Today, 23 April is the 25th anniversary of the greatest computer ever made…
25 years! I’m growing old…
Today, 23 April is the 25th anniversary of the greatest computer ever made…
25 years! I’m growing old…
We had a great time last weekend at DudesConf. We met a lot of Debian people from all parts of Spain (and some non-Spaniards too) and had some interesting talks and BOFs. Check Mario’s report and don’t miss our photo with Steve Langasek!
As usual, John has been doing the hard work and has updated the Debian diff for the Last.fm client.
I have been very busy these days so I had no time to release the packages until today. These are the news:
You can get the packages here.
Some friends have been asking me how to use QEMU. While there are many other virtualization packages (such as Virtual Box, KVM or the non-free VMware Player), QEMU has been around for a while, it’s already packaged in Debian stable and it’s really easy to use.
Moreover, the (optional) kernel accelerator kqemu has been released under the GPL a couple of months ago, so it’s a good moment to give QEMU a try.
Let’s see the basic usage:
And that’s it! QEMU has built-in SMB, TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers. Everything in user space, so you don’t need special permissions nor additional configuration: no kernel modules, no tun/tap interfaces… nothing!. I said it was very easy to use, didn’t I? 😉
Of course there’s a lot more, but you won’t need it for the basic usage.
If you’re too lazy to install an operating system inside QEMU, you can download a hard disk image built by someone else. Note that QEMU can read the VMware disk format, so you’ve got a really big collection of images ready to work.
And if you want a bit more, you can compile the kqemu kernel accelerator, which will make QEMU run faster.
Now I can remember the old times when I first installed Debian…
I’ve been playing a bit with Google’s new toy: my maps.
It’s very easy to edit things, create routes and share maps. I’ve created a sample map showing how to get to my office 🙂
Cool!
DudesConf is starting in less than 10 days!
DudesConf is a DebConf-like meeting for Spanish-speaking Debian developers that will take place in Corunha University from 13 to 15 April 2007.
The program includes several talks, workshops, bug-squashing parties and BOFs. I’m sure that we’ll have a great time and of course it will be a great opportunity to meet Debian people from everywhere.
Just like other free software-related events such as Guademy, GUADEC-ES and GUADEC, DudesConf is sponsored by Igalia.
See you there!!
This has been a busy weekend.
Guademy, the meeting between people from both Gnome and KDE projects has just finished. We had people from all parts of Spain, with the notable exception of Aaron Seigo from KDE who was there too.
It was a pleasure to meet people like Carlos Garnacho (and his interesting talk about system tools backends), Álvaro del Castillo (who spoke about F-Spot), Albert Astals Cid (who gave talks about Okular and Valgrind), Álvaro López Ortega (author of Cherokee web server and former Fidonet member like me!) and many more. I hope to see you again soon!
Among other things, we even managed to compare Gnome and KDE using a scientific method impossible to refute. And here’s the result: no matter how you look at it, Gnome wins!
Of course Igalia was very interested in this event (we were one of the sponsors, the other one being Trolltech) and some of my colleagues gave talks about some (IMHO) interesting topics such as the Gnome Build Brigade (by Iago) or the Maemo introduction (by Andrés) among others.
For the interested, there’s a blog with more info about Guademy (including slides of the talks) and people are uploading pictures to Flickr.
Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away from Coruña, John had been working hard and created some new patches for the Last.fm client. I’ve just compiled and tested the new version this afternoon and finally the new pakages are available: Last.fm 1.1.3.0-msk5 is out!
Besides some minor changes and bugfixes, the most important thing about this release is that John has managed to compile Last.fm 1.1.3.0 on Qt 4.1. Well, I had compiled it too some time ago but the difference is that John has got it working 😉
What does this mean? It means that users of Debian sarge and Ubuntu dapper need no longer stick with version 1.0.7. So welcome to Last.fm 1.1.3.0!
You can get the compiled packages here and the source code, Debian diff and detailed information here.
As usual, if you find any problem with this new version just let us know.
And now I should go to sleep (or, at least, rest a bit).
Always looking for better ways to increase our happiness and being a devoted follower of the great 3.60 happiness movement (proposed by the even greater Sergio), I found a program that enhances the typing break utility included in Gnome.
I’m talking about Workrave, a little tool that will help you taking rest breaks and thus preventing Repetitive Strain Injury.
Major features:
In case all this wasn’t enough, it is translated into several languages. So there’s no excuse! It’s not a matter of laziness(*): it’s a matter of health. Join the 3.60 movement now!
(*) No, we Galicians are not lazy. Read paragraph 5.
Here’s a useful program!
Pizza Party lets you order pizzas from the command line. It has lots of benefits, including:
The only drawback is that it currently only supports Domino’s pizza. We’ll have to port it to Telepizza or whatever.
Yum!
Johh has backported the latest patches he created for the etch/edgy versions of Last.fm to version 1.0.7, so Debian sarge and Ubuntu dapper users can benefit for them. Changes include the ability to select the web browser from the configuration dialog, a new ALSA plugin and some other minor fixes.
Last.fm 1.1.3.0 for Debian etch and Ubuntu edgy has been updated too, including a fix for environments with several sound cards.
Although there are only official binaries of Last.fm for x86 processors, faxm0dem has managed to have Last.fm compiled for amd64. And it seems to work, so I put it in my webpage.
Currently just for Debian etch, but I guess it should work in Ubuntu edgy too.