I’ve decided to move my blog and the Urlmarkr site away from Dreamhost and to a VPS hosted with Bitfolk. The main reason for the move is that now my exams are finished I hope to be able to spend some time working on urlmarkr and a few other projects and Dreamhost’s Ruby setup just didn’t cut it.

The Urlmarkr site is now running on Mongrel with Lighttpd 1.5 at the frontend. So far everything seems pretty stable. The new VPS is also a lot closer to home than Dreamhost, only 4 hops away with a response time of less than 20ms compared to the 18 hops and 200ms response from Dreamhost.

Freevo is an open source multimedia platform written in Python, which allows you to easily turn your Linux based PC into a jukebox, VCR, PVR and HTPC. This latest release includes lots of new features including a web interface for remote administration, PS3 support under Yellow Dog Linux, an RSS server for fetching podcasts, an encoding server and lots more.

Setup of Freevo was straight forward enough once the required modules were installed. The only problem I ran across was the need to install Kaa from SVN. To install Kaa, simply check out the latest revision and install the kaa.base and kaa.metadata packages as so:

svn co svn://svn.freevo.org/kaa/trunk kaa
cd kaa/base
sudo python setup.py install

...

cd ../metadata
sudo python setup.py install

...

Configuration of Freevo can be a bit of a pain as you have to edit the configuration by hand but it’s all clearly documented. You can also head over to the Freevo Help website if you do have any issues. Once everything is setup, Freevo is simple to use. From the main menu, you can select to watch tv, watch a movie, listen to music, look at pictures, view the weather or read some RSS headlines.

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The Flash 9 beta for Linux has finally been released! There are two packages available, a Mozilla/Firefox plugin and a GTK based standalone player. The player does not include full-screen mode and the standalone player doesn’t have SSL support just yet, both of which will be available in the final release.

The release has been tested on Red Hat Enterprise 3 &4, SUSE 9.x and 10.1 by Adobe. I can confirm that everything works fine under Ubuntu too. You should be able to install it by simply removing all previous Flash versions and copying libflashplayer.so to either ~/.mozilla/plugins/ or /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/.

It looks like Linux has been confirmed for the PS3. Terra Soft Solutions today announced that:

Yellow Dog Linux v5.0, Terra Soft’s next generation Linux operating system for Power will support PLAYSTATION 3, providing an end-user experience far surpassing previous versions.

Under basic agreement with SCEI, Terra Soft was granted a unique opportunity to develop and bring to market a complete Linux OS for the Sony PLAYSTATION 3.

The most interesting thing about this to me is the fact Enlightenment E17 will be the desktop environment of choice for possibly thousands of new Linux users. I’ve flirted with E quite a few times in nearly 10 years since it’s original release. It has always been the most beautiful, elegant and revolutionary window manager and then desktop environment out there.  The ability to customize Enlightenment to what ever suits your taste is one of the best things about it and I hope this is maintained in the PS3 release and it’s not locked down by Sony.

I’m guessing that YDL Linux will run in a Cell Secure Processing Vault to try and prevent any backdoors which could allow the execution of backup copies and such from within the Linux environment. YDL v5.0 will be available through YDL.net Enhanced accounts, through the Terra Soft on-line Store, retailers, and public mirrors world-wide. The PS3 is starting to look very tempting again, even with it’s high price tag.

An exploit has been found in the NVIDIA binary Linux X driver that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code as root. The bug can be exploited remotely simply by visiting a malicious web page in a vulnerable X client. A proof-of-concept exploit is available. The open source “nv” driver is not effected by this exploit.

The overflow stems from a problem with how the XRender extension handles rendering glyphs to the screen. Any local or remote X client can gain root access using the exploit available above and using a short sequence of user generated glyphs, for example in Firefox using Flash, Java applets or embedded web fonts, the NVIDIA binary driver can be tricked into writing into an arbitrary location in memory allowing execution of code with root privileges. A simple HTML input field with a long value can exploit this causing a DoS.

There are reports that the problem is fixed in the latest Beta drivers and the open source “nv” driver is not effected. You should be able to revert to the “nv” driver by replacing the “nvidia” with “nv” under the driver section in your X config.

This exploit once again raises the issue of having, proprietary closed source code, unaudited by peer review, present in the kernel. Had this problem been found in an open source piece of code, a patch would be available within hours, if not minutes and the risk would be negated. There have been many calls for NVIDIA, going back to 2000, to open up the kernel module in question before and this will only add to those calls, but to be honest, I can’t see it happening anytime soon, they just wail on about trade secrets and the advantage their competitors (or competitor) would gain from this. I’m hoping that NVIDIA would like to prove me wrong!

People often ask questions such as “When will Photoshop be available for Linux?” or “Will [insert favorite application here] ever be ported to Linux?” without taking to time to look at the vast array of applications already available. Here is a quick rundown of what I consider to be five great Linux desktop applications. Some of these applications even surpass their commercial counterparts in term of innovation and features, and best of all, they are both free and free.

F-Spot

F-Spot is a photo management tool that lets you import, touch-up, organize and share your digital photos. F-Spot supports a wide array of file types, including RAW support, so you can import your photos from just about any device. When importing your photos or images, you can tag each batch of images for easy searching and sorting later on.

It’s easy to edit your photos in F-Spot, you can rotate, crop, resize, and adjust red eye and adjust other color settings. You can easily roll back your changes with versioning support and your original photos are left intact.

Once you are ready to share your photos, F-Spot allows you to easily export to a wide range of places, including Flickr, PicasaWeb, Gallery, CD and there is also also a static HTML export option.

The GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP) can be used for everything from simple paint program to photo retouching, image composition and image authoring to batch image processing and conversion. The power of The GIMP lies in it’s extensible plug-in and extension system which allow you to script everything from the most basic task to highly complex image manipulations.

The GIMP comes with the usual full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush and Clone along with custom brushes and patterns. It also supports layers, a large range of filters for applying effects such as engrave, emboss, scratches, ripples and many more, animation tools and you can even run Photoshop plug-in filters.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. It supports shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping of objects. It can import from formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, SVG, Adobe Illustrator and others and exports SVG as well as other vector-based formats including DXF and of course PDF.

Some of the tools available include pencil, pen and calligraphy tools for drawing. Rectangle, ellipse, polygon and spiral shape tools and a text tool.

Inkscape is still a young project and is under active development, with new features being added often.

Gaim

Gaim is a instant messaging client that supports AIM,

ICQ , MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr messaging networks. With Gaim you can log into multiple accounts across different networks all from within the one client. Gaim has all the usual features of native clients including file transfer, away messages, and typing notification.

Gaim also has a plug-in system witch allows you to extend the application and add features such as encryption and graphical notifications and there are also a large range of themes available.

Songbird

Songbird is a digital jukebox built on the Mozilla XULRunner platform, the same platform that Firefox and Thunderbird are built upon and supports MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA. However Songbird is more than just a simple audio player it provides an alternitave to iTune and Windows Media including support for services like Odeo, SHOUTcast, Amazon and last.fm.

Similar to Firefox, there is an extension system which will allow people to develop their own extensions to plug-in to Songbird one of the most interesting of which is the iTunes importer.

Although Songbird is still in the early stages of developemnt, it promises to shake up the media player world in the just same way Firefox has the browser world.

That’s five great applications for the Linux desktop. What other great Linux applications can you think of?

The final release (at least by me) of the gp2x-gpe, a port of the GPE palmtop environment to the GP2X is out! This release includes pretty much everything except the kitchen sink. AbiWord, Evince, Gaim, Dillo, Gnumeric, XChat, The GIMP, GpsDrive, GCC are included along with all the standard GPE applications.

Almost everything is working pretty smoothly and there has been some speed increases, most notably the new Xorg server patched by Orkie and compiled under OpenEmbedded.

You can download the archive from here

You can find more information on installing and running gp2x-gpe here.

If anyone is interested in taking up this project please get in touch with me. I just don’t have enough time to carry this on by myself with work and other commitments.

Please let me know if you come across any issues and I’ll do my best to help you out.

After the first Ubuntu billboard advertisement was spotted last week near Oracles headquarters, a second has appeared further along Interstate 101.

As of today I’ve started moving my sites over to Dreamhost! I had been running everything on a Sun Blade 100 using Ubuntu for SPARC, hosted on my cable connection but the uplink was crippled to 512 kbit/s. My blog is first to move, and also moves to a new domain, darxr.net. All old links should redirect fine. I’ve also upgraded my blog to Typo 4 . Everything went pretty smoothly except for a few MySQL problems which were solved by using a fresh database schema and importing the old articles from the command line.

I’ll be moving over the urlmarkr site and also migrating the SVN repository to Dreamhost in the next few days. I have already moved the site to Drupal and again all seems fine. urlmarkr also moves to it’s own domain, urlmarkr.org.

The main reason I’ve choose Dreamhost is their Ruby on Rails support seems pretty good and the control panel is NOT CPanel. I can’t stand using CPanel, its UI is terrible. I am a command line user most of the time, but when I have to use a web based interface, CPanel is one that I’d just rather avoid.

If you interested in signing up for Dreamhost, you can signup for either the L1 (20GB disk, 1TB bw), L2 (40GB disk, 1.2TB bw) or L3 (60GB disk, 1.6TB bw) packages for only $9.90 for the first month with all setup fee’s waived and a free domain name! Simply enter the code DARXR in the “Promo Code” box on the signup page to take advantage of the discount.

I have uploaded a native build of GPE for the GP2X. Unlike the previous build, this build has been compiled from source using the OpenEmbedded environment and optimized for the ARM920T.

If you wish to setup your own OpenEmbedded environment you should follow the guide at the GP2X Wiki. The configuration files used are available here. OpenEmbedded will fetch all source code and patches required to build everything.

Included in this build are a full GPE setup, Abiword, Gnumeric, Gaim, Evince and Dillo. You can download the image from here: http://x11.gp2x.de/downloads/gp2x-gpe-20060617.tar.bz2

Update: New release available here.

Here is a very “Alpha” release of the “GPE Palmtop Environment”:http://gpe.handhelds.org/ for the GP2X. There are lots of things still to be worked on and many things are completely broken and don’t work at all.

However, AbiWord, Evince (PDF Reader), GAIM (Instant Messaging) and the Dillo web browser are all functional. You can see some screenshots in the previous post. The download includes a ext2 image, which must be mounted as a loopback device and a static chroot binary. A .gpu script is also included which you should be able to run from the menu and have it set everything up for you.

The .gpu script mounts the ext2 image on /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root and also mounts devfs and proc on /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root/dev/ and /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root/proc/ respectively. It this creates a chroot using the included binary at /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root/ and runs /bin/startgpe/ from within the chroot. It expects the contents to be extracted to /mnd/sd/gp2x-gpe/ and for Orkies “X server”:http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=28653 to be installed in /mnt/sd/x11/

When GPE first launches you will be prompted to create a user, this user is then created with the chroot and you should be able to login and play around!

For better performance, you can format your SD card to ext2 and extract the image there rather than mounting it. You might also want to re-nice gpm for better responsiveness also.

The image is based on an “OpenEmbedded”:http://www.openembedded.org build of “OpenZaurus”:http://www.openzaurus.org/wordpress/ 3.5.4. Ideally the next build will be compiled for the GP2X directly (arm920t or arm9tdmi) using OpenEmbedded. If anyone would like to help then please let me know!

And don’t forget to leave your suggestions as to where to go from here!

Again, this release is VERY BROKEN but it does work. Please don’t blame me if it kills your GP2X (it shouldn’t, but still). You can download the tarball from these sites:

* “http://www.filehosting.cc/download.php?id=5AE693E1″:http://www.filehosting.cc/download.php?id=5AE693E1
* “http://s13.quicksharing.com/v/4103035/gp2x_gpe.tar.bz2.html”:http://s13.quicksharing.com/v/4103035/gp2x_gpe.tar.bz2.html