Tag: linux

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Digikam-pocalypse

I’ve been using Digikam to organize my photo portfolio into albums and tags for quite a while. I have something like 2500 photos, with a few albums and a LOT of tags. The new version of Fedora comes with KDE 4, which apparently includes a new version of digikam. Normally this would be a good thing – more features, prettier interface, etc. Unfortunately, the new version’s database is a little different, so it’s gotta import photo info from the old database. Sadly, it failed to import mine for some reason, maybe because I have so many tags or photos. It started up fine with just the photos, making a new database from scratch, but my old tags obviously weren’t there.

I thought about just waiting patiently for an update to digikam to see if that’d fix it, but I figured I’d poke around in the meantime. Digikam stores its photo info in a SQLite database, which can be messed with using the SQLite Manager add-on for Firefox. Sounds strange, looks pretty ugly, but it works well enough. SQLite databases are just files so I made a copy of my old database and the new, empty database to work with. The old and new databases looked pretty similar – there are just a few new tables and some tables have new fields. The tag-related fields look exactly the same though, so it’s pretty odd the import failed. I’d hoped to just use SQLite Manager to just copy the old tags tables into the new database, but the image ids were sadly different. All my image names are unique, which meant I could run a query to match up the old and new image ids using the image names as a key, then replace the old ids in the copied-over ImageTags table with the matching new image ids. Complicated, but it worked…

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Liferea + Flash in Fedora redux

I’ve been without Flash support in Liferea for my x86_64 Fedora for quite a while. Well, Adobe has a 64-bit alpha version of their sucktastic Flash Player available now, and it seems to work perfectly with both Firefox and Liferea – so now I can watch BB’s lame unicorn videos right in my favorite feed reader. I can’t decide whether this is good or bad.

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Getting Flash working in Liferea on Fedora 9

Seems like Flash stuff in Liferea was working fine in Fedora 8, but in F9 a worthless popup appears, asking to download a plugin but doing nothing. I already had the evil Flash plugin installed, but Liferea didn’t know about it. Maybe I did this same procedure a few months ago and didn’t remember to do it this time. Here’s what fixed it for me (based on the instructions found here):

# ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9pre/plugins/libflashplayer.so

YMMV, depending on what version(s) you’ve got installed. I’d imagine it’ll be necessary to do this again if/when the xulrunner version changes.

Update: This works great for me in i386-land, but not in x86_64. I’m not sure, but it looks like x86_64 liferea isn’t using xulrunner, and I haven’t figured out if gtkhtml supports plugins at all.

Update²: As Dylan notes below, you can get an x86_64 version of Flash Player 10 from Adobe now, which will let you view videos of cats right in Liferea, and also seems to make Flash suck less in Firefox. I don’t remember having to do the linking thing – I think I just dropped the plugin in Firefox’s plugins folder and Liferea found it automagically.

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Eee PC impressions

I got an ASUS Eee PC when my iBook finally died. I like the little thing a lot – the tiny form factor easily makes up for the limitations.

Where the 12-inch iBook had an adequate-sized 1024×768 screen, the Eee PC’s screen is 720×400, too narrow for a lot of web pages. Zooming out can help, but I find that just makes my eyes hurt after a while. I expect ASUS will add a version with a larger screen sometime this year.

The keyboard is probably my biggest gripe. The keys are all there, but they’re a little small. With my small hands and fingers it works okay, but the iBook certainly was more comfortable for extensive typing.

The installed OS is good and bad. Good because it’s a Linux distribution, so I didn’t pay for a Windows license that I wouldn’t be using anyway. Bad because it’s Xandros and defaults to a simplified user interface. I did live with the advanced desktop mode for a while. That does offer more flexibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep things properly updated – counting on ASUS to update Firefox seems foolish.

Luckily, I’m not the only one underwhelmed by Xandros on the Eee PC – the EeeUser Wiki has a long list of alternative operating systems people have installed on the Eee PC. Fedora usually works for me, so I decided to try Eeedora, a live cd version of Fedora with some customizations for the Eee PC. It seems to work well enough, but there are a few things I’ve done that I’ll post about later.

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Xubuntu on an iBook (nope…)

Update: Well, I thought I had it working, but after several failed boots I gave up and installed Fedora 8 instead. It worked right out of the box, with the exception of the tap-click thing, right-click emulation, and the eject button. Not too bad.

I’ve got an old 12 inch dual-USB iBook that’s been running various flavors of Linux, most recently Fedora 7. That was working fine, but it seemed a little slow. Rather than upgrade to Fedora 8, I decided to try something allegedly better for older hardware. Xubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu using the Xfce desktop environment, is supposed to be lighter-weight and faster. This is my little story about getting it running.

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