Mindless Techie

It seems that Wordpress.com really won’t let me customize the themes very much.  I can’t install any addons either.  I really like the admin interface, and the free blog of course.  I’m thinking that maybe I’ll keep my personal blog here and create a seperate blog elsewhere for the Tips and Tricks.  That way I can customize the look and feel to better suit it for the tips.  Hopefully it’ll make it easier for me to post the tips, categorize them, format them better and provide better search capability.

I hope to do it this week.  Now I need to think of a good domain name.

Now that I have decided to start blogging regularly, I’ve been looking for a good blogging editor.  I’ve tried some of the post editors that go into the Gnome and KDE panels.  They are nice for quick posts, but I am looking for something more full featured.
As far as full featured blogging editors go, so far I’ve only tried ones that work in Windows.  Even though I love Linux,  I still spend most of my time in Windows.  So far, I’ve tried: Ecto, W.Bloggar and Qumana.
Between Ecto and W.Bloggar, I think I liked Ecto the best.  It had a very intuitive interface and I found it easy to use.  Since I’m a cheap bastard I decided to keep looking for something free.
W.Bloggar seemed full featured; however, I really hated the interface.  I’m sure once I used it for a while, it would be great.  Unfortunately, I’m not that patient.
Lastly, I found Qumana.  It’s a free editor that also has integrated support for their QAds.  The interface is actually very nice and pretty intuitive.  I think I’lll stick with Qumana for now.

Tags: blog, editor, ecto, w.bloggar, qumana

On amd64 systems, you can use media-video/mplayer-bin to play multimedia files that require 32-bit only codecs (win32codecs), but mplayer doesn’t look as good as the 64-bit native version and it doesn’t integrate very well with the system. KDE users can emerge kmplayer – a KDE based “front end”. If you use konqueror, kmplayer adds a plugin to the browser. For this tip to work, you will need to unmerge your native mplayer, if you have it. When you install kmplayer it will not work as there is no /usr/bin/mplayer.

Code Listing 4.4: Creating the mplayer link

ln -sf /usr/bin/mplayer-bin /usr/local/bin/mplayer

Now, the native kmplayer will play wmv files and you can “preview” them in konqueror.

With the diverse array of overlays now available to the community, one of the issues a person might have is finding that overlay that is just right for the package they are looking to install. Unfortunately, the default search capabilities of portage are only able to search though overlays that have already been installed on your system. Stefan Schweizer has written an excellent article at his Planet Gentoo blog this week detailing the workings of a tool that makes searching through remote overlays a much easier task than ever before.

The package for this task is app-portage/eix. You will need to unmask it to get all the latest and greatest features:

Code Listing 4.1: Installing app-portage/eix

# echo app-portage/eix >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge eix

Then, to make sure that eix has all the information it needs about all the available overlays, you can issue the following commands to update it:

Code Listing 4.2: Updating eix’s global overlay list

# update-eix
# update-eix-remote update

eix is now able to search for packages in all of the available overlays in the global layman list as well the official portage tree.

Code Listing 4.3: Searching for packages

# eix -e xmms

[D] media-sound/xmms
Available versions: [M]1.2.8-r5[2] [M]1.2.10-r6[2] [M]1.2.10-r8[2]
[M]1.2.10-r14 [M]1.2.10-r14[3] [M]1.2.10-r15 [M]1.2.10-r15[3]
[M]1.2.10-r16 [M]1.2.10-r16[3] [M]20101010[1]
Installed: 1.2.10-r15[01:54:46 08/29/06][nls esd mmx
vorbis 3dnow mikmod -directfb alsa oss arts -jack -sndfile -lirc
-flac mad mp3]
Homepage: http://xmms.org
Description: X Multimedia System

[1] (layman/fluidportage)
[2] (layman/gentoojp)
[3] (layman/zugaina)

For more information, refer to the eix man page and the original blog post linked below.

* http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/genstef/2006/11/03/searching_for_ebuilds_in_overlays_that_a

I finally hope to start using this blog. At the very least, I want to start putting Linux tips and tricks in here. Most will probably be from the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, while others may be original.

A recent poll shows a good percentage of *tech-savvy* XP users considering a move to Linux over an upgrade to Vista. It seems Microsoft are pushing users away with more looking at using Linux than legally upgrading.

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