I’m going to become a father

I doubt I could express my feelings right now well enough in a blog, so I won’t write a long post about this topic. Just keep in mind that I’m happy as I never was before, and I’m glad to be now ready to tell the world about it

So.. now it’s time to wait. Let’s see what happens in 8 monts time!

And it has nothing to do with cats, just in case you wondered:

Mincha: one of my cutest cats

Just stay tuned!

https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/vagalume-devel/2008-June/000151.html

…today I’ve finished the implementation of a new patch for Vagalume which will enable D-Bus support in the desktop version of this nice player, since so far D-Bus interaction was only allowed in the maemo platform (due to using functions from libosso for RPC methods, instead of dbus-glib).

So, this is how the vagalumectl script (formerly known as vagalume-dbus) would work from now on in a “regular” GNU/Linux machine:

mario@bender:~$ vagalumectl
Usage:
vagalumectl
(Vagalume will be automatically started if not already running)

COMMAND:
play:              start playing the current radio
skip:              skip to the nex song in the current radio
stop:              stop playing the current radio
love:              mark the current song as ‘loved’
ban:               mark the current song as ‘banned’
tag :         change to a ‘global tag’ radio.
artist :   change to a ’similar artists’ radio
group :     change to a ‘last.fm group’ radio
loved :      change to a ‘loved’ radio for a specific user
neighbours : change to a ‘neighbours’ radio for a specific user
personal :   change to a ‘personal’ radio for a specific user
playlist :   change to a ‘playlist’ radio for a specific user
playurl :     just play the specified URL on Vagalume
volumeup [INC]:    increase playback volume
volumedown [INC]:  decrease playback volume
volume :    set the playback volume to a specific value
start:             start Vagalume (if not already running)
close:             close Vagalume (if not already closed)
help:              print this information

Double quotes are REQUIRED when specifying parameters to some commands,
such as TAG or ARTIST, because of the white spaces they might contain, e.g:

$ vagalumectl tag “hard rock”
$ vagalumectl artist “Led Zeppelin”

mario@bender:~$ vagalumectl loved homemaxico
Command ‘loved’ successfully executed
mario@bender:~$

Well… perhaps not a too much useful ’screenshot’ after all… but believe me, that’s the proof that D-Bus is working fine on my GNOME desktop from now on.

I hope you can enjoy the patch soon (as soon as Berto applies it to the SVN trunk)… perhaps in Vagalume 0.7 , who knows…

The Arbo War: red team

The Arbo War: green team

They seem quite fierce, don’t they?

Also, the weather was so nice that I couldn’t find anything wrong regarding to the organization of this edition, so thanks and congratulations Eva for setting everything up in a so good way, I really had a good time there… and I think we all had it too indeed .

But now it’s time to get back to work again, so I’d better go to sleep right now, since I’m really tired. Moreover, I’ll have the opportunity to attend to more Summits in the future, so no time to be down now…

But first… here you are a picture of all of the igalians who attended to the Summit:

Igalia Summit, June 2008 edition

See you in the next Summit!

After that, I thought it could be a good idea to implement a freedesktop tray icon as well, so you would be able to hide/show Vagalume with a tray icon in the notification area, in the same way you could do it with some other programs such as pidgin, xchat or rhythmbox, for instance. Moreover, some people told me that it would be very nice to have a tray icon in the desktop version of vagalume, so everything seemed to say that I was not mad after all and that it could be a good idea…

So, I’ve started working on its implementation (using a GtkStatusIcon) some weeks ago and now I finally managed to get the enough ’spare time’ to plug everything together and to finally finish the patch for being applied to one of the latest revisions of the SVN trunk (158). In fact, at this moment I’ve already sent it to vagalume-devel@maemo.org mailing list and I’m waiting for Berto to take a look into it to finally integrate it for (hopefully) the next release

Update [2008/04/29]: After working a bit more on this new tray icon during the past weekend I’ve added libnotify support to allow the tray icon to show a notification each time Vagalume starts playing a new song. Of course, as I know there’re people who might dislike this feature, I’ve also added the possibility of disabling these notifications from the ‘Settings’ dialog in the GNOME version of the application. I’ve also added an screenshot of the notifications working at the end of this post.

To finish with this post, and knowing that sometimes an image is better than just a description, here you are a couple of screenshots of the new tray icon working in my GNOME environment:

Vagalume’s tray icon: showing the menu

Vagalume’s tray icon: showing the tooltip

Update [2008/04/29]: Vagalume’s tray icon: showing playback notifications

And that’s all. I hope the patch is good enough to integrate it with the next release of Vagalume. Of course, suggestions and criticisms are always welcome, so don’t hesitate to leave your comments here.

I hope you like it

So, yesterday I spent some time looking for an easy and effective way for showing people attending to the talk how cool this cute device (my N810) is… and thinking about the past I remembered when Andres gave a talk/workshop about the Maemo development platform, where he used an VNC server installed in the device to show the N810 “screen” to everyone in the room, just using an VNC client in the laptop connected to the proyector.

IIRC, Andrés compiled the VNC server for the device to get it working, but yesterday I found a much easier way to get it working, so here you are the receipt (I use too much this word in my blog, perhaps I should consider to become a cook… ):

• Download the pre-compiled .deb package for your device from this web.
• Copy the .deb file to your device and install it following one of the following methods:
• Install it with the Application installer from the Control Panel (N770).
• Install it with the Application Manager from the ‘Settings’ Menu (N800 / N810). It’s required to have the red-pill mode enabled. To know how to enable this “peculiar” mode, check this out.
• Open a root terminal in the device with a remote ssh connection and install it this way:

dpkg -i x11vnc_0.9.3-1_armel.deb

• Configure it to use a password with the default username available in the device (’user‘):
• Make sure you are running the terminal as ‘user’, by executing the command:

su user

• Create a VNC password (recommended):

x11vnc -storepasswd

• This will store your password (encrypted) under /home/user/.vnc/passwd
• Start the server:
• Not using the password: from Menu -> Extras, click on x11vnc.
• Using the password (recommended):
• Open a terminal for ‘user’
• Execute the command:

x11vnc –usepw

• Connect to server (already running on the device, at port 5900):
• Using any VNC client connect to your device’s IP, using the following credentials if you started the server with –usepw:
• Username: user
• Password: (whatever you’ve set with –storepasswd)

Of course, there are lots of options you can pass to x11vnc (see x11vnc –help) but these ones worked fine for me: I have an easy VNC server working with password authentication

And to finish this post, just a last advice: If you think you’re going to use always (like me) the VNC server with password authentication, it could be more nice for you to edit the /usr/bin/x11vnc.sh script so it also includes the –usepw. This way, you can always start the VNC server from Menu -> Extras, withouth having to open a terminal for it… although, to be honest, I still prefer a remote terminal for most of the times, because of the output I continously get through it… but hey! that’s just a very personal opinion!

Moreover, maybe we didn’t get the acknowledgement of being the “Mobile Ruler ‘08″ under the Multimedia category, but we met a lot of people indeed, and we enjoyed a lot of the event, which was nicely arranged to allow all the participants to meet each other and to have a good dinner at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda (look at the picture to see me in front of the beautiful San Jose City Hall).

So, maybe the next time we could have more luck with Vagalume, but now it’s the present and, as Berto said in his last post, it’s time to get back to work and keep on getting Vagalume even better with some nice improvements we already have in mind and others that I’m sure are still to come.

PS: This was the first time I’ve been to the US West Coast, and I have to say that I loved California… such a lovely place, such a lovely place. I hope I could go back soon

To do that, I just followed the instructions that Berto had posted some months ago in his blog, either for encrypting full regular partitions with LUKS as for encrypting temporary filesystems, say, /tmp and swap partitions.

So, once I got those tasks done (quite easy if you follow the steps Berto’s explained in his posts), only one more task was still left: to make those LUKS encrypted partitions to be automatically mounted when logging into the system with my username.

The idea behind this is just that you use the same password both for logging into the system with your username as for decrypting those LUKS partitions before mounting them. To do this, I’ve just used the pam_mount module so it took care of using the user password to automatically mount those partitions right after the user gets identified in the system. And of course, that pam module also takes care of unmounting those partitions right after you log out and no open sessions with your username remains active.

So, I’d like to share with you a recipe to get all this stuff easily working:

1. Follow the steps in Berto’s post to encrypt a full partition with LUKS.
2. When you add a LUKS password for that encrypted partition, use the same password you use to log into your system with your username. LUKS allows you to add more than one password for your partitions, so at least one of them should be the same than your user password.
3. Install the pam_mount module:

sudo apt-get install libpam-mount

4. Edit your /etc/security/pam_mount.conf file and append there a line like the following one (one for each encrypted partition you’d like to automatically mount):

volume USERNAME crypt - DEV_FILE MOUNTPOINT - - -

For example, to mount a encripted partition present in /dev/sda6 under a /encrypted folder whenever the user ‘mario’ logs into the system, you should append the following line:

volume mario crypt - /dev/sda6 /encrypted - - -

5. Edit /etc/pam.d/login so it looks as follows at the end of the file

[…]
# Standard Un*x account and session
@include common-account
@include common-session
@include common-pammount
@include common-password

6. And, if you use GDM (as me), you should also edit /etc/pam.d/gdm in a similar way:

[…]
@include common-account
session required pam_limits.so
@include common-session
@include common-pammount
session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start
@include common-password

7. At last make sure that you have removed (or commented) some lines in /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab, in order to avoid both asking for the LUKS password at startup (because the crypttab file) as trying to mount a not decrypted partition (because of fstab). For instance, this is how those files would look for the example given:
• /etc/crypttab:

#encrypted /dev/sda6 none luks,check=ext2
cswap /dev/sda8 /dev/urandom swap
ctmp /dev/sda9 /dev/urandom tmp

• /etc/fstab:

[…]
#/dev/mapper/encrypted /encrypted ext3 defaults 0 2
[…]

Once you have followed all those steps, you should be able to reboot and see how the encrypted partition gets mounted right after you login in your system, either by using GDM as by using a text-mode terminal.

And that’s all. I hope you find it useful.

]]> http://blogs.igalia.com/mario/2008/03/08/automatically-mounting-luks-encrypted-partitions-with-pam_mount/feed/ http://blogs.igalia.com/mario/2008/03/01/my-sloppy-dirty-ugly-but-maybe-useful-script-for-the-vagalume-d-bus-interface/ http://blogs.igalia.com/mario/2008/03/01/my-sloppy-dirty-ugly-but-maybe-useful-script-for-the-vagalume-d-bus-interface/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:16:39 +0000 msanchez Planet Igalia Maemo Vagalume Planet GPUL http://blogs.igalia.com/mario/2008/03/01/my-sloppy-dirty-ugly-but-maybe-useful-script-for-the-vagalume-d-bus-interface/

Today, while doing the houseworks, I plugged the N800 to the AUX input of my mini hi-fi system (see the photo), in order to listen my online radios with Vagalume while I was doing several tasks all around my flat.

Then, after finishing those tasks, I sat in front of my laptop and I began to do some tipical tasks: read mail, surf the internet, talk with some friends through IM… while Vagalume kept playing music through my hi-fi system in the living room. And then, while I was thinking how nice is to listen Last.fm through a couple of good speakers, I suddenly found out that I should face the big dilemma:

• Sometimes I’d like to change the radio station which is being played in Vagalume, or just to Skip some songs.
• I love to listen music through the hi-fi system, even when I’m not in the living room (likely, my neighbours love this too), so stopping Vagalume from running on the N800 and running it in my laptop would not be an option.
• The N800 is in another room, so I should leave the chair if I want to interact with Vagalume.

Maybe, you could be thinking of me as a very lazy person, but first just think of yourself in a similar situation and maybe you could understand what I’m talking about

So, this stupid situation was the perfect excuse for me to write an small, sloppy and ugly script that, at least, works pretty well on the N800, and which allows to easily manage some of the functions of Vagalume that are available via its D-Bus interface:

• Run / Close Vagalume application (via D-Bus methods).
• Play / Skip / Stop songs.
• Setting the current radio to:
• A ‘global tags’ radio, specifiying tags separated by spaces.
• A ’similar artists’ radio, specifying an artist name.
• A ‘last.fm group’ radio, specifying the name of the group.
• An ‘user’s loved / neighbours / personal / playlist’ radio, specifying the username.
• A custom radio, just specifying a valid lastfm URL.

So, now I’m able to remotely manage Vagalume in the N800 in an easy way, while it’s playing music in the living room and I am, say, in my bedroom working on my laptop, just by ‘implementing’ the following recipe:

• A ssh server (available through the maemo-extras repository, IIRC) running on the N800.
• My sloppy script installed on the N800 as well.
• A X terminal running on my laptop, to remotely control Vagalume.
• A bottle of a good beer near the laptop, to minimize the need of leaving the chair without a good reason (not mandatory ).

For instance, this is how I’d skip a song and then I’d set a hard rock radio:

$ vagalume-dbus skip
$ vagalume-dbus tag “hard rock”

So, here you are the script just in case you’re so lazy as me and you’d like to use it too: vagalume-dbus script.

Please notice that this is not an official script of Vagalume, at least not yet . I’ll talk to Berto to see if it would be or not a good idea to bundle it with the next release of Vagalume. Perhaps it could be useful after all .

What do you think?

]]> http://blogs.igalia.com/mario/2008/03/01/my-sloppy-dirty-ugly-but-maybe-useful-script-for-the-vagalume-d-bus-interface/feed/