Hírolvasó

I was looking around for desktop search frameworks today, specifically something with a gtk frontend and that required the fewest resources to run.

I discovered Pinot, a dbus-based file index/monitor/search tool. It even comes with a minimal gtk+ interface. I found few reviews on Pinot, and even fewer recent reviews comparing it to other search frameworks like Strigi, Tracker, and Beagle. I also discovered Catfish, a lightweight frontend to several different search services. There's not much out there on integrating Catfish and Pinot, so I forged ahead and wrote my own code, then did some trial-and-error experiments.

All ebuilds are available on my overnight overlay. Instructions for adding the overlay are on the wiki.

Writing the ebuilds

The only ebuild I found for Pinot is sadly out-of-date, and is completely incorrect. Also, it depends on libtextcat, and I never found an ebuild for that.

So, I wrote my own ebuilds for the latest versions of Pinot and libtextcat.

Not content with Pinot's minimal gtk+ interface, I decided to try Catfish, a PyGtk frontend for several different search engines, including Pinot. Catfish is made by the same developer of Midori, a well-respected lightweight WebKit browser. While Catfish's development has been stalled for two years, I figured it was worth a shot, since its user interface is friendlier than Pinot's.

Catfish, like Pinot and libtextcat, is not in Portage, but there is an open bug for its inclusion. However, the ebuild for the latest version needed updating, as it didn't include Strigi or Pinot. So I rewrote it and added descriptive metadata.xml entries for Catfish's and Pinot's USE flags.

There's still a bit of work left on the Catfish ebuild, since there's a QA warning about not leaving precompiled Python object files in /usr/share/catfish. However, the application itself works perfectly. Just need to clean up the install process so that the bytecode doesn't clutter up the filesystem.

Pinot

On first run, Pinot will take a long time to index your files. I pointed it at my user's /home/ directory, which contains 51,000+ files, totaling 9.3GB on a Reiser3 filesystem with tail enabled. That operation took probably half an hour, and that's on a fast SSD! All of Pinot's indexes and databases take up 455MB, bringing my total /home/ usage to about 9.7GB. Pinot typically used about 50% of my CPU while doing so, sometimes dropping down to the 20s and 40s.

However, since Pinot is on a fast SSD, and it's running off a 2.3Ghz dual-core Athlon backed by 4GB RAM, I didn't notice any performance hit while indexing. I'm not running any special kernels or schedulers (like BFS) either; just vanilla-source-2.6.35.4. There was no noticeable lag or slowdown, despite viewing two Thunar windows, working with four terminals, and browsing nine Firefox tabs. My system was only laggy when compiling Pinot and its dependencies.

Once my /home/ was indexed, I searched around. Queries were pretty much instantaneous. There's no easy way to measure the speed of each query, since it's much too fast to time with a stopwatch. That's probably mostly because of the SSD -- as it is, without a desktop indexer/search app, most similar queries take less than a second. Once the initial filesystem index is complete, Pinot drops back to just monitoring directories if you've told it to do so, relying on the inotify feature in the kernel. That drops CPU and memory usage to zero, as near as I can tell. Nice!

Pinot's greatest advantage on my system, at least, is not its speed, but its usefulness for easily finding deeply buried files and folders.

Interestingly, even though Pinot by default is not supposed to index Git, CVS, or SVN repositories, it seems to ignore that setting. Searching for "catfish" turns up a document named catfish tricks and all the ebuilds and git logs that have "catfish" in the title. Apparently Pinot's regex filter isn't very reliable. I probably need to add in another asterisk to disable searching or indexing of any files within a git directory.

Catfish

Catfish mostly works as expected, though it defaults to using "find" rather than "pinot" as its search engine. I haven't yet found a way to set it to use Pinot as the default search provider. Catfish is quick to load, and its layout is fairly intuitive. Sometimes, however, it will just stop working with Pinot, and even though Pinot has indexed my entire home directory, Catfish won't return any search results, though I can get those results by using Pinot's interface. The rest of the time it works great.

Besides offering a friendlier UI for searches, Catfish's real strengths are its useful options, both for presentation and for tying in with my desktop's filemanager. With a couple of commandline switches, Catfish can display thumbnails of various filetypes, use larger icons in search results, use various wrappers for opening and working with files, or even use powerful regex search methods. No, it won't have the awesome preview capabilities of Gloobus, but you also don't have to install all of Gnome to get similar features.

Right out of the box, Catfish will allow you to open files and folders obtained from your search results just by clicking them. I don't know if that works for all filemanagers, but it works with Thunar, which is all I ask.

I like to use Catfish in combination with another powerful feature of Thunar: custom actions. Since Thunar lacks a built-in search bar (aside from a rudimentary go-to alphabetical list when you press a key), how do you integrate a search utility? One way is by adding search functions to the right-click menu.

1. Open a Thunar window, and go to Edit -> Configure custom actions.
2. Click the plus icon: +. Give the action a helpful title, description, and icon. "Search" is pretty standard among icon sets, so there should always be one available even when you change themes.
3. Add the action command: catfish --path=%F
4. Now go to the Appearance Conditions tab. I left the file pattern as * and checked all boxes, so that no matter where I browse or click, I can launch a Catfish search.
5. Save the new action and exit Thunar. The next Thunar window you launch will let you right-click anywhere in the browser to open a Catfish search.

You can add any commandline switch you like to the catfish command; just run catfish --help to see the available options.

Thunar's custom action feature is pretty nifty; there are all kinds of things you can put in the context menu. It comes with an example to open a terminal in the current directory. You can create actions to launch applications with a root prompt, convert one image type into another, play media, print or email documents, and more. If you can script it, you can write a trigger for it and stick it in the context menu. Just read the custom actions documentation for many more examples of what you can do with Thunar. Neat!

Looking forward

So, will I keep using Pinot and Catfish? Possibly. While I am leery of any process like Pinot that writes so often to my SSD, and I'm not at all happy with its database size compared to my actual directory size, I do like that it's fast, and responsive. It doesn't seem to have the huge memory leaks or lag that Strigi/Nepomuk do in KDE. In fairness, KDE is trying to get us to believe in the power of the "semantic desktop," while Pinot and Catfish just want to create an easy frontend for finding stuff, without worrying about associating them with various files or activities.

As long as the database doesn't get too much larger, or the indexing/monitoring services use too many resources, I'll keep it around. I've got five+ years of accumulated files in various folders, with more constantly being loaded to and from offline backups. Pinot and Catfish can help with my hard drive spring cleaning, and help me locate stuff that I've just plain forgotten about. The older you get, the less you remember, right?

What I'd really like is a search bar built-in to Thunar, maybe in the upper right corner, backed by Pinot. That'd place everything I need right up front, without having to drill down through right-click menus.

* * *

Speaking of Thunar:

Do you use Thunar? Do you use Dropbox? Xfce developer Mike Massonnet posted a message to the xfce-dev list this morning with a link to a new project: Thunar Dropbox. It integrates the Dropbox service right into your favorite lightweight filemanager. No longer do you have to run Nautilus just to use Dropbox easily. Now you can use it within Thunar.

Original post from Planet Gentoo.

Part of today’s KDE Team meeting:

KDE 4.5 status and plans to put it in Portage

We agreed that KDE 4.5.1 is suffering of some important bugs, and after a long discussion we decided to put it in portage, but it will never make it to stable branch. We are mentioning the upstream bugs, as we think that users should be aware of them before updating:

• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247144
• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246931
• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230247 <-The most important

Also, keep in mind that KDE SC 4.5 lacks the KDEPIM suite, so users should use KDEPIM 4.4.5 instead, which is also stable in portage tree.

In case of an update it should be smooth.

The whole summary and log can be found at the KDE project space.

The Qt Team also had a meeting one our later, summary and logs at the Qt project space

=-=-=-=-=
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Megjelent a µTorrent szerver első alpha kiadása Linux-ra. kezelése HTTP API-n vagy az uTorrent webes felhasználói felületen lehetséges (a normál, teljes szolgáltatást nyújtó kliens fejlesztés alatt, hamarosan érkezik). Használatához minimum 2.6.13-as kernel szükségeltetik. Szolgáltatások:

• Web-based remote control daemon
• Multiple simultaneous downloads
• Configurable bandwidth scheduler
• Global and per-torrent speed limiting
• Quick-resumes interrupted transfers
• Trackerless support (Mainline DHT)

A bejelentés elolvasható itt. Letölthető innen.

Habár a hír nem éppen új, de kiválósága miatt ajánlom mindenki figyelmébe.

Anders Hejlsberg két nagyon élvezetes előadást tartott 2010 áprilisában a Microsoft DevDays hágai konferenciáján. Anders Hejlsberg 2000 óta a Microsoft C# szakmai vezetője. Korábban hasonló pozíciót töltött be a Borlandnál, ahol a Delphi fejlesztéséért felelt.

A két előadás lazán kapcsolódik. Az első a C# 4.0 újdonságaira fokuszál, mint a dinamikus típusosság és használata, a ko- és kontra-variancia, nevesített és opcionális paraméterek és végül a COM interoperabilitás. A második előadás fő témája a programozási nyelvek jövője és azok a trendek, melyek többek között a C# jövőjét is formálják.

Az előadások letölthetők, illetve megtekinthetők itt:

C# 4.0 and beyond
Trends and Future Directions in Programming Languages

- Süni

What: Larry the cow t-shirt graphics contest ...

Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-artwork

Starts: Wed, Sep 01, 2010

Ends: Sun, Oct 31, 2010

Introduction:

Larry the cow is our prized mascot and he is not getting the respect he deserves. Just about every other Linux distribution, their mascot is adorned on t-shirts and other types of schwag, but not our Larry, he cannot even decide his gender. Please help up fix this terrible injustice by entering our contest and provide Larry the graphics he deserves. For more information visit this Forum Post.

The top 3 contestants will receive three t-shirts in their design, donated by the Gentoo Foundation. The judging panel includes Dawid Węgliński, Alex Legler, and your host David Abbott.

Requirments:

Preferred format is scalable vector graphics (SVG) but any of the industry standard vector graphics formats will be accepted.

How to Enter?

Please email your graphics to artwork@g.o

1. By making a submission to the contest, you agree to give unlimited, non-exclusive rights to the Gentoo Foundation for your submission.
2. This may include relicensing or trademarking the content the if required to protect it from unfair commercial usage.
3. You may, at your own discretion, also provide the content to any other party under some form of open license (including, but not limited to the full range of Creative Commons licenses, including re-sampling)
4. The Foundation needs to be informed of any future licensing.

A PostgreSQL fejlesztők bejelentették a népszerű, nyílt forrású adatbázis-kezelő 9.0-s verziójának első RC kiadását. A bejelentés szerint az összes ismert hiba javításra került, így a felhasználók azonnal jelenthetik, ha új hibára futottak. Akik részt kíván venni a tesztelésben, az hasznos útmutatót talál a HowToBetaTest wikioldalon. A bejelentés elolvasható itt.

Az openSUSE csapat ma bejelentette az openSUSE terjesztés 11.4-es verziójának első fejlesztői mérföldkövét. Elsősorban fejlesztőknek, tesztelőknek ajánlott. A következő Milestone kiadás szeptember 30-ra várható. Letölthető innen. A kiadási ütemterv szerint a végleges 11.4-es kiadás 2011. március 11-re várható. A bejelentés itt olvasható.

In this Podcast comprookie attempts to explain some tips on staying motivated.

Larry the cow is Gentoo's prized mascot and he is not getting the respect he deserves. Just about every other Linux distribution, their mascot is adorned on t-shirts and other types of schwag, but not Larry, he cannot even decide his gender. Please help up fix this terrible injustice by entering the Gentoo Larry Graphic's Contest and provide Larry the graphics he deserves.

LINKS:
Motivation
http://gentoo-pr.org/node/29

Larry Graphics Contest
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20100901-larry-contest-announcement.xml

OpenRC
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/openrc/index.xml

Gentoo Live DVD
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/releases/10.0/faq.xml

Download

Egy év szünet után megérkezett az elsősorban román és magyar Linux kezdőknek szánt, Ubuntu-leszármazott Kiwi Linux 10.08-as kiadása. A disztribúció célja, hogy olyan terjesztést adjon át a felhasználóknak, amelyben a leggyakrabban használt, legszükségesebb szoftverek alapértelmezetten telepítve vannak. Mindezt igyekszik úgy megtenni, hogy közben nem távolodik el kinézetben az Ubuntu-tól és nem igyekszik külön közösséget kialakítani maga körül. A Kiwi 10.08 az Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-re épül és mint mindig, kizárólag a GNOME x86 Desktop CD változatban kerül a felhasználók elé.

Az Ubuntu-tól leginkább az alapértelmezett programok tekintetében tér el:

• Firefox helyett Chromium (HTML5 video codec-ekkel)
• F-Spot helyett Shotwell (az Ubuntu 10.10-ben is megejtik ezt a cserét)
• Empathy helyett Pidgin
• Totem mellett helyet kap a VLC 1.1.3 is
• Adobe Flash plugin, gstreamer "ungood" és egyéb más codec-ek
• Libdvdcss2 az encrypted DVD támogatásért
• Eltávolításra került az Evolution
• p7zip és rar segédprogramok
• Tomboy helyett Gnote
• Compiz extra beállítások konfig
• Firmware a Speedtouch 330 USB modem driver-hez
• Eltávolításra került a Mono, Erlang + CouchDB, Telepathy, Gwibber

A bejelentés itt. Letölthető innen.

Augusztus közepén jelentette be a Google, hogy már Linux alól is elérhető Google videó- és hangcsevegés szolgáltatása. A bejelentéskor azonban csak .deb csomagokat lehetett letölteni. Akkor ígéretet kaptunk arra, hogy hamarosan .rpm csomagok is elérhetők lesznek. Tegnap Justin Uberti - a Google ezen projektjének technikai vezetője - blogjában tudatta, hogy már .rpm csomagok is letölthetők.