Nautilus and stalled SFTP connection

After a long idle period my SFTP connection through Nautilus get stalled. Only cure I've found is to unmount and then connect again.

Unmount can be done from command line as follows:

 gvfs-mount -u sftp://you@you.net/

Jolla - se kaunein vaihtoehto

Jolla on esteettisesti erittäin miellyttävä. Tai oikeastaan voisi käyttää myös sanaa kaunis.

Jolla on mustavalkea pinta, jossa ei ole logoja eikä tyyppinumeroita. Jollan ei tarvitse kertoa kuka se on.

Kun Jollan käynnistää ensimmäisen kerran, yksi ensimmäisistä kysymyksistä on lempiväri. Se on koneelta aika hyvä iskurepliikki.

Voiko puhelin olla lempeä? Voiko hektiseen informaation vaihtoon suunniteltu laite olla rauhoittava? Jolla tuntuu pystyvän siihen.

Informaatioähky ei tunnu niin pahalta, kun siinä voi navigoida pehmeästi sivellen.

Sähköposti? Ei from, to tai cc-kenttiä. Ei klemmarin kuvia tai mainoksia. Vain lähettäjän nimi ja teksti. Ne kaksi asiaa, jotka ovat tärkeitä.

Yksityiskohdat löytyvät sipaisemalla vasemmalle.

Herätyskello? Ympyrä, kehä ja kaksi planeettaa. Aika ei ole digitaalisia numeroita, aika on positioita.

Erilainen.

Kaunis puhelin, joka on teknisesti (sangen) avoin. 

Humanistinörtti kiittää.

How to restart X in Debian?

Just a quick note and reminder (for myself). I have experienced occasional GUI freezes. The mouse moves but nothing else works. However, I'm able to switch to command line (Ctrl + Alt + F1).

From terminal I can restart X with this (as root):

service gdm3 restart

And then the we run again... 

How to shutdown Ubuntu with one click

Just make a following script and add custom application launcher to the panel:

#!/bin/bash dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement.Shutdown

Why do I have a problem with Android market

I bought Samsung Galaxy S phone. It has Android in it and it is a wonderful phone. And then there is the Android market which has a lot of nice applications in it. The problem is that I don't trust them. I'm so used to use Free software that any proprietary code makes me suspicious.

And why should I trust? Android applications knows more than they should.


Where is a market place for Free software only?
I think FLOSS-market place could be a great way to support Free software. So far, I haven't paid for Free software (although I've donated), but I can see myself paying for Free applications more happily than proprietary ones.

Ubuntu 10.4 is fast!

I tried the latest version of Ubuntu and it is just fast! Boots quickly and overall appearance is snappy. I hope next version of Fedora can compete with that.

Anyway, good work devs!

http://www.ubuntu.com/

From Ubuntu to Fedora

There are lot of distros to choose for Linux users and I've been a loyal Ubuntu user since the beginning of the Ubuntu saga. Until now. Ubuntu is doing great work enabling "out-of-a-box" experience for novice users. But when you are not a novice user any more, this approach starts to annoy a little bit. So it was time switch from comfort zone to Fedora.


Why Fedora?
According to Paul Frields (Fedora's project leader) Fedora is intended "first and foremost for users interested in and capable of contributing to open source." I would really like to count myself to those users. In addition, Fedora is a bleeding edge distro and Red Hat is a big contributor to Linux kernel.

So Fedora just seems right for me :)


In practise
Of course I had tried several distros earlier but now I wanted to convert my work PC to another system and that is something that you I'm not willing to do very often. I've listed some differences that I had to deal with:


Selinux
Selinux is an additional security layer and it can drive you crazy. I did not remember that Fedora has this on by default. I spent whole one day trying to get PostgreSQL and Apache working nicely. Finally I realised what was causing the trouble up and I turned the selinux off.

http://www.crypt.gen.nz/selinux/disable_selinux.html

PHP Development
There are some differences in PHP settings between Ubuntu and Fedora.
I need PHP's xml and mbstring modules for my development. In ubuntu these are included by default, but in fedora they can be found as a separate packakeges: php-xml and php-mbstring. In fedora, PHP's errors are logged to file instead of showing them. That's good for production server but not for a development server. Not a big deal, just small edit in php.ini file.

display_errors = On


Yum
Yum is Fedora's "apt". It is little bit slower that Apt in Debian or Ubuntu, but it is also more verbal by default. The speed is really not an issue, at least for me. Yum install XXX, yum remove XXX, yum update, not big differences here.


Multimedia
By default Fedora does not find any closed codecs like MP3. Luckily there is a RPM Fusion. Just install RPM from the Fusion site and codecs are found when you try to play those unneeded closed formats.


Software Development
So far I haven't found any significant differences here. Make, scons, SVN and CVS just do their work like expected.

DWM
DWM is the window manager I'm using and can't live without. Downloaded source, compiled and it was working. So no complaints!

http://dwm.suckless.org/

Beagleboard running!

I finally got my Beagleboard running! It took time but now I'm satisfied :)

EBVBeagle

I ordered EBVBeagle, which is Beagleboard with out-of-the-box functionality. It comes with a SD card that has Angstrom distribution in it.

I had no previous experience of embedding Linux and I was very unsure of how things worked. But finally I got it booting and got display working. But things still did not work very well. The problem was that I was not able to login graphically. X died every time after login screen. I decided to try with a newer version of Angstrom. But how?

Making it running

Luckily there is http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard.
So, I followed loo-oong directions in http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard and I managed to get the new Angstrom demo image running. It booted and I could use BeagleBoard through serial connection but now I lost mouse and keyboard. Next I tried Ubuntu's arm version (http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu). I got it running but again, no mouse or keyboard.

I thought that maybe I'm just not geeky enough and maybe I should leave these to real geeks :(

But I don't like the idea of giving up, so I tried one more thing: I updated the U-boot. The update process seemed to be a little bit scary operation since it means changing the content of board's flash memory. But that solved the problem, I have now mouse and keyboard in XFCE Ubuntu BeagleBoard box.

So why did I have to update the U-Boot? Because:

The kernel your running (2.6.29 series) is expecting the usb pins to be setup in U-boot..
source

Directions for updating the U-Boot:
http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu#Upgrade_U-Boot

/dev/Arduino

I noticed that if I unplugged Arduino from my Ubuntu-box and then plugged it back, the /dev name for Arduino changed from /dev/ttyUSB0 to /dev/ttyUSB1. Fortunately this was easy to fix. The problem was solved by adding a file 97-arduino.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ and adding the following rule (all in one line):

kernel=="ttyUSB*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0403", 
SYSFS{idProduct}=="6001", 
SYMLINK="Arduino"

So now I can always trust that Arduino is in /dev/Arduino. If you have two Arduinos,you can use serial numbers in order to recognize them (see link below).

Original source:
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Linux/Udev