svn status | grep -P ‘^(?=.{0,6}C)’

The net result is that there are three types of QT apps.

1) Apps with dynamically linked libraries and are thus able to use the Oxygen style. They look great!

2) Apps with static QT libraries that include the gtk style in QT. Because of the oxygen-gtk GTK theme. In essence the app launches in KDE (powered by QT), runs the GTK style for QT which uses GTK to draw it’s widgets and GTK uses the Oxygen GTK theme. In the end it looks right. Hopefully the app in question will let you choose which QT style to use like the Skype app. The Skype app by the way seemed to start out in the base QT theme, plastique.

If not, you can use the command-line switch to manually specify it.

appname  -style=gtk

3) Apps with static QT libraries that don’t include the GTK style. No hope there for a perfect match. The Scrivenever for Linux app appears to fall into this category. However, you can make Scrivener and many other QT apps look better by using the qtconfig app. You can install this in Ubuntu with the qt4-qtconfig package. Run qtconfig and you can specify the theme QT apps should use by default. Make sure you save the changes you make (which show up instantly on running apps). If the app (like Scrivener) doesn’t include the GTK style, changing it to GTK+ in qtconfig won’t help. For me, Plastique and Cleanlooks offered the best visuals for Scrivener. Hopefully when it’s released they’ll compile packages for actual distributions with shared QT libs and everything.

In Thunderbird I just had an HTML signature that was appended to the email. In KMail you can append a file, but it does not get rendered as HTML or rich text when it’s appended. It appends raw code. Ugly. The bug for this is at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300142

To add a stylish HTML signature (whether you want to or have to),

1. Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Configure KMail’ and a dialog window opens.
2. In the ‘Identities’ section/tab, select the Identity for the signature you want to add and click the ‘Modify’ button on the right. Or just double click the Identity in question. Another dialog window opens.
3. Click the ‘Signature’ tab along the top.
4. Check ‘Enable signature’ at the top of the tab.
5. You have three choices in the select next to ‘Obtain signature text from:’. You can enter text, append a file, or get output from a program. The latter is a fun option if you want to run a script to do random or date dependent things in your signature. I’ll let you play with that option- I don’t have time. Appending doesn’t work for HTML, so we’re going to opt for ‘Input Field Below’.
6. Check the ‘Use HTML’ checkbox at the bottom of the tab area.
7. You now have some rich styling tools. I found them adequate if quirky. The size of the dialog window hides an even quicker option however. Next to the ‘Format Painter’ (brush) icon is the tiny arrow pointed right hiding further options. Within that group is ‘Insert HTML’! Yes! I think you’ll save yourself some time if you lay it out elsewhere and paste it in here. That will at least give you a head start. 

Big caveats- like all email, if you specify a font the recipient doesn’t have they won’t see that. Also, pasting in HTML left all the images broken in my editor. BUT when I sent the email with the broken images in my signature and checked another email account they show up fine. So KMail is apparently just choosing to block the external image references. I recommend you specify height and width of the images for proper placement. Also, HTML standardistas should remember that HTML email is still back in the 90s/2000s. The closer you get to  Netscape 4 compatible code the more successful you’ll be in various email clients. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

Do a search for Nepomuk and mostly you find things like “Help! Nepomuk is eating all of my CPU” or “How do I get rid of Nepomuk?”. Now I know that some KDE 4 underpinnings like Akonadi and Nepomuk (man we have exotic names) have had stability issues. But at this point they’re fairly stable and I’m guessing they’re even better in KDE 4.10 which will be released in a few weeks.

I ran into trouble with Nepomuk in the last week or so. The indexing process, virtuoso-t, was just on all the time. I had made so many drastic filesystem and email changes that I suspect that the file repository was having trouble adjusting. But unlike many out there, rather than turn off Nepomuk because something’s not quite right, I want to figure it out to keep it on to take advantage of what it offers.

So I decided to wipe out my Nepomuk data by deleting the $KDEHOME/share/apps/nepomuk directory (as suggested here). I also cleared Akonadi db_data but I don’t think I needed to do that, in hindsight. I of course did this while I was logged out- I don’t know what would happen if you tried to mess with Akonadi and Nepomuk while they were running- probably a bad idea.

So I logged in and sure enough- 0 files in my repository now. Unfortunately, Nepomuk didn’t automatically start re-indexing my files as I assumed it would. Finally, I got it going by unchecking all folders from the Customize indexed folders dialog (System Settings > Desktop Search > Desktop Query), clicking ‘Apply’ and then going back in and checking the needed folders and clicking ‘Apply’ again.

Immediately Nepomuk was off to the races, indexing my files. This time I had unchecked ‘Index my emails’ so it would first focus on the files.

I also noticed that there’s a setting (Advanced Settings tab) to devote more RAM to the indexing process (virtuoso-t) which supposedly boosts its performance. A while back I maxed out my motherboard and installed 16GB of RAM. The system may be dated, but it’s got plenty of RAM now. With that plentiful amount (and let’s face it- most of you have more RAM than you need too), I gave virtuoso-t as  much RAM as the slider allowed. Hopefully it appreciates that sacrifice and behaves.

My files are indexed again. So far, so good.

I switched to kdm as the display manager, but that immediately caused a problem for me since the gnome-keyring-daemon powers Ubuntu One integration, which I love. I also need it for MySQL Workbench. So I set about figuring out how I could get gnome-keyring to authenticate without me having to unlock it with a second password prompt when I log in.

I found quite a bit of help online, but not all of it was helpful. In the end I had installed the

sudo apt-get install libpam-gnome-keyring

Then I added the file /etc/pam.d/common-pamkeyring with this content

auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so try_first_pass
session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start

and added a line to the end of /etc/pam.d/kdm

@include common-pamkeyring

Many thanks to others that share online- especially this post, which helped me get over the last hurdle- a simple text change.

One thing that I love doing is genealogy and family history. As part of that I volunteer as an indexer, indexing the vast amount of historical records amassed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). Yes, I’m a Mormon. The records they’ve collected are amazing but sadly not as helpful without being searchable. So people all over the world work on this together using a Java-based app. Once indices are complete, the data and images are published on familysearch.org and are freely available to be searched. It’s amazing!

Anyway, I’m happy to say that their webapp auto-detects my platform and offers a shell-script installer for download. After downloading, and before the installer would work on my 64-bit OS, I had to install the ia32-libs package.

./Indexing_unix_3_15_1.sh

Launch FamilySearch at the conclusion of the installer but my advice is to

Now again- their app icon is… small. Only 48×48. Basically, it doesn’t ever look good- in any OS.

As a stopgap, I found a large version of their mobile app (iOS and Android!) and did a short bit of editing. I didn’t put a ton of time into it- I want to get to indexing!

mv Indexing.png ../.FamilySearchIndexing/indexing.familysearch.org/.install4j/indexing.png

That will take the place of the one included by default. Of course you can use a different filename and modify the FamilySearch Indexing.desktop file instead.

The .desktop file for this app just references ‘mysql-workbench’ as the icon- no path or extension. Luckily I found mysql-workbench.xpm in the /usr/share/pixmaps folder. I found a nice hi-res icon online- where you ask? In a source package for MySQL Workbench!! Words fail me.

So in the terminal:

cd /usr/share/pixmaps

sudo mv mysql-workbench.xpm mysql-workbench.old

sudo mv ~/Inbox/MySQLWorkbench-256.png mysql-workbench.png

Notice I renamed the file to have the name ‘mysql-workbench’ which is what Unity will look for. Keep the extension accurate- don’t change that to xpm.

As I worked on it, Unity showed a question mark icon. I launched the app and a few seconds later Unity had self-healed and my nice, big icon was working like a champ. If someone knows how to submit a patch and can fill me in I’ll do it!

A couple of things I ran into:

1. I had weird visual striping problems trying to run the desktop cd for Quantal Quetzal (beta) so I instead installed Precise Pangolin and upgraded from there.
2. I recently acquired a diNovo Edge keyboard and a Touch Mouse. These are very slick. And thanks to this note, the keyboard works like a charm.
   

   Edit the file: /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules(If you need help editing a file, see bottom section.)

   Change this line:

   # Logitech devices
   KERNEL==”hiddev*”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”046d”, ATTRS{idProduct}==”c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]“, \
   RUN+=”hid2hci –method=logitech-hid –devpath=%p”

   to

   KERNEL==”hidraw*”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”046d”, ATTRS{idProduct}==”c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]“, \
   RUN+=”hid2hci –method=logitech-hid –devpath=%p”

3. I got Sublime Text 2 running with no trouble, thanks to the convenient repository from WebUpd8.
4. I run into this in Thunderbird every time- I want to reply above the quoted email! Here’s where to set that.
5. Do yourself a favor and set Firefox to reopen whatever you had open last.
6. I don’t seem to be able to watch my Amazon videos online- in fact, it tells me my Flash plug-in is out of date! Chrome, which builds in its Flash player also seemed to choke on the Amazon player. But what’s this? Adobe Flash is EOL on Linux?!
   

   NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux.

7. I prefer Firefox, but I always install multiple browsers. I think it’s very cool and smart for Chrome to automatically add a software repository to Ubuntu so it can be updated in the “right” way.
8. Thank goodness for this man and his help in getting me the Solarized theme in my copy of Komodo.
9. Really, really odd issue with Apache. The javascript folder in my htdocs folder was being bypassed and the files were being looked for in /usr/share. It turned out this was caused by /etc/apache2/conf.d/javascript-common.conf. I don’t know why this was added but I removed the symlink and now things are peachy.

I saw one reaction to this on omgubuntu.co.uk that dismissed the numbers and the comments were, I think, unfair. The author rightly notes that all these ‘news’ stories are based on Distrowatch visitors. And not based on the their platform as reported by the browser, but the pages on the Distrowatch site that people visit. In other words it’s useless. Before you rip me apart, follow my logic here.

Gus uses Windows but keeps hearing that the wise and powerful think Linux is where it’s at- but he’s confused about the idea of ‘distributions’. A friend suggests he look at Distrowatch to help him decide on a distribution to try.

Gus visits Distrowatch. He clicks around, looking at Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. He decides he doesn’t know enough and doesn’t install anything.

Distrowatch tallies his visit- 1 new visit each for Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu!

Gus sees in the news that Linux Mint is actually the best. He checks back at Distrowatch and looks at Linux Mint. He decides he’s still not ready.

Distrowatch tallies a new visit for Linux Mint.

Gus sees more and more articles about Linux Mint and returns to Distrowatch, trying to muster his courage to install.

Distrowatch tallies a new visit for Linux Mint.

At this point, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu all picked up a visit, and Linux Mint picked up 2 and he still hasn’t installed! News people somehow equate those visits with distribution usage. The irony behind this whole conversation is that the resources at Distrowatch are geared to people wanting a new or different distribution. A real user isn’t going to visit the page when he’s happily using his chosen distribution of Linux every day.

‘News’ writers: you’re ridiculous and you are the problem here. Distrowatch doesn’t pretend that their stats have anything to do with users. Write some real news articles please.

All Linux distributions: can you please settle on a centralized way to track actual usage? Managed by someone else. Maybe it just counts via your update mechanism. I don’t know.

Until they do, can everyone stop whining about who is best and get back to making great apps for Linux?


$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teatime/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install teatime-unity