into the right context when we start daemons remotely.

conserver w/ GSSAPI support for Fedora 12

I upgraded to Fedora 12 last night and found that the conserver package still doesn’t support GSSAPI even though the patch has been in bugzilla for months and upstream released a new version which includes it. Here’s a new source rpm you can use to build your own GSSAPI enabled version of conserver for Fedora 12.

If anyone wants to sponsor me, I’ll take over maintaining the package.  I know Jima has wanted me to do that for a while.

Dear Lazyweb: Best Dual-DVI Video Card

What’s the best video card for running X.org with two DVI-connected monitors?

My workstation is a Dell Precision Workstation 470 with the stock nVidia Quadro and two Dell 1905 FP connected via DVI.  I’m running Fedora 11 with the nouveau driver and I’m really happy with it.  But I can’t escape this feeling that I could be getting a better experience with a newer video card.  I think I want an ATI Radeon card, but the last graphics card I purchased was an nVidia TNT2.

Recommendations?

Using Ubiquity to read Planet Fedora

I just realized today how useful Ubiquity can be while reading all those non-native language blog entries on Planet Fedora.  By just highlighting the text and entering the translate command, I can now read most entries.

git doesn’t really take up 100MB

Valent’s post on finding the largest installed rpms sparked my interest.  I’m almost obsessive about reducing my set of installed packages.  But when I saw this output, I was a bit shocked.

  87599107-java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0
  97552966-glibc-common-2.10.1
 100008386-git-1.6.2.5
 106080469-java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.11
 112425640-texlive-texmf-fonts-2007
 227731461-openoffice.org-core-3.1.0

While I’m not surprised the openoffice.org and java take up huge amounts of disk space, I was amazed that git does.  After all, most of git is hard linked to /usr/bin/git.  I whipped up a quick awk script to add based on unique inodes.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { s = 0; lasti = 0 }
{ if ( lasti != $1 ) { s += $6; lasti = $1 } }
END { print s }

Then ran it on git like so:

[nstraz@tin ~]$ rpm -ql git | xargs ls -lid | sort -n | ./countsize.awk
15956998

Roughly 16MB vs 100MB.  That makes more sense.

gxpp 1.1 released

Since I’m doing released for my other tools I figured it would be a good idea to merge the Makefile and spec changes to gxpp and cut a release too.  You should be able to build an rpm directly from the tarball.

Gxpp is a grep-like utility for XML documents.  It uses XPath expressions instead of regular expressions to query sections of XML documents.  It provides most of the standard grep command line options.

gxpp-1.1.tar.bz2

qarsh 1.24 released

Qarsh is a remote shell for testing environments.

qarsh-1.24.tar.bz2

This release includes several bug fixes.

• Fix a hard to hit hang after a command completes
• Add proper return codes to btimec
• Extend the amount of time btime waits for a response
• Force IPv4 on btimed
• Fix segfaults in qacp

collie 0.14 released

I just pushed collie-0.14 out the door.  This release fixes a really bad bug and introduces a very powerful feature.  The bug would cause collie to suck up CPU while waiting for tests to complete.  That was fixed and collie should now sleep like a baby until your tests complete.

The new feature is the ability to set environment variables in herds.  There’s a new How-To describing how to use this feature. In combination with XIncludes, you can reduce the size of those really repetitive herd files.

A Better Image Viewer?

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m looking for a better image viewer. For years I’ve been using qiv because it load images really fast and it’s not a memory hog. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well with dual screens. The images tend to span both monitors and I really can’t pan the image around well.

What I want is something that understands XRandR so images only display on one screen. I would like a full screen mode where I can easily zoom in and pan the image. I want to be able to launch it from the command line. Extras like exif parsing and a thumbnail browser would be really nice.

Back to IceWM

After a few weeks of trying out Fluxbox on a new Fedora 10 desktop, I’m going back to my long time favorite, IceWM.  I guess I’m just too stuck in my ways to change at this point.

What brought me back to IceWM?

• The command line in the taskbar.  Having it built into the window manager really does make a difference.  Even though I was able to bind CTRL+ALT+SPACE to launch fbrun, it couldn’t launch fast enough.  Often I would start typing before the little window came up and I’d lose a few characters to the last app in focus.  I also miss being able to hit CTRL+ENTER to get the command in a terminal.  I do that often to get the python calculator.  It’s an easy patch, I know.
• All the built-in keyboard bindings for moving around windows.  I really like being able to quickly move between workspaces, dragging windows along with me.  I also like being able to position windows with the keyboard.  In IceWM you can hit Meta4+NumPad to place the window in that section of the screen.  Add shift to the combination to move it in that direction until it hits something.
• I also missed the built-in CPU and Network monitors in the IceWM taskbar.  I like to know when my network or CPU usage spikes.  I probably could have found a monitor to put in the slit, but I don’t really like the idea of the slit.  I never was a WindowMaker fan.
• If you grab the edge of a window in Fluxbox you start to resize the window.  This drove me nuts when I had Firefox all the way on the right, I would reach for its scrollbar and get the window edge instead.  The theme I was using didn’t even have size borders!  I couldn’t find any way to turn that off.

I did like a few things about Fluxbox.

• I liked the sleek look of the toolbar.  I just wish I could have stuck a few more things into it like CPU and Network graphs or a command line.
• It worked well with a dual-head setup.  IceWM 1.3.x has better support, but the taskbar still doesn’t span both monitors.  That bugs me a bit.
• You could set the width of items in the taskbar to a fixed width which made it look really clean.  You could also include only minimized tasks in the taskbar which seemed like a good idea at first.  Then I realized that I’d lose track of windows once they get burried.
• I really liked being able to switch workspaces by using the scroll wheel on the desktop or toolbar.  I’m still trying to do that in IceWM and it’s not working.

I have been wanting to try out Awesome, but I don’t think Awesome 3 is going to make Fedora for a while.  It’s waiting on XCB support to be includes in the Cairo packages.