Minix editline v0.1.4

- 1 min read
Another day another release, I guess. :-) Lots of small fixes — it can now be cross-built for Arm (Xscale) without any serious warnings. Get it from the usual FTP location: http://ftp.vmlinux.org/pub/People/jocke/minix-editline/

Minix editline v0.1.1

- 1 min read
Hot on the heels of the first one, only minor build fixes but this one should actually be usable by others. Now installs both library, include file and man page into the given --prefix. http://ftp.vmlinux.org/pub/People/jocke/minix-editline/

Minix editline v0.1.0

- 1 min read
I’ve been looking long and hard for a small and useful GNU readline replacement. Oddly enough, all the time I was looking for one I never even once considered looking at the Minix sources! Currently I’m using the NetBSD editline derivative (readline compatible) from Jess Thrysoee, but it requires ncurses, which is huge! All I really wanted was a bare bones readline() suitable for small embedded systems. One which could record history and preferably, but not required to, support completion.

Enterprise Emacs

- 3 mins read

Many years ago I discovered the beauty in a beast called Emacs. I am actually a frequent user of both Emacs and Vim, but I firmly belive in the notion of learning one editor well:

“The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.” — The Pragmatic Programmer

At the many jobs I have had, colleagues often glanced over my shoulder and said; “Oh, Emacs … Yeah I used that ages ago when I was working on UNIX …”, often they remember it fondly, sometimes for all the quirky keyboard shortcuts. Very few know that it is still being actively developed.

Emacs can be quite counter intuitive and sometimes even an outright pain to use. I find it a shame that still today, after (literally) decades there are no sane defaults. Once, when I was still forced to use Windows, I saw a setup wizard in Win32-Emacs that resembled what I would like to have — a sort of use cases possible to chose from. It may have been some extension that was maintained in some non-official version, because now when I look for it I cannot find it. But why not have a setup wizard in the upstream distribution of Emacs as well?

Well, this is my gripe, the pieces of Emacs that are still unfriendly to users, and mostly new users, coming from Windows or MAC. I will use this blog to present ideas and small things I have done to make Emacs more user friendly. I call this Enterprise Emacs.

Suspend/Resume Nightmare in Ubuntu

- 3 mins read
I’ve had my ThinkPad T43 for a while now and I’m really pleased with it, everything just works! It took some pleading and, I admit, begging to persuade my boss and the IT department to buy it since they usually only buy from Dell or HP. This was mainly due to care packs and payment plans that these suppliers offer companies. My ThinkPad they had to actually pay for straight up.

Bzrweb 0.1.2 Released

- 2 mins read
The end of my own “summer of code” is here. Seriously, this summer I took it upon myself to clean up my act and move whole heartedly to the Bazaar version control system for my private projects. Needless to say, I didn’t get far. Being quite lazy I haven’t upgraded this server yet to the latest shiny Debian 4.0. This made it a bit hard to setup the new shiny Loggerhead web gui (see it in action here) for Bazaar — so instead I started fixing up the old bzrweb that I already had setup a few years ago.

Netapplet Patchwork

- 2 mins read
I think I’ve finally done it — achieved my ultimate goal of combining the awesome powers of the Debian /etc/network/interfaces file with guessnet, wpa_supplicant, ifplugd and now also with netapplet! I’ve been looking for a way to just point-and-click to select a different access point, both at home and at work. To that end I have a pretty advanced interfaces file that automatically detects where I am, what I am connected with (cable/wireless) and then, like magic, sets it all up.

Making bzrweb work again

- 1 min read
During the past weekend and the last couple of evenings I’ve been studying the Python code in bzrweb — which I’ve been using for online repository browsing. It broke sometime last year due to not keeping up with the development of bzr. Yesterday I got it working again! Browse: http://vmlinux.org/jocke/bzr/ Branch: bzr branch http://vmlinux.org/jocke/bzr/bzrweb Having only programmed Python very little earlier I must say that it’s really easy to get in to.

Buggy Gnome Main Menu

- 1 min read
I’ve been living with the new Gnome Main Menu for a while now. Like many others I run Ubuntu these days and I’ve found the version in Feisty Fawn to be extremely slow and buggy. I tried manually installing (dpkg -i) the latest version in Gutsy, but it had too many dependencies. So I decided to try and backport it, and it worked! I haven’t set up any repository, so just download the below two .

VMWare Kernel Modules for Your New Kernel

- 1 min read
My recent post on building Debian kernels misses a subtle but useful point. Namely that of building Debian kernel modules alongside your new kernel. I wanted to run a new kernel with the Ubuntu vmware-player-kernel-source package. I was fumbling around wanting to use module-assistant to do this for me when I stumbled upon on the solution, presented so eloquently by my friend Albert Veli. This gives us a small update to the previous post: