About two years ago I first started playing with Freevo. I was impressed, and started building up fxd files with loads of info about all my media. I figured i’d keep the work from then and build upon it, building a full blown media PC running Freevo.

The hardware:
Dual Core AMD 64bit
1 gig RAM
80 gig SATA Seagate Disk
CD/DVD-R
cx88 based TV Tuner

First attempt at getting this off the ground was with the 64 bit version of Ubuntu.. Which as ubuntu often does, frustrated me to no end.

Moving past this I stuck in FreevoLive, based on Mandriva. I gave up on Mandrake at version 10, before the Mandriva thing happened… the Live based distro based on Mandriva’s live thingie reminded me why I don’t like it. Package management is horrible (i’m a Gentoo user, and Debian on my production servers, so most package management annoys me. Hail mighty apt, praise thee, emerge.)

enter OpenSUSE, stage left

The install is neat, flexible, but unobtrusive. It has been one of the most enjoyable new distro installs i’ve used in along time. I’m installing 10.3 - I had the media handy.

The install timed out a fair bit on package and repository info; but my internet connection has been a little flakey the last few days. Manually having to retry when it did meant the install wasn’t entirely unattended for the most part.

No Gnome.

People who know me know that I like feet. Thats all feet except for the Gnome-foot, and the rest of Gnome in general. The ones made of clay with red hats are however quite nice to have around. So I selected xfce in the install. xfce is a good compromise - i’ve just gone back to IceWM on my primary desktop.

The default login picked fvwm for me… ehh. shrugs.

Thats where I am now… I’ve added the 3rd-party Packman repository, the package management system has let me pick freevo and the bits I want… I’m about to configure the TV Tuner… wish me luck…

Recently I began playing with dbus alot, including libnotify. I found some irssi plugins for people running irssi locally to integrate with libnotify, but all the solutions by people for doing this remotely involved re-establishing ssh connections for each message and various other overheads that I was not comfortable with. The solution was obvious, to me - ssh needed dbus forwarding support. Well I don’t have the time nor experiece with the ssh code base to do it, a workaround was needed.

It didn’t take long for one to become apparent.

Nobody I know uses a relatively unheard of terminal capability known as terminal printing. This allows control characters sent to your terminal to turn on/off a locally connected printer. The content isn’t displayed by your terminal, but captured. Excellent, we could utilise this functionality for carrying a payload to the local machine, the connection is already there and the facility should be available in most terminal emulators (I’m a purist and use basic xterm which supports it).

What do I need?

• You need a terminal emulator that supports local printing. I’m using xterm 229
• libnotify and libnotify-bin, this includes the notify-send package
• a libnotify daemon (I’m using notification-daemon-xfce)

Obviously you’re already using irssi as an IRC/IM client, and you’re probably running it over ssh (and hopefully screen too if you are). But that is outside the scope of this article.

How is it done?

First thing we do is install the local handler script. This is the script that we configure xterm to pipe the content to be “printed” to.

Here is the script:

Grab it from here and put it somewhere sensible and make it executable.

The next thing that is needed is to configure XTerm to locally print using the script above. I use X resources for this. Infact I define a class in my Xresources called irssi and start xterm with a ‘-class irssi’ option for my IRCing.

If you don’t want a seperate class for irc, you can use the following lines. If you do want a class specific for your IRCing replace XTerm with the class name you like. The printer command should also point to wherever you put the script above.

The last thing you need is the irssi plugin. I’ve uploaded it and attached it to this document, you need to download it and run it with /script load notify.pl inside irssi.

It is written by Luke Macken and Paul W Frields, i’ve adapted it deliver it’s payload to STDERR wrapped with ESC[5i (turn printer on) and ESC[4i (turn printer off)

notify.pl.gz

Happy IRCing!

I will update my online resume shortly to reflect the last contract that was recently completed, again I won’t post details of the current one until completion.

One of our requirements is WPA-PSK, for use on the network where we are both working at the moment. There are a couple of references to a HOWTO for using wpa_supplicant with the ipw drivers (it has been at http://www.bughost.org/ipw/wpa_howto.txt) but the server appears to be down.

Google cache found a copy for me; which I will put up online as it would be very sad for a resource like this to be lost. You can find my mirror here.

• Download filmpress10.zip

I may in my spare time during this period develop the occasional theme which will be posted, but I expect this website will also be a little less frequently updated in this period.

IceWM is a lightweight Window Manager for X. The IceWM official website states that:

The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way.

So we now have PerhapsRGB2 for IceWM. It fits in (in my opinion) much better with the recently released themes for other common desktop applications (GKrellM, XMMS, Audacious).

IceWM

You can find much more information on IceWM at the official IceWM Website. There are plenty of other IceWM themes available at Freshmeat.

Download

• You can download perhapsRGB2-icewm.zip here.

Installation

The .zip (or .tar.gz) file you downloaded should be extracted into your ~/.icewm/themes directory (or into the system-wide shared themes if you are the system admin and want it available for all users). Refer to IceWM documentation for more information on IceWM themes.

What’s in store for the coming year?

Lots of the same, more themes for WordPress, IceWM, XMMS, gkrellm.. more plugins. Video related info is coming soon, as it’s what i’ve been tinkering with lots lately. Kate’s been busy with POVray, so we should see some scenes and samples of that coming soon too!

Here is a new theme to match your IceWM and gkrellm PerhapsRGB themes.

• Download perhapsRGB-xmms.

GKrellM is one of the best system monitoring tools i’ve every come across. I have depended upon it for network monitoring at several small Internet Service Providers and use it to monitor multiple machines across my home network all on my desktop live in realtime.

perhapsRGB has taken the workstations Kate and I use by storm and is appearing everywhere, certainly GKrellM was not to be spared, especially due to the extent Kate depends on it for keeping binky cool (more on that later).

So here it is… perhapsRGB for GKrellM.

GKrellM?

You can find plenty of information on GKrellM at Wikipedia or at the Official GKrellM Website.

Dell Users

I mentioned before Kate’s use of GKrellM for keeping binky cool - If you’re a loyal Dell notebook user like Kate is, you’ll probably be interested in also checking out i8krellm which is an interface to Massimo Dal Zotto’s i8kutils and very useful in keeping lots of models of Latitude and Inspirion notebooks cool (some of them do a pretty poor job of it due to a bug in their BIOS).

Download

The theme is available for download:

• Download perhapsRGB-gkrellm2.tgz

Installation

To install it untar the downloaded file into your
~/.gkrellm2/themes directory and select it from the theme configuration area within gkrellm.

The installation would go something like:

Other PerhapsRGB Themes

Also available is a perhapsRGB theme for IceWM, and XMMS / Winamp 2 and Audacious media players.